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Reposting from a slight thread derail here in case it's of interest to anyone else. I'd also appreciate checks on my numbers in case I'm wildly off (it happens):
It seems there's no upper limit for colossal creatures. The aspidochelone at 500 feet and 100,000 tons would be as long as a large ship and over 100x the weight of the smallest colossal ship (8,000 tons).
But now that I compare ship tonnages, Starfinder starships do seem suspiciously tiny. A WW2-era heavy cruiser is ~700 feet long (large) and displaces ~8,000 tons (colossal). Star Trek's USS Voyager is supposed to be 1131 feet long (huge) and weigh 771,617 tons (!?).
If Voyager (344 m long, 130 m tall, 63 m wide) were a cuboid of 700,000,000 kg, its density would be ~248 kg/m^3--or a little under a quarter that of water. So let's say the Voyager takes up a quarter the space of its cuboid, making it about as dense as water. A mid-weight huge (810 US tons, or 734,820 kg) Starfinder ship of the same dimensions would be ~0.26 kg/m^3 as a cuboid and ~1 kg/m^3 as the shape of Voyager. That's a little lighter than air at sea level.
Information sources and assumptions:
- Starfinder ship data: Chapter 9 of the Core Rulebook, with tonnages assumed to be in US tons (consistent with the norm of US-imperial measurements used by US-based Paizo).
- WW2-era Heavy cruiser: Wikipedia article, specifically mentions an international treaty putting an upper limit on cruiser tonnage.
- USS Voyager: Dimensions from various wiki sources and other websites, but they're all consistent, at least. Tonnage of 700,000 from mentions in a couple episodes of Voyager, assumed to be metric tonnage (1 metric ton = 1,000 kg ≈ 1.1 US tons) since Star Trek dialog tends toward metric usage. 1/4 cuboid volume is a hand wave, but it feels more-or-less intuitive to me *shrug*.
I think the error in your thinking is using a fictional space ship as a point of comparison. If I'm reading this right, Voyager is about 60% longer and 90,000% heavier than the WW2 cruiser.
For a better, real life example, the US space Shuttles (Challenger et al) are 122ft long, 28ft in diameter and are essentially cylinders. The weight is 75 tons empty.
I found the error in your calculation. Water is 1kg/1000cm3, liter is a 10x10x10cm cube. 1m3 is 1,000,000,000 cm3
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Wikipedia gives space shuttle dimensions of 56.1 m (184.2 ft) long and 8.7 m (28.5 ft) diameter. At 78,000 kg, such a cylinder would have a density of 23.4 kg/m^3.
Water is 1 g/cm^3 = 1000 kg/m^3.
Using a Northampton-class heavy cruiser (183 m long, 20 m width, ~16 m double draft; 8,164,663 kg) as the archetypal example, we would have a cuboid of 132 kg/m^3. I have no idea what the best geometric shape would be to approximate a navy cruiser, but it would at any rate get denser as parts of the cuboid were chopped away.
So ranking by density:
1. cube of liquid water (1000 kg/m^3)
2. 1/4 cuboid USS Voyager from Star Trek (~1000 kg/m^3)
3. cuboid USS Northampton from US Navy (~132 kg/m^3)
4. cylindrical space shuttle from NASA (~23.4 kg/m^3)
5. cube of Earth air at sea level (~1.2 kg/m^3)
6. 1/4 cuboid spaceship in Starfinder (~1.0 kg/m^3)
Perhaps we should find a different fictional example than the very specialist Intrepid-class deep space explorer. I think a Klingon Bird of Prey probably lines up closer to Starfinder ships, or perhaps a mid-sized Star Wars ship.
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Yes, the starships at the upper end of the scale in Starfinder are extremely light. With enough magic and science fantasy involved, that's not necessarily wrong in and of itself. The numbers are still completely nonsensical, but it is not just because the ships are light.
The short version of that post is that ship mass and ship length increase with no consistent pattern and do so completely independently of each other, resulting in a blatant, inelegant violation of the square-cube law and thus basic physics. This is a problem even for smaller Starfinder ships, as it is merely most pronounced with the largest ones.
Yes. I for reasons I can't explain decided it was 1000cm per m when doing the cube.
I'm a biochemist, not an engineer.
I used the Orbiter dimensions, not including the launch rockets, since that's the part flying around.
Wikipedia gives space shuttle dimensions of 56.1 m (184.2 ft) long and 8.7 m (28.5 ft) diameter. At 78,000 kg, such a cylinder would have a density of 23.4 kg/m^3.
Water is 1 g/cm^3 = 1000 kg/m^3.
Using a Northampton-class heavy cruiser (183 m long, 20 m width, ~16 m double draft; 8,164,663 kg) as the archetypal example, we would have a cuboid of 132 kg/m^3. I have no idea what the best geometric shape would be to approximate a navy cruiser, but it would at any rate get denser as parts of the cuboid were chopped away.
So ranking by density:
1. cube of liquid water (1000 kg/m^3)
2. 1/4 cuboid USS Voyager from Star Trek (~1000 kg/m^3)
3. cuboid USS Northampton from US Navy (~132 kg/m^3)
4. cylindrical space shuttle from NASA (~23.4 kg/m^3)
5. cube of Earth air at sea level (~1.2 kg/m^3)
6. 1/4 cuboid spaceship in Starfinder (~1.0 kg/m^3)
