Irishman: We had this discussion about three years back when Gabriel Koerner suggested essentially dressing up the 1701 but dividing it into twice the number of decks, miniaturizing the windows, and calling it bigger. In a thread on this forum, I remember Koerner suggesting that this improved the 1701 design by giving it, as he described them, bigger breasts.
I responded then (or if I didn't, I should have) that a well-engineered, artistically considerate design suggests to the eye automatically the size that it is. You can't just inflate a good design to double or triple the size and suggest that it fits. Bernd Schneider on
Ex Astris Scientia posted a wonderful discussion on why, after the latest Trek movie was produced, the guys who boasted how great it was that the new 1701-XI was double its original size, were just blowing smoke. Putting together all the visual cues, including deck divisions, Schneider demonstrates that Ryan Church had no obvious intention to make 1701-XI significantly larger than it ever was.
(Besides, the interior designers placed all the important rooms within 30 yards of one another anyway: sickbay's down the hall from the bridge, turn right instead of left and there's the transporter room, and just downstairs is the brewery. But that's another tangent.)
In short, if you're making your ship triple the size, you need to present some degree of engineering that justifies the expansion. I like the '66 Ford Mustang too, but I wouldn't triple its size and call it a Freightliner.
DF "Although There Were Times During the Last Snowstorm I Could Have Used a One-third Scale Freightliner" Scott
