How did so many people decide titans start at 100k mass?

[Xavori]

I know. I know. It's been debated a thousand times and a newbie like me shouldn't be dredging up things like this.

But I have to since my poor ship is getting to be really sensitive about his weight.

See, he's only 261m long. Compared to the titans I've seen in videos, that's tiny. And he's only 81m high and 93m long. But he's prolly going to mass 150-200k. And that makes him sad.

And it's not like it's a solid ship. I'm building crew quarters and a luxurious captain's quarters (my ship, so yes I get the silk sheets and jacuzzi). There will be a lounge for the crew to relax, separate rooms for jumpdrive, engines, overdrive, etc. and even a number of gun decks for interior mounted turrets.

But I'm still going to blow way past 100k on what I think is a medium sized ship. So how did anyone decide on 100k for titans? Was it just that one of the first people to propose classifications said 100k, and like college football polls, nobody was smart enough to remember that the preseason polls should be thrown out completely once real results are available? Was it just that 100k is a nice even number that sounded like a good place to end normal ship scales? Was it a secret communist fascist plot to overthrow our government and install a secret lizard person as President-For-Life?

Inquiring minds want to know!

 

[refirendum]

nobody decided it really

I'd rather just go by max dimension volume for determining titan or not.
5 million cubic meters is where i think i draw that line of titan. (multiply lengths/width/height for number)

 

[therimmer96]

I am of the opinion a ship becomes a titan when it exceeds 10 million blocks, but thats me. Sure, 100k is alot, but they are too common place now to be special. The word titan insinuates the ship being massive, blocking the sun sorta deal :P

 

[Lord Daro]

How i personally refer to ships has very little to do with mass or size and depends mostly on intended roles. The size becomes rather a side effect of the role.

A titan in my opinion should be something capable of taking on whole fleets on its own.

 

[Thalanor]

It may be performance-related, but I don't know since my machine is above average.
100k mass ships can be reasonably used in combat by mostly everyone, but ships considerably above that line will start to fry weaker clients. As such, the 100k might have come up in order to allow everyone to user a lower-tier titan.

I personally class anything realistically usable above battleship as dreadnought; a "titan" in my eyes is at least a kilometer long or makes up for that with other dimensions and is usually not very economic. Take keptick's charon, for example; that is a titan.

 

[Xavori]

Well, I originally envisioned my ship as a dreadnought with mining capabilities (cuz why not when I have that much space to play with). It's got decent firepower 4500-4500-4500 cannon-cannon-punch as a main gun, and a pair of 1500 block guided missiles (~7m energy each to fire...missiles don't get ridiculous quickly or anything....). And lastly, it has 16 50-block heatseekers that I like to think of as my loot pinata bats.

So if I was judging by firepower based on some of the designs I've seen, ya, dreadnought. I fear nothing smaller than me, and with some of the logic based defenses systems I've come up with, I fear nothing that's the same size or just a bit bigger either.

 

[ToyotaSupra]

Does it really matter?

This is starmade, ships start off big and go progressively and exponentially bigger until the server crashes.

Ships basically come in three sizes:

1) 'You found a good system/asteroids' big
2) 'You stole our ships to build that!' big
3) 'You're on a build PVP server, go mental till it crashes' big.

Anything smaller is an RP server/single player.

Spoiler

I haven't played MP in ages though so I might be wrong

 

[CyberTao]

Am I the only one who's confused that people class something this size as a titan? Just me? kk.

Generally speaking though there is no agreed upon ship classing, so you can call your ship whatever you want really. Classing systems are just to compare your ships to other people's. I dunno, maybe it's just too early in the morning and I don't understand the thread.

 

[Keptick]

I generally go with dimensions to decide if something is a titan or not. And to be honest, it really depends on the person.

Sure, some people might call their 100k mass ship titans. The main turret on my titan is bigger than that. So "titan" is a very subjective label.

