www.ditl.org

Some excellent points there.

For the vast majority of fans Star Trek is: TNG, DS9, Voyager, Enterprise and some of the movies. Actually, probably for most of the fans, TNG is viewed as "classic Trek". TOS is mostly viewed as... actually a cool parallel... viewed as a pilot for the series that was later changed into TNG. (I said cool parallel as Star Trek's pilot is quite different than the direction TOS went. Therefore, making the new movie series based more on TOS is actually a major change for the majority of the fans.

My main issue, and I can rather easily overlook it, is the scale of the ships. I am not a fan of the immense size difference. It is not a deal breaker though.

I don't have that same problem with the scale of the ships. I accept that I'm not watching the exact same TOS... and after all, the Valley Forge from Silent Running was the same length as an ISD from 'Wars and operated for a fair bit of the film with a crew of one and a couple of droids.

Mikey wrote:I don't have that same problem with the scale of the ships. I accept that I'm not watching the exact same TOS... and after all, the Valley Forge from Silent Running was the same length as an ISD from 'Wars and operated for a fair bit of the film with a crew of one and a couple of droids.

I don't mean to say that I don't like the "BIG"... it is just that if it is "the same universe", right from go the Kelvin was larger than any other Federation ship that we (fans) have seen before. I totally understand that things would change moving forward after the Kelvin was so easily destroyed. Maybe larger ships, better defensive systems, better firepower etc... but the Kelvin itself I would have liked to have been more in line with the approx 30 seasons of television and previous movies.

I sort of misspoke before though, that was my main "technical" type issue. My main issue with the movie, which is big, is Nero himself. Such a tool. Horrible character.

Jim wrote:I don't mean to say that I don't like the "BIG"... it is just that if it is "the same universe", right from go the Kelvin was larger than any other Federation ship that we (fans) have seen before.

Actually the Kelvin, while a very big ship by Primeverse 23rd century standards, is nowhere near the biggest Fed ship - the Neb, GCS, Sov and Ambassador classes are all bigger, and the Ex may be as well.

Graham Kennedy wrote:Some excellent points there.

Idk....imho that was exactly the problem. Sure the films are full of references and homages to TOS.......but there is so little original there. The first one is ok imho....but Into the Darkness.....there is just so much recycling referencing going on that maybe it would have been better if they DIDN'T know so much about Star Trek.

Maybe it is sufficient and better for writers to know the rough workings of the universe (can't beam through shields etc. etc.) but not every piece of dialoge by heart.

I can see why that would put some people off. I found it quite fascinating, the idea of a parallel universe where events happen in a way that is similar but different.

That said, I wouldn't really want to see a whole series that was a slew of old TOS episodes remade. It would get old fast. I'd love to see something with a bit more of that TOS sense of adventure and a bit less of TNGs stuffiness, though.

I personally cannot see Kelvin being bigger than the Enterprise. It can't be. There is no true reaskn why it can't but no true reason why it should either. But if we assume that the Kelvin is actually part of the Primeverse then we have to assume it should be smaller than the Enterprise.

Personally I always assumed the Enterprise being the same size as the original. Really not a lot has changed that except for the opening of the second movie.

I am corrected. The Kelvin was not as large as I originally blurted. According to this site... It was basically the size/length of the Excelsior. Its nacell was a bit longer than the entire length of TOS Enterprise though.

Although my original comment is obviously off base, the Kelvin was a 2200 design when all of the previous ships (non-Abrams) were MUCH smaller than the Kelvin. Nothing even came close to the Kelvin until the Ecxelsior in 2287. It then took unto 2330 and the Ambassador to end any and all "who's the biggest" discussions. Therefore, it was still a considerable anomalous size shift.

McAvoy wrote:I personally cannot see Kelvin being bigger than the Enterprise. It can't be. There is no true reaskn why it can't but no true reason why it should either. But if we assume that the Kelvin is actually part of the Primeverse then we have to assume it should be smaller than the Enterprise.

Personally I always assumed the Enterprise being the same size as the original. Really not a lot has changed that except for the opening of the second movie.

When you say "it can't be", what exactly do you mean?

Do you mean that the CGI model of the ship clearly does not scale to a size greater than c. 300 m long? Do you mean there is some reason why the Kelvin shouldn't be larger than the Enterprise?

