Accuracy of WC3 Materials

Farbourne

Farbourne

Rear Admiral
So I've been looking over all the neat source materials that come with the GOG WC3 release. I have an eye to make a WC3 version of my Excel WC1 ship comparer, so I'm looking at ship stats.

Unsurprisingly, the different source materials don't entirely agree when it comes to ship stats. Some things I can figure out from the game (i.e., I know the Hellcat actually mounts two ion cannons and two neutrons, despite all of the source materials implying something different), but some of the stats (like YPR, or numerical shield thickness) I have to get from the source materials.

There are four different source materials bundled with WC3: Victory Streak (the WC3 manual), "Warbirds" (whatever that is), the Official Origin Guide to WC3, and the WC3 Authorized Combat Guide.

I'm assuming the discrepancies arise because the earliest materials were written before the game was finalized and the developers were tweaking stats for game balance. What was the cronology of the four different souce materials? Anyone know? The most recent one should be the most accurate, I would imagine... Would that be the Authorized Combat Guide (it seems to be the closest to observable in-game traits, when there is disagreement).
 
Hellcat heh ? Nice :) From memory I can say that Hellcat is wrong in both Kilrathi Saga manual and Warbirds. In Fact the only manual that I have and is correct is the PSX Wc3 version.
Hellcat has (Orange) 2 Neutrons and (Purple) 2 Ions in game.
Warbirds says 2 mass 2 Ions
Kilrathi saga says 2 lasers 2 Ions.

Even the WcPedia and Ships Database has it wrong....now that I checked :)
Thats what I remember from memory about my beloved Hellcat.

I dont have the Wc3 novel (yet :( ) or the 2 wc3 strategy guides to compare .
Also in WCAcademy (TV) the 265x hellcat has 2 cannons.What they are I dont know.2 Lasers maybe?

These maybe typos or mistakes in the manuals but I can imagine that maybe there were other variants that we never see or fly in the games

EDIT: I fotgot to mention about the WC4 version Hellcat. It has 2 particles and 2 ions. :)
 
Wing3's hellcat is a Hellcat V. The academy variant, like the Arrow, might be an earlier revision with a different loadout.
 
TCSTigersClaw said:
Even the WcPedia and Ships Database has it wrong....now that I checked :)
Thats what I remember from memory about my beloved Hellcat.
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Yeah the Hellcat article is pretty out of date. It's a template that's in there now. One thing WCPedia will aim to do is provide listing of the stats from every source. For example look at the Hornet page. It lists the different stats from Claw Marks, the game engine and so forth.

I'm about to start working on a small project to get every ship page at least created with layout so that fans can help fill in the data fields.
 
Dundradal said:
I'm about to start working on a small project to get every ship page at least created with layout so that fans can help fill in the data fields.
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Durandal , if it helps you I can do the same for other Fighters ,I just recently got all my WC material out of the boxes and I have every WC installed in my "WC PC " :).
 
Something else interesting I've just noticed in Warbirds is that the armour values are somewhat ridiculous. Apparently a Thunderbolt has a metre-thick durasteel casing around the entire spaceframe. I see the WCPedia has taken the sensible expedient of dividing all those values by 10, probably because the stats are taken from their appearance in Secret Ops where the stats were just ported across as numbers into the Vision engine, which expresses its values as millimetres thickness of durasteel.

Is consensus opinion that this was just a printing error and a Thunderbolt doesn't actually have more shields/armour than an Exeter?
 
The thing about armor in Wing Commander is that the cm measurement typically means "cm of durasteel". It doesn't mean that all ships are made of durasteel, but rather that whatever material the ship is plated with has the same protection as if it were layered with that many centimeters of durasteel. So, no, the Thunderbolt doesn't have 100-120 cm thick armor plating, but it's going to be able to take as many shots as 100-120 cm of durasteel.
 
Did it appear to anyone else that the damage system in wc1/2 was more... ummm... fun? (if that is the right word) There was something really satisfying about finishing off the last enemy with your one remaining weapon (or ramming!) and limping home at 1/3 normal speed... I just never had that experience in later games. You were either in near-perfect shape, or dead. Or as with Prophecy, 3% core but all systems operational...

I do understand it had a lot to do with damage repair systems, but it also seemed that, despite however many cm's of durasteel equivalent armor, your ship took SOME damage whenever shields were down, and that got the heart racing. (Privateer also had this damage model, but had damage repair also. And got it right.)

