Original. The math was done for this long before the NuEnterprise was dreamt up.
JJ Enterprise Tech Specs
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Original. The math was done for this long before the NuEnterprise was dreamt up.
trevanian
Rear Admiral
Pffrt, yeah right.
Blow analog pictures up and you'll get grain. That's not molecular resolution, it's noise; it does not contain useful information.
Grain is not noise, anymore than brushstrokes are noise. Noise is what you get when you push an electronic capture beyond its capacity. (EDITADDON - you can also get an artificial buildup of grain by pushing film beyond its capacity or rephotographing it repeatedly, but that ain't what you start with.)
They used to say that 35mm film was the equivalent of 4K (most movies get DI'd at 2K, so you're getting something like super 16 these days, pretty pathetic considering most still originate on 35.) But the more they've studies, the more they've found that 35mm is actually the equivalent of 8K, and that 65mm film is so far beyond ANY digital system that there isn't really even a basis of comparison. I've been following this on the Kodak sites as well as the others (just to make sure agendas aren't being pushed more than actual results), and the digital end just isn't anywhere near what is should have been when it started to displace analog. This is clearly driven by economy and not quality, just as the move to CG over miniature work is the same (though for all I can see, they are still spending tons more, presumably because they think they need 1000 fx shots to tell the story that 100 shots used to tell just as well.)
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trevanian
Rear Admiral
See my previous post to address some of this about digital capabilities, but as far as Hassleblad's digital equivalent ... geez, Hasselblad's current digital systems can't even begin to compare to the old analog stuff. They don't use Zeiss lenses anymore, it is like saying you drive a Jaguar from 1990 onward ... that isn't really a Jaguar, it is a FORD, a Ford with a Jaguar shell and logo on it.
I've written a couple of articles (about a really intriguing dance video as well as the less-than-intriguing THE SPIRIT) on the Phantom digital cameras, including the Phantom 65. These things are the absolute highest-end for shooting digital in terms of chip size and also being able to shoot at a high frame rate ... but the imagery still is not in any way comparable to well-exposed film neg.
To show how really sharp stuff like old Hasselblad cameras are, you can look at a number of scenes in 2001. Many shots (not just the space clipper, but a lot of DISCOVERY shots and moonbus shots and Aries shots) use still photo cutouts animated, and those were all shot on these still cameras, which had such high resolution that the super panavision 65mm movie cameras rephotographing the cutouts couldn't pick out the grain, even though 65mm is so sharp that it can photograph airbrush grain, according to Richard Edlund.
darkwing_duck1
Vice Admiral
You wouldn't happen to have the total volume in cubic meters would you? And is that total JUST raw food, O2, etc or does that include the processing gear?
Oh, what about fuel? Anyone tanked that out?
That figure sure throws out pretty much every deckplan I've ever seen...they have nowhere NEAR that much storage space allocated.
And that last 1/3 is gonna be CROWDED: bridge, at least one sickbay, conference room, 1-4 transporter rooms, 14 science labs, rec rooms, bowling alley, etc. THEN find room for 400+ people...
trevanian
Rear Admiral
For the most part you've got it, though I believe there is ample evidence that in terms of image resolution, analog systems still produce a much higher quality when well-employed.
That doesn't mean you can use a motion control system to make the models do backflips on their way to infinity, but if that is the criteria for making the new shows, then you probably don't care how great it looks up close while it is performing like a team of space monkeys.
But my original point in commenting on this related to his statement that they could rescale this stuff BECAUSE it was CG, as if you couldn't actually reshoot if it were a physical element. And whatever rescaling they did, apparently didn't address the window issue, if the posts I've read about how the ship appears in the movie are correct. Going by the single close-in ship shot in the trailer (looking down at the engineering hull and the back of the dish), the ship looked big, but it looked very painterly, which means it is one of those movies like NEMESIS where I'm gonna need to turn the brightness down a ton to keep from thinking a cartoon comes on every time they go outside into the rift or whatever the gassy background is they're fighting in, because it ain't cutting it visually.
