

Size Comparison - Science Fiction spaceships - morphics
http://dirkloechel.deviantart.com/art/Size-Comparison-Science-Fiction-spaceships-398790051

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deletes
This site has much wider range of sci-fi objects. It goes from human size all
up to planetary sizes with every picture exactly to scale.

[http://www.merzo.net/](http://www.merzo.net/)

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Shish2k
Similarly, a size comparison of anime (and other) objects:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOXjkO9DXxg](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOXjkO9DXxg)

~~~
devindotcom
That is pretty insane. I like the guys who are larger than the universe. No
translation tho. Can anyone tell me who the guys are that are much larger than
earth, or what shows they're from? I can't seem to OCR the titles out of
screenshots.

~~~
Shish2k
Many of the ones near the end are from Gurren Lagann, a show that follows a
guy through his life as he overcomes an ever-larger series of problems, with
"larger" having a very literal representation -- from childish bullies, to the
head of the village, eventually up to all of existence :P

(Or something like that; my memory is terrible and I've not watched it for
years)

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diziet
Too bad this is limited to ships that have renderings of them (such as all the
EVE online ships that dominate the scale).

I'd love to see some of Iain Bank's Culture GSVs
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_types_of_the_Culture#Gene...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_types_of_the_Culture#General_Systems_Vehicle)
or some ships by Alastair Reynolds

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andyjohnson0
A 200km-long System Class GSV might ruin the diagram's scaling a bit...

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arethuza
It would be cool to see a diagram comparing the computing power of different
science fiction spaceships - I suspect Culture ships would do fairly well in
that comparison!

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noir_lord
According to in-universe canon for the Culture they are the most powerful AI's
you can possible have without subliming.

Comparing on a like for like basis I can't think of any other series that have
similarly powerful AI except for the Neil Asher Polity novels (if you haven't
read them check them out best description I can think of is Culture novels
crossed with die hard) which also has god-like AI's.

~~~
arethuza
Actually, I suspect the _Eschaton_ that Charlie Stross writes about is
probably more powerful that a Culture Mind as it appears to use time travel
for computational purposes:

[http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
static/2010/09/books-i-...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
static/2010/09/books-i-will-not-write-4-escha.html)

Of course, _proving_ that the Eschaton is more powerful than a Culture Mind
(or one of Vinge's Transcendent Powers) might be a bit tricky.

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mcguire
See also Scott Aaronson, _Quantum Computing Since Democritus_ , or the
lectures on which it's based[1], or his paper, "Closed Timelike Curves Make
Quantum and Classical Computing Equivalent".[2]

[1]
[http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec19.html](http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec19.html),
Lecture 19: Time Travel.

[2]
[http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/ctc.pdf](http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/ctc.pdf)

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pcrh
I couldn't find Tintin's rocket...

[http://us.tintin.com/adventures/destination-
moon/](http://us.tintin.com/adventures/destination-moon/)

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_mulder_
It's missing a Death Star, Discovery One (2001:A Space Oddesey) and, my
personal favourite, the ship from Solaris (2002). All of a similar design to
Valley Forge (Silent Running) which does feature. Maybe they're all too small.

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quarterto
Death Star 1 is 160km in diameter. At this diagram's scale, that's 160,000
pixels.

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Pxtl
I've always felt that scale was too "sci-fi" ish for the fantasy-esque Star
Wars universe. Star Wars planets don't really feel like planets, more like
islands in an ocean. They're "planetville" planets.

[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Planetville](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Planetville)

The "small moon" being the size of an _actual_ small moon feels... weird.

Everything about Star Wars is modelled after pulp era stories transplanted
into a space setting. A man-made ship that could comfortably house billions of
people is firmly into the realm of "true" SF and doesn't fit into a
pseudo-1930's setting. Putting such a huge number onto the Death Star (and the
SSDs, which are each the size of Manhattan) feels like a midichlorians moment.

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Shivetya
When does it stop counting as a ship? If mobility is a requirement would not
the Death Star be allowed? In Andromeda they had bad guys who used a captured
Star as the central point of their ship.

B5, could not find the Vorlon planet killer

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danielweber
These pictures have been going around the Internet for about 10 years (not
that I complain about reposts, I love this one). People always ask about the
Death Star, and the answer is that it would completely dominate the chart.
Depending on this chart, if it was just on the side of the chart you might not
even be able to see the curvature.

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DuskStar
Well, if your only criterion is "artificially constructed, can move under own
power", then the Death Star would not even come close to dominating the chart.
For example, the Ringworld was a ring ~1,600,000 kilometers wide and
~150,000,000 kilometers in radius, complete with central sun - and as of last
appearance in the novels, was steadily accelerating towards the Andromeda
galaxy.

