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."

Comments

slashdotted

[neurostar]

Well, it looks like the battle happened before I got there... all the ships are gone already :(

Re:slashdotted

[FlashBIOS]

Well, it is on IIS - I Infrequently Serve.

Re:slashdotted

[alphaseven]

The site was up on Metafilter yesterday, and it even had trouble handling that traffic. Nice site though, you could choose from a few different resoluctions from 1 metre per pixel up to 2000 metres per pixel. And you could drag the images around to compare.

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.

/.'ed but who cares?

[smoondog]

I guess comparing spaceship sizes is really important to /. readers. Always reminds me of the scene in "Stand By Me" where the kids argue over the superiority of mighty mouse vs superman.

-Sean

Re: /.'ed but who cares?

[Black Parrot]

> I guess comparing spaceship sizes is really important to /. readers.

Maybe they don't realize that sometimes a starship is just a starship.

What i want to know....

[Photon01]

What i've always wanted to know is how do sci-fi starships always manage to be the same way up?

I'd love to be watching star trek, and see a bird of prey fly along upside down in relation to the Enterprise.

Re:What i want to know....

[Apaturia]

What I find even more pathetic is when they have ships surrounding them and say "we can't go anywhere!". Have they not EVER heard of the third dimension? Ya know, UP or DOWN?

Reminds me of a Futurama episode, where people encircle a ship so that it won't move. The ship just moves up and speeds away. :)

Re:What i want to know....

[SlashdotLemming]

The reason is that...

No it isn't
You think every race in the universe decided on a standard AND they all use it? HAH!!!
In my experience as an intergalactic pilot I can tell you that, in general, a ship, while not travelling, is in a position normal to the celestial body that is exerting the largest gravitational pull on it. While traveling, a path is planned to the destination, this path is not a straight line, but a series of arcs and lines, depending on whether or not gravity is being used as a mechanism of propulsion. So, for each point in the path, a ship is either in the position it was in during its last point, or it is in transition to the position it must be in to take the next point of the journey. Often this is dictated by the design of the ship, more importantly, the flexibility of the propulsion unit. If your thrusters have a wide range of motion, then you have a bigger range of what your 'up' position could be relative to your path, and a larger set of choices for path planning
Now, if we're talking about a super-spectral propulsion mechanism.. err.. oh gods of vacuous matter, I've said too much already.

Re:What i want to know....

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

What's even funnier is that when these always upright ships lose power they "lose" the ability to stay upright and drift on their side or upside down.

Actually, when artifial gravity fails, the graviton matrix that supports the inertial effect degenerates, and you get a recoil effect resulting in exactly that. Don't they teach you kids anything in high school any more?

Wait... This is 2203, right? Because if it's gone wrong and I've jumped too far again, the time cops are going to ki

Re:What i want to know....

[Jerf]

One of the sequels to Elite tried accurate space battles.

It sucked.

PROBLEM: Any ship with more acceleration then the other ship can always escape. So to deal with this gameplay "problem", they made the enemy ship magically re-appear with magical acceleration so it can take another shot at you.

PROBLEM: Unless you use an unrealistically slow amount of thrust, you tend to have these ships zipping by each other at the very least hundreds of miles per hour, leaving you with a fraction of a second to meaningfully fire on the other ship, then it's turn back around and do it again. Since you're a human you can't whip around instantly, it take time to move the ship, so every time you miss and come around for another pass, you're going a little faster since you had more time to accelerate.

PROBLEM: It is virtually impossible to tail someone. If you're matching their thrust vector, you're not pointing at them, you're pointing in the same direction they are. Now, if you had a gunner this might be OK, but when you're both piloting and gunning because whatever the ship info screen says your crew is, it's just you, this doesn't work.

PROBLEM: It takes time to learn how to land on things! Typically to get somewhere in an airplane-like space simulator you point your ship at it, apply maximum boost, and stop when you get there. Do that in a real simulator and you'll whack into the object (or miss it) at a significant fraction of the speed of light. (The Elite sequel capped speeds at 1/3 the speed of light, presumably to avoid relatavistic effects.) You have to learn to turn at "midpoint", which, inconveniently enough, is also when you're going the fastest and this is fairly hard for a human to do correctly. (If you're on autopilot, it's easier, but if you're on autopilot you're not really playing...) Turn around a little too soon, and you have to creep up on the target object, which might literally take several minutes or even hours (fortunately the Elite sequel had a time compressor). Turn around a little too late and by the time you realize it you're on an unstoppable collision course. *Whack*.

