Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale/No Sense of Mass: Difference between revisions

** [[All There in the Manual]] Dahak and the other planetoid sized ships were built in order to defend against the next genocidal attack by the Achuultani, so they'd want them big, not only so they could stuff in as many weapons as possible, but to [[Made of Iron|take a pounding as well.]] Given that ships like Dahak were intended to be deployed on picket duty for years, if not decades, they built the crew quarters with comfort in mind. You also need to take into account the hangar decks for the sublight ships. The volume isn't really wasted, and it turns out to even have something of a psychological effect; the aliens are ''terrified'' by the sheer size of the planetoids.

** Exactly. The planetoids are that big because they're not just warships, they're ''mobile bases''. They are intended to carry entire fleets of normal-sized warships inside them and deliver them to places. Indeed, each individual planetoid is intended to hold enough people, resources, and infrastructure to potentially allow the restoration of the entire human race from scratch if necessary<ref>Which actually happened during the course of the storyline, as the entire population of the planet Earth is descended from Dahak's original crew.</ref>, as that's exactly the size of the impending galactic apocalypse the Fourth Imperium was gearing itself up to fight.

* [[Larry Niven]]'s ''[[Ringworld]]'' takes the common misconception about the Dyson Sphere (see below) to a more 'practical' level. Why build an entire sphere around a star when a single continuous strip could house more life than could possibly fill it? But the example of this trope comes more into play with ''The Ringworld Engineers'', which was written after Niven attended a convention where several college students were roaming the halls chanting "The Ringworld is unstable". Niven did the math and, nerds being nerds, discovered they were ''right''. The Ringworld is indeed unstable, so he added some jets to allow it to maintain its position.

** Of course, ''Ringworld'' starts off with the Puppeteers fleeing the galaxy, dragging the five ''planets'' of their home system with them, which has its own host of Sense Of Scale problems (But come on, they're ''towing planets''. [[Rule of Cool|How is that not awesome]]?)