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[Heron TSG]

Drawing it top-down and calculating stuff might take a while... When do you plan to start?

Also, bigger ships automatically win over smaller ships. (more crew, more thrust, more weapons.) Simply scaling a smaller design to make it twice as large will effectively double the excess lift and thrust, the firepower, etc, while the ship could still fly just as long without refueling/landing. In my opinion, there should be either a maximum and minimum size (either maximum dimensions, or a maximum number of total tiles), or a penalty for larger ships.

With weight, that means that their thrust and speed will be the same, due to having more to carry.

[Pillow_Killer]

Sensei, could YOu help me to determine my ship lift

[Jetsquirrel]

could somebody post me a link to ASCII draw? and how does lift work becaumse im confused

[EagleV]

ASCIIdraw? Let me google that for you.
Hint: press f1 to start, and also save often.

Lift: Every non-wing tile of your ship (eg wall, floor, stockpile, whatever) has a weight of 1 (unless you'd have a tile filled with some really heavy stuff, then it could be 2). Every wing/rotor/lifting mechanism/upward thrust tile has a lift of 1. Total lift - total weight = excess lift, which causes your ship to go up.

EDIT: It suddenly strikes me that above link can be seen as an insult to someones intellect, if you take it very strict. It was never my meaning to do this, consider it a joke at most

[Boksi]

Can anyone help me with counting the amount of a certain tile here? It's my biggest concern right now, I can't do this unhesitatingly until I can be certain how much lift and thrust I need...

[Sensei]

You could put it into MS word, and delete all your non-weight tiles, then do a word count, which also counts characters (you'll want the number without spaces).

[Luke_Prowler]

Ok, a couple things. the one line wall in the back of Z0 and Z1 are part of the tile (like a rail), so I didn't add them to the weight. On Z1 the one line wall next to the fortification is meant to be a regular wall, so they are part of he weight (and there suppose to be a door between it, but I made this picture before I though of it. there's also meant to be floor hatch on the stairs one Z2. the brown web on Z1 is a rope net, so I didn't know know to still count it as 1 weight or if it would be OK to have it at half (I have the calculation for both).

Background: "A steel airship? Preposterous" they said. True, previous attempts have all failed spectacularly, but that would not stop me. using a new technique, If have found a way to heat the air in the balloon to be able to lift the airship with ease. After hearing about this game, it would be the perfect place to test it. And what shall I call it? in honor of my "peers" I shall name it the Preposterous

stats:
*Weight: the non balloon parts weight 288 (or 269 if the rope net is 1/2)
*Lift: the twin balloons have 618 units of lift. Ya. With the weight, thats 330 (or 349)
*The thrust from the propeller in the back is 8 (24 if we count each segment) so that makes the speed...somewhere in the negatives. uh...huh.
Propellers are cranked through hand power, but the blimps require the two fire bin to keep it up, and that requires 1 unit of coke/charcoal each day.
*The Perposterous has a rope net hold that can hold 18 barrels of food or beer. With the extra space, it's possible to hold another 28, but then there'd be no room for anything else.
*there are 4 crew members, the captain (me) and 3 others multi-taskers
*Weapons: 3 crossbows, 75 bolts, and 1 axe

Special:
The Preposterous moves using a hand crank like device (actually more like one of those bike exercise machines).
Heating the air in the balloon is used with a pair of micro furnace (the magma bin/fuel trick).
In cases of emergency, the back end of the balloons can be opened wide, giving the preposterous a massive speed boost at the risk of being unable to uphold itself.
There is an automated gangplank on it's starboard side.
Because of the close proximity to the micro furnaces, the axles are made from Bauxite.
There is a well on board, allowing the ability to collect water without leaving the ship.
The rope net no only stores equipment, but also doubles as a bed (similar to hammocks)
*symbol: =

[Shades]

Thrust moves your ship. Your speed is your thrust, minus the weight of the ship.

