Volumetrics

Starship Volumetrics I
Starship Volumetrics II:  Chrono-Volumetrics
Starship Volumetrics III:  Crew Densities

Recommended Reading:
Volumetrics 101 by 'BHMM'

Quick Reference
Starship Mass Data Explained
   1.  Canon Masses and Densities (Scotty)
   2.  The 190,000 Tonne Fallacy
   3.  The Kobayashi Maru
   4.  The Borg and Starship Hull Material Density
   5.  Historical Trend?
Notes by Ship Class

Deriving volume estimates for the objects and spacecraft we see is a troublesome task, especially for curvy TNG-era Trek ships.  While it would be virtually impossible to do by hand, though, it can be done quite well by computer.   Raytracing programs have been around for a long time, but as the technology and internet have improved the online CGI modeling community has grown and shared its resources.  Hundreds of meshes are available these days, and a good many of them are of sci-fi ships.   With tools such as areavol for Lightwave, plus the many extraordinary meshes shared among the modeling community, it is possible to get very good estimates of starship volume data.  Any such estimates are obviously rough estimates only . . . a model is not the "real" thing, and variances will occur with even the best-looking mesh of polygons.  Indeed, lower-poly models may even be preferable, since high-detail models can have overlaps and whatnot that skew the results.   Of course you don't want to go too undetailed . . . calculating the surface area of a perfect sphere will put you in the ballpark of the surface area of the hull of the Death Star, for instance.  However, as anyone who's seen Star Wars can tell you, the Death Star's surface isn't perfectly flat and featureless.   The level of detail on the model, then, can make a large difference in the results obtained.

The above having been said, any data from just about any model is going to be far superior to what someone could come up with on paper.

Masao Okasaki of the exquisite Starfleet Museum (Enterprise, the way it should've been) was kind enough to provide me with some of that data as originally compiled by Nob Akimoto, a poster to the TrekBBS.  The volume and surface area measurements were based on meshes whose design length corresponds to the ship lengths given by Bernd Schneider's Ex Astris Scientia starship database.   In addition, reader "D-Five" has also provided an amazing amount of assistance with this page, confirming many of Nob Akimoto's values within a reasonable margin of variability.  (An exception was the Excelsior, which "D-Five" and I agreed based on comparison with the TMP Constitution was simply too small in the Akimoto list; its data has been replaced below.)    "D-Five" also provided values for ships which were not on Akimoto's original list, including various Star Wars vessels and Federation adversary vessels. 

For the most part, the lengths of these newly-added ships also correspond to EAS, but there have been a few occasions where I made a judgement call based either on my own scalings or on choosing a different compromise of contradictory scalings than Bernd.   These values may change later if I should find my calls to be in error after additional scaling work occurs.

In the following, I provide those length estimates along with the surface area and volume data for ships of that size and design.  Again, these are approximations only, though I do give the values to as many significant digits as I'm given, and unless specifically marked otherwise I consider the ships to be valid representations and thus the values should be within a few percentage points.   However, your cubic meterage may vary.

I also provide some other extraneous minutiae.  The first bit of minutiae is listed as "Constitution Volume", and is intended as a comparison to the volume of the Constitution Class (TOS) ship in multiples of the 1701 volume.   The second is the volume coefficient, suggested in the Volumetrics 101 article by BHMM.  It is basically a comparison of the ship's true volume with a cube of the same length, so long skinny-looking ships will have a low one and wide, tall, beefy-looking ships will have a high one.  It is also useful for getting a volume for ships whose length you disagree with.  Third is "V/SA ratio", which gives a comparison value between the volume and surface area of the vessels . . . not all that useful necessarily as it will scale with size, but interesting nonetheless.

And finally, I offer an estimated metric tonnage, based on the starship volumes.   The values serve as an upper and lower range based off two mass statements.   More on this very interesting data can be found below.

Star Wars vessel data appears at the top of the list.  First come the two Death Stars.  Naturally, no Trek-based tonnage estimate appears with those.   (And besides, they're just helluva-heavy.)    Similarly, I decided against guessing at the masses of the smaller vessels.   Next comes Federation starship data, listed by either canon or popularly-accepted class name.  Then come shuttles, stations, and adversary ships.  