That doesn't mean you can use a motion control system to make the models do backflips on their way to infinity, but if that is the criteria for making the new shows, then you probably don't care how great it looks up close while it is performing like a team of space monkeys.
But my original point in commenting on this related to his statement that they could rescale this stuff BECAUSE it was CG, as if you couldn't actually reshoot if it were a physical element. And whatever rescaling they did, apparently didn't address the window issue, if the posts I've read about how the ship appears in the movie are correct. Going by the single close-in ship shot in the trailer (looking down at the engineering hull and the back of the dish), the ship looked big, but it looked very painterly, which means it is one of those movies like NEMESIS where I'm gonna need to turn the brightness down a ton to keep from thinking a cartoon comes on every time they go outside into the rift or whatever the gassy background is they're fighting in, because it ain't cutting it visually.
All of which, in the Trekiverse, would be the role of a survey ship or a patrol vessel. This, arguably, is what the TOS Enterprise would be in the new universe, doing sensor analysis, stellar research, search and rescue, communications coordination, and so on (and these as its primary role, of course).
We've learned alot in forty years, though, and it turns out that these things alone do not constitute "Exploration of space," since these are things even automated probes could probably do (except for search and rescue, but still...). An exploration vessel needs to be something more substantial than a manned probe IMO.
Not exactly. The new Enterprise has a saucer section five decks high at the rim and about three hundred meters in diameter, with a drive section about 300 long (not counting nacelles). This is not a ship "the size of a small city." Actually, this is a ship equivalent to an aircraft carrier with an AEGIS escort, a factory ship and two deep-sea research vessels.
Enterprise-D was CONSIDERABLY larger, considering its saucer is wider and longer than the NuEnterpirse', as is its drive section; its 641 meter length is the distance from the front of the saucer to the end of the secondary hull, the equivalent of which--on the new 1701--only amounts to about 450 meters.
And Enterprise-D was as large as it was, in the 24th century no less, because it was supposed to be operating continuously over a period of years, long enough to justify officers raising their children on board. As it stands, they barely pulled it off.
First of all, I don't want it to be bigger, it IS bigger; what I want is to understand WHY it is bigger, and there are quite a few in-universe reasons why Starfleet might have designed a bigger ship.
Second of all, Abrams considered the obsession with such questions beneath him because--in point of fact--they ARE beneath him. He's the director, not the tech guy, he has advisors who are paid to worry about these sort of things and it seems to me they did a fantastic job considering how frighteningly ambitious their objectives were. Re-imagining an existing ship is one ting, but what they've done here is design a totally new one, basically from scratch.
I did. I'm just extremely cognizant of the fact that the Enterprise is NOT a WWII Naval vessel. Taking a real world precedent for you, consider the capabilities of modern space craft; the ISS, at the size of a jumbo jet, can sustain a crew of seven for about three to six months. Now supposing the ISS was equipped with warp engines instead of solar panels, you'd have a pretty decent comparison.
Or take another real world precedent: the smallest manned space craft ever built have invariably been larger than the smallest manned boats. Following this pattern, I don't see why one would object to Enterprise being massively larger than its water-borne counterparts; Earth science has mastered the manipulation of gravity by now, and in any case there's no gravity in SPACE to limit how large you can build things anyway. The ship can be as large as it needs to be, so the real question facing is us why the ship needs to be that large. In other words, what can Nu Ent do that the original can't?
This is a very valid point, but think about things "in-universe" for a moment...You don't get it? Do I need to draw you a picture?
This is a rectangleIt is thirty underscores long.Code:_______________________________ | | | | |______________________________|
This is a ship
It is also 30 underscores long.Code:_________________ ======== |_______________| _\\_____/ / -------______|
The ship, as you can see, is not quite as large as the rectangle despite the fact that they have the same length. The saucer section--the habitable volume of the ship--is relatively small. The engineering section--where presumably the cargo bays and fabrication facilities are located--is also small. Really, the entire internal space of the Enterprise could fit comfortably inside of a pair of public high schools. That's "friggin huge" in the same sense that your local WalMart is huge; it's adequate for a ship that might go for six to eight months without stopping for supplies and maintenance, but I just don't see it lasting a whole five years independently and frankly never have. Obviously, neither did the writers of TOS considering how frequently the ship stopped at a starbase.
