Please read before voting.
So, now that the new movie should have been seen by anyone who claims to be a remote Star Trek fan...
Most of you will have noticed they mentioned the Connie's length in ST XI. Something of around 700 metres. Now, anyone who knows anything about the "old" series and movies will know that the Sovereign flagship is 685 metres and the old Connie a 290-300 metres.

With rumours of another two new ST movies coming out, we can't just ignore the difference in these numbers. This is a different universe, really. As the past has been raped completely in this new movie.
My question is, which do you prefer? The old sizes, relatively small in comparison to other Sci-Fi series, but maybe more realistic if we compare it to our current society. Or the new ones, clearly bigger and stronger, but completely different from the past.

Another question is, should we start speaking of a New Star Trek? So that old and new lore and cannon stuff doesn't collide with one another? They did it with Battlestar Galactica, it might be needed if many more movies of this new Star Trek generation are being released.

What do you guys have to say about this?
Now, the poll is multiple choice because I've basically asked two questions in the same thread. So, the idea is to click one of the top two poll options, and one of the bottom two. Not that confusing, I'm sure. =)

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ALL HANDS ABANDON SHIP!

well TBH the "new" ST can kiss its own ass (it began with ENT series actually or maybe even first contact movie...) when they began messing about the lore they had... it culminated at said series (ENT) and the XI move is just bullshift i mean seriously the ENT series failed because of poor writting / directing / acting (anny or all) with phrases like "Hull plating is offline" and the fact that its frontline to the temporal cold war but they keep travelling to OTHER times... (not to mention the ultimate time weapon is in 1940 something).
i say we spam Paramount with message that they flacked up and that they should differ to the fan's production...


to the question (sorry for missvote ... the question seemed to point towards TOS/TNG ship designs) i prefer original design this one looks like ... well pop video as to the whole movie... there is wea plot with no reasoning what so ever and the ships do justice to just that theya re oversized overpowered and unrealistic (not to say that ToS ships are more realistic but still.... they are at least ORIGINAL).

we should start speaking of Star terk Wrecked.... ever since the voyager (and i overall l,iked the series...) it took downfall (where Deep Space 9 / terak nor .) series excelled VoY utterly failed and twice as much can be said for enterprise series and what i refer to as ent movie (XIth) wich just took it to whole new level of degenerated unentertaning "wow" kind of movie/series that pays no attention to logic, cahrakters or well annything besides the effects.... Besides the Federation had some logical roots this gang of psychopaths has none... (Braking rulles just because friend's ego dose not take kindly to defeat is just wrong)

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a)Minardi F1, B)PC games made to entertain not farm gold, C)Finalized (or at least working as intended) PC games, D) Communism's social policies , E)Humor that is actually funny, F)Entertaiment in Television, G)some sort of a decency and quality on (Czech) national tv., H) 3dRealms I) The Pirate bay (treason is worse than end) J) TorrentSpy.com K) Megalol.net ~all those things ...and more have been lost during my life R.I.P.

The logical size of your warships depends on what missions you intend them to carry out, how free you can be with your resources, your ideology, and what they're likely to run up against in doing so.

If your half mile long warship can be taken out by a man in a shuttle with an anti-ship missile it might not be the world's greatest idea to build large ships. Instead you'll tend to build many smaller ships and when one of them gets taken out you haven't lost as much. If on the other hand the guy with the anti-ship missile can't overcome your point defences/armour/shields with any sort of regularity then you'll tend to build a few larger ships and minimise your loses that way.

Maybe. Because warpcores might be really hard to build and contain rare isotopes and if that’s the case you’re not going to be sending fleets of thousands of smaller ships into space each with one of these incredibly expensive things.

