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Topic: Scale (Read 48950 times)
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Art
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Re: Scale
« Reply #75 on: April 29, 2005, 07:36:30 am » |
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I'd say the best ship to get a sense of scale is the flagship. Figure out the size of the modules, and you figure out the size of the ship. I'll assume each module is about 15M long x 50M wide x 40M tall. That seems like more than enough space to fit anything in. 6-8 Stories tall, with room for adequate space on two sides of a hallway, and bulkheads. There are 16 modules, so that means the module section is about 240M long. Add on the bridge and rear portion, and 300M seems like a good possible estimate. The ship may be bigger or smaller, depending on how large you see the ship modules.
This is a lot of assuming. You don't know, for example, how much room life support takes place in a crew pod, how large the mechanisms that fire the ion-bolt guns are, and so on. Remember that the Spathi accuse you of having weapons "capable of punching a hole through a small moon" -- this is obviously somewhat hyperbolic and vague, but even so, we're talking about a universe where ICBM warheads do minor damage against ships, and one Ur-Quan Dreadnought has the resources to overpower an entire planet, and blast through defenses that permeate a star system. *One ship* seems to be a pretty big deal in the Star Control universe.
Don't forget the fuel costs for the flagship are insane! The captain himself commented that your fuel needs are so large, that you have to supply your own fuel from offworld resources. You can easily stripmine a few systems just to get the fuel needed for your ship. All the other ships have negligable fuel costs by comparison. A nice consolation, is because your flagship makes a hyperspace signature so large, it can also carry 12 other ships in tow free of charge.
...And you still seem to be forgetting we almost never have actual *units* to put these claims into perspective. An "RU" is, itself, a completely arbitrary unit of resources. Less than one RU of uranium seems to be sufficient for the Starbase to run life support and synthesize food and oxygen for 1900 human beings.
All right, so that's a game-mechanics thing and not strictly a plot thing -- nevertheless it seems pretty clear that for doing anything *except building ships and fueling them* an RU is an *enormous* amount of resources -- by *our* standards, the resources necessary to actually maintain a space habitat the size of the Starbase would be significant, but for you in SC2 it's peanuts.
Actually, to me the subjective size of an RU is pretty huge, and makes me think ships are pretty huge. I have to strip-mine several major deposits of metals on a whole planet to get enough RU to make an Earthling Cruiser. "Mining out" a solar system is a relatively trivial task in SC2, while by our lights, mining *all the iron* on Mars would be a pretty huge amount of resources for one project to require. (And yes, I know, we probably aren't actually mining all the minerals from these planets, just certain easily accessible deposits. Even so.)
Besides, if you can build two flagships, why not just make a single bigger one? Or maybe build 40 warships instead. Admit it, you can wage war with 40 warships alot better than you could ever do with one flagship.
Well, yeah, I'm not sure what you're arguing now. I'm the proponent of *all* ships being pretty huge by modern standards, and the flagship being *super-huge*. They couldn't build more than one flagship if they wanted to -- they lack the technology.
But that doesn't mean that the flagship, as you're assuming, is a relatively small ship and means the other ships have to be tiny. And there's a point at which having one big ship is a lot more helpful than having many smaller ships -- for one thing, the requirements of propulsion through HyperSpace may require an engine that's a certain minimum size, and hence require fuel supplies a certain minimum size, and it may therefore make sense to build ships around that basic minimum. (This, by the way, is part of my objection to dinky-sized Cruisers -- they don't have to be ICBM-sized warheads, but for the Cruiser's missiles to be named as "nukes" and to be explicitly relics of the "atomic age" and *not* involve some sort of exotic energy-generating technology, they must be a certain minimum size. It's called critical mass. It's why we don't, and can't, have "mini-nuke" weapons.)
It's a subjective matter, but I just find the idea of little tiny ships weird. The absolute *minimum* size in my mind for a starship is something the size of an actual spacecraft like the Space Shuttle, and I would picture most starships being bigger. They travel really long distances -- they have to carry all kinds of resources *to be able* to go that far. You should think "ocean liner" or "battleship" when you look at them, not "fighter plane" or "motorboat".
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Deus Siddis
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Cruisers
« Reply #76 on: April 29, 2005, 09:02:40 am » |
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Modern Navy Destroyers are 100 meters and Navy Cruisers are 200 meters in length. I think Earthling Cruisers should be some where in that range. By the way, this is an interesting picture of the earthling cruiser:
I'm not sure what structure that guy's cleaning limpets off of. If it's the main hull the cruisers are small, if it's an engine it's moderately sized, and if it's a wing then it's big.
If you look at this picture:
You can see little red viewports on the wings which seem to match up with the port hole in the first picture. This would make the cruiser a little over 200 meters in length, 65 meters wide, and 45 meters high.
