As a retired Navy Sailor, I think Kirk's Enterprise is large enough to carry a highly diversified crew on long endurance missions...military surface ships of comparable mass go for months without hitting ports. The Enterprise, by comparison, has significantly fewer personnel, allowing better crew accomodation for longer missions. It's a sweet spot.
One thing people often fail to realize is you need a ship large enough to hold at least 1,000 people and perhaps a few thousand. There's no such thing as "warp drive" so you would need a sufficient population to avoid genetic diseases. Frankly interstellar travel is so impractical as to be impossible.
One thing people often fail to realize is you need a ship large enough to hold at least 1,000 people and perhaps a few thousand. There's no such thing as "warp drive" so you would need a sufficient population to avoid genetic diseases. Frankly interstellar travel is so impractical as to be impossible.
Military surface ships are on the surface of this planet, with support a few hundred miles away not a few a few trillion miles away because 1 ly = 1 trillion miles and they aren't usually disabled in a single hit to their engineering section like the ship is in WOK. A larger ship would have weathered that storm better. They have a suicidally high degree of automation leaving it vulnerable to conventional attacks, like we see in SFS, as well as cyberwarfare - as we see the Borg do countless times to Starfleet ships a century later. I love Star Trek, have my entire life, but Starfleet ships are unfit for purpose. They're too small and too vulnerable to attack.
@@igncom1 anything capable of going to space or getting anywhere in space can accelerate enough to surpass most non-nuclear weapons by simply ramming into the target.
Galactica's another one. She's the size of a star destroyer, but what does the bulk of the ship really do when the flight pods launch and recover the vipers? Crew quarters, cargo, fresh water tanks, fuel...things like a Nimitz-class carrier has. Definitely a case for bigger can be better if it's planned out right.
Also, armor. Battlestars don't have what we usually think of as sci-fi shields. They use hyper-advanced armor to just soak incoming fire. I bet a surprisingly large percentage of the Galactica's mass is just her armor.
@ Didn't they say at the beginning of the show that they had stripped a lot of it away for some of the newer ships? Shows how badass she was taking that much damage without all her armor.
I think it really depends on the spaceship in question, its purpose, and the forces opposed to it. Thrawn makes a great point about Palpy's love of superweapons that can be felled by a ragtag team of virtuous underdogs, but being virtuous underdogs didn't stop the Borg from completely murking Starfleet at Wolf 359
While the Vietcong beat the US Millitary, they did so by choosing the battles. In every engagement where the yfought by the US's rules? They got stomped and stomped hard. The borg simply outclassed starfleet's assets that were fielded.
@@singletona082 Fair, though Charlie should get props for playing the game smart. Borg only died out because they went full-on Dalek (especially in Picard S03)
@ Oh absolutely. I'm simply stating when they got overconfident and thought they could lay Our game... they got rolled. Constantly and consistently. They were smart enough to realize their mistake, but dumb enough to not stick to their game rules except only in cases to draw opposition forces into a trap.
Starfleet wasn't even a ragtag fleet during the tng era. Even though their ships were many decades or even centuries old they were still enough to compete and for the most part, win against peer enemies. Starfleet is honestly similar to the US Navy fleet today where ships have very long service lives but are still enough to compete and easily win against other known powers.
@@awesomecomputers7076 "Peer" being the operative word here. The Borg was above being Starfleet's peer here- the Enterprise D crew being fucking brilliant is what saved the Alpha Quadrant from assimilation, at least that day.
When I think about super massive ships, I think about the game Homeworld. There, the main ship is a mobile construction yard, forward operating base, resource refinery, and most importantly the last home of the entire population of humanity. It's a bit like a Battlestar in that regard.
I remember the first time I ever heard of Homeworld (in the physical magazine incite PC gaming), they made a big deal about how similar the premise of (the then still upcoming) Homeworld was to BSG (although at that time they could only have been referring to the show from the '70s). I think they even made a point to question if the game would suffer from not paying to get the rights to the clear inspiration.
I'm surprised that the SDF1 from Robotech, which housed a city with initial population of ninety thousand, *maybe* counting the crew or *not,* down to fifty thousand later on wasn't included. Or the Voth city ship from Star Trek Voyager.
@@whitewolf3051 In the case of Robotech, Harmony Gold gets really sensitive about people talking about Robotech/Maccross and it's just not worth messing with them. But the Voth ships are a good inclusion!
A few contentions. The Yamato did participate in a surface battle during the battle off samar, and secondly her design came about due to special circumstances. The major naval powers were constrained by the 1920 Washington naval treaty, limiting ships to 35000 tons and 16 inch guns and limiting their fleets to set ratios of tonnage. If the Japanese could in secret produce something significantly larger than anything currently in service, they could build something which could be nearly immune to any ship currently in service. But there was never a decisive surface battle. In the beginning of the war the US Navy was still rebuilding their surface strength and unwilling to risk major surface actions, and by the second half of it carriers had caught up to battleships due to developments in carrier aircraft and tactics. Secondly the ticonderoga class cruisers are about the same size as their contemporary destroyers, being separated by their role not their weight class. And finally, the usefulness of large starships in sci-fi is entirely up to the setting. Ships could be nearly immune to ships from lower weight classes due to having more powerful shields, or they can be idiotic wastes of material which are vulnerable to the smallest attack craft doing a clever trick, its up to the author.
The Yamato was basically a giant waste of ressources. The Japanese did not use when it would have been useful because of the risk of losing it. And when they finally used it, it was too late and it couldn´t do anything to turn the tide of the war. If the Japanese had used the ressources to build 20 or 30 Destroyers instead to protect their freighters from US submarines, this would have had a far greater impact on the war. They wouldn´t have won neither way of course.
The Ticonderoga was originally a DDG built on a Spruance hull. Congress got sticker shock so the Navy reclassified it as a Cruiser. Congress responded "Cheap Cruiser! Well buy it!" Just when the Navy believed it had pulled a fast one, Congress cancelled the Agis version of the Virgina class CGN proclaiming "You have your Agis Cruiser!"
@@hermes7587 no, replacing yamato with 20 destroyers would not have made a difference either. One because Japanese ASW was just awful. more destroyers wanst going to make up for the IJN's terrible ASW capabilities. Two, the cost of one Yamato isn't equivalent to 20 japanese destroyers, its more equivalent to 10. And replacing Yamato with another carrier wouldn't have made a difference either because Japans inability to train enough competent pilots meant they barely had enough pilots to fill out the carriers they had. Simply put, while Yes the yamatos where pretty useless in WW2, that uselessness didn't really turn into much of a net loss for imperial japan because of all their other structural issues and total lack of industrial capacity compared to the US.
@@hermes7587 The Yamato would have been useful had there been an early war decisive surface battle, her armor would have stood up to any 14 inch and 16 inch 45 caliber gunfire at most battle ranges. Only two ships in the pacific fleet even had 16 inch guns at the start of the war. The 18 inch guns would have outranged anything available. The flaw in the ships was the flaw in the entire Japanese decisive battle doctrine. Their entire naval plan was predicated on the Americans playing right into their hands. They had planned for the entire us pacific fleet to sail to defend the Philippines, where they could whittle it down on the way, then fight whatever is left over in a decisive surface action. Then theyd wait for the atlantic fleet to do the exact same thing and pull the same trick again. The US plan had actually been to do just that up until a couple years before the war. But the japanese were planning the war as if they were playing both sides of the chess board. And one could argue Pearl Harbor was too effective for their decisive battle doctrine, 2 battleships permanently lost and 3 more were on the bottom requiring more than a year to recover. Not enough surface forces remained operational to commit to a surface action any time soon, so it came down to carrier fights. By the time the US navy had built up enough battleship strength in the pacific, the Japanese had lost most of their carrier strength. Not to mention the advances in carrier aircraft technology and tactics which made them far more effective in 1944 than in 1941. Without carrier aircraft to scout for and defend the battleships from enemy aircraft, the Japanese battleships became useless by 1944. But they didn’t start off as so.
It probably depends more on your industrial capacity and naval size. For example, the Covenant probably wouldn't feel much if a CAS class assault carrier was taken out, and those things are multiple kilometers long.
And any realistic galactic empire or even an empire of a few thousand star systems could easily field huge fleets of executor sized vessels, that would actually need to be larger due to needing propellent and large interstellar class engines.
I agree. In WH40K common cruiser ships are like 5km long and it's no problem to churn them out because the economies in that galaxy are so massive. It's like "Oh we lost another planet and 10 trillion lives to the Tyrannids? Tuesday already huh?"
@@TheEventHorizon909 You do not spend huge amounts of ressources on giant war ships because you can, but only because you have a purpose for them. Just showing off is not a viable purpose - except in movies.
In Star Wars ironically bigger ships make sense because in their Universe shields defeat guns: to strike through shield of a spacecraft you need a weapon that can be mounted and powered only by a bigger spacecraft. Thus ISD was a killer of a smaller ships of CW era (missed Lore opportunity to claim that it was designed during CWs to complement Ventors that were clearly struggling in fleet on fleet engagements), and SSD would be logical killer of fleets of ISD-sized warships. This was sadly never explored in SW...
The only canon SSD is the Executor, it did function as a mobile shipyard for normal ISD's. Otherwise, you are right. The Executor was built to engage and defeat entire fleets of Republic capital ships. The Republic had built a small number of Mon Calimari MC80 Star Cruisers, which could fight Star Destroyers on even terms. If the Republic massed there forces and engaged from surprise, they could overwhelm fleets of regular Star Destroyers. The Executor was a means to prevent that by engaging and quickly destroying the largest of Republic ships while being near immune to return fire. In spite of that, it was still destroyed at Endor but that loss was a bit of a fluke. It tanked the entire Republic fleet, which knocked down the shields around the bridge just long enough for an out of control A wing to hit it
@@PeachDragon_ It helps that in The Expanse, they didn't have shields that can just stonewall weapons fired from smaller ships. The Expanse is much more realistic, like where small speedboats with missiles are a threat to even the bigger US Supercarriers if we let them get close enough to fire.
yeah this is a good point each ship was part of some sort of arms race and it might make sense to have super massive ships or never get beyond the cruiser sort of tier depending on the environment it evolved in. If for example you can put a planet cracking weapon in a corvette or cruiser class ship it becomes extremely hard to justify ships larger than that as its just further concentrates your assets in a single blow-up-able thing. On the other hand if say the shield tech in a particular fictional universe scales exponentially with size / power it makes all the sense in the world to make the single biggest most crazy powerful ship you can to make the most of your resources.
The harder the sci-fi either the slower your ships have to be or the bigger they have to be in order to be fast. The minimum size of ships goes up the more real physics based their drives are. If you want to get to Mars in a few days, then you basically have a torchship with a massive amount of fusion fuel. On the other hand, small ships would make a lot of sense within the asteroid belt or if you have a lot of space stations that aren't that far apart in the grand scheme of things.
Come back to reality asteroid belts in the movies isn't real asteroid in our asteroid belt are miles apart from each other that why we can send probes into the outer solar system without them crashing in to a rock.
@@erp2000 Yes, but the delta v to go between them is much lower than to go between planets, and while they are very far apart, distances don't necessarily have to take as long as going between, say, Mars and Earth. In a sci-fi setting there's also plenty of material in the asteroid belt to build space stations out of, and you could arrange them in a large co-orbital ring, so the time between each station is short. That would allow you to go between a lot of different "settings".
And also the square cube law. In realistic sci-fi settings, or real life, bigger IS better. So for interstellar spaceships, I think the minimum viable size is O'Neil cylinder.
We’ve seen how quickly a planetary ion cannon can disable an ISD, but the Executor’s immense size may allow it to better endure the same level of punishment while remaining operational. In other words, the SSDs may have been designed for sieges and invasions of well-defended planets.
Admiral Ozzel got blamed by Vader for the failure to exit hyperspace undetected, but it wasn't his fault, they were already tipped off by the probe droid. It's highly likely Vader knew this and just hated the guy anyway. Notice how he didn't kill Piett after he failed.
@@DeathBYDesign666 they were tipped off, but if ozzel hadnt come out of hyperspace that close to Hoth, they couldve easily just orbitally bombared Echo Base from the asteroid belt
To be fair, the executor was destroyed by a single A-wing crashing into its bridge. 19km of dreadnought all gone because a tiny fighter landed in its command deck.
@@adambrown6669 No that temporarily disabled it long enough for them to keep blasting it with turbo lasers. Notice it was the aft section shields that were disabled and that's where most of the damage was done before it crashed into the death star, which was also actually a death blow for it as well. Haven't you ever wondered why they were evacuating even before they hit the main reactor? It was completely disabled at that point so it was only destroyed for good measure. It wasn't the A-wing alone, but it was the key blow.
Another Megaship would be the motherships of the Homeworld series. They are mobile cities and factories, building the rest of their fleet, but have little in self defense ability.
It depends on what they're for. Star Wars ships are big for the sake of being big. In 40K the Gloriana class was designed for Space Marine Legions, tens of thousands of Transhumans, many of which where over 8 feet tall in their armour, with all their equipment, ammunition, food, plus production, repair and training facilities, apothecaries and stores of Gene-seed, and that's before you get to ship munitions and auxiliary craft. Since they were designed to conquer the galaxy and usually operating far from friendly space, they needed to be able to take a lot of damage and remain operational. This is an example of a smartly thought out design to justify their 20+ km length sizes.
Yes, I agree! Also the weapons mounted on 40k Imperium battleships are pretty massive. Look at the Execuutor from Star Wars and how super tiny the turbolasers are. And than look at basically any Imperium battleship and look at how massive those broadside cannons etc are. A ship has to be huge to mount weapons such as these and these weapons are needed to actually make a dent in all the stuff that is thrown against them. And when it comes to pre-Horus-Heresy ships - they were also made to impress and intimidate. If a human colony would join the Imperium without a fight that would be the best scenario in a galactic crusade.
Saying Warhammer's ridiculous super-capital ships are any more practical or realistic than Star War's ridiculous super-capital ships, just because you describe the function of one while completely omitting the stated in-universe functions of the other, is very disingenuous. I don't say that to stick up for Star Wars, because, frankly both are genre fiction settings that use a lot of Rule of Cool (and that's the point). But, c'mon, claiming Warhammer's Gloriana to be better designed for function in this manner stinks of fanboyism.
I have really always hated "the ship is huge" just to be impressive... its always felt to me like a couple of 5 year olds arguing over who's dad is stronger and can lift bigger and bigger things... it quickly loses its meaning.
Yeah, I can understand that. Though personally, I'm fine with ships and constructs being ludicrously massive so long as they naturally fit the internal consistency of the setting that they are in. For example, normal "capital ships" in Star Trek are typically only a few hundred meters at their largest point at most, with notable outliers like D'deridexes and Borg Cubes having notable reasons why they are so large compared to everyone else that make sense. The Romulans have comparatively few ships compared to the Federation and Klingons, so they rely on the size and firepower that the D'deridex implies, combined with its more self-sustaining singularity power core, and their mastery of cloaking to deter enemies as theoretically, one could pop up anywhere, so they don't need to populate their territories with as many smaller ships. However, if you go to a different setting, like Warhammer 40K, then the scaling is completely different, but most importantly it makes sense in the context of the universe. 40K ship sizes are massive compared to most other sci-fi, but it's important to know that every faction has their rough equivalents of everything in a fleet (escorts, frigates, light & heavy cruisers, battlecruisers and battleships/fleet carriers) at around the same size range, meaning that it's perfectly reasonable in universe for people to be using hundreds of km to mile-long ships like Klingon BOPs or CR-90s because to the factions in the setting, that's the role those ships serve. Another aspect to 40K is that the weapons of the ships are proportional to their size, so that they can do meaningful damage to enemy ships expected to be in the same size and tonnage range. The smallest standardized naval warships in the Imperium are the Cobra pattern of destroyers, with various sources putting them between 750 and 1500 meters in length. 40K lore has some leeway in these inconsistencies as the Imperium is very unstandardized, as there are tons of regional variations or equivalents of the same thing that share common core tech components. These destroyers serve in formations as escorts, scouts and harassing elements for larger ships, mainly relying on torpedoes with long-range support from the oversized fixed weaponry of frigates (2-3 km long typically). These escort ships are seen as mostly expendable, which can be thrown out and be busted or ripped apart by single shots from the main turreted weapons of proper capital ships (cruisers, which are typically 4-ish km for the light variant and 5-6ish km for the standard and heavy variants. Battleships are typically 7-8 km in recent sources, though sometimes they reach 10+ in size).
While I can't disagree with your argument, I'd like to point out a certain psychological aspect of giant ships. Giant warships are frequently meant to serve as terror weapons. Imagine you're in a city that's unexpectedly in shade. The whole city. You look up and see that the sun (or whatever the star is for that star system) has been eclipsed by The Death Star. Other people look up too, and very quickly, your ears hear the sounds of panic as people (irrationally?) start running around like chickens with their heads cut off in a panic. Quite possibly, without firing a shot, The Death Star has potentially brought a world to its knees...
@@jeffanderson8165 In a sci-fi setting where large-scale constructs and interstellar battleships are not rarities, the terror value of a megaship is somewhat dubious. The artistic depiction of 'suddenly being in shade' leading to rapid mass panic doesn't even need be operant; just seeing a ship that's so ginormous it can be seen in orbit, in daytime, would be enough to project terror and foreboding over a few days or weeks while the local government/populace/uprising or what have you is subjugated.