Maybe it just goes titan < supertitan (kilonought)

 

[Thalanor]

The "general consensus" ship classifications in starmade are actually pretty good. They do not take the sizes of some scifi franchise's ships as a base but instead are oriented around the average distribution of player built ship sizes.
Of course there are far less people successfully building at 1km+ dimensions, so most classification systems stop way before that.

I personally think "Titan" (or better yet, "Dreadnought") should be the end of it, though. Supertitan and above starts to get ridiculous at some point. "Battleship" IMO denotes a ship that surpasses almost all vessels in size and firepower, anything larger is basically a personal flagship, and the sizes of these are not bound by any size conventions anyways.

 

[Mered4]

260x80x90 is around 1.8mil, so your ship has a maximum mass of 180k IF it's a noob cube.

Just as a reminder, noob cubes (no matter how they are disguised) are heavily frowned upon by many servers. Personally I abhor ships that are basically rectangles with decoration and rounded corners, and I'm not alone in that regard.

The reasoning behind what is a titan and what is not goes back to the deep past of last year's old website. In those days, we had sector limits that were hard-coded into the game - and thus, it was lunacy to bring a ship over 1km long to any event, combat or no, and expect recordable frame rates. As it stands, many ships are much longer than they are wide, but also much wider than they are tall. In other words, long and flat. This leads to some interesting sizing conventions, but it also leads to the artificial inflation of mass. For example, the Executor that I built back in December is only 180k mass because it's a long and thin wedge. It is very inefficient for blocks per negative space, but it still breaches the titan class because it's so long. Your ship COULD be 180k mass, but that's if you just made it a massive rectangular prism.

Another reason 100k is a reasonable titan classification is that the crafting system puts very real limits on what you can bring into a fight. I am currently working to bring the Executor onto the MFleet server - and it's going to take forever. The artificial rarity of shields notwithstanding, the sheer amount of resources I have to bring to the table to spawn the thing is enormous. I highly doubt I'll be spawning in more than one, and while it isn't an *end game* vessel by any means, the sheer firepower and shielding outclasses 95% of the ships spawned on the server. Thus, it's a Titan - because it is unique and in a class of its own.

 

[Xavori]

260x80x90 is around 1.8mil, so your ship has a maximum mass of 180k IF it's a noob cube.

Just as a reminder, noob cubes (no matter how they are disguised) are heavily frowned upon by many servers. Personally I abhor ships that are basically rectangles with decoration and rounded corners, and I'm not alone in that regard.

1. My ship is definitely not a "noob cube". It's adorable, and boxes are not. Well, except Companion Cube, but that's only because it loves me.

2. Your math sucks. If I built a rectangular box, I could stick 1,958, 580 blocks in it. It's nowhere near a box, which is how I knew it would be less than 200k back in my original post. It's also already over 100k, but I have tons of space inside. So I'm back at my 150k-200k. Might even be a little less than that since the last 5% of the length or so is really only 3 high, and the top 15 or so 'rows' are only 3 wide and 10 long. Like I said, NOT A NOOB CUBE AND YOUR MOM DRESSES YOU FUNNY!

3. Crafting system limits huh what the hell are you talking about? I've been playing the game two weeks. I have 200 million credits on my server, and have prolly spent another 200 million on other ships, the station I'm working on, etc. Even if I wasn't using shops, just bashing loot pinatas and having a very good mining ship would have given me everything I needed to build my current ship in less than a week. Me thinks you aren't working hard enough if you think there is any limit to ship size from crafting.

 

[CyberTao]

Another reason 100k is a reasonable titan classification is that the crafting system puts very real limits on what you can bring into a fight. I am currently working to bring the Executor onto the MFleet server - and it's going to take forever. The artificial rarity of shields notwithstanding, the sheer amount of resources I have to bring to the table to spawn the thing is enormous. I highly doubt I'll be spawning in more than one, and while it isn't an *end game* vessel by any means, the sheer firepower and shielding outclasses 95% of the ships spawned on the server. Thus, it's a Titan - because it is unique and in a class of its own.

