Reactions to the Kelvinverse Enterprise

To black and white cutaway looks more reasonable that the popular mechanics one(which simply squishes the huge sets in). I have no idea if the scale actually works.

I just feel it's a bit cartoonishly big, with implausible chasms inside. I'm sorry for having that opinion, but I have stated some of my reasons and they are reasonable enough. I'm sorry you or Fireproof don't share that opinion.

The Enterprise D was designed to be as large as it was. It may be too large for a thousand people, but that just makes this case all the worse. The Kelvin Enterprise must largely be a ghost town. Perhaps all the decks without windows aren't getting used.

 

Why be sorry? It's a difference of opinion, not holy writ.

I don't think it is too large by either count. I think the Kelvin Enterprise was designed around a different philosophy, one in which bigger is better for the Federation. I think it also may include larger shuttle and auxiliary craft facilities and weapons emplacements, all of which would have required hardware.

YMMV and obviously does. IDIC and all that

 

The level of detail is amazing! There should be a game like the old GTA where you walk around in a 2D top-down view!

 

Yes, I especially like that one. Someone put alot of work in

 

Compared to things like beaming stuff around, power requirements for heat and oxygen should be trivial, from TNG "The Ensigns of Command" we know that the Ent-D can carry at least 15,000 people in addition to its crew of > 1,000.

It still is. Shorter doesn't mean smaller, there's more than just length. A Galaxy class starship (GCS) is a lot wider (seconadry hull too), and a great deal of the Kelvinprise's 725 metres comes from the nacelles alone. You could easily get the same or more length for a GCS by simply moving its nacelles backwards, hell, you could go one step further by additionally rotating the saucer by 90° to achieve something beyond 800 or 900 m without actually adding anything to the ship!

If this is reliable, a GCS has 5.8 million cubic metres.
http://www.st-v-sw.net/STSWvolumetrics.html

I would estimate the Kelvin-1701's volume at something like 3 to 3.5 million cubic metres which would make its size comparable to an ambassador, smaller than a GCS or nebula.



But perhaps somebody has better numbers or actual calcs.

Not really. Does Star Trek generally have a scale limit? Whale Probe, V'ger, Yonada, Dyson sphere... If life forms count, there are also planet-sized space amoebae.
So I'd say no.

I seriously don't understand what all the fuss is about considering how ship sizes are handled in the ST universe. First of all, people pretend that the bigger the better the more advanced, more powerful which is just nonsense with tons of counter evidence. Look at those tiny Species 8472 bioships that make short work of giant Borg Cubes. Look at the Dominion which greatly relies on small attack vessels. Look at the Defiant. Look at those huge (hundreds of millions of cubic metres), "primitive" Kazon/ Trabe Predators. The Yonada is an asteroid converted into a ship with a diameter of over 320 kilometres, built by an even more primitive people etc.

Besides, it seems nobody gives a damn about 22nd century Vulcan cruisers with an estimated length of 600 m.






The NX-01 is supposed to be 225 m long.

I kind of appriciate the size of the alternate 1701 version(s) because it makes more sense to me. In both realities it was designed to operate for years on its own, regarding all those hostile Aliens, entities, and deadly anomalies, this seems more reasonable...



than something like this (original Ent-A).



Further, you can evacuate more people in case of emergency.

 

I don't either. I just made a small comment about how I thought the ship looked slick, but found the big empty spaces inside to be silly, specifically engineering.

 

It's just a point of discussion.

 

I thought it was interesting in another thread where someone compared the windows on the Rec Deck set in TMP to the ones on the model, and found the ship would actually have to be about twice as long as the KT Enterprise if you scaled based on that.

Honestly, after poring over the Strategic Designs deckplans for the refit and seeing how cramped everything was trying to squeeze in a shuttle bay, a cargo bay, a M/AMRA, 14 science labs, and quarters for 430 people (and, like, two extra rooms for visitors), never mind cramming two decks into the rim of the saucer in 3D, I definitely started to sympathize with the KT Enterprise's scale more. Even DSC's upscaling makes a lot of sense.

 

The Enterprise-D supposedly has much more volume than the Kelvin Enterprise but, since it's sets are based on the Motion Picture Enterprise's but without that ship's huge rec deck or engineering (although the same engine room set as TMP, it loses the forced perspective and thus immense scale), it comes across as much more cramped. The deck plans depict a ship made up of endless identical corridors and rooms with nothing like the plaza we see in Into Darkness or the giant engineering or hanger areas. When we see Enterprise-D cargo spaces, they're all redresses of the same tiny shuttlebay set and nothing compared to the giant USS Vengeance hanger Scotty runs across.

Perhaps they shouldn't have tried to depict such an enormous ship in 1987, when the only resources they had to do it were some redressed sets of a much smaller vessel. Nowadays with CG extensions it's easy, and we see the Discovery shuttlebay and Turbolift Funhouse all the time. But back then, the best they had was a painted corridor extension.

 

I seem to recall that by the measurements of the refit that the rec deck would not fit inside. So, upscaling is one thing that I think makes sense, since the sets are not often made to accommodate the dimensions of fictional model.

More to my original point is the fact that I think the larger spaces are appropriate to support the crew's wellbeing on longer trips. Tight and confined spaces are not known to have a positive impact upon human mental health over long periods.

 

Supplement: While the designs aren't exactly the same as is well known, the overall structure of the K-Ent isn't much different from the original constitution. So applying the Square-cube law to the numbers from st-v-sw.net, the Kelvin Enterprise would have a volume of...

211,248 * (725/289)^3 = 3,335,133 cubic metres ~ 40 % less than a GCS

Relax. That point wasn't really aimed at you but rather at the wailing "so oversized" community.
I am not a fan of the "Budweiser" engine room either, less in terms of empty spaces than the industrial, "pipy" look. The warp core from Into D. isn't bad though.

 

Trek's era is technology-meets-art. They'd waste space just because they could. They built it in the US, after all.

It only becomes an issue when you want realism in your Trek, but that's when you start questioning the shape of the ship and why the most important room is terminally vulnerable and the whole franchise crumbles...

 

The size of the ship doesn't matter, it's the size of the Warp Bubble.

Which means it's a question of conservation and efficiency.

Huge warp bubble, might mean instability and massive power consumption.

Smaller the bubble, might mean stability and less power consumption, but the bubble might be smaller than the ship.

Possibly the slower you go, the less unstable your bubble has to be?

 

Little bit of the bubbly?

 

You have to be careful with those, or you might suck your own mother into it

 

I have never, never sucked my own mother, I think?

Oh.

Forgot about beast feeding.

Sorry.

Coco Pops just ain't the same any more.

 

Anyways....

The issue with the recreation deck isn't one of scale, but of shape; the concave underside of saucer. Doubling the size of the ship would not make the room fit, but make it worse, unless you did not enlarge the windows, and put both rows in the upper half of the saucer rim.

 

How would it make it worse? Doubling the size of the ship also gets you more space until the concave would bite into the deck. At worst, a “rationalized” rec deck would make it less stubby than most attempts to fit it into the ship by stopping it at the peak of the undercut.

 

IS there even an agreed upon size for the Enterprise-D...because as it was originally designed, the leading edge of the saucer was barely *1* deck thick...but when we factor in 10-Forward, that significantly expands the size of the saucer leading edge to at least 2 decks, possibly *3* - which makes the ship MUCH larger than originally represented as.

Which I am actually fine with personally...I always thought that the E-D looked smaller than it should wen shown in a comparison photo next to the 1701 and 1701-A.