Ok so the Galaxy class starships are big. Really big. Freaking enormous in fact. But I have seen a large number of sources all of which cite vastly different sizes for the ship. Some as low as half a million tons. And others go as big as five, six, seven or even eight million tons. Both ends of these figures seem impossible to me. I wonder though, has anyone on this site, or does anyone know of someone who has done the math to figure out exactly how large the Galaxy class of starship is? And if so have they also found the sizes of other starships from the wide world of trek?
http://www.ditl.org/ That site has size comparisons of most, probably all ships in Star Trek. http://www.merzo.net/indexSD.html Compares ships of Star Trek with ships from other sci-fi franchises.
Yeah I have read that article. But it doesn't really cite any figure on the volume of space the ship displaces anywhere does it? I'm not really interested in the size of the vessel in terms of dimensions, length, width and height. But how much the ship actually displaces. RL naval vessels often are shown as displacing a certain amount, IJN Yamato for instance displaced over seventy thousand tons. I was just wondering if anyone had done the math to find how much the Enterprise D displaced, or would displace if she were real.
Well, a starship by definition displaces zero tons, regardless of size. That is, displacement is not the mass of the ship - it's the mass of the substance the ship shoves aside till it settles down deep enough not to sink. (If it does sink, the concept becomes meaningless. With submarines, it merely becomes complicated.) A starship displaces massless vacuum.... Or are we discussing the ship entering air or water? In the former, it would most probably sink, and there would be no displacement. In the latter, who knows? It's perfectly possible to build a shell the shape and size of the E-D and have it float. But we have little idea about how much warp coils weigh, say. Except we sorta do. Scotty's ship was said to be "nearly a million gross tons", and a "gross ton" is a unit of mass more or less the same as the metric or imperial tons (and not to be confused with the gross register ton, which is a unit of volume). This means there's something superdense within the ship, to allow her to be that dense on the average. Might just as well be the warp coils. We get little quantitative data from that, but it certainly justifies the Tech Manual or fandom speculation on a Galaxy mass of a few million tons, give or take. As for ship volumes, here's basically all you ever wanted to know, and then some: http://www.st-v-sw.net/STSWvolumetrics.html Timo Saloniemi