Those early Next Gen comics were crazy

:)

Seven Hundred and Twenty Five Meters

One of the many controversial changes made in the 2009 Star Trek reboot was one probably only a few tech obsessed die-hards noticed or cared about: The size of the USS Enterprise NCC-1701.  And even if only a few noticed it, they were very opinionated.

For reference, the original series USS Enterprise was 289m long and the refitted classic movie version 305m - although like all fictitious places there's a lot of movie magic going on and the insides never really fit inside very well.  The version of the Enterprise in the Kelvin universe?

725 meters long.

This new movie USS Enterprise NCC-1701 was designed by Ryan Church to be 366m long.  But as the story goes, the shuttlecraft were made a lot bigger than initially expected (12m long) and in order to fit the them and the mammoth beer brewery location used for engineering inside, the ship was scaled up accordingly.  Throughout the movie's development, the ship's scale fluctuated, first 366 meters long, then 1200 meters long, at some points 718 and 762 and then finally 725 meters long. As a result all the different sizes actually do appear at different times in the movie although the finer external detailing all points to 725m.

At the Riverside shipyard, the Enterprise is 366m long, which fits it neatly over the Pastoria Energy Facility location they used.  Trickery is used where there are walkways under the saucer for both 366m and 725m sizes, and the guy walking along the walkway wouldn't fit on the exposed decks.  The very first "under construction" teaser used the 725m size.

At Starbase One in Earth orbit, the Enterprise is 1200m long, which is the size that fits the CG shuttlebay model which like the classic Enterprise and Voyager, the shuttlebay is way too big (Into Darkness shuttlebay pictured from ILM VFX reels, although slightly different from the ST'09 shuttlebay it's made to the same scale)

The bridge window changes shape and size throughout the first two movies.  The low-detail version is too low and wide and has a photo of the bridge set behind it.  The higher detail one (seen whenever the camera zoomed in or out of the window in the first two Kelvin movies) was scaled for 725m.  In Beyond, the window keeps the correct proportions throughout and is scaled for 725m and for distance shots has a 3D model of the bridge inside and for closeups is composited with the actual set.

The 16-deck plaza at the centre of the saucer, between the large domes top and bottom (seen in Into Darkness and Beyond), was designed for the 725m size.  It's another big change from the classic Enterprises, where the upper dome was the roof of the bridge.  On the Kelvin Universe Enterprise, the bridge is at the front of deck 2, and the forward window is what was the floodlight which lit the NCC-1701 on the saucer of the TOS movie vessel (on an impossible angle but that's for another post on another day)

The airlocks are different from those on the classic movie ship, they have small doors in larger housings and are seen up-close in Into Darkness.

Window sizes were hotly debated in 2009 and 2013, with people in the 366m camp insisting the saucer rim windows would have to be floor-to-ceiling on a 725m ship (which was somehow wrong?)... something Star Trek Beyond explictly canonized with closeups showing people walking inside the ship.

Still there are diehard fans who refuse to accept the Enterprise having been made larger than even the Enterprise-D from The Next Generation (obligatory link to Ex Astris Scientia), even though this is an Enterprise from an alternate reality which was built in Riverside and launched in 2258 and not the one from the classic TV show built in space and launched in 2245.  I guess it comes from a deeply rooted idea of what's "right" and "wrong" in Trek and ties into lots of gatekeeping and "true fan" nonsense.  For what it's worth, this is how the interiors would fit if the Kelvinverse Enterprise was 366m:

This picture is from the Discovery writer's room circa season one, showing the Kelvin timeline Enterprise's size relative to the ships of classic Trek.

And here is the official cutaway graphic from Popular Mechanics.  As with all Trek ships and fictitious places, there's some fudging to make it all fit, but it looks amazing and convincing here.

And that's more than you probably ever needed to know about the size of a pretend spaceship.

speechless

every time someone touches a ferengis ears its an explicit onscreen handjob on national television

gene roddenberry’s vision