I'm Tired of Stupidly Big Sci-Fi Ships
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 14 มิ.ย. 2023
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Spacedock delves into unnecessarily large spaceships in science fiction.
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Also, huge scifi ships are awesome. Unlike this video.
The Dune ships are an interesting counter example, since mass and size matter little, but there's a limited number of Navigators to move the ships, meaning you want to be able to move as much as possible in each jumps.
I'd argue the heighliners aren't ships at all. If memory serves they don't even have sublight drives. They're more like space stations that regularly teleport.
@@ShawnMCowles Not really, the Holtzman drive allows ftl by "folding space". Ftl ships in the Dune universe need a Holtzman drive but they also need a guild navigator or there's a 1/10 chance they'll get lost during the trip. That seems to imply that they must have to move, either by going through a pocket dimension or some other method. Herbert never explained how it worked. But logically there would be no need for a navigator if all the ship does is just teleport from one spot to another.
@@99bulldog sort of- there is a brief explanation of why they came about- the Holtzman drive pre-dates them, but it requires significant amounts of calculation to operate. In a society who's most advanced logic engine is a man who did a degree in calculus, this poses a problem. It's entirely possible that the reason that the navigators are needed is matching simply to match relative velocities with the destination system even though they ARE just teleporting- whilst Apollo proves you can basically math orbital mechanics in your head and get close enough, which is presumably how their shuttles work, the issue would then be that, over long distances you'd need to work out where everything was going to be in the future (because a star system isn't where it looks like it is- that's where it was when the light left, several years previously). The timeline of the invention of the heighliners matches this- they were, and this is important bit, implemented during the Butlerian Jihad i.e. at the point you couldn't just run a computer simulation to work out those things anymore (and there's absolutely no evidence for limited calculations still existing in Dune, unlike say 40k, and plenty of evidence they don't, like the widespread use of eugenics in order to replace them with specially bred people).
Dune's Heiliners can get away with massive size because they are just racks for ground-to-orbit ships, and they don't move under thrust or even maneuver much, if at all.
They are also non-combat craft, being more akin to our post-Panamax cargo container ships.
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A combat ship in most sci-fi settings has to move under thrust, turn by thrust, and continue to do so while sending out and taking in damage.
Materials have limits, in even a remotely realistic setting. If a Star Wars SSD was built with the best materials we know, accelerating too fast, or simply turning to the left could result in a twisted and mangled wreck unless most of the ship is just structure and thrust.
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As an easy example of what I am saying, think of a 1/2 inch (12mm) thick wooden dowel about 3 feet (1 meter) long. Pretty strong, has a little flex.
Now turn that dowel into an arrow. Fire it from a 100-lb draw bow and it flexes like rubber on launch as the back end experiences acceleration before the front end.
If that dowel has a structural weakness like a knot or cut, or an imperfection like being bent or having a thinner middle section, it may break before it goes anywhere.
I one fired an arrow I made from a hardware store dowel from a handmade bow, and it shattered, sending splinters into my hand.
That is what happens when a bow is too strong for the arrow AND the arrow is made from inferior materials.
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Imagine hitting the "full speed" button on your SSD and the whole ship becomes suddenly shorter (without relativistic effects) or bends at an undetected weak point.
@@reganator5000 The navigators use prescient planning, in other words they use a limited foresight to "see" dangers of the flight path. They're able to do it by ingesting massive quantities of spice. Frank Herbert never says how the Holtzman drive works. His son might've tried to explained it in his own follow up novels idk. But the original author never explained it other than saying "folding space". All the rest of what you said is conjecture on your part. But I'll say it again if there wasn't some kind of movement then a navigator wouldn't be needed. If you want to believe there is some kind of teleportation then we'll have to agree to disagree.
For the 40k part : Servitors are not counted as "crew members" or "passengers" ,if it was the case ,the number of personnel would be considerably higher.
Equipment at best, emergency rations at worse.
The eldar craftworlds of 40k are the most sensible representation of space ship construction I've seen in games.
@@thehellyousay Those and Escort-class ships, i.e. Raiders, Frigates and Destroyers.
Those are the submissive twinks right?
furthermore, im pretty confident slaves are not counted as crew either, its serfs (slaves with technical skills) and free humans/marines who are "crew"
In Star Wars the point of the insanely massive ships was to scare the population into submission. When a ship is so large it can be seen from orbit the population in the shadow of that ship are going to live in fear. Many of us believe that the downfall of the Empire in Star Wars was due largely to the fact that they misallocated resources to these mega projects that were vulnerable to attack even from a single-seat star fighter.
Not even just that. Video misses the mark in other ways for why these vehicles had such large crews specfically. The crews had jobs and employment- something the Empire heavily used to reduce rebellion in local systems. Go to school, join the academy, and then serve the Empire to make a modest living. Most sectors for near 2 decades were overwhelming void of heavy rebel activity.
It’s less the fighters themselves but what they represent
The empire was equipped to fight another CIS not the Rebellion and when the Rebels showed up took too long to turn around while also wasting money on projects that consolidate power into singular large warships when the threat they faced relied on many nimble units to disrupt and decay imperial rule
It isn’t the weakness to starfighters but rather the fact that 90% of the time there isn’t even a ship positioned to properly stop the fighter that was the problem
They are equivalent of the Jaffa staff weapon.
I think the worst offender in absurd sizes is the new trilogy. The sizes in the old republic era were much more reasonable and believable with available resources and it got increased during the imperial era due to how the whole state was military focused. First Order and Sith Eternal however got everything unreasonably bigger and stronger for no reason though.
Source?
I'll never forget a bar brag story I heard once.
A crew of an oil tanker was sitting in a bar relaxing and a group of Navy servicemen walked in.
After a few rounds, the sailors started talking about their ships and it turned out the Navy boys were off an aircraft carrier
Boasting about how large the ship was and how it was a monster at 66,000 tons and took thousands of sailors to run
The tankermen laughed at this because their ship dwarfed the carrier at something like 100,000 tons unlaiden, but only had a crew of 26
Edit:
For y'all who are missing the joke here. They are comparing pp sizes, and while the aircraft carrier has a much different role, it's still sailors talking smack and the mid size tanker easily dwarfs the carrier, and could give it a piggyback ride.
In most day to day operation, that aircraft carrier has to yield to the tanker because "might makes right" by navigation convention (smaller boat is more manuverable than the bigger one, and it's _way_ bigger and could run them down)
That what real spaceship should look like. Gigant armored shell with couple of guns and gargantuan storage of everything needed for years ahead, with minimal crew possible.
Thats still tiny, super tankers can go above half a megaton and near half a kilometer long.
The last bulk carriers I crewed for was 295m long by 55m wide and could load 150000 tons of iron ore in 9 holds and we were regularly dwarfed by tankers and container ships we encounter.
@@kuskusdikus6014 oh yeah, i couldent remember the exact numbers so I just pulled a large/mid lcs just to show how small a carrier really is in comparison to commercial vessels.
Some of the real big shippers out there have about the same mass parity with a supercarrier as the supercarrier does with it's tugboats.
It would be really funny to see a supercarrier and a super freighter alongside each other. The carrier pilots would be so jealous of landing on such a comparatively small top deck compared to the cargo ship
@@seldoon_nemar It also comes down a lot to density, a super carrier is visually huge but has a lot of empty spaces inside while commercial ships like an ore carrier is huge AND packed as much as safely possible to carry.
The ore carrier I mentioned has a loaded draft of 30m meaning it SINKS down the the equivalent of a 7 story building when fully loaded.
@@alexturnbackthearmy1907 If you need that much storage, you should probably be separating logistics ships from combat ships entirely. Never let the enemy get within range of or ideally see the supply ship, because dragging around a ton of supplies will be lousy for its combat performance. The combat ships can screen for it and rendezvous when their much more modest stores run low.
More like how it is with a submarine/destroyer tender or carrier.
(Edit) I thought this was self-evident, but people keep arguing with me, so: you can still send the supply ship on mission with the combat ship. It's not as good as keeping freighters far, far away from battle but you still get more tactical flexibility if the two aren't physically tethered together.
Most people: Heresy!
Imperium of Man: Heresy!!!!!!!!
@@subarticb5670That's the Imperium's reaction to pretty much everything
OBJECTION!
Even chaos agrees ships can never be big enough
It's treason then
There is weird and kind of interesting bit in regards to the ships in 40k in the book series 'twice dead king' where a necron gets on board one of those stupidly sized imperial battle ships wondering about the massive crew capacity and then realized that everything is done by hand and he looks at a gigantic anti ship cannon being loaded manually by thousands of slaves and crewmen and there are even mutated sub species of human who've founded their own tribal civilization in the bowls of the ship. I found it extremely interesting in it's sheer insanity.
what always killed me about W40k ships is the warp fuel being extremely toxic, but for some reason carried by one guy who is guaranteed to die by the end of his delivery, instead of just using a conveyer belt, or even just a giant slide.
I mean, it's awesome, but, why tho ? I get the no AI stuff, but simplifying most simple tasks does not require any kind of AI, or even computers.
@@ledocteur7701 older 40k fans often refer to this as "grimderp", things the Imperium (or other factions) do that makes the world grimmer and darker primarily through object stupidity instead of pragmatic evil.
@@ledocteur7701 I think it's the whole stagnation and degradation part of the setting, humans are plentiful and are easy to replace whilst even simple things like a conveyer belt are worth more. A conveyer belt needs materials to construct, repair, and maintenance whilst a human self-procreates and will even eat the processed dead in this setting.
@@markgrehan3726 Except that if such practices are widespread enough in the imperium, they are burning through their resources (humans) faster than they produce them and would rapidly depopulate planets. Even if the conveyers aren't cheap and I can't imagine they aren't, they are more reliable and sustainable.
@@ledocteur7701 what i always find odd is, i cant find a single source describing the fuel being carried and toxic and all that. Sure, it sounds like 40k, but in all the books i have read, all the games i played, none ever mentioned that part.
I honestly would be glad if somebody could point me to a primary source.
Something good to point out with crew sizes is automation. You can feasibly have an entire ship with a crew of 10 people, if everything is automated. The US carriers have massive crews because it gives them a lot of flexibility, it is generally cheaper/easier than heavy automation, and most of the carriers were designed literally decades ago. They can accomplish this because they have a large system of naval supply networks that makes it very cheap to supply, feed, and transport those sailors.
In space, each person on board requires not just food, but air, water, waste reprocessing facilities, and many other elements that just aren't needed on a naval ship. While this is obviously a flawed example, each ISS astronaut is estimated to cost more than $100,000 per hour while on board. While a huge amount of this price is because everything has to be brought from the surface, space is expensive. These costs heavily incentivize automating everything you possibly can, because a robot is drastically cheaper than a person in space.
I mean carriers also have to have a lot of crew because they have hundreds of pilots alone, and it’s also kinda hard to automate a lot of the emergencies and uncommon scenarios that happen in war
Things like damage control require more crew. It's also nontrivial to automate improvising to deal with unexpected situations. And of course, redundancy. If you have exactly the number of personnel needed to do critical tasks, then you're in trouble if anyone gets sick, injured, dies, goes rogue, or is otherwise incapacitated. Not good if you're light years away from the nearest port you can safely put in to.
It costs almost a billion dollars / year / per astronaut?!?
