Realism - Large & Small Ships

For what's not in 'Top Priority Game Design'. Post your ideas, visions, suggestions for the game, rules, modifications, etc.

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skdiw
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#16 Post by skdiw »

utilae wrote: What I am wondering though, if we want to make big ships slow, and small ships fast, we could do it by using the ships mass to determine how many enigines are ship needs to reach a certain speed.

So a small ship needs 1 engine to reach FTLx4, while a big ship needs 4 engines. What do you think. Would people just say that this is not realistic, as mass doesn't matter?
Fine by me. If a player wants to forgo much of the advantages of greater capacity for large ships in favor of faster large ship by using that capacity for engines, I think that should be a valid design. Albeit unfavorable in most circumstances, but if a player has a specific strat in mind I think it should be allowed.

For example, a small ship has 2 spaces and a large ship has 8 spaces. A small ship can equipe an engine and a weapon, while a large ship can have an engine and 7 weapons. Both ships can have the same hyperspeed, but large ship will moves slower during tactical combat, unless the large ship equips more engines, like 4 engines and 4 weapons to move like a small ship.

I am not sure if a large ship should move slower in both tactical and on the galaxy map? I think small and large ship should move the same speed on galaxy map, but the large ship will move slower tactically.
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Dreamer
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#17 Post by Dreamer »

Geoff the Medio wrote:This would also make big ships less useful for force projection, as it'd take forever for them to get where they're going... so you'd want some medium ships as well to actually go out and shoot stuff most of the time, and you'd only move your big ships around for important things. In theory anyway...
Sounds like a nice theory and I kind of like it, but in my experience a ship slo on the map becames almost useless, at least in Moo where you didn't have starlanes. I would maybe make this ships move a little slower maybe, but not proportional to how slow they move in combat.

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utilae
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#18 Post by utilae »

skdiw wrote: I am not sure if a large ship should move slower in both tactical and on the galaxy map? I think small and large ship should move the same speed on galaxy map, but the large ship will move slower tactically.
I think a large ship should be slower on the tactical map because, well it may hit a planet, another large ship. Gotta watch what you fly into. In distances between stars, the large ship would be travelling in subspace (or however our warp/hyperdrive/FTL works). They would not hit anything, and it's simpler, travel real fast, then stop before you hit some planets in the destination system.

To truly settle which ships can travel fast in the galaxy map and in tactical combat we can have FTL engines, Sublight engines and Vector thrusters (better name? or good?). FTL engines allow travel between systems, Sublight is your tactical combat speed. Vector thrusters improve turning radius. So a fighter with Vector thrusters could turn on a dime and weave in between various large craft. A large ship would take a long time to turn around, it would have to travel a large radius to turn. Vector thrusters are more costly for larger ships. For a large ship having FTL, Sublight and Vector thrusters would take up a lot of space. Smaller craft who have sublight and vector thrusters do not have so much space taken up. Larger ships can have basic Sublight taking up minimal space, but they won't move very fast in combat.

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Geoff the Medio
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#19 Post by Geoff the Medio »

Dreamer wrote:Sounds like a nice theory and I kind of like it, but in my experience a ship slo on the map becames almost useless, at least in Moo where you didn't have starlanes. I would maybe make this ships move a little slower maybe, but not proportional to how slow they move in combat.
So that's why you balance the combat effectiveness / cost efficiency / whatever of big and small ships well, so that you really want to build some big slow ships, even though they move slow.

Alternatively, the big ships don't have to be used just for combat. Medium or small ships might be as good or better than huge / collosal ships at actual combat, but be much more efficient / effective for troop transport, or carrying special ship parts that have area-of-effect bonuses in combat, or are useful for planetary bombardment through strong planet shields, or whatever else... so that you'd still really want to build some big ships even though they're inconveniently slow.

(And more so, so that small ships have a significant strategic advantage in their map-speed)

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skdiw
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#20 Post by skdiw »

we also need to discuss whether we gonna have traditional larger ship hulls requires research. It may be in our interest that we do something else, like research small, medium, large, and maybe extra large ships with each tech improves on the respective hull sizes.
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#21 Post by Dreamer »

Geoff the Medio wrote:So that's why you balance the combat effectiveness / cost efficiency / whatever of big and small ships well, so that you really want to build some big slow ships, even though they move slow.

Alternatively...
I DO understand your point an dall the implications. I was just mentioning that if in combat I can have a small ships ten times faster than a big one in the map I would like it to be at most 1-2 times faster. I think that utilae's explanation on linear aceleration over long periods of time can tweak this point.

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#22 Post by discord »

this reminds me abit of command and conquor generals, as well played, those damn terrorists with their patheticly weak units, can cut you to shreds with superior movement/tactics.

and there is actualy a point you are missing, the heavier the ship, the more % of it must be structural integrity, if assuming similar movement patterns.

for example, take a F-22 fighter, the 'hull' can handle over 30G's easy, the pilot can not....try to pull 5G's out of a carrier? it'll snap like a twig, the engine would tear it apart.

