Actual Size of Ships in Star Trek

[CuttingEdge100]

It sounds like a silly questions because all the vessels have canonical lengths, but I have over the years heard various discrepancies in lengths.

I'll provide some examples

• NCC-1701 (TOS): Has an official length of 288.6 meters or 947 feet
• Early on the vessel was to be 540 feet, with a crew of 203; this was then doubled to 1,080 feet with a crew of 430
• When it came to most aspects of the sets and things of that nature. 1,080 tended to fit better than 947 provided the position of the windows were similar to F.J.'s designs (higher up)
• When it comes to the shuttle-bay estimates, larger sizes such as 1,350 or 1,450 feet have been floated around, though I cannot be certain

As a result I'm trying to do a somewhat scientific analysis based on the following analysis

• Deck size relative to window-size provided the windows were positioned in the way F.J. did in his drawings -- lined up with the mid/upper portion of each deck.
• Shuttle-bay dimensions and shuttle-size relative to the ship (including the below bay capacity for 4 shuttles)

My idea is to create a sort of fudge factor that can be produced to make reliable ship sizes.

 

[sojourner]

Many men have been ruined in the pursuit of this quest. I wish you luck in the endeavor.

 

[Boris Skrbic]

We don't actually know if the 540-foot length was doubled.

One should be careful about making scale assumptions because the reality can be fairly subtle. DS9 was initially blueprinted with a stated scale of 1 inch ≈ 60 feet, later increased to precisely 70 feet, but originally as a four-foot miniature. In a memo to modelmaker Tony Meininger, however, Rick Sternbach finalized the scale at 1 inch = 45 feet, presumably because the miniature was six feet in diameter as built, and 70 x 4/6 does work out to just under 47. At this point, the size would've worked out to roughly 3200 feet.

(Of course, all of this was years before the compromise in the DS9 technical manual, where the station diameter increased even further to approach the VFX figure of 5280 feet.)

 

[CuttingEdge100]

I was thinking the best strategy would be to do the following

• Acquire a model of a shuttlecraft from TOS, TMP, TFF
• Acquire a good external model of the Enterprise from TOS (Canon line-drawing)
• Acquire a good internal model of the Enterprise from TOS

Then from there

• Establish a scale for the shuttle, whereby a certain number of pixels equal an inch
• Scale the Big-E to 947 feet, and 1,080 feet according to the same scale

From there, the idea would be to do the following

• Use the internal drawing which shows deck-layouts to effectively determine how many feet are present for each deck: It should be about 10 feet a deck with a few inches between each floor
• Whichever fits best for the deck-arrangement is the correct answer for the general scale of the ship itself excluding the shuttle-bay

For determining the size of the shuttle bay, you scale the shuttlebay up until the point where the four shuttles could fit properly in the specified locations factoring in their size. Whatever size works best is the best arrangement for the ship; at that point you just conclude the size of the ship.

The concept is fairly straight forward though time-consuming and a pain

 

[Timo]

until the point where the four shuttles could fit properly in the specified locations

This is a good example of the snags on the route: there are no "specified locations" for the shuttles. Nor is there good evidence that four would be aboard; it's only conjecture from the fact that the Exeter had four, but in contradiction with the idea that the Galileo would be shuttle number seven.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[F. King Daniel]

Many men have been ruined in the pursuit of this quest.

You called?

There is no way to reconcile Trek ship sizes. The Enterprise-D is screwed because Ten Forward was made double the size it should have been. The Ready Room has a physically impossible window which we even see from the outside a few times. I don't think any of the exterior windows match the generic crew quarters set windows and even if they did, fixing the size to accommodate ten forward breaks that.

The Excelsior is twice it's official size and more if you include the bridge dome and other additions which came along in STIV.

The new movie Enterprise's saucer is scaled for 725ish meters, and the engineering hull interiors 1200.

The Reliant has a row of windows along the centre of the saucer rim, with another row added very closely underneath. Either deck 6 has ankle-height windows and 7's are overhead, or it's a lot bigger than we think.

The Oberth class has a contradictory physical model and MSD in "Hero Worship", and even then wouldn't fit the long corridors seen in "The Naked Now". The window rows on the model indicate 300m at least.

DS9 had a definite scale until, during construction of the model, word came down to add more windows.

The Klingon Bird of Prey! Enough said.