Vessels marked with a gold asterisk have data which comes from "D-Five".  The TMP nacelle information comes from "The Red Admiral".  Contributing data on his exquisite Nova mesh is modeler Joe McMullen.  The remaining Star Trek ships are from Nob Akimoto's list.  Vessels with a "~" in front of their values are based on models I find to be very questionable representations, such as my use of sphere data for the Death Stars, or the Romulan Warbird, which evidently people find especially difficult to model accurately.

Extensive notes follow.   So, without further ado:

Note:   Some of the figures are in a state of official review, and these are darkened in the below.

Starship Mass Data Explained

1.  Canon Masses and Densities

We've only gotten a few references to starship masses in the various Trek adventures, but fortunately we have enough:

"The man drives a 700,000 ton starship, so someone thinks he'd make a good field medic." 
            - The Doctor, "Phage"[VOY1]

"700,000 metric tons, 15 decks, computer systems augmented with bioneural circuitry, top cruising speed warp 9.975."
            - Captain Janeway, "Relativity"[VOY5]

The first, smaller masses in the list above were obtained from dividing the 700,000 tons by Voyager's volume, and then applying that density to all the other ship volumes.   The result of the division was approximately 1.11842, which implies that the density of the Intrepid Class starship should be just 1,118.42 kg/m³, roughly (and intentionally) corresponding to the density of the Apollo capsules per TrekBBS posts by Rick Sternbach.   (Just for fun:  if the first Death Star were as dense as Voyager, it would tip the scales at 1,011,834,574,000,000 (one quadrillion) metric tons!)

The second, larger masses used a similar method based on a different comment altogether:

"Almost a million gross tons of vessel, depending on a hunk of crystal the size of my fist."
            - Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott, "Mudd's Women"[TOS1]

This statement is a curious one . . . gross tonnage generally isn't a unit of mass at all in the naval context.  The best jargon-free definition would be the one I found here, where the following is stated:

 "A Gross ton is not, as some would expect, a unit of weight.  Rather it is a marine term equal to 100 cubic feet [...] used to describe the size of vessel.  Gross tonnage indicates the internal volume of a vessel, including cargo holds and other areas, while net tonnage is the commercially useful internal capacity of the ship, that is, gross tonnage less the crew quarters, engine rooms, and so on."

As noted above, the volume of the ship is estimated to be 211,248 cubic meters.  That's 7,460,152 cubic feet.   The ship should therefore be about 74,600 gross tons, not even close to "nearly a million".   

One solution would be to accept Scotty's statement and take the ship to be a helluva lot bigger . . . but we can't do that.   Not only do we get a good sense of the ship's scale from the windows, the TMP hull-walking scene, various comparative graphics (such as the one in Keiko's classroom on DS9) and so on, but we also have a direct sizing of the ship (in feet) from "The Enterprise Incident"[TOS2]:

(Thanks to Trek5 for these images)

There's just no way the ship should be ballooned out to the length that would be required to give her nearly a million gross tons of volume.  The images above constrain us to the low-to-mid 900s, in feet . . . or around 289 meters.   Had Scotty meant to imply that the volume-based gross tonnage were about 900,000, then the ship would have 900,000,000 cubic feet of volume.  That's 25,485,161.9 cubic meters.   Using the volume coefficient based on 289 meters and 211,248m³, then the Constitution Class would have to come in at 1,428 meters, or over 4,700 feet.  That's well above any estimate for the vessel, and given Picard's direct statement that the Enterprise-E was almost 700 meters long, it would put the Constitution at over twice the length of the Sovereign Class.  Obviously taking the gross tonnage as a volume statement is not the way to go.

There is, however, a solution.  The Imperial weight scheme features the "gross hundredweight" or "long hundredweight".  Twenty of these are equal to a "gross ton" or (as it is more commonly known) a "long ton", equal to 2,240 pounds (1,016kg).  References here, here, here, et cetera.   

