Starfleet Jedi

Well, its been some time since Star Trek Into Darkness was released to DVD and BlueRay DVD. I'd hoped to do a scaling once some good screencaps were available at TrekCore, but that site has been unusually sluggish in putting any out. Luckily there is YouTube, and this clip is of decent enough quality that you can see the Vengeance and Alt-E clearly enough to provide a good rough estimate.

The video can be viewed here.

At 0:51 seconds through 0:54 seconds we have that beauty of a side view showing the two ships. I measure the Alt-E in small screen mode at 1.57" and the Big V at 3.768" respectively. This is an approximately 2.4 to 1 ratio difference! This is much larger than the 2 to 1 ratio most people initially guesstimated it to be while just getting a quick glance in theaters. With this established and using the typical 725 meter length for the Alt-E, that places the Big V around 1,740 meters long. That's 140 meters longer than an Imperial-class Star Destroyer!

It gets a lot bigger, if we go by the other official Alt-E length of 762 meters from the Experience the-Enterprise.com promotional website, then the Big V is 1,829 meters!

If this is correct, then the Big V is the largest Federation starship ever built canonically, dwarfing even the 1,341 meter Romulan D'Deridex-class Warbirds! Only the Narada mining ship still stands as the largest Alpha-Beta Quadrant ship known.

The real question remains: If the mid 23rd century Federation built such a large ship, and in less than a year's time, then why don't they do so in the Prime Timeline? What is the big change in construction and design philosophy?
-Mike

The "Big V" indeed. ;)

Mike DiCenso wrote:The real question remains: If the Federation build such a large ship, and in less than a year's time, then why don't they do so in the Prime Timeline? What is the big change in construction and design philosophy?

Well, sir, if you don't mind me injecting my two cents I favor the theory that the incursion of the Narada and the trivial ease at which it dispatched a Federation starship broke a shift both towards a more militant starfleet, of which the Vengeance would be the ultimate fruition of, as well as, for lack of a better wording, a greater focus on " raw industrial strength" rather than the, admittedly, arguably more refined and elegant technological superiority of the Prime 23rd century. Minus the 60's aesthetics of course.

I would suggest we saw something similar, but to a much smaller degree, in the Prime 24th century against the Borg with such classes as the Defiant and Sovereign.

Well, yes, I've brought that one up before. I'm just seeing if anyone can come up with another one that explains what we're seeing. Of course the reality is that J..J. Abrams imposed more Star Wars elements on the traditional Trek ones, which is why the ships are vastly larger than their Prime Timeline counterparts. They are, in fact, Star Destroyer sized ships.

The look of the Alt-E phasers are more like turbolasers, though at least they are still comparable in look to the Prime Timeline Defiant phasers as well as the old proximity blast mode seen in TOS' "Balance of Terror".

But all that aside, we have to find some "in universe" explanation that fits what we're seeing.

So other than that theory, are there any others?
-Mike

Mike DiCenso wrote:So other than that theory, are there any others?

Well, brainstorming, the structural differences such as a shift from a singular Warp Core to multiples could be an attempt to increase endurance rather than sheer power output. Such would a use to an even more exploratory minded Starfleet, think doing a five year mission completely isolated and away from the Federation frontier, and the increase in the size could be needed to facilitate the needed Deuterium stores necessary to sustain this long term power generation.

Alternatively the Enterprise, and by extension other starships, seem to posses faster Warp speed and we learned in the "The Changeling", {TOS-02}, that the Prime Enterprise is physically capable, with improved efficiency via a god-like machine intelligence, of traveling far faster than it can structurally withstand. Its possible in the altered timeline Starfleet, for bother militaristic and exploratory purposes, decided to push the envelop of Warp Speed requiring greater structural integrity of their designs hence increasing ship size for greater volume of material and SIF generators.

Lastly it could be something completely stupid such as Richard Daystrom not having his breakthrough in Duotronics resulting in a follow up of larger designs for the equivalent computing power.

Mike DiCenso wrote:Well, yes, I've brought that one up before. I'm just seeing if anyone can come up with another one that explains what we're seeing. Of course the reality is that J..J. Abrams imposed more Star Wars elements on the traditional Trek ones, which is why the ships are vastly larger than their Prime Timeline counterparts. They are, in fact, Star Destroyer sized ships.

The look of the Alt-E phasers are more like turbolasers, though at least they are still comparable in look to the Prime Timeline Defiant phasers as well as the old proximity blast mode seen in TOS' "Balance of Terror".

But all that aside, we have to find some "in universe" explanation that fits what we're seeing.

So other than that theory, are there any others?
-Mike

I don't think there's any need for another thread.
Big scary ship comes to Earth and blows planets up.
Quickie, there are fishes out there we can't even hope to deal with unless we refocus our design on less hippie-exploration with "some torps" to more brutish designs.
That said, the Federation was still quite optimistic so they couldn't purge the love boat spirit out of their designs, but they seem to have gone for a clear more of what we know that the Prime's lets test and jampack our smaller ships with funky stuff.

So you end with phaser banks which seem to be an upgrade of ground guns, and capital ship grade weapon arrays seem to be too complex to manage and there seems to be a break in sensor tech applied to weapons (but not teleporation) so they combine phaser banks with interception CWIS-like designs and get the rapid fire spray-n-pray types.
Meanwhile, some heavy "old-style" phaser guns are produced, but no deemed worthy, for some reason.
Meaning that the device used by Kahn, a typical phaser at that, is an oddity.
Many things seem to go raw and bigger, with the occasional piece of super tech pulled out of some storage from time to time (super icecube tech for example).

If anything, this clearly mirrors the militaristic evolutions of vehicles and tech seen during the Word War I & II (biger things, tanks and planes, and super cannons) and the Cold War (with a development of an even super bigger soviet aerial platform).

And to pick up with sonofccn's good remarks, it's basically to get more into one ship to it can do more. More + more = more x2 and they add more more to the more, to the power of more.

In the end, I think it's all about the Narada trauma. It really shocked the Federation.

Mike DiCenso wrote: The real question remains: If the mid 23rd century Federation built such a large ship, and in less than a year's time, then why don't they do so in the Prime Timeline? What is the big change in construction and design philosophy?
-Mike

The Technology does not always scale up or down well(Voyage: Extreme Risk). The Prime time line may go for the optimum size for their tech.

The Prime Timeline seems to carry fewer shuttles, and the shuttle seem to be smaller. Those hangers are a lot of wasted space normally.