Size of the new Enterprise

[Darth Onasi]

That iteration of the Trek XI Big E looks a HELL of a lot better than the shots we've seen of it in previous threads so if it IS accurate those shots did the design a disservice.
It still loses to the original leave alone Refit/E-A design but it is no longer ugly.

It's not accurate. They simply assumed the saucer was the same size and sclaed the other parts from there, but there's no indication that the saucer is identical.

Well the saucer is visually almost identical to the TMP saucer, it's not an unreasonable assumption to make that their size is similar.

[Bounty]

Well the saucer is visually almost identical to the TMP saucer, it's not an unreasonable assumption to make that their size is similar.

"Almost identical"? Well, if you ignore the shape, details, livery, window size and window spacing, then yes, it's identical.

However, to jump from that and say that because it's a pancake it's identical in size to the old ship is... suspect at best.

[Bounty]

I know this is a necro, but if this article (warning, mild spoilers) is anything to go by, the size of the JJverse Enterprise has been confirmed at 3000 feet, or 900+ meters. I don't know if this jives with the on-screen visuals; guess we'll know this week.

In the article, which is an interview about the effects work ILM in particular did for the movie, this is said about scale:

"J.J. and Roger and I would go over things and I would send retouched drawings or diagrams back to the folks at ILM," says Earl. "It's sort of taking everything that's come before and trying to build upon that. J.J. wanted you to be in a moment with the characters on a ship and then be able to cut to an exterior shot of the ship and have it feel just as realistic."
Another aspect was the daunting scale of the ships. The Enterprise is 3,000 feet long but bad guy Eric Bana's ship is designed to appear a humongous five miles long.

Incidentally, this means you can probably park the TOS ship between the JJPrise' nacelles. With room to spare.

[Jon]

That seems... ambitious.

Using that scale someone posted these...

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v438/ ... Scale2.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v438/Dac/NewScale.jpg

and here it is under construction

http://img24.imageshack.us/img24/5369/entcons.jpg

[Crossroads Inc.]

they cant be serious... that would make the ship bigger then the Ent-D or even Ent-E

[Bounty]

It does seem to fit with the hangar shots from the IESB clips.

[Jon]

You can kinda see the shuttlebay interior in these few shots... it does look rather large in there, with shuttlecraft stacked up, facing inwards on the side of the bay.

[Bounty]

Huh, I hadn't noticed the stacked shuttles. The E-nil only managed a few Workbee crammed into docks on the side...

[Darth Wong]

If Eric Bana's ship is so much bigger than the Enterprise, doesn't that beg the question of how much more advanced he is? Is he a time traveler who brought the thing back from the future?

[Jon]

Without spoiling it too much... yes.

[Darth Wong]

I guess I shouldn't ask for more details, since that would spoil the film. It just seems that if Eric Bana's character has a ship from several centuries in the future, he should have a huge technological advantage over Kirk, and a lot of implausible writing acrobatics would be required in order to make Kirk win.

[Kamakazie Sith]

If Eric Bana's ship is so much bigger than the Enterprise, doesn't that beg the question of how much more advanced he is? Is he a time traveler who brought the thing back from the future?

Spoiler

Actually, yeah. According to what I've read he comes from the TNG timeline.

[The Romulan Republic]

I guess I shouldn't ask for more details, since that would spoil the film. It just seems that if Eric Bana's character has a ship from several centuries in the future, he should have a huge technological advantage over Kirk, and a lot of implausible writing acrobatics would be required in order to make Kirk win.

Kirk faced bigger and seemingly more advanced ships (as well as beings with God-like powers) in TOS. If course, you could say those episodes are pretty implausible as well, but its not like this is a new thing for Kirk.

[Ilya Muromets]

So, any possible in-universe explanations for the MASSIVE up-scaling of the Enterprise from you guys? I'm going with the events involving the Kelvin getting its ass kicked by Nero's ship prompted Starfleet to become more militaristic. A more militaristic Starfleet probably would have found the specs for the original Connie lacking given Nero's monster. So, they decided to make a completely new and huge design to place even more firepower (and possibly armor)?

[Anguirus]

If Eric Bana's ship is so much bigger than the Enterprise, doesn't that beg the question of how much more advanced he is? Is he a time traveler who brought the thing back from the future?

Spoiler

Actually, yeah. According to what I've read he comes from the TNG timeline.

Spoiler

Not only that, but according to the comics he spanked the combined Federation and Klingon fleets in a Neo-Wolf 359, overpowering the Enterprise-E and blowing the hell out of Worf. That "mining ship" is actually a real monster built with Borg-tech.

Speculation: Nero and his big-ass ship radically shift the balance of power to the Romulans. He shows up, nukes a Federation ship, then flies to Romulus with it and overnight makes the Romulans into a galactic power. Starfleet radically alters its plans for new ships, making them larger and more powerful, in an attempt to defend against another sudden Romulan attack. That neatly explains the Monsterprise.

[Stark]

I'm not sure how much the whole 'is same until Nero shows up then changes' idea holds up to the widespread differences. The Kelvin's bridge doesn't look like a TOS bridge (and the whole ship isn't pre E-nil), the uniforms are different, they have entirely new procedures like orbital drops, etc.

