Facts Revealed of Star Trek 2009/ J.J. Abrams' USS Enterprise NCC 1701

Kenny and I was invited to Richard Chua's house warming cum chinese new year party yesterday. Richard is also a fellow Trekker and the proprietor of sci-fi movie memorabilia and toy store, "The Outpost" at e @theCurve, formerly known as Cinneleisure, Mutiara Damansara. That means one thing: topic of conversation - Star Trek.

It started raining about 4pm, just as Kenny and I were about the leave, so we decided to stay for a while to check out a blu-ray version of Star Trek 2009 with interesting technical specs of JJ Abrams' famed reincarnated USS Enterprise NCC 1701. The blu-ray set comes with 2 DVDs, the movie and the bonus materials.

The bonus materials DVD contains, among others, a layout of and simulation of almost the entire starship with superb CGI and details.It's confirmed- the official length of the 2009 starship is 725 meters/ 2,380 feet compared with the classic Enterprise spanning only 288 meters/ 948 feet. In my September 2010 (click here)posting on the subject, I remarked:

Maybe this time ILM will get the USS Enterprise NCC 1701 sizing right! For the uninitiated, the size of the new starship has been subject of debate. The design size was 366m according to Alex Jaeger of ILM, and this still makes sense, considering that in this case the shuttle bay 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.

So the debate is settled, as I found out.

Since the images on film can be too fast to pick up, I never knew that the 2009 Enterprise's hangar bay doors had a indented Starfleet Delta Shield design when closed.

Phasers on the 2009 Enterprise are for once utilized in the way they should. The ventral primary hull phasers has a 3-point axis configuration. Naturally, the tactical officer should be able to discharge all 3 emitters simultaneously or in succession and on multiple vectors to the limits of the tageting range. Prior to the TNG, DS9 and Voyager, all audience saw was one or two single continuous beams.

Back then , phaser emitters were in pod configurations and it seems from the close-up above, a single emitter has a swivelling mechanism giving it the most line-of-sight from the target subject. With CGI, these details can be seen. On a movie prop, these details can only be made out if the prop makers actually built a scale version of individual components.

And for the first time (for me at least), the Enterprise's aft photon torpedo launcher. Located on the belly of the ship, on the stardrive section.