Not quite.
It doesn't look like a heavy cruiser.
It doesn't look like a mining or a trade vessel or whatever it was supposed to be.
It doesn't look like it's any bigger than a truck either.

It looks like an american MLRS that had its tracks and missiles stolen, and instead given some four tiny pew pew machine guns.

Bleh. If THIS is how you equip a ship so it becomes a heavy cruiser, I can't believe the Sova doesn't deal 200 DPS while broadsiding.
The worst thing however (which really breaks the visual experience for me) is that this ship doesn't LOOK big.
I could watch it all day long, but if I wasn't told beforehand that this is the HEAVY CRUISER, I would NEVER suspect this thing is more than maybe 20 meters long. There are just too many details which you can see on modern vehicles that simply cause the ship to look the size of a modern vehicle.

Assailant, same story. The curved details and fancy bodywork. And the mustache (?!). There's nothing about this ship  hinting that it's a huge missile frigate.
To me, it looks like a scooter with a pringles tube on the roof... and a silly mustache. Not a single detail hints that this ship is bigger than maybe 10 meters long.

Garda. If you zoom in on it, you can see that what first appears to be boxes on deck are in fact some kind of office buildings. Then you look at the gun and realize that it should be maybe 200 meters long... but looks like it was just a tiny machinegun.

I know Brad&friends don't give a crap whether I'm satisfied with those looks.
But I'm not.

N3rull, I suggest you download Neowborg's (did I spell 'is name right?) Mesh Resize Tool from JasonFJ's SW Requiem site.

My suggestion would be to-

increase the zoom on all the ships in their entity files. Make the ships smaller, (and so that caps are big, SBs are really big, but planets are HUGE). At the same time, since the meshes are smaller, it will look like they are bigger (in some ways), and that planets are the monstrous space objects they truly are.

Alternately, make things BIGGER. Sometimes BIGGER really is BETTER.

if you don't want to do it yourself, I'm sure that another modder would do it for you. I may do it myself.

The vacuum have no force... it is the interne pression who is a force... and since these force is around one atmosphere, it is really minimal... nothing compare to the force when you are under water... by the way, animal experiments show that rapid and complete recovery is normal for exposures shorter than 90 seconds to the vacuum...

If our space station, everything is cylindrical, it is simply because rocket are cylindrical... a bullet form have a better aerodynamism that a cube for fly out of the atmosphere...

But if spaceship was build in space, form will have no importance because friction is null... the best example of a real space ship is the Apollo Lunar Module who have no round shape... was not needed since it was made for fly ONLY in the vacuum...

No.

Just no.

No space bugs.

Ever.

Fascinating!

Another ship that looks plain rediculous to me is the Vasari carrier. It looks like a skeletal frame on a floating board. Worse it looks like the strikecraft would be open to random weapon fire and it can sure take a lot despite not having anything that looks like armor plating. I've got to say even the drone host is more practical than that.

Ya ok Star fleet commander what ever you say .....BTW when was the last time you were in space, in a boxy structure, with a stress monitoring device taking stress point readings while browsing the internet and writing posts mis-spelling concentration ....... hmmmm

 Go back to your loom weaving, horse driving cart back water chanty. ok

[/scientist moment]

The advent ships are very stylised - hence the focus on shields, as the structural integrity is probably rubbish - but it doesn't imply much.  Male architects have designed more stylish skyscrapers, after all.  And what is a spaceship but a jiant flying skyscraper?

why do u have a pic of a scooter?

images.google.com.

Iirc, the Kody is an asteroid buster.

Dude, please, do not try to do science in English when you don't really know English.

1. If you're in a spaceship, you want to breathe. To breathe, you need Earth-like atmospheric pressure. That's a force that affects the hull from inside. It is much more easily contained when the ship is cylindrical.
2. When you want to make a big tough object (a space battleship), it is best to make it round - the hull is more solid, incoming blows from every direction need to get through a lot of plating to get deep inside the chassis, which is where the people would want to be. Away from incoming damage.
3. Mark 48 torpedoes show why long and thin objects are a shitty idea for warships to look like.
4. That 90 second recovery is a good joke, true for Cockroaches maybe. Link to some data to back it up or stop spreading stories, you've watched too much Superman. If you're thrown into vacuum, your eyeballs blow up, your lungs would be ripped out of your chest through your mouth, your blood would blow your veins, you brain would geyzer out of your ears and your shit would fly out like you had the worst diarrhea case in the recorded history of medicine.
5. Apollo Lunar Module was not a warship. The creators didn't expect meteors hitting it, didn't have too much knowledge about space radiation either.

