I've just been going over the size arguments again and still just cannot justify a big Enterprise.
I went over the Ex Astris arguments, to see if I can find any way that a 750m ship would be better.
I find that I still can't.
I don't mean that
there isn't evidence for it, I mean that there is too much reason to choose to
ignore that evidence. It would just cause far fewer contradictions, especially considering the inconsistencies that the films have presented us with, about whether this version of Star Trek is a reboot or not.
It's very damn persuasive.
I mean that in a non-confrontational way; but after looking at the problems involved, it would be so much more plausible for the ship being the original 366 meters that Ryan Church made it. As someone pointed out a couple of pages ago,
Admiral Marcus had a replica of Archer's NX-01 sitting on his desk - which means, as much as I would like to, we can't really take as truth Simon Pegg's comments about the movies being a full reboot! After all, the nature of physics is such that if there were huge differences between the two universes, the NX-01 would not have been an exact bolt-for-bolt clone of the original. It is a ridiculous mess thanks to these conflicting and inconsistent visions we have been presented with.
Like millions of other fans, I watched "Star Trek (2009)". And like pretty much everyone else who cares for starship design I was totally convinced that the new ship has to be about the same size as the original Enterprise or the Enterprise refit from the Prime Universe: around 300 meters long. This is what the design clearly looks like, and there was little real evidence in the movie to the contrary - except the oversized engineering location (that almost everyone seems to hate anyway) and the scene when the shuttles with the cadets arrive at the ship. Here we can see how a dozen shuttles are stacked in two rows on each side of the obviously huge shuttlebay.
As usual, I decided to ignore the blatant mis-scaling in case of the shuttle shelves. It would not be the first time that the VFX team disregarded the design sizes as given by the designers, just for an additional dramatic impact. We all remember the Merchantman that appeared to be only shuttle-sized compared to a Klingon BoP in "Star Trek: The Search for Spock", and still no one claims that the ship is really that small. Or the Defiant in "First Contact", which appeared to be just some 50m long compared to the Enterprise-E, whereas any other size evidence is somewhere between 100m and 170m. Or the big shuttles inside Voyager's shuttlebay, which could never pass the shuttlebay door. Or, in a more recent case, the Denobulan medical ship in ENT: "Cold Station 12" that must be some 20m long and almost as high, but fits into the shuttlebay of a Klingon Bird-of-Prey! All this we had to ignore because it was physically impossible. And so was the notion that some 24 big shuttles could be stowed aboard the new Enterprise.
But the more or less official Enterprise Tour comes up with an overall length of as much as 2500ft (762m) for the new Enterprise. The Society of Digital Artists says that the length is 2357ft (718m). And Gizmodo Blog claims that the ship is 2379.75 feet (725.35 meters) long. And because it's apparently so much fun, the blog demonstrates how well the extremely oversized ship performs compared to other sci-fi franchises, at least size-wise. Finally, we have an extra feature on the "Star Trek (2009)" Blu-ray disc that confirms the length of the new ship to be 2379.75 feet. Embarrassingly, on the comparison diagram with the TOS Enterprise that is supposed to make the huge size retroactively plausible the scale is totally off. The new Enterprise would be just 490m long if we chose to trust the depiction, rather than the figures!
Unlike these various statements insinuate, the ship has not been designed by Ryan Church to be that huge in the first place. In an interview for the Cinefex magazine #118, ILM Art Director Alex Jaeger says: "The reconfigured ship was a larger vessel than previous manifestations -- approximately 1,200-feet-long compared to the 947-foot ship of the original series. Once we got the ship built and started putting it in environments it felt too small. The shuttle bay gave us a clear relative scale -- shuttles initially appeared much bigger than we had imagined -- so we bumped up the Enterprise scale, which gave her a grander feel and allowed us to include more detail." So the ship was designed at 1200ft (366m) by Ryan Church, and was later scaled up by a factor of 2!
My size comparison with correct relative scales speaks for itself. Everyone has to agree with me that, if we base our estimation just on the picture with the relative sizes and not on the visual effects from the movie, the true length of the new ship has to be much closer to 302m (my original assumption) than to 725m, and that Church's size of 366m works well. The 725m version is undeniably totally out of proportion.
Evidence of a huge Enterprise
In all fairness, we have got the following evidence of a huge ship.
- The teaser trailer of January 2008 shows workers on the nacelle, between the two fins at the aft end. The distance between the roots of the fins would be as much as 18m based on the visual evidence, and this gives us a ship of well over 600m length. The trailer may have been made with the new "official" larger scale of the ship.
- The shuttlebay is huge and is meant to be huge. Actually, getting a much larger and more impressive looking shuttlebay appears to have been the most important rationale to retroactively increase the scale of the ship. When the cadets arrive in "Star Trek (2009)", we can see how a dozen shuttles are stacked in two rows on each side of the shuttlebay. Since the new shuttles are more than 10m long, this shuttlebay must be at least 40m across, requiring an overall length of the Enterprise of more than 700m.
