Why Do Sci-Fi Spaceships Seem To Change Size?
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- Опубликовано: 2 янв 2023
- Spacedock delves into the often inconsistent scaling of spacecraft in Sci-Fi TV.
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Totally thought this was going to be about Warp Stretch and other Relativistic effects.
Scaling issues in sci fi wasn’t a 90s thing, it goes further back, not sure how much further, but it was a problem much earlier on. A good example of this would be the shuttles in the original Star Trek. On the outside, next to an actor, it didn’t look that big, but inside shots suggests otherwise.
The interior in discovery has actually a canon explanation. From Enterprise we know that ships from the 29th century onwards were larger on the inside, presumably due to timelord tech (JK).
@@hagen-henrikkowalski3835 Discovery should be considered non canon by Star Trek fans.
@@whitewolf3051 Well I used to think so too, don't get me wrong I don't like the sup par love plot but tarkas pain was well written, however remember Star Trek always was a mirror of its time it has to evolve. Controversially, Lorca was my favourite Captain. The issue stems that many people think Trek has become dark but it always was arguably even more so. In I am Hugh the UFP discusses Genocide, in DS9 they commit genocide (albeit it's thwarted yet this does not changes the intend). Sisko is a war Criminal, poisoning worlds, denying reinforcements, remember how Malcom in ent stated that the acceptable amount of casualties in any engagement is 25% ? On Ar... (forgot the number) they nearly lost the entire platoon, sisko states we are spread to thin, to thin to protect such a valuable asset ? He is not only to be sent to a tribunal he is bad at planning, in many regards he sees people as expandable. He has a double standard, condemning the marquise those who defect to them, at the same time we see that at one point (In the Pale moonlight) he is an accessory to morder he knew what garak was about to do. This dates back to TOS in much more severe form. No Trek was always dark, we just dont want to see it.
Even in TNG, despite not being Picards fault, we see what war has done to O'Brian hes left alone with his pain. Burnham was a scapegoat Starfleet always was shady as hell.
But to come back to you original comment, I did refer to enterprise as canon not disco, I only stated there is a canon explanation.
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.
That’s one of the best examples in Trek and I’m surprised he didn’t mention it.
@@romigithepope Every video needs obligatory Mass Effect or Halo references. It's in the BreadToob TOS or something.
@@Corbomite_Meatballs To be fair, Halo is another example of the same issue as the Bird of Prey, with the same asset being used for Covenant capital ships of vastly differing sizes. I think the video was very deliberately avoiding these examples as being a separate issue, instead focusing on instances where what is supposed to be the exact same ship is shown at different sizes in different scenes.
EC Henry did an amazing video on whether the whales from Star Trek IV would actually fit inside the ship.
@@DrakeAurum Yup. Even the Halo lore books try to explain it away that certain shipbuilding forges would have their own patterns for ship classes which is why ships like the Long Night of Solace were given pattern names after the fact to recognise they are a different class versus ships such as the Shadow of Intent despite them sharing the same model, just scaled differently.
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.
Halo 4 did it even worse, increasing the size and design of the FUD by several orders of magnitude
@@agonefire They straight up changed the entire layout of the cryo room Chief was in lol
Playing it through the first time, I was like “WTF?!”
And the bridge
Not to be impossible, but, one could argue they're smaller on the outside...
“How big is your ship?”
“As big as the plot needs and as much as the budget allows.”
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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.
Fun Fact: During the opening of Serenity, when they walk through the ship, the movie snuck a cut into a whip pan.
The vast majority of the ship was just 2 continuous sets (1 was the bridge, galley/mess hall and the engine room, while the other was the cargo bay, infirmary and passenger quarters), which meant they only needed to cut the camera when transitioning decks, as the sets obviously couldn’t be stacked on top of each other
I remember when they did the firefly blueprints and the only adjustment they had to do to get the interior to fit the exterior is make the walkway from the bridge to the rest of the ship canted at a slight angle. For the movie they actually made the full upper and lower portions to scale and only had to do one whip pan to join the two together.
ya. it was amazing in the mass effect games when you can either walk threw the entirety of the ship or see the places in detail that you couldnt walk into. really helps you feel like your on a real ship
Nope... I disagree.... Firefly was way off it's Mark for a ship that spent months in deep space. They don't talk about it, but Firefly the series was 1 huge star system. Firefly on the outside always looked smaller! Take for instance the shuttle, there were 2 of them and both had enough space to live in for awhile. Plus look at the cargo bay and sleeping quarters. It just wasn't enough space.
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.
Apparently, doors are one of the things devs _hate_ having to do, according to some things I've heard.
That reminds me of trying to introduce my father to Red Dead 2. He could NOT get through a door without crashing into the walls on either side.
They look too small and claustrophobic on the screen. You've never noticed that regular room doors in Half-Life 2 are almost three meters tall.
This becomes even worse in 3rd person games, where not only the character and his hitbox has to fit through doors, but the camera too, without clipping into some walls.
It would seem to me that you could just make the hitbox (well, interaction box) larger, rather than the doors themselves.
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.
I'd also like to nominate the Runabouts from DS9, which felt like a practical small craft / large shuttle. Standard shuttles, interior/exterior scaling issues aside, feel like an oversized minivan or short bus.
Even the various TARDIS sets gave it a certain feel, especially in the new series (and the wood-paneled auxiliary control room of the Fourth Doctor / Leela era). Pillars and split levels notwithstanding the central console of the control room was also the center of most of the action; the auxiliary rooms added and deleted as the episode demanded added either humor (e.g. the Boot Cupboard), character moments (e.g. companions' bedrooms, the Cloister Room), tension (e.g. the maze of corridors and at one point a whole factory), or wonder (e.g. the Eye of Harmony in the movie, the entirety of "Journey to the Center of the TARDIS").
