Forewarning: unintentional essay incoming.
Back on my shit again re: the Inquiry's size. I had a friend of mine throw some of the models from STO into Meshmixer, with the Inquiry set at the length of 630.94 meters given by Eaglemoss, and...
Yeah...I'm not buying it. No way in hell did they build 112+ of a ship
that big. Nuh-uh. No sir-ee-bob.
At the Eaglemoss scale, the length is 630.94 meters, width is 320.3012 meters, height is 108.8373 meters and volume is 3,729,760 m^3. By comparison, the Sovereign-class is 685.2 m long, 233.1295 m wide, 87.7258 m tall, 1,785,030 m^3 in volume.
That puts the Inquiry at
twice the volume of the Sovereign.
Two times. And 77% of the volume of the Galaxy-class. I just don't think it plausible at that size for there to be
that many.
For comparison, going by the TNG technical manual, the Galaxy Class Project was announced in 2343 and the USS Galaxy was finally launched in 2356 and was commissioned the next year -- fourteen years from project launch to the first ship getting commissioned (with the Yamato being built in parallel, apparently). And only
six of the total twelve spaceframes initially constructed were built to completion initially, with the other six left as frameworks to be completed if required. If Memory Beta's to be believed, the Sov's development cycle took...okay, about 5 years, with the Sov launching in 2370 and the Enterprise-E following shortly after. Thank you, Borg, for giving Starfleet a reason to get off its ass.
Even so, the -E was on a year-long shakedown cruise to get its systems tested by the time of the Battle of Sector 001.
Even if we count the changes that Starfleet may have made in regards to shipbuilding protocol, there's still a
long period of testing for new and advanced starship designs. And we only ever did see, what, ten Galaxy-class starships in DS9? Maybe another batch of Galaxies was constructed after the Yamato, Enterprise-D, and Odyssey were destroyed, but those were
certainly built well
after the extensive testing of the initial few had been completed to truly perfect the design. Mass production's easier when you've got tried-and-tested ships built in advance, but even so, it takes
quite a bit longer for large ships to be built.
Frankly, I find the scale that STO defaulted to initially -- shown here for comparison -- far more plausible for there to be
112+ of:
At 383.54 meters and with a volume of 837,853 m^3, the Inquiry as scaled in STO is a bit larger than the Intrepid-class (sitting at 344.424 m long and 641,692 m^3 in volume). Again, I find this
far more plausible. Construction would go a lot faster; given the far smaller volume, there wouldn't need to be as much work done nor as many resources spent on filling out as large an interior as otherwise. Resources that would've probably been spent on
one 630-long Inquiry could easily go into nearly
four and a half 383-long Inquiries (that's how many times the volume of the smaller goes into the larger). Goodness knows how many Miranda-class starships were eventually built, but given that her volume (counting hull thickness and interior volume together) is a little less than
half that of even the Intrepid according to EC Henry, we can reasonably assume that the Intrepid- and Miranda-classes both were easily mass-producible on account of their smaller size and proven designs. And once a design is proven effective and spaceworthy, the easier it is to reproduce.
On that latter note, I did a
bit of math and came up with a
rough graph extrapolating the duration of development time
from volume based on the data provided by the Galaxy and Sovereign classes thereof -- the Intrepid-class was added after the fact, but if Memory Beta (again) is to be believed, a 1.775-year duration from drawing board to drydock-departure for the USS Intrepid
may be feasible considering that its construction began "in the 2360s" and its launch was in 2369. By this graph, the development of the smaller, "STO-scale" Inquiry-class would take roughly two years and four months, more or less, while the "Eaglemoss-scale" Inquiry-class would require an estimated
ten years and eight months to go from development to commissioning for the first ship.
I'll concede that there were significant changes to the political and technological landscape after the Galaxy-class was developed, and as such, the Galaxy-class may be an outlier I'd be wrong to count. But even so, that ship
is big, and it
was complex for the time. Regardless, considering it alongside post-Wolf 359 designs may have skewed the results for the Eaglemoss-scale ship. But then again, twice the volume and twice the development time to assemble the prototype
may indeed track.
Apart from that, the smaller one just...
feels right to me, I guess. That's part of what does it for me; it
felt better at a smaller size. The bridge scales much better compared to the other vessels in this diagram; roughly the same length as the bridge structure on the Sovereign if not a bit more narrow. The shuttlebay does as well; comparable in size to that at the aft of both the Sovereign- and Intrepid-classes. Though I concede again, the viewscreen on the
Zheng He's bridge is
very wide, pointing
possibly toward the bridge of the Eaglemoss-scale Inquiry being accurate -- which is near twice the size of the Sovereign's bridge structure.
I know I basically just wrote an
essay on why I think it's more plausible that the Inquiry is smaller than Eaglemoss (and by extension, CBS?) is stating it to be. I know this is basically just me headcanoning to my wit's end about a ship whose development on the production side was rushed. I
know I've done all this, and I don't expect anyone to take this with anything more than a grain of salt -- or in any way seriously. Mad ramblings of a 21-year-old nerd out here. I know what I say isn't the be-all-end-all with the Inquiry. I'm just...airing my gripes, I guess. 112+ of any ship in one shot still doesn't sit well with me -- as the authors of the TNG technical manual stated, the reason they never replicated any starships "would allow us to create entire fleets of starships at the touch of a button. This might be great for Federation defense and science programs, but makes for poor drama" -- but 112+ of a smaller powerful ship would sit...a little better with me, than 112+ of a far larger one.
Sorry for the ramble.
