Questions & Answers

And that's that even our dear Author doesn't truly understand how awesomely powerful and huge the Sheol actually is and thus fails at portraying her accordingly.

The biggest failure being that at the stated size, capacity and capability of the ship, even after being effectively crippled, there should be no issues whatsoever for it to sustain a population of not even 10k in the short term. Hell, not even the long term should be an issue, as in the Sheol should be entirely capable of sustaining those 10 thousand indefinitely as long as there are no power problems.

I did some math, and depending on how much armor a Megalith-class Super Carrier actually has, they are equivalent anywhere from 2,400,000 to 1,000,000 Ford-class Aircraft carriers. Meaning at comparable crew density a Megalith-class should have 11 to 4.5 billion crew. Yes, Billion with a B. (The Ford-class has about 4500 crew)

My Math: I took the volume of the sphere at almost no armor, 5mi (~8km) diameter, and at 1km of armor, 6km diameter.

Then I assumed that about 80% of that would be hollow while 20% would be structures and machinery of various sorts. So I divided the volume by 5 and multiplied it by the density of titanium (4.5g/cm³) which seemed like a plausible enough average density for the amalgamation of all the sci-fi materials used in the ship. Afterward I just compared the resulting tonnages to the tonnage of the Ford-class as stated on wikipedia.

Due to the wide variety of materials and methods of construction I excluded the weight of any possible armor in those calculations. The Ford-class itself also has no armor to speak of and almost entirely relies on active defenses so the given tonnage remains comparable. It obviously also ignores the singularity at the Megalith's core.

The following tonnages are in Kilotons (1000 metric tons) No armor = 245,525,892 Kt

1km armor = 101.787.300 Kt

Ford-class = 101 Kt

As you can see the Sheol is operating at a truly absurd scale.

And even if we bring down the normal crew size/population to just 1 million, due to extreme levels of automation, that would mean that even if the various life-sustaining systems of the ship work at just 1% capacity it would be enough for the current population to be perfectly fine. (I also want to point out that all those calculations were unnecessary for this conclusion as it was described in the books that at full capacity the Sheol would be holding millions of prisoners, so the author's math doesn't math regardless.)

Also what unit is GT? My first thought was Gigatons (Billion metric tons), but that math really really doesn't math in the books. Maybe Galactic Standard Ton? The math still doesn't math but it'd make more sense. as for why it doesn't math, if the amount of raw resources is accurate, they'd be nowhere near a food shortage, not for decades or even centuries. And if the food is accurate then the repair system must be conjuring materials out of thin air to have fixed as much as they have.

I think I'm done for now, have a nice day!😀 Also, Welcome Mr. Gaumer! To the joys of giving your readers hard numbers. 😋