CS Clogau

[Graham Kennedy]

The battleship is the Kororra class. They are the most powerful warships of the Coalition. There are ships that are bigger (the largest is a little short of
8 km), but those are more in the way of support and supply, not heavy combat units.

[Teaos]

You planning on taking over the Galaxy arent you Graham. Come on you can tell us...

[Graham Kennedy]

Dude, the Coalition is small fry compared to some out there. There are those to whom a fleet of Kororra class ships would splatter on the windshield as they blow past.

[Teaos]

Size isnt everything.

[Reliant121]

Firepower and durability are more important.

Plus you need a good logistics service for galactic domination.

[Graham Kennedy]

It's my experience that few people who design very large ships have any real understanding of just what that would mean.

Take a Nimitz class carrier. They're 300 m long and hold about 90 aircraft and a crew of some 6,000. If you scaled one up to a mile, 1,600 m, then in volume terms it would be 151 times the size. That means it would be able to handle 13,653 aircraft and a crew of 910,000!

And that's not just how many you could stuff into it, that's how many it could comfortably operate as well as having all the necessary support facilities, fuel, weapons magazines, crew quarters, etc, plus space for the ship's own weapons and systems.

Now we can argue that a sci-fi fighter might need more extensive support facilities so you would fit less of them aboard... but few sci fi fighters are depicted as needing even as much support as a modern fighter, let alone far more.

Or take weapon emplacements. A Nimitz class has about four weapon emplacements, and it's regarded as a pretty lightly armed ship - basically point defence weapons only. If you scaled it up to a mile, the surface area alone would increase by more than 28 times, so it would easily be able to house 110+ weapon emplacements without being at all over the top.

One of the things I strive for in my designs is to avoid making ships bigger purely so I can go "wow, how cool is this 5 km ship!" The Kororra class carries 7,500 fighter craft. I could show you calculations of weapon yields against shield strengths to prove why it needs to have that many craft.

I could show you interior views of the launch catapults and landing runways it has to have to launch and land that many in a reasonable time. I could show you where the hangars are - and where all 7,500 craft are parked, along with space to easily move them around. I could show you where they are fuelled and armed, where the weapon magazines and fuel bunkers are in the ship.

So yeah, the Kororras are hellish big. But they're big because they have to be...

[stitch626]

Of course, if you compare them to V'Ger...

[Graham Kennedy]

Of course, if you compare them to V'Ger...

We don't really know how big V'Ger was, though. I came up with an estimate of about 100 km, but it could just as easily be half of that or ten times that.

[stitch626]

Good point. But we know it is big.

[Captain Seafort]

I'm not sure about the ship itself but the cloud, IIRC, was 2 AU in diameter.

[Graham Kennedy]

I'm not sure about the ship itself but the cloud, IIRC, was 2 AU in diameter.

It was 82 AU in the original movie. Actually makes it the largest artificial structured object in the whole of Trek. They retconned it to 2 AU in the special edition, for reasons that escape me.

[Captain Seafort]

They retconned it to 2 AU in the special edition, for reasons that escape me.

Maybe they decided having a ship over a third wider than the orbit of Neptune was a tad excessive.

[Teaos]

Depending on how dense it was thats a lot of raw materials.

[Graham Kennedy]

That wasn't the ship that was 82 AU, it was the cloud.

[Captain Seafort]

True, but that's still a vast amount of matter it's dragging along.