And the crew would spend the first eight months their mission sleeping on top of stacks of cargo containers until they eat their way to the deck. Assuming that the only thing the ship stores is FOOD and doesn't carry any scientific equipment, machine shops, experimental modules or fuel tanks.
The overall point: it would be a tight squeeze that only becomes feasible with a fantastic amount of technological magic. A larger vessel makes a certain amount of sense for a ship that is supposed to be versatile enough to go anywhere and do anything any time without worrying about provisions or material expenses.
The Enterprise, under Captain Pike, had a crew of about 200, not 430. When did this change, and why? I've thought about that extensively, as have many of us, and we've played all sorts of "whyizit" games over that point. But there's only one explanation that really works, and works well, which I've ever heard.
The 1701, under Pike, carried a crew of 200 "space naval" crew, plus a large amount of storage for consumables and spare parts.
The 1701, under Kirk (during his "barrier penetration" mission) was similar, though with some minor retrofits in place.
The 1701, after the barrier debacle, was extensively refit... with the central aspect of this refit being the installation of early replicators. This freed up a tremendous amount of internal volume (you still need raw material storage, but you can recycle and restructure as needed). This allowed the equivalent of a full "science survey vessel," complete with non-naval crew members (historians, linguists, anthropologists, etc) to be loaded into the space which was previously food and parts storage.
Now, guys, this is all "storytelling magic." But it works, and works well, I think. We see "food processors" on the TOS ship making whatever food items you request, in a matter of seconds... how else do you explain that other than "replicators?" (or something very similar)
The calculations I've seen... which are quite reasonable... assume the 947' (or rather, 1000-foot-ish, since the exact size IS subject to some debate, I believe) with a crew of 200, not 430. In which case, yes, the numbers work quite nicely. Once you have replicators... all bets are off insofar as this sort of calculation goes, however...
That said... the TOS ship is UNDENIABLY a big freakin' ship. Bigger (not just in length, but in useful volume) than any currently-existing naval vessel. It's FREAKIN' HUGE, guys.
So making it "even hugerer" is, I think, very appropriately what Vance described. It wasn't NECESSARY, either from a storytelling standpoint or (honestly) from a special-effects standpoint (as is clearly indicated by the fact that so many people couldn't tell!)
Alex can say what he says, and I'll accept that he thinks that way... but I think he's full of shit on that count. I'm not sure if it's really how he sees it personally. I doubt it based upon other things he's done in the past... he's shown that he "gets" scale reasonably well, and a special-effects professional like him HAS to know that there's no relationship whatsoever between "size" and "detail level," especially when dealing with CGI models. You can add as much, or as little, detail as you want. The "scale" of the model matters not in the slightest.
I suspect that what he was saying is the "official line" given to him by the head of the project, and he's playing "good soldier" by playing along.
I really do blame Abrams, principally, for this SNAFU. I had hopes that Abrams would "get it" but he proved, repeatedly, in this movie that he didn't. Hell, he even went so far as to create a "NABOO UNDERWATER MONSTERS" scene... he gave us "Star Trek - The Phantom Menace." A film that failed to capture what made the original worthwhile, but did sell a lot of popcorn and had "kewl" effects shots and "cute homage" scenes galor, but remarkably little character (and what was there felt "wrong" in virtually every instance). Hell, the flick even had it's own "Jar Jar" (in this case, not quite as noisy, but every bit as "cutesy." And its own "cardboard villain who's menacing without ever allowing the audience to connect to him" in Nero, just like Darth Maul.
There was a recent thread in this form that worked out the water supply, but not the processing equipment. We were working under the assumption that the systems were 'mininaturized' somewhat , or were part of the existing machinery 'blank spots' in the blueprints.
