Absalom Station and Idari seem smaller than I thought they’d be.

[theelcorspectre]

I apologize if this question makes me sound foolish, but when I first heard about Starfinder, one of the first heard about the Starfinder setting, the first part that came to my attention was Absalom Station. A large space station that replaced the orbit of the lost planet Golarion. The center of power and culture within the Pact Worlds. A melting pot of different alien cultures and a homing beacon for ships traveling light years through Drift Travel. I imagined it to analogous to Mass Effect’s Citadel.

Then I read through the Core Rulebook, and Absalom Station is only five miles in diameter. Now I might be underestimating how much Space that is, but it does seem a little small for a Space Station that is described as being the size of a large city. In addition, the Idari is only three miles in length.

What do you guys think?

[Nyerkh]

Scale in Starfinder is surprising on a bunch of points, especially compared to other scifi settings. It's just a thing.

Absalom specifically doesn't tell the whole story though, because the dimensions don't take the armada into account. I don't think it's ever clearly stated, so it could be just my headcanon, but I'd kind of expect most of the population living there rather than on the station itself.

The Idari bothers me more, because that's just not a whole lot of people for a civilization's ark.

[Corsair17]

As far as Idari goes, let's make the assumption that it is 3 miles long by 1 mile in width and 1 mile in height. Each deck is 20' high on average. 3 square miles per deck with approximately 250 decks gives 750 square miles of habitation space.

Absalom station has approximately 19.6 square miles of area per deck, so however many decks are on the station gives that space.

[Pogiforce]

The width of Absalom station may be 5 miles, but that doesn't take into account vertical space. See the Spire, or Bluerise tower.

[Pantshandshake]

I believe them to be approximately Plot Sized, or perhaps Big Enough For the Story You're Telling.

Starfinder and Real Life Numbers do not generally get along.

[theelcorspectre]

I like the idea of saying that Absalom and Idari aren’t being measured in LAND miles, but SPACE miles. What’s the difference? Well you see, a LAND mile is equal to 1.609 kilometers and a SPACE mile is equal to *unintelligible alien gibberish*!

[thejeff]

Corsair17 wrote:

As far as Idari goes, let's make the assumption that it is 3 miles long by 1 mile in width and 1 mile in height. Each deck is 20' high on average. 3 square miles per deck with approximately 250 decks gives 750 square miles of habitation space.

Absalom station has approximately 19.6 square miles of area per deck, so however many decks are on the station gives that space.

The space being 3-dimensional makes it much larger than we intuitively expect comparing it to Earth cities of equivalent width.

[Pantshandshake]

Then you have to figure out the completely made up sizes for all the equipment you need to make a space station/ark ship permanently habitable, like water treatment/reclamation, ductwork/pipes, power grids, greenhouses, etc, and subtract that made up number from the guesstimate we used to figure out total area, and you end up with a habitable area that has zero basis in reality.

Which is why I stick with Plot Sized.

Although, I might just start saying Space Math, because of Space Measurements, from now on. Thanks, theelcorspectre!

[Corsair17]

I like Space/Plot math. On the Reaper Forums we use Goblin Math, anything more than you can count on fingers and toes is 20.

[Tryn]

You are poking into a generell problem in many tales or RPGs. Humans are really bad in setting sizes (and especially volumes) into relations.
Take the a medium size ship (~80 Meter] this sounds small or?
But it's quite large. I normally do a rough 3D block-out of my players ships and put a human in scale next to it, so my player know the size (or put it into a game engine, which is even better).
And you would be supprised how f$%$ing big a 70 x 20 x 10 Meter ship is.

Now take Absalom station, 5 miles/8km diameter diameter, so one deck has a area of 50 square kilometers (20 sq miles).
Now assume 10 meters per deck = 4000 / 10 = 400 Decks => 20.000 sq km
Half this number since it's not a cylinder, but more of a half globe and we have 10.000 square km (or ~ 4000 square miles) which is roughly 50 times as big as Washington DC.

And now we are at another problem with "space sizes":
If Absalom Station only contain housing, commerce, industry like a normal city this space could house ~ 35 Million people.
Ok, let's assume one third of the station is life support, energy & food regeneration etc. then we are still at enough space for 22 Mio people at a density similar to a modern city.
So the problem is not the size of the station but the low population (you have similar issue with the space ships in SF (and other Scifi IPs, see e.g. Star Trek https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lwx5uB0pyhQ)).

So basically it's a generell problem with three dimensional space and size. ;)

[Pantshandshake]

I think it's probably more the size part, than the 3D space part. Having built some buildings, I'm a pretty fair judge of how much space we're talking in square feet. I can do cubic feet, up to like regular livable space sizes, fairly well.

