Fantastic work! Forgive me but what scale is this again? I am working (slowly) on a 1/537 scale and have yet to work out where I could get some decals from.
That is a very interesting question...! *lol* I am one of those who has looked at how the
Excelsior maps out to its official length at the time of 467m didn't work -- saucer rim was too narrow for two decks, windows were in all the wrong places, etc. The Deep Space Nine Technical Manual gave us a length of a bit over 511m, but there are issues with how that length was arrived at (goofiness with book layout and misinterpretations by people who weren't told).
People with even more time to nerd out over this have banged their heads against it for years, assessing things like the TSFS bridge set versus the 'bubble' bridge on top of the original version of the model, windows, the upper limit of possibility based on the size of the Spacedock door it exits through in that film to pursue
Enterprise, which we see in comparison to that opening and its size is known (although debate over the size of the TOS and TMP
Enterprises is another matter)... The aired/screened material is little help, as it has given us deck locations and MSDs that just don't
work.
The end result is that the ship needs to be somewhere between the old official 467m (which it can't be) and the maximum estimated 700m of the
Enterprise-B MSD (which it also can't be). Some have objected, pointing out that the
Enterprise-D is only 642m long, but it was rebutted that a great deal of the
Excelsior's length is the warp engines, and that's not a good indicator of overall volume, given the much more compact engines of later starship generations. Me, I go by the saucer rim. Upscaling by 15% to keep up with the required size increase of the
Enterprise (both versions), and then about another 10 percent to get things to line up better. Others, using similar methods, have arrived at similar figures. So a current "idealized" estimate would put the
Excelsior somewhere in the 543m-590m range.
Given all the changes Vidar has made to the LM model, I think we'll need to wait until he's done to get the final length of
this version. But my vague estimate, based on the changes he's made to the engines and saucer and going by the "corrected" size of the "real" ship, above, would put his in the vicinity of 1:500, which is a nice, common battleship model scale.