And then you've got the different roles they can fill in like escorts, scouts, transports, point defence carriers, sensor ships, command ships, science ships, etc. And depending upon how your enemies build their ships you've got the different grades in-between those as you try to maximise your bang for your buck. Then there's the question of expense internal to your own empire. Maybe you can't afford to build a battleship and a scout ship - so you build a fast battleship instead that sacrifices some defence for speed; a 'battlecruiser' one might say

On the other hand maybe you’re rich in one resource but not in another, maybe you can afford many warpcores but don’t have the stuff to build powerful shields, and don't care that much about life – so you end up with a zergling swarm and the other guy who’s not as rich in warpcores but can build powerful shields goes with a smaller number of higher quality vessels. Whereas a people who cared more about life might have lived with the military disadvantage of having fewer ships in return for a greater protection deeming the loss of life unacceptable in a zerg rush.

Horses for courses. If something like the Romulan starship showed up in the past it’s only to be expected that you’d get a different ship building theory coming into practice in the races that were affected by it. Imagine if a nuclear powered aircraft carrier had shown up in WW1.

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Actually if you reach that level, you just build missiles.

The truth is, the muchly vaunted space fighters are not a very feasibly idea. You'll just want a payload which can travel a lot further as it doesn't have to return as well.

That's one of the things I've always liked on Startrek ship designs. It's logical in this way.

As to which fed era of ship designs I liked the most? I guess it's got to be the voyager one.
Generally I've always had something against those oversized discs which just offer a bloody big area with having no retaliatory options on it. Yes galaxy and nebula class I am looking at you.

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That's a very enlightening post, Nem. But it doesn't really answer any of the thread's questions. It just dances around the topic.

I'm not saying that the Connie should be smaller or larger because of its function. All the ships from the new ST movie have been turned bigger considerably, no matter what class they are. (Of course, a battleship will still be bigger than an escort, but that's not the point I'm trying to make here).
Why? Obviously to make them look cooler. The question was, is this good? Is it really better than the old series? Or is it just raping the lore that is Star Trek?
And if so, should we categorise the new ST movies into something different? Such as a New Gen Star Trek?

As to your warpcore comment, well. I would assume that much hasn't changed from the old Star Trek. Warpcores are likely just as rare (or un-rare) as they usually are. Though, we do see the Constitution ejecting five warpcores, instead of one you normally see on a ship (which I still think is a mistake in the movie itself, as Kirk orders to "eject the warpcore", making it sound there's only one).

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You're going to be spending a lot of money on warpcores, advanced computers, and other items that would be recoverable with a survivable delivery system if you just build missiles. Missiles are cheap and cheerful because they have very limited capabilities by comparison to a shuttle/fighter/small ship. If you start ramping them up to the same sort of capabilities soon enough you may as well just have made a shuttle.

I don't think you'd see people involved, computer are just infinitely better and require far fewer resources to keep going - but then again the same goes for most of the ships seen in Trek anyway. Presumably their computers utilise some sort of Schrodinger principle that requires someone be there to watch the computer.

Huh? If you scale everything up then no-one will be able to tell you’ve changed the size of anything since there’ll be no scale to judge it against. Tougher/bigger enemies, tougher/bigger ships is, I imagine, the design philosophy they went with. Kinda like the race to build ever bigger warships back in the days before the Washington Naval Treaty. Everything gets scaled up to fit in the new line of battle.

Would you even have noticed if someone hadn’t mentioned it?

I find it hard to bring myself to care about the stated size of a warship to that degree. It’s fairly obvious that the lore for the Star Trek movie differed massively from the norm. This is not TOS. Personally I disliked the design for the new Connie pimp-mobile, but it wasn’t as bad as I’d feared.

I tend to look at it in much the same way I looked at the difference between TNG and TOS, different content same kind of theme.

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No, there's no scale to compare it against. Except, of course, if they would fight against smaller ships. Which wasn't really the case in this movie.
That's not really what I'm getting at, though. I'm one of those Trekkies who's into the ships, more than anything else. And as such, I've gotten to used to Star Trek's ship sizes. Now, in this movie, they're changing all of those. A connie is 700 meter instead of the "cannon" 300.
It just feels...odd. What would a Sovereign be like, then? A kilometre? It would make ST vs SW debates a whole lot more interesting, I suppose.

