The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

A few thoughts on the Earthling Cruiser

Working on a Star Control fanfic recently I began wondering about the dimensions and crew capacities of the various Star Control Ships. Someone at the Pages of Now and Forever message board directed me to a wonderful discussion of this very topic here on the UQM forums. After reading the rather extensive thread I decided to do a little calculating of my own focusing on The Earthling Cruiser. So here goes. Let’s start off with a few bedrock assumptions.

Assumption #1 Due to the two dimensional nature of the Star Control games, the limitations of graphics technology at the time of their release and an intention by the authors to create a balanced gaming experience the Star Control Melee screen accurately depicts the combat capabilities of the various vessels involved in the Ur Quan Conflict, but does not accurately represent their dimensions.

Assumption #2 Given that the ComSim central starship databank from SC 1 contains in game terms “technical readouts of  hierarchy and alliance vessels” (even though we know that in reality they are simply awesome drawings done by fantastic artists) we can assume that the vessels depicted in those specifications are in fact properly scaled. So how do we determine the size of an object from a picture of that object?

Well first of all we need a point of reference (an object in the image whose dimensions are known to us) In the case of the Earthling Cruiser there is a very obvious point of reference as the entire picture is orientated on one plane and we don’t have to account for variations in distance. This point of reference is the nuclear missile identified as a “Fire and Forget Nuclear Missile (MX surplus)”

Although we do not know for certain what type of nuclear missile is depicted, the image does give us a few pointers from which we can make a fairly educated guess. Firstly we know that we are dealing with an MX or in other words Inter Continental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) we also know that the ICBM used for this particular image was “surplus” that according to Star Control history came from the peace vaults established in 2015 after the Small War meaning the missiles were in use until at least 2015 Knowing these facts we can begin looking through various classes of ICBM’s for a suitable candidate. After doing a bit of research on the subject I determined that the Trident II ICMB fits the criteria quite well. Developed in 1990 and slated to be deployed well past 2020 (which fits quite nicely into the Star Control timeline) it is designed to be deployed from mobile platforms and is used in many of today’s nuclear submarines, (and perhaps starships of the 22nd century?)

If we take the missile in the technical specs of the Earthling cruiser to be a Trident II the length of the depicted object would be 13.4 meters (as per the length of a Trident missile)  The missile in the image being 44 pixels long would give us a measurement of 30.45 cm per pixel.
Applying this to the image of the cruiser proper we get a length of 136 meters (from the rear engine nacelles to the tip of the “saucer”) with the main body (minus the engines) being 126 meters long. Similarly we get a height of 26 meters (from the lowest part of the engine to the tip of the blue dome on the saucer) and a beam (width) of 38 meters (from engine to engine).
   

These measurements seem to me to be completely reasonable. The Earthling Cruiser seems roughly equivalent in size to one of today’s midrange nuclear submarines, such as the Benjamin Franklin or Resolution class. Submarines of this type usually carry an armament of between 16 and 20 ICBMs which I think is entirely reasonable for the Earthling Cruiser as well. They also typically carry a crew of well over 100 but in regards to SC ships crew is another discussion entirely. (If the Earthling Cruiser does indeed only have a crew of 18 then this allows plenty of space for accommodation and additional missiles.) I will be making calculations for other SC ships soon but for now this is as good as I can come up with for the Cruiser.

 

Seems quite believable to me. Job well done.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

I think all the extra space that can be reclaimed from the crew of 18 is likely to be devoted to equipment that no submarine would ever need. AKA: a Hyperspace-capable engine, point-defense laser system and the targetting computers necessary to allow it to track a multitude of targets simultaneously, etc.

Targeting computers being sizable? Come on, even if moore's law conks out now it'd take one heck of a computational load to require a volume of computers that's a noticeable fraction of the volume of a nuclear submarine.

I would guess that a decent fraction of the mass goes to armor that can withstand a few nuclear blasts...