Besides serving as an argument for the immediate adoption of the metric system in both normal and naval affairs to avoid all this damned confusion of similar terms having totally different meanings, this also happens to mean that Scotty's statement was not in error.  The Enterprise was indeed nearly a million gross (or long) tons in mass.   If we assumed that "nearly a million" equalled 900,000 gross tons, then the ship's mass would be 914,442 metric tonnes, and her density would be 4,329kg/m³.

2. The 190,000 Tonne Fallacy

The Star Trek non-canon has featured different mass estimates for NCC-1701.  One of the more popular has been a figure of 190,000 metric tonnes, which originally appeared in the writer's guide (much like a 1.5 million tonne figure for Voyager).  The 190,000 tonne figure, however, appeared well before the design of the ship was finalized, and before a final size had been chosen.   (One of the early Enterprise concepts had the ship as being 200 feet long, and even shortly before the first pilot the ship was thought to be around 500 feet long.)   

Nonetheless the figure persisted, due in part to its inclusion in Whitfield's 1968 "The Making of Star Trek" which made it easy to find and reference in an age before DVDs and VCRs.   From there it made its way into Franz Joseph's Technical Manual, and from there into many other materials.  Some newer non-canon materials such as the DS9TM have supported the canon mass by showing TMP-era vessels as having high densities, but others such as Starship Spotter continue to use the fandom figure.

At 190,000 tonnes, the TOS Enterprise would be 90% as dense as water . . . that is to say, the ship would float.  Voyager, a ship designed to land and which is explicitly identified as being fast and nimble, would be 133% denser.   That's 136,000 metric tonnes extra.  This, of course, makes little sense . . . one would expect Voyager to be as light as possible, with probably the smallest density in the fleet.  Otherwise they could just slap landing legs (or pontoons, for that matter) on an old Miranda class and go on about their business.

Proponents of Trek fandom deride Scotty's canon comment as "anomalous", and claim priority due to 35+ years of non-canon materials which have persisted with the erroneous figure.  Further, it's claimed that the "Mudd's Women" statement was an error by the writer, listed in the credits as Stephen Kandel.

Such arguments are flawed in multiple ways.  First, an error that persists does not become more correct the longer it lasts.  It simply becomes an older, more oft-repeated error.   

Second, the TOS writers did not operate in a vacuum . . . Roddenberry's rewrites and the oversight by the writing team were well-known.   Further, as reported in Star Trek Creator (p. 285), the writing credits submitted to the Writer's Guild for "Mudd's Women" read "Story by Gene Roddenberry; teleplay by Stephen Kandel, John D.F. Black, Gene Roddenberry".  Roddenberry also attempted to charge Desilu for a "polish" of the story.  Thus, there is no question on the matter of authorship and validity . . . Roddenberry was involved.

3.  The Kobayashi Maru

There has been one other incident wherein we received detailed ship data, though it has too many problems to be very useful.  Note the following graphic from Star Trek II:

As you can see, a freighter of that period could mass at least 147,943 metric tons, or 147,943,000 kilograms, when loaded.   Unfortunately, we don't know anything about the ship's volume.   We have the length, width, and height, but that has little meaning.   Only the Borg make ships which are blocky enough to actually fill a box based on their length, width, and height.

Add to that the fact that we have a situation not unlike the "gross tons" above.   "Dead Weight Tonnage" doesn't refer to the mass of the ship, though this is a common misconception.  It actually refers to the difference in mass between a ship when fully loaded and when empty. However, since we also have the cargo capacity in metric tons, this seems a peculiar redundancy, and given the difference of 50,000 metric tons it also would seem to be a peculiar discrepancy.  On the other hand, the additional 50,943 metric tons (over and above the cargo) could refer to ship's additional operating equipment, stores, the 300 passengers and their effects, the 81 crew and their effects, deuterium, and so on . . . even though that seems like an awful lot. It does not refer to the superstructure, propulsion systems, and so on, if it really is dead weight tonnage. In any case, using the 147,943 metric ton figure as ship's mass is actually quite conservative, since that figure (if used properly) would not include the actual mass of the ship, but simply the mass of cargo, personnel, et cetera. The actual mass of the ship when loaded would be far greater.

