This is topic Rhode Island / Nova Variant Size Etc. in forum Starships & Technology at Flare Sci-Fi Forums.


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Posted by Eclipse (Member # 472) on :
 
Do we have any reasonably consistent guesses for the dimensions of the Nova class, and hence the Rhode Island variant? I've just spent half an hour trying to find two sets of figures that agree... and failing. The only consistent figures I've got are

length ~ 180 m
draught ~ 40 m

for the original Nova. Any guesses on mass, either?
 

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Posted by Dax (Member # 191) on :
 
Starship Spotter gives the length of the USS Equinox as 165m. Works for me.

It gives the displacement as 110,000 tonnes, but I'm not the person to tell you if that's accurate to the ship size or not.
 

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Posted by O Captain Mike Captain (Member # 709) on :
 
the only difference for the Rhode Island to the overall sizewould be the addition of another deck, probaby plus 5 meters or so to the height. and the sovereign escape pods are scaled wrong, to muddle the issue, but no window sizes change.
 

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Posted by Eclipse (Member # 472) on :
 
I made a little progress by getting some scans of the Rhode Island schematics from the fact files. By judicious use of the cropping tool I came up with the following relations:

length ~ 2.05 × beam
length ~ 4.51 × draught

I suppose draught might actually be the easiest to guess, given that the windows give away the number of decks. What's our best guess for deck height these days?
 

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Posted by Boris (Member # 713) on :
 
The Equinox was almost certainly intended to be larger. Anybody's first guess would be that Rick Sternbach made it 230m long, the size of the pathfinder when scaled using the Defiant's bridge at 171m (and no, you can't tell me that Doug Drexler wanted the Defiant to be 110m long here, check out just about any size comparison chart he's ever done). Sure enough -- on March 10, 1999, Rick tells us about designing a new ship that'll have six 13' decks and two 16' decks ("allowing 1.5-2' for structures", not sure what he meant here). Plug in the 110' overall deck span in either the MSD or the Tim Earls deck lines from the Magazine, and you'll get about 220-230m (even though the two sources differ on just where the tallest decks are, as is understandable given that the MSD is almost always drawn before the blueprints are finalized since the scenic art is needed a lot earlier for live-action shooting, with models coming into play only in post-production).

In Equinox, it was much smaller in a comparison of the two MSDs and in an animation depicting the two ships -- about 140-170m. I suspect that the actual script called for a ship "half the size" of Voyager, as written in the novel, and that the Equinox was later scaled down by the parties involved. Now, since the Defiant is probably 110m long (MSD), it would make a lot of sense to have the Equinox be 150m long to maintain the pathfinder story. The official figure of 165m is in the right range if you want to use it.
 

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Posted by Dax (Member # 191) on :
 
I've been giving this some thought and I'm really starting to wonder just how big the Nova-class is/was meant to be.

The "official" 165m figure in Starship Spotter is all well and good as an interpretation of the VFX in "Equinox", but it's structurally too small taking into account the 80 crew size, deck height, shuttlebay door height, and escape pod size. Even the VFX in "End Game" showed the Rhode Island to be of larger size. I'm starting to doubt how AlexR(?) came to that length, although 165m perhaps coincidentally nicely converts to 540' (a possible VFX figure).

Using Sternbach's 110' total deck height mentioned by Boris, the CGI side view produces a length of ~700' (213m). Applying the 700' figure corrects all the problems listed above. Also, it's interesting in that, at 700', the Rhode Island's escape pods are a size match for those of the Ent-E.

I might email Rick and ask him if he had a specific intended length for the Equinox, but I fear that he likely no longer has that information.
 

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Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
 
I'd be far easier to sugguest that the Nova class has a crew of 40-45 instead of 80.
I'd much rather deal with a messed up line of dialogue than pretending all those shots of Equinox and Voyager next to each other are somehow incorrect.
...and I doubt that so few remaining crew could have kept the critically damaged Equinox running for as long as they did if the ship runs on a crew of 80.
Anybody know how many crew were left when Voyager found them?
I am told the Defiant is supposed to be 170 meters, but that ship is all engines and nose, so there's not too much to compare with and that shot from First Contact certainly can't be right!
,,,that shot puts the Defiant at about 50 meters long!
 

