Weight classes of Federation starships - re-examined

[F. King Daniel]

1) I wonder where the different numbers are derived from? Were the initial numbers more accurate to the models, then changed because of fan feedback?

Numbers which changed during the film's production, all dated and from Star Trek: The Art of the Movie. If they were reacting to fan feedback, the Enterprise would be 300m and the Kelvin 150, or something.

To bastardize a quote from Sean Hargeaves when Trekyards asked him about the sizes of the ships, it's Hollywood where bigger is better and he'd have been laughed out of the room if he'd even suggested scaling back the Enterprise to match the original series version.

 

[INACTIVEUSS Einstein]

I still think there is a chance future material will retcon it to be 370 meters or something.

Might not happen for 20 years or whatever - like the way TNG material superseded post-TOS stuff.

But it wouldn't be unprecedented, and maybe one day the powers that be will lean that way.

I know this forum is very staunch in it's adherence to the 750 meter official size, so I won't argue anything about the evidence, only to say that, in fiction, things of vastly greater notability are retconned, than brief visual shots of shuttle bays or people in windows - I think Star Trek V has some scaling problems that we simply overlook nowadays, for example. Until then, the Enterprise being a battleship weight could make some sense; it would serve to tie the two timelines closer together, by suggesting their technology isn't that different, if you are so inclined.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Looking at how everything fits inside, any attempt to retcon the size of the new Enterprise down would only make a complete mess of things. How would you fit any of this into a smaller frame?
Kelvin timeline:

Prime:

 

[INACTIVEUSS Einstein]

Like I said, we would probably not be welcome going over this again looking at deck plans and screenshots; the official TrekBBS consensus is 'accept the size'.

But remember the infamous turbolift in Star Trek V - deck 78? Probably done on the insistence of some staff member to make the scene look more dramatic. Everybody ignores it. So conceivably, if the powers that be ever felt like retconning the size of the New Enterprise, we could just ignore screen evidence the same way - if in 20 years, there is a new generation of Okudas and Sternbachs writing technical manuals, working on a new show, and they feel that they want a 400m Kelvin timeline, I guess they might make it happen.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

1) I wonder where the different numbers are derived from? Were the initial numbers more accurate to the models, then changed because of fan feedback?

Nope. The initial numbers were based on the original estimates of the CG artists doing finishing/detail work on the designs. They had in mind a certain scale for the ship that would be consistent with windows, airlocks, surface features, etc. The problem is, only some of those details were done at the larger scale, while the team that did some of the finer work in post-production (e.g. chairs, tables, little people looking out of the windows) based their estimates on set design cues. The sets were not made to be perfectly consistent with the CG models (set design and CG art being almost totally unrelated teams, not to mention unrelated skills) so the fully finished and detailed model was revised to the smaller figure since that made more sense with the set designs. A similar thing basically happened to the Enterprise; the undetailed CG model was envisioned at about 366 meters, but as the sets and interior designs took shape they realized that none of the things they wanted to be IN the Enterprise would actually fit into a 366 meter ship. So the model was re-skinned and re-detailed to reflect the larger size.

2) I thought of volume as well as length from the start.

Clearly you didn't, since you just tried to claim that the Kelvin is larger than the Enterprise-D. It isn't; its upper estimate is LONGER than the Enterprise-D, but it is not even close to being larger by volume.

All those ships/stations pre-divergence are/still far too big.

This statement is baseless. There were larger ships than that even in the 22nd century, and by the 23rd century the Federation has CLEARLY demonstrated the industrial capacity to build very large structures in space. There is no logical reason to assume they COULD NOT build ships as large as the Kelvin if they had wanted to.

"Why would they have wanted to?" is a good question that deserves a more thorough answer.

 

[StarCruiser]

There are a few possible factors that could restrict construction of VERY large starships.

A space station is exactly that, a station - meaning, it doesn't really move much. Such a structure can be built quite large since you don't have to allow for an significant stress other than station keeping thrusters.

A starship has to move, both under warp and some form of sublight drive. Additionally, we have to consider that there may be limits to the volume that the warp engines can enclose. Just building bigger engines may not work if you can't build reliable field coils to generate the warp field, or can't built a power plant that can reliably provide enough energy for that engine etc... etc...

Engineering isn't as simple as many non-engineers think it is.

