History Main / UnnecessarilyLargeVessel

* Pretty much every ship Tagon's Toughs of ''Webcomic/SchlockMercenary'' has owned since their first one was meant to house a lot more than the under 100 troops the company comprises. Including an Ob'enn Superfortress, a DropShip from said superfortress that was rated for 25,000 men (needed some sleeping space though), and then a cruiser meant for 6,000. They rely pretty heavily on the ships' A.I.s to run things. Tagon actually considers this roominess as a downside most of the time, recounting a story from his military service about the grunts [[http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2006-01-24 having too much room to spread out.]] Most recently, the Toughs who were active in Sol system during Book 15 - a group unlikely to reach triple digits, put it that way -- are operating a UNS battleplate, a triangular ship with 8km sides. However, they're only manning it on behalf of their current clients and because their much more reasonably sized ship, the ''Neosynchronity'', was destroyed during the climax of the previous book.

* May or may not be the case in Creator/AndreiLivadny's ''Literature/TheHistoryOfTheGalaxy'' series, at least according to the author's website. Flagship-class cruisers are noted as being nearly 7 kilometers (4.3 miles) long with a crew of about ''150'', and can actually run with no crew whatsoever thanks to InstantAIJustAddWater. Nowhere do the books justify ships of such size. One novel mentions that these cruisers carry a WaveMotionGun that takes up a ''fifth'' of its size but that's no justification for the rest of it. Another novel mentions a normal-sized cruiser (still over 5 kilometers) with a crew of 2000. For reference, the RealLife USS ''Nimitz'' is about 330 meters long and has a crew of 3200, and that's not even counting the air wing complement (2480).

* Entirely possible in ''Videogame/KerbalSpaceProgram''. You can land on the Mun in a simple one-person lander launched on a modest rocket. Or you can build a ship that's several times the height of the building it's supposedly constructed in. The game performance suffers with large ships though, making them often AwesomeButImpractical.[[note]]This has been mitigated somewhat in the newer versions; previously, ''Kerbal Space Program'' was limited to using 4 GiB of RAM at a time, due to using an older, 32-bit version of the Unity UsefulNotes/GameEngine. This is exacerbated by the fact that KSP is quite prone to memory leaks, meaning that the game stays slow even once you've switched to a different craft, and, frequently, the only way to retrieve all the leaked memory is to [[HaveYouTriedRebooting shut down the computer and restart it]]. Newer versions use the 64-bit Unity 5, allowing them to make use of as much RAM as the computer has available. This considerably improves performance on beefier computers.[[/note]]

** A good while back, Starwars.com had a Databank entry which stated that even the regular Star Destroyers were unprecedented in size and absolute overkill for what the Empire needed. This appears to have been retconned however, with the Star Destroyers being treated more as a standard ship size, and with similarly large vessels popping up elsewhere in the Expanded Universe and elsewhere in the galaxy's history. Even in the films, the Trade Federation battleships and Admiral Ackbar's flagship are both significantly larger, while the Mon Calamari cruisers, the Venators, and the Providences are all only marginally smaller. The difference seems to be more in the fact that the Empire tends to just use the Star Destroyer as a baseline ship (it's by far their most commonly-appearing large ship), where a ship of its size would ordinarily be used as a flagship or a heavily-built overkill option.
** The Death Stars are far larger than is strictly necessary, as you could just as easily mount the superlaser directly to the reactor core and have a perfectly operational battlestation without needing to build what amounts to an artificial planetoid around it (this was actually done in the Expanded Universe). As with the Super Star Destroyers, it seems they intentionally made them the size of a small moon just for the symbolism and the [[GunboatDiplomacy intimidation factor]]. It is also implied that Death Stars function as the support facilities (repair and refit docks, construction yards, supply/weapons/fuel depots, and so on) for their own support and screening fleet. That still doesn't come close to justifying the sheer ''volume'' of the things. The first one had a volume of more than 2 million cubic kilometers, and the second would have, if completed, had a volume more than 380 million cubic kilometers. The sheer size does, however, make them damn near indestructible to anybody that doesn't have their own superlaser on hand, barring Force-guided torpedoes or destroying the thing while it's only halfway built (which are of course the way they actually ''do'' get taken out).

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* Even allowing for lots of cargo room, the ship the movie ''Film/{{Alien}}'' takes place on has an astonishing number of empty corridors, service passageways, and xenomorph-sized hiding places. Well, the ''Nostromo'' is more of a cargo tug than a freighter itself. Presumably the service corridors are just easy ways to get to areas in need of servicing. Nevertheless, the crew are concerned with finding the alien before they are forced back into the freezers due to ''running out of air''.

