test content
Logo
What is the Arc Client?
Install Arc
ESD Stats OR What keeps Taco awake at night.
tacofangs
Member Posts: 2,951 Cryptic Developer
Ok math nerds, let's talk about some stats for ESD.
I've already said that in building the new ESD interior, I based my dimensions off of Ex Astris' supposition of the station being 3.8km in diameter. We don't have much else to go off of.
However, there is an old set of blueprints for Starbase 79, which is the same format, but smaller than Ex Astris' assessment of ESD.
Using the scale provided on Sheet one, I measured SB79 as 8500' across. Which is roughly 2.6km.
ESD is then 1.4672 times larger around than SB79.
The SB79 sheets also list the mass, and volume of SB79. We don't have such stats for ESD, but we can multiply them by 1.4672 to get a rough estimate. (Yes, I know this is BS, the volume would increase much more than the diameter as the scale goes up, but I'm not going to go calculate the actual volume of ESD)
So, using my ultra-fuzzy math, if SB79 has a total volume of 19544000 yards³, then ESD is somewhere around 28675000 yards³, which is roughly 21924000m³.
If we go with a deck height of 6m (as per Ex Astris), then for every 6 cubic meters, we have 1 square meter of deck. So we end up with 3654000m² (or 3.654km²) of deck space.
New York City has a population density of about 10000 people per km². Tokyo is about 6000. LA is about 3000.
If we multiply that by our deck area, we get about 36,540 people on ESD. Which is an order of magnitude off of what it should be. (in the hundreds of thousands)
Ex Astris claims 1200km², but I'm not sure how they are deriving that. And if ESD had that much deck space, even at LA's density, the station population would be in the millions.
So, clearly, I suck at math. What am I missing? Where am I going wrong? (dimension>Volume, I know) Anyone want to calculate the actual volume of ESD, based on the diameter of 3.8km?
I've already said that in building the new ESD interior, I based my dimensions off of Ex Astris' supposition of the station being 3.8km in diameter. We don't have much else to go off of.
However, there is an old set of blueprints for Starbase 79, which is the same format, but smaller than Ex Astris' assessment of ESD.
Using the scale provided on Sheet one, I measured SB79 as 8500' across. Which is roughly 2.6km.
ESD is then 1.4672 times larger around than SB79.
The SB79 sheets also list the mass, and volume of SB79. We don't have such stats for ESD, but we can multiply them by 1.4672 to get a rough estimate. (Yes, I know this is BS, the volume would increase much more than the diameter as the scale goes up, but I'm not going to go calculate the actual volume of ESD)
So, using my ultra-fuzzy math, if SB79 has a total volume of 19544000 yards³, then ESD is somewhere around 28675000 yards³, which is roughly 21924000m³.
If we go with a deck height of 6m (as per Ex Astris), then for every 6 cubic meters, we have 1 square meter of deck. So we end up with 3654000m² (or 3.654km²) of deck space.
New York City has a population density of about 10000 people per km². Tokyo is about 6000. LA is about 3000.
If we multiply that by our deck area, we get about 36,540 people on ESD. Which is an order of magnitude off of what it should be. (in the hundreds of thousands)
Ex Astris claims 1200km², but I'm not sure how they are deriving that. And if ESD had that much deck space, even at LA's density, the station population would be in the millions.
So, clearly, I suck at math. What am I missing? Where am I going wrong? (dimension>Volume, I know) Anyone want to calculate the actual volume of ESD, based on the diameter of 3.8km?
Only YOU can prevent forum fires!
Post edited by tacofangs on
0
Comments
can u really compare population density of cities with those of spacestations, regarding shape and interiors like space for maintenance?
(cities flatterred on the ground with more than enough space up- and downwards f.e. for maintenance facilities)...
i'm out, have fun with ya maths peeps
Did you figure in the interior dock space, which obviously would not be filled with people. Also some other spaces within the station would not be always filled with people.
Try this, a good scale equivalent for a starbase might be a Galaxy Class ship. Built to handle multiple missions, mix of Starfleet and civilians, space to hold more people if necessary, but not 100 percent full all the time.
If someone has the volume of a Galaxy Class ship plus the normal crew/civilian complement written down somewhere, we can multiply that up and get a good idea of the crew/civilian complement of a starbase.
http://www.st-v-sw.net/STSWvolumetrics3.html
Of course someone's already done something like this
The above website gives the internal volume of a Galaxy class vessel as 5,820,983 m³ (~10% are warp nacelles).
