Behemoth's size

Cyberion

Master of Orion
Hey guys, does anyone have the information about Behemoth's size?

I'm modeling it right now and i want it to be pretty accurate. I'm not sure if WC3 models were the real size, that is why it will be very helpful to have this information.

Thx,
Cyb.
 
Here's a quick little study I did on this.

behemothsize3fx.jpg
 
I have read varying size for Behemoth. I have read in the neighbor of 8 to 15 kilometers. 4.9 km is smaller than I expected. That's much smaller than the Kilrathi Dreadnought, a whopping 22 km. :eek:
 
The size sounds reasonable to me. Thinking of how big that is its a wonder that confed in its state could even build a ship this size I guess. Beside that its all quite hightech or lets say specialised technology. Massproducing it would be quite difficulte.

About the KDN...I still don't belive the 22km size...more 2.2km. IIRC the Kilrathi had more ships of this class..counted at least 5 in one cutscene around Kilrah. Not think of them beeing 22km long..what a mass of resources would that take.
Still this isn't the KDN discussion ^_^
 
There's video clips with the Victory and Behemoth side by side that should be a pretty good reference. The comparison in those scenes doesn't seem too far off from Bradmick's image.

gevatter Lars said:
The size sounds reasonable to me. Thinking of how big that is its a wonder that confed in its state could even build a ship this size I guess. Beside that its all quite hightech or lets say specialised technology. Massproducing it would be quite difficulte.

About the KDN...I still don't belive the 22km size...more 2.2km. IIRC the Kilrathi had more ships of this class..counted at least 5 in one cutscene around Kilrah. Not think of them beeing 22km long..what a mass of resources would that take.
Still this isn't the KDN discussion ^_^

Yeah, and it really can't be up to debate. There's just too much solid evidence. Arbitrarily saying it's 2.2 km creates far more problems. In both the Behemoth and Kilrathi Dreadnought, they're not thick solid bodies. Both are quite "hollow" and the mass figures we have for the Kilrathi Dreadnought are in line with this and not so large as to seem unreasonable at all. We also see Dreadnoughts and Carriers cruising side by side in WC3 cutscenes, and the Dreadnoughts are many many times larger. The Bhantkaras next to the Dreadnoughts look smaller than the Victory next to the Behemoth. There's no way that the Dreadnought is only 2.3 times as long. And to top it off, one of the major talking points of the False Colors novel is how freakin amazing it is to be interacting with a ship that's a full 22 kilometers long.
 
well, this'll probably get me yelled at, but since you brought up the dreadnaught, i decided to see what i could come up with, i guess just to spark some deeper thought to it.

now, in this first image, i just did the window scale deal i did with the behemoth. and then scaled up the destroyer to 530 meters, that brought the dreadnought out to about 1.2km in length.

dreadnaughtsize2zh.jpg


In this second image, i assumed the windows were twice as tall. Scaled the ships up so the destroyer is 530 meters. The dreadnaught came out to be about 2.2km in length.

dreadnaughtsize24ad.jpg


edit: posted before you edited chris. just thought i'd throw this up here. also, the end sequence when you loose lends itself to the dreadnaught being more close to 2.2km, than 22, as the victory isn't super dwarfed by the dreadnaught.
 
Wing Commander III has three scales - fighter, capital ship and giant capital ship. You can't compare the 3D models between the three.

You can compare the size of the dreadnaught model to the size of the Behemoth model, though, and possibly figure out the length from that.
 
well, in comparing the two models, the behemoth and dreadnaught, neither are in scale.

but, in scaling the dreadnaught up to 22km, the windows come out to be 60m tall. assuming that kilrathi decks are say, 4m tall, that's 15 decks covered by one window.

anyway, i'm all well and good to accept 22km, its whats stated. just thought i'd throw that in there for fun :)
 
I believe that it was calculated that a 22-km long dreadnaught with the shape and mass stated would be lighter than an equal-sized block of sea-level Earth atmosphere at normal temperature. If the mass number is correct (i.e. that a 22-km long vessel with that shape masses only a couple hundred thousand tons), then it must be at least 80% empty vacuum inside its hull.
 
I've never heard of anyone making any sort of crazy calculation like that, but if you take the top/bottom/front/back/left/right points of the ship and look at what's between them, yeah, most of the space is empty. The only thick part, in the center, has a giant flight deck running the length of it. The thing is really all beams and spires.
 
Ijuin said:
I believe that it was calculated that a 22-km long dreadnaught with the shape and mass stated would be lighter than an equal-sized block of sea-level Earth atmosphere at normal temperature. If the mass number is correct (i.e. that a 22-km long vessel with that shape masses only a couple hundred thousand tons), then it must be at least 80% empty vacuum inside its hull.
Well, I have a question for you.

