The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

In the category 'who cares!' I have the following question for u (it may have been asked before but theres so many threads in this forum, I cannot possibly check them all):

The stinger has 10 crew. That means it cannot have an equal number of zoqs, fots and piks on board. I think its most likely theres 3 sets of zoq-fot-pik's + 1 extra creature. Does the ship have 1 extra zoq, 1 extra fot or 1 extra pik? Or are the zoqs, fots and piks equal in their capabilities and completely exchangable and thus have a completely random crew composition? That would mean u could encounter a ship manned by only Fots!  :-\

I'm sure they're all equal in skills somehow...

But ya, someone else asked this before, but the question was slightly different.  It would be a nice question to ask Toys For Bob...

I think there's one brown one, who's the captain. Notice how he's the one that steers the thing when they're flying, I think the rest are just odds and ends, etc...

I always thought that each Zot, Fot or Pik count as 1/3 crew so in fact there are 30 of them...

Since you always see them together and the Captain potrait only
ever shows one Captain, I assumed the three guys counted as one unit.
So, I agree with the above post, there are thirty guys, in ten groups
of three.

Wow, wacky. There must be something about the Stinger's design that increases its enemy's weapon lethality threefold, then; what a crappy design!

If we follow that logic, does this mean there are actually 80 Androsynth aboard every Guardian? 36 humans in every Cruiser (separated into exactly equal numbers of males and females)? Of course, the alternative is that there really is at least one "odd man out" aboard every fully crewed Stinger.

My personal take is that the only thing guaranteed about the Stinger's crew composition is that it includes a minimum of one of each subrace: The brown guy to steer, the green one to man the gunner's station, and the blue one for the tonguing (Yeah! The tonguing's the best part!). The rest of the crew are manning support stations, and could be of any of the 3 subraces. What happens if there are less than 3 crew left on board? Er... Well, what do I know, anyway?

"BOOM"? ;D

Any Zoq, Fot or Pik can change form into any of the other two "species". ;)

could be 9 crew and 1 computer... :3

...With the computer doing the actual flying and captaining, and the ZFP just along for the ride. :P

Oh No!  Not uneven numbers of our dear friends and allies that are an alliance of three races!

In other news, the human cruiser is suspected of not having equal numbers of male and female humans.  More on this as it develops.

Okay, I forgot about the Andros having five guys in the Captain's picture. My
mistake. In my defence, the Guardian ship doesn't appear in SC2...

Okay, new theory, there are three of each and one extra guy. Each
one _can_ pilot/fight, but they much prefer to break up the tasks.

What if those 5 guys were linked into a hive-like mind? Would they therefore count as One mind and thus captain or several? It would explain their uncanny ability to coordinate so well...

The Androsynth are not the only ones with multiple crew members in the captain's pic. As mentioned, the hunams have got two (one lady and one gent; as I said before, does this mean the entire crew is paired up with someone of the opposite gender?), and there are two Spathi in their captain pic as well. I'm fairly certain this was done just for flavor (or maybe they couldn't come up with enough simple animations for only one member of those races back in SC1), and so I'm going to just chalk the ZFP pic up to the same idea as well.

And after all... we don't have an answer to questions like "Why is the planet is only 3 times bigger than a spaceship", or, say, "Why minerals on planetary surfaces look like colored dots" . Not to mention the Crew/Hull discussion or "how 12 ships fit in the Vindicator" and so on...
It's a similar question.
I don't even think that PR3 and FF can answer these ) And they don't have too ))

Of course. It's to prevent loneliness during those long cold space nights aboard the vessel. I don't know if any of you've actually tried it, but a human vessel can actually replenish it's crew the same way as the mycon due to this circumstance. It's fairly easy to try. Enter against a slow enemy. Take one hit. Wait 18 years. Your crew will regenerate as a enw generation steps in to fill the void.

Of course, you can't do this too many times. in simulations with enhanced clock frequency, I've determined that after 20 or so generations, the steering ability of the ship seriously degenerates. I think this may hev to do with inbreeding.

Or maybe because the captain is really old?   ::)

No, the Captain is immortal. This is common knoledge.

Hunam cruiser's got a computer in their picture too.  It lights up when you activate point defense, and I think it's one of the 'casualties' when you get hit under 3.  First is weapons officer, can't remember if it's the helmsman or the comp to take the hit next in the picture.

Damage taken reducing the crew seen in the captain's picture works with the spathi too.  Can't remember if it did with the 'synth...

This has to be another one of those "things we really remember, but aren't actually in the game" again. I've never seen a captain's portrait for any race get altered from taking damage.

bet i'm getting it mixed up with the tobermoon earthling mod from http://starcontrol.classicgaming.gamespy.com/sc2shp/ but i'm goggling at the idea my memory could be so... half baked.

This is seriously bugging the hell out of me, but for the life of me I can't find my original disks and the pngs in UQM's files don't even have the maps for damage on them.

Could have sworn that... *mutter mutter*

In a weak defense I have to say i'm beginning to notice things that are... different.  I recall tanaka's ship actually having the limpets on his ship when you battle him, both on his status screen and in the tactical map and I don't recall them in UQM.  I'm beginning to wonder if there were different versions of this game...

Now wouldn't it be cool if the pictures changed as the ship's crew decreased. Have like 3 levels of backgrounds with transition effects? Considering the cool animations in the first game (like planetary bombardments and such) I'm surprised they didn't do this.

Yeah, this is an urban myth. I've played SC2 in DOS and that never happened. You'r memeory is quite faulty. It'd be an interesting idea though

However, on a side note, I do remeber Tanaka's ship in the DOS version looking rather crippled and limpety as well, as well as having a modified captain's portrait. Of particular note was that there was a big gash across his destruct switches, implying that he couldn't activate his glory device (even though it's not explicitly stated in dialog, I believe the AI still follows that logic). I wonder why that image was cut from the 3DO version.

Eh? All of the above is in UQM, as far as I can remember: modified ship and pilot graphics, Tanaka mentioning the destruct switch breaking (ask him why he didn't use his Glory Device) and so on. I don't have a suitable save game handy, but all the content for this is in UQM.

In my opinion the captain crew(last one) represents the ones you see and the rest are crew who do other stuff which are not related to actually controlling the ship. (Mainly maintance)
So the zfp has 12 crew, the cruiser has 19 crew etc etc.

2 hours of scrounging in the basement...
40 minutes to realize the old 386 bios had its battery run dry years ago and needs the cylinder and head number for the hard drive...
5 minutes of searching on the net to find the specs, only to have the video card fail...
20 seconds to realize that's why you packed the the 386 away in the first place...

...only to find that you're memory has the retention of a broken sieve, again?  Priceless, just priceless.  :P

I ran a new game to delta gorno to see if the sofixti had all the correct trappings.  His ship in the combat zone has limpets (which I did not remember) and his captain's picture has the broken switch (which I did remember) but his status pic (the scout pic above the captain's picture) does not have limpets, and I remember that at one point it did.

However, given the state of my memory maybe I should be looking for the cylinder and heads specs for the human brain.  It's obvious that i'm missing a few now.  :-\

oooo-Kay! Here's my take:

Crew: number/stat to represent ship size. Therefore it is an approximation. So if the Syreen crew is also an approximation, those little green dots represent approximately 1 (one) crew member per dot. Actually 1.333 or 1.2 or 0.9 crew per dot, or similar.

Alternately, the crew represents hull strength/armour. What about the syreen? (handwave, handwave) (insert long stream of virtually meaningless technoscientific babble, probably involving quanta of photons, mesons, borons and masons).