* ''ComicBook/XMen'': The Characters/{{Starjammers}} are a band of rebel SpacePirates who fly around using the ''Starjammer'', a hijacked ''Fearless''-class Shi'ar [[TheDreadedDreadnought Dreadnought]]. Said dreadnought is around ''38.2 miles'' in length and weighs a whopping ''1.2 billion'' tons. For a ragtag crew of five to six, they seem to have no trouble piloting around a warship that is longer than the width of ''Rhode Island''.

* Subverted/handwaved in Creator/EEDocSmith's book ''Literature/SkylarkOfValeron'': while the eponymous vessel was a sphere over 1000km in radius and has a crew of four, it needed to be that big to contain the navigational instruments necessary to cross intergalactic space.

* The Boeing 747 became this for a number of airlines, particularly Braniff International, which was operating flights with the huge planes nearly empty, and was probably a contributor to the airline's eventual collapse. The improving efficiency of smaller planes meant that flights could still be profitable with smaller passenger loads, and ETOPS rules allowed twin-engine planes to make trans-oceanic flights, eliminating some of the 747's primary advantages. Most 747s currently flying are freighters, where BiggerIsBetter still holds true.

* In ''Fanfic/{{Fractured}}'', a ''Franchise/MassEffect''[=/=]''Franchise/StarWars''[[spoiler:[=/=]''[=Borderlands=]'']] [[MassiveMultiplayerCrossover crossover]], we are introduced to the ''Revenant''-class Star Dreadnaught, a 35-kilometer-long behemoth that can do virtually anything from [[WaveMotionGun cracking small planetoids]] to launching hordes of [[SpaceFighter starfighters]] or [[DeathFromAbove glassing a planet]]. All because the [[InsistentTerminology Spacelane Protection Force]] decided to build big ships for... reasons. It becomes useful later, though still lacks an InUniverse justification -- and is even called out as being unnecessarily huge by the more physics-respecting races of ''Mass Effect''. It has, among other things, swimming pools, civilian-grade entertainment centers, and Admiral's quarters that are a ship unto themselves. Why did the Trans-Galactic Republic build ''multiple'' technically-non-military ships that are so heavily armed and so gigantic? ''[[RuleOfCool Because they could]].''

* ''Eva's Hammer'' from ''VideoGame/WolfensteinTheNewOrder'' and ''[[VideoGame/WolfensteinIITheNewColossus The New Colossus]]'' is a gigantic submarine armed with a nuclear cannon. While we only get a glimpse of its size in ''The New Order'', come ''The New Colossus'', we discover it has a huge landing bay for helicopters, a cantina and can house enough crew members that the [[LaResistance Kreisau Circle]] can all live on it and use it as their mobile base. [[SurprisinglyRealisticOutcome The sheer size of the ship is a problem for the Circle, however]], which they find out when they discover, much to their shock [[spoiler: that there is an entire deck of the ship they didn't discover, which is where the remnants of the old crew are hiding out and transmitting their position to their Nazi comrades.]]

* The ''Götterdämmerung'' in ''Film/IronSky'' is the monstrous flagship of the Nazi space fleet (ItMakesSenseInContext). Its guns can take out a tenth of the Moon with each shot, however, the ship is too overpowered. Since the Nazi computer technology is so far behind, their ENIAC-sized machine can't hope to run all of the ''Götterdämmerung'''s systems. Then they get ahold of a smartphone.

* [[Literature/TheBible Noah's Ark]] would already have to be a pretty huge vessel to hold all those animals, but ''VideoGame/Super3DNoahsArk'', being [[TheMoralSubstitute a religious-themed famil-friendly total conversion]] of VideoGame/Wolfenstein3D, naturally replicates its sprawling, maze-like level design, and as such gives us an Ark with an interior full of huge, mostly empty rooms and long, twisty corridors.

* The ''Polaris Raven'' in ''[[VideoGame/EscapeVelocity EV Nova]]'' is tied with the Auroran carrier for the title of largest starship in the setting at 1,200 meters in length. For all that size, it has a mere 30 crew, making one wonder exactly what it's doing with all that space when the Federation carrier is only 500 meters long but has a crew of 200, and the aforementioned Auroran version carries a crew of 250. There are three reasons given for this: one, the ''Raven''[='s=] length is exaggerated by the two "prongs" of its Capacitor Pulse Laser system, which account for a good half of its length; two, it has ''black hole generators'' for engines, a technology so advanced the ''Raven'' is the only ship ever to use it; and three, most Polaris ships including the Raven are to some extent [[LivingShip living organisms]], and so are probably capable of handling their own internal organs with minimal human intervention, explaining the low crew count.

* In ''Machinima/ClearSkies'', the titular ship is a ''Tempest''-class battleship, approximately the same size as a [[Franchise/StarWars Star Destroyer]]. It has a crew of less than five.

