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.

Look at Deep Space 9 and literally anytime a starship is near it. The scale goes way out of whack.
- In the DS9 title credits you can see engineers repairing the outside of one of the pylons on a spacewalk and the scale feels really wrong
It's hard for people living on a planet to comprehend how huge space is.
- Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
Ever played Eve Online? The “Noob ship” you get free when yours goes boom is bigger than a fighter jet, the battleships (fairly big) are about 500 meters and the capital monstrosity stuff gets to a plainly overkill 17 kilometers. And in all of this? It’s hard to figure out the small ships actually need a crew and aren’t just the pilot inside
- Zooming in and realising that little nubbin on your Rifter is actually the whole cockpit is quite the shock!

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

That's like, half of a half mile.
- It's as if it's two times half of a half of a half of a mile
- I came to Lemmy to avoid this Reddit style comment
Thanks because this image still didn’t help. Most people don’t see container ships very often.
Or 40% of a kilometre.
- Sorry, they use miles in Star Trek. Ha ha, America wins. Stupid Europe and your stupid metric system and stupid rail network and stupid universal healthcare.
- Nobody knows what kilometres are.
Yeah but youre also saying that the bridge of the enterprise was about the size of a container, which i am not sure is accurate.
- Have you seen a container?
We get oil exploration rigs docking in our little port downtown. Mind bending is right.
Sat in the park and watched one roll in one day. Went from:
There it is!
Damn, looks pretty big.
My. God.
- wait, exploration rigs?
  Those things that look like platforms rather than boats?
  they can dock?
that's the origin of picard's famous saying "I live my life a 1.304E-14 parsec at a time"
- Parsecs are units of distance, Han.

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've never seen either. I'll have to convert this to "cruise ship"
- Ok... the one I am familiar with is Disney Wonder at 294m long

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…

TV adds 20 pounds.

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

A container ship's crew is 20-30 people, and that whole thing is mostly containers. I bet they'd fit.
- Oh you.
- But people mainly occupy the saucer portion right? Like they don’t live in the engines.
  Looking at OPs pic, that saucer is very small compared to the container ship.
- Oxygen is an issue, but heat generation is also an issue.
They sleep in hallways....
- AS much as I enjoy some aspects of Lower Decks, that was one of the most phenomenally stupid decisions that they could possibly have made.
  The crew sizes for Federation starships are TINY compared to the actual size of the ships. SNW giving every crew member their own studio apartment is something that reflects the ludicrous amount of empty space that a Federation starship has availalbe to it.
  If you ever look at the deck plans, there's just a crazy amount of space that's unused.
- Maybe if they narrowed that hallway a little, they could all have their own quarters.
In Strange New Worlds everyone above Ensign apparently has their own studio apartment.
- In TNG and Voyager they all did.
- Speaking of which, something funny I noticed about Discovery recently is that Burnham and Tilly continue to be roommates even after ::: spoiler spoiler Burnham gets her commander rank reinstated ::: . What's up with that?
- Here's some more perspective. The aircraft carrier pictured apparently carries almost 2000 people.
- Speaking of submarines, SNW s1e4 Memento Mori does a great job with the "flying blind" trope. They even use the "depth charge" trick.
I thought in NG 1000 people lived on it?
Iiving in one of the most densely populated cities on Earth, it sounds quite spacious to me. Perspective is wild.

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

Well damn, how tiny was Voyager? It only had like 1-200 people IIRC.
- Voyager is just a hair longer than the classic Enterprise, but it's also chonkier so it has more volume. About 150 people on an Intrepid-class, 200 on a Constitution-class.
This Is the 1701, Kirk's. It only had 430 people on it.

Honestly thought it was way bigger than this.

Then how about this one: a large container ship carries 24,000 TEU which is about 12,000 40 foot containers.

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

- What kind of emissions are we producing to build the ships?
- Good point, I wasn't considering production.

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

Star Trek: Evergreen
- Stuck sideways in a hyperplane!
Should've done that with Flint
- Flnt is NOT a small town

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.

305m is 1000 feet. The USS ENTERPRISE was 342m or 1,123 feet.
A modern day FORD class carrier is 1092 ft or 333m.
For personnel comparison, ENTERPRISE held ~5000 people and a FORD class has between 4-5000 people.
The fact that NCC-1701 only had like 1000 people is...a big difference.
- I can understand that on a mathematical level, but on a more emotional one, it's hard to process. Just like I know that the speed of light is 186,000 mps, but I can't really fathom how fast that actually is.

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

Even crazier, the Galaxy-class has the capacity to evacuate an additional 10,000+ humanoids.
When you watch videos like this, you realize that 1,000 is not that much against the actual size of the ship. The entire crew can comfortably gather in the main shuttlebay at the same time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lwx5uB0pyhQ
- Uhm what are you guys talking about?? I don't quite understand...

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.

"I literally can't fathom"

Or this sort of a boat at 488 m ! boat

Should we start having villages on boats?

Those are called cruise ships and they suck.
- That settles it, we now need spaceships pronto

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.

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

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

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.