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Posted by Mark Nguyen (Member # 469) on :
 
An aircraft carrier is about 300m long, and carries over 5000 people. You can very easily put 80 people into a Nova, and have lots of room to spare! We see in the first episode that the Equinox has modest bunk rooms with at least four to a billet, which can be consistent with a short-term science vessel. Twenty of those, plus a few more singles for the senior officers (we see what is probably the Captain's quarters, which is a redress of Voyager's JUNIOR officer quarters set), can easily fit into the Nova. When Voyager finds Equinox, there's less than a dozen people left, judging by the number of people who escape later on.

Whenever I start to think that any ship is too small for its crew, I simply remind myself that ANY principal starship we've seen can easily fit several houses my size in their saucers and still have room for my neighbors' houses. I live in a two-story house with basement. That tends to put the issue to rest rather easily.

Mark
 

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Posted by Dax (Member # 191) on :
 
I admit that a 165m Nova could hold 80 crew, but I doubt it could support 80 crew abandoning ship if necessary. The escape pods are simply too few in number for how tiny they'd be (the hatch doors would be less than 2.5m per side). A 700' Equinox OTOH would have hatch doors nearly 3.2m wide i.e. big enough for the escape pods featured in the DS9TM and equipped by Voyager.

Anyway, I've sent an email off to Rick and am waiting on his response.
 

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Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
 
Good points regarding crew compliments.
I still think that a dozen stressed survivors would have had a really (impossible) tough time maintaining any ship in the 200+ meter range.

....Y'know, the Equinox really kicked Voyager's tail for a critically damaged science ship with almost all of her crew dead!
If Equinox was running at 100% we might have been spareda few bad seasons of Voyager!
 

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Posted by Dax (Member # 191) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by Jason Abbadon:
Good points regarding crew compliments.
I still think that a dozen stressed survivors would have had a really (impossible) tough time maintaining any ship in the 200+ meter range.

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I wouldn't necessarily describe the condition of the Equinox as "maintained". Regardless, I think you're forgetting how few crew it took to run the badly damaged Enterprise in Star Trek III.
 

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Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
 
Yeah, but that was with Scotty,
...and he "had it rigged like a christmas tree".
I can't even tell you if Equinox had it's original engineer.
On the other hand, I think someone really could have cleaned up the bridge of Equinox after running into Voyager....crap was everywhere!

Well, whatever Equinox's size, it is one tough little ship to be sure: mabye a little leftover toughness from the Defiant Pathfinder days.
 

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Posted by Dax (Member # 191) on :
 
I got a reply back from Rick Sternbach but he informed me that he never got around to measuring out the length of the Equinox i.e. he has no specific intended length. He did tell me though that he used a deck height that averaged ~12.5'. By my calculations, that produces a total deck span of ~100' and a length of ~630' (192m), but the figures are open to interpretation.
 

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Posted by Bernd (Member # 6) on :
 
Of course, Rick must have had a definite size figure in mind. So if he tells of a certain deck height (the same as on the Intrepid as the sets of Voyager were used), we quite easily obtain a length, give or take 20 meters. I would prefer a length of 180m over saying that the Nova has lower decks than the Intrepid while the interior doesn't look like that.
 

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Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
 
A length of 180 meters is pretty much whats shown in the episode too.
 

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Posted by Dax (Member # 191) on :
 
Unless he's lying, Rick didn't have a specific intended length. I'll quote from one of his emails:

quote:

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Well, contrary to popular opinion, I never had the time to work out all the details, even though I love that kind of stuff. The size of the ship in the blueprint drawings fit the bill, but after the drawings were finished I never actually took out a ruler and measured it. All I know is that I used a deck height that averaged ~12.5 feet, and with a smaller number of decks, it made for a smaller ship than Voyager. If VFX ever got the size relationships wrong, that's their own problem.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Boris:
It might be useful to superimpose the two top views by matching their details, which would allow us to measure the exact length differential.

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