Person in space costs assume planet-based resupply source. This is true for our current level of technology, but not necessarily true for sci-fi. Much of the cost, as you said, comes from needing to bring stuff from the surface, and launching a rocket is expensive. But in Star Wars launching a spaceship is more akin to sending a cargo truck or a regular cargo ship. Launching stuff from the surface to space is trivial because they have some sort of anti-grav tech. And then we have to consider that stuff like food could be grown in space, fuel and water could be mined in space, oxygen is generated etc. So there is no need to bring stuff from the surface and fight the gravity of the planet to resupply spaceships.
subnaltica is like that a ship 1km with only 151 crew one of then being a diplomat , but i guess most of it is just drive space and cargo with everything being automated
I always liked how in Isacc Asimov's Foundation's Edge novel, the latest and most advanced ships were notably tiny compared to previous ships, and required hardly any crew due to advanced engines, computers and other tech.
Yeah, but it literally makes no sense(though it sounded good for teenager me at the time).
After all, Empire shattered into shards(of which any was much larger than Foundation), which were competing between themselves. And if anything, competition is what spurs progress in technology.
@@AKUJIVALDO But the Foundation grabbed all the best minds before the fall of the Empire, which led to a kind of Dark Age, like the Fall of the Roman Empire (a clear inspiration); it didn't lead to leaps in technological progress. It's not really until the Reformation and the protection of freethinkers by some rulers that you really get the movements forward. And those tech freethinkers, in Asimov's galaxy, would have fled to the Foundation.
Technological miniaturization. It's obvious to those of us who actually witnessed it happen over our lives. All of us, after enough years pass.
But it was a rather prophetic, visionary, unbelievable notion in the era Asimov wrote these stories. People in that era had no reason to believe technology would get smaller.
@@crabbieappleton except Empire had trillions of people, few thousands of scientists and their families couldn't make difference that massive...Literally.
@@pwnmeisterage that is why it was called a fiction. I mean, you can make one person sailboat now as few thousands of years ago, but there wouldn't be massive difference in size. Oh, sure newest materials is lighter and easily shaped, sail is far easier to get...but in the end it is a one person's sailboat. If you put it against trirem it would be fracked.
I mean that massive starship needed massive powerplants. But then a tiny ship could easily withstand that massive warship's firepower few decades or couple centuries later? LOL there should be multiple quantitative leaps in these few years all white having multiple times less people and resources. Just not believable enough. AKA Handwave.
It made good read for my young mind, or people whose only information was from books, education and TV/radio... But in information age it falls on its face. Still good read, but not the aclaimed classic it was once was. Not that much replacement is out there...
I think the size=power thing is at least partially a holdover from the Age of Sail, where the firepower of a ship was pretty much only proportional to the number of cannons, and more ship=more cannons.
Except they realised quickly that intermediate ships were much more effective. The more guns a ship had, the heavier it was and the slower it sailed and the poorer it manoeuvred.
In 1805, the British Royal Navy had eight First Rates which were ships with a hundred or more guns over three decks, fourteen Second Rates which had ninety or more, and one hundred and thirty Third Rates of 64 to 84 guns. A recognition of how much more versatile a Third Rate was with its balance of firepower, speed and manoeuvrability.
The Spanish had a four deck First Rate called Santísima Trinidad which carried 130 guns at her peak. She was absolute failure as a warship because she was too slow and too heavy and needed so many men to man her guns that she couldn't sail far without consuming all her own supplies, making her reliant on other ships to feed her crew. In the two battles she fought in, she was shot to pieces by British Third Rates that were able to shoot at her while avoiding the fire of her guns which couldn't be brought to bear because she handled so poorly. She was vulnerable even to frigates (Sixth rates) because they could avoid her fire and pound her from a distance.
First and Second Rates were only useful on the rare occasions big battlefleets were assured to come together. The rest of the time, Third Rates were the practical, reliable warships.
Dreadnoughts would like a word about Big ship and big guns. Considering most modern USA warships are light crusher size there seems to be other things at work
@@bobo-cc1xw There is a limit to how much a waterborne ship can put above the waterline before they get major stability issues, or just capsize like the Swedishh ship Vasa.
@@bobo-cc1xw
The torpedo that can explode beneath the keel of a ship and break its back is what happened there. There's no way to defend against it. Various naval exercises have shown that a single diesel attack sub can sink an entire US carrier battlegroup thanks to its torpedoes and ability to run completely silent; unlike a nuclear sub. It's why the US Navy hates Sweden.
Basically, there's no point building a huge expensive ship when an extremely cheap (by comparison) torpedo can sink it. And it only takes one.
tbf it does work in sci-fi as well because more ship = more reactor space, and the power of sci-fi ships is usually dictated by how much energy they can pour into their shields and energy weapons, so a massive ship with half its interior dedicated to power generation would be invincible against fleets of smaller ships, even if the opposing fleet has equivalent total mass to the dreadnought, just because of how concentrated and centralized its power generation and distribution network is.
Another factor to consider for massive ships is maintenance and docking facilities. A smaller-size ship can be repaired, maintained and upgraded at any of dozens or even hundreds of facilities, whereas one that's exceptionally large may only have one or two dedicated spacedocks capable of accommodating it.
That isn't so much of an issue for spaceships as it is for sea-ships as you don't have a waterline to contend with. You can just park the tools and work vehicles near the damaged location, you don't need to pump any water out and fight with gravity to access the place you want to work on.
On the flipside, having a plot contrivance like "this system can only be maintained in-atmosphere" is a good way of justifying abnormally small spacecraft.
@@aurtosebaelheim5942 while that makes sense, I'm certain an extremely large ship will be much more costly to be serviced, both in resources and logistics. It is still not impossible and surely there is a way to streamline that process within a fictional setting.
Nazi Germany's Bismarck. 41,000 tons displacement and 242 meters in length. My understanding is that Germany was reluctant to use the thing in battle because they only had 2 or 3 drydocks big enough to service it, and the Allies had bombed one of them into rubble.
It depends on the level of infrastructure. the cargo ships today wouldn't be able to travel back in time and find a harbor that could facilitate their design. but the bigger the ship the more stuff it can hold and in order to keep the life blood of a Galactic Empire going you would need really really big ships and the big infrastructure to facilitate them
The other thing to consider though is that the scale of an interstellar civilization itself is also going to be vastly larger than any modern earth nation. So trying to service billions of smaller ships vs a few million much larger ones would be easier, especially if said civilization has huge populations and resources concentrated in a smaller area. A very large civilization concentrated in a few star systems is going to prefer fewer, larger ships due to economies of scale and not having to worry about vast volumes of space to patrol, where as a very thinly spread out civilization over vast volumes of space is going to need larger numbers of smaller ships to deal with that greater volume.
To make a somewhat realistic starship you need to think about it like an engineer. You first think of what you want this ship to do, and then you design how big it will be. Most warships in our time are essentially weapon systems that have a ship build around them to bring the weapon system where it needs to be, as well as some space for the crew that you need to operate it squeezed in between. You don’t want a big ship. You build your ship as big as it has to be for the intended purpose, but not bigger.
It is really surprising how big modern fighters are, but how cramped,literally, the cockpit IS for them. Because the frame had to hold an engine and weapons, and space for a crew was almost begrudged. Starships don't have to contend with air resistance, but they do, if nuclear based, require a way to turn fusion/fission/Matter-Antimatter to energy, which is handwaviumed away to "the engine does it", but it ought to be given a fair amount of space to DO that magic, otherwise it is clearly and obviously magic.
@@markhackett2302in the science fiction i'm writing the ships are pretty much 40 percent engine, most fights end when the engine is hit, none of that leaking energy.
@@terrelldurocher3330I'm doing a similar thing. I was working on a design for a ship powered by an orion drive, so the ship's diameter was determined by that combined with the rotating crew area, and wanting to use the largest possible fusion bombs for fuel economy reasons. It's length was determined by it's railgun, which is at a fixed angle about 15 degrees off of axial, so the ship can shoot at an enemy, then dodge the return fire. I then strapped as many nuclear missiles as I could fit to the outside of the ship.
In defense of the pillar of autumn, a large portion of the ship is devoted to its giant gun and structural supports.
This is one of my issues with his video that is somewhat specific to Halo. In Halo, both the UNSC and Covenant are building ships designs AROUND a weapon. Literally like the A-10 in real life.
@@Seriona1It's almost the same in WH40k, those ships carry HUGE guns, large enough to put some real life ships inside them, they not only need to carry these guns, but also the impossibly complex systems to make the ship work, the shields, the ship's engines and reactor being an example.
He did mention in the video that UNSC ships tend to be built around their weapon...
@@Seriona1 Because sometimes that's what you have to do. "Oh gee we have this awesome weapon but it's absolutely huge and doesn't fit into anything we currently have, oh i know lets design something new for it!"
I remember a little graphic EC_Henry put together that really shows the absurdity of this sort of thing. He had the entire crew of the Enterprise D stood up side-by-side on the hull in close formation and they basically amount to an inconsequential speck on the hull. If you found yourself on a random hallway inside the thing you'd think the whole ship was abandoned just based on how long you'd have to travel before you ran into another person. I think in his breakdown he said that if you divided the livable space on board the ship evenly between each crew member, they'd each be given roughly a square kilometer of space on the ship.
Speaking of, the canon size of Enterprise has grown in scale between the original trilogy, and the new trilogy. I think the Star Trek 2009 version is like double the size of the original trilogy. So star trek is a perfect example of sci fi writers inflating the sizes of ships over the years. I think one of the biggest effects was going from practical models to CGI. Ship sizes were limited by models and set design. Now theres basically no limits to what fake nonsense someone can paint in during post.
@@hatman4818to be fair it is stated in expanded lore that the ships increased in size due to a change in philosophy of starfleet design after the battle that destroyed the kelvin
I both like and dislike the lore explanation on how the Enterprise D / Galaxy class and other big Starfleet ship has modularity and purposeful empty space built into the design. It make sense for the flag ship to be able to host a fancy diplomatic conferences or science event, but also a lot of wasted resource to maintain a mostly empty ship during normal operation.
People gripes on the Enterprise-G and I absolutely love the F, I don't like how they went about doing it in the story, but at least the sizing makes more sense now with the G.
Wasn't the Enterprise supposed to be able to act as a science ship, diplomatic envoy, large scale transport while passing by other federation planets on planed routes, Military defence, modularity in the hull to be adapted for different tasks. AND have enough food, fuel, water and spare parts to be able to go into space for a year or two without needing a resuply unless really critical. That shit makes a ship big really fast. Oh and lets not forget that each crew was given quite a spacious quarter and the rooms deisgned for free time and hanging out. XD
I'd think the internal volume of the Enterprise would be mostly be taken by ship systems so the problem may not be as bad as presented
The easiest answer to the ship-size-to-crew-ratio issue is to say that most of the ship is taken up by giant reactors or solid superstructure or refrigerators or the like, so the populated parts of the ship aren't all that big. I think most Death Star cross-sections, for example, claim that most of the thing's volume is actually solid or void, not inhabitable space. You'd also probably need a large supply of automated systems and repair robots to keep things functioning.
Still, you should probably consider how people actually get around inside the thing. A three-mile-long ship means that you need to walk at least three miles to get to the other side. (One thing I really appreciate about Star Wars's Malevolence was that it has an internal train system to move stuff around.)
The Death Star also covers the issue of distance, with each section essentially having everything needed for the crew in that area. It is why I don't think Space Dock referencing the DSI is particularly fair considering it isn't even a warship, it is a space station that acts as an armored city.
"The ship is too big. If I walk, the movie will be over." - Mel Brooks as President Skroob, Spaceballs (1987)
@@dhwwiiexpert It DEEPLY amuses me that the size comparison clip used at 4:26 has Spaceball I in it.
Every big ship has its own internal transportation system
With a ship the size of the Death Star, the floors might as well be toward the center because it has a significant gravitational field!
