Capital Ships - Weapon Placement

The player ships from Privateer 1.
Also most ships that were mentioned only in novels.

You can find non-canonical sizes for them in almost every mod that uses them, for example for the Behemoth you can use Saga's model or something like that. Same for the Caernaven. The Durango was in UE, so maybe Quarto can give you info about that. I think Saga also had a model once, but it wasn't included in the game and I don't know where it went. Which is a pity, I would like to have it since Confed used that class. :(
 
Here's an issue I think I can try to get out of the way real quick: which ships don't have stated lengths anywhere? The ones I know about are the Belleau Wood, Jakhari, Paradigm, Caernaven, Behemoth, Durango, Pelican, Murphy, Hades, and pretty much everything from Privateer 2. Any others anybody knows about?
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Ship lengths in Wing Commander Prophecy can be extracted from the game, since it's the one where everything is to scale. The Pelican is 390m and the Murphy is 589m. The Hades-class has not one but two published lengths: 750m in the Secret Ops fiction and 777m in the Prophecy Gold manual.
 
The third important "fact about the Austin which must apply to whatever the Gettysburg-class" comes from Super Wing Commander, which is Jazz's quote: "Getting used to life aboard the Tiger's Claw has been easy. It's a smaller ship than the Austin. You know, a man could get used to this. "
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I happened across another quote in Freedom Flight today that takes some of the wind out of the amazing giant mystery cruiser--the Ras Nik'hra (a Fralthi) is "almost as big" as the Austin.
 
Bandit LOAF said:
Ship lengths in Wing Commander Prophecy can be extracted from the game, since it's the one where everything is to scale. The Pelican is 390m and the Murphy is 589m. The Hades-class has not one but two published lengths: 750m in the Secret Ops fiction and 777m in the Prophecy Gold manual.
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That's helpful, thanks. I can calculate using both figures for the Hades; I imagine the final result will be in the same Size Class for both permutations. Missed it in the Prophecy Gold Manual; what page was that on?

Got a few ships calculated this morning and I foresee problems. Hvar'kann......the only thing I've got big enough to handle that one is a freakin' Space Station chassis......
 
Aginor said:
The player ships from Privateer 1.
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Player ships are handled in the vehicle catalog already. The capships from P1 - you've just got the Kamekh (a size for which is listed in WC2), the Drayman-II (same as the Drayman-I from WC1), and the Paradigm (for which I'll probably wind up using the non-canonical SWCU figure; what the hell, right?).

The ones mentioned in the novels - I would call those "craft with ill-defined stats", and shunt them over to the non-canonical capship catalog (you know, still in the game but largely stuff I have to make up). Right now I'm just dealing with what we do know.
 
That's helpful, thanks. I can calculate using both figures for the Hades; I imagine the final result will be in the same Size Class for both permutations. Missed it in the Prophecy Gold Manual; what page was that on?
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Page 113, the Cerberus specifications page. 777m is probably more accurate to the game; the earlier fiction page actually says "750m (?)," in the grand tradition of WCSO fiction not quite being copy-edited properly. Perhaps one is the Hades testbed and the other is the Cerberus herself...
 
Bandit LOAF said:
Perhaps one is the Hades testbed and the other is the Cerberus herself...
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I suppose that's possible; I'd need to see the phrasing of the sentence with the 750 meter figure in it. You wouldn't happen to know where that is, would you?

In any case, I got the math done on it, and it did wind up being in the same SC with both figures, so that's all cool and froody. Wound up in the same SC as the Bengal, Waterloo and Yorktown, for those curious.

Actually have been managing to knock down the unknown canonicals fairly quickly today. All I've got left at this point is the Durango, the Behemoth and the P2 capships; there was a figure for the Caernavon-class at the old CIC ship's database (650 meters). Don't know where that figure came from, of course, nor why it wasn't already in my notes...
 
I suppose that's possible; I'd need to see the phrasing of the sentence with the 750 meter figure in it. You wouldn't happen to know where that is, would you?
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But of course! https://www.wcnews.com/articles/sofiction/1_1b_d_icis.html

Actually have been managing to knock down the unknown canonicals fairly quickly today. All I've got left at this point is the Durango, the Behemoth and the P2 capships; there was a figure for the Caernavon-class at the old CIC ship's database (650 meters). Don't know where that figure came from, of course, nor why it wasn't already in my notes...
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I believe that's from the 650m frigate from Victory Streak... which we discussed either here or in *shudder* the Paradigm thread.

LOAF, just spotted a post from 2009 where you mention the length of Behemoth is 11,000 meters - https://www.wcnews.com/chatzone/threads/models-available-for-download.22574/page-4#post-336929
Where did that figure come from?
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Ahh honestly I don't know. I really don't think there's a canonical length for the Behemoth. It has been said to be 8 or 11km over the years, but I don't think either can be sourced properly. (There's actually a stats page for the Behemoth in the Japanese Wing Commander III official guide... but it just says 'classified'.)
 
