Ridiculously large ships

[Saul]

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)

Hang on a minute, weren't you arguing on the Discovery boards that Discovery is not part of the Prime Timeline and is a reboot?

 

[The Wormhole]

Hang on a minute, weren't you arguing on the Discovery boards that Discovery is not part of the Prime Timeline and is a reboot?

I argue the same thing, but for the time being the official party line is that Disco is somehow Prime.

 

[gerbil]

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.

I do like to watch the size argument threads inevitably deal with on screen issues like this. People argue that TOS-era ships couldn’t be nearly the size of the Enterprise-D while onscreen evidence seems to show the Stargazer and Excelsior class as fairly close. That’s just how special effects were with models and compositing.

As fun as it is to speculate and play around with and as much as we know certain things were designed certain ways, we have to admit that none of this ever really made sense or was all that consistent.

 

[F. King Daniel]

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

Not compared to the rest of the fleet - compared to themselves. If you "fix" say, the shuttlebay or bridge by making the overall ship larger you break scale with airlocks or other features.

 

[Rahul]

I do like to watch the size argument threads inevitably deal with on screen issues like this. People argue that TOS-era ships couldn’t be nearly the size of the Enterprise-D while onscreen evidence seems to show the Stargazer and Excelsior class as fairly close. That’s just how special effects were with models and compositing.

As fun as it is to speculate and play around with and as much as we know certain things were designed certain ways, we have to admit that none of this ever really made sense or was all that consistent.

Indeed. I take the official lengths of modern day production more serious: If they say the Discovery is 750,5 m long, then that's the length they have in their computer, that's the scale all hull details are scaled up to, and that's the scale which it exactly has compared to other objects that are on screen.

With models though the official scale is usually just an approximation. They weren't designed with a specific number in the head - they were designed around their features (some of which are even off-scale towards each other on the same ship - The Enterprise D-s saucer windows are way waaaay taller than the windows on the neck and secondary hull).

Not compared to the rest of the fleet - compared to themselves. If you "fix" say, the shuttlebay or bridge by making the overall ship larger you break scale with airlocks or other features.

Again: We're talking only about up-scaling the original Connie to about 450m (and the Excelsiour proportional). The original Connie doesn't have that many features giving a scale. Mainly windows - and it has two rows of them on the saucer.

And on the movie refit, ONLY a larger size (~450m) works, even from the outside: If you look at the airlocks (at the bridge dome and the torpedo bay), they aren't designed for a length of 305m - They are designed to fit with the deck count. And regarding the deck count, the dome clearly is a complete, full deck. And the saucer two decks. And the shuttlebay at least three decks high.

This is entirely impossible at 305m. Everything would be scaled way too small: Windows at peoples feet, airlocks only big enough to crawl through. The bridge dome only housing the ceiling of the bridge. The "official" size (305m) has always been wrong. Thus I'm SO happy it was never, ever actually confirmed in any canon material on screen.

The original Enterprise has always been around 450m. The Disco-refit only makes that number finally official.

 

[gerbil]

Indeed. I take the official lengths of modern day production more serious: If they say the Discovery is 750,5 m long, then that's the length they have in their computer, that's the scale all hull details are scaled up to, and that's the scale which it exactly has compared to other objects that are on screen.

With models though the official scale is usually just an approximation. They weren't designed with a specific number in the head - they were designed around their features (some of which are even off-scale towards each other on the same ship - The Enterprise D-s saucer windows are way waaaay taller than the windows on the neck and secondary hull).

Indeed, even then there are some cheats here and there. I will say that the NX-01 seems to have been very carefully designed to match the sets and has a lot of thought put into the placement and size of airlocks.

Discovery actually seems to be deliberately vague about the location and sizes of the ships and various locations on it.

 

[TommyR01D]

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

This might be passable if not for the recreations in later series - Relics; Trials & Tribbleations; In A Mirror, Darkly - which show it really did look that way.

 

[Mytran]

This might be passable if not for the recreations in later series - Relics; Trials & Tribbleations; In A Mirror, Darkly - which show it really did look that way.

Yep: Scotty confirmed that the sets really looked the way they did which led to DS9 confirming that the Klingons really looked like swarthy humans (despite Blood Oath indicating otherwise) which led to ENT introducing a convoluted reason to explain something that way back TMP was supposed to be nothing worse than a soft reboot.

 

[johnnybear]

I argue the same thing, but for the time being the official party line is that Disco is somehow Prime.

To quote McCoy, "In a Pig's eye!!"
JB

 

[Mytran]

I have no problem with the broad strokes of the events being Prime, but it can hardly be denied that the entire universe has had an aesthetic reboot.