PROBLEM: "Random" encounters are impossible without cheating. I would routinely see enemies boost across the system, probably hitting the 1/3 light speed, on an intercept course, and the instant they reached me, "suddenly" they're on basically the same vector as me so they can fight me. Reality is they should have zipped across my radar so fast it would be unlikely I would even see them.

Space is big. By the time ships are moving in real Newtonian mechanics and not taking years to get from Earth to Mars, you're incapable of handling the scales as a human. The computer cheating helps but not enough (and it's frustrating as all computer cheating is). A tactics-level simulator might be cool, but flying around in Newtonian space is no fun at all. If it was, we'd have more simulations based on that.

Also note this demonstrates space piracy is virtually impossible unless your acceleration is on par with your maximum speed, because you just can't intercept ships to save your life. (Literally, in some cases.)

The Force strikes again

[uptownguy]

Hahaha! It is amazing, when you think about it... What other force on the Internet is as powerful as /.? Within 60 seconds of the original article appearing on the front page of Slashdot, the linked site was already taken down.

Ethical question: Do we owe our linked site owners some advance warning before our herd of tribbles swarms onto their bridge?
Bonus Question: Is it possible to be karma whoring AND trolling at the same time?

Re:The Force strikes again

[Cpt_Kirks]

What other force on the Internet is as powerful as /.? Within 60 seconds of the original article appearing on the front page of Slashdot, the linked site was already taken down.

You know, according to the Patriot Act, /. could be classifed as a terrorist device.

Re:The Force strikes again

[darkonc]

Do you really think a slashdotting is that intense? Slashdot isn't a particularly big site, and it handles the load. CNN's traffic dwarfs /.'s on a slow news day, let alone during war coverage.

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.

Slashdot logic..

[mumblestheclown]

1. The site is slashdotted.
2. it runs IIS.
3. therefore, microsoft is evil.

SpaceBalls

[AntEater]

I'm sure none of those ships are as big as the one that they show during the opening scenes of SpaceBalls. That one was BIG!

"Ludicrous Speed!"

Re:Mirror?

[quantaman]

You know it's bad when the first post is requesting a mirror!

Since that site is down...

[mansa]

Here's an interesting graphic comparing ship size.

-Mansa

Mighty Mouse vs. Superman

[nucal]

You're right, that's just silly.

Superman is far greater than Mighty Mouse.

I don't know about that - on a Power per Gram ratio, Mighty Mouse beats Superman ...

Plus, MM has a better theme song ...

Image from original site

[marlingrando]

You can see the image discribed in the original post here Beware, there are a few popups from the link though...

Operation Timed Out?!?!

[mraymer]

What a shocker this is... An article on Slashdot about Starship Sizes... why would that be Slashdotted?

I mean, it's not like it is the nerd version of a pissing contest... oh wait, it is.

Nerd1: The Enterprise-E could SO waste a Star Destroyer!
Nerd2: Nuh-uh! Star Destroyers are so huge, you can't even see the windows most of the time. You can ALWAYS see the windows in the puny little federation starships.
Nerd1: Look, I don't care how big it is... One quantam torpedo from the Enterprise-E will make it a giant space junkyard.
Nerd2: You're such a dork!
Nerd1: No, you're the dork!
[begin pathetic, uncoordinated nerd brawl]

If all those ships were together...

[Peterus7]

The enterprise would probably start trying to open diplomatic relations with the Death star, and make a new ally, the Babylon 5 alien cruisers would go off against the cylon forces, And the robotechs would get accidently blown up by Stanley Tweedle.

Google

[YearOfTheDragon]

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

Re:Google

[TwP]

SHIP NAME/TYPE: Earth (class M)
LENGTH: Approximately 12600 km.
BUILDER/COMMENTS: Originally built by God for humans and launched near the creation of the universe for peacful enjoyment of life and relationship. Earth was invaded by evil forces under direct control of Lucifer and has not been the same since. Recall notice has been sent to fix problems introduced by Lucifer. The exact time of the recall is unknown.
SOURCE: Bible, (Book), Written by God, et. al.

Re:Strange ...

[Oloryn]

What ? No WV bug comparison ?

They don't actually grow them that big in West Virginia

Red Dwarf

[bstadil]

Do not forget Red Dwarf.