In my view, superships exist for one reason and one reason alone, to hold claimed territory. Once the assault ships and massive fleet battles are over, you warp in the uss huge AF to now act as a mobile star base. This ship should act as the main supply base and fort for your occupying force, it launches strikes from a distance and maybe even acts as a carrier for smaller destroyers. Kind of like if the Enterprise had a pocket defiant with it.
The massive ship is a prestige project to show that they can afford to build it.
Also works for nomadic factions in settings where most of space is well, space. No civilization for lightyears and the areas that have big bubbles of starsystems have it for the industrial aspect that you can ship stuff around if it's closer.
Just have some scouts check a area out with plentiful resources then plop in. Start building enough there and maybe someday it'll be able to make another supership to go out and do the same thing.
@@lukea1533 basically a result of circumstances. a bit like making a decision on how fast spaceships should be going. that depends on how big the universe is supposed to be.
No what if The Defiant had a Pocket Danube Runabout, with a Pocket Flyer from Disco, With a pocket automated surveillance drone. And its actually just the pocket enterprise of the Enterpise J, which belongs to a Voth Citadel Dreadnought.
"If you do specify a mass for your creations make sure they're in the right ballpark."
*Thinks about David Weber's Honorverse ships having the density of smoke, before he corrected the numbers in later editions*
there are also Webers dahak books, though he didnt give any numbers on the mass of the planetcrafts there...
One of the more notorious cases of the density issue was in the Honor Harrington novel series. David Weber had originally given the dimensions and tonnage of, IIRC, a dreadnought class warship, and someone actually did the math and it turned out the overall density of the ship was roughly equivalent to that of a cloud of smoke. He ended up retconning the numbers to something much more reasonable.
Thankfully, he limited references to length (though the early books do feature those numbers, such as HMS Nike apparently being 1200 meters long), with tonnage being far more important. He kept the tonnages, and shrunk the ships to maintain a density of about 250 kg/m3.
Nike's new length is 713 meters.
@@jessecarozza8134 Which Nike?
There are at least 3 of them in the series.
I'd love to live in something as ethereal as a cloud of smoke. But seriously, if a spaceship wasn't weighed down with an obscene mass of propellant, wouldn't it be mostly air? The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction must be believable. Though come to think of it, a dreadnought should be armor-plated.
@@bricefleckenstein9666 Reliant-class, from Short Victorious War and Field of Dishonor. Not the big one from later on meant to patrol Silesia. I think she was somewhere in pre-war battleship tonnage.
@@eekee6034 : Ironically, for a dreadnought armored with Whipple shields, "could of smoke" could be a potent density.
As soon as the topic for this video came up I thought of Spaceball 1. Spacedock does not disappoint.
"Why were you running?"
"This ship is too big! If I'd walked, the movie would be over!"
Don't forget they also had a zoo and a mall onboard too :=)
@@jaymartin8273 I'd love to have had anyone that's interviewed him to have asked Brooks if the zoo was a dig at ST:TNG for having Cetacean Ops on the Enterprise-D or some other reason.
@@cericat Highly unlikely, the first mention of Cetacean Ops in TNG was 1988, Spaceballs came out in 1987. More likely would be a dig at TOS arboretum, a botanical garden on board the Constitution and Galaxy Class ships
Wasn't the UNSC _Infinity_ originally a colony/ark ship? That would be pretty much why it's so huge: much like the _Supremacy_, it was actually designed as a mobile base.
Also the fact that it needs to carry its escort fleet within it due to how it's slipspace drive is forerunner tech so they can't exactly make more of them, and it's far faster than anything humanity can produce on its own.
Eve Online Titans of about 20km sizes are also justified since they are warships especially designed to face and destroy entire enemy fleets by themselves alone without any allied support
@@battlesheep2552 why wouldnt the escort fleet just go into the infinitys slipspace wake?
@@robertharris6092The Infinity have a precise and faster slip-space drive that could take weeks could be shortened to a couple of days.
@@warhammer8867 so?
This is why I like the 40k approach, a galactic empire not only builds big, but builds *lots* of ships.
You see, my opinion is there are two ways you can have absolutely giant ships.
A. Massive interstellar empire capable of producing a ship like it en masse due to their technological prowess (Forerunner Ecumene).
B. It is the most technologically advanced ship and the pinnacle of research at the time (UNSC Infinity).
The Covenant, as a side note, is somewhere in between with the 29km long Sh'wada-pattern supercarrier. It takes an immense amount of effort to build a thing, and while there’s definitely more than what we saw in the games, they’re not very common. We only know of two in fact, the Long Night of Solace, which was destroyed during the Fall of Reach, and the Hammer of Faith, which was never completed due to it being destroyed by Blue Team during Operation: SILENT STORM during the Attack on Zhoist.
In addition, the Infinity was not originally meant to be a warship; it was originally commissioned as an emergency evacuation/colony ship for the remnants of humanity near the end of the Human-Covenant war, when defeat seemed inevitable.
While not explicitly confirmed to be the same pattern as the Long Night of Solace, there are other covenant supercarriers mentioned. The flagship of Imperial Admiral Xytan ‘Jar Wattinree was a supercarrier and Nizat ‘Kvarosee spoke of 20 massive ships larger than his own ship (an assault carrier) around High Charity gathered for the war against humanity. So the covenant had a fair amount of those.
@@AbolaSpartan True. I just mean it’s not like they are present in every fleet and go to every colony being glassed. I don’t think the Fleet of Particular Justice had one, but on the other hand the Second Fleet of Homogeneous Clarity probably had many due to being part of the accompanying fleet and defense force of High Charity.
Indeed
For my ship the lightbringer its designed for the LONGEST TRIPS
From hub to hub
...C. It's the _least_ technologically advanced ship in the setting, being inflated by overpreparation, overedundance, and in general not finding the most optimal solutions yet. Just look at the size of a steam boat's engine and related space, and compare it to a modern ship engine of a similar horsepower.
To be fair, the Infinity was also supposed to be a mobile city, as it was originally a mobile ark in case of extinction.
The UNSC ships also rely heavily on their onboard AI to run a lot of its systems, which theoretically helps keep crew sizes down.
@@phantomninja01yeah but when the ships comes to be in manual mode there will be no enough crew
@@dvrchweesse1frfdozemkaanai594
Not really. Just cause theyre in "manual mode" doesnt mean they dont have computers to do everything.
40K's occasional low crew sizes makes more sense when you realize Servitors don't count as 'crew'.
Other time there's whole communities of thousands upon thousands living in sections of a ship that barely interact with the rest of it's crew, living for generations just maintaining some part of the vessel as a cultural tradition, mostly otherwise unaware of their place in the galaxy.
Imperial warship have small forge world worth of manufacturing equipment and a lot of farms. Also living quarters are just tiny part of ship, most of it is taken by rectors/engines, weapon decks and ammo for them, dozens of layers of armor and hundreds of sensors along with various warehouses for all sorts of needed cargo. Also every ship have its own air group suited for ship needs (cargo ships, troop transports, officer transport). Not to mention that big chunk of living quarters is also taken for hospitals, cantines, briefing and training rooms and etc. They drop down number of crew to massively increase its utility, habitability and autonomy.
@@alexturnbackthearmy1907also, Imperial ships have two entirely different engines mounted on them: the warp drives for FTL and the plasma drives for sublight travel.
While they can alternate the use of the same reactor to power one or the other, that's probably a lot of space used just for propulsion.
The “too big ship” and logistics I think work the opposite way. Modern ships have a minimum size for endurance. One the the failings of the US corvette sized (3000 tons) LCS was that it was too small to operate for more than a month at a time. Crossing either Atlantic or Pacific takes 1-2 weeks, so these ships had to be forward deployed. For comparison, 9000 ton DDGs routinely do 9 month deployments. As pointed out, a space ship is going to use a lot of its space for fuel and food.
To ba fair to Star Wars, it's canon that Imperial-Class Star Destroyers are logistical nightmares, and it required a military apparatus the size of the Galactic Empire to field such a ship. When the Empire fell, a huge number of them were mothballed because the infrastructure supporting them no longer existed. Only the most powerful warlords like Thrawn and Zsinj could keep using them, and even then they were usually operated in a reduced capacity (skeleton crews, limited fuel reserves, understrength fighter wings, etc).
This isn't entirely true, the part about the ships being mothballed. Really, the necessary infrastructure was in regards to building and crewing more. The Emperor dying didn't result in the crews of the existing ships immediately disappearing. Rather, they became a finite resource and as they battled the rebellion (which grew into the New Republic), they lost more and more ISDs. Repairing the ships were still costly, but the ISDs essentially acted as dreadnoughts in WWI after the battle of Jutland, used only when absolutely necessary since they were too expensive to replace. This was shown in the expanded material as ISDs were still utilized when the remnant forces needed a show of force.
@@AstinCrow The Star Wars legends handled ships pretty good, Large ships had specific roles that needed support to survive against a well balanced fleet. Usually the super star destroyer and up ships had flaws that a smaller fleet could take out at a cost. In the legends (EU) the gigantic ships didn't have real use until the Vong war were massive mobile weapon platforms were an advantage when you had battles with thousands of capital ships fighting it out.
I don't think the critiques were aimed at the ISD so much. They could be argued to be overkill, but not by much since Mon Cala cruisers could hold their ground against them. On the other hand even they are dwarfed by SSD's, despite already being more than a match for any of their contemporaries.
@@justinthompson6364 Aye, he was criticizing oversize ships in general, I was only really defending Star Wars. The Executor is the perfect ship to bring up in that regard, personally it's around the maximum size I'm comfortable with (at least as far as human-built starships go, anyway, and I don't consider self-propelled space stations such as the Death Star or DS9 to be "ships" as such).
Warhammewr 40K ships are absolutely gorgeous, some of my favorite sci-fi ships aesthetically, but when you get into the battleships and dreadnoughts they're a bit too big (Gloriana-Class Battleship ~30Km)
Unpopular opinion... Zsinj > Thrawn. Bro had one of the top ten biggest nations in all of StarWars, was closest to being a real successor to the Empire, and had probably the third most iconic super in all of StarWars behind Vader's Executor and the Eclipse
I always liked that the Tauri ships in Stargate were more realistically sized. The BC303/304 ships had a fairly rational size for what they were intended to do.
Yes and also:
SGA S2E19 18:34 Inferno:
- From the number of people that we're detecting, thats four trips
- But the Deadalus is quite Large surley you can fit more---
- This is a spaceship, which means that our life-support resources are finite, four trips wuld already strech those resources to the limit
Thanks!
overpowered too; given they took out wraith hive ships without much trouble, and even smallest craft (x/F 304) had jump space generator, enemies never had chance against tauri. even those annoying self replicating blocks (replis9 were beaten by "primitive weapons " (as supreme commander thor said it ) ...
@@ApocGuy
304s weren't overpowered until they received the most advanced weapon tech ever developed in the Stargate franchise; Asgard beam weapons. Before then, their railguns never downed anything bigger than an Al-kesh. The closest a railgun and missile armed 304 ever came to scoring a capital kill was during the battle between galaxies when the Daedalus' railguns firing on the dart bay caused secondary explosions that crippled the Hive... But not before the Hive crippled the 304 in return.
Before the beam weapons, they couldn't do anything to the shield of even a Ha'tak which was ironic because that was the ship they were built to fight.
@@DomWeasel Also, the hive ship kills before beam weapons were from teleporting nuclear weapon on board the wraith craft.
Not many ships are armored against internal nuclear explosions, never mind ones "enhanced" by Stargate's explodium - naquadria.
@@MonkeyJedi99
And that only happened in two episodes; the first time they used it before the Wraith developed a countermeasure and a second time when the countermeasure couldn't work because of a blackhole.