Meh, that too. Then again, maybe in 20 years, they'll decide that vacuum tubes were way ahead of their time. ;)

Hello everybody,

Maybe the MX missile refers to the MX missile? ;D

http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/usa/icbm/lgm-118.htm
Given legnth is 21.8 meters.

from our 2006 perspective the Trident II seems the more apropriate choice but as Eth pointed out on the pages of now and forever the Authors probably intended to use the LMG 118-A seeing as in 1991 they had no reason to think it wouldnt survive to the small war of 2015. Using this as our yardstick we get a cruiser that is 221 mtrs. However this in my opinion makes 18 crew a little sparce...even if you include anti nuclear armor..hyperdrives...computer systems...etc....221 mtrs is...quite a fair amount of space. These calculations are always open to all kinds of interpretation. Thus the debate. I don't think we can ever really establish exact specifications unless TFB comes out and says this is how it is. (maybe in the next star control eh?) i think it's safe to say that the Cruiser is somewhere between 130 and 220 mtrs, yes I know, quite a range but it all depends where your coming from I guess.

I decided to do a more detailed comparison of the two missile candidates compared to the missile in the picture. Assuming that the internal components of the MX missiles were modified, but the outside structure at least kept relatively intact, the length to width ratio should be the same as today. Using the entire image, it came out to be in between the Trident and Peacekeeper. However, the top part of the missile in the image is dark. Since the top part of the cruiser is fairly bright, this leads on to think that part of the top pixel (actually four pixels together) is just empty space. Thus, taking only half of the top pixel in the calculations (and leaving out the very front, which is also quite dark), one gets a ratio extremely close to that of the Peacekeeper.

Using this method gives a conversion ratio of 0.5 meters per pixel in the picture below.
(http://img206.imageshack.us/img206/5418/comparisonqy9.th.jpg) (http://img206.imageshack.us/my.php?image=comparisonqy9.jpg)

For the small crew, it doesn’t seem at all implausible to me. The Ohio class submarine carries 155 crew and has 24 Trident missiles. It is smaller then the Earthling Cruiser, but not much smaller after factoring out the protruding engines (presumably for hyperspace). Futhermore, even today, efforts by the navy are underway to greatly reduce the crew of many ships (see DDX program). There is no reason to expect this would be greatly changed in the future.
Here is a cutaway of the Ohio class SSBN (linked on this page):
http://americanhistory.si.edu/subs/const/anatomy/boomers/index.html#

Finally, I highly doubt that “crew” really refers to crew. It is probably an combination of damage resistance and crew, so is really just an approximation.

Here is a scale comparison of the Ohio and the Earthling Cruiser:
(http://img204.imageshack.us/img204/5572/submarinecomparisonne6.th.jpg) (http://img204.imageshack.us/my.php?image=submarinecomparisonne6.jpg)

Just to note, the size I arrived at does seem a bit large to me, but I can’t see any way around it right now. The Umgah size might be able to be calculated from the picture, and it will probably be fairly big.

The MX missile is meant to work on a planet with gravity and thus has a ton of fuel that isn't needed in space. As with all rockets, much of the fuel is just there to propel the other fuel because it has to fight gravity. The warhead itself is the size of a traffic cone, and could be made much smaller.

A nuclear explosion doesn't work well in space, so that might explain why they're a little weak. I think if they were real nukes as they function on earth, any warship armour would have trouble standing up against a direct hit. That image of a nuke towering over a fleet of guinea-pig warships comes to mind. The MX is 25x as powerful as the nuke that leveled an entire city in Japan.

Remember, if we go after the sprites, art and text, the Shofixti scout is some 5 meters long and a 25x Hiroshima nuke only deals 66% damage to it. The small Scout also carries a nuke that's far more powerful than the MX. If you start reasoning about it you'll soon end up with terribly inconsistent results, unless you cherrypick some data and ignore other.

I think it's fine to assume that the sizes of the ships aren't to scale. However, if one were to do a sequel with more realistic proportions, it wouldn't feel right to me to make the UrQuan cruiser some some 1km long, and then make the Shofixti Scout 5 meters. It just wouldn't be playable without having some sort of crazy HW2 zoom, which I think detracts from gameplay (i.e. overview).

