I go by the onscreen graphic.
Starship design history in light of Discovery
- Thread starter INACTIVEUSS Einstein
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Even though the proportions of the 2019 1701 are all wrong compared to the 1974 Tech Manual specs listed?
At this point I'm just exhausted and stick with what I've known for decades. 
I'm sorry but that's all nonsense.
Yeah this is getting quite pedantic and needlessly tiresome.
I'm more concerned with why we didn't see more NX-style and TOS-style warp nacelles after Bryan Fuller left the show. At that point I'd have said: "Throw more classic-looking nacelles on starships and give them red or orange Bussard collectors. We're not adhering to any more of this 'all nacelles must be boxy or spiky' stuff."
Well, it helps give character to Pike's ship. Everybody else went square in this big upgrade, but the old girl soldiers on with the round stuff - and prevails!
The exact size of NCC-1701 is one of the least complicated issues of Trek. Sure, it may be all across the charts in theory - but in practice, the situation never arises where we should pay attention to it, since Pike and Kirk never meet anybody in space for comparison, not intimately enough anyway. Not until DSC "Sorrow", where the hard docking gives us the first thing we could call a datapoint.
Things are minimally complicated by there being some scaling detail in the TMP-refitted version of the same ship. But it's really "an almost completely new" ship anyway...
Timo Saloniemi
The exact size of NCC-1701 is one of the least complicated issues of Trek. Sure, it may be all across the charts in theory - but in practice, the situation never arises where we should pay attention to it, since Pike and Kirk never meet anybody in space for comparison, not intimately enough anyway. Not until DSC "Sorrow", where the hard docking gives us the first thing we could call a datapoint.
Things are minimally complicated by there being some scaling detail in the TMP-refitted version of the same ship. But it's really "an almost completely new" ship anyway...
Timo Saloniemi
I am sick and tired of being insulted. It is literally the only way to explain problems like the Oberth class
And theres another size issue unrelated to the Federation meters debate. There are huge vulcan ships almost as long as the Galaxy-class predating the federation. Unless the Vulcans continued to refuse to share technology, then Federation ships should be much larger
Why?
That is, why should the Federation build big, just because Vulcans did?
As for the Oberth, there's no real size for it other than us eyeballing a comfortable figure. Some ancient references to 120 meters were made back when these models had no scale: various bits of VFX were simply pasted atop each other, ending up looking big or small depending on the shot.
Not that there's anything wrong with 120 meters, though. A turbolift cab can easily negotiate the curve even at that size. It just needs to curve. Which should be no problem at all.
Timo Saloniemi
That is, why should the Federation build big, just because Vulcans did?
As for the Oberth, there's no real size for it other than us eyeballing a comfortable figure. Some ancient references to 120 meters were made back when these models had no scale: various bits of VFX were simply pasted atop each other, ending up looking big or small depending on the shot.
Not that there's anything wrong with 120 meters, though. A turbolift cab can easily negotiate the curve even at that size. It just needs to curve. Which should be no problem at all.
Timo Saloniemi
Maybe the consensus was for Federation starships to generally be smaller than 22nd century Vulcan ships? At its founding the Federation comprised at bare minimum four member species if not more. I could see the members of those species agreeing within the parameters of the new unified Federation Starfleet that spaceships should not be too large or too small, that space aboard each vessel should reflect the best balance to meet the needs of individual species serving on said vessel.
Also, Vulcan ships tended to employ ring drives to achieve warp speed. We don't see ring drives on Federation starships within TV and movie canon so that would reduce the mass and overall size of vessels since warp drives would be constructed with external nacelles which didn't have to be as large in many instances.
The move from rings to cigars is amusingly visually quite evocative of the moving from paddlewheels to screws - something that tended to make steamships slightly smaller when it happened...
OTOH, the same Vulcans who flew giant ringships in ENT agreed to cramming a survey team of four or five into a bloated shuttlecraft for at least months at an end. Crew density on the two categories of vessel was drastically different, and might suggest that we shouldn't really base our evaluation of "necessary" size on anything much, since we can't figure it out anyway!
Timo Saloniemi
OTOH, the same Vulcans who flew giant ringships in ENT agreed to cramming a survey team of four or five into a bloated shuttlecraft for at least months at an end. Crew density on the two categories of vessel was drastically different, and might suggest that we shouldn't really base our evaluation of "necessary" size on anything much, since we can't figure it out anyway!
Timo Saloniemi
Well the real reason is that the Oberth model was detailed to be around the same size as the Enterprise, but scaled much smaller without a care. Likely a lack of communication at ILM.
