Blockade Runner ship class

[Happy_Dau]

I recently had the idea for the following:

How about making all Ship Classes (the standard ones) available from the start. Escort would stay normal but all other ships would take HUGE amouts of resources to build. I mean really huge. So you COULD build a Battlecruiser but it would take several years to be completed.
Advanced levels in Ship Construction would make either the next ship (lvl 2: frigate, lvl 3: destroyer, ect.) cheaper (normal cost) or make all hulls a little bit cheaper.

This would have worked extremly well for SE3 since ships were build OUTSIDE the ship yard. This could prove interesting:
Empire A begins construction of a really HUGE Ship that would surely devastate EMPIRE B. Now Empire B could break the defense lines and directly head for the space yard the colosss is built and destroy it before it's done. Well, in SE4 the ships are contructed INSIDE the Space yard, making it necessary to destroy the space yard. Could prove difficult if it's built on the homeworld.

That was just an idea and I will test it out as soon as I got some time again...

MfG Happy_Dau

[murx]

What was the discussion with mass, acceleration, gravity ?
To give you a clue, The Enterprise class ships from Star Trek would probably depart in three different directions when going warp, both gondles accelerate to warpspeed and the main body would just stay where it was cause the mere force of accelerating just at the outer edge of the structure would rip the lightweight gondles from their 'thin' attaching structures. Either you have the main body of the mass directly in front of the drive (but then you should try to accelerate relative slow else the front part of the ship would look like you drove it against a wall) or you have a superstructure that can withstand the acceleration. But putting the mass in front of the drive gives less trouble and need for high grade materials.
But there is also another thing to obey even without acceleration the mass of the ship itself will form a gravitational force on itself. So if you have a metal staff 1cm thick and more then a kilometer long the staff will twist and turn and break due to its own gravitational force. To counter this you need to shape a form that is balanced - easiest way is a spherical ship. But again this is gets only really important within a gravitational field or at a considerable size and mass of the ship.

murx

[rdouglass]

quote:

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Originally posted by murx:
...The Enterprise class ships from Star Trek would probably depart in three different directions when going warp, both gondles accelerate to warpspeed and the main body would just stay where it was cause the mere force of accelerating just at the outer edge of the structure would rip the lightweight gondles from their 'thin' attaching structures...

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Not to get too picky, but what about their "Integrity Field" and "Inertial Dampeners"???

[nerfman]

Gravitational forces would not have much of an effect on a ship unless it was really huge, and even then the forces would be static and not actually change during acceleration (at least if you only consider the problem in non-relativistic terms). The bottom line is that unless everybody wants to play a game where each turn represents hundreds of years and all commands are executed with a delay/lag, then some laws of physics are just going to be broken, no way around it.