Abramsverse Federation Ship Classes

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1. One of these vessels (previously referred to as "unnamed class I" at EAS) can be seen docked to the space station in "Star Trek (2009)". This ship later departs from the station and is visible on the upper starboard side ahead of the Enterprise before going to warp.
2. The nacelles appear to be of the same type as those of the Kelvin, with what looks like impulse engines at their aft ends. They are most likely meant to be smaller though. The central nacelle is longer than the port and starboard ones. The pod is reminiscent of that on the Miranda (in its original form as USS Reliant) and may hold the torpedo launchers.
3. On an early comparison chart that can be found in Star Trek: The Art of the Film and in the special features of the Blu-ray the Armstrong type is represented by a "USS Armstrong NCC-1769" (1969 being the year of the first manned moon landing). It is not entirely certain whether this very ship is actually in the movie, but the visible portion of the registry could be "1769" in the closest view that we are shown, so it is a good guess that it is indeed the Armstrong.
4. The chart in Star Trek: The Art of the Film also depicts a reddish brown ship "USS Excelsior NCC-1729" with the same silhouette as the Armstrong type. Since the purpose of the chart is to allow a comparison of different types, this additional depiction was most likely meant to be just a placeholder for a design that was not yet decided on and that never made it into "Star Trek (2009)". Hence the re-use of the Armstrong silhouette and the very unlikely color. However, in "Star Trek Into Darkness" there is indeed a reddish ship of the Armstrong type. It can be seen at the stardock behind the Enterprise. Although we can't read the name and registry, this is very likely the Excelsior NCC-1729, considering that whoever included the model must have been aware of the chart. We can only speculate whether someone in the CG department saw the chart and mistook the placeholder for a ship that was seriously meant to appear or whether it was supposed to be some kind of in-joke.
5. If the relative scales of the comparison chart are still correct for the final ships, then the Armstrong type measures 254m (366m Enterprise), after a slight correction of the nacelle proportions, which are too clumsy on the chart.

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1. Khan calls the Vengeance a ship of the Dreadnought class, which would only make sense if the first ship of the class were named USS Dreadnought, rather than USS Vengeance. But he may actually mean "Dreadnought type", which could stand for a new type of heavily armed vessel, much like the HMS Dreadnought was one in real life.
2. The Vengeance can be seen next to the Enterprise, and the visual comparison confirms Khan's statement that the new ship is twice as long. The max. speed of Warp 11.5 (old scale, of course) results from Khan's statement that the Dreadnought class is three times as fast as the Enterprise.
3. The ship was designed, built and launched in just one year, by an organization that is known for covert operations and not for shipbuilding, in a secret installation that likely didn't previously exist, and in the Sol system with its heavy space traffic that would make keeping the secret extremely hard. Uhm, yes.
4. Seeing that the people in charge have lost perspective of ship sizes, we may decide that it all doesn't matter any longer and put up with whatever they decide, or we settle on a more reasonable size for the Enterprise, so we are dealing with a Vengeance of "only" some 750m, and not one mile.

