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Author Topic: Observations and Suggestions  (Read 12527 times)

TrashMan

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Re: Observations and Suggestions
« Reply #15 on: January 08, 2015, 04:34:35 PM »

Carriers and the battleships designed around the same time had roughly similar crew complements,

Except they didn't.
Air crew IS part of the carrier crew. You can't not count them.

Carriers always have and always will require more crew than other ship types.
Hell your own examples proves it.
New carriers have even bigger crews than old ones, while other ships crew complements went down! Aircraft are maintainance hogs. ESPECIALLY modern ones.
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angrytigerp

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Re: Observations and Suggestions
« Reply #16 on: January 08, 2015, 04:54:27 PM »

Carriers and the battleships designed around the same time had roughly similar crew complements,

Except they didn't.
Air crew IS part of the carrier crew. You can't not count them.

Carriers always have and always will require more crew than other ship types.
Hell your own examples proves it.
New carriers have even bigger crews than old ones, while other ships crew complements went down! Aircraft are maintainance hogs. ESPECIALLY modern ones.

Yes and no. Take, for example, my ship, an LPD. You might say "oh, well, without Marines it's useless!" Except we can still embark an air squadron (which requires considerably less than the Marines), and with the 'normal' crew, still engage threats, as a last resort, with our cannons, LMGs, and RAMs, not to mention the capability of embarked Ospreys to bring a decent amount of firepower themselves.

In SS, this is even more accurate, as many of the game's carriers have passable combat capability in and of themselves. Like the LPD I serve on, you wouldn't want them in the frontlines against a true warship, but they can still DO things.

And I posit once again that you are far too focused on current standards for the requirements of SS's theoretical air wing personnel. In fact, Aeson made a great point in that an Iowa-Class battleship -- ostensibly the SAME SHIP -- plummeting by 1/3 by its lattermost days of service, given more and more automation and newer technology reducing the number of positions to fill. Yes, we're talking about a combatant ship, and aircraft require far more personnel per chassis then, say, per gun on an Iowa, but I say once again that in an era of Autofacs churning out chassis like there's no tomorrow, I can't reasonably believe that we need to account for having dozens of personnel working for days on end on repairing a single fighter, as is the case for something like an F/A-18.
« Last Edit: January 08, 2015, 04:58:49 PM by angrytigerp »
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Aeson

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Re: Observations and Suggestions
« Reply #17 on: January 08, 2015, 07:10:15 PM »

Carriers and the battleships designed around the same time had roughly similar crew complements,

Except they didn't.
Air crew IS part of the carrier crew. You can't not count them.
Except that they really actually did have roughly the same crew sizes. USS Essex (CV9), 2600 crew, commissioned 1942; USS Iowa (BB61), 151 officers + 2637 enlisted = 2788 crew, commissioned 1943; USS Hornet (CV8), complement 2217, commissioned 1941; USS North Carolina (BB55), complement 2339, commissioned 1941; HMS Ark Royal, complement ~1500, commissioned 1938; HMS Nelson, complement 1361, commissioned 1927; HMS King George V, complement ~1300-1600, commissioned 1940; HMS . USS. Crew size is not all that significantly different, especially if, as Starsector does, you do not count fighter and bomber crews and pilots towards the carrier's crew. Yeah, I guess you're right, those look like completely, entirely different crew sizes for carrier-type and battleship-type capital ships of the same eras and commissioned by the same nations. Perhaps you shouldn't compare capital ships which were new in the 1940s to ships which were new in the 1970s? Especially when one of the ships (conveniently, the one which is of the type that you're trying to argue requires significantly larger crews) is significantly larger than the other?

You've also missed one of the points of my post - you went "gee, look at that, a Nimitz-class carrier has roughly three times the crew complement of an Iowa-class battleship," and neglected to recognize that the battleship was a lot smaller than the ship you're comparing it against. Based on the beam and keel dimensions that Wikipedia lists for the Nimitz-class carriers and Iowa-class battleships, the Nimitz-class has about 70% more deck area at the water line than the Iowa-class does. Based on the displacements that Wikipedia lists, the Nimitz-class carriers have at least 72% more mass, and may have more than double the mass depending on which displacements you choose to look at, suggesting that the Nimitz-class carriers have significantly more internal volume since the battleships in all likelihood have a greater average density. Beyond that, you haven't looked at how capital ship crew sizes seem to be related to the size of the ship:  Iowa-class battleships at the time of introduction had crews of about 2700 people; Nimitz-class carriers have crews approximately twice that size, but the ship's beam and keel dimensions are roughly 30% greater and its displacement is roughly double that of the Iowa-class battleship. If you look at the HMS King George V and compare it to the HMS Revenge, you will see something rather similar - HMS King George V has roughly 41% greater displacement and ~18% greater beam and keel dimensions, and has a listed crew complement roughly 40% to 70% larger than that of the HMS Revenge. HMS Nelson had nearly 90% greater displacement with beam and keel dimensions each roughly 30% greater than those of the HMS Dreadnought, and had a crew complement one and a half to two times larger than that of the HMS Dreadnought. USS Iowa (BB61) had roughly 40% greater displacement and was nearly 42% longer and 10% wider than the USS Colorado (BB45), and carried about 2.6 times as large a crew. Would you look at that? Four pairs of capital ships which all entered service roughly 20 years apart, all of which show similar increases in dimensions and crew requirements to your comparison between Nimitz-class carriers and Iowa-class battleships! It's almost like bigger ships have roughly proportionately larger crews! Who would have guessed?
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TrashMan

