Today is January 17th, otherwise written as 17/01 (besides in the U.S.) which makes it the perfect day to celebrate the U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701! This is a great tradition that I’m glad exists and to celebrate it I’ve come up with a set of new spaceframes from the era of the original Star Trek series.
Jester Dave has previously come up with a bunch to supplement the Constitution class and the Miranda class in the core rulebook. I gathered together his era-appropriate spaceframes in a single pdf for your convenience. Below that is a new pdf with six different spaceframes from the tumultuous Battle of the Binary Stars in the pilot of Star Trek: Discovery. These are the Cardenas class, the Engle class, the Hoover class, the Malachowski class, the Nimitz class, and the Shepard class. Use them for your TOS-era Star Trek Adventures game or as leftover spaceframes from a previous era. And give me feedback by all means!
There are some significant problems in a lot of the ship histories.
A lot of them refer to Starfleet wanting warships and preparing for war, decades prior to 2256. This, when the Federation had existed almost a whole century with no wars and no major threats. The Klingons and Romulans were both isolationist at the time, hiding behind their borders for a century each, and none of the other big threats (Borg, Cardassians, Dominion, Breen) or even most smaller powers (Gorn, Ferengi, Tzenkethi) had been encountered yet. There was no reason during this era for Starfleet to expect wars. So it makes little to no sense to pretend that Starfleet would be in a big rush to arm itself heavily in the 2220s to 2240s. Ship histories refering to this need to be rewritten.
Second, it isn’t popular among pro-war fans, but it is canon that the Defiant class of the late 24th century was Starfleet’s first dedicated warship. Pretending that DISCO era ships were intended as anything but scientific explorers is just adolescent fantasy, or leftover dregs of apocrypha from the bad old FASA days. Even the hugely powerful Crossfield-class was described primarily as a science ship.
Wow, it seems like a nerve was hit! Well, this was my attempt at melding different fan-canons and beta-canons. Your mileage may certainly vary but you should still be able to use the mechanics even if you don’t like the histories.
What is your history with Star Trek? Should I interview you?
You have a lot to say but I don’t think people know your superfanhood.
From a canon perspective, a casual look at history will show that there are always voices looking to spend on the military regardless of current threat levels.
And the Defiant is definitely said to be Starfleet’s first dedicated warship but I’ve chosen to take that very strictly. All of the military vessels here can reasonably take on other missions from exploration to state missions. That appears pretty regularly in this description. The Defiant,
though, can’t reasonably do anything but fight, either in the series or in game mechanics,
thus “dedicated warship.” Personally, I don’t think it’s feasible even a little that Starfleet existed for three centuries without any skip designs with strong combat focuses but if that’s your head canon then you can fix this in a few minutes for your campaign.
You’re welcome to whatever personal fan canon you feel like, in your own game. But I’m talking from a strictly alpha canon perspective, not anything personal. If you’re going to write from any less standard perspective, it would be good ettiquette to clearly spell out your personal, non-canon assumptions, so GMs and players can identify your odd digressions with ease. This is especially important with a random mishmash of “different fan-canons and beta-canons”.
I’ll strive for better etiquette. It can be difficult on the internet not to get carried away.
According to my calculations, the Engle-class needs to be Scale 4, not 3. It’s almost 100 meters longer than a TOS Constitution (another Scale 4 ship) and at least twice the volume.
And I’m convinced that the Malachowski could be a Scale 4 ship as well since it’s about the same volume as a Miranda, another Scale 4 ship, and the Mal’s nacelles give it an even longer length (277 meters) than the Miranda’s length (243 meters).
Ooo, can you share your sources? I’m not opposed to adjusting stats but I had trouble finding dimensions for either of those classes. Memory Beta lists the length of the Malachowski class to be 227 m as compared to the Constitution’s 288.6 m. That’s why I put it at Scale 3 and the Engle class (which has no dimensions on either Memory Alpha or Memory Beta) seemed about the same size.