So I decided to make my ships almost  the minimum size they could be, because that's less arbitrary to me than being able to make them any size and fit anything you want in them. It also explains the low crew number, and works as a gameplay scale while also being logical, and it can explain their agile dog-fighty behaviour. This makes my version of the cruiser some 33 meters. Some 30% of the crew will always be sleeping, so it'll be about as crowded as a sub.

A 5 meter long Shofixti scout definitely wouldn't make sense in terms of power compared to other ships.

However, I'm fairly sure that the Earthling Cruiser calculation I made above is accurate. The warhead might be small, but the design is supposed to use MX missiles, not jsut warheads. The missile works out well in size ratio comparison. If the missile were to be changed, it would have to have reduced legnth, not diameter (or else it would be a whole new missile), which seems to rule this out. Besides, the missile needs to travel very far, very fast, with great acceleration (presumably supplied with futuristic technology).

As a side note, a nuclear explosion in space would still be very, very powerful. In addition, the warhead might have a modified tip, and use kinetic energy from its great speed to penetrate a small ways into the target before exploding.

Back to the Shofixti, I thought about this for awhile, and believe I can use all evidance to justify a Scout that is larger then it appears. Basically, the picture during melee only shows a small portion of the scout, at the base of the blue triangle in the melee picture. Thus, only a tiny portion of the scout would be dedicated to the cockpit. How does one explain the diagram picture then, with a Shofixti seemingly in the window? Well, to be consistant with the melee picture, the cockpit would be entirely transparent. Furthermore, the controls the Shofixti works (and probably the hands) would be visible, and in melee, the back area of the cockpit is verticle, while it is at an angle in the diagram picture. This leads me to believe that the 'shadow' is just a random blob, allowing the Scout to be scaled like the cruiser was using in-game images.

I once guestimated the cruiser to be about 200 meters long, based on a pic that shows a crewmember next to a porthole on the outside of the ship (removing a limpet with a jack hammer) and one on the inside looking out. Since people are about 2 meters, I then looked at how big the portholes were in the schematic view at compared that to its overall length in pixels.

So yea, about 200-220 meters or so.



But is it proven the dreadnaught is 1km long? It could just be as long as the cruiser, or maybe 50% longer.

Size aside, how long does it take to build a star ship? The
game seems to produce ships in seconds, but surely it
takes longer to build a cruiser? The number of ships
in the game seems symbolic (endless defensive fleets, for example)
but it makes me wonder how many ships a star base can pump out in a year.

I would think that there are ships in stock, and that whilst your out in space they'll be making them, that's what I think anyhow...

Weak?  Compared to a nuke in atmo, yes (no huge area shockwave), but since they detonate on impact, they'll still do quite a bit of damage per hit (more than other technologically advanced races' weapons) because the impact point  (along with the missile itself) will be vaporized, allowing for a minor kinetic push.

Well, the Shofixti bomb is an anti-matter reaction which is most of the mass of their ship...
Edit:  Hmm, can't find a source for this assertion.

I don't see why the sizes of the ships in super melee can't be taken to be accurate comparisons. This would put the Dreadnought as slightly shorter  then the Cruiser. Of course, it will still be significantly larger in volume, which is more indicitive of combat capability.

The glory Device is antimatter? Where does it say? The Utwig bomb is anyways.

Nukes detonating against a hull will do quite a bit of damage, but at a distance they're much less 'bang for the buck'. I meant 'weaker', not 'weak' really. I guess my sentence construction is a bit fuzzy, but I meant to say I don't think they're firing big ICBM nukes at all. They behave more like TomaHawks (which can carry almost any warhead, maybe something that came from a dismantled MX missile...).

http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3x.html#nuke

If I were going for a StarTrek scale, I'd say the cruiser is 250 (it seems like an early earth ship, later ones could be upwards 500m) and the Dreadnaught is upwards 1km. I motivate 1km with: It's a big number, a whole kilometer. Quanies are big and build big. It's also a hangar ship and those tend to be pretty massive. Planetery Siege Unit sounds like something that warrants a full km aswell. This would also match it well against ships in other sci-fi series. It's just a feel-good number I'd pick for that scale.