~~~
beambot
And don't forget about the puppeteer "homeworld": 5 planets (or was it stars?)
in an artificially-created rosette formation.

~~~
DuskStar
Interesting comparison, that. Probably much smaller in radius than the
Ringworld, but I'm not sure how the mass would compare. (Not counting the star
at Ringworld's center, that is)

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chewxy
My favourite ship is not there. You may have seen it. Blue box, has the words
"PULL TO OPEN" on it. Some times a St.John's Ambulance logo. Both my hearts
love that ship dearly.

~~~
IvyMike
"Also, by popular demand: the Tardis is already on the image. Whether it's on
the Red Dwarf and .25 pixels large or ALL of the image is your choice, it's
probably both, anyway."

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ruricolist
The boldest of the officers resumed speaking. 'That one ship is ninety million
miles long, Your Highness. It shimmers like fire, but moves so fast that we
cannot approach it. But it came into the center of our fleet almost touching
our ships, stayed there twenty or thirty thousandths of a second. There it
was, we thought. We saw the evidence of life on board: light beams waved; they
examined us and then, of course, it lapsed back into nonspace. Ninety million
miles, Your Highness. Old Earth has some stings yet and we do not know what
the ship is doing.'

[...]

The cabin was small, twenty feet by thirty. The control area of the ship
measured nothing over a hundred feet. All the rest was a golden bubble of the
feinting ship, nothing more than thin and incredibly rigid foam with tiny
wires cast across it so as to give the illusion of a hard metal and strong
defenses. The ninety million miles of length were right. Nothing else was. The
ship was a gigantic dummy, the largest scarecrow ever conceived by the human
mind.

(Corwainer Smith, "Golden The Ship Was—Oh! Oh! Oh!")

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btbuildem
What I find slightly disappointing is the relative lack of vartiety -- the
ships all look alike, with small variations. Maybe because this subgenre of
nerddom is more SCI than FI, and rules constrain the construction of vessels?

It would be interesting to see more drastic variations on the theme --
something beyond a roughly oblong object with superficial extrusions.

~~~
antjanus
that's always been an issue in sci-fi. They're all basically either literal
ships that do not have a regular uncovered deck and merely mirror the bottom
of the ship, or airplane/fighter jets, and finally, submarine-type vessels.

Once in a while, we throw a sphere in there, that's it.

It's really boring, and yeah, you're completely right. If you look at the
picture, it's just a bunch of same looking ships aiming right. That's it.

~~~
Tloewald
When Iain Banks discusses the appearance of Culture ships he tends to describe
them as being very boring -- a cylinder with a flattened area or whatever.
This is a little odd because of all the major SF settings, the Culture has the
least trouble making spacecraft and could presumably shape them any way it
pleases.

Arthur C. Clarke's "Discovery" is a shielded sphere joined to nuclear
propulsion systems by a long shaft -- seems pretty plausible to me.
"Realistic" spacecraft are probably going to look very utilitarian until/if
space travel becomes technically easy and safe. The vast majority of aircraft
look pretty much alike for similar reasons.

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marssaxman
It depends on what you consider to be the surface of the ship - Culture ships
don't have rigid hulls, so the ellipsoid shape is really just the surface of
its field envelope; the outline of its atmosphere, more or less. Presumably
the physical structure inside is far more complex.

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Tloewald
Sure, but the ships are still described as having very uninteresting
appearances. Now where do i remember your name from?

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artgon
Where's the Homeworld ship? Isn't it supposed to be ~25km?

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GotAnyMegadeth
There's very detailed information about all the Homeworld ships in the booklet
that came with the game. I'm going to find it...

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GotAnyMegadeth
The Kushan Mothership is in the bottom right actually... 610m

EDIT: that's 610m long, 2138m high

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liotier
What ? No Culture ships ?

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dspeyer
It seems paint will fall into disuse in the future, and the color green will
be forgotten entirely.

