Anyone else bothered by the size of the carrier launch in FE

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Nielk1
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Anyone else bothered by the size of the carrier launch in FE

Post by Nielk1 »

I was fixing up some FE stuff and sorting it, packaging it, etc (I've got a single folder that gives you Hadeans so far and actually made a full set of Imperial Hadean skins to fill out the gaps in the existing ones, so look forward to that) and I noticed, aside from the rude hacks used to make FE missions work, that the carrier launch makes the carrier look tiny. I mean, it's big, don't get me wrong, but it just feels way too small.

Is that thing scaled right? We actually have a way to check by comparing to the crashed carrier model from stock. Are the carriers really that small?

I would go have a look for myself but I'm at work so that will have to wait.

(Also, how does a carrier have the needed thrust to take off vertically like that, doesn't it need a booster or two? Concept art has the carrier landing on planets but it has never happened in game and beta assets show diagrams of classic Newtonian flight paths from Pluto to the dark planet, making classic physics look like the reigning paradigm.)
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Re: Anyone else bothered by the size of the carrier launch i

Post by Ded10c »

Yeah, that whole scene at the end of that mission is dodgy. The mission doesn't fit all that well with the prologue either. The whole mission feels shoehorned.

Also, that silo is horrible.
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Red Spot
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Re: Anyone else bothered by the size of the carrier launch i

Post by Red Spot »

Compare it to the carrier used in one of the last ISDF missions, the Condor seems roughly as high as the carrier itself is. Which by itself looks a bit strange to begin with, I'd imagine these carriers to be 'huge' and able to store several Condors. From that mission I got to believe it might not be able to store more than just 1 or 2 Condors.

Havent really compared that carrier to the one you're refering to, but that one is tiny for how big I thought it should be.
Perhaps at the time the devs just didnt spend a lot of time on it cause it is a non-functional craft.

For all I care it could be huge, but that again raises a few questions about why they would hide a carrier on the surface, in a subterainian storage.
Possibly it is a sort of smaller version carrier and several classes were used at the time, but that again doesnt really correspond with the story told, iirc.
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Re: Anyone else bothered by the size of the carrier launch i

Post by Zero Angel »

If you look at the size of the crashed ISDF carrier in the BZ2 campaign, you can appreciate how truly massive the carriers are. I never really paid it any heed in the FE mission, but even a smaller variant carrier should still be rather huge, given that it's transporting multiple recyclers (Intrepid, Vengeance, etc), condors, vehicles and at least a Company's (80–225) worth of soldiers.

That said, the cutscene at the end of the mission did a good job of portraying the launch even if it bugs your OCD a bit.
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Re: Anyone else bothered by the size of the carrier launch i

Post by Nielk1 »

I'm planning to correct what issues I can with that mission when I shift it over to C++ (going to do that for everything). Having the carrier at a sensible scale would be a good start, and its going to be hard to resist putting some sort of lift boosters on it or something for how fast that damn thing flew out of there.

Here's a question, is the carrier like a recycler? Can it build condors? Then why can't it built recyclers? And then look at how the condor itself looks, its a box on a clamp leaving what is actually a rather small body. Might the condors be stored in pieces?

I think the crashed carrier at the storyline split mission in stock is probably the only chance we have to get proper scale. Anything else, even the scene from the mission before where the condor is approaching the carrier, can't be trusted (but we might find that it is in fact correct after we compare it).

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I would like to fix its size, but I am concerned it might get to be TOO big. There is a bit of room to play with on that part of the map and even if its too big for that I can double the terrain area of the map and then have a chunk of it off map.

My mission to port FE to 1.3 in a careful and controlled manner, removing every piece of extra crap (my god so much) and packing up the bits nicely has turned into FE Redux from the sounds of it.
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Re: Anyone else bothered by the size of the carrier launch i

Post by Ded10c »

Build condors, perhaps. Build Recyclers, definitely not; the campaign points out several times that you barely have enough. There are three aboard when it takes off.

Frankly I'd be very, very tempted to either replace it with some Condors or put it horizontally on the horizon behind the base. It could also benefit from a cutscene showing the events on Core, or at least the StormPetrel passing through the wormhole.
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Zero Angel
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Re: Anyone else bothered by the size of the carrier launch i

Post by Zero Angel »

Nielk1 wrote:Here's a question, is the carrier like a recycler? Can it build condors? Then why can't it built recyclers? And then look at how the condor itself looks, its a box on a clamp leaving what is actually a rather small body. Might the condors be stored in pieces?
Carrier could be like a recycler for all we know, being a production/recycling of condors and starting units without necessarily having to carry everything all the time. But maybe it has to transport the recyclers themselves and cant fabricate them, given in the story it's stressed how the Vengeance is the last EDF recycler and if the EDF lose that then they're perma-hooped.

I've always assumed that there's some really convoluted process to recycler fabrication like rare metals or needing a huge facility to do something like nuclear fusion or particle acceleration or something like that to construct a recycler's 'core' hence you cant make recyclers build more recyclers or build a second recycler using a constructor.
Last edited by Zero Angel on Mon Nov 18, 2013 9:07 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Anyone else bothered by the size of the carrier launch i

Post by Red Spot »

No, imo it cant build as it doesnt have a direct link to scrap. If it would it would be able to reproduce parts and be able to produce segments of a new carrier, etc etc. Next to it, why would a recy need to deploy if a carrier can build anything it wants while in space, wouldnt it be much easier to get scrap safelly of planet and send new ships back down and use recy's only in secured areas?

