A little short for a starship, isn’t he?
Have you seen container ships? They’re perpective-bendingly massive. 400m is a quarter of a mile.
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.
Thanks because this image still didn’t help. Most people don’t see container ships very often.
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
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.
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”
Ok… the one I am familiar with is Disney Wonder at 294m long
Disney Cruise line is the best! That was the first thing I thought of to compare this to.
I’ve never seen a cruise ship. How many washing machines long is it?
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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.
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.
Honestly thought it was way bigger than this.
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.
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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!*
Other than electric vehicles that were charged by zero-emission sources of electricity
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?
Good point, I wasn’t considering production.
But don’t worry. The cargo ship sprang into being from nothingness and there were utterly no environmental impacts related to drilling, refining, and transportation of the fuel used to power the ship. So clearly EVs are so much worse for the environment /s
the Enterprise “D” (632.5m long) held 1000 people IIRC. crazy!
Even crazier, the Galaxy-class has the capacity to evacuate an additional 10,000+ humanoids.
When you watch videos like this, you realize that 1,000 is not that much against the actual size of the ship. The entire crew can comfortably gather in the main shuttlebay at the same time.
Uhm what are you guys talking about?? I don’t quite understand…
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 remember many years ago seeing a size comparison between an aircraft carrier and the TOS Enterprise. The aircraft carrier was bigger. I didn’t even know how to process that because of how big the Enterprise seemed to me.
305m is 1000 feet. The USS ENTERPRISE was 342m or 1,123 feet.
A modern day FORD class carrier is 1092 ft or 333m.
For personnel comparison, ENTERPRISE held ~5000 people and a FORD class has between 4-5000 people.
The fact that NCC-1701 only had like 1000 people is…a big difference.
I can understand that on a mathematical level, but on a more emotional one, it’s hard to process. Just like I know that the speed of light is 186,000 mps, but I can’t really fathom how fast that actually is.
I think the scientific term is “very”.
It’s actually “most”
Well the speed of light is actually faster than you can reasonably comprehend… you can’t see or experience the travel time of something going that fast. 300m is not unreasonable to understand once you’ve experienced it though - that’s a big boat, but you can see one and get a sense of the scale.
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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.