I know for the Roci at least, that the interior is not laid out like the exterior. I don't think it would even fit without cutting off some of the decks (total square footage may be the same though). But they did this for easy set layout, as the ships are navigated vertically, but horizontal sets are much easier.
@@philipfahy9658 Without magic "grav plates" spaceships should be laid out like towers (or spinning drums) not boats. Building such a set would strain budgets and raise safely concerns, though.
@@fmitchell238a ...Removing the fictional gravity plating scifi loves to use would not raise safety concerns. Not on set and likely not for the purpose of the story either. Functionally on set it would make no change whatsoever, you're still going to be shown rooms and corridors and a bridge and an engineering section. If they did this in Star Trek it would equate to needing more turbolifts with basically little else in the way of changes other than the outer appearance of the craft. If anything it would likely leave them more room for Cetacean Ops.
@@fmitchell238a All of the shuttles in Star Trek are guilty of spatial inadequacy or a blatant omission of needed parts.
They all supposedly run on the same concept as the larger ships, but at no point are we ever shown the warp core of a shuttle even with different series showing coverage of every square inch of the inside. It makes no sense DS9 and Voyager had shuttles with a 'back room' but still never showed the warp core, it's not like they had a 3rd section for engineering.
Not to mention TNG's ability to open up the back of the shuttle so you can all pile in like it's a minivan, but still no sign of a warp core.
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.
True that would be epic and also something about the miniaturization of tech would be cool. For example the computer on the Saturn V rocket is wayyyyyyyyyyyyy less powerful than even the lowliest cell phone and is wayyyyyyyyyyyyy smaller.
I know a person who constantly creates absolutely huge ships and berates us for creating reasonably sided ships instead of a km long corvette.
Maybe people think making everything bigger, is cooler. Past a point of making any sense for the purpose the ship is used for. Like 3 km long ships that would need 50,000 crew members to operate. Over-scaling things can also break the immersion, when gets to the nonsensical range.
oooh yes... Hello whole Star Wars francise :P (I probably just pissed off some people)
@@florianN132 and the Warhammer 40k as well (Gloriana being like 20km++ and with km corvettes)
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.
I really wish this channel would use aspects of Homeworld, either as examples or just game footage. I can't recall ever seeing that series show up anywhere here other than in the comments.
@@tba113 It would be nice. It definitely could have fit here as an example.
There was actually a setting in the config files which controlled the degree to which the entire model would be scaled up as the camera moved away also. So not only were the silhouettes designed to evoke a certain scale and maintain readability, but the in end everything still had to just scale up anyway. It worked excellently in the games originally and you really wouldn't notice it.
@@MachineCode0For Homeworld 1 and Homeworld Cataclysm, the "true scale" mods would remove all the "NLips" lines for you. Since everything else in those ship files stay the same, it could be used as a very handy start-off point to make your own mods.
Homeworld 2 has turning off Nlips, as a standard feature in the graphics menu.
@@hansakkerman2611 yep I know, I was just adding on to what the op was saying.
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.
Portal 2 uses similar tricks. Tiny models are blown up and projected onto a nearby skybox to make the Aperture facilities look much bigger than they actually are.
The trick is actually quite simpler and simultaneously more complex than that. The Citadel and other surrounding objects were stored in a separate part of the level map and they had a separate camera that copied movement of the player at a reduced scale, and rendered what it was seeing as a replacement for the actual level's sky.
@@DarthBiomech I think a similar thing is done on several Team Fortress 2 maps where if a player noclips out of the map they can find the map skybox in a separete area and if they fly into it the players on the normal map will see a giant player in the skybox.
@@ilmevavi1112 Same game engine, so it's logical. =)
3D skyyboxes are common in warframe, where its just a miniatureof the items and sjy somewhere under the level, sometimes peoples found it and wiht glitches put decorations in them. its pretty obvious as the distant scenery is glued to the camera.
I'm impressed half life ha something in between skybox and map geometry.
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.
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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.
It's certainly not the first time ST used non-sensical interiors. And it won't be the last time.
They might have gotten it from SW. Even back in the original trilogy, there were huge open spaces inside stations and starships that simply make no sense, as no-one would waste any space on a space craft, let alone so much. It was simply done for a certain aestetics.
@@Bird_Dog00 tbf that was mostly in the death star which is massive anyway so it can afford to have some empty spaces (maybe it's for cooling or something) but in a ship that should be tightly packed like the Discovery it's really weird. Or have you seen it in other ships aswell in Star Wars?
You talk about scaling issues and ignore the warthog run from Halo:CE and how it can't fit in the canon size of the Pillar of Autumn.
@@twandepan Well, Bespin had those spaces too, and even the rather small rebel ships had iirc unusually spacious interiors.
Not on the same scale, but a corridor 4 or 5 meters wide is too wide for any military space craft.
The EU then just ran with it..
@@Bird_Dog00 Bespin is literally a city though. It's meant to be a place to live comfortably and constantly being in tight spaces is very bad for mental health. Most rebel ships are civilian vessels converted into warships, so most of them are either freighters or cruise liners. Cruise liners are more open for passanger comfort, while cargo ships need big spaces in order to move oversized cargo around.
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.
Considering the comparatively limited budget of the original Star Wars it's impressive such a large setpiece was built.
I can’t remember if it ever happen in Ep IV, but in Ep V we see Chewie on the inside of the cockpit of that (or a similarly sized) mock-up on Hoth, which immediately shatters the illusion when you notice him filling up most of a space which usually fits 4 people with considerable room to spare
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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
You mean you don't think the X-302 has a 75m wingspan?!
