Slashdot Mirror
Comparing Sci-fi Starship Sizes
LiberalApplication writes "It looks like someone has very lovingly created something that sci-fi fans everywhere will likely want to see; if not out of curiosity, then at least to revitalize the burning, seething, grudges between fanatics of rival science-fiction universes. Starship Dimensions places images of various starships from science fiction settings such as Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5, ID4, Macross/Robotech, Lexx, Freespace, and Battlestar Galactica side-by-side, in scale! The author has also conveniently included football fields, humans, King Kong, and buildings for comparison. You can even drag them around the page and stage your own interstellar battle royale."
Hahaha! It is amazing, when you think about it... What other force on the Internet is as powerful as /.? Within 60 seconds of the original article appearing on the front page of Slashdot, the linked site was already taken down.
Ethical question: Do we owe our linked site owners some advance warning before our herd of tribbles swarms onto their bridge?
Bonus Question: Is it possible to be karma whoring AND trolling at the same time?
I would have to say that explosives are the most abused technology in all of history.
The reason is that in free-flight, they arbitrarily choose a direction to be 'up' to function as the Z-axis in whatever coordinate/sector/grid system they use. Typically this would be perpendicular to whatever the plane is of your galaxy, so in our case here in the Milky Way, x and y would be across the galactic disc, and Z would be a line going through the core. Totally arbitrary, but helpful to allow humans to 'visualize' their position in the galaxy while warping from place to place. So, to keep things in relative perspective, I assume the computers in the ships are more than happy to 'auto-level' the ship so that it appears that you're in level flight. Plus, I guess it keeps the less-intelligent folks sitting on their couches that don't understand spatial relationships from hurting their fragile little minds. =)
Also, how the hell do physics work in sci-fi? At least in games, have you noticed how you move along in space by firing up engines to a constant rate of thrust? In space, this would equal a constant rate of acceleration if you forget about minor gravity variances from nearby planets/stars/what-have-ye because there is no drag in space. Also, it's funny that ships in games slow down merely by decreasing the thrust from said engines... Star Trek does this too if I'm not mistaken, with constant thrust from starship engines...
Hate me!
I take it no one noticed the .sytes.net address. He was running that from his home connection via a no-ip type of setup. Odd are good the poor guys computer is now drooling on the floor. That will teach him for doing something geeky and not using the appropriate bandwidth.
To strive, to seek, but not to yield
Slashdot should really really start getting a way to mirror sites that dont look like that can hold the presure and go down as fast as this.
/. effect, but then charge the poor person for all the traffic.
Its annoying for us that read this site that half the sites you link to dont work.
Its a pain in the ass for the people that have the sites. Either because they have them at home at some small adsl connection or at a expensive host company that might uphold the
You should really make a client where you mirror it and when people click your link they download the site from slashdot and not the orignal source and then use p2p to share it with other.. A kind of mirror p2p browser. Maybe it could be done with mozilla somehow =)
To be fair, we haven't yet designed an engine that will allow us to move faster than light. Maybe moving through subspace involves a force akin to wind resistance. I know that in Star Commander 2, normal physics applied in star systems and battle scenes, but interstellar travel forced you to use fuel the whole way.
Last post!
QUESTION: If slashdot postings are put in a queue and it waits there for _at_least_ 20minutes then why aren't they doing this already? If every fricken site linked to is slashdotted all to hell then what's the point of reading slashdot, a round-about DNS check?
;)
Well, in "Stasis leak" they take an elevator down 2567 floors...
On the other hand the show is extremely inconsistent, StarBug for instance is clearly not much bigger than a truck but still it has huge cargo decks and mile-long ventilation shafts!
But who cares, it's still funny as hell.
Here's a partial mirror:
http://bshort.com/shipdim/shipdim.html
Please be gentle.
-B
One of the sequels to Elite tried accurate space battles.
It sucked.
PROBLEM: Any ship with more acceleration then the other ship can always escape. So to deal with this gameplay "problem", they made the enemy ship magically re-appear with magical acceleration so it can take another shot at you.
PROBLEM: Unless you use an unrealistically slow amount of thrust, you tend to have these ships zipping by each other at the very least hundreds of miles per hour, leaving you with a fraction of a second to meaningfully fire on the other ship, then it's turn back around and do it again. Since you're a human you can't whip around instantly, it take time to move the ship, so every time you miss and come around for another pass, you're going a little faster since you had more time to accelerate.
PROBLEM: It is virtually impossible to tail someone. If you're matching their thrust vector, you're not pointing at them, you're pointing in the same direction they are. Now, if you had a gunner this might be OK, but when you're both piloting and gunning because whatever the ship info screen says your crew is, it's just you, this doesn't work.
PROBLEM: It takes time to learn how to land on things! Typically to get somewhere in an airplane-like space simulator you point your ship at it, apply maximum boost, and stop when you get there. Do that in a real simulator and you'll whack into the object (or miss it) at a significant fraction of the speed of light. (The Elite sequel capped speeds at 1/3 the speed of light, presumably to avoid relatavistic effects.) You have to learn to turn at "midpoint", which, inconveniently enough, is also when you're going the fastest and this is fairly hard for a human to do correctly. (If you're on autopilot, it's easier, but if you're on autopilot you're not really playing...) Turn around a little too soon, and you have to creep up on the target object, which might literally take several minutes or even hours (fortunately the Elite sequel had a time compressor). Turn around a little too late and by the time you realize it you're on an unstoppable collision course. *Whack*.
