Description problems

On the ship detail screen some of the data makes no sense.  A Drengin guardian weighs 35,000 tons,  that about the weight of a US battleship in WWII.  A Titan warship is 173m, that is a mere 2/3 of the original Star Trek Enterprise.  The Enterprise E was 650m and a Star Destroyer is 1600m.

5,521 views 7 replies
Reply #1 Top

So what is the problem?

 

 

Reply #2 Top

The guardian is a tiny ship at 15 meters, a F15 fighter is 19m and weighs about 22 tons fully loaded.  It doesn't matter in the game, but wouldn't you prefer it to be a little realistic?

Reply #3 Top

a 170 meter ship is much more realistic then a 1600 meter ship.

 

Volume/mass of a ship increases by a power of 3 if you increase length/width by a power of 2. so larger ships quickly become to massive to be practical. A 1600m ship would be 10x as large as a 170m ship, but 1000x as massive. 

 

35000 tons for a 15 meter ship seems abit much, but the density of a 15meter cube at 35000 tons would be about 10 tons/m^3. The density of iron is a little under 8 tons/m^3. Ofcourse a ship has empty spaces inside etc but its not unreasonable to assume the armor in particular will be  denser then iron. The actual volume of a ship is probably about half of that of a cube tho, so then it would be 20 compared to 8 of iron, which does seem a tad overboard.

The density of a abrams tank for reference is only 0.8 tons/m3 tho, so thats quite the difference. 

Reply #4 Top

I have to agree. The current values don't make much sense (especially the weight and the cost). However, I'm certain, that they will still be tweaked.

The values in GalCiv 2 weren't perfect either (mostly the weight again). However, they were still more believable. Here are some examples:

Terran scout (tiny)
length: 36m
span: 49m
weight: 3.5 tons

Terran star fury (tiny)
length: 33m
span: 49m
weight: 11.4 tons

Terran defender (small)
length: 43m
span: 81m
weight: 18.5 tons

Terran colony ship (cargo)
length: 933m
span: 503m
weight: 1.5 million tons

Terran survey ship (medium)
length: 299m
span: 256m
weight: 0.001 million tons

Terran battle axe (medium)
length: 299m
span: 218m
weight: 844.2 tons

Terran destroyer (large)
length: 1133m
span: 271m
weight: 0.118 million tons

Terran dreadnaught (huge)
length: 1583m
span: 1464m
weight: 13.8 million tons

Reply #5 Top

Those GC2 masses are extremely low indeed :( Densities come out at like a factor 100 lower then the modern day tank.

Heck, most of those ships would be lighter then air. 

 

Makes me feel like i mathed wrong somehow :S

Reply #6 Top

a 900 ft WWII battleship weighs 45,000 tons and they had armor over 1ft thick.  That is 80 meters longer than the biggest GC3 ship I saw. I think GC2 was closer to what things should be.

Reply #7 Top

Thanks for bringing this up, the game is currently in early development. We will need to tweak these numbers.