Shatner's 'Trial Run'

[Christopher]

The TOS Enterprise itself didn't have a consistent size initially, which is why the crew complement in "The Cage" was so small. After the pilot, they doubled the effective size of the vessel.

And then there's the depiction of the Stargazer in "The Battle." Despite being kitbashed from TMP-Enterprise model parts, it was portrayed by the FX artists as being nearly as large as the Enterprise-D.

And then of course there's "The Doomsday Machine," where Decker's shuttlecraft is portrayed as only slightly smaller than the Constellation.

Inconsistency in depictions of ship size isn't proof of separate realities. It's just proof of artistic license.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Are you sure? The opening shot of "The Cage", where the camera zooms into the bridge shows its size relative to the rest of the ship the same as it would be thoughout the series and TOS movies. The old blueprints in the Making of Star Trek have scales. To me the crew size is more about them deciding how much automation a futuristic spaceship would have.

The STXI Enterprise is the one that was doubled in size, when they realized the bridge deck, brewery and shuttles wouldn't fit.

 

[Christopher]

I'm not talking about the visuals, I'm talking about the assumptions made by the creative staff. And The Making of Star Trek came along in 1968, four years after "The Cage." What I said was that they locked down the size of the ship after the first pilot, which means that they had it settled on by the time of the actual series.

And you can't really draw any firm conclusions about scale from the "Cage" opening shot, since the technology didn't let them line up the miniature and the bridge interior shot perfectly. They just approximated it as best they could. After all, they had no idea that the production they were making would be obsessively analyzed and freeze-framed and screen-capped decades later. They just assumed it would be one shot that came and went and might never be seen again, so the impression it left mattered more than the precise measurements.

A lot of ST effects shots over the years have been eyeballed rather than precision-measured. Look at the Trek Tech forum sometime for the ongoing debates about the sizes of various '90s-era ships like the Cardassian Galor class or the Defiant. Those were never definitively locked down at all, and different FX shots depict them inconsistently.

The point is that it's silly to nitpick details like this as evidence of contradictory realities, because the whole thing is a fabricated construct and is subject to variations in artistic detail. A ship is whatever size looks best in a particular shot.

 

[Steve Roby]

And I think between the Defiant sets in "In A Mirror, Darkly" and the Phase II sets, that whole "it was made now so of course it looks more advanced" has been exposed for the empty sophistry that it is.

Hardly. Two fanwank productions aimed solidly at diehard fans (Enterprise season four and a fanvid series) can't reasonably be compared to a major motion picture.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Yes, it's pointless to use VFX as definitive proof, but in the case of the USS Kelvin the ship was supposed to be huge. It wasn't an FX goof, the ship had to fit the 800 crew and fleet of shuttles the script required.
Admittedly the reason for the size is probably that "800" sounds more impressive than the "200" crew the Destroyer/Scout class (from the FJ manual, the ship the Kelvin design was based on) holds, but the ship was meant to be big nonetheless.

 

[Christopher]

The Star Trek universe has always been reinterpreted over time. Nicholas Meyer reinterpreted it as something far more military (and technologically backward) than it had been before, but fans accepted that revisionist take. Heck, Khan's people's habitat and costumes on Ceti Alpha had movie-era Starfleet equipment and paraphernalia decorating them even though they'd been stranded there for 15 years, a blatant contradiction. Either the filmmakers were assuming the tech had always looked that way or they just figured the audience wouldn't know or care that it was inconsistent (not knowing how obsessive Trekkies could get about such details).

I'm not talking about "FX goofs." That's misreading my argument. I'm talking about artistic license, about differences in creative interpretation. If a new artist takes over a comic book and starts drawing Peter Parker with a radically different facial structure than before, or if a new writer takes over and starts portraying Tony Stark's politics in a way diametrically opposite to how an earlier writer portrayed them, that's not a "goof," it's the creators exercising their license to vary the details of a fictional work to suit their particular creative visions. The audience is expected to suspend disbelief and pretend that the inconsistent portrayals represent a consistent reality.

I'm not denying that the new movie has revisionist ideas. I'm saying that plenty of previous Trek productions have engaged in similar degrees of revisionism, but we've learned to accept or overlook their different approaches. We've gotten used to thinking of them as parts of a cohesive whole, and we've had a long time to think up rationalizations for their discrepancies. I'm sure that when TMP or TWOK or TNG came along, there were plenty of people who protested their revisionist depictions of the universe just as vehemently as some people are complaining about ST2009 today. But over time, the audience got used to them and memory did its magic, blurring it all together into the perception of a cohesive whole. And I have no doubt the same thing will happen here.