* In ''Film/{{Alien}}'': Even allowing for lots of cargo room, the ship the movie takes place on has an astonishing number of empty corridors, service passageways, and xenomorph-sized hiding places. Well, the ''Nostromo'' is more of a cargo tug than a freighter itself. Presumably the service corridors are just easy ways to get to areas in need of servicing. Nevertheless, the crew are concerned with finding the alien before they are forced back into the freezers due to ''running out of air''.

** Suffice to say, the Empire really loves this trope — as it befits to an entity that rules more through terror and disenheartening of the enemy than through practical combat. Imperial Star Destroyers aren't all that efficient as starships, as it's repeatedly shown that two Victory Star Destroyers — about half the size — are more effective, more resource-efficient and an altogether better idea, to say nothing of the Supers and even more massive ships. But they absolutely ''trash'' enemy morale, simply because there's ''so much ship'' to get through before you damage them enough to take them out of the fight. And things like the ''Eclipse'' are instant "this planet is now mine" buttons; even if you could win fighting them — and it's pretty damn unlikely — you'd expend so many resources doing it that nobody could possibly afford the cost.

* The ''Series/RedDwarf'' is a mining ship quoted as being 6 miles long, 5 miles wide and 4 miles high, that originally had a crew of hundreds[[labelnote:specifically]]It was originally stated to have had a pre-disaster crew complement of 169. This was deemed ridicously low early on, and later mentions of the original crew retconned the figure to '''1''',169. Since series 8, the [[BackFromTheDead resurrected]] crew were '''1'''1,169 members.[[/labelnote]]. Three million years later it's crewed by a slacker who was in stasis for bringing a cat on board, a being that evolved from said cat, the ship's somewhat senile computer, a hologram of one of the dead crew, and, from series 3 onward, a robot butler they picked up on a passing asteroid. This is very much PlayedForLaughs, as the express elevators have movie screens in them so you'll have something to watch while you wait a few hours to reach your floor.

* {{Invoked|Trope}} in ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration'' episode "[[Recap/StarTrekTheNextGenerationS4E5RememberMe Remember Me]]". As the NegativeSpaceWedgie of the week {{Ret Gone}}s the crew of the ''Enterprise'' one by one, leaving only Beverly with any memory of them, she's eventually left questioning the logic of a starship normally crewed by around 1,000 people now having a crew consisting solely of herself and Picard (then just herself). Neither can give a satisfactory answer to that.

* The ''Great Eastern'' was launched in 1858 and was bigger than any ship built for the next half century. She was a commercial failure in part because there simply wasn't any need for such a huge ship in the 1860s — the main reason for her size was the dearth of coaling stops along the route to Australia, her proposed destination, and she was designed to be able to carry all the coal for her horrendously inefficient engines herself. However between her being laid down and being launched a source of coal was discovered in Australia, rendering her instantly obsolete. Finally the development of transoceanic cables gave the giant ship a purpose, as she could carry an ocean-spanning spool of cable in one trip.

* The proposed project to recycle Russia's typhoon-class subs as cargo ships, due to [[UsefulNotes/RussiansWithRustingRockets financial difficulties]].
* The Japanese battleship ''Yamato'' (yes, [[Anime/SpaceBattleshipYamato that one]]) and her twin sister ''Musashi''. The true embodiment of AwesomeButImpractical, their nine [[{{BFG}} 18.1-inch main battery guns]] were the largest ever put to sea, but Japan's poor radar-based targeting systems, meant they would much less effective than Allied battleships. Their anti-aircraft guns were too small and again, the lacked of radar-directed, fire control. Furthermore, the ships were so huge that even at slower speeds used enormous quantities of fuel. It was the fuel consumption that ultimately kept them from earlier battles. ''Yamato'' and ''Musashi'' both ended up fighting in the Battle of the Philippine Sea and the Battle of Leyte Gulf, where ''Musashi'' was sunk in a air attack by 19 torpedo strikes and 17 bombs. ''Yamato'' did get to engage US warships in combat, albeit small escort carriers and their escorting ships, succeeding in crippling destroyer ''USS Johnston'' and escort carriers ''USS Gambier Bay'' and ''USS White Plains'' and sinking destroyer ''USS Hoel''. ''Yamato'' was sunk later in a SuicideAttack, also by aircraft, taking 13 torpedoes and 10 bombs before sinking. The US forces sank her quicker, due to [[CombatPragmatism hitting her mostly on one side]].

** Though not to the same levels of the Yamato class, the German and Soviet warships of the same era were very consistently heavier than their similarly-equipped counterparts in other navies. The infamous ''Bismarck'', for instance, was arguably no better than the ''King George V''-class battleships sent to fight her despite being a good 5000 tons heavier. This can be put down to the fact that both navies took a twenty-year involuntary hiatus from not only building, but ''designing'' warships due to treaty and economic damage, respectively.