[Osiri]

I always thought of the collossus as a huge toy that children(High Command) was playing around with.  

It made sense to build the collossus but not to design it as they did.  

The Saths didn't make much sense either.  If just one of those big fu**ing beams had been on its back it would have been a much better weapon.

If nothing else they could have had the beam cannon power relays hooked up in such a way that they could alternate back and forth.  

It makes no sense to have the cheaper part of a weapon like that(the lense or whatever) be the only outlet for the expensive part of the ship(the huge generators).

Why not have a switch that shunts the power so that you could have 4 beams on the front but with 2 of those having the ability to be disabled and shunt the power to the assend of the ship...

I think it would be a much better use of the power grid.  

Under the current design the entire power grid would likely overload anyhow if the front outputs were disabled(bye bye ship).


MY PICTURE OF THE COLLI


A BORG CUBE.  Why.  

Modified to FS world of course.

You would have on each of the 6 sides redundant outputs.  

4-8 big guns and whatever flak and laser.

you would also have 3 engine outputs.

This is space all that matters for flight is mass not aerodynamics.

each of the 4-8 guns would be able to be deactivated and power from them shunted to another gun.  

Thus you with the current power model you can run 12 cannons simultaneously.  BUT only like 4 were up front and in the end it is extremely difficult to fire all of them at once you know.

Anyhow....
you could shunt all power to the side with a sath on it for the 8 cannons and the rest of the power could be devoted to sides with smaller targets such as ravanas or demons.  

how long can a Sath last against 8 of the 12 main beam cannons of the Collie all firing at once.

I also think the problem was cooling time for the emitters right.   This solution give you another option.  Turn the ship 90 degrees and you have completely cooled off beam cannons to fire from.


actually scratch the cube.

Make it a sphere with highly reflective skin.

The curved hull would reflect the fire and the ship could continuously turn and shunt power from one cannon to another and since the power generation was not the problem it would be able to fire almost constantly.

If nothing else make it a dodecahedron but with the same armaments and engine ports.  IF would be able to just spin and keep the guns firing.

Just a thought.

[Galemp]

let it die

[Osiri]

? let it die ?

[FireCrack]

A cube is a poor design, a wedge (like a star destroyer) is much better.

[Osiri]

A uniform shape that has a uniform distance to any vital part is a good design in many ways.  

There is also an arguement that I would accept for placing heavier armor on one side of the ship.

The uniform armor allows for the ship to turn a badly damaged area away from the enemy.  This would allow the ship to survive longer.  You would not want your power generators in the butt end of a collossus far away from the guns at the front.  Nor do you want distributed power generators to the extent the collossus was designed.  This allowed for the blowing up of the grid in sequence.  

IMO it would be better to have a thicker skin around all of your generators with the ability to shunt power in any particular direction.

If one side has been fighting the sath and has taken damage while another side has been fighting a ravana and has almost no damage just rotate the ship which would be a much faster turn rate than any other capital ship could keep up with.  You now have presented the sath with a side that is almost undamaged that it has to eat through again.
Kinda like the current collies baseball bat of death act.

Plus I thought the sheer enormity of the Colly was a waste.

There was no reason to have it so spread out.  yes it allowed for hierarchical damage but that does not matter when (and this is the only explanation I have for FS destruction rules) only the forward section is damaged and the whole ship blows up due to the power grids failure overall in that section.

This essentially weakened the design by making it unable to fire with all beams at a nearby enemy.

I see one valid defense.

The collie was designed to be a behemoth.  It was never supposed to have to fight a Sath.

The biggest target it was to fight was the Lucifer.

The distribution of guns across its huge body was to allow it to engage multiple destroyer class ships at once.

This does not work so well when it is a behemoth v. behemoth.

Then the Sath is better because you can use your most powerful guns all at once while cutting any interference to pieces with your flak guns

anyway

[Polpolion]

IF all 4 beams on the Sath. were gone, why didnt command put out somore ships? like a corvette or even a couple of cruisers? wouldve been quicker and the C's guns wouldn't have overheated.

[SuperCoolAl]

IF all 4 beams on the Sath. were gone, why didnt command put out somore ships? like a corvette or even a couple of cruisers? wouldve been quicker and the C's guns wouldn't have overheated.

The Sathanas decimated all ships in the area before the Collie took it on.

[Polpolion]

ahh.  Another thing, how come the only ' action' the aquatane ever  saw was in the mission with the test pegasus and the mission where you escort it? the one with the trinity didn't count. And how come you barely ever see hecates? Its always Orion, leviathan/fenris, deimos, aeolus, then hecate. the hecate only made 4 or 5 apperances in the game! and its not liike that they were THAT new.

