Proportions 2.3 nearing completion

[Spuzzum]

Originally posted by Phoenix-D:
"1000 tons has always meant 1000 tons to me. ;-)"

Figure this out then. How much *damage* is 50 kilotons?

Phoenix-D

Well, while people do have me on the ship scale concerns (like a 25K ton fighter), I can answer that one -- it's the amount of damage you would need to inflict to destroy 50 kilotons' worth of an average component. ;-)

Scale-wise, the game probably would have been better off choosing tons rather than kilotons. A 10-ton mine is definitely not out of the question when you're trying to destroy a 1200-ton dreadnought, and a 25-ton fighter makes perfect sense (assuming it was built to be solid, it'd be about the size of the average city bus).

Unfortunately, at that scale, it'd be pointless to carry population, since you'd be carrying thousands rather than millions.

[Spuzzum]

Originally posted by Phoenix-D:
Having a 20kt storage bay store 100kt+ of stuff is a bit odd though

Not if you assume that supplies are very dense and not very bulky. The only concern is being able to tug all that weight around, which the game thankfully ignores. ;-)

[PvK]

We had a good discussion of the measurement issue in an earlier Proportions thread. Some general conclusions were and are:

1. "kT" must be taken abstractly in many cases. It can be interpreted in many ways, few of them equating directly to kilotons mass.

2. Proportions population mass of 1000kT per 1 million colonists was taken with actual mass in mind, but it does not only include the mass of the people themselves. If it did, your population would arrive nude and starving on an alien world, and would die immediately. I do NOT assume that every empire starts with super-efficient cryogenic storage (or ANY cryogenic storage). I do assume that they need clothing, food, drink, atmosphere support, shelter, tools, medicine, construction equipment, power generators, raw materials, spare parts, and a thousand other things. In sum, I'm being extremely generous with my estimate of the required mass to successfully move one million colonists to an alien world and to have them arrive in a condition where they will be able not only to survive there, but to start building a space age industrial/military colony, etc. However, see #1 above - kT is only meaningful in terms of what you can DO with it in the game.

3. There are many very goofy numbers in the default set (or Proportions) if you try to take kT literally. It's generally exaggerated by at least 1000 times, unless you imagine fighter units to be entire squadrons, etc, which is entirely reasonable. It's all a matter of interpretation.

PvK

[Spuzzum]

Well, Spuzzum the Lummox is now entirely flummoxed. You win. ;-)

[DirectorTsaarx]

Just to add some more fuel to the discussion... I always assumed kT referred to "displacement", like it does with sea-faring vessels. In which case "1 kT" means it displaces 1 kT of water. At which point it has less to do with mass than with volume. (Although one could argue that density was the important factor, but that's just mass divided by volume, so that 1 kT still isn't really mass (or even weight, which is a measure of the effect of a gravitational field on mass)).

Have fun debating!!!

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by DirectorTsaarx:
Just to add some more fuel to the discussion... I always assumed kT referred to "displacement", like it does with sea-faring vessels. In which case "1 kT" means it displaces 1 kT of water.

It's funny you mention fuel, because that I believe is actually the source of the terminology. Someone posted here a while back, (can't remember who or where, but I wanna say it was Baron) that the source of the kiloton unit of measurment for ships originated with old pen and paper space games such as Traveller and Starfire. In those ships were fueled by liquid hydrogen, which was stored in tanks and measured in kilotons. Other components were measured relative to this in the amount of fuel that a similer size tank could hold. And weapons rating according to this is how large a component they can destroy according to this scale. At least that's how I remember it. It made sense at the time.

Geoschmo

[Baron Munchausen]

Despite the ability to adjust the 'weight' of population, I'd really like to see the return of dedicated population quarters. It's unrealistic to be able to load a bunch of people like they were cargo pallets & then drop them somewhere else and pickup a bunch of mines or satellites or some other dead weight. People don't live in containers. They need living space with life support, furniture, food, and minimal entertainment (communications?), etc. You should have to use special transport components for population. In this sense SE IV is a step back from SE III. I wonder if we could get MM to install another 'option' to allow dedicated population quarters since the image for them is included in SE IV.

[PvK]

I agree Baron.

I've tried to approximate this in Proportions 2.2 by adding a starliner module component that offers savings over a massive number of cargo bays, but gives combat penalties so people will have disincentive to use them on combat designs.

PvK