The Starbase 400-RPG furthermore gives the Galaxy class floor area as ~800,000 m².
Assuming a crew complement of ~1,000, this would result in 1 per 5821 m³ or 800 m².
STOWiki admin.
First, I would think that much (if not most) of ESD would not necessarily be designed for habitation. The enormous main docking bay, for instance, is clearly not a habitable space. Some other fan-made blueprints suggest that there might be a second large docking bay elsewhere in ESD. That right there would tremendously reduce the volume (and therefore surface area) available for habitation.
Even if there isn't a second docking bay, I like the idea of there being a large open park space, much like the one shown in the Starbase 79 blueprints. It makes a great deal of space to include such a space as a recreational space for those who've spent years living in space. Like the beautiful concourse in the revamped ESD, it feels like a place that people would *want* to live. So while that space would be technically habitable, it wouldn't be residential.
Then there are all the other uninhabitable areas that a space station would likely have -- mechanical and engineering spaces (including what I'd imagine to be a ginormous main reactor), offices and work spaces that generally don't house people, etc.
Even with the much, much, MUCH smaller Deep Space Nine, there were mysterious areas that seemed totally deserted. Ore processing, for instance, as shown in "Civil Defense," was unused and uninhabited.
True, a city is likely to have some equivalent spaces -- but probably not to the same degree. A city doesn't need to worry about life support facilities or fusion reactors or starship docks, all of which are likely to be very voluminous.
OK so if we take that density and pair it with Taco's volume estimate of 21,924,000 cubic meters for ESD.
You get 3,766... which on further reflection seems very low.
Estimating -habitable- space would be more helpful. 10% of the Galaxy class are warp nacelles.
As for ESD: Don't forget to substract the shipyard (mushroom top) and a lower "root" section probably containing of non-habitable space, too (tanks etc?). EAS estimates the habitable volume to be ~25% of the total volume (compare ~90% of the Galaxy class are habitable).
Moreover, I think the crew density of a Galaxy class ship may very well be the lower end member of the spectrum, being a "family ship" and having an emergency capacity of up to 15,000 (15x standard!!!) according to the ST Technical Manual.
I would not assume the ESD having such emergency capacities, therefore the crew density might be significantly higher than that of a Galaxy class ship...
Finally: Taco employed a linear relationship where a cubic one is needed: Instead of ESD having ~1.46 times SB79 volume, it should be more on the order of ~3.1 times as much. HOWEVER, as EAS points out, it is more probable that ESD and SB79 are actually of the same size, and that Starfleet merely built in new shipyard doors (or has different-sized doors on opposite sides of the mushroom).
Personally, I would feel "comfortable" with an ESD complement of ~25,000-45,000 or so...
STOWiki admin.
If we figure in families and civilian personnel, what would that bring the Galaxy to, 3,000 people?
see my last post
STOWiki admin.
I think that this is probably a reasonable assumption, given the number of non-habitable spaces that the station is likely to have.
There's one question that I have, however -- are we attempting to figure out the station's permanent population? Or the typical daily population? At any given time, I would imagine that there would be (tens of ) thousands of transients and/or vagrant STO captains running around.
And the answer to that question rather depends on what we consider the purpose of ESD to be. If it is a Starfleet-built but largely civilian-populated installation, then I don't see much problem with the population swelling to hundreds of thousands... much like a small city. In that light, ESD might be one part Starfleet base of operations, one part hub leading to the rest of the galaxy, and one part futuristic Silicon Valley analog, with people pursuing other ventures. Living and working in space. This is kind of how I've always pictured it.
If ESD were a strictly Starfleet facility, however, I would imagine that the population would be much much much lower. Why keep tens of thousands of able-bodied officers in low earth orbit when they could be out manning starships and exploring the galaxy?
This is also how I picture it.
So what about this. Is there a modern military base with a large civilian staff that we could compare it to?
The naval base in San Diego (the biggest on the West Coast of the US) has about 20,000 military personnel and 6,000 civilians. The base occupies about 900 acres of land, or about 3.64 square kilometers.
Given the Roddenberrian view of the future, I suspect that the ratio of Starfleet-to-civilian population might be reversed at ESD.
Consider a bridge over a river - obviously before you start building it you work out how strong your bridge needs to be. So for a small, rural, single lane humpback bridge over a small river, about 2 loaded trucks, as that is far more than you could actually fit on said bridge, and therefore the capacity to withstand two trucks will do.
