EVE General Discussion

Yes, it's important to remember the scale of things here.

Guns in EVE are big as houses. Literally.

It's just that some of the ships we fit them on are big as villages — even large house doesn't look that big in comparison.

Size matters? I thought the important part was how you use them?

This topic is why I don't do body building.

Yes?

Drone assist...

That's nice and all but there is no banana, so I still do not have a proper frame of reference.

But if we can village sized ships, why not mount them with village sized guns?

Why does the warp engine and hull take up so much space? Why not maximize the engineering architecture for offensive capabilities in the ship instead of wasting so much volume on essentially decorative elements?



I agree with OP. The guns are *relatively* too small in size compared to the rest of the ship. Some ships should literally be floating cannons. It's not like crew needs anything but injectable food and regular lashings in order to do their job..

That is a different design principle. You MAKE the plane around the gun not the other way around. AKA it's a flying gun.

Here's something pretty close to a 425mm Railgun in general size - a 20m long barrel. And this guy here is pretty close in caliber to a 150mm railgun. The latter's got a 7.6m long barrel and fired a ~50 pound shell; you can imagine that'd look fairly large on a Harpy, which the game claims is ~100m long. The latter, on the other hand, fired a shell with a mass of 860-1200kg through a 20m barrel (only three times longer!) but the Megathron and the Rokh are just over a kilometer long, so such a gun looks tiny by comparison.

However, with a muzzle velocity of 898m/s, the 6" gun would have had a muzzle energy of about 40.3 megajoules, whereas the 16" gun, with a muzzle velocity of 762m/s and a shell mass of 1225kg, had a muzzle energy of 711.3 megajoules - nearly 18 times larger than a gun only a third of its size. You can't just make the gun arbitrarily large, though. Naval guns tend to fall within a given length to diameter - 38:1 to 50:1 according to wikipedia - to maximize projectile velocity. Make your barrel too long and you lose more and more energy to friction, both with the air and between the bullet and barrel.

Incidentally, projectile weapons in EVE ignore this - the length to diameter ratio is 10:1 to 11:1 for artillery, and 15:1 to 24:1 for autocannons. Perhaps not having to contend with air friction, combined with exotic futuristic barrel linings to minimize or eliminate that source of friction, allows for a smaller barrel. You still don't want to make your barrel arbitrarily long though, because you get diminishing returns (the pressure drops behind the round as it moves down the barrel), and a longer barrel is more difficult to keep on target. This may explain why projectile weapons in-game seem to have length to diameter ratios of about 10:1-11:1 (for artillery) and 15:1 to 24:1 for autocannons.

Or it's just that 3m, 7m and 14m are standard lengths across all weapon classes for small, medium and large guns. Ah well.

Anyway, back to the original point, the damage imparted by a weapon (as compared by muzzle energy since that's a convenient way to do it) has several factors, and increasing one often increases one or more other, leading to an exponential increase in power. For example, if those 150mm and 425mm railguns shoot cylindrical rounds and (as one would reasonably assume) all dimensions increase proportionally, then we get a 4.7x in shell mass and thus muzzle energy out of the 2.83x increase in caliber. Interestingly, due to the physics involved in railguns, if I'm interpreting them right (and given that I only landed in iceland a couple hours ago, am decidedly sleep deprived, and am trying to do the calculus in my head, it's quite possible I'm not...) the 425mm barrel would have to be a little over eight times as long as the 150mm barrel to achieve the same muzzle velocity. But even so, that would only be 24 meters long, and so they would still look freakin' tiny on a battleship.


I'm gonna stop now though, because I'm about half a step from comparing the tracking of two weapons so as to estimate the moment of inertia, and from that the mas and thus in turn the length of the barrel.



Attack Battlecruisers are around 60% the size of battleships but use battleship guns, so yes, they have proportionally larger guns. Likewise, dreads are in the 3200-3800m range with 131m long turrets, so the turrets are ~3.5-4% of the length of the ship, so a fair bit larger than the ~1.4% of battleship guns. And well yeah, stealth bombers are, uh...yeah. They're kind of a gimme.

I really enjoyed this post. Your time was totally well spent, in my opinion.