SciFi Writers have no sense of scale

bintananth

behind a desk
When I came up with the idea which resulted in the story Tintagel I'm sharing here I wanted to avoid a flaw that all too many SciFi writers fall victim to: tossing out numbers which sound impressive but actually aren't.

Fr'ex: One of Babylon 5 movies has a massive fleet defending Earth from a Drakh fleet with a Shadow planet killer. 10,000km is mentioned as too far away to effectively hit anything.

Before I started writing I decided the ancient power (the Llyrians) which has been around for awhile and seen some shit would think of the Virgo Supercluster as basically their back yard and that each of their warships would be a Type I Civilization on the Kardashev scale all by itself while also being so ridiculously tiny that they're basically telling others "to us the laws of physics are merely polite suggestions".

I came up with 600 - only 25 of which are capital ships - as a reasonable number of active warships of all types for them to have.

I just looked up the number of Galaxies in the Virgo Supercluster. If I stick to that number for the size of the their fleet the odds a random Galaxy actually having a Llyrian battleship in it are worse than the odds of rolling a Nat1 on a d100.

I'm guilty of this too, but in the other direction.
 

UberIguana

Well-known member
It might be more useful to think about space fleets in terms of energy output instead of numbers or tonnage. A K3 civilisation has access to ~10^36 watts of power. Dedicating a few percent to military activities (assume their energy budget mirrors modern militaries financial budgets) is a reasonable extrapolation. Lets say 2%. That equates to 2*10^34 watts, or about 20 times what is needed to mass-scatter a planet every second. For reference, the Sun puts out around 3.85*10^26 watts.

This means a K3 civilisation might have a fleet of trillions of mile long star destroyers, or it might have 20 fire-at-will capable death stars. These don't need to be death star sized, either. Maybe they're linked via stargate to a main firing array and are actually only a few hundred metres long.

They'll still need at least some concessions to quantity. 20 ships can't effectively control a galaxy, so a few billion cruisers may be needed to supplement them.
 

bintananth

behind a desk
I was thinking in terms of power output and including waste heat which has to go somewhere else. At 32km the waste heat coming off the smallest Llyrian warship redlining its reactor is about as bright as the Sun is ... at noon on a clear day in the tropics.

It's all gamma radiation.

EDIT: The Llyrians in my story also don't control the Virgo Supercluster. They're more like great-grandma taking a nap during a family reunion. Do something which wakes her up and you will regret it.
 
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The Immortal Watch Dog

Well-known member
Hetman
Brutalism in sci fi, especially. Hard Sci Fi becoming Fedora sci fi, dark, grim, extremely limited and bound by an understanding of physics that should always be derided as "primitive stuff developing worlds embrace"

Guys like Orci saying "No one watches star trek to see floating cities" when that's why most people enjoy sci fi. When that's exactly why people watched Trek also comes to mind.
 

BlackDragon98

Freikorps Kommandant
Banned - Politics
Reminds of the "25000 Imperial Class Star Destroyers" quote from Admiral Gilad Pelleon in Star Wars Legends.

The number sound impressive until one realizes that there are about 1000 sectors in the Galaxy.

25 Imperial Class Star Destroyers per sector really doesn't have the same ring as 25000 Star Destroyers NGL.
 

bintananth

behind a desk
Reminds of the "25000 Imperial Class Star Destroyers" quote from Admiral Gilad Pelleon in Star Wars Legends.

The number sound impressive until one realizes that there are about 1000 sectors in the Galaxy.

25 Imperial Class Star Destroyers per sector really doesn't have the same ring as 25000 Star Destroyers NGL.
I'm tempted to write a crossover omake for my story where the Enterprise (7.1TW) from Star Trek gets introduced to my setting, tries to interfere with something, and one of the locals basically tells Picard where his objections to the proceedings can be placed using less than polite terms for the exit of his gastrointestinal tract.
 

Lord Sovereign

Well-known member
Reminds of the "25000 Imperial Class Star Destroyers" quote from Admiral Gilad Pelleon in Star Wars Legends.

The number sound impressive until one realizes that there are about 1000 sectors in the Galaxy.

25 Imperial Class Star Destroyers per sector really doesn't have the same ring as 25000 Star Destroyers NGL.

Twenty-five capital ships, five full battleship divisions, in each sector sounds rather daunting actually, especially if they have their escort vessels. The full size of the Imperial Navy, non-capital vessels included, is probably somewhere in the vicinity of a million warships, which is actually a reasonable number for a galaxy spanning empire.
 

bintananth

behind a desk
Twenty-five capital ships, five full battleship divisions, in each sector sounds rather daunting actually, especially if they have their escort vessels. The full size of the Imperial Navy, non-capital vessels included, is probably somewhere in the vicinity of a million warships, which is actually a reasonable number for a galaxy spanning empire.
It's the escort vessels which make up the bulk of a fleet's numbers. In my story there are at least five for every single ship light cruiser-sized or larger.
 
