I think the fleetyard is great. I can sketch and design some stations or ship/fleetyards for any race. I'm currently studying engineering graphics (along with other stuff) and It could be a fun way of connecting to this.

The Klingons are in need of a good Fleetyard design.

Vjeko: Thanks man. I have a Klingon Fleetyard on the drawing board already, but have nothing in mind for the Dominion or the Federation yet. I suppose we have actually seen some designs for the Federation.

Kenneth: Right with you. See Above - working on Klingon. There is also a progression of matching Romulan Shipyards that go with the fleetyard.

Romulan Ship yards i and ii

Nice and It looks like the poly count would be in limits for use in the mythical combat engine.

Actually that’s not exactly what I was meaning but its actually better than what I was thinking, it also works well to make it look more Romulan like too, nice job.

Oh would it be probable to have maybe 1-2 docks for just docking, not construction, so that objects that don't fit have some place to dock. Those new bays look more like they can open wider now so that’s good. Would Bays with floating pieces work; sort of like brackets that float around a ship? You sort of have room for 2 more tubes since you used 6 for bays and they are 8 points, kind of reminds me of a Star which is fine being the “Romulan Star Empire” and all.

I think I might be missing the scale of the yards/bays, how big are they compared to the largest known ship?

I know the Warbirds are larger than even Enterprise E. I tried to make the Bays as large as feasible, looking at the size of the windows on a Warbird, compared to the windows on the fleetyard. I did the same with the airlock door on the following with Docking.

Just out of curiosity, do you have any numbers on the relative sizes?

In blender I could put it in blender units that can be translated to meters. That will not work in other programs so I made a simple model with relaive sizes. You load the scale model and then your ship or station next to that. Scale your model to the standard and save it. We can not use the given sizes. If you load a starbase you never see the orbital batteries. We will have to use our own ruler

There are places on the web where they are compared. I saw one just Googling "Romulan Warbird." There was an Enterprise E next to one. I'll try to look tonight.

You're probably referring to the image below, Bashir.



Another good one is:

Yep, both of those and one shot of Enterprise E next to the Warbird from above.

Ok doing some quick research and some rough math myself


Enterprise D (Galaxy class):
642.5 meters in length (Google research) and
Approximately 100-125 meters tall (guessing 2.5 Meters per deck x 42 decks, guessing from people walking on the sets, might go 3 meters)

Gives a 6:?:1 (L * W * H) Ratio

Enterprise E (Sovereign class):
700 meters in length (memory Alpha, reference from an episode)
(23-29 decks {some discrepancy / variable deck size), so it could be less in height than D. So using the same math I used above 58 Meters - 87 Meters in height (23decks*2.5m or 29decks*3m) Avrerage about 73 meters.

Not sure if this helps, but you can take the image of the Enterprise E and use it as a ruler so for example Warbird = 3.5 * EtrpEs so would be 2450 meters long (I didn't actually compare them, just using the numbers as an example).

Ok just found a much cleaner reference from wikipedia, I'm not sure where their source is exactly from but it matches pretty much with the previous ones I found or calculated.

Enterprise E: (Wikipedia data)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Enterprise_(NCC-1701-E)

Length 685.7 metres
Width 282 metres
Height 75 metres

Romulan Warbird (D'deridex class):
(Memory Alpha quotes/research)

These warbirds were roughly twice as long as a Federation Galaxy-class starship with a lower overall maximum speed. (TNG: "The Neutral Zone", "Tin Man") - Memory Alpha

Length: 1250 meters (aprox) {applying what I found before}
Decks: 45 (I can't find visual reference to deck height)

Some of the images make the Warbird look 3x the size but its probably just a perspective thing, I'd go with the reference from the episode.

What we end up doing in the mythical combat engine depends on how good visibility is in combat.
If big things like a starbase make small things, (scouts and orbital batteries) so small you can
not see them we will have to cheat the size.

Good work. Dang those warbirds are big. A lot of it is the open space in the middle. I wonder if the interior volume is comparable?

One would assume rough thought off the top of my head (no direct logic or science involved) a station with docks for 6 warbirds would be probably 10x the size of one of the warbirds (possibly larger). That gives you a 10:1 ratio for Warbirds, a 20:1 for one for the largest Federation ships (Sovereign class), and getting more extreme for the other smaller ships and races. I can't imagine a fight between a small warship and a large space station where the ratios are 50:1 or more. So you are probably right about being able to cheat a little, but time and testing will tell.

Though I recall playing Decent Freespace a long while back and having to fly up along side that massive capital ship, it was pretty neat (though that was 1st person).

Speculation: If the combat engine has some sort of zoom feature and also marks the ships in some way then it is probably ok to have a more realistic scale, since the user can adjust it how they like, and finding tiny ships won't be hard if they are marked (i.e. a circle around them, or etc.). It might also look fun to have the huge difference in size.

It comes down to look and feel versus practicality and usability then. Once you have a firmer grasp on the combat engine it will likely become clear what is right for the game after seeing it. Besides adjusting scale of ships shouldn't be too hard is it?

Ok was fooling around researching ship sizes and then figured there is sort of a way we can compare the ships. I collected a list then calculated the ratios and used 1000 pixels to represent the Romulan fleetyard and reduced the other images accordingly. Keep in mind I only used the lengths of the ships and the image is using a square as a placeholder, so its not actually a true representation, but should be close enough. Also note that reducing an object’s dimensions on all sides (in this case 2 dimensions) reduces its area exponentially (so it will look even larger/smaller).

After checking this image with the Fleetyard against the Warbird beside it, I think my estimate of 10 times the size is probably not a good value to use (especially since in 3 dimensions the issue will be even worse), maybe 5:1 might be better; I'll adjust the image for that case.