Depends on how well they do it. In space? Doubtful.
I haven't paid too much attention to the shuttles, though maybe I should. To see if they look tiny (as they should against a ship of 700 meter) or not.
I did notice the size change, though. It's not hard to miss when you see the ship being built on the planet's surface. There was a voice in my head saying "there...is no way that this is 300 meter". I'm pretty sure everyone who saw that scene knew it looked gigantic.

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so given federation's (the original...not reseted) did focused on exploration thus it had to have good sensores... and as far as i can tell they had bettter shields than most (or all?) other spices they ran into... as for battle equipment they seemed to prefer phasers over torpedoes (until ExcelssiorII aka sovereign)
Federation SEEMED to focus on well design tbh .) ahrem aside from that they had mainly medium sized ships (smaller versions of capital ones such as Lexington) or something that resembles battleships (Akira - i never got why Defiant were first TNG and onwards ship class taht got battleship in its defining pourpouse) wich seemed pretty well balanced (and again showing off the federation shield prowess
Federation (surprise) having eject warpore and doing on redular basis (yea yea i dunno much about it but i think that Voy done it like 3x times) prooly dose not lack resources to build warpcores (and having build at least one - for the Delta flyer i assume its not that hard to make).
again fed O.o (darn i claim to bo romulan but keep pointing out those federation people?!) ahh nvm i already answered this. Essencially they prefer Battleships and Small battlecruisers with great shields and weaker weapons.
given what i learned at "armada II" it seems that Fed has simpliest designs to build (building feels fastest) and or cheapest thus i assume taht they are either rich on resources OR just good at designing (i sure hope not ... altho Defiant seemed like something Klingons would build... small (both in size and crew complement) tough and powerfull)
Indeed but why it did not had a cloack? (i know i know its just a miner but still.... you had the darn databse! just build one or go to Romulus! bloiting hell nero is such a sissy)

That's one of the things I've always liked on Startrek ship designs. It's logical in this way.[/QUOTE]
i personally miss fighets (and did so even before BSG ReI) besides in DS9 (one of the battles Sisco sends fighters on the Dominion ... they look like Ju'Day class tho) so Fed DO have them... and imo if you send enough of them on enemy it CAN help you in distracting them and possibly jamming their sensores (20 Ju'Days every one of them equiped with sensor jammer flying around you fast enough to prevent target lock just might do the trick)
hmm VoY (accidently) had delta flyer wich is classifaeble as heavy fighter / light bomer but VoY's design itself is appealing.... it is reasonible light battleship / explorer and as mentioned before its design has some meaning (apart from incapible capitan.... and most of the crew se YouTube and look up SFdebires he has alot to say about it)

its raping and it rapes both fans (not literarly .. well at least not to my knowlidge) and lore... ooki a bit more serious (ill at least pretend to try). Problem With everything beyond DS9 (thats VoY, ENT and XI movie) is that they did nto came up with ammy interesting plots and essencially wasted money on crap... they should have purused the charakter developement idea of DS9 and try to implement that onto starship (that is what i thought VoY would be) and thus onto "classical" ST setting man that would be so freeking awsome.. ent just went downhill from there and XI movie took that eidiculous ideology and made made everything more USamerican... thus BIG BADASS ship came on scene andcompelled federation to make their own BIG ship (why is it even called constitution class annyways? i would assume they name it accordingly... something like dreadnaught or Defiant of big ass ship) and than added flares and zooming (to throw fans off balance....
(re answereing? what the ehll am i doing?! boredom sux....)
yeah we should classify it as star wars oh wait that taken ermmm star battles?Trek Wars? War Trek? Ubber epic X battle series (i am sure idiots at paramount marketing would love that one) ?or just renname federation into terran empire and be done with it XD
Federation have everything Backuped... its mentioned on DS9 and its even suposed to be some fed. guidline... Backup and Backups for Backups (so why the hell they always ran out of energy?) so assuming thats true for warpcores aswell every Fed starship has at least 3 of them 2 extras on ENT WTF(XI movie contitusion or my nickname for it at least) ship are least of the problems IMO...

