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a replay or what became of one night
Thread starter Deacan
Deacan
Wc3... a great game indeed. Last night I played it again and something catched my attention.
The scenes on the fightdeck - It seems that the nose of the T-bolt (including the cockpit) had nearly the some size as the pilot...
With snapshots and this blueprint from the user Flanker I calculate a lenght of 23,5 - 24m for the T-Bolt... This "fits" perfectly to the later WCP ships and the fighters of WC2 (quite the size of the sabre)...
So my night went from play to scale...
btw - the little arrow is little by this scale: approx. 14m...
Aginor
Vice Admiral
Without wanting to go too much into the details (you know what happens in size discussions here every time....):
Wing Commander and real world sizes don't mix. Almost everything in Wing Commander fails that comparison (person next to ship). For example if you look at WC1, the Raptor should be 36 meters IIRC. That's pretty large. But when you look at the scene during the launch where the player can be seen sitting in the cockpit and you compare that to the blueprints, then you may notice that something is wrong.
The same happens in WC3. IIRC the arrow is too small, and so is the Hellcat. I forgot the others but I'm a bit surprised that you got some satisfying results with the Thunderbolt. The one time I tried to check this I came to some strange results.
On a larger scale it becomes even worse. When you compare capship and fighter sizes in the cutscenes or (even worse) ingame, you get the funniest results. Of course that has reasons, such as ingame engine limitations. There is no real excuse for the cutscenes, though...
That's a problem when you want to do a mod. It happened to Saga and I'm almost sure it happened to Standoff and other mods, too. There are canonical ship sizes that just don't match anything. Not even each other.
So what to do? Some people will hate you for making the ships the size from the manual, because it looks ridiculous. Others will hate you for making them larger or smaller to fit realistic sizes, because "it's not canonical". It's the kind of problem that leads to arguments like "NO WAY the Raptor can be 36 meters long, it wouldn't even fit in the hangar" and "if you compare the size of the doors either the characters are 6 meters tall or there is a wrong size in the manual for the Victory". Then everybody and their mother starts to call each other and their mothers morons, accuse them they would want to piss all over Wing Commander or similar things, and the topic is closed. People get banned and such things.
And I won't even mention a certain ship that spawns this kind of discussion every. single. time...
btw: The same happens with speed. Don't do the math. You will only get a headache.
Wedge009
It definitely happened in Standoff as well. That's why we get the gun placement on the Raptor, Hornet and Sabre that everyone complains about.
The same happens with speed. Don't do the math. You will only get a headache.
That's where the ominous "klick" comes in handy...
"kps" in the cockpit? does mean "klicks per second". An unlike in today's military jargon, one klick is not the same as one kilometer...
Strangely enough, the other display shows distances in a unit called "m"... Again, these can't be meters, and on closer observation you realize, that these are the same "klicks" as the one in the speeds...
We just don't know how much a klick is... (other than it must be more than a meter, but less than a kilometer... ) or why you can write it as "k" as well as "m"... micks?
But it helps me suspend disbelief. You can use these units of measurements ingame and get a feel for them, just don't get the idea it's kilometers per seconds or meters. It's klicks.
frostytheplebe
Seventh Part of the Seal
Wedge009 said:
Yeah I'm not a big fan of what they did about it in Standoff... With all admiration due to the standoff team, having the guns in a different firing arc made them more challenging to fly.
This has been discussed before. Eder and team needed to make a choice with regards to how rigidly they should adhere to the official statistics and models. Given the dilemma, I'm content with the choices they made.
Bandit LOAF
Long Live the Confederation!
In all fairness to this especially pervasive fan theory, the manuals must say a dozen times over that a 'klick' is a kilometer.