Any chance Cryptic will ever set the ships to their actual scale relative to each other?
This is a direct quote from the arguable "Bible" of Star Trek... the Memory Alpha wiki:
Comparing the Enterprise-D (a Galaxy) with a Constitution using a 3D modeling program shows that the former had over 25 times the internal volume than the latter. The claimed "eight times" may refer only to the regularly accessible habitable volume.
Realistically, there should be no reason why realistic scale should not be allowed since the game automatically puts interface boxes around all targets... to ease targeting.
So what do you guys think? Am I the only one who'd love to see an actual sized Galaxy class vessel flying around?
Comments
I second this wholeheartedly. The ship scaling in the game is awful. A shame really when they said they would try to make it as close as possible.
There is absolutely no grandeur in captaining a Galaxy class ship when a Defiant is nearly the same size of the saucer section.
Please fix the scaling, its all wrong! This isn't a huge game play issue, but it BOTHERS me so much.
The ship sizes are a big contributor to their personalities, and should not be marginalized. "Tough little ship" and such.
The problem was to do with the view of your ship, if you got it on the exact same Z axis and thin got inline correctly the ship scales were actually correct-ish
It is definitely possible. Try the free trial of EVE, and just stack your starter ship next to any cruiser or space station for that matter and you'll see a HUGGGGE difference. Puts STO to shame. Terrible shame. I just can't fathom what possible nod to "Star Trek" it would be to just flat out not make any of the ships (or anything for that matter) to scale.
Find that post if you can.
Even so... no matter what perspective you are looking at ships in EVE... you can genuinely tell the ship scaling/size differences. If so many people feel the scaling is wrong in STO... then it is a matter of perception that needs to be looked at, as they likely didn't do something right.
I've tried comparing ships in ALL different angles, positions, etc. They never seem to turn out to correct scale to me. Never.
yes but it does mean it "significantly" larger
http://www.eve-files.com/media/12/eve_chart-rmr.jpg
Zoom in and you might be able to sort of make out the smaller ships next to the titans.
On the other hand a star trek ship chart looks like this.
http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/fleet-charts.htm
Click on the top left and you'll see that, while there is a fair size difference, it's not much. So a big problem in comparing your ship to another, especially at huge distances or odd camera angles and elevations, is that they just don't seem supermassive.
Another problem is with ships like the defiant, here's another link.
http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/articles/defiant-problems.htm
The shows and movies can't even get their own scaling right, for dramatic effect the defiant was shown at being 50m long when the enterprise swooped in to save it's "tough little ship companion" and 200m long when it was in command of the dominion war task force.
Now, what we should be arguing is if they should blow the ships way out of proportion like they did with deep space 9 in STO (if you look it's actually super massive compared to what it was in the TV series). If you don't feel impressive in a Galaxy right now maybe they should make it 1.2km long, almost twice the size. But then sadly you'd get a huge rush of "Why are you trying to turn Star Trek into Star Wars? It's fine the way it is!"
All ship are the same size (roughly), people's head are big, planets are 100km in diameter, corridor and bridge are HUGE.
Again, Cryptic really need a technical director.
Mmmm... this is one of the few times where I'd have to answer in a definite no.
Just fly up to a Galaxy class next time, you'll find very quickly how disproportionate things are.
Those are some nice charts, but I think for the game... we can probably stick with the various Tech Reference books that Paramount publishes.
Though i'm probalby oversimplifying the issue. In any case, I think there's a general community consensus on ship scaling and scaling in the game as a whole.
Besides, there's nothing more dissatisfiying than getting to Rear Admiral and busting out with your Prometheus class, only to find its about as large as the Stargazer T3 cruiser and a good deal shorter and smaller than the Akira.
Actually.. no. They aren't (as has been posted previously in this thread):
http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/fleet-charts.htm
Just look at the Olympic vs. Galaxy. Or the T'Pau to ANY of the ships...
Certainly, some of the ships are correct scale relative to each, but you'll note the vast majority are not to scale.
Actually yes the scale is correct. This has been proven time and time again. The search feature is your friend.
Did you even bother to look at the ships in those diagrams? Rather than relying on the holy writ that is search... can you at least look at the source material? Or even bother to check the examples I gave?
I did look. I also looked at several of the other diagrams posted in the various threads. Plus several times during beta we went over this. The ships with the exception of the smallest are to scale. whenever someone posted pictures refuting this they were shown to be wrong. Usually because their ships were not lined up at the correct altitude or the camera was wonky. We also had the devs come in several times with evidense to show that the ships scale is correct. It was discussed very often during beta both closed and open and there are dozens of threads filled with pictures from in game and from the various online sites with Trek ships to scale and guess what, they all point to the ships being to scale with just the aforementioned exception. Those are not to scale on purpose.
Holy wall of text.
You still haven't actually answered other than to say that others have shown. Since you have all that evidence, how about you pull some of it up?
This subject has been done to death and there are many easily searched threads on it. i am not doing your homework just because you are to lazy to do a search.
However I will post this Dev reply which took me all of 1 minute to find.
mtattersall
Cryptic Studios Team
Join Date: Sep 2009
First of all I would like to thank everyone for the feedback. We have tried to make ship scaling as accurate as possible while taking gameplay and ship tier into consideration. In the case of smaller ships like shuttles we decided to increase the size a good amount to make them easier to see in the environment. When researching other ships we found the scale sometimes varied depending on the episode. We took that into consideration as well. We have and will continue to make adjustments in scale and proportions based on game changes and player feedback.
ldotson
Cryptic Studios Team
Join Date: Jun 2009
As Marc mentioned earlier we have tried to be diligent in maintaining accurate sizes for the ships when possible. A lot of the perceived inaccuracy most likely comes from a combination of distance, viewing angle, and fov both in the game and the way people are used to seeing the ships in the shows/movies.
I've included a screenshot with a Miranda and Sovereign class ship, top down, side by side, with and a near orthographic fov so you can see that there is quite a large difference in scale between the ships.
Attached Thumbnails
http://forums.startrekonline.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=2553&d=1262828137
Quote:
Originally Posted by LenaMarie
I agree, they really need to fix the scaling, its immersion breaking to have a Miranda almost as big as a Galaxy Class
Perhaps the best way to fix this is just simply taking the the biggest ship Sovereign and a Defiant and make the Sovereign Dwarf the Defiant then scale from there.
It's only immersion breaking because in the shows the camera angle was always set to show the enterprise being massive and intimidating, here's a screenshot of a miranda config right beside a galaxy, I even put it closer to the camera so if anything the error would be in favor of the galaxy being small.
http://forums.startrekonline.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=2581&d=1262844850
The galaxy in fact does dwarf a miranda, as it should, but at the speeds people are often going and with the distances between ships and the camera it's often very hard to tell. Not to mention that ships like the connie aren't exactly a pip-squeak, here's a picture of a connie on it's end beside the empire state building.
http://forums.startrekonline.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=2582&d=1262845552
There are some ships in game that are in scale to one another. But the ships in game are by no means subject to a unified scaling and its very clear when you match up some of the vessels with known sizes and known man-scale features, such as bridge modules/travel pod ports what have you.
I actually can't find any good data on the Klingon ships but the feddie ships are to scale.
The biggest problem with any BoP is that in any given episode/movie, they vary *tremendously* in size. It was very lazy to use the same model to represent so many different classes in ST:III, ST:IV, ST:VI, TNG, DS9,etc.
Take a chill pill and enjoy your e-peen.
Now go back to /b/