Ah Crap

I just realized that I forgot the TPM reactors and reactor overload incident for the Star Wars Power Tech page.

D'oh.

Krenim SketchUp

The Krenim Temporal Weapon-Ship, scaled to about 1250 meters per DITL, nets me 12,862,049 cubic meters.   I was trying to avoid putting one-off ships in the list for some reason, but I may have to add it to the newly updated Volumetrics page.

DS9 Scaling Retardedness

In Google SketchUp, I have a DS9 model, a runabout model, a Defiant model, and a Galaxy Class model, along with some little blue figurine dudes for scale, and I have them all scaled correctly.  SketchUp lets you create 'scenes', meaning you can carefully place your camera, adjust your field of view and zoom and such, and basically get a picture looking more or less like you want it.

I'll be reporting more on this soon (hopefully sharing images for comparison against DS9 screencaps). But first, I just wanted to say that David Stipes and his dramaturgical rescaling routine is really, really annoying.  I knew it would be going in, but it truly boggles the mind to actually watch it unfold on my screen.

In any case, this is just a quick note about the little mini-project.  Remember the DS9 opening credits with those welding dudes?  Yeah, even if the station is a 'mere' 1097 meters (as designed), those dudes are over 24 feet tall.  (James Cameron, eat your heart out.)   To get 1.8 meter humanoids to look anywhere close to correct against the station, it must be shrunk to around 335 meters.

Goofy.

In lighter news . . . well, I won't name names, but someone posted a screwed up model of the TNG shuttlepod . . . the one they made super-boxy so that it would be cheap to build.  A shuttlepod!  Good sweet heavens, man!  I realize it isn't a cube, but it isn't that complicated either  . . . no curves, no complex curves, no nothing.  Just simple angles. 

Now bear in mind, I respect these guys . . . I sure wouldn't want to do any of this mess.  I'd probably die trying to get the TOS Constitution right.   But good grief . . . I have to draw the line at a screwed up shuttlepod.

Updates on the Main Page

I haven't mentioned them here yet, but they're there, including updates to the Overview, a new page on SW power technology, and more.

I'm probably going to update the Volumetrics page with the new Star Wars and new Google SketchUp data, then quit for awhile.  Been spending a lot of time on this, which is nice insofar as making up for a lot of lost time, but I don't want to get burned out.  And, it would be nice to get other things done.  :-)

Thanks for reading!

Neo-Volumetrics

Sweet!

You can do volumetric analysis without LightWave or any other expensive modeler now. Google Sketchup has had a lot of Star Wars models made for it. And, with a volume plugin found here, you can get far better estimates of a ship's volume than you can by simply guessing at simpler shapes.

For instance, a TOS Connie I downloaded and tried to rescale by hand (I think it's about 850ft right now, which is only 259 meters) came out to 156,000 cubic meters, which is not too bad considering. If I calculate after the fact to try to correct it (bearing in mind I've never used the program so I don't know what I'm doing when measuring), I come up with 216,000 cubic meters. My ST-v-SW Connie volume is 211,000, so that's pretty damn close all things considered.

Models I've tried so far:

TOS Enterprise with bad length
http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=c6fbcd07ca96c97ed217db332f4745ff&prevstart=0

Gorgeous Munificent, but only 733m long (had to lengthen it)
http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=9ad48f8c225108697417f80cc0f3cf2c&prevstart=0

Venator (bad length, had to lengthen to 3725ft)
http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=99aa1f34d852fbb5ff2c56fe607e6796&prevstart=0

Invisible Hand (awful length)
http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=768aca096055b122a64762cc420ce77a&prevstart=0

The very pretty Munificent model I measured to within 5% gave me a volume of 2,137,120 cubic meters. A simple Venator model at the same accuracy nets me 10,616,929 cubic meters . . . a difference of almost five times, despite the ships being only 1130 vs. 830 meters (the Muni's shorter). (For reference, the Muni's volume is less than a Sovereign Class Federation starship, and she's 130 meters longer . . . we all know how sleek and spindly the Sovereigns are.)

Given that much of the Venator volume is composed of carrier-related space, though, she's really a big empty ship. If we assume half of her volume is dedicated to fighters, then the ship's only about 2.5 times the volume of the Muni, which (in concert with life support and other humanoid crew requirements) gets us closer to understanding the combat ratio from TCW.

The Invisible Hand, at only 1088m, comes out to a length-corrected volume value of 6,436,107m^3.

Other models:

AT-AT:
http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=1a451e8ef0305f6ec4e5bc34eca27821&prevstart=0
615 cubic meters at 22.5m height (or thereabout).  Seems about right compared to Danube Class at 542 cubic meters.

Pretty good Falcon:
http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=4ebf7bc43d767bd425405c61741b95bb&ct=mdsa&prevstart=0
But something's wrong with it . . . even with the length corrected, it only reads ~700 cubic meters, which is very wrong.  Even a 30m wide 2m tall saucer should have twice that.  The Falcon should be at least 1500m^3 and probably double or so.

ISD with excessive docking bay:
http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=f9efd56c3137d14ba4ee0fb6a51564c3&prevstart=0
There's another ISD with excessive reactor bulb and unshapely docking bay.  Can't seem to find a really good one.
Edit:  Ah, here's one:
http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=b656e4ab907a876b213ef50647c3c88&prevstart=12
But when I make it a mile long, I get a volume of 86,547,000 cubic meters, which is way high.  I tried doing the volume in cubic feet, since the template for the model is in feet, but it came out the same.  So something's wrong with the model, I think.
http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=ec3479e79c61cf1ef33214a2991e934f
Tried this one, too, but ended up with 18.7 million something whatever, which is also crap.

Dammit, Star Wars fans, can't we build a model that doesn't suck!

Executor:
http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=21053701a00c82de630a81e41b3b6ffd&prevstart=0
The volume comes out wrong (10% of expectation based on what I had already), but the ship is of approximately the correct dimensions.

Romulan Warbird:
http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=c5b88c16e0091eed6208ceb8c2299bcc&ct=mdsa&prevstart=0
Scaled to 1358m, I got a volume of 18,389,163 cubic meters, which is probably much closer than the 26 million that came from a really crappy looking Lightwave model back in the day.

Runabout:
http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=d421c83927baa74e264c43f47c3e0e4d&prevstart=0
The length is bad.

Enjoy!

Klingon Battlecruiser Question

So in TOS the Klingons were supposedly flying D-7s but most of the rest of the time we're seeing K't'inga Class ships, including in "Unexpected"[ENT] from 2151.

But see, here's my thing:  Am I the only one who can't tell the bloody things apart?  

Bernd at Ex Astris suggests there is a "clear difference between the two ship classes", but other than extra greeblies and similar surface detail I can't see it.  And the DS9 "Trials and Tribble-ations" ship and the remastered TOS Klingon ship had surface detail, too (especially the DS9 ship), so unless I'm supposed to determine ship class by looking at hull plating intersection designs I'm not seeing an obvious way of doing it, and I'll be damned if I'm going to care to distinguish them by intersection designs.

So what's the deal?  What am I missing?

Star Wars Text vs. the Enterprise

This is fantastic . . . the amateur effects (mostly the fire FX) are remarkable:

Star Wars vs. Star Trek