This here for speed is just thrust? or thrust and lift? Because I don't see how it matches with the two ships you've accepted so far and so I'm having trouble designing my own ship. Each thruster (which appear to be powered, wings and balloons giving only lift) has weight of 1 and a thrust of 2 which means you need at least one thruster for every square of ship you have (other than wings, balloons and other thrusters).

Clearly I've miss understood something as noone's design does this and the two you've accepted so far have positive speeds but I don't know what and can someone explain it to me

[qwertyuiopas]

There it is with colour.

[Heron TSG]

Clearly I've miss understood something as noone's design does this and the two you've accepted so far have positive speeds but I don't know what and can someone explain it to me.

I thought mine would be a lot smaller, but I had to add in a crapload of propellers and wings. Basically, the only thing that saved me was that I could add some thruster power to my lift.

[Shades]

Clearly I've miss understood something as noone's design does this and the two you've accepted so far have positive speeds but I don't know what and can someone explain it to me.

I thought mine would be a lot smaller, but I had to add in a crapload of propellers and wings. Basically, the only thing that saved me was that I could add some thruster power to my lift.

Lift yes, but speed is thrust - weight according to the first post (not thrust + lift - weight) which means as far as I can see you'd have to have well over 50% of your craft as thrusters. I'm assuming I'm missing something as he accepted your design with a speed.

For example by my math for your design the weight adds up to 50 (a 5 by 7 shell + 1 for the ram + 14 for thrusters outside the shell) and your thrust is 44 which means your speed is -6. Clearly I've missed something but I don't see what?

[Boksi]

Maybe the thrusters have no weight, then? I think that's permissible.

[GlyphGryph]

I can't figure out how the first "accepted" ship can move with the current thrust rules, actually. Someone's going to have to explain that one to me.

[Boksi]

Say, I'm having trouble fitting enough thrust onto my ship as well. It has a tremendous amount of lift though, so I was thinking : What about diving? Sacrificing altitude to gain speed?

Anyway, I'm considering how to give my lift system some disadvantages. I'm thinking frequent breakdowns, necessitating constant refueling and maintenance, and being an easy target. I need some way to justify getting 2 lift.

[Itnetlolor]

I've been mulling over the whole issue in my head (also the fact that my ASCII drawing is a scaled down version to fit in post (and since much of the area is repeat), so essentially, it's going to be triple the amount percieved in the drawing (props are actually 3, not 1).

Considering I put some work behind explaining how the machinery works on my ship rather well, you don't mind if I elaborate the system, right?

The lift system, according to observation, seems a tad broken, especially for my ship. So, considering the amount of mechanisms and the size of the boilers within the ship and etc; I might as well calculate the power/lift through a bit of observational engineering.

Simply put, the boilers would provide pressure to make the mechanisms operate, and to flush out more power to all the engines, transmission and differential blocks would have to be used to further refine the raw power into something more intense, making the props on the craft more useful, and provide more necessary lift.

So, I guess I'll be doing a bit of Min/Max listing, and assume an average torque which would allow for a level cruise speed flight, and have enough to propel the craft forward. And as mentioned, tossing some booze would allow extra burn to provide more power.

Unfortunately, looking at things this way, it now makes my ship a bit broken for this race.

NOTE:
I'm still cramming the area and weight per block, but at least I figured how to calculate the lift. Sorta. I'm going to need Excel's to help  with some of this.

EDIT:
Okay, after a bit of number crunching, I have estimated the total weight of the ship, full-scale (the blueprint in my project page; my illustration is a 3:1 scale model to fit).

Here are the totals I have racked up so far. By deck, and a grand total. The only additional weight added was the boilers, and that was +1 weight per tile.
6- 266
5- 465
4- 1045
3- 1035
2- 229
1- 96

GT: 3136

Now to calculate the correct pressure and gear ratios for optimal output.

EDIT:
Excuse the delay on the other numbers. I was pulled away for an outing while working on it, and I can't seem to get back at the moment to finish up on it. Give my until tonight to get back. Not at my machine right now. Still out.