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1. The new Enterprise was designed by Ryan Church and built into a CGI model at ILM.
2. Compared to the pilot version (2254-2264) and the largely identical original Constitution class as it appeared in TOS (2264-2268) the changes to the re-imagined "Star Trek (2009)" vessel are substantial. Its proportions are roughly similar, retaining the basic saucer-neck-engineering-nacelle configuration. The secondary hull and the "organic" nacelles are totally new. There is a spinning "fan" in the Bussard collector, and the fins at the nacelle aft end have movable segments. The saucer is similar as the one of the TMP refit, and hence different than the somewhat smaller one of the TOS Enterprise. Some of its details such as the windows and the three stripes on the edge even seem to be identical to the TMP version. The bridge dome is a bit like in TMP and very different than on the TOS model.
3. Since the new Enterprise is different because history has been altered, there is no need for another in-universe justification why it doesn't look like the TOS ship. There is no need to make the design fit in any fashion. Still, it is true that the re-imagination would be somewhat plausible as a predecessor of the Enterprise refit of 2271 mainly because of the saucer. It would have been a nice nod if Spock had arrived earlier and had given the plans of this ship to Starfleet. But up to the point when the Narada shows up above Vulcan no one in the Federation is even aware that history has been altered.
4. The ship receives a refit at the end of "Star Trek Into Darkness", after it has suffered substantial damage. Most notably the previously two impulse engine exhausts are combined to one. Other portions of the ship may have been changed as well, but were not visible at the end of STID.
5. The ship was even further modified for "Star Trek Beyond". The neck and the nacelle struts were made thinner, the latter now lean backwards instead of pointing straight up. The nacelles were scaled down to 90% their original size and slimmed down a bit. Nevertheless, the ship is 3% longer now, as the nacelles are moved further backward. More phaser emplacements are added as well. These changes appear to be plot-driven, to let the ship appear more vulnerable to the Swarm attack in "Star Trek Beyond". But they were also described as an attempt to be closer to the original Enterprise. There is no in-universe rationale.
6. The playful interior of the bridge is in contrast to the purism of TOS. There is a real window instead of a viewscreen. The corridors have round cross-sections. The interior of the engineering section looks like what it actually is: a brewery. There are largely no recognizable decks in this section, and much of the volume is filled with a maze of water pipes. The warp core (first seen in STID) is a huge (yet realistic) piece of machinery. This is very different than on any Prime Universe Federation ship. It also begs the question whether the huge filming set would fit into the engineering hull at all. In a similar fashion, the shuttlebay may be too small for the many bulky (>10m long) new shuttles, which are stacked in some sort of shelves on two levels on either side of the shuttlebay. Here the shuttlebay looks like it is at least 40m across.
7. Comparing the side views of three Enterprises, I took it for granted that the height of the saucer had to be the same as on the Enterprise refit with its remarkably similar saucer shape, which would make the ship overall 302m long. The design size was 366m according to Alex Jaeger of ILM, and this still makes sense, considering that in this case the shuttlebay door and the torpedo launcher would be the same size as on the TMP refit. Also, the hatches would be reasonably tall compared to just 1.8m on a 302m ship. The VFX team at ILM, however, purportedly scaled up the ship to as much as 725m (200%!), the main intention apparently being to be able to squeeze in all the big shuttles. (Embarrassingly, on the size comparison with the TOS Enterprise on the Blu-ray disc the relative scale is totally wrong. The new Enterprise would be just 490m long if we trusted the depiction, rather than the figures.) At 725m length the new Enterprise would be bigger than a Galaxy class! Yet, the basic proportions, the recognizable deck structure and many details are evidence of a smaller ship. For the sake of the plausibility of the movies I have decided to rank these facts higher than the details pointing to a larger size. More about the scaling issue.
8. The Enterprise is built on the ground, in teenage Kirk's neighborhood in Riverside, Iowa. This is in contrast to everything we knew about ship construction so far. (The ship that Kirk sees in Iowa is indeed the Enterprise. The "1701" is visible as the shuttle passes by the warp engines.)
9. An animation on the occasion of "Star Trek (2009)" on the official movie site at startrekmovie.com showed that the new Enterprise belongs to the Constitution class, just as in the original universe. In "Star Trek Into Darkness" there is a bridge display on the Vengeance identifying the Enterprise as "Constitution class", while the dedication plaque of the Enterprise says "Starship Class".

See also Starfleet Ship Classes A-K

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1. We can see how the ship is being built and launched at the end of "Star Trek Beyond".
2. The Enterprise-A is a completely new ship design. Therefore it is not classified as "Enterprise type" (or even "Constitution class") here at EAS. Most notably the neck is no longer placed in the middle of the engineering hull. It also looks like the neck is blended into the engineering hull now without the previous flange. The nacelle pylons appear to be straighter and thicker. The nacelles are more conventional, without the curved "engine hoods". They are also farther apart than previously. Finally, the slope of the saucer edge is not as steep any more, and the saucer may be smaller in diameter (or thicker).

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1. The USS Franklin NX-326 was commanded by Captain Balthazar Edison, a former MACO. In 2164, the ship was on a mission in the Gagarin radiation belt when it vanished in a wormhole and ended up crashing on Altamid.
2. The Franklin is said to be the first Warp 4 ship, but Enterprise NX-01 was built for Warp 5 around the same time as it seems. However, it is well possible that the Franklin is older, and was kept in service after 2161 because the young Federation urgently needed ships after the Romulan War. The Franklin may be a sui generis design, so it seems plausible that the ship got an NX registry (now standing for "experimental" and not for "NX class") although it was already outdated at the time.
3. Designer Sean Hargreaves says the Franklin is 450ft long.
4. Like the other Abramsverse Federation ships, the Franklin has a bridge window instead of an opaque viewscreen, although it predates the timeline change. Sean Hargreaves says this was done to be able to see the crew from the outside, but no such shot made it into the film.
5. In the real world, the USS Franklin's name is an in-joke, rather than referring to Benjamin Franklin or to a US Navy ship of that name. The namesake is Justin Lin's father, Frank Lin. The Franklin's registry NX-326 commemorates Leonard Nimoy's birthday on March 26, 1931.
6. The ship was named "Pioneer" in an early script and the nacelles were on the bottom. The class was named "Freedom" in production artwork, which would be in conflict with the 24th century Freedom class.