Voyager's shuttlebay is never the same configuration twice, and in "Drive" doubled in size. The Delta Flyer not only spawned a back room, but a freaking Jefferies tube(!!) in "Collective"

The Neg'var! Either battlecruiser sized or comparable to the Narada.

Fudge factor of infinity.

 

[Kemaiku]

And the fact the Defiant suddenly gained the ability to launch the Chaffee, which while still small for any shuttle, is still to large to fit inside the interior of the ship.

 

[Boris Skrbic]

The Chaffee is not too small; again, one must do some research on the subject. A few years back, Doug Drexler opened his copy of the LightWave model and said 26 feet, consistent with his deck plans developed around the same time. Brandon MacDougall, who animated that scene at Foundation Imaging, gives 42 feet, which is probably a result of upscaling in relation to the 560-foot Defiant model, whereas the deck plans are clearly closer to 400. Larry Nemecek wrote down 25 feet following a 1998 conversation with Gary Hutzel, who was VFX supervisor for that episode.

As for DS9, I'm not sure where that window-argument comes from, but even if windows were added between the planned levels, obviously the model wasn't changed nearly enough to contradict the original blueprints. Since the station usually did remain small next to smaller ships, the problem seems to be in the scenes featuring the Enterprise and other larger ships, but one can increment the diameter only so much before the unchanged shape of the miniature stops making sense.

 

[Mytran]

I was thinking the best strategy would be to do the following...The concept is fairly straight forward though time-consuming and a pain

Nice! My approach to determining the TOS size is slightly similar and works on the assumption that most of the original ship ended up in the refit - I've never been a big fan of extra bits being welded on here and there just to make the saucer fractionally larger etc.

The length of the TMP-Enterprise is officially 1,000 feet long, but extensive CGI modelling by Blsswlf shows that the Cargo Deck cannot possibly fit in a ship of that size and the length is more like 1,164 feet (355 metres). Going with the notion that the TOS saucer would have survived mostly intact (except for interior decoration), I size-matched the bottom radius of both versions of the ship and determined that Kirk's original Enterprise was around 1,250 feet in length.

This is of course longer than the refit (flying in the face of "official" lengths) but I see no reason why more advanced=bigger; in fact the opposite is often true, making the TMP-E a sleeker, faster, leaner vessel.

YMMV


P.S.
Also, a larger TOS-E helps to fit in the 10' high sets, the offset Bridge and the 124' long shuttlebay miniature, although these last factors may or may not be relevant depending on how literally you want to interpret what's on screen.

 

[F. King Daniel]

The Chaffee is not too small; again, one must do some research on the subject. A few years back, Doug Drexler opened his copy of the LightWave model and said 26 feet, consistent with his deck plans developed around the same time. Brandon MacDougall, who animated that scene at Foundation Imaging, gives 42 feet, which is probably a result of upscaling in relation to the 560-foot Defiant model, whereas the deck plans are clearly closer to 400. Larry Nemecek wrote down 25 feet following a 1998 conversation with Gary Hutzel, who was VFX supervisor for that episode.

Whether it fits or not, it's a shame that, when launching a shuttle, the underside of the Defiant changes from a large protruding panel to recessed double doors.

As for DS9, I'm not sure where that window-argument comes from, but even if windows were added between the planned levels, obviously the model wasn't changed nearly enough to contradict the original blueprints. Since the station usually did remain small next to smaller ships, the problem seems to be in the scenes featuring the Enterprise and other larger ships, but one can increment the diameter only so much before the unchanged shape of the miniature stops making sense.

That would be Rick Sternbach himself. Click!

 

[Mytran]

An upgrade maybe? I suppose it's too much to hope for that we never saw the underside of the Defiant after this episode?

 

[Timo]

The change is fairly minimal, and IMHO might be seen as something other than change in in-universe terms, too.

In most episodes, the area that will launch the tiny shuttle features a dome in the middle. In the above cap from "By Inferno's Light", that dome emits a tractor beam. Now, it's fairly logical for a tractor beam to emerge from what is supposed to be a shuttlebay... Suppose the engineers simply installed a telescoping tractor beam emitter (ever since ST:TMP and the Andy Probert / Shane Johnson treatment of the movie ship, all tractor beam emitters supposedly have been mounted on telescoping poles anyway, even if we never see this in action) that descends from the ceiling of the cylinder bay all the way to the doors and then pokes through them?