Thats because there is no reference point for size. You can't understand how big it really is because you don't know what the scale is. There aren't people in the windows or anything so you can't tell.

I don't think so.

http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/970603.html

http://www.geoffreylandis.com/vacuum.html

Good sites.

Go throw yourself into open space, see what happens.

There's a huge difference between having air slowly sucked out of your suit and being directly exposed to space void.
People had a number of thories in the history of science.
Until NASA throws a naked kid out of the window of a space shuttle, grabs and pulls him back inside 90 seconds later and that kid won't end up as a vegetable, I'll be convinced.

And yet people CAN make frigates look like they're BIG.

Look at this picture:
http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/5576/marinefrig.jpg
This is a Marine Frigate in Homeworld 2. Poor graphics aside (this game is whaa... 8 years old?), this ship looks big. All those tiny details, tiny bridge on its side, the general 'bulkyness'. Reskin it a little bit and it might be TEC's new battlecruiser.

And yet, this picture:
http://img408.imageshack.us/img408/3677/marinefrigvsmothership.jpg
Shows how that Marine Frigate compares to a hiigaran Mothership.

It's not the lack of human crew waving their hands at you from windows that blows the the scale. It's the abundance of details that look like a racecar's sideskirts, not a massive cruiser's plating, that screw the feeling.

Many many ships share this. Yes they are unique, yes they're different, but no, they don't look like massive cruisers or something.

AN AUSTRALIAN SUB FIRED THAT TORPEDO! WOOT! AUSSIE PRIDE!!

personally, i hate most Advent ships, the drone host, the space chilli, the woodcutters axe (mothership), yuck...

thats the main reason i dont usually play Advent... their ships are just ugly to look at....

Calm down, the torpedo is an American product

i know... Aussies do so few cool things military wise we need to fire up about the things we do do...   

I get it. But don't feel too bad. 
If I tried that, it would sound like:

"Yay, Polish forces bombarded a civilian town in Iraq!"
"Yay, Polish soldier died in Afghanistan"

Very impressive indeed.

^^haha^^

i feel for you... then again... the schadenfreude just kicked in... sorry =P

i'm not so sure that sins ships were intended to be huge. just look at the crew sizes given in the manual. the kol battleship has a crew complement of 2,500. a modern carrier has a complement of more than twice that! and the kodiak has a crew of less than 475

And if this unit is not a kilometer and those ships really are meant to be a few dozen meters long... then... this just ruins the whole epic feeling about the game, doesn't it?

agreed... sometimes though, you have to give things up to the "Rule of Cool" and Poetic Licence...

i know its easily changed, but nowadays with the current speed of ships etc, making things bigger just slows the game down by heaps... i play with Distant Stars and other mods that increase planet sizes to be more realistic... and oh man... its like watching a girl grow a beard...

also... if we boost ship sizes much larger, it will be hard to see lots of ships at once... massive fleets will take up much more physical space, and bleh, it gets complicated (and im tired so im not going to go into it...)

basically, we can either get over it and leave it as it is, or we need to rehaul and rebalance the game for scale...

but yeah, i do agree, Sins is supposed to be epic, so...

I didn't say that exposing yourself to a vacuum was recommended, but you won't explode or die instantly like you claim.

Animals have been exposed to a hard vacuum. They swell as water in their tissues turns to vapour, but they survive without permament damage if rescued in under 90 seconds. Temperary blindness occurs.

If frigates looked like shrinked akkans or dunovs, not like boats or scooters, they would really feel big.
All you need is a proper model with a generally bulky look and a number of tiny details that a person will think "hmm.. okay, if this tiny little thing over here is an antenna, then this ship is....". When you give ships antennas that are a third as high as the ship is long... the ship instantly looks like a car with SB radio mounted and not like a massive spaceship anymore.

haha, i just pictured a rat with Downe Syndrome... lol, thats gonna keep me entertained for hours =P

Whatever floats your boat ^^'.

That's yor point of view but a boxy ship is more structurally sound than a cylinder.  You actually store less in a cylindrical shape for a warship becauce you're going to need a large sturdy keel to keep the ship from breaking apart at the first sign of a fracture.