The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

Me and a friend are trying to figure out the UQM ship's scale.

Like between a Dreadnought to a Shofixti Scout. What are the "realistic" scales for all of the ships?

An example is sticking the HD Dreadnought up against a Vanilla Scout:

(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/387711552985366546/431954935668670464/Gorno8.PNG)

Is there a chart anywhere or perhaps a list of ship dimensions out there somewhere?

This is a tricky question to answer, one I've struggled with every now and then.  While hunting through my old documents the other day, I found a diagram I did of our ships relative to one another specifically for scale. I sort of shook my head and disagreed with my past self at the scale choices -- the ships were too close in size.  So, starting from scratch, let's think about the relative size of an Ur-Quan Kzer-Za fighter -- it is probably around the same size as a Shofixti scout (Shofixti are smaller than Fighter Pilots, but they do carry a Glory Device, so let's call it a wash.). A Dreadnaut can carry around 40 fighters -- 20 per side.  So, presuming that the main body of the Dreadnaut holds all the fighters, pointed outward and there needs to be some space between the individual launch tubes, I'd say that the Scouts would be 50-75% the size you've shown.  How does that seem to you?

Wow, that's pretty damn small.  :o

But, in-game, the scout has a crew compliment of 6 and Commander Heyes did mention that he traveled aboard a Scout before.
No mention how exactly he fit on-board, given that the Shofixti are smaller than Humans on average and their ships would more match their physiology, only that he was worried about the Glory device.

Though around 75% of what we see here might work out, because like before, the Shofixti are smaller on average so they could cram more crew in such a small area.

We speculated that the Dreadnought's "nacelles" are the delivery source of the fighters. But given that the fighters are one crew each to the Shofixti's 6 I'm thinking the size shown is pretty close if not 80-90% of the size shown.
How does that sound? It would be up to how big the Scout would be to where it can cram six crew members.

And then there's the matter of the other 24 ships.
Are some of your scale sizes "non-shake-head-able"?

P.S. Big thanks for taking the time to answer. Makes my day every time.

Since Paul is reading, I have a related question...who crews the Kohr-ah Marauder? Fan speculation has included:
- Sub-sentient slaves, kind of like a talking pet
- Robots
- Other Kohr-ah - who being engineered originally for labor and war, may be be less instinctively territorial and/or more numerous than the Kzer-za?

Part of what makes it tricky is that the Syreen song works on them, though it may just be an abstraction for gameplay's sake.

I think you could pick a size between 75-95% of your initial size and feel comfortable that it's reasonable accurate.  

One other way of looking at would be to look at the Star Trek TOS shuttlecraft for reference...

http://www.karltate.com/?p=211

...they fit 7 humans in there with tons of leg room to spare.  Scale down for Shofixti size, make the walls slightly thicker, add a small weapon system up front, a bit bigger thruster in back, and of course, a sweet, shiny bomb on the bottom.

Thinking about this has reminded me of a short story by Cordwainer Smith called, "The Game of Rat and Dragon" about using uplifted cats to fly miniature fighter escort around FTL starships.  

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/29614/29614-h/29614-h.htm

Smith wrote relatively little and not everyone enjoys his work, but along with Jack Vance, he's one of my favorites.  "Norstrilia" is probably his best-known work, but "Mark Elf" and "Scanners Live In Vain" were pretty great too.

Edit: Added link to 'Game of Rat and Dragon" and corrected names of two stories.

For Mormont , Re: Kohr-Ah crew... let me think a sec... (reads what other people have written about this)... okay, my favorite alternative (and I reserve the right to change this in GotP) is that the Kohr-Ah have a 'treatment' applied to any sentient non-Ur-Quan entering their ships -- kind of like a de-lousing spray applied directly to the brain which removes enough higher mental functions to drop the being to a non-sentient-but-still-useful state.

There's also that the Shofixti have only recently been uplifted to space-age, and as such may lack the industrial basis for building ships with plenty of room.
Whereas the Ur-Quan (both races) LiVE in space. No homeplanet for recreational purposes. They need to do everything on their ships.
Industrial basis, sport, privacy, education, child raising, ....
I personally imagined the ship size differnce much greater than shown, sinc they are territorial and may need lots of room to get out of each others way.

That is (would be?) a major development. It's the first sign of Kohr-Ah taking any slaves other than their talking pets, and brings up many more questions. Are the Kohr-Ah performing mass abductions on worlds they've defeated shortly before scouring them, or is there some other procedure they follow? Are there still Burvixese alive aboard some of their Marauders, given that the Burvix homeworld was the last place they cleansed? Do the Kohr-Ah put much effort into breeding, training, and replacing slaves or are they perpetually grabbing new ones? I'd understand if you wanted to keep these questions unanswered for now.

