Nu-Enterprise Crew Complement

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Where's it said that Kelvin had a crew of 800? IIRC, Pike simply says that was the number of people saved by Kirk's father.

The Enterprise D was supposedly capable of carrying quite a few times its crew complement in emergency situations such as evacuations, etc. It's possible that the Kelvin was carrying hundreds of passengers at that moment, for one reason or another not explained.

 

[T'Girl]

Seeming that there was no way 800 people fit into that few shuttles that we saw escape from the Kelvin I tend to think of it as a script error and just ignore it.

Actual, Pike said George Kirk saved 800 lives, not 800 people. Perhaps a important distinction. Suppose the Kelvin was a armed transport and not a "ship of the line?" In addition to her regular crew, she was carrying a few hundred special passagers. Special meaning psychiatric patents.

They were experiencing dissociative identity disorder (or multiple personalities), in the pathetically politically correct environment of the Star Trek universe, each of these personalities would be considered a separate "life." So 800 lives encased in 200 to 300 bodies,

That could have been only the last group of shuttles to leave. Winona's shuttle was #47, and the evacuation was ongoing for the whole scene.

Also there is the possibility that the medical shuttle that mommy Kirk gave birth in was atypically small, the first evacuation shuttles to leave the ship were the larger ones, capabe of holding many dozen of people each. Because they possessed more passager capacity, they would have priority in the departure line-up.

And, the group of shuttles we saw departing the area immediately following George Kirk ramming of the Narada, might have been only one of many shuttle groups leaving the area in multiple directions. Given the situation, having the shuttles break into separate groups makes both sense and multiple targets, increasing the chance that some of the shuttle would survive.

And, some of the crew (and passagers?) could have left the Kelvin in lifeboat/lifepods.

 

[M'Sharak]

Besides, guys, are you seriously trying to suggest that the classic Enterprise was a fucking dingy throughout TOS and the movies and that everyone, including Kirk, the Klingons, Romulans, Star Fleet, and Gene Roddenberry, were just too fucking stupid not to realize that the 'real' ships were ships like the Kelvin instead?

Vance, where in this thread did anyone say anything of the kind? Never mind replying, because the answer is: nowhere. You made all of that up, so that you could pretend to yourself that you had a reason for throwing a tantrum. I'll just say here that that sort of stunt from you is getting really, really tired.

Take a deep breath, step away from the computer, and why don't you go find something else to do for a while?

 

[F. King Daniel]

Excelsior, come 2285, was the largest ship of the fleet at the time in the 'Prime' universe. (This is somewhat backed up on screen by several comments from various crew-members upon seeing her). If the Excelsior was dwarfed by a factor of ten by ships immediately preceding the Enterprise, then wouldn't they be more shocked by how fragin' small the classic NCC-1701 was while being the Federation's workhorse?

"Somewhat" backed up? In the happy retcon world of Trek? Please. That's nothing that can't be interpreted as the crew simply acknowledging that Excelsior's bigger than the old Enterprise.
Besides, you of all people should know that unless Excelsior has postage stamp-sized windows, a porta-potty sized bridge and 6' tall decks, it's actually 700+ meters long - putting it roughly on par with the 2009 Starship Enterprise and making it bigger than the Kelvin.

Face it, guys, the only reason the ship's scaled that way in the movie is a severe case of Star Wars penis envy with little rationalization beyond that point.

They merely had a bigger budget, a grander vision than a 1960's TV series could ever hope to realize, filmed in huge locations for their ships' interiors, designed bigger shuttles, made the ships bigger to match and then retconned it into the continuity.

Consider the changes to the timeline as 'splash' damage rather than a linear progression and just have done with it. The Kelvin simply was not in the Prime universe as shown.

Since Star Trek is a work of fiction, anything they want can fit anywhere they want it to. That includes retconning away elements of "Balance of Terror", adding the NX-01, slowing down warp speed to fit the plot of Voyager, inventing the slave race Remans and pretending they were always just off-screen until Nemesis and Enterprise and making the USS Kelvin and her kitbash sister ships bigger than the TOS Enterprise. Make peace with it.

Besides, guys, are you seriously trying to suggest that the classic Enterprise was a fucking dingy throughout TOS and the movies and that everyone, including Kirk, the Klingons, Romulans, Star Fleet, and Gene Roddenberry, were just too fucking stupid not to realize that the 'real' ships were ships like the Kelvin instead?

Voyager fans don't get upset that the Next Gen Enterprise was bigger than "their" ship. Other than ejecting the saucer while stirring music plays, the E-D and Voyager had pretty much identical capabilities. Similar would be true of the USS Kelvin, the TOS Enterprise and her larger 2009 equivalent.

