I disagree somewhat. My point earlier that I was trying to make was not that it's impossible for the civilian ships to enter and leave from the bottom bay of Perry but that one picture doesn't mean that all civilian ships enter and exit through Perry's bottom bay and allmilitary ships enter and exit through the top of Perry. That could very well be true but basing that off of one picture is not conclusive enough for me.
Oh, certainly, I agree with that - we can't know one way or the other; my bone is more with the claim that the artwork should be disregarded because it's a "montage".
That said, if there is some reason that ships have to be divided between military and civilian, then this is certainly how it's done -- since the same artwork also has Stiletto's launching from the 'top' bay.
In regards to the size issue...I disagree because when we look at New Constantinople. There are several ships docked inside the cavernous bay of the station. Noticeably we see quite a size difference between the Drayman (which we really should have hard numbers on size for...) and the Centurion. I don't have the particular picture I'm referring to in front of me but I think there's at least 10 or so ships pictured with plenty of open room between them all. If the Centurion is 100 meters and the Drayman looks to be about 3-5x that size then that means the interior of New Constantinople's hangar area alone is much much larger than 10,000 meters...not to mention the actual living areas of the station.
I believe you are misremembering the New Constantinople artwork. Here's a picture, from Wedge's site:
Only four ships are visible: two Draymen, a Paradigm and the player ship. None of the ship are at the same 'level', making comparing their lengths impossible (especially the player ship, which doesn't seem to be arranged in the same manner as the other four).
We really don't see a very clear difference between the Drayman and the PlayerShip -- they're in different directions, at different levels and the PlayerShip is apparently sitting flat to the viewpoint while everything else is angled upwards. If anything, the 'feel' of the picture is that the "docking area" is roughly the same size as the Drayman to the left (which is further down the station) -- but that's far from scientific, and the difference in docking ports is clearly meant to indicate that the Drayman is larger. There certainly isn't, however, the 3-5x size difference that you indicated.
I would argue that the Centurion/Galaxy/Orion/Tarsus are 40-70 meters long (they're all roughly the same size), since they're supposed to be one level 'lighter' transports than the 104 meter long Drayman.
As for the size of the hangar area -- note that there's no requirement, since nothing has ever been stated about the size of the station. We can make some estimates based on the known size of the Drayman, as you mentioned.
The original Wing Commander gives a 104-meter length for the Drayman-class. If we apply that to Privateer's artwork, the transport is 59 meters wide and 42 meters high.
Someone with a better eye or who is a better mathamagician than I am can work from there, but I would say that the radius of New Constantinople's docking port seems to be about four Draymen (using the lower Drayman as a visual reference). That gives us a docking port that's ~472 meters across.
Assuming that the docking port is the large circular entrance at the top and bottom of the station, this works out to the station being roughly 6,000 meters across.
wow....100 meters or so? i did some comparison stuff, and based on cockpit interiors and putting a human sized figure relative to the privateer ships....there is NO way they are anywhere near 100 meters in size. more in the 30 or so meter range. in fact, for the tarsus, it came out to be about 36.8 meters. compare off the cockpits of the other craft, and you'll discover they're not going to be much bigger than that.
What you've neglected to mention, however, is that you run into this problem with *every* fighter in Wing Commander when you try to apply their published size statistics to them.
Off topic, I wonder how large Perry is? I remember at the Fleet Tactics website saying that Ella is 4 kilometers and Sol Station is 10 kilometers.
I wouldn't take Fleet Tactics' specifications as being particularly reliable -- they wanted to fill in the blanks and they didn't care how they went about doing so.
Working just with what we have, which admittedly isn't much, we can reasonably say that the upper sphere has about a hundred decks (judging from the number of windows). And, it's certainly possible that the majority of these windows correspond to the storeys-high windows seen in the background of the main concourse, although more likely these are only present around the equator.
I count ~25 levels of windows on the top part of the sphere.
Assuming that it has precisely the same diameter of 1200 meters, it's still more than twice as large because it's substantially taller, pole to pole, and appears to possess greater volume.
The *radius* of the WC2 station is 1200 meters -- so the diameter would be 2400 meters. That's why I mentioned it -- they're much, much larger than they look in WC2's sprite engine.