-----------oh hell i missed answeres-----------------------
You remember VoY with that missle thingy from cardassians? it failed utterly XD funny how races weaknesses show off when its convinient... Cardies are sloppy, Bors are not as adapive as they should be, Romulans are WAY to inquisitive federation is unstable fashist utopia....
W00T! i love that reference because well of SG-1 XD
annyways i pressume that federation either:
A) saw terminator / BSG, or other robot uprising things too manny times (nvr red RuR but i assume its about the sam damn thing.... i know i know its herecy not to read Čapek... but atm i am readin capital by Marx (and that will take some time)due to my desire to understand as much about politics as possible so i can PWN our dear politicians (and head idiot certan professor) on forums)
B) are so curious that they want to get there themselves and see it (almost) first hand
C) are stupid


well i dont remember that because well i am 1986 XD so all i know is heresay (and knowing our media...) ahrem ill rather sum it up... that treaty essencially limited size of cannons and (not sure) ships themselves... maybe even amount of armanents they can carry to assure there wont be ship that could single handidly cause collapse of one nation (if you played CC RA3 than the Jap's tyrtle fortress is the ultimated wersion of what MIGHT havre been build if it were not for that treaty) there with this offhand i should probably mention taht thereis limit wich you just cant go beyond... the amount of mettal that would generate its own gravity is much smaller than were Dathstar... .)
i did not knew there is dffrence of size untill i were pointed towards this thread by unnamed source .)

well i tend to look at it as i did with ent : great ideas wasted in ton of bullshift and nonsence...

[quote=Sovereign002;463394]No, there's no scale to compare it against. Except, of course, if they would fight against smaller ships. Which wasn't really the case in this movie.
That's not really what I'm getting at, though. I'm one of those Trekkies who's into the ships, more than anything else. And as such, I've gotten to used to Star Trek's ship sizes. Now, in this movie, they're changing all of those. A connie is 700 meter instead of the "cannon" 300.
It just feels...odd. What would a Sovereign be like, then? A kilometre? It would make ST vs SW debates a whole lot more interesting, I suppose.

hmm ruins your whole univerese dose it not? and i am one of those (o noes! i were pulled into it by no fault of my own!!!) trekkies that prefer charakters over ships altho Starships are iconic in Star Trek universe so it just feels wrong when they are all of sudden resized.....
as for Sov (sorry Excelssior is closer to me XD) rather Exce i really am not sure whater it would be built in the first place... rememner it were created for soule pourpouse to battle against Klingons.... now that fed is more aggressive its probable taht its design would never even come throu Fed already has lined up Battle ships and Battle Cruisers.....

now that you mention it it dose look too big and as for shuuttles they too look way biggher than they should (i happened to pay little more attention to it...)

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a)Minardi F1, B)PC games made to entertain not farm gold, C)Finalized (or at least working as intended) PC games, D) Communism's social policies , E)Humor that is actually funny, F)Entertaiment in Television, G)some sort of a decency and quality on (Czech) national tv., H) 3dRealms I) The Pirate bay (treason is worse than end) J) TorrentSpy.com K) Megalol.net ~all those things ...and more have been lost during my life R.I.P.

To be honest nem, a smaller ship is not necessarily faster. At least not in space.

A bigger ship, can have bigger engines and thus doesn't have to have mass slowing it down.
The only really plausible reason, for why bigger ships have to move more slowly is, that their mass is spread out on a larger area and maneuvering could prove catastrphical due to all the material stress.

