Volumetrics for Federation Hull Strength

 For Bridge Commander, I've been playing around with trying to use my Starship Volumetrics work to calculate plausible values for "Hull.SetMaxCondition" in the Python hardpoint files. 

(Click "Read More" for the jump...)

There is, of course, a lot more to it than that.   

In-universe, even ignoring polarized hull plating or structural integrity field strength, the simple fact is that different ship types, even within the same navy, can have different hull thickness, resilience, et cetera, even if the volumes of the vessels are similar.   For example, I rather doubt that the late-build Oberth Class ships running around in the TNG era have equivalent hulls to the Defiant Class, just as a matter of design intent. 

There's also the 'scaling paradox' which will affect different vehicles of different sizes.   A shuttlecraft, for instance, can afford to be a big empty balloon of a structure with a foot-thick (or however much) hull, but if I built the saucer section of the Enterprise-D that way I'd either have a crumpled mess with a foot-thick hull or a giant heavy anvil with a scaled-up hull thickness of many, many meters . . . and likely the worst combination of those two outcomes. 

Then there are the issues of construction timelines.   The hull of an old Excelsior Class, from an era of denser, and presumably heavier, ships, might be worth more in some cases than the hull of an Ambassador from the 2330s or a Sovereign from the 2370s . . . or it could be worth less.   We've seen late-model Miranda hulls (like the Sitak and her five digit 3xxxx registry) get utterly gored by 'modern' Dominion weapons in ways Kirk's Constitution couldn't even begin to pull off in the 2280s against a contemporary Miranda build, but is that because 2280s Mirandas suck in the 2370s or is it that the later-build Mirandas were made of paper?    Who knows?   A Daedalus Class, given its simple shapes and presumed wartime construction, could be a brick s***house, or it could be tin foil ... who's to say?    And let's not even get started on refits!

Broadly speaking, however, we can generally assume at least parity, if not progress.  Overall, the basics of combat didn't change much between the 2150s and 2370s.   Contrast this to the century between the World War I age and the modern era, where the old inches of heavy armor against tremendous guns have been largely discarded in favor of active countermeasures against guided missiles.   Other than standoff forcefields (deflector screens, shields, or whatever you want to call them), the basic tech stayed very similar overall, so the modern experience wouldn't seem to apply.

Then again, there was a seeming drop in vehicle densities over time.  The Enterprise in TOS was a million tons, which is heavy as all hell.  Compared to a late 20th Century American supercarrier, which was about one tenth that mass, it seems as if the early 23rd Century involved a time when people generally didn't seem to worry about ridiculous vehicle masses *that* much.   Even the far larger and lighter Voyager still comes in at 700,000 metric tonnes, and that for a ship that they intended to park on planets.   Mass-lightening is sweet tech, if you have it.

There's also the aspect of playability . . . sure, it might be proper for a particular little ship or shuttle to have a hull that may as well be made of mylar, but Bridge Commander doesn't exactly lend itself, from an FPS standpoint, to the 100 vessel fleet that might be required to challenge you in that instance.   Even flimsy ships may thus end up with higher-than-appropriate, normalized figures just to keep the ship counts low.   Some ships might also need higher hitpoints just to maintain a proper, expected behavior, one-on-one.

The moral of the story, though, is that one's mileage may vary, and any number I provide may yet need manual tweaking to one's preferences and opinions of what was shown in the canon, not to mention modification for playability.  Comparative absurdities can and will exist, and resolving one absurdity or set of absurdities will only end up creating another elsewhere, so pick your battles.   Additionally, there's more than a little inertia involved here from my assorted past fiddlings and tweakings.   I've already been working out a rough phaser beam power ranking, for instance, and missing Graham as I do it because I think we'd have a great time talking about it and comparing against his exhaustive figures.  As a result, though, a full Galaxy phaser shot is basically locked in at 1000 units, with other ships dropping off quickly from there, so that informs my numbers for hull and shielding.   

In brief, I tried to work out a system where my DJGalaxy mod was still at the 32,000 value I found it in (I think I'd nerfed it down from like 50,000 or more in its original form before).   Of course, using any mod as a reference point instead of a canon ship as made for the game is rife with potential consequences.   However, when I initially started my tweakings, I didn't have a simple way to unpack a compiled Python .pyc, if I could've even found the right one, so I picked something good and went with it.   I could've done a lot worse.

I would then compare against the Excelsior, Ambassador, Sovereign, Miranda, Intrepid, New Orleans, Defiant, and the Danube and shuttles.   As you might imagine, it's not super-easy to automatically generate good numbers given this wide range of sizes.   By volume, for instance, the Intrepid is a mere 10.75% of a Galaxy, an Ambassador almost exactly half, and several Danubes could fit inside that rounding error.   Runabouts and shuttles should, by all rights, be blown away with a starship's impulse exhaust, yet we usually see them able to survive at least a partial hit.

Again, your mileage may vary.  