The funniest part about most huge sci fi ships is that, with what we know about heat build up, they arent _big enough_ to support their crew and armament and not end up as glowing infrared slag hulks just from their inability to shed heat.
you assume a world that has solved the faster than light problem.. has not solved the cooling problem?
@@Kraniumbrud we can hand wave away physics or we can choose not to. FTL *might* be allowable. There is nothing in physics that tells us that dodging heat build up _is._
I miss those hard-sci-fi details, actually
@@defective6811Quantum something something. Or they have retractable, large surface area radiators we just don't see on screen.
Maybe they siphon the heat away into giant batteries that are used to power a lot of systems?
It's something that I really love about the Avatar movies, the fantastic design of the ships, which includes huge radiators literally glowing with heat as they get to the end of their journey.
Cargo ships bring smaller than warships is a very ww2 convention where break bulk cargo was the only kind of cargo and the only thing really bigger than a warship was a passanger liner.
In some of these, the ships have purposes beyond simply combat. The UNSC Infinity was I tended to serve as a lifeboat for humanity in the case of Earth falling, allowing the species to escape, plus the primary design consideration for all their ships is where the mass drivers go, and the bigger it is, the more powerful it is. Battlestar Galactica was never intended to enter atmosphere, so it isn't bound by concerns about gravity or drag, and includes limited manufacturing capabilities, while Battlestar Pegasus has enough manufacturing capability to make whole new auxiliary craft. That's even why the ridiculous megaship in _The Last Jedi_ works, but only if you've read extra materials that state it can build Star Destroyers.
But ships beyond a couple kilometers that are solely for combat seem a bit silly, and exist only for bigger-is-better logic.
Even with building star destroyers it still sucks, but it is better. Because it actually from what I can tell lacks any point defence or shielding, as shields in star wars can easily tank hyperdrive rams and star fighters are easily capable of destroying unshielded vessels. So the first order should have made it have large shields and point defence, then kept it away from any danger they could, and protected it using a support fleet that surrounds it instead of sitting behind it and leaving the bridge exposed. This would have made it a very hard to kill vessel that would support the war more then the mega ever could. Edit: I actually am fine with every other point, I just really hate the mega star destroyer for how stupid it is and how many plot holes it makes on its own.
Well i would counter the last point and say it depends on doctrine, say you have a nation that has a large amount of resources but lacks the size and manpower to run a large fleet of smaller ships, in this case a few very large warships would be practical for defense as crew survivability would be higher and they would be able to tank whole fleets from other empire.
@@gaiusmariuscaesar The bigger the better in space. Especially if it isnt SW space, that extremely populated. It allows warship to be more autonomous, like have its own food production, oxygen production, manufacturing of spare parts on go, more ammunition and useful equipment on board (like ability to carry troops for ground warfare or mining equipment to increase autonomy). Also if shields are thing in universe, then bigger ship can have best defence systems possible, instead of these that can fit in small limited space.
I like to add another Example here since it was shown in tbe Video: tge Taken King's Dreadnaught.
Oryx's Dreadnaught wasn't intentionally built that big. It was simply that big because Oryx made it from the carcass of a creature that was that big (the worm god Akka).
A vast majority of the Dreadnaught is unmanned. There are entire sections dedicated for troop transport, a bio-hive magic fusion reactor for power, it traverses FTL through the use of two Deathsingers opening and closing portals on either end of the ship, and it essentially serves as the capital and throne of one the Hive rulers.
But again, it wasnt Made that way. It was hewn from the corpse of a creature whose body was that large
EVE Online Titan warships are about 15-20 km length but that's because they were designed to take down entire enemy fleets by their own without any support, basically for massive but single scale space combat where It would be a 1 vs 100 vessels duel. Just imagine a couple kilometers ship facing a enemy fleet alone, It won't last a second. So at least in this case by the fact that are making them huge is justified
It is worth noting, if you are intending to have a ship that can operate independently for long time periods, you would go big probably, resources aren't an issue generally once you have asteroid mininig at a high level and if you don't need to pull out of a gravity well, larger let's you have full ecosystems for oxygen, water and food supply, good radiation protection just from the hull as well as space for solar panels and radiators. Not to mention any armaments, docking spaces for smaller craft, mining equipment etc. Of course, in support range or with a fleet this logic does fall down somewhat
I think the real problems with massive ships are actually propulsion, power, and integrity.
Size and mass don't increase at the same rates, mass increases faster so these massive ships would realisticly be insanely heavy. Look at halo's UNSC Infinity, it weighs 907 million metric tons. The entire 8 billion humans on earth combined weigh 390 million metric tons. It would take huge engines to realisticly move that kind of mass, and there's still the matter of turning and slowing down.
The amount of power needed to produce that kind of thrust would have to be immense. And without some kind of energy field (another power drain) to reinforce the structure, the ship would crush itself after the first direction change.
@@GrandInfernoElite Hmm, I wonder why nauvoo from the expanse is not crushed by its own thrust?
do they have some kind of structural reinforcer?
@@GrandInfernoElitehere’s where the sci-fi part of the show takes over. They would simply use Something that hasn’t been invented yet. As far as the structural problem goes they would just need stronger materials. Like what happened to planes, they went from wood to aluminum
@Rifky809 Nauvoo might use low thrust for longer time that gives less stress to the ship.
Basically mobility and accelerations still works in real life just like in something like Star Wars - smaller ships have less mass to accelerate and less integrity stress while being at higher acceleration. The balance, though, is lower Delta V.
@@GrandInfernoElite Not really. It will be able to turn, accelerate and decelerate just fine. But it will take much much longer then smaller ships. More important question is why they need to do it very fast in first place?
Do note that larger ships can equip longer-ranged weapons and better sensors so that they can hit enemies before enemies hit them. They probably also have longer cruise ranges, since they have more room for crew compartments and supplies. They might also survive harsh environments (such as the atmosphere of stars) which will instantly annihilate smaller vessels.
I thought that too. Its not like trying to hit a zero with a flack cannon, a smaller ship may well not be much harder to hit or even much easier when you consider how much better defended a large ship might be.
There will be a lower limit simply by the tech that has to go into the ship. Sensors and engines will need a certain amount of space and weapons and armor will become ineffective below a certain level.
A good example is hyperdrive in Babylon 5. It has a certain minimum size, so only sufficiently big ships will have one, while smaller ships need to use preexisting installations.
But a bigger ship can put more weapons or bigger weapons and stronger engines inside.
On the other hand a bigger ships will also need more power to move around and more resources to build.
Now the optimal range obviously depend on the systems used and the technology available.
@@HappyBeezerStudios Sensors: you might prefer one big sensor that sees 10 light-seconds, instead of 100 sensors that see 1 light-seconds.
Carriers: small carriers are just inefficient, just like the real world counterparts.
People are always acting like smaller means you can dodge stuff.
You could not dodge a barn if it was coming at you at 0.1% speed of light, even if you were in a 150 meter "reasonably sized ship"
“Star Wars has this strange one-upsmanship that seems so petty!”
Star Wars Legends: _Laughs in Suncrusher_
I think one way to excuse it away for yourself, is that we don't know how big all the machinery is. If the ship is 3 times bigger, but holds the same crew, let's just say the extra space is needed for supplies/machinery.
And, if the crew seems too small for the size, then consider that there is a lot more automation on that ship somehow (as universes allow), for example AI crew, repairbots, etc.
that what I do for my universe, the main faction who has ridiculously huge ships is an AI, so it doesn't really change anything if term of logistics, because a small drone can be controlled exactly the same way as a big drone.
non-AI factions that have very large ships use a lot of automation as well, only the soldiers and officers/captains/commanders absolutely need to be organic, the rest can be automated away.
alongside that, food, water and even manufacturing is done only using one ressource fed into different styles of totally-not-star-trek-inspired-replicators. so most of the space of any given ship is mostly weaponry and propulsion.
need a bigger gun ? slap it on a bigger ship, or build the ship around the gun in certain cases.
A good example for the automation argument would be the Constitution-class vs the Intrepid-class from Star Trek.
Despite being roughly 1.2 times longer than the Constitution, the Intrepid has 25% fewer personnel on board which is likely owed to it being over one hundred years more advanced than its predecessor.
Even The Expanse, a series with the most realistic depiction of what void warfare would look like, does actually respect this. The ships have a lot of diagnostic systems and automation to it so the crew sizes can be on the smaller side rather than be trying to cram crew and storage space into every nook and cranny like aircraft carriers do. The Rosinante is a corvette crewed by 4 and has enough subsystems and moderation to make that feasible.
The Galactica seems to be like 50% jump drive, enforced further by Adama's flythrough a shipwreck in Blood and Chrome
@@ledocteur7701 We can even see this today:
Blake-class Protected Cruiser, 1891:
Length: ~122 meters
Mass: 9300 tonnes
Crew: 570
Arleigh Burke-class Missile Destroyer:
Length: ~155 meters
Mass: 9500 tonnes
Crew: 323
The thing about larger ships being easier to hit comes down to what space combat is like in the setting, I believe. If fighting takes place at hundreds or thousands of kilometers while all combattants are zipping around at double digit km/s, I imagine that whether a ship is 1 km or 5 long doesn't matter as much. Within half a second it will be in a completely different spot anyway.
Yeah, but in that setting, the projectiles will also be relatively faster, making the size difference matter.
@@MyVanir That's a good point aswell. Though it also again depends on the target's speed to some degree. Even if the projectile only takes one or two seconds to hit, if the target is going really fast, even a tiny course change will leave it in a wildly different location, affecting hit probability. Though that is of course affected by how maneuverable the ship is, and how good the tracking is, and so on and so forth...
In the end, the whole thing comes down to the interplay of a very wide array of factors.
"If you make something bigger, you make it heavier, which means you need more propellant.."
The fact that this came right after the square cube law is funny.
Bigger ships can carry a higher proportion of fuel, and can therefore achieve much better range and/or top speeds.
Crew sizes vary wildly with automation. A modern NATO frigate has much less personell but way more firepower than a similarly sized WWII light cruiser. In sci-fi settings, most systems can conceivable run automated, including maintenance which can be done with robots/droids etc.
I my setting, massive ships like these are used more as mobile space stations rather than actual capital ships.
Intended for establishing an orbital launch platform rather than fighting in pitched battles.
(And by "massive" I mean the size of standard Star Destroyers or Galactica, not the crazy huge stuff)
How about giant mobile manufacturing ship to create infrastructure for star system colonization such as laser highways and profit from the infrastructure use by incoming colonists.
@@addisonchow9798ooooh
And it could move on once the colony is well established.
@@mitwhitgaming7722 or be expanded into an orbital main manufacturing hub.
@@mitwhitgaming7722 no, in order to maximize profits, they only build the the laser highways in the star system and quickly move on to the next star system and is always travelling to reach the edge of the galaxy and use the profits earned from the infrastructures to fund and build a near lightspeed ship to colonize or reach another galaxy.
@@addisonchow9798 Ah
I think the mass conveyor from 40k makes sense actually. Its working on the same idea as modern cargo ships. The settings FTL option is also probably a factor. Its kinda weird actually that 40k has better considered cargo ships than most other sci-fi settings.
tbf 40k is all about showing the massive scale of galaxy-spanning war, so having massive logistical transports adds to the sense of how titanic the amount of stuff they need to move around between battle grounds is
Not only that, but there are other larger ships too, The Phalanx, The Rock and Speranza just to name some, but they are literally cities that move, so they need to be big
Also, one of the most expensive parts of the ships in WH40k is the Warp Drives, with it being just much more efficent to build massive ones than many small ones
He missed the part where one single small hiveworld has 10x population of modern earth so no wonder the cargo ships are so fucking big especially when you need Psykers to run warpdrive
Regarding armor, the square cube law means that scaling up ships requires less armor per unit of volume the bigger they get.