 

[Ithekro]

I would think they the Federation can build larger ships, given the 600 meter long warp six-seven-ish Vulcan ships that seemed fairly common in the 2150s. Add that the Earth Starfleet has seen the Xindi weapon and the Xindi Aquatic ships (which is huge), means that all they know such large ships are not out of the realm of possibility. So they could have larger ships, but their engineering technology may not have been up to par with what was needed, or the efficiency of said ships was too low or required too much manpower to maintain a larger fleet against the aggressive Klingons. Either the Federation needed more ships to counter the Klingons, or they needed to make sure that if they did lose a ship to the Klingons, it wasn't so vast a loss as if a ship the size of USS Kelvin was lost will all hands to a Klingon attack group.

It could also be that the more efficient engines on say the Constitution-class made some higher speeds possible, while the larger bulky engines of the Kelvin type ships just couldn't make it much past warp seven or eight, while the Constitution could make Warp eight with a lot of complaining from its engineering staff, and make much better than that with a lot of sweating and nail biting.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

A starship has to move, both under warp and some form of sublight drive. Additionally, we have to consider that there may be limits to the volume that the warp engines can enclose. Just building bigger engines may not work if you can't build reliable field coils to generate the warp field, or can't built a power plant that can reliably provide enough energy for that engine etc... etc...

The fact that these ships exist in the Kelvinverse tells us that, from an engineering standpoint, none of those are valid objections. SOME version of Starfleet has the technology to build starships on that scale, which means the technology existed in the 23rd century and was within Starfleet's capability. Meanwhile, the Prime Universe is now introducing the USS Shenzhou, which is already (we believe) considerably larger than the TOS Enterprise and pretty much makes this entire thread irrelevant.

Lastly, there's NX-01, which a hundred years before the Constitution class was only about 30% smaller. The size difference shrinks even more in NX-01's semi-canon refit configuration with the secondary hull slung underneath; it tells us that the Federation was capable of building ships about as big as the Constitution even a century earlier, at a time when their nearest rivals already had much larger vessels in service.

Engineering isn't as simple as many non-engineers think it is.

Sometimes it is, though. The fact that both the Kelvin and the NuEnterprise have warp engines that are proportionately MUCH larger than they are on smaller vessels of the same era tells us that, yes, you CAN solve that problem just by building bigger engines.

More importantly, we can plainly see that 24th century designs reach similar sizes as the Kelvinverse designs, but manage to do so with comparatively tiny engine installations. The Enterprise-D, for example, not only has a greater overall volume than the NuEnterprise, but a far greater portion of that volume is useful space for the crew; something like 30% of that space is engineering and machinery, compared to about 60% on the NuEnterprise. And even a comparison between the Nova and Constitution classes yields similar parallels: Voyager has a greater volume than the TOS Enterprise, but still has much smaller warp engines, a larger shuttle complement, greater firepower, better sensors, a much higher top speed, and can operate for years at a time with a crew of only 150 (compared to 400 of the Constitution). These are all technological improvements that have nothing to do with Starfleet's ability to build ships bigger.

In THAT sense, you're correct that engineering isn't that simple: it isn't a question of size, but efficiency and composition and the capability of the technology you can install on a vessel of a particular size. Just because an older ship might be the same size as a brand new one doesn't mean they have the same capabilities.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

It could also be that the more efficient engines on say the Constitution-class made some higher speeds possible, while the larger bulky engines of the Kelvin type ships just couldn't make it much past warp seven or eight, while the Constitution could make Warp eight with a lot of complaining from its engineering staff, and make much better than that with a lot of sweating and nail biting.

My own theory is that the ships of the Kelvin and Alt-Constitution classes are actually insanely expensive vessels compared to their smaller "economy class" counterparts like we're used to in TOS and the movie era. Federation planners tended to think of the bigger ships as costly boondoggles that were way more powerful than they could ever possibly need to be, and therefore couldn't be justified financially. Probably there was a movement to cancel the superships and instead focus on building larger numbers of smaller and more efficient cruisers, but then the destruction of the Kelvin put the fear of god into Starfleet and changed their priorities. After all, if the over-priced over-engineered Kelvin couldn't stand up to the Narada, a squadron of Constitutions might as well be clay pigeons.

 

[Ithekro]

I like some of the concepts in your Kelvin-verse Starfleet Manuel, Crazy Eddie. Some of them might even still work for Prime Universe Starfleet. We'll see once Discovery comes out if they've taken the road in yet a third (fifth, sixth?) direction to where nothing really fits anymore.

 

[Arpy]

Clearly you didn't, since you just tried to claim that the Kelvin is larger than the Enterprise-D. It isn't; its upper estimate is LONGER than the Enterprise-D, but it is not even close to being larger by volume.