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Atarlost

Well-known member
Twenty-five capital ships, five full battleship divisions, in each sector sounds rather daunting actually, especially if they have their escort vessels. The full size of the Imperial Navy, non-capital vessels included, is probably somewhere in the vicinity of a million warships, which is actually a reasonable number for a galaxy spanning empire.
But Star Destroyers are not capital ships. We can tell because they run about without escorts and in turn act as escorts for the only definitive capital ship we see.

The Imperators are pretty clearly presence destroyers: large escorts with the facilities for peacetime show the flag missions in backwaters that don't justify the expense of sending a cruiser but that perform Destroyer roles during wartime. If you have a few hours I recommend this livestream/lecture on the real world concept I think the Imperators are unconsciously based on. There's also some of the post-war American ship designation confusion involved, but we definitely see Imperators as escorts in TESB so they're not just misdesignated cruisers.

Venators got treated as capital ships, but it's obvious that (a) the Empire is not using the Republic's naval doctrine and (b) the Republic had no clue what they were doing at the start of the Clone Wars when they ordered the ships. There are also hints that the Seperatists didn't have much clue what they were doing either. No one had fought a proper peer on peer naval conflict since the last Sith war thousands of years ago. They are using destroyers or light cruisers or militarily inefficient converted cargo haulers as the mainstay of their fleets because they haven't had time to build any proper capital ships.

I can actually buy the 25k number if it's just Imperators (pure destroyers would be used in the core sectors rather than multirole presence ships since they'd be important enough to have actual cruisers showing the flag). That assumes that the bean counters assume that the need to deploy them will always be localized and short term which is foolishly optimistic, but frankly it would be less believable for bean counters to not be foolishly optimistic. What I can't buy is that 1000 sectors are military operational areas. Hyperdrive is too fast for that. You want to centralize your forces to nodes a few days apart and the galaxy seems to only be two or three weeks across and large minority of it is cut off from the hyperlane network and not part of the Empire.
 

Lord Sovereign

Well-known member
But Star Destroyers are not capital ships. We can tell because they run about without escorts and in turn act as escorts for the only definitive capital ship we see.

The Imperators are pretty clearly presence destroyers: large escorts with the facilities for peacetime show the flag missions in backwaters that don't justify the expense of sending a cruiser but that perform Destroyer roles during wartime. If you have a few hours I recommend this livestream/lecture on the real world concept I think the Imperators are unconsciously based on. There's also some of the post-war American ship designation confusion involved, but we definitely see Imperators as escorts in TESB so they're not just misdesignated cruisers.

Venators got treated as capital ships, but it's obvious that (a) the Empire is not using the Republic's naval doctrine and (b) the Republic had no clue what they were doing at the start of the Clone Wars when they ordered the ships. There are also hints that the Seperatists didn't have much clue what they were doing either. No one had fought a proper peer on peer naval conflict since the last Sith war thousands of years ago. They are using destroyers or light cruisers or militarily inefficient converted cargo haulers as the mainstay of their fleets because they haven't had time to build any proper capital ships.

I can actually buy the 25k number if it's just Imperators (pure destroyers would be used in the core sectors rather than multirole presence ships since they'd be important enough to have actual cruisers showing the flag). That assumes that the bean counters assume that the need to deploy them will always be localized and short term which is foolishly optimistic, but frankly it would be less believable for bean counters to not be foolishly optimistic. What I can't buy is that 1000 sectors are military operational areas. Hyperdrive is too fast for that. You want to centralize your forces to nodes a few days apart and the galaxy seems to only be two or three weeks across and large minority of it is cut off from the hyperlane network and not part of the Empire.

The Imperial class star destroyer is absolutely a battleship. It's bristling with firepower and clad top to toe in armour for line battles as it slags anything smaller than it and can merrily slug it out with the Rebellion's capital ships. It's just that the writers of Star Wars haven't got a clue how naval warfare works and George Lucas wasn't interested in learning.
 

Atarlost

Well-known member
The Imperial class star destroyer is absolutely a battleship. It's bristling with firepower and clad top to toe in armour for line battles as it slags anything smaller than it and can merrily slug it out with the Rebellion's capital ships. It's just that the writers of Star Wars haven't got a clue how naval warfare works and George Lucas wasn't interested in learning.
If you dropped a Le Fantastique or Tribal class destroyer into the Napoleonic Wars it would be bristling with firepower and clad top to toe in armor for line battles as it slags anything smaller. Doesn't mean it's not an escort in its proper context. You aren't calibrating your notion of ship size to the mineral availability of a nation that controls more than half a galaxy and has semi-autonomous droids that can operate in vacuum.
 

bintananth

behind a desk
I was thinking about what Picard would think if he stumbled upon Fomalhaut as it is at the moment in my story.

