Ship Strength Calculator

[Captain Picard's Hair]

I've copied it for myself in an Excel spreadsheet for me to play around with. I find it useful to keep an original ship next to the new one for comparison, and here I can just copy and paste the code into a new block of cells! I haven't created code for automatically calculating the hull strength/armor stuff yet, but I know ways of using "if" statements to do that.

The standard Galaxy represented here:

http://s250.photobucket.com/albums/gg24 ... Screen.jpg

As you can see, it only applies to Fed ships (there are too many variations on torps to do in such a neat package otherwise)

[Captain Picard's Hair]

Anyway, this really demonstrates the way Graham's system works, so it should be nice to see this way for you guys. You do need two calculations for warp speed, since if you put a warp value below 9 into the equation for warp 9 and beyond, the result is undefined. So, you need one for modern capital ships and another for a slow ship.

[Graham Kennedy]

Heh, I used to have a gian big Excel like that somewhere, with the ship stats for every class and their corresponding strength numbers on it. Probably still have it somewhere, but it's obsolete now, the site calculates that stuff automatically.

I never really got the strength system to a point where I was happy with it. What's there represents my best compromise attempt.

[Teaos]

Its pretty good although there are a few things that I think arent quite right. But since I have no idea how to fix them...

[Sionnach Glic]

I think it's good enough as it is. It isn't 100%, but it lets us gauge a rough idea of a ship's capabilities and how it compares to other ships, which is really all that it needs.

[Captain Picard's Hair]

This was a nice way for me to take apart the workings of the thing, and make it portable. I agree that it works well enough to give you a decent comparison between ships.

[IanKennedy]

I can easily make a version on the site that would allow comparison between two ships, however, what would you want it to look like.

This is the code to calculate the speed score:

Code: Select all

	nWarpFct=oForm.WarpFactor.value;  // This reads the warpfactor from the form.
	cWarpScale=oForm.WarpScale.options[oForm.WarpScale.selectedIndex].value; // and this the warpscale in use.
	if (cWarpScale=="0") {
		// For TOS scales we use warp factor cubed.
		nWarpSpeed=Math.pow(nWarpFct,3);
	} else if (cWarpScale=="2") {
		// For impulse we multiply by 0.25
		nWarpSpeed=nWarpFct*0.25;
	} else {
		// For TNG it's complicated. We start calculating a Pow factor
		nPow=10/3;
		if (nWarpFct>=10) {
				// if we're >= 10 then we cop out.
			alert("Transwarp factors not available in this version of LCARS");
			oForm.WarpFactor.value="9.99999999";
			nWarpFct="9.99999999";
		}
		if (nWarpFct>9) {
				// Above 9 we adjust the Pow factor as follows
			nPow+=0.0026432 * Math.pow((0 - Math.log(10 - nWarpFct)) , 2.879267);
			nPow+=0.0627412 * Math.pow((nWarpFct - 9) , 5);
			nPow+=0.325746 * Math.pow((nWarpFct - 9) , 11);
		}
		// Now we have a value for Pow we raise warpfactor to that value.
		nWarpSpeed=Math.pow(nWarpFct , nPow);
	}
		// We get the score by dividing by this constant.
	nWarpScore=nWarpSpeed/1.9151779204666188;

[Captain Picard's Hair]

I can easily make a version on the site that would allow comparison between two ships, however, what would you want it to look like.

Yeah, I have ideas about how to fully automate the rest in Excel (or, I could just write a C++ program if I decide to), but I haven't gotten to that yet.

As to how it would look, I'd guess that just lining the numbers up side by side under their respective ID headlines would be convenient.

[Deepcrush]

I'm going to agree with Rochey and go with "The stuff works well enough".

Not that I understand anything you guys talk about with it comes to math but oh well.

It doesn't have to be perfect but from everything we've seen and done it hasn't been off either.

[Graham Kennedy]

Where it tends to fall down is in extremes. For instance a Saturn V rocket comes out at strength 1. Which means 1001 Saturn V rockets could destroy a Galaxy class starship. This is, of course, absolutely nonsense.

Another issue is that if you take a ship and reduce its armament to 0, then the overall strength remains above zero. For example, a Galaxy with no armament rates 351. So in theory, three unarmed Galaxy class ships could kill one fully armed one. With what, aggressive intentions and harsh language?

We fiddled with systems where the strength was derived by multiplying a score for weapons, defence and speed. That way if any of those three dropped to zero, the overall strength dropped to zero as well. Spent literally two months trying out all sorts of different systems like that, never arrived at anything satisfactory.

[KuvahMagh]

I'd say its good enough, you are never going to get it to work out for everything. Besides if someone really wants to create a scenario with 1001 Saturn V Rockets taking on the E-D I doubt they'd be too interested in looking up the relative strength of each of them lol.

[Captain Seafort]

Where it tends to fall down is in extremes. For instance a Saturn V rocket comes out at strength 1. Which means 1001 Saturn V rockets could destroy a Galaxy class starship. This is, of course, absolutely nonsense.

Another issue is that if you take a ship and reduce its armament to 0, then the overall strength remains above zero. For example, a Galaxy with no armament rates 351. So in theory, three unarmed Galaxy class ships could kill one fully armed one. With what, aggressive intentions and harsh language?

I'd be pretty surprised if three unarmed GCS's couldn't take down a typical one. Five million tons of starship, mass dampening or no, is going to make a mess if it hits something. Ditto for the Saturn Vs, although that's a somewhat more dubious situation.

[Sionnach Glic]

Couldn't the E-D use its tractor beams as weapons in that scenario? In one TOS episode, the E's tractor beam caused a jet fighter to break up. Presumably the E-D could do the same to the Saturn V.

[Mikey]

I think we're talking about NOT resorting to ramming situations.

[Graham Kennedy]

I wouldn't rate tractor beams as a weapon myself. Crushing a 300 year old jet is one thing, but a Starship? We've never even seen a tractor beam crush a shuttle.

As for ramming, it's not really something the strength index includes.