Size of the new Enterprise

[TithonusSyndrome]

Is nobody here reminded of Pale Blue Dot by all of this railing against a bigger and more militant Enterprise?

The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed"? Instead they say, "No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way."

Just replace "god" with "Enterprise", which is not a huge leap if you really want to understand how these people think.

[Kamakazie Sith]

I don't get why people are offended with the new size. I personally like it. To me this new size strikes me as a ship that is capable of conducting and running operations in an area which is something you expect from a flagship. The TOS Enterprise never made me think that it could take on a command ship role...but was it even considered to be the flagship in TOS? I don't recall...

There was nothing wrong with the size of the old ship. It was a very large ship on the scale of modern seagoing warships, after all. It's just that so many other sci-fi series have come out with much bigger ships since then, and the producers apparently felt a case of penis envy.

Yes, that's true. However, the larger size gives them more room for designing the layout. The TOS Enterprise had enough room in its hanger for roughly one to two shuttles. This new Enterprise has a respectable hanger for a handful of shuttles.

[Batman]

I don't think the E-Nil in TOS was ever intended to be a flagship in the sense of actually having a flag staff aboard and coordinating fleet moves as opposed to SHOWING the flag, as in being around potential trouble spots so the local Feds would know they were being watched over by one of Starfleet's premier vessels and potential troublemakers would know they'd be UP against one if they chose to become actual ones.

[Darth Wong]

I don't get why people are offended with the new size. I personally like it. To me this new size strikes me as a ship that is capable of conducting and running operations in an area which is something you expect from a flagship. The TOS Enterprise never made me think that it could take on a command ship role...but was it even considered to be the flagship in TOS? I don't recall...

There was nothing wrong with the size of the old ship. It was a very large ship on the scale of modern seagoing warships, after all. It's just that so many other sci-fi series have come out with much bigger ships since then, and the producers apparently felt a case of penis envy.

Yes, that's true. However, the larger size gives them more room for designing the layout. The TOS Enterprise had enough room in its hanger for roughly one to two shuttles. This new Enterprise has a respectable hanger for a handful of shuttles.

True. In DS9, they already showed an interest in adopting a more Star Wars style of combat, with small fighter craft supporting the larger ships in battles. It makes cinematic sense: small craft are more exciting and dynamic. This new layout gives them the ability to launch a decent number of shuttles, and they could easily invent a "combat shuttle" variant for extra zoom factor.

[Connor MacLeod]

I've said this before WRT galactica - just because the modellers say a ship is a given size out of universe one cannot just assume that as total gospel. That's out of universe stuff and it breaks with SoD. Its nice if it DOES mesh up with what we see, but you have to take it with a grain of salt because the visuals are always the primary canon. I had this problem quite often back when I was debating with Rabid Fivers and scaling they would ALWAYs introduce some out of universe "artists intention" for some ship or not (and at one point it even DID come to size charts I might add) that did conflict with established (movie/TV) canon.

This isnt going to be a big problem with the ST movie, since we've established the sizes (from visuals) can match with the "stated" figures (although it seems to fit the smaller one rather than the 900m one I see more commonly tossed around.)

[Patrick Degan]

Examining Schneider's argument in detail:

So what can we make of the supersized Enterprise? Do we have to believe what the official sources keep telling us now that there are scenes in the movie (that we would otherwise ignore) and more evidence in the form of scaled down external features?

No, we believe the visual evidence of the movie.

There are many reasons why I still maintain a size of some 300m for the new Enterprise:

As you wish...

* The sheer size of the new Enterprise is ludicrous. Had it been a fan design submitted to the JoAT, I would have declined it right away as an übership, unless the designer had agreed to modify the size to something more reasonable. At 725m length the Enterprise would be 2.5 times as long as the original Enterprise, and it would have as much as 15.8 times its volume! The alternate ship dwarfs any known Starfleet vessel of the Prime Universe, including the biggest starship classes of the 24th century. Sure, there is no rule that vessels always have to grow in size. But the leap to 15.8 times as large vessels in this new universe is a stretch by any means, especially if we consider that many things (such as the crew) are still the same in spite of the huge historical and technological differences.

Appeal to Incredulity Fallacy, and one turning on the wholly unfounded assumption that a rebooted Star Trek must conform in all measures and aspects to it's parent series. That is not at all a given, never has been, and it was patently absurd to ever expect it to be so.

* The proportions of the saucer, neck, engineering hull and nacelles are somewhat different than on either the TOS and the TMP Enterprise, but overall still similar enough to put it into the same size range. In contrast, the designs of the much larger Enterprise-C (Ambassador class) and Enterprise-D (Galaxy) are visibly more compact, as we would expect from bigger ships because of the scaling issue. The big Enterprise-E (Sovereign class) is less compact again, but with its more streamlined hull the design takes a still different direction. If we don't pay attention to the small details such as the window sizes, everything about the new Enterprise looks like on a small (300m) ship, but we are supposed to believe that it is about the same order of size (volume-wise) as the Galaxy class!

