The Disproportion of Sins

Ever here of a sandtable? its what the military uses when they are trying to explain a mission to troops that are involved with visual representation.  Im not saying this is what that is, but I noticed these issues a while back when i put my Akkan sidebyside with an Egg during a battle. According to the Lore the Egg is outrageously big compared to any other capital ship, yet an Akkan which should be much smaller was atleast the same length and almost the same height. Also next to the planets these same Capital ships are MUCH too big to be as big as they are claimed to be in the Lore. But back to what I was talking about originally, a sandtable is just a visual representation of the actual objects it in no way represents the size and distance of anything. This is the way I view the SINs galaxy more of a moving exploding Sandtable. As your the Admiral of the Entire Fleet and everything else you can magically view everything from a Godly view.  But atleast thats the way I try to explain the size issues.

Real sizes aren't possible.

Taking scale from the ships on an average sized monitor, a terran planet would be about 0.4 miles across, the sun would be about 4000 miles away. The nearest star would be 1.2 billion miles away.

I don't think that would fit on your monitor...

@Allegiance: I know what a sand table is.  Its just that is how I imagine the icons to be rather than the actual ships.

@Fuzzy: I know they aren't.  As I said, just an observation.  I know how incompatible this would be with gameplay, so I'm just saying how different it is from reality...

I guess they could scale down the ship and stucture sizes, and you would just have to zoom in more to see the details.

I read somewhere that planet sizes where going to be larger, but they got in the way when zooming around your grav well.

Btw I always though the crew sizes in the manuals to be to large, only pictured a crew of hundreds in capital ships, and most frigates maybe a crew of 50+

Well, if you go by how big they look by zooming in, the Akkan would probably carry 900-1200 and the Egg would carry half a million on board.  If you go by how big they are in comparison, then they end up being in the hundreds of thousands, or in the Egg's case,tens of millions...

Frigates would probably have crews from 50-200...  Just depends...

Roughly estimating based on crew complement, lore, and look of the ship, I'd put the Skirantra and Jarrasul at ~1.5km long, with the Kortul and Vulkoras at ~1km, then the Antorak at ~800 meters. Many frigates would be a measly 100 meters or so.

It is a shame that it is not feasible in Sins the way it stands now. I thought the same thing looking at the different sizes. Then I used the resize model tool floating around the mod forum and ended up going back to almost the same dimensions they are now. If you increase the planet & sun size dramitically, you have to also increase the gravity wells. Then it takes way too long to get from one side of the planet to the other. This dramatically reduces the effectiveness of defenses. It also slows the game down to a crawl. Also when you ships to a more accurate size, most of the battle would be watching icons. You would have to zoom in so close to see anything.

I see the Capital ships as massive versions of Aircraft Carriers currently fielded by the World Powers today. The Aircraft Carriers of today (the big ones, not medium sized ones) carry between 3000 to 5500 cant pin down a number right now as every site i search for an answer varies widely some putting the numbers in 6000, but my gut is telling me its somewheres between 3000 and 5500. As for frigates and cruisers, it should be between 50+800 maybe more depending on size of the ship.

The U.S. Navy recruiting website puts the numbers between 3000 and 5500 depending on size of ship.

I'm with Allegiance.  Since it is space, and the limits of gravity do not exist, plus the concept of multiplanet mining, they would be a cross between today's AC's and battleships...  For this reason, I see HC's having somewhere around 900-1200 and capitals 10-20 thousand with the egg more in the range of 100,000...

That's putting alot of eggs in one basket........

Game's manual puts the Jarrasul at a crew of 15,000. HCs range from 475 to 900.

If you zoom in all the way, the Egg's top has skyscrapers on it.  Now, zoom out.  Look at how big it is.  Think about it.  Minimal crew may be 15000, but the maximum would likely be in millions.  It is called the Evacuator for a reason...

Nimitz class supercarriers can have total crews over 6000, though more typically a bit more than 3000 are the ships crew and while about 2500 are the air wing. As I'm sure the Sins capital ships were meant to be far larger in size than our modern day ships (disproportion not included), I think the only way the crew size could be so low would be due to extensive mechinization.

Well, it's pretty obvious that they fudged it with the scale.  It's blatantly obvious that the sun is way too small and way too close to the planets, and that ships are exceedingly large compared to planets. 

Here's an interesting one, though:  By observing the rotation of a planet, I was able to time one day to approximately 7.5 minutes.  So, does this mean that our two-hour game took a matter of a few weeks in "game time"?

That's true...  But I'm sure that things like the Akkan or Egg would have far higher population caps as they are meant to transport vast amounts of people/Vasari...

well just look at the planets in our solar system.........It takes Venus 243 Earth days just to complete 1 day, Mars is just alittle longer then an Earths day. Jupitar takes 9.8 Earth Hours to complete 1 day but 11.86 Earth years to complete one rotation around the sun.

Considering how fast we can build ships, and how fast the Planets rotate 360 degrees.. Its pretty obvious from our standpoint, time passes much faster for SINs (even though its only to have you playing a game a few hours and not a few years)

You also forgot that when you play with all the settings on fastest (but game speed not sped up,)  It takes about 40 seconds to a minute to make massive infrastructural changes to every main city on a planet, which is about the same amount of time it takes to blow up a medium sized crusier by repeatedly shooting it with missiles.  Assuming modern weaponry, that should take maybe and hour tops.  So either their politics/society is REALLY advanced and weapons technology has not kept up, or the game is just unrealistic.  

Though personally, I kinda like it that way.

Although I know it would slow down the game to much for some, I wish there was a little more space in space.

when you create maps in map designer you can adjust phase space lanes so that they are very long distances and can take a very good amount of time to get from one GW to another. Made that mistake once before creating a map.........ended up losing a good number of planets because the Phase lanes took too long to traverse when seconds counted.

Any crew complement numbers would almost assuredly be for optimal running of the ship. Minimal numbers would severely degrade ship performance, and that'd make sending a ship off to war completely pointless. Better to use optimal numbers.

When I said minimum, I meant without any extra people...

Ah. What about the colony frigates then? They have the largest crews of any frigates by a wide margin, and they're not combat vessels.

Well, they are colonizers...  They have to carry that many people so they can start colonies...

they dont have all the BIG guns and and cool military technology to get in the way. the Combat vessels would be fore effeciency and much of its space would be taken up for different devices needed to operate the vessel in combat conditions........if you look at ICV's (Infantry Carrier Vehicles) the military use today. The soldiers are crammed into small spaces in a very LARGE vehicle because devices like NBC gear, computers, large engines, and emergency repair tools take up much of the space inside the vehicle. Same thing would go for the Frigates, Cruisers and Capitals. While they are HUGE and if they were stripped of all the necessary military equipment theyd be able to fit MUCH more personell. The sheer need for all of the equipment lowers the available room for a crew.

that is definitely true, although I don't think it applies to sins...  Even a scout is larger than today's destroyer, so I don't think there will be too much cramming going on...