Reconciling Starship Scale in a Discovery Game

The powers that be at CBS have determined that, for whatever reason the starships in ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ are somewhat larger than ships of that era of Trek were previously.

Specifically the familiar, and much beloved Constitution-class -- including the
USS Enterprise NCC-1701 herself -- has been scaled up. Whereas the accepted length of that ship was previously 281 m for the iteration seen in TOS, and 290 m for the “refit” introduced in ‘Star Trek: The Motion Picture’, the best information at the time of this writing based on the lengths of models puts the ‘Discovery’ iteration of the Constitution-class ships at 442 m.

With that significant a change in size, the question than needs to be asked, what happens to its Scale? In the Core Rulebook, Constitution-class spaceframes are Scale 4, and while it can be difficult to pin down exact sizes for most ships in Star Trek, scaled up to 442 m the DSC Constitution is more in line with ships listed as being Scale 5 in both the Core Rulebook, and the Command Division supplement. Obviously size isn’t the only factor in determining Scale, but generally within the fiction of the series larger ships mean larger drives, and larger drives mean more power for the shields and weapons, and Star Trek Adventures uses Scale as means of representing that.

Though the Constitution-class is the only ship class we’ve seen in both ‘Discovery’ and the previous Star Trek installments, I’m going to assume that if other familiar starships do make an appearance on the show, or any of the other shows CBS intends to produce, they’ll be similarly scaled to maintain relative sizes; it wouldn’t make much sense for McCoy to exclaim how large the
USS Excelsior was if the Enterprise was of comparable size.

So then, does the Constitution-class class remain Scale 4, and what that means changes, or does it become Scale 5, and does that change ripple along the entire line, bumping all other ships up in Scale to accommodate the change? Granted, it probably doesn’t matter at this time for most people playing in a ‘Discovery’ era game just how relatively powerful a Galaxy or Sovereign-class ship is, but the Star Trek universe is lousy with time-travel, so it’s not unreasonable to assume that the issue might come up.

My proposal would be to have the Constitution-class and all the subsequently produced starships increase in Scale one step, with all the accompanying changes. Everything that entered service prior the Constitution-class should remain at the established scale from the official rules. So while the ‘Enterprise’ era NX-class would still be a Scale 3, the Defiant-class introduced in the TNG era would not be a Scale 4. Obviously this wouldn’t apply to the Scale 1 and 2 small craft, which would remain the same regardless of the service date.