I dun goofed. · 8:41am May 5th, 2023
I goofed.
Not today, no- actually quite a long time ago.
The thing is... the First Light and Dawnbreaker, in Starbound Flight, simply can't be as small as they are described. Only a 600-person crew capacity on the First Light, yet it's capable of berthing an interstellar passenger vessel internally, and is also aerodynamically capable, and a warship, and so on?
Based on just hydroponics space requirements, the Enterprise must be the size of an aircraft carrier or so, in order to haul a few hundred passengers long-term through space. Okay, as many as a thousand plus crew, probably, I always imagine the Enterprise as being the equivalent of a cruise ship, and those usually have around a thousand passengers... with a surprisingly nearly-equal number of crew.
In order to berth a 330-meter (~1100ft) "aircraft carrier" non-surface-capable (that's important, means the bay is rectangular rather than square) vessel internally in a ventral cargo bay, the First Light needs to be comparatively bigger.
Such as, say, 3.3 kilometers, so the bay is 10% as long as the ship, to minimize the structural strain of the door.
3.3 kilometers is about 2 miles, for those who aren't familiar.
If we assume the First Light's fuselage has a similar length-to-width ratio as, say, a 747 (roughly 10-1), then hydroponics filling just 6% of that internal volume, across 132 decks, would feed not the 600 people the First Light is cited as having food/recycling/etc capacity for, but 500,000.
Five hundred thousand.
Half a million people.
Fed with only 6% of the ship's volume.
A fair percentage of the ship's volume would be surrendered to undoubtedly innumerable bays capable of fitting 747s (with the ship 50 times as large as one in each direction, that's pretty easy), to quite a few more weapons systems than the mere eight turrets and 30 missile tubes listed in the story, to more than just 3 nuclear reactors, to ammo bunkerage, to fuel tanks...
But that 6% feeds 500,000 people. Those same 500,000 people will need another... what, 10% of her volume as living space. And that's if you give everyone private bedrooms.
The First Light isn't just a warship. She isn't just the biggest surface-capable ship anyone's ever built. She's so large that the curvature of the Earth will mean the middle of the ship is close to a foot closer to the ground than either end when landed. She's the world's only airbreathing arkship.
And she's one hell of a terrifying warship, even without using her weapons. Which, if she's that large, probably includes multiple of the standard artillery cannons that only Dreadnought and Superdreadnought-class warships are big enough to mount, not just her unique plasma artillery...
Then don't even get me started on the Dawnbreaker, which was about fifteen thousand times as expensive as the First Light, which was already around ten thousand times as expensive as a superdreadnought-class warship. She's explicitly stated as being able to easily berth the First Light internally, nevermind the whole towing-planets thing, so her length is probably something like 5% of the diameter of the Earth (which comes out to around 400 miles/640km).
So I'm curious, what do you think of these numbers, and various side effects (the First Light's engines could probably be used for weather control, for example)- and what do you think such a stupendously large warship as the First Light should be armed with?
Oh, and should this literal flying skyscraper be submarine-capable? Obviously not as deep as a true submarine built with the same materials (lit. space battleship armor material used for everything from hull to structural), and unless specifically ballasted (or driven with reverse VTOL power), she would float... though like an iceberg, only a small portion would show above the surface. Water landing capability is non-optional and definitely there, submersible is optional.
Oh, and fun fact: That'd incidentally make the First Light a "Flying Aircraft Carrier Carrier", and the Dawnbreaker a "Carrier for Flying Aircraft Carrier Carriers".
So it's a spacehulk. A spacehulk someone built on purpose. The materials cost must have been ungodly.
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Makes it really quite amazing that it only took them a couple years to build it, doesn't it?
But yes. The price tag is known to be ungodly, and the materials cost probably similarly so.
I forgot the calculations for Habbakuk, but this values look about right. I got the build to be approximately 100 million tons, using 12 months waste paper from the UK alone, and a single 4 Gigawatt power station for the refrigeration. A Hull over 80 feet tick before any design complexities taken into account such as cryogenic centre layer for BEC experiments, built ina pressure vessel at the bottom of the mariana trench to get the 25km water pressure needed for the hull to be Ice 2 for wormhole traversal theory.
Four pulse fusion reactors in 3 engine bays, 20 rotary multi gigawatt diesel thermal generators, as primary and secondary, the internal structure divided up into box section for strength with multi meter thick hull walls and decks.
Yes, these class of vehicles can easily end up being totally overpowered and yet the basic design can be thrown together extremely quickly by only minor redirection of even low end planetary civiisations.
The biggest proposed WW2 design was 4km for the Super carrier for heavily loaded bombers to take off from? ther was even a Liberty Ship cargo variation? Much smaller, but it could literally crush a wolfpack if they got in the wrong place at the wrong time.
As for the curvature, heres an even more mind bendiing effect.
Its self gravity is large enough to raise the local sea level by a good few millimeters around it.
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You're right, that is mind-bending.
As is the fact that, while floating in water (ex. water landing), the top of the First Light's hull will be in air while the bottom will actually be so deep that most (manned) submarines can't dive under it... Really puts a perspective on exactly how useful (or lack thereof) submersion capability would be, doesn't it? Perhaps she could submerge by folding her wings...
That said... what is the waste paper used for?
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For the origional Habbakuk, the material used was worked out by a guy in WW2, he called it Pykrete. About 12-14$ wood pulp in water ice. Mythbusters made a small boat out of a couple inches and froze it in a commercial freezer trailer. But there wasnt any insulation or active cooling on the Mythbusters design so it melted fairly quickly.
In the last few years, there has been research in processing bulk and wood waste to improve its material properties, and so far the best theyve achieved is pretty much turning the processed cellulose nanofibre bulk of dry mass wood, into a material that has many properties of aerospacemil grade titanium alloys. But then you can strip even more off the cellulose fibres, and leave carbon nanotubes and graphene flakes behind as reinforcing.
As a really rough guide to the size of the ship design, is that theoretically it could absorb most if not all of the blast energy from the Tsar Bomb, being severely damaged to destrioyed into chunks, but being water and carbon forms, the main radiation would be from the weapons materials, not the irradiated hull.
And given the material is readily available from planetary sources, asteoids and cometary fragments, the odd 20 meter deep crater is relatively easily repairable without a specialist shipyard if the maintenance gear is set up right.
Think of it as more like a junkion ship fro Transformers the Movie, equivalent?