Dana Shilling wrote:
Actually, I think Liberator is huge compared to the London-- so much so that in a later episode, footage from SpaceFall is re-used because someone failed to notice the tiny speck of the London model in the footage. So even if Liberator is "only" five times the size of the London, there are six and then five bio-crewmembers in a ship that could probably hold 250 people.
But that assumes the empty volume/ship machinery ratio is the same, which isn't necessarily so. The drives evidently work on completely different methods which might be bulky. And who knows how much volume is consumed by the power regenerators? And the recycling/recreation machinery for life support and mechanical maintenance must have been pretty extensive. Heck, even Zen itself might require a sizeable amount of memory banks or whatever. Not to mention the offduty lounges for all the robots that actually do the grunt work. ;-)
And, of course, you can't assume non-filled-with-machinery volume equates to crew accommodations. They had at least one cargo hold large enough to admit a space shuttle. Perhaps there were dozens of them, empty ones the Altas were looking to fill with <something> in the course of their journeying.
I can't help but think that if there *were* accommodations for 250 people, we'd have heard something about it, especially from people used to living in what looked like a densely occupied dome. References to the ship being eerily empty, jokes about using a different cabin every night, complaints about the miles of corridors to pass through on the way to <some place.>
Not to mention that having those 'wasted' rooms would have preyed on Blake's mind. Why not frequent references to taking extra people on board simply to ferry them away from bad circumstances/to places they were needed? Okay, the show's budget wouldn't allow that to be shown, but there could have been remarks about 'Glad to finally get those rebels to Chandra Six and have the ship to ourselves again.'
My impression was always that there was SOME more space than they needed, but not extremely so. Something more on the order of a handful of extra cabins.
Susan Beth (susanbeth33@mindspring.com)