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Size Comparison - Science Fiction spaceships
- diziet 13y agoToo bad this is limited to ships that have renderings of them (such as all the EVE online ships that dominate the scale). I'd love to see some of Iain Bank's Culture GSVs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_types_of_the_Culture#General_Systems_Vehicle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_types_of_the_Culture#Gene... or some ships by Alastair Reynolds
- bane 13y agoIf remember, Larry Niven's Ringworld ended up as a kind of spaceship. Actually instead of an image, a site where you can compare lots of ships would be cool, and adding more ships would be pretty simple.
- cstuder 13y agoWell, there's the classic* Starship Dimensions-page: http://www.merzo.net/ http://www.merzo.net/ It features more ships, but no direct comparison capability. And no Culture ships. * = Frames! And Drag'n Drop-stuff which apparently only works on MSIE.
- bencollier49 13y agoI had exactly the same reaction. Nice appropriate handle, btw. :-)
- andyjohnson0 13y agoA 200km-long System Class GSV might ruin the diagram's scaling a bit...
- arethuza 13y agoIt would be cool to see a diagram comparing the computing power of different science fiction spaceships - I suspect Culture ships would do fairly well in that comparison!
- jerf 13y agoUnlike distance, I don't think there's a comparable metric that can be used. Star Trek, just to take one tiny example, always talks about "quads", where one might expect bits. What's a quad? You might think "maybe it's a four-state bit", but in that case the numbers talked about on the show are absurdly low [1]. One "gigaquad" would be 2 gigabits, or about 256 megabytes (depending on whether we're using 1000 or 1024 as our base). Indeed, the entire point of the measurement is to be mysterious. This does not play well to comparisons. By contrast, "kilometer" means the same thing... well... more or less... across a wide variety of fictional universes. By "more or less", I mean that it's pretty easy to just splat a number down without thinking about it. Here, let me write my own story: One day, astronomers spotted a perfectly spherical, shiny spaceship approaching Earth from outside of the orbit of Pluto. It was a trillion kilometers in diameter! They sent it radio greetings, but before the message got there, the ship blew up. Truly, Man was humbled by his place in the capricious cosmos. The End. There's all kinds of things wrong with that. I mean, jeez, could the moral have been any more trite? Umm... wait... that's not what I was trying to say... I mean, those numbers are silly. Ah, yes, that was the point. If I were serious, it's likely that my understanding of "kilometer" is a bit off. And to be honest, I rather think the Independence Day ship fits that description. It's absurdly large for what it actually did; if taken seriously, our little fusion bomb should probably not so much have "exploded" it as "caused a bit of a flash, if you were looking". (Secondary explosions may have finished the job but it would have looked quite different.) [1]: http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Quad http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Quad
- arethuza 13y agoThe refugee Mind from Consider Phlebas actually had a rather nice way of visualizing its data storage capacity. However, as later stories make clear, this Mind was very limited compared to later models.
- incision 13y agoI enjoyed that visualization. When you consider that Consider Phlebas was published in 1987, it was probably necessary. In 2013, a writer can count on all sorts of metaphors and approximations that wouldn't even have been a concept to most in 1987.
- qwerta 13y agoThere is novel which suggest using entire star cluster for inter-galactic travels..
- sdfjkl 13y agoThe Nostalgia for Infinity was ~4km in length. She rode the spinal trunk, the four-kilometre-long shaft which threaded the entire length of the ship. She had boarded somewhere near the nominal top of the shaft (there were only 1050 levels that she knew of) and was now descending at ten decks a second. The elevator was a glass-walled, field-suspended box, and occasionally the lining of the trackless shaft turned transparent, allowing her to judge her location without reference to the elevator's internal map. She was descending through forests now: tiered gardens of planetary vegetation grown wild with neglect, and dying, for the UV lamps which had once supplied the forest with sunlight were mostly broken now, and no one could be bothered repairing them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revelation_Space_universe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revelation_Space_universe
- andrewflnr 13y agoAnd from the outside it's basically just a black streak, even before it starts actively hiding itself. I find the inside far more fascinating. Forests on a starship? Sign me up.
- deletes 13y agoThis site has much wider range of sci-fi objects. It goes from human size all up to planetary sizes with every picture exactly to scale. http://www.merzo.net/ http://www.merzo.net/
- Shish2k 13y agoSimilarly, a size comparison of anime (and other) objects: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOXjkO9DXxg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOXjkO9DXxg
- devindotcom 13y agoThat is pretty insane. I like the guys who are larger than the universe. No translation tho. Can anyone tell me who the guys are that are much larger than earth, or what shows they're from? I can't seem to OCR the titles out of screenshots.
