Homeworld2: ISD vs Sajuuk

[Vanas]

I thought that one was 'I dunno what it is, but it's REALLY big', with this monstrosity being Sajuuk.

Hmm.

[Ra]

Maybe the Progenetors are the Imperials?
Behold, the Executor-class Star Destroyer Sajuuk! The starship whose Hand Shapes What Is About to be Slagged!
Meh, would have been better as an Eclipse-class star destroyer. Mini superlaser. Continent go boom.

[Ra]

A little OT, Vanas, but how did you get the HW sig banner?

[Crossroads Inc.]

sig banners are easy to do I made mine in about 5min.

Oh, and those pics are nice, Hounestly, I don't mind how Sajuuk looks in the game, I just wished, you know, it was a little more God like!

[Nephtys]

Not like a space doorstop? That's what I bloody thought it was at first. I was thinking... neat. A starship named after GOD. Wait. The hell? AUGGH!!!!

[Vanas]

It's a Homeworld promo poster, with a screenshot of explosions and some text added. Nowt special, but it works.

"I present the HMS God!"
"Um. It's a little... crappy."
"Shut up! It's God!"

Ra, consider the sizes of HW ships. The monstrosity is many times the size of even the SSD. It's friggin' huge.

[Ra]

Of course, I hate to bring up the worst Trek movie of all time, but I think a Spock quote is prudent:
"What does God need with a starship?"
Ra:
"Muchless a starship that looks like a paperwieght?"
Of course, I rode in style, in my Pyramid Ship, that is until Zor blew it up with the Chinese fleet!
Anyway, something truly sleek and elegant would have made more sense as a "God Ship", and it would have also been equipped with something like Sun Crusher armor. Since God is supposed to be merciful, I guess uberwank cannons are out of the question.

[NecronLord]

Is the Hiigarans god merciful? Or maybe just merciful to them.

[Vanas]

I think Sajuuk's more of the smiting kind of god.\/

Aziraphale:"Did you ever go to Gomorrah?"
Crowley:"Yeeeah. They had these great cocktails there"
A:"I mean after."
C:"Oh"

And perhaps it's just named after Him. Like the 'Quaar-Jet' (Kushan God of Pain & Enslavement) class and the Dreadnought class (For it shall Dread nought but God)

[Ra]

Anyway, I have noticed the immense size of HW ships. The fact that a mining Kiith can produce vessels bigger than an Eclipse-class is impressive indeed.
Like the Imperials, the Homeworld civilizations are basically ancient spacefaring races. Thus, the focus on superships is unsurprising.
Back to the sig, I thought you had to put in an HTML adress or something for the sig banner?

[Vanas]

You put in the link to the image inside [img] tags.

Like [img]http://well-of-souls.com/homeworld/hws/kushan/title.jpg[/img]

I think HW ships are so large in order to fit in their magazines and so forth. I mean, a single Ion array fills a frigate, and the mass drivers have got to draw ammo from somewhere. Missile destroyers need PDA and raw materials to work with, so the size is purely practical rather than 'because I can'

[Crossroads Inc.]

Can anyone provide some screenshots of these Eclipse sized ships from HW?

[Vanas]

Biggest thing in the game I think. Certainly the tallest at 7km.

The Nomad Moon is damned big, but can't find a good screenie of it.

Sajuuk Himself. As the HW2 MS is bigger than the original and Sajuuk is a similar size to it, Sajuuk is pretty huge.

[Ra]

Thanks. I'll keep that until I can engineer something else.
Anyway, I have always supposed most of the forward spaces of the Dreadnought were preserved for not only the magazine, but also for the large mass-driver firing tubes and a missile-production bay, which would require several PDA's and some raw materials.

[Crossroads Inc.]

Biggest thing in the game I think. Certainly the tallest at 7km.

The Nomad Moon is damned big, but can't find a good screenie of it.

Sajuuk Himself. As the HW2 MS is bigger than the original and Sajuuk is a similar size to it, Sajuuk is pretty huge.

Well your second pic is of the Sajuuk from HW2, I thought that things was just about twice the size of an ISD, smeone was talking about a 'little' minning ship making Eclipse sized ships?

[Vanas]

The Kuun-Lan is about 5km long, going by it's size compared to the MS, and it can produce 1 mile-ish Dreadnoughts. Nothing's quite 16km long, but there is the (broken) Karos Dyson Sphere. You see chunks of it in HW2, too.

[Ra]

Sorry, I may have exaggerated about the Eclipse, as I've never really gotten a good size-comp of her. I actually was referring to the Kuun-Lan herself, not ships she builds. There were only two "Explorer-class" mining ships, the Kuun-Lan and Faal-Corum.

[Hawkwings]

the Mothership built those, not the somtaaw. Still, 1km ships from a 7km ship is pretty impressive.

[Stark]

W00t the expected HW wanking begins! Any takers on '30km high m0th3rsihpzor lol'?? After all, the manual makes amusing claims about their ship sizes... like their 'heavy cruisers' with what? 4 axial guns (range: 3-4kms) and 8 turrets? Turrets that can't kill a fighter in one hit? Wooo.

Who CARES how large they are? They're PATHETIC. Their idea of shipkillers are tiny blue splats! Their speeds are ridiculously low, their ranges are short, their sensors are useless, etc etc etc. They need special technobabble to sterilise a planet! Christ.

AND Sajuuk looks ridiculous. All you need.