That is, where we in "The Sound of Her Voice" see the Chaffee, a working end of a tractor beam is normally seen, of more or less the same size. The doors close over its narrow pole, by virtue of having a small notch each - and this notch in turn can be smoothly closed when the tractor beam emitter is retracted (such as during shuttle operations).

the underside of the Defiant changes from a large protruding panel to recessed double doors.

Make no mistake, the recessed double doors are only as large as the recessed area in the middle of the protruding doughnut of the underside. That is, the Chaffee is about half the size of the runabout forward cabin, which is more or less right in terms of what little we saw of the interior.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Forbin]

This requires too much braining for me. I just take the "official" 947 foot figure for the TOS E as gospel, and handwave any problems. While I am a devout Trek-tech-head and dearly love all this, I think we do have to "let the art flow" sometimes.

 

[Mytran]

Hey, IDIC man, all the way!

Luckily Trek is diverse enough so there's an obsession that's suited to everyone's tastes.

 

[Wingsley]

Forgive me if this seems like an awkward take on the whole "size of TREK ships" forum, but has anyone ever made a detailed review of the internal volume of the saucer and secondary hulls of the TOS Enterprise and tried to see if all of the sets fit and the "official" size, plus canon-size crew quarters for all of the ship's standard personnel, plus "Journey to Babel" supercargo passengers, plus four shuttlecraft? Can it all fit at the 947-feet size?

(I fail to see what every deck has to be exactly ten feet in height, BTW; that's not how I understand modern naval vessels are built.)

 

[Mytran]

Well, Franz Joseph kept the official 947' length but altered the heights (the walls of the sets were all 10' high but he shortened them to 8' or slightly under). However, he did squeeze in enough accomodation for all the passengers and crew, with each person getting their own single bed:

http://www.cygnus-x1.net/links/lcars/star-trek-blueprints.php
http://www.cygnus-x1.net/links/lcars/uss-enterprise-fasa-15mm-deck-plans.php

The downside is that the majority of interior space is taken up with bedrooms, but FJ was going by what was written in TMOST, with "every officer having his own stateroom" or somesuch.

I did my own version of Enterprise Deck Plans about 15 years ago and used 9'6" ceiling heights, as well as preserving the layout of corridors and rooms that were shown onscreen. Everything fitted, although bunks and double bunks were needed in the majority of crew quarters. The "onscreen accurate" corridors made for some very odd shapes in places and since I was using VCR freezeframe the results are probably not as accurate as I would do today.

There are two threads on the TrekBBS that are doing what I did but with greater accuracy and attention to detail:

http://www.trekbbs.com/showthread.php?t=119751
http://www.trekbbs.com/showthread.php?p=8864851#post8864851

Both thread owners found that the onscreen accurate rooms fit better into a slightly longer TOS-Enterprise, but both are also W.I.P.

The bottom line is that yes, everything could fit into the volume of a 947' long Enterprise, even moreso if you are willing to vary the deck heights more than what was seen onscreen.

 

[Timo]

It would be a bit unrealistic not to vary a key parameter: the curvature of the corridor. If we only accept the set we see on screen, we have to place every room accessible from that corridor to the exact same distance from the axis of the saucer.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Mytran]

The corridor is 51' radius to the outer edge (larger than any Trek series, BTW). Still, it does help placement if you apply some "squinting" to some scenes, particularly those that only show a short stretch of the curve (where a wider radius would be less noticeable).

Or just ignore it altogether - different Deck-planners attritube different levels of importance to different things, after all

 

[blssdwlf]

IIRC, if I tried to be super accurate with the TOS hangar deck I'd have to make the ship at least 1084' to fit properly. Haven't tried putting in all the seen spaces in the hull though.

 

[CuttingEdge100]

I looked at the thread, and one major flaw I'm seeing is that the assumption is made that the saucer was the same size as it was in TMP: It wasn't.

Frankly, the reason the Enterprise was modified so much was because the guys at Desilu/Paramount frankly got a whole lot more dough and felt it was dated. There really isn't much around this.

The rims aren't exactly the same height: The Refit has more curvature up top which the TOS design does not. However if you count just the "belt" -- the area where the windows cover, and that sort of thing you'd probably be okay.

It's very important that the ship can squeeze at least four shuttles below-deck: I don't mind really removing the turntable, and putting two elevators in instead.