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Topic: the Earthling Cruiser (Read 13759 times)
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Arne
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Yak!
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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.
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« Last Edit: August 28, 2006, 05:39:08 pm by Arne »
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Icemage_999
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The glory Device is antimatter? Where does it say? The Utwig bomb is anyways. No where apparently, not even in the SC1/SC2 manuals. :/ I guess this is fodder for the SC Myths thread.
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.
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Rados
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Glad to see this post has grown so  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.
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Lance_Vader
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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.
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Neutrino 123
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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... 
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-Neutrino 123 (pronounced Neutrino One-Two-Three)
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Draxas
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That would mean there are 18-30 crew stuffed inside every Scout... Sounds implausible, unless it's a lot bigger than everyone thinks.
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Culture20
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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.
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Arne
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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.
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« Last Edit: August 31, 2006, 01:03:59 pm by Arne »
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Neutrino 123
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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)
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:
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.
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-Neutrino 123 (pronounced Neutrino One-Two-Three)
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Mugz the Sane
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need coffee...
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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.
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I'm seriously considering going to Bali to paint nude women.
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