[Kolgena]

My bad. Glanced up and pulled the wrong number. Regardless, the difference in size makes the Orion hitting it negligible.

Although, if the Colly weighs in at 110ish million tons, then 5k megatons is a wad of TNT 50 times the size of the Colossus. How is it supposed to survive that?

[Goober5000]

Wow, two pages went fast... Let me just make a few points:

1) There's a large difference between intelligence and wisdom.

2) Fighting for independence is neither unintelligent nor unwise, especially considering the 18 months prior to FS2.  Fighting with the intent to commit xenocide is rather less so.

3) Koth is likely to be quite intelligent (you can't defeat 75.1% of a system's garrison without outstanding tactics) but rather unwise in Feint! Parry! Riposte!.  Being a high-ranking leader, likely being a fanatic, and riding high on his victories in Epsilon Pegasi, he probably deluded himself into thinking he could take out the Colossus.  It would make him a posthumous hero.

4) I rather doubt all 10,000 officers on the Repulse wanted to ram the Colossus.  I suspect it was Koth's decision alone; the bridge crew may or may not have agreed but they were trained to follow orders regardless.  It took less than 30 seconds from the Colossus's arrival until Koth's decision to ram it; that's hardly enough time to conduct a poll.

[Mongoose]

Maybe they all had those little audience keypads from Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

[deathfun]

Hey, hold on Colossus, I need to do something...

"Yes, I would like to call a lifeline. I would like to call the audience to decide on the majority on this question "Ram into the Colossus?"

Okay Colossus, I'm back. No I do not surrender. Prepare to be rammed into




That's what your comment made me think of

[karajorma]

I'm only wondering how his Phone A Friend with Bosch went.

[Androgeos Exeunt]

Kosh: Hello?
Bosch: What is it, Koth?
Kosh: The Colossus is warping in ahead of the Repulse. What should I do?
Bosch: Ram it. It'll take you too long to flee anyway.
Kosh: Okay. Can I do a martyr speech?
Bosch: Go ahead.

[TrashMan]

My bad. Glanced up and pulled the wrong number. Regardless, the difference in size makes the Orion hitting it negligible.

No.

The armor properties don't scale up together with the ship. Neither does the armor thickness scale linearly. And increasing armor thiicknes has diminishing returns after a point.

Do some research into the matter. You have a 2100m long metal box crashing into the Colossuss from the front (it's shape is far less uniform..and that thin neck is a very big weak point).

Best case scenario - the whole front of the Collie is gone, the neck snaps. That's not negligible damage - that massive damage.

[Kosh]

The Colossus would survive because of the beam cannons slowing down the Repulse, and the size of the Colossus playing a large factor. Only a portion of the front section would be hit by the smaller Repulse Destroyer. That, and the Repulse would need far more momentum to penetrate the amount of hull. It's a billion tonnes going at maybe 20 m/s hitting a trillion tonne warship moving minimally backwards due to the beam (Third Law).

Time for a nice, fun lesson in masses and densities.  Current ships are not really all that heavy, when you think about it.  The modern aircraft carrier displaces what, 400,000 101,600 (off high) tonnes (source: Wikipedia, ship: Gerald Ford class carrier, scheduled for 2015)?  The carrier is slated to be almost exactly 1/3rd of a kilometer long, and 41 m wide (unable to find height.  Reasonable estimate:  50 m).  An Orion is, what, 2 kilometers long?  Call the width 100 m, and height 300?.  If both were just big boxes, almost 88 carriers would fit into an Orion, which I actually doubt on the face of it (682,650 m³ for a carrier, 60,000,000 m³ for an Orion?).  I need to get actual measurements for an Orion, since it isn't completely a box.  Anyway, that equates to about 9.3 million tonnes, not a gigantic number of billions.  Using the cutscene on the Colossus, 12 Orions could fit inside its hull.  That equates to just under 111.8 million tons.  However, that could be off by orders of magnitude due to lack of known average density, internal open spaces, and actual, complete dimensions and volumes.

Given that the Collossus carries proportionally fewer fighters than an Orion IIRC (despite it being 3 times longer it doesn't have 3 times the fighter complement), I would imagine the Collie would still win in that regard. Not to mention the effects of aging on the hull of the Repulse, for all we know it could well have been in service since the Great War.

[Kolgena]

My bad. Glanced up and pulled the wrong number. Regardless, the difference in size makes the Orion hitting it negligible.

No.

The armor properties don't scale up together with the ship. Neither does the armor thickness scale linearly. And increasing armor thiicknes has diminishing returns after a point.

Do some research into the matter. You have a 2100m long metal box crashing into the Colossuss from the front (it's shape is far less uniform..and that thin neck is a very big weak point).

Best case scenario - the whole front of the Collie is gone, the neck snaps. That's not negligible damage - that massive damage.

Um what? If you read my post, you'd see that I agree with you.

Edit: Whoops. Vague sentence.
Here's what I said: Regardless, the difference in size makes the Orion hitting it negligible.
Here's what I meant: Regardless, the difference is negligible, ie, the Orion would still make a crumpled can of the Colossus.

Edit 2: Apparently I can't read my own posts. I guess I did mean that the Orion hitting it would be negligible, assuming that the Colossus could survive a 5000 megaton blast. Of course, I don't believe that any space vessel can, which is why the Orion should be able to write off the Colossus.

[TrashMan]

I like to point to the difference between background universe full and game performance. Those are not the same for balance reasons.
Examples of this are many in all types of game. Book/movie and game don't perform the same.


With that said an Orion ramming is worse than any Harbringer/Helios bomb. Altouhg I belive a Colossuss could survive being hit with  such a bomb.
But "survive" and "minimal damage" are not one and the same..