I don't see how resource rarity is a reason to downsize ship classing, it just means larger caliber ships are rarer, which seems more appropriate. If something is rare, it creates the sense of Awe that befits a titan or even battleship.

I dunno, it makes more sense to say everyone is running around in cruisers while large factions obtain titans than it does to say everyone is riding around in titans while factions have NOMNOMNOMPUNEHSHIPS, but that is preference, which is all classing is really. The Ra Rakehn is still a battleship to me, it was built to be one, fitted with weapons to fit one, and the interior is planned to be styled "Higher class militarian" to fit it's role. It's not a titan in the slightest and is over 600m long with a 60k mass shell, hence why 100k mass threw me way off. I mean I haven't been on servers on a while, but from what I can tell, the size of ships are generally still the same as the 2km sector days, with titans just slowly getting outclassed with kilonaughts.

1. My ship is definitely not a "noob cube". It's adorable, and boxes are not. Well, except Companion Cube, but that's only because it loves me.

2. Your math sucks. If I built a rectangular box, I could stick 1,958, 580 blocks in it. It's nowhere near a box, which is how I knew it would be less than 200k back in my original post. It's also already over 100k, but I have tons of space inside. So I'm back at my 150k-200k. Might even be a little less than that since the last 5% of the length or so is really only 3 high, and the top 15 or so 'rows' are only 3 wide and 10 long. Like I said, NOT A NOOB CUBE AND YOUR MOM DRESSES YOU FUNNY!

3. Crafting system limits huh what the hell are you talking about? I've been playing the game two weeks. I have 200 million credits on my server, and have prolly spent another 200 million on other ships, the station I'm working on, etc. Even if I wasn't using shops, just bashing loot pinatas and having a very good mining ship would have given me everything I needed to build my current ship in less than a week. Me thinks you aren't working hard enough if you think there is any limit to ship size from crafting.

Did you mean 100k mass? or 100k blocks? Cause 100k mass is 1 million blocks, so 200k mass with your dimensions would put you close to a brick. Does your server still use buy with credits by chance?

 

[Xavori]

Did you mean 100k mass? or 100k blocks? Cause 100k mass is 1 million blocks, so 200k mass with your dimensions would put you close to a brick. Does your server still use buy with credits by chance?

Ya know...I'm gonna go slam my head into the wall a few times.

Just checked and the game reports the ship at 7094.4 mass with 100,526 blocks. So it's going to be the tiny happy adorable ship I thought it would be when I started the build. I was definitely looking at blocks and thinking mass.

And the server is one I rented for me and a dozen or so friends. The only things I've changed were upping the top speed to 150 (so 300 w/overdrive), sector size to 5k, and protecting the starting sector which doesn't seem to help astronauts as we tested that the other day and poor astronaut hiding in the starting station got blown up. I'm also going to add more waypoints, but since I haven't put together a new config file since we had that, I have to go lookup what line I need to add to get more than 20. Hasn't been much hurry on that is the only reason it's not done.

 

[jorgekorke]

For me, Titans are anything bigger then 1 mil mass, anyway.
The future of the game should still have titans, but for then being more rare and special, being mostly flagships of leaders or something like that.

I support general combat being used with smaller ships (100k~300k mass), that said, not-key-battles.

The reason that Titans have gone from "WOW, LOOK, A TITAN!!!" to "meh, another titan" in the overall community (including myself) for those two years was the saturation - there were titans everywhere, every time and their disturbances was getting old. (such as people without i7's to handle them)

 

[Mered4]

1. My ship is definitely not a "noob cube". It's adorable, and boxes are not. Well, except Companion Cube, but that's only because it loves me.

2. Your math sucks. If I built a rectangular box, I could stick 1,958, 580 blocks in it. It's nowhere near a box, which is how I knew it would be less than 200k back in my original post. It's also already over 100k, but I have tons of space inside. So I'm back at my 150k-200k. Might even be a little less than that since the last 5% of the length or so is really only 3 high, and the top 15 or so 'rows' are only 3 wide and 10 long. Like I said, NOT A NOOB CUBE AND YOUR MOM DRESSES YOU FUNNY!