- hoojiwana from Spacedock
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.
It's more likely that the writers did their job first, then the animators tasked with doing what the writers put down laughed their asses off and did what was actually possible, and no-one went back to the lore and updated it. This sort of thing happens all the time in software with manuals, tutorials etc.
That's been true since the very first Sci-Fi to be filmed. In Star Trek, they would cut from the bridge, where characters talk of engaging other vessels at "100 thousand kilometers" while engaging in "evasive manouvre Delta". To the actual battle, with the two vessels standing a couple hundred meters away at most, firing phasers definitely nowhere near lightspeed, and very slowly turning away from eachother.
Ironically, the very advances of technology and techniques, is what made this discrepancy possible. Also for Star Trek, the original series or TOS films, felt far closer to the lore, because it wasn't actually possible to show the two ships slugging it out. It would have been even less believable. So instead, all we got were separate shots, one ship firing, then cut to the other taking fire, then cut to stuff exploding on the bridge. To represent movement, as moving the models would be more difficult, they instead moved the stars in the background, giving the illusion the ships were actually moving at extremely high speeds.
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.
glad to see you already pointed out exactly what I was thinking when watching this.
SC gets a lot of flack for a lot of reasons but it must be set there is quite a lot of stuff they do that ends up being really cool. the ability to fly around the outside of someone's carrack and see the people running around on its bridge and its all properly scaled with no handwavy magic is pretty crazy.... even more so when you fly up to a stations big windows and you can see everyone inside. Its kind of crazy!
I would love to be on the train at new Babbage when someone flys along the trains for fun. this is the kind of thing I felt happened a lot at port O and it made that space feel really cool. I wish they could do something more interesting with the stations elevators to solve this problem as they feel awkward compared to how polished some of the game can feel.
Star Wars galaxies as well I think, at least for ships that have interiors with windows.
@@gregmosher4287 The elevator is one of the needed tricks to have large stations and cities work. When in it, the game can load and unload resources, and magically warp the player around.
Came here to say exactly this. All the ships in proper scale and all with fully functional interior spaces, and most with some amount of component access and built in storage. They aren't getting criticism for no reason, but they are knocking it out of the park anywhere they can turn their attention.
Yeah, Star Citizen is an interesting case study in this sort of thing where they kind of have to be strict about ship scaling.
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
Not to mention how material properties create a limit on size of vessels. A wooden seafaring vessel can be up to only about 500 feet before it starts breaking apart under stress. Steel seafaring vessels can be up to more than a thousand feet long but you will start seeing it bend while navigating waves. With more advanced materials you could get far larger, but the larger you build something the more internal space you need to dedicate to structural support. The Death Star is probably the very maximum in terms of theoretical size before self-gravitation becomes a problem, and it beats that only because it is a sphere which is a very stable shape.
> "could a human realistically manipulate and install this piece of hull plating?"
Assembly industrial robots: "Am I a joke to you?"
@@DarthBiomech ,
Human: "I don't work in factories so you don't exist."
And let's not even get into the issue of having space for fuel -- and additional space for the fuel needed to move that fuel.
@@deusexaethera Well, in almost any space scifi rocket equation is usually the first thing to go because it instantly "you aren't allowed to do that"s 99% of your ideas.
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.
Too bad you can't walk inside most parts of ships and stations. If ego had just 10% of Star Citizen money...
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.
That warframe issue is partly based on the space for drydock having to fit into the dojo building system and its still the largest room by far. There was also a redesign one year after the first version where interior was shrunk and they deleted its Middle section. But it's still taller and wider than it should be from outside and the prop of the wings were never fixed and dont adapt to the chosen skin when seen from inside. And this annoys me more than size issues.
In the game Homeworld, there was this setting called NLIPS (Non-Linear Inverse Perspective Scaling) which made smaller ships look bigger to help with playability. I guess here we can call it NLAPS (Non-Linear Adaptive/Artistic Perspective Scaling) :P
I still remember playing Halo Combat Evolved and thinking on the last mission, "WOW, the Pillar of Autumn is Huge, over 3 km long!" and then being confused when I saw in other materials that it was only about 1km long.
I was loosing my marbles when that discovery interior shot happend. Apparently Starfleet created the TARDIS. It's bigger in the inside!
In strategy games, scale really does have to take a back seat. Lore wise, Starcraft battlecruiser would be bigger than the entire map, and being able to fit an ultralisk on a single screen would proabably make individual marines way too tiny to play with.
There's a true scale mod that fixes this, yet renders the game nearly unplayable.
@@hansakkerman2611 Was gonna mention this. The mission where you have to fight the Protoss Mothership is absolutely terrifying as all you can see is this big ominous shadow on the ground.
Not sure when you started using Ultraman Tiga footage in your videos but damn is it a surprise to see. Childhood nostalgia.
A similar topic, but a bit different, is the depiction of distances between ships. You see it regularly when you get a callout in thousands on kilometres but you then see its two or three lengths of the protag's kilomtre-size ship.
I feel like this gets cheated a lot just so that two ships can appear in the frame together. Realistically most space battles would happen at great distances. But it's more fun to see both ships blasting away at close range.
@@darinfoat8410 The Expanse gets this mildly right, and Babylon 5 has some good depictions as well. Like in the Battle of Gorash 7
@@darinfoat8410 LOGH Die neue these and The expanse use their CGI to avoid this issue, they just have the camera move sufficiently fast.
Though it's a style that cant be done with 2d animation or minatures, Only full CG
Star Trek used to depict this well in the original series (which also saved them on making detailed models of opposing ships), but Wrath of Khan set a precedent that practically every subsequent Trek production followed. The reasoning for the close-range encounters in that movie was well-founded, but it was so much more exciting having them blasting away at point-blank range that they basically did it evermore after that, with or without any reasonable excuse for it.
