ESD would be equipped with some of the best equipment Starfleet has access to. Science labs, design departments, office spaces, etc. would be in abundance. These would be for use not just of starfleet personnel, but for civilians, aliens, etc. that have obtained permission. I'd imagine non-starfleet people would obtain essentially a lease, or permit to use the facilities of the base.
This raises something I've been thinking about recently. I think it would be fantastic in the future if Fleets had a recruitment office holding on ESD in one of the many of smaller administration areas that are undoubtedly surrounding the spacedock.
My thought is that it could be an area where fleets could display trophies for fleet achievements (Like max level holdings, "gold" score in a fleet defense, etc) and that anyone could get to it via the fleet search (if the fleet is public). Also, the main turbolifts in ESD would add a 3rd option to take the lift to the fleet's office area (for fleet members).
This area would act as the fleet's primary interface with Starfleet Command and a recruitment center for new members.
We're talking about a place with several million square meters of floor space, and you are disappointed that you don't see MACO guys running around the couple thousand square meters you have access to? MACO is the special forces. They would not be relegated to guard duty.
I wouldn't even say guard duty. But just like airports IRL, you'll have military personnel coming and going quite often -- I'd argue that the ground troops Starfleet has, like MACOs outnumber Starfleet ship personnel. If I'm disappointed, it's because I'd expect to see more of them because like any military, the infantry and ground assault troops outnumber the rest of 'us'. Statistically speaking, we should be running into more of them than we currently do.
MACO might also be the special forces (and thus lower in number), but my original meaning is all ground forces. I'm assuming Starfleet has regular ground forces that aren't MACO. In other media they've been called Federation Marines, Starfleet Marines, or whatnot. Since MACO is the only representation of any ground forces I've seen in STO, that's the term I'm going with. But I do mean any infantry, marines, etc.
After all, they depend on 'us' to get around the galaxy, so I don't think it's unreasonable to expect to see them near their transportation in between downtime and deployment. We depend on them to fight on the ground, they depend on us to fight in space. It's a relationship that isn't represented well in-game.
My personal opinion follows the Starbase 79 plans in the use of the 'bell' of the station. I don't think it makes sense to have a secondary docking bay
This would be tactically unsound. I would argue that there would be auxiliary docking bays in case the primary docking bay is disabled in an attack or closed for repairs since Captain Full Impulse decided to make an Odyssey-sized dent into the spacedoors.
... and I like the idea of there being an immense park/recreation area in there for use by both station personnel and transient populations.
Just one?
There would be temporary housing available for those transient populations, and crew quarters for the stationed personnel.
And their families. Like any naval base, there would likely be permanent residences for the families who can't stay on board the ships with their spouses/parents (like Escorts).
The Shuttlebay brings in cargo for the Exchange, and shops, but is also the main access point for the shuttles of those diplomats, as well as Quinn and other personnel when they need to get someplace. IMO, the transporter wouldn't be used for everything. For instance, unless there was an emergency or such, you would not necessarily transport to Earth. You'd get a shuttle, and take that down. You also wouldn't transport around the station. Turbolifts would get you around pretty quick, but if you really wanted a direct route from one end of the station to the other, you might grab a shuttle.
This is kind of contradictory (to me, anyway). Particularly, since the Odyssey bridge has a transporter pad built into it, and in the later series and movies of Star Trek, transporter technology was highly advanced. You could essentially beam directly to any part of the ship you needed to go, and the Enterprise-E beamed a Scorpion fighter into its shuttlebay.
Site-to-Site transport I imagined was not only fairly advanced, but common enough that the only people who used shuttles were those who had a fear of transporters (like Dr. McCoy). I argued that having a transporter room directly on the bridge was a tactically unsound decision. You beam the wrong guests aboard and you just gave them free access to the entire ship's controls.
However, the people who disagreed with me had a point in that site-to-site transport could happen anywhere on the ship, particularly in 2409, and that a ship as large as the Odyssey would commonly have site-to-site transporters to not only reduce turbolift congestion, but allow you to get where you need to go faster.