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Re: Observations and Suggestions
« Reply #18 on: January 09, 2015, 05:31:07 AM »

Except that they really actually did have roughly the same crew sizes. USS Essex (CV9), 2600 crew, commissioned 1942; USS Iowa (BB61), 151 officers + 2637 enlisted = 2788 crew, commissioned 1943; USS Hornet (CV8), complement 2217, commissioned 1941; USS North Carolina (BB55), complement 2339, commissioned 1941; HMS Ark Royal, complement ~1500, commissioned 1938; HMS Nelson, complement 1361, commissioned 1927; HMS King George V, complement ~1300-1600, commissioned 1940;

Older aircraft carrier are smaller than those of today - even thought the number of aircraft they carry didn't change much (60-70, and today we have 70-80).
The Iowa itself was the biggest battleship the US had, almost the size of a carrier. 276 meters in length, that is a LOT. And yes, carrier have a lot of volume and mass. They kinda have to since internal hangars require a LOT Of space. All that hull and structural support, plus all the equipment and supplies, and aircraft - of course a carrier is gonna have a huge tonnage, even a small one.

I'm not sure where you get your numbers.
Midway has a 4,104 complement, Essex has  2,170 (ship), 870 (air wing), 160 (flag) = 3000+, Forrestal has 4378, Wasp (small carrier) has 2,167

Oh, look at the Nimitz:
    Ship's company: 3,200, Air wing: 2,480

I bolded for a comparison with the older carrier. So even tough the number of aircraft carrier barely increased, the number of air crew required skyrocketed!

Quote
It's almost like bigger ships have roughly proportionately larger crews! Who would have guessed?

You are honestly telling me that ship size is the only crew indicator? That purpose, equipment and other factors are irrelevant?
You DO realize that the biggest tankers in the world, bigger than Nimitz in length, have a crew of roughly 40 people?

You also do realize that modern aircraft like the F-22 spend more time in maintainance then in the air?
"The United States' top fighter jet, the Lockheed Martin F-22, has recently required more than 30 hours of maintenance for every hour in the skies, pushing its hourly cost of flying to more than $44,000, a far higher figure than for the warplane it replaces, confidential Pentagon test results show. "
Seriously, go talk to air maintainance crews. They will all tell you how older aircraft are in terms of work-load and logistics far better.

I have yet to see that high-tech has ever caused reduced maintainance. If anything, cutting-edge tech is fickety, temperamental and prone to failures even at best of times. Your old car could be quickly fixed in any old car repair shop. These fancy new ones? You need to bring them to a special, authorized and certified shop and then wait for days for them to repair it. Diagnostic tool can help, but only up to a point.
I for one don't believe in a magical technology wand that will undo maintainance.

So when you tell me that aircraft carriers don't require more crew than battleship, I can only laugh.
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SafariJohn

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Re: Observations and Suggestions
« Reply #19 on: January 09, 2015, 06:22:19 AM »

High tech cars do have reduced maintenance. My dad owns and operates a preventive maintenance business for cars (AKA oil changes and things like that). It used to be that cars could safely go 3,000 miles on an oil change, but now they can go 10,000 miles or more. Other things like improved gas mileage mean cars are cheaper to operate.

The problem with new cars is that they have numerous extra features the dealers convince you to buy. Obviously that drives the price up. Sure, they still have a lot of hard-to-work-on computers even without that, but many of the expensive high tech stuff that often needs to be repaired is simply convenience stuff. GPS, Bluetooth for your phone, and other things that are luxuries.
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Aeson

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Re: Observations and Suggestions
« Reply #20 on: January 09, 2015, 04:07:40 PM »

Older aircraft carrier are smaller than those of today - even thought the number of aircraft they carry didn't change much (60-70, and today we have 70-80).
The Iowa itself was the biggest battleship the US had, almost the size of a carrier. 276 meters in length, that is a LOT. And yes, carrier have a lot of volume and mass. They kinda have to since internal hangars require a LOT Of space. All that hull and structural support, plus all the equipment and supplies, and aircraft - of course a carrier is gonna have a huge tonnage, even a small one.
And it entered service 30 years before the Nimitz-class carrier, which was 23% longer and 133% wider in maximum dimension; even using the waterline dimensions for the Nimitz, it's still more than 17% longer and nearly 24% wider, which puts the minimum difference in bounding area at about 44% more area for the Nimitz-class. Meanwhile, the type of fleet carrier that entered service at the same time as the Iowa-class battleship, the Essex-class, had a crew complement which was comparable to that of the Iowa, whether you use my numbers from Wikipedia or your numbers from wherever the hell you got yours. ~2800 men on an Iowa is not significantly different from 2600, 2170 + 870 (~9% more total personnel), 2170 + 870 + 160 (~15% more total personnel), or 3100 (~11% more total personnel) on an Essex, when the Essexes were up to ~36% wider (but ~16% narrower at the waterline) and ~2% shorter than the Iowas were. The Essex-class carriers are far more comparable in size to the Iowa-class battleships than the Nimitz-class carriers are, they're far more comparable in terms of the era in which the ships were actually both modern capital ships, they're far more comparable in time of introduction and service, and they show little significant difference in crew size. There is little evidence within Starsector that the ships of each era are of significantly different scales; in fact, the vast majority of Starsector's ships within any given class are very similar in scale and especially sprite bounding area.

