Aginor
Vice Admiral
You missed another important point windows are incredibly useful for: They give a great sense of scale. Without things that give a sense of scale capships look like a blurry mess of textures. One can use other techniques to create a sense of scale, for example armor plating, but for me windows are what is most effective.
Also interesting example, because I think those pictures show why using windows might actually be not that bad of an idea:
What do we see there? We see railings (which happen to be between 85 and 110 cm high usually), we see windows (at least at the bridge) and we see other things we know the size of, for example the cannons (which are between 35 and 42 cm inner diameter on battleships usually, in this case 40.6), smaller guns, or the cranes on the deck and of course people walking around. So we have plenty of possibilities to tell this thing is big. Big things should look big, that is great.
The Bismarck ( some pictures here http://www.tobien.de/bismarck.htm ) and the Yamato have a few windows more, the Yamato even has catapults and so on. So lots of greeble that show their size.
Here's another example of a ship picture, a German Brandenburg-class frigate: http://www.marine-portraits.de/deut...regatten/typ-123-brandenburg-klasse/cover.jpg
How do you tell it is smaller than the Missouri? You can easily see that based on railings and windows, and the helicopter deck. No problem at all.
....but one problem for us. That's because space ships in the WC universe don't have railings or cranes or that kind of stuff on their hulls. And as you point out windows don't make any sense at all on a real star ship, but I'll ignore that argument for now (although I agree with you) because Wing Commander ships seem to have windows quite often.
So we cannot judge the size, except using windows.
Star Wars did it differently, they added random greebles (look at the ISD for example), the more greebles the bigger. Every huge ship has at least one greebled part (or windows) to show how big it is.
Also interesting example, because I think those pictures show why using windows might actually be not that bad of an idea:
What do we see there? We see railings (which happen to be between 85 and 110 cm high usually), we see windows (at least at the bridge) and we see other things we know the size of, for example the cannons (which are between 35 and 42 cm inner diameter on battleships usually, in this case 40.6), smaller guns, or the cranes on the deck and of course people walking around. So we have plenty of possibilities to tell this thing is big. Big things should look big, that is great.
The Bismarck ( some pictures here http://www.tobien.de/bismarck.htm ) and the Yamato have a few windows more, the Yamato even has catapults and so on. So lots of greeble that show their size.
Here's another example of a ship picture, a German Brandenburg-class frigate: http://www.marine-portraits.de/deut...regatten/typ-123-brandenburg-klasse/cover.jpg
How do you tell it is smaller than the Missouri? You can easily see that based on railings and windows, and the helicopter deck. No problem at all.
....but one problem for us. That's because space ships in the WC universe don't have railings or cranes or that kind of stuff on their hulls. And as you point out windows don't make any sense at all on a real star ship, but I'll ignore that argument for now (although I agree with you) because Wing Commander ships seem to have windows quite often.
So we cannot judge the size, except using windows.
Star Wars did it differently, they added random greebles (look at the ISD for example), the more greebles the bigger. Every huge ship has at least one greebled part (or windows) to show how big it is.
. Since the windows seem to have been a big feature from WC3 onwards, I withdraw my objection. It makes sense to add windows on the Ralari to give it more common ground with later ships.
