Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Synopsis:



http://eve-files.com/dl/278769

(from: http://mos.creativebloq.com/features/2013/dirkloechel-ships.jpg)

The image above illustrates everything wrong with ship masses and volumes in Eve:

• There is no consistency (densities) between size classes
• Volumes are woefully underestimated as ships scale up
• Relative masses as a result are completely out of sync

Why should we care? Well, the end result of this is exceptionally anomalous behaviour when it comes to collisions e.g. how did that cruiser, warping to a Titan at zero, cause it to ‘bump’ so heavily? - That would be because of the old ‘garbage in, garbage out’ chestnut.

1. Avatar

Let’s start with the Avatar in the centre; this vessel is 13,774m long, translating to 1375 pixels on this image, if you approximate it to a cylinder (lets stay on the conservative side from here on in), taking the smallest diameter at the engines, it is 215 pixels, corresponding to 2152m in diameter

Volume: (1076)(1076)(3.142)(13,774) = 50 billion m^3
In game: = 155 million m^3
Difference: 323x

For mass, let us use the density of Iron, 7870kg/m^3, and assume the ship is 97% empty space (if you try this with a modern aircraft carrier/WWII Battleship, you’ll find 95-97% is about right…)

Mass: (50,000,000,000)(7870)(0.03) = 11,830 billion Kg
In game: = 2.4 billion Kg
Difference: 4929x

'Le Sigh'


2. Revelation

Let’s now move onto the Revelation in the image; this vessel is just shy of 3800m long, translating to 379 pixels (Check: consistency with Avatar, 10m per pixel – Hurrah!) , if you are very conservative, approximating it to cylinder width of the engines, but full length nose to tail... it is 49 pixels (490m) in diameter

Volume: (245)(245)(3.142)(3791) = 715 million m^3
In game: = 18.5 million m^3
Difference: 39x

Following the same assumptions for mass as before….

Mass: (715,000,000)(7870)(0.03) = 169 billion kg

In game: = 1.29 billion kg
Difference: 131x

Why???


3. Apocalypse

Finally to complete this comparison, let’s now take a look at the Apocalypse off the Avatar’s bow. This is just a smidge over a mile long, 1608m and (Hurrah for consistency again!) 160 pixels in this image. If you ignore the ‘droopy bits’ and follow the same approach as before, it is a cylinder 260m in diameter

Volume: (130)(130)(3.142)(1608) = 85 million m^3
In game: = 495,000 m^3
Difference: 172x

Mass: (85,000,000)(7870)(0.03) = 20 billion Kg
In game: = 97 million Kg
Difference: 206x


Ugh...


As can be seen, there is also no consistency between ship densities. At all. Otherwise, the difference in masses and volumes would scale linearly. I’ve picked an average density of 236 kg/m^3 (i.e. a steel structure, 97% empty volume), but the specific number doesn’t matter – it just needs to be consistent.

Let’s just summarise the mass differences between classes:

Avatar (70x) Revelation (8.45x) Apocalypse ('actual' figures)

Avatar (1.86x) Revelation (13.7x) Apocalypse (in game figures)

i.e. we have a Titan which ‘should be' 591 times the mass of a Battleship, but actually only is 25 times. Clearly a massive () difference when it comes to collisions.

I haven’t gone any further with this, beyond looking at the ‘average' densities of a Crucifier, Arbitrator, Harbinger, and they too are all over the place. I’ve used approximated volumes here, but it should be possible to apply a fixed density to the actual ship models to generate more accurate mass values. If you really wanted to, you could vary this density between racial ship types to reflect the more heavily armoured Amarr ships vs Minmatar scrap heaps and so on, which would maintain real differences in ship accelerations, behaviour and therefore 'flavour'.

1. Compute ‘actual' volumes of every ship model and replace current values
2. Apply specific average density (add racial flavours if you wish) to compute mass
3. Tweak wormhole mass limits accordingly
4. .....?
5. Profit!

It's not rocket science.

Because density/mass and volume are balancing factors with regards to speed-acceleration and storage (respectively speaking).

I'm not sure how 'normalizing' these attributes will fix something that is broken or Improve game play. Are you going for something in specific?

In some instances mass is used to facilitate game play. The big one that comes to mind is that supers can't fit through wh. WH mass allowances are based on the current values you seem to be hung up on. If you 'fixed' all the masses to conform to your guidelines would it make a mess of that? Case 1: Would I suddenly be able to fit out a super and slip it into a c5/c6? Case 2: Would ships suddenly be excluded from passing in and out of wh that were designed to enter? It looks like the current mismatches are fairly large and exaggerated. Would making them realistic cause a wh travel nightmare and create ripples of module mass balancing that would take months / years to sort out?

I get the desire for realism, but at the end of the day would making masses 'reasonable' create more headache on the programming end than it is worth? It seems you may be trying to stealth rid the game of bumping. I'm against that. Bumping is a skill (dare I say art) that takes both brains and practice to master.

It's been argued many times in the past that it isn't realistic for a little ship to bump a big ship off a gate/station/intended flight path. Then comes the realistic collision with damage argument and suddenly titans can just steam roll smaller ships into dust and a plated rifter becomes a high speed projectile that can destroy ships waaaay above it's weight class in a single run. It's a whole mess. I'll just ask this of you folks that feel bumping mechanics aren't realistic. How do you feel about being an immortal space hero that routinely warps time and space without consuming the massive quantities of fuel necessary to accelerate the mass of your ship to several times the speed of light??

