Talk:Portal:Artifacts

I think the magic swords and such should go under Weapons. With all the magitech around, the distinction between a magic sword and a magitech gun is less important than grouping the weapons together. - X Stryker

Well, I think the primary distinction between the weapons under Magic Weapons is that they're all unique artifacts, whereas the weapons listed below under "weapons" are mass-produced in order to outfit entire armies. Scen 11:55, 25 July 2006 (CDT)

They have lots of distinctions. Clearly, they are both Weapons and Magical Apparati (sp?). But were I to taxonomize them, I would group all weapons together. If you asked Sir Toadus whether he would call the Masamune a "Magical Apparatus" or a "Weapon", I'm betting he would either say "Weapon", or just fucking cleave you half to prove a point. ;-) Xstryker 12:05, 25 July 2006 (CDT)

Organization Discussion

I'm just going to throw this out there because this was bugging me a lot when I was moving some of my old ON stuff over:

Can we have fewer categories please? I hate having to distribute my equipment infosheets across ten different pages. And having each piece of equipment get its own article is a pain. I don't want to have to navigate through twenty different pages to read about Esperian weaponry; I miss being able to have one or two articles that would cover all the Esperian equipment. I don't want to have to take the time to make a links page for Scandian Tanks that has links to the two models of Scandian tanks. Plus, corporate catalogues are going to be a nightmare for me to convert. The omnibus arms sheets were much simpler, and they have search functionality. Most of the NPs don't have whole seperate articles for each section, and neither should the weapons and such.

Certain very famous weapons systems can and should have their own articles, but as its structured right now this is a pain in the ass to set up and read, and the point of moving things to the wiki was to make things easier and more accessible.

While I'm on a rant about this I think we may want to consider overhauling this to have the primary listing be by nation and the secondary listing by type, rather than the way it is now. This would allow writers more flexibility with their assets. Plus, most people who are doing research on this (I think) are doing research on a specific country, not on a specific class of weapon. (It's not like I'm going to have a battle where I just need to know capital ships from four different countries anytime soon.) Grumble, grumble, laptop not connecting to internet at home, grumble...--Celiose 16:21, 4 August 2006 (CDT)

I could get behind this; it seems somewhat disjointed as-is. However, I think I'd like to stop at splitting things up by nation - basically, I'd have an Esperian Artifacts sub-heading that links to the capital ships, mecha, et cetera. Thus far, most stuff doesn't seem to have individual pages with the exception of capital ships - which could be condensed, I suppose. I can't think of any good reason not to in most cases (with exceptions for famous ships, I guess).

This does, however, raise the question of what to do with swordcasters, Seraphim, and non-nation specific tech. Also, we should maintain articles on crap like needle weapons, gravitic weapons, et cetera. --Tex 16:45, 4 August 2006 (CDT)

I still think all of this stuff should be moved over to the Technology portal anyway. And actually, now that I think about it, Travis does have a point. I think I'd much rather have things organized by nation/controlling entity rather than by equipment type. I mean, some of the categories are a little ridiculous by themselves. Scande has two types of tanks -- Guardia only has one. Scen 19:31, 4 August 2006 (CDT)

Personally, I hate the monolithic stat sheets. Reading and/or editing them is a nightmare. However, this is an area where I feel that the opinion of those who write the stat sheets -- Travis, Tex, and Matt -- outweighs the opinions of those who (like me) read them but really have no actual use for them. Now, Travis, when you say categories, you mean the headings on the Portal page, not my categories (ie. Category:Capital ships). Seeing as how I maintain them myself anyway, and that they don't prevent you from making omnibus listings, I think categories serve as a useful search function for someone who might perhaps be looking to compare starfighters so that he could design his own.--Xstryker 20:31, 4 August 2006 (CDT)