A little short for a starship, isn’t he?

  • Telodzrum@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • teft@startrek.website
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      1 year ago

      Look at Deep Space 9 and literally anytime a starship is near it. The scale goes way out of whack.

      • bionicjoey
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        1 year ago

        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

    • Stamets@startrek.websiteOP
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • Stampela@startrek.website
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      1 year ago

      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

      • thegiddystitcher@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Zooming in and realising that little nubbin on your Rifter is actually the whole cockpit is quite the shock!

  • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Have you seen container ships? They’re perspective-bendingly massive. 400m is a quarter of a mile.

  • lolcatnip@reddthat.com
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    1 year ago

    Going by the caption, it’s the container ship they had a hard time visualizing. Seems weird because I’ve seen container ships IRL but never a starship.

  • ZombiFrancis@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • ummthatguy@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Yeah I’m not seeing how there’s several dozen people moving, working, and living in that.

    • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      A container ship’s crew is 20-30 people, and that whole thing is mostly containers. I bet they’d fit.

      • jaybone@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        But people mainly occupy the saucer portion right? Like they don’t live in the engines.

        Looking at OPs pic, that saucer is very small compared to the container ship.

        • JWBananas@startrek.website
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          1 year ago

          Actually the thing they often get wrong in depictions of life support failure is that the ship would get too hot. The vacuum of space insulates the ship.

      • iyaerP@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • Stamets@startrek.websiteOP
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • grue@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Here’s some more perspective. The aircraft carrier pictured apparently carries almost 2000 people.

        • iyaerP@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          That’s not even a big carrier either. American supercarriers between the flight crews, the ship crews, the marine contingent and everything else can fit up to SIX THOUSAND people.

          There’s no need for anyone on the Cerritos to sleep in the fucking hallways. That’s like “we live on a literal submarine” level of privacy. It’s beyond idiotic. The Cali class are MASSIVE. There’s no need for anyone to be living in the hallways like that.

            • iyaerP@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              The problem is that they want to eat their cake and have it to when it comes to being a comedic show that parodies Trek, but also a serious part of the Trek canon.

              Sometimes it works, like with the SNW crossover episode, or the ludicrous gambit to clear the captain’s name when she’s being framed for blowing up Planet Packled. Other times, like with the stupid koala or the people sleeping in the corridors it goes beyond what makes sense in-universe and becomes stupid for an out-of-universe joke.

              • samus12345@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                It might seem like that at first glance, but every Star Trek show has had episodes more absurd than even the silliest Lower Decks one.

        • VindictiveJudge@startrek.website
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          1 year ago

          Yep, the Enterprise has about the volume of an aircraft carrier, but only a fraction of the crew. By modern standards it is downright roomy.

      • CarlsIII@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • Neato@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • SeaJ@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Container ships are fucking massive. The Enterprise only held like 1000 people which is only a small portion of a basketball arena.

    • brianorca@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Then how about this one: a large container ship carries 24,000 TEU which is about 12,000 40 foot containers.

  • Wilzax@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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

    • Iceblade@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I’d wager that just accounting for emissions in the production of said electric vehicle will make it entirely unable to compete with container ships. Boats are crazy efficient.

    • aeronmelon@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      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.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lwx5uB0pyhQ

      • The Liver@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Uhm what are you guys talking about?? I don’t quite understand…

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Ryumast3r@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I can understand that on a mathematical level, but on a more emotional one, it’s hard to process. Just like I know that the speed of light is 186,000 mps, but I can’t really fathom how fast that actually is.

        • BluesF@feddit.uk
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          1 year ago

          Well the speed of light is actually faster than you can reasonably comprehend… you can’t see or experience the travel time of something going that fast. 300m is not unreasonable to understand once you’ve experienced it though - that’s a big boat, but you can see one and get a sense of the scale.

  • ParsnipWitch@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    This made me realise you could probably fit an entire small town including all it’s drama on a container ship.

  • AndyLikesCandy@reddthat.com
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    1 year ago

    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