@@eps200 can be done with 2d and minatures you just have to want to do it
The Defiant has a simple in-universe explanation; the DS9 episode *One Little Ship* S6 E14. A Runabout is shrunk by a rare *subspace compression phenomenon* _while tractor beamed by the Defiant,_ and then later flies around inside the captured Defiant and liberates it from the Jem'Hadar.
It's obvious that the compression field leaked into and contaminated the Defiant via the tractor beam, causing it to have a variable size.
And it's already been established in Trek that future events can ripple into the past, so therefore this encounter resulted in _the Defiant never having a fixed determinant size._
The Defiant having tachyon radiation leak into the hull from the cloaking device is the interaction that instigated the temporal elements of the effect - consider how many times the Defiant has been subjected to temporal effects and even closed time loops…
It was always destined to not have a fixed scale.
*QED.*
So the people controlling the Defiant have variable sizes too?!?
You made the kid in me giddy, I grew up watching thunderbirds! My dad had the whole serie on dvd and he showed it to me as a kid
Ship sizes is definitely a topic i want to see. As much as i like 15km long vanity project, practical sizes are based and i'm tired of pretending they're not.
Scaling in sci-fi has been the bane of existence as a scale modeller. According to my 1/72nd model collection, a B5 Starfury could carry BSG Mk II Vipers like missiles. You could convert Starfury to carry at least 8 Vipers probably, 3 on top, 3 underneath, and 2 inbetween the wings. Also, how big is an A-wing? Nobody knows!
the show fire fly was pretty clever with how the did the interior of the ship and were really good at the shots showing the scale etc
It helped that they built the entire ship interior to scale in the right layout (except for the top floor being beside the bottom one, for obvious reasons). And a full scale mock up of the front/part of the sides.
The amount of Ultraman footage shown in this video fills me with delight. Does this mean we’re going to have breakdowns of the various craft seen in Ultraman used by the defense teams?
Homeworld changed scale of smaller craft as you zoomed out, so they wouldn't completely disappear.
Also... just see the Transformers Wiki article on "Scale." It's... amusing.
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Moff Gideon's arquitence from the Mandalorian can have a launch bay that's barely big enough for a Tie Fighter to go through in one scene, than in another is big enough for an entire Lambda class shuttle to fly through it.
i think that is an rare exception, since it is an enlarged One, like the CIS Ships that came in different sizes and it was acknowledged in Universe
@@enisra_bowman But it's not two different ships with size varying hangers, it's the same ship magically altering it size in the same span of minutes
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I usually don't notice this kind of thing, but I did notice it in the original Starcraft. There is a level or 2 that is supposed to take place inside one of the playable units, but because the units don't look that big onscreen even in comparison to each other I found myself wondering how this big level fit inside the tiny unit.
*glares in Terran Battlecruiser*
Would love to see a video on the sizes inside vs outside of ships.. like the Falcon's escape pods are the size of wine barrels, Chewy either sleeps in a chair or rolled up like a kitten because those beds are waaay small, and the workspace below the floorboards would leave his feet dangling in outerspace :)
The scaling is something I love about Star Citizen. The interiors and exteriors are fully realized, meaning you can summon your ship, go down to the landing pad, open the ships doors, walk through the entire ship, and get in the pilots seat to fly it out. There is no playing with scale, the ships are just as large as they are. Some of the ships are just massive, like the Reclaimer and the 890j, but you can walk through every deck and room on them seamlessly since they are fully mapped out on the inside without any scaling problems.
Unfortunately for the designers, it also wrecks havoc on their concept art once they realize that big things are big, and so ships have had to inflate considerably to fit the internal space for payload, hardware modules, and crew facilities. As well as break out of the mindset of laying out ships like FPS maps with all kinds of twisty passages and alternate paths.
@@watchm4ker Reminds me of the chaos design for Anvil Carrack, they have to fatten the bottom of the Carrack just to fit all the rooms and the bridge has to changed few times so it have two levels deck inside bridge
This video reminds me of being a kid playing Starcraft as a kid and not understanding why the Terran battleships and Protoss carriers were so small lol
4:38 The civie ships in that particular shot were far from the camera, and thus smaller by perspective. You can even see the animators trying to convey this with the parallax and a little delay from when the virtual camera moves and from when the background ships start scrolling on screen.
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And that's a great wayto solve this issue and mak a ship/object look impressive without scaling it
Elite: Dangerous is an interesting case where the ship sizes are consistent( and fairly internally consistent with their canonical capacities and capabilities, as these ships haul many tonnes of cargo and the technologies in the Elite universe are quite bulky...) but the aesthetics of their designs lead most players to underestimate their sizes.
The Faulcon DeLacy Anaconda for example is over 150 meters long, but its oversized bridge is easily mistaken for a smaller cockpit, shrinking the apparent scale of the whole ship.
Star citizen is much the same way. A ship that's currently being developed, the Polaris, actually got upscaled without changing the outer mold line, because they had trouble fitting all the rooms they wanted in it before they made it bigger.
Elites ships used to be much smaller and then got scaled up to make them bigger early in the development, without adjusting certain proportions. Some smaller ships have handles on the cockpit ceiling that would have made perfect sense for a small ship to squeeze in the pilot seat, but are now way up there (I think that was in the DBX). Also, just Lok up Odyssey Screenshots of the Cutter stairs with people, individual steps are insanely big.
The Eagle class LOOKS like a fighter plane, but the interior camera views show that there's room for three pilot seats side-by-side (it only has one), and the rear of the cockpit where the door enters is easily 10 feet high.