He'd see what appears to be 3-ship standoff where the one in the middle is 15 times as massive the Enterprise-D while the other two are tiny. 25ly away there's a ship 1/3 the size of the smallest ship in Fomalhaut with the same configuration, several which look similar to the massive one, and the star system is being evacuated.

He's going think the enormous ones are the aggressors and he would be very, very, wrong.

The smallest one in Fomalhaut is the aggressor and the even smaller one near Earth with the same configuration is the only one present with any chance whatsoever of stopping it in a firefight and has orders to stop it. The ones more massive than the Enterprise-D are effectively "bullet sponges" at the moment.

The remaining tiny one is the weakest warship involved in this mess, has the situation somewhat under control, and has a two light-second area defense system pulled out of a museum which requires an order of magnitude more power than the Enterprise-D's warp core can provide.

"Hush you, adults are talking." is the response Picard would get from basically any warship captain present.

EDIT: The one responsible for this clusterfuck is an upset teenage girl who got her hands on a battleship built during the Upper Paleolithic that still outclasses all but one warship currently in the Milky Way Galaxy and that one won't win the firefight without taking damage.
 
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edgeworthy

Well-known member
In Battletech there are 500+/- Mech Regiments in the Inner Sphere. Even accounting for each one being a Regimental Combat Team, with a dozen+/- Conventional Regiments that is no more than the manpower requirements for 500 Contemporary Divisions. And Battletech is supposed to be an Ultra-Militarised setting with near constant warfare.

500 Divisions, even using US Army style support and logistics, would require 25 Million men. Which sounds like a lot until you realise that the Inner Sphere has a Population of some 5 Trillion!

Which means that in a universe where the next war might well be Tuesday, 0.000005% of the population is under arms.
The current Active element of the US Military makes up 0.42% of the population, with reserves 0.68%.

The setting acts like some states have North Korea level militarisation, when it doesn't have the mobilisation rate of Iceland.
 

bintananth

behind a desk
Another one from Star Trek is the Borg Cube power output: 5.37TW

Humanity already produces more than that on average. It's hard find good numbers but I think we're in the neighbourhood of 20TW from all sources. The most powerful of our high-energy toys can very briefly push us into Type I on the Kardashev scale.
 

bintananth

behind a desk
Remembered this and tracked down the video:



Asteroid fields are nothing like what SciFi presents. The Moon is 75 times more massive than Ceres and 25 times more massive than the entire asteroid belt combined.
 

Sobek

Disgusting Scalie
Reality is highly unrealistic, and humans have horrendous senses of scale.

On your first post, depending on who these "Llyrians" are having a conflict with one mining ship might be all that is needed to solve the problem. At those scales, getting into a fight with a civilization like say Earth in 2021 over a particularly good wield of platinum group metals on the moon which the Humans insist are theirs is gonna be less like colonists sending a brigade to stop the locals harassing the miners and more like modern miners just using their own vermin rifles to kill some squirrels who keep chewing on the electric cables of the mining equipment. The army won't even know it ever happened.

As for the Borg Cube ones, being fair to the Borg that is going against some 8 billion humans with a single 3 cubic kilometer sphere is pretty decent. Though now that you mention it I do wonder if we could match it with current technology by just brute forcing it by, I dunno, building one stupid huge nuclear reactor with multiple stages and chambers that size.
 

bintananth

behind a desk
@Sobek,

The Llyrians are in an undeclared conflict with Earth in a "USN providing convoy escort in the Atlantic pre-Pearl Harbor" manner. Humanity, despite being quite technologically primitive as far as interstellar societies go, is also one of the few with warships the Llyrians have to treat with respect. One of the others is the society Humanity is openly fighting and the cause was akin to what you said: Humanity mining stuff in someone else's territory.

As for 2021 Humanity v. The Borg. We could probably build something the same size and with the same power output as a Borg Cube if we wanted to or needed to. I've seen design drawings for an NFL football stadium.

.25km x .23km might not seem like much until you realize that the building footprint is three times as large the flight deck of a USN supercarrier.
 

BlackDragon98

Freikorps Kommandant
Banned - Politics
Remembered this and tracked down the video:



Asteroid fields are nothing like what SciFi presents. The Moon is 75 times more massive than Ceres and 25 times more massive than the entire asteroid belt combined.

The Hoth asteroid field from ESB was pretty accurate, except for the giant space worm that ate the Falcon.
 

bintananth

behind a desk
The Hoth asteroid field from ESB was pretty accurate, except for the giant space worm that ate the Falcon.
I'd need to watch that again to confirm my memory. IIRC, the Imperial ships were taking damage from asteroids.

Whenever we've sent (admittedly tiny compared to a Star Destroyer) probes into and through the Asteroid Belt they didn't have the ability to dodge due to the minuscule amounts of fuel they carry and not one has come close to an asteroid it wasn't looking for.
 

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