 

[F. King Daniel]

^Understood and agreed.

 

[Christopher]

One way of reconciling a larger crew size and shuttle complement with a smaller or comparable-sized ship: maybe different ships get different crew sizes for different mission profiles. Pike's Enterprise had a smaller crew despite being (retroactively accepted as) the same size as Kirk's, so we know that a ship of a given size could have variations in crew size by more than a factor of two. Maybe 200 was the optimal crew size for the mission the E was on during "The Cage," 430 was the optimal crew size for the E's 5-year tour, 400 was the optimal size for whatever mission the Intrepid was on before "The Immunity Syndrome," and 800 was the optimal size for whatever mission the Kelvin was undertaking at the start of the movie. Maybe it was on an assignment that required ferrying large numbers of personnel to a particular destination, and was equipped with a sufficient number of shuttles to carry them. Its interior might've been a lot more cramped than the E's because of the need for a larger crew complement. So there's no need to assume it was a giant ship.

 

[F. King Daniel]

But we do, simply because the ship looked bigger then the TOS Enterprise did, inside and out. The Kelvin bridge seemed a little bigger then the TOS Enterprise, and, like the nuEnt, had corridors leading off the bridge. There's a window on the side of the top dome. We see the size of a phaser turret when that poor woman is sucked out into space. We can see the size of the windows relative to people on the intro flyby. The power plant engineering area was huge, and the number of shuttles wouldn't fit in the TOS shuttlebay (yes, I know Voyager had a dodgy shuttlebay too). I don't mind when people say "I wish the ship were smaller like TOS", it's when people blindly ignore all the visual evidence (which nowadays stands up to scrutiny far better then ever before) and say the ships in STXI are TOS-sized that annoys me.

 

[F. King Daniel]

...By that rant and rave what I meant to say was that reconcilling the sizes of the new ships shouldn't be done by ignoring everything we see in the new film. It's far simpler to say that there "always were" ships bigger than everything we saw from TOS to TNG operating in that timeframe.
Who's to say Mayflower-type ships didn't co-exist with the old Constitution class? A few hull details? The size? None of that precludes their possible existance.
Not that any of it really matters outside size comparison charts (says the guy who just wrote TBBS's 10,000th post on the subject)

 

[Christopher]

Sure, there could've been larger ships, but as I pointed out above, one can't take visual evidence of ship size too literally because it's always been inconsistent. Especially since we know that the FX artists in ST2009 changed their minds about ship size as the production went along rather than having a definitive idea in mind. There's no way the Enterprise under construction in the Iowa shipyard is as big as the 2000-foot-long version seen in the later space scenes. When even a single text presents inconsistent visual information within itself, that suggests that the visual data should be taken with a grain of salt.

Still, you have a point; we were never overtly told in TOS that there weren't ships larger than the Constitution class. Or if the Connies were the biggest and most powerful ships in the 2260s, it doesn't mean there couldn't have been something larger in the 2230s, something that in the Prime timeline was superseded by a more compact design. (While in the altered timeline, with Nero's attack hinting at a possible new Romulan threat, Starfleet altered its design approach and reworked the proposed Connie design into something much bigger and higher-powered than it otherwise would've been.)

 

[Therin of Andor]

I'm sure that when TMP or TWOK or TNG came along, there were plenty of people who protested their revisionist depictions of the universe just as vehemently as some people are complaining about ST2009 today.

You bet they did! I got caught in the middle of the TMP arguments, naively proclaiming my "newbie" excitement about the movie and discovering most TOS fans hating every change made to their beloved TV series. Rinse and repeat for ST II, ST IV and TNG, each one losing lots of club members (who usually stormed off in anger or just faded away to find a new passion), but gaining other "newbies".

 

[RookieBatman]

The Star Trek universe has always been reinterpreted over time...

You're absolutely right about this, I don't think there's much room to argue the point. When I was young, there was the show and the movies, already extant, so the young mind just naturally thinks of them both as being "the way it is." But now that I'm an adult, and a bit more fanatical, I can imagine what I would've felt like seeing early production stills of TMP and wondering what they were doing to my show. And then, after long years of struggling to finally accept that, it would happen all over again with TWoK. And TNG, and every other show. But having grown with it, I do think of it as one single cohesive universe, complete with a bunch of fanatical explanations for why some things don't make much sense (like, maybe the uniform changes were because of a new Chief of Staff of Starfleet).

