Slashdot Mirror
Comparing Sci-fi Starship Sizes
LiberalApplication writes "It looks like someone has very lovingly created something that sci-fi fans everywhere will likely want to see; if not out of curiosity, then at least to revitalize the burning, seething, grudges between fanatics of rival science-fiction universes. Starship Dimensions places images of various starships from science fiction settings such as Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5, ID4, Macross/Robotech, Lexx, Freespace, and Battlestar Galactica side-by-side, in scale! The author has also conveniently included football fields, humans, King Kong, and buildings for comparison. You can even drag them around the page and stage your own interstellar battle royale."
You can see the image discribed in the original post here Beware, there are a few popups from the link though...
You seem to have played the wrong games. In one of my favorite space-game, Frontier, you speed up, turn your engines off and let the inertion do the 'flying' for you. Then, when the time is right, you have to fire up your retro-rockets to slow down, or rotate the ship 180 and fire the main engines. If you are good, you don't crash into the space station at 10000 km/s
guru in training
Site without images
SHIP NAME/TYPE: V'Ger (Voyager VI)
LENGTH: Approximately 98 km.
BUILDER/COMMENTS: Originally built by humans and launched near the end of the 20th century for peacful reconnaisance purposes, the Voyager VI probe was intercepted by an evidently technologically advanced race who augmented the probe and sent it back to Earth under a new internal conciousness, resulting in a near cataclysm.
SOURCE: Star Trek, the Motion Picture (Film, 1982 Paramount Pictures), Drawn by Jeff Russell
Whale Probe from Star Trek IV, 74 km long
SHIP NAME/TYPE: Whale Probe
LENGTH: Approximately 74 km. There are numerous conflicting sources for the length of the Whale Probe, but extrapolation from the film has led me to accept this length as being the most likely.
BUILDER/COMMENTS: Unknown, although the device was able to communicate with humpback whales.
SOURCE: Star Trek IV, (Film, Paramount Pictures)
Marduk Base from Macross II, 50 km diameter
SHIP NAME/TYPE: Marduk Mothership
DIAMETER: Approximately 50 km. This is the stated length of the RPG version, although the movie version seems to be much larger. Further investigation is needed.
BUILDER/COMMENTS: Marduk, the creators of the Zentraedi.
SOURCE: Macross II, (Animated Film), Drawn by Jeff Russell
Rama, 50km long
SHIP NAME/TYPE: Rama
LENGTH: 50 km long, 20 km in diameter.
BUILDER/COMMENTS: Large habitat ship
SOURCE: Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clark, Drawn by Jeff Russell
Vorlon Planet Killer, approximately 45km long
SHIP NAME/TYPE: Vorlon Planet Killer
LENGTH: Approximately 45 km. There are numerous conflicting sources for the length of the Vorlon Planet Killer, but extrapolation from the show has led me to accept this length as being the most likely.
BUILDER/COMMENTS: The Vorlon
SOURCE: Babylon 5, (Television Series)
Phobos, moon of Mars, 27km long at longest axis
SHIP NAME/TYPE: Phobos
DIAMETER: 27 km x 23 km x 20 km
BUILDER/COMMENTS: Moon of Mars
SOURCE: Discovered in 1877, August 12 by Asaph Hall; photographed by 'Mariner 9' in 1971, 'Viking 1' in 1977, and the Russian 'Phobos' probe in 1988.
City Destroyer from ID4, 24km diameter
SHIP NAME/TYPE: ID4 City Destroyer
DIAMETER: 24 km across, stated in the film.
BUILDER/COMMENTS: ID4 Aliens. Please see notes
SOURCE: Independance Day (Film), Drawn by Jeff Russell
Super Star Destroyer from Star Wars, 17.6km long
SHIP NAME/TYPE: Executor/ Super Star Destroyer
LENGTH: 17.6 km. Please see http://www.theforce.net/swtc/ssd.html.
BUILDER/COMMENTS: The Empire under Darth Sidious (human). Darth Vader's command ship.
SOURCE: Star Wars Episode V and VI, the Empire Strikes Back, and the Return of the Jedi, (Film), originally drawn by Chad Wilson
Cloud City, 16km diameter
SHIP NAME/TYPE: Cloud City
LENGTH: 16 km.
BUILDER/COMMENTS: Bespin Mining Colony
SOURCE: Star Wars Episode V, the Empire Strikes Back (Film), Drawn by Jeff Russell
Lexx, 10km long
SHIP NAME/TYPE: LEXX
LENGTH: 10 km. From original Blueprints used in the design of the ship.
BUILDER/COMMENTS: The Empire under His Devine Shadow (human). This vessel is a wepon capable of destroying an entire Earth Size planet.
SOURCE: LEXX (TV series)
Babylon 5 Space Station, 8454.1m long
SHIP NAME/TYPE: BABYLON 5/ Deep Space Station
LENGTH: 8,454.1 m, from http://www.b5tech.com/babylonproject/babylon5stati on/babylon5station.html
BUILDER/COMMENTS: Human. "Babylon 5 is a 8,454.1* meter (five-mile) long, 840 meter diameter, 9.1 billion ton O'Neil class space station, located at a pivotal main jump gate in the Epsilon system."
SOURCE: Babylon 5 (TV series)
Macross I & II capital ships
SHIP NAME/TYPE: MACROSS Sta
-= If you fight Dragons long enough, you will become a Dragon =-
The largest was the second Death Star from episode 6, followed by some alien ship from Macross 2, and the ID4 mothership (which held several 24 kilometer city destroyers).
