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dm19delta
Member Posts: 206 Arc User
I noticed this at DS9 today, although I'm not sure why I didn't notice it sooner because I used to frequent DS9 quite often, but here it is.
Sovereign/DS9 size comparison
Here is a couple of shots from the shows
Enterprise D docking at DS9
Defiant docking at DS9
Here is a size comparison chart of Federation ships
Comparison chart
The last chart shows the size difference between the Defiant and Sovereign classes. The photo from in-game shows my Sovereign easily able to fit into one of the docking bays on the outside ring. Looking at the stills you can see that the Defiant just fits into the dock on the outside ring, and the Enterprise D is too large to use the outside ring so it has to dock at the end of the arms extending from the outside ring. Look again at the size chart, and you can see that the Sovereign is far larger than the Defiant, and slightly larger than the Galaxy.
I took some other shots to compare several other ships in STO to my Sovereign, and they all look fairly accurate, but DS9 is far too large.
My question to the developers is this: Is this intentional? Is it something having to do with the game mechanics as to why DS9 is so oversized?
My question to the community: Has anyone else noticed this? Has anyone noticed any other size discrepencies in STO?
Sovereign/DS9 size comparison
Here is a couple of shots from the shows
Enterprise D docking at DS9
Defiant docking at DS9
Here is a size comparison chart of Federation ships
Comparison chart
The last chart shows the size difference between the Defiant and Sovereign classes. The photo from in-game shows my Sovereign easily able to fit into one of the docking bays on the outside ring. Looking at the stills you can see that the Defiant just fits into the dock on the outside ring, and the Enterprise D is too large to use the outside ring so it has to dock at the end of the arms extending from the outside ring. Look again at the size chart, and you can see that the Sovereign is far larger than the Defiant, and slightly larger than the Galaxy.
I took some other shots to compare several other ships in STO to my Sovereign, and they all look fairly accurate, but DS9 is far too large.
My question to the developers is this: Is this intentional? Is it something having to do with the game mechanics as to why DS9 is so oversized?
My question to the community: Has anyone else noticed this? Has anyone noticed any other size discrepencies in STO?
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Rest in Peace Brothers
Post edited by dm19delta on
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Yes, there have been many threads about size scales
DS9 is big because it's a hub and big hubs are more impressive. The Dominion Dreadnaught is too small because its true size would be ludicrous for a player ship. Most of the game's Escorts, Fed-side at any rate, are slightly larger than they ought to be for, and shuttle are gargantuan because if they were accurate, they'd be specks on the screen next your Odyssey.
Then there's the Defiant which is a clusterfrak of biblical proportions regarding its... proportions.
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They actually scaled it down a bit from when it was first created, but the Defiant is still not much larger than a runabout in the current DS9.
1. DS9 is about 5 times it's actual size.
2. Spacedock is too small. Canonically it can contain 8 Galaxy Class sized ships. The Galaxy Class cannot fit through the doors.
3. K-7 is FIFTY times its actual size! It should be smaller than a Galaxy Class.
4. Every shuttle is too big. Supposedly this too make them easier for players to "see", but there are actual sized shuttles/fighters in game.
5. Torpedos are too large. Seriously.
6. The Defiant is also too big.
7. The B'rel, and Jem'hadar bugship are supposed to be smaller than the Defiant.
8. The D'deridex and Scimitar of all things are too small.
9. Most of the combages, the TNG ones in particular, are way too big.
10. The Odyssey is an interesting case. Due to it having no canon size, it's tricky trying to figure out how big it's really supposed to be. But the more you look at it currently, the weirder it looks. Going from the number of floors, it's only about the size of the Sovy. However, it looks really stupid at that size. So based on it's crew capacity and description, that makes it wider than a Galaxy class.
11. The Jem'hadar Dreadnought is about half it's actual size.
12. All the shuttles are more or less the same size. Even if you have only a passing experience with the show, you know that this is really wrong.
...and that's just what I have at the top of my head. :P
Actually the size of Spacedock is accurate to the films. The starbase we see the Ent-D fly inside in a couple of TNG episodes is not Spacedock, it's Starbase 74, a ludicrously scaled up version of Spacedock. The Galaxy class was never even supposed to be able to enter Spacedock because it was too large. It was intended to dock on the exterior.