Based on the guy that paints the last letter in the intro Red Dwarf is around 1Km high, and 8Km long. Width is about 2X height.

Anyone has better numbers?

Re:Red Dwarf

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, in "Stasis leak" they take an elevator down 2567 floors...

On the other hand the show is extremely inconsistent, StarBug for instance is clearly not much bigger than a truck but still it has huge cargo decks and mile-long ventilation shafts!

But who cares, it's still funny as hell.

Re:Mirror?

[1u3hr]

The only relic still available is on his old site at fortunecities, the background image is still there which is fairly interesting in itself. I think some other bits of that site might still be there if you can work out the URLs. Nothing on the Wayback Machine for either site.

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)

What about...

[los furtive]

What about the starship in Spaceballs, the one that transformed into Mega Maid?

"Dear God, she's gone from suck to blow!"

Re:Mirror?

[bshort404]

Here's a partial mirror:

http://bshort.com/shipdim/shipdim.html

Please be gentle.

What's the difference b/t a /.ing and a DDOS'ing?

[fbg111]

When ddos'ers successfully crash your server, they move on to the next victim. When the slashdotters crash your server, they sit around bitching about your IIS POS, till you're back online, then they slashdot you again.

Scotty! Beam us out!

[Pharmboy]

Slashdot Readers:
More power, dammit! Show us your pretty pictures!

Webmaster Scotty:
She can't taking anymore Captain! She's givin' us all she's got, but she can't take the slashdotting!

Distributed Mirrors Project

[ckedge]

http://solem.cs.man.ac.uk:8006/cgi-bin/mirror.pl?g et=http%3A%2F%2Fzardalu.sytes.net%2F

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.)

Star Wars Technical Commentaries

[willith]

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.

A solution - temporary local mirrors on Slashdot

[WIAKywbfatw]

Unfortunately, I think this might be a side effect of the new "mysterious future" feature. If subscribers can see an article 30 minutes before the rest of the Slashdot crowd then that gives them 30 minutes in which to slashdot the relevant server and/or eat up all of the site owners bandwidth cap.

Looks like uber geeks who can't stand missing out on articles like this one will have to subscribe if they want a fighting chance of reading the relevant article(s). I know the editors here really don't give a damn about issues like site management any more than they have to (witness the number of headlines and summaries that are inaccurate, badly spelt and/or grammatically incorrect, the number of dupes, fakes, etc), but when it's someone else's bandwidth then they really should be trying to work with people rather than against them.

Offering to mirror articles on non-commercial sites locally for a week or so would be a good start. The story links could point to the local server mirror which after a week could be changed to s simple redirection page pointing back to the original source site. This solution would stop major slashdotting of small "mom and pop"-type sites, and benefit Slashdot readers, Slashdot and the site owners as well. (If ad revenue is an issue, I'm sure Slashdot and the site owner could agree on splitting the revenue that the locally hosted mirror generates. And I'm sure Slashdot could cover itself against any possible legal ramifications with a well-worded contract that clearly illustrates that the content and the consequences of publishing it are the responsibility of the original owner - just like ISPs do all the time and Slashdot does with posts at the moment.)

I'm not saying that this should be compulsory, but that it should be an option. It seems to be a win-win situation all around, so why wouldn't they consider it?

Any editors reading this have any comments to make?

Eureka!

[snilloc]

/. cannot ask to mirror a site for legal reasons, nor can they just go ahead and mirror it.

What is needed is for site authors to pre-emptively allow mirroring. This could be done with some kind of apache mod (as somebody has suggested below) or with a simple statement like "Please mirror this site if you're going to post a link to this site that is likely to generate massive amounts of traffic."

perhaps some sort of web content license that allows for mirroring... Just so that nobody has to ask before either posting to /. or mirroring.

Seriously though, anybody posting a site about dimensions of sci-fi starships must have some knowledge of slashdot and the possibility of getting /.ed.

Surprising

[Etriaph]

I was amazed by the sheer total of universes he was able to combine. To find The Gunstar from The Last Starfighter on that site was really amazingly cool.

Unfortunately, my Star Trek Technical Manual shows the Constitution Class and the Galaxy Class in different scale. On his site, the original Enteprises ship class looks about half as big as the Galaxy Class, which it's not, it's about 1/4 - 1/3. But seeing the size of the Sovereign Class as it compares way up there to the Super Star Destroyer (and it's comparison to the original unfinished Death Star) was even more cool.

This guy should get an award from someone for his patience.