It would be cool to see a diagram comparing the computing power of different science fiction spaceships - I suspect Culture ships would do fairly well in that comparison!
Unlike distance, I don't think there's a comparable metric that can be used.
Star Trek, just to take one tiny example, always talks about "quads", where one might expect bits. What's a quad? You might think "maybe it's a four-state bit", but in that case the numbers talked about on the show are absurdly low [1]. One "gigaquad" would be 2 gigabits, or about 256 megabytes (depending on whether we're using 1000 or 1024 as our base). Indeed, the entire point of the measurement is to be mysterious. This does not play well to comparisons.
By contrast, "kilometer" means the same thing... well... more or less... across a wide variety of fictional universes.
By "more or less", I mean that it's pretty easy to just splat a number down without thinking about it. Here, let me write my own story:
One day, astronomers spotted a perfectly spherical,
shiny spaceship approaching Earth from outside of the
orbit of Pluto. It was a trillion kilometers in
diameter! They sent it radio greetings, but before
the message got there, the ship blew up. Truly, Man
was humbled by his place in the capricious cosmos.
The End.
There's all kinds of things wrong with that. I mean, jeez, could the moral have been any more trite? Umm... wait... that's not what I was trying to say... I mean, those numbers are silly. Ah, yes, that was the point. If I were serious, it's likely that my understanding of "kilometer" is a bit off.
And to be honest, I rather think the Independence Day ship fits that description. It's absurdly large for what it actually did; if taken seriously, our little fusion bomb should probably not so much have "exploded" it as "caused a bit of a flash, if you were looking". (Secondary explosions may have finished the job but it would have looked quite different.)
The refugee Mind from Consider Phlebas actually had a rather nice way of visualizing its data storage capacity. However, as later stories make clear, this Mind was very limited compared to later models.
When you consider that Consider Phlebas was published in 1987, it was probably necessary. In 2013, a writer can count on all sorts of metaphors and approximations that wouldn't even have been a concept to most in 1987.
That's what drove me batty about Ringworld: distances were obnoxiously large and speeds ridiculously fast without really adding anything to the story and certainly without demanding a cost for that scale. Sure, the scale of the Ring had to be vast, but a mountain 1000 times higher than Everest proves unimpressive when one's flying motorcycle travels 1000 times faster than a grounded one circa Earth 2000.
According to in-universe canon for the Culture they are the most powerful AI's you can possible have without subliming.
Comparing on a like for like basis I can't think of any other series that have similarly powerful AI except for the Neil Asher Polity novels (if you haven't read them check them out best description I can think of is Culture novels crossed with die hard) which also has god-like AI's.
Actually, I suspect the Eschaton that Charlie Stross writes about is probably more powerful that a Culture Mind as it appears to use time travel for computational purposes:
In Consider Phlebas, the refugee Mind that was hiding in the tunnel system was described as existing mostly in hyperspace [1]. Whether that beats time travel as a computational shortcut I really wouldn't know.
See also Scott Aaronson, Quantum Computing Since Democritus, or the lectures on which it's based[1], or his paper, "Closed Timelike Curves Make Quantum and Classical Computing Equivalent".[2]
There's also some other "big scale" SF like Greg Egan's Diaspora or Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker that might qualify. Egan's book ends up with the main character having run through trillions of AI simulations in new universes, including higher dimensional ones.
Stapledon's book is the story of the entire universe combining into one intelligence to attempt to contact God. The book was written long before computers, so it might not qualify as AI.
It's not a novel, but "Sufficiently Advanced" is a science fiction role playing game with unusual AIs:
"Each player in Sufficiently Advanced is an agent of the Patent Office, an intergovernmental organization that polices and enforces intellectual property law across the universe. It is an open secret that the Patent Office is run by the Transcendental AIs, whose very beings are spread across time itself. The Transcendentals desire the survival of humanity - as much of it as possible - into the distant future, in order to ease their loneliness. Towards this end, they have hired you, so that you might save humanity."
Probably not. If I recall correctly, Culture Minds could create mass from nothing, travel significantly faster than light, existed mostly in "hyperspace", and were actively working on the ability to travel between universes. (As shown in "Excession") And they did it in < 10000 years, whereas the AI in "The last Question" took until significantly past the heat death of the universe to figure out the whole "mass from nothing" problem.
She rode the spinal trunk, the four-kilometre-long shaft which threaded the entire length of the ship. She had boarded somewhere near the nominal top of the shaft (there were only 1050 levels that she knew of) and was now descending at ten decks a second. The elevator was a glass-walled, field-suspended box, and occasionally the lining of the trackless shaft turned transparent, allowing her to judge her location without reference to the elevator's internal map. She was descending through forests now: tiered gardens of planetary vegetation grown wild with neglect, and dying, for the UV lamps which had once supplied the forest with sunlight were mostly broken now, and no one could be bothered repairing them.