I don't see why this is such a contentious issue myself. The I know of, nothing in canon ever indicated that the E-nil was the biggest ship to that point, or even that it was the biggest ship of its time. Certainly nothing indicates that it was remotely close to being the biggest ship that the Federation was capable of building. What would actually limit ship size, anyway? People seem to project that idea that because there are several practical limits on ship size in the present day, this idea should reasonably extent to Star Trek. But at least some of the present day limits are based in practicalities that don't apply. For example :

1) Present day ships are often built to fit through the Suez or Panama canals. Clearly there's little analagous to this in Star Trek. The closest you could come would be to say that a really large ship might not fit through things like the Bajoran wormhole. But given that there is only one stable wormhole known in all of history, which wasn't discovered until well after the TOS era, it isn't a factor.

2) Present day ships are often built to be able to fit into ports - any given port has a limit to how deep below the waterline ship can be, and may have limits for how much space there is around the pier sides. This only applies somewhat in Trek - ships mostly just sit in orbit on their own. When they do dock to a station, the docking system is usually arranged with the ships radiating outwards from the station, leaving plenty of space for much larger ships. The only three occasions I can think of where docking with "port" imposes a size limitation is Spacedock and Starbase 74, where you need your ship to fit through the space doors, and Deep Space 9 where ships above a certain size wouldn't be ale to use the upper or lower pylons.

Present day ships must be able to fit in dry dock facilities. Dry docks are a given size, and building very large ones is relatively expensive. This does apply somewhat in Trek, with those framework docks that we saw for the first time in TMP. But a lot of the expense in building a large dock on Earth is that you have to physically excavate the dock, pour tens of thousands of tons of concrete, etc. The docks also need to be built in existing ports, and ports are often in built up areas where you may not have space for a huge new dock because some expensive or historical building is sitting right behind it. You also have to worry about whether the ground can take the weight of the ship and water. In contrast, the TMP style dock is just a metal farmework with some lights on it floating in orbit. How hard could it be to build a bigger framework? The existing docks are even modular in nature, so extending their size would be a simple matter of bolting more panels together :





As for space to put them, the TMP dock was miles from the orbital office complex, with nothing around it - that location could easily have taken a dock ten or even a hundred times that size, and a hundred other such docks could have been strung out in close proximity to that one orbital office with ease. Unlike groundside docks, space has an awful lot of, well, space!

3) Limits of the materials involved. Ships today face upper limits on how large they can be due to the physical limitations of their materials. For example, wooden ships above a certain size simply cannot be built beause wood isn't stiff enough - it flexes, opening the joints between boards and making your ship more leaky as it gets bigger. It's actually one reason why Noah's Ark is an impossibility - no ship of the described size could possibly be seaworthy. Metal also has limits, of course. Only... one of the main reasons why material strength is needed in a seagoing ship is that the hull flexes as it rides over the waves. If a ship is much larger than the average wavelength of the waves in the sea, then it will find the weight of the ship suspended in the middle, with the forward and aft 'hanging' over the troughs. Or with the forward and ft sitting on a wave with the middle hanging over a trough. Either way puts a lot of stress on the hull, and it happens day in, day out, for decades on end.

But in Trek, no such forces apply. Certainly the ships do face physical stresses, especially Starfleet ships which are constantly trying to escape tractor beams and whatnot, and of course there's no saying what sorts of forces warp drive involves. But inertial dampers negate most of those forces anyway, yes? So it's dubious that they need to withstand as much force; at the very least, there's nothing in canon to say that the forces in space/warp travel are particularly greater than those in ocean travel. Also consider, even today we already build ships that are larger than the E-nil - the largest ever built is more than half as long again as the E-nil is. And we are nowhere near the upper limit of ship size available from our materials - we could build kilometre-long ships right now, if we were really determined to do so.

And then consider that Starships are made of advanced materials - duranium, tritanium, etc. We have no idea what these are, how strong they are, etc. And then add on top that structural integrity fields boost the strength of the materials anyway - and those can reinforce materials so much that they resist weapons fire!

So there is nothing to say that the E-nil is anywhere near the structural limits of the materials of the day.