Also included were ships from Star Trek (the probe from episode IV was huge) Lexx, Babylon 5, Hitchhikers Guide, Battlestar Galactica... that's all I can remember. It borrowed some graphics and the look from skyscraperpage.com.
Cowboy Neal is doing well today. Earlier his spam story is a dupe, now this one where he kills a site before there'sa "FIRST POST".
Slashdot needs 1) dupe detection (or at least marking,
2) some way to mirror low-bandwidth sites (give a veto to the owner)
3) spellcheck on submissions (ESPECIALLY for the editors)
The Enterprise was a large, well-outfitted High-tech starship willfully exploring space. Space 1999 was a bunch of shell-shocked astronauts trying to deal with interstellar space using vaguely 20'th century technology.
About the only thing that the two shows had in common was space.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Here's a partial mirror:
http://bshort.com/shipdim/shipdim.html
Please be gentle.
-B
Incorrect. Impulse engines use the exhaust from a fusion reactor to move the ship; they are a Newtonian drive like any other.
Warp engines, on the other hand, use asymmetric peristaltic continuum distortion - they essentially "squeeze" the ship through a bubble of distorted spacetime. No local motion takes place, but with respect to the rest of the universe, the bubble of spacetime that encapsulates the ship is moving.
ph34r my n3rd1n355.
+++ATH0
Actually the site was down before it when live on the front page. I was getting some page loads and some 404s while it just being previewed for subscribers.
I hope that someday we will be able to put away our fears and prejudices and just laugh at people. - Jack Handey
http://solem.cs.man.ac.uk:8006/cgi-bin/mirror.pl?
Everyone, add the following URL to your shortcuts, it'll be dang handy if you're a slashdot regular.
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~brejc8/mirror/index.html
Note that by going to the main distributed-mirror page, you can add to the list of mirrors (if you know of others, or if you are creating one yourself.)
Let us not forget the Star Wars Technical Commentaries, a collection of near industry-quality analyses of Star Wars tech, put toghether by a Ph.D with a lot of time on his hands.
There's a couple of weeks of engrossing reading there. Highlights include Warships of the Empire, The Endor Holocaust (an interesting examination of probably ecological fallout on the sanctuary moon due to the explosion of the Death Star II), and The Injuries of Darth Vader.
Yeah, and a 25 year old harrier may not be much of a combat fighter, but if you pit it against a 1942 mustang it's not going to be much of a fight.
Slashdot may not be "a particularly big site", but it is built with a large handfull of boxes, it's own routers, etc. and probably a couple hundred megabits bandwidth. Some of the sites that get slashdotted are things that are co-hosted with dozens or even hundreds of other sites on a single box at a large hosting company and (maybe) a 10 megabit pipe.
I have a friend who's site gets throttled by his (free) service provider with just a couple dozen hits in an hour. Just the slashdot editorial team viewing his site could put him near his limit, much less being posted on the front page.
My own web site spent some time being hosted on my home ADSL connection. 0.5megabits split over 10,000 /.ers trying to get first post comes to 50baud per viewer -- and that presumes that the old 200Mz P2 that I let do the hosting doesn't collapse under the load. If I had an hour or so warning, I could at least change the box to run level 3 so that the RAM being eaten up by X could be freed up. I might even switch it over to my primary desktop box and/or just mirror it somewhere with the pipe to handle the load.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
SHIP NAME/TYPE: Scranton, Pennsylvania/spindizzy drive
LENGTH: 5Km
BUILDER/COMMENTS: The first city to "go Okie", leaving an economically depressed Earth in search of paying jobs.
SOURCE: James Blish, "A Life for the Stars"
SHIP NAME/TYPE: Hern VI/spindizzy drive
LENGTH: 3000Km ("considerably smaller than Mercury")
BUILDER/COMMENTS: Flown across the galaxy by New Yorkers on a mission to destroy the Vegan Orbital Fort.
SOURCE: James Blish, "Earthman, Come Home"
SHIP NAME/TYPE: Mars/tweaked space-time elements of quantum descriptors
LENGTH: 6750Km
BUILDER/COMMENTS: The Federal Republic of Mars moved their planet to a new system 10,000 light years away in order to escape the oppressive politoco-economic expansionism of Earth's Greater East-West Alliance (GEWA). Mars's moon Phobos was used as a "scout ship".
SOURCE: Greg Bear, "Moving Mars". The novel won several awards, including the Nebula Award.
SHIP NAME/TYPE: none.
LENGTH: 90 million miles
BUILDER/COMMENTS: The ship was a gigantic dummy, the largest scarecrow ever conceived by the human mind. It was used at least twice, once to frighten away nonhuman agressors from a forgotten corner of the galaxies, once to serve as a diversionary action in the destruction of the dictator Lord Raumsog and seventeen million noncombatants with carcinogenic poisons.
SOURCE: Cordwainer Smith, "Golden the Ship Was -- Oh! Oh! Oh!"
Taxation without representation is tyranny! Statehood for DC, Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands & Pacific Territories!
The quote was "We were taking a vote when the ground came up and hit us."
From the only good episode of Galactica 1980.
The site Ex Astris Scientia concentrates on measuring and comparing Star Trek ships, but it's still an impressive effort.
Unlss you will count the Death Star - and even them,
I'd nedd it's specs, because OLD MAN station
is probably still larger, Perry Rhodan - a German Sci Fi series, is the clear winner.
With 2.5 Kilometers in an ordinary battle ship,
Weapons ranging to tenths of millions of kilometers, they are unmatched.
-><- no