You are right, I should have said "could be" instead of "is".
I only wanted to say that there could be always a bigger ship out there
I'm fine with the ships in game, but I would not mind more hull classes either.
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no bigger ships than battleships
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I only wanted to say that there could be always a bigger ship out there
I'm fine with the ships in game, but I would not mind more hull classes either.
The CL/BC bit is historical... and is in the game. The second bit is like arguing there aren't tie-fighter classes or firefly classes or galaxy class.
A dreadnought is a battle ship... the main purpose of dreadnoughts in history and scifi is to be a ship of battle... try and stop thinking about the sizes of the ships as classes and think of the ships as sizes. You have 4 different hull sizes and with this you make ship classes. 5 with the military one. Now what is the need to add more hull sizes?
How awfully specific, I've NEVER heard of that particular structure!
That's not really you can just apply to sci-fi in general.
Mind you, I would like Titans of ships too ^_^
In Star Wars the largest type of ship is a star dreadnought or super star destroyer if you will. I think the key here is "star destroyer" part as for ship that has so much firepower it could kill a star. But that is Star Wars for you, more about fantasy than anything else. As for the other empire the biggest class is a battleship (besides mobile chapter fortress and few other examples which exist in quantity of one):
As you can see classes fit nicely with ship classification by tonnage besides destroyer being smaller than a frigate. Meanwhile a capital ship or flagship can be biggest ship available in given fleet. That said I do not see how more classes would help anything.
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A mega ship of total destruction tell stories better than a bunch of regular ships can.
Er, no it wasn't. The largest Ship built by the Empire was the Executor, which was in fact a Dreadnought: http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Executor-class_Star_Dreadnought/Legendsm=n
The ones commonly called "Star Destroyers" was a colloquialism coined by the Rebels - because they have the power to "destroy a star system". But according to the in-Universe classification of Anaxes War Colege System, they were actually Cruisers/Battlecruisers - http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Star_Destroyer/Legends
In fact, their classification system pretty much mirrors the Terrestrial system:
- Corvettes: Ships of roughly 100 - 200 meters length
- Example: CR90 corvette, Marauder-class corvette
- Frigates: Ships of roughly 200 - 400 meters length
- Cruisers: Ships of roughly 400 - 600 meters length
- Heavy Cruisers: Ships of roughly 600 - 1000 meters length
- Star Destroyers: Ships of roughly 1000 - 2000 meters length
- Battlecruisers: Ships of roughly 2000 - 5000 meters length (small battlecruiser models were classed as "Star Cruisers", to separate them from larger ships of the type, but few recognized this classification as a formal part of the system.)[1]
- Dreadnaughts: All ships over 5000 meters length
It's the smallest ship of the line, yes. The largest ships in the Imperial Navy are the Battleships, specifically the Emperor or Retribution classes. In between the Battleships and the Cruisers lie the Battlecruisers and Heavy Cruisers.
In fact, there classification system pretty much mirrors the Terrestrial system.
Actually there is - there is just no consistency over your interpretation or knowledge of it
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Stumson your knowledge of Star Wars is impressive... But what does adding that many classes add to the game when 4-5 classes basically covers those classifications more or less?
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titans would be massive dealers of death and even one should be able to bomb a planets infrastructure into dust.
Then the deathstars would be more a display of technology. A kind of mobile starfortress. Powerful yes.. but costwise a titan is in many ways better. However deathstars begin loading up on mineral, energy, science generating modules and can thus REPLACE planets and miningstations as a source of your economy. And since they run a tight ship, there are no rebellions etc fuss like on planets. Oh and a module or two and they don't even take up space on fleet maintenance in the form of costs or fleet limit.
Oh and best of all? They can construct. And with the right Mugani? HAK HAK HAK tech, go to other galaxies on their own to colonize, build etc..
Then the deathstars would be more a display of technology. A kind of mobile starfortress. Powerful yes.. but costwise a titan is in many ways better. However deathstars begin loading up on mineral, energy, science generating modules and can thus REPLACE planets and miningstations as a source of your economy. And since they run a tight ship, there are no rebellions etc fuss like on planets. Oh and a module or two and they don't even take up space on fleet maintenance in the form of costs or fleet limit.
Oh and best of all? They can construct. And with the right Mugani? HAK HAK HAK tech, go to other galaxies on their own to colonize, build etc..
Tonnage scaling vs. set ship sizes.
A little late to the discussion here, and I've just skimmed the very tip of 8 pages. I do think this would be better for a mod / another game entirely, but I think it would be interesting to have a game such as Stellaris that didn't use preset ship sizes, and instead used an actual tonnage system.