Also

Borg Cube:
(wikipedia reference)

Length: 3000m
Height: 3000m
Width: 3000m

A Borg Cube is 2.5x the size of a Romulan Warbird then.

I think there is something off with the dimensions because:

Deep Space Nine
Length: 1,451.82 meters <--
Mass: 10.1 million metric tons

Unless DS9 is much smaller than I thought. Is a Warbird really 75%-80% the diameter of DS9? Now I'm going to have to go check the episodes and watch

Again it could be a perspective thing and the warbirds really are huge.

Edit: Looking at some of the episodes and images, I think DS9 is just small (well relatively), it looks like 3 maybe Enterprises nose to tail equals the diameter

You know, I bet they cheated a lot in the series on the relative sizes, for filming purposes. Same issue as what we would have in the combat engine - you have to be able to see it.

Thanks Kaladin. Your image of comparative sizes visualizes the problem for us.
You can see that in the combat engine smaller ships would become invisible.
It would be even worse when we put in a starbase. We will cheat the size.

Well as I was saying in an earlier post, the size is deceptive because increasing 1 dimension by a factor of X then applying that factor to all dimensions actually increase the volume exponentially. I actually failed to think of this myself, when I came up with the x10 for the fleetyard as an example.

Increasing the Length, Width and height by 10 each actually increases the volume by 1000. So technically if you were to see that Warbird I have as the green square then think of it in 3D and then do the same to the fleetyard example I have shown, 1000 of them would fit in its volume. So that 10x estimate is way too much and was an error on my part. More realistically it would be somewhere between 2x and 3x the size on all dimensions giving you a volume 4x - 9x the Warbird's. I should have increased the volume by 10 along the lines of my original though not each of the dimensions by 10.

A factor of 3 would make much more sense, and seeing DS9 to Enterprise ratio (DS9’s diameter = 3x Enterprise E) as an example it makes more sense now that I think about it. Ignoring things like empty space, unusable space and odd shapes, DS9 has approximately 9x the volume of the Enterprise. Enterprise E has a crew capacity of about 1000, DS9 has a max capacity of 7000 (Ref: Memory Alpha) which makes sense given that its outside dimensions are 9x that of the Enterprise (factor in the less bulky wiry nature and frame of the DS9 station and it fits).

Figuring the Romulan Fleetyard as 3x the warbird on all dimensions (9x volume) changes my example picture to actually increase all of the other sample squares (excluding the fleetyard) to 3x the number of pixels in size in comparison image. So the small Federation Danube class starship {at 23m length} will instead be 6x6x6 pixels in size instead of the 1.8 pixels shown in my original chart. Now 6x6x6 pixels is still pretty small, but with a proper zoom feature it is not terribly bad. My example also use 1000 pixels to represent the Fleetyard so if that we actually zoom in so that its 2000 pixels the Danube class starship would then be 12x12x12 pixels.

I’m curious what the smallest 3D ship art you have is so far (can you list it’s dimensions in pixels)? Also what is the smallest you are willing to see a ship (in pixels)?

Ok I fixed my error and added some images to show it in a more fun way. I had to stretch some of the images to make them the right size so the height to width rations might be off, I also didn't spend too much time getting ships from the right angles so forgive the goofy lookingness.

You can do the math. Look up the size of the largest canon Starbase in Star Trek. That would not be DS9 but rather the Federation bases where we see Starships flying around the interior of the station. Then compare that to the size of the Cardassian Orbital Battery seen in DS9. They look to be less than the size of a shuttle. Taking a wild guess the pixels left to the Orbital Battery will be less than one. A glance at your image above again shows why we cannot use canon sizes.

I am sure that once we have a combat engine there will be an endless parade of Star Trek fans complaining that we did not make the ships the right size. We will endlessly explaining to them about how the combat engine view would not work with canon sizes. This is already the forth such discusion that I can recall and we still do not have a combat engine.

I don't think it is a bad thing that the Danube Class is only 6 pixels since it is just a glorified Runabout after all (4-6 crew max). How often will ships this small be in combat? Some strategy games have small freighters and fighters represented by as little as a single pixel.

Anyways I hope the comparison helps, even if it is for something down the line, at least maybe it will help to keep in mind when designing art, especially art that’s going into the combat engine later.

Another question that comes to mind (albeit for much further down the road) will you see planets in view in combat, because that’s a whole larger issue (most games cheat the size on planets, or put it off in the distance)?

Yup, I totally agree with the need to adjust and take liberties; also my apologies, I didn't realize it was discussed elsewhere. My train of thought was started with the conversation on the size of the fleetyard's bays and ports on the lovely art work in this thread. My focus was more to aid in the size of the bays compared to the average ship that would dock in it (I was using Federation ships as samples because its tough to get measurements on Romulan ships).

For sure you will need to cheat the sizes, as you said the starbases are massive, I think there is an earth starbase from the original movies that holds something like 100 Enterprises inside it that would make it 10x the size of the fleetyard I have in the image above, making the image scroll probably across 8 average web page screens and I think thats not even the largest one

(Edit: Just noticed this was post 100)

That is a good point about the bays. We are making models for the yards but it is not clear if they will be in combat. It has been kind of a given that Starbases, as seen in BOTF, would also be seen in our combat. You can see how the Starbases in BOTF are downsized to fit.

Given that a Starbase could be built at one of your planets and that Orbital Batteries would be there defending in combat this is the extreme example of size we have to account for. The yards might show up there as well or we could just leave them out of view for a number of reasons.

The other discussions of size took place years ago. There is no reasonable way for you to know of them and now it does not matter.

You could just leave them in the background with the planet like this:
(I'm not the greatest with art and I'm using ms paint)


I don't own any of this work I snatched 50% from this site (from this and other threads) and the rest from google images; then pasted them together.