Sunday, April 13, 2008

Oganization

I've always liked to see things in order. My mom tells a tale of buying cucumbers and then setting me on the table as she put away groceries. I got into the cucumber bag and proceeded to arrange them by size until I got to a pair where one was shorter but fatter than the other. Apparently I spent a lot of time switching them back and forth as my 2-3 year old brain attempted to grasp volume as measure.

My enjoyment of a topic is usually enhanced if it has some sort of organizing I can do with it, be it organizing dog breeds by size or sword patterns by age or calibers by velocity.

In this same vein, I used to ask my father questions of "If a crocodile and a lion got in a fight, who would win?" and then whatever answer I'd slightly shift the variables "What if the lion was really old? What if the crocodile was young? How about a gorilla vs a crocodile?"

Now in the realm of space vessels I am able to waste a lot of time comparing ships across 'universes'

http://www.merzo.net/

I've always wondered how Battlestar Galactica stacks up vs the Galaxy Class Enterprise, or an Imperial Star Destroyer. That web page kept me occupied for hours, comparing things, and making the Hindenburg crash into the Pyramid ships from Star gate or grab Godzilla and The Statue of Liberty and have them fight each other...

It is also interesting to place real world examples next to Star Wars Icons like a 747 next to the AT-AT, an X-wing next to an F-14.

I just wish there was a faster way to drag things around. My second complaint is you click on tabs on top to get a set of ships built to a certain X pixels = Ymeters often the same ships can be found on multiple tabs sometimes being one of the biggest sometimes one of the smallest. However, he is inconsistent, like King Kong is just a tiny little bugger on 1X where all the Star Trek ships are, but he is absent on 10X which has everything from a Volkswagen Beetle to the AT-AT (whose body is as long as an F-14), Sure, I can extrapolate, but the whole beauty of this sight is I don't have to! I can grab the Millennium Falcon and a 747 and put them next to each other.

Oh, and I wish I could figure out how to make buildings lie sideways, makes it easier to compare things to the Empire State Building (man, I never new Kong was so small compared to it)

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Great post, Andy. I used to have a poster that did the same thing as this website. The number of space craft were much more limited, but it was really cool to see everything in the same space.

Similarly, the was a great to-scale ad campaign for the terrible Godzilla remake. In Los Angeles they regularly take over entire sides of buildings with movie, TV and Apple ads. For Godzilla, they put up a kind of ruler, showing you just how big the lizard would stand next to the building. It was pretty cool.

w1ndst0rm said...

Any site that has a Zentradi battle cruiser front and center on the main page is a winner.

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