Do you like spending hours looking over the schematics of your favorite starship, wondering just how big was Captain Picard’s quarters and exactly where did Scotty do all of his reading of the technical manuals? Or… how many secret cargo compartments were actually on Serenity?
One of our fans named Michelle has turned us on to a site that will put every specs guru and engineering techy in scifi geek heaven.
Jeff Russell’s STARSHIP DIMENSIONS is a site that was created to allow the real hardcore scifi fan to get a real feel for the true scale of their favorite starships, space ports and space stations by being able to compare ships across genres, as well as being able to compare them with contemporary objects with which they are probably familiar.
The scales are based on meter-to-pixel ratios so that they are accurate on any platform. The background grid is divided into groups of ten, and larger groups of one hundred pixels, to allow for easy measurement.
Keep in mind however, that the site is only intended to compare the actual physical dimensions of the starships it showcases, and makes no claims as to any other aspect of these ships, such as their firepower, speed, and so forth. Each genre is worthy of respect in its own right and no preference is given to any one genre. If you have a preference for a specific vessel, the site recommends you view the film or read the books in which they originally appeared in all their glory. The site’s creator promises that in time, he will provide the source information with each vessel to make it easier to find these sources.
The charts are intended to be interactive such that Internet Explorer users may click and drag the starships within the charts to arrange them in whichever way they please. The site creator is working on incorporating the same feature for Netscape and other web browser users. The site is very Graphics intensive by nature and therefore is targeted towards a higher bandwidth connection (DSL, etc). It will likely bog down dialup connections.
STARSHIP DIMENSIONS has gathered many of the starship images from various sources on the web (included in its LINKS page), plus some that have been drawn from scratch. This site is a constant work in progress, you will have to check back often to catch the latest changes and additions.
STARSHIP DIMENSIONS is a homage to the many great people who have created these ideas for all of us who love the technical high-end stuff of scifi.
She be a big beauty of a ship captain, bet she holds 10,000 crew members…
That was pretty impressive, thanks for sharing…
I’ve enjoyed the wonderful renderings at Starship Dimensions for quite a while now. I enjoy showing it off to fellow scifi fans because it always provokes arguments ^BS^BS^BS^BS^BS^BS^BS^BS^BS discussions about the validity of the sizes.
The larger ships (not things like Dyson spheres) always make me think that writers just pull some ship sizes out of thin air. “I’ll make this ship, heck, 1 mile in diameter.” Meanwhile another writer decides, “I want to impress people with how powerful this spaceship is. Let’s make it 10 miles in diameter.”
I’m all in favor of space opera with huge planet-sized ships and everything. But if you’re going to write “realistic” SF, think about the economy that would be necessary to support the building of (possibly) multiple planet-sized ships. 🙂
Maybe moon-sized might be more realistic.