It makes no sense from sci-fi perspective and it makes even less sense from game design perspective knowing the difference between utility, tank and punch they pack. What is going on?
Quick comparison of Cerberus and Nighthawk:
Mass: 13k tons and 13k tons
Shield: 5500 and 2000
Capacitor: 2800GJ and 1200GJ
Sig radius: 285m and 135m
…
Was this overlooked? Who did these numbers? The mass should be at least x2 higher.
Nighthawk 13,200,000 kg
Cerberus 12,720,000 kg
480 ton difference seems indeed a bit low considering the big difference in size.
My guess would be it’s due to balancing reasons. Ship mass plays a role in how their movement behaves at sub-warp speed. If you added more mass to a battlecruiser, it would become much slower and cumbersome to handle. You can fit some 1600mm armor plates to get a feeling for it. (A T1 1600mm plate adds 3,500,000 kg of mass before skills)
It’s also more likely to fit big plates for buffer on BCs than Cruisers. That migth also have played a role.
It’s probably because they are both using the same Propmods. If they had a huge mass difference, like 3x, the MWD/AB Speed of BC sized ships would be hilariously low compared to cruisers. So they are just a bit heavier to make the cruisers still have a mobility advantage, but basically stay roughly in the same realm (speed/agility wise).
Frigs and Destroyers are also pretty close in Mass (Punisher 1.19kt / Coercer 1.65kt)
Interesting choice of ships for your comparison, I enjoy Caldari hulls and these two are particular favourites but Caracal: Thicc Edition is much nippier on grid that the Nighthawk which, by comparison, lumbers about like a stoned sloth.
I’d like to see the Nighthawk buffed in this regard, rather than further nerfed as this post appears to advocate.
Allow me to answer this with the short answer first.
A: The lighter ships have a lower mass by employment of the MacGuffin alloys created by Professor MacGuffin and his team of engineers Hitchcock and MacPhail. This information is not found in any official documentation, because it is classified above top secret.
Now for my wall of text.
Eve Online is not Star Trek Online where you attempt to figure out the technical details to a fictional universe. Doing this breaks the immersion of the game. There is no way to travel beyond the speed of light, yet we can. If you managed to travel FTL, then upon return decades would have passed by and your mission agents would be dead or too old to care. You can’t hear sound in a vacuum of space but it would be no fun to play the game muted. You can’t travel through wormholes, none have been discovered and generating one artificially would require the energy of a star.
I am sorry to poo-poo on your discovery, but it is a large database, made by dozens of authors, and there are always bound to be mistakes. Star Trek the TV series gave 4 different explanations about the science of teleportation. Meanwhile the more recent TV series The Orville only use shuttles, avoiding the magic of teleportation.
If I seem a tad bit irked by this thread, it is because I wrote for Star Trek, and all I wrote was always challenged by some fat fan boy with Cheetos stuck in his neckbeard. I also wrote some fantasy and even one about vampires ( the vile ones that don’t sparkle ) and no one questions these fictions. There is no science in science-fiction, it is a genre, and by definition both terms together negate any science or facts.
Have fun!
This is the reason.
Mass plays a big role in mobility and both Cruisers and Battlecruisers use the same size modules, including propulsion modules.
Battlecruisers are slightly slower cruisers with more firepower, like destroyers are frigates with more firepower. They’re still roughly the same size, if only a bit bigger, heavier and slower.
You could think that Battleship > Battlecruiser > Cruiser > Destroyer > Frigate is evenly spread, but it’s more like Battleship >> Battlecruiser > Cruiser >> Destroyer > Frigate
There are many smart ways of going around this. Bonus to MegaNewtons of the Propulsion Modules. Adjusting Inertia Modifiers and other stuff. It seems like someone has been lazy when doing the numbers. Most likely the numbers were done before WormHoles were released. As a result of the laziness BCs are the meta in J-Space.
And why is it bad that battlecruisers are strong in J-Space?
I think it’s nice that J-Space has it’s own meta that’s different than other parts of space, a meta where weight matters.
One smart way is to simply make battlecruisers and destroyers not weigh much more than cruisers and frigates, which is what CCP did. Simple solutions.
It does mean that battlecruisers and destroyers are popular ships if weight matters because of their firepower per weight, but one ship type or another is going to be the most popular anyway, so why is it bad that battlecruisers are strong in J-space?
Well, putting and keeping BCs in a sensitive system for 20 years sounds not that lazy. Each and every feature is under the eagle eyes of the community, and if it was a problem, it would have been addressed and probably changed already.
Here’s some patch notes from 2004 as the class of BCs was introduced.
It’s not even entirely true what he claims. All types of ships are heavily used in JSpace, depending on the size of the operation.
You can literally check the Killboards of all larger WH entities and you will notice that there is quite a good balance between T3s, Commandships, Battleships and smaller support ships on the kills. BCs/CS are far from being at some lonely top spot or the “best choice”.