If you'd like to learn more about working with the nuts and bolts of Memory Alpha, I have a few links that you might want to check out:

• Our policies and guidelines provides links to inform you on what is appropriate for Memory Alpha and what is not. Particular items of note are the canon policy, the editing guidelines, our point of view, copyrights and guidelines for proper etiquette.
• How to edit a page includes a basic tutorial about how to use our special wikitext code here on Memory Alpha.
• Naming conventions provides guidelines on how to name a new page that you may want to create.
• The Manual of Style is an overview of the basic guidelines for how to format and style your articles.
• How to write a great article is a list of suggestions that can help you put together an article that might end up on our Featured Articles list someday.
• See the user projects page for current projects of our archivists, or help us to reduce the number of stubs.
• Look up past changes you have made in your contributions log.
• Keep track of your favorite Memory Alpha articles through your very own watchlist.
• Create your own user page and be contacted on this page, your talk page.

One other suggestion: if you're going to make comments on talk pages or make other sorts of comments, please be sure to sign them with four tildes (~~~~) to paste in your user name and the date/time of the comment.

If you have any questions, please feel free to post them in our Ten Forward community page. Thanks, and once again, welcome to Memory Alpha! – Tom 19:19, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the welcome :)Eta Carinae 20:11, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Hey, I really wasn't offended by your comment about Star Trek the film. I only just read it. And I did not vandalize your user page. I don't know why you think I did, or who did it, but I don't support that kind of behavior. Thanks for not inducing a flame war over a misunderstanding! I appreciate your civility. --75.151.116.106 19:56, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

Why the Apple Store Enterprise is so SmallEdit

Why, yes, I do have an explanation for the diminished size of the Enterprise. Bigger is not often better. In military terms a large vessel often packs a big punch, but lacks the ability to deliver it. The Yamato-Class was a tremendous vessel used by the Japanese Imperial Navy during World War II, and to this day holds the record for most non-nuclear firepower ever brandished by a single vehicle in human history. And yet not one Yamato-Class destroyer ever sank and Allied ship. Why? Because it was incredibly unwieldy. By the time it ever got a gun turned about onto an Allied vessel, the vessel was no longer there. The massive ships would take hours to alter formation, all while American and Australian destroyers, frigates, and submarines were rapidly making course corrections, swarming, and sinking the behemoths.

The "Prime" Enterprise was primarily a science vessel. Arguable, so was the "Abrams" Enterprise, but with far less emphasis on science and far more emphasis on tactical equipment and strategic value. Starfleet has a long record of making massive science vessels and tiny combat craft. The Galaxy Class was the top-of-the-line long range science and scouting craft, and it's absolutely massive. Meanwhile the Defiant Class is positively miniature. In space, the smaller the vehicle the more tactically important it is. It's just a matter of packing as much punch into as small a space as possible.

Thus the larger size of the "Prime" Enterprise is due to a necessity for larger cargo space (we must carry a whole lot of medicine to Beta Gamma!) and passenger space ("Journey to Babel"). It was also required to act as a mobile embassy. There was also a large emphasis on crew morale through the use of open space and recreation. Meanwhile, the most pressing concerns for the designers of the "Abrams" Enterprise were vehicle speed, turning radius, density (those really big open hallways and rooms are prone to collapse - make them smaller and make the ship denser so it can withstand more concussion), and power consumption (there's a lot of energy lost in the plasma stream just to travel 300 feet - and you can get more fuel efficiency if the fuel only has to travel 150 feet.)--75.151.116.106 20:58, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Thank you very much for the effort you put into this comment. It makes all the sense when you put it that way, but, unfortunately, for me this is yet another indicator that the franchise I know and love is now dead. The new Enterprise would be right at home in the Star Wars universe (right in line with all those tie fighters--is that what they are called?), but Star Trek is not supposed to be about noise, explosions, and no coherent plot whatsoever--those are the attributes I would seek (and enjoy) in a Star Wars or a Terminator movie. Star Trek is about people, and this is one area where the new movie fails spectacularly. Even though the actors' performance is for the most part amazing, the overall story sucks so bad that all that performance goes to naught. And I hear that one of the writers is a "massive Star Trek fan"--if that's so, he must be a fan of some other Star Trek I don't know about.

Anyhoo, thanks again for the detailed comment; I truly appreciate that you took time to do that. Best,—Eta Carinae 13:27, 21 May 2009 (UTC)