Still, the main problem with the Kobayashi Maru . . . besides being fictitious, even in the fictitious Trek universe . . . is that we never get to see the design of the ship.   Is it really a 237 x 111 x 70 box?   Or is it a 237 meter long, two-meter wide cylinder with some slender 34 meter long appendages on the top and bottom, and some slender 54.5 meter long appendages on the side?   We have no way to know.  As a result, all we can do is guess at the density of the ship.

4.  The Borg and Starship Hull Material Densities

In "I, Borg"[TNG5], the Enterprise discovers a crashed Borg scout vessel.  Riker, Worf, and Crusher beam down and find a Borg cube that appears to be approximately the size of a small house.  Only one of the five crew survived.  

Later, what Data describes as "a scout ship similar to the one that crashed" comes to the area to find the crashed ship.   Data reads its mass as 2.5 million tonnes.   Even if we assume that the crashed vessel is much bigger than what we saw on the planet . . . some buried in rock or spread around elsewhere on the surface . . . the small crew does place certain limits on its size given normal Borg crew densities.

But at 2.5 million metric tons, the ship would have a mass over three times that of Voyager.   Unless we try to make the ship ridiculously large, this must imply a very high density.

We know from "Endgame"[VOY7] that Borg hulls use tritanium, and this is also used for the infrastructure of their tactical drones ("Dark Frontier"[VOY5]).   

What else do we know of tritanium?   Well, we also know that natural veins of tritanium ore are 21.4 times as hard as diamond and well-nigh impossible to break ("Obsession"[TOS]) and virtually impossible to melt ("Arsenal of Freedom"[TNG2]).  (This naturally leads one to wonder how the hell they do anything with it, but that's neither here nor there.)    We know that the material can be alloyed with various other substances ("Dead Stop"[ENT2], "The Raven"[VOY4], et cetera).   Tritanium alloy is commonly employed in starship framework/hulls ("Dead Stop"[ENT2]), ship hulls ("The Raven"[VOY4], and Type-6 shuttle hulls ("Rascals"[TNG5]).  The interior bulkheads of the Enterprise-D are also tritanium in some cases ("Where Silence Has Lease"[TNG2]).

The Borg ship density would imply that tritanium is very dense.

Also featured on ship hulls is duranium.   The outer hull of NX Class ships was lined with duranium in the 2150's ("The Xindi"[ENT3]) as insulation.  Duranium was used for the outer shielding of the warp core on Intrepid Class ships, and would require a sustained phaser beam to burn through ("Projections"[VOY2]).   Duranium alloy was considered for reinforcement of the tritanium shuttle hull in "Threshold"[VOY2], but was thought to be too brittle for the purpose of transwarp.  The hull of Voyager is at least partially duranium ("Drone"[VOY5], "The Disease"[VOY5]).  Duranium was added at some point to reinforce the hull of the tetraburnium-hulled Delta Flyer ("Body and Soul"[VOY7]), hence the reading of duranium alloys in "Once Upon a Time"[VOY5].  

Cardassian Nor-type stations use two-meter thick duranium composite in the construction of their access conduits, making them difficult to scan within ("Captive Pursuit"[DSN1], "The Siege"[DSN2]).  Duranium composite is also used for the rather less-thick hatch doors of Federation runabouts.  Sisko estimated that it would take Kira an hour to burn through it with her Bajoran hand phaser ("Q-Less"[DSN1]).  Duranium alloy from a destroyed Klingon Vor'Cha cruiser's secondary hull had a magnetic field sufficiently strong to partially disrupt runabout sensors ("Dramatis Personae"[DSN1]).  Magnasite in a liquid form is a substance that can eat through the duranium pins used to hold panels on the walls of DS9 ("Necessary Evil"[DSN2]).  "Poly-duranium alloy blend" is used on the bridges of Defiant Class ships.  Gallamites were trading partners with the Federation, supplying duranium for the war effort ("Penumbra"[DSN7]).

