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

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....

[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.)

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

Re:slashdotted

[FlashBIOS]

Well, it is on IIS - I Infrequently Serve.

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.

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:Strange ...

[Oloryn]

What ? No WV bug comparison ?

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

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.

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.