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Gonzo
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I know what it's really about, my girls nacelles are bigger than theirs and they don't like it.
Starship Size Argument™ thread
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I know what it's really about, my girls nacelles are bigger than theirs and they don't like it.
I like big nacelles, I also like small perky nacelles.
In all honesty, some people have put a lot of time into things being a certain way. The Abrams ship size upset their apple cart.
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Gonzo
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That's putting it mildly don't you think. (Space reserved for dead horse flog emote)I like big nacelles, I also like small perky nacelles.
In all honesty, some people have put a lot of time into things being a certain way. The Abrams ship size upset their apple cart.
Yeah from what I have seen of the last couple of days of posts it seems that certain individuals have finally got past the denial, anger and bargaining stage with a bit of depression thrown in.
Mind you its taken them 6 years.
It should be plain sailing now all the way to acceptance and beyond.
Probably.
Not.
I've always been somewhat baffled by the opposition to the size of Kelvin-era starships, yet there is almost complete acceptance of the idea that in the 3-4 years between the end of the five-year mission and TMP everything looks completely different with very little design continuity whatsoever.
A rock group needs to keep at least one original member in it to be able to use the name...
To be fair, Decker did say that it's almost an entirely new Enterprise.
In my head--TOS lead up to the movies and TNG
No WW III.
Spaceflight progressed. TSTO shuttle ringships, etc.
First aberation was in The Voyage Home. This is in the timeline where we saw Voyager over Earth.
The tech jump is pronounced. Archer's Enterprise exists here--then to kelvin timeline
There is a WW III, but Earth actually progresses faster due to time meddling.
So Shatner's Kirk never had a father aboard the Kelvin--Kelvin never existed.
No WW III.
Spaceflight progressed. TSTO shuttle ringships, etc.
First aberation was in The Voyage Home. This is in the timeline where we saw Voyager over Earth.
The tech jump is pronounced. Archer's Enterprise exists here--then to kelvin timeline
There is a WW III, but Earth actually progresses faster due to time meddling.
So Shatner's Kirk never had a father aboard the Kelvin--Kelvin never existed.
Correct color and shade of nacelle caps/Bussard collectors... ?
STARFLEET destroyers and battleships are not.
It's disingenuous to suggest they DID, because that's not what happened.
By the time the decision to rescale it was made they had a rough 3D model for the ship with some of the details already taking shape. It was realized that some of the things they wanted to fit into that model wouldn't fit into a ship at the smaller scale, so additional details were added and/or changed to a smaller scale. Which is to say, they didn't actually make the SHIP bigger (there's no reason to do that with a 3D model) they actually made the DETAILS smaller and included significantly more of them. One of the earlier designs for the finished product had featured a totally different window arrangement to boot, reflective of the larger ship size; it was realized that this different window design looked kind of tacky, so they went back to the TMP-inspired dot-dash-dot pattern because it looked better.
It was rescaled several more times before even before a penultimate model was ever finalized, and the details changed significantly through subsequent iterations. The shape and position of the bridge, the shuttlebays, and interior details were all tweaked repeatedly, but in almost all cases the artists were primarily focussed on exterior details like hull paneling, hatches, window detail (and what you can see behind them) the shuttlebay, the torpedo bay, etc. These things were finally rendered to the new scale where they all ended up fitting together much better than they had in the smaller ship.
So no, it's not like some guy in photoshop hit the "rescale" button on a mostly finished ship. Between the decision "let's make it bigger" and the final product was something like four months of additional highly detailed work, some of which had to be REDONE to be consistent with the larger hull.
There were Starfleet "destroyer units" that were part of the fleet in "Sacrifice Of Angels," and a diagram of a Starfleet Saladin-class destroyer was shown in STII and III. (Also, not strictly canon, but the official backstory drawn out by writers bible for TOS said Kirk had commanded a destroyer before the Enterprise.)
And a computer screen in "Drone" (VGR) referred to the Defiant-class as a battleship, although I think this was a silly mistake since in "The Search" (DS9) Sisko says she's officially an escort, and the people who made that display likely just confused the specific term "battleship" with the generic descriptor of "warship" that he also used there.
And yet no Starfleet vessel has ever been referred to as such; it's not an official designation for any existing ship. Even the "escort vessel" of the Defiant class is about as militant as Starfleet generally gets in its classifications, as you yourself point out.
Dude, that would be FUCKING AWESOME!!!
But... yeah... design aesthetic... yeah, that's something we should be very concerned about...
When was it ever suggested that the CONSTITUTION was flagship class? Even the term "flagship" was never applied to the original Enterprise, or even to Excelsior for that matter.
It WAS, on the other hand, applied to the Reboot Enterprise, which is volumetrically slightly smaller than an Ambassador class starship (thus failing to break the sacred "design aesthetic"). I'll also point out that the "tradition" of gradually-growing starships only exists between the Enterprise-C and -D, considering the Enterprise-E is slightly smaller than both of them.
Rick Sternbach didn't even design the original Excelsior model and the TNG production crew was not intimately involved in the original movies. To say that there was a deliberate progression of increasing bigness from one generation to the next is a bit like trying to analyze James Bond's evolving taste in women.
(However, I am in agreement with your general points about the reboot Enterprise.)
Of course, but the point is that this only applies as long as those particular designers (or like-minded ones) are working on the show and exerting an active influence. As soon as a new production team comes in, they may well decide to disregard it and go in their own direction. That's their prerogative. If they think something else works better for a particular story, or even just looks better, that's enough reason for them to go that route. It's fantasy, it doesn't have to all make sense in every detail, even though most of the time it only takes a bit of creative thought on our part to make sense of it if we are so inclined.
Your long-winded response not-withstanding, that's exactly what they did (and your post actually confirms it). They modeled the new Enterprise after the ORIGINAL design -- scale, window spacing, etc... THEN they realized they needed something bigger. So, whether you claim they rescaled after or rescaled before, it is irrelevant to the conclusion. Your argument of specifics is moot. The ship is rescaled from the original without attention to what a bigger ship would actually look like from the outside, because of the need to have a bigger interior. You yourself have admitted this in your post.
I always found it neat that this is the salt shaker Kirk plays with after Pike leaves the bar in ST'09. Complete with the antenna above the bridge.
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