how many units of length in the hull.txt file covert to a real world meter?
or at least a fair guess?
The number in the file is length in meters.
i’m sorry but that can’t be right then how large does that make Panther Cruiser?
i try’d using this for my halo mod…didn’t end well 0_0
The Federation Panther cruiser is 160 meters in length. I assure you that’s indeed quite right; it’s meant as one of the smallest cruisers in the game.
It does create issues with sci-fi franchise mods. For example, many Star Wars frigates dwarf GSB cruisers. The standard Republic cruiser is nearly 1200m. Oh, and the 1st death star was 180km, with the second’s dimensions 5 times bigger.
You don’t necessarily need to have your mod’s vessels to scale with the vessels found in-game. To go with the example that Tek0516 was using, if I were to make a Star Wars mod, Nebulon-B frigates at 300m would dwarf many cruisers and 1600m Star Destroyers would have difficulty fitting on the screen, but I could scale both down by a factor of 5 and get a 320m Star Destroyer and a 60m Nebulon-B frigate, which isn’t unreasonably outside of normal sizes for Gratuitous Space Battles while still keeping the relative size of the ships appropriate. Anyone who knows that Star Destroyers are a mile long would realize that the 320m hull length I picked is a compromise to make things reasonable within the game, rather than being strictly accurate to Star Wars.
For fighters, I wouldn’t bother with scaling since taking a 9.6m-long A-Wing and making it less than 2m in-game just means that it’s too difficult to see on the screen even at maximum zoom.
In other words, if your cruisers and frigates have ‘canonical’ sizes that don’t really work in GSB and you want to keep the relative scale of the vessels the same, pick a common scaling factor to move the size into the range you want.
You could also have multiple similar scale factors - as an example, maybe I think that a 60m Nebulon-B is too small but I don’t want the Star Destroyer to become any larger than the 320m length I mentioned previously. So I could pick a scale factor of 4 for the Nebulon-B and get a 75m frigate, while still maintaining roughly the correct relative scale (sure, the Nebulon-B is roughly 20% larger than it should be relative to the Star Destroyer, but it is still close to the correct scale, and I’m not making anything too unreasonably small or too unreasonably large). I could also go with a sliding scale factor which might be 4 for ships under 400m in length, 5 for ships over 1000m in length, and some proportionate number between 4 and 5 for ships between 400m and 1000m of length.
I’d say that picking numbers that make the ships look roughly the right size relative to one another when placed together on the map is more important than picking numbers that match the sizes specified in the Star Trek Technical Manuals, the Star Wars Encyclopedias/Guides to Ships/Database, or whatever else your particular sci-fi universe has for ‘real’ size information. The most important part is that it looks decent when you have them on the battlefield, not that the sizes are exactly correct, or that the relative sizes between various ships are exactly correct.
Alternatively, you could try using the size values specified in whatever sci-fi universe, and then deal with whatever balance issues pop up. A 1600m long Star Destroyer would likely cause issues for the game since its centroid would need to be within the maximum range of any other ship’s weaponry in order for those ships to fire on it, but I could compensate by giving it weak armor or shields or both. Similarly, instead of covering it with large numbers of standard and weapon module slots (which tend to make the design screen difficult to use), I could instead give it only a few more modules than a normal large cruiser, but make some special modules which would be difficult or unfeasible to deploy on a smaller ship in order to compensate for the relative lack of module slots available, and I could cluster the weapon modules around the centroid of the ship so that it doesn’t gain any unreasonable advantage from its length.