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« Last Edit: April 29, 2005, 09:10:39 am by Deus_Siddis »
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Arne
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Re: Scale
« Reply #77 on: April 29, 2005, 09:31:29 am » |
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Re: mini nukes of the cold war era.
This one best illustrates the how small a 'nuke' can get:
Edited in another link:
Davy Crocket
Davy Crocket
28cm cannon from 1953 (Ebaum though, but I've heard of cannon nukes, and they're limited to a certain caliber.
Some guys with suitcase sized nukes, 400-174lbs (1965) More modern suitcase nukes are 50-100lbs maybe.
They could be built smaller, but there's a ban for mini nukes atm. so no (official) research is being made.
Did anyone answer where they get the nukes from with the shielded earth and probably cleaned space station? Personally I don't think they used the larger ICBMs other than for special missions. They used the radioactive materials to make mini nukes to fit on the Cruisers.
The weapons were then dismantled and their components stored in huge subterranean bunkers that came to be known as "Peace Vaults."
Also, nuke research, fusion and fission, might have gone on until 2015. They were likely to use the most hightech versions first. Where does it say ICBM btw? ICBM earthling only yeilds this thread on google...
Hyperspace might also be harder to 'open' the larger you are, and this way restrict shipsizes. No one knows. I guess you can make an arbitrary rule to suit your preferences here.
Edit: Deus> Everything from SC1 is less canon than SC2. Maybe it's a good idea to grade canon in this case? This is why I size up the Scout and size down the Cruiser.
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« Last Edit: April 29, 2005, 09:52:35 am by Arne »
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Bobucles
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Re: Scale
« Reply #78 on: April 29, 2005, 07:10:57 pm » |
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...And you still seem to be forgetting we almost never have actual *units* to put these claims into perspective. An "RU" is, itself, a completely arbitrary unit of resources.
That's true. But an earthling cruiser costs 1100 RUs to make. That comes out as 55 fuel units for the flagship, plenty for cruising for a couple months. Would you consider a flagship that burns cruisers for fuel to be big?
Less than one RU of uranium seems to be sufficient for the Starbase to run life support and synthesize food and oxygen for 1900 human beings. So, the game wasn't picky about how many radioactive resources the space station needs. What the captain didn't tell you, was that for every 8 RUs that a radioactive resource is worth, he's keeping 1RU for himself. Who's to say just how much he's pocketing from his resource system? I think it's fair to assume that a typical player should be dropping off resources at the base regularly through the course of the game, so keeping the station intact would be a non-issue. 
This is a lot of assuming. You don't know, for example, how much room life support takes place in a crew pod, how large the mechanisms that fire the ion-bolt guns are, and so on. Arne managed to cramp them in with an eighth of the space, with a lower floor to spare. A flagship cetrtainly isn't going to have the crew living as pod people though, and crew modules would likely have a few dining areas, redundant systems, stores, the space dome, etc. The sort of stuff that'd keep morale high, while still having adequate space. It's true, the module size will be up for debate, as you can never really get a true sence of scale. Like I said, the size of the flagship could be more or less depending on how you see the modules.
Remember that the Spathi accuse you of having weapons "capable of punching a hole through a small moon" The spathi could be talking about Phobos and Deimos, and would still not be lying. Just the thought must make them quake with fear. Small moons like that are relatively fluffy, and although a high-caliber bullet probably wouldn't make it through, it would go in pretty deep.
this is obviously somewhat hyperbolic and vague, but even so, we're talking about a universe where ICBM warheads do minor damage against ships Nukes aren't that impressive to begin with. ICBMs can fly so far on Earth, because they have an atmosphere to push off of. The simplest heat source inflates the air, and pushes the rocket extremely far. In space, all propulsion must be provided by the nuke itself. A space ICBM could be using a radioactive fuel source for the rocket, to give good speed at a relatively moderate weight.
Even then, nukes SUCK in space for 2 major reasons: No atmosphere to explode, and no focus for the damage. The instant a nuke explodes on a hull, half of the energy and material is already blowing up into space. A high percentage of the heat is being reflected off the hull, which is likely to have heat shielding. A large amount of energy would be divided around a sizable portion of the hull dissapating the damage further. And a good ship hull would give the nuke little material to explode. A bunker-buster style nuke would do pretty damn good, if it was capable of penetrating the hull. But that'd depend on the propulsion system being capable of getting those kind of speeds, and high speed comes at a cost of payload.