ESD would still have a finite amount of turbolifts and shuttles -- and with a station as large as ESD, you could easily run into a scenario of SimTower (if anyone played that game) of having people waiting in long lines for the turbolift to reach their level. I'd say ESD would have the same line of thought of site-to-site transporters being not only advanced, but very commonplace.
This raises something I've been thinking about recently. I think it would be fantastic in the future if Fleets had a recruitment office holding on ESD in one of the many of smaller administration areas that are undoubtedly surrounding the spacedock.
My thought is that it could be an area where fleets could display trophies for fleet achievements (Like max level holdings, "gold" score in a fleet defense, etc) and that anyone could get to it via the fleet search (if the fleet is public). Also, the main turbolifts in ESD would add a 3rd option to take the lift to the fleet's office area (for fleet members).
This area would act as the fleet's primary interface with Starfleet Command and a recruitment center for new members.
We're talking about a place with several million square meters of floor space, and you are disappointed that you don't see MACO guys running around the couple thousand square meters you have access to? MACO is the special forces. They would not be relegated to guard duty.
Since this keeps coming up, here's my personal take on ESD's use/occupancy.
ESD is run/administered by Starfleet. It is a military base. It has numerous defenses it can throw out should the need arise. That includes not only torpedos and phasers, but large hangars of fighters, and their crews. For starfleet, it serves as a staging point. An airport/train station for starfleet personnel leaving the system to transit through from Earth to their assigned ships.
It's equally a transit point for anyone coming through Earth's space. ESD would serve as traffic control for the immediate space. Civilians, Aliens, Transport crews, etc. etc. would all potentially come through ESD for various reasons. They may be dropping off/picking up cargo, personnel, or information. They could be transferring ships. They could just be looking for a little short term shore leave for their crew.
MACO would certainly be stationed there, but I imagine they'd have their own designated areas, including holodecks they could use as training aids. I'm sure you'd see them around the station regularly, but I don't think they'd be in full uniform when off duty.
My response to that is... Starfleet as defined by the Great Bird himself is not a military organization. It just gets handed the Space Navy duties by default, imo. MACO on the other hand is the only true Military organization we see. And a heck of alot more competent than Starfleet Security.
Considering current standing of Starfleet and the Federation as a whole. Starfleet Sec is sucking at its job more than usual. We've an Ambassador, a high ranking Admiral and the chief scientist in charge of the Dyson research project all replaced by Undine. Considering how sensitive the stuff that goes on in Operations at ESD... Yeah, I don't even think Quinn would trust the redshirts by now. I totally see the Admiralty's guards have been switched out with heavily armed MACOs after the incident with Zelle. And with the Undine coming for us in full force now, it just makes sense that ESD might be on heightened alert.
Plus it has the added benefit of subtly letting new players know "we're at war, we know it and we're not taking it lightly" upon their first trip to ESD.
On a off-topic note - Why did it take Starfleet this long to develop body armor for themselves when their barrels were Phaser-proof way back in DS9?
On a off-topic note - Why did it take Starfleet this long to develop body armor for themselves when their barrels were Phaser-proof way back in DS9?
The same reason we don't use crossbows and spears in Iraq and Afghanistan. Technology does not remain stagnant even if they were 'effective' back in the day.
According to the path to 2409, the PSG was a semi-recent invention after the events of Nemesis.
The same reason we don't use crossbows and spears in Iraq and Afghanistan. Technology does not remain stagnant even if they were 'effective' back in the day.
According to the path to 2409, the PSG was a semi-recent invention after the events of Nemesis.
Doesnt explain why the people on AR-558 were in uniforms without body armor against the Jem Hadar. :P
Doesnt explain why the people on AR-558 were in uniforms without body armor against the Jem Hadar. :P
Real Reason: Budget constraints. From what I recall, there were plans to introduce regular armed (and armored) guards in DS9 as extras or what have you to emphasise that the Dominion War was not just fought in space, but in ground engagements as well. However, due to the sheer number of extra uniforms and props needed, it was decided to keep them in variants of the uniforms seen in DS9. I'd imagine those on AR-558 would similarly have armor and gadgets for futuristic warfare.
The same reason we don't use crossbows and spears in Iraq and Afghanistan. Technology does not remain stagnant even if they were 'effective' back in the day.
