[NGTM-1R]

Originally posted by nuclear1


That is assuming, of course, that nothing happens to the Colossus during the battle, such as overloading or redlining fire control or heat sinks as the Colossus did against the Sathanas. What is there to assume that the Colossus wouldn't do the same against a huge number of warships, which could all outflank the Colossus's weapons/destroy the weapons/cripple the ship in multiple ways and then finish it off?

Faulty logic.

Colossus' standard table mounts BGreens. Colossus' problems in engagement against the Sathanas were due to overcharging its beam cannon to produce BFGreens.

Unless CFInsane altered the tables or manually changed the beams in FRED, the Colossus would have maintained that rate of fire indefinitely.

Regarding the Sathanas: attacking it from MULTIPLE vectors is essential. At least give the GTVA that much credit.

[JoeLo]

I liked the C, proabably because I'm a sucker for huge ships. I think hi-poly is nessecary, but it was still pretty cool.

[Boomer]

Why is it that the Colossus never uses it's fighterbay?  

In High Noon, the Colossus should have been throwing out bombers like nobody's business.  Yet, lo and behold!  4 bombers are all that is assumed necessary.

BTW, call me a swip swap, but I just realize that the big C kicks ass, it's only problem lies with the AI (and some technical ones maybe), but on the whole, the Big C could take out anything that came it's way.  (Minus a Sathanas of course...)

[Fade Rathnik]

Hey is the FS for homeworld mod working yet, test fleet engagments in there.

[Liquid Fire]

It works, sure, but it's only freespace 1 right now, so the only thing with beams is the lucifer.

[FireCrack]

The C does deploy some fighters, but only in "Their finest hour"

It deploys two wings, one perseus, one boanerges.

[Nuclear1]

Originally posted by ngtm1r


Faulty logic.

Colossus' standard table mounts BGreens. Colossus' problems in engagement against the Sathanas were due to overcharging its beam cannon to produce BFGreens.

Unless CFInsane altered the tables or manually changed the beams in FRED, the Colossus would have maintained that rate of fire indefinitely.

Regarding the Sathanas: attacking it from MULTIPLE vectors is essential. At least give the GTVA that much credit.

Are we talking simply from a game standpoint, or if such an engagement actually happened? In Real Life™, a number of things could go wrong, as I elaborated on in the first point. The Colossus, while still powerful, had a number of weaknesses, and they came to be exploited on a number of occassions. For one, the Colossus was meant to fight the Lucifer, which may have been more vulnerable to BGreens and Slash beams, but as soon as the Sathanas came along, which happened to be much tougher than a Lucifer, the Colossus had to up its firepower--therefore using BFGreens and LRBGreens which would cause its cannons to overheat.

Now assuming a large fleet engagement occurred: it's safe to assume that the fleet commanders attacking the Colossus aren't stupid--they more than likely will realize the dangers posed by the ship's anti-cap beams and will try as best as possible to disable them or somehow get around them. This can be accomplished using a Bosch-style sabotage to the fire control systems, or simply attacking certain subsystems of the ship that would lead to an overload or power spike in the beam turrets.

In Real Life™, all sorts of things can happen. If we're simply talking about placing the Colossus and a dozen or so enemy caps in FRED2, hitting Beam-free-all and then playing the mission, then yes, the Colossus would maintain the same fire rate.

[FireCrack]

And somehow in real life the collossus inst allowed to disable turrets on enemy capital ships or deploy interceptors to defend it....


not to mention the colossus would have the rest of it's fleet with it.

[NGTM-1R]

Still faulty logic.

In Real Life™, the Colossus remains practically unstoppable. The sheer size and armoring of it resists rapid or easy disabling of turrets/weapons subsystem/engine. The only area of safety from its beams is directly aft of the engines...in the engine wash. Bad place to be, as in Real Life™ the Colossus engine wash would be considerably more powerful then an Orion's or Hecates.

Also in Real Life™ at least grant the Colossus the same abilities you would its enemies. A single BGreen is enough to knock out most subsystems on anything up to and including a destroyer. Lost engine subsystems, and inability to manuver, would render its opponents unable to seek safety from its beam fire.

The Colossus is surprisingly fast for something its size: 25 m/s, which means that in Real Life™ it can outrun any destroyer in FS, and hold even, at minimum, with most cruisers. It is also surprisingly quick to manuver (baseball bat effect, anyone?). This casts doubt on the likelyhood of being able to effectively approach from an angle it cannot engage you at.

The NTF sabotage of the Colossus' weapons knocked them out for twenty seconds. No more. The Colossus can easily weather twenty seconds of enemy fire. In Real Life™ knocking out the Colossus' weapons subsystem would not slow its rate of fire, only degrade its accuracy, and given the size and speed of the targets it would be engaging it would be difficult to miss even so.