It's a subjective matter, but I just find the idea of little tiny ships weird. The absolute *minimum* size in my mind for a starship is something the size of an actual spacecraft like the Space Shuttle, and I would picture most starships being bigger. They travel really long distances -- they have to carry all kinds of resources *to be able* to go that far. You should think "ocean liner" or "battleship" when you look at them, not "fighter plane" or "motorboat". I'll agree there. But in space, you have to remember that volume goes up as a cube factor. So if you take two ships of the same shape, but one ship is twice as long as the next, it's really 8 times larger than the little ship. So if you compare my estimated 300M Vindicator, to say, a 15M Shofixi ship, (yet another lame guesstimate...) the flagship would be 8000 times larger. Of course, that's not taking the shape of the ships into consideration, but it is still something to think about.
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Bobucles
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Re: Scale
« Reply #79 on: April 29, 2005, 08:18:45 pm » |
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Oh, and if the theoretical 300M Vindicator was compared to a possible 2KM Sa-Matra, the Sa-Matra would still be about 300X larger. Just thought for food.
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Deus Siddis
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"Everything from SC1 is less canon than SC2."
If we followed your logic, the we'd have to consider everything in SC2 less canon than SC3, right? Besides, I don't know of anything in SC2 that says the earthling cruiser is not 200 meters in length.
"This is why I size up the Scout and size down the Cruiser."
As cool as your art is, the shofixti live probably live in burrows, they don't need rooms, and the earthling cruiser has a lot more than 18 nukes. Even if it uses mini-nukes, it still needs to be 200 meters long to hold a nearly infinite supply of ammo, especially given how thin and stick-like it is.
"Even then, nukes SUCK in space for 2 major reasons: No atmosphere to explode, and no focus for the damage. The instant a nuke explodes on a hull, half of the energy and material is already blowing up into space."
I think you are wrong, I believe a detonation directly on the hull would do tremendous damage. It's a distance burst you're thinking of.
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Arne
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Re: Scale
« Reply #81 on: April 29, 2005, 09:15:33 pm » |
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"Everything from SC1 is less canon than SC2. Maybe it's a good idea to grade canon in this case?"
These wasn't really my words, I was quoting other people from earlier in this thread. And you can grade canon by author, so SC3 isn't really canon in that sense. If it was, the captain would have horrible looking kids!
The gun of a small motorboat (SC1 scout) damages a 200m ship by 1/18th, while a nuke, the primary weapon, fails to destroy the small motorboat?
That is why I scaled the scout up and the cruiser down. Since I consider the Vindicator to be 140-200, I can't have a 200m cruiser either. I'm using the relative sizes of the ships to judge how large they are.
I did make bed tubes for the scout. What's inside the tubes can only be speculated about.
The cruiser need to be of infinite size to hold an infinite amount of nukes, unless it manufactures them aboard using materials from space. I figured 18 nukes is pretty good. I could make them smaller though, seing how small Davy Crocket is, but I sized them up so they would show in relation to the ship.
I'm not sure if you can concentrate the power of a nuke, but you can with regular explosives. Basically it concentrates the explosion into a beam that cuts through the hull and pressurizes/heats/wrecks the insides.
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« Last Edit: April 29, 2005, 11:55:58 pm by Arne »
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Art
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"Everything from SC1 is less canon than SC2."
If we followed your logic, the we'd have to consider everything in SC2 less canon than SC3, right?
"Even then, nukes SUCK in space for 2 major reasons: No atmosphere to explode, and no focus for the damage. The instant a nuke explodes on a hull, half of the energy and material is already blowing up into space."
I think you are wrong, I believe a detonation directly on the hull would do tremendous damage. It's a distance burst you're thinking of.
It's just not true that an in-space detonation of a nuclear weapon would be harmless. The fact that the energy of the detonation would be delivered in the form of pure radiation rather than absorbed by the atmosphere and delivered as a shock wave does not, as far as I know, make the detonation any less deadly. (I'm not an expert on this, but ISTR that NASA actually did a report on how dangerous it could be to set off nuclear blasts in space.)
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Deus Siddis
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Re: Scale
« Reply #85 on: April 30, 2005, 04:17:43 am » |
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The cruiser really needs to be big enough to carry over 100 nukes, given it's reliance on them. If it was just big enough for 18 nukes, it would only have enough firepower to kill one ur-quan dreadnaught, which is just ridiculous.
"The gun of a small motorboat (SC1 scout) damages a 200m ship by 1/18th, while a nuke, the primary weapon, fails to destroy the small motorboat?"
An F/A-18 Super Hornet can carrier tactical nuclear weapons. I'm sure a starship of similar size (shofixti) can carry at least an equal arsenal. The "motorboat" might not be destroyed by the nuke, because it is too small and fast to be hit directly, and only suffers the weak area effect of a space detonation.
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Arne
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Re: Scale
« Reply #86 on: April 30, 2005, 05:35:14 am » |
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Deus> The fighterplane you mentioned is almost 17m long. The shofixi scout is maybe 3-5 if we're to believe the SC1 art.