This was Thrawn's entire argument against making things like the Death Star, or the Executor Class, and he brought it up deliberately to Palpatine, that they could do far, far more with hundreds of fleet groups made out of the same amount of materials from the Death Star, it was just that Palpatine had different plans that required them so whether or not you prefer the canon arguments for them, or the Legends ones with the Vong, they had their purpose, it just may have been better to make way more ships than a single, gigantic asset that was incredibly devastating to have destroyed.
Ships getting bigger isn't new. Modern destroyer and Cruisers are as long and as massive as early battleships.
As long, yes, but still nowhere near the displacement. Even a Ticonderoga-class cruiser is still less than 10,000 tons at full load, and even WWI battleships could top three times that number.
@@griffinfaulkner3514 Yeah, but Dreadnought was only 20,000 tons and some pre-dreadnoughts got down to that, for example the german Brandenburg-class at around 10,600 tons and pre-dreadnoughs, even ones put into service contempary to the Dreadnough, displaced around 14,000 tons
@@InsufficientGravitas Sure, but the Brandenburgs, to use your example, were also about 30 feet shorter than one of the old Oliver Hazzard Perry-class _frigates,_ which have only 40% of the displacement of the Brandenburgs. Battleships tend to be exceptionally heavy relative to their length, especially for the early ones.
@@griffinfaulkner3514
The bulk of that missing displacement is mostly from the modern ships having less armour to favour other factors like crew ammenities, acceleration, maneuverability and hull shapes to make them less noticeable on radar, sonar and to make them more fuel efficient. Bring the armour back and modern destroyers and cruisers would probably sit comfortably in the 10,000 to 20,000 ton range.
@@Kakarot64. You're correct on the majority of the missing displacement coming from thr absence of armor, but not the reasoning behind the removal of armor. Armor was removed because getting hit by a modern anti-ship missile is going to mission kill all but the largest of vessels, and the displacement was needed for improved sensors and fire control. The closest equivalent to armor you'll find on moderns ships is, ironically enough, their missile systems. As for the rough displacement of a modern cruiser if it retained its armor, I'd say the Des Moines class is probably your best bet, though even that might be too heavy once you account for the replacement of the main battery with VLS complexes that don't require their own heavily armored barbettes and turrets, and the much more power-dense nature of modern gas turbine power plants.
You know, the other factor that scifi usually doesn't talk about is heat radiators. Which brings up the idea of big huge sections of these ships being essentially just dead metal and space used to drain thermal energy from the actually important bits of the craft.
That wouldn't really make sense. You don't need bulk to radiate heat, you need surface area and/or a way to concentrate the waste heat. So sensibly designed radiators would be designed to get the most surface area for the least amount or glowing hot, if not both. Either way, you'd know if you were looking at them.
The bigges problem is how to get rid of heat… Not a easy task…
@@justinthompson6364 Well, maybe not. Here was a try to develop nuclear powered thermal engine for space. And it runs into 2 problems:
For having effective and powerful (lightweight) thermal engine you need a big difference in temperature of your heat source and radiator
For having compact (lightweight) radiators you need them to be very hot.
So, here is 2 kinds of nuclear-powered space projects: one that have extremely hot radiators but barely produce any electric power, and one that is very effective and lightweight, but require an enormous low-heat radiator.
Not to mention that with glowing-hot radiators it would be nearly impossible to hide from thermal cameras.
And not to mention stuff like concept of heat absorber. Maybe absorb huge amount of heat by a hull and then slowly disappear it by radiators is way to go for some impulse-firing weapons.
@@user-mc5oh2pl7t Hull can be huge radiator by itself. So bigger hull with most surface is best.
@@user-mc5oh2pl7t Read carefully, I said maximizing surface area and concentrating heat were _both_ options. Either way the radiator would be visually distinct from the rest of the hull.
BTW, you're not hiding your heat signature in space unless you take great pains NOT to radiate heat.
In terms of realism I actually think bigger is exactly how it's going to be done in the earlier stages. These will be multigenerational vehicles so the size is to accommodate room for future growth and lots and lots of fuel and supplies.
That's my thought process in this, too.
The first human ships that anyone else interacts with in my setting are bigger than IRL supercarriers (roughly double in each dimensionn) with the same crew. But, they're on the bleeding edge of human technology and are meant to travel for years completely independently to scout planets out and eventually seed a colony apiece. They have to grow their own food; carry materials for ship repairs and colony construction; process fuel and aforementioned materials from raw materials available on asteroids and other planets (because trying to carry enough from the start would be insane); carry shuttles and drones to investigate planets/asteroids and retrieve said raw materials; and provide otherwise non-essential activities, because humans need breaks and recreation to stay sane. And if you skimp out on any of that, your crew of thousands dies in the cold vacuum of interstellar space.
@@hulking_presence When did I say anyone is obliged to go anywhere? I have those ships as being sent out purely because we're explorers at heart. Because humans will see a place we haven't been before and a way to get there, and go "try to stop me, I dare you"
@@hulking_presence
That's kinda like asking: "why people have crossed the ocean?" or "why people have gone to the Moon?".
The reason being exploring, this is one of Humanity's defining traits if compared to our (now extinct) cousins, the Neanderthals, we have always felt the need to explore and we will do it.
@@davisdf3064Explore, colonise, conquer... we don't just go to take pretty photos. 😉
Long live the Terran Empire!
@@davisdf3064careful with that! Neanderthals did chemistry before "we " ever did and scientists now think they were actually smarter than us😂😂😂
Something I always liked about Mass Effect is that their ships are a much more reasonable size compared to other franchises. The Reapers are the biggest vessels (being a maximum of 2 kilometers in length) and they're treated as incredibly dangerous still. The codex mentions that their energy cores break physics as they know it, allowing them to operate near infinitely; and they also mention that most of their power is diverted whenever they land just to support their own mass in gravity. They also show why they don't care about being bigger targets, because their shields are so tough that you'd need to outnumber them four-to-one with dreadnaughts to wear down the shield. Anything less they could indefinitely protect against.
And it's not all reapers that are that big, too! It's a few exceptional ships like that, most are like 200-300 meters long
Yeah, it is basically the realistic version of most sci-fi. In Ips like Halo, The UNSC would've classified the biggest Reapers(purely based on size) as a Heavy Carrier or a Support ship. Maybe even a Battleship(Doubtful). Nowhere near the top ships of the UNSC, but in Mass Effect, they're considered to be God-like and beyond comprehension, while the frigates of nearly every other Sci-Fi universe could tank thousands of shots from them and destroy them in one. This doesn't make them lesser, but unique.
unfortunately for them, that makes them prime stomping material in fanfiction.
True, but I would argue that limitation in size in Mass Effect also has to do with the FTL method. When countless Mass Effect relays can sling you fast through the whole galaxy, there is no need for upscaling. As for the reapers, they are autonomous living ships, they don't need to haul or support people or supplies while hibernating in the void. In fact, we only see ships larger than some Reapers with the Quarians (because they carry their whole population) and with the Arks (who have to bring enough people and supplies to another galaxy without mass relay support)
I always liked how in the Universal Century of Gundam ships were closer in size to reality. Ships were generally unshielded and no larger than needed. The largest ships are specifically carriers.
The UC ships are often gorgeous. In Zeta Gundam both the AEUG's ships and the Titans' ships are in similar size with similar weapons and hangars. Most likely they were even built by the same corporation, Anaheim Electronics.
Then the Axis Zeon show up with a single ship that absolutely dwarfs everything else.They have been isolated and build their ships for prestige more than efficiency.
In general, the Zeon ships tend to have these curved organic shapes that make them look slightly more advanced than anything the Federation can field.
My favorite, at least for space battles, is from Heroes of the Galactic Empire because they're basically super thin / slim ships just firing dead on.
@@CheapSushi You mean "Legend of the Galactic Heroes"? I don't see any other result coming up for "Heroes of the Galactic Empire" unless it's a star wars thing. If you are talking about LoGH then I definitely agree, though Empire Ships like the Brundhilde and Asgrimm are my favourites just purely for their uniqueness in the setting.
@@CheapSushi Yeah I love those ships purely because they seem to be designed for the massive fleet formation fighting that is almost closer to massive walls of space guns then what we might consider to be ships. Where macro scale formation fighting is more important then any individual heroics.
To be fair, most ships in the Gundam franchise don't have to worry about stuff like FTL drives and such, because their stories are usually confined to just the solar system, most often within the Earth Sphere. There are humongous ships in the setting like the Dolos-class or the Jupitris, but these are often custom-built ships whose sizes are justifiable due to their function, with one being a gigantic mobile suit carrier, and the other being a helium-3 tanker.
One reason for large ships that I like is them being huge because the FTL technology requires a ton of hardware or the way that FTL works it's far more efficient to have one huge ship to make one trip then trying to make smaller vessels darting back and forward (Too much energy, takes too long, etc)
Then think how huge ships would effect your setting.
If you need a miniature sun to power your engines, you need enough mass and volume to support that drive.
It would be interesting to see stories where different faction has different sizes of ships because of limited technology. Faction A would have huge ships because they need a small sun and can't make any FTL drive smaller while Faction B only have small ship because the sci-fi wonder resource they have can't be upscale to power bigger drives.
@@ArchOfWinter I really like the concept of different factions having different FTL technology and needing to work with different flaws.
Eg: A warp drive ship needs to be well armored and aerodynamic because the way the warp field works captures all the dust and particles along the way, making it as if flying through a harsh atmosphere.
While ships with some sort of hyper drive are far more blocky and crude, and needing tons of radiation shielding while traveling through the extra dimension.
Or cultures that have some gates or wormholes don't even have massive vessels since they can't fit through the portal and there is no need for them since you can get to a different system in an instant.
@@ArchOfWinter That's Babylon 5. Humans are not that advanced to they have to build big and they lack artificial gravity. Other species have smaller ships capable of hyperspace jumps. They still build big for warships because the scale of their weapons and the energy they throw around is massive.
That sounds like Battletech where Jump Drives are big, expensive, can only be used at specific "Jump Points" in a star system, and can't be charged too quickly or else bad things happen. The typical Jump Ship is simply a giant stick with a solar sail and a turned off fusion reactor, sitting still at a Jump Point, with a bored skeleton crew, waiting a week to charge while smaller Dropships dock and undock to it to join its waiting.
There are Warships which are like Jump Ships but with massive weapons that can kill anything smaller than another Warship in one hit, and covered in armor so tough that space naval weapons were invented because nukes aren't efficient at breaking them, but Warships are super expensive because of all that firepower and armor and even more expensive because they're built with a special compact Jump Drive.
I like the size of UNSC ships in Halo. They seem signifigantly more realisitic to what would be viable. The largest ship ever made by the UNSC was the Infinity, and its 5.6km long, with a crew of about 18k people. The most prolific ship was the Paris class frigate, coming in at a very nice 535 meters long with a crew of around 250 people.
UNSC ships are also just glorified MACs with a superstructure and powerplant around them so it makes sense.
Makes me wonder what those people breath.
Military spaceships would have much smaller crews than naval ships for two reasons: first they need to cover the top of the shop with material to keep the atmosphere from running away, and second they would need to recycle that atmosphere.
At sea you can put as many people as you want on it, until their weight is so much that the thing just sinks. In space you can't sink, but more people will more oxygen and emit more heat, and the systems can only take care of that to a certain point.
@@HappyBeezerStudios you need 1 cubic meter of algae to provide oxygen for one human adult.
@@skipperg4436 yup. and they tend to be rather bad with it without sunlight. Like in an enclosed room.
@@HappyBeezerStudiosartificial light.