[FireCrack]

Actualy, they were "That" new, and also such things werent made to engage in large scale combat.

[TrashMan]

IF all 4 beams on the Sath. were gone, why didnt command put out somore ships? like a corvette or even a couple of cruisers? wouldve been quicker and the C's guns wouldn't have overheated.

The Sathanas decimated all ships in the area before the Collie took it on.

And emerged with 100% hull integrity to boot...
Geez, they could have weakened the Saths hull a bit for realism sake at least.

[FireCrack]

The sath can kill a destroyer in a single 7 second volley then can do the same again in 3 seconds...


Not to mention that all non "supercap" weapons only do a fraction of damage (or no damage) to supercapital ships.

So i suppose it's reasonable

[NGTM-1R]

ahh.  Another thing, how come the only ' action' the aquatane ever  saw was in the mission with the test pegasus and the mission where you escort it? the one with the trinity didn't count. And how come you barely ever see hecates? Its always Orion, leviathan/fenris, deimos, aeolus, then hecate. the hecate only made 4 or 5 apperances in the game! and its not liike that they were THAT new.

They might actually have been that new; there's also the point that the Hecate makes a lousy ship for when you're forming Battle Line. Still and all, the Hecate could have made a few more appearances; that forward-mounted BGreen could have been put to use in a variety of situations where it wasn't.

[Polpolion]

one of those big fu**ing beams

speaking of big fu**ing beam cannons, why didn't  they put lucy beams on the saths?

[Unknown Target]

This thread's still alive? Kill it!

Anyway, they didn't put the lucy "beams" on the Sath because they were most likely powerful only by contemporary standards. By modern GTVA standards they were probably relatively weak.
Or it could have to do with the apparant uniqueness of the Lucy - a topic that has been debated for ages.

[Shiku]

Or even the fact that the only Lucy beams in existance were destroyed on the other side of the Sol Node. Making it kinda hard to figure out how they worked. (My guess is that Terran/Vasudan command came up with beams by guess work and tactical data from the Lucifer encounteres, as they didn't have any actual beam cannons to studdy untill the Second invasion(and it was to late to put them on the Collosus by then, wasn't it)

I don't really mind the Colossus, I see it as more of a big prop than an actuall ship in Freespace, mostly because it didn't really do much besides what it had to do in the story.

[NGTM-1R]

Four Shivan Super Lasers are actually more powerful then four BFReds, IIRC. Or at the very least extremely close. The Hecate and the Orion actually have the same number of hitpoints, and the Galatea was toasted by four shots from the Lucy, while the Phonecia can be toasted by four shots from the the Sathanas.

[Polpolion]

they do? i always thought the Orion would have thicker armor beacuse it is a more combat oriented destroyer, while the hecate is almost like a light carrier.

[knn]

yeah, but the phoecia was a hecate, not an orion.

They have the same hitpoints

[WMCoolmon]

one of those big fu**ing beams

speaking of big fu**ing beam cannons, why didn't  they put lucy beams on the saths?

You'll have to ask the Shivans.

Or even the fact that the only Lucy beams in existance were destroyed on the other side of the Sol Node. Making it kinda hard to figure out how they worked. (My guess is that Terran/Vasudan command came up with beams by guess work and tactical data from the Lucifer encounteres, as they didn't have any actual beam cannons to studdy untill the Second invasion(and it was to late to put them on the Collosus by then, wasn't it)

I don't really mind the Colossus, I see it as more of a big prop than an actuall ship in Freespace, mostly because it didn't really do much besides what it had to do in the story.

There was that mission where you were supposed to scan all sorts of ships, I think the Lucifer weapons subsystem was one of them. Maybe teh data provided let the GTVA build beams.

Or maybe there's something they weren't telling us...some isolated incident...

Oh, wait, I'm not making that campaign.

[Kie99]

Four Shivan Super Lasers are actually more powerful then four BFReds, IIRC. Or at the very least extremely close. The Hecate and the Orion actually have the same number of hitpoints, and the Galatea was toasted by four shots from the Lucy, while the Phonecia can be toasted by four shots from the the Sathanas.

They're miles off, a single BFRed Blast can toast and Orion/Hecate, and the only reason the Phoenecia survives (sometimes) is becasue of the guardian flag.  FRED a quick mission with a lilith and an Orion, give the Lilith a BFRed, and the Orion will die in a single shot.  Arm the Lilith with a Shivan Super Laser and they'll take ages, the LRed is more powerful that Shivan Super Laser.