@@klti0815 I don't need to look up screenshots; I've stood at the comically oversized stairs of my Cutter. :P
I actually came very close to mentioning that in my original comment.
Starbug from Red Dwarf surely has the most inconsistent internal/external scaling of any sci-fi vessel.
The SSV Normandy SR1 supposedly has a length of 170m and yet only two very small decks, no real living quarters and a tiny crew (not necessarily a bad thing). If you compare that to a modern warship, a British Type 23 frigate for example, they have a length of only 133m and yet they have 6 decks, dozens of compartments and living quarters for 205 personnel. The SR2 suffers from a similar problem but to a much lesser degree and I have to imagine her having at least one more accommodation deck to make any practical sense.
A type 23 can pack the space MUCH tighter thanks to human dexterity over game-engine wonkiness. The Normandy in all its various forms is downright hollow by comparison
The Normandy tried to handwave the lack of quarters by suggesting that the crew "hot cot" in sleeping pods (which I think you can actually see on one of the decks). Keep in mind, there's a paltry number of pods - and the only other space for crew not on duty is the mess.
@@Dream0Asylum If they'd designed her properly then hot bunking wouldn't be necessary. If modern attack submarines can cram in enough accomadation for the whole crew then so should a larger, advanced future space warship. In reality, its limitations of medium and mid 2000s tech so you can't really blame the developers for simplification. What you can blame someone for is the incoherent mess which is the Systems Alliance rank structure.
It doesn't make a lot of sense to compare a space ship to a floating ship. It would make a lot more sense to compare it to a high altitude aircraft, or a submarine; both craft with comparatively limited life support.
Cool to see Warframe in one of your videos! In case you didn't know, the interior of the Railjack was originally even larger! The developers reworked Railjacks to remove a lot of unnecessary interior space. The original Railjack had pretty much four full decks, but its now condensed into basically two, with a little extra space at the top and bottom.
Scaling issues do bother me a little bit. Once I've noticed them, I can't un-notice them.
Something I love in Star Citizen is that the scale is correct.
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That is an awsome recreation of the Defiant in the video preview. Realy unfair not to credit the artist.
You missed one factor that really contributes to the perceived scale issue: perspective putting a small shuttle near the camera and a large ship further away will have the viewers see them as closer in size. You did include it's use to hide the scale differences but it is also very common to use it to create them.
Great video as always Hooj! and yes please do an analysis of in-universe ship size, I'd love to see that
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Stargate had a lot of scaling issues throughout the series but it never really mattered much, the shots still (most of the time) worked in their scenes and looked great!
Wrath hive ships always bothered me, those things grow and shrink by an order of magnitude in the same episode. The scaling is so bad you can see it by eye.
@@eps200 Which makes the fact that they are, in fact, grown, all the more amusing. Scaling in Stargate also happens to be the reason I don't hang around this channel as much as I used too.
As a "Niner," i always get a bit blushed when people bring up the Defiant. It's like "ugh they're bringing that up again."
For the last 5 years we've been building lego star wars ships to "correct minifigure scale" (roughly 1:43). We quickly realized the official cannon material that provides measurements for ships and vehicles can vary vastly from what is seen on screen. fun video :)
Scale imo is always important for accuracy and for a sense of size. I think a good representation is the size of a viper compared to Pegasus with how tiny it is. I forget the video title but another person did a scale measurement of a Valkyrie class to the Seawise Giant, and he showed how a single viper launch tube is only 13ft from floor to ceiling. That’s just me though, I like accuracy when it comes to scale inside and out.
With infinite money, time, and story adaptation, sure...but this video literally explains why sci-fi shows/movies can't keep scale for sake of accuracy.
Respecting the exterior-interior scale can make things more difficult, but it can hugely improve the atmosphere.
Just look at the old classic Das Boot.
The movie's atmosphere would simply have been much worse, had they made the interior models larger than a VII-c boat realy was.
Having the actors stuffed into this narrow steel tube made the whole movie so much more claustrophobic.
@@emmakai2243 true, but planning and coordination with design teams also helps for the most part. And maybe a few bits of input/advising from actual naval ship designers. With how much money is being thrown into movies and tv now I wouldn’t surprised to see more and improved BSG style stories. Sci-fi has a bright future, maybe a reboot of the early 2000s with all the cool shows we had to pick from.
@@Bird_Dog00 Das Boot was amazing. Definite one in my collection. And agreed, scaling inside to outside definitely has an affect on the atmosphere, just like in the Orion from BSG Blood and Chrome. That ship was tiny and cramped.
seeing a mention of Seawise Giant made me think a note for scifi people, RL ships also have gotten pretty darn big. Remember the infamous "Ever Given" operated by Evergreen, source of many memes. That ship is 400m long.
One main problem is that designers like to design stuff huge, you know, the classical "bigger is better" trope. So they make a huge ship/docking bay around a small ship. Now when this small ship leaves the huge ship/docking bay and it would be on scale, it would only be 4-6 pixels on the screen. See the problem? Alternatively you could show the small ship in a close up but then you will only see a very tiny fraction of the huge ship/docking bay exterior while the ship is leaving, as the ship would have to be very far away to even get half of the large ship/docking bay on the screen in background. Yet what the designer really wants is a wide shot that covers most of his beautiful huge ship/docking bay on screen, as he invested so much time creating it, while at the same time show enough details to have the small ship recognizable, so the viewer knows what he's watching there ("Ah, I see the small ship leaving the ...") and that is only possible if scale is ignored in that shot and either the small ship or the huge ship/docking bay are shown at wrong scale.
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When I think of scaling error in Sci-Fi I always think of the Pillar of Autaumn in Halo . Esspecially during the last mission ! The ship double it's size during the level haha
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I remember when the Godzilla vs Kong trailer dropped the lead animator had to come out and basically say, yeah, I have no idea what size he is, I just scale him to look cool in every shot.