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Bandit LOAF said:
But of course! https://www.wcnews.com/articles/sofiction/1_1b_d_icis.html
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Ah, much thanks...

Reading it, it looks like you could go with either figure. The 777's what I put in my calculator; I'll go with that result. Why not.

Bandit LOAF said:
I believe that's from the 650m frigate from Victory Streak... which we discussed either here or in *shudder* the Paradigm thread.
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Works for me.

Bandit LOAF said:
Ahh honestly I don't know. I really don't think there's a canonical length for the Behemoth. It has been said to be 8 or 11km over the years, but I don't think either can be sourced properly. (There's actually a stats page for the Behemoth in the Japanese Wing Commander III official guide... but it just says 'classified'.)
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I might just use the eleven kilometer long stat anyway, and make a note that its size can't be confirmed.

I did find some aspect shots of Behemoth a little while ago here at the forums; something from like seven years ago of someone arguing the Behemoth's length versus that of Victory. Not going with their result - but that did appear to be shots of the original Behemoth model they were using for their argument. Close enough for jazz in any case.

Now I just need to knock down the Durango and the Ella Superbase and I'm all set...
 
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Bandit LOAF said:
Ahh honestly I don't know. I really don't think there's a canonical length for the Behemoth. It has been said to be 8 or 11km over the years, but I don't think either can be sourced properly. (There's actually a stats page for the Behemoth in the Japanese Wing Commander III official guide... but it just says 'classified'.)
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Hmm. Did you check the briefing movie where we see a close-up wireframe of the Behemoth? I don't remember either way, but if there were a canonical length, it probably would have come from there....
 
Here's a render of the behemoth made by the folks at origin back in the day for the official guide...
BEHEMOTH.png
 
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Quarto said:
Hmm. Did you check the briefing movie where we see a close-up wireframe of the Behemoth? I don't remember either way, but if there were a canonical length, it probably would have come from there....
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55 minutes at Queeg's movie and......that's a neg. At least, I couldn't spot anything other than the word "Classified".

AD said:
Here's a render of the behemoth made by the folks at origin back in the day for the official guide...
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Yeah, I had that picture. Tough to get the lengths of all three aspects from those perspective shots, unfortunately.

Where did I find that set of aspect shots? Lemme see if I can find it again......ah, here we go:
https://www.wcnews.com/chatzone/threads/behemoths-size.18062/#post-273085

I do wonder if I should use the roughly five kilometer length this guy came up with. An eleven kilometer length puts the width and draught around three kilometers, and the total bounding box would be larger than that of the Tiamat. From the way the Tiamat's description is phrased in the Prophecy cluebook, it sounds like it should be the bigger ship...

And then again, maybe not. The "size of the windows" bit sounds like a crap way of trying to figure everything out (something y'all pretty much said in that thread seven years ago).

At least it's good for the side and top aspect shots.
 
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Thought I'd scored a length of the Durango a few minutes ago...until I took a look a the rest of the site on which that figure was listed. Didn't know they ever used the Durango against the Cylons; must've missed that episode...

Beginning to wonder if I can do a reverse process for a guesstimate of the size of the Durango. WC4N mentions on p. 174 that Intrepid's damage control chief was too busy keeping the air from getting too toxic to "have to worry about how they're going to clean a hundred thousand cubic meters of air" - that figure's with a third of the ship gone. And then on p. 181, hawk reports the ship is "down to thirty-one front line strike craft, with seventeen obsolete models ... still in storage below-decks." That does give me at least a few numbers to try to crunch.

Push comes to shove, I can set it at SC24. That seems to be where most of the carriers are clustering...
 
Yeah, the Behemoth. The ship second most hated by me for its ridiculous size.
Saga has it 4km I think, which is still ****ing huge. Its comparable to a naval base. But even at 4km it is hard to stomach for me.
It is almost as bad as... well, the one I don't talk about here anymore in order not to get banned.

I'm a big scifi fan, but some people just overdo the size thing. I stopped reading the Perry Rhodan series when ships became more than 10km long and one of the most annoying things for me in in Star Wars is the ridiculous sizes. SSD for example...

I'm glad that Wing Commander has only a very small number of ridiculously sized things. And (most of *sigh*) the biggest ones are stations fortunately, which I find easier to accept because - you know - they don't have to move around normally.
 
