Ekapshi Model?

Aginor said:
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.
Click to expand...
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.

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?

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.
Click to expand...
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?

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.
Click to expand...
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?

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).
Click to expand...
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.

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.
Click to expand...
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.
 
@LOAF: I thought that one text said that it couldn't land on a .... wait for it... Paradigm. :D

@Quarto: Some valid points, but I still can't agree with all of them. I will come back later and explain what I mean.
 
About the Privateer 2 ships: I have no idea, but there IS a model of a human in a spacesuit in the game (the "spacedude"), so you could compare it to the other models and assume that it's about 2 meters high (unless there's a genetically challenged karatikan in it, then it may be 3 or 4 meters).
 
quaker2k8 said:
About the Privateer 2 ships: I have no idea, but there IS a model of a human in a spacesuit in the game (the "spacedude"), so you could compare it to the other models and assume that it's about 2 meters high (unless there's a genetically challenged karatikan in it, then it may be 3 or 4 meters).
Click to expand...

That would work if I could assume the models were to scale with one another; experience has shown that's the sort of assumption I can't really make. I appreciate the suggestion, though.

Did finish up the pixel hunting for those fighters this morning; might have to tinker with them a bit.
 
capi3101 said:
That would work if I could assume the models were to scale with one another; experience has shown that's the sort of assumption I can't really make. I appreciate the suggestion, though.
Click to expand...
Yeah, that's definitely not an assumption you can make ;).
 
Right. I don't think that there were any models which were to scale to each other in any WC game, including Privateer.

@Quarto:
Concerning the engines: If they are more powerful they are smaller if you need less power. It is the same thing.
Also this may be interesting, but it can't explain the differences between the Privateer ships since obviosly the same technology is avbailable to all of them.

What I wanted to say about the sail ships is that the allowed-mass-to-volume ratio of WC space ships is obviously much more in the region of ships (sail or not) than of space ships. I picked this particular ship as an example because those ships carried almost all of their cargo internally. So I found it very strange that such a huge ship which is also built as a freighter should only be able to carry a minimal cargo. Then it wouldn't be a freighter.

The visual thing isn't the real interesting one here IMO. But you are right what the consequences of that train of thought are: Those ships actually don't make any sense at all if they are used to transport cheap goods such as grain or water. Except the Galaxy maybe. And that one only if the canonical cargo size is wrong. That's the thing we learn, because it makes no sense to build a new ship that is twice as long, three times as wide, twice as high AND much more expensive if you can only transport 50% more goods and are also slower and less armed than the other one.


That means if the cargo size is right, two of our starting points can't be correct: The ship trader picture as a reference and the assumption that the Galaxy is big.

1. The ship trader picture is horribly out of scale.
2. The Orion is smaller than the Tarsus, not bigger.
3. The Galaxy is not big. It's not much bigger than the Centurion or the Tarsus. Nowhere near 60m let alone 85m (like the ship trader picture suggests), more like... 40m while the rest of the ships is 30m.
4. Traders like the Galaxy



Obviously I don't like those sentences above not very much, and that's why I'm trying to explain... well... that everything fits together if the canonical cargo size is just a number for gameplay reasons so the other ships except the Galaxy are not completely pointless. I would be ready to accept that because everything else I looked at fits.
So it is the three sentences above vs. the canonical cargo size. There is no other theory yet.


The Orion is another point though: We know from the ship dealer dialogues that it is heavily armored and has very good shields. So yeah, it can be bigger than the Centurion, and have only slightly more cargo capacity. It must have a huge reactor and so on. Still I think I should redo the math on this one, assuming it is a little bit smaller than I previously stated. Perhaps 50 instead of 63 meters long. That's becasue the Orion's size was calculated based on the width of its cockpit compared to that of the galaxy. This is less accurate than what I did for the others. Its worth a try I think.
 
The best is, someone make the privateer models in Saga and we can changed sizes to the one we all think its ok. So.. how makes it? *need that* ^^

Because there are no "official sizes" of the Paradigm and the Privateer ships we can changed them like we want to do :)
 
That's right, we could do that. Still I'd be glad if I found a way to explain the cargo capacity based on the sizes, which I can't yet.
The sizes I figured out seem fine to me, except the one for the Orion which looks too big.

EDIT:
I looked at it again, and I really did measure a bit too big the first time I think. I did it more precisely this time and redid the math. Here are the results for the Orion:

Length: 45m
Width: 39.5m
Height: 22.8m (26m with radar dish)

So the cargo bay door wouldn't be twice as big as that one of the Galaxy anymore but "only" (it is still the biggest one) 5.8m high and 6.3m wide.
The cockpit side window would be about 7 meters long.