The fact that every other object to which this ship compares as well as pixel measurements confirms the evident visual evidence is not dependent upon a fan's expectations for how a large-scale vessel is supposed to look. Indeed, this argument seems to make no cogent point whatsoever. Especially as it is quite apparent that the reboot movie was never made to conform to the measures and styles of either the parent series or it's direct sequels.

* While their sizes are subject to vary considerably between different ship classes of different eras, we would not expect all kinds of mid-sized and well-recognizable details such as phasers, thrusters, impulse engines, deflector dish, shuttlebay doors or bridge dome to change their sizes almost proportionally with the rest of the ship. This, however, is the case on the "Star Trek XI" Enterprise. Even if it could make sense technically, the proportional upsizing of almost every feature goes against the notion that it is intended to be bigger. The upscaled design would have to establish *some* substantial visual difference, but it doesn't.

Why? Certainly, the impulse engines and deflector dish would have to be of sufficient structural volume to adequately fulfill their functions for such a large spaceframe, and again this argument derives from a personal expectation of what a large ship is "supposed" to look like.

* There are two rows of windows in the saucer edge, whose arrangement is almost exactly as on the Probert Enterprise refit. Even the two darker stripes around the edge are almost the same. Actually, this detail was the ultimate reason for me to assume that the saucer has to be the same size, which made the new ship overall just a bit shorter than the TMP version. If the actual "Star Trek XI" Enterprise were more than twice as long, then the window arrangement in the saucer would be an incredibly stupid coincidence. It is already little useful to scale up hull designs as a whole. But the assumption that the windows would be still the same, leaving the new deck in between (the one behind the stripe) without windows, is simply ridiculous.

Why? What rule of design dictates that there must be viewports for every deck on the ship or that they must conform to a particular size range in proportion to the decks they're located on? That there really is no reason to have viewports on a spaceship at all is another issue for another discussion perhaps but there is nothing really prohibiting huge picture-viewports on such a large vessel from a design standpoint unless they would constitute an unacceptably hazardous series of weak-points in the hull.

Yes, it is just a detail, but the details are crucial to create an impression of the size of the ship.

Because a hangar deck with twin storage levels for a small fleet of 15-metre shuttlecraft obviously cannot create this impression, I suppose...

And with its saucer being an inflated Probert design without any changes to indicate the larger size, it miserably fails in this respect. The same applies to the window rows in the neck and in engineering. They always leave "incidentally" one deck between the rows on an alleged 700m ship without windows, hence insinuating that it is only half as long.

This again assumes that every deck must incorporate viewports, which is not at all a given.

* At more than 700m length, the ship has overall just a handful of windows, and as already mentioned, many decks in the inhabited parts of the ship, are completely without windows. Adding more windows would have been crucial to insinuate a larger size, but overall the ship has about as many as the 300m long Enterprise refit.

And having every deck incorporating viewports is listed in which rule of starship design...?

* The radically different looking engine room should not be taken as a sign that, if the technology inside the ship is different, the same should apply to its size. Sure, the "brewery" would realistically be too big for the ship. But aside from the size of the set it is circular reasoning that it is an alternate timeline, and if the technology inside is different, then the ship could just as well be 16 times as large.

Nonsensical babble.

* This Enterprise has evidently been built on the ground in its entirety and must have been lifted up into orbit somehow. The length of more than 700m would aggravate the problems of getting it up into space in one piece. Since it would be 16 times as heavy as originally assumed, the lever forces of the enormous nacelles would realistically break off the nacelle pylons already when the ship is standing on the ground.

Does Schneider simply pull numbers out of thin air to support his incredulity? Surely the builders of the Enterprise would already have designed it to where the centre of mass for the nacelles, and the greater concentration of said mass, would be located in the area of where each joins the support pylons, with the structures tapering off with length to decrease weight towards the tail ends —which is what appears to be the case. This would be necessary simply so that the ship's (and the nacelles') overall mass-distribution would not be unbalanced to begin with. It is also reasonable to assume that the bulk of the actual warp engine machinery in the hollow nacelles would also be located in the area of the mounts, with most of the abaft internal area given over to heat sinks which would be far less bulky and weigh considerably less than the drive mechanism.

Besides, if the ship had been designed as Schneider seems to suggest here, what credibly backs any assumption that a 300-metre Enterprise would not face the same problems getting off the ground as a 725-metre ship? The same objection obtains with the smaller ship as it would with the larger one —tail-heavy warp nacelles would break in two or more pieces and fall to the ground before the ship could even attempt an ascent from the stocks.

