SE5, Tell Aaron what's on your Wish List

[Phoenix-D]

10 million tons is a hell of a lot bigger than a current aircraft carrier. Those generally get into the 90 KILO ton range at max- several orders of magnitude smaller. (even the SE4 escort is bigger)

Just because you can slap together that much material doesn't mean you could make it move, either. Place the engines wrong and it would rip itself apart..

[Colonel]

This was in a mod but I thought it was a good idea and should be in SEV, You should be able to make weapons take up less space but still hold attack values, but this would increase the cost of building ships

[Baron Munchausen]

Originally posted by Shane Watson:

quote:

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Originally posted by Suicide Junkie:
[QB]

quote:

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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 ]

[Kana]

If you are basing things on Size, and there is no size requirement or max, then there would have to be a cost for the basic frame of the ship. This is already in SE4, but we are limited by the size class. But to prevent people from just making these big mammoth scouts, is to make it much more expensive to by the frame, plus not to mention the engines need to move something that size. Alot cheaper to have a 100 ton scout than a 1M ton scout. And maintance...whoa we wont even go into that...

Kana

[Colonel]

why not do what they did in some mods make three or so sizes for each ship size--- So Light Escort, Escort, Heavy Escort, they somewhat did this with crusiers in SEIV light, normal, Battle

or this, Have Size Range for each ship so you could have anywhere between 100-200 Kilotons for an escort and you would define in game what you wanted it to be and you would name the size you created

So you could build a 123kt escort
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Should split up the Intel Projects into two sections, Offensive and defensive.

You should have to do specfic counter intel projects, so maybe intel recon to discover what the enemy are doing then have to launch a counter intel against that project, so if the enemy was setting up a puppet goverment you would have to assainate there puppet leader and maybe garrison the planet with troops and ship

[ August 01, 2004, 21:20: Message edited by: Colonel ]

[Shane Watson]

Originally posted by Phoenix-D:
10 million tons is a hell of a lot bigger than a current aircraft carrier. Those generally get into the 90 KILO ton range at max- several orders of magnitude smaller. (even the SE4 escort is bigger

I stand corrected and apologize. Was thinking 100's of thousands of tons, and typed millions in my pre-coffee haze this morning.

actual size of the USS Nimitz, by way of reference, is approximately 97000 tons, as per your post.

But still.

[Shane Watson]

Originally posted by Baron Munchausen:
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. [/QB]

There's a reason that I'm an artist and not an engineer or programmer haha.

I dig your ideas. I think something like that would work very well and be a lot of fun to noodle as well.

Cheers,

[Greybeard]

One thing that really makes colonization difficult is the change of the "planet status" from colonized to available if you move your ship out of a system. I would like the planet status to remain the same as the Last time I "saw" the system. However, this would probably take significant programming or large player files.

Another option would be to show that the "unseen" planet is colonized but without the designation of who owns it to avoid giving away information on conquests. That way I could plan my colonization without sending ships to planets that are already claimed.

[Colonel]

Someone suggested something like this before but i wish to refine the idea, Limiting larger ships, You should be able to pick a design type of Capital Ship and you would only be allowed 3 of this design, and you would need a certian population in order to get this size ship, but this ship shouldnt have any limits like only 2 engines for it or something like that, and if you lost one you couldnt rebuild it, it would lost---This would give greater importance to Fleets and protecting Larger ships because they are more of an investment

[Timstone]

- I would like to see weapons with splash (area) damage.
- The possibility to give and equation to determine weapon damage (that way you can include various parameters into the damage (ship size, distance from target, etc.)).
- The possibility to let a weapon fire more than one "beam". That way you can damage a whole lot of ships at once.
- In conjunction to the first and third wish; weapons that can affect more than one ship (like creating a gravity hole in the center of an enemy fleet).
- More room for pics (and larger pics).
- And of course the possibility of adding animations into the space for the pics, maybe in gif-format.

[ August 03, 2004, 09:49: Message edited by: Timstone ]