Stats/Information on the new Enterprise

[Tsukiyumi]

I like the theory that the POD (point of divergence) is Star Trek: First Contact...

So do I. If you consider ENT: Regeneration to be canon (which I do, but ), then this clearly created an alternate universe; the Federation had no knowledge of the Borg in TNG: Q Who?

The Narada simply ended up in the ENT universe. It neatly explains everything except for the Narada herself, which the (admittedly non-canon) Countdown comics did explain.

I was actually able to explain the Narada (and her "strange" crew) IU rather easily: it's simply a ship class we hadn't seen before. The Romulans like making ginormous ships; everyone know this. The crew being "different" from Romulans we've seen in the past? Take a person from, say, Houston, Texas, and then take a person from Plantersville, Texas (only about 40 miles away) and compare the two. One is likely to be an educated urbanite who speaks recognizable English, and the other is likely to be an incomprehensible rube with a 5th grade education. Nero's crew are miners, not the city-dwellers or military-types we've seen in the past. Just because they're different from the Romulans we've seen in TNG and DS9 doesn't make a valid argument against the canonicity of the Narada or her crew.

[Mark]

Hell, look at your average city dweller and say a deep sea fisherman. Look, act, and think nothing alike.

[BigJKU316]

Hell, look at your average city dweller and say a deep sea fisherman. Look, act, and think nothing alike.

Exactly. And a large ship does make sense, depending on the mission profile. The drill suggest to me it is after something that is far away and on an inhospitable planet. Otherwise you just build shoreside after all. The defenses make sense if it is something very valuable and very remote from help. You need enough weapons to ward of pirates and the like and those weapons would seem very powerful more than a century before.

[Mikey]

And? Modern ships likewise all look pretty much the same, despite their differing sizes. The greater size is certainly solid proof of an early PoD, but there's nothing inherently unrealistic in the basic structure of the ship remaining the same.

Agreed. In fact, given that this is the UFP we're talking about (albeit the Abramsverse UFP,) I'd be surprised if the ships didn't share the same design aesthetic, no matter the scale. Seafort said it well, but it bears repeating: an ancient nao or drakkar has the same fundamental shape as a Ticonderoga-class cruiser. The size of the vessel has nothing at all to do with how we understand, and treat, fluid dynamics.

This alleged "problem" has been soundly thumped many times, but I will reiterate that it neither disproves the size of the neoE nor is unrealistic - the E-nil herself had very few windows, and on a warship (which is what a vessel of a "peacekeeping armada" is) the fewer windows that are present the better.

The window issue is one of preference or personal comfort. Bernd, or anyone else, may "feel better" about not skipping a deck per each row of windows, but it's hardly evidence of sizing (as we've shown here repeatedly.) Hell, for all we know a ship the size of the neoE could have "tween decks" space or maintenance access between every single deck.

As has been pointed out already, we have seen other ships built on the ground - a GCS no less, much the same size as the neoE, in "Parallels".

And as we haven't seen the smaller Geneverse analogs being built on the ground, we have no idea what such planetside facilities are capable - or incapable - of.

Very true, and therefore further evidence of an early PoD.

Also, it's canon - we all saw that engineering section when we watched the movie.

Alternately, time-travel may be more familiar, works in the same way it has historically in Trek, and everyone realises that an attempt to fix it will merely result in an additional parallel universe.

Or, there is no temporal PD or any sort of temporal department in Abramsverse 'Trek. The rest of the post in question doesn't really seem to speak to anything concrete or even to any particular question, so I'll leave this at that.

[Graham Kennedy]

Me, I go for the Kelvin as the point of departure; it's clearly the intent of the movie that it be so, and is specifically stated as Spock to be so right there in the movie. It may create problems, but as I said earlier; my policy is that canon is canon and we're stuck with it, even if that means we have to solve problems.

And the problems aren't great, to me. Yeah, the Kelvin was a pretty big ship, and had a big crew. There's nothing I know of in any aspect of canon to say that such ships did not exist. Yeah, transporters and warp drive have somewhat different effects. Virtually every transporter system we've ever seen has a different visible effect, and more than a few warp drives have too.

Going to a ship 8x bigger in 25 years? Sorry to disagree, but to me that seems perfectly possible. It's a matter of what the limiting factors are/were. Historically nations rarely build the biggest ships they are capable of - treaty limits sometimes apply, or cost issues. Today a LOT of cargo ships are limited in size by the need to pass through the Panama and Suez canals - and indeed they are widening the Panama canal right now, after which ships will grow in size rapidly once more. But if we really wanted to, the only limits to a ship's size are what the materials could handle. There are designs on the drawing board right now for ships 1,300 metres long, FOUR times the length of any military ship around, and I've no doubt we could go bigger if we wanted. It's only a matter of what it would cost and how much demand there is for it that stops us.

Point being, there is absolutely nothing in canon to indicate that the Connies represented the biggest ships that the Federation was capable of building. And even if one assumes that they are, then I don't see why a determined effort couldn't build a ship 8x larger with 25 years to do it.

[Reliant121]

I can very well see the Kelvin as being an experiment by starfleet to see if insanely large (in relation to other fed ships of similar time periods) actually worked. In the original source, it might not have been suitable. Since the Narada, a muthertrucken huge thing comes along, starfleet thinks "shit, its still too small. Let's get EVEN BIGGER!"

[Mark]

Hey GK.....has any of your "backstage" sources come up with anything else? (ie Star Log magazine)???

[Graham Kennedy]

Nope.

My take on the Kelvin, given that it seems to carry something like 40+ shuttles, is that it's some sort of disaster relief/colony support/troop transport ship. Something designed to carry a lot of cargo and people and be capable of transferring them down to a planet with or without transporters. Basically something like a Federation Wasp class.

[Mark]

Or colonial operations.....that was the first guess that I had when I saw the ship for some reason.

[Tyyr]

She could be a garbage truck for all I care, she's a sexy sexy beast.

[Mikey]

She could be a garbage truck for all I care, she's a sexy sexy beast.

Now, now - no need to recreate a night at the bar with a bottle of mezcal.

[stitch626]

She could be a garbage truck for all I care, she's a sexy sexy beast.

The Klingons would agree with that first part...

[Tyyr]

Do. Not. Care.

I dunno why but the Kelvin is just a gorgeous ship to me.

[Reliant121]

I agree entirely.

[Mark]

To each his own I suppose. The Kelvin looked like an unbalanced, topheavy kitbash to me. Sorry gang, but thats just the plain truth.