Every new ship in STIII was scaled wrong in later productions. The Excelsior and the Oberth got smaller, and the BoP changed to about 10 different sizes. Heck, it was at least two different sizes in the TOS films it was featured in.
...But the Oberth was scaled wrong from the get-go, in terms of detailing: she's by far the largest of the ships of ST3:TSfS, dwarfing the Excelsior, if we count the window rows. I mean, she has two of 'em on the bridge dome alone!
So we don't, and in general we ignore surface detail or interpret it to match more pressing scaling criteria. Both the Excelsior and the Oberth are malleable in that sense, since if we start disbelieving in window rows, none of their remaining detail is particularly specific or intuitive: we see no doorways, we see no shuttles coming and going, least of all docking, and the supposed bridges are nondescript bulges where the exterior (a very shallow dome) places no limitations on the interior (a set modified from the busy hero ship one, or built from scratch to be as flat and featureless as possible).
The malleability theoretically ends when the Excelsior gains ST6:TUC style shuttles in the aft ventral shuttlebay (we never see 'em for real, but the model reputedly features them from its Melbourne incarnation onwards) and an Enterprise style bridge, and the Oberth gains an internal structure exposed to us via convenient hull damage. The error bars are still big enough to allow for all the previous interpretations, perhaps even simultaneously...
Timo Saloniemi
So we don't, and in general we ignore surface detail or interpret it to match more pressing scaling criteria. Both the Excelsior and the Oberth are malleable in that sense, since if we start disbelieving in window rows, none of their remaining detail is particularly specific or intuitive: we see no doorways, we see no shuttles coming and going, least of all docking, and the supposed bridges are nondescript bulges where the exterior (a very shallow dome) places no limitations on the interior (a set modified from the busy hero ship one, or built from scratch to be as flat and featureless as possible).
The malleability theoretically ends when the Excelsior gains ST6:TUC style shuttles in the aft ventral shuttlebay (we never see 'em for real, but the model reputedly features them from its Melbourne incarnation onwards) and an Enterprise style bridge, and the Oberth gains an internal structure exposed to us via convenient hull damage. The error bars are still big enough to allow for all the previous interpretations, perhaps even simultaneously...
Timo Saloniemi
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I don’t mind Starfleet building ship classes in different sizes over time. In the 2230s they build big, kept doing it in Kelvin and 2250s, and back in the 2260s-2300s we go small again. There’s presumably technical or political reasons behind that. Before the new shows, the Enterprise-E had a smaller volume than the C and D, for instance.
Taking a look at the 31st-32 century ships introduced in Discovery, I would reckon that the Enterprise-J was one of the largest/widest Enterprises, and that the pre-Burn Enterprise may easily have belonged to the “smaller” neoConstitution class.
Strange to think that the E-J (2554) is more ancient to Vance (3289) than the NX-01 (2151) is to the J. (600 vs 400 years).
Similarly, the gap between NX class and Connie is smaller than Wells class and Burn-era Starfleet.
Sorry for not really making a point, I’m just in awe of the timescales involved. The 26th and 29th centuries used to be those unimaginably distant futures…and now they’re stuff missing from our history books. Perspective has changed.
Taking a look at the 31st-32 century ships introduced in Discovery, I would reckon that the Enterprise-J was one of the largest/widest Enterprises, and that the pre-Burn Enterprise may easily have belonged to the “smaller” neoConstitution class.
Strange to think that the E-J (2554) is more ancient to Vance (3289) than the NX-01 (2151) is to the J. (600 vs 400 years).
Similarly, the gap between NX class and Connie is smaller than Wells class and Burn-era Starfleet.
Sorry for not really making a point, I’m just in awe of the timescales involved. The 26th and 29th centuries used to be those unimaginably distant futures…and now they’re stuff missing from our history books. Perspective has changed.
Alternatively, Starfleet always builds ships of all sizes, and sometimes we follow the adventures of a small one (TOS, VGR), sometimes of a larger one (TNG, DSC).
That is, the E-E being smaller than the E-D need not be a "decision" of any sort: Starfleet keeps on building big ships, but the E-E doesn't happen to be one of those, just like the E-D didn't happen to be one of the small ones.
Timo Saloniemi
That is, the E-E being smaller than the E-D need not be a "decision" of any sort: Starfleet keeps on building big ships, but the E-E doesn't happen to be one of those, just like the E-D didn't happen to be one of the small ones.
Timo Saloniemi
No one is insulting you