However, I do not like this scale much. It seems very traditional and inflational. Take a look at a skyscraper that's a few hundred meters tall. It's huge! Well, So are warships and Typhoon subs, but they also behave far from the lightly crewed flimsy SC ships which seems to be more like torpedo boats duking out.

No where apparently, not even in the SC1/SC2 manuals.  :/  I guess this is fodder for the SC Myths thread (http://uqm.stack.nl/forum/index.php?topic=3163.0).

I'm fairly certain the only time the technology behind the Glory Device has ever really been mentioned in SC1/2 was the story about what the Shofixti did when the Ur-Quan fleet arrived in their system: they used a modified Glory Device to make their sun go nova.

While this is speculative only, the Wikipedia article on antimatter-matter interaction is estimated to produce 134 times the energy of a standard fusion H+H -> He fusion reaction.
 (reference http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter )

Additionally, most of that energy is produced as kinetic energy.  It's close enough within the realm of science fiction to say that a large scale introduction of antimatter into a star could conceivably cause it to go nova.

In other words, it's at least a plausible explanation, though how you would go about acquiring that much antimatter is an open question.

Glad to see this post has grown so  :D I dont think that the melee screen  can be taken as an acurate judge of ship scales simply because that would make most of the star control ships half the size of planets...since the ComSim central breif  descriptions of ships (the ones you are given when initialy selecting a ship to fight with in practice mode) do offer some sense of scale, (for example the Dreadnaught is described as Huge, while the Shofixti scout is considered Tiny) which don't seem to be reflected  on the melee combat screen. I think only the Starship Databank pictures can be considered acurate. I have However wondered about the pictures of the ships in the various SC manuals. They seem to offer a lot more detail than either the Databank or Melee screens.

Note: The bomb that the Shofixti used on their sun was not a modified glory device.  It was a Precursor bomb used just like a glory device.  See Yehat dialogue for details.

See my post in the "Open Source" thread. If the Ur-Quan Dreadnought was so much larger then the Shofixti Scout, then it would be very weak for its size. The Ur-Quan are very advanced from a technological point of view, so they should be able to design a superior ship  compared to the Shofixti if both were the same size. If The Dreadnought had 100 or more time the volume of the Scout, it couldn't be more advanced. That's why I think that the melee sizes are correct.

There are some odd things in melee, true, but I think they can be largely explained.

"Crew" is not crew, but general damage to the ship and its shields (there are several referances to shields), as well as crew casulties. The Syreen can be explained by influencing the crew to smash important systems on the way out, and also using an amplified psionic technobabble device to somehow transmit a computer virus too (especially important for certain robotic crew). How does it recover "crew" when it picks up crew, though? This is still unexplained, though crew certainly is part of damage. Most likely another technobabble explanation.

The size of the planets, ships, and only partial relativistic effects are of course, explained by a complex interaction of hyperdrives with nearby gravity wells. When at least one hyperdrive is active, the two hyperdrives will warp truespace and hyperspace creating a toroidal arena including a nearby large mass, and pulling any smaller masses in the area as well (hence the astoroids). However, the differances between the planet's gravity and the hyperspace effect (possibly combined with the ship's shields) make the planet occupy far less space the the ships in the toroidal arena.
Another explanation is as above, but that the sizes of the ships are blown up to represent targeting abilities superior to that of the eye, but capable of being somewhat jammed too (or else targeting computers would do all the sniping for us). Astoroid size would also be explained by this method.
I would lean toward the second explanation. Of course, speed calculations would still not be valid due to hyperdrive effects...


Okay, that is my crazy physics explanation... ;D

Maybe the Crew points aren't just one person, but (for instance) 3-10 people in that Crew Cabin. Maybe?

That would mean there are 18-30 crew stuffed inside every Scout... Sounds implausible, unless it's a lot bigger than everyone thinks.

Well, the Shofixti breed like rabbits, and from what I guessed from the portraits and so on of them, they must be a lot smaller than us, so it might not be too outrageous...

And with that in mind the Spathi would have something like a whole family on board, talk about unlucky!