If the argument were over the degree of logistical support that Astrals require as opposed to Onslaughts, then your comparison of the Nimitz-class carriers to the ~40% smaller and ~30 years older Iowa-class battleships might be appropriate (though even that is debatable; the sprite sizes of Starsector vessels make it seem likely that the size of any given type of ship has remained roughly constant throughout the entire period for which we have example vessels, whereas real-world modern naval vessels have been growing in size for more than a century, with plenty of examples of capital ships roughly doubling the size of ships in the same category and two decades older, and this growth in scale hasn't been restricted to capital ships - modern US Navy destroyers are comparable in size to WWII-era cruisers, and if you want to go back far enough they're also comparable in size to capital ships such as the 1906 HMS Dreadnought). However, the argument is over the degree of logistical support all of Starsector's carriers require to all of Starsector's other ships, including those vessels which are of the same design era or generation, and there's no way in hell that I'll buy that Astrals are to Paragons what Nimitzes are to Iowas. As far as size goes, the sprite bounding area for the Astral is only 17% greater than that for the Paragon, whereas the bounding area for the footprint of a Nimitz is ~69% greater than the bounding area for the footprint of an Iowa, which suggests that the Nimitzes are relatively much larger compared to the Iowas than the Astrals are to the Paragons; the mass attribute listed in ship_data.csv also supports this conclusion, as while the displacement of the Nimitz-class carriers roughly doubles that of the Iowa-class battleships, the mass of the Paragon-class battleships is listed as 3500 to the Astral-class carriers' 3000. As far as time of introduction goes, Astrals and Paragons appear to be of the same design generation, with each ship having many of the features characteristic of the late high-tech period, such as highly-efficient shield generators with deep flux reserves and excellent venting for the armament, relatively thin armor and weak hulls for ships of their class, and somewhat better speed and maneuverability than older ships in the same class (not that there's that much to compare against, as the Onslaught is the only battleship to compare the Paragon against and the Astral is the only carrier at the capital level). As far as crew levels go, the Astral-class shows little difference between itself and the other heavy capital ships in terms of capacity in combination with significantly lower levels of required crew even if a significant fighter group's requirements are added to that of the carrier, with 50 less crew required than is necessary for the capital ships with the next-smallest minimum crew (both of which are battlecruisers), and 100 or more fewer crew required than either of the battleships; the minimum difference of 50 crew is sufficient for 8 wings of Tridents and Piranhas and Warthogs, or 25 wings of Thunders and Longbows, either of which seems to me an ample fighter group for an Astral's six flight decks.

All of this suggests that if you're looking for real-world capital ships which are analogous to Starsector's capital ships, you should be looking no later than the end of the second world war for your examples, as the Astral and the Paragon appear to be contemporary designs built on a very similar scale, similar to the USS Essex and the USS Iowa, or the HMS Ark Royal and the HMS King George V, or the HMS Courageous and the HMS Hood, or the USS Yorktown and the USS North Carolina, all of which are examples of ships built at about the same time, all of which are of about the same size by bounding rectangle when compared to the other class in the pair, and all of which have similar crew requirements to the other class in the pair. The USS Nimitz and the USS Iowa are very much not contemporary designs and are very much not built on a similar scale, and, as might be expected, have very different crew requirements.

You are honestly telling me that ship size is the only crew indicator? That purpose, equipment and other factors are irrelevant?
You DO realize that the biggest tankers in the world, bigger than Nimitz in length, have a crew of roughly 40 people?
Certainly the ship's role is a factor in its crew size, and that factor can potentially be significant. However, comparing modern cargo ships to modern warships instead of comparing one type of modern warship to another type of (vaguely) modern warship is taking this to a ridiculous extreme, as cargo ships do not typically have even remotely the same purpose as warships and as such have very different requirements for the amount and type of equipment, and relatedly the size of the crew, required to serve adequately in their designed role. Comparing cargo ships to warships to estimate crew requirements based on ship size is like comparing eighteen wheelers to main battle tanks to estimate crew requirements based on vehicle mass - it's entirely by luck if you arrive at vaguely the correct number, as the types of vehicles being compared are entirely unrelated.

Beyond that, the difference in crew size between the Nimitz-class carriers and the Iowa-class battleships is roughly the same as the difference between two types of battleships whose dimensions differ by similar degrees. As such, ~100% more men on a carrier ~70% larger than the battleship whose crew you're comparing against is not a particularly unexpected result - you see similar increases in crew sizes when comparing types of battleships with similar disparities in size. As soon as you come up with a rational explanation for why I should pay attention to your example of two ships which are not even remotely contemporary designs and which are not particularly similar in size to one another rather than my examples of contemporary designs with similar dimensions, I'll listen. Until then, though, I regard your argument as being based on a flawed analogy.