[Ilya Muromets]

Monsterprise is an apt term. Looking at the scale pics again, it seems that a single nacelle from that thing would out-mass an entire Connie.

EDIT:

I'm not sure how much the whole 'is same until Nero shows up then changes' idea holds up to the widespread differences. The Kelvin's bridge doesn't look like a TOS bridge (and the whole ship isn't pre E-nil), the uniforms are different, they have entirely new procedures like orbital drops, etc.

How far back does the TOS-era aesthetics go in-universe, though? The whole Kelvin incident had Kirk as a baby, so there's at least about two decades of time (what is Kirk's age supposed to be in the movie?) for stuff to change. For all we know, that may well have been how Starfleet ships and uniforms looked back then even in the original timeline. Most of the new procedures I've noted seem to be post-Kelvin.

Although, yeah, that does seem to be a stretch.

[Darth Wong]

It makes no sense that Starfleet would just decide to make their ships vastly bigger and more powerful. If they could just decide to do that, why didn't they do it in the original timeline and squash the Klingons easily?

We should just assume that this is an entirely new continuity, ie- a "reboot" rather than clumsily trying to make it fit with the original continuity.

[Stark]

Particularly since it's ST + time travel, which makes it more or less likely it's yet another parallel world rather than the original pre-TOS situation.

[Havok]

It makes no sense that Starfleet would just decide to make their ships vastly bigger and more powerful. If they could just decide to do that, why didn't they do it in the original timeline and squash the Klingons easily?

We should just assume that this is an entirely new continuity, ie- a "reboot" rather than clumsily trying to make it fit with the original continuity.

Mike, you can say that a million times. Some people just aren't going to understand it. It was said repeatedly in another ST XI thread and it didn't sink in then either. The same thing is going on in the Wolverine review thread "OMG it's totally different from the comics!!" "The movies are their own universe and continuity" "But it doesn't follow the comics!!"

[Ilya Muromets]

It makes no sense that Starfleet would just decide to make their ships vastly bigger and more powerful. If they could just decide to do that, why didn't they do it in the original timeline and squash the Klingons easily?

We should just assume that this is an entirely new continuity, ie- a "reboot" rather than clumsily trying to make it fit with the original continuity.

Mike, you can say that a million times. Some people just aren't going to understand it. It was said repeatedly in another ST XI thread and it didn't sink in then either. The same thing is going on in the Wolverine review thread "OMG it's totally different from the comics!!" "The movies are their own universe and continuity" "But it doesn't follow the comics!!"

The same thing going on? I'm not even remotely going for the whole they-changed-it-now-it-sucks thing behind those comments you quoted. All I went for was a possible in-universe explanation based on the whole plot of Nero going back and killing Kirk's dad. The impression I got from the plot was that the continuity of the movie only diverges after that point, and my speculation went from there. It only got more confusing since some of the stuff I've read refers to the film as a "semi-reboot" rather than a full reboot. And even I admitted that my speculation was a stretch. I have no problem at all if this whole thing is a whole reboot (making my whole assumption of "it only diverges after Kelvin" moot) and all my speculation gets thrown out the window.

[Junghalli]

It makes no sense that Starfleet would just decide to make their ships vastly bigger and more powerful. If they could just decide to do that, why didn't they do it in the original timeline and squash the Klingons easily?

Well, there are very good reasons for using your resources to build more small ships instead of a handful of big ships. Larger numbers of small ships can cover more ground; be in more places at one time. For the resources that went into Monsterprise you could probably build dozens of lesser vessels that could patrol dozens of systems instead of just one. My guess, if I had to maintain some continuity with TOS, is they could have built the Monsterprise in the original timeline but chose not to because it would have been a ridiculous waste of resources. In this timeline apparently for some reason a huge super-expensive monster ship looked attractive.

[Anguirus]

If they could just decide to do that, why didn't they do it in the original timeline and squash the Klingons easily?

Cause building bigger Constitution-class ships means a bunch of Andorian kids starved?

I'm not fretting about it myself. It's clear from reading even a few spoilers or interviews that this is intended to fit with the original continuity--hence Leonard Nimoy. However, they then get to use that as their catchall excuse for changing things that they want to change. Of course, this stands up to scrutiny about as well as the rest of Star Trek does, but it's not really meant to. They're just having their cake and eating it too.

(Is the Three-Nacelled Dreadnought from those old TOS books canon? I seem to recall that was a monstrous battlewagon. The "change" might simply be that the Constitution became the Federation's most heavily-armed ship, rather than a smaller one. There is also a (definitely non-canon) ship in the Diane Duane Rhiannsu books that was described as having four nacelles and a saucer with a diameter greater than the Enterprise's length.)

[Stark]

Hah. The Mirror Universe has Nimoy too, and it's not the same as pre-TOS either. Even worse, Nimoy is there because HE TIME TRAVELLED TOO, so his presence means only that they CAME from TNG-verse. If they're in (yet another) parallel world where everything's the same but just a little bit different, Nimoy's presence proves NOTHING.

[Anguirus]

^ Who are you trying to have an argument with, anyway? I'm sure that when the film comes out it will be very possible to argue under SoD that Spock and Nero traveled to some random universe. That's almost certainly not what the filmmakers intended, however.