[Baron Munchausen]

Originally posted by Shane Watson:

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Originally posted by Suicide Junkie:
[QB]

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Ships should be built to whatever size you want and classed how you want (If I happen to want to have a 10 million ton behemouth scout, then dag-nabbit, I *want* one!)

And just because you want to build a 10 million story tower dosen't mean you can at our current technology level, no matter how much money you have.
You have to do the research to figure out HOW, then you can. If you want to start out running around with battlemoons, that's what a high tech start is for.

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Tower vs. Ship.

Tower is planet based. You are fighting gravity and wind sheer.

Ship is orbital. 10 million tons, incidently, isn't even as large as a current day air craft carrier.

My point is that yes, you *can* (or at least *should*) be able to if you want to spend the amount of time and money and resources and manpower it takes to put something like that together, but it won't be terribly effective.

I *do* concede a partial point to you on the engineering note. Perhaps this could be overcome by the larger the ship and the lower the technology the more problems it inherently has.

On the other hand, lower techs usually use larger things. They don't have the finess of higher technology. I keep thinking of the basement sized computers that couldn't do a smidgeon of what my wife's laptop can do that my father-in-law worked on when he was starting out in the aerospace industry.

Cheers,

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The Nimitz class carriers run up to around 100,000 (thousand, not million) tons when fully loaded. The largest things afloat are the 'super tankers' that run between off-shore terminals and can't even come into port. They get to about 1.5 million tons Last I heard.

But building a large structure in space still requires engineering for stresses and pressures. Especially if it is going to be a moving structure. The engines have to 'push' on something or other to make the thing move, and it has to hold together when they do. Not to mention resisting damage from enemy weapons.

That said, I agree that a more flexible style of 'engineering' is needed for SE ship design. The current fixed 'tonnage' for every ship regardless of what is really installed just doesn't make sense. We need to see real costs/benefits from altering the engine power/mass ratio of our ships. The idea of ship classes as rigid 'containers' needs to be dumped.

I still think a series of hull size classes should dictate the relative building costs (scaled by your construction/materials technology level) according to how big the final design really is. BUT... we should not go 'choosing the size' before we do anything else and then be forced to 'choose the size' again if we want to add more equipment than will fit into the rigid size we chose before. We should be able to just add equipment to the design and let the game track how big it's getting. As it crosses 'levels' of construction size, the cost gets re-calculated to reflect our ability to handle the scale. And if it looks too costly you scale back to a smaller size -- by removing equipment, not by 'choosing the hull size' again.

[ August 01, 2004, 18:44: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]