I'm not kidding when I say for the FIRST time I actually can grasp the size

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.

Have you seen container ships? They're perspective-bendingly massive. 400m is a quarter of a mile.

Going by the caption, it's the container ship they had a hard time visualizing. Seems weird because I've seen container ships IRL but never a starship.

I used to work at a port and would see those ships out at sea. They look like they are just offshore.

Then you see the fishing boats go out and all but disappear against the massive backdrop. You realize they're many many miles out.

It seems bigger on TV…

Yeah I'm not seeing how there's several dozen people moving, working, and living in that.

Container ships are fucking massive. The Enterprise only held like 1000 people which is only a small portion of a basketball arena.

Honestly thought it was way bigger than this.

I think for me this highlights how massive these boats are than anything. 400 m? What the hell? That's almost half a kilometre. I've never actually seen one unless from very distant, so I can't envisage how big it is. I know how big a bus is, but "80 buses" isn't a very useful comparison either.

Per kilogram-meter of cargo transported, container ships actually have some of the lowest emissions of any form of transportation!*

Other than electric vehicles that were charged by zero-emission sources of electricity

I remember many years ago seeing a size comparison between an aircraft carrier and the TOS Enterprise. The aircraft carrier was bigger. I didn't even know how to process that because of how big the Enterprise seemed to me.

This made me realise you could probably fit an entire small town including all it's drama on a container ship.

the Enterprise "D" (632.5m long) held 1000 people IIRC. crazy!

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I know we only ever see a handful of rooms, that's fine, but with over 100 crew they always all have personal quarters that are probably the square footage of 3/4'ish containers.

150m in diameter is one way to think about it. But then it's also 8 containers long, or 25 containers circumference at the largest point down to no more than a few in circumference at the bridge.

You know, that seems tiny, it's like there's no volume left for the hardware that needs to be between every room and all over the hull

More context, Empire State Building is 380m without the spire, 443m with spire and antenna.

It helps that containers are a standard size.

Should we start having villages on boats?

Or this sort of a boat at 488 m ! boat

I really hate/love that is is what actually put the size of those container ships in perspective for me. I've seen the massive liquid natural gas tankers and those things are terrifying big but like... I still didn't get the scale of these. Thanks sci-fi (look you guys that box set of TOS pays off irl!!!) 🤪

(Fr tho, anyone else have that set with the plastic curved cases with one of the uniform colors for each season? Prtty curves, infuriating snag-the-case,drop-the-DVD-on-the-floor-and-swear-and-snag-the-insert-pamphlet-closing-it-up-every-singlegoddang-time. But prtty curves)

That's what she said.

I grew up near the coast, so this actually helped me conceptualize the size of the starship more XD

What's the Enterprise-E look like in comparison?

I always used athletics tracks as a frame of reference. On a 400m track, the saucer section sitting in the center would be longer than the straights, but wouldn't reach the ouside edges of the curves.