It's possible, that they fitted some extraordinary nuke on the scout though.
If the shofixi is so small, why does it have a collision area one third of a cruiser?
The gun still remains. It can destroy an UrQ ship with fourty shots.
When they sunk Bismarck, they first got a lucky hit on the rudder with a torpedo. Bismarck coudn't steer and some Brittish battleships caught up with her. Then they fired at her for 2 hours with their battlecannons and it wouldn't sink! They also shot some torpedos at her, without the desired effect. The Germans themself sunk it in the end, to prevent it from falling into enemy hands.
Yamato and her sister ship were under fire for hours by hundreds of american planes before getting sunk, and the most severe damage was done by the bombs/torpedos (secondary), not the guns (primary).
Besides fitting 6 crew in that thing, they also have a massive nuke, life support, a front cannon 1/4th as powerful as a nuke capable of taking out >200m hightech dreadnaughts with 40 shots, and engine plus fuel. Not likely.
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Deus Siddis
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Re: Scale
« Reply #87 on: April 30, 2005, 06:31:04 am » |
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"Deus> The fighterplane you mentioned is almost 17m long. The shofixi scout is maybe 3-5 if we're to believe the SC1 art."
Yes, so the scout might be 15-20 meters long. The only SC1 art I've refered to is the earthling cruiser's.
"If the shofixi is so small, why does it have a collision area one third of a cruiser?"
Why is a dreadnaught half the size of a planet?
"The gun still remains. It can destroy an UrQ ship with fourty shots."
Kind of like a couple proton torpedo's destroying a space station the size of a small moon, right? We can't make assumptions about weapons that don't exist yet.
"When they sunk Bismarck, they first got a lucky hit on the rudder with a torpedo. Bismarck coudn't steer and some Brittish battleships caught up with her. Then they fired at her for 2 hours with their battlecannons and it wouldn't sink! They also shot some torpedos at her, without the desired effect. The Germans themself sunk it in the end, to prevent it from falling into enemy hands."
They were shooting primitive weapons. I'm sure things could be different in a few centuries. A while ago, people thought stone fortifications were pretty hot stuff. . .then came the cannon.
"Besides fitting 6 crew in that thing, they also have a massive nuke, life support, a front cannon 1/4th as powerful as a nuke capable of taking out >200m hightech dreadnaughts with 40 shots, and engine plus fuel. Not likely."
Again, we don't know enough about their tech to make these kinds of assumptions. Even SC1 canon is better than blind guesses.
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Art
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Re: Scale
« Reply #88 on: April 30, 2005, 07:05:41 am » |
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Nukes aren't that impressive to begin with. ICBMs can fly so far on Earth, because they have an atmosphere to push off of. The simplest heat source inflates the air, and pushes the rocket extremely far. In space, all propulsion must be provided by the nuke itself. A space ICBM could be using a radioactive fuel source for the rocket, to give good speed at a relatively moderate weight.
As others have said, this is, also, wrong. The "must have air to push against" thing is one of the oldest fallacies about rockets. If this is how rockets like ICBMs actually worked space travel would be impossible. That's *not* how Newton's Third Law works -- all that needs to happen is that propellant comes out the back, and the rocket moves forward, whatever medium it's in.
The Apollo moon rockets basically *were* refitted ICBM delivery systems -- it was our ICBM technology that let us make moon rockets in the first place. That, itself, tells you something about the scale on which nuclear weapons are built.
Yes, the nukes on a Cruiser are probably smaller tactical nuclear weapons, but even so -- if there's any Cold-War-era stockpiles in there, those missiles are gonna be *big*.
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Arne
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Re: Scale
« Reply #89 on: April 30, 2005, 08:51:10 am » |
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Deus> So, in the left corner:
Motorboat piloted by 6 little rats!
Techlevel: noob
Suggested volume: 100 cubic meters
Forward gun damage: 1
AAAAAaannnd in the right cornerrrrr:
Ur-Quan battleship!
Tech level: 20 000 years
Suggested volume, 500 000 cubic meters
Forward gun damage: 6
We don't know anything about the anatomy of the cruiser. Those might not be windows, that's an assumption. It could be vents, decor or anything.
Besides, with a moon sized UrQ, why would the windows be of the right size? Maybe they're using cameras in the viewports? We don't know anything about future technology. If they're standing in front of a window, maybe it's just a screen?
Edited again: I think with contradicting material and logic, you have to assume a little and since I have to assume some sort of size for the ships, I chose proportions that:
- A, is playable in 2D, works graphically.
- B, is consistant with the ingame gfx where it can.
- C, reflects the power of the ship.
- D, would work logically, but with the usual scifi suspension of disbelief of course.
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« Last Edit: April 30, 2005, 09:43:26 am by Arne »
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