I started writing these ‘real vs. star wars’ as a way to fill out my otherwise kinda boring letters to my daughter who is in the Navy. I enjoyed it enough that I decided to post them elsewhere which led to setting this blog up. This was the first of those.
Real: Mercy Class Hospital Ships
I’ve long been a fan of these ships. Replacing the Haven class hospital ships that served the US navy from the mid 40’s through the 1980’s, they are regularly stationed with one on each US coast and are each fully equipped for medical / surgical deployments with 1000 bed capacities. The logistics of maintaining that on a ship are fascinating to think about…power, communications, sanitation…but think about doing actual surgery in heavy seas…how would that work? The answer: they have 12 operating rooms aligned along the ship’s rotational axis, so movement is minimized. Not ideal to conduct surgery in that kind of environment, but possible. Pretty sweet right?
I found an “ask me anything” on Reddit with someone who worked on these with a fun tidbit…
“Fun Fact: If you look at the front of each ship you will see that the red cross is centered for Comfort, and offset to the port side for Mercy. This was done after the helicopter pilots had a hard time telling the two ships apart!”
Also noteworthy – per the Geneva convention hospital ships are allowed to act only in defense or risk losing those protections. , and must provide aid and comfort to all forces. They truly are humanitarian in nature.
The engineering stats are equally interesting – the ships were originally oil ‘super tankers’ built to serve the Alaskan pipeline system but converted for Navy use. 894 feet long, 105 feet beam (width), and 65 feet of draft (depth below the water). This is Panamax…the biggest a ship can be and still make it through the panama canal. Power comes from twin GE Turbines and Foster Wheeler steam boilers with power output of 18.2 MegaWatts. Engines like this are huge…I’ve seen diesel engines this size in data centers I’ve visited and you may have seen similar outside corporate buildings for backup power or on large ships.
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Start Wars Ship(s): Rebel Alliance EF76 Nebulon-B escort Frigate
First off, this clearly has a much cooler name, but ‘quick get this patient to the EF76 Nebulon-B escort Frigate’ doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. These are featured in several of the movies, but the most iconic was at the end of Empire. If you remember the ship Luke is one when he gets his hand replaced, that’s one of these. I’ve always thought it was one of the coolest looking ships in Star Wars, but they have a long narrow bit in the middle that just screams ‘crash a TIE fighter through me and cut this capital ship in half’.
These are ‘escorts’ not ‘hospital ships’ per se, so they are heavily armed. They show up several times in the movies and other media and they look cool blowing up so they are shot down a lot. They were built for the imperial navy originally, but the rebels stole a bunch of them (Vader was there trying to trap them and he was suuuuper pissed about it), so the official specs show things like how many TIE fighters are supported. That said, I don’t believe the Empire ever gets to actually use any of them. Most recently, there are a few of these in the battle above Exegol at the very end of “The rise of Skywalker”.
There are a lot of similarities between these and the USNS ships. Length is almost the same at 900 feet and crew complements are also similar (around 1000+ for this and for Mercy/Comfort). I like to think that the folks who designed this were looking at the Haven class hospital ships mentioned above when they wrote up the concept.