Author Topic: Biggest Starships - Size Comparison (Read 2023 times)

sanman · « **on:** 01/01/2023 04:24 am »

This is a good list - though not exhaustive, it's certainly got many of the better known ones:

catdlr · « **Reply #1 on:** 01/01/2023 06:16 am »

Quote from: sanman on 01/01/2023 04:24 am

This is a good list - though not exhaustive, it's certainly got many of the better known ones:

Wonderful, but so much I've missed reading, watching, and playing. Thanks for finding and posting.

Eer · « **Reply #2 on:** 01/01/2023 03:36 pm »

One of my all-time favorite science fiction vehicles was described almost 2000 years ago - check out the dimensions of New Jerusalem in Rev. 21 ... 1,500 miles cube (or some might say pyramid) ... so 2,225km on a side and height. Clearly an interplanetary if not interstellar ARK ship (transporting entire population to new planetary home), and larger than most fiction you find written about today.

dgmckenzie · « **Reply #3 on:** 01/01/2023 05:21 pm »

Ships from the Perry Rhodan series seem to get forgotten when ship sizes are thrown around:

There are more...

DanClemmensen · « **Reply #4 on:** 01/01/2023 05:54 pm »

In David Weber's Dahak series, Earth's Moon is actually a starship.

Niven and Pournelle's Ringworld is actually a starship.

AmigaClone · « **Reply #5 on:** 01/02/2023 07:54 am »

Quote from: DanClemmensen on 01/01/2023 05:54 pm

In David Weber's Dahak series, Earth's Moon is actually a starship.

Niven and Pournelle's Ringworld is actually a starship.

The video posted by the OP mentions Ringworld.

There is a Star Trek short story that mentions the Milky Way becoming a starship.

edzieba · « **Reply #6 on:** 01/24/2023 08:29 am »

Quote from: DanClemmensen on 01/01/2023 05:54 pm

In David Weber's Dahak series, Earth's Moon is actually a starship.

Niven and Pournelle's Ringworld is actually a starship.

Lensman has self-propelled planets (both as battlestations as as the 'nutcracker'), and Niven's Known Space has the Puppeteer's 5-planet system which is mobile (at c-fractional velocities).

There also Russell's extensive charts in non-video form.

Blackstar · « **Reply #7 on:** 01/24/2023 02:27 pm »

One of the things that bugs me about modern filmed sci-fi is that they've lost all sense of scale by going bigger and bigger. The only point seems to be "it's really really big." But after a certain point, the audience can no longer really comprehend the differences. What's the difference between a ship that is one kilometer long and another that is five kilometers long? They're both massive, and you cannot think about living and working in something like that.

When Roddenberry and others created the original Star Trek, they thought out the scale of the Enterprise and roughly how people would live and work inside it. But by the 1990s and later, all the ships were just massive and the concept of being inside of them no longer mattered.

Vahe231991 · « **Reply #8 on:** 01/24/2023 09:07 pm »

I noticed on Wikipedia that one spacecraft design envisaged as part of Project Orion would have been 1,300 feet wide and weighed approximately 8 million tons, while being potentially big enough to host a city of 100,000 or more people. How does this proposal compare with other starships (fictional or real design studies) in terms of size?

AmigaClone · « **Reply #9 on:** 01/25/2023 07:56 am »

Quote from: Vahe231991 on 01/24/2023 09:07 pm

I noticed on Wikipedia that one spacecraft design envisaged as part of Project Orion would have been 1,300 feet wide and weighed approximately 8 million tons, while being potentially big enough to host a city of 100,000 or more people. How does this proposal compare with other starships (fictional or real design studies) in terms of size?

While much larger than anything humans have built so far, it would be fairly small compared to some of the later ships in the video attached to the OP.