Corvettes: Paradigm vs Venture?
- Thread starter gavinfoxx
- Start date
Deathsnake
Rear Admiral
xD - yes the turrets location make it smile
*hehe*The ships in the picture above are all in Enigma 2666, except the Blacklance Transport. The Clarkson (WC3+4) is Ingame more then double the size of the Drayman. Galaxy, Tarsus, Orion and the Drayman from Privateer are missing in the pic but I have already the 3ds files so we can convert it. Standoff has the movie Dilligent - Errant-class too. Prophecy Pelican are too on my disc as 3ds
And the frigate... must by a typo. The model on the WC3 files and in WC4 are just about 330m long. When you see the cutscenes from WC3 and WC4 its clear that the Talla is 620m and the Southampton around 400 - 430.
Here 2 pics:
I was making for Last Line of Defence another sizes and put the Sheffield to 490 and the Talla to 530. It was ugly. Don't match in any direction and looks terible. To match with the pics above (canon fans - close your eyes) Sheffield 390m - Talla 620m - matches perfect to the videos.
Or can you imagine the Caernaven in the size of the Talla?
I don't think so...
Ah.. hmmm. It's a typo here, then: https://www.wcnews.com/ships/wc3confedfrigate.shtml This is the same ship as this, yes? https://www.wcnews.com/ships/wc4caernaven.shtml And it uses the destroyer model for some reason??
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Deathsnake
Rear Admiral
But getting back to topic: I miss a corvette in WC3 and Scooby build a good one: (Just need to replace the turrets):
The Tonga-class. He used the tower of the Caernaven and build a torpedocorvette around it. Size are 86m. A little bigger then the Venture. 2 Torpedolauncer, 4 Laserturrets and 2 IFF Missilelauncher are enough firepower for its class. I used it in Last Line of Defence and they are the "modern" Wolfpack. In groups around of five to eight offensiv or single hitting in an asteriod field and waiting for a Kilrathi convoy.
Thats a better replacement for the Venture
The Tonga-class. He used the tower of the Caernaven and build a torpedocorvette around it. Size are 86m. A little bigger then the Venture. 2 Torpedolauncer, 4 Laserturrets and 2 IFF Missilelauncher are enough firepower for its class. I used it in Last Line of Defence and they are the "modern" Wolfpack. In groups around of five to eight offensiv or single hitting in an asteriod field and waiting for a Kilrathi convoy.
Thats a better replacement for the Venture
Deathsnake
Rear Admiral
Between the Venture and Paradigm. Its smaller and shorter then the Paradigm. Its a gunboat to kill Capships. The Paradigm is more a fighterdestroyer with its many point defence turrets. Or if you want to imagine - its the submarine class in space: short, silent and hit and fade!
Quarto
Unknown Enemy
Ok... why exactly must it be a typo? What does the Tallahassee's size have to do with this? What, apart from the scale of a model in a game that doesn't bother keeping models in the right scale, prevents the WC3 frigate from being 620 metres long in your eyes? Why exactly is it inconceivable that a frigate - possibly the least understood ship class of the WC universe - would be longer than a cruiser?
Aginor
Vice Admiral
For me it is the size of the windows and the number and size of the turrets. The Caernaven is much smaller than a Tallahasse. It is comparable to the Southampton though, both ingame and in the cutscenes. You can see it in the screenshots of the wcpedia entries for those three classes. All of them have laser turrets and windows, look at those sizes.
EDIT:
Actually based on waht we see there we could almost argue that the Caernaven might be bigger (or at least as big) as the Southampton. But I can understand the reasons why it was scaled for the FSO engine the way it was in Saga, it fits quite well when you see the ships next to each other.
EDIT:
Actually based on waht we see there we could almost argue that the Caernaven might be bigger (or at least as big) as the Southampton. But I can understand the reasons why it was scaled for the FSO engine the way it was in Saga, it fits quite well when you see the ships next to each other.
Bandit LOAF
Long Live the Confederation!
I've never really considered this an issue. It's been well established that the "gameplay" armament isn't the same as the in-universe armament on capital ships... we can name a dozen ships that are dotted with turrets and which use all sorts of capital weaponry in cutscenes and descriptions while only having a few lasers in the game itself. But even in a world where we don't do that, the Paradigm is pretty heavily armed for an in-game destroyer... its massive number of (much more advanced) guns compare pretty well to the two previous destroyers we'd seen in 1993.
Mostly, though, I worry that we're going against the intent of the Paradigm and only the Paradigm for no particular reason other than that it's kind of weird looking compared to ships introduced later. From the rendering and the description in Origin FX and just the role in Privateer (two of them is an impressive fleet!) it was clearly imagined as a powerful warship... so much so that they had to embiggen the Kamekh in the manual to match it.
There are two canonical Draymen, the Confederation transport from Wing Commander I and the civilian one from Privateer. It's not known what the connection between the two is. There's also a third apocryphal Drayman, from the Privateer 3 information. It looks like this: https://cdn.wcnews.com/newestshots/full/dr_full.png (Interestingly the Privateer 3 Drayman would have been a fifth the tonnage of the original... so it's apparently not a case of three different looks for the same ship.)
