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A multi-verse ship size comparison

Jan 21, 2009 Daare link
Ran across this old site while cleaning out bookmarks:

http://www.st-minutiae.com/misc/comparison/index.html

- so I wondered how ships in VO compared and looked at

http://images.vendetta-online.com/screenshots/relative.scale.jpg

as well as the info on VO-Wiki which lists a HAC as being 773m.

So, very roughly, a Trident is about the size of a Constitution-class Enterprise (TOS) while a HAC is just a little longer than a Galaxy-class Enterprise (TNG) (or a Battlestar for you BSG fans). Keep in mind that flyable ships in VO run from 10m to 34m. I don't know what it means (if anything) but I find this kind of stuff interesting, geek that I am.

P.S. There's also this site: http://www.merzo.net/. A 747 is 70m, a Behemoth is 34m which sounds about right.
Jan 21, 2009 JestatisBess link
Daare: Thanks that was very cool. Seeing the ships on the screen you have no way of knowing how big they are. The caparison chart is very cool.
Jan 22, 2009 toshiro link
...and it's been here for ages. It's almost the only way of determining numbers for capital ship suggestions (overall density of ships, rotational inertia and so on).

But it's interesting to see that the Enterprises are so small. I always had the impression of a floating city.
Jan 22, 2009 Daare link
For comparison, the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier is often referred to as a city at sea with a usual crew of about 5,000. It measures at the waterline 317m.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimitz_class_aircraft_carrier

The TOS Enterprise is listed at 289m with a crew of 430. How all this actually compares volume-wise is hard to say but 300m is nothing to sneeze at.
Jan 22, 2009 maq link
VO's capships somehow don't feel as big as they ought to.
Jan 22, 2009 Daare link
Agreed. Space is big and it's difficult to get an accurate sense of scale.

Part of the problem is the distortion caused by wide fields-of-view in VO as in "Objects in mirror are closer (and bigger) than they appear". The default value of 75 give you 135 degrees of vision on your screen which probably only spans about 90 degrees or less of your actual field of view. Try setting your fov to 45 (or even 30 on smaller screens) to get a more accurate sense of how big things are visually.

Also, the typical cruising speed for a ship in VO is 65 meters/sec or 234 kilometers/hour (145 miles/hour). A turbo speed of 220 meters/sec is 792 kilometers/hour (492 miles/hour) which is slow in terms of space travel but quite fast on a human scale - about 65% of the speed of sound at sea level. Try setting your speed to 1m/s (walking speed) and traveling the length of a HAC to get a sense of how big it really is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(speed) helps give these speeds some context.

Station suffer from the same problem and are bigger than they might seem at first glance.
Jan 22, 2009 mr_spuck link
Yah ... the scale looks totally off from the first person perspective. I made these a while back with the free floating camera to show the difference.

http://home.arcor.de/famscheffler/ven/dump0027.jpg
http://home.arcor.de/famscheffler/ven/dump0028.jpg

I was sitting right next to the station in both shots. Stations are actually pretty large.
Jan 22, 2009 Infinitis link
I really miss properly working external view in VO. I mean external view you can really use to fly, dock, everything.

That could add much adventurous feelings to traveling through the space, completing your missions and so on. Add more stations, asteroid fields and other things to one sector, let us travel without jumping between them and VO will be twice as good as it already is. Sorry, I'm just dreaming.