A little short for a starship, isn't he?
this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2023
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Sci-fi has issue with scale a lot of the time. Star Trek is no exception. Population numbers and scale of ships is often really bad.
Look at Deep Space 9 and literally anytime a starship is near it. The scale goes way out of whack.
In the DS9 title credits you can see engineers repairing the outside of one of the pylons on a spacewalk and the scale feels really wrong
Oh agreed but I think there's one major thing which is what really fucks up how your perceive it. There's nothing to compare it to.
When we see the ship it's typically just by itself flying through space where there's no comparison. Or it happens across a ship but same problem as the Enterprise so no reliable comparison. Orbiting a planet, surveying an asteroid, being yanked into a Pulsar, sitting in front of a Borg cube... All of these huge events have literally nothing reliable that humans are familiar with to compare it to. The closest you can say are the windows but the windows are such strange sizes for what we're used to that it doesn't help much.
Honestly the biggest 'events' that I can think of in Trek media that demonstrate the size of the ship are usually ones where the ship ends up on a planet. Generations crash land, Into Darkness crashland, Voyagers Blue Alert sequences, Discoverys crash land, etc. The only other one I can think of is from Picard Season 3. The Borg cube in Jupiters eye. That thing is fucking massive and the cube took up an enormous amount of space in it. That really shook the hell out of me in seeing how big that vessel was.
Ever played Eve Online? The “Noob ship” you get free when yours goes boom is bigger than a fighter jet, the battleships (fairly big) are about 500 meters and the capital monstrosity stuff gets to a plainly overkill 17 kilometers. And in all of this? It’s hard to figure out the small ships actually need a crew and aren’t just the pilot inside
Zooming in and realising that little nubbin on your Rifter is actually the whole cockpit is quite the shock!
It's hard for people living on a planet to comprehend how huge space is.
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
47 after inflation.
The universe is big. Probably one of the biggest. K. Trout
It's hard for people living on a planet to comprehend how huge a planet is too, thus low-ball numbers for populations of ecumenopolises, just like for ships. The population given for Coruscant (1 trillion) on a planet the size of Earth would give over 500 m² per person, and that's not accounting for multiple layers. So not as crowded as it looks. The population would be limited by resources or heat dissipation more than by area.