- Shish2k 13y agoMany of the ones near the end are from Gurren Lagann, a show that follows a guy through his life as he overcomes an ever-larger series of problems, with "larger" having a very literal representation -- from childish bullies, to the head of the village, eventually up to all of existence :P (Or something like that; my memory is terrible and I've not watched it for years)
- alan_cx 13y agoYeah, that is the one I regard as being the proper original. I like the way it scales and has real world objects for comparison. Can't see any real world object on the submitted image, but that might just be a me thing.
- BrandonMarc 13y agoI've always liked this site, and come back to it very often. The close 2nd, geared toward real-world buildings (but some imaginary ones) is SkyscraperPage [0] (link goes to their diagram of the current world's tallest buildings ... but you can see the buildings in a given city, or state, country, etc ... as well as details of a specific building) ----- http://skyscraperpage.com/diagrams/?searchID=200 http://skyscraperpage.com/diagrams/?searchID=200
- _mulder_ 13y agoIt's missing a Death Star, Discovery One (2001:A Space Oddesey) and, my personal favourite, the ship from Solaris (2002). All of a similar design to Valley Forge (Silent Running) which does feature. Maybe they're all too small.
- deletes 13y agoDiscovery One compared to International Space Station http://www.merzo.net/images/1mpp2001discovery.gif http://www.merzo.net/images/1mpp2001discovery.gif http://www.merzo.net/images/1mppexistSpaceStation.gif http://www.merzo.net/images/1mppexistSpaceStation.gif
- quarterto 13y agoDeath Star 1 is 160km in diameter. At this diagram's scale, that's 160,000 pixels.
- Pxtl 13y agoI've always felt that scale was too "sci-fi" ish for the fantasy-esque Star Wars universe. Star Wars planets don't really feel like planets, more like islands in an ocean. They're "planetville" planets. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Planetville http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Planetville The "small moon" being the size of an actual small moon feels... weird. Everything about Star Wars is modelled after pulp era stories transplanted into a space setting. A man-made ship that could comfortably house billions of people is firmly into the realm of "true" SF and doesn't fit into a pseudo-1930's setting. Putting such a huge number onto the Death Star (and the SSDs, which are each the size of Manhattan) feels like a midichlorians moment.
- _mulder_ 13y agoYes true, it occured to me after writing the death star was massive.. and Discovery One perhaps a bit small?
- sdfjkl 13y agoThe first Death Star was 160 kilometers in diameter, while the second Death Star was 900 kilometers in diameter. http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Death_Star http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Death_Star
- artgon 13y agoWhere's the Homeworld ship? Isn't it supposed to be ~25km?
- GotAnyMegadeth 13y agoThere's very detailed information about all the Homeworld ships in the booklet that came with the game. I'm going to find it...
- GotAnyMegadeth 13y agoThe Kushan Mothership is in the bottom right actually... 610m EDIT: that's 610m long, 2138m high
- RBerenguel 13y agoI'd rather have the Ion Frigate, or one of the destroyers. The Ion was a really cool ship in the game!
- galaktor 13y agothis makes a pretty cool phone/desktop wallpaper!
- coob 13y agoDoes a Dyson Sphere count as a ship? Big enough to hold a star… http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Relics_(episode) http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Relics_(episode)
- chaz 13y agoIt's a structure, not a vessel that can move under its own power.
- jerf 13y agoIn one of the anthologies for Larry Niven (either N-Space or Playground of the Mind), he describes a Ringworld that induces magnetic effects on its star to shoot out a jet of plasma, using that to propel the whole system. While trying to find an online reference for this, apparently in the last Ringworld novel they hook a hyperdrive up to this, making it the largest "ship" I know. (I use "I know" advisedly... I'm sure somebody somewhere has turned a multiverse into some sort of ship for some reason or other.) In the Cities in Flight series by James Blish, the planet "He" gets about quite well, though that is dwarfed in every measurement by the Ringworld.
- Shivetya 13y agowhat would V'ger count as? If we would count it as a ship would we count its energy field in it size or just the support area directly around the probe itself? Based on "Trek Wikia" the novel put it at about 78km for the vessel itself. Pretty much one of the most powerful space moving vessels conceived. Do ships have to be "manned"?