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oh_teh_meows
I find this very fascinating. Is there a site that discuss the kind of
materials (never mind if they're non-existent, as long as they're plausible,
i.e. within the realms of known physics) and technology needed to construct
such massive vessels that wouldn't collapse under its own...ok not weight,
since they float in space, but I imagine the moment thrusters are fired the
internal structures would be pushed and pulled in different ways (the stresses
on the system, and how the internal subsystems adapt mechanically may create a
myriad of interesting noises/visuals perceptible to the inhabitants within)

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coob
Does a Dyson Sphere count as a ship? Big enough to hold a star…

[http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Relics_(episode)](http://en.memory-
alpha.org/wiki/Relics_\(episode\))

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chaz
It's a structure, not a vessel that can move under its own power.

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jerf
In one of the anthologies for Larry Niven (either N-Space or Playground of the
Mind), he describes a Ringworld that induces magnetic effects on its star to
shoot out a jet of plasma, using that to propel the whole system.

While trying to find an online reference for this, apparently in the last
Ringworld novel they hook a hyperdrive up to this, making it the largest
"ship" I know. (I use "I know" advisedly... I'm sure somebody somewhere has
turned a multiverse into some sort of ship for some reason or other.)

In the Cities in Flight series by James Blish, the planet "He" gets about
quite well, though that is dwarfed in every measurement by the Ringworld.

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dclowd9901
I notice Gurren Lagann's galaxy-class unit is conspicuously absent.

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mhurron
Someone linked an anime inspired one further up. It has Tengan Toppa Gurenn
Lagann

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RBerenguel
Hmmm so Star Trek Armada (a quite old Star Trek themed RTS) had the size for
the Enterprise quite mismatched for a Borg cube: they were roughly 1:2 or even
1.5:2 in size.

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Pxtl
RTS games have to make compromises in scale in order to fit the various
elements on the screen in size large-enough to preserver recognition. Look at
StarCraft, with its puny carriers and battlecruisers - I mean, the buildings
in that game look about the size of a cube van.

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RBerenguel
Of course, but I think they could have made the cube slightly bigger (or in
fact, much bigger) without any problems. It was the largest ship IIRC, and the
game had a pan-zoom so you could see things close by or from slightly afar, so
it wouldn't have been that troublesome.

~~~
mhurron
When Armada was released 1024x786 was your standard resolution, with 800x600
not being that unusual.

To have 'fleets', especially on the small maps, you were going to have to
shrink that cube down. On top of that, only the Borg are going to send one at
a time, a player is going to have several at once.

~~~
RBerenguel
Didn't think about it, when I played Armada I didn't play online (still had a
modem!) and the computer only sent one cube at a time. And I always was more
like playing the Federation, I liked the ships more (I don't remember the name
of the frigate class, but the special shot, bouncing among enemies was great,
and the long-range destroyer "bombs" were also deadly: its range was barely a
few more pixels than defense towers from the other races.)

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Semaphor
No one ever has Perry Rhodan [1] ships even though they play in the very big
leagues [2].

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_Rhodan](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_Rhodan)

[2]
[http://www.perrypedia.proc.org/wiki/Raumschiffsklassen](http://www.perrypedia.proc.org/wiki/Raumschiffsklassen)
(German)

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snake_plissken
It's missing this one:

[http://s3.amazonaws.com/data.tumblr.com/tumblr_lbjnlhr8vt1qe...](http://s3.amazonaws.com/data.tumblr.com/tumblr_lbjnlhr8vt1qedl16o1_1280.png?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAI6WLSGT7Y3ET7ADQ&Expires=1380383902&Signature=Y92DFZ8%2F9McLmAVhr45e5BKB1qU%3D#_=_)

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maw
I guess Spaceball One wouldn't fit.

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EastCoastLA
A minecraft or 3d interior map of each would take this to the next level.

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xenophonf
Have you logged into the MineTrek server recently?

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bayesianhorse
Did anyone see a TARDIS in there? I didn't find it...

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bradleysmith
I immediately went looking for an itty bitty TARDIS.

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a3n
General Products?

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socalnate1
Waaaay too much information. do I really need to see every single variation of
Star Destroyer?

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Nihei
Is it sad that I knew the name of most of these without reading the text? I
feel sad.

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d0ugie
Speaking of size comparisons, how many bytes does this mother weigh in as a
WebP?

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dangayle
That is one of the nerdiest things I've ever seen. Awesome.

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terabytest
I can't find the Star Trek ones!

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chiph
Top right. Somehow I thought the Galaxy class was bigger..

Maybe you can help me find the Cygnus from "The Black Hole"

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galaktor
this makes a pretty cool phone/desktop wallpaper!