The Victory Streak gives us the ship's length as 22 kilometres, and the ship's mass as 290,000 metric tonnes. And yes, that mass does look awfully small for such a huge ship (no, I don't buy the "it's all empty space inside" argument - the ship is no less solid-looking than any other Kilrathi capship from WC3). But the problem is that you're trying to use one Victory Streak figure to prove that another Victory Streak figure is wrong. Which just begs the question - assuming that one of these figures is indeed a mistake, how do you know it's not the mass that's wrong? I mean, since you're relying on one figure to prove wrong another figure from the same source, then the argument goes both ways - if 22 kilometres is too big for 290,000 tonnes, then obviously, 290,000 tonnes is too small for 22 kilometres.



Additionally, I'm attaching a screenshot for those of you who argue that the dreadnought doesn't look that big. See that ship crashing into the dreadnought? That's the 700-metre Victory. See how the dreadnought is so much bigger, that it seems like the Victory could fit between those forward prongs and still have plenty of space to spare? Granted, it's hard to make out too much in these dark and low-res shots, not to mention that the Victory is seen at a very different angle than the dreadnought. However, I just don't see how anybody can look at the tiny Victory crashing into the dreadnought and still argue that the dreadnought is 2.2km long. I don't know if it's actually 22 kilometres long, or something in-between... but it's definitely far, far bigger than 2.2km. Unless, of course, the Victory is not 720 metres - but making that argument just for the sake of the dreadnought would be crazy :).
 

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Arguing from shots isn't realy helpfull at least for me.
You can play around with cam-setups, distances and scales so long that everything will look like its the same size even if its not....and in most SF animations you will find dozen of these errors where sizes dosn't seam to match from episode to episode.
As for WC....try to find the scene where Blairs Excalibure is brought into the hangar and take that as a scaling point. Or the freighter in the intro that is flying close to the DN. IIRC it wasn't very little next to the DN.
And what about the ship in the background of the second shot that was posted here?
A Fralthi II and a DN. The DN must be very very far away if its 22km long, but from the pic you got more the impression that they are closer together.

Brads aproche on this topic is quite interesting. Assuming that their are common design elements that are keept at about the same size can give you quite a good thing to work with.
Still the windows in WC where mostly very big...at least that is my impression.


So I think finaly we have to live with what is in the book...even if its still lunatic IMO...60m tall windows...on a warship...well thats the way it is.

PS: I once made a test with a basic Kilrathi DN model (sized to 22km) in FS and set around it a number of Rangers....the DN KI didn't even stoped after juping in...just pushed the other ships aside. A must see if you ask me ^_^
 
The problem with Brad's claim is that there's absolutely no continuity of textures anyway: you get more details as you zoom in closer to the ship. A yellow dot that's one window from one perspective may be a bank of windows with more detail added. The resolution is just too low to determine anything. It's also a fallacy to jump to that kind of conclusion -- saying "this must be a window, therefore all the windows are 60 meters high" is like saying "this must be a window, and since I don't see any Kilrathi in it, the ship must not have a crew". It's an unreasonable connection made simply for the sake of trying to say something 'cool'.

(Brad's method is pop garbage anyway... because there's no reasonable baseline. He's taking two sets of data in a vacuum and deciding that one is right and the other isn't. If he were to apply the same 'method' to every Wing Commander model he sure as hell wouldn't get *any* of the lengths right and he'd come up with a lot more weird window sizes.)

Victory Streak's lengths will never make sense. The fighters are much longer than they appear to be in the cutscenes. The capital ships are all longer (or incredibly shorter, if you measure with only your fighter's computer) than they are in the game engine. There's no continuity of length anywhere in WC3 -- deciding that there should be for the sake of criticizing the dreadnaught is silly. And of *all* the ships in Wing Commander III, the 22 kilometer dreadnaught is the *one* that now has a plot point built around its size. You can change the length of the Victory, the cruiser, the transport, the Excalibur, etc. and it wouldn't matter to a story... but the giant super-dreadnaughts are a key aspect of False Colors.
 
he problem with Brad's claim is that there's absolutely no continuity of textures anyway: you get more details as you zoom in closer to the ship. A yellow dot that's one window from one perspective may be a bank of windows with more detail added
That could be solved with just using the highest detailed texture on all ships.

What I think is more likely that the textures wheren't made with the size of the ships in mind they where later applied to.

Still if their isn't any intention that ships should fit to each other by the developer then their isn't much you can argue with for what size anything is.
What would be quite good since that way we get rid of the old Caernaven size problem ^_^
 
Still if their isn't any intention that ships should fit to each other by the developer then their isn't much you can argue with for what size anything is.
What would be quite good since that way we get rid of the old Caernaven size problem ^_^

There is an *intention*, a very clear one: the number published in Victory Streak and then used in every other source and reprinting after that.

0________0
 
That's the thing: there's no different numbers. There's people deciding that there *should* be numbers based on what they see in cutscenes aind in the game engine and making up new ones... but the only numbers ever published are the ones in Victory Streak.
 
Could someone go back in time and tell Origin that they should look at what they have done first and then publish the numbers ^_^

Still this point is realy strange. When taking the models and place them side by side the ship is smaller then a destroyer but the numbers say its bigger.
Realy a confusing thing.
 
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