So, to break it down, there'd be no restriction on the size of ship you want to build, at whatever tech level you are at. How effective that ship is would be, and whether or not your race could afford it in a timely manner would be separate issues entirely.
So, for example, if I wanted at the start of the game build a 2 million ton colony ship, I could. There'd be nothing physically preventing me from doing this in the game. However, that's a big ship, and it would take time, and each component has it's own tonnage value, and certain components would be influenced by each other - like engines. Engines are only effective up to a certain amount, and they themselves have weight, so you'd need a lot of engines just to move your behemoth, thus reducing what you could actually fit into a 2 million ton superstructure.
The value of technology would be shifted from just new stuff, to refinement of available knowledge - or miniaturization. The smaller a component, the more of them you can fit on a ship, because you're dealing with tonnage, and not slots, and the class of the ship is irrelevant to the size.
20 ton battleship? Sure - if you've got the tech, it'd be a holy terror of death. If not, you'd be a laughing stock and target practice. Better tech doesn't always mean bigger. Look at your smart phone and then compare that to the room sized tape driven computers of the 1950's that were lucky if they had a few kb of memory.
Anyway, it's a thought.
~S
A little late to the discussion here, and I've just skimmed the very tip of 8 pages. I do think this would be better for a mod / another game entirely, but I think it would be interesting to have a game such as Stellaris that didn't use preset ship sizes, and instead used an actual tonnage system.
So, to break it down, there'd be no restriction on the size of ship you want to build, at whatever tech level you are at. How effective that ship is would be, and whether or not your race could afford it in a timely manner would be separate issues entirely.
So, for example, if I wanted at the start of the game build a 2 million ton colony ship, I could. There'd be nothing physically preventing me from doing this in the game. However, that's a big ship, and it would take time, and each component has it's own tonnage value, and certain components would be influenced by each other - like engines. Engines are only effective up to a certain amount, and they themselves have weight, so you'd need a lot of engines just to move your behemoth, thus reducing what you could actually fit into a 2 million ton superstructure.
The value of technology would be shifted from just new stuff, to refinement of available knowledge - or miniaturization. The smaller a component, the more of them you can fit on a ship, because you're dealing with tonnage, and not slots, and the class of the ship is irrelevant to the size.
20 ton battleship? Sure - if you've got the tech, it'd be a holy terror of death. If not, you'd be a laughing stock and target practice. Better tech doesn't always mean bigger. Look at your smart phone and then compare that to the room sized tape driven computers of the 1950's that were lucky if they had a few kb of memory.
Anyway, it's a thought.
~S
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By the time the human operator sees the enemy on the monitor the enemy will be in a completely different place. A light-second is not a big distance in space, so it's impossible to ever tell exactly where anything is at the present moment.
And regardless, the human operator would still have to use an IFF, because there's no other way to know what they're looking at. That means firing an electromagnetic signal and waiting for a response. Same thing, just slower.
When you see pictures of distant objects taken in space, they are taken through incredibly powerful telescopes. Those telescopes are not only very, very big, but they can only look at a tiny proportion of the sky at once. They also take a long time to set up. If you think it's going to take a long time to use an IFF, then how long do you think it's going to take to rotate and set up your massive telescope to look at an object hundreds of thousands of kilometers away?
Since you can't realistically install a massive telescope on your spaceship, and you certainly can't expect to be able to use it, what you have is a very basic electromagnetic transmitter and receiver, like a radar system, which means you don't see a picture, you just see a blip, and that is all you have to go on.
Yes. Space is extremely, incredibly, unimaginably empty.
You could be in the middle of the asteroid belt, and the entire diameter of earth's atmosphere would likely not cover the distance between you and the nearest object capable of appearing on your radar. Space is really, really, really empty.
Maybe. However, if your spacecraft were manned you'd lose your entire fleet and all the humans crewing them. You've wasted millions of gallons of fuel launching all this completely useless life support into orbit just to have a human there who.. could do nothing, and died.
At the kind of distances we are talking, human operators would be completely and utterly at the mercy of their equipment. They would have absolutely no ability to discern what was going on except by looking at blips on a screen. A computer could do the same thing only faster, and without requiring many tons of additional equipment.
It's clear you really like the idea of manned space warfare and I can respect that, it makes for more interesting and fun science fiction, but barring some technological singularity beyond which the future becomes impossible to predict it will not be realistic. Space is very big, it's very difficult to take anything there and it's very dangerous for living things to be there, so even if a human operator did confer an advantage (which I really can't see how it possibly would) it would have to be an advantage capable of outweighing the huge costs and design challenges of putting humans in space in the first place.
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Star Ruler pretty much. You can design anything you want and then give it the size ranging from small fighter to something 10x bigger than any planet.
