Ridiculously large ships

[Syd Shanshala]

In my head cannon I just said ok, let’s make the kelvin’s saucer like 3 meters wider than the nx-01 saucer and size everything else accordingly. Works for me. The only real issue is the interior shots being ginormous but hey thats movie making. Pretty sure the enterprise A didn’t have 78 decks but it’s in the movie.

 

[XCV330]

Ships scale to the requirements of the service. Battleships were once common for navies. No one has any intention of building anymore, and the last were retired years ago. But ifs not impossible to imagine some change in thinking, say, advanced ABM forcing navies to resurrect the ideas with new battleships sporting dozens of railguns.

A more recent example: the STS shuttle fleet was retired. A little too soon perhaps, but they were heavy-lift vehicles capable of launching 7 crewmembers AND large satellites + kick stages. Long before Spacex and Blue Origin, the launch services could be done cheaper with expendables so that need was simply not there. After building ISS and one final Hubble visit, the large shuttles were retired. The only current space-plane operational for orbit, the X-37 is unmanned and very small.
Forthcoming designs like the DreamChaser are likewise far smaller than the STS.

The Kelvin I could see as an earlier long-distance exploration or patrol ship doing jobs that would eventually be done much better by Constitutions in the prime universe, or whatever class Enterprise was in the Kelvin timeline. In the Kelvin timeline, Starfleet designers got to see an extremely powerful, and rather large ship intrude from the future, and reacted accordingly with ships that would hopefully be big enough to hold their own against another. In this they were successful.

 

[F. King Daniel]

These theories trying to reconcile Kelvin Trek with TOS are getting more and more moot since they're changing the size of it and other starships of the Prime Universe 2250's...

(For reference, the Kelvin is 457m, same as the Discoprise, and the Kelvin Enterprise is 725m)

 

[pst]

These theories trying to reconcile Kelvin Trek with TOS are getting more and more moot since they're changing the size of it and other starships of the Prime Universe 2250's...

(For reference, the Kelvin is 457m, same as the Discoprise, and the Kelvin Enterprise is 725m)

now that is ridiculous.

 

[Mad Jack Wolfe]

Discovery is the Stretch Armstrong of Starfleet.

 

[gerbil]

I don’t mind them messing around with the scales. This is a culture who can manipulate space, matter, and gravity. They can control vast amounts of energy and have a boundless desire to explore.

They can well afford to build 700m long ships.

 

[caseylee4ts]

So the USS Kelvin is technically a Prime timeline ship, since it was before the Narada incursion. The Narada was far bigger than the Kelvin. Far, FAR bigger. It seems only logical (sorry, I couldn't help it) that Starfleet would consider this going forward. Those in charge of the fleet likely decided they couldn't be caught so unawares in the future and started designing bigger ships. To me, it only makes sense that the ships are getting bigger earlier in the Kelvin timeline. As someone mentioned earlier, look at Yorktown! Holy cow! If they can build something that big, why not build bigger starships?

Back in the Prime timeline, it's possible that as they moved forward on designs for ships, there may not have been a need to make the ships bigger right away. So when they designed Constitution-class ships, they made them a little smaller than the Kelvin.

 

[DonIago]

What we should really be asking is how the Imperials in SW managed to make some of the ridiculously-sized ships they built.

 

[gerbil]

So the USS Kelvin is technically a Prime timeline ship, since it was before the Narada incursion. The Narada was far bigger than the Kelvin. Far, FAR bigger. It seems only logical (sorry, I couldn't help it) that Starfleet would consider this going forward. Those in charge of the fleet likely decided they couldn't be caught so unawares in the future and started designing bigger ships. To me, it only makes sense that the ships are getting bigger earlier in the Kelvin timeline. As someone mentioned earlier, look at Yorktown! Holy cow! If they can build something that big, why not build bigger starships?

Back in the Prime timeline, it's possible that as they moved forward on designs for ships, there may not have been a need to make the ships bigger right away. So when they designed Constitution-class ships, they made them a little smaller than the Kelvin.

My headcanon always assumed something along these lines. Starfleet’s trajectory changed from a bunch of smaller ships to a few larger ships. I also assumed that some technologies progressed differently. Transporters seems slightly less versatile while warp drive seems to have advanced significantly and sensor technology seems to have stagnated.

It’s just a different set of ground rules and none of them necessarily need to flow seamlessly.