According to the path to 2409, the PSG was a semi-recent invention after the events of Nemesis.
We have a finite amount of space to work with. There are facilities (Life support, Power Generation, waste processing/removal) that will take up space. I think "city" is probably not a good analogy for what ESD is. Aircraft Carrier/Cruise Ship is better. A city on a planet can expand and contract. A space station is largely static. It can only hold so much. We need to remember that there needs to be a substantial amount of support machinery to sustain the population.
As we know the mushroom is the docking facility, I think we ought to focus on the central spindle. I think we can make a few assumptions. I would say roughly 30% of the internal volume would need to be dedicated to the aforementioned support machinery.
The next logical step would be to differentiate between "work" space, "home" space, and "Living" space (To see how many people "live" here as opposed to packing them in like sardines). A cruise ship, for example the Oasis of the Seas, has 16 decks accesible to passengers, and can hold approximately 6300 passengers and 2400 crew. The decks are between 17000 m^2 and 21700 m^2, roughly 300,000 square meters (give or take. Fuzzy math involved.) 1 person (non crew) for every ~50 square meters of floor space.
The Gerald Ford class Aircraft carrier is about 1 person for every 120 square meters, and the two ships are roughly the same size. (Counting all of the available space, not just "passenger decks")
If we have a total volume of 129,890,838,000 cubic meters, wiith an average deck height of 4 meters, with my 30% reduction in space for mechanicals, we'd have 22.7 billion square meters of floor space. I imagine that half of that will be for medical facilities, office spaces and the like.
11.35 billion square meters of space for quarters and recreational facilites. Lets assume that a further 30% is recreational facilities (parks, holodecks, restaurants, etc). This leaves us with almost 8 billion square meters for quarters. If we assume that we have more of the cruise ship mentality, we can probably house 160 million people inside ESD. Of course this is all one big SWAG.
For grins, if 40% were needed for just mechanicals, we'd end up with around 136 million.
40% with 6 meter decks would be 90 million.
30% with 6 meter decks woubl be 106 million.
It could even be substantially less if we add more room for cargo bays and additional launch facilites (There are several additional bays visible in various shots). If we assume that between mechanicals and cargo storage we lose a full 50% of the volume, we still can easily hold 75 million people.
And I'll stop there. We could go on and try to define just how much space is utilized by everything and we could come up with just about any number of answers. I would tend to think that any answer from 50 million to 200 million would not be unreasonable given the size of the station.
So, in thinking about how to reasonably calculate the volume of the station, it occurred to me that the station as a whole could be simplified to a cylinder pretty easily. If we draw a cylinder that encapsulates the trunk of ESD, we can estimate that the areas that hang outside that cylinder could all be crunched up to fit into the gaps in the areas inside the cyilnder.
Like so:
My cylinder is 800m x 4700m. Honestly, it could probably be a little thinner, but we'll run with that for the time being.
π*800 = 2010618m² (area)
2010618*4700 = 9,449,904,600m³ (volume)
9.5 billion cubic meters is quite a ways over the 19.5 million cubic yards in my original estimate.
Given 9.5 billion cubic meters, let's lose 40% of that for the above stated systems.
That still leaves us with 5,669,942,760m³
5.5 billion cubic meters of useable space, divided by our 6m deck height, gets us just under a billion square meters of useable deck space. (944990460m²)
The question now, is what population density to apply to said square meterage? IMO Aircraft Carriers and other navy vessels are far two densely packed for comparison here. Cruise ships might be closer, but they're still tight.
Well earlier on (as suggested by another poster) based on the density of one of the largest US naval bases, which I think is a reasonable analog for ESD, I came up with 1 person for every 140 square meters or 1 person for every 840 cubic meters.
So multiply that by your new estimate, you get 6,749,931 people.
5.5 billion cubic meters of useable space, divided by our 6m deck height, gets us just under a billion square meters of useable deck space. (944990460m²)
The question now, is what population density to apply to said square meterage? IMO Aircraft Carriers and other navy vessels are far two densely packed for comparison here. Cruise ships might be closer, but they're still tight.
