Akira

Akira-class

The Akira-class is a relatively large type of starships with heavy armament. The warp pylons are swept downward and are attached to two catamaran-like secondary hulls which are connected to the top of the saucer section. A weapons module is located at the top between the two secondary hulls. The Akira is a through-deck carrier with two doors at the rear and one central door at the front end of the saucer.

The Akira-class appears in "Star Trek: First Contact:, various Deep Space 9 Dominon War episodes and Voyager: "Message in a Bottle". A few scenes showing the Akira with ships of known sizes point to a length between 300m and 400m. It seems that this size of simplicity, the same VFX sizes were determined for the three larger ships of "Star Trek: First Contact", although the Akira design should probably be longer than the Norway and the Steamrunner. Actually, most VFX scenes don't exclude the possibility the Akira is actually longer than 400m. "Message in a Bottle" shows the Akira next to the Defiant, whose size is in dispute as well and the evidence is even much more contradictroy. Under the assumption that the Defiant is 170m this time, as always postulated, the Akira would be longer than 400m.

The Akira-class has countless windows - probably too many for an alleged warship - that allow an easy distinction of decks. There are 19 decks altogether, without the weapons pod. This yields an absolute minimum length of 330m, if the decks are only 2.5m tall and a maximum of 522m for an average deck height of 4m. Assuming a standard deck height of 3.4m as on most Federation starships seen so far the Akira would be 440m, and further evidence points to about the same length. There is no reason to assume that the Akira is an exception, even if we speculate that a warship might have decks of only 3m or less. The Defiant as the only warship so far is the best counter-evidence, at a generous length of 120m the decks (4-deck version, unless we ignore the MSD) would be 3.9m tall, not to mention the odd "official" ship with still 4 decks but 170m!

Davide Stipes gives a length of only 262m in his newsgroup post. This is much too small for a ship with 19 decks. Actually, the decks would be only 2m tall! This is the main reason why this figure does not deserve further consideration.

The first printed size comparison for the Akira is given in the Federation Starships chart in the Star Trek Encyclopedia II. Unfortunately, the ships are only roughly but not exactly shown to scale in this chart. Concerning the Akira, any length between 400m relative to the Intrepid (344m) or 460 relative to the Galaxy (641m) could be true. The size charts remain unchanged in the extended Encyclopedia III.

The Deep Space Nine Technical Manual gives size figures for the ships featrued in teh series, including the Akira-class. It can be noticed that several Starfleet as well as alien ships with definitely known design sizes are rendered too long in the DS9TM. This reason is that the size figures for the DS9TM were derived directly from the ship charts in the Encyclopedia II, by simply measuring the depictions and calculating the "real" lengths based on a 642.51m Galaxy or a 48m Vor'cha. Therefore the Akira size figure in the DS9TM is not new, but a consequence of the faulty (or at least highly inaccurate) Encyclopedia II chart. The intended size for the chart is somewhere between 400m and 460m.

The VFX shots mostly suggest an Akira-class of less than 400m length, but the ship could be larger if we take into account that the Akira is shown either too small or next to ships (in the same plane) that don't really allow a size comparison (Steamrunner, Defiant). The structural analysis points consistently to a size of 440m + or - 10m. This is most probably the design size intended by Alex Jaegar. The Akira sizes given in the official literature are in the expected range, but not reliable because of careless scaling of the ship schematics. Unless the ship is shown at a really small size next to a ship whose size is definitly known, I will stick to the 440m Akira.