No, they're relatively accurate. The Dreadnought was always intended to be 1500m long but in game it's closer to 1300m. The D'deridex is about the same size as the Dread and it's official length was meant to be 1300m. The Scimitar's length is only 800m. The width is what makes it seem big in Nemesis, but really it's not larger than the D'deridex.
This is because when it was playtested at "real" scale, it felt very small. Designers wanted you to be able to fly around the station, in and out of the rings, through the upper docking arms, etc. If it were proper scale, only something the size of the Defiant or smaller would be capable of that, and even that would be a tight fit.
ESD is actually not too small. Well, it is, if you're going by the bs that it can fit 8 galaxy's inside. ESD in game has roughly the measurements of it's canonical size. If you want to claim 8 galaxy's fit in there, then it must be some kind of Tardis.
K-7 is ridiculous, no doubt.
Shuttles are too large in comparison with regular ships. This is mostly so they are visible at all. If they were proper size, they would be specs on screen. They are, however, largely in scale to each other.
As for the ships themselves, I've posted a couple of these comparison shots over the years:
http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8324/8424623320_ed3a1beb19_z.jpg
http://farm7.staticflickr.com/6043/7006085291_49cf6ea7c9_z.jpg
Each of these is a screenshot taken within 3D Studio Max, of the actual in game models of the ships you fly around, all stacked, side by side. Measurements have to be converted since all of our ships are roughly person sized in game. The final measurements of each ship is within a few meters of the canonical size of each. (Noted exception for the Defiant which actually has a pretty wide range of canon sizes between 120-180m. 164 falls within that obviously)
* Though all of those shots of the Ent D, and Defiant are out of scale with each other as well. When filming the show, a ship was whatever size they needed it to be for the shot. The only reason it's more apparent with STO, is that you can spend time comparing them, flying around, and looking at them in much more detail than the fixed shot you saw on the shows.
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I feel bad for you, do you copy and paste this because i think i've seen you explain this like more than 20 times already, and it wont be the last.
No, I'm too lazy to go look it up, I just retype it. Feel free to bookmark that post and propagate it in any such future discussions. You'll save me some time.
I really would not complain as long as my vantage point was not compromised, and to be selfish about it, I really couldn't care less that another person feels "small" in their escort or shuttle. They are supposed to be small. I really hope this decision was because there was an outcry early on about size, or a limitation in camera view points, and not a presumed future complaint by players.
I want to feel large in a cruiser, and I want to feel small in an escort. Without these factors it's very hard to feel immersed in the gameplay when all you ever do is notice how small/how big you are depending on the ship. Not that I expect the scales to ever change at this point, but it needs to be said. I don't want to be one of THOSE people that likes to state things like they know it's a fact, but uh, I guarantee that most people paying up for this game would have the same opinion as I in regards to the scaling issue because we're all ST nerds, so if there isn't any limits in the way, I say make the paying playerbase happy if it's not too much trouble. At the very least, if it's easy enough, give us a testing run of new scales on tribble for awhile and see how it goes there.
DS9 is probably the worst for this. For all the continued discussion about how DS9 feels in space, it's really the station's interior that needs love the most. I feel positively ant-like sometimes walking down those halls.
If I had Q powers, going back and rescaling all the older interiors so they feel fit for humans and not the lonely god Apollo might be the first art-related change I would make to STO.
Rest in Peace Brothers
ST nerds rarely agree on anything especially size....it's been 19 years and they still can't agree on how big the Defiant is.
Pretty sure the player care more about what the ship does in PVE and PVP than how big it is ....unless you're a star fleet captain going through a midlife crisis Ba dum tssshhh
Psst, you looked at the parking lot outside the Shipyard Window? Just saying. :P
Well that was only true when they were filming with the studio models and having to guestimate sizes. But once they started using the CGI models, pretty much the issue with different scales stopped.
Have you guys thought about contacting Doug Drexler to get a copy of the actual Star Trek CGI Models to use for measurements or to help increase modeling accuracy with the low poly models? I know they used 3D Max for those models, because I got my hands on a copy of the Enterprise-Refit Model they used in the remastery of TMP.
Honestly, I do not believe switch to CGI models changed anything. For instance, if they did a shot in CGI and decided the ship looked too close, they could simply scale-down one of the ships. Just like real models, you pretty much never get a shot with CGI models where you know for certain what size a ship is in comparison to another ship.