The only structures I could think of to compare it to would be massive buildings that are for business, entertainment, residence and dining. The best example that came to mind is the Burj Khalifa. A building so massive, it has to contain everything a person needs in a day.
Its listed as having a floor area of approximately 310,000 square meters. Its maximum occupancy is listed at 35,000 people and a "normal" inhabitant level of 12,000. This would put you at a typical of 26 square meters per person or a maximum of 9 square meters per person.
Using this estimate puts us at a "normal" population of roughly 38,400,000 persons on ESD.
The only structures I could think of to compare it to would be massive buildings that are for business, entertainment, residence and dining. The best example that came to mind is the Burj Khalifa. A building so massive, it has to contain everything a person needs in a day.
Its listed as having a floor area of approximately 310,000 square meters. Its maximum occupancy is listed at 35,000 people and a "normal" inhabitant level of 12,000. This would put you at a typical of 26 square meters per person or a maximum of 9 square meters per person.
Using this estimate puts us at a "normal" population of roughly 38,400,000 persons on ESD.
If that's the case, then ESD would have almost twice the population of the present-day New York Metropolitan Area (23,508,600), give or take 15,000,000 people. Condensed into a cylinder like ESD, I don't think that's too unreasonable.
If that's the case, then ESD would have almost twice the population of the present-day New York Metropolitan Area (23,508,600), give or take 15,000,000 people. Condensed into a cylinder like ESD, I don't think that's too unreasonable.
I'm also of the opinion that 40% is too generous for unusable space, but if that's the guy's rough estimate for the Burj Khalifa is around 38,400,000, that seems close.
It was also brought to my attention that there are other factors to consider. Aircraft carriers, cruise ships, naval bases, skyscrapers, and cities are made with budgets in mind. If economics are different, architecture would be too.
You would be building ESD based on materials available, not necessarily how many people you could sustain -- which our current comparisons are based on, since we're using real-world examples that themselves are based on the idea of finite resources, whereas Starfleet can just replicate as much as they want.
We could just occupy the outer skin of ESD and devote the rest to unusable space if we really wanted, since the Federation lives in a society of 'plenty', and might not care so much about efficiently using that space.
Honestly, I'd flip your assumptions around. 60% unusable space, which we can assume is in the forum of shuttlebays, power conduits, cargo bays, fusion reactors, warp reactors, weapons, whatever.
So, in thinking about how to reasonably calculate the volume of the station, it occurred to me that the station as a whole could be simplified to a cylinder pretty easily. If we draw a cylinder that encapsulates the trunk of ESD, we can estimate that the areas that hang outside that cylinder could all be crunched up to fit into the gaps in the areas inside the cyilnder.
Like so:
My cylinder is 800m x 4700m. Honestly, it could probably be a little thinner, but we'll run with that for the time being.
π*800 = 2010618m² (area)
2010618*4700 = 9,449,904,600m³ (volume)
9.5 billion cubic meters is quite a ways over the 19.5 million cubic yards in my original estimate.
Given 9.5 billion cubic meters, let's lose 40% of that for the above stated systems.
That still leaves us with 5,669,942,760m³
5.5 billion cubic meters of useable space, divided by our 6m deck height, gets us just under a billion square meters of useable deck space. (944990460m²)
The question now, is what population density to apply to said square meterage? IMO Aircraft Carriers and other navy vessels are far two densely packed for comparison here. Cruise ships might be closer, but they're still tight.
JFK Airport's terminal area alone is 880 acres. That's 3,560,000 square meters. Let's set aside 40% of that for systems. 2,136,000 square meters.
JFK handles 50 million passengers per year. That's 137k per day. Let's assume the average person is there for 4 hours. That's roughly 23k passengers present at a time.Given a billion meters of usable space, that leaves you with
It has roughly 35k employees. That means we can estimate roughly an average of 11.7k at a time given 8 hour shifts.
34,700 people at a time.
0.01624 people per square meter.
Given a billion square meters of usable space (which ignores the possibility of large sections being cetacean ops staffed by dolphins or something) and you're left with 16 miliion people. The number goes dramatically down if there's less civilian traffic or if time per visitor goes down.