That doesn't explain the loss of exactly the same number of crew that the lander crew says died when Fwiffo shot at them.

Random Note:  I was reading the SC2 manual recently, and found that the landers were originally precursor design, and were made to hold two precursors.

The physics involved give me a headache, but it's better than work atm so here goes...

I've always imagined the lander as being like a small lear jet effect thingy with a bunch of seats, a big cargo bay, a small cockpit area and two engines in place of wings. The interior would be minimalist, almost spartan.

Neutrino> I posted about that (quan vs scout size) aswell, but I think you overestimate how long '100 times more volume' would be. The Dreadnaught ship is 30 pixels and the scout is 10. Assuming they have the same shape-density, the Dread already have 8^1.5 (22.6) times more volume. Had it been 50 pixels (5x scout length) it would have been more than 100 times more massive already. If a Scout is 5m and a Dread is 640m then you have 2 million times the volume.

Even with 22.6 times more volume (melee scale) it is almost unreasonable that the fusion blast only deals 6 times more damage than the scout dart. A cannon 3 times the caliber will have a bullet with 22.6 times the mass. Now assuming they travel at the same velocity (I'm not sure they would), let's say 3000m/s, the large bullet will impact with 22.6 times the energy, the same power as 22.6kg TNT. The smaller buller equals 1kg TNT. I have no clue how much more structural spaceship damage the large bullet would do though. Explosions die with the inverse square root by distance don't they? I suck at math/physics so please correct me.
(KineticEnergyJoules = 0.5 * KiloGrams * MeterSec^2)

Okay that was pretty pointless. If someone else have some free time, they can try to figure out the damage from laser and energy weapons here:
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3x.html



Anyway, here's my WIP for my 'minimum scale SC'. The cruiser is packed tight. I have stuff like opposing pilot seats (like on the cockpit pic), 4 nukes and 16 missiles, sleeping chamber combined with life pod, Jeffries tubes, life support, fuel, point defence periscope room, engine&storage room, hangar & atmospheric fighter/shuttle (chibi Corsair), engines. It's quite tight though, 8 of the crew is on shift, 8 can be asleep, and 2 are spares or have free time.

(http://itchstudios.com/psg/sce/shipscales.jpg)

Also, when Fwiffo said there were dozens, even hundreds of crew aboard his specially-modified Eluder, Zelnick was incredulous. Which means that the 'crew' to actual crew ratio must be sufficiently less than 6 that modification to 6 would be ridiculous. That means, roughly, 2 or 1.

Sorry for the misconception. I said 100x as a completely random number that seemed quite high. I didn't do any kind of calculation or even rough estimate at all. Your own calculations look about right to me at first glance, perhaps I will investigate further later.

At any rate, 22.6 times larger seems a bit high to me considering capabilities, but it should still work out. After all:
The Dreadnought has a weapon six times more powerful then the Scout with longer range.
The Dreadnought has a "battery"/"weapon power source" 10.5 times that of the Shofixti.
The Dreadnought has seven times the crew/hull/shields of the Scout.
The Dreadnought keeps a fair number of fighters (probably not 41, the melee is surely just an approximation in some cases, or else ships would has infinite many things...), while the Scout only has a bomb strapped to the bottom.
The crew of the Dreadnought are surely larger on average then the Shofixti, and there are more.
The dreadnought carries more war equipment then the Scout. It can put up slave shields, carry out detailed scans, etc.
The Dreadnought may be the only ship of the Ur-Quan Kzer-Za. In this case, it needs to carry many necessities and manufacturing supplies.

So while the Dreadnought should have more capability/volume then the Shofixti, the consideration of all of the above surely means that the Dreadnought is still notably larger. I will endevour to do a more detailed calculation/estimation of some of the ships' volumes in the mid-future.


However, in the mean time, I am still having trouble with lengths. Everyone might be interested, that in the melee, the legnth of the ship depends on its orientation! I testing several upward and rightward facing ships to test this. Even the width of the ships changes, and the length/width ratio is not always kept!!! The Earthling Cruiser seems to suffer the most from these things. The ratio in the specifications picture seems to be in between the two ratios for up and right facing cruisers. Still, despite these problems, it should be possible to get estimates for all ship sizes, but the uncertainties will be larger then one would hope.