- liotier 13y agoWhat ? No Culture ships ?
- pcrh 13y agoI couldn't find Tintin's rocket... http://us.tintin.com/adventures/destination-moon/ http://us.tintin.com/adventures/destination-moon/
- a3n 13y agoGeneral Products?
- EastCoastLA 13y agoA minecraft or 3d interior map of each would take this to the next level.
- xenophonf 13y agoHave you logged into the MineTrek server recently?
- Semaphor 13y agoNo one ever has Perry Rhodan [1] ships even though they play in the very big leagues [2]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_Rhodan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_Rhodan [2] http://www.perrypedia.proc.org/wiki/Raumschiffsklassen http://www.perrypedia.proc.org/wiki/Raumschiffsklassen (German)
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- Nihei 13y agoIs it sad that I knew the name of most of these without reading the text? I feel sad.
- terabytest 13y agoI can't find the Star Trek ones!
- chiph 13y agoTop right. Somehow I thought the Galaxy class was bigger.. Maybe you can help me find the Cygnus from "The Black Hole"
- RBerenguel 13y agoHmmm so Star Trek Armada (a quite old Star Trek themed RTS) had the size for the Enterprise quite mismatched for a Borg cube: they were roughly 1:2 or even 1.5:2 in size.
- Pxtl 13y agoRTS games have to make compromises in scale in order to fit the various elements on the screen in size large-enough to preserver recognition. Look at StarCraft, with its puny carriers and battlecruisers - I mean, the buildings in that game look about the size of a cube van.
- RBerenguel 13y agoOf course, but I think they could have made the cube slightly bigger (or in fact, much bigger) without any problems. It was the largest ship IIRC, and the game had a pan-zoom so you could see things close by or from slightly afar, so it wouldn't have been that troublesome.
- mhurron 13y agoWhen Armada was released 1024x786 was your standard resolution, with 800x600 not being that unusual. To have 'fleets', especially on the small maps, you were going to have to shrink that cube down. On top of that, only the Borg are going to send one at a time, a player is going to have several at once.
- RBerenguel 13y agoDidn't think about it, when I played Armada I didn't play online (still had a modem!) and the computer only sent one cube at a time. And I always was more like playing the Federation, I liked the ships more (I don't remember the name of the frigate class, but the special shot, bouncing among enemies was great, and the long-range destroyer "bombs" were also deadly: its range was barely a few more pixels than defense towers from the other races.)
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- coldarchon 13y agohow many of these would actually not break apart at 30.000 km/h?
- Shivetya 13y agoWhen does it stop counting as a ship? If mobility is a requirement would not the Death Star be allowed? In Andromeda they had bad guys who used a captured Star as the central point of their ship. B5, could not find the Vorlon planet killer
- sigzero 13y agoThe Death Star was called a battle station in the movies so I would not count it as a ship.
- danielweber 13y agoThese pictures have been going around the Internet for about 10 years (not that I complain about reposts, I love this one). People always ask about the Death Star, and the answer is that it would completely dominate the chart. Depending on this chart, if it was just on the side of the chart you might not even be able to see the curvature.
- DuskStar 13y agoWell, if your only criterion is "artificially constructed, can move under own power", then the Death Star would not even come close to dominating the chart. For example, the Ringworld was a ring ~1,600,000 kilometers wide and ~150,000,000 kilometers in radius, complete with central sun - and as of last appearance in the novels, was steadily accelerating towards the Andromeda galaxy.
- beambot 13y agoAnd don't forget about the puppeteer "homeworld": 5 planets (or was it stars?) in an artificially-created rosette formation.
- DuskStar 13y agoInteresting comparison, that. Probably much smaller in radius than the Ringworld, but I'm not sure how the mass would compare. (Not counting the star at Ringworld's center, that is)
- bradleysmith 13y agoI immediately went looking for an itty bitty TARDIS.
- chewxy 13y agoMy favourite ship is not there. You may have seen it. Blue box, has the words "PULL TO OPEN" on it. Some times a St.John's Ambulance logo. Both my hearts love that ship dearly.
- IvyMike 13y ago"Also, by popular demand: the Tardis is already on the image. Whether it's on the Red Dwarf and .25 pixels large or ALL of the image is your choice, it's probably both, anyway."