I'm not sure where you get your numbers.
All of my numbers came from Wikipedia's pages on the ship or ship class mentioned.

Older aircraft carrier are smaller than those of today - even thought the number of aircraft they carry didn't change much (60-70, and today we have 70-80).
...
Midway has a 4,104 complement, Essex has  2,170 (ship), 870 (air wing), 160 (flag) = 3000+, Forrestal has 4378, Wasp (small carrier) has 2,167

Oh, look at the Nimitz:
    Ship's company: 3,200, Air wing: 2,480

I bolded for a comparison with the older carrier. So even tough the number of aircraft carrier barely increased, the number of air crew required skyrocketed!
...
You also do realize that modern aircraft like the F-22 spend more time in maintainance then in the air?
Would you mind providing a reason for why I should care that modern aircraft carriers carry ~30 men per aircraft while WWII-era carriers carried ~10 men per aircraft, or that modern aircraft spend significantly more time being maintained than WWII-era aircraft do, or that modern aircraft are typically significantly larger than WWII-era aircraft are, when Starsector is based on the WWII-era warships and aircraft, when Starsector's fighters appear for the most part to be the same size over all eras by sprite bounding area (okay, fine, the Xyphos is a bit large at ~15% larger than the Gladius and ~50% larger than the Broadsword, but the Wasp is only 65% the size of the Talon and the Dagger is only 87% the size of the Piranha; if you classify the Xyphos, Wasp, Longbow, Dagger, and Trident as high-tech, the Gladius, Thunder, Warthog, and Piranha as midline, and the Broadsword, Mining Pod, and Talon as low-tech, the average midline fighter sprite bounding area is 1058, the average high-tech fighter sprite bounding area is 1037, and the average low-tech fighter sprite bounding area is 810, and if you shift the Piranha to low-tech the midline average increases to 1071 and the low-tech average increases to 865, so it's not at all clear that the high-tech fighters are in any way as significantly larger than the midline fighters as modern fighters are relative to WWII-era fighters), or when it's not at all clear that the discrepancy in the age of the designs of the Astral and Paragon is at all similar to the discrepancy in the age of the designs of the Nimitz and Iowa (as I said earlier, visual cues and ship statistics suggest that the Astral and Paragon designs are contemporaries of one another, whereas the designs of the Nimitz and Iowa are separated by 30 years, a power plant of a type which didn't exist at the time the first was designed but which had been used in a preceding design at the time the latter was designed, and a significantly different fleet doctrine).

Beyond that, the Astral is the oldest (and only) known capital ship which is a dedicated carrier; the next newest dedicated carrier design known in the in-universe history of Starsector is classed as a cruiser, and the only other dedicated carriers are both classed as destroyers, which suggests that the Astral was the first carrier designed to serve as the centerpiece of a major fleet in the Starsector universe in much the same way that a Paragon or an Odyssey might serve as a centerpiece of a major fleet. The other carriers all appear to be intended for secondary roles, providing fighter cover and scouting for the more traditional heavy warships which form the main part of the fleet or serving as convoy escorts while more valuable warships are employed elsewhere. This is not at all dissimilar to the situation in the late-interwar period and WWII, where carriers were just starting to be the centerpieces of fleets while the more traditional heavy warships shifted towards becoming escorts. Earlier carriers had been viewed as support units for more traditional heavy warships, but by the end of the second world war it would be the heavy warships which were the support units for carriers, and this, it seems, is about where things stand in Starsector - prior to the Collapse, naval doctrine was shifting to a carrier-centric model from a battleship-centric model, and as technological development appears to have, for the most part, frozen since then in the universe of Starsector, or at least in the region of the universe covered by the game, naval doctrine is stuck in something not terribly dissimilar to late-interwar and WWII-era real-world naval doctrine, where some favor the battleship as the primary capital ship, others favor the carrier, and others favor whatever they have or can afford to build. The Essex-class and Iowa-class are of such an era, whereas the Nimitz-class came during an era in which the carrier had clearly won.

Please, enlighten me as to why I should acknowledge your analogy as the superior analogy when, as far as I can tell, everything about the carriers of Starsector favors my own analogy more than yours.
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Velox

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Re: Observations and Suggestions
« Reply #21 on: January 09, 2015, 06:06:52 PM »


Hey you guys!

I've been reading the conversation and really enjoying the insights into naval operations and thoughts on crew - the relationships between combat personnel, maintenance and operations, handling of bleeding-edge technology, and the like!

But, also, you're totally arguing, and it'd be awfully nice if you'd stop.

We're talking about a setting in which humanity has ships that travel faster than light and where we have transformed entire planetary ecologies.  Moving from the surface of a planet to orbit is so trivial that it's never even mentioned, huge chunks of machinery can literally teleport from place to place or even just disappear from reality for a bit, and millions upon millions of people live on worlds build by the little dude from Dig-Dug.  We're practically knife-fighting with million-ton dreadnoughts and fighting WWII-style fighter rat-races with ships carrying power sources powerful enough to do that IN ZERO GRAVITY.  None of these things have much in common with real life, at all.

