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Crewman
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Joined: 08 Oct 2007, 01:00
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Greetings,

I was looking through the list of star ships and comparing them with lists I've found online before and I was just wondering about something. You know how some two designs will look mostly the same save for a few changes made to where the necells are positioned. For instance taking from the original BotF game you had the Galaxy class and the Galaxy-X class (three nacells). Well I saw a game play video for Star Trek: Legacy that has a Sovereign class with three nacells, Soveriegn-X class?

It got me thinking. What if you could built ships that were just Galaxy or Soveriegn class ships, but that when you go to select them, you can select from a dropdown box and build variant types?

For instance

Explorer II ¬
Galaxy
Galaxy-X

Cruiser V ¬
Intrepid
Yeager

It would mean a whole host more stats and images to make, not to mention models 3D models. I may be that it's not really worth it, but still.

You know, looking at the sheer number of different star ship designs in the federation alone... there's dozens, perhaps hundreds. Maybe it would be better to stick with the ones we have, the ones that are most commonly known/featured in the Star Trek series/films.

But, I'd love any other thoughts or ideas on the subject anywho.

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26 Aug 2009, 04:32
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I've heard of the three-Nacelled Sovereign before. It's apparently called the Macbeth class. I think there was a model of it on Battleclinic for Starfleet Command 2.

As the shiplist currently stands, we've got over four HUNDRED models. 99% of which have been made, acquired, modified, or retextured by Kenneth_of_Borg. Dafedz has also painstakingly worked out all of the ship stats. All of this work took hundreds of hours, and I seriously doubt either of them would relish the idea of spending hundreds more hours working on an expanded shiplist when we've already crammed so many ships into the game.

There are also other issues with doing this. We want the game to be as canon as possible. The Galaxy-X was part of an imperfect alternate timeline that was created by Q. And recent events in Trek mean that this timeline could never happen. (The Enterprise-D was destroyed and Picard found out his future and changed it for instance) The idea that the Federation would develop and implement a superweapon that could smash through both the shields and armor of a Klingon Battleship in a single shot is also rediculous - the Klingons would have gone to war with the Federation if they did that. So technically the Galaxy-X isn't a canon design, even though it did appear in the shows.

As for the Yeager, yes, we could put it in...but what about all of the other canon ship designs that are "missing"? There are the Cheyenne, the Curry, the Nebula variants, the Niagara, Peregrine, Springfield, and Sydney classes to name but a few. These ships aren't in the shiplist for the same reasons that the Yeager isn't in; the Federation has more designs than the other Empires already, and it was hard enough to balance the existing classes against those of the other Empires. Adding more would simply make it even harder to balance out the ship designs.

On top of this, you've also got to thing about filesizes. Adding more models means bigger downloads. I believe that most of the models are around the 500kb-2mb mark each. You could be looking at adding another 20mb to the download just by adding the few ship models that I mentioned above, and this doens't take into account the database entries and 2D images needed to make them work ingame, which could potentially add another 500kb download per ship. Plus you have to factor extras in such as the ship voices and special effects. All of this extra data might not sound like much if you've got a broadband conenction, but there are still people out there on slower connections. And someone has to pay for all of the bandwidth the game will need as well.

Now obviously you've mentioned most of these problems in less detail already, so i'm not trying to nag or shoot down the idea. I have to grapple with many of the same issues when adding in new buildings or images to the game myself. But adding more ships could potentially be more of a problem than you might realise which is why i've mentioned all of this. Ships can also easily be modded into the game at a later date, so even if they don't make it into the official release, they can always make it into the game later. I'll probably end up modding in the Cheyenne, myself. :P

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26 Aug 2009, 12:45
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Crewman
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Joined: 08 Oct 2007, 01:00
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Indeed. I was actually unsure just how many of the ones I saw were actually cannon to begin with. There doesn't seem to be any one definative list that I can lock down anywhere. But no matter! I completely understand the problems involved. Were I able I would offer to help implementing other classes, but I simply have no talent in making 3D models, coding or 2D art for that matter. =P

Besides, my favorite class is already in there so I'm quite happy as far as that goes. ^_^

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"Commander, destroy the remaining Borg, then blow the Federation vessels out of the stars... I want total galactic supremacy."


26 Aug 2009, 17:14
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