BombStrike
Ministry of War
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Posted - 2009.09.23 08:12:00 -
[1]
 Originally by: Iria Ahrens
Edited by: Iria Ahrens on 13/08/2009 04:08:39
Originally by: Irida Mershkov
The thing that bugs me the most, is that frigates, which are well, frigates, and are pretty big, a Rifter is about the size of a 747 if I remember correctly. Yet, they maneuver like fighters.
I think this entire thread is funny, but this one really made me lol. In Honor Harrington, a penance, which is essentially a parasite landing boat that fits inside a frigate's boat bay and has no warp capability is described specifically as being about the size as 747.
Scale for spaceships is based on the innards of a ship not seagoing equivalents. Since this technology doesn't exist for real, authors have to make assumption about how "big" each essential subsystem is.
Warp Systems
Thrust Systems
Comms
Particle shielding
Inertial control.
Antigravity.
In "Sci-fantasy" like Star Trek and especially Star Wars, where the Authors barely even pay lip service to such things, you end up with really small ships. But lots of other authors come up with even bigger ships. Babylon 5 had an explorer ship docked for a time that was bigger than the space system itself, it was described as just ONE HUGE ENGINE.
...
Shielding, the Shields presumadely take up mass too, but how big does a shield have to be cover a specific area, and how quickly does that change? Again, many authors don't even think about it and just magic it in. But another thing making ships big is attempting to create shields that have a given number of HP and can extend to a given distance.
Antigravity: how big does an anti-gravity engine have to be and how does it scale with ship size? Something again, lots of author's will barely pay lip service to, Star Trek has "anti-grav" plating that is essentially the size of floor tiles. How convenient, Not so in other books.
Don't compare EVE ship sizes to ships in Books/movies where the author didn't even consider these things, compare them to ships of author's that did. And you'll have a whole different perspective about ship sizes.
If anything, I think a lot of ships should be made bigger, especially carriers.
While I agree with you on many points - if we continue in this way, ships should be a lot larger and complex, thus things like battleships, carriers, dreadnoughts and maybe even cruisers should cost an insanely huge amount of money, making them out of reach for the young pilot killing a bunch of pirates or mining rocks and only the major faction armies would be using them. Cruisers could maybe bought by a bunch of players working for weeks to make the money, and they'd have to operate it all together to get something out of it.
No seriously, EVE, while aiming for a realistic world, shouldn't push it too far, most ships are ok by their size while I agree that carriers which should be made bigger ( they have insane cargos, can transport unpackaged ships ) to reflect their current capabilities.
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