Why Do Sci-Fi Spaceships Seem To Change Size?

Spacedock delves into the often inconsistent scaling of spacecraft in Sci-Fi TV.

THE SOJOURN - AN ORIGINAL SCI-FI AUDIO DRAMA:

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[Spacedock]

Check out this free excerpt from #TheSojourn, an Original Sci-Fi Audio Drama:

[DomWeasel]

Firefly was always good with its scaling. Serenity always seemed to be a consistent size. It helped that there were sequences where they walked through the length of the ship.

[be-noble]

“How big is your ship?”
“As big as the plot needs and as much as the budget allows.”

[HoofmanJones]

I'm rather surprised you didn't mention the Klingon Bird of Prey, where the different scaling issues resulted in 3 different classes of the exact same ship.

[TheBabaloga]

Interesting note to add to the section on scaling in games: Doors in video games are always enormous, because the player's control of the character is very clumsy compared to moving around in real life, so realistically scaled doorways would be finicky and irritating.

[kalebk]

A video on the practicality of ship size would be awsome!

It's such an important part to building a world, and can lead to some crazy stuff with massively oversized vessels.

[inductivegrunt]

Ships are always bigger on the inside, Dr Who proves it. And Halo is most evident of this with the Warthog run being 3 times the length of the Pillar of Autumn.

[twelfthknight]

I do quite like it when a SF property uses the limited interior space within their ships to give them a certain sense of character. The Millennium Falcon, the Nebuchadnezzar, the Rocinante, the Bebop, the Milano, Serenity -- they really create a sense of homeliness when you see the characters actively work and relax in this one pretty-well defined set. Of course that's not always what you're going for, with something like the Nostromo being a good example of a work intentionally alienating you with it's factory-like feel, but in general I'd rather see movies/shows write around a more defined set than TARDIS in infinite decks occupied by infinite extras as the script needs.

[Koniving]

In the game homeworld, the lowest level of detail for ships actually had to exaggerate very specific features so that for example fins were larger than the ship itself so that it could still be identified from a massive distance. I believe the exact quote was four times larger than the ship in the case of a certain fighter.

[DrakeAurum]

Half Life 2 did some clever Lord of the Rings style perspective trickery to render unfeasibly-large objects within its playable environment. The massively imposing skyscraper of the Combine Citadel is actually several times smaller than it appears on-screen, but it actually moves as the player does, maintaining the illusion that it's both larger and further away.

[nocelebrity]

The real problem is if the story you're creating with your media depends on the scale being accurate, like if we declared in Chapter One that three Gizmo class attack craft can barely fit inside a Deployer class carrier--and it was important to the plot at that time, but then later on a scene in Chapter Fifteen has the Deployer class carrier's crew walk past *eight* Gizmo class attack craft *inside* the same storage bay we mentioned in Chapter One, to get to where the murder victim's body was found. If it's jarring enough to jar you out of the story, it's "bad, " otherwise, it's not a problem.

Discovery did that a couple of times, but the "Turbolift Fight Scene" you mentioned is the most egregious time it happened.

[Paveway-chan]

Every month I become more convinced that in both the movie and big videogame industries there is a significant disconnect between the writing teams and the art teams. Take Mass Effect as an example - the tactics and strategy for large scale fleet tactics described in Mass Effect's background logs describe something ENTIRELY different to what we get to see in cutscenes. Presumably because the writers were told to write good sci-fi while the animators were told "just make it look sick af, go nuts!" and the writers weren't invited to that meeting.

[akizeta]

I seem to remember that the _Millennium Falcon_ in Ep IV built in the Mos Eisley spaceport set was actually something like 5/8ths scale of the canon size. And to jump sideways to a slightly different genre, the submarines in the oil tanker set in the Bond flick _The Spy Who Loved Me_ were also built to 5/8th scale, despite being copies of real submarines. All down to the exigencies of having limited space on even the biggest sound stages.

[Prich]

I think Star Citizen might be one of the few IPs where ship scaling is kept as accurate as possible since the game has no loading screens to transition between ship interiors and planets, so everything has to be in the same scale. Hell, some ships wound up getting larger from concept because they found the original concept didn't have the internal volume to fit the interior and still have room for components.

[arcadeRGB]

Usually scaling issues don’t usually bug me. The only one that really does for me is the scene in the interior of the USS Discovery.

[autumngottlieb]

This is the reason I am able to resist the constant temptation to spend an unreasonable amount of time screaming in comments sections about Spacedock ignoring empirical scaling evidence

[Tarnfalk]

Got to say this is one of the reasons I love the ships in Star Citizen. Unlike Warframe the ships have to have everything contained within them. They addressed this recently in a vid where one of the devs had created a cool doorway then got told to zoom out and open the door which promptly clipped out of the hull. It makes it super immersive when you're boarding your ship since everything fits and makes sense from both the outside and the inside. Also means half the time you can just eyeball whether or not something will fit when loading up your ship on a planet.

[sinnops]

I was loosing my marbles when that discovery interior shot happend. Apparently Starfleet created the TARDIS. It's bigger in the inside!

[StarshipSimulator]

Scaling is an important subject for us, because when you start building massive ships at a realistic scale you have to start thinking about things like; "could a human realistically manipulate and install this piece of hull plating?". Having everything be consistently human-scale is a fascinating challenge, and it's really changed the way we approach starship design. We've got a crew of 200 on our first ship, so just yesterday for example I was trying to work out how much physical internal volume is needed to feed that many people long term.

I think one of the biggest problems with sci-fi ship scales is that the ships are designed to look good from the outside. Thought is rarely put into the internal structure of the ship, and that's really frustrating for those of us who like modelling the interiors of classic sci-fi vessels :P

[comradevodka]

The X series of space games does ship scale realy well. When you dock on a station and leave your M class frigate for the first time you realize the ship is the size of building. Then you realize that dockin bay your in can fit 20 more of these. Then you realize that the docking bay is just a small part of the station. It realy gives you an amating feeling how large all this stuff is.