What I took from the manual stats was that your ship could take damage equivalent to X cm's of durasteel BEFORE IT EXPLODED. In other words, armor was not just a second set of shields, and your 'peripheral' systems (engines, weapons etc.) would take damage according to where you were hit. Then, once the armor was gone, enemy fire was free to slice straight through and explosively decompress the spaceframe or something. At least in my mind.

Anyway back on topic, X cm's durasteel equivalent, not literal. But it almost looks literal in the case of some of the heavy variants in Arena, huh?
 
The armor was basically a second set of shields that didn't regenerate. Later games you could take component damage while taking armor damage, but I don't believe WC1 and WC2 implemented that. I could be wrong, but I don't think you started taking component damage in those games until your armor on a face was completely gone.

At the very least, the idea is that after your armor is whittled away, your power plant starts taking damage, until it goes critical. So you can still take a bit more damage on a face that's completely without shields or armor before you go up.

Concerning system repairs, I do recall seeing some systems reporting themselves as repaired in WC2. I don't know the exact details, but my guess would be that you could repair up to a certain point, and so damage would progressively increase? In any case, it certainly wasn't like the later games, where as long as a component isn't destroyed it can be completely repair over time.

My theory, though, would be that it's also a big part psychological. In WC1, WC2, WC3 and Priv you can directly observe cockpit damage. Seeing the computer system damaged in WC1/WC2 was quite concerning, too, as if that took too much damage, your VDUs would tend to just show static, and you'd either have to deal with it or fight them to display something useful, or at the very least not full of static. This is something that later games didn't implement.
 
Yes, systems did repair themselves in WC1 & 2 (or at least, in WC2 - I don't recall in WC1). This was very rarely seen, however, because of the scale - after WC2, missions started getting longer, and the repair systems had more time to do their job. In WC2, you never fought against more than 10 enemy fighters during the entire mission - so really, things happened pretty fast, and you just didn't have time to see much in the way of repairs. You can really see the contrast in mission length when you consider what happened in Standoff. At first, we tried to give all ships exactly the same amount of AB fuel as they had in the original game. It just didn't work, you'd run out of fuel about a quarter of the way through most missions - we had to boost it by enormous amounts just to get it all balanced out.

Visual damage is of course another thing, as Nomad Terror points out. In the early WC games (the last of these were Priv and Armada), you could actually lose elements of the HUD. You could find yourself in a situation where you have working shields... but no shield display. And radar, of course. I guess this wasn't considered player-friendly - at least, I can't see any other reason why this wasn't implemented in the later games.
 
The point, of course, is that regardless of the units used, we are for some reason expected to believe that between WC2 and WC3 there has been such a revolution in armour technology that heavy fighters now have as much armour as destroyers used to. Which is a little silly, though I guess not entirely impossible.

I have another issue with the various WC3 guide materials which is that as far as I can tell none of them actually acknowledge the existence of the neutron gun. Conversely, I believe the particle cannon only exists in the manuals. Now, the obvious conclusion is that one got renamed to the other partway through development, but it'd be nice if somebody could confirm that.
 
Ilanin said:
I see the WCPedia has taken the sensible expedient of dividing all those values by 10, probably because the stats are taken from their appearance in Secret Ops where the stats were just ported across as numbers into the Vision engine, which expresses its values as millimetres thickness of durasteel.
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To be honest that was not a choice that was made. If anything it was the result of copying from CIC Green.

We are in the process of designing new Ship pages (we've started some but still working on other details) and how to present this type of info is something we are looking at.
 
Ilanin said:
The point, of course, is that regardless of the units used, we are for some reason expected to believe that between WC2 and WC3 there has been such a revolution in armour technology that heavy fighters now have as much armour as destroyers used to. Which is a little silly, though I guess not entirely impossible.
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It does seem silly at first - there have been many fierce arguments about it over the years, and many people used to simply refuse to acknowledge this change, insisting that WC3 just plain got the numbers wrong (especially since WC2 internally stores the armour stats in millimetres too, which creates the impression that somebody took WC2's millimetric data and erroneously thought it was centimetric).
There are, however, a few factors that explain all this and make it perfectly reasonable - indeed, they make the alternative unreasonable:
- There is already a pretty revolutionary progression in armour between WC1 and WC2. The armour increases greatly between these two games.
- Then there is Privateer, where you can upgrade your durasteel armour to plasteel (x10), tungsten (x20) and then isometal (x40!). If civilians in 2669 are able to replace 10cm of durasteel with a 10cm layer of something that gives them 400cm of armour, that's a change that WC3 absolutely has to take into account.
- Finally, there is Armada, which presents us with a "missing link" between WC2 and WC3 - you have ships with plasteel armour.