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1. The Kelvin design predates the new timeline. Its original task is to investigate an anomaly, from where the Narada attacks and destroys the Kelvin.
2. Locations seen on the ship include the bridge, corridors, sickbay and a very spacious engineering/shuttlebay section. Like the new Enterprise, the Kelvin has a bridge window instead of a viewscreen.
3. The main deflector (with a shuttlebay at its aft end) is located above the bridge and a single nacelle below it. Discounting the Saladin/Hermes that could only be glimpsed on a monitor, the Kelvin would be the only Starfleet vessel besides the barely visible Freedom class from TNG: "Best of Both Worlds" with just one nacelle. It is odd that the warp nacelle has an extra exhaust (an impulse engine?) at its aft end, unlike on any other Federation design of the old continuity.
4. It is odd how a survey ship (such as the Oberth class is one) can have a crew of 800, twice as many as the original Enterprise. It is possible that the crew complement was increased and the CGI of the ship was scaled up much like it was done with the Enterprise, although it doesn't make any sense in-universe before Nero's incursion. The possible real-world reason is the dramatic license that George Kirk's self-sacrifice saved 800 people and not just 100. Also, there are apparently no escape pods on the Kelvin, and we saw only a few shuttles of the size of the TOS shuttlecraft leave the scene, at most 20 (which is already a lot for any kind of starship). It is hard to believe that each of them could have been crammed with 40 people.
5. Irrespective of the crew complement, owing to the poor scaling references of the movie the size of the Kelvin is hard to estimate. If the saucer edge is two decks thick, the ship would have to be about 350m long (assuming these decks are as thin as on the 305m TMP refit). Its nacelles would even dwarf the "ample nacelles" of the new Enterprise! With a one-deck saucer (and somewhat taller 4m decks such as on the 366m new Enterprise) the Kelvin would be around 250m long. The true size could be anywhere in between. Of course, it wouldn't be a problem for the Kelvin to be even 1500ft (457m), as stated on the Blu-ray, if we decided to put up with the 725m Enterprise. But then the ship scales in the Abramsverse would be genuinely flawed, even before Nero's incursion.
6. A better size comparison is possible with the early size chart depicted in Star Trek: The Art of the Film, although it doesn't include the Kelvin. But we can match the ship perfectly with the components of the Newton type. The saucer, the nacelles and the pod are all the same size. Discounting some inaccuracies of the Newton's depicted nacelles, this gives us a length of 315m for both the Newton and the Kelvin, provided the Enterprise is 366m long and the relative scales of the chart still apply.
7. The leading "0" is an oddity in a 4-digit registry. We know that later in the 23rd century, registries below NCC-1000 will have just three digits. The real-world explanation is that May 14th is the birthday of J.J. Abrams's grandfather for whom he named the ship.

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1. Unlike the Kobayashi Maru of the year 2284 of the Prime Universe, we can actually see the tanker on the screen in the test that Kirk takes in 2258 in the "Star Trek (2009)" timeline. As already mentioned in the Prime Universe entry, the Kobayashi Maru is most likely a ship with a made up name, albeit of an existing class.
2. The design of the ship with its underslung tank pods follows the lines of Roger Sorensen's Kobayashi Maru, first published in 1983. John Eaves changed the saucer to a round shape and gave the ship TOS-like nacelles on his sketch. These were later modified to the usual Abramsverse-style nacelles.
3. We don't have solid evidence that the Kobayashi Maru design is using the very same basic components as the other Abramsverse ships. But assuming that the nacelles and saucer are the same as on the Mayflower and Armstrong I arrive at a length of 284m for the ship.

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1. Three of these vessels (previously referred to as "unnamed class III" at EAS) are docked to the space station in "Star Trek (2009)"; we see one of them go to warp.
2. The configuration is Miranda-like, with two Kelvin-style nacelles with integrated impulse engines underneath a round saucer. The ship type is somewhat smaller than the Enterprise.
3. On an early comparison chart the Mayflower type is represented by the "USS Mayflower NCC-1621", here still with a rollbar that is not on the movie model. The Mayflower can be identified in the debris of the Starfleet vessels at Vulcan, where the Enterprise almost collides with a huge saucer, whose starboard half is missing. Actually, this saucer is considerably bigger than the Enterprise's, which has to be rated as a scaling error, considering that the Mayflower type was evidently designed smaller. Also, we can see the same saucer twice. First the Enterprise passes by above the saucer, and after a few cuts it shows up ahead of the ship again.
4. The huge saucer is labeled "NCC-1621" as on the early chart, although the Mayflower's journey was in 1620. Perhaps whoever labeled the ship took into account that upon their arrival the settlers spent the winter aboard the ship?
5. If the relative scales of the comparison chart are still correct for the final ships, then the Mayflower type measures 236m (366m Enterprise), after a slight correction of the nacelle proportions, which are too clumsy on the chart.