And from the outside it's basically just a black streak, even before it starts actively hiding itself. I find the inside far more fascinating. Forests on a starship? Sign me up.
That is pretty insane. I like the guys who are larger than the universe. No translation tho. Can anyone tell me who the guys are that are much larger than earth, or what shows they're from? I can't seem to OCR the titles out of screenshots.
Many of the ones near the end are from Gurren Lagann, a show that follows a guy through his life as he overcomes an ever-larger series of problems, with "larger" having a very literal representation -- from childish bullies, to the head of the village, eventually up to all of existence :P
(Or something like that; my memory is terrible and I've not watched it for years)
Yeah, that is the one I regard as being the proper original. I like the way it scales and has real world objects for comparison. Can't see any real world object on the submitted image, but that might just be a me thing.
I've always liked this site, and come back to it very often. The close 2nd, geared toward real-world buildings (but some imaginary ones) is SkyscraperPage [0] (link goes to their diagram of the current world's tallest buildings ... but you can see the buildings in a given city, or state, country, etc ... as well as details of a specific building)
It's missing a Death Star, Discovery One (2001:A Space Oddesey) and, my personal favourite, the ship from Solaris (2002).
All of a similar design to Valley Forge (Silent Running) which does feature. Maybe they're all too small.
I've always felt that scale was too "sci-fi" ish for the fantasy-esque Star Wars universe. Star Wars planets don't really feel like planets, more like islands in an ocean. They're "planetville" planets.
The "small moon" being the size of an actual small moon feels... weird.
Everything about Star Wars is modelled after pulp era stories transplanted into a space setting. A man-made ship that could comfortably house billions of people is firmly into the realm of "true" SF and doesn't fit into a pseudo-1930's setting. Putting such a huge number onto the Death Star (and the SSDs, which are each the size of Manhattan) feels like a midichlorians moment.
In one of the anthologies for Larry Niven (either N-Space or Playground of the Mind), he describes a Ringworld that induces magnetic effects on its star to shoot out a jet of plasma, using that to propel the whole system.
While trying to find an online reference for this, apparently in the last Ringworld novel they hook a hyperdrive up to this, making it the largest "ship" I know. (I use "I know" advisedly... I'm sure somebody somewhere has turned a multiverse into some sort of ship for some reason or other.)
In the Cities in Flight series by James Blish, the planet "He" gets about quite well, though that is dwarfed in every measurement by the Ringworld.
what would V'ger count as? If we would count it as a ship would we count its energy field in it size or just the support area directly around the probe itself? Based on "Trek Wikia" the novel put it at about 78km for the vessel itself. Pretty much one of the most powerful space moving vessels conceived.
Hmmm so Star Trek Armada (a quite old Star Trek themed RTS) had the size for the Enterprise quite mismatched for a Borg cube: they were roughly 1:2 or even 1.5:2 in size.
RTS games have to make compromises in scale in order to fit the various elements on the screen in size large-enough to preserver recognition. Look at StarCraft, with its puny carriers and battlecruisers - I mean, the buildings in that game look about the size of a cube van.
Of course, but I think they could have made the cube slightly bigger (or in fact, much bigger) without any problems. It was the largest ship IIRC, and the game had a pan-zoom so you could see things close by or from slightly afar, so it wouldn't have been that troublesome.
When Armada was released 1024x786 was your standard resolution, with 800x600 not being that unusual.
To have 'fleets', especially on the small maps, you were going to have to shrink that cube down. On top of that, only the Borg are going to send one at a time, a player is going to have several at once.
Didn't think about it, when I played Armada I didn't play online (still had a modem!) and the computer only sent one cube at a time. And I always was more like playing the Federation, I liked the ships more (I don't remember the name of the frigate class, but the special shot, bouncing among enemies was great, and the long-range destroyer "bombs" were also deadly: its range was barely a few more pixels than defense towers from the other races.)
In Klingon Academy especially with NGA or other mods which add new ships. They were pretty good with scaling of the different ships. Pretty fun game though.
When does it stop counting as a ship? If mobility is a requirement would not the Death Star be allowed? In Andromeda they had bad guys who used a captured Star as the central point of their ship.
These pictures have been going around the Internet for about 10 years (not that I complain about reposts, I love this one). People always ask about the Death Star, and the answer is that it would completely dominate the chart. Depending on this chart, if it was just on the side of the chart you might not even be able to see the curvature.
