According to the ingame ship information, the centurion, warthog, and bus are all 10m long. The vulture is 12m long. Now, go back and look at those wireframe pics again.

...

...

The cent isn't the only thing too small.

Also, can we get a render of the raptor's relative scale (when its done)?

So... hem... back on track...

Given the Cent and Thog have a sizeable CU capacity difference (1-2 compared to 8-18), shouldn't there be a larger size difference to them?

I always assumed the ship sizes were somewhat based on their CU capacity, this explaining the Valk being fatter than Cent, given it could hold 2-6 CUs.

Can we have some specs on the Raptor or are those not final?

'Coz I realize just now that I sent a massive PO ffor TPG and never got to read the fine print!

The cent mk2 can carry 11 cu methinks... or it could the last time I flew one.

The thing that doesn't make sense... is that the cent can carry more cargo than the Vult.

According to this page, you are correct.
http://www.vo-wiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Centurion

Yeah... and all vults can only carry 2 cu... and the rev C and IBG can carry more? like? how do you explain why the bigger one can't carry more?

well i was just looking at the collision models for the vulture and cent, and thought, why not make the wings a whole lot thinner on the vulture?

For all you dumbasses out there, I have not canceled my account in the hopes that the devs would do there job and implement some of these carrats that they keep dangling, but alas they have yet to show me anything but pictures, not even a wireframe. As for not having a say till I put my "dime" in, I've been putting my dime in since Sept of '04 so I DO have a say in this. Stick to the design plan, get the new ships in the game, and then maybe after you have some NEW content I could see a rebalancing warrented, but since you've been ignoring this for so long and you NOW decide to do it really is irritating, especially since it only takes a total of 10 minutes to fix. This game is going no where and as soon as everyone wakes up to that fact the better. It will forever live in obscurity!

"This is going to completely lock the track records in place making them unbeatable."

http://www.vo-wiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Race_tracks
<--- Those aren't gonna change.
Believe it or not the size of the ship matters once you get to a certain point.
(Not that anyone's at that point except me)
If you do this Inc, can you keep a small "racing version"?

:P

This is all because I beat that Stygian Furie with quad posis in my rev c ain't it?
My point was that the centurion isn't the ship that needs balancing and here we are tweaking a ship that's perfectly fine.
If the objective is to make all the ships equally effective in combat then the hog needs more thrust the prom needs more mass the vult needs more thrust the maud needs more armor the valk is fine cause everything should be exactly like the valk and the moth needs more thrust and the cap ship needs less armor more thrust and nerf those mining beam guns and that should do it.

[Flame Removed]

[edit]
nvm I didn't beat that stygian it was a draw.
[/edit]

Incarnate wrote:

"Due to its tiny size, the Centurion has the advantage no matter how much the various ship stats are tweaked.

I propose increasing the size of the Centurion. I'll scale it uniformly.. its handling behaviour should not be changed at all by this (distribution of mass will remain the same). I'm not saying a massive change either, but maybe a 40-50% increase in scale. Something to bring it in line with.. seemingly.. all the other ships."

We all SAY we like how the Devs reach out to the community, but when they do (now more than ever, by the way), we go all wildly off-topic and ranty at them. Incarnate has found an undeniable disparity in scale. It was never his intention that the disparity would exist, and he is well within his rights to just change it without notice (in which case it would have already been done by now). The Devs consistently show respect (and patience) for the community, and they are owed the same in return.

I say make the change and we'll adjust it if it sucks. Ship balance is always in flux.

[Response to flame removed]

Did someone say: "Adapt or Perish" yet?

I kind of miss he-who-was-not-named-kindly.

I definitely think the cent needs some kind of revamp... I don't know if it would be good to make it THAT large, however. I think its ok to have a really hard to hit ship - but the smaller and lighter it is, the less armor it should have. I really think that the cent should be made a -little- bit larger (10-20%) and the armor should be at LEAST halved. That way, you still keep in the diversity of ship types, and there is a considerable risk gained to flying such a small SUPER-manueverable ship.

johnhawl: I've stated, explicitly, that I CANNOT MAKE CHANGES TO THE GAME RIGHT NOW. The diverging source tree branches required for the new UI development have kept us from doing client releases for several months. We're working on trying to finish that up and get it out sometime soon (I've come to hate using that word), but I'm also trying to get a bunch of other changes in that release.. ie, all the stuff that I normally would have done over the last few months.

I've explained the technical reasons why we haven't been able to release, the split source tree and protocol version changes and so on, and that all I've *been* able to do is post images so people can at least see that we're trying to add new stuff, even if they don't see it in game.

This is not "John is delaying the new stuff release so he can tinker about with rebalancing crap!@#" this is like.. "John & co are somewhat stuck wheelspinning while the UI work is finalized, and he's decided to make the new release as good as humanly possible by reworking the ships and game (both graphically and stats wise)".

I either have to assume that you have not read the threads where I explained this, or you have chosen to ignore my explanations, but regardless.. could we please just comment on the topic at hand? Not when I should have done it, or how evil we are for having to practically rebuild the entire client from scratch and being unable to make client releases for a few months, or whatever other axes people have to grind with me. Can we just try and stay positive? I'm just trying to make the game better here, and I'm making the best use of my time, and my entire dev team's time as I possibly can.

The Dev's rock, so STFU and stop whining. There have been a few threads about how ships are unbalanced lately. I can't see anything wrong with the Devs fixing this, especially as, as Inc said, the time spent is minimal.

Now to get them to delag the convoys. :P

i've got your back incarnate,
the devs have good reason for not releasing much new content resently. those reasons have been explained.

also you can't build a house on a bad foundation and expect to fix the foundation later. you HAVE to get what is out there now working and balanced before you can move forward.

now back on topic:

i think an inportant thing to concider is the surface area vs linear dimension issue. i see a lot of sugestions that are either surface area estamates, or fairly extreem changes. personaly i've recomenede a 3-5% increase in liniar dimension (that's roughly 6-10% increase in surface area).

incarnate,
can we have your estimates of how much biger you think the Cent should be?

Incarnate wrote:
but maybe a 40-50% increase in scale.

Huh... yeah, I don't know what that would look like.

Scale... scale... so... if the cent is a box of 3m x 3m x 10m... then...
4.5m x 4.5m x 15m?

Or is it scale based off of volume?

When I rescale it, I'll post comparative screenshots again. I'll mostly "eyeball" it, I expect, and try to make it a little more in-line with the other small ships. Still smallest, but a little more reasonable. For what it's worth, I prefer to make small changes rather than large ones, but I'll probably just figure it out when I load it into Max.

I have a question John,

When you get a chance, could you look at the collidable area of a valk again? I know numerous pilots would rightly state that its massive potato shape makes it a very easy target. This is the reason it gets owned by so many other weapons and fighters, especially gatling turrets. Is there any chance that the valk might be made a tiny bit smaller to counteract its large collidable area?

Also, I love the idea of making the cent bigger. That should solve the current uberness of it. But my only request would be that balance changes to the prom be made at the same time as balance changes to the cent. I know you said you were looking at the agt/flare prom as well. It's just that if the cent gets that balance change and the prom doesn't, what little competition the prom had will be non-existent.

Thanks, let us know what you think!

hear hear.

Fixing the cent without fixing the prom is like peanut butter without jelly.

You can do it, but WHY?!?!

(dont mind me, i'm crazy)