Aginor said:
I'm glad that Wing Commander has only a very small number of ridiculously sized things. And (most of *sigh*) the biggest ones are stations fortunately, which I find easier to accept because - you know - they don't have to move around normally.
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This intrigues me. I mean, if I wanted to come up with something really ridiculous in the Wing Commander universe, I wouldn't really know where to start. Sound in space? Laser bolts that move so slowly you can dodge them? Ammo-based mass drivers that magically carry infinite ammunition?Fitting a hundred huge fighters inside a ridiculously small, closed hangar bay on the Tiger's Claw? Kilrathi and Confed pilots talking on the same radio frequencies? Kilrathi and Confed pilots actually talking on radio at all, instead of always using laser beams or something? Ships having a roughly 30 km radar range limit, smaller than the radar range of a present-day jetfighter? And so on, and so on... what I'm getting at is that ultimately, having a ten or twenty kilometre ship is just at the very bottom of the list of things that would bother me :). Why is it that these are the things people always want to "fix" first? Why not start with the more obvious stuff, for example... disable all sound?
 
This is called "suspension of disbelief" (may also be found in lexicons, the term was defined in the 19th century IIRC). As long as it useful in the narrative process it doesn't bother us that much.
Also you can easily tell that sound in space doesn't exist in the Wing Commander universe. The books tell us that numerous times. They also tell us that the ridiculous speeds of the games and the sound and taunts death screams of enemy pilots (but nothing else) on your comm channel are just for gameplay and so on. Games without sound suck. The books put distances, speeds and some more things into perspective.

Problems only occur when something is not fitting into the rest of the whole thing and thus breaks the suspension of disbelief. That effect is sometimes called "jumping the shark" or "nuking the fridge". When something is common in a fictional universe people tend to ignore it, like jump-points and laser beams being slower than light, which are very common in sci-fi universes. But when something is over the top people tend to fall back to judge by things they know, so those normally are real things. Then they start to compare them with each other and with things of other universes, and some things clearly stick out and those are perceived as "unbelievable" or "unrealistic".

Also those are not the same for different persons. For some people Indiana Jones surviving a nuclear explosion in a fridge didn't break the film (that's the reason the trope is called "nuking the fridge" nowadays). For some it did. Some people don't mind the SSD being 20km long, some do. Especially when the source material contradicts itself both visually and in numbers. That's why SSD discussions are not particularly popular on SW boards, and why I don't want talk about some ship sizes in WC. A lot of those numbers don't fit together anyway. Some people don't mind, others want to make mods or something and thus need them fitting.
Ah, to hell with it: The KDN (there I named it) is perfectly ok in a mod being 2,2km, 4km, or even 6 km long. It just looks plain ridiculous when being 22km which is the reason Klavs designed it for 2,2km for example. It looks great and I hate that I have to think about this being non-canonical by a factor TEN each time I see it. That ridiculous number which I still consider an error that was unfortunately propagated and thus became the 100% undoubtable official canonic number of super-big awesomeness spoils that for me, and I hate it.

I'll stop talking now, I don't want to derail the thread and I don't want to get banned because I need the forums to work on my mod. Sorry. Write me a PM if you want to talk about it further.
 
Aginor said:
Problems only occur when something is not fitting into the rest of the whole thing and thus breaks the suspension of disbelief. That effect is sometimes called "jumping the shark" or "nuking the fridge".
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"Jumping the shark" is actually something completely different - it refers to a TV show's high point, beyond which it can only get worse because the authors can't beat the audience expectations any more. The term comes from some TV series where, in one episode, the main character literally jumped over a pool with a shark in it.

Anyway, to each his own. If huge ships bother you, it's pointless for me to explain why they shouldn't bother you - it's a subjective thing. Just keep in mind, to my knowledge, no one has ever been banned for talking about the dreadnought's length, and there's certainly been a lot of furious discussion about it over the years. If anyone has ever been banned in a discussion like that, it was because he was acting stupid. So relax :).
 
I can't really remember the last time anyone was banned for anything. This place is pretty mellow these days.

But you are being silly. Not LIKING something isn't the same thing as it being an error... and there's no reason it should need to be.
 
Quarto said:
The term comes from some TV series where, in one episode, the main character literally jumped over a pool with a shark in it.
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Happy Days. It was the Fonz that did it, and with the way his character had been developed, it was out of character.
The related term "nuking the fridge" is from Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, but I probably didn't need to tell y'all that...

If I have a problem with the length of any ship class in the entire WC continuity, it's the Hvar'kann-class, simply because a) they came right on the heels of the Hakagas (you know, when the Cats were thinking they could lose because too many resources were being pulled away from the war for their construction) and b) they don't seem like they'd be able to use most Akwende jump points given what's been established about them. I mean, come on, Vesuvius had to make a detour to get to Earth because it was too big - how often do you think Hvar'kann, a ship that's in the neighborhood of ten to twelve times longer than Vesuvius, would have that problem? (I could figure out the differences in lengths; I just don't feel like doing it right now).

Anyway, that's all a discussion for a different thread. And I'm sure it has been discussed on a different thread. Over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over......................
 
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