| abstract
| - In media, spacecraft and starships revel in their inefficient use of on-board space. Passageways will be broad with high ceilings. The bridge will be an expansive multilevel complex paneled with floating viewscreens and control panels. Crew quarters will be as spacious as a suite at the Plaza. Real Life military and commercial ships make very efficient use of space. Every cubic meter of volume requires finite resources to support. This will be especially critical in spacecraft where the only resources available will be those carried on board. The nearest port may be months or years away. Therefore sustaining a space the size of a gymnasium that's manned by only five people is criminally wasteful on a military vessel. However, "cramped" and "luxurious" are also purely relative terms between time periods. A modern, space-efficient, hot-bunking military naval vessel is the epitome of space and comfort and luxury compared to ships of ancient times. A sailor from the navies of 1600 would consider life aboard, say, the Nimitz-class supercarrier Abraham Lincoln to be palatial ... and probably inconceivably wasteful. Also, real ships have decks and windows, and even submarines can surface and open hatches. A purely mathematically efficient use of space might have a detrimental effect on the mental well-being of the crew, especially if spaceships are out of port for a very extended period of time. To give a more interesting Real Life case, the Soviet/Russian Akula/"Typhoon" class submarines (all but one has now retired) had a swimming pool, sports facilities, a sauna and a smoking room, since the subs could spend at least 180 days submerged at a time. Tom Clancy got this wrong in The Hunt for Red October, but that was more a bad guess based on other submarines. The "Typhoon" is the exception rather than the rule, although ballistic missile-carrying submarines are noted for their attention to crew comfort. If you want cramped, look at modern hunter/killer submarines or go back to World War II subs (watching Das Boot will give you an idea of how ridiculously claustrophobic these are). This trope is usually given a pass for "cruise spaceships", where the wasted space is part of the point, as the passengers are wealthy enough to absorb the cost. For Sufficiently Advanced Aliens (or humans at the Crystal Spires and Togas level), cost would naturally be less of an issue. Often, though not always, a feature of a Cool Starship. Examples of Starship Luxurious include:
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![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)