So ventures can hold up to 5,000 cubic meters of ore in the ore hold… But why aren’t the ships themselves bigger? It seems like the entry level cargo ships are massive, yet if you ship ore they can only hold marginally more.
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Ah, one of those great mysteries alongside “why do the engines need to operate to maintain a constant speed?” and numerous others.
In practice the answer is “because that’s how the game engine works”.
The basic shape of a ship in game is a sphere. It’s invisible, and there’s a graphic object (“the ship you see”) within it. I suspect that there is a size limit on the ship fitting into the sphere to prevent weird graphics effects. And than spheres are of defined sizes for the different ship classes.
The various other parameters about “container size, fitting” and so forth are not limited by the sphere (that’s a motion mechanic thing only). This de-coupling of physical representation from the logical model is the source of your question.
You can see the effect of the sphere as ships bounce off each other at the sphere boundary, but more commonly it can be seen in how ships manoeuvre - the facing direction a ship is drawn in is driven by the direction of the velocity vector of the sphere.
Which answers the question that is never asked which is “why does a big heavy high-inertial ship such a battleship spin quickly on the spot when changing direction?”
Eve with realistic vacuum and freefall physics would be interesting, but counter intuitive and a completely different set of challenges (reaction mass resource management anyone?). I’m happy with the beast it is - a sort of space skinned submarine billiards. With lasers.
The most impressive thing (and thank-you CCP) is that it exists in all it’s strange wonderful complexity at all.
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Before the Venture, new players needed to “jet can” mine using frigates without a large ore hold. These frigates were re-purposed as logistics frigates.
Ships, and everything else in the game, are designed from a gameplay perspective - there are occasional calls for things to be more “realistic” but, based on our current understanding of the laws of physics, very little of the technology in Eve is even possible.
Simply suspend disbelief and enjoy the game!
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I like this a lot.
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Well actually the physics in the game is actually based on that of being underwater.
CCP hired an elite team of Icelandic ninjas to infiltrate the BBC and have a sneak look at the Dr Who TARDIS,. From that CCP figured out how to make Ventures bigger on the inside than on the outside.
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