Bury the lead! Awesome graphic but, the headline: 99% OF ALL SPACESHIPS IMAGINED AS STREAMLINED PHALLUS - SPACE STILL A VACUUM (WE’RE PRETTY SURE)
Q: Why isn’t the Death Star/CSO Carrier/V’Ger/other large ship on the chart?
A: For reasons of image quality and chart organisation, only ships between
a minimum of 100 meters and 24000 meters are applicable for this chart,
sorry. Arbitrary? Yes! But I had to draw the line somewhere.
Okay, so it doesn’t include the weaponized planets from the later Lensman novels…
I would like to see a similar chart [or series for charts for different size classes] for classic and pulp sf.
Still no Death Star.
For the size queens among us, http://Merzo.net has got the best range of scale. It hasn’t been updated for a while, but it covers the basics. If you have internet explorer installed, you can even move the models around on the page for more specific comparisons!
It’ll be a really really big chart. Sam Lundwall’s Refanut was 20,000 miles long.
Very disappointed to see the T.A.R.D.I.S. left off. It more than meets the minimum size…on the inside.
That’s where all these ships are parked, silly.
Is the garage left or right from the swimming pool? I always get turned round.
Well, you don’t have to bother about aerodynamics, but you still have the pesky issues of load bearing in the directions of highest load; a stick shape is still one of the best choices when you have to accelerate/decelerate with mass-driver engines. Then there’s the issue of small cross-section of the front during the flight, due to the minuscule but still significant amount of matter in space, and possibly of opening portals/passageways in the fabric of the universe.
Plus there’s the issue that you want the engines/reactors/power cores as far away from the living quarters as possible due to stray radiation.
And, in orbit, you want to be facing front-down, due to visibility from below; you want the least cross-section for sensors. That said, most of the ships will be awfully visible (you want dull black for visible light, low emissivity for infrared, and low RCS for radars); maybe the contradictory requirements led the designers to give up.
Seriously? What is this, recycle Boing Boing day?
This guy has been compiling this chart for a long time. I have copies saved from like 15 years ago or something.
If they repost this every year or so from now until the end of time, I’d be okay with that.
Yep, and still no Cetacean/Whale Probe from The Voyage Home.
Anyone else remember that old SNL sketch “Planet of the Men vs. Planet of the Women”?
He’s not done, of course. Somewhere a Culture GSV laughs momentarily as it remembers the lone Citizen left on Earth performing penal observation duty. That citizen is right now in a room at some generic Hilton composing an observational report for upload out through the solar-system-wide quarantine field. Close at hand on the minibar is a delightful meat stew made from vat-grown Idi Amin and displaced down to the room on an automated schedule.
Would the appropriate entry into this chart be the moon-sized GSV as it cavorts near the galactic core or a bare caption noting the dimensional nowhereness in which its presence resides when it visits Earth?
We definitely need more of the saucers that they had in the good old days.
OK guys, where’s Mals Serenity??? I don’t see any mid-bulk freighters in there.
I was thinking this had been around the block a few times.
Ok, so where’s the waffle iron from Hardware Wars?
