Ship Size?

posted on August 21st, 2012, 8:16 pm

Yeah, it had the 'tickle guns'. Kinda fitting, considering it was pretty much a canon veteran. The only Negh'Var ever seen in the main timeline/universe and it had them.

I wouldn't bet on the weapon the Negh'Var fired were cannons. To me they looked more like the DS9 klingon-torpedoes that were also fired by the Birds of Prey, just bigger. The klingon visuals of cannon-fire didn't rotate on DS9, but the Negh'Var's weapon visuals did rotate in the direction they were fired towards.

posted on August 22nd, 2012, 6:11 am

JeanLucPicard, you've proven my point exactly. The BoP and the Defiant are the same size, but in game, the ship is too big. Maybe the dev team could probably downsize it a little.

What do you think?

posted on August 22nd, 2012, 9:40 am

Here is a good Video about the size of the Defiant and a Warbird of Deridex-Class
Play at 3:00min, or watch it from beginning. It is the Intro of Armada 1.

posted on August 22nd, 2012, 1:01 pm

JeanLucPicard, you've proven my point exactly. The BoP and the Defiant are the same size, but in game, the ship is too big. Maybe the dev team could probably downsize it a little.

What do you think?

Funny thing is that you want the defiant to get smaller and I want the BoP to get bigger! And my reason is simple: micromanaging, sometimes in the middle of a battle to click and select a BoP is quite difficult (to me at least) and add to that that those guys die very quickly, so that's why I want them to be a little bigger, the defiant is manageable IMO.

Let the devs decide

posted on August 22nd, 2012, 3:33 pm

http://www.merzo.net/

For the sake of you guys arguing use this. you can even drag and drop the ships to compare them side by side. Its kinda cool actually.

posted on August 22nd, 2012, 5:00 pm

It is the Intro of Armada 1.

Man, I wish I understood German. I have the game in storage, the english version.

On a side note, I'd love to redo the sounds for that. I did one on youtube, for the Battle for Sector 001, but they deleted it for copyright issues, even though there was a guy who did almost the exact same thing, but his is still active. (i think)

Back on topic, it does show what I'm talking about. The Defiant is smaller then a warbird, which, in itself, I beleave is smaller then a Dominion Battleship. In the shows, the Dominion Battleship is massive compared to the Defiant. In game, they are virtually the same size. Maybe they should shrink the Defiant, cuz its not right.

Hey Devs, wanna pitch in here?

posted on August 22nd, 2012, 10:13 pm

The guy from DITL actually wrote a rant-like thing about the Defiant's size.

But this is peanuts compared to the issue of the Defiants size. Surely it would not be so difficult to ask the creator of a Starship to set a concrete size of their ship which everybody then sticks to. Yet apparently, different departments use completely different sizes for the same ship!

Defiant is, without doubt, the biggest example of this problem. The official length of the ship is 170 metres, according to the DS9 Technical Manual. However, if we look at the ships deck plans in the back of the book, we see several illustrations of people standing on the four decks. Taking these to be about 1.8 metres tall, we get a length of about 115 metres for the ship - if it's 170 metres long then those people are 266 cm tall, or about eight feet nine inches!

Comparing the Defiant to other ships leads to all kinds of numbers. When we see the ship above a Galor in "Defiant", it appears to be about 60 metres long. This is reinforced by the battle sequence in "First Contact"; the Enterprise-E swoops past behind the Defiant. Given that the E-E is "nearly seven hundred metres long" according to Picard, the Defiant looks to be in the region of 50 - 60 metres in comparison.

On the other hand, the episode "The Sound of Her Voice" includes a shot of the hangar doors in the ships belly. Assuming the shuttle is a reasonable size, the circular doors are about 15 metres in diameter. If so, then the ship itself is about 130 metres across, and so about 170 metres long again. The episode "One Little Ship" includes a comparison with a Danube class Runabout - this ship is radically shrunk later in the episode, but we see it full size to start with - which makes the Defiant look significantly more than 170 metres long.

If you look at the inside of the nacelles of the Defiant, there are clearly visible two or three rows of lights. These look exactly like windows; if we assume that they are windows, then with a spacing of around 3.4 metres the whole ship becomes a good 8+ decks tall, and goes back to about 170 metres again.

Basically it's so incredibly inconsistent that you could have it be just about any size smaller than an Intrepid and it would probably be something that appeared on screen.

posted on August 22nd, 2012, 11:29 pm

Yes, precisely because of those sizing problems, we chose something that fit within that canon range

posted on August 23rd, 2012, 2:08 am

to be honest who cares about the size as long as it hits like a truck and looks about the size of a smart car i don't.

posted on August 24th, 2012, 9:53 pm

This is an RTS and not a SIM people, close enough is close enough.

posted on August 26th, 2012, 3:01 pm

Yep, there are many difficulties in finding the right size for a ship ingame. First, Star Trek tends to be quite "flexible" with ship sizes. A good example is the Defiant, as quoted above. It gets even worse for the Bird of Prey for example. Second, there are also gameplay relevant decisions, because Fleet Operations is - at the end of the day - an "eSport style" strategy game, where the visual size of a unit matters.
We usually try to stay as close to Star Trek as possible and find a vessel size that 'feels right'. For some cases, there is no 'feels right', either because the ship appeared in such a large range of scales or because there are only few comparison shot with less "flexible" units. In these cases we try to find something that matches markers like windows and that fits to the gameplay requirements. (I had some ideas about implementing something for the Bird of Prey back in April, if you remember )

At the end of the day, I'm quite happy with the vessel sizes in Fleet Operations for the Federation and i think they are about right for both canon and gameplay.

posted on August 26th, 2012, 9:26 pm

...
At the end of the day, I'm quite happy with the vessel sizes in Fleet Operations for the Federation and i think they are about right for both canon and gameplay.

So am i,.

One thing always bothered me though: why is the D'deridex only half the size? That Romulan main line warbird is usually around 1200 meters, +/- a bit, but where does the FOPS size come from?
Just a gameplay decision, or any other info on size that i overlooked?

posted on August 27th, 2012, 1:08 am

You might as well ask why the Norexan, V-15 etc are also differently scaled, right?

Most of the largest capital ships are not to their full scale, largely for gameplay purposes: these ships are more or less scaled to each other properly, but then there are "gaps". After all, the Norexan is huge, width wise, the D'deridex is just huge all around, and the V-15 are pretty enormous too. Otherwise we'd end up with a D'deridex roughly 2/3 larger than the current one, same with the Norexan and V-15 (or up to 5x the size for the latter-.-). Really cumbersome for gameplay. Then of course there are the outposts/starbases/yards... which generally dwarf the ships

posted on August 27th, 2012, 10:39 am

it is a fair point to tweek sizes for a RTS,

star trek Excalibur on the other hand can go to precision on scale since its a flight sim

posted on August 27th, 2012, 3:48 pm

Yet even Excalibur won't do scale models for anything beside ships as I understand it - the distances in space are far too large