* When the Enterprise arrives at Vulcan, the ship runs into a debris field and almost collides with a saucer that is considerably bigger than the Enterprise's. This saucer would have to be at least 500m in diameter, and it would belong to a ship of some 1000m length, provided that it has about the same basic structure as the 725m Enterprise. This is either another case of mis-scaling, or the Enterprise is just 300m long, which would not preclude the possibility that there are ships with bigger 200m saucers. Alternatively, the saucer could belong to a starbase, but it rather looks like one of a starship.

Even if Schneider is not simply misreading the visual data and his assumed measures for the wreckage in orbit over Vulcan hold true, exactly how does this demonstrate that the movie Enterprise cannot possibly be a 725-metre ship? How does this negate the clear visual evidence of the hangar deck? Or the ship's internal volume? Or the large number of shuttlecraft carried by the smaller USS Kelvin seen to be escaping the damaged Narada, which supports the apparent evidence that Starfleet in this reality builds large starships? A rather obvious non-sequitur.

[Bounty]

This isnt going to be a big problem with the ST movie, since we've established the sizes (from visuals) can match with the "stated" figures (although it seems to fit the smaller one rather than the 900m one I see more commonly tossed around.)

The 900 meter ship is from a single 3000ft statement in one article; it gets mileage because it's the first solid size figure, but it hasn't been repeated by an actual movie source. 726 meters seems to be the 'actual' official size.

For the Galactica outline I used the 1445 meter figure from Doug Drexler's site. Is that a wrong one?

[Worlds Spanner]

I don't think the E-Nil in TOS was ever intended to be a flagship in the sense of actually having a flag staff aboard and coordinating fleet moves as opposed to SHOWING the flag, as in being around potential trouble spots so the local Feds would know they were being watched over by one of Starfleet's premier vessels and potential troublemakers would know they'd be UP against one if they chose to become actual ones.

SF seems to use "flagship" in a different sense than a ship with a flag officer on board. It seems to be attached to the individual ship, and simply mean "biggest and best at X."

[DaveJB]

Canonically only the Ent-D, Ent-E and the new flick's Enterprise have ever been mentioned as the flagship. Common wisdom has it that the original Enterprise was the flagship for a few years following TMP, the Ent-A was never the flagship (Excelsior holding that honour despite spending several years parked in Spacedock) and the Ent-B started the tradition of the Enterprise being the flagship, but of course there you're going into the murky realms of fanon.

[Questor]

Actually, The E-Nil is one of the few ships we've seen that might have actually been an admiral's flagship.

Spock was a full captain, and Kirk was an admiral.

[DaveJB]

Now you mention it, the Federation seems to have two different definitions of flagship - there's the overall Federation flagship, which was the Ent-D and then the Ent-E in the TNG era, and "flagships" that are commanded by admirals in charge of fleets, e.g. Nechayev's ship in Descent, and whichever ship Hayes was commanding in First Contact.

[Questor]

Actually, on further thought, perhaps we can merge them, and make one stupid part of the movie less stupid.

Starfleet ships tend to operate on their own under normal circumstances, which is part of what makes the concept of a flagship silly.

Perhaps the ships are members of squadrons and fleets, but the admirals stay in port most of the time because the formations are dispersed. This could mean that a ship is the flagship (designate) and only have an admiral embarked occasionally.

That could even help explain giving such a junior officer command of the Enterprise. Politics may have dictated he be rewarded that way, but he is only captain in the sense that Spock was the captain of the Enterprise in TWoK. Perhaps Pike is coming along.

I'm guessing that there are a bunch of reasons this is a stupid idea, and I just can't see them, though.

I would really like to see a flag bridge on the ship if that is the case.

[tim31]

I dislike the term flagship and prefer ship of the line. Implies that 'we built this one with balls!'

[Richardson]

I think I've gotten a pretty clear shot of the bridge window to scale off of, if I can get a few moments, I should be able to post it up. I kicked myself in my balls after I realized I had been ignoring the send-off sequence, in which we get a nice, almost head-on shot of the upper saucer, with a slow flyby that gave an ideal opportunity to take a pic of the superstructure.



So, this should give us a chance to get a proper scaling of the bridge window, if we can figure out how high it is. Figure that out, and we can scale everything else from that. I believe the current estimation is from 3-4 meters? That is a goddamned wide window, though. I wish he (abrams) had gone ahead and said 'screw cannon' and stuffed the bridge deep inside the ship, though.

[Bounty]

The window is about 2m high, both in the movie when seen from inside and on the schematic. From a quick scaling the ratio of the height of the bridge window to the distance between the bottom of the bridge deck and the top of the dome in is almost precisely 1:6, which matches up exactly with the sideview schematic confirming the scaling work on that image holds for a 726 meter Enterprise.



