Ever since Ciff has lifted the ship size limitation, the modding community has slowly expanded into uncharted teritory past the realm of cruisers.
The purpose of this thread is for people to post their opinion on these types of ship, while it would be awesome if a common consensus could be reached and we get consistency across the mods - It will be ultimately up to the modder to decide if they wish to use the suggestions here or go with their own.
To start off the conversation, i was thinking of using something like this to classify ship classes in any mods i make in the future:
Cruiser <300
Dreadnaut 300-500
Juggernaut 500-700
Leviathan 700+
Discussion of how to design them, how big the ship graphics should be, the number of slots they should have, and what sort of missions they’d be used for are all part of this topic. Fire away!
If you wish to discuss Destroyers, Corvettes and Patrol Boats - Head here
in my short experience the dds files can only be squares if u make the dds file not square the game resizes no matter what making it look bad, so if u have a ship bigger than 512x512 if the sprite its not square u will have a lot of blank space in the dds,and that creates some problems,like selection the ship clicking in the blank space around it.
i would rather something like
less than 256 cruiser
256-512 Dreadnaut
512-768 Juggernaut
768+ Leviathan
The width and length of the graphic does not have to be to same, the important factor is the ratio.
For example i have a graphic that is 400x800, so if i make the ingame image 200x400 there will be no distortion.
However a square image makes scaling very easy
For example i can fit the The Federation Eagle Cruiser into a graphic that is 512 x 256 and remove the blank space on the sides, however when i edit the hull settings i have to make it 200x100 to keep the ratio the same.
In the game the ship will not be distorted, but in the design window there will be distortion. While its not a strict requirement that the graphic be square, its an very very very very good idea.
I like the humorous pun that is the title of this thread…
Hi there, Darkstar. I have a big post that I’m working on for this thread. For the short term, it’ll definitely steer things away from the procedural/graphical aspect of showing dreadnoughts within the game. I hope you won’t mind.
Forgive me, but a correction is in order. “Dreadnaut” should actually be spelled as dreadnought or dreadnaught. The term derives from Admiral Jackie Fisher’s revolutionary 1905 battleship HMS Dreadnought - a ship that instantly obsoleted every other warship on Earth. As such it had no need to fear any other class of warship; literally, dreadnought: “fear nothing”. Sorry about the pedantry – “dammit, Jim; I’m a historian, not a doctor!!!”
Some of my assumptions and biases in this interesting topic may differ from everyone else’s by a wide margin. I’ll try to explain them, as fuel for this discussion. They may help spark some new ideas from the rest of you, which would be sweet for all of us.
[size=150]Dreadnoughts[/size]: cruisers that are over-caffeinated, bulked up on excersise and steroids, and able to carry enough firepower that, in a duel, only another dreadnought can be expected to injure or kill it. In a squadron or fleet engagement, a massive fighter wave or several cruisers working together are the minimum needed to have any chance of holding a dreadnought back. There used to be a lot of very confused and contradictory talk about dreadnoughts in GSB, but mercifully that seems to have settled down.
I think of dreadnoughts as warships in the 280-400 pixel bracket. I have one DN design whose performance envelope definitely makes it a DN even though it’s smaller than 280. I usually draw a distinction between various types of large ships that I don’t do with small ships. I brand a hull type as a dreadnought if it has more than a certain rough percentage more modules, weapon slots, and hull size than the cruiser that inspired it. The reason for this is a personal one, as I tend to be MUCH more focused upon the performance envelope of a ship class than simple definitions like pure physical size. It’s a kind of heresy around here, I’m sure, but I generally don’t care much (if at all) about the visual pretty or coolness of a ship .dds as long as that ship has the abilities to fulfill the mission on my mind. Just wanted to explain my biases for what’s next.
If I was to assign a larger than “normal” hull size to one DN when compared to other DNs, it would almost always be not just because I gave it more internal volume for slots, but also because I gave it more abstract, non-module-based advantages like a high hull integrity bonus (the extra space being consumed by additional bulkheads and reinforcing spars) or a high armor bonus (extra room needed for the racks and brackets to hold the thicker armor belts, making the hull itself far thicker).
For example: look at the Federation Tiger in GSB. For its relatively great size of 210, it’s a fairly mediocre cruiser. Its relative weakness implies to me things outside of GSB itself – such as having major non-combat functions, or being the result of a much older & inefficient “peacetime” design – things that subtract from its combat usefulness. In my opinion, the Tiger takes up a hell of a lot more space than a ship with that many weapons slots should. It’s definitely big enough to be seen as cruiser, but unlike a superb warrior like the Fed. Panther class (size 160), the Tiger flies and fights more like a light cruiser. Hopefully you see what I mean with how I draw the cruiser/dreadnought distinction.
[size=150]Juggernauts[/size]: there’s hasn’t been any use of the uncommon term “juggernaut” on the Mod Forum since last summer; let’s give it a warm welcome.
