I guess the question can be summed up “so how many Enterprises/Imperial Star Destroyers/White Stars etc.” can you manufacture from a planet which has as much mineral as Earth. Would it be necessary to strip-mine a couple of Earths just for an Imperial Star Destroyer?
The assumption is that you could strip-mine the entire planet if you need to.
Wiki gives the Enterprise “E” a mass of 3.25 million metric tons. (And 685 meters long, 282 meters wide, 75 meters high.)
No mass on a Star Destroyer in wiki, but it gives dimensions of 1600meters by 1000 meters.
A US Nimitz-type carrier is 104,000 metric tons, 330 meters long, 78 meters wide. (Don’t have a “height” for keel to top of island structure. It’s draft is given as 37ft.)
Enterprise looks to be roughly twice the volume of a Nimitz, but 31 times “heavier”. Nimitz is steel, but “E” is some “future metal”.
(I realise that an increase in volume is not necessarily linear in ships. HMS Dreadnought was 161 x 25 x 29, carried 11 inch armor plates, and still weighed in at 1/5th a Nimitz.)
Short answer: Earth alone could build a shit ton of any of these ships.
I think it’s assumed in most fictional universes with these kinds of space faring behemoths that the builders have already mastered the art of mining resources from places other than their home planet.
I assume that’s the black hole they keep in the basement that keeps everyone from floating around when the power dies (as it does in every other episode).
You’d probably use asteroid material. Assuming that star destroyers are built out of stuff you can make out of asteroids. No need to build them on a planet, and there are a few good reasons not too.
The biggest being that, even in soft SF, most of the big ships can’t land, and probably couldn’t take off without damaging themselves or the planet.
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The whole industry is pretty heavily regulated these days, ever since the SDF-1 took out that island.
For Star Trek, is there an official origin for the materials used at Utopia Planitia?
The economics of the future is somewhat different. You see, money doesn’t exist in the 24th century. We work to better ourselves.
Building them out of material mined on a planet doesn’t mean you need to build it there.
Twice the volume? Assuming similar shape, which they aren’t, and a height of a carrier of twice the draft, the Enterprise would be ~25 times the volume of a carrier.
You’re right. I meant twice the linear measurements. Sorry, I gots my terms all srewed up.
Length (N) 330 to (E) 685. Twice the length.
Width (N) to 78 (E) 282, or 3.6 times the width.
Hieght (N) 25m est. to (E) 75, or 3 times the height.
I know volume does not scale in a direct linear fashion: Twice the length does not mean twice the volume, which you are pointing out.
Bear in mind that with the proper technology, you can make some amazingly complex materials out of carbon and hydrogen. No need to mine anything.
Science fiction never gets economics right. The cost of a starship would be such that no planet could afford more than a couple. It’s just something the genre ignores (to its benefit).
A couple what? Star Destroyers? Well, the empire has how many planets under their control? Seems like a couple per planet is a shit ton of them.
If you’re talking about something more modest, why would they be so limited? What assumptions are you making about the economy and technology thousands of years into the future that you can definitively say what they could or could not build?
On the contrary; if anything the genre generally grossly underestimates how many starships it could build, given the portrayed technology. An entire planet with better-than-modern industry ought to be able to build lots of ships, since they typically aren’t portrayed as being any more resource intensive for them than oceangoing ships are for us.
Utopia Planitia replicates it’s metals, surely?
I remember a Trek trivia book from the 70’s that claimed the Enterprise cost 50 billion credits. The book claimed that figure came from a TOS script that mentioned the cost of the ship but was never used in the filmed episode.
Edit: Woops, wrong thread.
Eight Ningis, or one Triganic Pu (more convenient).
Oh, please.
Galactic empires are a pulp fiction absurdity. They would be impossible to govern, given the limitation of the speed of light. The British Empire had trouble when it took months of travel time, and they weren’t trying to control an entire planet (they also reached their biggest extent after the invention of the telegraph).
You’re using pure circular reasoning: If you have a galactic empire, you can build enough ships to create a galactic empire.
The idea of FTL travel is a necessary plot device; while it can be theorized, no one has come up with any real-world solution. How exactly do you bend space and time? And how do you do it in such a way that you can send an entire ship across the universe? The power requirements would probably make a supernova seem like a AA battery.
No matter what advances are made in technology, the laws of physics and chemistry aren’t going to change. We would have to build ships out of materials that exist today. Any advances involve new combinations of the building blocks we already have. And any new combinations are going to be far more expensive than what we’re using now.
We would have to get energy from sources that exist today (at the very basic level, it’s all atomic energy at the root). Antimatter is the magic solution, but on a purely realistic basis, there is no way to create it that won’t cost a fortune, and the idea of being able to harness it dubious, while the idea of being able to harness it safely is absurd.
ST may portray starships as being battleships. Science fiction used to portray people building spaceships in their backyards and flying to the moon in them. You can portray whatever you want, but that doesn’t mean it can happen.
It is silly to ask questions about economics in science fiction. Few SF writers care, since it’s not important to the story. The economics never work in any rational way. So pick any number you choose: 50 quatloos, ten HUCs, a billion and half acacia seeds. It’s meaningless.
Why? With automated fabrication, AIs, easy route to orbit and abundant energy (which usually are pretty standard at the “building starships” tech level in fiction), the only limitation is the will/desire. I’m with Banks on this one - an advanced culture (or Culture) should be able to knock out *millions *of startships, in relatively short order, should it want to.
So too would starships be impossible at all. So what are you doing in this thread, again?