@@fadelsukoco3092WH40K is more military science fantasy than science fiction. I'd give it a 2 on the Mohs Scale of Sci-Fi Hardness. That doesn't mean I hate it. Dawn of War was an awesome game.
To me the Enterprise D is the PERFECT “big ship”. It’s big, but not absurdly larger than other ships around it. And they treat it more like a mobile starbase with civilians, recreation, more science and diplomatic suites than could likely ever be used at once, etc. It’s big because its vast mission profile needs it to be. With the TNG technical manual and the Rich Sternbach deck by deck blueprints, it proves that the space of the ship is adequately used, and it’s one of the few ships in my eyes that “deserves” its larger scale.
It's hard to tell in Star Wars, since ships in Star Wars tend to move at the speed of plot - but, in lore, Super Star Destroyers like the Executor are designed to be mobile bases coordinating fleets of Star Destroyers on multi-system operations well away from the "civilized" center of the Galaxy Far, Far Away where they may be weeks or even months of hyperspace travel time away from base or reinforcements. Those undercut decks on the lower side of the ship are supposed to be repair facilities for Star Destroyers. It even had manufacturing centers that can build new TIE fighters or AT-ATs to replace battle losses. (Though, how they'd replace the personnel lost . . . )
Not all damage is going to be critical damage. The repairing of things such as heavy turbolasers also needs to happen. I can't see many things which wouldn't fit on a star destroyer, but maybe the SSD could be some kind of large, well armed logistics hub.
In ROTJ, Han called the super SD a command ship. Of course he also said the Empire had lots of them. The galaxy is pretty big and to me they are like true aircraft carriers, but I also think he was trying to make Luke feel better. To me a SSD just also looks badass, not like the turd in that later movie. Of course I am also bias.
The ship is large enough it can carry reserve troops as well. Then, if they had that population of troops on rotation, it could give the troops some good leave time to relax while out on long missions to help them not go crazy or get burned out. Therefore, the biggest ship should have the best food and entertainment.
It depends on the setting; the square-cube law can be leveraged in your favor for specific things. So.. basically volume increases more than the demand for hull materials. Even though it's freakishly big, it's even biiiiiiiiiiiger inside. Great for slow colony ships at least. Now, for narrative/story telling: I have to answer "medium is the most fun :D!" .. because um.. well, I chose a 'medium sized capital ship' for the home/hero ship for the story I'm writing (at a glacially slow pace). I'm biased lol ~ Further, I went with a sub-optimal design... It's an anachronism; doctrinaly obsolete before it was even launched yet they built it anyway. A 'Battle-Carrier' or 'Self-Escorting Battleship' - It's even acknowledged in universe, after a fairly short career as a front-line warship, it was quickly shuffled off to serve as a carrier training ship instead. I wanted to make the characters have to deal with various problems and shortcomings, learn to leverage it's strengths and lean into the fact it's not going to fight a conventional battle, or war. I feel it's just big enough to be plausible, **without** feeling luxurious or "having an answer to everything" much like the vibe of a Galaxy class offers.
You have the most important thing. The square-cube law means that bigger is always better when you are in the vacuum of space. Larger ships will be faster and more maneuverable than smaller ships in the vacuum of space if designed to be so. The square-cube law means bigger is more efficient.
If energy is fungible and a larger ship would have more power available for weapons and shields than a small ship then this would create an advantage for the larger ship. A large ship would be able to generate much higher shield density then a small fighter sized ship.
This is all conjecture because in fiction, the technology can do whatever the author wants it to. In reality, increasing raw output always increases waste heat due to entropy due to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. It is, (for example) why we don't build singular, super-sized nuclear reactors in aircraft carriers, but multiple, smaller more efficient reactors working in tandem, even though they collectively takes up more internal volume (and likely more mass too, due to the lead shielding). As for "shield density": Every increase in size is EXPONENTIAL because space is in three dimensions. Specifically, it's a cube function at its simplest (cube is x*y*z, or a sphere being 4/3 Pi *Radius^3). So unless your power source's scalar grows faster than a cube function, you will always LOSE shield density with larger ships.
@@atmosdwagon4656 Using the USN as an example: the USS Gerald R Ford generates approx 700,000hp at approx 1100 feet, while an Arleigh Burke destroyer has approx 106,000 hp at 500 feet. Thus the USS Gerald R Ford would have nearly 7 time more power to generate an energy based shield (which we don't know how to do yet) or power its weapons.
@@PequaKnight You are comparing nuclear energy to gasoline, of course the nuclear option will be more efficient. When we actually compare apples to apples, the Ohio-Class nuclear submarine is also around 500ft, but it produces 220MW with a single reactor compared to the 520MW of the Gerald Ford's two reactors. There is basically a linear increase and not the exponential growth necessary as the above commenter pointed out
@@hentielover It is not the source of the power that is the question as much as it how energy is available to generate a shield bubble around an object.
@@atmosdwagon4656 The size available for power generation is cubed, while the size of the shield is squared as you get bigger. This means that you always outpace the power requirements. The waste heat issue is a function of power generation versus surface area, so it should scale the same as shield density, such as double the shield density requires doubling the percentage surface area dedicated to radiating waste heat. Of course if you boost power to other systems then the radiator density will outstrip the shield density. If you use the space for storage to house fighters, ammo, fuel, etc. then you end up with greater staying power with no real increase in radiator percentage surface area. If you double the shield density for a ship that originally would need 5% of its surface area dedicated to radiation for the shield's power generation then you would need 10% dedicated to radiation for the shield's power generation. If the original ship also needed 5% for all other power generation and the double sized version uses the same systems then it would need 1.25% of its surface dedicated to radiation non-shield power generation. Overall a double sized ship with double shields that simply uses the extra space for extra hangar, living space, and distance between critical systems, then it would go from 10% (5% for shields, 5% for all other) of its surface area dedicated to radiation to 11.25% of its surface dedicated to radiation. That larger ship would require double the force to penetrate its shields and effective damage from penetrating shots would decrease by roughly 1/8. That requires 16 times the dedication to weapons to defeat it, easily outpacing potential weapon output in a general sense (targeted attacks, or other tactics can mitigate the increase quite a bit).
At either 265 or 333 meters (depending on original or remake series respectively) the Space Battleship Yamato serves - ironically - as one of the best examples of the heavy cruiser class you can find. Obviously it's bristling with heavy shock cannons and defensive lasers and mounts vertically launched missiles (both dorsal and ventral) and side batteries. It's not a true carrier, but it does have a small 26 ship fighter wing. It was also designed from the start with long range FTL travel - up to intergalactic scale. A trip to and from the Large Magellanic Cloud galactic cluster outside the Milky Way is proof of that.
Bigger is better if you have shields in your universe that must be depleted before you take damage and the primary limit to shields is the power you supply to them. In Halo the UNSC has massive ships with metres thick armor, but there's no point to them because their armour does not protect against Covenant weapons, building small harder to hit expendable strike craft might have been more efficient because large ships get one shot anyway. In Star Trek for the most part where shields must be depleted before damage and very accurate weapons that can easily target smaller ships, having more room to have more power generation, for more shields makes sense. Also in Star Trek almost no weapons 'pierce' the target, they almost always scorch or explode on the surface of the ship, so bigger ships can just soak up more damage because the outer hull is normally damaged first.
@@centurion7398 it will depend on the setting but your volume will increase exponentially faster than your surface area so you should be able to generate more power per area of shield if you just increase size and add reactors. More power should just be more shield unless there is a limit to shield strength established in setting. For example a 2inx2x2 cube has a surface area of 24 square invhesand a volume of 8 cubic inches but a 4x4x4 cube has a surface area of 96 square inches and an interior of 48 cubic inches. By the time you get to 7x7x7 it's 294 square inches to 343 cubic.
@@tandemcharge5114 less redundancy true, but smaller ships will be easier and cheaper to upgrade. Just like with carriers and fighter planes in real life, the Nimits class carriers have seen many different planes come and go all of which were upgraded multiple times during their service life.
The bigger the more crew you need. The more crew you need the more supplies you need. The more power you'll need. And the more support you'll need. You may even need onboard factory farms just to feed people
The more structural weight you get, the more surface area you get, the bigger drives you need... I've been stuck in the add more stuff-add bigger drives- stuff doesn't fit anymore cycle often enough. Not even counting that one GURPS Traveller book that had power plants as separate systems (as opposed to each drive, weapon etc. providing the power plant slice needed to run it as a build system abstraction) and a way more detailed crew calculation. I don't even want to know how many death loops I encountered there...
Actually no. A tiny engine just means lower acceleration, and since the matter expended has a speed, then even the best engine has a max speed. The only question is how long it takes to get to max speed, and given the distances involved, a few years extra to reach top speed is a drop in the bucket.
A Star Destroyer is not a siege weapon, it's a intimidation tactic. It's meant to instill fear in the people. A much smaller ship can still be a siege weapon !
It's just the simple truth, of course. Nothing but one ridiculous Mary-Sue fanfic from 2015 onward. With the exception of Rogue One and the first two seasons of Mandalorian.
There's truth, and there's the head-canon of certain fans. I honestly don't care how much the sequels somehow hurt you so much that you need to whine about them publicly, but at least have the decency to be factually accurate. For those at the back of the class, material released by disney is canon and the old Expanded Universe is not. George did not give a crap any books or video games other than to mine them for good ideas to put in his work and the new Disney owned team feels the same as he did.
This video is... okay, We don't really know the practicality of large space ships yet though; we haven't built them. Sure, if you lose a big ship, it's dead and gone. That said, we could probably build point defense that tracks fighters with sophisticated computers, and blows them up at the speed of light with lasers, making fighters obsolete. In this scenario, bigger is better, because you are unlikely to build something small enough to out-maneuver a large ship's defenses, and shots almost always land. Something that is tankier, and can serve as a fleet anchor, despite the costs, would become vital for success in battle.
You are correct in saying there are factors we dont know yet, but building a big ships is a game of time and resources, which is why you should build for a role. You are also right in how a huge ship would be a good idea to act as a fleet anchor as you put it. Though at the same time the big ships while powerful and reliable will still be in less quantity than smaller ships. Cause lets be real it would be more reasonable to have a bunch of drones you can remote control than have actual fighter ships. With the smaller sizes being used in every field while the biggest would be only the capital ships, carriers and colonial ships
I saw in some Star Wars souces that The Executor was defined as a mobile space station and not a starship, so it's purpose was to be the best next thing to the Death Star as for it's purpose of space station and not super weapon, before ending the construction of another Death Star. It is also that the Empire seems to give the emphasis on brute force for their spacecraft, and that's one focusing part, but for whatever vehicles, perhaps not the best emphasis. I'll give a real example by some huge helicopters made by the Soviet Union with the same principle (brute force), but in general they weren't better than a Black Hawk or any other model including Puma or Super Puma.
I think giant spaceships makes more sense for cargo vessels than smaller ones. If you are making a business of hauling freight from one planet to another, using a ship the size of a FedEx truck isn't going to cut it. Giant space warships strike me as a status symbol, something you bring out when you want to impress somebody with how wealthy and powerful you are. Although you might have rare situations where a species needs abnormally large ships such as the Zentradi from Macross, but those are generally outlier situations.
In Star Wars travel is so cheap that it makes sense for the equivalent of a pickup truck to travel across half the galaxy. Still most of the shipping is dominated by gigantic megacorporations like the Trade Federation and the Comerce Guild.
If you are going to be in space for a LONG time, having room to wonder around will be a significant benefit. Even the original Star Trek Enterprise had a small greenhouse/park for the crew to enjoy a more natural environment when relaxing when off duty.
This is great, you hooked me with the " non-cannon Star Wars sequels " part. That had me rolling, you sir get my like & sub. I look forward to more & back catalog of videos.
The question really can only be answered for every individual sci-fy universe and pretty much exclusively depends on the setup. If you have some kind of hyperjump ability like in Star Wars where it feels like space ships can travel hundreds of lightyears in a very short amount of time in even something like one man fighter craft, large ships don't really make much sense - unless you need to transport something big - as "on shore" support is easily reachable. In a universe like in Avatar, where interstellar travel takes 6 years, a massive ship is a necessity.
The Executor is a massive mobile base that can be self-sustaining tho. It has stations where they can repair ISD's, create more TIE fighters, and create more ISD's, hence there's no need for them to return to a base when one's already a moving base.
@@benginaldclocker2891 It isn't used as one though. If I remember correctly Vader had the Executor follow the Falcon into an asteroid field instead of parking it at the edge of the system and send freshly produced squadrons after them.
Bigger means more endurance. It takes a lot more to sink it. Look at the Malevolence from Clone Wars. Several Venators hammering the Malevolence still couldn't sink the ship.
I think what's fascinating about big ships is not the size of themselves, but what our brain fills out about *the size of the things they would carry.* Ships don't just get bigger for getting bigger's sake (or at least they shouldn't), they get bigger because the new systems they carry require their size. When launched in the mid-18th-century, Santisima Trinidad was the largest ship of the world, weighing about 5000 tons. Not even two centuries later, a single one of Yamato's main gun turrets would weigh about 2500 tons, meaning all three main turrets of Yamato alone would already have weighed more than Santisima Trinidad. By a Spanish sailor of 1770 the 1300kg shells of Yamato would have been considered a super weapon. The battleship is gone, but even still, ships have only grown till today. The F6F Hellcat fighter of WW2 had a maximum take of weight of 7 tons. The F35C has a takeoff weight of 31 tons. Subsequently, carriers grew from 30 000 tons to 100 000 tons to accomodate for the heavier planes and their required launch equipment. By the crew of the USS Essex a JASSM would have been considered a super weapon. The term super weapon is one that can only be used in a relative context, and as ships grow larger and their weapons with them, the 'standard weapon' larger ships mount will often have to be considered super weapons by smaller ships. I feel like this is what especially the Executor class and similar ships do weirdly. Instead of having the weapons' size scale with the ship, it just instead mounts a lot more of them. It's as if you build a warship the size of Yamato and instead of mounting any main batteries you just put 40mm autocannons on the entire hull. On the contrary, ships like the Mass Effect Dreadnoughts, the warships of the UNSC or the Eclipse handle their scaling quite well.
There is some historical precedent to this, with the naval _ship-of-the-line_ just like the Santisima Trinidad. These were galleons which did not carry larger cannons (the size of which were limited by the technology of bronze and cast iron) just a lot of them, sometimes as many as 100-140 mounted in rows across multiple decks, allowing a massive "broadside" to be brought to bear on another ship. Similar to the plot of Star Wars, these ships were eventually rendered obsolete during the time of Napoleon by smaller, more maneuverable attack ships, and those broadsides could not hit them. Given that Star Wars as a whole leans very heavily into the "Space Is An Ocean" trope, this may have been intentional. If we imagine that the standard turbolasers were literally the largest laser weapons that it was possible to make in whatever system of physics that universe has, then this suddenly makes historical sense. The winner of a capital ship engagement is simply which ship has more, and the standard wedge-shape of a Star Destroyer allows all of it's surface- and edge-mounted weapons to be brought to bear on a single target directly in front of it: that's one hell of a "broadside". After all, the Superlaser was an experimental weapon system that required vast power and special technology (kyber crystals) and really couldn't be mass produced, at least for a very long time.
i guess since it's science fiction one can always make up a technology where there are non linear increases of performance or even abilities that require a certain minimum size to achieve. i guess one thing that haunts me is that if ships are just made of really good metals, which are super strong on the human scale, as size increases matter itself becomes relatively weaker until they're basically like tin foil constructs rather than super stiff solid objects. even a solid armor bar a mile long would look pretty squishy when hitting another or when trying to turn quickly..not that giant ships are known to be nimble but it'd be funny to one break in half trying to do so..
Besides specific operational needs, the way how technology scales is the most important factor, which decide how much sense ship sizes make. A too large ship might have weak shield due it needs to cover more area, but it might be the other way around that energy generation becomes so efficent, that the shield are near impenetrable by smaller vessel. In Wing Commannder 1 Fighters were able to shot down shield, in Wing Commander 2 Capship shield where so strong that special torpedos were needed to penetrate the phase shields. If power generation is an important thing, and bigger is more effecient in scaling, means that bigger ships would be faster. About Star Destroyers, i think they are a little unfarily judged, i think it´s kinda the Worf-Effect. To show how dangerous an enemy is, they defeat the strongest Warrior (Worf), o it becomes a meme. Similiar with ISDs, they are the threat, but in the end, the heros most overcome them + ISDs are the Symbol of the Empire. Have you ever put an ISD to scale to an Earth sized planet? Could be interessting, to see what ground an ISD cut cover or if fleet of several ISDs make now more sense, when the goal is invasion and not destruction.
Agreed. Tech assumptions are king because tech dictates what you can and cannot do and what ship size is "ideal". You could for example have "fighters" that are 1 km long because anything smaller is too easy to kill and too weak to do meaningful damage and anything larger than the fighter is too fragile to survive direct combat. The 1km ship is only considered a fighter because it has the absolute minimum stuff including crew required to be an effective combatant because the absolute minimum hardware is so effing big, and the "fighter" operates out of bases and carriers a thousand times it size. Alternatively, you could have a battleship the size of school bus because Tardis like "bigger inside than out" technology allows you to stuff more tech and crew into less volume and anything that's bigger externally becomes too hard to protect. These examples of course are extreme cases.
