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. 😋
Haha, I love this kind of stuff. Very glad you put the time and effort into it. :)
A lot of what you brought up has answers slipped into the dialogue and narrative of the books, but of course I don't want to just do a big data dump on my readers in the middle of the novel they're trying to enjoy. I also don't want to take all the fun of speculation away from readers, so I'll just drop a few items in here regarding your figures and some of what is going on in the background.
Honestly, I thought the first objections were going to be to the travel times on the ship, not tonnage. Though I did mention very briefly in book 1 how he's traversing those distances without the lateral movement option of the vacuum transportation system by using the angled movement of the elevators around a sphere.
btw, if any of you are good with 3d modeling, I'd love to make a mock-up of the Sheol at some point. For now I just use my 2d cross section for reference while I write and it isn't worth posting.
Anywho, where to start...
So first off, the tonnage of the ship isn't really how you calculate crew capacity. For that you need the available surface area opposite the gravitational pull of the singularity, IE the floor space. Most of those floors aren't meant to hold housing (and as you see in book 2, they aren't living in tiny barracks like they would be on an aircraft carrier), just like we don't cover every inch of the earth with houses, and the height of the floors are non-standard. Some only contain maintenance tunnels and others hold mountain ranges (or machines the size of mountain ranges in the case of engineering). The Core Sea also takes up a lot of the ship, and does not have floors (though it could in the future).
The reason there was only a skeleton crew onboard, and why there aren't that many prisoners before the Ashtor attack (and even fewer afterwards) are both mentioned early in book 1.
The books are taking place on a section of about an eighth of one hemisphere of the ship, specifically the part Greye could get to and secure in the limited time he had after the Ashtor attack. It isn't in any particular order, just the nearest contiguous portion that he could seal off based on the damage. It mainly revolves around the central elevator nearest the bridge, connecting all the way down to main engineering. (the same elevator that runs through that part of medical)
There are power problems. Lots of very serious power problems. They are a major plot point in both books.
Life support is a huge limiting factor. The ship had most of a day to vent its atmosphere out of thousands of holes in its hull and a gigantic piercing wound that made it more than halfway to the core, made by the Ashtor flagship's last stand. A big part of book 1 was Greye strategically sealing off the section of the ship holding the survivors, and that section is later reduced in book 2 to make the inhabited section more defensible.
Hydroponics was a huge part of the life support recycling system and the Ashtor flagship made it far enough to pierce those floors, which flash froze almost all of the flora and fauna. What remains of that system is not localized on the part of the ship they're living in, so when you see 6% capacity on the recycling system, that is not 6% serving their section, it's serving the whole ship and some small part of that is serving theirs.
Megalith class ships in their Supercarrier form are largely filled with drones, fighters, bombers, and the smaller class fleet ships and the Battleship form is largely an enormous weapons platform. As you pointed out, with a functional AI and a fleet of maintenance robots for it to direct, crew requirements are minimal (some would say even optional)
In it's decommissioned Prison Ship variant, a Megalith only carries as many inmates as it is assigned, and it is meant to carry the worst of the worst. Even the medium security wing of the Sheol is filled with killers. While everyone in this setting is more or less immortal thanks to regenerative technology, the Sheol hasn't been a prison ship that long, and by and large women commit fewer capital offenses than men by a lot. She has never been anywhere near full, and that fact has led to the ship being used for "other" purposes. As you'll see down the line.
GT is Gross Tons and represents what remains of the usable stockpiles after the attack, which means what the automated systems can still access. For food it is roughly assuming 2,250 calories per half kilogram for a population estimate near 10k as of book 1, although there are a whole bunch of variables in there to change that, such as different species dietary requirements and the "people not accounted for" in book 2. As for the raw materials weight, they aren't replacing the armored hull, they're patching it with a thin covering to make the ship airtight again, and I am most definitely not going to go into the finer details of how many holes, how big they are, how much the self-repairing nano-adamant can regrow using attached debris, or any of the other plethora of variables you'd need to actually make that calculation. The ship isn't a factory and ideally, it isn't supposed to take hull damage at all, let alone lose access to large parts of the ship from battle damage, so I don't think you can reasonably expect it to be floating around with a ridiculous amount of scrap onboard. That being said, it could certainly start cannibalizing itself or enacting debris recovery at some point, or maybe they'll just find a way to resupply, like the original crew would normally have done in such a situation.
Anyway, that's probably enough. I just enjoy stuff like this a little too much. Just remember, this is a ship that was very nearly torn apart fighting an enemy fleet without its primary defensive countermeasure in place. Everything is on the edge of falling apart and as the reader you only get a narrow window into what is happening through the POV character. You can only know what he knows and believes and I write it that way intentionally. Aside from the prologues, I never intend to break out of 1st person perspective. I like to keep the narrative form constant, and as a result, you will always be seeing the world through an imperfect lens.
Hopefully it's an enjoyable one. :)