Starship Dimensions

August 29, 2006 9:42 PM

Starship Dimensions: A Museum of Speculative Fiction inspired Spaceships - Click in the different zoom levels to compare starships.
posted by bob sarabia (30 comments total)

Strange, I don't see any firefly class transports.
posted by Balisong at 10:02 PM on August 29, 2006

Nevermind, I found it in the updates.
posted by Balisong at 10:04 PM on August 29, 2006

Wow! This is really cool. My friends and I tried to do something like this on graph paper. We failed. But - we were ten years old.
posted by bunglin jones at 10:05 PM on August 29, 2006

So that's what V'Ger actually looks like then?
posted by Artw at 10:53 PM on August 29, 2006

Great link — but no classic Chesley Bonestell spacecraft? No "speculative non-fiction" ships, I guess.
posted by cenoxo at 11:33 PM on August 29, 2006

I've seen this site before, and I still love it. Cheers.
posted by Orange Goblin at 11:34 PM on August 29, 2006

Holy crap, this is nerdtastic!
posted by sklero at 12:55 AM on August 30, 2006

That it is.
posted by recurve at 2:28 AM on August 30, 2006

Ummmm....double? Not that I mind all that much, and it's been a couple of years or so.


I wonder if Jeff Russell will ever add some of the ships from those UK shows with the marionettes, like Thunderbirds and UFO?
posted by pax digita at 3:23 AM on August 30, 2006

I'm glad for the repost, I lost the link a while back and had been idly considering hunting for it.

I am somewhat dissapointed that he hasn't included more of the ships from Firefly (the Alliance Cruiser, for example would be interesting to see in scale), and no ships at all from the new Battlestar Galactica. But I'm sure he has a life and real things to do instead of cater to my every whim.
posted by sotonohito at 3:40 AM on August 30, 2006

Fuck me running, I'd seen this a few years ago but had lost it. Thanks bob!
posted by sciurus at 5:56 AM on August 30, 2006

Very, very cool.
posted by MarshallPoe at 6:11 AM on August 30, 2006

This is one of my favorite things ever - I keep forgetting it exists and then it comes back to remind me that it loves me and misses me.

That is what V'Ger looks like under the cloud, btw. The "new" edit of ST:TMP shows much more of the actual form of the ship, along with making the movie much, much more watchable by shaving giant chunks of staring.
posted by beaucoupkevin at 7:20 AM on August 30, 2006

This has been around forever, I had completely forgotten about it until I saw it linked here a while back.

I'm so glad that he has kept it updated; like Balisong the first thing I did upon revisiting it was look for Firefly ships. And there it was.

Yay for super nerdy sites like this!
posted by quin at 7:48 AM on August 30, 2006

Just one thing - what's this "Speculative Fiction" bollocks? What's wrong with good old sci-fi?
posted by Artw at 8:01 AM on August 30, 2006

No DS9? Or am I looking the wrong place?
posted by poweredbybeard at 8:21 AM on August 30, 2006

Artw - Harlan Ellison trumpeted the use of spec-fic over 30yrs ago in Dangerous Visions. I think it is mostly used to trick people who refuse to read sci-fi into reading sci-fi.
posted by sciurus at 8:26 AM on August 30, 2006

Also, I think spec-fic pulls in the fantasy crowd, too, doesn't it? And the alternate history buffs?
posted by pax digita at 8:57 AM on August 30, 2006

This is wonderful, thank you.
posted by sidereal at 9:08 AM on August 30, 2006

Here's the earlier post--probably not found in the search because it's changed domains since it was posted over 3 years ago. And I'm standing by my earlier comment.

No DS9?

According to Memory Alpha, Deep Space Nine has a diameter of 1451.82 meters, so just slightly larger than the Vorlon cruiser on the -2x [sic] page.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 10:05 AM on August 30, 2006

Deep Space Nine is on the minus 10 page.
posted by MythMaker at 10:31 AM on August 30, 2006

I protest the complete lack of ROUs, GCUs, and GSVs on this page. You'd think they could at least include Vavatch with Halo and Ringworld.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 10:36 AM on August 30, 2006

I would've liked to have seen artist's conceptions of the General Products hulls from Larry Niven's "Known Space" stories, seeing as how the Ringworld was in there.
posted by pax digita at 10:50 AM on August 30, 2006

It didn't have my hovercar on there.
posted by Joeforking at 1:43 PM on August 30, 2006

I'd love to see the (new) Battlestar Galactica ships on there. And I'm a nerd.
posted by OverlappingElvis at 2:04 PM on August 30, 2006

ROU, Banks is fairly oblique about his descriptions of you Culture craft... "A big slab with huge pockets of air around it" seems to be as close as he got to ever describing them clearly. Artistic impressions are just that, impressions.

Orbitals, on the other hand, seem to be better fleshed out.
posted by jiawen at 3:42 PM on August 30, 2006

Actually, the pictures of ROU Limiting Factor and GCU Arbitrary are from sketches done by Banks for a (defunct?) fanzine.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 4:42 PM on August 30, 2006

Love the description of people at the near bottom of the 10X page

SHIP NAME/TYPE: Generic Humanoid Carbon Units
HEIGHT: Anywhere from around 1.5m to 2.0m.
BUILDER/COMMENTS: Monkeys? God? The God of Monkeys?
SOURCE: Warm Liquid Protein Goo

Check out the 'Warrior' Bug across from it.
posted by MiltonRandKalman at 4:47 PM on August 30, 2006

um?


klingon military transport


cardassian military transport
posted by poweredbybeard at 6:02 PM on August 30, 2006

I guess that could be a reference to this, but I really have no clue.
posted by bob sarabia at 7:02 PM on August 30, 2006