Ship size versus mission and Earth year old

[Ronald Held]

There are posts in other fora. Perhaps this will be a Nexus for them.
Ships seem to be getting larger in the prime universe with time,at least for the Enterprises. The JJverse may have started it's non linear growth after the Nerada.
Sticking in the Prime universe for now,even with different missions require different sized ships, IS DSC changing the sizes which may not fit into what we have known?

 

[F. King Daniel]

Discovery deliberately completely changed the Klingons and their ship designs, upgraded the on-board technology to stuff far beyond TOS or even TNG, and ignored the uniforms worn in "The Cage" which is supposed to be roughly concurrent to their timeline. I think it's a little silly to expect them to maintain Federation starship design continuity any better.

Otherwise, we have to try and make sense of the USS Enterprise, which is described in TOS as being special, being far smaller and lacking all the advanced technology we've seein on the new USS Discovery and even the old USS Shenzhou. And requiring a whopping 400 crew in its comparitively tiny frame instead of 130 in Discovery's (which is comparatively gigantic even without the nacelles)

 

[Ronald Held]

Let me add to the premise, that over time, more of the ships volume can be used for crew and not machines needed to run the ship?

 

[Bry_Sinclair]

As time marches on, the Federation expands its borders as new members join and they venture further and further out into the unknown, as they do ships would need to be more self-sufficient with more crew needed to carry out their mission of exploration, which would require more cargo space and recreational facilities, so that crewmembers have a chance to unwind and relax, whilst technological advancements may see some staples onboard reduce in size as systems are refined additional newer tech would be added, which would in turn go through the same process.

 

[C.E. Evans]

A bigger size may also allow more mission options, such as rescue/evacuation efforts and mission-specific personnel transport.

As far as DIS, it may just simply be that it doesn't matter how big TOS or TNG ships were.

 

[Go-Captain]

My impression is there isn't much limiting ship size in Star Trek, just mission requirements. I figure with structural integrity and power output which doesn't scale downward a ship can be any size.

In Voyager we saw at least two huge ships built by societies less advanced than the Federation, some sort of multi-pod generation ship, and the Kazon carriers. There is also the D'Deridex, while probably being technically comparable to the Galaxy-class, it is, I think, eight times larger than the Galaxy-class by volume.

So, if we get a ships-larger-in-the-past impression, then it may be nothing more than what it takes to get better performance out of less efficient systems. I figure that is the logic in the Kelvin timeline too, that the Constitution class of that universe is no where near as powerful as a Galaxy-class despite having similar volume, but by going that size it did get tremendous performance improvement for the era.

Let me add to the premise, that over time, more of the ships volume can be used for crew and not machines needed to run the ship?

The TOS Constitution class and Intrepid have similar volume but the former has over 400 crew, and the latter has less than 150. But, I think the quarters size does increase over time.

 

[Unicron]

The Kazon stole a lot of their technology from the Trabe, and I can't recall whether said technology was more on par with that of the AQ powers. The D'Deridex model was never scaled consistently with the Enterprise-D onscreen, but personally I'm glad the exaggerated scale that seems to be implied in "The Neutral Zone" wasn't kept. I liked the warbird being more of a similar size, as was seen in other episodes.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

The Kazon stole a lot of their technology from the Trabe, and I can't recall whether said technology was more on par with that of the AQ powers. The D'Deridex model was never scaled consistently with the Enterprise-D onscreen, but personally I'm glad the exaggerated scale that seems to be implied in "The Neutral Zone" wasn't kept. I liked the warbird being more of a similar size, as was seen in other episodes.

Well, the semi-official size of the warbird and the scale where it's seen most consistently gives a length of about 1200 meters. Most of its surface detailing more than bears this out. The D'Deridex is and for years has been a datapoint for the (already meaningless to dispute) supposition that size alone is not a reliable indicator of power or technology.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

The TOS Constitution class and Intrepid have similar volume

Intrepid has almost 4 times the Constitution's volume, and a much larger portion of that volume is habitable space compared to Constitution with its engines. It's a very fat, chunky starship while Constitution is built with a lot of long and skinny components that taper in odd places.

 

[Ronald Held]

I am certain there were more luxurious quarters allocated in the 24th century. One would think a lesser percentage taken up by machines from 23d to 24th centuries.

 

[Tenacity]

TUC showed that some of the Enterprise crew slept in tiered bunk beds, Dax mentioned that the TOS crew was "packed in." The officers (Lt and above?) had their own private quarters, but we don't know about the majority of the crew.