Almost impossible to say. Anti-matter/matter even with low efficiency would provide insane amounts of power (see threads on torpedo yields for examples)... the nature of the impulse drive is also unsure, since we know it's fusion based, and uses heavy hydrogen, but how much thrust/mass we get is completely unknown. A small fusion-based power core can handle most the mundane stuff we see on the Enterprise with TODAY'S technology, and wouldn't be that huge, though.
Won't disagree there. Even with replicators you would need 'bulk storage' somewhere on each ship, but none of them have allocated that space. Granted, depending on usage efficiency, you could definately clear up some of the ancillary stuff in the secondary hull for that. (Which was the original intent anyway).
Not too bad, about the size of a very large apartment complex really. If the crew are living in dorms, it's still pretty good in space (the saucer is fargin' huge, really, and the TMP version adds about 20 percent more space to it). It would be tight, but doable. And even DS9 mentions that the old ships were 'pretty packed', after all.
ANY system will provide higher quality when well-employed. The question is whether analog is NECCESARILY better than digital, all other things being equal.
Basically, they're not, because analog is necessarily MORE EXPENSIVE than digital, which is why digital is being used so much. We got to see some things in STXI unlike anything we've seen before in the Trekiverse, and while nobody is saying you couldn't have done it with models and negatives, it would have been a hell of a lot more expensive to do.
Now for your money: imagine what STV could have been on their crappy budget if they'd had access to 2009 CGI systems. Shatner's "rock men" might have made it onto the big screen after all. In this case they did alright with what they had, but they could have done more with the same amount of cash if they had the new technology.
I'm sure they could have reshot it if they had an infinite amount of time and money. I seem to recall a similar problem of bad visual effects in TMP that forced not just a reshoot, but a complete revision of the script to replace a key scene in the film. CGI of today might have saved TMP's "memory wall" parts, and may even have kept the film under budget in the long run.
Just saying: CGI gives filmmakers more OPTIONS, and it's clear at this point that the effects time utilized as many of them as they could. Nobody was blithely cutting corners as a callous "fuck you" to the fans; this just isn't that kind of movie.
Don't know which trailer you're talking about, but I've seen this movie five times already and I haven't seen anything tat could be called "painterly." Except for that one scene where Enterprise was dodging through the debris field over Vulcan, but that's mainly because it was a very GOOD looking scene for me.
And that, ultimately, is how it's SUPPOSED to work. But, in the case of this movie, it's not how the movie DID work.
Abrams violated that rule. We're just responding to the things he did. He, as the producer/director, really should have sat back and let his subordinates do their jobs. Instead, he fired one of the most respected people in "Trekdom" from his movie because this guy had a picture next to his desk comparing the old and new ships. That's outside of the scope of what a director or producer should be doing... that's a sign of a total control-freak who's going well beyond what his role in the process should be.
Abrams told people what he wanted, in terms of every little detail. He's a reasonably good storyteller, but he's not a good designer... and he drove that side, resulting in design work in this film that just generally fails, both in terms of "selling the reality of the story" and in terms of being practical design (LIGHTS IN THE FACE OF OFFICERS ON THE BRIDGE FOR CRYING OUT LOUD???)
Abrams should have sat back and trusted his team to do their jobs, and should have stuck to doing his own job. If that had happened, the resulting movie would have been far better than what we ended up with, I think.
Thinking "in universe," remember that this Enterprise was supposed to be Pike's as well. And yet it clearly isn't a small ship with a crew of 200. So if we're going with the "no replicators, lots of storage" explanation, this ship makes sense in that regard; not a cruiser, but the Starfleet equivalent of a Nimitz class aircraft carrier, storing the bulk of its material freeze dried or whatever long-duration method they use.
