Behemoth's size

Before Prophecy, no WC game engine modeled everything to scale, so simply comparing the in-game models to one another won't work.
 
There's also one more problem with using windows to determine the 'size' of a ship - why should all ship windows be the same size in-game? Or are you assuming that Kilrathi and Human engineering is so standardized that they'd use the same components for their ships, thus resulting in only one size of engine, window, or jump drive?

Short form - you can't. If there was a Kilrathi standing in the window to provide a sense of scale, at least there'd be something to work with... and even then, Kilrathi vary a bit in height, but at least you could get a sense of the window's size then - which we don't have here. However, as LOAF and Death have stated again and again, none of the game engines prior to the Vision engine even attempted to render things in scale, which makes those comparisons meaningless.
 
Could someone go back in time and tell Origin that they should look at what they have done first and then publish the numbers ^_^
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First of all, it's a practical impossibility because game balancing goes on for months after a manual goes to localization and printing. The fact that Victory Streak is as accurate as it is is amazing and the fact that every manual since it is vauge with regards to specifications is understandable.

Second of all, once again the problem isn't that there's a "right" answer in the game and a "wrong" answer on paper. It's impossible to judge the length of a ship in the engine or in the FMV... which is why whenever we have these stupid threads everyone comes up with 900 different possible lengths based on what they think they see.

Third of all, knock off the horrible emoticons.

Still this point is realy strange. When taking the models and place them side by side the ship is smaller then a destroyer but the numbers say its bigger.
Realy a confusing thing.
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This doesn't ever happen.
 
That horrible emoticon is fine, but I ran out of LM jokes to make about the awful anime ones a long time ago.
 
Well, the 22 km length would be just fine if we assume that the mass should be 290 million tons instead of 290 thousand tons. Massing only as much as four regular carriers does not make sense for something that is regarded as "immense".
 
Ijuin said:
Well, the 22 km length would be just fine if we assume that the mass should be 290 million tons instead of 290 thousand tons. Massing only as much as four regular carriers does not make sense for something that is regarded as "immense".
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Why does it have to be 290 million tons? With that much mass, I'm wondering how it'd maneuver well enough to enter a jump point without spending hours maneuvering, even with scoop fields. The fact of the matter is that we don't have enough data here to render any accurate judgements - does the mass listed include the mass of guns, armor, fighter support equipment, missiles, etc? How much of the ship is 'empty' and how much is in use? What density are the materials involved? How thick is the armor?

We don't know enough to say whether or not that weighs too little. Most of the calculations to date have assumed the ship was a homogenous mass with equal density of all materials, which is patently false. There's no way for us to tell what the 'real' mass is, given the paucity of data available to us.
 
Well, the 22 km length would be just fine if we assume that the mass should be 290 million tons instead of 290 thousand tons. Massing only as much as four regular carriers does not make sense for something that is regarded as "immense".
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Again, though, no one is disagreeing with you that from a practical standpoint it doesn't make sense -- there's just no better data to go with. It's exactly the same situations as the fighters: clearly, a Thunderbolt isn't 34 meters long when Mark Hamill is standing next to it... but since we don't have a more valid number and could never agree on one based on the existing evidence, we'll keep listing it as 34 meters.

(As for the second part of your argument, I do disagree somewhat -- four times the largest regular something you ever see *is* fairly immense. I'd be pretty darned humbled if I saw a warship four times as large as a modern carrier, for instance...)
 
Loaf: While four times the mass of a regular carrier is quite large, it is definitely too lightweight for something that is THIRTY times the length and breadth.

Haesslich: I got the 290 megatons (vs. 290 kilotons) figure based on the idea that 290 kilotons seems an appropriate mass for the dreadnought if it were the 2.2 km size, and scaling that up by a factor of ten in all dimensions would mean one thousand times the mass.

As for calculations, let's say for the sake of argument that the dreadnought's hull actually takes up about ten percent of the volume of the box that circumscribes it (about 22 km by 5 km by 5 km if we go with the larger size). If anybody has a better guess than ten percent and a reason for it, then please correct me.

Anyway, this gives us an estimated hull volume of about 50 cubic kilometers. Let's cut this even further by assuming that 50% of the space is the hangar/landing bay(s), which are depressurized and hence do not contribute to the active volume. This leaves us with 25 cubic kilometers.