Personally, I'd assume large sections of the station are forests or aquatic tanks staffed by the dolphins in Starfleet.
It depends. If you consider ESD as a major floating city, one which houses more than just a military installation, then it wouldn't be too huge a population compared to let's say London's population size of 8.174 million people. However this also depends on just what ESD is supposed to have inside it, and how much automation is used.
It depends. If you consider ESD as a major floating city, one which houses more than just a military installation, then it wouldn't be too huge a population compared to let's say London's population size of 8.174 million people. However this also depends on just what ESD is supposed to have inside it, and how much automation is used.
I think for overall population, one of the more sound ways at a sane estimate is, well...
We all tend to say it's part airport, part research hub, part tourist facility, part commerce hub, part military installation, part command center.
Decide what percent it is for each role. Then do a weighted average of the population density using real world benchmarks of each role to determine the station population.
Also consider that the population density should probably vary by part of the station. Quinn's office is probably closer to the Pentagon, the exchange should be closer to a grocery store population density, and Club 47 should probably be more like a Manhattan nightclub.
For example, I just gave what I think are good numbers for an airport at 16 million. But if ESD is 5% airport, that would be 800k in the travel booking sections.
If the goal is to determine NPC placements for the content team, I'd break each room/area into a function with its own square footage and have each room get a distinct population density based on a real world benchmark.
Base the shuttlebay on the population density of an aircraft carrier deck. Base the tailor area on the population density of a mall clothing store. Base the area around the view of earth on a population density half derived from the Pentagon and half derived from an attraction like Mount Rushmore.
6.7 million people is a lot, but I want to make sure we do have the "usable volume" correctly, as we need to account for a lot of things which are referenced in semi-canon sources:
Large "Open Air" Ship docking Port and movement area
Shuttlebay Docking Area in "Open Air" area
Cargo storage for ship equipment
Deuterium Storage for ships
Workbee storage bays
Cargo storage for shops
Commerical district
Parks
Large open air garden area with area, football field, mini-lake and mini-forest
Alternate Shuttle docking areas
Fusion Reactors
Military only sectors
Sensors
Station's own Deuterium storage
Janeway's Coffee storage
Replicator bio-material
Replicator non-bio material
Fusion reactors (multiple)
Backup batteries
Weapons systems
Torpedo storage and deployment systems
And to put a little dampener on things, the accepted deck height for "larger" things is 4 meters not 6, as the TNG Tech Manual with a bit of maths makes deck heights 4 meters rather than 6.
and Yay, after 2 BSOD's I got this posted.
6.7 million people is a lot, but I want to make sure we do have the "usable volume" correctly, as we need to account for a lot of things which are referenced in semi-canon sources:
Large "Open Air" Ship docking Port and movement area
Shuttlebay Docking Area in "Open Air" area
Cargo storage for ship equipment
Deuterium Storage for ships
Workbee storage bays
Cargo storage for shops
Commerical district
Parks
Large open air garden area with area, football field, mini-lake and mini-forest
Alternate Shuttle docking areas
Fusion Reactors
Military only sectors
Sensors
Station's own Deuterium storage
Janeway's Coffee storage
Replicator bio-material
Replicator non-bio material
Fusion reactors (multiple)
Backup batteries
Weapons systems
Torpedo storage and deployment systems
All of which is irrelevant depending on what we're comparing it to. When you measure the population density of a city, no one says "But 10% of that is streets, 5% is Water storage, etc." Same with boats. If we're measuring population density, it's measured as it compares to the whole.
And to put a little dampener on things, the accepted deck height for "larger" things is 4 meters not 6, as the TNG Tech Manual with a bit of maths makes deck heights 4 meters rather than 6.
That's for a starship. IMO, ESD would have far more structure and systems needed to be run between decks. We're not saying that the ceiling is 20' above you in most places, we're saying the floor of the next deck is.
Comments
This raises something I've been thinking about recently. I think it would be fantastic in the future if Fleets had a recruitment office holding on ESD in one of the many of smaller administration areas that are undoubtedly surrounding the spacedock.