I’d consider a juggernaut to be a warship in the 401-600 pixel range. For now, I think that the term is really just “a solution in search of a problem,” since the modding community seems to only now be able & willing to explore truly huge vessels in GSB. It’s somewhat harder for me to picture a clear role for a warship of such size in the fleet doctrine that I use. That doesn’t mean that juggernauts are a bad idea, though; just that we as a group still have a lot of unexplored design territory to edge into! I look forward to seeing a JG or two in future modded content from you guys.
One notion for the justification of juggernaut-sized ships might be not only as pure combat versions, but ones that also have some major quantity of something that gives an indirect fighting ability. For example, a JG with 12 (or more!) carrier modules and no guns except Guidance Scramblers and Defense Lasers would make one hell of a GSB version of the US Navy’s Nimitz-class supercarrier! Imagine a Swarm JG designed to be used as a “minsweeper” against missile spam by carrying some ungodly amount of Smart Bomb Generators aboard. So you see how we could “fork” juggernaut development / fleet doctrine into two different paths.
[size=150]Leviathans[/size]. As a Biblical term, it gets the job done in the context of GSB: half-legendary; rarely ever seen and verified because every enemy ship in sensor range of it during battle gets pasted; massive beyond nightmares; the power to destroy nearly anything. I like it.
For me, a leviathan-sized warship would be anything larger than 600 pixels. Let’s put that minimum size threshold into perspective, please. A ship that displays in-game at 600 pixels on a side is going to have nine times the surface area of one that’s 200 pixels on a side. Compared to “vanilla” classes like that Fed. Tiger (size 210), the smallest leviathan-sized ship will be amazingly, shockingly, jaw-droppingly huge. When seeing it surrounded by standard-sized ships, the appearance of an LV in-game is going to be like seeing the Balrog from the movie “The Fellowship of the Ring”. And that’s just at 600x600 pixels! I’m sure than any modder going to that much effort will end up with an LV that’s bigger than 600. It seems that there’s at least two such megaships under construction right now in various mods…
As for what mission a leviathan might have, or how it might be equipped, or what sort of hull bonuses might be appropriate…let us debate. For my part, I’d picture a LV as having enough weapon hardpoints to deserve being sold in stores and labelled as “Fleet In A Can”. Others might prefer surprisingly “small” or apparently under-featured LVs, wanting instead to use them as combat platforms to drag around tremendous giga-turret-sized modded weapons that are on the scale of a natural disaster or a force of Nature instead of a military action.
Please share with us not only your ideas about what sizes these various classes of superships should have, but also some of your philosophy about your preferred mission profile for them and how your design would make that possible. And if you have alternate class names for any of these hulls, let’s talk about that, too.
Leviathans need to have a minimum size of 1000 pixels in size- that would make it an extremely exclusive group (there are only 3 ships (that I know of) that will qualify at the moment).
thank you for taking your time to share your thoughts!
i agree with almost everything.
im suprised that none of the “new” mods have made a juggernaught yet. thank you for reminding us. i now have a class name for the deserter ship im planning.
and tha carrier juggernaught you mention, sounds more like a supercarrier. this is another great idea!
i was beginning to lose ideas of ships, but you helped me realise how much i havnt yet explored! thank you!
Interesting. I tend to think of the 600 range as already freakin’ huge in GSB. I do like your idea of a certain exclusivity, though. It helps keep the leviathans as a “V.I.P.” club, and I think preserving that aura of mystique is important. Without it, I worry that LVs will be just one more very big warship. I really don’t want that to happen.
I hope Cliffski reads all this and finds it in his heart (and busy schedule) to create these classes for us
Randy Tjang - A ship that is 1000 would truly be a Leviathan, the standard cruiser weapons on a ship that size would be tiny specks. Also you would have to disable the minimum zoom fucntion so see the entire ship at once.
It’s English, but using somewhat archaic words. All of you surely know the word “dread,” but “nought” has long since fallen out of everyday use. Remember that the already-old term dreadnought was applied to that famous British all-big-gun battleship 106 years ago!
So shall we have a separate thread for Corvettes and Destroyers? They are far more represented in mods in general, but as it is we are forced to bend the game to fit our design wishes.
i had considered if we should also include Corvettes and destroyers into this topic (but i ran out of room in the title)
Plus is would spoil the already bad joke.
But I must admit that a thread dedicated to that group of ships would be a good idea . .
I have a big post that I’m working on for this thread. For the short term, it’ll definitely steer things away from the procedural/graphical aspect of showing dreadnoughts within the game. I hope you won’t mind. 
Others might prefer surprisingly “small” or apparently under-featured LVs, wanting instead to use them as combat platforms to drag around tremendous giga-turret-sized modded weapons that are on the scale of a natural disaster or a force of Nature instead of a military action.