A little bit of consistency is a good thing because it makes us feel like we're there a little bit, and - forget guns, who wouldn't want to bring a million-ton dreadnought to a knife fight?  But any shred of total-organizational-unity went *pliff* when the gates went down and the chaos started.  Maybe some carriers have tiny crews because they consist of vast caverns with one dude with a megaphone in the middle yelling "OK, ROBOTS, LAUNCH FOUR HUNDRED FIGHTERS FROM THE AFT TELEPORTER!" and maybe some have huge-ass crews because it takes a group of 20 people in fancy helmets to initialize the neural-nets built into each of the fightercraft so that they can perform ridiculously well, and also there's a whole group of guys with anger issues talking to the missile guidance systems to make them SO DAMN ANGRY that they will practically exceed the laws of nature just to BLOW SOMETHING UP DAMMIT.

Maybe you've got battleships with a single crew-member because he was wired into it 150 years ago and spent a century out in an Oort cloud making it respond as if it were literally his own flesh, and maybe you've got battleships crammed full of eager torpedo pilots who get teleported back to the ship moments before the antimatter bomb they used their 30 years' experience to fly through PD without a scratch hits someone's hull.  Maybe some drones don't land for servicing at all but fly directly into a grinder connected to a high-speed autofactory that spits a brand new one out the other end and into a launch tube?  Maybe Luddic AI-targeted turrets perform astounding feats of superhuman accuracy as long as each has a 20-person choir filling their electronic brains with beautiful inspiration and purity of purpose?

Analogies are great for starting points but they make terrible and uncompromising slave-drivers who pit friend against friend for twisted s**ts and giggles if you give them a chance.  Don't try to figure out which ship takes how much crew based on how its size compares to something in a similar way that something else's size compares to yet another something else's size.  The real world is not the boss - nay, not even the advisor - of Future Space Awesome.  Figure out what works for balance and fun, and then figure out what AWESOME reason explains it.
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TrashMan

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Re: Observations and Suggestions
« Reply #22 on: January 10, 2015, 03:30:32 AM »

Older aircraft carrier are smaller than those of today - even thought the number of aircraft they carry didn't change much (60-70, and today we have 70-80).
...
Midway has a 4,104 complement, Essex has  2,170 (ship), 870 (air wing), 160 (flag) = 3000+, Forrestal has 4378, Wasp (small carrier) has 2,167

Oh, look at the Nimitz:
    Ship's company: 3,200, Air wing: 2,480

I bolded for a comparison with the older carrier. So even tough the number of aircraft carrier barely increased, the number of air crew required skyrocketed!
...
You also do realize that modern aircraft like the F-22 spend more time in maintainance then in the air?
Would you mind providing a reason for why I should care that modern aircraft carriers carry ~30 men per aircraft while WWII-era carriers carried ~10 men per aircraft, or that modern aircraft spend significantly more time being maintained than WWII-era aircraft do, or that modern aircraft are typically significantly larger than WWII-era aircraft are, when Starsector is based on the WWII-era warships and aircraft,

So the numbers don't fit your idea/notion, therefore, why should you care?
Ok, I'll bite.
Tell me why *I* should care about anything you written above? You just seem to be repeating the same old "but Nimitz is bigger and made later". Who the frak cares? The Iowa was modernized and in active service untill recently. And you got other ships to compare to, not just the Iowa.

You are going so far as to use SPRITE LENGTH in a game as to make an argument.
Also, where is your proof that SS is based on WW21 and thus only that maters? What, you think technological progression doesn't matter? You think the history of changing requirements doesn't matter?

So even tough big ship = big crew (generally. You acknowledge that, but then immediately downplay the tanker example.)
so even tough aircraft becoming more complex and advanced has produced more requirement for maintaiance, and thus the AIR CREW numbers have been increasing - you want to ignore that too "because SS is WW2". Well ,when you point out high-tech fighters with energy beams and complex electronics in WW2, you can make that argument.


Quote
Please, enlighten me as to why I should acknowledge your analogy as the superior analogy when, as far as I can tell, everything about the carriers of Starsector favors my own analogy more than yours.

It does? Only in your head.
Let me quote you back "I regard your argument(s) as being based on a flawed analogy."
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TrashMan

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Re: Observations and Suggestions
« Reply #23 on: January 10, 2015, 03:32:48 AM »

We're talking about a setting in which humanity has ships that travel faster than light and where we have transformed entire planetary ecologies.  Moving from the surface of a planet to orbit is so trivial that it's never even mentioned, huge chunks of machinery can literally teleport from place to place or even just disappear from reality for a bit, and millions upon millions of people live on worlds build by the little dude from Dig-Dug.  We're practically knife-fighting with million-ton dreadnoughts and fighting WWII-style fighter rat-races with ships carrying power sources powerful enough to do that IN ZERO GRAVITY.  None of these things have much in common with real life, at all.

