Re: Relative ship sizes in the B5 universe (and others)

It is alleged that Vorlonagent claimed:

First off, it's not just Earth building the Omegas, it's the Earth
Alliance, a multi-planet nation, and they were built off-world. Second,
it may be an "insane amount of ship" based on +today's+ capabilities,
but this is what, 200 years in the future?

One word. Maintenance.

A ship that large has a correspondingly large amount of stuff that is going
to continually break down. Earth ships don't have the nifty self-repair
systems that the Whitestars have.

Controling the ship doesn't take the people. Maintaining it does.

If B5's any judge, Earth stuff still breaks down and has failure rates more

Are you talking about the B5 station, or the B5 universe? If the
station itself, remember that in the story the B5 station was built on
a shoe-string budget with bargain basement parts. OTOH, an Omega class
destroyer expects to be damaged periodically.

or less on a par with the present day. You're taking 1/3 the crew of a
Nimiz class carrier and expecting them to take care of 91x the ship. I'm
all for automation, but expecting it to multiply a crewman's
effectiveness --in maintaining the ship--by a factor of 270 or so seems a
bit much.

Of that crew of the Nimitz (or the Reagan), how many do damage
control/repair work? And again, large portions of an Omega, or a
Warlock, are (should be) given over to storage. Storage for parts.
Storage for fuel. Storage for food. Storage for water. Even if they
are able to achieve 100% water recycling, they'd still need big-ass
storage tanks for it.

For comparison, in Moore's Battlestar Galactica, compare the Galactica
to the Pegasus. The Pegasus is what... half again as big as the
Galactica? Twice as big? Yet it needs only half the personnel to be
fully crewed. Not only is it simply newer, it's also got a lot more
automation.
I really don't accept one SF show as justifying assumptions made in another.

But you accept +reality+ as justification for an SF show? IAC, such a
technical comparison between B5 and the new BSG isn't much off base, as
neither one has any "magic tech" beyond their respective methods of
FTL, and maybe artificial gravity.

And one more point about the Omegas: only about one third of the total
length has any kind of gravity effect at all, which places its own
limit on how large the crew can be.

No it doesn't. The Hyperions seem able to have crews without any rotating
section.

The Hyperions are also a lot smaller, with a corresponding smaller
crew. Take a look at them in the poster. The Hyperion is ~700 meters
shorter, and it's also noticeably smaller in cross-section. I didn't
say you cannot crew without gravity, but it does limit what you can
effectively do.

--
Jeffrey Kaplan www.gordol.org
The from userid is killfiled Send personal mail to gordol

Peter's Top 100 Things I'd Do If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord, #76.
If the hero runs up to my roof, I will not run up after him and
struggle with him in an attempt to push him over the edge. I will also
not engage him at the edge of a cliff. (In the middle of a rope-bridge
over a river of molten lava is not even worth considering.)

.

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