I know its not a Star Destroyer, but I love the Acclamator class assault ship from 2002's attack of the clones, used before the Venators were ready i think, its one of my favourite dorito ships, there's some other triangular ones like the Quasar fire carrier, and the Arquitens light cruiser, you get to see them as part of a fleet in Star Wars Squadrons in the first few Imperial campaign missions.
In space where distances is vast and needing to be independent and self sustaining, massive ships would be needed as they need to carry everything to do everything. They're greatest weapon is also intimidation.
In hard SF, the three main factors encouraging large ships are that: 1. Large ships are inherently more durable. You're not going to accidentally punch a hole in the hull of something with a pressurized habitat a could hundred meters across. Whereas you very well might in a flimsy tin can a few meters across. The thicker hull also allows more effective radiation shielding, which is important for combat, given that the kill radius for nukes is kind of stupidly large against unshielded targets and the real bad day radius is much larger than that. Nukes in space don't have much blast and the heat tends to just flash-vaporize a super thin layer of the surface or blind sensors (and eyes) not actually do too much damage, but radiation is shockingly lethal with no atmosphere attenuating it. Anything you can't have thick shielding on that can't prevent something getting within a few hundred kilometers is serious nuke bait. 2. Engine choices. Quite simply, size and complexity are what make good engines work. If you want anything like lightbulb core NTRs, nuclear saltwater rockets, big nuclear reactors powering an electric engine, fusion engines, nuclear pulse engines, etc, there is a certain minimum size where they become inefficient and impractical. The smaller ships will use cold gas thrusters. The next smallest, hypergolic or monopropellant thrusters. Many kinetic missile first stages will use solid fuel rockets. There will also be a niche for solar-powered or RTG-powered electric engines but the acceleration is likely to be painstakingly slow and useless in combat. The next smallest size will use conventional liquid-fueled rockets. At a certain size if becomes practical to use something nuclear in some fashion to get both acceptable TWR and good efficiency. I think chem fuel ships are probably going to be strictly outclassed in performance by missiles at absolutely any range. This basically means anyone who can actually exhaust a missile can put themselves on an intercept course and just launch a missile from interplanetary distances at little to no risk to themselves. The minimum requirements for the space fighter game are probably the ability to put in more than what a practical, lethal, cost effective missile salvo can in terms of dV without turning yourself into a derelict unable to return to your original course and in need of rescue. And that's gonna be like a 5 digit figure in dV at the absolute minimum. Any single stage chemfuel design with meaningful payload is gonna fall way short.
@@spencersholden There is no "stationary" in space. Even if a station were to just maintain orbit it would need some kind of propulsion to counteract the gravitic pull of whatever it's supposed to be orbiting. Because of that I would draw the line between a station and a ship based on how much moving is part their standard operation. Deep Space 9 is not a ship - even though in the pilot it did move from the orbit of Bajor to the vicinity of the wormhole. But that's the only time the station is moved during the entire series. The Death Star on the other hand needs to move across the galaxy to blast planets. Thus it's not a space station - even if it's referred to as such on screen.
These videos always make me roll my eyes. Why? Because "science fiction" is just movies and games. READ some science fiction if you want BIG starships. Right off the top of my head I can think of three or four which make every single ship you mention in this video seem small. David Weber's Dahak makes the Death Star seem like the runt of the litter. My favorite aspect of Weber's ships? They carry fleets of ships the size of the stuff you talk about in this video. And when you realize there were MILLIONS of those type of ships you realize Weber was thinking and imagining on a much larger scale. Then you have Alan Dean Foster's Tar'Aiym (an ancient extinct race) Defense Platform which is as large as Earth. Or the classic from back in the 1930's written by E.E. "Doc" Smith: The Skylark of Valeron which was a planetoid ship LARGER than the planet Earth. Dude wrote that story back in the '30's!! You know what all of those giant starships have in common? They work because the STORY is great. They are so well written you BELIEVE there can be ships as large or larger than planets.
I have to note that if your setting is even remotely realistic a interstellar warship would be absolutely huge just to fit all the propellent and enormous interstellar class engines (see, project daeadlus for what a small one way probe looks like with near future fusion technology) though FTL drives may offset this somewhat, but would still require fairly large vessels for interplanetary flights and that’s just considering an unarmed vessel. Armoring vessels like these against the stresses of interstellar flight (small interstellar dust motes hitting with the force of several nuclear bombs repeatedly for however long your interstellar flight is) alone would need extremely heavy armor or dedicated whipple shields but at that rate you also need weapons able to penetrate such armor, and all that means even more fuel and even more propellent. I do think that a lot of sci-fi warship designs are actually far too small if considering any sort of realism that doesn’t use basically magic technology which I don’t have a problem with, but it’s still an issue if you want to have a semblance of realism in your setting. Oh and don’t forget civilian ships are often in real life much larger than their military equivalents (see list of largest ships in the world and note how many of those are military ones vs civilian ships).
Star Wars Legends addressed this with that “Nebula Class Star Destroyer” from the later books. In real life, modern Ticonderoga missiles cruiser are much smaller than 1940s Iowa class battleships, but more useful in today’s context.
Depends on technical capabilities. Star wars power generation, propulsion and utility scales fairly well with size, meaning that if you have any real reason to build big, it IS advantageous to do so if you can afford it. Or in other words and hugely simplified, it's basically a matter of the square cube law. Also, look at realworld aircraft and ships. They keep trying to increase in size.
though i think they saw that the aircraft limit is about 80 pership. they tried larger and had issues. one big advantage the Ford Class has over the Nimitz class is future proofing. turns out the Nimitz reactors struggle to generate power for al lthe new toys we have.
@@Revkor "though i think they saw that the aircraft limit is about 80 pership." Yeah, but that's mostly due to being unable to provide more than 4 "runways" and catapults. Back in WWII, some carriers went above 120 aircraft at some times. There's also the secondary issue of aircraft traffic control, but that's never been a hard limit, because multiple carriers operating together have managed literally several hundred aircraft at once. "turns out the Nimitz reactors struggle to generate power for al lthe new toys we have." Oooh yes, same as with aircraft, getting so much electronics that both power generation and COOLING has become massive problems. Those issues however can be more easily mitigated the bigger the ship, so this is a realworld issue that is one of those actually pushing hard for going every bigger and more sizecreep.
I feel like Elite dangerous does a good job with mega ships, most being civilian hydroponic, cargo, or science ships, and even for the smaller (still IRL ship sized) ships the players use in the game, it also teaches biggest isn't always best as Medium ships kinda reign supreme in versatility
I live in the real world where spaceships are basically giant, boring sails... So for me, the bigger the spaceship and the more visually appealing it is... the better... When I see a movie or a game that has spaceships, the last thing I want is realism!! I want to be impressed... I want to be amazed!! And gigantic spaceships leave me amazed!!
I actually went smaller in my setting (I had to double check the size just to make sure the ship worked as big as I wanted it to be). You have 'frigates' which are all the way down in the mid double digit meters in length (like 30-50m), cruisers (which are about a hundred or so meters in length) and then finally battleships sitting at a couple hundred meters or so. Each ship has a purpose - frigates are tiny and cheap patrol and escort ships; automation and miniaturization means that they only really have a dozen or so on the crew. Cruisers are that but bulked up and less reliant on stations and such - as the name implies, they're properly cruisers and can cruise around solo if needed. Their extra size gives them a few more weapon mounts than frigates so they hit a little bit harder too. Battleships are of course the heavy hitters, and are, like cruisers, properly line of battle ships - somewhat like arsenal ships in concept, but in space. Their job is largely to have a ton of missile launchers and just spam broadsides of missiles at an enemy target, with fleets forming a conga line of sorts (so a battle line, line of battle ship, etc) to all be able to fire off their missiles without getting in the way of each other. They're slow and vulnerable and so you'll have the smaller and more agile frigates run escort around them to intercept incoming missiles with lots of point defense turrets, as well as attempting to position themselves to have a better transversal for a missile that's trying to spiral in towards the battleship. Cruisers in these fleets can offer a sort of flanking force. Everyone has their role to play and having modeled the small end I feel like the size works (36 meters is enough for two hab decks - one of which is the bridge - a couple of cargo bays, missile bays and a decently sized reactor room) and does its intended job without being too resource heavy, but these ships would be absolutely dwarfed by ships in most sci-fi - like I'm pretty sure you could fit a decent sized cruiser fleet with frigate escort in the (never seen on screen) main shuttle bay of a Galaxy class starship, and some Eve Online ships fire projectiles larger than the frigates.
I was re-watching Clone Wars season 1 yesterday and I was kind of surprised that they almost mentioned the uselessness of a battleship larger than a venator. The Malevolance has to be the size that it is (not explicitly stated but seems to be about 10km) to mount the weapon, but most of the ship is just empty space and structural supports, and it's taken down just as easily by small fighters as a 1km size battleship/carrier. I'm still surprised at how much thought they put in a show supposedly for kids
1:50 This rubs me a weird way. While not liking the sequel trilogy is understandable, calling it "Non cannon" (in my opinion) is basically a giant middle finger to all the VFX artists, CGI teams, actors, set designer, costume, designer, etc who pour their soul into making the movies as good as it could be with the scripts that they had. You really didn't have to include that at all in the video, but overall liked it good work.
Just because a shit have skill dressers, and colorful artist, it still does not change the fact it is a shit. A movie is just an enhance storeytelling. It it fails at storytell, then it fails period.
7:35 Actually you skipped *Heavy* cruisers. Battlecruisers, despite sounding like a bridge between Battleship and Cruiser, are actually the middle range of Cruiser. Heavy Cruisers are the biggest ships which still have the maneuverability and ability to be self-sufficient, essentially pocket battleships which can move without a fleet, and often fill the bulk of a fleet’s firepower. Think a Galaxy class, a Liberty-class MC80, or the Daedalus 304. Light Cruisers are the lightest and nimblest self-sufficient ships, able to perform scouting, interception, patrol, and other ranging actions which require a single ship rather than a battlegroup or squadron. Think the Intrepid-class, White Stars, or even the Normandy SR-2. Battlecruisers are the middle of the road. The term “cruiser” shouldn’t be used on its own, as it’s more a general description than a grade unto itself. Like “submarine” or “station.” Without some clarification in a descriptor, it doesn’t mean much. Battlecruisers are the all-arounders, the Mario of ships. Their combat role is to do whatever’s needed of them, and what other ships can’t. Getting behind enemy lines and attacking supply lines, swarming foolish super ships like the Bismarck, or other such Hero actions. Think the Constitution-class Refit, NX-class, or Excelsior-class. Now, all classification systems are different, so some people just mark them as destroyers or frigates, or even add carrier capacity to something and screw the whole system over, but based on what I’ve learned about the various real life and fictional ships over the last decade, this seems to be how the term was intended to be used.
Battle Cruisers historically displace more than Heavy cruisers and were intended as similar to battleships but faster in return for missing out on armour protection or firepower of a normal battleship. They fell out of use as technology allowed battleships to get those desired speeds without the need of sacrifices.
From Star Wars, the one Mega-Ship i really love, and which makes sense, was the "Arc Hammer" from the game Dark Forces. It was roughly 9600 meter long (its still hard to tell, because of very few cutscenes with good references, so could be more) and was a Mobile Construction and Launch Platform for the Dark Troopers. It was the complete factory for building and testing them, or pretty much anything you want, if you reconfigure the factories. It only got the raw resources, and everything else was done in its own giant factories and refineries and assemly lines. And it was powerful enough to defend itself without any escort, because it had to travel alone as part of its secret mission.
See you are still thinking to much gravity bound limits, that just won't apply to any size ship, fighter could be out maneuvered by a large ship pretty easily as larger ship's thrust is just more, and since it honestly isn't pushing against anything it will be just as fast as a fighter in turning and such meaning even if you get into it's blind spot the large ship can just turn just as fast as a fighter if not faster due to thrust to mass. This also means your big ass ship better be aware of internal forces of such turns and such. But to think smaller is faster is so terrestrial bound thinking it's not really a factor in zero gravity where your weight doesn't matter as much as people think it would be like it is inside a gravity well.
A Capital ship will not be as maneuverable as a fighter in space. Inertia is still a thing that has to be overcome and the more mass a ship has the more inertia it has.
@ You are forgetting that the larger the ship has the more volume it will have in relation to the rest of the ship. A larger ship will have less mass compared to its internal space, allowing a larger power plants and a better power to mass ratio. In the vacuum of space larger vessels are inherently more efficient, and the better power to mass ratio it will have.
@@RenlangRen you're incorrect I think, without doing the math, for two reasons. One, if both the capital ship and the fighter start at the same time the fighter, with less rest mass will move first of the starting block even if the mass to power ratio is proportional. The capital ship has so much more rest mass to accelerate it's not moving soon from a dead stop. Two, if they both turn 90°s by pivoting about their center of mass both will still be going in the same direction of the original thrust. The capital ship will travel further along its original thrust vector than the fighter again because of inertia. Even if they bank, which in space why would they, inertia is still going to be harder to overcome by the capital ship.
@ But the power to mass ratio has the potential to not be proportional because the surface area of small shapes is proportionally larger than the surface area of large shapes, so small ships will require a larger proportion or armor/shell than a larger shape. The larger the shape, the higher proportion of interior room, the higher potential for power plants/engines.
The super star destroyer and regular imperial star destroyers were the correct choice, IMHI. Lucas had the Empire painted as iron fisted totalitarian regime. Big, powerful, intimating is the theme we see with so many tyrannical governments. Hitler was obsessed with bigger tanks and having bigger battleships the British. You can find other examples with Chinese emperors, Roman Casears, and list goes on. Its an ego and obsession thing. These overboard projects always backfire on these tyrants in the end. It fits perfectly for the Empire in SW and I've always been glad Lucas did it despite discussion like this I see. Impractical regimes don't build practical things.
I remember as a grade schooler having a little contest about whose ship is bigger. The end game was a tiny dot next to his ship, and he said “That’s the universe, that’s my ship.” He definitely won, and we laughed.
There is a blurring of classification conventions between the Age of Sail, modern wet navies, and futuristic systems that include motherships, support vessels, and megavessels like you described. Simply as size classification goes, this wasn't a bad comparison, but definitely not rigorous or comprehensive. Thanks for your creative work.
It's best when the size of vessels is influenced by the limits and requirements of the technology and situation in the setting. Culture used the huge General Systems Vehicles as their primary war asset until they had a chance to produce sufficient numbers of purpose-built General and Rapid Offensive Units, which were a lot smaller, but packed more punch per resource input, not to mention the redundancy offered by groups of small ships instead of a single huge one. In the Algebraist and Orion's Arm, most groups are able to build xboxhueg megaships, but the size limits of wormhole portals means that smaller ships offer not only more tactical, but also a lot more strategic mobility. In OA, some megaships do exist in order to project power outside the reach of the wormhole network. But in most cases, hot wars in OA seem to be fought by sending seeds of replicating warmachines or ordnance (with the occasional rampancy).
I think Star Wars' "super star destroyers" like the Executor are also basically fleet tenders. Resupplying and repairing star destroyers, while acting as the command ship carrying the fleet command and support staff. They're large enough to have massive medical facilities and huge stocks of equipment stores like AT-ATs, fighters, shuttles, and probes, which the Star Destroyers would tend to use up on missions. Han refers to it as a non-unique "command ship" as well, implying that they're rare, but not surprising, at the core of a fleet at an important place.
Another good example of a world ship are the Eldar Craftworlds from Warhammer 40k. They are quite literally world ships that the Eldar fled to after their planets destruction likely at the time of the birth of Slaneesh and the Dark Eldar.
You overlooked one crucial purpose of the super ships like Darth Vader's Executor...intimidation! It says..."Look at us...we have the resources, knowledge, and power to build this! Don't mess with us!"
I think huge ship size can be justified, but it has to be justified. For instance, the Supremacy. It has factory facilities and even on board drydocks, everything a relatively small force might need if they don't have much in the way of planetary territory. Everything except good writing, though. Because the way the Supremacy is meant to be used very much conflicts with the plot of the movie, as if the writers stated one thing and showed another. Or stated something and failed to realize the implications of it. Basically, a very large ship could have its size justified if it is meant for a very long journey with no or minimal support, or essentially as a mobile forward operating base. A Super Star Destroyer, for instance, could be used as a mobile strategic strongpoint, providing that to a fleet of smaller, more flexible ships that do the fighting, while also providing other strategic and logistical resources. However, neither the Supremacy nor the Executor are really well used from this standpoint. The Supremacy is absolutely something that should not be used offensively as shown in the movie, unless you are besieging a planet. Same thing goes for the Executor. As a bonus, the Executor is not at all suited for what the Empire needs. Sure, if the Empire was fighting against a peer or near peer enemy like the CIS, where they had a need for a forward operating base, and desired the capability to carry a large amount of war material to avoid overstretching supply lines or to reduce their vulnerability, then the Executor makes a lot of sense. But that's not what they were up against. What they needed was peacekeeping, and to go after some scrappy rebels. So, what they needed was more smaller, more flexible ships. On the other hand, I think the Executor was actually intended not to crush the Rebellion, as it was used for, but to further Palpatine's goal of extragalactic conquest. In that case, it makes a lot more sense. This isn't even really a theory, the EU Dark Empire comic series detailed how Palpatine had ambitions of becoming a god-emporer of the galaxy, and then conquering the universe. To that end, he had the Eclipse star dreadnought and the World Devastators, absolutely essential for invading another galaxy. More to my point about a ship going on a long journey with no or minimal support, which applies to both military and civilian ships alike, is how do you resupply? If you don't have any kind of FTL, you need to carry everything you could possibly need on the journey, and/or the ability to make more. Even if you do have FTL, resupply could be difficult, again justifying a ship being large to support its mission with large amounts of supplies. One last justification is in relation only to near future technology, and that is the idea of the ship needing to be large in order to isolate the crew from the engines/reactor, which could be a potential hazard.