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I think that Star Blazers 2199 deserves a shoutout here. They approached scaling by first modelling the bridge of the ships and went from there, meaning that all vessels are correctly scaled in all scenes and the canonical lengths are the actual dimensions of the assets.
In case you missed my own comment, I'll repeat it here: The Yamato (Argo in Star Blazers) can't possibly carry all the fighters, shuttles and munitions we see her deploy in the anime, even if we assumed she was essentially an empty bottle waiting to be filled -- which she's not!
One of the most egregious ones IMO has to be Starcraft. Admittedly they don't have a lot of choice in the matter, there's a mod that scales all the units to closer to their canon size, and the game becomes very nearly unplayable for it thanks to the truly *massive* scale of some of the units (like Battlecruisers, Ultralisks or Colossi)
Ah yes, Real Scale Starcraft II with its tiny marines and ships that don't fit on the map. Still, it's fun watching people play it
Real scale Starcraft would've been a great thing to put in the video in hindsight
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I think details like this is important. It shows that the creators cares about getting it right, even if most people won't notice.
Here's the thing about WF if I'm correct they said the canon reason for it was something along the lines of Space/matter folding technology to make the inside space larger, whilst keeping the size of the ship the same. Or was that the explination for the expansive inside for the Murex ships that the sentients use. Theoretical science and lore are hard difficult at times.
4:11 shoutout to Dark Souls 1's super Ornstein cutscene shrinking the cathedral interior model as Ornstein grew to emphasize the size change.
I never realized how huge these "miniatures" were... I always thought they were just like fancy toys.
This really makes me appreciate Star Citizen and all of the hassle CIG goes through to keep scaling consistent. For those that don't know, all of the spaceships in that game have fully modeled interiors. You can walk around a ship, then dock it in a bigger ship and walk around, then dock the whole thing in a space port and go shopping. That said - space stations are a bit of a magic box in terms of hangar space.
Not a mention to the hilarious Starbug from Red Dwarf? it became an injoke how every season it got bigger and bigger as the plot needed.. as it went from a medium size shuttle to a ship with 3 decks and "miles" of vent tubes (i think the miles line was inserted from the creators as a selfaware joke with the audiciences)
On the mention of the Railjack, Warframe used to have some pretty egregious scale problems with its Archwing gameplay. Particularly noticeable with the Corpus Archwing missions, where some of the enemies were normal ground units with a spaceflight backpack, but taken at face-value, appeared to be nearly 15 feet tall. At one point there was even a glitch where your animal companion would spawn in the mission, and you were the size of its leg when normally it would be waist-height on a Warframe. Essentially the Warframe got shrank down when in Archwing missions. This was later corrected, but the effect still exists intentionally with the Titania Warframe, who can turn into a fairy and fly around with Archwing mechanics.
Actually, Spacedock, if you're reading this, can you do one on travel speeds? This is a subject that often irks me even more than ship scale.
that opening music is a Serotonin shot I need.
Tokusatsu miniatures are the greatest miniatures ever used on screen.
What about distance in combat?
Trek ships can appear right next to each other in combat while apparently tens of thousands of kilometres apart … although that could just be because they are _being filmed under extreme zoom_ from light seconds away - would you want to be within the firing range of a photon torpedo while documenting a battle?
For a strategy game it makes sense that ships would not be displayed in scale, because realistically spaceships of different types would so vastly differ in scale and all of them would be so much smaller than the distances between them that you couldn't gather any information from a scale model. To identify ship classes and see their positions in one image they have to all be scaled up to around the same size.
Cinematic space battles often have to do the same. We may also theorise that in-universe the viewscreen in Star Trek, for example, can do the same thing too.
Deadlock is a good example and one I actually tried testing a few days ago. Someone quoted the length as being about 800m, but if you go by the size of the launch tubes it can't be more than about 300m at most.
One thing. Starships tend to be massive compared to smaller ships like shuttles. If you try to actually scale things correctly (Homeworld is a game that actually scaled everything correctly), it becomes impossible to have small fighters and large capital ships in the same shot, and this tends to be a problem for television. If you're zoomed in enough to see the fighters, the capital ship will fill the screen. If you zoom out enough to focus on the capital ship, the fighters become tiny dots. Homeworld, being an RTS, resolved the issue while maintaining accuracy, by just zooming in on whatever you selected, and making it easy to select other things no matter what size they were.
The funny thing...I've even seen size/scaling problems in animated shows that are not in any way focused on sci-fi, so this isn't even just a spaceship problem. Building interiors don't match exteriors (a lot of the time due to exteriors looking more like stock assets). Seeing a town from the air makes it look like 3 buildings, but from the ground it's obviously a fairly large town. Etc etc etc.
Watching this, I couldn't help but think of the Father Ted scene, _"No, Dougal. This cow is very small. That cow is faaaar away."_ 😂
One of the best examples I can think of is Voyager and the Delta Flyer. Given it's supposed size, it would not fit in the shuttle bay and the interior was even larger. haha
Thank you for adding captions to your clips
Hell yeah, footage from Ultraman Tiga and Ultraman Decker!
