Template talk:Ship infobox

I tried using this new ship template for the Reaver (ship) page, but it's not showing up correctly when you view the page outside of the source editor. Advice?? Artemaz (talk) 00:21, January 12, 2016 (UTC)


 * Ah, my source edit page is jacked compared to the building template page. I'll fix it tomorrow. Artemaz (talk) 00:29, January 12, 2016 (UTC)


 * I see the documentation, but not the actual template. I'll make a draft and you can proof it. &mdash;Moviesign (talk) 01:14, January 12, 2016 (UTC)
 * Recommendations: I would shorten notable crewmembers to notable crew and standard armament to just armament. Less wasted space in the cut and paste template, IMHO. Also, beam length should be beam width. Do you really want the "inhabitants", "organizations" and "locations" links? Or was that just a cut and paste from another infobox? I made a quick and dirty template, see what you think on Reaver (ship) and feel free to test it out. Note any changes you want made here. &mdash;Moviesign (talk) 01:49, January 12, 2016 (UTC)


 * Thanks for all of your help with this template Movie! They can be a bit confusing at first. I agree with all of your suggestions regarding shortening to notable crew, armament, and beam width.


 * I do still want the "inhabitants" and "organizations" because I think it's useful to say a captain (or other named crewmember who spends alot of time aboard the ship) can actually be classified as living on the ship. Same for "organizations" if I come across a group of named pirates or such. I think we can remove the "locations" one though since I don't foresee any named locations onboard a ship. Artemaz (talk) 14:31, January 12, 2016 (UTC)

Appearance
Why does this have such a different appearance to the other infoboxes? — BadCatMan (talk) 00:55, April 16, 2016 (UTC)


 * How so?Artemaz (talk) 01:58, April 16, 2016 (UTC)


 * As I saw at Realms Master and sambuk, infobox titles and section titles are left-aligned, left-column entries are bolded, and it's all in shades of grey. — BadCatMan (talk) 02:05, April 16, 2016 (UTC)


 * I'm looking into it. There seems to be a new monobook css file, or perhaps this change didn't get sync'd with monobook. &mdash;Moviesign (talk) 03:21, April 16, 2016 (UTC)
 * There ya go, all fixed. You may have to purge the page or clear your cache to see the change. &mdash;Moviesign (talk) 03:26, April 16, 2016 (UTC)
 * Hmm, maybe not. The colors are there, but the alignment is off. They have changed something in the matrix. >-(  &mdash;Moviesign (talk) 03:49, April 16, 2016 (UTC)
 * Okay, should be fixed for realz this time. Let me know if anything is amiss. &mdash;Moviesign (talk) 04:16, April 16, 2016 (UTC)


 * Thanks. The formatting's the same as the other infoboxes now, only bright blue. That must be the first time I've seen it. I presume that's the colour scheme we're going with? I'd've gone for a darker shade of blue, myself. — BadCatMan (talk) 05:40, April 16, 2016 (UTC)


 * The discussion took place here and nobody else complained at the time, but feel free to bring it up (it's a little bright IMO also). &mdash;Moviesign (talk) 15:55, April 16, 2016 (UTC)


 * I think I missed that. But I dunno, there's too many possibilities: ocean blue or sea green for sailing ships, sky blue for flying ships. There's even sand-skimming desert sailing ships on the Raurin. :) — BadCatMan (talk) 01:08, April 17, 2016 (UTC)

Feature requests
I would like to suggest a few features to be introduced to this template (I should eventually learn how to code this stuff):


 * Reference grouping on section titles, like basicrefs and configrefs fields or similar, instead of source and page, which seem to be falling in disuse when compared to more recent templates.
 * An option to italicize the title in the infobox only if the article refers to a particular ship. There is a difference between a dragonship and the Dragon, for example. Could be as simple as a propername = yes option.
 * Automatic category generation for ship type, such as general ones like Category:Ships and specific ones like Category:Spelljammers.
 * By the way, is there any functional difference between Category:Ships and Category:Vessels? If not, I'd suggest them to be merged into the same one.

