Another Firefly question (starship specs)...

[MacTech]

I’m torture testing a customer’s iMac G5 20" with a suspected wonky power supply, by running proccesor-heavy apps, Apple DVD Player, which is a software-based decoder does a good job of heating up the processor…

anyway, i have the Serenity movie playing in the background, and it’s in the opening scene where Serenity is performing atmospheric re-entry…

first off, what is that spinny ring thingy on the aft end of the ship, and what purpose do the “gates” around the ?thruster? assembly at the stern (directly behind the spinny ring thingy) serve?

secondly, how large is Serenity, compared to other more familiar starships…

Enterprise (Constitution class)
Ent-D
Moya
Talyn
Rio Grande runabout (DS9)
the Defiant (DS9)

i get the feeling that Serenity is a smaller starship, perhaps around the size of a DS9 Runabout or Defiant class, maybe a Correlian Corvette from Star Wars…

[Ethilrist]

I don’t know about the spinny ring thingy (remember, they were trying to make a spaceship that looked like a cross between a bird and a bug), but it’s tiny compared to the Enterpriseses and Moya, probably bigger than the Rio Grande, smaller than the Defiant. Shorter than a jumbo jet, if about as tall.

[Ephemera]

*Serenity is an 03 Firefly-class spaceship featured on the science fiction television series Firefly and follow-on movie Serenity, created by Joss Whedon. She fits the profile of a light freighter, having a cargo area equivalent to about three or four semis. The photon-reaction drive in the bulbous rear section of the ship lights up when accelerating, resembling a firefly and, thus, the class moniker. The engine pods rotate down like a VTOL aircraft. Whenever the ship lands, her wings fold down like the wings of a bird coming to rest. The aft of the ship is outfitted with extenders beside and below the photon-reaction drive to ease the turbulence of lift-off and atmospheric re-entry. As she is a run-of-the-mill civilian cargo vessel, Serenity has no weapons or defenses beyond the guile and skill of her crew.

…*

Serenity (fictional spacecraft)

It’s bigger than a Danube (which is the class name of the runabouts) but much, much smaller than a Defiant.

[Push_You_Down]

Corellian Covettes are pretty big relatively. I would say the Serenity is smaller thab a Star Wars Corellian Corvette but bigger than the Defiant. I was always under the impression the Defiant wasn’t all the big.

[Banquet_Bear]

…I can’t find Serenity here, but this should provide you with a few hours of fun…
http://www.merzo.net/
Best viewed on Internet Explorer, that allows drag and drop comparisons…

[Push_You_Down]

Guess I’m wrong

[Ephemera]

@Push You Down

Corellian Covettes are pretty big relatively. I would say the Serenity is smaller thab a Star Wars Corellian Corvette but bigger than the Defiant. I was always under the impression the Defiant wasn’t all the big.

In comparison to other Federation vessels, no, not very, but it’s not tiny, either.

ditl.org, a treknology site, lists its dimensions as 171 meters long, 134 meters wide, and 30 meters (4 decks) tall with a mass of 355,000 metric tons with an operating crew of 50 and a maximum passenger limit of 150. That’s definitely larger than Serenity.

[Santos_L_Halper]

The references I’ve seen say Serenity is 191 feet long (I think Joss Whedon says that on one of the commetaries on the DVD set too). Thomas Models is working on a model kit of the ship, and has several diagrams on their web site, including this one comparing it to the Enterprise. The Enterprise is about 1000 feet long, so that drawing matches up well with the 191 foot size for Firefly.