I call this Prime 2.0

 

[fireproof78]

Yep: Scotty confirmed that the sets really looked the way they did which led to DS9 confirming that the Klingons really looked like swarthy humans (despite Blood Oath indicating otherwise) which led to ENT introducing a convoluted reason to explain something that way back TMP was supposed to be nothing worse than a soft reboot.

Oh no! Not a soft reboot!

 

[gerbil]

I have no problem with the broad strokes of the events being Prime, but it can hardly be denied that the entire universe has had an aesthetic reboot.

I call this Prime 2.0

This is exactly how I feel about it and I’m more than willing to accept it even if there are bits and pieces I don’t like.

 

[Qonundrum]

Because Nero changed everything.

Or because JJ Abrams wanted to make Star Trek look more like Star Wars, since big big ships are always dyn-o-mite!

 

[fireproof78]

Or because JJ Abrams wanted to make Star Trek look more like Star Wars, since big big ships are always dyn-o-mite!

Not the first time Star Wars has inspired Star Trek.

 

[Bry_Sinclair]

They're overcompensating for something...

 

[F. King Daniel]

Or maybe they just thought those massive engineering sections looked really cool and so scaled the ship to accommodate.

It's only the boys with the little ships who get hung up on this stuff

 

[M'Sharak]

Or because JJ Abrams wanted to make Star Trek look more like Star Wars, since big big ships are always dyn-o-mite!

Amazing. Ten years have gone by, and "J.J. wants to make Trek into Star Wars" gotcha! statements are still seen as clever?

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They're overcompensating for something...

...

It's only the boys with the little ships who get hung up on this stuff

And less of this, please — Bry, because no-substance chickenshit drive-by posts like that one are about all you've contributed here in years, and Daniel, because... well, that's veering a little too far from "post, not poster," don't you think?

Now, is this thread finished (not that it didn't start off flogging a dead horse, or anything like that) or might there still be something of value to be discussed? I'll give it a day or two.

 

[BK613]

The only time I get eyerolly over ship sizes is when I notice something in real life that demonstrates how over-the-top the sizes seem to be. Like saucer sections the size of the Pentagon being propelled by warp nacelles the size of the Petronas Towers

 

[Bad Robot]

I have no problem with the broad strokes of the events being Prime, but it can hardly be denied that the entire universe has had an aesthetic reboot.

I call this Prime 2.0

That's been my take on it as well. In fact I would even go a step further and say that TMP was 2.0, TWOK was 2.1, TNG~ENT (Berman era) was 2.2, and now with STD we're in 3.0

I like to think that being in Prime 3.0 negates the need to continue explaining away how to reconcile 1.0 with 2.2 (or to continue acknowledging or dealing with a S4 episode of ENT which already claims to have done just that). Why Klingon Ruffles Have Ridges from 1979-2005 is kind of a moot point once they've redesigned Klingons yet again.

 

[Bry_Sinclair]

I apologise for an obvious attempt at humour, it is a difficult concept.

Given that the NuTrek films begin at a point between our only real points of reference (ENT where the ship had a crew in the 80s and "The Cage" where there was only just over 200 onboard) a ship such as the Kelvin having 800 survivors (because lets face it with the damage she takes there would have been losses) seems very out of place, especially as she seems to be acting as a survey ship--given that all other surveyors we've witnessed have all been relatively smaller than most with crew complements to match, add to that the fact that the Constitution-Class is deemed a heavy cruiser and on the forefront of Starfleet operations and exploration then would most likely be kept fully staffed as much as possible. This is for a ship that is meant to be within the Prime Universe, which makes it stand out compared to all other evidence we have available to us.

Whilst some of the changes in design aesthetics could be explained away (i.e. one of Starfleet's most prominent starship designers of the 2240s/50s was an engineer on the Kelvin who was killed during the battle, therefore someone else was given the assignment), that doesn't provide much of an explanation why the fleet suddenly feels the need to double the size of their ships, as it gives them no real advantage or improvement over what we've seen in the Prime Universe (whilst it may allow for more personnel and equipment, if anything making ships larger targets would be a noticeable tactical disadvantage--not exactly a logical compromise).

As from a production standpoint, I can only assume that they wanted to give the ships a bit more gravitas and make them more substantial, but in space with no point of reference then there isn't much point, the Enterprise could be 500 or 5000 meters long and it wouldn't be something that most would be able to discern watching the film. Since the Narada is coming from the future (from a time where we know the major powers are building bigger ships, and as a mining vessel she would be a considerably larger ship than most, given the need to processing and storage bays) then keeping the ships of the 23rd century at their original sizes would've worked just as effectively, showing them to be the underdog in the fight, which would mean having to rely on the guile and quick-thinking tactics Kirk really is famous for (so tension and drama can still be built up on whether or not the ship is going to make it through in one piece). Other than updating designs (either for modern cinema goers or if they had to due to not having the full rights for design elements) there is no real reason why the ships size had to be tampered with, at least none that are apparent.