Starship Size Argument™ thread
- Thread starter WarpFactorZ
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You say that now, just wait until you need to fly five thousand colonists to Nimbus III
trevanian
Rear Admiral
^That's what freighters are for. If you're using starships for that kind of duty, you've got too many starships with not enough to do, and that's probably not possible, given all there is to do and see .. plus the fact that somewhere the Enterprise is the only ship within the quadrant or interception range.
Here's an airplane (an Airbus 320):
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/Lufthansa_Airbus_A320-211_D-AIQT_01.jpg
It's about 37m long. It can seat about 200 passengers.
Here's a bigger airplane (the A380):
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/A380_Emirates_A6-EDC.jpg
It's twice as long (about 73m). It can seat four times as many people (850 passengers). It clearly is a bigger plane: it has two levels, windows for each level, and note the windows are the same size as on the A320. The hatches are all the same size, because they're built for the same thing (people). The cockpit windows are the same size. The cargo doors are the same size.
No one at Airbus decided to simply take the A320 design and scale it entirely up by a factor of 2, because that way, it would be a bigger, grander plane. The doors aren't twice as big on the A380. The windows aren't twice as big. There are design consequences to upscaling.
And before anyone tries: even bigger planes that have only one level (e.g. Boeing 767, etc....) have MORE WINDOWS that are the same size as the smaller one, hatches that are the same size, etc....
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/Lufthansa_Airbus_A320-211_D-AIQT_01.jpg
It's about 37m long. It can seat about 200 passengers.
Here's a bigger airplane (the A380):
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/A380_Emirates_A6-EDC.jpg
It's twice as long (about 73m). It can seat four times as many people (850 passengers). It clearly is a bigger plane: it has two levels, windows for each level, and note the windows are the same size as on the A320. The hatches are all the same size, because they're built for the same thing (people). The cockpit windows are the same size. The cargo doors are the same size.
No one at Airbus decided to simply take the A320 design and scale it entirely up by a factor of 2, because that way, it would be a bigger, grander plane. The doors aren't twice as big on the A380. The windows aren't twice as big. There are design consequences to upscaling.
And before anyone tries: even bigger planes that have only one level (e.g. Boeing 767, etc....) have MORE WINDOWS that are the same size as the smaller one, hatches that are the same size, etc....
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The windows on the nu1701 are now only giant because they made the ship to be 300m and only later scaled it to 725m as stated in this thread many times.
Starship scaling occurs a lot in Trek. The most notorious case would be the Klingon Bird of Prey. The 50m sized version in Way of the Warrior from DS9 has tiny tiny windows whereas the 400m version of the Bird of Prey seen in TNG 'The Defector' has fucking massive windows.
Starship scaling occurs a lot in Trek. The most notorious case would be the Klingon Bird of Prey. The 50m sized version in Way of the Warrior from DS9 has tiny tiny windows whereas the 400m version of the Bird of Prey seen in TNG 'The Defector' has fucking massive windows.
I understand that. But it's stupid, sloppy, and I reject it. If they wanted to make the ship twice as big, they should have made more of an effort to design a bigger ship. This isn't a weekly TV series with a limited budget and a production staff that really doesn't care -- it's a 100 million dollar movie (with a staff that claims they're making something "real" that "could actually happen in our future", but apparently really doesn't care either).
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That's exactly what people are doing. The only standard by which nuTrek falls short in terms of plausibility in any regard is "the more it resembles what I'm comfortable with, the more believable it is."
That ignores, of course, the fact that Star Trek ships have never been very carefully thought out in engineering terms.
^This. The scandal isn't that the ship is or is not the same size as the original, it's that it's incandescently obvious that they intended it to be the same size and then changed somewhere for stupid reasons and without giving adequate thought to how it would/should work. Extrapolating scale from window size is folly IMO, but, really, it just looks like they decided to say it twice as big and knew no one would care except those of us here.
(actually, the real scandal is that they put bar-code scanners on the bridge stations, but I seem to be the only one outraged by that, so I'm going with the size issue)
One could choose not to be "outraged" by anything in a Star Trek movie, of course.
Or one could choose to enjoy hyperbole, and geeking out, and hashing out all the things that we love, and love to hate, about Star Trek.
I'll gladly play by their rules and I'll gladly buy into the fictional world that they set up. But when they trade on the past, when they lay claim to the equity of a beloved franchise and yet make sloppy mistakes and violate their own continuity, often out of sheer laziness, then I reserve the right to call them out.
(yes, I'm typing this in the basement, but, no, it's not my mom's basement)
I'll gladly play by their rules and I'll gladly buy into the fictional world that they set up. But when they trade on the past, when they lay claim to the equity of a beloved franchise and yet make sloppy mistakes and violate their own continuity, often out of sheer laziness, then I reserve the right to call them out.