[Mongoose]

I like to point to the difference between background universe full and game performance. Those are not the same for balance reasons.
Examples of this are many in all types of game. Book/movie and game don't perform the same.

Except this dichotomy exists only in your own mind, as you've been told in the past.  For our purposes, the game is the universe.  The Colossus was rammed by the remnants of the Repulse, and it suffered only minimal damage.  Any speculation to the contrary is just fanon.

[ChronoReverse]

Energy is still energy though.  Withstanding over a billion-fold times the energy without much damage is pretty indicative of how much shock the Colossus was meant to absorb.

Frankly, with that in mind, it's more likely the Repulse would have crumpled into itself against Colossus with much of momentum converted to heat energy.  It's exactly as you say; at such scales the way things collide change.  It's just that it also applies to the Repulse.  That is, it's not like the Repulse is a single ideal solid either if you make the (correct) assertion that the Colossus is not.  Therefore, the momentum the Repulse brings to bear against Colossus is only a small fraction of its total.  And since volume for volume the Colossus' construction is much (understatement) tougher than the Repulse, it could even work out that in the impact zones, the Colossus could even potentially get a sort of "Damage Reduction" effect.

This would mean the collide into Collossus and bounce scenario depicted by the game engine might actually be somewhat realistic.  An extreme case of Realistic is Unrealistic (warning: TVTropes can ruin your life).



(Incidentally, in my gameplay experience, the Repulse is usually shredded before reaching Colossus anyway)

[TrashMan]

Except this dichotomy exists only in your own mind, as you've been told in the past.  For our purposes, the game is the universe.  The Colossus was rammed by the remnants of the Repulse, and it suffered only minimal damage.  Any speculation to the contrary is just fanon.

No.
Or are you saying that if you were to make a FS2 movie it would be exactly as the game?

No visible damage on ships, they just suddenly blow up? Same damage, same speeds, same balance? The move hero, the pilot, will collide with himself if he moves too far away from the battle?

There is the setting of a universe - the story, the background that in the head of the creator. It and the game play out a  bit differently due to the game being a playing medium first, story medium second. You just can't pull off some thing as well in the game - or don't want to, for gameplay purposes.
Heck, the Repulse doesn't even ram the collie in all cases.
Remeber that Aten that rammed the Bastion in FS1? It did a lot of damage to it..and the size difference between it and hte Orion is bigger than the size difference between a collie and a orion.


That said, IF we are talking about any sort of realism and/or believabiltiy, the repulse would be utterly destroyed in a chrash with a collie. But the collie would suffer heavy damage. Anyone claiming the opposite is out of touch with reality.

[General Battuta]

With armor and structure that regularly survive multi-megaton hits? I don't know.

[ChronoReverse]

With armor and structure that regularly survive multi-megaton hits? I don't know.

Forget megatons, the Colossus tanks multi-gigatons of explosive force (meaning the energy transfer is much closer to instantaneous than a collision would be).

[Mongoose]

That said, IF we are talking about any sort of realism and/or believabiltiy, the repulse would be utterly destroyed in a chrash with a collie. But the collie would suffer heavy damage. Anyone claiming the opposite is out of touch with reality.

Well good, because FS had never bothered with such frivolous pretensions as "reality."

But in all seriousness, unless you've seen some Word of floating around somewhere that no one else has, all we have to go on from a canon standpoint is what is presented to us in the games.  Any sort of further speculation or claims of "what really happened" are, as I said, so much fanon.  Often very good fanon that helps to flesh out what we see in-game, but fanon nonetheless.

[General Battuta]

Yes.

[deathfun]

Armour wouldn't matter as much in a collision situation so much as how it's put together

Take body armour for example. You could have just a flat piece like usual, stopping certain different rounds, but not others
While the better scaled body armour has scales of that tissue that when hit, will distribute and absorb far the impact of the round making it in turn, stronger.

Wouldn't the hull be the same concept?

[Commander Zane]

I got it!!!
Dedicate three meters of the ship hull to have Non-Newtonian fluid between layers.

It only gets harder and harder as more and more pressure is forced upon it.

[ChronoReverse]

Armour wouldn't matter as much in a collision situation so much as how it's put together

Take body armour for example. You could have just a flat piece like usual, stopping certain different rounds, but not others
While the better scaled body armour has scales of that tissue that when hit, will distribute and absorb far the impact of the round making it in turn, stronger.

Wouldn't the hull be the same concept?

That's definitely true.  However, the hull of the Colossus doesn't seem to have particular weaknesses in terms of the damage type.  It protect against piercing and cutting damage of beams (which isn't very much like collision damage) just as well as massive blunt impacts from bombs (which is more similar to collision damage).  Furthermore, the superstructure within is at least strong enough to easily take the force of the engines pushing the entire ship.  It should be a safe assumption that there's some margin there as well (which translates to quite a bit since the Colossus is so stupendously huge).


Keep in mind that when you have superstructures of that size colliding, the momentum and energy brought to bear is only a small fraction of the total.  If each subsection of the Colossus is tough enough to endure a collision with an equal sized subsection of the Repulse, the Repulse would collapse against the Colossus as chunks and pieces fly out all around.  The Colossus may lose some sections (breaking off or crushed) in the impact zone but that's relatively "minor" damage that wouldn't keep the Colossus from its anti-NTF duties.


In any case, the Colossus' superstructure is at least designed to withstand forces (and subsequent shaking) of multiple impacts of over a billion-fold the energy of the entire Repulse collapsing into the Colossus at a single point.  The Repulse crumpling against the Colossus in a "realistic" manner is less than feeble in comparison.