quote:
Originally posted by HP Delron:
I think it is very reasonable to fit over 4million population on a transport. Depending of the size of the ships in this mod. ( i have not played it yet). But i am assuming that the largest of the large reach the size of baseships.
The largest pop transport is the Large Starliner, and 1450kT. There is a Heavy Baseship at 2000kT, though.
quote:
Now a base ship is just about as large as the empire state building if you count tonnage.
Well, that's the rub - interpretation of tonnage. Even if you take "kT" literally (which I frequently don't), I still don't know how you're equating a baseship to the Empire State Building. It's an interesting comparison, though.
quote:
The empire state building has 37million cubic feet. Lets say that large baseship sized ship uses 1/2 its cubic feet on cargo. that is about 19million cubic feet. Now lets say the cryo chambers are 10feet tall 5 feet deep and 5 feet wide. that means you could would have 3.8milx3.8milx1.9mil chambers in that combined cargo space.
that makes about 27M peoples. Using only 1/2 its volume for cargo space. if it used more like 4/5 for cargo space. it would be about 30million cubic feet.
so you would get 3milx6milx6mil. 108M peoples on da ship.
Now mabey the ships in this mod are much smaller or the people in it are just giant lardos i dunno.
But using regular ship sizes. About 108Million peeps could fit on a dedicated Cargo ship loaded to the brim with cryo-statis chambers.
[ 13 April 2002: Message edited by: HP Delron ]
Very interesting, though your premise data is just one possible way of doing the math. Several other ideas to consider:
1) Cryogenic storage of population is not necessarily given. If this were my Foundations mod, there should probably be a tech tree branch for cryogenic technology, and I'd say it would take some advanced research before you could reliably freeze, store, and revive someone using a 10' x 5' x 5' device.
2) In Proportions, I assume that population units are more than just a million bodies and some pijamas. Even if you could stuff 100 million folks into ice boxes and un-pack/freeze them on a colony... what then? You've got the population of a good-sized nation, with no clothing, houses, vehicles, factories, farms, medicine, cities, tools, weapons, food, fuel, books, computers, vehicles, or anything else to keep them alive on a world that is not their native atmosphere, biosphere, gravity, weather (or even close to their native temperature), and may or may not be full of alien flora, fauna and microbes, and other hazards.
So, I assume that a population unit has to bring a lot of this stuff with them, and so is somewhat included in the mass rating, and even then it seemed I was being generous.
3) Because of the limitations of SE4, I had to take into account that players can and will do what one player here has suggested, and use planetary development fleets. A colony ship can arrive at an unsettled planet at the same time as a pile of transports. This is ok, as long as it doesn't get out of hand. If a transport could carry 100 pop units, then a fleet could turn a dead alien rock into a military base churning out high-tech units in a few turns. Therefore, this is another reason why pop cargo capacity should stay low in order to maintain the effect and purpose of the mod (to be able to make more realistic a game that ignores many realistic limits to colony development rate - in some cases this comes at the price of some abstractions and cases where things aren't literally what they say they are [e.g., population isn't necessarily just a million people, and kT isn't necessarily a kiloton, or even a particular type of measure - these are what they do, not what they say they are.)
4) A typical homeworld in SE4 has a limit of 2000 pop units. If you take that literally to mean two billion people, then it's not in line at all with Earth population. On the other hand, you could say that a population unit only represents the part of the population that is useful from a Space Tyrant's perspective - trained servile workforce, or whatever.
5) Real-world examples tend to have less than half their mass in cargo capacity, although these are of course different tech levels, and different sorts of vehicles, than in SE4. Some examples:
Boeing 747 - 400 tons, 122 tons cargo capacity
Pegasus SSTO 1960's - 1500 tons, 20 tons capacity
Ithacus Senior 1960's - 6400 tons, 360 tons capacity
VentureStar space plane - 1000 tons, 25 tons capacity
6) I tend to think that SE4 ship sizes are probably grossly overrated in terms of tonnage. An 80,000 ton "small" satellite? A 10,000 ton bridge? How many crew could you fit in one 10,000 ton crew quarters unit, even if you pack sandwiches and drink for them? The smallest ship in SE4 normal is 150kT. The battleship Bismarck weighed 46 actual kT. Is the smallest exploration spacecraft going to be more massive than three battleships? The nuclear aircraft carrier USS Enterprise weighs about 75 actual kT. Any of these figures tend to make me think that all figures in SE4 are truly meaningful only in their effects.
7) On the other hand, in plotting the ship sizes I used, I referred to the venerable old Star Trek Star Fleet Technical manual, and found the sizes were less than an order of magnitude greater in SE4. I tend to think in terms of
Star Fleet Battles, which was based on this book and other materials from Franz Joseph. I think TNG ships are supposed to be bigger, so maybe that's where Malfador came up with basic figures. Anyway, seeing these were only off by about 2-3 times, and the proportions of destroyer to cruiser to dreadnought looked about the same, and especially considering the task of converting ALL the SE4 size values just to try to have an accurate kT measure for ship hulls, I just decided I should stick with the basic SE4 scale, and the
effects it has, rather than trying to worry about whether the kT would work out to real-universe kiloTons, because it was clear that they never would. There are metric tons, and there are imperial tons, there are tonnes and dry tonnes and who knows what else, so there can be Malfadorian SE4 kT, with different Versions for ship size, satellite size, drone size, fighter size, population size, weapon platform size, planet capacity, etc etc etc. They are what they do.
PvK
edit: fixing quote bolds
[ 14 April 2002: Message edited by: PvK ]
Re: Proportions 2.1 available
That is the real goal, which goes back to my statement of if it works for you... However, it is quite possible for bays to hold more then they weigh as long as you are talking mass.
If a 20kt cargo unit can carry 70kt of cargo, then a 300kt ship suddenly becomes (30 kt C&C comps) + (60kt engines) + (20kt cargo comp + 70kt cargo) * 10 cargo comps = 990kt. However, despite the sudden 230% increase in mass, the speed of the ship becomes the same. Perhaps in SEV, true QNP will be possible, with the mass of cargo factored into total ship mass, and ship sizes actually relative to volume. That would drastically change ship design.
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