Text 13972, 101 rader
Skriven 2007-04-25 05:04:59 av Vorlonagent (335.babylon5)
     Kommentar till en text av rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated
Ärende: Re: Relative ship sizes in the B5 universe (and others)
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"Jeffrey Kaplan" <nomail@gordol.org> wrote in message 
news:v1hs23pegfuo9fcda35l2aa4lpfp77nt93@gordol.org...

>> 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.

I'm talking about the station.  If Earth made things that lasted extra-long 
you'd see it in the maintenance that B5 crews weren't doing.

I wouldn't think Omegas don't get shot all that often.  Most of the time 
partols are quite and confrontations one-sided.


>> 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.

With only 1150 people, an Omega doesn't need super-sized storage for 
people-stuff.  It supports between 1/5 and 1/6 the people a Nimitz-class 
carrier does.  Arguably their storage is smaller.  Fuel and parts would grow 
with the volume of the ship, naturally.  But when you have 91x the volume of 
stuff and a corresponding failure rate, you arguably need more than 1/270 
the crew to keep the ship maintained.


>> > 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.

So?  They compare but they're both the products of an imagination that may 
well never have considered real-world factors in constructing and crewing 
their ships.

That's kind of my point, to tell the truth.  Nobody really considered what 
it would mean in practical terms to crew a kilometer-long ship.  Or more 
likely crew was decided over here and size was decided over there and the 
two were never considered as a unit.

The lack of god-tech also limts how much you can wave your hands at real 
world problems and say "it's the future.  They do things better."  They 
don't have god-tech that just magically does things for them  Something 
breaks down, someone has to go fix it.


>> > 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.

Nova-class dreadnought.


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John Trauger,
Vorlonagent

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