Currently listening to Existence Combat, and they have a fun aproach where you have a 800 meter long ship, with a crew of just 3 or 4, and the ability to maybe cram an extra 20 or so foot soldiers in with two light tanks if you want, and that's a tiny warship. They're aproach is that the entire ship is basicly a massive lump of metal, and solid storage areas. The biggest part of a ship is the engine, itself a super dense metal that controls gravity, meaning it's not external, just like 70% of the inside of this massive brick of a metal ship is this one type of metal that lets it move at speed or hover through an atmosphere. Fun how because basically everything is super dense and solid state, the ships basically just start cracking and sinking into any normal ground they land on given their shear density over any real amount of time. Mixed with life support (that's most importantly the inertial negation system that keeps the crew from turning into a red mist inside the ship when it accelerates) means they can ram through probably 95% of other settings ships out there without much issue as they are insanely durable just massive chunks of super high quality armor basicly, with a couple hatches leading into missile pods inside the hull. And for weapons, the main focus is on melting away armor after heating it up, so plasma warheads, particle beams, or DU railguns putting metal storm or anything else today to shame for rate of fire. So in this setting with this tech, the bigger a ship is, the more power it has, the faster it could potentially go (both sublight and FTL), the proportionally thicker it's pure armor shell can be making it tougher, and the larger and more powerful it's AI can be. A small ship might be fast sublight, but so so light speed, and take awhile between FTL jumps. While an 8km behemoth might have the power and AI to let the thing make rapid in system jumps far faster than any smaller ships could computer or get the power ready for such an act. And ships that have less than 300 meters of brick size would likely fail to have the power and computing ability to even make any type of FTL jump, let alone also cram any weapons or crew on board. Hence why the smallest oldest military ships humans used were around 600 meters I think. Now in setting with the right super powered long range weapon that can't be reliably intercepted, these supersized ships did become just vulnerabilities that were kept hidden away till eventual counters could be found and retrofitted, but even then if they just dropped in point blank next to an enemy few things could survive the thousand plus missiles doing their best to be a local star. Also meant some of the biggest ships were transports, massive tugs that were just boxes with FTL engines and grav teathers to pick up and drop off massive planetary mining systems, prefabbed refineries and bases, and load up on the quantities of resource such operations could spit out. Or, for some of them, the part they could just take other warships into their bays and do internal reparis and retrofits anywhere it was needed or at least bring them back to allied bases that might do that work. And avoiding spoilers for later, but for the super/mega ship ranges... Well, if you are doing colony work and want a massive mobile factory that can make colonies, ships, other tech, etc... you can end up with things in that class. And oh boy... I'm just imagine the supremacy or almost anything else in those ranges going up against the main one in the story, despite being smaller than them... ya, it would turn them into literal swiss cheese in seconds with it's primary defensive armaments. I mean, again when larger ships might be 8km of solid metal, with the outermost something insanely durable and even the intermost engines still more durable than solid steel, large weapons that can defend against such ships are the types of things that might be punching holes through literal miles of super durable metal, and not just a fine little hole, but a big broad one to deal actual damage. Some people might not like having the idea of super high tech ships where even a small fighter or shuttle could FTL, or have it's own shields or stuff, but this slightly more grounded and brutal aproach to high tech is very interesting and a nice variety from the more common and generic stuff. So if you are making your own ship or setting, seriously consider how things work, both what you can do with X, but also what you can't do with X. Finding limits and constraints in your tech is key to making interesting and enjoyable stories and stuff, and also helps things stand out if you can come up with something more unique than a reskin of a star trek or star wars ship with shields and lasers and the other general rules they use.
This was an interesting exercise in trying to impose logical constraints on what is essentially author driven make-believe. What generally (in my mind) separates the wheat from the chaff regarding sci-fi, especially military sci-fi, is whether the story is internally consistent and applies its own rationale in a reasonable fashion. Different sci fi worlds set different parameters so it is difficult to do what you tried to do, using examples from multiple stories. Something within a storyline (such as a scarcity of mages who can use a jump spell to enable interstellar travel) would tend to drive construction of larger ships, while if weapons are (in a true to life fashion) generally potent enough to take out even very large vessels, then military craft have much less reason to become super large - unless, as you noted, they have a carrier role to deliver masses of vessels that each have the capacity to take out ships orders of magnitude larger than they are... Nicely done. Cheers, JW
From a hard sci-fi enthusiast, really size is entirely limited by the setting's industry. Gravity is a non-factor for most aspects of a ship and most sci-fi settings has so much handwavium that the structural integrity doesn't matter. Not to mention that theoretically it's not difficult to engineer for insane sizes anyways as long as you have the resources to actually build such a thing. The greater the industry, the greater that industry's capacity to build larger ships, and larger ships are always better than smaller ones, at least for the core of a fleet. The square cube law by itself means that larger ships gets more benifits from heavier armour than smaller ones (armour size is based on surface area, while a ship's size is based on volume. Double a ship's length, you square the surface, cube the volume. Make a ship ten times longer, you need a hundred times the armour, but get a thousand times the space to fit in more stuff, including bigger engines. Big enough ships can get entire kilometers thick armour while still accelerating as fast as a small ship. Honestly, this armour theory alone is enough to justify larger ships. If you have one ship that is invulnerable to all weapons of the enemy faction, and can mass produce them to have one in every minor fleet, why not do so? Sure, there are reasons to have smaller ships, but there's no reason to not have a bunch of picket ships, destroyers, then hundred km long battleships as the basis of every fleet in a space navy. It's not like you have to have millions of people working on such a ship if your setting has the automation to have a dozen people tear apart a small moon of all its resources over the course of a decade. The size of the biggest ships is entirely a result of the setting's industry's capacity to build such a thing. How and where such a ship would be used is a different thing of course, but at the very least, a galaxy spanning empire with an industry comparable to current Earth scaled up that far should be able to build Executor-class ships far easier than we can build a typical destroyer.
Originally, the Eclipse Class was larger than the Executor. But at some point the source books scaled up the Executor while not touching the Eclipse for some reason
In canon, Thrswn discusses with his officers. He stated that the Navy is best with Star Destroyers mixed in with Starfighter as support. Basically the bigger ship you have means you have more power and support structure to mount the most powerful shield generators and the most powerful turbo laser cannons. Obivously the tech stops at a certain point but still in order to stop a Star Destroyer you need a comparative sized ship with similar weapons and shielding to match. Or a number of small ships armed with proton torpedo launches with skilled pilots to coordinate with each other to fire at the same time . Failure to do so will wast ammo and Starfighter only carry a few torpedos.
In many sci-fi settings I wrote or prepared for campaigns, huge 5-30 km ships (in any direction) are one of the most versatile tools: as plot devices! Be it either a looming danger, an unknown vessel like Rama, or simply display of power. In most cases they are not to be used, except to go boom, or as a background, if the settings is already on board (in this particular case: there is manga and anime called Knights of Sidonia / Sidonia no Kishi, which is 29x5 km seed/colony ship, with lenghtwise running railgun, checking almost all of the boxes, and one of the better written settings tech-wise). For a few cases, where I had to flesh out the gigantic ones, I made the following (I defaulted to "empire" everywhere for simplicity): - 12x2x3 km long, cigar-shaped passenger-oriented ship, meant as a mobile HQ for administration/first contact force in a space empire. After encountering new peaceful civilization, this one would be sent to perform first contact smoothly (overcoming biological/language/cultural barriers, agreeing on rules of communications, exchanging laws, etc.), preparing neutral ground for diplomacy, using detachable mobile space stations, etc. It's meant to literally carry bureaucrats and some xenobiology crew. It would be accompanied, by: - 20x8x1 km big, H-shaped freighter/mobile factory/terraformer tool ship, meant for colonizing moons. Minimum crew, packed to the brim with tech, would land flat on the surface and unfold into factory/city building machine. It's capable of utilizing all of resources at hand, and setting up freighters to import all what's needed (ice/water, gases from nearby gas giants for atmo, etc.) to set up livable open-sky environment within one year timeframe. Lore here was that space empire after encountering new civilization would buy a moon in their home system, allowing potential uplift to empire standards, opening access to market and technology, and later paving a way to alliance and then incorporation to the empire. - From another setting: The Flowers of Fire. Looking like elongated 10km tall, 5km wide octohedron, it would open one one side (like a flower, hence name), revealing assortment of mid to very large weapons, with central main neutron cannon. When closed, heavily armored and shielded, almost indestructible. While open, moderately shielded. While it looks like run of the mill weapon platform, twist lies in its control system: Flowers are controlled exclusively by sentient AI, each of them was carefully grown, often as members of prominent families on certain world, where they learned what they are to protect. These would be transferred into smaller version first, then to final "Guardian" form. Together, they could link up, forming a giant planet protecting shield-wall, and could share and redirect power allowing omnidirectional application of unprecedented firepower. Lore is, the original planet was destroyed by (this time evil) space empire to specifically steal that technology. It couldn't be replicated so well, so they are forcing every single new AI to be grown on a "sensory replay" of a training they managed to steal, and then it's immediately overwritten by "glory to the empire, obey empire" on repeat to ensure loyalty, and then produced by the billions as enforcer fleets supporting weapons. Empire could not get the linking feature to work. Renamed from Guardians to Flowers of Fire, they would sometimes go berserk due to low quality of AI training and mental issues it developed when working together with its copies. - From same setting, 350km long chainship. Consisting of tens of thousands modules, roughly 150m in diameter, each containing power systems, propulsion and some manufacturing equipment, with 50km long whip/slingshot at the end. Chainship is meant to dive into remnants of rocky moons or planets destroyed by other weapons and conceal its presence while working. Loosely inspired by Ebola virus, it coils and wriggles, capturing chunks of material to manufacture mines/explosives/kinetic payloads, and both deploy them inside the debris field and fling them at various targets using its long tail to catapult them around. Think of a very nasty, quiet and invisible area denial system. Crewed by complete psychos. While I had a lot of fun writing these, ultimately, fleet of smaller ships is to some degree always batter suited to any task at hand they could do. Cheaper, more resilient, without single-point-of-failure. Except for the chainship, size is always a plot device or a projection of a feature - usually display of power or indication of difficulty/monumental size of task ship is designed to tackle.
Eh, the only Mega ship that ever made sense to me was the Zentraedi Factory Satellite. It was meant to be a mobile factory/shipyard for its fleets, but wasn’t a combat vessel itself.
I feel like size is all about context and the situation, are you building a ship meant to travel across a whole galaxy or between galaxies bigger is better. Are you trying to create a weapon meant to whip out an enemy, its alright until after a certain point it becomes a liability and a giant target.
Exactly. There is also the point about ships needing to be a certain size relative to the other ships of its respective faction fleet comp to effectively fulfill its intended role. Then there is the issue of being large enough to mount and supply all the tech and weapons needed to contend with its equivalents deployed by the enemy, and tech limits play a part in this. 2 good examples of this are EVE Online and Warhammer 40K. In both settings, every major faction have their own fleets with their own tech, design and cultural feel, but they all have the same types of ships in about the same size range as all their rivals. For example, each EVE empire has their own classes of frigates, destroyers, battleships, carriers, super carriers, dreadnoughts, and Titans, each with similar levels of power as each of their contemporaries, just in a different shape and style. In 40K, it's more of a case where every faction can have more different looking and designed ships, but still each have their own equivalents that are in the same size range and have around the same level of firepower and defense (though if that defense takes the form of more armor & shields vs more powerful engines & maneuverability differs). Every faction has their own escorts, frigates, light cruisers, heavy cruisers, battlecruisers, battleships and carriers, and each one from each faction is made to be comparable and competitive against its equivalents from each other faction (game-wise, anyway, in lore it varies much more due to specialities and implications if tech level).
The best things about the larger sized starships is the same as the amenities found on aircraft carriers. You are basically a mobile city with a large community and access to more places to go and spend time with others. The larger the ship the more space to spread out and the more space for more people doing more things. The larger the ship the higher the capacity for storage of more diverse goods for longer trips.
6:17 the Liberator-class Cruiser has always been one of my favorites. Likely cause I like carriers. Probably why I like the Venator and Gladiator Star Destroyer (really a Heavy Cruiser but whatever) so much.
The problem with star wars ships is that they're largely being built on a paradigm that we've abandoned. They're built like pre-dreadnaughts. They don't have main guns, that have a rediculous number of secondaries. Even the heavy turbolasers of the star destroyers are relatively tiny compared to the mass of a Star destroyer.
Sci-Fi has one more qualifier that modern warfare does not have: Shields. When you have shields, E and larger ships start to make a lot more since as actual warships because the shield can be so powerful that a large fleet of small ships with small shields can be attrited losing firepower with every casualty whereas a large ship can take hit after hit without losing any firepower. This means that a single 100,000,000 ton ship might actually beat 10,000 10,000 ton cruisers.
I'm a huge sci-fi fan for my 50+ years. Used to READ Asimov, Heinlein, Vonnegut, etc. The problem now is that fans focus too much on the stuff, and try to create ways these ships could be built, how much they would cost, etc. You are missing the point of sci-fi. The STUFF is just a vehicle to tell a STORY. The STORY is the thing!!! Dune is the ultimate example, most of the back story is used to remove computers, droids, technology so a human story could be told.
inverse square law means that the larger the ship the faster its volume grows, double the size of the ship, and you end up with four times the volume, so building bigger ships is MUCH MUCH better.
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"This ship is too big! If I walked, the movie would be over!"
We brake for nobody!
Even Enterprise had internal travel pods. Why would anyone try to walk from place to place?
@@lokai7914, becouse the elevaters broken, even in the future nothing works!
@@daanvos194 Ever hear of redundancy?
@@lokai7914 with the way hes running things those wont last a month
As a retired Navy Sailor, I think Kirk's Enterprise is large enough to carry a highly diversified crew on long endurance missions...military surface ships of comparable mass go for months without hitting ports. The Enterprise, by comparison, has significantly fewer personnel, allowing better crew accomodation for longer missions. It's a sweet spot.
The 1701 really was a well realized ship.
I looked at EC Henry's videos on the scale of the Enterprise and the enterprise D, and I had to wonder just how empty the ships are for the most part.
One thing people often fail to realize is you need a ship large enough to hold at least 1,000 people and perhaps a few thousand.
There's no such thing as "warp drive" so you would need a sufficient population to avoid genetic diseases.
Frankly interstellar travel is so impractical as to be impossible.
One thing people often fail to realize is you need a ship large enough to hold at least 1,000 people and perhaps a few thousand.
There's no such thing as "warp drive" so you would need a sufficient population to avoid genetic diseases.
Frankly interstellar travel is so impractical as to be impossible.
Military surface ships are on the surface of this planet, with support a few hundred miles away not a few a few trillion miles away because 1 ly = 1 trillion miles and they aren't usually disabled in a single hit to their engineering section like the ship is in WOK. A larger ship would have weathered that storm better. They have a suicidally high degree of automation leaving it vulnerable to conventional attacks, like we see in SFS, as well as cyberwarfare - as we see the Borg do countless times to Starfleet ships a century later. I love Star Trek, have my entire life, but Starfleet ships are unfit for purpose. They're too small and too vulnerable to attack.
"We have shuttles."
' And these shuttles, they are formidable warships?'
Oh yeah. Yeah.
there is no such thing as an unarmed space vessel.
@@peterhacke6317 Not going to lie, I can't see a space shuttle being all that great of a weapon.
Jenkins universe?
@@igncom1 anything capable of going to space or getting anywhere in space can accelerate enough to surpass most non-nuclear weapons by simply ramming into the target.
Galactica's another one. She's the size of a star destroyer, but what does the bulk of the ship really do when the flight pods launch and recover the vipers? Crew quarters, cargo, fresh water tanks, fuel...things like a Nimitz-class carrier has. Definitely a case for bigger can be better if it's planned out right.
Also, armor. Battlestars don't have what we usually think of as sci-fi shields. They use hyper-advanced armor to just soak incoming fire. I bet a surprisingly large percentage of the Galactica's mass is just her armor.
Because Galactica has an entire universe around her. We never get to see the day to day operations on a ISD.
@ Sure wish we did, see how it compared to what we have today on naval vessels.
@ Didn't they say at the beginning of the show that they had stripped a lot of it away for some of the newer ships? Shows how badass she was taking that much damage without all her armor.
My recollection is that a Battlestar is approximately 1,200m in length. I refer to the 1978 television series, no interest in the reboot nonsense.
"From the non-cannon star wars sequel trilogy", took the words right out of my mouth!!!
Omg get over it
Absolutely. What an abomination.
canon, not cannon
@@L0kias1 Why don't you get used to eating shit sandwichs? It's the same thing. So no, I'll never get over it.
@@L0kias1No. it’s a dumpster fire.