Not exactly.
What we tend to ignore is that the 620-meter frigate in the Wing Commander III manual is NOT the frigate from Wing Commander IV! Yes, we know from digging through Wing Commander III's files that the WC4 frigate was originally designed for that game (https://cdn.wcnews.com/newestshots/full/lostship3-1.png)... but what was actually USED was a Southampton-class ship relabelled FRIGATE in one mission. So we can take the idea that the Caernaven-class (which is certainly smaller in WC4) is supposed to be 620-meters with a grain of salt.
... and honestly we can take the damn thing's name the same way. Yes, the Wing Commander IV novel identifies the pirate frigate as a modified Caernaven-class ship... and in the same breath it points out that the Confederation has retired the ships! So why we take one bit as gosep and push aside the other is something of a mystery (save the age-old desire to have a name for every ship.)
Frigates of varying sizes do appear throughout the Forstchen novels. The only one named is the Kilrathi Targu-class frigate from the opening chapters of Action Stations. The Wing Commander III guide also refers to the mysterious Kilrathi scout as a "scout frigate" at one point.
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Quarto
Unknown Enemy
Well, it's not the armament but rather the armour and shield stats I was thinking of. However, looking over the manual stats again, I come to the conclusion that yeah, there's nothing especially "weak" about the Paradigm's stats. In fact, if we compare the Priv manual stats with the in-game stats from WC2, we find that the Paradigm is actually superior to the Gilgamesh in armour. Of course, it would be more proper to compare the Priv manual with the WC2 manual (or even the WC3 manual, since this is 2669! Let's not go there...), but that just doesn't seem fair given how WC2 went and multipled its capship armour tenfold for the purpose of the manual.
It still bothers me that the Paradigm's Kilrathi equivalent is the Kamekh. The Kilrathi do have that weird tradition of producing multiple capship types similar in appearance but different in size and role... but what's the sense in making a destroyer that looks just like a corvette and calling it the same name? I know there's ultimately any number of explanations for this (maybe it's not really called a Kamekh, we only have a Confed civilian's word for it), so I guess it comes down to the fact that because the Kamekh was originally a corvette, I've always automatically thought the Paradigm should naturally be a corvette's equivalent.
Hmm, now that's something I hadn't even noticed before. Do we ever see Confed Caernavens in WC4, or just pirate ones? I think we see Border Worlds ones...
Bandit LOAF
Long Live the Confederation!
Another interesting bit of Paradigm hearsay -- the placeholder for them in early Privateer concept art was a Bengal-class carrier...
Yes, we see all three. Confed frigates appear twice, in the Orestes "attack the convoy" mission and during the "avoid Ella" mission.
Yes, we see all three. Confed frigates appear twice, in the Orestes "attack the convoy" mission and during the "avoid Ella" mission.
See, this is why I started this discussion -- lots of information I never would have heard about otherwise is brought up!
I've noticed that a lot of people agree that the Paradigm looks wrong for the style of blocky (presumably because those were easy to repair in wartime...) Confed ships. Has anyone made a, you know, modified version of the Paradigm to look more appropriate for Confed and their stylistic methods?
I've noticed that a lot of people agree that the Paradigm looks wrong for the style of blocky (presumably because those were easy to repair in wartime...) Confed ships. Has anyone made a, you know, modified version of the Paradigm to look more appropriate for Confed and their stylistic methods?
Bandit LOAF
Long Live the Confederation!
Uh, you know it kind of makes sense for something they named PARADIGM to look different from other ships.
ChrisReid
Super Soaker Collector / Administrator
There's so much factual information that people don't know, do we really need to make presumptions like that? (blocky ships are easier to repair?) I ask because so many of these offhand comments have made it into the fan lore over the years.
"Stylistic methods" change drastically with each new game engine. Has anyone tried modifying an Exeter or Murphy to fit better with the Confed stylistic methods we see in employed throughout the Gemini Sector in 2669?
Well, what I mean is -- I am hardly the only one who feels the Paradigm looks out of place from the entire rest of the Confed lineup...
capi3101
Admiral
Well, maybe the designer at the shipyard felt like being creative that day (for once). Maybe he was channeling the Mon Calamari or something...
Actually, I'm gonna go with Brilliance. Many awesome and creative things came from people who were stoned off their gourd.
From a practical standpoint, the curved shapes of the Paradigm and the Drayman in Privateer look as though they were intended for atmospheric flight and planetside landings. This might be considered advantageous on the frontier, where planetside drydocks are easier to set up than orbital ones, and where you might wish to load freight planetside instead of using a lot of shuttles.
Larger ships also makes sense for the Privateer player ships -- those aren't meant to be carrier based, they can carry cargo, and they can carry jump drives... so it makes sense that they would probably be a bit larger than what confed considers a 'heavy fighter'. I'd view the Tarsus and company as Super Heavy Fighters, perhaps?