The "Battleship Bridges Problem" (and Hello)

Bingo.

The vestigial structure argument sort of works, but it doesn't come across in gameplay. I remember when I first played SupCom I was confused as to whether the ships were manned or not. Many of them had obvious windows and observation decks, which couldn't be explained away as evolutionary quirks because human engineers had designed them.

Speaking of vestigial structures, there is another evolutionary trend called "cephalization", in which an organism's sensory organs and tissues become concentrated in one place, eventually forming a head.
In PA, as humans were phased out, the empty command deck was used as the foundation for a primary sensor suite (in many ways a bridge already is this).

The bridge doesn't have to rotate for the idea to still make sense. It was just something I wanted to try, to give the ship a little extra character. But like knight suggested earlier, a stationary bridge could have several small cameras instead, or a single "eye" that looks around. There are plenty of possibilities here.

That's really neat. Do you have any other mechanical design stuff on any other sites?

Actually I did up something quick on my battleship;



And in the end, I think we solve one problem only to create another. Yeah it doesn't look like a populated bridge anymore, but now it looks more like a weapon. Admittedly this is still mostly a first draft, and the rest of the design wasn't done with such a thing in mind so result might vary, might need to do a new ship model and see how it turns out.

Mike

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo8Qls0HnWo

YES. I fully support scanning red lights. They're just so badass!

Re: cephalization; wouldn't apply to robots. Neural impulses are slow, multiplexed electromagnetic signals are fast. It especially wouldn't apply to robot warships which would want to have redundant distributed sensors to allow them to continue operating after battle damage.

Re: "The silhouette of a contemporary battleship is important for readability." There is only one battleship in the PA unit pool and it's the largest mobile unit in the game. What is it that it needs to be distinguished from?

(I'm fine with either design but I will say that I find the logical leap from "Bridges make no sense on a uncrewed robotic warship!" to "Let's replace it with a oversized robotic head!" a bit hard to swallow.)

Sure it would. Would you rather have a bunch of tiny sensors, or a large one with twice the power and range?

Of course, that same singular system is an easy target for enemy weapons. But dealing non lethal blows isn't always a winning strategy, and it only takes one non-blind survivor to re establish contact with the enemy.

Indeed they are! That I would like to see

Because scaling up a sensor package automatically means more range and effectiveness? (The horizon is only a few km away at sea level, by the way.) Because all sensor packages have to be exactly the same size? Come on.

I'd rather have a bunch of sensors good enough to do the job arranged with overlapping coverage so that they can cover for the loss of individual sensors. Sensors have been shrinking over time and I see no reason for this trend not to continue into the distant future.

This is about the possibility of making robot bridges cool, so the basic assumption of discussion here is that we want a bridge. Because it is an assumption it may not be true but getting that out of the way allows us to talk about this.

All the other ships maybe? They follow the same design queues as the Battleship does, thus they all have a tower like structure approximately mid-ship where a Human Crewed design would place the bridge.

See the Whitebox Images, in particular this one.

Mike

The battleship is large enough that I could easily find it in the thumbnail and I wasn't wearing my reading glasses. (A sensible player wouldn't send out a battleship unescorted so the scale should be readily apparent.) Even looking at the full sized image, the three triple mount turrets are quite visually distinct. I'm sorry but I can't say that I see an issue with readability.

Moreover, the alternative would place a sensor "head" structure where the bridge structure would be for all vessels so nothing would have changed with regard to readability.

Could use different head patterns for different ships?

Like a cyclops head for battleships, and a insect compound head for missile ships?

japporo you're missing the point.

The question is not 'should we add bridges for readability'.

As stated by Neutrino, they HAVE designed ships with bridges to be more readable.


This thread is all about the question 'Why do we have bridges for ships piloted by robots?'


To which the original poster had quite a nice solution - make the 'bridge' into something more robotic while keeping the overall shape (instantly recognizable 'bridge' section).

I like it. Make the ships their own robots. The Ships are robots. No need for a bridge it is the bridge.

I don't like the design so much. Your graphic skills are impressive, but the conceptional idea doesn't work out so good imho.

Moreover, it's true that bridges don't seamlessly fit into the PA-reality, but this idea doesn't solve that either. Replacing something with something else that has the same drawback isn't a step solving a problem.

As Pawz just explained, this isn't really the point. Tower-Things That Look Like Bridges are already going to be in the game, like it or not, because the devs say so. You can argue with their reasoning (I would, personally), but that's another topic entirely...

The goal now is to design a bridge-thing that doesn't look as conceptually out of place as an observation deck built for humans. If you have suggestions in that regard, feel free to elaborate.

I didn't question the fact that ships will have bridges. I rather questioned whether your idea solves the "Battleship Bridges Problem". And my personal answer is no.
Because I don't think this kind of bridge is a realistic design. And it should be, because the complain of people regarding the bridges problem is exactly that bridges are unrealistic. So if your solution is not "better" (more realistic) than the status quo, why not keeping the status quo?

The concept of giving a ship a huge head is in my opinion even more out of place than having a useless bridge. But that's just my personal view.

Since you asked for suggestions.
How I determine the design of a bridge: The function of a bridge is very clear, gathering intel. It seems that some people believe bridges exist so humans can look around and drive the ship. But that's only 20% of the truth. They could also use periscopes or cameras. Modern warships have bridges for one main reason: radar.
The design of a bridge is defined by the radar the ship uses. How does a radar look? Usually that way, the larger the better. How do bridges with nothing more than this radars (plus some cameras, lasers and other electro-optical stuff) look like? Probably similar to that ships bridge.
But I know neutrino doesn't like that kind of radar because you can't intuitively see whether a ship has radar or not, so even this bridge design has a logical error.

To me, it looks like a huge gun than optical sensor.

I really, really like this idea. It solves the readability and lore problems all at once. I really hope one of the devs reads this and passes it along.

Most of the complaints seem to be about the optical sensor, but that's a minor thing they can work out, like the Delta commander's arms.