Because Space Magic?
Frankly I hate space magic. It's lazy and dishonest and does not make for great depth.
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Histidine

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Re: Observations and Suggestions
« Reply #24 on: January 10, 2015, 04:41:07 AM »

EDIT: removed the rudest stuff

Ugh, this thread is a textbook example of how to ruin a true point with rudeness and illogical arguments for it. The most egregious examples:

You are honestly telling me that ship size is the only crew indicator? That purpose, equipment and other factors are irrelevant?
You DO realize that the biggest tankers in the world, bigger than Nimitz in length, have a crew of roughly 40 people?
- Huge strawman.
- The fact that battleships and carriers both require more crew than supertankers does not say anything about whether carriers require more crew than battleships.
- Comparing a warship of any kind to a civilian bulk carrier is so obviously apples-to-orangutans that you should be ashamed for even making it.

Quote
I have yet to see that high-tech has ever caused reduced maintainance. If anything, cutting-edge tech is fickety, temperamental and prone to failures even at best of times. Your old car could be quickly fixed in any old car repair shop. These fancy new ones? You need to bring them to a special, authorized and certified shop and then wait for days for them to repair it. Diagnostic tool can help, but only up to a point.
I for one don't believe in a magical technology wand that will undo maintainance.
- Conflating specialisation/tools required with maintenance required
- Conflating time taken for repair with maintenance required, and not even controlling for things like the workshop's workload against capacity or using a more direct metric like man-hours spent
- How do you account for the Iowa-class losing a full third of its crew as it was modernized?

And you got other ships to compare to, not just the Iowa.
Since Aeson is the one posting comparisons other than Nimitz : Iowa and not you, how do you get away with making this demand?


Now, I did some back-of-envelope comparisons involving more modern ships (not to battleships, since they haven't been built for a long time, but to cruisers) - Liaoning, Clemenceau, Charles de Gaulle, Giuseppe Garibaldi on the carrier side and Ticonderoga, Kirov, Slava on the cruiser side - that do in fact support your point (IIRC the carriers had something like 0.05X people per tonne of standard displacement inclusive of air wing, Ticonderoga and Slava were 0.04X, and Kirov was a mere 0.029). You could, you know, do such a thing and post the results instead of snarking at others.
« Last Edit: January 10, 2015, 05:07:10 AM by Histidine »
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Megas

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Re: Observations and Suggestions
« Reply #25 on: January 10, 2015, 06:37:34 AM »

Quote
Because Space Magic?
Frankly I hate space magic. It's lazy and dishonest and does not make for great depth.
Just about anything involving space in entertainment is fiction and/or fantasy, like it or not.  People who want to write a story or game that aims to be realistic should avoid space unless it is a simulator.

Starsector breaks reality in enough ways, but that's okay.  All that matters is firing flashy weapons and watching ships go boom!
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Aeson

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Re: Observations and Suggestions
« Reply #26 on: January 10, 2015, 06:56:27 AM »

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You are going so far as to use SPRITE LENGTH in a game as to make an argument.
Why do I bring sprite size into it? Because sprite size is the only thing we have indicating the relative size of the ships as compared to one another, aside from the vague categorization of various ship types as 'battleships' or 'heavy cruisers' or 'light carriers.' I will grant that the sprite sizes are not necessarily a good indication of the actual sizes of the ships, or potentially even the relative sizes, if they are not done to scale with one another, but weapon sprites have the same scale regardless of the ship mounting them unless I am very much mistaken, which suggests that the ship sprites are at a constant scale, and that therefore the relative sizes of the sprites can give a general idea of the relative sizes of the ships in question.

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The Iowa was modernized and in active service untill recently. And you got other ships to compare to, not just the Iowa.
It is true that the Iowa was modernized. It is also true that even after its modernization it was an obsolete unit which could have been mostly replaced by lighter, more modern units with little loss of capability.

Histidine helped slightly with providing examples; I'll help a little bit more: California-class cruisers entered service with the US Navy in the mid-1970s (1974, according to Wikipedia), making them contemporaries with the Nimitz-class carriers (which also entered service in the mid-1970s). The Nimitz-class carriers have ~0.054 personnel (ship's complement + air wing) per ton of displacement while the California-class cruisers have ~0.055 crew per ton of displacement. The Californias are considerably smaller than the Nimitzes, of course, at ~half the length and a little less than half the beam (using the waterline dimension for the Nimitz) or a about a quarter the beam (using the flight deck dimension for the Nimitz) and a tenth the tonnage. Nevertheless, this continues to suggest that the crew for a battleship contemporary with the Nimitz and built on a similar scale would have been largely similar to that of the carrier, as does Histidine's number for the Ticonderogas (based on the Ticonderoga number it'd be more like a ~20-25% discrepancy in crew size than the ~10-15% difference in crew size between the Iowas and the Essexes, but this is still far short of your ~200% larger total complement apparently simply because "it's a carrier and they require more stuff than battleships do," with no consideration apparently given to the size of the ships in question).