The Expanse really shifts my perspective on things. As ships are vertical rather than horizontal, a 36 m long ship is still adequately sized, with several floors.
I think a Donnager, state of the art battleship, is around 540 meters or so. And it is the largest capital ship in the Martian navy. It can actually fit escort ships within its internal drydocks.
When designing custom ships I try to reference things like The Expanse, the Soujourn and Halo, and the scale is way off. Not sure what my point is, but can we have a whole series on designing new space ships?
Building taller allows for less structural support, which means less materials needed for production, which means cheaper. Downside is they present a much bigger target in battle. It also requires well coordinated engine system.
Building longer requires more of your mass to be structural, but presents smaller target, and is generally more manueverable..
@@falseprophet1024 Taller and longer are the same in space when it comes to the target they present, the only reason why the Expanse ships are "vertical" is because the gravity is provided by the acceleration produced by the engine; no artificial gravity in that setting.
Almost all ships are actually vertical in sci-fi, engines at the back not the bottom, but would “feel” horizontal because they have artificial gravity.
The advantage of this technology would seem to be nice long decks that don’t require loads of going up and down and -- more importantly -- the possibility of counteracting g-forces from movement where necessary. The disadvantage is that you actually have to have that technology.
@@michaelwoods2672 another disadvantage is a mac gun going theough a horrizontal ship is gonna cause a lot more damage (assuming its powerful enough) though i suppose enough samage on a vertical ship could cut the thing in 2.
@@robertharris6092 That's an interesting point, but that's to do with whether or not you look horizontal or vertical to the person who's attacking you not how you see yourself.
So really you just need to avoid anyone hitting you end on as much as you can as I suppose anything powerful enough to snap you in half would also be pretty nasty if it banged you on the nose.
@@michaelwoods2672 well if a UNSC ship is pointing ita gun at the ensmy theyre gonna be vertical to said enemy.
Another reason that warship might be on the larger side; ammunition.
If you're lobbing missiles or explosive shells at your enemies, you're going to need to carry enough ammo for at least one engagement. Even then, you'd probably want more than that in case you run into another engagement whilst returning to resupply. So you'd need plenty of storage space, or better yet the means to produce more ammo independently.
also depending on your propulsion needs and power needs the systems for that might be large. For example in Babylon 5 universe ships are generally large because most species are not advanced enough to build small jump engines and if they want a ship that can jump into hyperspace on it's own they have to build big.
@@KatamuroTheFirstIt is similar in Star Wars, too. While I can appreciate Space Dock's point about crew sizes of current vessels, he also neglects the fact that unlike the Venator Class Star Destroyer, ships like air craft carriers irl don't need power plants and mechanical systems the size of a small city. Especially if you want a ship that is actually going to be protected by its own armor. Aircraft carriers irl, despite their size, are the weakest ships when it comes to getting hit.
And that is something that I think does need to be recognized. Aircraft carriers are absolutely packed, but they are designed as floating air bases for atmospheric aviation. In space, you don't need runways and to have your ship light enough to not sink into an ocean. But for something like a Infinite Class, sure they have a lot of space but jamming crew in every area of the ship means now every angle the ship gets hit from, someone dies and the thing vents. Redundant bulkheads, thick armor plating, and other forms of shielding to prevent the ship from being torn apart is going to be absolutely necessary considering they are going to be such a large target. If super carriers were designed to brawl or at least trade blows with other ships, they would definitely be designed differently.
@@AstinCrow yes. also current carriers don't need to life support, radiation shielding around the ship and so on. Really the closest comparison we have now is submarines. Their crews are much smaller than surface ships and they usually are extremely cramped. Now that might work for a dedicated crew for a few months but something like star Trek where missions can last longer and you need a mixed crew of scientists, engineers not just soldiers then the comfort is needed. Almost every TNG episode showed how crew spent a significant amount of time doing leisure activities.
@@AstinCrow yes. also current carriers don't need to life support, radiation shielding around the ship and so on. Really the closest comparison we have now is submarines. Their crews are much smaller than surface ships and they usually are extremely cramped. Now that might work for a dedicated crew for a few months but something like star Trek where missions can last longer and you need a mixed crew of scientists, engineers not just soldiers then the comfort is needed. Almost every TNG episode showed how crew spent a significant amount of time doing leisure activities.
Ammo? Ammo?! In my day sci-fi ships didn't need no stinking ammo. They used good proper energy weapons like lasers and masers and phasers.
I always thought it was funny how Star Trek TNG always made a big deal about life support failing despite the fact that the huge volume and small crew should give them hours/days of breathable air.
Not only that, but compared to the power demands from everything else, it'd be essentially free. Unless artificial gravity is massively power-hungry, I suppose.
I always found it funny that they would make a big deal about it, but, not only did they give a realistic amount of time (several days or more), but it was one of the first things to get its power diverted in a slight emergency. But, sometimes, they would say they had just a few hours. Like they suddenly had an extra 10,000 passengers they hadn't mentioned for some reason.
@@Roxor128 And even if so, with somewaht competent crew you could disable the gravity while keeping air scrubbers on and keep fighting.
@@alexmin4752Considering that the artificial gravity stays on, even when there's a dampening field disabling everything else... it's safe to say the gravity plating is powered by wizard blood.
@@AndrooUK Gravity plates are driven by money, or better, the lack of money.
The one thing that seems to be ignored with most large ships is they are never alone. A modern Aircraft carrier has several ships around it providing a ring of protection and rarely gets involved in battle directly. There are missile cruisers around it, supply ships that come and go, submarines, and mine sweepers.THe total coverage is up to 50 kilometres directly and with AWACS they can cover 10 - 200 km. So if anything has gotten in striking distance the taskforce commander and the supporting commanders have made grave mistakes.
I like the idea of a big ship having it's own industrial complex, the AI ships in Polety comes to mind as they have it as a self repair and re arming production.
And the Mega class star destroyer sounds like a awesome "villain" plot for starwars if we say they eat asteroids and poop out warships.
Like a World Devastator? It is an interesting concept. And I'll admit I really like productive abilities more than destructive abilities, it feels fresh and less generic.
It is why I like the Star Forge, a Rakatan battleship that drains literal stars to fuel its foundries.
I rather a capital ship being a command vessel and mobile base than just a giant battleship. It feels more like a distinct role and less "Hah, mine is bigger than yours!".
Having seen a lot of your guys' videos on space combat and ships, I came to the conclusion that bigger war ships only really make realistic sense in a setting that has some sort of energy defence shields. Bigger ship = bigger reactors = more powerful shield = can absorb/deflect more damage.
A long thin ship can put more stuff in the way of any attack.
on space engineers i almost doubled the size of my main ship to fit more reactors and shield generators. i reduced the armor from heavy to light to lower the weight overall, so it was bigger, more maneuverable, and had an insanely powerful shield.
There are many other uses for the large size of a ship's hull. Let's say if rockets are used as the main weapon, then its ammunition will depend on the size of the ship. In Star Wars, the ship had a whole army of thousands of soldiers with a full range of ground equipment on board. In Homeworld, most of the capital ships were mini-factories for the production of fighters, frigates and corvettes. A more unusual variant was in the books about the Empire of a Thousand Suns. There, the battleships had giant energy weapons that, at the moment of the shot, emitted something like powerful radiation around them. And in order to protect the crew from dangerous radiation, the hull had to be made incredibly huge. Although most of it was not used at all.
@@SuperFunkmachine shoot on the side
Nobody ever talks about cooling systems to prevent the crew from roasting inside from the waste heat all of those reactors and systems generate.
8:31 Pegasus was bigger as you know in part because it had an onboard foundry for building fighters and was a much more advanced BS and newer too.
and galactica had on-board manufacturing just not the full cycle like pegasus. I totally get battlestars, they are more like mobile bases than battleship/carrier hybrid.
When I watched Space Battleship Yamato back in the 70's, they made her seem huge on the inside, being able to hold dozens of fighters and support craft. In SBY 2199, they scale her back to the original Yamato's size, as they stick only a few fighters and support craft wherever they can find room.
One thing about the UNSC ships to consider, at least based off what I see in the games:
Each ship is basically setup as an independent operating base, with capabilities to setup significant installments of equipment, vehicles, and personnel upon the surface of a planet.
I do think this a fair mention
as far as ive seen ships in halo combat or otherwise are very high on the endurance side of things and im sure their size helps with that
Really big spaceships make more sense if space travel takes longer. More room for supplies and regenerative systems of all sorts.
If you can zip to any part of the galaxy in a week or less, they don't need so much storage and regenerative systems.
I always found it interesting how giant battleships never actually did that much. They were so big and expensive that no one wanted to risk them being lost and so there were very few large battleship engagements.
Yep, like how the Bismarck just ran away despite only one ship on the planet being able to pierce its armor at the time because it was still so scared and was only wanting to attack unarmed cargo ships. And when it was finally destroyed the Nazis gave up on battleships because they were too expensive.
@@jacksonhoiland2664 nothing in your comment is correct. The Bismarck was ordered on a commerce raiding operation, not "too scared" to fight against warships. The Bismarck and Prinz Eugen were quite willing to battle the HMS Hood and HMS Prince of Wales. Bismarck took several damaging hits in the engagement, which were sufficient to cancel the commerce raiding operation and force it back to occupied France for repairs. When the Bismarck had been made unmaneuverable due to rudder damage from an aerial torpedo attack, it was caught and sunk by a task force of Royal Navy ships. A far better example of navies being unwilling to commit battleships to combat would be the dancing between the Royal Navy Grand Fleet and Imperial German High Seas Fleet in World War 1 before finally meeting at the Battle of Jutland.
Good thing in fiction we don't have those boundaries
For further reading, see USAF F-22 Raptor
@@jacksonhoiland2664 That's not accurate. The HMS Prince of Wales withdrew and the Bismark's captain did not pursue per standing orders from Großadmiral Erich Raeder to avoid unnecessary combat with the Royal Navy. Admiral Lütjens knew one of his predecessors, Wilhelm Marschall, had been relieved for contradicting those directives.
And the Nazis gave up on battleships not for the cost alone (though that was part of it as one Bismark cost as much as 59 Type VII subs), but also due to the time it took to build one. It took four years to get a Bismarck class ship into service. A Type VII sub, the exact time depending on the exact model, only took ~9 months or so. Long before the Bismark sank they'd already begun to recognize they wouldn't have time to get more battleships into service, hence the switch to more sub-based warfare and strategies and Raeder's desire to try to conserve his surface fleet by not "recklessly" engaging the Royal Navy.
at least when David Weber's honorverse books went into bigger ships much of that size went into missile storage, in a setting where missiles quickly became the most important armament that a warship could have
Also, larger missiles. DDs and CLs have the light missiles, CAs and BCs have medium ammunition, and battleships, dreadnoughts, and superdreadnoughts (and... well, no spoilers ;) ) have big honking missiles that just need to graze a lighter ship to do catastrophic damage, whereas a direct hit from a heavy cruiser's standoff missiles won't do more than dent the armor on a DN or SD.
I really liked the Honorverse stories!
I think David Weber put quite a bit of "common sense" into his ships and war-machine.
And the evolution of FTL technologies were very interesting, especially the differences between wormhole and hyperspace travel, the wedges and sails.
There is another question to ask. Smaller ships work better when the supporting infrastructure is a given, In Firefly, flying from on port to another, there is always the potential for additional supplies. But what about when you are traveling interstellar space for five years with no back-up? You literally need to take not only enough provisions to support the crew, but you also need all of the equipment, tools, raw stock and parts you cant create in house to be able to rebuild any part of the ship from the drive system to the coffee maker. So if you are a warship that needs to operate independently for extended periods of time, you will need the extra size.