Shiver, those are good points.  It's my nature to spew wild solutions, but they might just cascade into other consequences and contradictions, so for now I will ponder and muse and watch THE TERROR, part of my recent 'Violent deaths in the Arctic' TV marathon.

That... did suddenly turn morbid didn't it?



Going to check this.

I like the option of there being one kind of specially bred minimally intelligent critter. I think if they were to take on and 'delouse' new aliens every time they did an extermination, that would be bringing filth aboard. And a security risk, though they'd be more likely to think of it in terms of cleanliness.

On the other hand, we do know they get up close and personal enough to fill their bone pits.

Re the Ur-Quan fighter craft:
A number of factors make me think they would be at the most 50% the size of the Shofixti:

- They have only a single crew member on-board
- They are so fragile that meteors destroy them (ie, basically no hull armour/mass)
- They actually have a limited fuel reserve (need to return to Dreadnought or they die)

All of those suggest that they are missing a large number of 'basic' systems that even the tiny Shofixti scout has.  I think they literally are just a pilot seat, basic thruster system (with small fuel/life support tanks), encased in paper-thin hull and with a tiny swivelling laser gun, and not much else.  I'd be inclined to think this is all to make the fighters smaller, so the Dreadnought can carry more of them.

As for the Khor-Ah:
I imagine the crew would be some sort of organic robot - basically bioenginnered, obedient, faceless clones with no real ability to dream or aspire.  Their thinking ability is limited to the thinking they do to fulfill whatever task they are given.  The Syreen call works on them because even though they don't have higher brain functions, they do still have a BRAIN, and if their brain tells them "I have to go to that ship over there now, time to put on that suit and step out of the airlock" they'll do it (much like they'd follow the orders of their Kohr-Ah keepers under normal circumstances).

You said Kzer-Za but I'm pretty sure you meant Kohr-Ah? Kzer-Za are the green ones who take slaves.

Correct, I buggered that up.  Have edited it now.

A long time ago, I calculated ship sizes, which still seem reasonable...
http://forum.uqm.stack.nl/index.php?topic=3228.0

Ooh, I would love to see that diagram even so.

I'm guessing the Sa-Matra battle platform is larger than shown in this video?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFsCsQI4ACs
At least I picture it to be much larger than shown in scale to the Dreadnought and the Marauder. (I think the scale when placed next to the Avenger is absurd)

That's UQM-HD, right? The Sa-Matra takes up a lot more space in the original game.

That's actually the MegaMod. It's catching on... Excellent. :D

There's no other version I could illegally place hierarchy and melnorme ships (besides the Umgah, Spathi, and Yehat) next to the sa-matra.

You could use a debug build of UQM. You press the F5 key and it will unlock all the ships to be bought.
Though I think you actually have to map the debug key yourself inside the .uqm (read .zip) file.

http://uqm.stack.nl/files/snapshots/

Here's my diagram on Star Control ship relative scale, created in 1992 on my dot matrix printer.  25 years later, I think I didn't get much right except perhaps for the relative scale of the Flagship and the Chevy Suburban. 

For what it's worth, last night spent some time looking at George Barr's painting of the Flagship being prepared for lift-off from Unzervalt.  Ultimately I decided it was about 275 meters long.  The original Enterprise is just a hair larger.

Looking at the large image of the Shofixti Scout from Star Control 1, I'd estimate it is no more than 7 meters long, so those other 5 Shofixti must be packed in there like sardines.  For comparison, a Colonial Viper Mark 2 from Battlestar Galactica is estimated to be a little over 8 meters long.   

I appreciate the scale estimate from the in-game bitmaps, but the relative scale in combat was intentionally compressed to make the experience more fun.

(http://i64.tinypic.com/mm333t.jpg)

Speaking of George Barr's paintings - are they the images you've been showing us in your blog posts? Because they are of much higher resolution than the in-game pictures, yet much truer to the original than the UQM HD graphics.

Yes, those are higher-res scans of the original artwork. I am sure I've said this before, but George is a fantastic illustrator and painter, whose book covers have inspired my imagination since the mid 1970s.

I am in the process of rescanning the originals at MUCH higher quality, which made me remember that there were little tweaks I did to some of the images in DPaint, mostly to deal with the artifacts of low resolution and only 256 colors. 

Commander Hayes said he "once flew as an observer aboard one of their ships" and that it had a "Glory Device' ... strapped to the bottom of its hull," but he never specifically referred to the ship as a Scout.

Looking at how much space the visible Shofixti takes up in relation to the rest of the ship in the large view, it would be pretty impossible for Hayes to fit in there.


