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.
That’s like, half of a half mile.
It’s as if it’s two times half of a half of a half of a mile
How much is that in bananas?
At least three, maybe twenty microwaves
Hey, no need to be silly! I do wonder what it is in thousandths of an inch though. The true freedom unit!
400 meters is equivalent to around 2,247.19 bananas according to Convert to bananas
Finally I get it!
I came to Lemmy to avoid this Reddit style comment
That’s funny. I came to Lemmy to avoid this style of comment where somebody has nothing to add except negativity. I get you don’t like it, but for the “culture” of Lemmy, please just use the freaking downvote button in cases like this
Or just block the user.
Going to Lemmy to avoid this type of comment is like going to Arby’s to avoid diarrhea.
Humans gonna be Human.
This.
Word
And my axe :(
Thanks because this image still didn’t help. Most people don’t see container ships very often.
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.
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.
Have you seen a container?
52ft or something long. Go look for a RV or camper. Simply because they are sold by the foot.
A 40ft camper is pretty huge and can easily fit 6-10 people comfortably.
People turn containers into apartment type buildings for a family of 2-3.
that’s the origin of picard’s famous saying “I live my life a 1.304E-14 parsec at a time”
We get oil exploration rigs docking in our little port downtown. Mind bending is right.
Sat in the park and watched one roll in one day. Went from:
There it is!
Damn, looks pretty big.
My. God.
wait, exploration rigs?
Those things that look like platforms rather than boats?
they can dock?
Nah, you’re talking about drilling platforms that are pretty much set in place. These are giant ships that explore and lay pipe.
Not sure which one this is, but it’s what I’m talking about.
You know I’m something of a giant ship that can lay pipe myself.
but that’s a great picture to show this scaled in
Even those things aren’t build on location. They build them on land and then sail them to the location they want.
They can even be moved after they were done drilling
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”
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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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Some producers use electric arc furnaces, a few of which use only scrap metal as input, which means they need far less coal and emit far less CO2 than a conventional BOF/BFF setup.
How long are the cargo ships gonna be in service compared to that smartphone of an electric car?
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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 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
More context, Empire State Building is 380m without the spire, 443m with spire and antenna.
It helps that containers are a standard size.
“I literally can’t fathom”
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)
