Deleted scenes

[Atekimogus]

I'd like to hear what you think the limiting factors - the Panama and Suez Canal analogs - are, because I can't think of anything equivalent. If the PoD was as late as the Kelvin's destruction, then SF had the means to construct Kelvin/neo-E sized ships all along, and there was some other limiting factor.

Probably technology but not in the way you might think. I think it is quite possible that breakthroughs in certain fields simple lead to the elimination of the need to build ships as huge as the Kelvin. Lets assume that we need 800 people to operate a Kelvin class ship which performs a deep space surveilance role. Let's assume about approx. the half to two third of the crew is needed to maintain the ship and its facilities because of her relativly low tech (which isn't unreasonable considering her industrial style) and assume that only about a third are actuall mission specialists and now let's assume that there where some really cool breakthroughs, for instance:

- Transporters are much more practical to the point where the whole flight deck is beeing reduced to about four shuttles. (Cut out the huge flightdeck of the Kelvin).
- Splitting the nacelles into two and other advancements lead to the whole propulsion system beeing not only far smaller but also a lot more maintance-friendly and efficient. (Cut out the need for half the crew including accomodation, provision etc along with an unkown size of the reactor and fuel supplies.)
- A really cool Phaser is developed, a breakthrough in accuracy, power output etc yet you can only mount so much because of reactor restraints so mounting more than a certain number makes no sense, certainly the large clusters of whatever the Kelvin is firing alongside old style phasers are no longer needed. etc.

All those things which can reasonably be assumed could lead to ships like the Enil which are able to perform the same missions much better, bring the same number of specialists to wherever they are needed and still perform better and more efficiently in a military role.

But but but why not build a ship like the Kelvin, mount it with the same technology, with four reactors, twenty new phasers and whatnot and watch the admirality faping to their newest male ego booster, you say? Because in the geneverse it wasn't needed, that simple, all you would achieve is starting an arms race with the klingons which COULD be exactly what happened in the abrahmsverse, where Starfleet might not be reacting to the single Kelvin incedent, but to the Klingons who reacted to Neros big ship (and suffered much more, depending on if you count deleted or cut out planned scenes)

[Graham Kennedy]

I'd like to hear what you think the limiting factors - the Panama and Suez Canal analogs - are, because I can't think of anything equivalent. If the PoD was as late as the Kelvin's destruction, then SF had the means to construct Kelvin/neo-E sized ships all along, and there was some other limiting factor. It wasn't resource availability, because we've seen that's never been a problem in 'Trek.

We can only guess. It might be that ships were built to fit the Spacedock doors, because putting bigger doors in to all those spacedocks would be expensive. Or maybe there was a Washington Treaty equivalent in force, putting a limit on how big ships were allowed to be. It might simply be that in the original timeline they looked at the threats they were up against and how much work there was to be done and decided that the best approach was to build ships "just big enough", in the largest numbers possible. Nero's arrival upped everyone's threat estimates considerably, and so "just big enough" got a whole lot bigger; they spent the money for bigger doors, or tore up the treaty, or whatever.

A conscious design decision? I doubt it, because (up until the Sovereign-class^*) 'Trek ship design has always followed the maxim that bigger=better/faster/more advanced. A political statement? Perhaps... we know that the UFP likes to put on a non-threatening face. However, that tendency waas much more minor/non-existent in the TOS era; plus, the existence of the Kelvin itself somewhat denies that possibility.

^* Even the case of the Sovereign doesn't really disprove the bigger=better trend; the Sovereign was purposefully built as a fighting ship, without the familial accomodations, etc., of the GCS - and even considering that fact, wasn't really that much smaller.

In TOS we aren't even really aware of other ship designs - we never see any Starfleet ship in service but the Connies, so it would be hard to judge the historical trend. Really only the arrival of the Excelsior showed us a "newer bigger" ship, with the E-D cementing the trend.

However, even in the alternate timeline that trend would somewhat hold true. It could well still be the truth that ships of a given TYPE get bigger and better over time; if so we can expect a 1000 metre E-B, and a mile long E-D. The only anomaly is that the Kelvin was so big... but I tend to think the Kelvin was more of a support ship than anything. She seemed to lack torpedoes, and had an ungodly number of shuttles; combined with the size, that to me says cargo ship, tender, colony transport, starbase supply ship, something like that. I have no problem with that being a large ship.