 

[Vance]

"Somewhat" backed up? In the happy retcon world of Trek? Please. That's nothing that can't be interpreted as the crew simply acknowledging that Excelsior's bigger than the old Enterprise.

True, but the point is that it would be rather frickin' odd that the classic crew would consider the Excelsior impressive if she were one of the smallest ships in the fleet. It would also be odd that the classic Enterprise, as a heavy cruiser, or battle cruiser, was a tiny pint-size dwarf of a ship, and that the Kelvin was the 'regular size' scout, of all things, all along.

The point that Timo, and others, is trying to make is that the classic Enterprise was not only not special, despite the dialog and 40 years of history that says otherwise, but is in fact a relative dingy. And that opinion is being put forward for no other reason to explain away the Kelvin's large size.

Besides, you of all peo[ple should know that unless Excelsior has postage stamp-sized windows, a porta-potty sized bridge and 6' tall decks, it's actually 700+ meters long - putting it roughly on par with the 2009 Starship Enterprise and making it bigger than the Kelvin.

The model has a lot of problems with it, to be sure, but she was never supposed to be that big. But even then, the idea we were supposed to get across about the Excelsior was that she was a "big ship", almost unheard of in size for the TOS period. It wouldn't make a lot of since if she were still at the same size or smaller than the bulk of the fleet 30 to 40 years prior.

They merely had a bigger budget, a grander vision than a 1960's TV series could ever hope to realize, filmed in huge locations for their ships' interiors, designed bigger shuttles, made the ships bigger to match and then retconned it into the continuity.

Not really. A lot of people here assume, despite the 'word of god' saying otherwise, that the production crew cared about the scaling and details of the VFX. Abrams (and others) explicitly said otherwise. Remember, the Art of the Movie book uses feet and meters interchangably (1' = 1m). They wanted a 'big ship' to prove how awesome it was - pure penis envy. It's also far from the only franchise to be suffering from that mindset. Nearly everyone's making bigger and bigger ships.

Voyager fans don't get upset that the Next Gen Enterprise was bigger than "their" ship. Other than ejecting the saucer while stirring music plays, the E-D and Voyager had pretty much identical capabilities. Similar would be true of the USS Kelvin, the TOS Enterprise and her larger 2009 equivalent.

No one is saying that 'The USS Voyager actually sucked, and was little more than a shuttlecraft because this OTHER ship from something else is really the end-all awesomesauce', which is what Timo's argument requires. Thing is, I actually like the overall design of the Kelvin, but I acknowledge that it's too big to be part of the TOS backstory. NuTrek's backstory is just NOT the same as TOS - it's that simple. Explain it away all you like, but the Kelvin would not have fit into the universe as presented from 1965 - 1989. The fan demands that it do so is just annoying.

 

[Dukhat]

Explain it away all you like, but the Kelvin would not have fit into the universe as presented from 1965 - 1989. The fan demands that it do so is just annoying.

But it's not the fans who are doing the retconning. It's the producers of Star Trek itself. The only thing the fans are doing is going along with the flow.

A century before TOS, there were Earth ships with saucers roughly the same size as Kirk's Enterprise 100 years later. True, this is from ENT and not TOS, but it was produced by the people that were in charge of the name at the time. The people presently in charge have shown that ships from the 2230's were even larger. So what? That doesn't mean they were more advanced than the TOS Enterprise or the Excelsior. Oil tankers and cargo ships are huge vessels, but they're not more advanced than a much smaller U.S. Navy frigate. Neither are they more elegant or impressive-looking. But to someone who's never seen an oil tanker, they may consider that frigate to be a pretty large ship anyway. When the Enterprise crew first saw the Excelsior, maybe they thought it was a huge ship because they truly hadn't seen a larger vessel before. That doesn't mean they didn't exist.

As KingDaniel said, I think the size factors were less a matter of "penis envy" as you so eloquently put it, but rather a matter of wanting a grander scale in relation to the sets, number of shuttlecraft, etc.

FWIW, I too wish there was more of a consistency with certain ships of certain eras. If you're gonna make a prequel to TOS, then make it look like TOS, not like Voyager. Ryan Church's preliminary sketches of the Kelvin (i.e. "U.S.S. Iowa") were more like what I would have liked. And I certainly would have liked an Earth ship from the 22nd century that didn't look like an Akira. But that's not what we got.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

No reason the Kelvin couldn't have fit into the TOS "universe." None at all.

 

[CuttingEdge100]

Dennis,

No reason the Kelvin couldn't have fit into the TOS "universe." None at all.

That's kind of a problem. See the storyline was altered because of Nero's actions -- the Kelvin was there prior to the timeline being altered.

