This week I saw a survey overwhelmingly declaring Trek geeks to be the most annoying of all geek types, surmounting even Linux users (my vote). This column won't be doing much to either defend or refute this reputation, for you see we are back to nitpicking ship details.

The official startrek.com site recently posted their tour of Enterprise NX-01. In addition to the cool wraparound set views - a clever idea, that - the website contains blueprints of starboard and dorsal views. The dorsal view contains usable measurements for width and length (though curiously not the maximums in either direction, computed below). The starboard view contains a crude cutaway locating major sets featured in the show.

The presentation chokes these images through a tiny browser portal (why?!) but the entire image can be extracted using piece-by-piece composition. The images are not scaled vis-a-vis each other but a desktop publishing package can be used to compensate.

The cutaway reveals few issues, including the queer location of engineering. From the starboard view it appears that engineering is located just aft of saucer center on decks D & E. However the episode "Cold Front" locates engineering on C-deck. How can this be? Unfortunately the deckplan is not easy to comprehend as it is crowded with unidentified markings.

Also, the cutaway shows the plasma conduits below the warp core outside engineering - yet the conduits clearly emerge and exit upwards inside! Do they double back inside the saucer? These are not exhaust conduits - this is part of the drive train of the ship. This layout does not make sense, and moving it up to C deck only makes the situation worse. (Sure makes more sense in the pod ... and it fits there too ...)

The dorsal view displays a length of 225m which not quite covers nose to nacelle tip. Including a front part of the saucer and nacelle tip then, the actual length of the ship comes closer to 275m. (My posted work involves calculations assuming the correct length to be 190m.)

Also, by the scale of the official drawings I estimate the width of Archer's ship to be roughly 150m - some 20 meters larger than NCC-1701. Scaling the starboard to the dorsal view, the overall height of the ship is about 43m, that of the saucer about 38m. At least it's not taller!

Can Archer's ship really be almost as big as Kirk's while fitting one-fifth the crew? Apparently so. Hey, I don't make up these numbers - I just relate what they say.