Is the Original Enterprise BIG Enough?? Analysis!!

[Graham Kennedy]

Now, if we were to really cram 500 people on the Intrepid Class for a five year+ mission of deep space exploration, maybe the 42 escape pods were redesigned for, at a push, eight people? 336. plus six shuttles of the type 8? 48+336=384.

The unpublished Voyager TM said that the pods take six people. The same pods were used for the USS Valiant on DS9, and the DS9 TM also said they hold six, but added that there was an eight person version.

Here's a question... if you really want to push the number, is there any reason not to say that the ship can be fitted with double-height pods? We don't know how deep those escape pod wells are, so far as I know, so maybe you could have a pod with two cabins one on top of the other, for twelve people total. Just a thought.

On a ship 343 or 344 metres long (places quote both), 15 decks, and only 181 quarters. I may be relying on the 'Strategic Design' fan-produced deck plans by Tim Paigut and david schmidt for the number of quarters.

I used to have a friend whose hobby was taking Trek ship designs and coming up with deck plans for them. She found that she could very easily work in huge crews if she devoted even a modest portion of the ship to accommodation. The only way to keep the crew to a reasonable level was to make the quarters huge and only fill a pretty tiny portion of the ship with them. She would always wind up sticking cargo bays and holodecks all over the place just to take up the space. Like I say, these ships are way bigger than people generally appreciate.

The TOS Enterprise could have a crew of 2,560.

Easily believable. Like I said above, the Connie is not that far short of being the size of a Nimitz class aircraft carrier that carries a crew of over 5,000. Up until you reach that kind of level, the only thing that's really going to limit the Connie crew numbers is how tightly you choose to pack people in.

And the crew of DS9's USS Defiant thought it was bad on their ship.

Defiant is an odd case, because it really does have crew quarters that are on a par with what you see in modern navy ships - a relatively small room shared by at least two people. But Defiant isn't a small ship either, she's comparable in size to a 20,000 ton Navy ship - something like the US Baltimore class, which housed over a thousand people each. Defiant has 50.

I should emphasise, I'm not so much arguing that Trek ships should have crews in the thousands or tens of thousands. Rather, what bugs me is that they establish that these ships are very sparsely populated, and then treat them as though they're not. It always amuses me that they spent money hiring extras for the stars to walk past when they did those corridor shots. Truthfully, TNG era ships should feel practically empty. You should walk down corridors most of the time and find them all deserted!

[bladela]

Subs have snorkels to replenish air.

OTOH, if ‘Trek ships can create foodstuffs from raw organic goo, surely they can extract O2 from CO2?

you can not fill a room with more people than life support can keep alive (a tube can only send a certain amount of air).

In TNG with replicators the availability of oxygen in itself should not be a problem, the only resource in some limited way should be energy and / or fuel.

[Graham Kennedy]

They recycle pretty much everything. From Breaking The Ice :

Tucker : "The first thing you've got to understand is we recycle pretty much everything on a starship. That includes waste, and the first thing that happens to the waste is it gets processed through a machine called a bio-matter resequencer... So the waste is broken down into little molecules and then they get transformed into any number of things we can use on the ship. Cargo containers, insulation, boots, you name it."

And that's in Enterprise. By TNG they just stick most of their waste back into the replicator. From Hard Time :

Molly : "I'm done. Can I go colour?"
Keiko : "Sure. Make sure to put your plate in the replicator, sweetie."

Replicators are pretty much the ultimate recycling tool, literally anything can be broken back down into component atoms and then replicated into something else.

As for air, I don't see why they couldn't just scrub carbon dioxide out of the air and either produce oxygen from electrolysing water, or just replicate oxygen like they do anything else. If they go the water route, I did some calculations for a Coalition ship and you need to break down only around a gram of water per person per day to give them the oxygen they need. Fifty tons of water would give the Connie crew Oxygen for about six months. That sounds a lot, but it's a block of water 12 feet on a side.

Of course, there's other possibilities. On the Orville, for instance, they've said that the walls of the ship are lined with and artificial substance that does some chemical equivalent of photosynthesis. The ship cleans and recycles the air constantly, all by itself.

[DarkMoineau]

Interesting. So there is at least three solutions for oxygen.

[bladela]

am I alone that you would not feel comfortable entering a room with a transporter that continually changes the air I breathe?

[Graham Kennedy]

am I alone that you would not feel comfortable entering a room with a transporter that continually changes the air I breathe?

I doubt they'd put an air unit in every single room. You'd circulate air around the ship and then have an atmosphere control room somewhere in the loop with machines that replicate oxygen and scrub out carbon dioxide. Probably have a bunch of such rooms for redundancy.

[bladela]

in this case, however, we return to the limitations of the transmission medium as indicated by me at the beginning (air ducts).

I must admit instead that the solution of The Orville is ingenious ... even if here you could find several "limitations" es. the source of energy

[AlexMcpherson79]

I imagine use of artificial gravity and pairing of floor and ceiling height vents, one for extraction, with one venting a mix of oxygen/nitrogen into the rooms/hallways, and one extracting CO2 from said places, but not necessarily all of it. This maybe doubles as fire-supression, by reversing the input/output near fires, with atmospheric forcefields around the fires, whatever.

[Graham Kennedy]

I imagine use of artificial gravity and pairing of floor and ceiling height vents, one for extraction, with one venting a mix of oxygen/nitrogen into the rooms/hallways, and one extracting CO2 from said places, but not necessarily all of it. This maybe doubles as fire-supression, by reversing the input/output near fires, with atmospheric forcefields around the fires, whatever.

In Obsession we actually see an air vent in somebody's quarters. Small, stomach height thing. Oddly, the system seems to allow ingress from the outside of the ship.

[bladela]

In First Contact the way in which the engine room is "cleaned" from the refrigerant gas suggests piping and ventilation openings at floor height.

[McAvoy]

I have been on six carriers in my eight years in the Navy. The US Navy along with other navies will use every single inch of space. Hallways (P-ways in the Navy, short for passage ways) always has equipment, pipes or whatever along the sides. You can barely walk though them with two way traffic.

Berthing especially in enlisted, has been in the dozens if not hundreds of people per room. Racks, bunkbeds are 6'x3' beds stacked three high with maybe three feet of clearance.

That is how the military works. That is how you fit thousands in a ship. Officers still share a room with another or two depending on rank. But they are hardly large rooms.