How many square km of living space do the various ships have?

[hxclespaulplayer]

We hear about the population density of real-world cities and countries all the time, which got me wondering what the population density of the various Enterprise ships are. (Figured Tech was the best place to post since I couldn't find even the total sq km of any of the ships by googling)

 

[Timo]

Hmm, a fun exercise, for somebody with enough patience. But I guess it depends a lot on how we imagine starships are put together. The saucer of a Constitution is about the size of the entire Defiant if not a tad smaller, yet the former has 430 crew while the latter has 40. And neither appears more or less densely populated than the other, judging by extras appearing in corridor scenes.

The maximum floor space available on a round Constitution saucer is relatively easily calculated: the supposed two full-width decks have about 13,000 square meters each, and then there are seven successively smaller decks plus insignificantly small top and bottom "decks" in the supposed 11-deck structure, bringing the total close to (for the sake of simplicity) 43,000 square meters of standing-height floor space, so 0.043 km^2 for the 430 people supposedly living there (there might be cabins in the secondary hull, but the lowest deck reference for such we ever get is Deck 12 which ought to be in the neck). That leaves each crew member with a whopping 100 square meters to play with, even if much of that goes to machinery, structures and communal spaces such as those relatively wide corridors.

So, ten thousand people per square kilometer... That's about half that of Paris, France, which is an exceptionally densely packed first world city but far from a world leader, and definitely not looking or feeling all that crowded! (It's a case of defining a city's limits; many first world ones are quite a bit wider than the actual dense urban core.)

I have never heard of a source for more exact or extensive figures, as starship volume is fairly easily established from exterior looks, but there's no good data on interior arrangements for most ships. A Galaxy probably has about a hundred times more space per person if carrying only a thousand people, but it's just about the only ship for which even semi-authoritative ideas of deck arrangements exist.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[T'Girl]

Living space would mean after subtracting machinery spaces, turbolift shafts, fuel tanks, water tanks, engines, etc., yes?

 

[Melakon]

Wouldn't square kilometers be pretty big, since most starships are less than a mile long?

 

[Timo]

...But multiple decks tall, so I have no doubt that the Galaxy and the Nebula at least exceed the one square kilometer mark. And people per square kilometer is a figure you can easily find from various sources for comparison purposes - say, population density in well-known cities or states or countries.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Ithekro]

For comparson, the Willis Tower (Sears Tower as I use to know it as) has over 400 gross square kilometers of floor space.

 

[Melakon]

I forgot about multiple decks. I miss "Sears Tower" too.

 

[Shaw]

Going off of Jefferies' designs for the interior layout of the original Enterprise (limiting to areas that would allow someone to stand comfortably) we get approximately 613,500 square feet (more if we included the sub-deck area of the engineering deck in the secondary hull). Most of the decks of the primary and secondary hull are 10-12 feet heigh, the decks of the dorsal are about 8.5 feet heigh and the engineering deck is 20 feet heigh.

For comparison, my apartment is about 700 square feet, so the original Enterprise has about 876.5 times the footage of my apartment.

The original Enterprise is actually quite spacious. I've been using the Booklet of General Plans for the USS Saratoga, CV-60 for reference/comparison purposes and living conditions on the Enterprise are much nicer.

Living space would mean after subtracting machinery spaces, turbolift shafts, fuel tanks, water tanks, engines, etc., yes?

We aren't given enough information to make those types of deductions, but this is how I approached this issue in my plans of the original Enterprise...

As far as living supplies and resources for the crew (food, water, clothing, misc. items), every crew member gets allocated about 1.5 times there body weight (mass) for these things. Because the Enterprise is a closed system the transporter would keep track of what you left with and what you came back with, so a significant difference would need an explanation if you didn't want it deducted from your allotment. So we're talking about approximately 1,617 cubic feet for raw materials for a crew of about 430. The people could comfortably live on much less (like 0.5 times there body weight), but this means that the Enterprise could support an additional 800 people in case of an emergency without over taxing the system.

Everything is recycled, elements that were part of your dinner one week might end up as someone's uniform the next and as part of someone else's specialty tricorder the week after that.

A lot of the space needed for fuel (mostly for the impulse engines) and other items take up the remaining volume of the ship outside of the minimum deck height areas. There are other areas (mostly in the secondary hull) for cargo/storage, and the bulk of the warp drive is in the nacelles themselves.

Fortunately the Enterprise is a wireless environment (for both data and energy transfers) which keeps the internal infrastructure pretty simple. It also means that most rooms are multipurpose by design. What was a briefing room can be converted into a lab/research center if needed, crew quarters can be converted to office space, etc. This type of versatility has been recently included in the design of the Ford class of aircraft carrier.

I try to avoid the specifics of how many things work to avoid steampunking the Enterprise. Trying to overly equate the equipment of several hundred years from now with what we know today would be like attempting to equate our technology using what people knew of back in the 18th or 19th century. That is part of the reason I consider the TMP Enterprise to be a steampunked version of the original Enterprise.