OTOH, I personally do not believe--and have never believed--that you can feasibly explore a planet by beaming the Captain, a scientist, a doctor and five redshirts onto a random garden spot in one corner of it. Imagine, for example, trying to explore EARTH by landing seven Apollo astronauts in a forest in China. You'll get a narrow cross section of Flora and Fauna and you'll meet a sample of a variety of a third of the sentient life forms on the planet. Full exploration would require beaming down something like five hundred officers to two dozen points around the planet along with automated probes, equipment for drilling core samples, equipment for recovering and processing artifacts, mobile labs, triage units, tents, temporary and semi-temporary structures, bunkers, etc. Even if you only take a month to do it (and the shuttles will be getting an awful lot of work in such a mission) any decent exploration of the planet will require detailed examinations of at least thirty different sites on all seven continents, some of which will have some very extreme environments, and that's not even counting DEEP SEA exploration which will require alot more specialized equipment and a few more specialists.
Of course, the tech designers of STXI could gloss over this like the producers of every other Trek production, but they've done wonderful so far; in the next film, it would bring tears to my eyes to see Enterprise enter orbit of a new planet and suddenly drop two dozen shuttles to every corner of this world packed with an ARMY of scientists to scout this world for its secrets. To do that--and I know you'll disagree--you need a big ship with ALOT of spare equipment on board, not to mention a factory or two if you suddenly have a need for something you haven't brought with you. Replicator technology might some day allow all of this to fit in a ship the size of a TMP refit, but until it does, THIS gigantic Enterprise is the exploration cruiser of my fondest dreams.
Indeed. An Enterprise of 305 meters overall length would be significantly smaller (and of shorter length, in the whole) than a modern US Navy aircraft carrier. It seems highly unlikely that the necessary facilities for an independently operating starship could be placed within a hull so small. As newtype_alpha noted, the larger Enterprise accounts for the presumable capabilities of the ship much more realistically than does a set of dimensions which results in a saucer not vastly larger (and considerably shorter in longest dimension) than a modern US Navy destroyer.
They never seem to get this point, among others. It's really not complicated at all.
BTW, the closeups of the Enterprise in this movie looked a great deal more like real, large objects than was ever managed with the ST:TMP model. A few people insisting otherwise doesn't alter that.
Actually, no, Cicero, the working area of the TOS Enterprise is pretty close to the working area (as in, deck space) as a Nimitz class aircraft carrier. This was a deliberate design decision for the ol' girl. It's just arranged unusually so it looks a lot more open.. but it's a LOT taller than a Nimitz.
You're the fifth person I've seen mention this but every time I ask for a source, nobody seems to have one. Please tell me you do, because I have a sneaking suspicion there was a lot more to it than just that (and the cynical part of my psyche loves a scandal).
I was happy with what we ended up with; in point of fact, I'm reasonably sure from my OWN reading of backstage material that most of Abrams' micro-managing was egged on by his tech advisors in the first place. Orci and Kruzmen are trekkies, after all, and you and I both know how anal those kinds of people can be.
trevanian
Rear Admiral
I have reality, and you have your illusion; wallow in that, don't try to dismiss my well-stated points with throwaway one-liners.
You didn't really address the point though, did you? Miniature work is time consuming, tricky, and incredibly expensive. CGI results in marked reduction of all three. This makes redoing effects sequences feasible in situations where they wouldn't be using conventional methods.
True or not?
trevanian
Rear Admiral
I'm pretty sure I've already pointed you toward it at least once. It was a John Eaves statement, probably on his blog, though I suppose it could have been a post he made on Drexler's.
trevanian
Rear Admiral
Movie stars are incredibly expensive, difficult to work with, and require multiple takes (i.e., time.) But even though Pixar works wonders with full character animation in place of live-action, most studios still use actors, in spite of these factors.
More on point, redoing fx practically is still an accepted way of doing things. In fact, given render times, it is probably the only way to effect a quick fix on a whole sequence at photorealistic levels. INSURRECTION wound up using a ton of miniatures in an otherwise all CG show a decade back, and it was probably the best looking stuff in the show, but all crammed into a couple weeks of work before release.
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