Enterprise D size.

I still can't get over how big the D is... It's longer then the refit A and a hell of a lot taller.

Could you get lost inside the ship if it were not for all the aids that help you navigate her many corridors?

Imagine that thing sitting on the ground it would be absolutely enormous.

Apart from the starship size comparisons which everyone knows about just wondering if you laid her on the ground would she take a few city blocks?

 

She's roughly the size of the Paramount Lot. That may not help, but it's accurate.

 

Could you get lost? Why, certainly - the corridors in various parts of the ship look almost identical!

Had the TNG movies been done a decade later, perhaps we could have gotten a greenscreen-augmented understanding of the vastness of certain internal spaces...

Timo Saloniemi

 

It's a shame you never get a sense of the scale from the sets. If the budget could have allowed for something like the rec deck from The Motion Picture, or if they did some location shooting for massive internals like the recent movies, it would have been great.

We see the Enterprise-D saucer crashed in a forest in Generations, and the twice-as-long USS Vengeance crash into a city in Star Trek Into Darkness

 

I just whipped up a comparison graphic. The Enterprise is 641 meters or 2103 feet... The Google Maps bracket is 86 pixels representing 500 feet.

So a simple proportion -- (86*2103)/500 ≈ 362 pixels for the Big D -- and here we go. I wasn't sure where to put the ship, so I decided to put it against the George Washington Bridge in New York. But I can take a few requests if you'd like. (I can't do rush deliveries though).

 

I never realized how large it was until doing really nerdy things like looking at deck plans for the various ships. Now...it's too big. Way too big. It's a floating city of endless monotony. I'm sure there are entire decks that Picard has never visited, nor cares to. I now find the smaller ships to be much more interesting, like the NX, defiant, and intrepid.

 

DITL gives us a size comparison.

 

A lot of that is hanger bay..open spaces
http://www.cygnus-x1.net/links/lcar...1d/whitefire-enterprise-ncc-1701d-sheet-4.jpg
http://www.cygnus-x1.net/links/lcars/star-trek-the-next-generation-enterprise.php

 

I actually think it'd be fine if the writers decided to make it a crew of around 2000 or even 3000. Although some others in a different thread supposed that a lot of that "empty" volume is useful for highly specialized equipment and cargo that might only be needed occasionally on a long exploratory mission. "Data, do we have a Tomagraphjc Imaging Scanner on board?" "Yeah, it's on Deck 40 right next to Quinn Mallory's sliding machine."

 

She was a long range explorer and diplomatic vessel. A city in space. Perfect for not goin nuts in deep space. Though I have a soft spot for the intrepid.

 

In time, the Enterprise-D may have eventually had a crew that large, IMO. She was basically still a brand-new ship throughout TNG's run, only a few years out of the docks, and could have been considered only in the first phase of her operational lifetime. Quite a few areas of the ship may not even have been fully utilized yet, but reserved for future expansion.

 

Figure roughly 8x (2^3) the volume of TOS Enterprise, you could have quarters for a pretty large crew plus families, or some gigantic spaces.

 

That's pretty sweet... It's not a small ship by any means.

Whatever happened to that guy that wanted to build a hotel in Las Vegas that was basically the refit A Enterprise?

 

In hindsight I wish they had redone the hangar doors in the blurays of the series? They were 90 degree vertical doors but should have been sloped.

I know it's super nerdy but that really bugged me.

 

They could have done more to give it the feeling of layers of management and crew and passengers numbering over 1000. Many,, but certainly not all, of the stories would lend themselves better to a small crew.

 

One of the original ideas was to have vast, open "mall" spaces inside for recreation, and relief from the confined feeling of being inside a ship all the time. These can be seen in the Ed Whitefire plans.
http://www.cygnus-x1.net/links/lcar...1d/whitefire-enterprise-ncc-1701d-sheet-7.jpg

 

Aren't those all the holodecks?

 

They are labelled as port and starboard towns, with squares...and there's a grotto.

 

Was there another version of these deck plans that redesignated those holodecks?