I think it really depends on the spaceship in question, its purpose, and the forces opposed to it.
Thrawn makes a great point about Palpy's love of superweapons that can be felled by a ragtag team of virtuous underdogs, but being virtuous underdogs didn't stop the Borg from completely murking Starfleet at Wolf 359
While the Vietcong beat the US Millitary, they did so by choosing the battles. In every engagement where the yfought by the US's rules? They got stomped and stomped hard.
The borg simply outclassed starfleet's assets that were fielded.
@@singletona082 Fair, though Charlie should get props for playing the game smart. Borg only died out because they went full-on Dalek (especially in Picard S03)
@ Oh absolutely. I'm simply stating when they got overconfident and thought they could lay Our game... they got rolled. Constantly and consistently. They were smart enough to realize their mistake, but dumb enough to not stick to their game rules except only in cases to draw opposition forces into a trap.
Starfleet wasn't even a ragtag fleet during the tng era. Even though their ships were many decades or even centuries old they were still enough to compete and for the most part, win against peer enemies. Starfleet is honestly similar to the US Navy fleet today where ships have very long service lives but are still enough to compete and easily win against other known powers.
@@awesomecomputers7076 "Peer" being the operative word here. The Borg was above being Starfleet's peer here- the Enterprise D crew being fucking brilliant is what saved the Alpha Quadrant from assimilation, at least that day.
12:56 "Non-Cannon" BWAHAHAHAHHAAHHAHA. LOVE IT. Hit the nail on the head!
That earns an immediate subscription!
@@Willigula agreed
He also said it at 1:51.
*canon
When I think about super massive ships, I think about the game Homeworld. There, the main ship is a mobile construction yard, forward operating base, resource refinery, and most importantly the last home of the entire population of humanity. It's a bit like a Battlestar in that regard.
I remember the first time I ever heard of Homeworld (in the physical magazine incite PC gaming), they made a big deal about how similar the premise of (the then still upcoming) Homeworld was to BSG (although at that time they could only have been referring to the show from the '70s). I think they even made a point to question if the game would suffer from not paying to get the rights to the clear inspiration.
HWC "Mother ship!" 🥰 Playing till today 👍😉🫡
I'm surprised that the SDF1 from Robotech, which housed a city with initial population of ninety thousand, *maybe* counting the crew or *not,* down to fifty thousand later on wasn't included. Or the Voth city ship from Star Trek Voyager.
@@whitewolf3051 In the case of Robotech, Harmony Gold gets really sensitive about people talking about Robotech/Maccross and it's just not worth messing with them. But the Voth ships are a good inclusion!
A few contentions.
The Yamato did participate in a surface battle during the battle off samar, and secondly her design came about due to special circumstances. The major naval powers were constrained by the 1920 Washington naval treaty, limiting ships to 35000 tons and 16 inch guns and limiting their fleets to set ratios of tonnage. If the Japanese could in secret produce something significantly larger than anything currently in service, they could build something which could be nearly immune to any ship currently in service. But there was never a decisive surface battle. In the beginning of the war the US Navy was still rebuilding their surface strength and unwilling to risk major surface actions, and by the second half of it carriers had caught up to battleships due to developments in carrier aircraft and tactics.
Secondly the ticonderoga class cruisers are about the same size as their contemporary destroyers, being separated by their role not their weight class.
And finally, the usefulness of large starships in sci-fi is entirely up to the setting. Ships could be nearly immune to ships from lower weight classes due to having more powerful shields, or they can be idiotic wastes of material which are vulnerable to the smallest attack craft doing a clever trick, its up to the author.
The Yamato was the right size for a wave motion engine though.
The Yamato was basically a giant waste of ressources. The Japanese did not use when it would have been useful because of the risk of losing it.
And when they finally used it, it was too late and it couldn´t do anything to turn the tide of the war.
If the Japanese had used the ressources to build 20 or 30 Destroyers instead to protect their freighters from US submarines, this would have had a far greater impact on the war.
They wouldn´t have won neither way of course.
The Ticonderoga was originally a DDG built on a Spruance hull. Congress got sticker shock so the Navy reclassified it as a Cruiser. Congress responded "Cheap Cruiser! Well buy it!" Just when the Navy believed it had pulled a fast one, Congress cancelled the Agis version of the Virgina class CGN proclaiming "You have your Agis Cruiser!"
@@hermes7587 no, replacing yamato with 20 destroyers would not have made a difference either. One because Japanese ASW was just awful. more destroyers wanst going to make up for the IJN's terrible ASW capabilities. Two, the cost of one Yamato isn't equivalent to 20 japanese destroyers, its more equivalent to 10. And replacing Yamato with another carrier wouldn't have made a difference either because Japans inability to train enough competent pilots meant they barely had enough pilots to fill out the carriers they had.
Simply put, while Yes the yamatos where pretty useless in WW2, that uselessness didn't really turn into much of a net loss for imperial japan because of all their other structural issues and total lack of industrial capacity compared to the US.
@@hermes7587 The Yamato would have been useful had there been an early war decisive surface battle, her armor would have stood up to any 14 inch and 16 inch 45 caliber gunfire at most battle ranges. Only two ships in the pacific fleet even had 16 inch guns at the start of the war. The 18 inch guns would have outranged anything available. The flaw in the ships was the flaw in the entire Japanese decisive battle doctrine. Their entire naval plan was predicated on the Americans playing right into their hands. They had planned for the entire us pacific fleet to sail to defend the Philippines, where they could whittle it down on the way, then fight whatever is left over in a decisive surface action. Then theyd wait for the atlantic fleet to do the exact same thing and pull the same trick again. The US plan had actually been to do just that up until a couple years before the war.
But the japanese were planning the war as if they were playing both sides of the chess board. And one could argue Pearl Harbor was too effective for their decisive battle doctrine, 2 battleships permanently lost and 3 more were on the bottom requiring more than a year to recover. Not enough surface forces remained operational to commit to a surface action any time soon, so it came down to carrier fights.
By the time the US navy had built up enough battleship strength in the pacific, the Japanese had lost most of their carrier strength. Not to mention the advances in carrier aircraft technology and tactics which made them far more effective in 1944 than in 1941. Without carrier aircraft to scout for and defend the battleships from enemy aircraft, the Japanese battleships became useless by 1944. But they didn’t start off as so.
It probably depends more on your industrial capacity and naval size. For example, the Covenant probably wouldn't feel much if a CAS class assault carrier was taken out, and those things are multiple kilometers long.
And any realistic galactic empire or even an empire of a few thousand star systems could easily field huge fleets of executor sized vessels, that would actually need to be larger due to needing propellent and large interstellar class engines.
I agree. In WH40K common cruiser ships are like 5km long and it's no problem to churn them out because the economies in that galaxy are so massive. It's like "Oh we lost another planet and 10 trillion lives to the Tyrannids? Tuesday already huh?"
@@TheEventHorizon909 In Legends each sector had at least one. About a few dozens would be counted in the 25k fleet of Star Destroyers.
@@AAhmouThey only started to enter service after the battle of Yavin
@@TheEventHorizon909 You do not spend huge amounts of ressources on giant war ships because you can, but only because you have a purpose for them.
Just showing off is not a viable purpose - except in movies.
Millenium Falcon - the RV Campervan with the racing engine
And a pair of military-grade AA turrets. 😂
@@shinigamimiroku3723 Sounds like a fun time in Mad Maxx
In Star Wars ironically bigger ships make sense because in their Universe shields defeat guns: to strike through shield of a spacecraft you need a weapon that can be mounted and powered only by a bigger spacecraft.
Thus ISD was a killer of a smaller ships of CW era (missed Lore opportunity to claim that it was designed during CWs to complement Ventors that were clearly struggling in fleet on fleet engagements), and SSD would be logical killer of fleets of ISD-sized warships.
This was sadly never explored in SW...
The only canon SSD is the Executor, it did function as a mobile shipyard for normal ISD's. Otherwise, you are right. The Executor was built to engage and defeat entire fleets of Republic capital ships. The Republic had built a small number of Mon Calimari MC80 Star Cruisers, which could fight Star Destroyers on even terms. If the Republic massed there forces and engaged from surprise, they could overwhelm fleets of regular Star Destroyers. The Executor was a means to prevent that by engaging and quickly destroying the largest of Republic ships while being near immune to return fire.
In spite of that, it was still destroyed at Endor but that loss was a bit of a fluke. It tanked the entire Republic fleet, which knocked down the shields around the bridge just long enough for an out of control A wing to hit it
oh? never seen this in the movies....
Kind of the opposite of the expanse where a Corvette can kill a battleship because missiles are missiles regardless of who launches them.
@@PeachDragon_ It helps that in The Expanse, they didn't have shields that can just stonewall weapons fired from smaller ships. The Expanse is much more realistic, like where small speedboats with missiles are a threat to even the bigger US Supercarriers if we let them get close enough to fire.
yeah this is a good point each ship was part of some sort of arms race and it might make sense to have super massive ships or never get beyond the cruiser sort of tier depending on the environment it evolved in. If for example you can put a planet cracking weapon in a corvette or cruiser class ship it becomes extremely hard to justify ships larger than that as its just further concentrates your assets in a single blow-up-able thing. On the other hand if say the shield tech in a particular fictional universe scales exponentially with size / power it makes all the sense in the world to make the single biggest most crazy powerful ship you can to make the most of your resources.
The harder the sci-fi either the slower your ships have to be or the bigger they have to be in order to be fast. The minimum size of ships goes up the more real physics based their drives are. If you want to get to Mars in a few days, then you basically have a torchship with a massive amount of fusion fuel. On the other hand, small ships would make a lot of sense within the asteroid belt or if you have a lot of space stations that aren't that far apart in the grand scheme of things.
Come back to reality asteroid belts in the movies isn't real asteroid in our asteroid belt are miles apart from each other that why we can send probes into the outer solar system without them crashing in to a rock.
@@erp2000 Yes, but the delta v to go between them is much lower than to go between planets, and while they are very far apart, distances don't necessarily have to take as long as going between, say, Mars and Earth. In a sci-fi setting there's also plenty of material in the asteroid belt to build space stations out of, and you could arrange them in a large co-orbital ring, so the time between each station is short.
That would allow you to go between a lot of different "settings".
And also the square cube law. In realistic sci-fi settings, or real life, bigger IS better. So for interstellar spaceships, I think the minimum viable size is O'Neil cylinder.
We’ve seen how quickly a planetary ion cannon can disable an ISD, but the Executor’s immense size may allow it to better endure the same level of punishment while remaining operational. In other words, the SSDs may have been designed for sieges and invasions of well-defended planets.
Admiral Ozzel got blamed by Vader for the failure to exit hyperspace undetected, but it wasn't his fault, they were already tipped off by the probe droid. It's highly likely Vader knew this and just hated the guy anyway. Notice how he didn't kill Piett after he failed.
@@DeathBYDesign666 they were tipped off, but if ozzel hadnt come out of hyperspace that close to Hoth, they couldve easily just orbitally bombared Echo Base from the asteroid belt
To be fair, the executor was destroyed by a single A-wing crashing into its bridge. 19km of dreadnought all gone because a tiny fighter landed in its command deck.
@@adambrown6669 after tqking heavy damage and being too close to the death star gravity well
No deaths star and it would have survived
@@adambrown6669 No that temporarily disabled it long enough for them to keep blasting it with turbo lasers. Notice it was the aft section shields that were disabled and that's where most of the damage was done before it crashed into the death star, which was also actually a death blow for it as well. Haven't you ever wondered why they were evacuating even before they hit the main reactor? It was completely disabled at that point so it was only destroyed for good measure. It wasn't the A-wing alone, but it was the key blow.
Another Megaship would be the motherships of the Homeworld series. They are mobile cities and factories, building the rest of their fleet, but have little in self defense ability.
"From the non Canon Disney Sequel Trilogy." 😂😂😂 Amen my man.
It depends on what they're for. Star Wars ships are big for the sake of being big. In 40K the Gloriana class was designed for Space Marine Legions, tens of thousands of Transhumans, many of which where over 8 feet tall in their armour, with all their equipment, ammunition, food, plus production, repair and training facilities, apothecaries and stores of Gene-seed, and that's before you get to ship munitions and auxiliary craft. Since they were designed to conquer the galaxy and usually operating far from friendly space, they needed to be able to take a lot of damage and remain operational. This is an example of a smartly thought out design to justify their 20+ km length sizes.
Yes, I agree! Also the weapons mounted on 40k Imperium battleships are pretty massive. Look at the Execuutor from Star Wars and how super tiny the turbolasers are. And than look at basically any Imperium battleship and look at how massive those broadside cannons etc are. A ship has to be huge to mount weapons such as these and these weapons are needed to actually make a dent in all the stuff that is thrown against them. And when it comes to pre-Horus-Heresy ships - they were also made to impress and intimidate. If a human colony would join the Imperium without a fight that would be the best scenario in a galactic crusade.
@@wanjanechtangroeger Yup, Macrocannon shells are the size of cars and a Nova Cannon fires a shell the size of the original Enterprise!
Saying Warhammer's ridiculous super-capital ships are any more practical or realistic than Star War's ridiculous super-capital ships, just because you describe the function of one while completely omitting the stated in-universe functions of the other, is very disingenuous.
I don't say that to stick up for Star Wars, because, frankly both are genre fiction settings that use a lot of Rule of Cool (and that's the point). But, c'mon, claiming Warhammer's Gloriana to be better designed for function in this manner stinks of fanboyism.
In the Babylon 5 series, only large ships could travel FTL without going to a jump gate or riding on a capital ship.
(Refering to the younger races.)
Actually Macro battery isn't just Macro cannons, it can be Railgun, coil gun, plasma gun, rocket, laser and exotic one like Grav pulsar. @@saladinbob
I have really always hated "the ship is huge" just to be impressive... its always felt to me like a couple of 5 year olds arguing over who's dad is stronger and can lift bigger and bigger things... it quickly loses its meaning.
Yeah, I can understand that. Though personally, I'm fine with ships and constructs being ludicrously massive so long as they naturally fit the internal consistency of the setting that they are in.
For example, normal "capital ships" in Star Trek are typically only a few hundred meters at their largest point at most, with notable outliers like D'deridexes and Borg Cubes having notable reasons why they are so large compared to everyone else that make sense. The Romulans have comparatively few ships compared to the Federation and Klingons, so they rely on the size and firepower that the D'deridex implies, combined with its more self-sustaining singularity power core, and their mastery of cloaking to deter enemies as theoretically, one could pop up anywhere, so they don't need to populate their territories with as many smaller ships.
However, if you go to a different setting, like Warhammer 40K, then the scaling is completely different, but most importantly it makes sense in the context of the universe. 40K ship sizes are massive compared to most other sci-fi, but it's important to know that every faction has their rough equivalents of everything in a fleet (escorts, frigates, light & heavy cruisers, battlecruisers and battleships/fleet carriers) at around the same size range, meaning that it's perfectly reasonable in universe for people to be using hundreds of km to mile-long ships like Klingon BOPs or CR-90s because to the factions in the setting, that's the role those ships serve. Another aspect to 40K is that the weapons of the ships are proportional to their size, so that they can do meaningful damage to enemy ships expected to be in the same size and tonnage range.
The smallest standardized naval warships in the Imperium are the Cobra pattern of destroyers, with various sources putting them between 750 and 1500 meters in length. 40K lore has some leeway in these inconsistencies as the Imperium is very unstandardized, as there are tons of regional variations or equivalents of the same thing that share common core tech components.
These destroyers serve in formations as escorts, scouts and harassing elements for larger ships, mainly relying on torpedoes with long-range support from the oversized fixed weaponry of frigates (2-3 km long typically). These escort ships are seen as mostly expendable, which can be thrown out and be busted or ripped apart by single shots from the main turreted weapons of proper capital ships (cruisers, which are typically 4-ish km for the light variant and 5-6ish km for the standard and heavy variants. Battleships are typically 7-8 km in recent sources, though sometimes they reach 10+ in size).
While I can't disagree with your argument, I'd like to point out a certain psychological aspect of giant ships.
Giant warships are frequently meant to serve as terror weapons. Imagine you're in a city that's unexpectedly in shade. The whole city. You look up and see that the sun (or whatever the star is for that star system) has been eclipsed by The Death Star. Other people look up too, and very quickly, your ears hear the sounds of panic as people (irrationally?) start running around like chickens with their heads cut off in a panic.
Quite possibly, without firing a shot, The Death Star has potentially brought a world to its knees...
@@jeffanderson8165
In a sci-fi setting where large-scale constructs and interstellar battleships are not rarities, the terror value of a megaship is somewhat dubious. The artistic depiction of 'suddenly being in shade' leading to rapid mass panic doesn't even need be operant; just seeing a ship that's so ginormous it can be seen in orbit, in daytime, would be enough to project terror and foreboding over a few days or weeks while the local government/populace/uprising or what have you is subjugated.
@@fadelsukoco3092WH40K is more military science fantasy than science fiction. I'd give it a 2 on the Mohs Scale of Sci-Fi Hardness.
That doesn't mean I hate it. Dawn of War was an awesome game.
To me the Enterprise D is the PERFECT “big ship”.
It’s big, but not absurdly larger than other ships around it. And they treat it more like a mobile starbase with civilians, recreation, more science and diplomatic suites than could likely ever be used at once, etc. It’s big because its vast mission profile needs it to be.
