b. The 190,000 Tonne Fallacy The Star Trek non-canon has featured different mass estimates for NCC-1701. One of the more popular has been a figure of 190,000 metric tonnes, which originally appeared in the writer's guide (much like a 1.5 million tonne figure for Voyager). The 190,000 tonne figure, however, appeared well before the design of the ship was finalized, and before a final size had been chosen. (One of the early Enterprise concepts had the ship as being 200 feet long, and even shortly before the first pilot the ship was thought to be around 500 feet long.)
Nonetheless the figure persisted, due in part to its inclusion in Whitfield's 1968 "The Making of Star Trek" which made it easy to find and reference in an age before DVDs and VCRs. From there it made its way into Franz Joseph's Technical Manual, and from there into many other materials. Some newer non-canon materials such as the DS9TM have supported the canon mass by showing TMP-era vessels as having high densities, but others such as Starship Spotter continue to use the fandom figure.
At 190,000 tonnes, the TOS Enterprise would be 90% as dense as water . . . that is to say, the ship would float. Voyager, a ship designed to land and which is explicitly identified as being fast and nimble, would be 133% denser. That's 136,000 metric tonnes extra. This, of course, makes little sense . . . one would expect Voyager to be as light as possible, with probably the smallest density in the fleet. Otherwise they could just slap landing legs (or pontoons, for that matter) on an old Miranda class and go on about their business. There's also the oddity of the idea of the Enterprise being only 75% as dense as the Apollo command modules.
Some proponents of Trek fandom deride Scotty's canon comment as "anomalous". Others claim that Scotty was engaged in hyperbole (albeit a minimal example) because, they say, he was exasperated. In general, such 'fandom-boys' claim priority due to 35+ years of non-canon materials which have persisted with the erroneous figure. Further, it's claimed that the "Mudd's Women" statement was an error by the writer, listed in the credits as Stephen Kandel, and it's also claimed that Roddenberry personally reviewed the Franz Joseph repetition of the writer's guide figure and signed off on it.
Such arguments are flawed in multiple ways. First, the lone canon example from TOS is not an anomaly, by definition, since there is nothing canon to compare it to. Second, Scotty's tone and demeanor . . . not to mention the reaction of Kirk and Spock . . . hardly qualifies the statement as one of Scotty freaking out and exaggerating things. See the behavior here:
Third, an error that persists does not become more correct the longer it lasts. It simply becomes an older, more oft-repeated error. Given that the mass is stated in the show as "almost a million gross tons", it is rather silly to then claim 190,000 tonnes. This would be like deciding Voyager's mass was 1.5 million tonnes (as per the writer's guide) despite clear contrary statements in the show. It just doesn't happen for the 90's show, so why would one do it for the 60's show?
Finally, the TOS writers did not operate in a vacuum . . . Roddenberry's rewrites and the oversight by the writing team (with occasional input from Rand engineers) were well-known. Further, as reported in Star Trek Creator (p. 285), the writing credits submitted to the Writer's Guild for "Mudd's Women" read "Story by Gene Roddenberry; teleplay by Stephen Kandel, John D.F. Black, Gene Roddenberry". Roddenberry also attempted to charge Desilu for a "polish" of the story. Thus, there is no question on the matter of authorship and validity . . . Roddenberry was directly involved in the script which described the ship as being almost a million gross tons.
It didn't happen so much in TOS but really flourished in TNG+. However as real-world science goes, Star Trek has never been something of hard science fiction.
