One Starship to Rule Them All -- Foreign Policy
What can we learn from the ultimate sci-fi geek chart of warships?
If Captain Kirk had to fight Darth Vader, he'd had better hope that size is not everything. Because the starship Enterprise battling an Imperial Star Destroyer would be like a flea attacking an elephant, if Dirk Loechel is right.
Loechel has created a size comparison chart of ships from nearly 40 sci-fi TV shows, movies, and video games. It shows a Star Trek Constellation-class starship, of which the Enterprise is the most famous progeny, being only about 300 meters long. A Star Wars Executor-class Super Star Destroyer, one of the largest ships on Loechel's chart, is 19,000 meters long (or 11.8 miles, because the Empire would be evil enough to reject the metric system).
A starship size chart may be the ultimate in geekery, but the notion that size reflects naval power is not. A 2,000-ton ship-of-the-line was reckoned more powerful in a Napoleonic fleet action than a 900-ton frigate; likewise, 20th-century naval powers raced to have mammoth battleships and cruisers, because larger ships could carry bigger weapons and thicker armor. Today's U.S. supercarriers aren't just awesome because of their firepower; these ships are also as long as football fields.
Read more ....
WNU Editor: The link to the chart is here.
No comments:
Post a Comment