With the TNG technical manual and the Rich Sternbach deck by deck blueprints, it proves that the space of the ship is adequately used, and it’s one of the few ships in my eyes that “deserves” its larger scale.
It's hard to tell in Star Wars, since ships in Star Wars tend to move at the speed of plot - but, in lore, Super Star Destroyers like the Executor are designed to be mobile bases coordinating fleets of Star Destroyers on multi-system operations well away from the "civilized" center of the Galaxy Far, Far Away where they may be weeks or even months of hyperspace travel time away from base or reinforcements. Those undercut decks on the lower side of the ship are supposed to be repair facilities for Star Destroyers. It even had manufacturing centers that can build new TIE fighters or AT-ATs to replace battle losses. (Though, how they'd replace the personnel lost . . . )
"speed of plot" is a good one. Without hyperdrive, how did they get to the Bespin system?
Not all damage is going to be critical damage. The repairing of things such as heavy turbolasers also needs to happen. I can't see many things which wouldn't fit on a star destroyer, but maybe the SSD could be some kind of large, well armed logistics hub.
Finally found this underrated comment.
In ROTJ, Han called the super SD a command ship. Of course he also said the Empire had lots of them. The galaxy is pretty big and to me they are like true aircraft carriers, but I also think he was trying to make Luke feel better. To me a SSD just also looks badass, not like the turd in that later movie. Of course I am also bias.
The ship is large enough it can carry reserve troops as well. Then, if they had that population of troops on rotation, it could give the troops some good leave time to relax while out on long missions to help them not go crazy or get burned out. Therefore, the biggest ship should have the best food and entertainment.
It depends on the setting; the square-cube law can be leveraged in your favor for specific things. So.. basically volume increases more than the demand for hull materials. Even though it's freakishly big, it's even biiiiiiiiiiiger inside. Great for slow colony ships at least.
Now, for narrative/story telling: I have to answer "medium is the most fun :D!" .. because um.. well, I chose a 'medium sized capital ship' for the home/hero ship for the story I'm writing (at a glacially slow pace). I'm biased lol ~ Further, I went with a sub-optimal design... It's an anachronism; doctrinaly obsolete before it was even launched yet they built it anyway. A 'Battle-Carrier' or 'Self-Escorting Battleship' - It's even acknowledged in universe, after a fairly short career as a front-line warship, it was quickly shuffled off to serve as a carrier training ship instead.
I wanted to make the characters have to deal with various problems and shortcomings, learn to leverage it's strengths and lean into the fact it's not going to fight a conventional battle, or war. I feel it's just big enough to be plausible, **without** feeling luxurious or "having an answer to everything" much like the vibe of a Galaxy class offers.
You have the most important thing. The square-cube law means that bigger is always better when you are in the vacuum of space.
Larger ships will be faster and more maneuverable than smaller ships in the vacuum of space if designed to be so.
The square-cube law means bigger is more efficient.
If energy is fungible and a larger ship would have more power available for weapons and shields than a small ship then this would create an advantage for the larger ship. A large ship would be able to generate much higher shield density then a small fighter sized ship.
This is all conjecture because in fiction, the technology can do whatever the author wants it to.
In reality, increasing raw output always increases waste heat due to entropy due to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. It is, (for example) why we don't build singular, super-sized nuclear reactors in aircraft carriers, but multiple, smaller more efficient reactors working in tandem, even though they collectively takes up more internal volume (and likely more mass too, due to the lead shielding).
As for "shield density":
Every increase in size is EXPONENTIAL because space is in three dimensions. Specifically, it's a cube function at its simplest (cube is x*y*z, or a sphere being 4/3 Pi *Radius^3). So unless your power source's scalar grows faster than a cube function, you will always LOSE shield density with larger ships.
@@atmosdwagon4656 Using the USN as an example: the USS Gerald R Ford generates approx 700,000hp at approx 1100 feet, while an Arleigh Burke destroyer has approx 106,000 hp at 500 feet. Thus the USS Gerald R Ford would have nearly 7 time more power to generate an energy based shield (which we don't know how to do yet) or power its weapons.
@@PequaKnight You are comparing nuclear energy to gasoline, of course the nuclear option will be more efficient. When we actually compare apples to apples, the Ohio-Class nuclear submarine is also around 500ft, but it produces 220MW with a single reactor compared to the 520MW of the Gerald Ford's two reactors. There is basically a linear increase and not the exponential growth necessary as the above commenter pointed out
@@hentielover It is not the source of the power that is the question as much as it how energy is available to generate a shield bubble around an object.
@@atmosdwagon4656 The size available for power generation is cubed, while the size of the shield is squared as you get bigger. This means that you always outpace the power requirements. The waste heat issue is a function of power generation versus surface area, so it should scale the same as shield density, such as double the shield density requires doubling the percentage surface area dedicated to radiating waste heat. Of course if you boost power to other systems then the radiator density will outstrip the shield density. If you use the space for storage to house fighters, ammo, fuel, etc. then you end up with greater staying power with no real increase in radiator percentage surface area.
If you double the shield density for a ship that originally would need 5% of its surface area dedicated to radiation for the shield's power generation then you would need 10% dedicated to radiation for the shield's power generation. If the original ship also needed 5% for all other power generation and the double sized version uses the same systems then it would need 1.25% of its surface dedicated to radiation non-shield power generation. Overall a double sized ship with double shields that simply uses the extra space for extra hangar, living space, and distance between critical systems, then it would go from 10% (5% for shields, 5% for all other) of its surface area dedicated to radiation to 11.25% of its surface dedicated to radiation. That larger ship would require double the force to penetrate its shields and effective damage from penetrating shots would decrease by roughly 1/8. That requires 16 times the dedication to weapons to defeat it, easily outpacing potential weapon output in a general sense (targeted attacks, or other tactics can mitigate the increase quite a bit).
At either 265 or 333 meters (depending on original or remake series respectively) the Space Battleship Yamato serves - ironically - as one of the best examples of the heavy cruiser class you can find. Obviously it's bristling with heavy shock cannons and defensive lasers and mounts vertically launched missiles (both dorsal and ventral) and side batteries. It's not a true carrier, but it does have a small 26 ship fighter wing. It was also designed from the start with long range FTL travel - up to intergalactic scale. A trip to and from the Large Magellanic Cloud galactic cluster outside the Milky Way is proof of that.
Bigger is better if you have shields in your universe that must be depleted before you take damage and the primary limit to shields is the power you supply to them. In Halo the UNSC has massive ships with metres thick armor, but there's no point to them because their armour does not protect against Covenant weapons, building small harder to hit expendable strike craft might have been more efficient because large ships get one shot anyway.
In Star Trek for the most part where shields must be depleted before damage and very accurate weapons that can easily target smaller ships, having more room to have more power generation, for more shields makes sense. Also in Star Trek almost no weapons 'pierce' the target, they almost always scorch or explode on the surface of the ship, so bigger ships can just soak up more damage because the outer hull is normally damaged first.
Bigger also means requires more power to cover with shields so there's definite diminishing returns.
Smaller ships have less redundancy, less staying power, less operational endurance, and less likely to be able to be upgraded than larger ships
@@centurion7398 it will depend on the setting but your volume will increase exponentially faster than your surface area so you should be able to generate more power per area of shield if you just increase size and add reactors. More power should just be more shield unless there is a limit to shield strength established in setting.
For example a 2inx2x2 cube has a surface area of 24 square invhesand a volume of 8 cubic inches but a 4x4x4 cube has a surface area of 96 square inches and an interior of 48 cubic inches. By the time you get to 7x7x7 it's 294 square inches to 343 cubic.
@@tandemcharge5114 less redundancy true, but smaller ships will be easier and cheaper to upgrade. Just like with carriers and fighter planes in real life, the Nimits class carriers have seen many different planes come and go all of which were upgraded multiple times during their service life.
@@centurion7398Square-Cube Law
The bigger the more crew you need. The more crew you need the more supplies you need. The more power you'll need. And the more support you'll need. You may even need onboard factory farms just to feed people
Or they have their own production/repair capabilities.
The more structural weight you get, the more surface area you get, the bigger drives you need... I've been stuck in the add more stuff-add bigger drives- stuff doesn't fit anymore cycle often enough. Not even counting that one GURPS Traveller book that had power plants as separate systems (as opposed to each drive, weapon etc. providing the power plant slice needed to run it as a build system abstraction) and a way more detailed crew calculation. I don't even want to know how many death loops I encountered there...
@@walkir2662 Square-Cube Law and Entropy spares no-one without author/setting fiat.
Actually no. A tiny engine just means lower acceleration, and since the matter expended has a speed, then even the best engine has a max speed. The only question is how long it takes to get to max speed, and given the distances involved, a few years extra to reach top speed is a drop in the bucket.
A Star Destroyer is not a siege weapon, it's a intimidation tactic. It's meant to instill fear in the people. A much smaller ship can still be a siege weapon !
1:50 "From the non-cannon Disney Sequel Trilogy." 😂😂😂
It's just the simple truth, of course. Nothing but one ridiculous Mary-Sue fanfic from 2015 onward. With the exception of Rogue One and the first two seasons of Mandalorian.
There's truth, and there's the head-canon of certain fans. I honestly don't care how much the sequels somehow hurt you so much that you need to whine about them publicly, but at least have the decency to be factually accurate.
For those at the back of the class, material released by disney is canon and the old Expanded Universe is not. George did not give a crap any books or video games other than to mine them for good ideas to put in his work and the new Disney owned team feels the same as he did.
@@bgphantom3Shut up Meg.
LOLOLOLOL I had to rewind and listen to it a couple of times to be sure, he slipped it in so casually… LOLOLL
@ To quote Adam Savage of Mythbusters - I reject your reality and substitute my own!
HAHAHA non cannon sequel trilogy. Shots fired.
Such a brave take lmao
@@stargatecommand714 100% right tho
@@isimiel3405except, no?? It is canon whether you like it or not lol Lucas willingly sold the franchise
@@stargatecommand714 me and a very large chunk of the fandom
it's immature nonsense. like it, hate it... it's cannon.
This video is... okay, We don't really know the practicality of large space ships yet though; we haven't built them.
Sure, if you lose a big ship, it's dead and gone. That said, we could probably build point defense that tracks fighters with sophisticated computers, and blows them up at the speed of light with lasers, making fighters obsolete. In this scenario, bigger is better, because you are unlikely to build something small enough to out-maneuver a large ship's defenses, and shots almost always land. Something that is tankier, and can serve as a fleet anchor, despite the costs, would become vital for success in battle.
You are correct in saying there are factors we dont know yet, but building a big ships is a game of time and resources, which is why you should build for a role. You are also right in how a huge ship would be a good idea to act as a fleet anchor as you put it. Though at the same time the big ships while powerful and reliable will still be in less quantity than smaller ships. Cause lets be real it would be more reasonable to have a bunch of drones you can remote control than have actual fighter ships. With the smaller sizes being used in every field while the biggest would be only the capital ships, carriers and colonial ships
I saw in some Star Wars souces that The Executor was defined as a mobile space station and not a starship, so it's purpose was to be the best next thing to the Death Star as for it's purpose of space station and not super weapon, before ending the construction of another Death Star. It is also that the Empire seems to give the emphasis on brute force for their spacecraft, and that's one focusing part, but for whatever vehicles, perhaps not the best emphasis. I'll give a real example by some huge helicopters made by the Soviet Union with the same principle (brute force), but in general they weren't better than a Black Hawk or any other model including Puma or Super Puma.
Enterprise D is the perfect size imo.
It makes perfect sense for the crew and mission profile it undertook.
“From the non canon star wars trilogy” yessssssssssss!!!
1:15 At this moment I realized that a Nebulon B from the side looks like a Ktinga cruiser. But backwards.
I think giant spaceships makes more sense for cargo vessels than smaller ones. If you are making a business of hauling freight from one planet to another, using a ship the size of a FedEx truck isn't going to cut it.
Giant space warships strike me as a status symbol, something you bring out when you want to impress somebody with how wealthy and powerful you are. Although you might have rare situations where a species needs abnormally large ships such as the Zentradi from Macross, but those are generally outlier situations.
In Star Wars travel is so cheap that it makes sense for the equivalent of a pickup truck to travel across half the galaxy. Still most of the shipping is dominated by gigantic megacorporations like the Trade Federation and the Comerce Guild.
If you are going to be in space for a LONG time, having room to wonder around will be a significant benefit. Even the original Star Trek Enterprise had a small greenhouse/park for the crew to enjoy a more natural environment when relaxing when off duty.
You earned a like for "non-canon Star Wars Sequel trilogy"
This is great, you hooked me with the " non-cannon Star Wars sequels " part. That had me rolling, you sir get my like & sub. I look forward to more & back catalog of videos.
The question really can only be answered for every individual sci-fy universe and pretty much exclusively depends on the setup. If you have some kind of hyperjump ability like in Star Wars where it feels like space ships can travel hundreds of lightyears in a very short amount of time in even something like one man fighter craft, large ships don't really make much sense - unless you need to transport something big - as "on shore" support is easily reachable. In a universe like in Avatar, where interstellar travel takes 6 years, a massive ship is a necessity.
The Executor is a massive mobile base that can be self-sustaining tho. It has stations where they can repair ISD's, create more TIE fighters, and create more ISD's, hence there's no need for them to return to a base when one's already a moving base.
@@benginaldclocker2891 It isn't used as one though. If I remember correctly Vader had the Executor follow the Falcon into an asteroid field instead of parking it at the edge of the system and send freshly produced squadrons after them.
(Gloriana Class Battleship has entered the chat)
Two or three Lunar Cruisers are enough to destroy and SSD.
Ew! One of the ugliest ships ever.
The Magog World Ship is made of 20 joined planets surrounding an Artificial star.
"non canon"... I see what you did there and I like it!
Bigger means more endurance. It takes a lot more to sink it. Look at the Malevolence from Clone Wars.
Several Venators hammering the Malevolence still couldn't sink the ship.
Big enough for internal rail transit.
"Mind the gap"
You are by far one of the best content creators for scifi that I watch. You do magnificent work.
I think what's fascinating about big ships is not the size of themselves, but what our brain fills out about *the size of the things they would carry.* Ships don't just get bigger for getting bigger's sake (or at least they shouldn't), they get bigger because the new systems they carry require their size.
When launched in the mid-18th-century, Santisima Trinidad was the largest ship of the world, weighing about 5000 tons. Not even two centuries later, a single one of Yamato's main gun turrets would weigh about 2500 tons, meaning all three main turrets of Yamato alone would already have weighed more than Santisima Trinidad. By a Spanish sailor of 1770 the 1300kg shells of Yamato would have been considered a super weapon.
The battleship is gone, but even still, ships have only grown till today. The F6F Hellcat fighter of WW2 had a maximum take of weight of 7 tons. The F35C has a takeoff weight of 31 tons. Subsequently, carriers grew from 30 000 tons to 100 000 tons to accomodate for the heavier planes and their required launch equipment. By the crew of the USS Essex a JASSM would have been considered a super weapon.
The term super weapon is one that can only be used in a relative context, and as ships grow larger and their weapons with them, the 'standard weapon' larger ships mount will often have to be considered super weapons by smaller ships.
I feel like this is what especially the Executor class and similar ships do weirdly. Instead of having the weapons' size scale with the ship, it just instead mounts a lot more of them. It's as if you build a warship the size of Yamato and instead of mounting any main batteries you just put 40mm autocannons on the entire hull. On the contrary, ships like the Mass Effect Dreadnoughts, the warships of the UNSC or the Eclipse handle their scaling quite well.
There is some historical precedent to this, with the naval _ship-of-the-line_ just like the Santisima Trinidad. These were galleons which did not carry larger cannons (the size of which were limited by the technology of bronze and cast iron) just a lot of them, sometimes as many as 100-140 mounted in rows across multiple decks, allowing a massive "broadside" to be brought to bear on another ship. Similar to the plot of Star Wars, these ships were eventually rendered obsolete during the time of Napoleon by smaller, more maneuverable attack ships, and those broadsides could not hit them. Given that Star Wars as a whole leans very heavily into the "Space Is An Ocean" trope, this may have been intentional.
If we imagine that the standard turbolasers were literally the largest laser weapons that it was possible to make in whatever system of physics that universe has, then this suddenly makes historical sense. The winner of a capital ship engagement is simply which ship has more, and the standard wedge-shape of a Star Destroyer allows all of it's surface- and edge-mounted weapons to be brought to bear on a single target directly in front of it: that's one hell of a "broadside".
After all, the Superlaser was an experimental weapon system that required vast power and special technology (kyber crystals) and really couldn't be mass produced, at least for a very long time.
"non cannon star wars" lol... good dig
i guess since it's science fiction one can always make up a technology where there are non linear increases of performance or even abilities that require a certain minimum size to achieve. i guess one thing that haunts me is that if ships are just made of really good metals, which are super strong on the human scale, as size increases matter itself becomes relatively weaker until they're basically like tin foil constructs rather than super stiff solid objects. even a solid armor bar a mile long would look pretty squishy when hitting another or when trying to turn quickly..not that giant ships are known to be nimble but it'd be funny to one break in half trying to do so..
There's a term for that; "The Square-Cube Law."
"non cannon star wars trilogy ". Nice. :)
Besides specific operational needs, the way how technology scales is the most important factor, which decide how much sense ship sizes make.