Even when a ship passes another ship directly above/below or to the side, all you know is the minimum relative size, not the actual size. In my opinion, CGI does not change anything whatsoever because the artists are only using whatever size they think looks right for the shot. You can see this in play with the size inconsistencies of the Jem'Hadar battleship, which was entirely done in CGI.
Not true, because re-scaling models takes significant amounts of time. If you had to mess with size, you do that in the planning and prototype modeling stages when creating the models.
The simple thing to do is either change a model's position or change camera positions.
I really wish it could have been at least a little bigger. Even though the canon ship sizes are somewhat fubar, I still think that the lore of the ship demands it to have slightly more presence. It drives me nuts that my Vo'quv is larger than my Dreadnought lol (using parts from both Vo'Quv ships).
I'm not a graphics artist and I never worked for the company that handled the CGI models for the later Star Trek TV shows, but I am extremely skeptical that scaling a model up or down relative to another model takes anything more than a couple of keystrokes. Even if I am in error, it is pretty clear that on the show, that is exactly what they did in certain cases.
The fact is, CGI model or not, in your final screen shot, unless you know that two ships are shown at equal distances from the camera (such as they are both on the surface of a planet next to eachother), all you can establish is the minimum size of one ship relative to another, and that is only if one passes directly in front of the other, otherwise you have no way of even knowing which ship is larger.
Take this shot for instance: http://img133.imageshack.us/img133/8905/320x240alz7.jpg
Since the Defiant passes directly over the Lakota, you know that the Defiant cannot be much bigger than half the saucer section, but you do not know if it is a big ship scraping the hull of the Lakota or an inch long and manned by Leprechauns.
As you may know, the Defiant's size seems inconsistent throughout the show and knowing the value they used in the CGI software for each shot (if they had used CGI from the beginning) would not be likely to fix that problem.
Dude, that was not CGI. Those were Studio Models.
They didnt' start using CGI until Season 5 of DS9 / Season 3 of Voyager.
I have. The shuttles ARE WAYYY TO BIG, and Soverign and Galaxy and many others I think should be re-scaled. PLEASE DO IT
Worried about your ship being too small?
Think about it this way.
The defiant covers most of your screen (it has been zoomed in) but if you fly near an Odyssey, it will take time to fly by. For an Odyssey , it will cover most of the screen, and the defianat will be very small.
THAT! Solves your problem
I hope STO get's better ...
#1 size of the bridge cake
#2 number of Decks on the official MSD, if available
#3 how many rows of Windows are there?
If a ship with 4 Decks is bigger then a Saucer with 8 Decks or a Bridge Cake is way too big compared to the rest, then something is very wrong.
Keep in mind, Star Trek was shot for Standard Definition TV's, that is not a lot of resolution to work with, the priority is always that a shot looks good, not that it is correct in scale.
Also if you see multiple Models in one shot, that are multiple layers of film cut together from multiple camera passes over stationary Ship Models in front of a bluescreen. -> they never held a Defiant over an Excelsior and made pew pew voices. That happened all in the cutting room.
Oh and the Chaffee Shuttle is the size of a Car, you could park 2 of them inside the Defiants Bridge, i don't see where the problem is supposed to be there.
both DS9 and the Defiant would change scale in the show depending on what the back ground ships where
You got a screenshot of said plate?
Also the "Starship Spotter" gives the BoP at a length of 88 meters while the "Bird-of-Prey Owner?s Workshop Manual" states the Bird of Prey was produced at several sizes (including the K'vort cruiser) at the Martok's BoP hat a length of 139meters.
I think you forget the time period we are talking about. CGI and a couple of keystrokes won't fit in the same sentence in the 1990s, any CGI was extremely expensive. DS9 didn't recycle every combat scene just because they were lazy.
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According to Memory Alpha, the size of the Defiant according to the CGI model used in the show was 170.7 m...very close to the 164.5 m the devs settled on.
Ex Astris Scientia has the most comprehensive analysis of the Defiant situation that I've ever seen. In short, there are so many problems, either because the Defiant was resized for an episode, or because Deep Space Nine was, or because some ship appearing on-screen with the Defiant was, I think it's pretty fair to pick just about any size within the wide range provided by the visual evidence as the "correct" one. Picking the most commonly depicted size is a logical way to do it, but it's not necessarily the only way to do it.
On the topic of the CGI models being superior, the Defiant's appearance in First Contact is extremely problematic...it depicts the ship as being in the 50 m range!
Naturally, I don't think this is the same CGI model used in the series, but...well, there it is.
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