The Garden of Kadesh in the Delta Quadrant

[Megabot]

I've measured the mothership using the game's movement system, and its barely a kilometre and a half tall. How the hell is it supposed to dwarf the Executor?

How did you get that? Using the "movement disc" method, the mothership measures around 7 km tall, with fighters being around 40 meters long, frigates being 100-200 meters long (I forgot exactly) and HC's being about kilometer long. Even so, it hardly "dwarfs" the executor, but those in-game mass labels are still ridiculous.

[Ryan Thunder]

Allow me to reiterate: I measured the HW2 mothership.

[Megabot]

Ah, okay, I missed that part. I thought the HW2 mothership was between 1 and 2 kilometers tall, though it has been a while since I measured it.

[Temjin]

How can you trust HW cutscenes but not the .shp files? Most of the cutscenes in the game (besides the black and white ones, and I don't think those would be too useful) are in-game cutscenes, and are directly reliant on the .shp files! Try messing with a .shp file and see what I mean.

And how big does that make the fighters again?

Then again, Starcraft guys say scaling ingame is messed, so maybe everything in Homeworld 'looks' a different size to it's 'real' size!

It does. Buried somewhere within the .big file is the option to turn dynamic scaling off, although I don't remember how much of an effect it had.

[Stark]

Don't be retarded. The cutscenes aren't dependent on 'lol teh 50 megatons lol' flavour text or the game stats using real units in a not necesarily accurate way. I can attack the accuracy of statements made in the datafiles without attacking what's present in cutscenes. That's like saying I can't accept the action in a Freespace cutscene without also accepting that the guns are lasers that travel at 450m/s.

[Temjin]

Ah, you're right. Blame it on a lack of sleep.

[Covenant]

I love Homeworld but it has the rigorous consistancy of porridge. The game itself is a load of fun but trying to quantify their stuff doesn't work at all.

It even commits a cardinal sin in HW2--the Laser Corvettes shoot nonrelativistic laser projectiles, proving that they are NOT lasers. And if these vessels are appropriately scaled then there's no way that the original mothership was all that big. It was INTENDED to be fuckin' HUGE, but like a lot of stuff in the game, it got cut. For reference, there are mega-engineering marvels in Homeworld Universe to dwarf the Deathstar utterly, but we see none of it in action and the weapons are all extremely suspect.

I think it's safe to say that the Kadeshi ramming maneuver would do some serious damage if they connected with one of the Needleships, but they move so damn slow I'm not sure we can suspect them to. We also see the weapon effects, occasionally, against asteroids... but I would caution against making firepower estimates about that. HW has no offical canon policy and follows none--none of the games make any sense when viewed together, really, as HW2 completely obliterates any vestige of sense the game had to begin with. We can assume they have some fairly ridiculous manufacturing capabilities from the things that were written in HW1, but none of that got followed in the sequel. The sequel either must be thrown out, and we'd need to use HW1 (and assume that, for reference, a HW fighter is the size of a Star Wars light cruiser) or just throw up our hands and say it's just a mess.

I'm saying it's just a mess. The cutscenes are based on the art, which is space epic wtfhugeness that we never see once in-game. The story and dialog make very little sense. And the in-game effects (let alone the gameplay conventions themselves) are utterly absurd. So... great game, bad sci-fi. Like with Starcraft, a lack of consistancy dooms it.

[Connor MacLeod]

Smiley's calcs aren't THAT far fetched for "back of the envelope" calcs. AS noted, we've seen stated velocities (when the Hiigarans were just starting out) for the mass driver railgun thingies on the scout. Going by a rough scaling of the guns and drawings I saw in the manuals I'd guess the rounds are somewhere in the 30-40mm range, and given the described composition of such projectiles I'd estimate at least a kilogram or two min (for the scout's weapons).

Just rmeember that KE isn't the sole factor with a kinetic impactor, especially WRT ot penetration. Momentum is going to be at last as important (though I probably should say force/pressure will be more important for penetrating than momentum alone.)

Ion cannons.. we know from the Catacylsm manual that ion weapons are (roughly) near-c beams. We can estimate mass either by using the recoil figures of mass drivers (do a rough volumetric upscale to differ between frigate and fighters, much the same way Mike scales ISDs vs DSs for firepower/powerplant on the main page).

Alternately, you can also go by the idea that the ion cannon's recoil is somewhat less than the ion cannon frigate's own mass (it doesn't move the ship noticably, and the engines aren't needed to fire), so the momentum of the ion stream might be some fraction of the ship's engine's own thrust (which wil itself provide an upper limit into the MT/sec range, roughly, d epending on the precise accecl figures you wish to use.)

As a double check we know that a pair of Taidanii destroryers in the Homeworld Catacylsm manual are described as vaporizing a frigate in "seconds". Generally speaking, you're looking at multi TW (or more liekly multi kt/sec) range firepower no matter what. More likely, its in the double (if not triple) digit Kt/sec firepower, especially since multibeam frigates use more than one beam.

The Kadeshi firepower ought to be more than sufficient to represent a danger to most any ship, given sufficent numbers. Its more a matter of resources/construction capability than anything (they REA basically unshielded after all.)

[Vanas]

I think we agreed in the last Homeworld thread that the Mothership is about 4 miles tall. Quite a lot of the middle third is empty space for shipbuilding and things, while another large void is there to store resources, so it's mass can vary wildly based on how much it's carrying.

Fighter-wise, the only thing to really go on is this cockpit, which would make the Taiidan Scout of a similar size, but larger than, to a modern fighter 'plane, though presumably more massive.

Kushan Interceptors are of a similar length, but significantly more massive. Correct me if I'm wrong, but a Swarmer is about half the length of a Kushan Interceptor and mostly seems to consist of armour and engine.

The picture I linked to on the last page shows a Kushan fighter under the landed Ion frigate, which looks to be about 5 times the length of it, while the full-size one of my av (which I don't have to hand), has the frigates near the Mothership. The errors will multiply, but it's the best I can think of.

[Covenant]

I prefer this shot--it gives you a better sense of scale in regards to a single tinyass harvester from HW2 with actual people:

http://shipyards.relicnews.com/hw2/imag ... rld213.jpg