Cheese. Bigger can be synonymous with longer (they shouldn't be either), and factoring in the changes the ships are still too big. You have a terrible attitude.

This statement is baseless. There were larger ships than that even in the 22nd century, and by the 23rd century the Federation has CLEARLY demonstrated the industrial capacity to build very large structures in space. There is no logical reason to assume they COULD NOT build ships as large as the Kelvin if they had wanted to.

OF COURSE they could have built bigger ships, but they didn't until ENT, then JJ, as King Daniel pointed out about Hollywood liking bigger for its own sake, in-universe logic be damned. I'm sure they'll be bigger still in the future and you can make more byzantine apologies for it. You're jumping through hoops to make it work for you, but it's not just the sizes that are way off but countless creative choices. I'm not playing along. Meh to your King Grover. If I'm going to take any of it seriously, I'll do so as separate entities. Whatever verbal connections future installments want to make to the past, swell, but it's as simple as picturing Chris Pine in a scene set in the future. It'll look nothing like TOS, in both ways that should and shouldn't have been altered by the Kelvin.

 

[Spot261]

My own theory is that the ships of the Kelvin and Alt-Constitution classes are actually insanely expensive vessels compared to their smaller "economy class" counterparts like we're used to in TOS and the movie era. Federation planners tended to think of the bigger ships as costly boondoggles that were way more powerful than they could ever possibly need to be, and therefore couldn't be justified financially. Probably there was a movement to cancel the superships and instead focus on building larger numbers of smaller and more efficient cruisers, but then the destruction of the Kelvin put the fear of god into Starfleet and changed their priorities. After all, if the over-priced over-engineered Kelvin couldn't stand up to the Narada, a squadron of Constitutions might as well be clay pigeons.

Which tends to make a certain sense. TOS showed the heroes face a series of threats which could be defeated by a clever resourceful crew, but against which a larger ship would have made little difference. '09 on the other hand presented the federation with a clear military threat, the sort that may well prompt them to believe the way forward was to build bigger and more powerful, thus continuing a trend which had been in it's infancy at the time.

Even the movie era trek seemed to be suggesting that the Ent, while sophisticated, came nowhere near representing the extent of the federation's engineering capacity. The size of the Earth starbase and the mining of the Genesis planet are both the product of civilisations beyond that shown in TOS, the starfleet who were largely wandering in an untamed unknown, perpetually forced to survive on their wits in a strange universe they could barely begin to understand.

Granted it's a little bit difficult to reconcile the size of the Kelvin era vessels with Kirk and company's astonishment at seeing the Excelsior, but no one outright says she is the biggest ship they've ever seen (we know she isn't, this is the same crew who faced the Faesarius and V'ger), the phrase is simply "Big ship".

I'm sure they'll be bigger still in the future and you can make more byzantine apologies for it. You're jumping through hoops to make it wor.k for you, but it's not just the sizes that are way off but countless creative choices. I'm not playing along. Meh to your King Grover. If I'm going to take any of it seriously, I'll do so as separate entities.

You seem strangely determined to insist on your own version of events despite being quite explicitly contradicted by the canon. The Kelvin was built in the Prime universe, that is made explicit. It existed prior to the building of the 1701, that is also explicit. You may dislike that (I do too for what it's worth), it may not seem to match up or gel, but that's only your take on things, your personal taste. The official accepted canon now clearly shows that such huge ships not only could exist pre TOS but did.

 

[Ithekro]

Cheese. Bigger can be synonymous with longer (they shouldn't be either), and factoring in the changes the ships are still too big. You have a terrible attitude.

OF COURSE they could have built bigger ships, but they didn't until ENT, then JJ, as King Daniel pointed out about Hollywood liking bigger for its own sake, in-universe logic be damned. I'm sure they'll be bigger still in the future and you can make more byzantine apologies for it. You're jumping through hoops to make it work for you, but it's not just the sizes that are way off but countless creative choices. I'm not playing along. Meh to your King Grover. If I'm going to take any of it seriously, I'll do so as separate entities. Whatever verbal connections future installments want to make to the past, swell, but it's as simple as picturing Chris Pine in a scene set in the future. It'll look nothing like TOS, in both ways that should and shouldn't have been altered by the Kelvin.

I find this thought process to be illogical and unproductive given the nature of the questions being asked. For ENT the Enterprise herself isn't all that large, and certainly still smaller than Kirk's ship. However other races ships are all over the place. Some are tiny (Suliban ships) and some are huge (Vulcan and some Xindi ships, plus the unknown attacking race early in season one where Enterprise get to test her overloaded phase cannons to some effect before help arrives). None of the alien ships are presented at having speeds over warp seven if they use conventional warp drive equivalents. The Xindi of course use something more wormhole like.