4) Economics. One limit on today's large ships is that larger ships may be impractically costly. Consider that America's latest supercarrier has cost $36 billion dollars. Most of that is development cost of new technology for a new class, but the expected unit cost is still $10 billion. Can you imagine how much it would cost to build a ship twice the dimensions, so eight times the volume? Could even America afford it?

But we have no idea what the economics of Trek are. Ignore the silly "no money" thing they throw up once in a while (it doesn't appear to apply to TOS anyway). What is the operating budget of Starfleet during Kirk's time? What is it as a fraction of government spending, or of the Federation's GNP? We have absolutely no idea. It could be that the Federation is stretched to pay for Starfleet and they could barely afford the Constitutions. It could be that Starfleet represents pocket change to the Federation, and a tenfold budget increase is easily achievable. My personal take on it is this : assume that a Starship is about as hard/costly to build as a US aircraft carrier. America alone has 11, and America is under 5% of the world's population. If the rest of the world were as productive - which they aren't now, but in Trek times, they may well be - the world would be able to support 220 such ships. And that's just one planet. 150 such planets could support 33,000 such ships.

Now of course most planets may be less developed that Earth, and starships may be far more expensive... but even if it was a tenth of that capacity, that's still over 3,000 ships. My point being, unless Starships are enormously more expensive per capita than even a US Supercarrier, then building a starship isn't economically that big of a deal to the Federation. Which would mean that producing one eight or ten times the size, dozens of times more expensive, whilst it may not be trivial, should certainly be within their grasp.

So what's left? Very large starships appear to be affordable and practically achievable, it seems that the infrastructure to build and support them is either already there or easily built with few of the limitations that apply to ships in the present day.

Really, the only objection I see being offered is that fans don't like it because it doesn't fit with their preconceived notion that the E-nil was the biggest ship around, and the biggest the Federation could build at the time. That's really not a convincing argument to me.

McAvoy wrote:I personally cannot see Kelvin being bigger than the Enterprise. It can't be. There is no true reaskn why it can't but no true reason why it should either. But if we assume that the Kelvin is actually part of the Primeverse then we have to assume it should be smaller than the Enterprise.

Do we have to assume that teh Kelvin is part of the Primeverse?


Personally...I always thought those are just similar but parallel universes. Would have to watch it again...but I always got the impression that the whole incident with spock didn't "create" the alternative universe.....it's like with the episode with Worf with countless parallel universes....he just switched from one to another.

I guess I just always assumed that the Narada traveled back in time...but not back in time in their "own" universe but back in time into the "abramsverse".


Hence I never had trouble with ship-sizes or that they look completely different and give of a hugely different vibe on the inside.

I always considered it back in time in the primeverse.

Graham Kennedy wrote:Do you mean that the CGI model of the ship clearly does not scale to a size greater than c. 300 m long? Do you mean there is some reason why the Kelvin shouldn't be larger than the Enterprise?

I don't see why this is such a contentious issue myself. The I know of, nothing in canon ever indicated that the E-nil was the biggest ship to that point, or even that it was the biggest ship of its time. Certainly nothing indicates that it was remotely close to being the biggest ship that the Federation was capable of building.

There is, however, solid evidence that the Excelsior was something unusual for her time - McCoy's somewhat awed comment that she was a big ship. Yes, he's a doctor, not an engineer, and yes, it's not a detailed analysis of the precise dimensions of the Ex compared to her contemporaries, but it is coming from a Starfleet officer of many decades experience, who's seen pretty much everything the galaxy had to offer. It therefore follows that the Kelvin, approximately the same size as the Ex would likewise be considered a very big ship even by the standards of the late 23rd century, let alone over half a century earlier when she was actually in service (and apparently an old ship at the time).

Atekimogus wrote:Personally...I always thought those are just similar but parallel universes. Would have to watch it again...but I always got the impression that the whole incident with spock didn't "create" the alternative universe.....it's like with the episode with Worf with countless parallel universes....he just switched from one to another.

I guess I just always assumed that the Narada traveled back in time...but not back in time in their "own" universe but back in time into the "abramsverse".

Agreed, for the reasons stated above.

McAvoy wrote:Personally I always assumed the Enterprise being the same size as the original. Really not a lot has changed that except for the opening of the second movie.

Along with every scene in both films that give us any indication of the ship's size. Please don't go all Bernd on us.