This eventually boils down to you (the OP or other 'realism' folks) being OK w/ ALL the funky space travel stuff, immortality, clone jumping, routine implant install/remove and so on, but somehow not being OK with ship bumping. It's an epic space hero game dude, feel free to warp all over it AND bump people off gates with your miss-massed ship.

The game works fine as is and mass is used as a computational variable to make that happen. It's a computer simulation, not a real girl.

Which is even more reason to ensure they make sense.

I agree. I'm sorry, but it's stupidly unrealistic.

I'm sure they don't want to fix it because it's a lot of work for no real gain, other than not looking like morons when their fans discuss the game (pretty much guaranteed to discuss it). Imagine if Star Trek did the same thing to their ship stats.

Incidentally, planets and moons have the same issue with their radius vs. mass vs. surface gravity.

Because "balancing" in your mind is not the same "balancing" we are thinking about.

If you give one ship more mass so that it "makes sense according to its size," you cut it's acceleration and speed down at the same time. This affects it's performance relative to other ships and upset the intended balance between ships and/racial ship lines.

"Well, simply increase it's speed and make it more agile!" you say.

Unfortunately mass is an intergal part of the formula that calculates speed and acceleration. You can't decouple it.
So this is how you end up with ships that have "questionable masses for their size."

With volume. it affects how a ship can be stored in other ships.


tldr; game balance > realism

Plus it is science fiction. Suspension of disbelief is kind of a requirement here.

Scales of things are not relevant, the essentials stay the same.
If you do not like the cars analogy then use a modern cell phone and a tablet. My cell phone and table have exactly they same functions and capabilities and yet the mass per unit of volume for the cell phone is more that triple that of the tablet, again because the tablet has the same things spread out over a larger area.

Your little "fix" for the perceived ship size versus mass problem also does not take into account differences in design, construction and materials. In my past I raced motorcycles and the components for that race bike were cast in exactly the same molds as the version sold to the general public. They were machined using exactly the same programs on the CNC milling machines and in every way when assembled looked exactly like and in fact were exactly the same size as the version sold to the general public. However due to changes in the specific materials used the weight of my race bike was 25% less than the version the general public could buy. Applying this to our spaceships how much of your perceived discrepancies would be accounted for by these factors.

Going a different direction on this even with the same size and shape design considerations can and would affect mass. Perhaps on ship is designed to have more open spaces where the crew could gather for enjoyment, while another race may prefer individuals privacy and there for that space would be broken up into a lot of smaller spaces this would increase the amount of weight due to the additional walls etc needed.

But I want to return to your counter argument about cars not being relevant because scale. Scale has very little to do with this situation, the essentials of the same things packed more tightly together versus being spread out over a greater area holds true whether you are comparing cars and vans or space ships that are as big as a city.

In the end there are so many factors that could affect the volume versus mass of a space ships the size of large cities that there is no way to apply a universal set of rules or guidelines to this, and in the end as long as they are balanced from a game play aspect does it really matter?

Game Balance is more important than lore balance.
Masses, Sizes & Volumes are all used to balance things inside the game, such as POS storage, if an item can be carried in a freighter, how large smart bombs from a particular ship are, what it's bump sphere is, how fast it accelerates and how well propulsion mods affect it.
This is what people are talking about when they say 'balanced'.

And you would also have to alter how Microwarpdrives and Afterburners affect ships... because they add mass to ships (so that ships using the mods can go in a straight line fast, but can't maneuver well).

And you would have to re-do wormholes as they are designed to collapse after a certain amounts of mass passes through them (which is roughly balanced around how many of a certain class of ship the DEVs want to allow through at any one time).

Collision mechanics would have to redone from the ground up.

Heavy Interdictors and their Warp Disruption Generators would have to be redone (yes, it also affects mass).


Yeeeaaahhhh... I don't see the DEVs doing all that just because someone wants things to make complete sense from a Real Life perspective.

This may be true assuming your overly simplistic estimates even vaguely resemble reality.

Take the posted image into a photo editing program and removing everything except the avatar itself.
Import the resulting image into Adobe Illustrator and then proportionally enlarging it till it is exactly 13.774" long to make conversion to meters easy in that 0.001" equals 1 meter.

Measuring the left edge(engines), at the very middle of the ship and then on the right edge just before the final widest flare we get these numbers.
2,109 meters
2,911 meters
5,139 meters
Now the math
2,109 + 2,911 + 5,139 = 10,159.
10,159 / 3 = 3,386.33 meters for an average diameter.
3,386.33 / 2 = 1,693.17 for our radius.
(1,693.17 x 1,693.17) x 3.142 x 13774 = 123, 799,946,515.82 m3 or more than double your estimate.
So who's number is more accurate?
No I do not claim my number is correct, there are far to many variables that are not accounted for, and yet simply because it is based on measurements made at more than one location on the ship it is more accurate than your overly simplistic estimate. Our varying numbers do however prove that any numbers we can generate are worthless when it comes to discussing things like mass per unit of volume or what they are or should be.


In this section of your OP you are specifically stating that you want the mass per unit of volume to be consistent across all ships in EvE, and yet when I post items from real life that prove the mass per unit of volume does not remain constant you tell me my analogies are worthless why?

Your demand to have the mass per unit of volume remain the same across all ships from all races makes no sense. From design considerations like how much free space the crew should have, actual materials used and the actual construction methods employed as well as dozens of other factors would all have an effect on the mass per unit of volume yet you want the game to completely ignore these very real things and have them all be the same why is that good?