There might be a way to get an estimate for the Vindicator size without using melee. It would be from this picture:
(http://img474.imageshack.us/img474/904/vindicatorscreenfv9.th.jpg) (http://img474.imageshack.us/my.php?image=vindicatorscreenfv9.jpg)
To do a calculation, one would want to get a .bmp file straight from the game. In the above .jpeg, some of the detail is reduced, especially around the humans, which will be essential for a length calcuation.

Every theory is one-third fact, one-third estimate and one-third imagination.

The Dreadnought, no doubt, will be immensely large. 'Planetary Siege Unit' implies either something massive, or something impossibly overpowered for its size.
Compare the dreadnought and the scout. If we go with the dreadnought as being colossally big, then (according to the melee scaling) the scout must also be pretty big. Big enough to be able to lay siege to a moon, or a large asteroid at least.
BUT: a scout that size is impractical for the given number of crew.
Given the nomadic nature of the Ur-Quan races, a dreadnought would have to carry its own manufacturing facilities, food processing, etc etc... basically a dreadnought is a large mobile military base with its associated support industry integrated.
A scout is used for long-range probe missions, intel gathering and surveillance. Among other things. So for a scout, whose primary attribute is mobility and stealth, the equipment payload would be a lot different and more task-specific.
Therefore a scout should be bigger than the Kzer-Za interceptor, but not by too much.

Thus, going with the above statements, the cruiser would probably be in the region of a few hundred meters long, about the size of a missile sub (as has been pointed out), the dreadnought size would be measured in the range of 1 or 2 kilometers, possibly bigger, ditto the marauder, and a scout would be measured in meters, not hundreds or thousands.
(implication: the equipment needed for hyperspace travel - assuming Tanaka's story is true - is probably not very bulky)

though a ship with a size in the kilometer range would more probably have a few hundred or a few thousand crew, not a mere 42 - unless as much as possible has been automated.

OT: Incidentally, I don't think it's a coincidence that the capital ship crew sizes are '42' on all of them. Another nod to Adams, maybe?

I hope my insights have not been too off-base. But now I am going to go, hunt down, kill, gut, clean, prepare and consume a cigarette and some coffee.

Might be an interesting question for TFB sometime if someone can ever corner them again (particularly since they might be more talkative, with their current campaign to get a new Star Control title released).  I think it's very likely, though it could also be a case of accidental design, since those side profiles with the bars exactly fit into the original 640x480 screen size.

---

I wouldn't try to read too much into any of the ship sizes. 

One must remember that:

(a) Most of the ships were originally designed and drawn in Star Control I, long before much, if any of the backstory for Star Control II was created.  I am sure they were sized and scaled based on the tactical implications within the Melee mode of SC1, rather than conforming to any set relative size ratios.

(b) If we're looking at relative sizes, there are tons of items in SC2 that don't compute.  Orz marines are significantly larger than Ur-Quan Dreadnought fighters (come to think of it, they're faster than the fighters, too, since they can Gravity Whip... not to mention being able to take much more damage).  And thinking about how it's possible that a single alien crew member can kill an Orz invader with a sidearm when it can take a direct hit from, say, a Syreen Penetrator's main gun and still keep on trucking makes my head hurt.

If using a large ship scale, I'd say that each melee 1on1 battle is just an abstraction of large space fleets engaging, say a thousands of Shofixti Scouts against a couple of Kzer-Za Dreadnaughts... kind of like the many hundred fighters and torpedo planes against Yamato or her sister ship. This would fit better with the epic nature of the game.

That rationalization works OK in SC1, but remember that you have just the one capital ship in SC2, not to mention there are numerous battles where you are specifically fighting a single enemy, such as the first Ilwrath you fight at the beginning, the Slylandro Probes, Tanaka (and Fwiffo if you screw up and make him fight you).

Thank you. i shall henceforth refer to the Scout as either a"Large Asteroidary Siege Unit" or a "Planetoidary Siege Unit".