(yes, I'm typing this in the basement, but, no, it's not my mom's basement)
But that's the way it is, either you accept the facts or delude yourself into believing otherwise and completely ignore the evidence. It's 725 meters, has been for four years. ILM says so, Paramount says so as well, and many "experts" agree.
trevanian
Rear Admiral
there's a HUGE factor being ignored here ... the reason the BoP and other scale issues were so prevalent on the TV series (and remember those are series on limited budgets) is that you'd have had to build new physical models or alter the existing ones.
With models that exist only in the virtual realm, the costs are not exorbitant and the time to alter should not be production-crushing either.
And it isn't like something like this didn't crop up before (and during the physical model era.) On FIRST CONTACT they had finished building the miniature and started shooting it, only to have to stop and revise the model to conform to the practical deflector dish, which Zimmerman was not able to have built to the original specs, necessitating the miniature being physically changed (really put ILM under the gun in terms of shooting ship effects too - they were shooting or reshooting the opening reveal of the -E in late October when I was there, which is pretty late in the game given when it released.)
One of the principal virtues of keeping the ships digital -- and I'm not going to get into the cg vs practical thing again, except to say that precious little spaceship stuff looks all that great to me in whole-cloth CG form -- is to address this exact kind of situation, so why they couldn't really get this fixed (especially given that the movie was finished at least a half-year prior to release), makes me think they just didn't give a shit -- and that suggests that if they mess with the scale for this film, it is because they still don't give a shit.
trevanian
Rear Admiral
You're probably joking about that, but to me the barcode scanners are a helluva lot worse than the carpet foam inside the elevators in the TOS movies. In fact, I think I put them about on par with something I remember from THE FANTASTIC JOURNEY when I was a teenager, and saw them using the TV remote control -- Zenith's Space Command 600 -- that I had in my hand, but they were chromakeying some kind of energy beam out of it as a weapon. I was going to include a reference to Sulu's stickshift in TMP, but I just remembered they have the same or worse in the Abrams, so I guess those are a push.
The "hatches" aren't only not the same size as they were on the TMP Enterprise (as I already showed you and you're predictably ignoring), but they clearly don't even have the same function! We see an airlock in the opening Nibiru scene of Into Darkness. When opened was the same height as the nearby engineering hull windows.
I've already posted overwhelming evidence that the windows (which are not simply scaled up versions of the originals in size, shape or placement despite your claim. They look vaguely similar but that's it) are far larger than they were. I think it's time to drop that comparison.
Here is it again, just for kicks:
Any exterior shot of the new Enterprise makes it clear the saucer rim and neck windows are all of that height and many of that width.
Thats my approach. As a kid i use to nitpick but that took the fun out of it so now i am strapped in for the ride and have a great time no matter the size of the ship i happen to sit down on
Thats my approach. As a kid i use to nitpick but that took the fun out of it so now i am strapped in for the ride and have a great time no matter the size of the ship i happen to sit down on
Yeah! Me too! If I take it too seriously, I won't enjoy it. Sure, I'll be disappointed about big inconsistancies, but otherwise, I'm fine with most things.
Just as an aside, "the people who made it say it's so" shouldn't count as an argument one way or another.
If what they made looks like X, then it's X, and the makers have succeeded in making it X. If it looks like Y, it's Y, and those folks have failed in their quest of making it X. It's quite analogous to TPTB saying something like "First we wanted to have Scotty be clumsy and comical, but then we decided he should be sexy and menacing, so now he's sexy and menacing". Well, we're the only valid judges of that; TPTB have no say in it.
As for hatch measurements and the like, yeah, it seems clear that basically every detail that so vividly reminds us of the ST:TMP ship is actually something completely different in terms of function and scale (windows instead of viewscreens, chutes instead of doorways etc.). Which is weird in in-universe terms, and suggests incredibly lazy artists in out-universe terms (even though the real reason is they weren't given the opportunity to get busy with a proper re-scaling), but there we have it.
Timo Saloniemi
If what they made looks like X, then it's X, and the makers have succeeded in making it X. If it looks like Y, it's Y, and those folks have failed in their quest of making it X. It's quite analogous to TPTB saying something like "First we wanted to have Scotty be clumsy and comical, but then we decided he should be sexy and menacing, so now he's sexy and menacing". Well, we're the only valid judges of that; TPTB have no say in it.
As for hatch measurements and the like, yeah, it seems clear that basically every detail that so vividly reminds us of the ST:TMP ship is actually something completely different in terms of function and scale (windows instead of viewscreens, chutes instead of doorways etc.). Which is weird in in-universe terms, and suggests incredibly lazy artists in out-universe terms (even though the real reason is they weren't given the opportunity to get busy with a proper re-scaling), but there we have it.
Timo Saloniemi
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