My thought is that it could be an area where fleets could display trophies for fleet achievements (Like max level holdings, "gold" score in a fleet defense, etc) and that anyone could get to it via the fleet search (if the fleet is public). Also, the main turbolifts in ESD would add a 3rd option to take the lift to the fleet's office area (for fleet members).
This area would act as the fleet's primary interface with Starfleet Command and a recruitment center for new members.
I wouldn't even say guard duty. But just like airports IRL, you'll have military personnel coming and going quite often -- I'd argue that the ground troops Starfleet has, like MACOs outnumber Starfleet ship personnel. If I'm disappointed, it's because I'd expect to see more of them because like any military, the infantry and ground assault troops outnumber the rest of 'us'. Statistically speaking, we should be running into more of them than we currently do.
MACO might also be the special forces (and thus lower in number), but my original meaning is all ground forces. I'm assuming Starfleet has regular ground forces that aren't MACO. In other media they've been called Federation Marines, Starfleet Marines, or whatnot. Since MACO is the only representation of any ground forces I've seen in STO, that's the term I'm going with. But I do mean any infantry, marines, etc.
After all, they depend on 'us' to get around the galaxy, so I don't think it's unreasonable to expect to see them near their transportation in between downtime and deployment. We depend on them to fight on the ground, they depend on us to fight in space. It's a relationship that isn't represented well in-game.
This would be tactically unsound. I would argue that there would be auxiliary docking bays in case the primary docking bay is disabled in an attack or closed for repairs since Captain Full Impulse decided to make an Odyssey-sized dent into the spacedoors.
Just one?
And their families. Like any naval base, there would likely be permanent residences for the families who can't stay on board the ships with their spouses/parents (like Escorts).
This is kind of contradictory (to me, anyway). Particularly, since the Odyssey bridge has a transporter pad built into it, and in the later series and movies of Star Trek, transporter technology was highly advanced. You could essentially beam directly to any part of the ship you needed to go, and the Enterprise-E beamed a Scorpion fighter into its shuttlebay.
Site-to-Site transport I imagined was not only fairly advanced, but common enough that the only people who used shuttles were those who had a fear of transporters (like Dr. McCoy). I argued that having a transporter room directly on the bridge was a tactically unsound decision. You beam the wrong guests aboard and you just gave them free access to the entire ship's controls.
However, the people who disagreed with me had a point in that site-to-site transport could happen anywhere on the ship, particularly in 2409, and that a ship as large as the Odyssey would commonly have site-to-site transporters to not only reduce turbolift congestion, but allow you to get where you need to go faster.
ESD would still have a finite amount of turbolifts and shuttles -- and with a station as large as ESD, you could easily run into a scenario of SimTower (if anyone played that game) of having people waiting in long lines for the turbolift to reach their level. I'd say ESD would have the same line of thought of site-to-site transporters being not only advanced, but very commonplace.
That would be nice.
My response to that is... Starfleet as defined by the Great Bird himself is not a military organization. It just gets handed the Space Navy duties by default, imo. MACO on the other hand is the only true Military organization we see. And a heck of alot more competent than Starfleet Security.
Considering current standing of Starfleet and the Federation as a whole. Starfleet Sec is sucking at its job more than usual. We've an Ambassador, a high ranking Admiral and the chief scientist in charge of the Dyson research project all replaced by Undine. Considering how sensitive the stuff that goes on in Operations at ESD... Yeah, I don't even think Quinn would trust the redshirts by now. I totally see the Admiralty's guards have been switched out with heavily armed MACOs after the incident with Zelle. And with the Undine coming for us in full force now, it just makes sense that ESD might be on heightened alert.
Plus it has the added benefit of subtly letting new players know "we're at war, we know it and we're not taking it lightly" upon their first trip to ESD.
On a off-topic note - Why did it take Starfleet this long to develop body armor for themselves when their barrels were Phaser-proof way back in DS9?
TRIBBLE Hydra! Hail Janeway!
The same reason we don't use crossbows and spears in Iraq and Afghanistan. Technology does not remain stagnant even if they were 'effective' back in the day.
According to the path to 2409, the PSG was a semi-recent invention after the events of Nemesis.