I have a growing fondness for the smaller cargo ships, like Serenity, Millennium Falcon, Ebon Hawk, and that new ship from Star Wars Outlaws.
Hero ships.
Same. I recently found myself liking smaller vessels in fiction, and in real life, smaller aircraft. For me, smaller vessels give the vibe of a comfortable home. They're not too small to the point it's uncomfortable/couldn't be lived in, but at the same time, they're not too large to the point it feel like you're living in in an office building
@@SceurdiaStudios As Hero ships they have the added benefit that you can intimately know each crew member, if there are only a hand full (or even one and a dog)
Nah, give me a lucrehulk class cargo carrier. Better have a mobile factory then dont have one.
The Millennium Falcon is a fun to look at but a terrible design as a "cargo" ship. Where does the cargo even go? Is there an elevator or just the one tiny ramp we always see. All those hallways and "living space" are where the cargo should go. At least Serenity has a cargo door, ramp and loading cranes.
I agree that sometimes people just throw out numbers based on pure shock value/spectical or an endless game of oneupmanship, but otherwise I think it’s almost expected. Given the economy of a more developed and technologically advanced earth, multiplied by all of the developed planets in a sci fi state, plus all of the colonies and stations, you will have either massive ships, or tons of them. More likely both, like we have seen throughout history of capital ships and escorts: ships of varying size covering each others weaknesses.
the size of container ships are limited by structural integrity and the need to be able to fit into places, but in space, structural integrity isn't nearly as much of an issue thanks to 0g and sci-fi materials, and you just need smaller ships on board to make the cargo transfer, whish isn't really viable for a irl container ships.
with how economy of scale works, cargo companies would 100% develop kilometers long ships if they could. only limitation still left is initial building cost, and potentially crew if you can't use automation for whatever reason.
@@ledocteur7701Structural integrity is still a factor if you want to move at any reasonable pace and not rip your ship apart with its own thrust. Or use spin gravity instead of handwavium deck plating.
@@justinthompson6364Except this is sci fi we are talking about. The big ships don't break because science overcame physics. Structural integrity isn't an issue then.
@@justinthompson6364 out of curiosity, would it be an issue with a gravity drive, since everything would accelerate at about the same speed?
@@AstinCrow That’s nonsensical. For any finite value pertaining to structural integrity, there is a point at which it will be overcome and fail. The alternative is things being literally indestructible.
Dune's Cargotrailers really deserved more attention as they are designed to exploit economy of scale to an absurd proportion. Navigators are rare in the Dune universe, they need precious Melange to operate the ships, so the more cargo you can fit into the single vessel, the better. All space travel is basically a "mass transit" in the Dune universe. They also fold space, so they do not need to care about things like inertia. Their tubular design is very effective and structurally sound.
There are a couple important things missing from this discussion (which admittedly are often glossed over in the source material, too)…Aircraft carriers do not need to carry reaction mass, which many space ships do, and take up a large percentage of their capacity. They also need to either carry an entire ecosystem with them (to supply food, air and water as they go along), or carry enormous stores with them and restock frequently, which is difficult as space ships will generally be MUCH farther from port than any aircraft carrier ever is.
It's the same reason we build taller and more elaborate Skyscrapers, because we can. It would most likely be built completely by robots in the future. Raw materials in, spaceship out no human workers required. Ships on Earth can easily be restocked or docked somewhere. I can't even image the distances involved in space travel, so yeah bigger does mean better for survival.
Also try Star Wars KOTOR, where no warship outside of the comics is more than 1200 meters long. A Sith dreadnought is between 600-800 meters, and most Republic ships are barely over 100-500 meters.
The best era, and the ships are one of the reasons.
4 main issues I have with this which can end up really effecting the sizes of ships. Most of which can basically be summarized by 'if this were true, then who would have build battleships.'
First, armor is probably to be in an all or nothing scheme, where more vital parts of the ship would have more armor and the rest would barely be armored. If you can double the protections of the guns/command/communications/magazine/sensors etc at the cost of less armor in stuff life crew quarters, then the ship is already surviving longer in combat.
Second, sci-fi ships would have a much greater degree of automation, you can just have a swarm of roombas instead of having a crew whose primary job is to keep the floors clean. Using Star Trek replicators, as an example, means you can remove anyone who works in the galley.
Third, for at least some of the settings, the size of ships is pretty much standardized, and naval arms races between factions will gradually increase the size of ships as everyone wants to have the new class of ships be better than the old one and the enemies' counter to it. Over the last 100 years, the displacement of a US destroyer has gone up around 9 times, despite the newer ones being basically unarmored compared to the old ones. Assuming this trend continues, then in ~60 years, destroyers will have the displacement of an Iowa Class battleship.
Fourth, and something very few tv/film series ever take into account is how target acquisition works in space. The distance you can hit a target is significantly higher than any series which lets you clearly identify two ships shooting at each other in the same shot. not to mention how speed vs armor has pretty much always been the biggest tradeoff and most of said film/tv does not have practical evasion for capital ships. This gets even more confusing when you realize that bigger ship means bigger engine means you can put more armor for the same speed.
Much more armor for same speed and volume. Cube/square law work massively in favor of gigant space battleships here. Basically for doubling everything in size, you will have more space inside, then by halving it. Also bigger reactors tend to work much better then more smaller reactors taking same volume, thus using the space more efficiently, giving MORE then double the power for double the size. So by making everything twice the size, you will receive more then twice the space and power!
One part with the arms race on naval ships is also a massive change in doctrine. Until the mid 20th century guns were everything. If you had bigger guns with more range you can hit the enemy first and harder, and if your armor was stronger you can survive their returning fire.
But during WWII things moved towards naval aviation with carriers becoming much more important.
And after WWII guns got replaces by rockets and missiles. Ever wondered why nobody built a big battleship since then? With the only somewhat surviving ones being the US Iowa-class ships, and that only because they were already there and giving up sea-based artillery was considered a waste.
The biggest directly armed ships nowadays are missile destroyers.
5:04
Dad's bringing in the groceries understand this principle well
In my setting, massive ships are basically a requirement. The most powerful energy source in the modern era is the psychoblitz reactor, which basically means "stick a black hole in a containment chamber, use psionics to extract energy from it". Problem is, these black holes are still subject to hawking radiation, and if they're too small, they will evaporate almost instantly, which means psychoblitz reactors are not viable for small scale use. This effectively means the smallest a ship can be while still being practical is several kilometers in length and diameter.
I like it, which is why my first FTL-equipped ship will be larger than any previously built capital ship. It is incredibly difficult to miniaturize stargates, so the smaller a gateship is, the more advanced the faction.
And any ships without FTL-drives will have to be carried, putting an upper limit on their size.
I love enormous star dreadnoughts but they are far too common. A lot of franchises feel like the only reason their ships are so massive are because huge numbers are needed to feel big in Sci fi.
In my own setting, most ships are surprisingly large for their crews because ftl is still long duration between stars and you need a lot of supplies, plus most ships exist to carry people or cargo. The hero ship is a refit cruiser and is kitted for exploration - it has a small enough crew of a few dozen but is still over 100m in length. This is because it needs supplies for long voyages and systems and options for any conceivable enigma they stumble across in a Big Scary Universe.
You need something bigger for exploration and couple of hundreds men. Exploration is long af and hard process, especially planet-wise.
@@alexturnbackthearmy1907 especially if you want your crew well rested, maintaining constant alert for long sustained expeditions realistically means shorter watches and more of them to cycle crews. Burn out's real and expecting anyone to sit a long shift safely is a bad idea even when you're not far from support.
Just give me a planet and a really big fuck off thruster and I shall move the world.
"You could try to make these weapons smaller, but to maintain the same effectiveness they need to use more energy for unit volume, and that's a recipe for melting."
That may apply in the heat of battle, but in the long term, what matters is energy per surface area. Especially because dissipating waste heat in space is pretty difficult.
Almost lost it at the Evergreen stuck in the warp gate. Bravo!
Try Mobile Suit Gundam UC timeline. Most warships are between 100-400 meters long, the only Star Destroyer-sized ship is a fuel tanker, and their idea of a large warship is 600-800 meters, less than a kilometer long.
Space Battleship Yamato and Legend of the Galactic Heroes have properly sized ships if we're talking sci-fi anime.
@@charleyzimmer2505really? I always thought thr ships in legend of the galactic heroes to be massive juggernauts, or at least their shapes suggested that to me
I personally prefer the Yamato/Gundam approach, so spaceships not being too different in sizes to real life seafaring vessels. Mostly though because I imagine building a spaceship that is capable of participating in space warfare would cost a lot and I prefer to save on materials, thus the majority of the ships I create are in average between 200 and 350 meters (destroyers and cruisers), with very big ones being 500 at best (carriers)
The Dogosse Giar-class at 630m is as far as i know the longest warship in the UC timeline before the second UC century at least
@@ReZel80657 Yep. And the Dogosse-Giar is supposed to be the Federation's largest warship.
@@HolyknightVader999 They only made two as far as i know and both got destroyed
There's a reason why my current shipbuilding project is keeping most warships at something like 25-50% of their "wet navy" versions. There's only so much you CAN do with that mass and while there are larger ships (freighters and colony transports), most warships are in the 250m-2km range. And even the largest warships are literally the hub of a fleet and not independent combatants on their own.
Still, I do have a fond love of the ships of "Gunbuster," which are HUGE (the biggest is 50KM).
Space imperial Japan needs to happen more often.
Been writing my own sci fi setting. The scale of ships was originally set by the size needed to have FTL drives. The FTL drives smooth out with the increase in mass of the ships making jumps between star systems easier. Sure you can fit an FTL on a drop ship once the tech reached that level of capability but the ride quality never got better making faster than light jumps on anything smaller than a Km or two in length like being in a blender.
In most novels I've read (at least semi-realistic ones), a ship's builk is mostly composed of automated systems, the power system (reactor, capacitors, auxiliary generators etc), life support and food. Add in the massive space taken by kinetic/missile weapons and their ammo, as well as the extra power and heat shedding systems required by energy weapons, and it gets very big very quick.
Now with regards to super-battleships and carriers and capital ships, they have an insane amount of armor, ammunition etc. In universes where battles are less sluggy and ships can't quite defend (think forever war iirc), ships are mostly barebones assemblies of FTL drives, energy and other systems.
"Warhammer 40k" Well of course, that's the point of Warhammer, it's a parody
They're incredibly unrealistic even for their own universe's logic, yet they're way cooler than any reasonably logical ship will ever be.
They're the only thing that makes logical sense. people of past centuries would be mind-boggled by the size of cargo ships and aircraft carriers today. ships that are larger than ancient cities . and for enforcing control over a galactic and supplying over populated worlds massive shift kilometers long would be necessary
@@serronserron1320 The way I think you should have worded is; it is not the *logical* way for it to be, but it is *a* logical possibility for it to be with future/Sci-Fi technologies. The thing is we don't know what could be possible, therefore, bashing Sci-Fi universes for having monstrously large ships is not the way to go. People have different opinions but we shouldn't reach extremism and hate for it.
Gonna say it here too. Scifi ships are too small to make logical sense, to be perfectly honest.
@@LostCauseRT
Of course no need for hate. but either way the Galactic Empire is impossible without constant connection reminder of compliance and consistent trade between the planets. if they have small ships it isn't as efficient as transporting the bulk of necessary material as they will also called ridiculously massive ships
@@serronserron1320 yes cargo ships are the backbone of any civilisation and massive ones tend to be more efficient.
Armor kind of depends on what its made of. They're experimenting with metal foam as space ship protection. Its both impact resistant and incredibly light. If you're talking about some kind of steel or something else super dense, that is incredibly heavy.