A too large ship might have weak shield due it needs to cover more area, but it might be the other way around that energy generation becomes so efficent, that the shield are near impenetrable by smaller vessel.
In Wing Commannder 1 Fighters were able to shot down shield, in Wing Commander 2 Capship shield where so strong that special torpedos were needed to penetrate the phase shields.
If power generation is an important thing, and bigger is more effecient in scaling, means that bigger ships would be faster.
About Star Destroyers, i think they are a little unfarily judged, i think it´s kinda the Worf-Effect. To show how dangerous an enemy is, they defeat the strongest Warrior (Worf), o it becomes a meme. Similiar with ISDs, they are the threat, but in the end, the heros most overcome them + ISDs are the Symbol of the Empire.
Have you ever put an ISD to scale to an Earth sized planet? Could be interessting, to see what ground an ISD cut cover or if fleet of several ISDs make now more sense, when the goal is invasion and not destruction.
Agreed. Tech assumptions are king because tech dictates what you can and cannot do and what ship size is "ideal".
You could for example have "fighters" that are 1 km long because anything smaller is too easy to kill and too weak to do meaningful damage and anything larger than the fighter is too fragile to survive direct combat. The 1km ship is only considered a fighter because it has the absolute minimum stuff including crew required to be an effective combatant because the absolute minimum hardware is so effing big, and the "fighter" operates out of bases and carriers a thousand times it size.
Alternatively, you could have a battleship the size of school bus because Tardis like "bigger inside than out" technology allows you to stuff more tech and crew into less volume and anything that's bigger externally becomes too hard to protect.
These examples of course are extreme cases.
I know its not a Star Destroyer, but I love the Acclamator class assault ship from 2002's attack of the clones, used before the Venators were ready i think, its one of my favourite dorito ships, there's some other triangular ones like the Quasar fire carrier, and the Arquitens light cruiser, you get to see them as part of a fleet in Star Wars Squadrons in the first few Imperial campaign missions.
My reason for having a huge star ship: I like to collect things.
In space where distances is vast and needing to be independent and self sustaining, massive ships would be needed as they need to carry everything to do everything. They're greatest weapon is also intimidation.
So you say the Star Wars sequel trilogy is non-canon. I can agree with that.
In hard SF, the three main factors encouraging large ships are that:
1. Large ships are inherently more durable. You're not going to accidentally punch a hole in the hull of something with a pressurized habitat a could hundred meters across. Whereas you very well might in a flimsy tin can a few meters across. The thicker hull also allows more effective radiation shielding, which is important for combat, given that the kill radius for nukes is kind of stupidly large against unshielded targets and the real bad day radius is much larger than that. Nukes in space don't have much blast and the heat tends to just flash-vaporize a super thin layer of the surface or blind sensors (and eyes) not actually do too much damage, but radiation is shockingly lethal with no atmosphere attenuating it. Anything you can't have thick shielding on that can't prevent something getting within a few hundred kilometers is serious nuke bait.
2. Engine choices. Quite simply, size and complexity are what make good engines work. If you want anything like lightbulb core NTRs, nuclear saltwater rockets, big nuclear reactors powering an electric engine, fusion engines, nuclear pulse engines, etc, there is a certain minimum size where they become inefficient and impractical. The smaller ships will use cold gas thrusters. The next smallest, hypergolic or monopropellant thrusters. Many kinetic missile first stages will use solid fuel rockets. There will also be a niche for solar-powered or RTG-powered electric engines but the acceleration is likely to be painstakingly slow and useless in combat. The next smallest size will use conventional liquid-fueled rockets. At a certain size if becomes practical to use something nuclear in some fashion to get both acceptable TWR and good efficiency. I think chem fuel ships are probably going to be strictly outclassed in performance by missiles at absolutely any range. This basically means anyone who can actually exhaust a missile can put themselves on an intercept course and just launch a missile from interplanetary distances at little to no risk to themselves. The minimum requirements for the space fighter game are probably the ability to put in more than what a practical, lethal, cost effective missile salvo can in terms of dV without turning yourself into a derelict unable to return to your original course and in need of rescue. And that's gonna be like a 5 digit figure in dV at the absolute minimum. Any single stage chemfuel design with meaningful payload is gonna fall way short.
3. Spin gravity and the ability to repair and manufacture things onboard eat up mass and space quickly.
"From the non-cannon star wars sequel trilogy" Thank you!!!
"Non canon sequel trilogy"😂😂😂
Past maybe 2km in length, it's not a 'ship' anymore its a mobile station.
Station implies it is stationary though. Maybe it should be based on function/design.
If its job is to go from point A to point B, its a ship.
@@spencersholdencarrier would be more accurate, it maybe doesn’t have to just transport small fighters, but transports etc.
@@spencersholden There is no "stationary" in space. Even if a station were to just maintain orbit it would need some kind of propulsion to counteract the gravitic pull of whatever it's supposed to be orbiting. Because of that I would draw the line between a station and a ship based on how much moving is part their standard operation. Deep Space 9 is not a ship - even though in the pilot it did move from the orbit of Bajor to the vicinity of the wormhole. But that's the only time the station is moved during the entire series. The Death Star on the other hand needs to move across the galaxy to blast planets. Thus it's not a space station - even if it's referred to as such on screen.
@@MrAranton good points
These videos always make me roll my eyes. Why? Because "science fiction" is just movies and games. READ some science fiction if you want BIG starships. Right off the top of my head I can think of three or four which make every single ship you mention in this video seem small. David Weber's Dahak makes the Death Star seem like the runt of the litter. My favorite aspect of Weber's ships? They carry fleets of ships the size of the stuff you talk about in this video. And when you realize there were MILLIONS of those type of ships you realize Weber was thinking and imagining on a much larger scale. Then you have Alan Dean Foster's Tar'Aiym (an ancient extinct race) Defense Platform which is as large as Earth. Or the classic from back in the 1930's written by E.E. "Doc" Smith: The Skylark of Valeron which was a planetoid ship LARGER than the planet Earth. Dude wrote that story back in the '30's!! You know what all of those giant starships have in common? They work because the STORY is great. They are so well written you BELIEVE there can be ships as large or larger than planets.
I have to note that if your setting is even remotely realistic a interstellar warship would be absolutely huge just to fit all the propellent and enormous interstellar class engines (see, project daeadlus for what a small one way probe looks like with near future fusion technology) though FTL drives may offset this somewhat, but would still require fairly large vessels for interplanetary flights and that’s just considering an unarmed vessel. Armoring vessels like these against the stresses of interstellar flight (small interstellar dust motes hitting with the force of several nuclear bombs repeatedly for however long your interstellar flight is) alone would need extremely heavy armor or dedicated whipple shields but at that rate you also need weapons able to penetrate such armor, and all that means even more fuel and even more propellent.
I do think that a lot of sci-fi warship designs are actually far too small if considering any sort of realism that doesn’t use basically magic technology which I don’t have a problem with, but it’s still an issue if you want to have a semblance of realism in your setting.
Oh and don’t forget civilian ships are often in real life much larger than their military equivalents (see list of largest ships in the world and note how many of those are military ones vs civilian ships).
"From the non-canon Star Wars sequel trilogy."
Earned yourself a sub with that comment.
Star Wars Legends addressed this with that “Nebula Class Star Destroyer” from the later books. In real life, modern Ticonderoga missiles cruiser are much smaller than 1940s Iowa class battleships, but more useful in today’s context.
That's because there's no way for modern ship to survive anti-ship missiles. In star wars you can't knock Star Destroyers out of battle that easily
You had me at "Non-canon Star Wars Sequel trilogy" :D
Starfleet does have a battleship sized ship, the odyssey class, which is 1000m long.
Depends on technical capabilities.
Star wars power generation, propulsion and utility scales fairly well with size, meaning that if you have any real reason to build big, it IS advantageous to do so if you can afford it.
Or in other words and hugely simplified, it's basically a matter of the square cube law.
Also, look at realworld aircraft and ships. They keep trying to increase in size.
though i think they saw that the aircraft limit is about 80 pership. they tried larger and had issues. one big advantage the Ford Class has over the Nimitz class is future proofing. turns out the Nimitz reactors struggle to generate power for al lthe new toys we have.
@@Revkor "though i think they saw that the aircraft limit is about 80 pership."
Yeah, but that's mostly due to being unable to provide more than 4 "runways" and catapults.
Back in WWII, some carriers went above 120 aircraft at some times.
There's also the secondary issue of aircraft traffic control, but that's never been a hard limit, because multiple carriers operating together have managed literally several hundred aircraft at once.
"turns out the Nimitz reactors struggle to generate power for al lthe new toys we have."
Oooh yes, same as with aircraft, getting so much electronics that both power generation and COOLING has become massive problems.
Those issues however can be more easily mitigated the bigger the ship, so this is a realworld issue that is one of those actually pushing hard for going every bigger and more sizecreep.
" the square cube law." - well you made this mathematician cringe
@@physicswithpark3r-x3x I specifically stated "hugely simplified".
@ That makes not a whit of difference.
BTW this proves once more that one should never argue with a guy who puts the word "wolf" in his handle.
I feel like Elite dangerous does a good job with mega ships, most being civilian hydroponic, cargo, or science ships,
and even for the smaller (still IRL ship sized) ships the players use in the game, it also teaches biggest isn't always best as Medium ships kinda reign supreme in versatility
I live in the real world where spaceships are basically giant, boring sails... So for me, the bigger the spaceship and the more visually appealing it is... the better... When I see a movie or a game that has spaceships, the last thing I want is realism!! I want to be impressed... I want to be amazed!! And gigantic spaceships leave me amazed!!
I actually went smaller in my setting (I had to double check the size just to make sure the ship worked as big as I wanted it to be). You have 'frigates' which are all the way down in the mid double digit meters in length (like 30-50m), cruisers (which are about a hundred or so meters in length) and then finally battleships sitting at a couple hundred meters or so. Each ship has a purpose - frigates are tiny and cheap patrol and escort ships; automation and miniaturization means that they only really have a dozen or so on the crew. Cruisers are that but bulked up and less reliant on stations and such - as the name implies, they're properly cruisers and can cruise around solo if needed. Their extra size gives them a few more weapon mounts than frigates so they hit a little bit harder too. Battleships are of course the heavy hitters, and are, like cruisers, properly line of battle ships - somewhat like arsenal ships in concept, but in space. Their job is largely to have a ton of missile launchers and just spam broadsides of missiles at an enemy target, with fleets forming a conga line of sorts (so a battle line, line of battle ship, etc) to all be able to fire off their missiles without getting in the way of each other. They're slow and vulnerable and so you'll have the smaller and more agile frigates run escort around them to intercept incoming missiles with lots of point defense turrets, as well as attempting to position themselves to have a better transversal for a missile that's trying to spiral in towards the battleship. Cruisers in these fleets can offer a sort of flanking force. Everyone has their role to play and having modeled the small end I feel like the size works (36 meters is enough for two hab decks - one of which is the bridge - a couple of cargo bays, missile bays and a decently sized reactor room) and does its intended job without being too resource heavy, but these ships would be absolutely dwarfed by ships in most sci-fi - like I'm pretty sure you could fit a decent sized cruiser fleet with frigate escort in the (never seen on screen) main shuttle bay of a Galaxy class starship, and some Eve Online ships fire projectiles larger than the frigates.
1:51 🥲 please marry me
I was re-watching Clone Wars season 1 yesterday and I was kind of surprised that they almost mentioned the uselessness of a battleship larger than a venator. The Malevolance has to be the size that it is (not explicitly stated but seems to be about 10km) to mount the weapon, but most of the ship is just empty space and structural supports, and it's taken down just as easily by small fighters as a 1km size battleship/carrier. I'm still surprised at how much thought they put in a show supposedly for kids
1:50 This rubs me a weird way. While not liking the sequel trilogy is understandable, calling it "Non cannon" (in my opinion) is basically a giant middle finger to all the VFX artists, CGI teams, actors, set designer, costume, designer, etc who pour their soul into making the movies as good as it could be with the scripts that they had. You really didn't have to include that at all in the video, but overall liked it good work.
Just because a shit have skill dressers, and colorful artist, it still does not change the fact it is a shit.
A movie is just an enhance storeytelling. It it fails at storytell, then it fails period.
"Explain as you would to a child."
7:35
Actually you skipped *Heavy* cruisers. Battlecruisers, despite sounding like a bridge between Battleship and Cruiser, are actually the middle range of Cruiser.
Heavy Cruisers are the biggest ships which still have the maneuverability and ability to be self-sufficient, essentially pocket battleships which can move without a fleet, and often fill the bulk of a fleet’s firepower. Think a Galaxy class, a Liberty-class MC80, or the Daedalus 304.
Light Cruisers are the lightest and nimblest self-sufficient ships, able to perform scouting, interception, patrol, and other ranging actions which require a single ship rather than a battlegroup or squadron. Think the Intrepid-class, White Stars, or even the Normandy SR-2.
Battlecruisers are the middle of the road. The term “cruiser” shouldn’t be used on its own, as it’s more a general description than a grade unto itself. Like “submarine” or “station.” Without some clarification in a descriptor, it doesn’t mean much.
Battlecruisers are the all-arounders, the Mario of ships. Their combat role is to do whatever’s needed of them, and what other ships can’t. Getting behind enemy lines and attacking supply lines, swarming foolish super ships like the Bismarck, or other such Hero actions. Think the Constitution-class Refit, NX-class, or Excelsior-class.
Now, all classification systems are different, so some people just mark them as destroyers or frigates, or even add carrier capacity to something and screw the whole system over, but based on what I’ve learned about the various real life and fictional ships over the last decade, this seems to be how the term was intended to be used.
Battle Cruisers historically displace more than Heavy cruisers and were intended as similar to battleships but faster in return for missing out on armour protection or firepower of a normal battleship. They fell out of use as technology allowed battleships to get those desired speeds without the need of sacrifices.
From Star Wars, the one Mega-Ship i really love, and which makes sense, was the "Arc Hammer" from the game Dark Forces. It was roughly 9600 meter long (its still hard to tell, because of very few cutscenes with good references, so could be more) and was a Mobile Construction and Launch Platform for the Dark Troopers. It was the complete factory for building and testing them, or pretty much anything you want, if you reconfigure the factories. It only got the raw resources, and everything else was done in its own giant factories and refineries and assemly lines.
And it was powerful enough to defend itself without any escort, because it had to travel alone as part of its secret mission.
See you are still thinking to much gravity bound limits, that just won't apply to any size ship, fighter could be out maneuvered by a large ship pretty easily as larger ship's thrust is just more, and since it honestly isn't pushing against anything it will be just as fast as a fighter in turning and such meaning even if you get into it's blind spot the large ship can just turn just as fast as a fighter if not faster due to thrust to mass.
This also means your big ass ship better be aware of internal forces of such turns and such. But to think smaller is faster is so terrestrial bound thinking it's not really a factor in zero gravity where your weight doesn't matter as much as people think it would be like it is inside a gravity well.
You have a very important point here.
A Capital ship will not be as maneuverable as a fighter in space. Inertia is still a thing that has to be overcome and the more mass a ship has the more inertia it has.
@ You are forgetting that the larger the ship has the more volume it will have in relation to the rest of the ship. A larger ship will have less mass compared to its internal space, allowing a larger power plants and a better power to mass ratio. In the vacuum of space larger vessels are inherently more efficient, and the better power to mass ratio it will have.
@@RenlangRen you're incorrect I think, without doing the math, for two reasons.
One, if both the capital ship and the fighter start at the same time the fighter, with less rest mass will move first of the starting block even if the mass to power ratio is proportional. The capital ship has so much more rest mass to accelerate it's not moving soon from a dead stop.
Two, if they both turn 90°s by pivoting about their center of mass both will still be going in the same direction of the original thrust. The capital ship will travel further along its original thrust vector than the fighter again because of inertia. Even if they bank, which in space why would they, inertia is still going to be harder to overcome by the capital ship.
@ But the power to mass ratio has the potential to not be proportional because the surface area of small shapes is proportionally larger than the surface area of large shapes, so small ships will require a larger proportion or armor/shell than a larger shape. The larger the shape, the higher proportion of interior room, the higher potential for power plants/engines.
The super star destroyer and regular imperial star destroyers were the correct choice, IMHI. Lucas had the Empire painted as iron fisted totalitarian regime. Big, powerful, intimating is the theme we see with so many tyrannical governments. Hitler was obsessed with bigger tanks and having bigger battleships the British. You can find other examples with Chinese emperors, Roman Casears, and list goes on. Its an ego and obsession thing. These overboard projects always backfire on these tyrants in the end. It fits perfectly for the Empire in SW and I've always been glad Lucas did it despite discussion like this I see. Impractical regimes don't build practical things.
1:49 THAT'S WHY HE'S THE GOAT, THE GOAT!
According to information from the Dune universe, a Guild Heighliner is described as being over 20 kilometers long.
Aren't those the huge FTL ships that ferry other, smaller ships from system to system?
I remember as a grade schooler having a little contest about whose ship is bigger. The end game was a tiny dot next to his ship, and he said “That’s the universe, that’s my ship.” He definitely won, and we laughed.
There is a blurring of classification conventions between the Age of Sail, modern wet navies, and futuristic systems that include motherships, support vessels, and megavessels like you described. Simply as size classification goes, this wasn't a bad comparison, but definitely not rigorous or comprehensive. Thanks for your creative work.
