www.ditl.org

The shuttles parked in a stack on the left and right side of the hanger bay. You see it in detail as the enter turn stern on to the hull and reverse into the 'parking' slot. There are two levels of these 'parking' slots within the hanger bay. In comparison with the original E-nil this is a marked size increase. The width of the original hanger bay could only just cope with two shuttles side by side. The new ship has enough room for the width of a shuttle plus the length of two shuttles added together.

As for the size of the shuttle, they are much larger than the original E-nil shuttles. In these new shuttles people can sit two-a-breast on each side of an 'isle', we see this as they are going up into orbit for the first time. That means they are as wide as five people sitting down. The old shuttles had enough room for one person to sit on each side of the 'isle', as seen in the Galileo Seven. There is also a larger shuttle which is able to seat about 7 people in a row. These rows are from side to side in the shuttle. We see this when Kirk is going to the academy for the first time.

...yeah, what he said.

I think with the two things we have to scale with, the bridge viewport and the shuttle bay I think it is fairly safe to say that the new big E is quite a bit larger than the classic version. Maybe not 900m but certainly more than 289m. The dual rows of viewports on the edge of the saucer harken back to the original Enterprise but you can't say what size those windows are. The shuttle bay and viewport both give a good reference point to scale from.

Tyyr wrote:I think with the two things we have to scale with, the bridge viewport and the shuttle bay I think it is fairly safe to say that the new big E is quite a bit larger than the classic version. Maybe not 900m but certainly more than 289m.

I'd agree with that. (Just as an aside, the TMP version was larger as well - 305 m compared to 289 m, by DITL's figures - which I think was largely because they increased the diameter of the saucer section.)

One more thing: as an experiment, we could try to scale the ship using the visible docking ports, on the assumption that they're the same size as the ones in TMP, and then see if the resulting figure sounds good.

One thing I must say is the torp launcher is much smaller in relation to the ship.

If the port is 7 feet in diameter then the engineering hull is about 150 feet in diameter.

That seems a little... small. I think. I'm not good with feet, I think in meters (blame physics for that).

I don't think it's a docking port though. Didn't Kirk's escape pod eject from that port on the interconnect?

Yeah, it did.

That pod was really small though. No more than a couple meters wide.

He's getting about the size I was for the shuttles I think. Not really surprised. I actually like the larger ship.

He does seem to make a pretty good case for the ~700 m figure. Although I have a little trouble reconciling the suggested 4-deck saucer rim with the shots from the film: with the pattern of "gray band ~ windows ~ gray band ~ windows ~ gray band" that you can see in my above post, it seems like 5 decks would actually work better there.

Anyway, I suppose I could grow to like the larger ship (especially if I had some cutaways, cross sections or MSDs to sink my teeth into), but for me the TMP Enterprise will always remain the most sensible and beautiful starship ever in science fiction.

I'm holding off on this. I want to see a high resolution 5 view render of the actual CGI model used in the movie; big enough that we can scale things on it.

GrahamKennedy wrote:I'm holding off on this. I want to see a high resolution 5 view render of the actual CGI model used in the movie; big enough that we can scale things on it.

IF we ever get one, I wouldn't wait up for it....

Whatever its dimensions, I still think it was an awesome movie.