I didn't do the math for the cargo yet but it will be significantly smaller than before. Small enough that we can explain the smaller size compared to the Tarsus with armor, a bigger reactor, and bigger shield generators. :)


That leaves the Galaxy. So in my book it is
everything else vs. canonical Galaxy cargo capacity
which is ok since I don't want to talk about cargo capacity in numbers in any game.

Now I would just need to model those ships for the FS2 engine.... Unfortunately I can't at the moment. :(
 
Aginor said:
Also this may be interesting, but it can't explain the differences between the Privateer ships since obviosly the same technology is avbailable to all of them.
Click to expand...
This is a possibility, but not a necessity. Cars have the same technology available to them, but I think we can all agree that the engine of a small city car will be smaller than the engine of an SUV, and certainly much smaller than a truck engine. We can also agree that a tank, while being bigger than the average truck, has a bigger, more powerful engine... and has a mere fraction of the cargo space. I just don't think it's productive in any way to make any assumptions on how much cargo space "should" be available onboard any of these ships based merely on the length.

And there's more to it. Anyone who's ever bought any kind of electrical equipment knows that you often face a choice of two items, with the same capabilities, but one is bigger and cheaper, while the other is more compact and more expensive. Have you considered the possibility that rather than the Galaxy having too little cargo, it is the Centurion that actually has "too much", which it achieves by having smaller, more compact equipment inside?

What I wanted to say about the sail ships is that the allowed-mass-to-volume ratio of WC space ships is obviously much more in the region of ships (sail or not) than of space ships. I picked this particular ship as an example because those ships carried almost all of their cargo internally. So I found it very strange that such a huge ship which is also built as a freighter should only be able to carry a minimal cargo. Then it wouldn't be a freighter.
Click to expand...
Again, this is just the wrong comparison. Compare the hull shapes - sailing ships are bulky, rounded, designed to maximise cargo space. Sailing ships have *no* equipment whatsoever inside - no engines, no huge power plant, no shield generators, no jump drive. The biggest piece of equipment is probably the cooking stove. Now look at the ships we're talking about - tons of equipment inside, the hull shapes are anything but maximised. Look at that sailing ship again, and try to figure out how many square (for simplicity's sake, let's stick with two dimensions) metres of space there are inside the hull - and compare to the Galaxy, where half the ship's length is taken up by a narrow nose-and-cockpit section.

Of course, none of this really matters, because we do not, in fact, know what the unit of measurement for cargo in Priv is - for all we know, these ships could have more cargo than that sailing ship you mentioned.

The visual thing isn't the real interesting one here IMO. But you are right what the consequences of that train of thought are: Those ships actually don't make any sense at all if they are used to transport cheap goods such as grain or water. Except the Galaxy maybe. And that one only if the canonical cargo size is wrong. That's the thing we learn, because it makes no sense to build a new ship that is twice as long, three times as wide, twice as high AND much more expensive if you can only transport 50% more goods and are also slower and less armed than the other one.
Click to expand...
Well, of course these ships don't make sense to transport cheap goods :). Just like in real life, you won't use a Learjet to transport grain, you'll use a big, slow freight ship. I think if we're arriving at the conclusion that transporting grain doesn't make sense with these ships, that means we're on the right track. And by the way - nobody said the Galaxy is a significantly better cargo hauler than the rest of them - it's better, but it's still the same class of ship. If the Centurion is a racecar, the Orion is an SUV, the Galaxy is a pickup. It should be very clear that it is the Draymen that ship most of the cargo across Gemini, while Galaxies are used for fast transport. A Galaxy is probably what Gemini's equivalent of DHL or UPS would use (for whom, the pricetag difference between a Centurion and a Galaxy definitely would matter!). By the way, though, you're not the only one who thinks the Galaxy should be faster - the reviewer in the Priv manual also notes that she's "not as fast as we would have hoped" :).

The Orion is another point though: We know from the ship dealer dialogues that it is heavily armored and has very good shields. So yeah, it can be bigger than the Centurion, and have only slightly more cargo capacity. It must have a huge reactor and so on. Still I think I should redo the math on this one, assuming it is a little bit smaller than I previously stated. Perhaps 50 instead of 63 meters long. That's becasue the Orion's size was calculated based on the width of its cockpit compared to that of the galaxy. This is less accurate than what I did for the others. Its worth a try I think.
Click to expand...
I honestly do not see the point of this kind of reasoning. We know so little about the inside of these ships, that any discussion about what kind of length would make sense in light of their cargo space is pointless. It's like comparing two houses from photos, and then talking about how big they should be based on how many people live inside. Of course, these lengths are not canonical, so you can choose any lengths you want - but I don't think they are worth such in-depth thinking. Just pick whatever fits your needs :).
 