Earth sea-level air at human-comfortable temperature masses 1.2 kilograms per cubic meter. 25 cubic kilometers of it would thus mass approximately sixty megatons. Even by cutting the air mass to a minimum by making it pure oxygen would still require at least a fifth of that mass. Note also that even though not all of the space inside the dreadnought is air (there are bulkheads and equipment and other things), pretty much everything except for vacuum spaces that would be inside the dreadnought would be DENSER than air.

This leads me to the conclusion that either the dreadnought masses AT LEAST tens of megatons or else it is largely a hollow shell. This is why I believe 290 megatons to be a reasonable figure.
 
a small footnote about camera angles and the rendered screenshot, the victory actually "rams" the dreadnought as i recall, this part of the shot could easaly be used to back up the 22km size.

as for the behemoth, in the mission where you escort it, just try to fly into the gun itself, flying inside gave me the feeling of "this thing is huge", and that was enough for me.

as for windows, in the WCA academy cartoon a lot takes place on the tiger's claw's bridge, when seeing that(not analyzing, i'd leave that to someone else), the window(s) in the command tower can easily be the size of three or four (normal)decks in height. when you go to the upper levels of the victory,
again your looking out through a giant window.

i never actually understood the needs for enourmous windows in (war) starships, you could just ram it and cripple the ship with little sacrifice, it is the ultimate weak spot.
 
Ijuin said:
Haesslich: I got the 290 megatons (vs. 290 kilotons) figure based on the idea that 290 kilotons seems an appropriate mass for the dreadnought if it were the 2.2 km size, and scaling that up by a factor of ten in all dimensions would mean one thousand times the mass.

As for calculations, let's say for the sake of argument that the dreadnought's hull actually takes up about ten percent of the volume of the box that circumscribes it (about 22 km by 5 km by 5 km if we go with the larger size). If anybody has a better guess than ten percent and a reason for it, then please correct me.

Anyway, this gives us an estimated hull volume of about 50 cubic kilometers. Let's cut this even further by assuming that 50% of the space is the hangar/landing bay(s), which are depressurized and hence do not contribute to the active volume. This leaves us with 25 cubic kilometers.

Earth sea-level air at human-comfortable temperature masses 1.2 kilograms per cubic meter. 25 cubic kilometers of it would thus mass approximately sixty megatons. Even by cutting the air mass to a minimum by making it pure oxygen would still require at least a fifth of that mass. Note also that even though not all of the space inside the dreadnought is air (there are bulkheads and equipment and other things), pretty much everything except for vacuum spaces that would be inside the dreadnought would be DENSER than air.

This leads me to the conclusion that either the dreadnought masses AT LEAST tens of megatons or else it is largely a hollow shell. This is why I believe 290 megatons to be a reasonable figure.
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Again, we don't know how much space in the dreadnought is used for various pieces of equipment, nor the composition of said equipment. For all we know, parts of it are empty vacuum, waiting to be used to house munitions, or other items which we've yet to see or hear about. We don't know how much of the dreadnought is filled with air, the density or composition of Kilrah's atmosphere (which would again affect the mass of gases contained - humans can breathe it, but whether it's thinner or has more of the 'light' gases in it than Earth's atmosphere does is another story), or the level of pressurization used there. From what we've seen in the novels and the games, it can't be TOO far off of Earth's in terms of pressure, but humans tend to be quite adaptable and function fairly well at a variety of altitudes and atmospheres, so long as there's a minimum level of pressure and oxygen present. This won't change your figures THAT much, but it is a factor to consider.

Plus, does that mass listed in the manual include the mass of the atmosphere contained, or does it exclude it? No data exists for this, much less whether it includes the masses of any other equipment in there. No floorplans exist to tell us how much of the ship is used, or how thick or dense the armor is. Unless we had more specific (and precise) measurements for each arm of the ship, and for the main body, we're unlikely to figure out the actual mass of the Dreadnought. For all we know, those arms are empty save for missile stores... which may not be counted in the mass figure for the dreadnought at all. We do know she carries planetary bombardment missiles, or that the dreadnoughts can do so, based on False Colors and the Wing Commander 3 novel.
 
