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Unnecessarily Large Vessel
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This trope is for when a ship in the story is hugely (and in some cases, comically) oversized for the crew or purpose it currently has. The large size may have had an original use, but in the story it's being vastly underutilized. Though mainly a sci-fi trope usually involving spaceships, it can apply in other situations as well (i.e. boats, hovercrafts, etc).
What happens when Bigger Is Better is applied to ISO Standard Human Spaceship. May overlap with Starship Luxurious. May involve an Enormous Engine. For things that are larger and have even less use, see Big Dumb Object. Compare Unnecessarily Large Interior, Mile-Long Ship, Planet Spaceship and Awesome, but Impractical.
Examples:
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Anime And Manga
- The Mammoth Car from Speed Racer. Possibly subverted, since its constructed out of stolen gold.
Film
- In Star Wars:
- The Imperial Shuttle has very large, folding "wings" and a large dorsal fin. Despite this, the shuttle itself can only carry a few people, and with the technology of the Star Wars universe, the wings are completely unnecessary anyway (it's shown multiple times taking off and landing while the wings are still folded).
- The Super Star Destroyer Executor. It is canonically 19 kilometers long, and while it is a fully functional warship, its purpose is clearly more symbolic of The Empire's vast resources. A fleet of smaller ships could easily accomplish the same thing.
- For a close second in length, we have the Eclipse-class super star destroyer from the Dark Empire comics (17 km, and outmasses the Executor-class). An in terms of mass, it's almost twice as big as the Executor. And by the New Jedi Order series the New Republic has a few such vessels of its own, specifically the Viscount-class battleship, expressly designed as a counter to the Super Star Destroyer and its ilk.
- 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. As with the Super Star Destroyers, it seems they intentionally made them the size of a small moon just for the symbolism and the 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 17000000 (17 million) cubic kilometers., and the second would have, if completed, had a volume more than 3000000000 (3 billion) cubic kilometers.
- Played with in Spaceballs with Dark Helmet's ship, which just goes on and on and on and on and on....
- In 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 was 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.
- In Explorers, the kids build a tiny spaceship — smaller than an Apollo capsule. When they get to space, an alien spaceship takes control of it and sucks it into a docking bay. That ship is depicted with an interior big enough to get seriously lost in. Then a few scenes later, a much larger alien ship comes around and drags the first alien ship into one of its docking bays. Each alien ship appears to run just fine with a crew of two.
- The corridors and rooms in the alien ship are depicted as being vastly larger than the aliens themselves. At the end we learn the reason: The aliens are actually young children. The adults find the large spaces slightly cramped.
Literature
- Alastair Reynolds is fond of this trope:
- The novel Revelation Space features a kilometers-long spaceship called the Nostalgia For Infinity that, despite being built to hold over a hundred thousand passengers, is crewed in the story by only a handful of post-humans.
- In House Of Suns, each of the main characters has their own kilometers-long ship that they fly around in alone most of the time. One tense scene in the novel takes place in the cargo hold of a ship, which itself is akin to a vast cavern kilometers across.
- In Stephen Baxter's Xeelee Sequence universe: the Xeelee Nightfighter. The cockpit is small, about the size of a room, but it's wings stretch out for kilometers in either direction, like vast sails. The purpose of these wings are never made evident, as the ship itself travels via teleportation.
- Subverted/handwaved in E. E. “Doc” Smith's book Skylark Of Valeron: 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.
- Ellis Billington in The Jennifer Morgue has a yacht called the Mabuse. For a certain value of "yacht", anyway: the thing is a demilitarized former Russian Navy Krivak III-class missile frigate. She basically exists to say that Billington is richer than Croesus. With the missile tubes and other armament having been removed, she has more than enough space for a luxurious suite of rooms and a well-equipped occult surveillance operation.
- The Moon (as in, Earth's actual moon) turns out to be a giant starship in Empire From The Ashes by David Weber. It's revealed to have been an ancient human starship, and all humans on Earth are the descendants of its crew.
- In Tom Holt's Flying Dutch, after the Flying Dutchman discovers that he's the richest person in the world, thanks to compound interest, he trades in his old ship for a used aircraft carrier. For his crew of less than a dozen.
- Lampshaded and called out in the Star Wars EU. When a side character gripes that if the Empire were still around, they'd be better able to handle the latest galactic crisis (the Yuuzhan Vong invasion), Han Solo snaps and says no, the Empire would have built some humongous, gaudy superweapon with a ridiculously foreboding name, which would then have been destroyed through some glaring weakpoint. (This is also a Take That at the earlier Bantam books, which gained the somewhat undeservednote It's really only the Kevin J. Anderson books that do this Fan Nickname "the Superweapon-of-the-Month Club".)
- The Great Ship in the Great Ship universe is a massive ship larger than Jupiter which has hundreds of thousands - or millions - of massive caverns, vacuum tube trains, and with space ports large enough to fit entire worlds inside. Even with billions of paying passengers aboard, most of the ship's space is almost totally unused. Since it was discovered streaking towards the Milky Way with signs of having flown through intergalactic space for at least a billion years, with no crew or even any records, it's original purpose is totally unknown.