Corridor panels on the Enterprise-D were solid duranium ("A Matter of Perspective"[TNG4]).  Simple transporter test articles were made of solid duranium ("Hollow Pursuits"[TNG5]).   TOS shuttle hulls were a duranium metal shell ("The Menagerie"[TOS1]).  "Most shuttlecraft hulls are made of duranium", according to Geordi in "Final Mission"[TNG5].  Data's skull is partially composed of duranium ("The Chase"[TNG]).  

For the most part, these datapoints would seem to support the idea that duranium is rather light, and features pleasing thermal conductivity properties.

5.  Historical Trend?

Based on the density difference between Voyager and the Enterprise, it's possible that starship densities decline as time goes by, presumably due to design improvements, metallurgical advances, and of course technological advances in propulsion systems.

Granted, it's dangerous to theorize like this with only two data points, since there are plenty of factors which would affect a ship's mass and plenty of other differences to look at in regards to the two ships.  Intrepids, for instance, have tiny nacelles compared to the Constitutions.  Voyager's nacelles account for less than six percent of the ship's total volume, whereas the TOS-era Constitution nacelles account for over a quarter of the Enterprise's volume.  (The Galaxies, incidentally, feature nacelles just under ten percent of the volume of the ship.)  The weight distribution suggested by Voyager's landing legs would seem to go along with the idea that warp nacelles are very massive objects, meaning that the overall density of the Constitution Class Starship may be centered in the area of the nacelles.

Also, the datapoints above regarding hull material densities might also be a clue.   Most starships have been referred to as having tritanium hulls, whereas Voyager's hull is apparently duranium.   Of course, it's most likely that, as is the case with NX-01, both materials are present to some degree.  However, if Voyager's hull is low in the dense tritanium (or if the tritanium is virtually absent from her hull), then it could be that much weight was shed in the design process by giving her a less-dense (but probably more thermally insulated) hull.

Then, there is the ship itself.   A larger ship will require increases in hull materials and internal structural members that will, as a rule of thumb, increase the vessel's mass far beyond what simple scaling by length would suggest.   If you draw a square 10 centimeters in width, a second square of 20 centimeters in width can easily be seen to have four times the surface area, despite the fact that you only doubled the width.  Volume works the same way, only it cubes instead of squares . . . a 10cm cube has a volume of 1,000cm³, whereas a 20cm cube has a volume of 8,000cm³, and a 30cm cube is 27,000cm³!   The surface areas of the cubes do not rise so quickly . . . 600m², 2,400m², and 5,400m², respectively.   But, if the ship's hull and superstructure are some of the most massive parts of the vessel, it's easy to see how quickly the mass of the ship would increase if the ship were larger but built to withstand the same sorts of forces.

Notes and Observations by Class

In no particular order:

0.  The Death Star estimates are heavily rounded above, because they're frickin' huge.  However, since the surface area and volume estimates are based merely on the equations for a sphere (i.e. not counting trenches, superlasers, surface emplacements, and so on), the rounding can't possibly hurt.

1.  The Sovereign's length (and volume, as well) changed in between Insurrection and Nemesis.   The CGI model was heavily reworked, and basic details -- nacelle position, pylon angle and thickness, and keel structure -- were significantly and visibly altered.  

Similar issues would occur with other "star" ships, such as the TOS Enterprise, Enterprise-D and the Defiant.    In the case of the Enterprise-D, there was the slender ILM six-foot Enterprise-D, or the thicker "Bulldog" four-foot Enterprise-D built by Greg Jein.  There were also multiple Defiant models, from the main physical model to separate and dissimilar CGI models by VisionArt, ILM, and Digital Muse.  The VisionArt versions were very close to the model, and very high quality.   The ILM version built for First Contact was quite good, as well.  Then there was the butt-ugly, long-nosed Digital Muse model (used to represent the USS Valiant, as well as the Defiant when she appeared in "Sacrifice of Angels").   

In the case of the Sovereign, we have to assume a refit occurred.   However, the Galaxy and Defiant ships which would switch back and forth even within the same episode (thanks to the magic of stock footage) have to be assumed to be the same, even though we know otherwise . . . unless we want to assume mid-episode refits back and forth between the variations, or else blimp-hulls.

