History Main / UnnecessarilyLargeVessel

* The ''Absolution'' from Creator/{{Toonami}} is incredibly huge, but it only has one operator ([=TOM=]) and a handful of assistants (The Cyldes). Considering its only used as a broadcast center, who knows what they need all that space for.

* Justified with the ''Series/{{Andromeda}} Ascendant'', as it had originally a crew of around ''four thousand,'' and now has... six. In fact, many of the hardships of the ridiculously small crew (for most of the series) are the fact that, even with a shipwide AI and a supply of humanoid android laborers, there are simply not enough real people around to do everything. Several times the crew either gets whipped in combat, or has to resort to trickery, because they don't have the crew to man fighters, conduct repairs, or the 800-strong contingent of elite shock troops the ship used to have.

* The ''Series/RedDwarf'' is a mining ship quoted as being 6 miles long, 5 miles wide and 4 miles high, that originally had a crew of hundreds. Three million years later it's crewed by a slacker who was in stasis for bringing a cat on board, a being that evolved from said cat, the ship's somewhat senile computer, a hologram of one of the dead crew, and, from series 3 onward, a robot butler they picked up on a passing asteroid.
** As you may already have guessed, in this series the trope is PlayedForLaughs. For instance, the express elevators have movie screens in them so you'll have something to watch while you wait a few hours to reach your floor.
** It was originally stated to have had a pre-disaster crew complement of 169. However this was deemed ridicously low early on, and later mentions of the original crew retconned the figure to 1,169. Since series 8, the re-creation of the large rouge one brought back to life its entire crew complement of (now) 11,169 members...this is an attempt by the writers to justify the size of the ship by giving it a bigger crew.

* In the reboot ''Film/StarTrek'' films Starfleet ships from the 23rd Century are as large as, if not larger than, their 24th Century counterparts in the original timeline. The new ''Enterprise'' is of comparable size to the ''Galaxy''-class, although much of it is UnnecessarilyLargeInterior. Main Engineering is a cavernous space and the ship even has what looks like a shopping mall style atrium many stories high.

* For the ''TabletopGame/StarWarsSagaEdition'' RPG, a fan-made, impossibly humongous ship apparently dubbed the Imperium "Ultra" Class Star Destroyer with all the fixin's inspired someone to write [[http://crossproduct.net/~md/sdsd.txt a status report]] concerning the maiden flight of the ''SDSD Freudian Nightmare'' and all the problems that would come with maintaining said impossibly huge ship. It's hilarious.

*** Kylo Ren's shuttle in ''Film/TheForceAwakens'' looks even more ''[[http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/kylorencommandshuttle_fathead.JPG ridiculous]]''.

* The proposed project to recycle Russia's typhoon-class subs as cargo ships, due to [[RussiansWithRustingRockets financial difficulties]].

* Entirely possible in ''Videogame/KerbalSpaceProgram''. You can land on the Mun in a simple one-person lander launched on a modest rocket. Or you can build a ship that's several times the height of the building it's supposedly constructed in. The game performance suffers with large ships though, making them often AwesomeButImpractical.

** The Doctor's Tardis: It's BiggerOnTheInside. It's designed to be piloted by six people and is only ever really operated by one. It's usually inhabited by only 1-3 people.

* The original SDF-1 ''Macross'' from ''Anime/SuperDimensionFortressMacross''. Its original builders were a race of giants, but for the purposes of humanity, who rebuild it and start flying it around, it is much, much larger than it has to be. To the point that the civilians who wind up on it build an entire metropolis inside the ship, multi-story buildings and all. Averted in later ''Anime/{{Macross}}'' shows for both ''Macross''-class and ''New Macross''-class ships, which are similarly big but also intended to service giant-sized crew if necessary.

* [[BigBad Ellis Billington]] in ''[[Literature/TheLaundrySeries The Jennifer Morgue]]'' has a yacht called the ''Mabuse''. For a certain value of "yacht", anyway: the thing is a demilitarized former Russian Navy ''Krivak III''-class missile frigate. She basically exists to say that Billington is richer than Croesus. With the missile tubes and other armament having been removed, she has more than enough space for a luxurious suite of rooms [[spoiler:and a well-equipped occult surveillance operation]].

* [[VideoGame/MetalGearSolid2SonsOfLiberty Arsenal Gear]] is so large as to be stated in-game to be so big as, without proper support, "nothing more than a giant, floating coffin." [[spoiler:[[VideoGame/MetalGearSolid4GunsOfThePatriots Outer Haven,]]]] to a lesser extent, since it's smaller and is more built for purpose. Both are unnecessarily large submersible warships.