- Although starships (just like other fictional vehicles or buildings) are routinely bigger from the inside than from the outside, it is hard to imagine that the engineering set (the "brewery") could fit into the secondary hull of a 366m long Enterprise.
So in fairness, Ex Astris Scientia is presenting the arguments in favour of the huge Enterprise, but points out that in the past, such as with Voyager, the Defiant, the Merchantman, etc, this kind of thing has been ignored. It goes on to make a case for the smaller size:
Evidence of a smaller Enterprise
So what can we make of the supersized Enterprise? We may decide to simply believe what the more or less official sources keep telling us. Or we can base our size estimation on visual evidence. If we take into account all visual evidence, including the design features of the ship irrespective of how big they are supposed to appear in the film (which is subject to vary), we may arrive at a different conclusion than if we just take into account the opened shuttlebay and the brewery set. It is a mistake in engineering to increase the dimensions until everything fits, thereby approaching or even exceeding a previously established size limit. I think it is just as wrong to nail down a huge size for the new Enterprise to make everything fit, instead of seeking a solution that may work with overall less suspension of disbelief.
There are many reasons why I have settled on the original design length of 366m as the true size of the ship.
- The sheer size of the Super-Enterprise is ludicrous. Had it been a fan design submitted to the JoAT, I would have declined it right away as a fanboyish übership irrespective of the excuse that it's a parallel universe, 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 would dwarf any known Starfleet vessel of the Prime Universe, including the biggest starship classes of the 24th century. Sure, there is no rule for the development of starship sizes over time. 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 senior crew) are still the same in spite of the huge historical and technological differences.
- 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. Absolutely everything about the new Enterprise looks like on a small (300m-400m) ship, and not as if it were bigger than the Galaxy class.
- While their sizes are subject to vary considerably between different ship classes of different eras, we would not expect the shuttlebay doors, phasers, thrusters, impulse engines, deflector dish or bridge dome to change their sizes proportionally with the rest of the ship. This, however, would be the case on the "Star Trek (2009)" Enterprise at 725m. Agreed, the shuttlebay doors and the torpedo launcher look small relative to the rest of the new Enterprise, but they match the ones of the TMP Enterprise in size, if the new ship is 366m long (obviously because they have been designed to match at that size!). Even if it could be technically possible, the proportional upsizing of almost every feature goes against the notion that it is intended to be overall bigger. The upscaled design would have to establish *some* substantial visual difference to look bigger, but it doesn't (obviously because the finished CG design was scaled up retroactively, and only the inside of the shuttlebay was adapted).
- The visible window rows make perfect sense at 302m length, and still at 366m. 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 nearly the same. Actually, this detail was the reason for me to believe that the saucer had to be the same size (before I came across the original design size of 366m, which would naturally increase the saucer too). My original assumption made the new ship overall just a bit shorter (302m) than the TMP version (305m), and undoubtedly not by mere chance, although it turns out that Ryan Church scaled it up a bit. If the actual "Star Trek (2009)" 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 extremely far-fetched. The window arrangement is a clearly visible detail and contributes greatly to the impression of the size of any ship. And with its saucer being an inflated Probert design without any changes to make the larger size plausible, it utterly fails at a length of considerably more than 300m. The same applies to the window rows in the neck and in engineering. They always leave "coincidentally" one deck between the rows on an alleged 725m ship without windows, hence indicating that it can only be half as long.
- In "Star Trek Into Darkness" there is visual evidence of the deck arrangement in the saucer. When the Enterprise has lost power and begins to tumble in Earth's atmosphere, there is one shot of a deck in the saucer that is exposed to space due to a hull breach. It doesn't look like there are four decks in the saucer rim as it would be the case on a 725m Enterprise but rather only two. My estimation of the height of the saucer rim is 10-12m, a bit too much for the 366m ship but way to little for the 725m version that would have an 18m rim.
I saw someone a couple of pages back trying to argue that there are four decks in this image of the saucer - when its perfectly clear there are two. At best, the internal visual evidence for a huge Enterprise is 'mixed', and very far from being the open and shut case some people have presented it as. The shuttle bay supports a huge Enterprise. This damage supports a small one. But the real problems now, and the reasons we must unfortunatly ignore Simon Pegg's comments, are the existence of older vessels of huge size, coupled with the existence of the NX-01 in the new timeline, which suggests design history was bolt-for-bolt identical in both timelines as of Archer's era:
- When the Enterprise arrives at Vulcan, the ship runs into a debris field and almost collides with the saucer of the USS Mayflower NCC-1621, whose diameter is at least 150% of the Enterprise's. This saucer would have to be at least 500m across, and it would belong to a ship of more than 1000m length, provided that it has about the same basic structure as the 725m Enterprise. This is clearly another case of blatant mis-scaling, because no other Starfleet ship of the movie is substantially bigger than the Enterprise, and in particular the Mayflower is smaller, as we can see at the space station. So we either have a precedence of mis-scaling that would call the alleged size of the Enterprise into question or, if there is no mis-scaling in the case of the Mayflower saucer, it does not totally preclude the possibility that there are ships with bigger 200m saucers, but only with a small Enterprise. The Vengeance is still a lot bigger than that, and one more reason why the Enterprise should be as small as possible.