About the Normandy in mass effect, if i recall correctly bioware adressed this point directly when they explained why they made Mass effect 2 start the way it did, and therefore having it replaced by the SR-2, with a much more credible outside to inside volume
The best example of ship scaling being messed around with for plot reasons has got to be the Arquiten-class Light Cruiser from Star Wars, the original 3d asset used in The Clone Wars, and later in Rebels, was scaled to approximately 230 meters long, however at some point there was a magazine which wrote the length at 325m long which started a long series of writers and artists adding more and more things and features to the ship that the 230m frame would simply never be able to do, which resulted in the ship seen in The Mandalorian. Moff Gideon's Light Cruiser was very clearly intended to be an Arquitens-class, the same as the ships we see in Rebels, however because of all the story and plot requirements, it was heavily altered and ended up being scaled to 381 meters long. That's right, a ship that was originally shown as being a little over 200 meters ended up becoming a ship that is nearly 400. That to me is the pinnacle of scaling inconsistencies, when the need to pretty something up for your story ended up completely changing a well established and well designed design.
For me, the best example of a ship with a seemingly larger interior would be the SDF-1 from Macross. It's official size is 1210 meters, yet it's inside is always depicted to be as large as a modern metropolis.
That's just because protoculture. The answer to all problems with the SDF-1.
For me the biggest offenders were Klingon Birds of Prey (including in star trek 4 where some of the shots scaled the ship to have too small a cargo bay for transporting the whales required by the plot) and the capital ships of the Clone Wars animated series, where things got so bad that they had to claim that most of their warship designs had multiple ship designs of the same hull built to different size categories
Always found that sort of reasoning a bit daft. Just makes the universe more stupid rather than just going "yeah its an artstyle/cinematic thing deal with it".
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To be fair, the Bird of Prey is one of those few spaceship designs where you could plausibly claim the Klingons built versions from fighter-size to nearly capital-ship size. If there were more subtle differences in exterior I think that would be a good explanation.
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You mentioned the interior size of Warframe's Railjack, it's not as bad now as it was when the Railjack was originally introduced, there's a whole deck that DE deleted when they updated the Railjack and the area behind the bridge is now considerably narrower than the original release.
This is a great original about something most people just don't think about. Thanks for the content.
In addition to the scaling issues you’ve covered, you can run into different perceptual scaling issues. This is most obvious if you ever visit a museum warship, as ships will sometimes feel large and small at the same time. The battleship Alabama (35,000 tons) feels massive when standing next to her, but on the main deck and in some internal spaces feels rather small and cramped (something historians also note). The destroyer escort Stewart (1,200 tons) often feels cozy or even cramped when you recognize the size of the crew, but at other times she feels much larger (especially walking along the main deck whether in the superstructure or outside). It’s a weird dichotomy that really becomes apparent when you walk the ships for extended periods over a day, walking the decks like the crews would have rather than simply hitting the high points on the self-guided tour.
This is something you occasionally get with science fiction ships, with Defiant a particularly good example. It only magnifies the actual scaling issues unless you’ve been on a ship to experience this strange feeling yourself.
I was on an old Skorpion-class Soviet submarine once -- precisely the kind of interior you'd expect for a smallish space-faring warship, like a Defiant or Rocinante.
There is NO WAY you could have a 3rd-person game camera in there -- it would be buried in the back of your character's head 90% of the time.
And then there's the further complication of lens projection. The same thing can look bigger or smaller depending on the size of the lens, positioning etc.
@@stevenscott2136 Same, spent a whole day working/shooting in a WW2 US Gato sub. You can live in it, but it doesn't have the kind of room cinematic imagery expects/demands.
Idk, I'd think generally you'd have an environment suit, that could ride around a small craft, which could be stored in a larger craft, with a space station larger than both... and all the smaller things in each larger thing would probably look similar, but smaller, and maybe customized to each person's needs or lifestyle choices... they'd be like flying houses inside a flying city, with cars and space suits inside.....
I would like to hear about the practicalities of realistic ship sizes. It’d be cool to look at it from two perspectives of like a civilisation that’s only industrialised their home system vs a post scarcity unlimited resources civilisation.
And also adding in considerations of fictional ultra-strong materials or high-tech reinforcement, like Star Trek's structural integrity field, as a means of making larger designs more feasible.
Even for post-scarcity, it would require an interesting mindset to willingly sacrifice performance and economy in order to have 5m-wide corridors and private quarters for every lowly midshipman.
I'm thinking of Robert Sawyer's Great Ship stories -- the titular Ship is the size of Jupiter, nobody knows who built it, and has so much internal volume that a 100m by 100m stateroom with a fountain in the middle is considered "low-class".
My favourite example of this has got to be Oryx's Hive Dreadnaught in Destiny 1 which people have tried to analyse the scale of by comparing it to the rings of Saturn and the hole its super weapon made in them, resulting in wildly varied upper and lower estimates for it's total length that are literally multiple orders of magnitude apart! (the most widely accepted estimates have it at roughly as long from bow to stern as the USA is wide from coast to coast)
I admit that I never really noticed most of these examples, while enjoying the content. This is reassuring, as I work on a game development project and have been designing ships and interiors. I try to keep things to scale as much as possible, but it's nice to know that I can break those constraints if I need to without most people noticing or caring much.
Thank you very much for the video, informative and you used clips from several Ultraman series. I didn't think I'd ever see that on this channel. However, I shouldn't have been surprised, clips from various Gundam series are used. Its not just a Western view of sci-fi. Thanks again (I am one of those who had not noticed the Normandy scale).
I loved that our editor Charles put in Ultraman, it was so unexpected!
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I had imagined a battle scene between two Imperial class destroyers from Star Wars and a squadron of White Stars from Babylon 5. But given the White Star have been reported anywhere between 100+ to 400+ feet long, the scaling is going to be really ackward.
The best scale I have seen is 268m in length for a Whitestar, as that matches the 8km for B5 and 1.6km for an Omega.
@@steveaustin2686 If you guys want the official Canon numbers I have them... a Whitestar is 475.6 Metres long from nose to end of tail fins.
An Omega class Destroyer is 1,717.3 metres long, never did find out if that includes the sensor antennae sticking out the front though (probably does).