I was going to say "never played" but then realized I had it in my library. I must not have been terribly impressed with the game itself. *shrug* I'll give it another look.
[edit] heh - yeeeah. 7 minutes played, and then uninstalled. >___>
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A flagship death star or titan would be a nice DLC addition.It would be more like a gaint starbase than a ship like in MOO2 but you would be limited in how many you have.
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The thing about this discussion is, that every Sci-Fi franchise can make up the sizes for the ships as it wants. In Star Trek for example ships are generally rather small compared to other Sci-Fi Universes.
The overall classifications of a lot Sci-Fi Universes are also rather sloppy, simply taking real life categories from the WW I to WW II era. "Light Cruisers" for example weren't necessarily "lighter" than "Heavy Cruisers", they only had smaller main guns. They also weren't always faster. Battlecruisers were battleships that switched armor for more engine power (an overall design that proved very flawed, specially for the British BCs). Dreadnoughts are no real category at all. They are "all-big-gun" battleships, compared to previous ship-of-the-line.
So this whole discussion about sizes and classes doesn't make much sense in my opinion. Since there is no real scale in Stellaris, the ships in the game can basically be as large as you want them to be (within reason of course).
A battleship in Stellaris can be 800 meters or 5 kilometers long, that is just something you have to "imagine" by yourself.
The overall classifications of a lot Sci-Fi Universes are also rather sloppy, simply taking real life categories from the WW I to WW II era. "Light Cruisers" for example weren't necessarily "lighter" than "Heavy Cruisers", they only had smaller main guns. They also weren't always faster. Battlecruisers were battleships that switched armor for more engine power (an overall design that proved very flawed, specially for the British BCs). Dreadnoughts are no real category at all. They are "all-big-gun" battleships, compared to previous ship-of-the-line.
So this whole discussion about sizes and classes doesn't make much sense in my opinion. Since there is no real scale in Stellaris, the ships in the game can basically be as large as you want them to be (within reason of course).
A battleship in Stellaris can be 800 meters or 5 kilometers long, that is just something you have to "imagine" by yourself.
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Well, the issue is cost, sending things to orbit is expensive, by the kilo actually is about 12500 dollars. Sending an unmaned robot is cheaper, no need for atmo, or food or air scrubbers or a number of other needs biological live forms tend to have.
And then there is the trip to mars, long and dangerous. the bottom line is that we need better thrusters an order of magnitude better, better material sciences, maybe a space elevator (which would reduce, more or less the cost per kilo to 100 dollars, estimated) but the latter is a massive engineering undertakement we might not be quite there yet (but the carbon is magic meme/research might shed some hopes here)
On the other Hand we have Voyager, still functioning, and that is kinda awesome.
The fact is that, while it would take longer, Venus might be more terraformable than mars at our tech level, even if it is by the crude tactic of throwing ice comets at it till it cools enough, might take a few lifetimes and would probably need extra work to keep it from greenhousing again, but....
Most of that can be applied to mars, it lacs a magnetosphere, ozone layer, proper gravity and the atmo is too thin...
In Star Wars the largest type of ship is a star dreadnought or super star destroyer if you will. I think the key here is "star destroyer" part as for ship that has so much firepower it could kill a star. But that is Star Wars for you, more about fantasy than anything else. As for the other empire the biggest class is a battleship (besides mobile chapter fortress and few other examples which exist in quantity of one):
As you can see classes fit nicely with ship classification by tonnage besides destroyer being smaller than a frigate. Meanwhile a capital ship or flagship can be biggest ship available in given fleet. That said I do not see how more classes would help anything.
Those are the most garish, over the top, horrid lookig designs I ever seen, they even seem to have a ram prow... in space! I know that 40k is silly, but damn...
No, the Empire built a bigger space ship than the Executor, it is called the Death Star
Well, if we are going to start discussing ships sizes I might as well post this
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Those designs are actually from Battlefleet Gothic (a game with that franchise just came out two days ago, btw) and the are pretty much meant to be played like old ships-of-the-line.
They are not meant as a realistic depiction of how "real spaceships" might look some day (obviously).
Yeah, but it is too silly, too ornamented, and ram prows! Ram, prows were only briefly ressurrected in the 1860(late) and died out again about the 1890s, and where impractical and really not used... and they look silly as hell
I'm always amazed that people over look the fact that the Death Star moved from the Alderaan system to the Yavin system. The climax of Star Wars even hinges on whether the rebels will destroy it before it gets within range of Yavin IV!No, the Empire built a bigger space ship than the Executor, it is called the Death Star
I actually like the design for what they are. Silly is just part of the WH40k Universe.
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