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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.
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 =)
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.
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!
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