2.  I agree with the EAS 120 meter length for the Defiant, even though the official line is that she's 170 meters in length.   The vast majority of visuals support a ~120 meter length for the ship.   (Scaling anything from DS9 can be a little tricky, however, since David Stipes chose to scale things at his dramaturgic whim, while also maintaining a length list with extremely peculiar values on it, to say the least.  I do not hold his work in high regard as a result.  I bet he liked the Big-Nosed Defiant, too.)   

More details on size and scaling issues are available in the EAS Starship Articles section.

3.  I'm presuming that the Nebula is of the standard type (the "Sutherland" edition, seen throughout DS9), and not the version with the Phoenix "AWACS" pod, which was a longer vessel.

4.  The Galaxy "Stardrive" refers to the entire Stardrive section . . . the engineering hull and warp engines as seen when the Enterprise-D separates. 

5.  I'm not sure how detailed some of the starship meshes were, which might affect the surface area part of the table somewhat.  For instance, the TOS Constitution is almost invariably modelled with a very smooth surface (much like the original filming models), whereas one might wish to put every little odd giblet, nook, and cranny from the Intrepid sensor suites on one's Intrepid model, which could significantly drive up the ship's surface area.   Thus, I wouldn't suggest trying to be too precise when drawing comparisons between the surface area of two different ships.

6.  The Jem'Hadar attack ship data is considered to be more of a guesstimate than an estimate.   The one model of the ship available online resembles the bugs, but is by far the least-accurate model used in the chart above.

7.  The Tac-Fighter is the fighter used by Starfleet and the Maquis . . . it is not the "Maquis Raider" or the Peregrine.   The full-size raider is the Antares Class, as named in Pathways.  The smaller version used by the Maquis is the Peregrine Class "courier ship", as Odo describes in "Heart of Stone"[DS9-3].

8.  Deep Space Nine's width is a subject of debate.  Originally designed at 1,097 meters, it's sometimes been scaled as high as two kilometers, with something in the 1,250-1,350 range being perhaps the most common.   The DS9 Tech Manual gives a width of 1451 meters as a sort of compromise position between one and two kilometers, but I opted for 1,275.   Suffice it to say that you'll never figure out how large the station is by looking at it or any ship near it . . . blame it on the Denorios Belt or something.   (Or, just thank Stipes, the Official Scaling Screw-ups Whipping Boy of ST-v-SW.Net.)

I went ahead and gave mass values for DS9, even though it isn't a starship and is without the heavy nacelles.  On the other hand, the station has two-meter thick duranium around some of its conduits ("Captive Pursuit"[DS9-1]), so I figure the mass should indeed fall somewhere in that range.

Incidentally, the station was, as of "Sanctuary"[DS9-2], only capable of housing 7,000 people according to Odo.  By the time of "Field of Fire"[DS9-7], over 900 Starfleet personnel were aboard.

8a.  Spacedock and the Starbase 74 style bases we've seen have had their mass reduced by 50% in an effort to account for the enormous hollow docking area in their mushroom-head section.

9.  The Klingon Bird-of-Prey has similar issues, having been scaled at everything from 50 to over 700 meters in various scenes throughout Trek.   We know there are various classes of the ship, though, which gives a little wiggle room.   In the above, I assigned the canon names to reasonably-average canon sizes.   The ship's volume, incidentally, will change a bit depending on the wing configuration . . . both BOPs were measured with wings flat, not tilted up or down.   Your mileage (or meterage) may vary.

10.  The Jem'Hadar battlecruiser is commonly estimated to be something like 600-650 meters.   However, scrutiny of its first appearance in "In Purgatory's Shadow"[DS9-5] and close comparison to the attack ship shows that the vessels simply cannot be that large, at least in that episode.  I haven't seen enough of the later seasons to judge the ship's size later, though.

11.  Being a much shorter ship, one might've expected the Miranda to have much less volume than the Enterprise-A.   However, the large four-deck-high extension on the rear of the saucer does much to offset the issue, though that and the torpedo "roll bar" do cause the ship's surface area to be rather high (hence the low value for its V/SA ratio).   The same sort of thing occurs with the Nebula, whose pod severely increases the surface area while providing little volume, giving the total ship about half the V/SA of the Galaxy Class. 