If we go by, that engine technology doesn't allow building as strong engines, then yes, you can have smaller ships being faster and more maneuverable as their acceleration is just higher. But not top speeds over time, as the big ship can carry more fuel to get to truly massive speeds even with lower acceleration.

As to federation ship sizes. I honestly am not sure. But it didn't look like, that shuttles were any smaller or larger compared to other movies or episodes.
So either they also upscaled shuttles, or someone just said a number they didn't know about.
And I agree with nem - if you upscale everything, you have no difference in the end.

Also ship classes - defiant and constitution are pretty good.
Though I miss a more typical addition to those.
For instance defiant class battlecruiser or battle-ship or whatever. Something that would tell you at once what kind of ship it is. Since in the end, the ships are going to fullfill certain roles. You might as well say what role it is, or into what familly of starships your new class belongs to.

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Except, of course, if you start comparing one Sci-Fi series/genre to another. As a lot of fanboys do, or used to do.

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Well i would personally go with smaller ships because of the manouverability but yeah i agree its possibly faster in manouvers but big ships can just outwarp them (possibly its not as if i understand annything about warp).. as fir the material stress i am unsure how it works in space (never been there you know) but i would more belive in gravitational stresses from stars/planets if some are nearby



again this assumes that the ships have some force acting against their acceleration i am just notcomfortable with that becaose somehow i remember hearing that in space there is no air thus there is no need to worry about aerodynamics and manouvering should be also pretty easy.
again i MUST point out that i am not a scientist and that all i say is just muy personal opinion thus it may be flawed (this si my way of saying that i am unsure of this)
well the scales seemed little bit off
Sisco mentioned classification of defiant class... i think

like yourselve? XD
i like to do that too for instance i belive that BSG could kick Galaxy's ass and both of those could Wipe anny rebell ship from SW...

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a)Minardi F1, B)PC games made to entertain not farm gold, C)Finalized (or at least working as intended) PC games, D) Communism's social policies , E)Humor that is actually funny, F)Entertaiment in Television, G)some sort of a decency and quality on (Czech) national tv., H) 3dRealms I) The Pirate bay (treason is worse than end) J) TorrentSpy.com K) Megalol.net ~all those things ...and more have been lost during my life R.I.P.

A fight between ST and SW would go like this: ten thousand star destroyers jump into orbit of Earth and bomb it into submission before moving onto the next federation world. A couple of weeks later the war ends with the federation never having caught up with a single 'Destroyer.

... Where did I say that it was?

Mass always slows you down. You just compensate for that by slamming bigger engines on it, but that's expensive; which would explain why bigger ships move slower.

Assuming your engines work like that the big ship will only be able to compensate up to a point. Beyond a certain point carrying more fuel reduces your capabilities because you're expending so much of your energy getting that mass up to a certain speed that the energy contained within the fuel is less than the energy spent in carrying it.

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how about the dathstar thingy? that would just pwn everything fed. has .)) and federation weapons would probably not do annything to it...
however if it were borg we would consider as oposition of THE EMPIRE now that would be rather interesting... altho the speed prob would be also issue here IF would borg capture one epirial ship they would adapt its technology to service thir mechanical asses and assimilated the empire...

maybe if we would assume underwatter (Aquanox FTW!)

not to mention that most fuel goes BOOM if introduced to fire so stocking up large amounts of it is not particullary good idea

unless you use voyager's logic ( refering ESPECIALLY to 7:00 - 8:45 )

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a)Minardi F1, B)PC games made to entertain not farm gold, C)Finalized (or at least working as intended) PC games, D) Communism's social policies , E)Humor that is actually funny, F)Entertaiment in Television, G)some sort of a decency and quality on (Czech) national tv., H) 3dRealms I) The Pirate bay (treason is worse than end) J) TorrentSpy.com K) Megalol.net ~all those things ...and more have been lost during my life R.I.P.