Nautilus?

F

Fatcat

Swabbie
Banned
This was probably already posted way back when, but I was messing around with WCEdit, and I tried swapping the Nautilus in. As soon as I fired up the mission, the game crashed and I get : "No non-null created". What is the Nautilus exactly and why doesn't it work?

Also: the Chimera. It's cool, but its guns are impossible to use because their covergance point is way to far off making it impossible to hit anything up close.
 
Hmm, this thread should go into the editing forum.

The Nautilus is the Copernicus-class vessel that gets destroyed in the WCP intro. I suspect the error you got here was caused by the fact that you tried to declare it as a ship, when it is in fact a capship.

However, you're not gonna have much luck with the Nautilus either way - the model is messed up and pretty much unuseable... and in any case, WCP is hardcoded to refuse to accept this ship (as well as the Mercury, which appears to be the Cerberus). Nonetheless, KillerWave and I (well, mostly him) once put in some effort to get this ship into useable form... I don't remember to what degree we succeed - I have definitely been able to use the ship inside the game, though. I should have it around here somewhere... I'll check it out, and if it is even remotely acceptable, I'll upload it to KillerWave's site.

As for the Chimera... I must say, I have no idea what this is. It's probable that I've seen it at some point during my WCP investigations, but even if I have, I don't seem to recall. Can you post a screenshot?
 

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Oh, that. I don't think this ship is actually meant to be a fighter - its file name is ADrone, which seems to suggest... you know, some kind of drone :).

(the "Chimera" name, of course, is made up by Primarch)
 
Small update: I dug up the Nautilus that was hiding out in the depths of my old hard drive. Just as I recalled, it's in pretty bad shape - some of its components can be flown through, while the engine is partially shielded by invisible polygons. And apparently, I had once planned to do a VDU for it, but didn't ever get around to it :p. Anyway, here's some screenshots.

I suppose I can upload it to KW's page if anybody's interested... but keep in mind, it's not something that I'd consider good enough to use in a mod or anything like that.
 

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~~~, the ships engines actually look like freighter containers...

for the rest the ship looks very okay judging from the in-game screenshot.
also i vagely remember the ship using some kind of beam to split an asteroid,
is that part working in the engine? would make a unigue weapon in the vision engine.
 
Mace said:
~~~, the ships engines actually look like freighter containers...

for the rest the ship looks very okay judging from the in-game screenshot.
also i vagely remember the ship using some kind of beam to split an asteroid,
is that part working in the engine? would make a unigue weapon in the vision engine.
Click to expand...

I'm sure it's not. It was only seen in a video sequence. There were plenty of weapon effects for real ships that didn't get implemented, I doubt they spent much time on a model that doesn't appear to have had much work done on it at all.
 
Nautilus?! Nautil *THEM*!

Seriously, though, if Captain Johnny or Taser or someone else who might know is around,it'd be interesting to know what the story here was...
 
Mace said:
~~~, the ships engines actually look like freighter containers...
Click to expand...
You don't know how right you are - most of the ship in fact does consist of destroyable cargo containers :).

As for the beam weapon - the ship is entirely unarmed, and WCP doesn't support beam weapons of any kind (well, it's possible to create something like beam weapons by making very long bullets... but even then, only the leading edge of the bullet actually damages stuff). However, the weapon itself is visible as a part of the mesh. I'm attaching a screenshot showing a close-up of the gun. Notice that the gun is placed asymmetrically.

In preparation for a possible release, I also went and made a VDU picture of this thing. You can see it in the second shot. Mind you, it's not the most exciting VDU image ever - I made it a top-down view in keeping with the WCP tradition (though some SO ships have side-on views), and... well, it looks kinda like a blob from top-down.
 

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Great, thanks. I seem to recall Captain Johnny saying that all the lengths in Prophecy could be measured based on the Midway... but I don't have a Prophecy-capable PC here in Texas (and, of course, I trust your understanding of the internal mechanics of the game far more than my own).
 
Ok, so here's what we've got.

Compared directly to the Midway, the ship appears to be approximately 433 metres in length - we can't be certain of that, however, because while the screenshot was taken from a position equidistant (uh, that is a word, right?) to both ships, the camera angle is not entirely calibrated (basically, I took this shot from inside a ship, with the cockpit switched off - when I have a little more time, I'll do a few more precise comparison shots from a proper camera where I'll be sure there's no perspective distortion). Still, that should be fairly close.

The problem begins when the Pelican enters the equation. According to a list of ship lengths that you posted a few years back, the Pelican is 490 metres in length. This doesn't match up, scale-wise, with the Midway - if it were on the same scale, the Pelican would be 383.68 metres in length (...except that the Pelican is closer to the camera than the Midway and Nautilus models, so it's actually smaller than it appears to be).

In any case, assuming that the 490 metres length is correct, we have two scales operating here. If we assume that the Nautilus is on the same scale as the Pelican, we end up with a length of 553.5 metres.

The second comparison picture is limited to just the Nautilus and the Pelican. In this case, we can see far more precisely the difference between them, because the camera is much closer and equidistant to both ships. In this case - again, assuming the Pelican is 490 metres, we end up with a length of 570.8 metres for the Nautilus. This figure, I believe, is far more accurate than the 553.5 metres from the previous comparison.

Finally, if we assume that the 490 metres length of the Pelican is false, and go by the length derived from the first shot (383.68), we can, based on the second shot, estimate the Nautilus' length to be 445.76 metres (in this case, 1 pixel = 1.24 metres).
 

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490 meters for the Pelican is wrong -- the proper length is *390* meters... which comes remarkably close to what you've found here.

Here's the Pelican.doc that Captain Johnny sent me some time back. I'm not really sure where 490 comes from, but I do know I've been guiilty of using it (I did post correcting that a while ago, though).
 

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Also, here's a few other stats for this ship. These stats are simply what the original ship file contained, which of course doesn't mean that's what they would have been had the ship appeared in the final version of the game.

Mass: 51,000 tonnes (pretty heavy compared to the Pelican's 11,000 tonnes... but then again, the Pelican is a far less solid-looking ship)

Speed: 180 kps

YPR: 12/12/12 (Pelican = 5/5/5)
YPR Rate of Change: 19 (Pelican = 2.5)

Components: 4 x cargo components, 1 engine, 1 bridge, all at 500 hitpoints. This makes the ship slightly weaker than the Pelican (whose components have the same hitpoints, but 2 engines instead of 1). Additionally, the Pelican has 7 cargo components instead of 4, but this makes no difference since these are not essential for the ship. Anyway, if I recall correctly the gun & missile stats, any of these components can be destroyed with just one Devastator plasma gun shot, or a light torpedo. This would mean that it takes two Devastator plasma shots or two light torpedoes to take out a Nautilus (compared to three for the Pelican).

Armament: The Nautilus has no turrets of any kind. Its only "armament" is presumably the beam weapon (laser?) used in the WCP intro, which is visible but not simulated in the game. Of course, the Nautilus also has an unknown number of those little mining probes.
 
Bandit LOAF said:
490 meters for the Pelican is wrong -- the proper length is *390* meters... which comes remarkably close to what you've found here.

Here's the Pelican.doc that Captain Johnny sent me some time back. I'm not really sure where 490 comes from, but I do know I've been guiilty of using it (I did post correcting that a while ago, though).
Click to expand...
Excellent, that explains a lot. I'll take that into account when I try to do a more precise comparison. For now, given that the second comparison shot is more accurate than the first, we can re-estimate the Nautilus' length at 453.1 metres (1 pixel = 1.26). If I had to guess, I would say that that the designers had intended it to be exactly 450 metres in length.
 
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