As an interesting note, Babylon 5 is much longer than 8km, only the centrifuge is 8km long, best guess for full station length from tip to tip has been about 11 miles (or 17.7km) based on the known diameter of the tube.
@@Ishlacorrin Yes, I know Tim Earl's 475m size for the Whitestar from S5 and then it doesn't match up to the Omega or B5.
Babylon 5 is 5 miles long per jms, so I accept that number.
@@steveaustin2686 ONLY the spinning section though, that is a Canon fact just like the Whitestar and Omega lengths. All of these were signed off on by JMS himself. I only use the verified Canon numbers myself.
@@Ishlacorrin While Tim Earl's S5 length is supposed to be canon, it does not match the 1.7km Omega. The 1.7km Omega matches a B5 that is 8km (5mi) long. A 268m Whitestar matches both the 1.7km Omega and 8km B5. Those are the sizes I use, no matter what later handwaving came along. The sizes of ships and B5 changed during the show, with S1 having the Sharlin at 300m, which fits the initial size of B5 at 1 mile. But S2 changed that. S5 brought the Whitestar changes, so the majority of the show S2-S4, matches what I said above.
Meanwhile, Star Citizen needs its scaling 100% perfect because there's no transition from inside and outside the ships, it's all one environment. Yet another thing that is way harder when you look back on other "great" video games of the past.
I personally wanna be really consistent about scale in my sci-fi because I want that moment when, some amount of time into the series, someone can say just the model of a ship and the audience knows exactly how scared/confident they should be. I want scale to be so well established that, when my relatively small hero ship encounters one of the other character ships, upon uttering the character ships name the audience will feel the same dread that my in universe characters might feel upon hearing that name.
Scale is especially important to this because the largest character ship in the story is repurposed for military use and is actually heavily impractical for that purpose. This makes it seem initially less intimidating and as a result I can't use legends of conquests to define the fear factor of this vessel. But my hero ship is tiny and therefore cannot meaningfully damage this vessel. An actual battleship would absolutely stand a chance but it's weaknesses as a military vessel aren't important to the main characters as they are just too tiny to take advantage of them
This just makes me think of The Expanse. Also, that sci-fi of yours sounds quite interesting; is it available anywhere?
@@widmo206 Not yet. Still in the early world building and writing stages. Getting a handle on what it's gonna look like before I dive right in
Oh hey, Ultramn Decker AND Warframe in one video!! It's like a treat just for me!! =D
Love for you to take a look at Star Citizen, they do the 1 to 1 inside to outside ships, and it has made things hard but makes them feel much more grounded then a lot of ships in Sci-Fi.
And one game that got around the visabilty of small ships at range is Homeworld1/2. They have the option to let smaller ships scale in the size as the camera moves away, so you can still see them clearly. Would love to see you all take a look at the ships from Hoemworld.
Thanks for video of a under talked about part of Sci-Fi.
I would really like a video on the practicalities of ship size overall, especially in a hard sci-fi setting. In my own fictional universe, everything is scaled up a little bit because of the fact that pretty much every ship, whatever its purpose, ends up being a generation ship, but in very general terms, I have the civilian ships be much larger than the military ones.
Elite Dangerous takes scale to a whole new level. They run a 1:1 scale of the MilkyWay. So if you’re on a planet, and you’re 100km away and your SRV has a top speed of 30km/h … you’re going to be driving for a while. This becomes even more prevalent when you’re on foot and you start running… you’ll be disappointed with how far you’ve run.
This does make the game a little more enveloping though. Anytime you dock at a station, you need to run to a certain location to board. While 30 seconds of running doesn’t sound bad… it really is annoying.
I do love the sheer size of the map.
A deep space trip can take weeks. It truly is horrifyingly big.
Starbug in Red Dwarf . . . basically a shuttlecraft with a cockpit and a rear room, matching the exterior design of two sections stuck together. . . but then sometimes it has miles of ducts to crawl through.
My only scaling sin is that I don't really check the rooms I'm making against the ships they're supposedly in. But for the ships themselves, I actually try to avoid scaling them, because scaled model **ALWAYS** going to cause problems in some way or another at some point in the future.
This problem can even crop up in books. When game designers at Ad Astra games pointed out the ships in David Weber's Honor Harrington novels had the density of cigarette smoke, he retconned the sizes of all his ships in subsequent editions.
Everyone knows about the scaling issues with the Bird of Prey in Star Trek, but the Oberth (introduced in the same movie as the Bird of Prey!) is another good example I keep coming back to in my mind. Depending on the scene in an episode/movie it might be 80 meters long-or more than 300m long- even longer than the original Enterprise. More modern interpretations seem to place it on the smaller end of the spectrum, but features on the physical model don't make much sense on smaller scales due to the unique shape of the ship. For instance, the 'saucer' section has a multiple hanger bays running around the saucer, you have windows indicating multiple decks, etc that just doesn't work with a small scale ship.
We just don't like to think about the Oberth. Fortunately, most of them blow up shortly after appearing on screen. 😁
Homeworld games have an option for NLIPS, or Non-Linear Perspective Scaling. This is a switch enabled by default that enlarges the uniform scale of smaller vessels like strike craft based on their distance from the camera. As an RTS that is often played zoomed out, the idea is to always make sure you can spot your units on the screen for easier accessibility and better gameplay. Once zoomed in, the "normal" scale of the smaller vessels returns.
There's a video on RUclips showing that the scaling of the Star Trek:Voyager ship was way off, because they had it fly through a planet's rings. They also rendered it's reflection in there and someone found out exactly how small that planet they were flying past really was!
Agreed especially about the Defiant in particular. I never could quite get it's scale