So even tough big ship = big crew (generally. You acknowledge that, but then immediately downplay the tanker example.)
so even tough aircraft becoming more complex and advanced has produced more requirement for maintaiance, and thus the AIR CREW numbers have been increasing - you want to ignore that too "because SS is WW2". Well ,when you point out high-tech fighters with energy beams and complex electronics in WW2, you can make that argument.
Directional radar is an "energy beam" and requires relatively complex electronics, especially for the time period, in order to function, and yet there are several types of fighter equipped with one or more varieties of airborne radar which were in service during the second world war, on both sides of the conflict. Look up the night fighter variants of many aircraft from the mid-1940s onwards, and they'll be equipped with airborne radars. Examples include variants of the Messerschmitt Bf-110, de Havilland Mosquito, Junkers Ju-88, Lockheed P-38 Lightning, Gruman F6F Hellcat, and Northrup P-61 Black Widow, among many others.

Of course, if by "energy beam" you mean a weaponized laser or science fiction's "plasma" weapons, I would point out to you that your vaunted modern fighter jets fail to meet this requirement just as much as the WWII-era aircraft do.

Beyond that, "high-tech" is relative. P-51 Mustangs and B-29 Superfortresses were "high-tech" at the time of introduction and are "high-tech" relative to older types; so too were all-metal monoplanes and aircraft which used control surfaces rather than wing-warping, or which could even get off the ground, at various times. F-14 Tomcats are "high-tech" relative to F-86 Sabres and obsolete by comparison to F-22 Raptors. Where is this magical marker which distinguishes that which is "high-tech" from that which is not?

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Also, where is your proof that SS is based on WW21 and thus only that maters?
From http://fractalsoftworks.com/2013/12/30/ships-stories/:
"When I was first drawing up spaceships for Starsector we determined what to make based mostly on what felt right according to the conceit of idealized WW2-era naval combat in space."

It's right there in the first sentence of the blog post.

However, I would not say that only WWI-WWII matters - in that, you are placing words into my mouth. (As for why I said that you should look no later than the end of WWII for capital ships to compare to one another - have any non-carrier capital ships similar in size to contemporary carriers in service with the same nation entered service with any navy in the past ~60 years? The Kirovs are a lot smaller than the Kuznetsov, and the ballistic missile subs tend to be even smaller relative to contemporary carriers, and I cannot really think of much else which might qualify as a capital ship; you could scale the cruisers like Histidine suggests of course, but you've already objected to that with your cargo ship "counterargument.") I would, however, say that WWI-WWII era naval combat and naval doctrine, rather than modern naval combat and naval doctrine, would appear to be the dominant inspiration for Starsector's combat model. Missiles are a specialty weapon rather than a primary armament. Carriers have not yet become the dominant capital ships, though it would appear that they might have been moving towards such a position. Fighters tend towards the more specialized types typical of the WWII era rather than the more generalized fighter-bombers typical of modern navies, and for the most part only the bomber types are a serious threat to capital ships and other heavy warships. Warships can actually expect to engage one another with non-missile weapons, often not long after they enter missile ranges of one another. Guns (including the various PD lasers), not missiles, are the standard anti-fighter and anti-missile weapon at all ranges, rather than the modern model where missiles are preferred for medium and long ranges and guns are reserved mostly for very short range defense.
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Velox

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Re: Observations and Suggestions
« Reply #27 on: January 10, 2015, 05:47:02 PM »

We're talking about a setting in which humanity has ships that travel faster than light and where we have transformed entire planetary ecologies.  Moving from the surface of a planet to orbit is so trivial that it's never even mentioned, huge chunks of machinery can literally teleport from place to place or even just disappear from reality for a bit, and millions upon millions of people live on worlds build by the little dude from Dig-Dug.  We're practically knife-fighting with million-ton dreadnoughts and fighting WWII-style fighter rat-races with ships carrying power sources powerful enough to do that IN ZERO GRAVITY.  None of these things have much in common with real life, at all.

Because Space Magic?
Frankly I hate space magic. It's lazy and dishonest and does not make for great depth.

OK - to rephrase, then: it's not "space magic", it's that vessels in Starsector have about as much in common with the ships and concepts you're arguing about as an F-22 has with a paper airplane.  Yeah, future tech should be consistent as much as possible to make for a realistic-feeling setting.  However, having a heated argument about how well that consistency holds based on your own theory about which fruit is better analogy for a model T is pointless and - frankly - very rude to a community that overall gets along very well.  If you just want to bicker, please take it outside.
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angrytigerp

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Re: Observations and Suggestions
« Reply #28 on: January 10, 2015, 06:28:17 PM »

We're talking about a setting in which humanity has ships that travel faster than light and where we have transformed entire planetary ecologies.  Moving from the surface of a planet to orbit is so trivial that it's never even mentioned, huge chunks of machinery can literally teleport from place to place or even just disappear from reality for a bit, and millions upon millions of people live on worlds build by the little dude from Dig-Dug.  We're practically knife-fighting with million-ton dreadnoughts and fighting WWII-style fighter rat-races with ships carrying power sources powerful enough to do that IN ZERO GRAVITY.  None of these things have much in common with real life, at all.

Because Space Magic?
Frankly I hate space magic. It's lazy and dishonest and does not make for great depth.