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1. Three of these vessels (previously referred to as "unnamed class II" at EAS) can be seen docked to the space station in "Star Trek (2009)". When leaving the station, one of them is visible on the lower port side and one on the upper starboard side ahead of the Enterprise before going to warp. Another ship of the type, the NCC-0718, is docked to the station in "Star Trek Into Darkness".
2. The nacelles appear to be of the same as those of the Kelvin, with what looks like impulse engines at their aft ends. The two lower pods are unlike the nacelles in size and shape, and they look like engineering hulls. Overall, this design appears to be somewhat bigger than the Armstrong type, as indicated by the spacedock shot and by the size of the saucer relative to the supposedly identical nacelles.
3. I previously assumed there was another type of vessel with essentially the same configuration but with only one underslung pod. But on two of the three docked vessels of the Newton type the second pod must be obstructed by a nacelle.
4. On an early comparison chart the Newton type is represented by a "USS Newton NCC-1727" (1727 is Isaac Newton's year of death). It is not certain whether this very vessel was actually in the movie, also because we can already relate six other names to the seven ships. But since we can spot the Mayflower and the Armstrong that appear to be labeled just as on the comparison chart, it is very likely that the Newton's name and registry is authentic too.
5. If the relative scales of the comparison chart are still correct for the final ships, then the Newton type measures 315m (366m Enterprise), taking into account a slight correction of the nacelle proportions.

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1. We can see the ship alongside the Enterprise-A in "Star Trek Beyond".
2. The design looks much like 24th century Prime Universe, with similarities to the Akira class.
3. The ship is named for CG artist Rhys Salcombe, who created the final sequence of "Star Trek Beyond".

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1. Spock is the only crew member when he embarks this little ship to create a black hole to stop the supernova from expanding. After running into Nero, he involuntarily travels back to the 23rd century. As opposed to what may have been reported earlier, the ship itself is not originally built for time travel.
2. My side view is based on the ship's depiction in the Countdown comic. In Countdown it is identified as a prototype ship designed to withstand atmospheres that would tear most ships apart. It is nicknamed "Jellyfish" there.

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1. These shuttles (called "Military Shuttles" on production sketches) are commonplace in the years 2255-2258. They belong to the complement of Starfleet Academy, of the Enterprise, of other starships and of the Delta Vega Outpost. There exist different interior layouts, with seats facing forward, facing inward, or with transporter pads.
2. The shuttle's angular general shape is in the tradition of the good old Galileo. The pods may be only impulse engines or thrusters for atmospheric flight, but in case of Delta Vega this wouldn't help a lot to leave the planet.

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These shuttles look similar as the ones of the Kelvin from 2233, but are arguably bigger. This seems to be the only shuttle type aboard the Enterprise to appear on screen in "Star Trek Into Darkness".
1. The name Copernicus of Scotty's shuttle comes from a deleted scene.

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These shuttles appear in the habitable areas of Starbase Yorktown and in the shipyards in "Star Trek Beyond". One can also be seen in the Enterprise shuttlebay when it gets trashed during the disastrous attack. The CG model was created by Andrew Lee McConnell as a redesign of the type 3 seen in "Into Darkness".

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1. There is no reason why the station shown in the Abrams movies would have to be the very same as the Spacedock in the TOS movies. Still, we may have expected it to be a nod to that design. The new spacedock, however, bears a similarity to the Star Fleet Headquarters designed by Franz Joseph for his Star Fleet Technical Manual.
2. In the novelization, this station is identified as Stardock 1 but it remains unnamed in the movie.

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1. The station was designed by Sean Hargreaves for "Star Trek Beyond".
2. The warped ground levels of the living spaces are characteristic of the design of Starbase Yorktown. It appears the whole interior of the sphere is filled with air.
3. The radius of Yorktown is at least 17 times the length of the Enterprise. This gives us a diameter of 12.5km (366m Enterprise) or 25km (725m Enterprise).

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1. In "Star Trek Beyond", Kirk finds a BX-70 motorbike aboard the Franklin. He is familiar with the type because his father used to have one.
2. Two motorcycles were custom-built or heavily modified for the film and painted green to insinuate a military use by the MACO. They may or may not be based on the real-life type BamX BX-70. Kirk may have said "PX-70" instead "BX-70".

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