So, you're right that no amount of visual restylising indicates conclusively that STXI took place in a different timeline. However, and this is just from watching the movie once when it came out, but my perception was there wasn't an absolute certainty that it was the Prime universe, before Nero came back. Spock came back after things had already changed for 25 years, right? So he wouldn't have noticed if things had already been different before then. Thus, my opinion of the subject is that whether the timeline shown is the Kelvin scene is the Prime timeline or not, is one of those things that can just be left to the individual. In my personal continuity, ENT was in a timeline created by the Borg and Ent-E going back in time in FC, and then the Kelvin scene was a part of that timeline. I don't think there's anything in the movie that specifically indicates that couldn't be the case, but if, in your personal continuity, the Kelvin scene takes place in the Prime universe, I'm not say you're wrong either. It's kinda like the question of whether the TOS stories took place in order of airdate, production order, or some people even say stardate. The Official Chronology may say something on the subject, but canon's only what's onscreen, so it's just a personal choice. I think saying that they took place in production order makes a lot more sense, but that doesn't mean that someone's wrong if they say airdate. It's just personal preference.

So, since the Concordance is a fan-created work, the fan that's creating it should be welcome to their own interpretation. Of course, such a decision should probably be up to Bjo, rather than CRA, but I'm just saying... It's not an official publication, so they don't necessarily need to stay in line with stuff that has just been implied offscreen. Of course, it would probably be a sound marketing decision to do so.

A simpler solution may just be to give a special notation to information that came from the movie, thereby allowing each reader to make their own interpretations. Best of both worlds.

 

[Christopher]

So, since the Concordance is a fan-created work, the fan that's creating it should be welcome to their own interpretation.

I disagree. The Concordance is not merely a work of fan fiction for the self-indulgence of the author. It's a reference work for the benefit of its readers. And that means its compilers have an obligation to be objective, to keep their own opinions and agendas out of it. The first Concordance covered all extant Star Trek productions to that point, namely TOS and TAS (but not counting "The Cage," which had never been broadcast). The second version added "The Cage," the TOS movies, Generations, and every episode of any other ST series that featured cast members of TOS reprising their original roles. The 2009 Star Trek movie features Leonard Nimoy reprising the role of Spock, and therefore it should be covered in the Concordance. How to "interpret" the relationship between the movie's "reality" to what came before is beside the point for a reference work like the Concordance. It's simply meant to document those works and their contents, not judge them.

A simpler solution may just be to give a special notation to information that came from the movie, thereby allowing each reader to make their own interpretations. Best of both worlds.

That wouldn't be a "special" notation at all. In both editions of the Concordance, every entry in the Lexicon had a notation indicating what episode or film it came from. In the analogous case of entries for things from the Mirror Universe, they were treated like every other entry, placed alphabetically in the Lexicon, with the entry specifying that the thing being discussed (such as the Empire or "Kirk-2") was from the Mirror Universe and that the episode it came from was MM (the code for "Mirror, Mirror"). In the case of the Halkans, there's only one entry because they were the same in both universes, but again it's specified (as with every other entry) that they come from episode MM.

 

[Herbert1]

Sure, there could've been larger ships, but as I pointed out above, one can't take visual evidence of ship size too literally because it's always been inconsistent. Especially since we know that the FX artists in ST2009 changed their minds about ship size as the production went along rather than having a definitive idea in mind. There's no way the Enterprise under construction in the Iowa shipyard is as big as the 2000-foot-long version seen in the later space scenes. When even a single text presents inconsistent visual information within itself, that suggests that the visual data should be taken with a grain of salt.

Both the U.S.S. Kelvin and the U.S.S. Enterprise use transdimensional engineering allowing the ships to rescale due to mission requirements.

 

[RookieBatman]

So, since the Concordance is a fan-created work, the fan that's creating it should be welcome to their own interpretation.

I disagree. The Concordance is not merely a work of fan fiction for the self-indulgence of the author. It's a reference work for the benefit of its readers. And that means its compilers have an obligation to be objective, to keep their own opinions and agendas out of it. The first Concordance covered all extant Star Trek productions to that point, namely TOS and TAS (but not counting "The Cage," which had never been broadcast). The second version added "The Cage," the TOS movies, Generations, and every episode of any other ST series that featured cast members of TOS reprising their original roles. The 2009 Star Trek movie features Leonard Nimoy reprising the role of Spock, and therefore it should be covered in the Concordance. How to "interpret" the relationship between the movie's "reality" to what came before is beside the point for a reference work like the Concordance. It's simply meant to document those works and their contents, not judge them.