A better term would be "Space Materials Sciences".

Ask people from 1900 to show you a container that's about as thin as paper, weighs not much more than that, is made of a translucent material, and is totally air-tight. They'd look at you like you've gone mad. Someone from 2014 (or more accurately, the late 40s/early 50s) would show you a Tupperware (or similar) container. Something far beyond the comprehension and capabilities of that past technology is an every-day, easily-produced commodity in the modern day.

The real kicker, here, is that the technology is a shifting scale.

To better attach this to the debate at hand... consider a handgun. Prior to the early 1800s, you would have had to find a trained blacksmith, who would have had to put forth dozens of man-hours (let's put this into an efficiency metric, rather than the "IT ONLY TOOK ONE OR TWO GUYs!" argument) to construct  parts for a gun. They've gotta melt down the metal, shape each part into its respective shapes, and form the final shape. THEN, they need to take those parts and match them together, including some fiddly little internal bits (although not nearly as much as modern trigger groups, for example). At the end of it, you'd have something like a flintlock, a simple, one-shot weapon that didn't have rifling, and was unable to handle great chamber pressures (and thus, powerful cartridges). Now, sometime in the 1800s, during the Industrial Revolution, the concept of interchangeable parts came to pass, and suddenly we were able to quickly die-cast dozens of gun parts in hours, and finishing the weapon a few hours on top of that. And even through to today, that standard remains present. Call it 20-ish hours from start to finish, you can manufacture anything from a piddly little .22 to a .30-06 or similar, given the equipment.

Now, with the proper equipment, a fully-functional M1911-style pistol can be constructed in just about 10 hours, 18 hours at the outside, and being constructed by a precision machine, you don't need to go back and do a lot of finishing on it to get everything lined up just right, provided your initial blueprint was sound.

And, to bring it all back to SS: yes, the initial design and construction of that equipment took a long time, sure. But do you think that, in a world (by canon) full of autofacs, that you have to have SO many people on-board... what, building new autofactories every time they need to use it? Nope, it's already made, all you need is someone to run it. You call it "Space Magic" derisively; well, I bet an 18th century gunsmith would say much the same of a 3D Printer, but for all they decry it as "impossible" and it involving technologies they don't understand, it does do the job MORE efficiently than that same gunsmith.

And similarly, saying that modern aircraft require a huge complement of crew is assuming automation literally stops, right now, at its current rate of progression. For your vaunted modern-carrier statistics, you're assuming that a future spaceship is going to need:

- ABHs to guide aircraft around a crowded flight deck -- you're telling me a futuristic spaceship doesn't, say, have its fighters tucked in racks hanging on the bulkhead, slotted into their launch positions by a crane system? No, Alex didn't either, but it sounds as logical as anything else
- ABFs to drive the bowsers and/or put the fuel into the spacecraft -- Unless fighters need a stock of promethium (and, as far as the game tells us, it's only needed for hyperspace fuel), this entire rating is nixed
- ABEs to setup, repair, and operate the launch and recovery systems -- presumably, these spacecraft probably launch via some magnetic impulse system. Nix the guys who have to calculate cat power and arrestor tension. Well, that's pretty much all of them.
- AOs to arm the fighters -- yeah, you might have one or two managing payloads, but I'm taking a guess here that you don't need groups of a dozen or so dudes manhandling a 500lb bomb into place anymore, yeah?

About the only aviation rates, actually, that would probably still be extant would be AMs (aviation mechanics), the guys who maintain the fighters' integrity (probably really important given the whole "vacuum of space thing"; AE (aviation ETs) for maintaining the no-doubt sophisticated sensor suites aboard these craft; and MAYBE ACs (air controllers), assuming some smart computer system doesn't do all the work for the airboss.

So with ABs completely cut out, and thus the vast majority of any modern carrier complement cut out, you have a handful of technical ratings left. I'd even posit that, despite someone (can't remember who) saying it quite cynically (once again, I'm discovering a pattern here), it might just be easier for the crew to feed fighters that are sufficiently busted into the autofacs for the sake of acquiring raw materials, and they DO try to hand-repair slightly-less damaged craft (accounting for being able to, in certain situations, see a fighter wing with one or two damaged craft).
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Histidine

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Re: Observations and Suggestions
« Reply #29 on: January 10, 2015, 09:35:10 PM »

it might just be easier for the crew to feed fighters that are sufficiently busted into the autofacs for the sake of acquiring raw materials
If we assume the Starsector game mechanics match the lore, they go even further: fighters seem to be one-use disposable items, like paper plates. A fighter that's launched and flies around for a bit without taking a scratch or firing a single shot costs the same amount CR (and thus supplies) as one that gets blown out of space (and not replaced by a carrier in the same engagement). Also note that fighters never have to undergo repairs.

I suppose making the fighters good enough to last for just one sortie does help a lot with reducing the logistical/economic impact of replacing frequent fighter losses in battle (I think a good analogy would be the Liberty ships from WWII, taken to the furthest possible extreme), but you'd think they'd at least recycle the ones that make it back for materials.
« Last Edit: January 10, 2015, 09:37:59 PM by Histidine »
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