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Hey, "techheads"...volume/mass question...

darkwing_duck1

Vice Admiral
How the heck does one figure out the volume (and thus mass) of a starship? I know the old Connies have been figured out, and I was wondering by what formula so I could plug some new dimensions in and try to figure out the new one.
 
There's no magic formula for volume. You try to split your ship into shapes with easy equations and then total it up. Or you use a 3-D modelling program and hope there's some nifty feature that does it for you.

As for mass... in a ST context? That's literally pulling a number out of your ass.

On the other hand, if you don't mind making some nebulous assumptions and contradicting nebulous "canon" figures, just make some assumptions about the density of each type of part (fuel, "empty space", hull, etc.), figure out how much volume each part takes up and away you go. Simple spreadsheet stuff.
 
Volume... well, there are two numbers you MIGHT be talking about there... actual volume occupied by solid material, or "displacement" (not really an accurate term in this case, since you're in space, but oh well)... the volume occupied by everything (including open space) inside of the outermost surface.

For "displacement," well... the easiest technique would be to buy or build a model, make sure it's air-tight, and then dunk it in a tank of water and see how much water it displaces. Alternatively, you can approximate this by calculating the volume of individual parts (say, a generally-equivalent cylinder for each nacelle, etc) and add them up.

For the "solid volume," well, that's different. If you use the "model" solution, you'd have to make sure that your model is extremely accurate, inside and out (down to the thickness of deck plating and the cross-section of every beam)... then make sure that there are no "sealed" volumes inside, and dunk it in water to see how much water it displaces. Or, you can do the same thing (with the same requirement of 100% accuracy) in a CAD program and it'll spit out the real volume.

There is no other way to do this. And while you can get a very reasonable and accurate "displacement" value, it's essentially impossible to get a "true solid volume" number. The best you can do is get a fair approximation (which is where I'm going with my version of the 1701) and make an educated guess on the "real" volume from there.

Mass is even harder... because every element in the design has a different material density. In CAD, we do this sort of thing all the time, but that's at a much simpler level... a motor, for instance, may have 100 different elements, each which has a unique volume, and you may have 50 or so different materials, each of which has a unique density. But by assigning the correct material properties to each, and getting the design details right, we can get the software to give us very accurate numbers for what the real part will look like (mass-property-wise, I mean).

For something like a TOS ship, I think the approach I'm taking is the best possible option. Since I'm modeling most of the solid volumes as solid, my approximations for the internal volume and "overall density distribution" should be reasonably accurate (say, within +/- 5%). I have NO IDEA what parts of the ship would be what density, but I"m going to treat the main hull as (for calculation purposes) basic steel, and will assign an additional value to some of the elements in the warp nacelle (to determine how much more dense the nacelles have to be for the impulse thrust vector to be appropriate for the location of the engines).

That's sort of long-term stuff, but I do hope to come up with a reasonable number.

The REAL answer to your question, honestly, is "they make it up." I hope that my approach will be the most "reasonable" answer which has been "made up" so far, though. ;)
 
The reason I was asking was that even if I could just get the volume, I could have used the mass/cubic meter figure Darkstar (aka DSG2K) came up with a long time ago for the original TOS Connie to approximate the total mass of the new Big E.

Turns out there isn't any way to do even volume calcs without software I don't have, so I guess I'll just have to WAG it.
 
I think we talked about this six months back or so. Check the old threads for information. I'll try to remember to check back on this to see if I can't cross-deck some information over.

I do remember that the discussion raised more questions than answers, though.

Anyone who knows how to do the 3-d modeling, et al, want to dust this topic off and start from scratch?
 
Well, we do have this reference:

Starship Volumetrics

And when citing mass, even though it's an estimate, don't forget to slip in a 47, if possilble:

MASS: 647,000 M.T.

That's the information I was talking about earlier. But how to apply it?

Someone said that doubling the length meant 8x the volume.

So would half again a length mean an additional 4x the volume (12 total)?
 
So 3,168,720m cu and 13,714,220 mt then... :)

Also keep in mind that the whole volume calculation only really works if the new shape is an exact larger/smaller copy of the original. Same form and all of that.

A similar thing goes for mass. (Which is why I'm always wary when people just assume each starship class has the same density...)

As the new Enterprise is not quite the spitting image of the old I would put little confidence in the resulting numbers.
 
True enough...but I'm not looking for exact numbers, just a ballpark figure. Some bits are bigger, some are smaller proportionately. I am assuming that it averages out over the whole of the ship.
 
The real question here is what happens if you know the volume of a starship but learn that it's a little longer or shorter than you previously thought. If the old length is 120 meters, how do you calculate volume for a new length of 140 meters, for example?

First, imagine it's made of soft clay, and roll it into a ball. Then calculate its radius, knowing nothing but the original stated volume.

r3 = .75*v/pi

Find r and increase/decrease it by the percentage difference from old length to new length.

Then simply use the formula for the volume of a sphere (a new ball containing exactly enough clay to resculpt your ship in the new size):

v = 4/3*pi*r3


Now, the short form of all that is to find the cube root of your known volume, change it by the percentage difference, then cube that.
 
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