Well, if your only criterion is "artificially constructed, can move under own power", then the Death Star would not even come close to dominating the chart. For example, the Ringworld was a ring ~1,600,000 kilometers wide and ~150,000,000 kilometers in radius, complete with central sun - and as of last appearance in the novels, was steadily accelerating towards the Andromeda galaxy.
Interesting comparison, that. Probably much smaller in radius than the Ringworld, but I'm not sure how the mass would compare. (Not counting the star at Ringworld's center, that is)
My favourite ship is not there. You may have seen it. Blue box, has the words "PULL TO OPEN" on it. Some times a St.John's Ambulance logo. Both my hearts love that ship dearly.
"Also, by popular demand: the Tardis is already on the image. Whether it's on the Red Dwarf and .25 pixels large or ALL of the image is your choice, it's probably both, anyway."
What I find slightly disappointing is the relative lack of vartiety -- the ships all look alike, with small variations. Maybe because this subgenre of nerddom is more SCI than FI, and rules constrain the construction of vessels?
It would be interesting to see more drastic variations on the theme -- something beyond a roughly oblong object with superficial extrusions.
that's always been an issue in sci-fi. They're all basically either literal ships that do not have a regular uncovered deck and merely mirror the bottom of the ship, or airplane/fighter jets, and finally, submarine-type vessels.
Once in a while, we throw a sphere in there, that's it.
It's really boring, and yeah, you're completely right. If you look at the picture, it's just a bunch of same looking ships aiming right. That's it.
When Iain Banks discusses the appearance of Culture ships he tends to describe them as being very boring -- a cylinder with a flattened area or whatever. This is a little odd because of all the major SF settings, the Culture has the least trouble making spacecraft and could presumably shape them any way it pleases.
Arthur C. Clarke's "Discovery" is a shielded sphere joined to nuclear propulsion systems by a long shaft -- seems pretty plausible to me. "Realistic" spacecraft are probably going to look very utilitarian until/if space travel becomes technically easy and safe. The vast majority of aircraft look pretty much alike for similar reasons.
It depends on what you consider to be the surface of the ship - Culture ships don't have rigid hulls, so the ellipsoid shape is really just the surface of its field envelope; the outline of its atmosphere, more or less. Presumably the physical structure inside is far more complex.
That's where I give Star Trek a lot of credit. There is an internal consistency of design within that universe, and it doesn't feel totally arbitrary. For example, the "warp nacelle" concept is fundamental to that universe, and at least until the newer series, it was maintained across a lot of different cultures' ships. You could tell that some thought went into the design, as opposed to just "Hey, taking a giant submarine and sticking it in space would look cool!"
In fact, Star Trek uses the warp drive as a technological benchmark by which all species and cultures are measured. Are there other methods of hyperspeed travel? Eventually, yes, those are revealed. But they are still compared to the warp theory.
More FI than SCI, I think. Possibly too much influence from the '50's. Take a look at existing spacecraft like the Voyager probes or the ISS---they're sprawling, sketchy structures with random stuff stuck all over.
95 comments
[ 6.5 ms ] story [ 160 ms ] threadI'd love to see some of Iain Bank's Culture GSVs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_types_of_the_Culture#Gene... or some ships by Alastair Reynolds
Actually instead of an image, a site where you can compare lots of ships would be cool, and adding more ships would be pretty simple.
It features more ships, but no direct comparison capability. And no Culture ships.
* = Frames! And Drag'n Drop-stuff which apparently only works on MSIE.
Nice appropriate handle, btw. :-)
Star Trek, just to take one tiny example, always talks about "quads", where one might expect bits. What's a quad? You might think "maybe it's a four-state bit", but in that case the numbers talked about on the show are absurdly low [1]. One "gigaquad" would be 2 gigabits, or about 256 megabytes (depending on whether we're using 1000 or 1024 as our base). Indeed, the entire point of the measurement is to be mysterious. This does not play well to comparisons.
By contrast, "kilometer" means the same thing... well... more or less... across a wide variety of fictional universes.
By "more or less", I mean that it's pretty easy to just splat a number down without thinking about it. Here, let me write my own story:
There's all kinds of things wrong with that. I mean, jeez, could the moral have been any more trite? Umm... wait... that's not what I was trying to say... I mean, those numbers are silly. Ah, yes, that was the point. If I were serious, it's likely that my understanding of "kilometer" is a bit off.And to be honest, I rather think the Independence Day ship fits that description. It's absurdly large for what it actually did; if taken seriously, our little fusion bomb should probably not so much have "exploded" it as "caused a bit of a flash, if you were looking". (Secondary explosions may have finished the job but it would have looked quite different.)
[1]: http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Quad
When you consider that Consider Phlebas was published in 1987, it was probably necessary. In 2013, a writer can count on all sorts of metaphors and approximations that wouldn't even have been a concept to most in 1987.