Several variations on multiple techniques were attempted.   I tried to employ the vessel volume and volume coefficient, by which I hoped to sorta-kinda include a nod to surface area (which I do not have calculated (or reliably calculated) for most of the ships).   Using these in various combinations and derivations to arrive at figures, the various techniques could produce different results up and down the line of sizes from the Galaxy.   I've saved four techniques that seemed to please me most, but even among those there's variation.   For the Intrepid Class Voyager, for instance, we know the volume is 10.75% of a Galaxy and the technology seems quite similar, so if it weren't for playability concerns we might aim for a hull figure in the 3000 range.  The phaser strips are skinnier and thus, I presume, a bit weaker, so I have them at 850 compared to the Galaxy's 1000 . . . which would imply around three hits from another Intrepid to leave it a burning wreck, and three hits from a Galaxy to destroy. 

Whether you liked the show or not, the notion of an Intrepid getting blasted so easily is somewhat unsatisfying, especially from a gameplay perspective.  So, I'd tend to want to land around 9000 or so, to keep it reasonable.    Of my four techniques, one actually lands right at 9,000 . . . but another that works well with some ships ends up at 2400, and the other two that frequently excel are around 11 or 12,000.  

As a result, I'm taking all four of my techniques and just averaging them to get the final figure of 8800, which is right about where I'd want it to be.  Of course, if it was my favoritest ship evar, I could easily fake some rationale to jam it up to fifteen thousand, twenty-five thousand, or more . . . but this isn't one of the Star Wars mods the StarDestroyer.Net folks put together (and yes, that apparently happened, way back when, but is a story for another time).

Compared to what some of my mods were set to, the results were sometimes surprising on their face.  For instance, my Defiant was set to 9000, my Bird-of-Prey 4500, and my Lakota 16000.  I was basically going to end up shaving all of them, the Defiant the most.  However, testing those and the Galaxy in various combinations produced results that were perfectly in line with expectations.  That said, I haven't tested everything, and there may be tweaks to do.

So, here's the list . . . and note that I don't have mods for some of these, but the whole kit should give you a flavor.  If you need ship details (e.g. knowing that the Daedalus is marked at 175 meters instead of the common, if senseless, 105), just hit the aforementioned Volumetrics page.

Class	Galaxy Volume Alone (Unplayable)	Method Average	Tweaked Average
Akira	7740	13800	14000
Ambassador	15800	20600	23000
Constellation	3500	7970	9000
Constitution (TOS)	1160	6110	6250
Constitution (TMP)	1290	6650	6750
Daedalus	696	3260	2500
Danube	3.13	578	1100
Defiant	339	2120	5700
Excelsior	4800	13700	11500
Excelsior B-type	5410	14000	13000
Galaxy	32000	32600	32000
Saucer	21100	21700	15000
Stardrive	10900	14300	16000
Intrepid	3440	8800	9000
Miranda	1200	4940	6500
Nebula	24400	24400	28000
New Orleans	6040	10300	11500
Norway	2940	8280	9000
Nova	487	3120	3500
Nova (future B-type)	501	3240	4500
NX	1100	4490	2400
Oberth	362	2510	2400
Prometheus (Bound)	3640	11200	11250
Prometheus Top	1270	5100	5500
Prometheus Middle	1220	6470	5000
Prometheus Bottom	963	6430	6500
Raven	241	1810	2500
Sabre	1320	3880	4500
Sovereign	13400	26900	23000
Steamrunner	3530	9160	7500
Sydney	2410	5800	3500
Vulcan Suurok	8040	21000	15000
Andor Kumari	1680	8690	7500
XCV-330	7.67	1060	300
Tac-Fighter	1.27	535	700
Intrepid Aerowing	3.5	595	750
Delta Flyer	1.85	552	650
NX Shuttlepod	0.19	482	150
Shuttle Type 6	0.14	478	375
Shuttle Type 7	0.34	490	525
Shuttle Type 9	0.16	482	325
Shuttlepod Type 15	0.04	467	200
Shuttle Argo	3.02	569	550
Sovereign Captain's Yacht	5.58	640	700
Station: Deep Space Nine	113000	102000	150000
Norkova/Xhosa	3320	7040	2500
Maquis Antares	93.4	1210	2200
Klingon Vor'Cha	6650	14800	17500
Klingon K'Tinga	873	4900	4900
Klingon BOP B'rel	222	1820	2750
Klingon BOP K'Vort	2030	5350	5500
Romulan Runabout	1.7	559	720
Romulan Scout	138	1460	3000
Romulan BoP 2150	1070	4020	2500
Romulan BOP 2265	716	2760	3400
Romulan Valdore-type (“Norexan”)	26400	28400	25000
Romulan D'deridex (B-type Warbird)	143000	118000	100000
Reman Scimitar	110000	84200	65000
Cardassian Galor	6370	14700	15000
Dominion (Jem'Hadar) Attack Ship (bug)	151	1540	3000
Dominion Battlecruiser	26300	26300	28000
Dominion Battleship	221000	163000	150000
Dominion Battleship (huge)	5980000	4110000	4000000
Kazon Predator	1230000	943000	925000
Krenim Weapon-ship	70700	84200	45000
Altstitution (JJ) Monsterprise	15500	32300	25000