It's best when the size of vessels is influenced by the limits and requirements of the technology and situation in the setting.
Culture used the huge General Systems Vehicles as their primary war asset until they had a chance to produce sufficient numbers of purpose-built General and Rapid Offensive Units, which were a lot smaller, but packed more punch per resource input, not to mention the redundancy offered by groups of small ships instead of a single huge one.
In the Algebraist and Orion's Arm, most groups are able to build xboxhueg megaships, but the size limits of wormhole portals means that smaller ships offer not only more tactical, but also a lot more strategic mobility. In OA, some megaships do exist in order to project power outside the reach of the wormhole network. But in most cases, hot wars in OA seem to be fought by sending seeds of replicating warmachines or ordnance (with the occasional rampancy).
I think Star Wars' "super star destroyers" like the Executor are also basically fleet tenders.
Resupplying and repairing star destroyers, while acting as the command ship carrying the fleet command and support staff.
They're large enough to have massive medical facilities and huge stocks of equipment stores like AT-ATs, fighters, shuttles, and probes, which the Star Destroyers would tend to use up on missions.
Han refers to it as a non-unique "command ship" as well, implying that they're rare, but not surprising, at the core of a fleet at an important place.
Another good example of a world ship are the Eldar Craftworlds from Warhammer 40k. They are quite literally world ships that the Eldar fled to after their planets destruction likely at the time of the birth of Slaneesh and the Dark Eldar.
You overlooked one crucial purpose of the super ships like Darth Vader's Executor...intimidation! It says..."Look at us...we have the resources, knowledge, and power to build this! Don't mess with us!"
I think huge ship size can be justified, but it has to be justified. For instance, the Supremacy. It has factory facilities and even on board drydocks, everything a relatively small force might need if they don't have much in the way of planetary territory. Everything except good writing, though. Because the way the Supremacy is meant to be used very much conflicts with the plot of the movie, as if the writers stated one thing and showed another. Or stated something and failed to realize the implications of it.
Basically, a very large ship could have its size justified if it is meant for a very long journey with no or minimal support, or essentially as a mobile forward operating base. A Super Star Destroyer, for instance, could be used as a mobile strategic strongpoint, providing that to a fleet of smaller, more flexible ships that do the fighting, while also providing other strategic and logistical resources. However, neither the Supremacy nor the Executor are really well used from this standpoint. The Supremacy is absolutely something that should not be used offensively as shown in the movie, unless you are besieging a planet. Same thing goes for the Executor. As a bonus, the Executor is not at all suited for what the Empire needs. Sure, if the Empire was fighting against a peer or near peer enemy like the CIS, where they had a need for a forward operating base, and desired the capability to carry a large amount of war material to avoid overstretching supply lines or to reduce their vulnerability, then the Executor makes a lot of sense. But that's not what they were up against. What they needed was peacekeeping, and to go after some scrappy rebels. So, what they needed was more smaller, more flexible ships. On the other hand, I think the Executor was actually intended not to crush the Rebellion, as it was used for, but to further Palpatine's goal of extragalactic conquest. In that case, it makes a lot more sense. This isn't even really a theory, the EU Dark Empire comic series detailed how Palpatine had ambitions of becoming a god-emporer of the galaxy, and then conquering the universe. To that end, he had the Eclipse star dreadnought and the World Devastators, absolutely essential for invading another galaxy.
More to my point about a ship going on a long journey with no or minimal support, which applies to both military and civilian ships alike, is how do you resupply? If you don't have any kind of FTL, you need to carry everything you could possibly need on the journey, and/or the ability to make more. Even if you do have FTL, resupply could be difficult, again justifying a ship being large to support its mission with large amounts of supplies.
One last justification is in relation only to near future technology, and that is the idea of the ship needing to be large in order to isolate the crew from the engines/reactor, which could be a potential hazard.
Currently listening to Existence Combat, and they have a fun aproach where you have a 800 meter long ship, with a crew of just 3 or 4, and the ability to maybe cram an extra 20 or so foot soldiers in with two light tanks if you want, and that's a tiny warship. They're aproach is that the entire ship is basicly a massive lump of metal, and solid storage areas. The biggest part of a ship is the engine, itself a super dense metal that controls gravity, meaning it's not external, just like 70% of the inside of this massive brick of a metal ship is this one type of metal that lets it move at speed or hover through an atmosphere.
Fun how because basically everything is super dense and solid state, the ships basically just start cracking and sinking into any normal ground they land on given their shear density over any real amount of time. Mixed with life support (that's most importantly the inertial negation system that keeps the crew from turning into a red mist inside the ship when it accelerates) means they can ram through probably 95% of other settings ships out there without much issue as they are insanely durable just massive chunks of super high quality armor basicly, with a couple hatches leading into missile pods inside the hull. And for weapons, the main focus is on melting away armor after heating it up, so plasma warheads, particle beams, or DU railguns putting metal storm or anything else today to shame for rate of fire.
So in this setting with this tech, the bigger a ship is, the more power it has, the faster it could potentially go (both sublight and FTL), the proportionally thicker it's pure armor shell can be making it tougher, and the larger and more powerful it's AI can be. A small ship might be fast sublight, but so so light speed, and take awhile between FTL jumps. While an 8km behemoth might have the power and AI to let the thing make rapid in system jumps far faster than any smaller ships could computer or get the power ready for such an act. And ships that have less than 300 meters of brick size would likely fail to have the power and computing ability to even make any type of FTL jump, let alone also cram any weapons or crew on board. Hence why the smallest oldest military ships humans used were around 600 meters I think.
Now in setting with the right super powered long range weapon that can't be reliably intercepted, these supersized ships did become just vulnerabilities that were kept hidden away till eventual counters could be found and retrofitted, but even then if they just dropped in point blank next to an enemy few things could survive the thousand plus missiles doing their best to be a local star.
Also meant some of the biggest ships were transports, massive tugs that were just boxes with FTL engines and grav teathers to pick up and drop off massive planetary mining systems, prefabbed refineries and bases, and load up on the quantities of resource such operations could spit out. Or, for some of them, the part they could just take other warships into their bays and do internal reparis and retrofits anywhere it was needed or at least bring them back to allied bases that might do that work.
And avoiding spoilers for later, but for the super/mega ship ranges... Well, if you are doing colony work and want a massive mobile factory that can make colonies, ships, other tech, etc... you can end up with things in that class. And oh boy... I'm just imagine the supremacy or almost anything else in those ranges going up against the main one in the story, despite being smaller than them... ya, it would turn them into literal swiss cheese in seconds with it's primary defensive armaments. I mean, again when larger ships might be 8km of solid metal, with the outermost something insanely durable and even the intermost engines still more durable than solid steel, large weapons that can defend against such ships are the types of things that might be punching holes through literal miles of super durable metal, and not just a fine little hole, but a big broad one to deal actual damage.
Some people might not like having the idea of super high tech ships where even a small fighter or shuttle could FTL, or have it's own shields or stuff, but this slightly more grounded and brutal aproach to high tech is very interesting and a nice variety from the more common and generic stuff. So if you are making your own ship or setting, seriously consider how things work, both what you can do with X, but also what you can't do with X. Finding limits and constraints in your tech is key to making interesting and enjoyable stories and stuff, and also helps things stand out if you can come up with something more unique than a reskin of a star trek or star wars ship with shields and lasers and the other general rules they use.
Dude your videos are so relaxing and immersive
This was an interesting exercise in trying to impose logical constraints on what is essentially author driven make-believe. What generally (in my mind) separates the wheat from the chaff regarding sci-fi, especially military sci-fi, is whether the story is internally consistent and applies its own rationale in a reasonable fashion. Different sci fi worlds set different parameters so it is difficult to do what you tried to do, using examples from multiple stories. Something within a storyline (such as a scarcity of mages who can use a jump spell to enable interstellar travel) would tend to drive construction of larger ships, while if weapons are (in a true to life fashion) generally potent enough to take out even very large vessels, then military craft have much less reason to become super large - unless, as you noted, they have a carrier role to deliver masses of vessels that each have the capacity to take out ships orders of magnitude larger than they are... Nicely done. Cheers, JW
From a hard sci-fi enthusiast, really size is entirely limited by the setting's industry. Gravity is a non-factor for most aspects of a ship and most sci-fi settings has so much handwavium that the structural integrity doesn't matter. Not to mention that theoretically it's not difficult to engineer for insane sizes anyways as long as you have the resources to actually build such a thing.
The greater the industry, the greater that industry's capacity to build larger ships, and larger ships are always better than smaller ones, at least for the core of a fleet. The square cube law by itself means that larger ships gets more benifits from heavier armour than smaller ones (armour size is based on surface area, while a ship's size is based on volume. Double a ship's length, you square the surface, cube the volume. Make a ship ten times longer, you need a hundred times the armour, but get a thousand times the space to fit in more stuff, including bigger engines. Big enough ships can get entire kilometers thick armour while still accelerating as fast as a small ship.
Honestly, this armour theory alone is enough to justify larger ships. If you have one ship that is invulnerable to all weapons of the enemy faction, and can mass produce them to have one in every minor fleet, why not do so? Sure, there are reasons to have smaller ships, but there's no reason to not have a bunch of picket ships, destroyers, then hundred km long battleships as the basis of every fleet in a space navy.
It's not like you have to have millions of people working on such a ship if your setting has the automation to have a dozen people tear apart a small moon of all its resources over the course of a decade.
The size of the biggest ships is entirely a result of the setting's industry's capacity to build such a thing. How and where such a ship would be used is a different thing of course, but at the very least, a galaxy spanning empire with an industry comparable to current Earth scaled up that far should be able to build Executor-class ships far easier than we can build a typical destroyer.
Originally, the Eclipse Class was larger than the Executor. But at some point the source books scaled up the Executor while not touching the Eclipse for some reason
In canon, Thrswn discusses with his officers. He stated that the Navy is best with Star Destroyers mixed in with Starfighter as support. Basically the bigger ship you have means you have more power and support structure to mount the most powerful shield generators and the most powerful turbo laser cannons. Obivously the tech stops at a certain point but still in order to stop a Star Destroyer you need a comparative sized ship with similar weapons and shielding to match. Or a number of small ships armed with proton torpedo launches with skilled pilots to coordinate with each other to fire at the same time . Failure to do so will wast ammo and Starfighter only carry a few torpedos.
At some point, if a starship gets TOO big... It will suffer structural issues because of it's own gravitational field! 😊
Any opinion on the Odyssey class?
In many sci-fi settings I wrote or prepared for campaigns, huge 5-30 km ships (in any direction) are one of the most versatile tools: as plot devices! Be it either a looming danger, an unknown vessel like Rama, or simply display of power. In most cases they are not to be used, except to go boom, or as a background, if the settings is already on board (in this particular case: there is manga and anime called Knights of Sidonia / Sidonia no Kishi, which is 29x5 km seed/colony ship, with lenghtwise running railgun, checking almost all of the boxes, and one of the better written settings tech-wise).
For a few cases, where I had to flesh out the gigantic ones, I made the following (I defaulted to "empire" everywhere for simplicity):
- 12x2x3 km long, cigar-shaped passenger-oriented ship, meant as a mobile HQ for administration/first contact force in a space empire. After encountering new peaceful civilization, this one would be sent to perform first contact smoothly (overcoming biological/language/cultural barriers, agreeing on rules of communications, exchanging laws, etc.), preparing neutral ground for diplomacy, using detachable mobile space stations, etc. It's meant to literally carry bureaucrats and some xenobiology crew. It would be accompanied, by:
- 20x8x1 km big, H-shaped freighter/mobile factory/terraformer tool ship, meant for colonizing moons. Minimum crew, packed to the brim with tech, would land flat on the surface and unfold into factory/city building machine. It's capable of utilizing all of resources at hand, and setting up freighters to import all what's needed (ice/water, gases from nearby gas giants for atmo, etc.) to set up livable open-sky environment within one year timeframe. Lore here was that space empire after encountering new civilization would buy a moon in their home system, allowing potential uplift to empire standards, opening access to market and technology, and later paving a way to alliance and then incorporation to the empire.
- From another setting: The Flowers of Fire. Looking like elongated 10km tall, 5km wide octohedron, it would open one one side (like a flower, hence name), revealing assortment of mid to very large weapons, with central main neutron cannon. When closed, heavily armored and shielded, almost indestructible. While open, moderately shielded. While it looks like run of the mill weapon platform, twist lies in its control system: Flowers are controlled exclusively by sentient AI, each of them was carefully grown, often as members of prominent families on certain world, where they learned what they are to protect. These would be transferred into smaller version first, then to final "Guardian" form. Together, they could link up, forming a giant planet protecting shield-wall, and could share and redirect power allowing omnidirectional application of unprecedented firepower. Lore is, the original planet was destroyed by (this time evil) space empire to specifically steal that technology. It couldn't be replicated so well, so they are forcing every single new AI to be grown on a "sensory replay" of a training they managed to steal, and then it's immediately overwritten by "glory to the empire, obey empire" on repeat to ensure loyalty, and then produced by the billions as enforcer fleets supporting weapons. Empire could not get the linking feature to work. Renamed from Guardians to Flowers of Fire, they would sometimes go berserk due to low quality of AI training and mental issues it developed when working together with its copies.
- From same setting, 350km long chainship. Consisting of tens of thousands modules, roughly 150m in diameter, each containing power systems, propulsion and some manufacturing equipment, with 50km long whip/slingshot at the end. Chainship is meant to dive into remnants of rocky moons or planets destroyed by other weapons and conceal its presence while working. Loosely inspired by Ebola virus, it coils and wriggles, capturing chunks of material to manufacture mines/explosives/kinetic payloads, and both deploy them inside the debris field and fling them at various targets using its long tail to catapult them around. Think of a very nasty, quiet and invisible area denial system. Crewed by complete psychos.
While I had a lot of fun writing these, ultimately, fleet of smaller ships is to some degree always batter suited to any task at hand they could do. Cheaper, more resilient, without single-point-of-failure. Except for the chainship, size is always a plot device or a projection of a feature - usually display of power or indication of difficulty/monumental size of task ship is designed to tackle.
Eh, the only Mega ship that ever made sense to me was the Zentraedi Factory Satellite. It was meant to be a mobile factory/shipyard for its fleets, but wasn’t a combat vessel itself.
I feel like size is all about context and the situation, are you building a ship meant to travel across a whole galaxy or between galaxies bigger is better. Are you trying to create a weapon meant to whip out an enemy, its alright until after a certain point it becomes a liability and a giant target.
Exactly. There is also the point about ships needing to be a certain size relative to the other ships of its respective faction fleet comp to effectively fulfill its intended role. Then there is the issue of being large enough to mount and supply all the tech and weapons needed to contend with its equivalents deployed by the enemy, and tech limits play a part in this.
2 good examples of this are EVE Online and Warhammer 40K. In both settings, every major faction have their own fleets with their own tech, design and cultural feel, but they all have the same types of ships in about the same size range as all their rivals. For example, each EVE empire has their own classes of frigates, destroyers, battleships, carriers, super carriers, dreadnoughts, and Titans, each with similar levels of power as each of their contemporaries, just in a different shape and style.
In 40K, it's more of a case where every faction can have more different looking and designed ships, but still each have their own equivalents that are in the same size range and have around the same level of firepower and defense (though if that defense takes the form of more armor & shields vs more powerful engines & maneuverability differs). Every faction has their own escorts, frigates, light cruisers, heavy cruisers, battlecruisers, battleships and carriers, and each one from each faction is made to be comparable and competitive against its equivalents from each other faction (game-wise, anyway, in lore it varies much more due to specialities and implications if tech level).
The best things about the larger sized starships is the same as the amenities found on aircraft carriers. You are basically a mobile city with a large community and access to more places to go and spend time with others. The larger the ship the more space to spread out and the more space for more people doing more things. The larger the ship the higher the capacity for storage of more diverse goods for longer trips.
6:17 the Liberator-class Cruiser has always been one of my favorites. Likely cause I like carriers. Probably why I like the Venator and Gladiator Star Destroyer (really a Heavy Cruiser but whatever) so much.
The problem with star wars ships is that they're largely being built on a paradigm that we've abandoned.
They're built like pre-dreadnaughts. They don't have main guns, that have a rediculous number of secondaries. Even the heavy turbolasers of the star destroyers are relatively tiny compared to the mass of a Star destroyer.
Sci-Fi has one more qualifier that modern warfare does not have: Shields. When you have shields, E and larger ships start to make a lot more since as actual warships because the shield can be so powerful that a large fleet of small ships with small shields can be attrited losing firepower with every casualty whereas a large ship can take hit after hit without losing any firepower. This means that a single 100,000,000 ton ship might actually beat 10,000 10,000 ton cruisers.
I'm a huge sci-fi fan for my 50+ years. Used to READ Asimov, Heinlein, Vonnegut, etc.
The problem now is that fans focus too much on the stuff, and try to create ways these ships could be built, how much they would cost, etc.
You are missing the point of sci-fi. The STUFF is just a vehicle to tell a STORY. The STORY is the thing!!! Dune is the ultimate example, most of the back story is used to remove computers, droids, technology so a human story could be told.
inverse square law means that the larger the ship the faster its volume grows, double the size of the ship, and you end up with four times the volume, so building bigger ships is MUCH MUCH better.