* In the ''Franchise/StargateVerse'', the Asgard are ''all'' over this trope. Their standard ships are just under a mile long, and each ship has a total crew of ''one''. The Asgard are a dying race, so they don't have a surplus of manpower, but you'd think they would take that into account when they build their warships. Not to mention the ceilings are human-height, even though the Asgard themselves are about three feet tall, making it the equivalent of a human spacecraft with a cathedral roof. Presumably this is a throwback to before the Asgard race's genetic degradation, as millions of years ago they ''were'' [[https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/stargate/images/1/1d/Asgard_ancestor.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20091230201030 of human-like stature]].

* In the ''Franchise/StargateVerse'', the Asgard are ''all'' over this trope. Their standard ships are just under a mile long, and each ship has a total crew of ''one''. The Asgard are a dying race, so they don't have a surplus of manpower, but you'd think they would take that into account when they build their warships. Not to mention the ceilings are human-height, even though the Asgard themselves are about three feet tall, making it the equivalent of a human spacecraft with a cathedral roof. Presumably this is a throwback to before the Asgard race's genetic degradation, as millions of years ago they ''were'' of human-like stature.

* The ''Moon'' (as in, Earth's actual moon) turns out to be a giant starship in ''Literature/EmpireFromTheAshes'' by Creator/DavidWeber. It's revealed to have been an [[AdvancedAncientHumans ancient human starship]], and all humans on Earth are the descendants of its crew. David has said that, when designing it, he put in all the engines and weapons and defenses and armor and living space... and discovered he'd used less than half the moon's actual volume. So he added ''more'' armor & weapons, then gave the crew accommodations fit for kings. Rich, ''important'' kings. All this lead to the ship having an UnnecessarilyLargeInterior, which is lampshaded at least once. Not that all the parks and gardens aren't appreciated, of course...

** There are three reasons given for this: one, the Raven's length is exaggerated by the two "prongs" of its Capacitor Pulse Laser system, which account for a good half of its length; two, it has ''black hole generators'' for engines, a technology so advanced the Raven is the only ship ever to use it; and three, most Polaris ships including the Raven are to some extent [[LivingShip living organisms]], and so are probably capable of handling their own internal organs with minimal human intervention.

** There are two reasons given for this: one, the Raven's length is exaggerated by the two "prongs" of its Capacitor Pulse Laser system, which account for a good half of its length; and two, it has ''black hole generators'' for engines, a technology so advanced the Raven is the only ship ever to use it.

*** A good while back, Starwars.com had a Databank entry which stated that even the regular Star Destroyers were unprecedented in size and absolute overkill for what the Empire needed. This appears to have been retconned however, with the Star Destroyers being treated more as a standard ship size, and with similarly large vessels popping up elsewhere in the Expanded Universe and elsewhere in the galaxy's history.

* The ''Götterdämmerung'' in ''Film/IronSky'' is the monstrous flagship of the Nazi space fleet (ItMakesSenseInContext). Its guns can take out a tenth of the Moon with each shot, however, the ship is too overpowered. Since the Nazi computer technology is so far behind, their ENIAC-sized machine can't hope to run all of the ''Götterdämmerung'''s systems. Then they get ahold of a smartphone.

* In StephenBaxter's ''Literature/XeeleeSequence'' universe: the Xeelee Nightfighter. The cockpit is small, about the size of a room, but it's ''wings'' stretch out for kilometers in either direction, like vast sails. The purpose of these wings are never made evident, as the ship itself travels via teleportation.

* The "Rebellion" ExpansionPack to ''SinsOfASolarEmpire'' adds the Titan class, which are truly enormous ships that dwarf the previously-huge Flagships. Notably, you can only build one, and it takes a long time to complete.

* [[VideoGame/MetalGearSolid2SonsOfLiberty Arsenal Gear]] is so large as to be stated in-game to be so big as, without proper support, "nothing more than a giant, floating coffin." [[spoiler:[[MetalGearSolid4 Outer Haven,]]]] to a lesser extent, since it's smaller and is more built for purpose. Both are unnecessarily large submersible warships.

* In Creator/TomHolt's ''Literature/FlyingDutch'', after the Flying Dutchman discovers that he's the richest person in the world, thanks to compound interest, he trades in his old ship for a used aircraft carrier. For his crew of less than a dozen.