Any thoughts? &mdash; Sirwhiteout (talk) 23:16, April 7, 2018 (UTC)


 * I will put in the section title references. The easiest way to fix the italics problem is to take off the mandatory format it uses now and just let the author put  around the ship name if it needs it. We would have to go through all the ship pages and fix this, but there are not that many. Yes, we could add a propername parameter, but we'd still have to edit all the pages and I like the simpler solution. As for ship type, that might be tricky unless there is an actual list somewhere. This template could be used for hot-air balloons and submarines (or maybe we should have a Vessel template with Ship as a passthrough?), as well as the dozens of types of boats, so I'm dubious that we can correctly generate a category in all cases. I think of Ships as a subset of Vessels, so Category:Ships should be a subcat of Category:Vessels. Those are my thoughts, I'm sure a few others will post their views. &mdash;Moviesign (talk) 03:04, April 8, 2018 (UTC)


 * I agree that we should have reference grouping.
 * I agree with Movie about the best way to deal with specific vs. general ships.
 * Unlike Movie, I am always in favor of more automatic category generation, but we need to work out a hierarchy first. I'd say that we do what I did for bodies of water. We provide an list of acceptable types. If someone uses a type not on the list, it simply doesn't generate a category, and no harm is done.
 * I want to agree with Movie on Ships being a subcategory of Vessels. On the other hand, I cannot think of any vessels that are not ships, unless spelljammers are not considered ships, but I think that they are. Boats are ships. Airships are ships. Even the vessels used for sailing the Astral Plane, as opposed to wildspace are variations on ships. There are no airplanes or helicopters in the Realms; everything is on some level a variation of a ship.
 * ~ Lhynard (talk) 19:01, April 8, 2018 (UTC)


 * I'll get that done soon.
 * Okay. You might want to start going through all the Ships and italicizing the proper names.
 * I'm on board with ShipCats. Make it so!
 * I'm fine with that as long as there are no submarines on Toril, and even if there were, I don't think it's worth the trouble to make a new category.
 * :) &mdash;Moviesign (talk) 21:22, April 8, 2018 (UTC)

Which ship categories do we want? ~ Lhynard (talk) 14:45, May 3, 2018 (UTC)


 * I'd say we could start with the following:
 * Flying ship (including airships and other non-spelljamming spaceships such as locusts)
 * Planar ship (for nautiloids, githyanki ships and others capable of navigating the Astral Sea or crossing planes)
 * Sailing ship (or perhaps just "Ship", or a more generic name for regular, water-surface vessels)
 * Spelljammer
 * Submarine (there was mention of at least one such ship in one of the announcement videos of the new Waterdeep: Dragon Heist adventure)


 * One more thing: it seems that the italicized name is creating problems with category generation. It is putting the ship's name in italics as well (see the Dragon article and Category: Inhabitants of the Dragon, for example). ― Sirwhiteout (talk) 21:53, June 6, 2018 (UTC)


 * Okay, it looks like we need to implement the propername parameter. Either that, or we need a different pass-through template to be used for individual ships as opposed to generic ships, but that might be overkill. &mdash;Moviesign (talk) 23:45, June 6, 2018 (UTC)


 * I have updated the templates and changed articles in Category:Ships so the links will work now. It looks like there are a number of "proper name" ship articles that need the new parameter. All I did was fix the broken links. &mdash;Moviesign (talk) 00:13, June 7, 2018 (UTC)


 * Thanks! I'm going through the ship pages to implement the new template. One thing that I noticed is the possibility of edition-specific stats. Most ships I've gone through so far either agree or don't overlap stats, but this does not seem to be true in general. For example, the cog has different values in 2e and 3e, and the squid ship appears to have different tonnages in 2e and 5e (although the 5e version seems to be a special case). Would this justify a set of edition-specific stats?


 * On the other hand, it could be an exception, or a very small minority to justify such a drastic change. In either case, I'll keep going through them to see if cog was the only anomalous case. ― Sirwhiteout (talk) 02:18, June 7, 2018 (UTC)


 * I am against edition-specific stats in this case. Tonnages are flexible anyhow; I would treat the two values between editions as highs and lows in a range of acceptable values. We really only need edition-specific stats in infoboxes for things that we want to generate categories for. ~ Lhynard (talk) 02:24, June 7, 2018 (UTC)


 * I agree. It really seemed too much. I like the idea of expressing stats as ranges if they don't match, so I'll adopt this notation whenever there is a discrepancy. ― Sirwhiteout (talk) 02:54, June 7, 2018 (UTC)