Quarto
Unknown Enemy
The external tank and boosters are actually what makes this a good comparison - the space shuttle does not have a disproportionate amount of space taken up by internal engines, because most of the engine power needed for escape velocity are drawn from the external boosters.No, comparing to real life space craft is even worse I think, since the engines available in the Wing Commander universe are able to accelerate ships to earth's escape velocity in a matter of seconds without using any fuel. The space shuttle carries a enormous external tank and two boosters to reach that. The cargo limitation of the space shuttle originates exactly there.
That said, we have no way of knowing that the engines used in the WC universe aren't even bigger than present day spacecraft engines. We know they must be more powerful - but who said they must be smaller?
Well, that's reasonable, but only if you're trying to say that no comparison at all makes any sense and we just plain should stop comparing. As an argument in favour of using sailing ships as the point of comparison... you've kinda lost me . How is it that WC's poor grasp of physics makes it more appropriate to compare WC spaceships to our sailing ships, as opposed to our spaceships?Also you can't compare WC ships to real space ships anyway because none of the ships in WC would be possible without violating several basic rules of physics. The speeds, acceleration values, sizes, masses and so on are completely out of place. In real life it wouldn't even make sense to use weapons like we see in the games.
I think that's too much of an oversimplification in this case, because this is exactly the point at which WC grew out of the "WWII in space" analogy. In particular - is Privateer in any way still WWII in space, or is it something else altogether? Is a Centurion more like a ship or like an airplane?So no, space ships don't fit. Wing Commander is WW2 in space, so obviously the big space ships in WC should be compared to ships, while fighters should be compared to airplanes.
You would agree, though, that the ships we are talking about here look visually more like aircraft than ships, wouldn't you? That they have closed, more or less aerodynamic hulls, often with much of the ship being very visibily identifiable as engines or other equipment? I accept that much of what applies to powered (but not sailing!) ships applies to big freighters in the WC universe. We even see, starting right in WC1, that freighters have most of the cargo mounted externally (in the same way that present-day freighters often have piles of containers on deck). But I don't think any of this is relevant when it comes to the ships available to the player in Privateer. I think the seaship comparison not only fails there, it's actually counter-productive.Also I don't think the sail ship is a bad comparison, since I used it to show that even sail ships could carry big loads of cargo. With modern ships it is even more extreme. A modern freighter with 300 metres of length (a small ship compared to what we see in space in WC) can carry hundreds of thousands of tons. In space it would make even less sense to build such small ships because of the huge distances. The bigger the distance the more sense it makes to built bigger transports. That's why freighters are that big. Because mass doesn't matter on water that much, you have lots of time to accelerate. In space it is the same (better even).
There could be many things. Maybe the Galaxy and the Orion have bigger, more powerful power plants. Maybe they have some additional equipment, additional crew space, or something like that.Much more important is that everything fits to each other, which is why I'm searching for the reason why the Orion and Galaxy could have a tenth of their relative cargo capacity compared to the Tarsus and the Centurion. It can't be the engines because those are not in the ship. There must be something else.