Doesnt explain why the people on AR-558 were in uniforms without body armor against the Jem Hadar. :P
EDIT: From Taco's twitter feed:
I like that idea. But use the 22nd Century Uniforms you guys never released on them. It would look more MACO and not Starfleet and not in full armor.
TRIBBLE Hydra! Hail Janeway!
Real Reason: Budget constraints. From what I recall, there were plans to introduce regular armed (and armored) guards in DS9 as extras or what have you to emphasise that the Dominion War was not just fought in space, but in ground engagements as well. However, due to the sheer number of extra uniforms and props needed, it was decided to keep them in variants of the uniforms seen in DS9. I'd imagine those on AR-558 would similarly have armor and gadgets for futuristic warfare.
Starfleet does have armored personnel though!
And Burke had a padded uniform here.
Which might have been energy-dampening or whatever, but it was clearly thicker than other uniforms.
Not according to the animated series:
We have a finite amount of space to work with. There are facilities (Life support, Power Generation, waste processing/removal) that will take up space. I think "city" is probably not a good analogy for what ESD is. Aircraft Carrier/Cruise Ship is better. A city on a planet can expand and contract. A space station is largely static. It can only hold so much. We need to remember that there needs to be a substantial amount of support machinery to sustain the population.
As we know the mushroom is the docking facility, I think we ought to focus on the central spindle. I think we can make a few assumptions. I would say roughly 30% of the internal volume would need to be dedicated to the aforementioned support machinery.
The next logical step would be to differentiate between "work" space, "home" space, and "Living" space (To see how many people "live" here as opposed to packing them in like sardines). A cruise ship, for example the Oasis of the Seas, has 16 decks accesible to passengers, and can hold approximately 6300 passengers and 2400 crew. The decks are between 17000 m^2 and 21700 m^2, roughly 300,000 square meters (give or take. Fuzzy math involved.) 1 person (non crew) for every ~50 square meters of floor space.
The Gerald Ford class Aircraft carrier is about 1 person for every 120 square meters, and the two ships are roughly the same size. (Counting all of the available space, not just "passenger decks")
If we have a total volume of 129,890,838,000 cubic meters, wiith an average deck height of 4 meters, with my 30% reduction in space for mechanicals, we'd have 22.7 billion square meters of floor space. I imagine that half of that will be for medical facilities, office spaces and the like.
11.35 billion square meters of space for quarters and recreational facilites. Lets assume that a further 30% is recreational facilities (parks, holodecks, restaurants, etc). This leaves us with almost 8 billion square meters for quarters. If we assume that we have more of the cruise ship mentality, we can probably house 160 million people inside ESD. Of course this is all one big SWAG.
For grins, if 40% were needed for just mechanicals, we'd end up with around 136 million.
40% with 6 meter decks would be 90 million.
30% with 6 meter decks woubl be 106 million.
It could even be substantially less if we add more room for cargo bays and additional launch facilites (There are several additional bays visible in various shots). If we assume that between mechanicals and cargo storage we lose a full 50% of the volume, we still can easily hold 75 million people.
And I'll stop there. We could go on and try to define just how much space is utilized by everything and we could come up with just about any number of answers. I would tend to think that any answer from 50 million to 200 million would not be unreasonable given the size of the station.
Like so:
My cylinder is 800m x 4700m. Honestly, it could probably be a little thinner, but we'll run with that for the time being.
π*800 = 2010618m² (area)
2010618*4700 = 9,449,904,600m³ (volume)
9.5 billion cubic meters is quite a ways over the 19.5 million cubic yards in my original estimate.
Given 9.5 billion cubic meters, let's lose 40% of that for the above stated systems.
That still leaves us with 5,669,942,760m³
5.5 billion cubic meters of useable space, divided by our 6m deck height, gets us just under a billion square meters of useable deck space. (944990460m²)
The question now, is what population density to apply to said square meterage? IMO Aircraft Carriers and other navy vessels are far two densely packed for comparison here. Cruise ships might be closer, but they're still tight.
So multiply that by your new estimate, you get 6,749,931 people.
The only structures I could think of to compare it to would be massive buildings that are for business, entertainment, residence and dining. The best example that came to mind is the Burj Khalifa. A building so massive, it has to contain everything a person needs in a day.