All in all, what you come to realise is that the revolution between WC2 and WC3 may actually have been a massive downgrade in terms of real armour thickness. That is to say, if WC3 ships use plasteel, their armour will be roughly the same thickness as WC2 armour (of course, we don't actually know that WC ships use durasteel - for all we know, the Ferret could actually be covered with 6 millimetres of plasteel!). But if WC3 ships use tungsten or isometal armour, then their armour will be half, or a quarter of the thickness of the WC2 armour plating.

If this kind of revolution still strikes you as silly or unlikely, consider that there were many cases in reality where such incredible revolutions took place in such a short period of time. In my hometown, there is a massive set of 19th century fortifications - the city itself was essentially a fortress. But... this fortress, which was built in a remarkably short time (six years, starting 1870)... was obsolete by the time it was completed. Because during that short span of time, the range of artillery fire increased tenfold. Something very similar even happens as far as aircraft are concerned, in WWII - there's just no comparison between the planes we see at the outset of the war and at its end. Even if you compare planes of the same specific type, you'll find that a Spitfire Mk. I is a rather unimpressive compared to the Spitfire Mk. XIV. And of course - in 1939, every single air force in the world still had some biplane fighters on stock, and would regularly use them. In 1945, most of the major air forces had jetfighters. The difference wasn't just in speed - in armament, it wasn't unusual for a fighter to have four 7.7mm guns in 1939, and by 1945, you had planes equipped with multiple 20mm cannons, or even 30mm cannons. The numbers deceive us about the difference, by the way - the difference between 7.7mm and 30mm is not that the resulting hole is 22.3mm bigger in the latter case, but rather the impact is several times more powerful. Even armour actually got a huge upgrade during the war - wooden planes were starting to disappear, fabric-covered planes even more so, and the metal armour plating around the engines actually got thicker. Finally, there were inventions like self-sealing fuel tanks, which prevented planes from exploding after taking a single bullet in the fuel tanks.

Put in that context, I can't help thinking that progress in WC is actually remarkably slow-paced...
 
Quarto said:
There is already a pretty revolutionary progression in armour between WC1 and WC2. The armour increases greatly between these two games.
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No it doesn't. The YF-44 has 5/5/3 cm equivalent of armour front/back/sides. The F-44 variant which appears in Fleet Action has 7.5/7.5/6 cm equivalent. Ten years later - that's a glacially slow progress, as you comment. And since this fighter is still in active service up to six months before the start of WC3, the increase by a factor of 200 has to happen within these six months. You're talking about variation over a time of six years to see the sorts of improvements that count as an order of magnitude, and even then, no fighter in 1945 had the firepower of a destroyer in 1939.

Overall, fighter technology appears to have broadly stalled with only incremental improvements made between 2654 and the introduction of the Excalibur in 2669. In fact we know that throughout the war humanity hasn't been making major improvements to their fighter designs because the Kilrathi were able to catch up substantially with Confed's technical lead - that's why all the TCSF's top aces except Blair and Marshall fought in the early part of the war.

Then there is Privateer, where you can upgrade your durasteel armour to plasteel (x10), tungsten (x20) and then isometal (x40!). If civilians in 2669 are able to replace 10cm of durasteel with a 10cm layer of something that gives them 400cm of armour, that's a change that WC3 absolutely has to take into account.
Finally, there is Armada, which presents us with a "missing link" between WC2 and WC3 - you have ships with plasteel armour.
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Right. So...a brand new Covert Ops team with a refitted carrier to the highest specifications launches fighters with armour inferior to that which civilians can get in a frontier sector of the Confederation if they have enough money, despite the fact that Confederation is operating as a highly centralised, mobilised state with government control over the economy (see Fleet Action, again). I'm sure I don't have to elaborate on how absurd this is and why using it as a basis for further speculation is not sensible.

I'm also kind of curious as to what new phase of tungsten the Confederation has discovered that makes it a suitable armour material of any type, but whatever (yes, I have a PhD in materials science and I *will* pick holes in WC3's science all day if you let me).
 