This is like a Connie.
For San Francisco's famous bridge, 2 trucks is a fraction of what is necessary, but say, 200 trucks, is more appropriate. Perhaps 10 times that again.
This is like ESD.
We know how many people are on-board a Constitution-Class cruiser, around 400. We also know how it looks relative to ESD thanks to shots from the Series - a simple, logical extrapolation means tacos calculated estimate of 36,540 people seems about right to me.
I agree, so if we reverse that and say 20,000 civvies and 6,000 military over 3.64 square km (3,640,000 square meters), that'd be a density of 1 person for every 140 square meters.
For the sake of argument let's add a height of 6 meters (for deck space) to that, so 1 person for every 840 cubic meters.
Not enough to account for the discrepancy... will have a look through the rest of the math and break out my EMH (emergency mathematical hologram).
So if we use that to calculate a new volume of 61,759,040 cubic meters. Times my density estimate based on the San Diego base, you'd get 73,522 staff. This would be full-time or part-time personnel both Civilian and Starfleet (about a 3-1 ratio). This wouldn't count visitor traffic, obviously.
I could live with that number. Still, that seems a little low given how massive ESD is, even despite the massive starship docking bay, etc. Then again, I was never very good at guessing how many jelly beans are in a jar...
Plus if you were in an active shooting war, which the U.S. is... kinda not... and which the Federation is on 10 fronts, you'd see a boost in personnel at a facility like this.
I ask because it appears that the habitable parts of ESD are in the core area and the mushroom is the dock. This simplifies the volume a bit.
Assuming you mean the stem and measuring from just above the life support/Reactor area and up to the base of the Sensor section. I come up with 128,073 cubic meters of volume.
Of course from the memory alpha images I can see our views are apparently from the Secondary Docking area / Commercial zone. For us to look up at the cap.
Originally Posted by pwlaughingtrendy
Network engineers are not ship designers.
Nor should they be. Their ships would look weird.
Just looking at sections K&J (the habitation sections....) cause they're a nice simple cylinder
length 2000 ft, diameter 1400ft, radius 700ft
-> volume = pi * radius^2 * length
= 3x10^9 cubic feet
= 1x10^8 cubic yards
which is ~100 times more than the value is the blue prints (1.6x10^6 cubic yards) for this bit, and much bigger than the value quoted for the total volume.
(for workings see: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=volume+of+cylinder+of+radius+700+ft+and+length+2000+ft+in+cubic+yards)
Disturbing Aside: Wolfram alpha notes that this volume is equivalent to 1/5 of the total volume of all humans alive on Earth.
Thought/ comments??
Canonically, the largest part of ESD, the mushroom dome, is mostly empty as it has to be large enough for multiple starships to move around inside, so most of ESD's volume, or habital space would come from the smaller, cylindrical part of the station:
To add the the confusion, in the movies, a Constitution and Excelsior class just fit through the doors, however in TNG the Galaxy Class, 3.3 times wider, is able to fit through those same doors. So does this make the TNG spacedock 36 times bigger than the TMP spacedock? Confused yet?
couldn't you load the ESD model into the modeling program you guys use, scale it correctly, and then some how ask the program to calculate how much space it displaces? that should tell you volume
id love to see numbers for various ships too
Contemporary Nimitz-class aircraft carriers carry over 6000 personnel (3200 permanent crew and 2800 temporary parasites aircrew). Displacement ~102,000t; 4.5 acres of flight deck, variable amounts of habitable space within its ~40' draft (under the waterline). Aircrew live and work mostly right under the flightdeck and rarely venture below the hangar deck for anything other than chow. Most everyone else lives under the hangar deck, maybe a couple decks down right about at the waterline.
Raptr profile
The point being, habitable vs inhabitable is irrelevant. Cities are measured at people per square km. No attention is placed on how/where those people in that given km are dispersed. Same goes for ESD. If we can figure out a rough area of deck space, we should be able to figure out the population within.
Perhaps the population density of a building is more in line. Volume of something like the Empire State building vs population of same?
I think EAS was way underestimating the habitable space of ESD. 25% is way low.
ESD and SB79 are not the same size though. The SB79 blueprints put it at only 2.6km in diameter, not the 3.8 listed by EAS.
And you're telling me that a Galaxy Class, something that can fit inside the docking bay of ESD, is able to take on 15,000 people, but ESD itself, which is 3.8km in diameter, and 5.5km in height, can only take on 3x that?