The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

Is it just me or are the coolest ships ever in sci-fi all green?

The ones I got are:
Klingon's Bird of Prey
Romulan Warbird
Boba Fett's Slave One
Ur-Quan Dreadnought
Leela's Planet Express Ship

Anymore anyone?

The coolest StarTrek ship (by performance, otherwise pretty dull) in my ophinion is Borg's grey cube.
Babylon 5 coolest ship, Vorlon's is kind off greenish too, though.

If you're going to compare ships, here is a little find - ship size comparison chart.
http://www.loganotron.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/comparison.gif

That ship chart is a great find!
the Romulan Warbird isn't a bad choice for best looking Star Trek ship, though I'm pretty partial to the Cardassian ships as far as looks, which I don't think are green.

Slave 1 doesn't hold a candle to the Mon Calamari ships, shutte Tyderian or the Death Star, all also not green.

Dreadnought is definitely debatable. The Mauler or Terminator for instance gives it a run for its money.

 

Starship Dimensions (http://www.merzo.net/) has a lot more happy fun starship dimensions action!

I'd love to see some star control ships added to that website. And I see from the FAQ that that would not necesarily out of the question. The question is though: would they be too colourful? Everythign in that site is somewhat grey.

The problem is that in StarControl ships are not to scale and as far as I know, proper dimentions aren't given anywhere.

Well in terms of sizes, I always visualised the Ur-Quan Dreadnaught as large as an Imperial Star Destroyer, whilst the Human Cruiser a little larger then the Rebel Blockade Runner. That would spice up the Melee wouldn't it?

I participated in the forum there for a while (if it still exists I can't find it), and did a dimensions calculation on the Vindicator. It came out around 200 meters, I think. I can't find any mention of it in any threads here.

The introduction picture with people standing around ?

You could make a rough guess of sizes based on how many crew and cockpit size in the comm screen. For example, I can't image the Shofixti Scout being too much larger than a small jet. Tanaka doesn't have much room at all, unless the glory device takes up more space then we think.

The problem with this statement, that other than Earthling, Androsynth and Syreen we don't have size references of any species. In addition, the Vindicator was built for Precursors, giants by our standarts, but is manned by Humans, so crew compliment isn't really an indicator also...

EDIT :
And commander Hayes has served on the scout, so it can't be really small.
EDIT2 :
I have done some "measurements" from the intro pic, and my results from different measure points were all between 163 and 172 meters long .
I have taken human size of 1.75m .
In addition I've checked the crew module it measures to about 10x19x26, minus the gardenand  the backbone it's about  80 cubic meters per crew wich is rounded 2.5m high room of 5x6m, which with all facilities and life support should be about right.

From this I can say that the Vindicator is about 170 meters long.

That sounds very familiar.

The StarBug from Red Dwarf is green too. It looks like something the ZFP would build. I like the Romulan warbirds with the wing motif (not the old TOS ones).


As for the SC scales, I see indications of two different ones.

1. Torpedo boat sized ships: agile with a small crew and a main weapon of some sort (this is what the Cruiser feels like to me). The melee gameplay feel more like I'm dogfighting, not steering huge battleships around and firing batteries. In the case of smaller ships, I'd also treat the relative sizes of the ships in the game as somewhat correct (ignoring the planet).

2. Much larger ships, for compatibility with typical sci-fi scales, and story realism. The game is seen as highly abstracted. A Dreadnought would be a fortress, some 500-2000 meters, and a Shofixti Scout would actually represent a whole squadron of small fighters.

Or you could go in-between, making the ships some 50-300 meters long. Really, the game doesn't give you much to go on, and when it does, it's contradictory. Almost any scale could work.

Didn't Ford Prefect (of HG2G fame) have a fixation on green ships?

Not exactly. The only reason he said green in particular was because green was the colour of the Betelgeuse Scout Corps.

Personally my pick for coolest ship ever is the Enterprise Constitution Refit (i.e. the TMP movies). Always been my favorite. From Star Control my favorite is the Orz Ship.