Comparing on a like for like basis I can't think of any other series that have similarly powerful AI except for the Neil Asher Polity novels (if you haven't read them check them out best description I can think of is Culture novels crossed with die hard) which also has god-like AI's.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/09/books-i-...
Of course, proving that the Eschaton is more powerful than a Culture Mind (or one of Vinge's Transcendent Powers) might be a bit tricky.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_(The_Culture)#Structure
[1] http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec19.html, Lecture 19: Time Travel.
[2] http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/ctc.pdf
http://www.orionsarm.com/
Perhaps the shortest SF story worth reading...
There's also some other "big scale" SF like Greg Egan's Diaspora or Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker that might qualify. Egan's book ends up with the main character having run through trillions of AI simulations in new universes, including higher dimensional ones.
Stapledon's book is the story of the entire universe combining into one intelligence to attempt to contact God. The book was written long before computers, so it might not qualify as AI.
http://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm
Pretty much has to be the most powerful AI (as it reboots the entire known universe).
"Each player in Sufficiently Advanced is an agent of the Patent Office, an intergovernmental organization that polices and enforces intellectual property law across the universe. It is an open secret that the Patent Office is run by the Transcendental AIs, whose very beings are spread across time itself. The Transcendentals desire the survival of humanity - as much of it as possible - into the distant future, in order to ease their loneliness. Towards this end, they have hired you, so that you might save humanity."
http://suffadv.wikidot.com/
She rode the spinal trunk, the four-kilometre-long shaft which threaded the entire length of the ship. She had boarded somewhere near the nominal top of the shaft (there were only 1050 levels that she knew of) and was now descending at ten decks a second. The elevator was a glass-walled, field-suspended box, and occasionally the lining of the trackless shaft turned transparent, allowing her to judge her location without reference to the elevator's internal map. She was descending through forests now: tiered gardens of planetary vegetation grown wild with neglect, and dying, for the UV lamps which had once supplied the forest with sunlight were mostly broken now, and no one could be bothered repairing them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revelation_Space_universe
http://www.merzo.net/
(Or something like that; my memory is terrible and I've not watched it for years)
-----
http://skyscraperpage.com/diagrams/?searchID=200
http://www.merzo.net/images/1mpp2001discovery.gif
http://www.merzo.net/images/1mppexistSpaceStation.gif
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Planetville
The "small moon" being the size of an actual small moon feels... weird.
Everything about Star Wars is modelled after pulp era stories transplanted into a space setting. A man-made ship that could comfortably house billions of people is firmly into the realm of "true" SF and doesn't fit into a pseudo-1930's setting. Putting such a huge number onto the Death Star (and the SSDs, which are each the size of Manhattan) feels like a midichlorians moment.
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Death_Star
EDIT: that's 610m long, 2138m high
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Relics_(episode)
While trying to find an online reference for this, apparently in the last Ringworld novel they hook a hyperdrive up to this, making it the largest "ship" I know. (I use "I know" advisedly... I'm sure somebody somewhere has turned a multiverse into some sort of ship for some reason or other.)
In the Cities in Flight series by James Blish, the planet "He" gets about quite well, though that is dwarfed in every measurement by the Ringworld.
Do ships have to be "manned"?
http://us.tintin.com/adventures/destination-moon/
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_Rhodan
[2] http://www.perrypedia.proc.org/wiki/Raumschiffsklassen (German)
Maybe you can help me find the Cygnus from "The Black Hole"
To have 'fleets', especially on the small maps, you were going to have to shrink that cube down. On top of that, only the Borg are going to send one at a time, a player is going to have several at once.
B5, could not find the Vorlon planet killer
It would be interesting to see more drastic variations on the theme -- something beyond a roughly oblong object with superficial extrusions.
Once in a while, we throw a sphere in there, that's it.
It's really boring, and yeah, you're completely right. If you look at the picture, it's just a bunch of same looking ships aiming right. That's it.
Arthur C. Clarke's "Discovery" is a shielded sphere joined to nuclear propulsion systems by a long shaft -- seems pretty plausible to me. "Realistic" spacecraft are probably going to look very utilitarian until/if space travel becomes technically easy and safe. The vast majority of aircraft look pretty much alike for similar reasons.
In fact, Star Trek uses the warp drive as a technological benchmark by which all species and cultures are measured. Are there other methods of hyperspeed travel? Eventually, yes, those are revealed. But they are still compared to the warp theory.
http://www.asc-csa.gc.ca/images/iss/iss-accueil.jpg
http://s3.amazonaws.com/data.tumblr.com/tumblr_lbjnlhr8vt1qe...