A little short for a starship, isn’t he?
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.
47 after inflation.
The universe is big. Probably one of the biggest. K. Trout
Have you seen container ships? They’re perspective-bendingly massive. 400m is a quarter of a mile.
Or 40% of a kilometre.
Sorry, they use miles in Star Trek. Ha ha, America wins. Stupid Europe and your stupid metric system and stupid rail network and stupid universal healthcare.
Never heard them use fantasy imperial system, are you sure?
Maybe in TOS, but didn’t see much of that. But definitely not in TNG and everything that followed.
Nobody knows what kilometres are.
Really, it’s quite easy. Just picture a container ship. Now double it and add an eighth of a mile. Simples.
Thanks because this image still didn’t help. Most people don’t see container ships very often.
Yeah but youre also saying that the bridge of the enterprise was about the size of a container, which i am not sure is accurate.
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.
I’ve never seen either. I’ll have to convert this to “cruise ship”
Ok… the one I am familiar with is Disney Wonder at 294m long
Disney Cruise line is the best! That was the first thing I thought of to compare this to.
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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.
It seems bigger on TV…
TV adds 20 pounds.
Honestly thought it was way bigger than this.
Yeah I’m not seeing how there’s several dozen people moving, working, and living in that.
A container ship’s crew is 20-30 people, and that whole thing is mostly containers. I bet they’d fit.
Oh you.
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Oxygen is an issue, but heat generation is also an issue.
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.
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.
They sleep in hallways…
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I don’t know what the hell they’re doing with all that space
After watching discovery I assume it’s all turbolift shafts.
Don’t forget the Jeffreys tubes
The amount of empty space in Discovery was just weird.
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.
Maybe if they narrowed that hallway a little, they could all have their own quarters.
In Strange New Worlds everyone above Ensign apparently has their own studio apartment.
Speaking of which, something funny I noticed about Discovery recently is that Burnham and Tilly continue to be roommates even after
spoiler
Burnham gets her commander rank reinstated
. What’s up with that?
Who wouldn’t want to room with Tilly though?
Me, but for all the wrong reasons
In TNG and Voyager they all did.
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.
Here’s some more perspective. The aircraft carrier pictured apparently carries almost 2000 people.
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.
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.
And it also isn’t carrying 100 fighter planes.
Voyager was carrying infinite shuttles, so it’s not that out there
Prodigy also showed us that they can replicate a new shuttle in like 30 seconds.
The only canon animated shows are Lower Decks and the original Animated Series.
About that…
Yeah, we were talking about the Connie. Galaxy class is like 20x the volume of a CVN.
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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.
That was a fascinating video!
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.
Speaking of submarines, SNW s1e4 Memento Mori does a great job with the “flying blind” trope. They even use the “depth charge” trick.
You even get to hear sonar pings. It was amazing as a submarine movie fan.
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.
This one goes in detail. They’re are a few floors that are just sleeping quarters.
Iiving in one of the most densely populated cities on Earth, it sounds quite spacious to me. Perspective is wild.
Container ships are fucking massive. The Enterprise only held like 1000 people which is only a small portion of a basketball arena.
Well damn, how tiny was Voyager? It only had like 1-200 people IIRC.
Voyager is just a hair longer than the classic Enterprise, but it’s also chonkier so it has more volume. About 150 people on an Intrepid-class, 200 on a Constitution-class.
The original ship was also packed. Many many packed bunks and crowded halls. Even as noted in DS9 time travel to TOS episode
The ship itself felt huge to me, but even Kirk’s quarters were pretty modest.
This Is the 1701, Kirk’s. It only had 430 people on it.
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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.
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
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.
What kind of emissions are we producing to build the ships?
Most of its steel and other metals, so assuming that theyre using electrically pwered smelters most of the emmissions would be in transport and mining equiptment. So probably somewhat comparable, depends on how much rail was used or if it was transportes exclusively via semi.
Most steel is (unfortunately) made in Chinese blast furnaces using coal coke and powered with electricity from coal power plants.
Im aware, I was giving a best possible circumstances type situation. Still the steel for both is probably sourced from the same factory.
And all steel is made using coal regardless of where it’s produced, except in experimental processes like HYBRIT.
How long are the cargo ships gonna be in service compared to that smartphone of an electric car?
Good point, I wasn’t considering production.
But don’t worry. The cargo ship sprang into being from nothingness and there were utterly no environmental impacts related to drilling, refining, and transportation of the fuel used to power the ship. So clearly EVs are so much worse for the environment /s
the Enterprise “D” (632.5m long) held 1000 people IIRC. crazy!
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.
Uhm what are you guys talking about?? I don’t quite understand…
This made me realise you could probably fit an entire small town including all it’s drama on a container ship.
Star Trek: Evergreen
Stuck sideways in a hyperplane!
Should’ve done that with Flint
Flnt is NOT a small town
How many people can stand in one container?
1 TEU ≈ 13.6m², so 27 @ ~0.5m² per person to not be too dense?
The Ever Given has a 20,124 TEU capacity, so that’s 543,348 people. With fewer people you get more space, including space for food stocks, sleeping quarters, kitchen area, etc.
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.
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
