I'm not kidding when I say for the FIRST time I actually can grasp the size
I'm not kidding when I say for the FIRST time I actually can grasp the size
A little short for a starship, isn't he?
140 comments
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Have you seen container ships? They're perspective-bendingly massive. 400m is a quarter of a mile.
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Thanks because this image still didn’t help. Most people don’t see container ships very often.
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I used to work at a port and would see those ships out at sea. They look like they are just offshore.
Then you see the fishing boats go out and all but disappear against the massive backdrop. You realize they're many many miles out.
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It seems bigger on TV…
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TV adds 20 pounds.
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Yeah I'm not seeing how there's several dozen people moving, working, and living in that.
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A container ship's crew is 20-30 people, and that whole thing is mostly containers. I bet they'd fit.
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Oh you.
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They sleep in hallways....
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AS much as I enjoy some aspects of Lower Decks, that was one of the most phenomenally stupid decisions that they could possibly have made.
The crew sizes for Federation starships are TINY compared to the actual size of the ships. SNW giving every crew member their own studio apartment is something that reflects the ludicrous amount of empty space that a Federation starship has availalbe to it.
If you ever look at the deck plans, there's just a crazy amount of space that's unused.
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Maybe if they narrowed that hallway a little, they could all have their own quarters.
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In Strange New Worlds everyone above Ensign apparently has their own studio apartment.
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You'd be stacking people on one another for sure. However the tight quarters then gives creedence to stuff like Cerritos and Voyager not having thick enough walls/doors to dampen sound. Then Enterprise-D is a whole different beast and it makes no sense for the opposite reason. It's too damn big with not enough crew. You'd have people working in their own section never meeting another soul during their whole day.
But that brings me to something else (because I have severely unmedicated ADHD and I apologize). Picard Season 3 got rapped for having the Titans bridge be really dark all the time. The lighting of the whole ship was way darker. Surprisingly I actually liked that. It felt like they were on a submarine or some small contained vessel, just then against the harshness of what was outside. That submarine quality really should be used in more shows. I know TOS had random people walking around the corridors (like the famous example of a dude who was turning an invisible valve on a wall) but I like those tight spaces.
Oh and to prove the ADHD? The Crossfield class is 900m long. Roughly. I mean she's 2/3rds nacelle but still.
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Here's some more perspective. The aircraft carrier pictured apparently carries almost 2000 people.
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This video has a rendering of the Enterprise D's crew standing in a group on top of the saucer section, to give an intuitive understanding of how ridiculously huge the ship is in comparison.
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Picard Season 3 got rapped for having the Titans bridge be really dark all the time.
Have these people not seen The Motion Picture? The bridge was so dark in that movie, it doesn’t even seem like they’re on the Enterprise. At least the Titan is a different ship, AND you still get to see the Enterprise with its bright lighting in the same show.
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Speaking of submarines, SNW s1e4 Memento Mori does a great job with the "flying blind" trope. They even use the "depth charge" trick.
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If we check this image, use the 947' total size, we can estimate the rest of the dimensions. That would put the deck heigh at about 8'. The saucer widest deck lengths at around 450'. Definitely cramped but doable. There's only about 100-150 crew on this version as well. It's essentially a weirdly shaped cruise ship and nearly the size of our world's largest.
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This one goes in detail. They're are a few floors that are just sleeping quarters.
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I thought in NG 1000 people lived on it?
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Iiving in one of the most densely populated cities on Earth, it sounds quite spacious to me. Perspective is wild.
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Honestly thought it was way bigger than this.
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Container ships are fucking massive. The Enterprise only held like 1000 people which is only a small portion of a basketball arena.
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Then how about this one: a large container ship carries 24,000 TEU which is about 12,000 40 foot containers.
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Per kilogram-meter of cargo transported, container ships actually have some of the lowest emissions of any form of transportation!*
Other than electric vehicles that were charged by zero-emission sources of electricity
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the Enterprise "D" (632.5m long) held 1000 people IIRC. crazy!
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Even crazier, the Galaxy-class has the capacity to evacuate an additional 10,000+ humanoids.