<edit>
as some structural engineers have pointed out at times, engineering does NOT scale well all the time.
</edit>

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Size and structure

#23 Post by guiguibaah »

well there's an old engineering saying: If you keep doubling the size of a chair, eventually, it will crumble under its own weight.

Hence why you can have wooden houses, but not wooden skyscrapers.
How does this apply to giant ships? Simple - the acceleration is the same, it's just not coming from the earth as gravity.

Hency why Hotwheel / Matchbox cars can be flung off roofs and bounce on pavement. Do the same with a life-sized car and multiply the distance to be according to scale, and the car will smush.

Therefore, due to a physical law of the universe, larger ships will accelerate slower than their smaller counterparts.
There are three kinds of people in this world - those who can count, and those who can't.

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Re: Size and structure

#24 Post by skdiw »

guiguibaah wrote:well there's an old engineering saying: If you keep doubling the size of a chair, eventually, it will crumble under its own weight.

Hence why you can have wooden houses, but not wooden skyscrapers.
How does this apply to giant ships? Simple - the acceleration is the same, it's just not coming from the earth as gravity.

Hency why Hotwheel / Matchbox cars can be flung off roofs and bounce on pavement. Do the same with a life-sized car and multiply the distance to be according to scale, and the car will smush.

Therefore, due to a physical law of the universe, larger ships will accelerate slower than their smaller counterparts.
A physical law means that the law has never failed throughout known verfiable history. Since there are numerous examples where larger more massive objects accelerate faster than smaller less massive objects, what you said must be false.
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Re: Size and structure

#25 Post by Yoghurt »

skdiw wrote:Since there are numerous examples where larger more massive objects accelerate faster than smaller less massive objects
:shock: Please name three!

More massive objects require more energy to be accelerated.

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Re: Size and structure

#26 Post by utilae »

guiguibaah wrote: Well there's an old engineering saying: If you keep doubling the size of a chair, eventually, it will crumble under its own weight.
Not in space. There's no weight where there is no gravity.
guiguibaah wrote: Therefore, due to a physical law of the universe, larger ships will accelerate slower than their smaller counterparts.
Larger ships will accelerate the same as a small ship, but the larger ship will require more energy to do so.

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#27 Post by Robin J. Cartwright »

In real life, for values significantly lower than c (the speed of light in a vacuum), the formula is a = f/m a = acceration, f = the force applied and m = the mass of the object. This is one of Newton's laws. An object of twice the mass requires twice as much force to accelerate at the same rate. If you get close to c then things start getting more complicated, but presumably FreeOrion will use some sort of made up propusion system for near-c & FTL travel.

There is also a separate issue of structural integrity - large things have a tendency to rip themselves apart if you accelerate them too fast. However, that depends greatly on how the thing is constructed. A giant rock is less likely to rip apart at high accelerations than a skyscrapper, even if the rock is bigger. This would also be less of a problem in space, because there's no air resistance. This is not a physical law, the formula above is a physical law, it's an engineering problem.

If we wanted to simulate this in the game we could do so by not making larger hulls available until youv'e performed some type of research, by having any ship that accelerates beyond a certain point (dependant on the size of the ship) be damaged or destroyed, or by limiting all ships to a certain maximum accelaration dependant on the size of the ship. If one of the later 2 is chosen, it might be a good idea to allow you to research various engineering technologies that would raise the limit. I'm not sure whether this is something that should go in.

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skdiw
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Re: Size and structure

#28 Post by skdiw »

Yoghurt wrote:
skdiw wrote:Since there are numerous examples where larger more massive objects accelerate faster than smaller less massive objects
:shock: Please name three!

More massive objects require more energy to be accelerated.
Easy. 1. A nuclear sub versus one man canoe. 2. A rocket versus a paper airplane. 3. SR-71 versus Wright Brothers. Note that only one wrong instance is all that's needed for a law to be false.

Massive objects requires more force.
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Re: Size and structure

#29 Post by utilae »

skdiw wrote: Easy. 1. A nuclear sub versus one man canoe. 2. A rocket versus a paper airplane. 3. SR-71 versus Wright Brothers. Note that only one wrong instance is all that's needed for a law to be false.

Massive objects requires more force.
Those examples are dumb. The reason one goes faster than the other is because the faster objects (which are bigger) have more force pushing them. So yes, bigger objects require more force to push them but that does not prove that a large object and a small object being propelled by the same force would move at the same speed.

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Re: Size and structure

#30 Post by Dreamer »

utilae wrote:
guiguibaah wrote: Well there's an old engineering saying: If you keep doubling the size of a chair, eventually, it will crumble under its own weight.
Not in space. There's no weight where there is no gravity.
Wrong. Gravity is only a normal aceleration so any aceleration of equal or greater value can break the chair. Even more rotation since chairs (and probably ships) will be designed with a particular direction in mind. And a "fast moving ship" should handle much greater acelerations than 1G.

Anyway. If you rotate a dreaghnout too fast you can risk spilling the captain's coffee. And that is completely unacceptable! :D

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