How big is the Enterprise?
How big is the Enterprise?
Good video, fun channel. But it unearthed a memory in me: does anyone else remember a website, probably from a while back, that let you superimpose various sci-fi ships over Google Maps? I swear this was a thing, and it was great for getting a sense of scale of these ships.
What other visual aids for ship scale have you come across?
He talks a lot, but really, it's just a lot of filler.
12 minutes of slow talking and he has three main arguments.
1: It's a lot bigger than the original enterprise.
2: It had a lot of modeled details that went unused.
3: It would have been so big, that there would have been a lot of stresses on the hull during acceleration.Those arguments are pretty weak. They had to design the ship before the first episode, so they would have had no idea what would be needed for a long running show, if they didn't put a lot of details into the ship, the writers wouldn't have options. They didn't know if the budget would allow for a bigger engineering set, or a captains yacht set, etc.
You can ask whether or not the D was too big, but the fact of the matter is that the D was as big or small as the plot needed it to be, even if it went against previous episodes. In some episodes it was a vast ship full of a maze of corridors. In others, it was a ten second walk from the bridge to engineering.
It's like a giant flying hotel in my mind. I love how much focus there was in TNG on all the living quarters and families on the ship, because it emphasizes the fact that they're on a mission of exploration, not war.
Watching TNG first that just seemed normal. Then ds9 was even bigger. Watching TOS was a bit weird because they seemed so small.
DS9 is such a funny escalation too. The station is just gigantic, since the D can easily dock at it while only using one of its (eight?) capital berths. But how much of it do we ever see? Private quarters, offices, some cargo holds. The Prominade should be the largest set we encounter but it barely seems larger or more impressive than a suburban shopping mall.
Something like Mass Effect's Citadel is how I image DS9 should really look on the inside, and even that's probably underselling it given these dimensions!
When you look at TOS as basically a submarine show in space (Roddenberry being a navy man and all), the original scale makes a lot of sense.
My take was that much of DS9 was unused. It was originally both an ore refing facility and a military base. After the federation took over there was basically no use for much of the ore refing facility. There must have been large storerooms for both raw and processed ore. Along with large ore handling systems to move bulk ore.
I bet its ability to dock multiple capital ships was probably adapted from being able to dock large bulk cargo ships for the ore. Think about it like current bulk material handling terminals for ocean going cargo ships. They are vast areas with relatively few people working at them.
Additionally I would assume that there were military brackets that were unused. I think it is a safe bet that the Cardassians had a much larger military presence there. Just think of how easily it absorbed the additional personal need to operate as the in theater HQ during the Dominion War. It was able to have a Federation, Klingon and Romulan General Staff along with some kind of unified command. While also serving as a place for RR and ship repair.
And now that I typed this all out, I realized I really need to find something better to do with my life. 😂
I agree DS9 inside and outside don't match. I think it would be too spindly if they did the correct proportions.
Now can you imagine StarFleet's starbases? Those were big enough for ships to enter.
The Constitution class is supposed to be significantly smaller than the Galaxy class, so that makes sense. And obviously, DS9 is huge since it can handle multiple ships even larger than Galaxy class ships.
EC Henry did a great video on the subject too! Going to watch yours in a moment the second I wake up
I was just about to post this same video.
I wonder if the site you are thinking of is parkmyspaceship.com
Yes, that's it! Thank you!