PROBLEM: "Random" encounters are impossible without cheating. I would routinely see enemies boost across the system, probably hitting the 1/3 light speed, on an intercept course, and the instant they reached me, "suddenly" they're on basically the same vector as me so they can fight me. Reality is they should have zipped across my radar so fast it would be unlikely I would even see them.
Space is big. By the time ships are moving in real Newtonian mechanics and not taking years to get from Earth to Mars, you're incapable of handling the scales as a human. The computer cheating helps but not enough (and it's frustrating as all computer cheating is). A tactics-level simulator might be cool, but flying around in Newtonian space is no fun at all. If it was, we'd have more simulations based on that.
Also note this demonstrates space piracy is virtually impossible unless your acceleration is on par with your maximum speed, because you just can't intercept ships to save your life. (Literally, in some cases.)
You're not alone, dude.
;)
I thought the original Star Wars series was ok, and worth watching once, but suffered because it was a little too kid-oriented (Ewoks??? Jawas??? too much obligatory cuteness). I don't see why people have to get so obsessed over it (did you see the guys dressing up as Jedi and lining up for the Phantom Menace? Holy Moly). And, the new series kinda sucks. Why did George Lucas make the Jedi into such a bunch of joyless fucks??? No love, no sex, no possessions, can't have fun, can't do anything amusing... Who the hell would join such an organization? No wonder they roam around, kidnapping kids to make new Jedi. Adults would chase them off with pitchforks and torches.
And, don't get me started on Star Trek. God, what awfulness. At least the original Gene Roddenberry series was an allegory for something. You had the USS Enterprise (named after an aircraft carrier), Klingons (who were basically communist Russians), Romulans (I guess Red China?) and so on. It let Roddenberry examine the cold war without being obvious about it, and he occasionally examined a traditional sci-fi deep thought or two. Not worth obsession or anyting, but amusing. But, God, the new series don't even have that to recommend them! They're so boring and sad... I mean, Jesus, it's all about geek wish-fulfillment: all the crafty techies doing techie things, with supporting women all around them, but never stealing their thunder, and so on. And, they're all so annoyingly typecast: Oh, Klingons are always butch, whatserface is the "sensitive one", the borg chick is cold and aloof... DULL, DULL DULL. Ick, foo.
And, don't get me started on all the crazy trekkies, walking around with chirping starfleet insignias on their chests... Did you hear about that maniac who spoke to his son only in Klingon for the first two years of the kid's life, making the kid's primary language KLINGON??? What is WRONG with these people? That kid's gonna be a mental case for the rest of his life.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
See this abusenet thread for the original debate, the Enterprise versus an Imperial Star Destroyer!
It's especially funny because you thought you were joking.
We can neither love nor pity nor forgive. If you make a slip in handling us you die!
It really depends on the kinds of weapons a small fighter can support. In the 20th and 21st century, a small plane is capable of carrying a weapon, such as a bomb, torpedo, or missile, large enough to destroy its carrier. If it absolutely positively has to be sunk in 5 minutes, a nuke could be used. A nuke can be carried by any reasonable sized fighter-bomber and will ruin the day of any ship presently afloat. This is the regime of the carriers.
Suppose defenses start getting really good when someone develops a force field. Now all of the sudden there is no kind of torpedo which can breach the defenses, or if there is, it is too large for a fighter plane to launch. Now in order to kill the enemy you need something like the supergun on SDF-1 or the gravity blast cannon on Nadesico. Both of these ships are basically built around their main weapons. Each weapon weighs many thousands of tons and requires more energy than can ever be extracted from an engine of a fighter. Here we are back in the regime of battleships.
Enterprise seems to be out of its regime, since photon torpedoes are small enough to be carried by a fighter. Perhaps rather than being a battleship, it is more like an attack submarine? Carrier launched aircraft are an order of magnitude faster than their carriers. Attack subs are basically underwater battleships. They rule beneath the sea because it is presently impossible to build a minisub which is an order of magnitude faster than its carrier. In Star Trek, the starships are invariably faster than their shuttles, just the opposite of a modern carrier. In this case there is nothing a small craft can do which the starship cannot.
Summary:
Small fast planes carrying effective weapons lead to carriers.
Small fast planes carrying ineffective weapons lead to battleships.
Small slow planes lead to submarines.
It really all depends on the technological state of the art and the laws of physics.
Lots of technical and environmental problems are solved by the application of vast amounts of nuclear power
They can't ASK for legal reasons? I respect Slashdot not wanting to deal with the issues surrounding mirrors, but that's just stupid.
Unfortunately, my Star Trek Technical Manual shows the Constitution Class and the Galaxy Class in different scale. On his site, the original Enteprises ship class looks about half as big as the Galaxy Class, which it's not, it's about 1/4 - 1/3. But seeing the size of the Sovereign Class as it compares way up there to the Super Star Destroyer (and it's comparison to the original unfinished Death Star) was even more cool.
This guy should get an award from someone for his patience.
"It's here, but no one wants it." - The Sugar Speaker
You don't need permission to link to a site (I know some stupid sites tried to say you did, but none have held up in court). You don't ask permission, just give warning that you're planning to do that, and ask if they want it to be mirrored.
With this kind of story, it's been around for a few months and is hardly time sensitive.
If a site really doesn't want links it can easily just take the page down for a few hours (as the floppy Enterprise site did recently), or just check for a Slashdot referrer and reject it.
This has been brought up in the past. Problem is, BitTorrent really only has big advantages for big files. The publisher still has to tell every client who else is downloading. For something as small as a web page you may as well just serve up the page.
However, including an mnet hash at the bottom of the article might do something for you. It's optimized for cacheing and serving up popular files. The hash is significantly small enough to be stuck on the end of an article and then no one server gets singled out.
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)