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- d0ugie 13y agoSpeaking of size comparisons, how many bytes does this mother weigh in as a WebP?
- dspeyer 13y agoIt seems paint will fall into disuse in the future, and the color green will be forgotten entirely.
- dclowd9901 13y agoI notice Gurren Lagann's galaxy-class unit is conspicuously absent.
- mhurron 13y agoSomeone linked an anime inspired one further up. It has Tengan Toppa Gurenn Lagann
- btbuildem 13y agoWhat I find slightly disappointing is the relative lack of vartiety -- the ships all look alike, with small variations. Maybe because this subgenre of nerddom is more SCI than FI, and rules constrain the construction of vessels? It would be interesting to see more drastic variations on the theme -- something beyond a roughly oblong object with superficial extrusions.
- antjanus 13y agothat's always been an issue in sci-fi. They're all basically either literal ships that do not have a regular uncovered deck and merely mirror the bottom of the ship, or airplane/fighter jets, and finally, submarine-type vessels. Once in a while, we throw a sphere in there, that's it. It's really boring, and yeah, you're completely right. If you look at the picture, it's just a bunch of same looking ships aiming right. That's it.
- yk 13y agoThe funny thing is, that the Borg cube is quite exceptional. Even though it would be a rather logical ship design.
- Tloewald 13y agoWhen Iain Banks discusses the appearance of Culture ships he tends to describe them as being very boring -- a cylinder with a flattened area or whatever. This is a little odd because of all the major SF settings, the Culture has the least trouble making spacecraft and could presumably shape them any way it pleases. Arthur C. Clarke's "Discovery" is a shielded sphere joined to nuclear propulsion systems by a long shaft -- seems pretty plausible to me. "Realistic" spacecraft are probably going to look very utilitarian until/if space travel becomes technically easy and safe. The vast majority of aircraft look pretty much alike for similar reasons.
- marssaxman 13y agoIt depends on what you consider to be the surface of the ship - Culture ships don't have rigid hulls, so the ellipsoid shape is really just the surface of its field envelope; the outline of its atmosphere, more or less. Presumably the physical structure inside is far more complex.
- snake_plissken 13y agoIt's missing this one: http://s3.amazonaws.com/data.tumblr.com/tumblr_lbjnlhr8vt1qedl16o1_1280.png?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAI6WLSGT7Y3ET7ADQ&Expires=1380383902&Signature=Y92DFZ8%2F9McLmAVhr45e5BKB1qU%3D#_=_ http://s3.amazonaws.com/data.tumblr.com/tumblr_lbjnlhr8vt1qe...
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- maw 13y agoI guess Spaceball One wouldn't fit.
- socalnate1 13y agoWaaaay too much information. do I really need to see every single variation of Star Destroyer?
- bayesianhorse 13y agoDid anyone see a TARDIS in there? I didn't find it...
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- ruricolist 13y agoThe boldest of the officers resumed speaking. 'That one ship is ninety million miles long, Your Highness. It shimmers like fire, but moves so fast that we cannot approach it. But it came into the center of our fleet almost touching our ships, stayed there twenty or thirty thousandths of a second. There it was, we thought. We saw the evidence of life on board: light beams waved; they examined us and then, of course, it lapsed back into nonspace. Ninety million miles, Your Highness. Old Earth has some stings yet and we do not know what the ship is doing.' [...] The cabin was small, twenty feet by thirty. The control area of the ship measured nothing over a hundred feet. All the rest was a golden bubble of the feinting ship, nothing more than thin and incredibly rigid foam with tiny wires cast across it so as to give the illusion of a hard metal and strong defenses. The ninety million miles of length were right. Nothing else was. The ship was a gigantic dummy, the largest scarecrow ever conceived by the human mind. (Corwainer Smith, "Golden The Ship Was—Oh! Oh! Oh!")
- oh_teh_meows 13y agoI find this very fascinating. Is there a site that discuss the kind of materials (never mind if they're non-existent, as long as they're plausible, i.e. within the realms of known physics) and technology needed to construct such massive vessels that wouldn't collapse under its own...ok not weight, since they float in space, but I imagine the moment thrusters are fired the internal structures would be pushed and pulled in different ways (the stresses on the system, and how the internal subsystems adapt mechanically may create a myriad of interesting noises/visuals perceptible to the inhabitants within)
- dangayle 13y agoThat is one of the nerdiest things I've ever seen. Awesome.