The JJ sizes bother me for the Enterprise herself, but from my point of view only the Enterprise actually bothers me, and wit the timeline change I can accept it. The Kelvin and others of her style can be made to work at any scaling presented due to them being of a different technology to what we see in either ENT or TOS, making them something different, yet still Starfleet. Adding USS Franklin in the most recent film as the first Warp Four ship provides some fuel for the idea that there were at least two competing design styles going on around the time of ENT. One was the Cochrane influenced drives built for Archer's Warp Five Project. The other was some other system that ended up on the USS Franklin. While the cylinders were of similar shape and the warp speeds were within a factor of each other, the way they go about achieving warp speed is different. The two styles may have competed for decades or even a century with the Kelvin style ships being based on the Franklin designs and what would be the Prime universes Constitution-class and others like her would be of the Archer lineage. There could even be more designs out in the Federation Starfleet would dip into from decade to decade until after the Great Experiment (USS Excelsior) redefined the scales and the newer warp drives were all based on that design with improvements and new designs for the nacelles over the next 90 years. But all the warp stylings from Excelsior onwards are basically the same, but was also based on the Archer drives on some level. The Refit Enterprise styling warp entry might be different from that and the older TOS styling, the new engines causing the ship to go into warp in a different way than previous ships or later ships.

In the Kelvin-verse, the Franklin style drives are better suited for big ships as is scales up better than the Archer drives. Due to the loss of USS Kelvin to a five mile long Romulan ship, "bigger isn't just better, it is required for survival" with larger starships being requested to counter whatever this Romulan ship was and whatever the Klingons might get from it. So instead of dropping the idea by the 2240s or 2250s (depending on what happens in Discovery), they refine it for better speeds, which was originally the goal of the Archer drive based engines on the Prime Universe's Constitutions.

While there are some fan made impressions of USS Defender, the very large Federation battleship from some of the Romulan Way series novels, it might be more useful to imagine them as large Kelvin style starships. Huge but left over older tech ships that are suited for the battleship role thanks to their mass more than their technological level. They could even have been designed (the Kelvin style ships) originally for this very large species and a few were taken over by smaller races (like humans) but found to be just too impractical for the relatively tiny races to man, thus leaving the rest to the giants after the completion of the next generation Warp Eight drive starships of the Constitution-class that fit the smaller faces better.

This of course could mean there are larger starships than the Galaxy-class in the 24th century for these larger races, or Starfleet has fitted some of those, the Nebula, and Ambassador-class starships with larger scale rooms and decks to accommodate these size races, who might find them to be smaller than the previous century's ships, but much higher tech and comfortable even if run by a crew of 150.

 

[The Old Mixer]

You have a terrible attitude.

No need to go there to argue your point.

 

[Captain of the USS Averof]

The size difference shrinks even more in NX-01's semi-canon refit configuration with the secondary hull slung underneath

The NX-01 refit is not even remotely semi-canon or canon.

 

[Dilandu]

While there are some fan made impressions of USS Defender, the very large Federation battleship from some of the Romulan Way series novels, it might be more useful to imagine them as large Kelvin style starships. Huge but left over older tech ships that are suited for the battleship role thanks to their mass more than their technological level.

The defining parameter of battleships are durability. I.e. the ability to absorb damage and remain in fight. The size matters only as long as the size allowed to more durability.

 

[Spot261]

The NX-01 refit is not even remotely semi-canon or canon.

It's phase canon

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Cheese. Bigger can be synonymous with longer

And the phrase "Well shit, you're right, I didn't really think that through" can be equivalent to "No, I totally knew that, you just misunderstood me!"

But somehow I don't think they are.

You have a terrible attitude.

There's nothing wrong with my attitude, I'm just a terrible PERSON.

OF COURSE they could have built bigger ships

Then your argument is invalid.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

The NX-01 refit is not even remotely semi-canon or canon.

I'm mainly alluding to Treklit and the fact that the refit design was something the producers of the show had been kicking around in the back rooms. Still non-canon, but closer to being official than any of the old FJ material that's been floating around in this thread.

 

[F. King Daniel]

I'm mainly alluding to Treklit and the fact that the refit design was something the producers of the show had been kicking around in the back rooms. Still non-canon, but closer to being official than any of the old FJ material that's been floating around in this thread.

Wasn't that old FJ stuff used as on-screen graphics and background bridge chatter for the first three movies?