Comparing two 1/350 scale USS Enterprises

I thought this was way cool! Really gives you a sense of scale for the TOS Enterprise. A little shocked that the shuttle bay is too narrow for a modern warplane.

 

The Connie looky ridiculously small in that video, I expected her to be bigger.

 

Do they make a 1/350th scale Kelvin-Prise, and would anyone but the Smithsonian have room for it?

If the TOS E was 947', the kit is 2.7'. If the Kelvin E is 2514', the kit would be 7.1'.

I tried building a 1/350 scale CVN-65 when I was young. Never did finish it and ended up losing half the planes before long anyway.

 

Perhaps this illustration by Matt Jefferies from The Making of Star Trek was an inspiration for this comparison.

http://www.trekcore.com/specials/albums/sketches/STTOS_Drw_2Enterprises.jpg

 

Thanks....hadn't seen that illustration in so long I forgot all about it.

 

1701 does look a little smaller than expected, but assuming that the scaling is actually correct on both models, the numbers don't lie.

And..Uhura and Chekov have been onboard both of them.

 

Nah, they got faked out....the carrier they were on was the USS Ranger.

 

What's more, the ship was originally going to be smaller than that. Captain Pike was responsible for 203 lives, and the bridge dome was taller relative to the ship's frame because it would have to be to accommodate the height of one deck.

Then Roddenberry decided the ship should be larger, which about halved the height of a deck, so the bridge dome was shortened and the crew was set at 430. That's when Matt Jefferies recalculated the model's scale and arrived at 947 feet. At that time, it seemed like the largest spacecraft we would ever need.

Then the TNG producers wanted a lot more versatility for what the ship could contain, and JJ Abrams came along with a childish, Doctor Seuss-like, fantasy-scaled ship. Because there should be no limits ever on what a lazy writer wants to put inside a ship.

 

I always enjoy that video.

Even the "back in the day" it would be a tight squeeze, folding wings and all. Except for the little Scooter, maybe.

 

The saucer section of the TOS Enterprise was smaller than that of the NX-01 of a century earlier, we know that much, but that's only because practically every inhabitable space on the 22nd century starship was located in the saucer. There was no stardrive section or neck, so with the exceptions of the catwalks in the warp nacelles there was no real living or work space outside the primary hull.

 

Did we know the NX-01's saucer was bigger?

 

Scaled side by side, yes.

 

Dimensions?

 

Well the NX-01 is canonically scaled at 225m in length and the TOS Enterprise at 289m. Placed side by side (sorry for the lack of a comparative graphic but I'm sure somebody here can oblige if they have one handy) the NX-01's saucer section is slightly larger than the NCC-1701's. The differences are marginal at best but the older starship does have a larger primary hull.

 

No, that's great; thanks. I can hunt down a graphic if needed. I think the only times that the Avenger was depicted as flying next to the Defiant in IaMD, we saw them both from the side, so the comparison never struck me. It's natural to think of the Constitution-class ships as being larger all the way around.

 

I was surprised, too, when I first found out. But when you think about it the NX-01 and other ships of her class had to cram almost everything into the saucer section whereas the Connies of 100 years later could spread equipment, labs, weapons and cargo storage across both the primary and secondary hulls. That gave the NCC-1701 much more room for people and technology than the earlier Enterprise and not have to confine almost everything of value to a mission profile to the saucer.

 

When you consider how narrow the neck and the engineering hull are, you realise how pathetic the habitable volume of the TOS Enterprise was, especially taking into consideration how luxuriously large the corridors were, and the amount of space that would need to be dedicated to turbolits tubes and the like. Corridors and rooms in real military vessels are way more compact than the equivalent Star Trek sets.

People love to complain about the size of the JJ Abrams Enterprise, but I actually agree that the Enterprise should have been scaled up, but I would have adjusted the windows and other details to match.

 

At most, I would scale the Connie up about 15 percent, and get rid of the scooped-out undercut in the saucer. That would give you the internal volume you really need without getting ridiculous.

 

A huge amount of a carrier's internal volume is the hangar deck. If you consider the volume of the rest of the ship and the fact the crew is 10x+ that of the fictional Enterprise, the starship seems plenty big and roomy.

 

I don't think it's that simple. For one thing, while the dimensions of the two ships are comparable, the shape of the starship means there is far less actual volume, with even less of that being usable as standing space. For example, the saucer is over 100m wide, but only one deck actually spans 100m, the rest of the decks in the saucer are half that size or less, with volume decreasing by 8x for every 2x reduction in width.

1/3rd of the starships's length is all engine. The neck is only about as wide as an aircraft fuselage, the entire back half of the engineering hull is made up of hangar bay and pylons and the hangar deck itself is too small IMO.

Comparing the aircraft carrier, the island alone is about equivalent to the central decks of the saucer or the forward part of the seco hull. The flight deck and hangar decks are huge, but they're also manned, habitable areas.

And the other big problem is the one I mentioned earlier about density. Do a Google image search for "nimitz class CIC" or "Nimitz class bridge" and you'll see images of extremely dense, cramped rooms compared to the spacious, sparsely populated sets we saw in TOS, and the corridors on a carrier are at most 1/3rd the width of the TOS sets. Also, they use ladders, not turbolifts.

And then there's the question of crew quarters. As far as I remember, the only time we ever saw bunks on the Connie was in The Undiscovered Country, and even those dorm rooms were downright luxurious compared to what most officers (let alone enlisted staff) could expect on a modern naval ship. From seeing Uhura's quarters, we can infer that everyone down to at least Lieutentant had their own cabin on the Enterprise.