A hundred meters is a fair bit more length so that would tip the balance for me. If they’re even, though, I would tend to round down with these two classes’ long nacelles. They both lack a secondary hull so that means less size overall and in game terms Scale affects things like hull resistance, phaser power, amount of crew, etc. The nacelles wouldn’t impact much of that (except maybe phaser power) so I would concentrate on the primary hull diameter if I had hard numbers. If the diameter of the Engle-class and/or Malachowski-class saucer section(s) were similar to the diameter of the Miranda class (as you mentioned) then it’s a shoe-in for Scale 4.
Like I said, happy to change if I get new data so consider me subscribed!
My sources for starship sizes comes from the Star Trek: Official Starship Collection Magazine published by Eaglemoss Collection/Hero Collections, the guys who do all those fancy die cast miniatures of sci fiction ships of all sorts, not just Star Trek. Each monthly magazine features a particular ship from Star Trek that apparently got meticulously researched by Eaglemoss through interviews with Star trek actors, crew people, and modelers involved with creating those particular starships. Eaglemoss has been publishing the magazine since 2012, so they’ve covered alot of starships, with more to come. For details about the magazine, see here: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Official_Starships_Collection
The source of my stats is from the most awesome thing I think Eaglemoss did: they went ahead and created image files of all the starships they’ve covered (almost 200 of them so far!) and put them *all on the same size scale* as well as labeled each ship by name, class and length in meters. Almost every starship (with the exception of a few space stations and the ships from Star Trek: Picard) that made a canon appearance in Star Trek, from small ships like the Galileo Type F shuttle all the way up to V’Ger(!), can be compared on these image files. These are OFFICIAL CANON stats since they were so meticulously researched using the original CGI studio models (where available).
There are three image files:
1) Federation starships: https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/memoryalpha/images/2/2d/Eaglemoss_Starships_At_In-universe_Scale_Federation.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20201109210238&path-prefix=en
2) Alien/non-Starfleet starships: https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/memoryalpha/images/2/24/Eaglemoss_Starships_At_In-universe_Scale_Alien.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20201024212853&path-prefix=en
3) Small/Massive starships, which includes shuttles/small ships; large ships like the varied Borg cubes, the Voth City Ship, Earth Spacedock, Starbase 74, the Mirror Universe ISS Charon; and finally V’Ger since its length of 78,000 meters puts it in a class all by itself: https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/memoryalpha/images/d/d5/Eaglemoss_Starships_at_In-universe_Scale_Small_and_Massive.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20201109210705&path-prefix=en
Remember, these are ALL OFFICIAL STATS, ladies and gentlemen. Enjoy!
(And if these links don’t work for whatever odd reason, I’m gonna eat my hat!)
I went ahead and removed the extra posts (we have to approve them so they don’t show up right away) so this is the seminal post.
Relatedly, HOLY CATS! This is, indeed, probably the coolest thing that Eaglemoss has done and they’ve done some cool things. Look for this featured in a future post! Also, I think you’re right about these comparisons and I’m going to start revising those stats today for an update.
Thank you for removing the extraneous posts. There’s no need to clutter up these posts any more than necessary.
TBH, I’m actually a bit surprised no one at Continuing Missions noticed this before I did. I’ve only just gotten into Star Trek Adventures just in the last few months around October 2020. I’m still trying to learn the rules, but it’s the starship stats that have currently grabbed my attention. As such, I was trying to find the most official starship dimensions I could and the stuff at Ex Astris Scientia struck me as out of date, so I bounced around the Internet until I found something (anything!) “official.” Finding the Eaglemoss Official Starship magazine entry at Memory Alpha was the result. I would have thought someone here at CM had gotten there before I did….
…But then again, the image files are dated October 2020, so they ARE relatively new.
In any case, I can’t wait to see the official CM post about this! 🙂
Mephit, it’s been three weeks, has anything happened yet with a featured post about the Eaglemoss scaled starship pics?