Its listed as having a floor area of approximately 310,000 square meters. Its maximum occupancy is listed at 35,000 people and a "normal" inhabitant level of 12,000. This would put you at a typical of 26 square meters per person or a maximum of 9 square meters per person.
Using this estimate puts us at a "normal" population of roughly 38,400,000 persons on ESD.
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If that's the case, then ESD would have almost twice the population of the present-day New York Metropolitan Area (23,508,600), give or take 15,000,000 people. Condensed into a cylinder like ESD, I don't think that's too unreasonable.
I have a hard time believing that.
Agreed. Even my 6.7 million seems high.
6.7 million is a lot of people.
It's the population of Turkmenistan...
I'm also of the opinion that 40% is too generous for unusable space, but if that's the guy's rough estimate for the Burj Khalifa is around 38,400,000, that seems close.
It was also brought to my attention that there are other factors to consider. Aircraft carriers, cruise ships, naval bases, skyscrapers, and cities are made with budgets in mind. If economics are different, architecture would be too.
You would be building ESD based on materials available, not necessarily how many people you could sustain -- which our current comparisons are based on, since we're using real-world examples that themselves are based on the idea of finite resources, whereas Starfleet can just replicate as much as they want.
We could just occupy the outer skin of ESD and devote the rest to unusable space if we really wanted, since the Federation lives in a society of 'plenty', and might not care so much about efficiently using that space.
Is it? I stopped when it became more than counting fingers.
40% habitable space.
JFK Airport's terminal area alone is 880 acres. That's 3,560,000 square meters. Let's set aside 40% of that for systems. 2,136,000 square meters.
JFK handles 50 million passengers per year. That's 137k per day. Let's assume the average person is there for 4 hours. That's roughly 23k passengers present at a time.Given a billion meters of usable space, that leaves you with
It has roughly 35k employees. That means we can estimate roughly an average of 11.7k at a time given 8 hour shifts.
34,700 people at a time.
0.01624 people per square meter.
Given a billion square meters of usable space (which ignores the possibility of large sections being cetacean ops staffed by dolphins or something) and you're left with 16 miliion people. The number goes dramatically down if there's less civilian traffic or if time per visitor goes down.
Personally, I'd assume large sections of the station are forests or aquatic tanks staffed by the dolphins in Starfleet.
It depends. If you consider ESD as a major floating city, one which houses more than just a military installation, then it wouldn't be too huge a population compared to let's say London's population size of 8.174 million people. However this also depends on just what ESD is supposed to have inside it, and how much automation is used.
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I think for overall population, one of the more sound ways at a sane estimate is, well...
We all tend to say it's part airport, part research hub, part tourist facility, part commerce hub, part military installation, part command center.
Decide what percent it is for each role. Then do a weighted average of the population density using real world benchmarks of each role to determine the station population.
Also consider that the population density should probably vary by part of the station. Quinn's office is probably closer to the Pentagon, the exchange should be closer to a grocery store population density, and Club 47 should probably be more like a Manhattan nightclub.
If the goal is to determine NPC placements for the content team, I'd break each room/area into a function with its own square footage and have each room get a distinct population density based on a real world benchmark.
Base the shuttlebay on the population density of an aircraft carrier deck. Base the tailor area on the population density of a mall clothing store. Base the area around the view of earth on a population density half derived from the Pentagon and half derived from an attraction like Mount Rushmore.
According to that breakdown roughly 50 -60% of the available space in esd isnt meant for inhabitation.
I'll say 30% of that is simply empty space for docking bays and such.
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And to put a little dampener on things, the accepted deck height for "larger" things is 4 meters not 6, as the TNG Tech Manual with a bit of maths makes deck heights 4 meters rather than 6.
and Yay, after 2 BSOD's I got this posted.
All of which is irrelevant depending on what we're comparing it to. When you measure the population density of a city, no one says "But 10% of that is streets, 5% is Water storage, etc." Same with boats. If we're measuring population density, it's measured as it compares to the whole.
That's for a starship. IMO, ESD would have far more structure and systems needed to be run between decks. We're not saying that the ceiling is 20' above you in most places, we're saying the floor of the next deck is.