Monday, August 3, 2015

We're Going to Need a Bigger Boat

Over the weekend we got a glimpse of some of the new staging platforms coming in the structures revamp. I did a post where I compared the size of the XL with the titans. This is just a guestimate given that we don't know the actual size of the XL array other than a line at fanfest which said they will be "...over 100km".

On Twitter I got a lot of response to the comparison graphic, one particular one regarding the need for a super-capital freighter for all the construction materials.

That guy has a point! 

I did some quick calculations and grabbed a magic eight ball for a wildly speculative post. The XL array is likely to be bigger than 25 Leviathans. No idea how 'deep' that structure is so lets just go real simple here. It takes 25 Levi's to blot out the XL array.


25 Leviathans need 1.3bn cubic metres of minerals.That's 1105 Charon's fitted with triple T2 cargo expanders.

To build 25 Leviathans the materials would cost 1,655,106,878,315.00 ISK at Jita prices (on 31st July) which is one point six trillion ISK.

It has been pointed out that titans move and jump and shoot things. Therefore the outposts won't need as much as 25+ titans. Not sure about that. Yes they won't need engines or drives but the shielding needed is going to be massive. CCP have already said they are investigating "station mounted doomsdays*". AoE doomsdays were also mentioned, similar to the terran super-weapon used in the Empyrean Age novel for defending your mahoosive space house.


Then you have all the services too. Production lines producing everything from shuttles to capital ships. Repair facilities for fixing craft and modules. Refining services to turn Ocras full of ore into shiny minerals. Huge hangers and tractor beams to dock everything from shuttles up to battleships and capitals. Massive warehouses to hold goods for sale on the local market.

I don't see why the XL array should have a significantly smaller build cost in lore terms. However it is likely to have one due to spacemagic as the XL array would cost 100x more than an outpost. I mean who wants to fly 1100 freighters back and forth?


I started this post following that Tweet that CCP might need a bigger industrial class vessel to help create the XL arrays. Now, I think I'll just stick with less raw materials and a bit of spacemagic! A super-capital class ship to haul minerals or ore? One serious downside would be that Chribba would explode from the world's largest nerdgasm!

* I'm 95.6% sure of this. It was at Fanfest and I had been drinking!

1 comment:

  1. More, it's in 3 dimensions. Call it 25x25 or 625 Titans, and actually probably a great many more than that.. Currently. But not really. Titans aren't big enough. I remember reading somewhere that capitals are supposed to be getting a huge size boost during the rework of structures.

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