You may have misinterpreted what I was saying. I wasn't saying that it should be the author's judgment whether or not the STXI entries should be in there, but just whether they should be listed as the prime universe or not. I agree there's every justification for having some listings for the movie.

A simpler solution may just be to give a special notation to information that came from the movie, thereby allowing each reader to make their own interpretations. Best of both worlds.

That wouldn't be a "special" notation at all. In both editions of the Concordance, every entry in the Lexicon had a notation indicating what episode or film it came from. In the analogous case of entries for things from the Mirror Universe, they were treated like every other entry, placed alphabetically in the Lexicon, with the entry specifying that the thing being discussed (such as the Empire or "Kirk-2") was from the Mirror Universe and that the episode it came from was MM (the code for "Mirror, Mirror"). In the case of the Halkans, there's only one entry because they were the same in both universes, but again it's specified (as with every other entry) that they come from episode MM.

Okay, well, fine then. I think I've already indicated that I hadn't owned any previous edition of the Concordance, so there wouldn't be any reason to think I'd know that. If all entries are so notated, I think there would really be no problem placing them in the commonly accepted section, because any fan who disagreed with that interpretation could just disregard the listing (as is often done anyway).

 

[Herbert1]

Still, you have a point; we were never overtly told in TOS that there weren't ships larger than the Constitution class. Or if the Connies were the biggest and most powerful ships in the 2260s, it doesn't mean there couldn't have been something larger in the 2230s, something that in the Prime timeline was superseded by a more compact design. (While in the altered timeline, with Nero's attack hinting at a possible new Romulan threat, Starfleet altered its design approach and reworked the proposed Connie design into something much bigger and higher-powered than it otherwise would've been.)

I believe that it is a case of fan presumption that the Enterprise and her sister starships are the largest and most powerful starships of their time. I believe that this is the case partially because no larger Federation design was ever depicted on screen during TOS and partially because no larger design was depicted as built in the Star Fleet Technical Manual. Many presumed that because the Enterprise is the vehicle used by our heroes, she must be the largest, most powerful, and the most capable ship in the Star Fleet inventory.

I also never understood the presumption that a greater mass or a larger crew means a vehicle is more powerful or more capable. We have become accustomed to believing that bigger is better or more powerful.

Also remember that Orci and Kurtzman have used contact with the Narada to explain why the new Enterprise looks more advanced and different than the Enterprise Prime. The true in-universe dimensions of the starship have not been established and there is contradictory on-screen evidence of the ship's true dimensions. If we are to accept the ship as originally designed by Ryan Church, she isn't that much bigger than the Enterprise Prime.

 

[F. King Daniel]

^But we really can't, because none of the innards (bridge deck, brewery) would fit. Add to that the huge hanger, the bridge window (which is far bigger in Church's smaller concepts) and even the tiny people at the viewscreen-sized windows looking down at DV when Kirk's pod is launched...I truly cannot understand how anyone could ignore *all* of that.
As far as I can tell, the only shot of the smaller ship in the film is the Iowa one - and the people in that wouldn't even fit in the exposed decks.
I know - I'm on a loop. I'll shut up now.

 

[Herbert1]

Yeah, that is why I used the transdimensional engineering joke.

I don't mind that the new Starship Enterprise is as big as the Galaxy-class Enterprise, I am just disappointed that they changed their minds during the creation of the special effects and upscaled the ship so the scale is inconsistent between shots and there is such a large variance.

But I guess I am being an unreasonable fan again expecting a fictional world to be internally consistent at least for one film.

 

[Captain Robert April]

That doesn't explain the rest of the laundry list.

Well pardon me. I answered the one I thought I could do well.

I see no problem with there being large UFP ships before the NCC-1701. The Kelvin was probably transporting colonists to and fro, seeing how Winona should have been heading home for an Iowa birth before it got waylaid by the lightning storm.

Bev Crusher's medical ship in "All Good Things..." was based on a very early pre-TOS ship design and it seemed pretty big.

The assumption during TOS was that the Constitution was the largest class of starship Earth had ever built, as per "The Making of Star Trek" (and yes, the term "Constitution class" dates back to the time of the series; it showed up on a graphic Scotty was studying in "The Trouble With Tribbles" and was incorporated into the 1968 version of the Concordance).

Previous slip-ups in continuity have generally been around the margins, minor details that don't effect the story and can be worked around. This movie blows big honking holes in the continuity that you can't just squint and pretend aren't there. And that's before Nero blows up the Kelvin.

So, sorry, but it's one big alternate timeline, beginning to end, Nimoy's Spock included.