blueFISH Interim Ship Set - Teaser/First Alpha released!

[andythenorth]

You´d have to understand that it is impossible to balance ships and trains/rvs in a sensible way for the game. Numbers (capacity, price, cost) for ships are HUGE and you can´t balance price/cost against capacity

A fair starting point is inland, coastal and short-sea shipping. That gives capacities close to reasonable game capacities, or not more than a factor of 10 out. 10 maybe sounds a lot, but isn't as per your oil tanker example, which is a factor of 500 or 1000 out from what I'd consider a useful ship in the game.

Smaller RL ships are also closer in scale to the rest of TTD-land. Scale is of course not consistent in the game, but the smaller ships fit the landscape better imho.

FISH and Squid are based on inland, coastal and short-sea prototypes, if that helps anyone balancing.
Both are also dead sets and won't be developed further

[SimYouLater]

Costs (pruchase and running) and speed. Where could I find that info easily?

You won´t find any real/historic running cost. And I don´t think purchase prices would help much, given their huge numbers. Just to emphasize my former post:

• AIDAaura 42,000 Aker 200 Mio US-$
  MSC Lirica 60,000 Chantiers 250 Mio US-$
  Costa Mediterranea 86,000 Kvaerner 350 Mio US-$
  Carnival Glory 110,000 Fincantieri 500 Mio US-$
  ...

You´d have to understand that it is impossible to balance ships and trains/rvs in a sensible way for the game. Numbers (capacity, price, cost) for ships are HUGE and you can´t balance price/cost against capacity, since you´d have to wait AGES until a 50,000 ton cargo ship, or a crude oil tanker* with 500,000 ton would be laden.

*TT Batillus, 1976 Chantiers de l´Atlantique, 414m * 63m * 36m, draught 28m, capacity 553,662t 667,300m³, GRT 273,500, 17kn, 2*23,800kW

regards
Michael

There might be one way. The above are clearly for "normal" ships. The kind that are better represented in something like Transport Fever where scaling is as easy as resizing a bit. Ships that seem that size in OpenTTD can't be realistically scaled to what they otherwise look like. However...

A train car is, say, 1/5 of the length of a paddle steamer I put in the teaser. Most such ships would even further dwarf the train car IRL. What if, instead of statting the ship to the ship the graphics are based on, finding a ship which is identical in all but scale. Instead of basing the Fastnet, in this case, on a ship which the sprites' window size suggests, it is based on: a paddle steamer which carried passengers and freight as needed, was speedy and was expensive because of those advantages, but which was (with the example size of 5 train cars long) actually approximately 5 train cars long? It probably wouldn't look the same as the ship the stats are based on, and the source would likely have and thus induce an earlier availability date, but the specs would make sense and be more scale-friendly instead of less.

Or would it? Could that method of obtaining stats work better, having lower prices than the megaships above? Or is it not helpful at all?

EDIT: Got ninja'd by andy. I guess great(?) minds think alike? (I'm probably not that great)

[Argus]

Any progress here?

[SimYouLater]

Any progress here?

Currently working on something else, but my main issue with doing this set was that the numbers were guesswork. I wanted to give the ships realistic cargo capacities and running costs based on how big they are in-game compared to trains and trucks, but I could only see what the numbers meant by compiling and looking at the ships in-game.