When you watch videos like this, you realize that 1,000 is not that much against the actual size of the ship. The entire crew can comfortably gather in the main shuttlebay at the same time.
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Uhm what are you guys talking about?? I don't quite understand...
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I remember many years ago seeing a size comparison between an aircraft carrier and the TOS Enterprise. The aircraft carrier was bigger. I didn't even know how to process that because of how big the Enterprise seemed to me.
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305m is 1000 feet. The USS ENTERPRISE was 342m or 1,123 feet.
A modern day FORD class carrier is 1092 ft or 333m.
For personnel comparison, ENTERPRISE held ~5000 people and a FORD class has between 4-5000 people.
The fact that NCC-1701 only had like 1000 people is...a big difference.
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I know we only ever see a handful of rooms, that's fine, but with over 100 crew they always all have personal quarters that are probably the square footage of 3/4'ish containers.
150m in diameter is one way to think about it. But then it's also 8 containers long, or 25 containers circumference at the largest point down to no more than a few in circumference at the bridge.
You know, that seems tiny, it's like there's no volume left for the hardware that needs to be between every room and all over the hull
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More context, Empire State Building is 380m without the spire, 443m with spire and antenna.
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It helps that containers are a standard size.
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"I literally can't fathom"
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Or this sort of a boat at 488 m ! boat
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Should we start having villages on boats?
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Those are called cruise ships and they suck.
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That settles it, we now need spaceships pronto
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I really hate/love that is is what actually put the size of those container ships in perspective for me. I've seen the massive liquid natural gas tankers and those things are terrifying big but like... I still didn't get the scale of these. Thanks sci-fi (look you guys that box set of TOS pays off irl!!!) 🤪
(Fr tho, anyone else have that set with the plastic curved cases with one of the uniform colors for each season? Prtty curves, infuriating snag-the-case,drop-the-DVD-on-the-floor-and-swear-and-snag-the-insert-pamphlet-closing-it-up-every-singlegoddang-time. But prtty curves)
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That's what she said.
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What's the Enterprise-E look like in comparison?
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Enterprise-E is 685ish meters if I remember correctly (previously my favorite Enterprise/Starship). So its not that much longer than the cargo ship.
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I grew up near the coast, so this actually helped me conceptualize the size of the starship more XD
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I always used athletics tracks as a frame of reference. On a 400m track, the saucer section sitting in the center would be longer than the straights, but wouldn't reach the ouside edges of the curves.
140 comments
Sci-fi has issue with scale a lot of the time. Star Trek is no exception. Population numbers and scale of ships is often really bad.
Look at Deep Space 9 and literally anytime a starship is near it. The scale goes way out of whack.
In the DS9 title credits you can see engineers repairing the outside of one of the pylons on a spacewalk and the scale feels really wrong
Oh agreed but I think there's one major thing which is what really fucks up how your perceive it. There's nothing to compare it to.
When we see the ship it's typically just by itself flying through space where there's no comparison. Or it happens across a ship but same problem as the Enterprise so no reliable comparison. Orbiting a planet, surveying an asteroid, being yanked into a Pulsar, sitting in front of a Borg cube... All of these huge events have literally nothing reliable that humans are familiar with to compare it to. The closest you can say are the windows but the windows are such strange sizes for what we're used to that it doesn't help much.
Honestly the biggest 'events' that I can think of in Trek media that demonstrate the size of the ship are usually ones where the ship ends up on a planet. Generations crash land, Into Darkness crashland, Voyagers Blue Alert sequences, Discoverys crash land, etc. The only other one I can think of is from Picard Season 3. The Borg cube in Jupiters eye. That thing is fucking massive and the cube took up an enormous amount of space in it. That really shook the hell out of me in seeing how big that vessel was.
Ever played Eve Online? The “Noob ship” you get free when yours goes boom is bigger than a fighter jet, the battleships (fairly big) are about 500 meters and the capital monstrosity stuff gets to a plainly overkill 17 kilometers. And in all of this? It’s hard to figure out the small ships actually need a crew and aren’t just the pilot inside
Zooming in and realising that little nubbin on your Rifter is actually the whole cockpit is quite the shock!
It's hard for people living on a planet to comprehend how huge space is.
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.