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Enterprise Size Vs. Crew Compliment (Video Discussion)

I always knew the Enterprise was large but it seems to be ridiculously large after watching this video.

The small quarters don't make a lot of sense, they have all that room but they cram families into less than 40 square meters? Of course the show had to make do with the sets they had but why not use the large quarter set more often? Or why not get rid of the old tiny quarter set and build something more appropriate? Or just put a fake door at one of the walls of the small set to make it look bigger.
 
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Well if we use todays Ship building, only a small percentage would be habitable.
Think of no crew rooms in the Engineering section, with all the tankage, engines, reactors etc.
Then in the saucer you have the computer core, backup reactors, tankage.
Still leaves alot of room for quarters and labs, offices, water Ski pond..

on the other hand... Earth is to big.. the population, standing shoulder to shoulder.. can fit on the island of Maui... Earth has plenty of room too!
 
IMO, the Enterprise-D was built around the philosophy that on a ship far from the nearest starbase or Federation member world, it was better to have the extra space and not need it than to need the extra space and not have it. If there was a disaster somewhere that required the evacuation of 10,000+ people, the Enterprise would be able to do the job. Likewise if there was a scenario that required thousands of Starfleet and/or civilian specialists to be dispatched to a given area. The inarguable enormous size of the Enterprise likely makes her more ideal in regions in which she may be "the only ship in the quadrant" and can do the job of multiple smaller ships.
 
I actually love how huge it is. I want to live on that during my 20-year mission into unexplored space with my family.

I wonder what its actual capacity is. If they had to evacuate Romulus before the shockwave hit, how many people could you fit standing-room only?
 
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Given all the mentions of stasis or coma techniques in the past fifty years, I'd say standing-room only is not the limit. After pumping the transporter pattern buffers full, stack the corridors seven high with pseudo-dead folks, and the cargo bays fifty high, and deal with possible medical effects later, when all these 1,200,000 or so people are safely in another star system. Heck, replicate really big plastic bags and put those on tractor beams for five million more corpsicles per sortie!

If for some reason you want your refugees awake and afoot (always a terrible idea), then I guess life support limitations might cut in before you fill the ship to volumetric capacity. Hundreds of thousands of folks would have standing room as per that video, what with hundreds of thousands of square meters being available even in pessimistic estimates, but some might suffocate during the first half an hour already.

Timo Saloniemi
 
I can't recall specifically, but I know there was a time or two that the ship either did evacuate hundreds (if not thousands) of people at a time, or that possibility was at least discussed, or happened off-camera sometime. This actually helps to show that the ship could take on that many extra people.
 
The E-D was slated to move 15,000 people in "Ensigns of Command", and they were still planning on it after it became evident there'd only be time for a single sortie.

Timo Saloniemi
 
The Enterprise is huge. It probably has endless identical corridors going through the saucer section.

We only see a small fraction of what the space is used for though. We never see the main shuttlebay, which takes up like all of the 3rd or 4th(or both?) deck. There's also probably two large decks in the saucer section completely devoted to holodecks.
 
Well, lets then talk about the Kelvin Enterprise size, and only having 430 crew?? ( and happen to fit on the Franklin at the end of Beyond.. must have been a blood bath that killed most of the crew..)

All this Size Envy that blew up the Prime Enterprise size as well..
 
That visual is pretty striking. Another way to think about how screwy it is is simple division: 1000 people divided by 42 decks means an average population of 24 per deck. You could put the entire compliment of a deck into one room, comfortably. You'd practically never see someone else in the corridors unless they were coming from or going to the same place.

Well, lets then talk about the Kelvin Enterprise size, and only having 430 crew??

I don't think anyone ever gave an official crew figure for the KT Enterprise. There might've been a tie-in website that had something around a thousand, but the closest thing I can recall specifically is a comic book saying the cyborg crewman Science Officer 0718 gave himself that name because he was the 718th member of the Enterprise's crew. Of course, the KT Enterprise actually is filled with giant open spaces and machinery, and isn't an endless warren of rooms and corridors, which the -D is always depicted as.
 
Well, lets then talk about the Kelvin Enterprise size, and only having 430 crew?? ( and happen to fit on the Franklin at the end of Beyond.. must have been a blood bath that killed most of the crew..)

All this Size Envy that blew up the Prime Enterprise size as well..
A lot more of the Kelvinprise is machinery spece, an enormous shuttlebay, the back of the saucer is all machinery and main engineering is a real-life experimental fusion power plant.

Although never established on-screen and an early script for the first movie does give 400, the defunct Experience the Enterprise site gave a crew compliment of 1100 (that said, either very few survived Beyond or they were squished up like sardines in the tiny USS Franklin:lol:)

Here's a comparison of interior space useage:
1erjpQ5.jpg

hileT5E.jpg
 
The engineering section also seemed to allocate a lot of space to several lateral torpedo tubes (like an ancient sailing ship's cannons) in STID
 
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