 

[M'Sharak]

Dennis,

No reason the Kelvin couldn't have fit into the TOS "universe." None at all.

That's kind of a problem. See the storyline was altered because of Nero's actions -- the Kelvin was there prior to the timeline being altered.

Right. It was there. So where's the problem?

 

[Vance]

No reason the Kelvin couldn't have fit into the TOS "universe." None at all.

The point is, yes there is a reason. The ships of TOS weren't that giantic, and larger ships than TOS came as a big fucking surprise to Kirk and crew. If Super-Star-Destroyers were commonplace in the 2210's, the TOS Enterprise would make no sense as a heavy cruiser.

I know you hate TOS, Dennis, and worship at everything that is NuTrek, but come on. The fucking producer of the movie outright said he didn't care about the tech details or the VFX past the point of looking cool. How hard is it to accept that this is just another Hollywoodism?

 

[Vance]

But it's not the fans who are doing the retconning. It's the producers of Star Trek itself. The only thing the fans are doing is going along with the flow.

Yes, but I accept that NuTrek is a reboot and retcon. That was the intention all along. The problem is that a handful of fans have declared NuTrek to be the new religious doctrine and that everything else in Trek, even in TOS, is obviously wrong and you're a horrible person if you think otherwise.

The insistance on the Kelvin "being there all along" in Trek, which is completely absurd and contradicts quite a lot of TOS, along with the insistance that the Enterprise in TOS was a minor ship of almost no importance is, frankly, a fucking insult to people who happened to have liked Trek over the past 40 years.

And the only reason that attitude is taken, is for a handful of fans to declare their preferences for NuTrek as 'the one true way' and anyone with an objection on any particular datapoint is a heretic.

 

[FredH]

My arbitrary fan assumption is that in the Prime universe, Starfleet experimented with a few monster do-everything ship classes in the 2230s, but ultimately decided they were too cost- and energy-intensive to be worth maintaining. Whereas in the Abramsverse, the Narada encounter convinced Starfleet to start making -more- monster ships, or else.

 

[Immolatus]

My arbitrary fan assumption is that in the Prime universe, Starfleet experimented with a few monster do-everything ship classes in the 2230s, but ultimately decided they were too cost- and energy-intensive to be worth maintaining. Whereas in the Abramsverse, the Narada encounter convinced Starfleet to start making -more- monster ships, or else.

that sounds like a good point. Prime universe: Hey lets try this huge ship that can do the job of several ships. not gonna work to expensive to build. lets scale back some.

Nu universe: Now Nero shows up and oh shit we need bigger ships that can kick ass

 

[WinstonSmith]

the weird thing is, I can buy the kelvin as coming after the nx-01, but I can't really buy it coming before the Enterprise of TOS. the size thing doesn't bother me that much (who knows, maybe it was built that large to transport resources for colonisation, or simply to give enough room to house massively inefficient reactor and propulsion systems, which wouldn't be necessary in TOS as the technology improved) but the thing that gets me is that it just doesn't look right. as it was designed by ryan church (I know people like to dump on him, but if you really look at his original designs you can pick out a fair bit of stuff that's really paying homage to TOS) it works, but the way it came out is just all greebly, covered in dirty hull panels (It's space people, there just ain't that much dirt and grease!) and an absolute far cry from the minimalist approach of matt jefferies (which makes sense; you don't really want to take a space walk to fix something if you don't have to, do ya?)

anyway, just my $0.02, probably doesn't make any sense anyways...

 

[F. King Daniel]

The point is, yes there is a reason. The ships of TOS weren't that giantic, and larger ships than TOS came as a big fucking surprise to Kirk and crew. If Super-Star-Destroyers were commonplace in the 2210's, the TOS Enterprise would make no sense as a heavy cruiser.

Okay Mr Technical Fanzine Man, what about the huge Planet of the Titans Enterprise model seen looming in the background of spacedock in STIII? The one fandom called an Arial-class shuttlecarrier and has a Kelvin-sized saucer? What about the dreadnoughts named in TMP, from FJ's manual?

I know you hate TOS, Dennis, and worship at everything that is NuTrek, but come on. The fucking producer of the movie outright said he didn't care about the tech details or the VFX past the point of looking cool. How hard is it to accept that this is just another Hollywoodism?

I love TOS, and I have no problem with it. It's a Hollywoodism. So were Klingon foreheads. Big deal.

 

[Kemaiku]

The Kelvin looked very industrial and practically no surface inside or out was polished or all that new. She was a hulking workhorse operating minutes from the Klingon border, with only a long-range uplink to Starfleet Command for company.

I don't buy the scale of the ship, there were enough visual clues that she wasn't all that big, but packing a large crew compliment into her with more spartan crew accomodation I can buy, it fits with her aesthetic. The ship really did not scream 'comfort' at any point.

