13 ms·

Too 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 C

by diziet 13y ago

Too 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 ago
If 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 ago
  Well, 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 ago
I had exactly the same reaction. Nice appropriate handle, btw. :-)
andyjohnson0 13y ago
A 200km-long System Class GSV might ruin the diagram's scaling a bit...
- arethuza 13y ago
  It 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 ago
    Unlike 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 ago
      The 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 ago
        I 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 ago
  There is novel which suggest using entire star cluster for inter-galactic travels..
sdfjkl 13y ago
The 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 ago
  And 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.

by diziet 13y ago

bane 13y ago

If 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 ago
Well, 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 ago

I had exactly the same reaction. Nice appropriate handle, btw. :-)

andyjohnson0 13y ago

A 200km-long System Class GSV might ruin the diagram's scaling a bit...

arethuza 13y ago
It 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 ago
  Unlike 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 ago
    The 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 ago
      I 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 ago
There is novel which suggest using entire star cluster for inter-galactic travels..

sdfjkl 13y ago

The 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 ago
And 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.