Real-life warships are insanely crowded. Some even utilize hot-bunking (one bed for two men, one man works, one man sleeps) to save space. If everyone was afforded actual personal living space aboard, you could easily inflate even a regular modern ship to 1-1.5km long without expanding its crew complement. And yes, what a concept, the Empire providing individual sleeping quarters for every stormtrooper, but then again why not. Working in space, even in fantasy space, is a lot harder than working at sea - you can't go out on the deck to breathe some fresh air and smoke a butt. It would be like being on a submarine that can NEVER SURFACE. Even the sturdiest men would start to waver and break after a while if not given space to unwind, especially on the Star Destroyers that are meant to be deployed for months and years at a time.
The Empire might be evil, but it ain't stupid. Well, mostly.
It is nice though when there does exist a big ship that actually has a reason to be there, especially if it's the only one of its kind. Something like The Ark from Transformers: Fall of Cybertron comes to mind.
Yes, the Arm!
The lifeboat to end all lifeboats!
In defense of the Infinity, it was a colony ship first that was retrofitted for war and it has its own small fleet of warships it carries around. Then you also have the fact that AI is one of the reasons why UNSC ships can seem to be so under staffed yet seem to be completely fine in terms of them being maintained. This technically makes it easier to have a crew that's more easily supplied and feed for longer periods of time before needing resupply.
I think the Infinity was always intended as a warship, but also as an emergency colony ship. The Spirit of Fire was legitimately a colony ship refit for the war with the Covenant, though.
@@PaulGuy Yes, and the Spirit of Fire's largely lack of major weaponry despite its size shows that.
This is why my favorite ship is the Rocinante. It's not big at all, the scale seems accurate and the way it works seems to at least follow the known laws of physics. It seems like most of the ships from The Expanse are designed with at least a sense of reality and practicality.
The Expanse probably has the best designed spaceships of any setting I have seen. It is worth noting that none of the ships carry an FTL-drive and the Epstein-drive is quite large in its own right.
Agreed. The Expanse does a pretty good job of making realistically sized ships look cool and powerful. The Donnager, despite being just a little longer than a real life aircraft carrier, can be just as intimidating in the setting as a Star Destroyer.
There are actually a lot of reasons why space ships could be gigantic:
1. Economics 1. A warp drive might be expensive, but upscaling a warpdrive is not. Thus economics dictate that the more mass per warp drive, the better. (Also a great justification for having all warships carry potentially world-ending weaponry).
2. Economics 2. In low-tech settings transfer windows are of crucial importance for any interplanetary civilization. For example a Jupiter->Earth transfer window comes once every 13 months or so, and since Jupiter should be the focal point of every hydrogen-based economy they best make sure that as much cargo as possible leaves Jupiter during said transfer window, and the bigger the ship the less hull per cargo space.
3. Demographics. If you have some sort of nomadic society, they need somewhere to house their massive population base. Bigger ships means more space for people.
As shown in S4 of BSG though, there is an entire negative space (empty space) between the outer hull and the inner hull, plus the additional very thick framework that made up the ship's integral structure, when excluding all that, the actual area where people moved around is considerably smaller than what the ship makes it look like.
And as for the UNSC Infinity, also explained in canon, as well, the ship was comissioned just after humanity got one-halved population-wise, so much less personel was around to crew a single ship, as well as the ship not needing as much personel as it could hold.
That's a good point and actually an interesting point when designing ships in more realistic scifi settings, for example the hull needs to be much bigger to accommodate anti radiation protection for the crews and electronic equipment... Not only that but also for protections against micro meteorite impacts too...
@@Napoleonic_S And some form of food and oxygen production, at least partially covering needs of crew (supplies are big problem for ISS alone, imagine how hard it will be with warship in outer space?).
Want to blow your mind? First, look up shipping container ship size compared to an aircraft carrier, and after that look up the "Blue Marline ship."
The Seawise Giant measured in at 458.45 meters in length with a crew of 40 man crew. US aircraft carriers, the largest in the world, measured between 342 and 330 meters with over 6,000 crew.
@@WolfeSaber9933 And spaceship is seawise gigant, being compared as undercrewed to US carrier. They are completely different thing, the only thing that unite them is world "ship" in name, yet being compared by some reason.
@@alexturnbackthearmy1907 Some ships are not overly complex, so they don't need that much crew.
Need large crew to fight and repair the ship so a warship needs a big crew
@@rigelkent8401 Unless you have drones.
Its the main reason I love homeworld. The assault frigate is the size of A corvette A battle cruiser is smaller than A star destroyer The pride of hiigara is smaller than the Super star destroyer
3:26 As far as these massive ships being seemingly undercrewed, you have to factor in design language, internal layout, and the technology required to operate these ships. In Star Wars at least, these ships are powered by massive matter-antimatter reactors that take up a very large portion of the ships interior. They also have to contain ftl drives, sublight engines, shield generators, life support, weapons, vehicles, communications, and crew quarters.
No. Go have a look at the movies and see how massive the Star Destroyers were. Then Executor class made them dwarfs. Then it kept getting bigger...
Star wars contradicts itself... You have small 10 meter fighters that have hyperdrives no life support or energy issues... And then you have star destroyers or super star destroyers that dont have any special weapons/drives/features that would explain their size.
The real problem isn't the size of the ship, it's the size of the ship and what they're using it for.
There is a maximum size for a warship beyond which just building a fleet would be better than building a huge ship. If it's larger than that limit, it needs additional uses, such as being an armed colony ship or habitat.
That's exactly what the UNSC Infinity was, a warship with colony capabilities if needed. I think the size of battlestars like Galactica or Pegasus is about the reasonable max for a pure combat ship.
@@PaulGuy also, the galactica, pegasus, and other batlestars are meant to be dedicated flagships, as well as be able to engage and destroy multiple basestars simultaneously, survive nuclear impacts(most cylon missiles are nukes), provide the majority of the fighter support a fleet has, and be a long range artillery battery. all while carrying extra ammo, water, fuel, and supplies for its fleet. it really does make sense for them to be that large
In my setting, a lot of the larger ships serve as support vessels. Mostly to act as mobile repair bases for main combat ships. (Mostly frigates)
Numbers are everything in my setting. Both strategically (a lot of space to cover.) And tactically. (High emphasis on formations and flanking maneuvers that cover the 3 dimensions of space.)
@@defnotthekgb8362 Yeah, realistically the newer Galactica also needs to have a far thicker hull than any warship of the past 150 years has had. And possibly does (I don't recall if it's been shown because it's been years since I watched it) also have several spaced layers of armour even potentially doubling as water tanks to keep down the necessary size.
@@PaulGuy I thought part of the Infinity's size was because it acts as a carrier for frigates
I have no complains about the size of the ships as long their tremendous firepower and durability are shown in all their glory
That poor Evergreen ship can never catch a break.
The square-cube law would absolutely help ships grow and grow and grow if your ships 1) have meaningful defense (such as being protected by armor) and 2) there is no technological limit that stops the size growth at a certain point (such as materiel science or your specific method of FTL).
All other things being equal, the volume of the vessel scales as length^3. The mass of a vessel is proportional to volume (this is -one of an enormous amount of places- the place the makers of Rogue Trader and its Universe-class Mass Conveyor goofed).
Consider ships A and B, where B is twice as long as A and of identical shape.
B has 8 times the mass.
B has close to 8 times the cost.
B presumably has close to 8 times the crew (although may have some functions that gain some benefit of economics of scale or where only one person is needed regardless of size).
B may have 8 times the power needed to propel it at the same speed as A (for some kinds of drive) - or possibly more if using pure reaction engines (since it's engine nozzles are only four times the surface area, so likely hotter for the same amount of fuel used per unit mass per time - leading to losses to the momentum per energy spent).
B has 8 times the amount of energy to throw into weapons.
B has 8 times the amount of energy to give over to energy shields (if that technology is available).
B has 4 times the surface area.
B has 8 times the amount of mass given over to armor (assuming both ships have the same proportion of mass given over to armor)...'
... leading to the armor being twice as thick. Which is probably the difference between A penetrating B or not - otherwise you wouldn't bother putting it on in the first place.
If you build 8 A-class vessels over one B-class, you can be in 8 places at once - B can only be one place. But if B shows up, you can't expect your 8 A's to stand up to it:
If ships in your setting are protected primarily by "sufficiently good" shields, B wins, because even though both sides bring the same amount of energy both to attack and defense, the B can focus all its energy on one A and knock it out early, which leaves the A side at a disadvantage for the rest of the fight. However, the A's don't need that much of a numerical advantage to win, so there is an argument between power and flexibility.
If, on the other hand, your ships are protected by "sufficiently good" armor, the A's are in an even worse place: they can't penetrate B's armor, while B _can_ penetrate A's armor and thus pick off your A's one at a time. Superior numbers won't really help the A's at any point.
There is historic precedent for this: This is why battleships grew and grew in size (until the thrice accursed Washington Naval Treaty stopped progress in 1923). Penetration tends to be very binary: you either go through or you don't, and ships that don't have no business being present in that battle to begin with. Navies traditionally settled for at most two-dozen of these monsters as the balance between flexibility and power, going bigger if funds allowed for it.
Thus: in Star Wars, the ships being that big makes no sense at all, since we clearly see that it's a fighter meta: size doesn't protect you from being knocked out by smaller ships. In fact: if the setting didn't require pilots, you'd probably want to go even smaller than that to get the most bang for your buck.
In settings, such as WH40k, where fighters don't get special rules, it is quite likely that the economics of scale would help B be a better investment than A. In those cases, ships would grow to truly enormous sizes, barring some kind of setting-specific limitation kicking in at a certain scale (which would then force everything to be that scale as the "optimum" scale for a ship).
If your ship-fielding polits then are empires that each consist of thousands or millions of systems - each unified and more productive per capita than modern time Earth - you may find that your ships will logically grow to truly uncomfortably sizes indeed (and probably far _larger_ than even SW or 40k).
Why shouldn't sci-fi ships be less crew dense than their US navy counterparts? Have you seen a submarine? Consider crew comfort if you have the luxury of making a bigger ship. That and you should consider even if it was supposed to scale, it would do more to the surface area than its size.
The reason why the UNSC Infinity was so big was because it was meant to be a contingency in the event Earth fell and the war was lost hence why it was designed to be self-sustaining.
Right and it isn't just a warship, it's basically a bigger badder version of the Spirit of Fire, an all-in-one package for a planetary invasion containing all the workshops and factories needed to sustain it.
If a scifi setting had actual magic ships would become very small very quick. No one is going to build big dreadnoughts when there is a non-zero chance that your foe might know the Create Black Hole spell
Always keep in mind that size does not equate to destructive power. A PT boat can crank more damage than an oil tanker 95% of the time and the tanker's main attack would be a one shot deal that you could see coming from miles away. Literally.
I thought the Infinity made sense for its size. Most of the space in the vessel was taken up but the MAC guns, armor, engines, and other ships it carried inside it. It also carried marines that wernt part of the crew and their equipment so I don't see room for the ship to have a huge crew because u have the bridge crew, engineering crew and weapons crews but security is taken care of by the marines so maybe they might have some science people also on board but I dont think they had much extra space.
I made stupidly massive ships for one of my settings but the reason why they're so big is due to their use. They're these massive ships that are used as mobile weapons platforms to rapidly overwhelm defenses in invasion efforts. they're used for "peacekeeping" efforts. and they're only used in attacks, they're like lances or spears so all the shielding is on the front. the back portions are largely unshielded except against micro-meteorites and ugh radiation and that's pretty much it. so i guess you can call them glass canons lol.
4:26 including Spaceball 1 shows true commitment to the cause, kudos