No point in argueing about the mass or size. Terran intelligence didn't have a tea party organized with the kilrathy to discuss the exact values. It's just some data scouts and some unlucky traders provided. They never had a full military scan of it before they put the news into victory streak did they?
Anyway, nice modells, and nice try. I would suggest scaleing ships so that it looks good. Your doing it for in-game, then it should have a size that supports play the best.
Flying around huge ships can be a sight, but useing all your afterburner just to get from one end to theother can be frustrateing, especially when the enemy is attacking that other end.

BTW Loaf, why are'nt we allowed to scale up things according to the books? We knew that ingame the ships were not to scale, but why we shouldn't do what should have been done then? I'm having scaleing problems with the victory and the Longbow for example... If I used the book values, it wouldn't look even lose to the cimetaics in the game... So I just don't care about inches, I just say its up to scale if it looks like the ingame hangar view in WC3.

Useing windows as scale is deffinetly a bad idea, though. You should know that Bradmick, you can apply the same texture to a ship thats 22 times the size of another, and the texture only gets stretched, so when you scale to the windows on the texture, the 22 times bigger modell scales down to be exatly the same size as the one that should be 22 times smaller.
 
BTW Loaf, why are'nt we allowed to scale up things according to the books? We knew that ingame the ships were not to scale, but why we shouldn't do what should have been done then? I'm having scaleing problems with the victory and the Longbow for example... If I used the book values, it wouldn't look even lose to the cimetaics in the game... So I just don't care about inches, I just say its up to scale if it looks like the ingame hangar view in WC3.
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I'm not sure what you mean by "according to the books" here.
 
Think he means "to match the stats in VS".

I'm not really sure what to make of a bunch of the numbers, though.

This is the same publication that also alleges that the Hellcat V has lasers/ions (rather than neutron/ion) as its gun armament, and IIRC the Longbow weaponry was also inaccurate (laser/plasma rather than neutron/plasma?).

On the other hand, I'd probably say based on cinematics and simple intent, the whole dreadnought being huge controversy is probably true.

Guess the main problem is partly that these numbers kind of seem to have developed in a vacuum (which is fine), which leads to slightly problematic things like fighters being too large in relation to carrier sizes, etc.
 
Very easy way to verify the length of the dreadnought and the behemoth, assuming you trust the 720m length of the Victory to be accurate.

Boot up your old copy of WC3, load up any old mission, and fly your ship at max speed (no burners) from one end of the Victory to the other. Time how long it takes you, multiply that by your speed, divide by 720, and invert to find out how many meters the "k" in "kps" equals. Then load up missions with the behemoth and the dreadnought and repeat the process (might have to use invulnerability when flying next to the dreadnought--remember, no afterburners). Time how long it takes to fly the length of these things at some constant speed, multiply that time times your kps speed, and multiply by the m/k ratio you got from flying past the Victory.

It's easy to calculate the exact, IN-GAME length of these things, compared to the Victory, which is the length you want since the IN GAME world is the only one that we experience.
 
Or for easier math:

L_X = (time flying past X/time flying past Victory) * 720m

as long as you fly past both at the same constant speed.
 
Farbourne said:
Very easy way to verify the length of the dreadnought and the behemoth, assuming you trust the 720m length of the Victory to be accurate.

Boot up your old copy of WC3, load up any old mission, and fly your ship at max speed (no burners) from one end of the Victory to the other.
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Again, the ships are not modeled in scale to one another, as has been said multiple times earlier in this thread. You can't use in-game models to compare any ship to any other ship.

And the dreadnaught length is easily verified. Read the Victory Streak manual or False Colors. That the given mass doesn't sound like it makes sense to the players is irrelevant. Origin says it's 22km long (in two totally different sources, at that) and masses 290,000 tonnes, so it's 22km long and masses 290,000 tonnes, end of story.

(Funny how these discussions never pop up about stuff that's hell and gone from reality as the player knows it, like a laser bolt going less than c, a tachyon not traveling FTL, or spaceships without an atmosphere around them maneuvering like conventional airplanes thanks to the hand-waving pseudoscience of "inertial dampeners". :p )
 
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