Absolute sizes can't be determined due to the camera angle but rations should be pretty safe.



Movie still lines up perfectly with sideview

And we circle right back to a 700 meter Enterprise.

[Richardson]

You realize that 2 meters is approximately human height, right?

I've got a shot that shows it's at least a meter bigger than that.



You can still see Chekov in his entirety in that shot, and the entire helm console, however far back it is.

Now then, that sure as hell doesn't look 'human being tall', that's more ' human being and a half'

[erik_t]

The camera is very close to the window though, which means you can't draw any conclusions on window height based on stuff more than a few feet inside. I can look out my 1m tall window and see 7m-tall houses if I'm next to the window and they're across the street.

[Crossroads Inc.]

_

[Bounty]

Look at the console on the starboard side of the bridge and follow the floorline - the window starts a good foot off the floor, easily accounting for the difference. Like I said earlier in the thread, the 1.88m Quinto just about fills the frame when he stands in front of it; taking the angle of the camera into account, it's a 2 meter window, give or take a decimetre in either direction.

[K. A. Pital]

Wait, are some people still saying the Enterprise is just 300 m long?

That's ridiculous. The new Trek, like the new Batman, is not bound to conform to some pathetic fan idiocy about "canonicity" (not to mention that Rodenberry is gone so Trek canon now is shaped by other people, and - honestly - from the latest movie I can infer they did a better job than the series and old movies ever did).

New Trek is meaner, bigger, more badass, with more powerful guns and weapons, and also (shush...) more coherent (that's a lot, considering the overall plot incoherency of Trek, which is always a bane for the series and movies). If someone can't wrap his head around that, he probably is just whining for his favourite childhood memory or something, so brutally stomped by this new Trek.

[Gemini-Preserver]

Perhapse the new Enterprise is in fact the same 75 deck Enterprise from Star Trek V?

[ray245]

Wait, are some people still saying the Enterprise is just 300 m long?

That's ridiculous. The new Trek, like the new Batman, is not bound to conform to some pathetic fan idiocy about "canonicity" (not to mention that Rodenberry is gone so Trek canon now is shaped by other people, and - honestly - from the latest movie I can infer they did a better job than the series and old movies ever did).

New Trek is meaner, bigger, more badass, with more powerful guns and weapons, and also (shush...) more coherent (that's a lot, considering the overall plot incoherency of Trek, which is always a bane for the series and movies). If someone can't wrap his head around that, he probably is just whining for his favourite childhood memory or something, so brutally stomped by this new Trek.

Considering that how hard it is to please the old Star Trek fans back into seeing this movie by saying the old Trek is still connected to the new Trek...

Although, I would think tons of star wars fans(minimalist) would be screaming their heads off if the star destroyer is much bigger in a rebooted Star Wars.

Which reminds me, how many people down here would even mind that fact?

[Captain Seafort]

Although, I would think tons of star wars fans(minimalist) would be screaming their heads off if the star destroyer is much bigger in a rebooted Star Wars.

You mean 12 miles rather than five, for example...

Indeed, IIRC, the ISD was originally intended to be six miles long, although it ended up working out smaller.

[Darth Wong]

Wait, are some people still saying the Enterprise is just 300 m long?

That's ridiculous. The new Trek, like the new Batman, is not bound to conform to some pathetic fan idiocy about "canonicity" (not to mention that Rodenberry is gone so Trek canon now is shaped by other people, and - honestly - from the latest movie I can infer they did a better job than the series and old movies ever did).

New Trek is meaner, bigger, more badass, with more powerful guns and weapons, and also (shush...) more coherent (that's a lot, considering the overall plot incoherency of Trek, which is always a bane for the series and movies). If someone can't wrap his head around that, he probably is just whining for his favourite childhood memory or something, so brutally stomped by this new Trek.

The new Trek is definitely meaner and bigger. I don't know about the "coherent" part; the story here is pretty damned convoluted and contrived even by Trek movie standards. They don't even attempt to explain why Pike suddenly promotes Kirk to First Officer, even though this becomes one of the most important events in the whole story. He seems to make the call as arbitrarily and nonchalantly as I would choose whether to order the french onion soup.

[Captain Seafort]

The new Trek is definitely meaner and bigger. I don't know about the "coherent" part; the story here is pretty damned convoluted and contrived even by Trek movie standards. They don't even attempt to explain why Pike suddenly promotes Kirk to First Officer, even though this becomes one of the most important events in the whole story. He seems to make the call as arbitrarily and nonchalantly as I would choose whether to order the french onion soup.

The impression I got was that Pike and Spock were the only proper officers aboard, so selecting a 2iC from among the cadets would have been a case of "eeny meeny miny mo". Pike evidently had a high opinion of Kirk (or at least his potential), so he got the nod.