Starship Enterprise size Discrepancy

[TransporterBeam]

Captain Pike said in the first pilot that the Enterprise had a crew of 200 people. No one thought of a ship yet carrying more people.
When it went to production and the 5 year Mission details were added. The Crew complement was boosted to over 400. The studio used the same wood models of the ship and only changed a few details on the ship. The end caps on the warp engines were changed. Some antennas were taken off and the bridge cap was reduced in size and made more streamlined to fit the ship better and make it more graceful.
The nacelles and dorsal hull were kept the same size because it would have required the building of a new filming miniature. Is it a major blooper that the Struts holding the engines up were sized to support warp engines almost half the size ? and then the engines were simply enlarged i nscale once the regular seroes went into production. The ship's neck was also built for a much smaller diamter saucer hull !
Is that a major oops that should be corrected ?

 

[Timo]

I don't really understand what you are aiming at... Surely the size of the pylons and neck was doubled when the intended size of the ship was? After all, to not do that would have required halving the size of the pylons with a saw or a file!

In any case, none of the surface detail in "The Cage" suggests a scale different from that in the rest of the series. And none of it supports a 500-foot ship as originally intended; the bridge zoom-in scene already fully confirms the 1000-foot scale.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[137th Gebirg]

Boy, TransporterBeam, you get around don'cha?

Timo, I think he's only really trying to get at one thing. Check some of the other forums around here.

 

[Timo]

Umm, I can only find him around this forum. And I think some of his questions are at least as interesting as those of RobertScorpio, never mind the obvious aim of both...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[TIN_MAN]

I think what the poster is getting at is, hypothetically, if the ship is supposed to be structurally sound at 500 ft. then would it still be at 1000? or would it need reinforcing via thicker pylons etc. and if so, should this have been reflected in the modifications to the filming miniature?

 

[Eric Cheung]

There are rooms in the pylons because there are windows there. I guess at a bigger scale the rooms would just be smaller to make for bigger bulkheads?

 

[Robert Simmons]

In "The Making Of StarTrek" by Stephen Whitfield and Gene Roddenbury the size of the Enterprise for "The Cage" was approximately 200 feet. ( 1 deck through the outer saucer...) It was revised to 947 feet for the second pilot. ( 2 decks through the middle of the outer saucer...) The size of the second pilot for the Enterprise has been the "official" size of the ship since.

The 11 foot shooting miniature was revised several times from initial delivery to series filming. ( adding of the faint grid topside...which I think was used to camoflage reference lines forthe optical effects team to line up the initial push in shot for "The Cage" with the centerline reference marked on the soundstage floor for the bridge which appear in the stage 9 drawing. And I think also would have been present prior to the move as well...either way they obviously didn't match given how the shot turned out. Nice to se that it got fixed in "The Menagerie Part 1 and 2" when I went to see it last year in the theatre...)

But the main 2 configurations were the "Cage" pilot version and "Production version" which the latter had the revisons to the lighted nacelles, lowered bridge, rear domes on the engines, weathering, reversing lower hull registry numbers on the port side of the model under the dish, loosing the top black lines surrounding the green and red running lights on the edge of the saucer, and putting serifs on the font on the top of the dish for the ship name and registry, changes to the impulse vents on the aft of the saucer, loosing the grilles at the end of the warp engines, changing the length and width of the deflector dish.

The crew completement was revised upward to reflect a larger crew necessary for longer time in space for a "5 year mission."

The other thing you are referring to in the series where we see both versions of the 11 foot model in the TOS episodes. This is due to the editing team using stock footage while not being versed in the changes in the "before" and "after" appearance of the 11 foot shooting miniature. These errors you are referring to are what is known as "Hookup errors." And you are right is is inconsistant for a new Trek fan to figure out. But with some homework..this mystery too can be solved.

But I don't fee like a Scooby Snak. LOL.

 

[Forbin]

There are rooms in the pylons because there are windows there. I guess at a bigger scale the rooms would just be smaller to make for bigger bulkheads?

Windows don't necessarily mean rooms. There can be windows in corridors, stair wells, ladderways, etc.

 

[MGagen]

Actually, the ship was initially blueprinted by Jefferies to be in the neighborhood of 540 feet in length. Sometime between these initial drawings and the completion of the "three foot" proof model the scale was changed to make the ship the larger size. A photo taken the day Richard Datin delivered the completed "3-footer" already shows the 947-foot window configuration on the dorsal pylon. This all happened before the larger model was even finished. Pike's Enterprise was already scaled up before a single frame of it was shot for The Cage...

M.

 

[Captain Robert April]

If you think about it, the proportion of the Enterprise work better for a ship of close to a thousand feet long instead of a little over five hundred.

For instance, how the hell would a turbolift get through that neck if it was only half as wide?

 

[USS Mariner]

For instance, how the hell would a turbolift get through that neck if it was only half as wide?

They'd walk.

 

[Captain Robert April]

The turbolift would walk?

 

[Santaman]

^^