But, like, a cubic mile? No way. I'd bet most people can't accurately conceptualize how much space a cubic mile is.

[Xenocrat]

The biggest problem with the Idar isn't dimensions, it's the population. I like to believe 90-95% of them settled elsewhere in the Pact Worlds and most of the ship is vacant or exceptionally roomy.

[Pantshandshake]

Reavers got 'em.

[Yakman]

Xenocrat wrote:

The biggest problem with the Idar isn't dimensions, it's the population. I like to believe 90-95% of them settled elsewhere in the Pact Worlds and most of the ship is vacant or exceptionally roomy.

I'd concur. There's lots of Kasatha on Akiton and elsewhere in the Pact Worlds.

But yeah, both the Idari and Absalom Station are as large as they need to be for your story. Paizo often has weird population numbers / areas for their setting, and DMs should feel free to ignore those things.

[Tryn]

For the Idari I would guess that beside the normal people, there were also several thousands of Kashata in cryo-sleep. It's a exodus arc, so you try to evacuate as much people as possible.

[Metaphysician]

I generally take the dimension measurements for both structures and add a zero in all directions. I do likewise for the population. It generally makes them fit druthers better. There may be a joke about how the official astrographic profiles in Starpedia have remarkably poor editing.

Also, while yes, that does mean I'm increasing their volume 100x more than their population. This is a feature, not a mistake: the way the insides of both structures are described, they do *not* actually resemble their volume used at NYC+ level population densities. Both have fairly vast wide open spaces taking up large chunks of their volume, and otherwise do not consist of vast bays of maximum-density living quarters.

[Ixal]

Tryn wrote:

You are poking into a generell problem in many tales or RPGs. Humans are really bad in setting sizes (and especially volumes) into relations.

Take the a medium size ship (~80 Meter] this sounds small or?
But it's quite large. I normally do a rough 3D block-out of my players ships and put a human in scale next to it, so my player know the size (or put it into a game engine, which is even better).
And you would be supprised how f++$ing big a 70 x 20 x 10 Meter ship is.

Now take Absalom station, 5 miles/8km diameter diameter, so one deck has a area of 50 square kilometers (20 sq miles).
Now assume 10 meters per deck = 4000 / 10 = 400 Decks => 20.000 sq km
Half this number since it's not a cylinder, but more of a half globe and we have 10.000 square km (or ~ 4000 square miles) which is roughly 50 times as big as Washington DC.

And now we are at another problem with "space sizes":
If Absalom Station only contain housing, commerce, industry like a normal city this space could house ~ 35 Million people.
Ok, let's assume one third of the station is life support, energy & food regeneration etc. then we are still at enough space for 22 Mio people at a density similar to a modern city.
So the problem is not the size of the station but the low population (you have similar issue with the space ships in SF (and other Scifi IPs, see e.g. Star Trek https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lwx5uB0pyhQ)).

So basically it's a generell problem with three dimensional space and size. ;)

On one side this is large compared to other man made objects.

On the other hand, compared to the Pact Worlds it is tiny.

Triaxus is close to earth like so even when you assume a rather low population density that are 5+ Billion people right there. Verces, even though its tidally locked will also house a few billion people. Same with the rather rural Castrovel (also earth sized) and the small planets in the system.

Just think about it, each of the major planets in the Pact Worlds has as much diversity and space as real life earth. Absolom is basically the Tokyo Bay area compared to that.
And when you realized that then double this size as the Vesk system also have several habitable planets...

[Tryn]

A friend of mine and I did a few calculation based on some todays stats.
- A normal european harbor city (Hamburg) has a population density of ~ 2500 per sqkm.
- today you need 1 sqkm to feed 100 people.

We assumed a the measurements above (8 km diameter, 10 meter per deck)
We made the following assumption:
- 1 sqkm of "scifi farms" can feed 1000 people
- Absalom should be half self-sustaining
- 1/3 of the space is dedicated to life support and other "life in space" stuff (o2 Generator, Waste recycler etc.)

Based on this we did some math:
- total area of Absalom Station ~ 10.000 sqkm
- dedicated to food production ~ 5000 sqkm (would feet 5 Mio people)
- 1/3 of the remaining space for live support etc. (~ 1.500 sqkm)
- 3500 sqkm left for people, Industrie etc.
- 3500 sqkm x pop densitiy = 8,75 Mio people

still more then in the book, but much closer then the 35 Mio I estimated above.
It's really interesting if you do this kind of math and really "see" waht space is needed. :D