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@lemmy.ca
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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.

  • 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.

  • ladel@feddit.uk
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    1 year ago

    I think for me this highlights how massive these boats are than anything. 400 m? What the hell? That’s almost half a kilometre. I’ve never actually seen one unless from very distant, so I can’t envisage how big it is. I know how big a bus is, but “80 buses” isn’t a very useful comparison either.

    • 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!

  • 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

  • Nurgle@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    More context, Empire State Building is 380m without the spire, 443m with spire and antenna.

  • BlueKittyMeow@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    I really hate/love that is is what actually put the size of those container ships in perspective for me. I’ve seen the massive liquid natural gas tankers and those things are terrifying big but like… I still didn’t get the scale of these. Thanks sci-fi (look you guys that box set of TOS pays off irl!!!) 🤪

    (Fr tho, anyone else have that set with the plastic curved cases with one of the uniform colors for each season? Prtty curves, infuriating snag-the-case,drop-the-DVD-on-the-floor-and-swear-and-snag-the-insert-pamphlet-closing-it-up-every-singlegoddang-time. But prtty curves)