The engine for the rear thrust very likely extends to or just before the cockpit's rear wall. If the Shofixti can ball themselves up real good and remain like that for prolonged periods of time, you could maybe fit 1-2 in the area between the pilot's seat and the cockpit wall that the control panel blocks from view, and if there's some empty space between the external glory device and paws and another small compartment between the engine and cockpit wall, perhaps another 3-4 balled Shofixti could fit in there. In which case, they wouldn't be onboard to actively man their own stations, but so that one of them can roll out and take over flight control if the pilot dies.

(Another option is the Captain's Window is simply representative of what the cockpit looks like when most of the crew have perished, and if you actually looked into a fully crewed Scout, you'd see a wall of hair behind the pilot with the odd hand, snout, or ear sticking out of it because there's only enough space below and/or behind the cockpit to fit more than a couple Shofixti. If so, perhaps Pistol Shrimp can fix this for the sequel.  :P).

In any case, I can't see Hayes being able to fill a comparable amount of space, even if you cleared out all the Shofixti, save the pilot. He wouldn't fit crouched behind the pilot and even if you could shove him in an empty space near the glory device/engine, he's no longer an observer; he's dead weight. He couldn't see anything, get into the cockpit to take over should the need arises, and it would be a very tight and uncomfortable fit for him.

It would make more sense if he was simply aboard a larger, never before seen Shofixti ship. For example, they had to have cargo ships, troop transports, etc, and it feels very in-character for them to strap a Glory Device onto anything that flies, even if we have nothing in canon to tell us that they did. With a war raging, occasionally repurposing civilian and/or military transport vehicles for patrol missions makes sense, especially if you have a habit of blowing up your main fighter class with wild abandon and you need to occasionally accommodate larger Alliance members who want to participate in an observation exchange program.

As an aside: I'd love to know where the life support system, water filtration system, and ration storage area(s) are supposed to be stored on a Shofixti Scout. Captain Tanaka (and his brother, Katana) took a pretty long time to get home from Mycon space and then remained in orbit around Delta Gorno for a bit with no mention of food, water, or oxygen being a problem, as far as I can remember.


The range issue may be by design. Restricting autonomy may be the best way the Ur-Quan found to ensure the compliance of their enslaved alien fighter pilots. If you don't have the ability to fly beyond the scope of the immediate battle or enter hyperspace, you have little choice but to engage the enemy and try to return to your Dreadnought for refueling. This would also...

A) Motivate pilots to fight with as much fury and gusto as they can muster as they'd likely be punished if they hesitated in battle and they can't try to escape the consequences of such mistakes by making a run for it.

B) Prevent enslaved aliens from escaping with Ur-Quan secrets. A Dreadnought's alien crew members would have access to technology and battle plans beyond the scope of what Battle Thralls are given. Fear of annihilation would likely prevent a defector's species from taking them back, but an alliance of free aliens or individual free aliens still engaged in active resistance against the Ur-Quan would probably welcome defectors. The threat of retaliation against their species can't be used to keep Dreadnought crews in check in this case as wiping out an overall loyal Battle Thrall over the actions of a few Dreadnought crew members would reduce the Ur-Quan's combat effectiveness to a greater degree than tolerating defections, and it would ultimately prove to be a hollow threat anyway as the Ur-Quan are motivated to take great care to avoid going to such extremes (only reaching the Sa-Matra in a Precursor vessel with the help of a re-evolved Dynarri resulted in them promising to annihilate humans completely). Thus, keeping a tight leash around Dreadnought crews may be their preferred solution to the problem of potential defectors.

The crew disparity issue makes sense to me as, per my previous comments, I struggle to see how a Shofixti Scout has room for more than a single crew member. That this isn't the case seems to be a joke related to how small the Shofixti are or an oversight with how the large image was drawn for SC1. Below is a larger view of the Ur-Quan fighter from SC1.


It seems like it has a larger cockpit than a Scout due to the rounded front and possibly reduced engine size (a thinner hull may also add a bit of room), but you would need more space if you wanted to comfortably fit a single Ilwrath or Mycon in a ship comparable in size to a Shofixti Scout. That means you could probably load up a fighter with more than one of their smaller fallow slaves, like the Umgah, but the limited strength + range of a fighter versus the impact on a Dreadnought's "health" + the reduction in the overall number of fighters it can launch probably makes giving some fighters the ability to take more than one hit a poor trade off, as far as the Ur-Quan are concerned.

The asteroid issue does present a problem. Sure, they could have paper thin hulls, but I think it would've made more sense for a planetary collision to continue to damage them (as was the case in SC1), since hitting a planet always takes out at least 1 crew member, and for fighters to instead bounce off asteroids, since they're apparently supposed to be similar in size to Shofixti Scouts. Of course, the decision to do the opposite made it a little harder to kill a Dreadnought as it was always easier in SC1 to lure fighters into a planet than into an asteroid, and I appreciate that the most logical solutions don't always make for the best game mechanics.