- The shuttlebay with the stacked shuttles of 40m or more width is undeniably solid evidence for an upscaled ship of more than 700m. On another occasion, however, when Pike's shuttle is seen leaving the Enterprise at Vulcan, the shuttlebay doesn't look all that big - at least at a first glance. The shuttle may be some 6 meters wide, then the door opening measures some 10 meters. Perhaps a bit more, since the shuttle may already be a couple of meters ahead of the door. But overall the shuttlebay appears to be much less than 40m wide. On the other hand, the shuttle occupies the width of the letters "C-17" on the Enterprise's hull in this shot, which complies with the above shot of the huge shuttlebay. The reason for the distortion is the use of a "wide-angle lens" in this CG shot.
- When Kirk visits the building site, we can see workers close to the hull of the ship, one just in front of the nacelle and one on a bridge a couple of meters below the saucer. The saucer measures 669 pixels from the center to the lower edge. The height of the tiny human figure near the saucer is 18 pixels. Assuming that the worker measures 1.8m, this would give the saucer a radius of just 67m, which is an almost perfect match with the saucer of the TMP Enterprise! Again, this can't be a coincidence. The figure in front of the nacelle measures some 15 pixels, while the nacelle, at the same distance from the "camera", is 194 pixels high from the upper end of the pylon to the very top. The overall length of the ship would be barely 300m based on this comparison, but we would have needed to account for some parallax, so the ship may be actually somewhat longer, perhaps 366m as designed. This is in contrast to the (ultimately non-canon) teaser trailer (see above), in which the ship looks like it is over 600m long compared to the human figures.
- As already mentioned, the visible windows on a 366m Enterprise would be absolutely reasonable. But what about the bridge windows that, as we can see from inside, are rather large? The combined window/viewscreen in front of the bridge occupies much of the set's height at the edge, but it doesn't quite reach from the floor to the ceiling. I estimate it measures about 6m by 2m. This window, like the port and starboard windows that appear to have the same sizes, is visible on the CGI model. In the teaser trailer we can see the bridge almost perfectly head on, at a certain distance from the "camera", so there is practically no distortion. The window does not occupy the whole deepening into which it is embedded. We can see a faint rectangular frame inside the more rounded contour of the cavity. But this narrow slit as visible on the model is not what we are shown in the close-ups. In order for the proportions to be correct, almost two thirds of this window must be submerged. The idea of a submerged window, however, does not comply with the take of Spock standing in front of a transparent window that is obviously not in the "basement", as well as with the look inside the bridge through the 6m by 2m window. The latter have to be rated as errors in the post-production, because they don't reproduce the correct window proportions of the model. In case we decided that the entirely unobstructed view from the bridge window were the correct depiction irrespective of the inconsistency in the window width (it would have to be some 18m wide at 2m height), the ship would have to be well over 1000m long! Anyway, the 6m by 2m mostly submerged window gives us an overall bridge dome height, measured from the hull surface in the upper third of the window to the very top, of barely 6.6m. The overall length of the Enterprise, based on this evidence, would be still some 450m, but nowhere near 725m.
I also did a little calculation myself on the size of the Vengeance, using the size of the island of Alcatraz (which the Vengeance destroys as it crashes) as a way of measuring it. The island is a certain number of hectares in size - but is much longer than it is wide. The Vegeance hits it at it's narrowest, and I got a figure somewhere in the region of maybe 100m for the width of the island at this point. If the Vengeance is 750m (as opposed to a mile long), the secondary hull certainly could be about as wide as seen on screen.
Other issues
I have come to terms with the new Enterprise. I have accepted it as an alternate-universe version. But that was under the precondition that the ship was 366m long. Aside from not making sense in-universe, there also a couple of real-world reasons why I hate the idea of the supersized Enterprise:
- From Matt Jefferies' original miniature to Doug Drexler's full-CGI NX-01 all Enterprises were designed, built and shown at a definite size, as it can be expected for a ship to bear the illustrious name, as opposed to an alien ship-of-the-week. The eighth Enterprise as designed by Ryan Church was originally 366m long and later scaled up at ILM without any changes to the design. The new huge size was made up way too late by people who apparently did not have an idea what they were doing. Moreover, it was evidently insufficiently communicated and accounted for.
I say we just throw out the shuttlebay's apparent size!
The size of things has been ignored in the past to fit with established sizes, such as when the Okudas were researching the Star Trek Encyclopedia. And I wouldn't suggest this if not for the conflicting evidence on whether it's a full reboot (ala Pegg), or a timeline shift (ala Admiral Marcus's models of the NX-01 and Phoenix). If they had simply chosen one or the other and made peace with the decision, we would not be having to reconcile inconsistencies/paradoxes in the evidence presented.
It's also notable that so far, some of the major "huge Enterprise" visual evidence only comes from non-official footage (unless it has been shown on screen, it's never been considered canon in Trek before), such as a music video (a work of art, not an in-setting tale), and a teaser trailer (none of which was shown on screen in the movie).