And the added hanger pod on top to house a small herd of shuttles seems fine too, look at the pull away shot just before the main title, the collection of shuttles escaping each packed with quite a lot of people. The Kelvin can manage ~1000, the NuEnterprise can handle ~2500.

 

[Timo]

It doesn't sound convincing that Starfleet would have reacted in any way to the Narada attack on the Kelvin. When Kirk brings up the incident that cost the life of his father, and draws a connection to the present situation, it appears to be a big surprise even to Pike, the man who wrote a dissertation on the issue! Apparently, nobody expected to see the Narada or anything like that again.

If the new Enterprise was built to challenge the Narada and other monsters like her, Starfleet didn't invest wisely, considering we saw that the former ship was still completely at the mercy of the latter. Nothing appeared to have changed between the Kelvin and the Enterprise - not size (large), not offensive firepower (impressive-looking but ineffective), not the ability to withstand hits (piss-poor), not the ability to shoot down incoming fire (very good).

The other ships of 2258 appeared no different from the Kelvin or the Enterprise, either. They might have been of different size, smaller or larger, as we didn't see them close up and didn't discern all the scale-establishing detail that may or may not have been there. But the few comparison shots we got suggested a generic mass of vessels, all of them bigger than the TOS one.

Still doesn't mean there couldn't have been TOS style ships in use by the STXI Starfleet, of course. But it's a bit funny that none of those were available at Earth while a uniform flock of large ships was standing by. Perhaps there were "TOS-sized" ships there (the spacedock scene actually shows some) but those weren't deemed battleworthy? That would still mean a fundamental difference between the TOS and STXI universes in their treatment of 300-meter-long starships...

The point that Timo, and others, is trying to make is that the classic Enterprise was not only not special, despite the dialog and 40 years of history that says otherwise, but is in fact a relative dingy. And that opinion is being put forward for no other reason to explain away the Kelvin's large size.

The argument that Kirk's TOS ship was nothing special has been put forth long before the movie came out, and exactly because TOS never made the claim that the ship would have been in any way special. Which is keeping true with the roots of TOS, the concept of a young and adventurous skipper braving the unknown despite being handicapped by the limitations of his hardware and the relative disinterest of his superiors.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[bryce]

I for one am convinced that the changes made by Nero *would* have had to echo both forward *and* backwards in time - it only makes sense. When you think about it, Trek's future is constantly influencing it's past (and, of course, vise verse) - via time travel.

*IF* the nuTrek's past is the exact same past as TOS...then nuTrek's past would be full of people coming from the Prime timeline (from Kirk'd crew to Picard's to Sisko's to Janeway's...) and that would men that if you traveled with one of *them* into the future you'd wind up in the Prime timeline's future - not the new altered-by-Nero nuTrek timeline...and that doesn't make sense.

nuTrek's past timeline is very similar to the Prime timeline...but not exactly the same...when Nero went back in time he created a new future - and since Trek's future affect's it's past - he also created a slightly different new past. One that is *almost* exactly like the TOS timeline...but with the nuTrek equivalents of Kirk, Picard, Sisko & Janeway traveling to its past...or not...depending on the changes in the timeline... (For example, perhaps in the nutimeline, Picard never encountered the Borg when he did, so he didn't need to go back and restore the timeline...but *probably* he did, since I think the writers and creators of nuTrek imagine that, up until Nero arrived, most of the events from the Prime timeline happened almost exactly as we saw them...though, I'd argue that they didn't necessarily have to...)

 

[Set Harth]

nuTrek's past timeline is very similar to the Prime timeline...but not exactly the same...when Nero went back in time he created a new future - and since Trek's future affect's it's past - he also created a slightly different new past.

It's exactly the same as the past of the Prime timeline before 2233 ( accounting for alterations made in previous versions of Trek ).

 

[T'Girl]

It's exactly the same as the past of the Prime timeline before 2233 ( accounting for alterations made in previous versions of Trek ).

I know there are some here that embrace that view point, but it just doesn't hold up to examination. The past in the Star Trek universe was built, not just by the people living in the past, but also by people from the future who interacted with the past.

The prime universe's future after Kirk's birthday is influenced by people from the prime future traveling into the prime past.

The alternate universe's future after Kirk's birthday is influenced by people from the alternate future traveling into and creating, what is effectively a alternate past.

It's almost impossible for the alternate people to make the identical decisions as their prime counterparts. In some cases, different people will travel into the past.

So, not only is the future of the alternate universe going to be diverged from the prime after 2233, but with each historical interaction, the past will also diverge from the prime history prior to 2233.

"In time," there will be a alternate past that is different than the prime past.