Ilanin said:
No it doesn't. The YF-44 has 5/5/3 cm equivalent of armour front/back/sides. The F-44 variant which appears in Fleet Action has 7.5/7.5/6 cm equivalent. Ten years later - that's a glacially slow progress, as you comment. And since this fighter is still in active service up to six months before the start of WC3, the increase by a factor of 200 has to happen within these six months. You're talking about variation over a time of six years to see the sorts of improvements that count as an order of magnitude, and even then, no fighter in 1945 had the firepower of a destroyer in 1939.
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Not exactly. The YF-44, with 5/5/3 cm, was state-of-the-art in 2654. It was a brand new prototype. In 2665, the ship is just barely keeping up, and there are many other fighters that have much higher armour values. Consider how the Raptor compares with the Broadsword (or even the Sabre, if you feel the Broadsword is a different class). I mean, yeah, progress isn't anywhere near as rapid as we might expect from real life, but even in that case, we can clearly see the trend, and we expect WC3 ships to take a big step forward.

Right. So...a brand new Covert Ops team with a refitted carrier to the highest specifications launches fighters with armour inferior to that which civilians can get in a frontier sector of the Confederation if they have enough money, despite the fact that Confederation is operating as a highly centralised, mobilised state with government control over the economy (see Fleet Action, again). I'm sure I don't have to elaborate on how absurd this is and why using it as a basis for further speculation is not sensible.
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Well, hey, if you think that's absurd, just imagine this - in the year 2011, most of the world's top-of-the-line jetfighters are armoured with the exact same stuff used to build civilian airliners! :). Come to think of it, I'm not sure if Boeing's Dreamliner isn't by any chance covered with more advanced materials than any jetfighter (except perhaps the F-35 or F-22). Also, during WWII, there were civilian planes covered with steel... while one of the best fighter-bombers of the war was made of plywood. I hope I'm getting my point across :).

Seriously - first, you must consider thickness. It's not at all unreasonable for a civilian ship to have, say, 1cm of tungsten armour (60 cm eq.), while military fighters fly about with 20cm of plasteel (200 cm eq.). That's not necessarily what we see in Priv and Armada (I'm too lazy to do a proper comparison at the moment), but you get the picture - the type of armour being used may be offset by quantity. Secondly, merely having resources does not necessarily mean being able to use them. Confed production facilities are finite, as is the manpower. It may be that such armour is available for civilians because Confed is already getting everything it can use at that point - after all, merely having the metals needed for armour (or even having actual armour plates ready to be cut and fixed onto a ship) does not mean having the manpower and facilities to use it. What's more, it may also be that Gemini is a special case - that Confed intentionally allows more vital equipment onto the civilian market than it does elsewhere, because having well-armed civilians in Gemini allows them to spend less resources defending them. It's actually a very, very good thing for Confed if the owners of all those civilian draymen in Gemini decide to spend money on better armour. Finally, it may simply be a case of military limits. Upgrading to better armour is an easy enough decision when you're considering what to put into production next - but when it comes to fighters and other ships on the frontlines, it may simply not be possible. In the same way that the UK used biplane Gloster Gladiators in Egypt and Malta - because they were there, and Hurricanes were not - so it may be that somewhere on the frontline, you'll have a poorly-armoured carrier filled with fighters using outdated armour, because the alternative is to take that carrier off the line for whatever amount of time, leaving the area unguarded. And yes, you may launch a special op with plasteel armour at a time when you already have tungsten and isometal in the pipeline - because the alternative is to wait, and you may not have the time (as is indeed the case).

I'm also kind of curious as to what new phase of tungsten the Confederation has discovered that makes it a suitable armour material of any type, but whatever (yes, I have a PhD in materials science and I *will* pick holes in WC3's science all day if you let me).
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Heh. Let's just assume "tungsten" actually means an alloy or composite of some kind, where tungsten is just one of the components :).
 
in 1945 several fighters had rocket racks with rockets that had a higher explosive yield than a destroyer shell. a p51 could carry eight of them and often used them for tank busting or antishipping. I'd say that makes them as powerful as a destroyer.
 
NinjaLA: True, but that's offense and I thought we were talking about defense.

Anyway, I can buy that 2669 fighters had four times as much armor strength as 2654 fighters (120 for the Excalibur vs 30 for the Rapier), but FORTY? That would require such a rapid up-scaling of fighter gun power that after each retrofit of fighters, the enemy's craft would die like flies until they upgraded their armor. AFAIK we don't see this massive recall-and-retrofit of the whole force OR the total obsolescence of non-retrofitted craft--craft from a few years ago are considered inferior but not unusable the way they would if WC3 fighter guns were several times as potent as WC2 ones.
 
Well, we do (kinda) see it in Priv - as you upgrade your ship, you get to feel well-nigh invulnerable.