Well, according to SC1, it is fully capable of wiping out enemy colonies and mining facilities, isn't it?

errr, that wasn't exactly what I meant, but 'Large Asteroidary Siege Unit' does almost seem to fit. Still, it fits the probe more.

So is a single modern fighter jet with a few precision bombs, although they're often some 15-20 meters. A planetery siege unit could be a 50m cruiser filled with heatshielded nukes it drops from orbit. These only need rudimentary guidance systems. A 475kt (re-entry cone / payload) nuke is about the size of a... dwarf. Double that size for heat shields and guidance systems. Now you have something along the lines of a barrel. Pack those tight in launch tubes, spend 1hr orbiting the planet and drop 100 of them (takes up some 3^3m of space). Each nuke would level some 50sq.km.  Multiply by Ur-Quan technology. Enough to 'siege' any civilization I say.

Remember that a planet is rather huge. A spaceship is still a piece of dust even if you make it 1km. Siege doesn't mean planet rivaling size. A siege-tank is pretty darn small compared to a city.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Nuclear_weapon_size_chart.jpg


Slightly irrelevant, but possibly of intrest:
http://fathom.lib.uchicago.edu/2/21701757/

That's a strange thing I just noticed, why is a nuclear war-head called a "Peacekeeper"?

hehehe.....
well, mainly because after you drop it everything is peaceful for a while... and then you have to drop another one.

Because at the time peacekeepers were created, the main purpose of nukes were as a deterrent, like  big body-guards.

"Igitur qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum." - Vegetius, from
Epitoma Rei Militaris

Translation from Latin into English: "Whoever wishes for peace, let him prepare for war"


Icemage

Cruiser length is known to be about 223.5 meters from pervious calculation.

Cruiser length is 84 pixels in zoomed in melee mode at 640x480 resolution when pointed right.

Cruiser length is 70 pixels in zoomed in melee mode at 640x480 resolution when pointed up.

Vindicator length is 100 pixels (108 with the glowing engine) in zoomed in melee mode at 640x480 resolution when pointed right.

Vindicator length is 86 pixels (94 with the glowing engine) in zoomed in melee mode at 640x480 resolution when pointed up.

Taking the average of these lengths gives the Cruiser a length of 77 pixels and the Vindicator a length of 93 pixels (101 with the glowing engine). This means that the melee size of the Vindicator is 270 meters (293 with the glowing engine).

Now I will try to calculate the length of the Vindicator from the colony screen I previously posted. I will leave out the glowing engine, since one cannot see it in the picture, so the expected length is 270m.
(http://img209.imageshack.us/img209/9330/vindicatorintroductionscreensizingat9.th.jpg) (http://img209.imageshack.us/my.php?image=vindicatorintroductionscreensizingat9.jpg)

The three nearest humans are 7 pixels each. Assuming that if they were standing right next to the front of the ship, let’s call it six pixels and give them a height of 1.8 meters. Let’s also assume that the ship is rotated 45 degrees from the viewpoint. The length of the line is ~560 pixels, so 560*1.4*1.8/6 = 235m. For such a rough estimate, this is fairly good agreement. For example, if the people used to size the thing were 2 meters tall and I extended the line a bit further back (I had to estimate where the back of the engine “plate” was), the estimate would agree almost exactly with the melee prediction (which has a fairly small uncertainty due to the ship’s orientation, about +-5 meters).

Thus, I think we can be fairly confidant that the melee sizes are roughly correct.

I posted this in another thread, but will cross-post it here, since the images go equally well in each:

I used the site http://www.merzo.net to get some relative lengths and added the Cruiser in (see previous calculation of 223.5 meters). Thus, I can now present two images with a bunch of popular ships in 1 pixel = 1 meter and 1 pixel = 2 meters scaling.

(http://img224.imageshack.us/img224/1602/sizechartscale1rh3.th.jpg) (http://img224.imageshack.us/my.php?image=sizechartscale1rh3.jpg)
(http://img224.imageshack.us/img224/7134/sizechartscale2dc5.th.jpg) (http://img224.imageshack.us/my.php?image=sizechartscale2dc5.jpg)