[Ra]

As for speed, how can you expect something the size of the Dreadnought or "M0th3rshipzor" to move really fast? The Homeworld races haven't developed the magic "mass-lightening field" technobabble that makes ST ships so fast. In fact, such technology is considered alien to them, reserved for stuff like the Naggarok and Bentusi Tradeship.
And their "technobabble" planetkiller simply burns the atmosphere off of a planet, not shower it in sparklies and rearrange matter like the Genesis probe. Taiidan launch weapon. Weapon detonates. Atmosphere burns. Civilization go boom.
And I'm not trying to start a fanwanking contest, I'm just trying to make a point on scale. A plasma bomb launcher hardly qualifies as a "ship killer" in my book. A shower of huge HC shells does. The sensors are at least better than Trek, which usually can't outperform modern radar, or even detect ships at a truly BVR range. I can see enemy ships coming from hundreds of klicks away, thanks to Sensors Manager. Even with passive sensors, the Kushan can outperform Starfleet. And this is an organization that has nothing to do with charting nebulae and stellar core fragments.

[Stark]

K, you've missed my point. Lets go.

As for speed, how can you expect something the size of the Dreadnought or "M0th3rshipzor" to move really fast? The Homeworld races haven't developed the magic "mass-lightening field" technobabble that makes ST ships so fast.

We're talking about ISDs here: I was comparing it to SW technology. Don't whine to me about HW's laughable capabilities: this *is* a vs thread, and HW *does* suck.

And their "technobabble" planetkiller simply burns the atmosphere off of a planet, not shower it in sparklies and rearrange matter like the Genesis probe. Taiidan launch weapon. Weapon detonates. Atmosphere burns. Civilization go boom.

They can't do it with their regular ships. They need the 'magic atmosphere destroyer beam'. Their ships are not powerful enough to sterilise a planet. Thus, weaker than ISD. Are you listening?

And I'm not trying to start a fanwanking contest, I'm just trying to make a point on scale. A plasma bomb launcher hardly qualifies as a "ship killer" in my book. A shower of huge HC shells does.

I've played HW. Bombers can kill anything, up to and including Sajuuk. Compare plasma bombs, with refire and 5 bombers per squad, to HV guns refire. Who wins? Bombers do. HW has no shields and heavy capitals that can be killed by starfighter guns. Guns that make lame, non-nuclear splats. SW has ludicrous shielding, effective immunity to starfighter guns, and huge motherfucking explosions.

The sensors are at least better than Trek, which usually can't outperform modern radar, or even detect ships at a truly BVR range. I can see enemy ships coming from hundreds of klicks away, thanks to Sensors Manager. Even with passive sensors, the Kushan can outperform Starfleet. And this is an organization that has nothing to do with charting nebulae and stellar core fragments.

Trek can detect shit all over a solar system. They have FTL sensors. HW can't, and doesn't. Needless to say, we're talking about *SW* here, and *SW* kicks the shit out of HW sensor wise.

I always loved how the Mothership was 20-40% engines, and limped along at so laughably low speed. Thats a true demonstration of power generation or materials limits, that is.

[Ra]

Yes, an ISD is more powerful than any HW ship. I do try to avoid getting into illogical arguments (though no one is perfect), and I do see your point. Pound for pound, the ISD is far more powerful than anything HW can offer. I was originally trying to imply that HW construction scale is impressive (which it is), even if they are thousands of years behind the Prequel Era. The comment about the Kuun-Lan being as big as an Eclipse was incorrect, and I conceed that.

[Crossroads Inc.]

Hey, Stark, chill man
It's MY Thread and I long ago conceeded that HW Tech couldn't hold a candle to an ISD. In truth it was silly of me to even propose the vs match up in the first place. But since then we have evolved a bit, and I am perfectly comfortable discussing other things since were mostly in agreement that the Sajuuk cannot take out an ISD.

[Stark]

No, no, guys, I misunderstood. Sorry. :S

Since you guys know lots about HW, would you have any idea where the very large sizes for HW ships came from? I've heard extremely large sizes quoted for everything from Motherships to frigates... are these numbers in the manuals?

Also, aside from story demands... after Kharak was destroyed, FC says 'there's nothing here for us now'. What about all the RU? The whole planet is right there. The moon, too... there's lots of asteroids out near the edge of the system... etc etc. If you have 'vacuum money out of dirt' technology, why didn't they hang around and get heaps of resources? Or at least jump to a random system and do the same? They spend all their time either in deep space or nebulas - and when they're in nebulas they think 'wow, look at all the money'. Why not take a detour?

And why did the Taiidan have such a poor fleet? They've got magical shipbuilding tech too, and a long, long time to gather RUs. What gives?

[Ra]

There isn't any size description in the manual, just mass numbers; e.g. the HC weighs 800,000 points. What this means, I have no fraking clue. My best guess would be metric tons, but that's speculation and doesn't fit the facts. 800,000 metric tons would be very light, considering how Scotty claimed the Enterprise "Weighs nearly a million tons", IIRC. And, considering how thickly armored HW ships are, this further puts the nail in the coffin of that idea. Best guesses are that the HC is about a mile long.
As for the departure from Karak, I think the fear was that the Taiidan would return and finish off the Kushan, so FC decided to get moving before they returned. Remember, despite the relatively nacent nature of Kushan space tech, their missile defense grid was able to heavily damage the Taiidan fleet. As a result, they scorched the planet and ran back to the Great Wastelands.
As for taking a detour, that would have been a great idea. Nothing prevented them from finding a resource-rich system/planet that they could have exploited. Simply harvest the resources there, and build up the fleet for an attack on the Taiidan Frontier Guard. That's what I would have done in S'jet's place (although I'd never hook myself up to a computer ).
As for the Taiidan fleet, considering how they have had much more time than the Kushan to develop their technology, they should have been much more advanced. However, the gameplay dictated overly matched sides. Again, this was victim to game design. It would have been far more impressive for the Kushan to have defeated a seriously superior (both in numbers and technology) foe.