In other words, it would somewhat break the lore of running dry on recy's. It should not be a problem as you would secure an amount of scrap on the carrier, build a few scavs, send them down to secure more scrap and produce new recy's safelly inside the carrier.

It wouldnt make much sense if a carrier would not be able to produce ships, etc, but that is basicly what the story tells us.

Edit: If it would be able to produce ships, its size might actually make sense though, you would not need to store much, just what you need to send down on the next mission .. and not forget to send enough scrap back up for the next mission .. just in case..
If it wouldnt be able to produce ships, you'd need a heck of a lot of storage space. There are missions where at least two condors land, and it is said they cary 3 recy's. Next to that you need at least 10+ sabre's, few scouts, probably a few heavier craft, scrap storage space .. and ofcourse room for all the groundpersonel and flightcrew. That would likelly make it larger than the large US carriers we see today (though it seems like the size of a smaller carrier).

Edit2: Concerning the Condor itself; I'd say these craft are basic spacetransport vehicles and the 'box' they carry allows for more functionallity. Like one type of box is to transport a few ships/single recy, and other would be more suited for transporting troops, while an other might be acting as a silo, etc.
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Re: Anyone else bothered by the size of the carrier launch i

Post by Nielk1 »

First note, I was being facetious with it being able to build recyclers.

Depending on what you look at, the 6 pods on the back of the carrier are either fuel storage, or biometal storage. If the carrier is able to use engines like modern BZ2 craft do, it's probably one in the same.

I would make a joke about a mission where you play on the carrier, making a tiny base in the cramped space and tapping biometal storage lines but after seeing the travesty of scale that is Star Craft do similar I want to avoid that at all costs (seriously, look at scale in starcraft, it literally makes NO SENSE).

It may be possible that the carrier in fact has no production capability but can use that of the recycler on board, or it may not.

Additionally, the reason you don't just make everything up in the carrier and ship it down is because it is too dangerous. It is simply far safer to establish a base with a small insertion team and then make all you need on site rather than risk your 'Flight of the Valkyries' getting shot down in whole. If a race was to use a drop pod system combined with some method of sending biometal up to the carrier in the form of energy, then building on the carrier would make sense. That was actually a design that was had for a brief time for Serenesis (one of around 20 different random gimmicks I threw at the author as ideas) before the author went ape-**** and said I was trying to control his mod after not touching it for a year and disappeared 'never' to return (until he popped up to donate his Serenesis stuff to CP2).


In the days of BZ1 the inability to fabricate made sense, you literally couldn't fit the recycler in a recycler, it had to be made in parts and assembled probably by hand.
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Re: Anyone else bothered by the size of the carrier launch i

Post by Zero Angel »

The 'recycler is too big to build with a recycler' argument doesnt make sense to me because if you look at an ISDF factory or bomber bay, they have way more mass than a recycler has, and even a constructor can build them.

However,what if to make liquid scrap usable using the current construction techniques, you had to use a catalyzing agent to convert liquid biometal into, say, biometal plasma that's capable of being shaped and molded however you pleased. Unfortunately the catalyzer/recycler module or whatever could not be constructed out of biometal so has to be constructed out of rare metals and maybe gases, things which CANNOT be fabricated with biometal alone and maybe you dont even want the central component to be made out of biometal at all because it would melt in the process of recycling or preparing scrap for use. Then it makes more sense why you can't fabricate recyclers, because otherwise if you could use garden-variety recs,facts,or cons's to fabricate more recys then it would cheapen the value of a recycler.
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Re: Anyone else bothered by the size of the carrier launch i

Post by Red Spot »

Zero Angel wrote:The 'recycler is too big to build with a recycler' argument doesnt make sense to me because if you look at an ISDF factory or bomber bay, they have way more mass than a recycler has, and even a constructor can build them.
Comparing that with todays engineers, constructors dont hold any of the material used to construct things, I should know and I am quite confidend I dont crap steel :)
I personally just see the cons as a representation of something supplying scrap while the cons actually molds it into whatever is build.
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Re: Anyone else bothered by the size of the carrier launch i

Post by AI_Unit »

Need to be careful what you fix too, I made some fixes the other day and caused a internal error. BZ isn't very mod compatible anymore unless the files are up to date with 1.3 6.4 which most of the FE files aren't.
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Re: Anyone else bothered by the size of the carrier launch i

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AI_Unit wrote:Need to be careful what you fix too, I made some fixes the other day and caused a internal error. BZ isn't very mod compatible anymore unless the files are up to date with 1.3 6.4 which most of the FE files aren't.
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Re: Anyone else bothered by the size of the carrier launch i

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Nielk1 wrote:
AI_Unit wrote:Need to be careful what you fix too, I made some fixes the other day and caused a internal error. BZ isn't very mod compatible anymore unless the files are up to date with 1.3 6.4 which most of the FE files aren't.
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Re: Anyone else bothered by the size of the carrier launch i

Post by Nielk1 »

I've mostly been digging in the assets as general systems. Next I start to link the missions to those assets OR their campaign specific variants. It is going to take a bit to get there.
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