3. Crafting system limits huh what the hell are you talking about? I've been playing the game two weeks. I have 200 million credits on my server, and have prolly spent another 200 million on other ships, the station I'm working on, etc. Even if I wasn't using shops, just bashing loot pinatas and having a very good mining ship would have given me everything I needed to build my current ship in less than a week. Me thinks you aren't working hard enough if you think there is any limit to ship size from crafting.

Oh, you aren't using the block system. Lol. Yeah I do admit 100k titans doesn't make sense for a credit system.

 

[CyberTao]

Ya know...I'm gonna go slam my head into the wall a few times.

Just checked and the game reports the ship at 7094.4 mass with 100,526 blocks. So it's going to be the tiny happy adorable ship I thought it would be when I started the build. I was definitely looking at blocks and thinking mass.

And the server is one I rented for me and a dozen or so friends. The only things I've changed were upping the top speed to 150 (so 300 w/overdrive), sector size to 5k, and protecting the starting sector which doesn't seem to help astronauts as we tested that the other day and poor astronaut hiding in the starting station got blown up. I'm also going to add more waypoints, but since I haven't put together a new config file since we had that, I have to go lookup what line I need to add to get more than 20. Hasn't been much hurry on that is the only reason it's not done.

Ahkay, so I wasn't going crazy.
Most new options to starmade appear in the config near the bottom, so start looking down there or try a find function with keywords.

 

[Panpiper]

Just as a reminder, noob cubes (no matter how they are disguised) are heavily frowned upon by many servers. Personally I abhor ships that are basically rectangles with decoration and rounded corners, and I'm not alone in that regard.

Wouldn't it be nice if the game mechanics didn't actually encourage and reward the building of cubes?

There is NOTHING more important to me than the handling characteristics of a ship. If I have to spend thirty seconds dragging my mouse just to line up a ship on an asteroid, I am NOT going to build or fly that ship, period. How pretty the ship is is absolutely irrelevant to me compared to this. At the same time however, the vulnerability of my ship to pirates and griefers is a huge deal, so I want to cram as much as possible into a ship while maintaining it's handling characteristics. And there is the cube, reigning supreme.

I realize I am at risk of hijacking the thread, but people's objection to cubes is IMO completely misdirected. It makes no sense to be against cubes, but be 'for' the mechanics that reward them. If you don't want people building cubes, champion eliminating the XYZ dimension function from turn rate calculation, make it solely mass based. I would further recommend having variable mass for different blocks, and make purely decorative blocks and basic hull very low mass relative to functional blocks.

I fly a cube. I personally hate flying a cube, I too think they are ugly wastes of time. But I hate flying slugboats that can't turn, much more.

 

[Xavori]

Oh, you aren't using the block system. Lol. Yeah I do admit 100k titans doesn't make sense for a credit system.

So how many blocks does it take to spawn a station? And do the shops let you trade blocks or something, or no shops?

I'm curious since like I said, I'm stupidly rich in credits without trying, and now with having a couple ships that wtfpwnbbq pirates, it's not like I have much use for credits anyway since you just keep bashing the pinatas and harvesting the loot clouds.

In fact, I'm thinking of building a titan out of nothing but EMP computers because I haz lots of dem.

 

[Viridis00]

I've always thought a "Titan" was a ship that's 750m in any dimension or longer. From what I can see here in this thread though Titan is totally arbitrary even among other players.

The reason that Titans have gone from "WOW, LOOK, A TITAN!!!" to "meh, another titan" in the overall community (including myself) for those two years was the saturation - there were titans everywhere, every time and their disturbances was getting old. (such as people without i7's to handle them)

I think they became so common simply because they're actually a possibility in SM unlike building games of past. Hell, my first post on the old site when I first found this game was if it was possible to build a 32km O'Neil Cylinder space station. People like big things. Strangely enough I prefer to build smaller ships now. Go figure. The hype wears out when seeing big ships all over the community content catalog.