I did it in 3D because you get horribly wrong results in 2D. Especially in your example of the ship. The Danes learned that the hard way when they taxed ships based on their deck size. The result was the "Fluyt", which had a small deck but was wider than the deck near the waterline. Also keep in mind that the third dimension is extremely important for cargo size. Double the size means 8 (eight!) times the volume.
Also I didn't just compare lengths, I really took the pictures, left out a lot of space (for example the whole cockpit part, everything that looked like engines, several centimeters of hull in every dimension and also some space for the crew to live in. The last one being much bigger in the Galaxy of course) and just measured the size of box-shaped rooms inside the ships that allow at least a 50cm box to fit into. The round shapes of the Centurion alone are the reason why it has half the cargo capacity of of a Tarsus although it is the same length.

So there is is still a lot of space left, and even when I assume that more than half of the Galaxy is filled by something else than cargo space and this is not the case for the Tarsus for some unknown reason it still doesn't make sense.

Btw: Here's the commodity list from Privateer (thanks to Wedge, I love his site), and, alas. We have lots of things that don't make sense at all to transport in such a small ship:
http://wedge009.net/wc/privateer/commodities.php#privateer

There's grain, and wood, and iron and plastics. Most of the other stuff makes pretty much sense though. Liquor and Food are things where an extra truck load is a lot for a small outpost. No problem here.
But you know, now that you've mentioned trucks.... A big truck has 120 cubic meters of cargo, and our Centurion has 250m³ cargo. It may actually be not that bad. If the food is needed really fast.... Those are two big trucks full of food.


Although I just have to chuckle a bit when reading "software". Software?? Really???
Pilot A: Hey, what's your cargo!
Pilot B: Grain, and yours?
Pilot A: Software!
Pilot B: .....

And yes, I know I shouldn't do that much in-depth thinking, but well, I love it and the feeling to have figured out possible explanations for something that wasn't planned by the creator at all is just great. I get that feeling a lot when figuring out numbers that fit to each other.
Of course for modding I will take what fits best for gameplay, period (as long as it isn't completely absurd, like a 100m Centurion or a 20m Galaxy).

But let's go on a bit anyway:
I actually like your car example a lot, but I would be very interested in your opinion what the Tarsus may be. It is roughly as big as the Porsche but has more room in it than the BMW X5. It could be... wait... It is a Honda Jazz! (it is incredible how much cargo fits in that small car) :D
But the Galaxy is more like a Peugeot Boxer size I think. And here is where it starts to become weird: Why does it have only four times the capacity of a Porsche? I would have guessed ten or fifteen times (which also is the realistic value for both the size I measured/calculated AND the size ratio in cars)

btw: I hope nobody is offended by the car types. I can insert American ones if you wish. :D
 
Well, if the software is discs in boxes everything is OK, that makes sense.

Concerning the cubic meter: REALLY?? Can you tell me which page of the manual says this? I would have assumed that one unit is something like 1,2 x 1,0 x 1.6 meters (roughly 2 m³, which is a very common cargo unit in real life, the EUR-pallet) or something like that.
 
Aginor said:
Concerning the cubic meter: REALLY?? Can you tell me which page of the manual says this?
Click to expand...

Hell. It does say that. Page 9 (Regarding the usage of the Quine 4000) :

"Manifest. Clicking on MAN brings up your ship’s manifest, telling you what’s in your cargo hold. At the top of the screen you are informed how much space in cargo units — roughly a cubic meter — are available in your cargo hold. Below that is a list of the items you have and the units of each. If your manifest goes beyond this screen, use W or Z to scroll through the list."
 
EVERYTHING IS RUINED FOREVER!
...
.....
........
Hrmpf... I have to think about that. Those numbers don't make any sense at all except everything would be MUCH smaller. Like, a fifth of what I previously calculated. And a 20th for the Galaxy (which is again the one that is completely out of scale).
 
Aginor said:
I did it in 3D because you get horribly wrong results in 2D. Especially in your example of the ship. The Danes learned that the hard way when they taxed ships based on their deck size. The result was the "Fluyt", which had a small deck but was wider than the deck near the waterline. Also keep in mind that the third dimension is extremely important for cargo size. Double the size means 8 (eight!) times the volume.
Click to expand...
Yeah, I know - I even read all about the Fluyt, it's a great example of how taxes distort design. I didn't suggest that the third dimension is unimportant, only that we don't even need to go that deep into the subject to realise how much of a difference there is.

I actually like your car example a lot, but I would be very interested in your opinion what the Tarsus may be. It is roughly as big as the Porsche but has more room in it than the BMW X5. It could be... wait... It is a Honda Jazz! (it is incredible how much cargo fits in that small car) :D
Click to expand...
I think there's only one natural choice of analogy for the Tarsus. It's a Volkswagen Type 2 T1 Kombi - you know, one of those ooooold hippie minivans :).
 
LOL, yeah. The Tarsus even looks like it. Time someone models it and does a hippie paint scheme for it :D
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top