- May or may not be the case in Andrei Livadny's The History Of The Galaxy 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 Instant A.I., Just Add Water. Nowhere do the books justify ships of such size. One novel mentions that these cruisers carry a Wave Motion Gun 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 Real Life USS Nimitz is about 330 meters long and has a crew of 3200, and that's not even counting the air wing complement (2480).
- In Cordwainer Smith's short story "Golden the Ship Was, Oh, Oh, Oh!" the Earth's ultimate weapon is a gold spaceship nine million miles long with a crew of one.
Live-Action TV
- The Red Dwarf is a kilometers-long mining ship that originally had a crew of hundreds. 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.
- As you may already have guessed, in this series the trope is Played for Laughs. For instance, 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.
- The Tulip in Starhunter is a retired luxury liner repurposed as a bounty hunting vessel. Since her crew currently consists of three people and an AI, she has so much unused space that the crew hasn't even bothered to explore the entire ship. Which led to a rather weird turn of events in one episode when a Human Popsicle in an unexplored corridor thawed out.
- Invoked in Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Remember Me" as a sign that something weird is happening onboard the Enterprise.
- The Lexx is so large that small aircraft are used for internal transport, and has a crew of three, plus a disembodied robot head, and the ship itself.
- Justified with the Andromeda Ascendant, as it had originally a crew of several thousand. In fact, many of the hardships of the ridiculously small crew (for most of the series) are the fact that there are simply not enough people to do everything.
Tabletop Games
- While all Eldar vessels in Warhammer 40000 have smaller crews than the Imperial ones (which have comparable crew densities to modern warships), the Wraithships fit this trope. They are several kilometer long capital ships that might only have a single living soul on board. note Emphasis on living, as the wraithships are piloted by the souls of dead Eldar within the ship's Infinity Circuit, with the one living being on board being the Spiritseer that helps guide the souls.
- For that matter, virtually all Imperial ships are unnecessarily large. Even smaller escort vessels are between half to two kilometers long, and they only go up from there. Their crew is similarly large, and scales with their size. Most of these ships are ancient, but built on chassis so tough that a ship can be damaged to the point of being adrift and repaired to full functionality later, so many have had countless generations of wear and repair and additions over time. This results in some ships having entire decks being sealed off since they are not worth the effort to reclaim. The huge crew is often the result of ships with advanced automated systems getting damaged and removed since the ability to build more of them has become Lost Technology, and the extra crew is needed to do the job the now-useless automation was meant for.
Video Games
- Referenced in Mass Effect 2: the Normandy SR-2 is considerably bigger than the first Normandy, and comes equipped with a spacious Captain's cabin. Several characters comment on the fact that, while the Alliance builds its ships for efficiency, Cerberus (being a criminal organisation with no oversight) can build to impress. Also, the SR-2 seemingly has fewer visible crew members than the SR-1.
- The Polaris Raven in 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.
- In X3: Terran Conflict the Dummied Out ATF Valhalla super-destroyer is easily the biggest ship in the game. In fact it's so big that A) it has serious issues with the firing arcs for its turrets, and B) it's wider than the jumpgates, meaning that if the player cheats one in and has it pass a gate while he's in the same sector, it bangs into the gate rim and loses its shields. The expansion Albion Prelude fixed the second behavior but not the first, and that, coupled with the fact that it's not much better of a Mighty Glacier than conventional destroyers, means that it's largely Awesome, but Impractical.
- Specifically averted in Sword of the Stars, where the smallest controllable ships are the destroyers, which are roughly 30 meters in length (for reference, a Space Shuttle is 56 meters long) with each subsequent class being 3 times the size. The only things smaller than destroyers are assault shuttles, boarding pods, and Attack Drones. The sequel plays it straight with the Leviathans, which are triple the size of dreadnoughts and are a huge investment of resources.
- It still takes a turn (which some people have calculates is equivalent to a year based on Hiver sublight movement) to build a destroyer by a single planet devoting considerable percentage of its industry to it.
- The "Rebellion" Expansion Pack to Sins of a Solar Empire adds the Titan class, which are truly enormous ships that dwarf the previously-huge Flagships. Notably, you can only build one, and it takes a long time to complete.
Webcomics
Web Original
- In Clear Skies, the titular ship is a Tempest-class battleship, approximately the same size as a Star Destroyer. It has a crew of less than five.
Western Animation
- The Absolution from Toonami is incredibly huge, but it only has one operator (TOM) and a handful of assistants (The Cyldes). Considering its only used as a broadcast center, who knows what they need all that space for.
- The episode "Battle Of The Planets", from Invader Zim, has the entire planet of Mars being converted into a giant spaceship, piloted by Zim. Later on, Mercury is also revealed to be a spaceship, which Dib promptly uses to fight Zim, leading to a hilarious montage of Zim and Dib bumping the planets into each other and actually dogfighting. With planets.
Real Life
- The Zeppelin the Hindenburg ended up as one of these. This was because she was designed to use non-flamable helium as the lifting gas but the company had to settle for flammable hydrogen due to an embargo. However this change also meant she had the capability to carry four times what she had the capacity to carry. It's sister the Graf Zeppelin II could carry nearly twice as many passengers and had plus sized state rooms for its wealthier travelers.
- The Titanic was deliberately built to be the largest ship in the world.
- 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. 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.
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