Re: UNSC fleet carrier design

>Mark Kochte wrote:
>>  I was thinking more along the lines of how Charles has a built-in
>>  'restriction' for coming up with designs which represent all visible
>>  weapon systems on a given mini; for fun I had tried to do that with
>>  Superior's SW Terran force, and quickly had a heavy cruiser out of
>>  a destroyer.  :-)  I believe Dean/Star Ranger tried to do something
>>  similar for his PBeM scenarios before he noticed the bristling array
>>  of weapons UNDERNEATH each model! :-)
>
>
>	Heh.  Reminds me of the venerable game STELLAR WARS
>	by Bruce Loren Miller (1977)
>
>	In it, you take your miniatures, and design ships
>	that correspond to each miniature.  All ship systems
>	take up so many build points.
>
>	How do you determine how many build points a given
>	miniature has?	Why, you determine how many cubic
>	millimeters the miniature takes up!
>
>	The back of the rulebook has the formula for determining
>	the volume of cubes, cylinders, cones, etc.
>	You approximate your miniature in terms of these, and
>	calculate it's volume.

Yeah, but the easiest way to figure out the volume of a figure is
to determine the volume of water it displaces. With a graduated
cylinder in sufficiently small increments, you can figure out
the volume very accurately. A variation on this method is to
fill the cylinder to the very top with water. When you add the
miniature to the vessel, the water will overflow. How much water?
Exactly the volume of the miniature. If you catch all of the
overflow in another vessel, you can then weigh the water. Since
the density of water is 1 g/ml, you can easily and accurately
determine the volume of the mini.

This method is much more accurate and simple than measuring all
of the mini cubes and cones that make up the mini and then
summing them all up.

Cheers,
Tony.
-- 

Tony Christney