12.  In general, one would think it preferable to make ships with high volume and low surface area.   That way, you get conservation of hull materials, allowing stronger hulls per ship, or more ships.   On the other hand, the end result of that line of thinking would be a sphere shape, such as that found on the Daedalus Class primary hull (a model of which appears on Sisko's desk, and is thus presumed to exist), or on the Death Stars.    

But a sphere would make a poor tactical choice, as it would not only make a nice big target from any angle (unlike an equal-volume saucer, which, though it could be even larger from certain directions, at least has the option of presenting a minimal aspect), but would also reduce the external area available for weapons emplacements.   And, as for warp-driven starships, there would appear to be warp dynamics issues in play, which is the presumable reason for all the curves on Federation ships. 

13.   It's interesting to see that there was such a sudden jump in ship volumes around the TMP era.  The Constellations and Excelsiors are both over three times as large as the Constitution.   To be fair, both have about twice the Constitution nacelle volume, thanks to the Constellations' four engines and the big huge engines of the Excelsiors . . . even so, there's still lots of extra space involved in the two newer ships).   It's also curious to note that the only other ship design of that era, the Soyuz Class, should also have an interior volume significantly greater than the Constitutions.

14.   The NX Class is disturbingly big compared to the Constitution.   She has about 94% of the volume of the Constitution, which is bad enough.  However, if you add to that the fact that her nacelles take up far less percentage of that volume, you come to realize that the useful internal volume of the NX Class is actually greater than that of the later Connie!

Fortunately, the NX has a crew of just 80 instead of the 203 of the 2250's Constitutions.  This allows us to assume that the ship's inner mechanics . . . propulsion, life support, et cetera . . . actually take up a far greater percentage of the available volume than on the later ships.   Nonetheless, a less-voluminous design (read: "Daedalus") would've been preferred.

15.  The mass and density of the Delta Flyer are unknown, but there was an occasion where the vessel floated slowly toward the surface of an ocean.   Unfortunately, that doesn't help us too much, but it does put us in the ballpark.   

In "Thirty Days"[VOY5], the Delta Flyer is used to go to the center of an artificially-maintained water sphere in space.   The center is said to be over 600km deep, and the residents of the water sphere have never gone there due to the pressure.    The Delta Flyer goes down there easily, but loses immersion shields and propulsion and thus must float back up.

Can the water density at such a depth be determined, thus giving us some indication of the Flyer's density?   Well, it's problematic.   The water sphere had a device in the center which somehow offered containment via artificial gravity.  Whether this acted like a natural gravity well or projected a containment field at the surface is unclear.  Assuming it was the latter, though, we can make some very rough calculations.

A 1200km sphere of water will mass approximately 9.05E20kg, or about 1/6600th of Earth's mass.  The sphere should thus have a surface gravity of about 0.16773 m/s, so at a depth of 600km the pressure would be about 100 megaPascals, or almost a thousand times normal Earth atmospheric pressure.  This is roughly equivalent to the pressure at about ten kilometers below sea level on Earth (and it doesn't get much deeper).  At such a pressure, though, the density of water becomes higher, approaching 1100 kg/m³.   To float back up, the Flyer had to rid itself of non-essential equipment . . . this might suggest that the flyer's normal density is probably similar to that of Voyager.

If, on the other hand, the central containment device acted more like a normal gravity well, then based on a simple depth model of our own ocean at 30 degrees latitude, even a chilly 100km depth would've produced a water density of over 1300 kg/m³, and a pressure of 150,000 decibars.

Those two values serve as very rough lower and upper bounds for the Flyer's density.  It isn't clear, though, whether these values would work for other shuttlecraft . . . the Flyer has several Borg-inspired systems, a hull composed of tetraburnium instead of the normal tritanium or duranium, and so on.   However, it is nonetheless a potential supporting fact.

Special thanks to scifi3d.theforce.net, the Lightwave Group, TrekMeshes.ch,  KlingonAcademy.com, and to all the modelers who have spent so much time making their vessels.

Extra special thanks to Flare poster "blssdwlf", who pointed out the existence of the "gross ton" mass measurement.