 

[caseylee4ts]

I hadn't really thought about the effect on the various technologies. But I would agree with your transporter and warp assessment. One could argue that weapons have also advanced faster in the Kelvin timeline. Setting aside production-value and our real-world visual effects improvements for a moment, the Kelvin-verse Enterprise seems a bit more well-armed that our TOS Enterprise. After the Narada incident, they likely felt the need to arm their ships more heavily. While in the Prime universe, maybe they didn't want to seem too armed or aggressive.

 

[Rahul]

These theories trying to reconcile Kelvin Trek with TOS are getting more and more moot since they're changing the size of it and other starships of the Prime Universe 2250's...

(For reference, the Kelvin is 457m, same as the Discoprise, and the Kelvin Enterprise is 725m)

Keep in mind, there is no canon source for the length of the original Constitution class (or the refit). Putting them around ~300m is more than arbitrary, happened in non-canon works, and only became somewhat accepted through sheer repetition. Unlike for newer shows, where the CGI models can be consistently scaled to each other, modelwork was always a much more rough estimate.

The original length never made much sense to begin with - it didn't fit with the size of the miniatures, or with the sets. Everything on screen (the size of the shuttlebay, the height of the bridge set) points towards a larger size of around 400-500m. The original Enterprise and Excelsiour were always heavily underscaled in supplemental material, wich was always unrealistically small. So the Discovery-Enterprise scale is actually more accurate even for TOS.

 

[thribs]

I see Discovery as a show that was made in the far future about the past and they've got every historical detail wrong. Similar to how Hollywood movies "imagine" what the past was like.

 

[Mytran]

Funnily enough, that's more or less exactly was Gene Roddenberry said in his foreword to the TMP novelisation; the look and tech of the TMP era was "reality" and the way they were depicted in TOS was just the interpretation of a TV show

 

[F. King Daniel]

Keep in mind, there is no canon source for the length of the original Constitution class (or the refit). Putting them around ~300m is more than arbitrary, happened in non-canon works, and only became somewhat accepted through sheer repetition. Unlike for newer shows, where the CGI models can be consistently scaled to each other, modelwork was always a much more rough estimate.

The original length never made much sense to begin with - it didn't fit with the size of the miniatures, or with the sets. Everything on screen (the size of the shuttlebay, the height of the bridge set) points towards a larger size of around 400-500m. The original Enterprise and Excelsiour were always heavily underscaled in supplemental material, wich was always unrealistically small. So the Discovery-Enterprise scale is actually more accurate even for TOS.

Thing is, anything a straight-up upscale fixes, breaks two more things.

 

[Spot261]

Only if you take it as really important how large the ships are

Surely they're just the backdrops against which the stories happen?

 

[fireproof78]

Funnily enough, that's more or less exactly was Gene Roddenberry said in his foreword to the TMP novelisation; the look and tech of the TMP era was "reality" and the way they were depicted in TOS was just the interpretation of a TV show

That is one of my favorite theories

 

[ISS Enterprise]

That is one of my favorite theories

Was this after GR sold the rights to TOS? His attitude about TOS changed after that LOL.

 

[Mytran]

He never owned the rights to TOS - it was created as a work for hire.
At one point he was offered the rights (when Paramount were selling off their less popular properties for cheap) but he didn't have the funds.

 

[Spot261]

Was this after GR sold the rights to TOS? His attitude about TOS changed after that LOL.

Adding to the point above I think that had more to do with his extended tenure living off the funds of lecture tours where he was exposed to a lot of the fanbase who had idealised Trek way beyond his original intentions.

 

[Rahul]

Thing is, anything a straight-up upscale fixes, breaks two more things.

What exactly would be broken if the TOS Connie and the Excelsiour would be upscaled compared to the rest of the fleet?

Just slightly, to about 450m for the Connie, to a more reasonable size where the actual bridge sets would fit inside their domes?

Especially since we have exactly zero canon sources for the smaller scales usually given anyway?

The only thing I can think of was that one shot with the Excelsiour next to the Galaxy class in TNG. But that's exactly one(!) single shot, and we have scaling issues in thousands of Star Trek model shots. Just think about the Defiant and the Enterprise-E in "First Contact" - yet no one suddenly presumes the Defiant was only about the size of a runabout. For both ships the more reasonable sizes are "canon" - the ones were everything would actually fit inside the ship - despite one single vfx-shot contradicting this.