[MedicinalGoat]

Regardless of whether or not it was an effective machine of war it did help one thing: the economy (This was already touched on earlier in the thread). Kind of like a new Tennessee Valley Authority to help push society through the economic turmoil that the first great war left. The Colossus involved hundreds if not thousands of contractors and probably created a few billion jobs. Hope those GTVA politicans enjoy trying to do something with all that debt now that the fruits of the labor got toasted

Oh, and the Colossus was really ugly. Honestly, for 20 years of work and money you think they could make it look more like a ship rather than a cryptic tool or bizarre tantric sex toy.

[Nuclear1]

You make some good points, Goat.

[ChronoReverse]

Originally posted by Boomer
Why is it that the Colossus never uses it's fighterbay?  

In High Noon, the Colossus should have been throwing out bombers like nobody's business.  Yet, lo and behold!  4 bombers are all that is assumed necessary.

The mission briefing states that damage had blocked the fighterbay entrance while all deployed craft were destroyed already and that's why you have no reinforcements.

My question is why they didn't think of having more than one door when they designed the thing.



Personally, I've always liked the Colossus.  That's mostly because I'm a sucker for gigantic capital ships that fire enormous beam weapons (unlike the equally enormous Star Destroyers that fire peas in Tie Fighter).

[EtherShock]

Obviously, the Terrans suggested one hangar.

That's why I like big ships too, but I think we all can agree that they're impractical and huge targets.

The star destroyers had turbolasers with a huge range in XWA though. They were fearsome to cap ships and stations from a considerable distance.

[Kie99]

I just FREDded a mission with a Hecate, an Orion, a Hatshepsut, a Typhon, and a Ravana against a Colossus with no fighters involved.

After about 10 Minutes all that remained was the Colossus and a Large Debris field.

This shows that the Colossus is excellent at what it is designed to do.

[Kosh]

One thing I don't like about the Collossus is that it is a real ***** to repair. After High Noon, it was stated that it would take "many months" of repairs to make it fully operational.

[karajorma]

That was cause they had melted the heat sinks on the beam cannons by overloading them in order to kill the sath. They can probably repair other damage at a reasonable rate but getting new heat sinks probably involved actually making new ones.

[Steel]

while i like FS a lot, i do think the ships look a bit odd.  take the colossus - a very long extension from the main hull with more engines mounted at the end of it...  seems like it would be a bit difficult to keep proper forward momentum with the long moment arm of that additional thrust off center from the rest of the thrust...

i think ships look better if ther are  a bit more like Star Wars or Robotechish (maybe disounting the SDF in its somewhat robotic form) and the space battleship yamato sure does look cool as well...  kinda so they make sense, rather than (as somone else said) a trantic sex toy...  

ah well, i know there should not be too serious limitations on streamlining, but thrust vectors should be taken into account.

yes, i know it is sci-fi,  

[FireCrack]

Originally posted by karajorma
That was cause they had melted the heat sinks on the beam cannons by overloading them in order to kill the sath. They can probably repair other damage at a reasonable rate but getting new heat sinks probably involved actually making new ones.

Not to mention other sections of the ship affected by this, excessive current draw from the reactors could cause the coils of generators to fuse, power counduits would probably have melted here and there, the beam cannons themselves may have taken excessive damage, compulsators torn apart for example, mabye they're big an require precision macining.

It's not a case of slapping some new armour on the ship, it's an engineering nightmare.





I personaly like the FS style, how things are tall and have extranuous engines on the bottom, if you think about it it would be somwhat logical for manuvering, atleast in pitch, this way.

[Taristin]

Originally posted by EtherShock
Obviously, the Terrans suggested one hangar.
 

Unlike the Vasudans, the Terrans feel that any additional fighterbays would be a waste of space and a redundancy quite unnecessary...


*shrugs* 's what happens when you build foolishly.

[knn]

Originally posted by Kosh
One thing I don't like about the Collossus is that it is a real ***** to repair. After High Noon, it was stated that it would take "many months" of repairs to make it fully operational.

Actually, that was because you get the same debriefing wether or not the Colossus is damaged. If you do destroy all  4 beam cannons, you get the good job debriefing - even if the C survived with 1% hull. However, if the C destroyes the Sathi before you take out all the beams, you get stg like "had you completed your objectives, the C would've sustained less damage". This is quite strange, but I guess [V] made Bearbeiting so hard so that you can`t destroy all beams and the C suffers damage. Then the C`s comm officer`s shouting makes much more sense ("were giving it all we`ve got" etc.), and the mission is more interesting (since you have to destroy two or one more beams while enemy fighters are attacking you). If you do destroy the beams, you still get the medal, even if you failed to complete Bearbeiting perfectly.

BTW, that cb was clearly referring to the hull: it will take several monts "to fully repair the warships hull"