I just remembered another detail, as far as pre-WC3 upgrades go - if we go by the manual stats, then capships in WC2 were already tenfold better armoured than in WC1. The Concordia could actually go from WC2 to WC3 with no upgrades whatsoever, and its armour would still be only 50% weaker than the Victory's - granted, the Victory is a small light carrier, while the Concordia is a dreadnought, so the fact that the Victory would be more powerful is a testament to how far these upgrades actually go. But this is important - why is it that the Concordia, after the Battle of Terra, is assigned to patrol duties in a "safe" sector, while ships like the Victory get out onto the front lines? Might it not be that the damage taken during the battle made it uneconomical to repair and upgrade the Concordia, while upgrading the old Victory, a light carrier that probably took relatively little damage throughout its career? And this also answers the question of what happens to the unupgraded ships - true to history, they get sent off to where they can still be useful. In WWII, the British used Gloster Gladiator biplanes in the Horn of Africa campaign - because the Italians had similary outdated equipment out there. Everybody saved their best equipment for the main show, because there wasn't enough of it to go around.

This is exactly what we see in Wing Commander. As I already mentioned, the Concordia gets withdrawn from the front. Meanwhile, when we transition from Privateer to Righteous Fire, we're told that a year has passed - but even though isometal is now available, as well as many other new upgrades, the Confed and Kilrathi fighters & capships remain unchanged. By this point in time, Blair is taking his Excalibur to Kilrah, if he hasn't already (IIRC, Righteous Fire actually takes place after the war ends, though this never quite made sense), but here we still see unupgraded Stilettos and Broadswords going up against equally unupgraded Dralthi and Gothri. And the Kilrathi are shifting the balance of power in the sector by... offloading Salthi fighters to the Retros. Yet clearly, these aren't the same Salthi we saw in WC1 - as light fighters, they are three times better armoured than the best of WC2, and ten times better armoured than the original Salthi. Ten times... it's as if someone took that 1.5cm of durasteel and replaced it with 1.5cm of plasteel, isn't it?

Now, all of this is very little. I wish we had a "smoking gun", a game where we see this exact process of replacement taking place, with the player getting the opportunity to slaughter unupgraded Kilrathi fighters, or vice-versa, trying to stay alive in the face of an overwhelmingly powerful enemy. But this didn't happen, and for good reason - unbalanced ships don't make good gameplay. There's a handful of WC fans who'd love this experience to death, but the mainstream players would be turned off. It's fan project material. So, we'll probably never see these "missing link" moments.

We do know, however, that Fleet Action provides exactly the kind of opportunity needed for such massive upgrades to occur. Both sides take enormous losses in Fleet Action, meaning that there's no longer thousands of fighters to upgrade, and even for capital ships, there isn't that many of them any more (by the way, one does get the impression that the Hakaga carriers are not just bigger, but better armoured as well). And there must have been something of a "quiet period" immediately after the battle, as both sides took stock of what had happened, and set about reorganising their forces.

We also know that the upgrade wasn't total, and it wasn't an immediate jump from durasteel to tungsten or isometal (indeed, I suppose now that isometal probably never filtered across to the frontlines at all - not if Righteous Fire took place after the war...). We see ships first being upgraded to plasteel, and only several months later do we see the ships of WC3. And the same happens on the weapons side - we see, in Armada, ships equipped with guns that do a good job against plasteel, would have done a great job against durasteel, and could still do a satisfactory job against tungsten. All in all, it's clear that the possibility is there - there is a year for all this to happen, and we know it only happens on the main frontline in Vega rather than everywhere... so it is easily conceivable.

One last thing. It's worth keeping in mind that we don't actually know how many of these upgrades work. With armour, it's clear - take one plate off, replace with new plate. But shields? Guns? Do you actually need to replace a laser with a better laser for it to be more powerful? Or do you just need to replace the ship's power generator and tweak some settings on the gun to allow it to use more power? Maybe upgrading weapons is actually a process that took place alongside almost by accident - ships get new power generators (needed to handle the new shields), and there's enough leftover power to allow weapons to operate at higher power settings than before. Maybe, though we don't have the opportunity to see this, this comes at a price, and weapons have to be more frequently replaced on fighters now, until newer, better weapons are produced that can handle such power. Who knows?
 
I think a lot has to do with the fact that Chris Roberts was more heavily involved with WC3 than WC2. LOAF can attest to the fact that there were some things in WC2 that he didn't like.

It is always tough to come up with reasonable "in-universe" explanations for seemingly contrary or bizarre decisions made by the game's programmers. For instance, WC2 source material indicated that the particle cannon was to replace the neutron cannon on fighters - it already had on the Rapier - and yet we see the neutron cannon on the Hellcat and Longbow in WC3. Hell, the Crossbow sported three neutron cannons!
 
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