While we're at it: It isn't completely uncommon to even give different names to variants of the same plane. In WC Arena we have the additional code names for the variants (Blade, Vanguard, Cavalier etc.) and in real life we have the F-84 that was called Thunderjet, Thunderstreak, and Thunderflash. Prototype variants included also Thunderscreetch and Thunderceptor, of which only one got a new number. But while this is interesting I don't think it will get us somewhere with this thread unfortunately.
The F-44 is always the Rapier II, in Wing Commander I and II. The roman numeral refers to an entirely new aircraft, like the P-47 Thunderbolt and the A-10 Thunderbolt II in reality. We now know the first Rapier is the CF-117 Rapier from the movie (although we've known there was 'another Rapier' starting in 1997 when the Kilrathi Saga manual introduced the Rapier II name.) Individual models are distinguished by the letter... the Rapier in Wing Commander II is the F-44G Rapier II, whereas it's (probably) the F-44A Rapier II in Wing Commander I. The Hellcat does seem to be older than the Rapier II, though... they show up in the first episode of Wing Commander Academy, before the Rapier II is introduced. F-86 doesn't really make sense with that information, since -86 puts it wayyy past the brand new -44 from around the same time. No, there's no real reference to the Thunderbolt's age (beyond the F-66 designation.) No, there's no reference of that nature. The Arrow is newer than the Ferret (which first shows up early in the late 2630s) but older than the Epee (early 2660s.) "Arrow V" is a strange typo from the Kilrathi Saga manual that some people jump on. It's from the Flight Tactics "situations" article in the Wing Commander III portion. For whatever reason they decided to replace "Hellcat" (in the original Victory Streak) with "Arrow" in the text and didn't take out the following V. We don't really know what the guns on the Academy version were; they don't ever get used or mentioned in dialogue. Page 24. Sadly, you're imagining the important part. Victory Streak: "Once you’re inside the hull, you can activate the slide (only available on the Arrow and Excalibur) and fire sideways at will." Playguide: "The autopilot systems in the Arrow and Excalibur allow you to maintain a constant, linear velocity, mluch like the cruise-control on a car." Official Guide: "The Arrow and the Excalibur are the only two fighters available with afterburner slides. The Excalibur’s “super slide” is particularly marked." Wing Commander III uses these terms interchangably; in fact, the afterburner slide page in the playguide is titled "Afterburner Slide (Shelton Slide)." Not quite! If you look back at the Wing Commander 2 manual you'll see there's no mention of a "Rapier II" at all--it's just the "F-44G Rapier." The II was something inserted in the Kilrathi Saga manual years later that helped explain what was going on with the movie. Actually, we recently dug up a 1991 draft of the movie proposal! We're working on getting permission to post it... Yes, this was Psych's claim for years and years. He eventually came up with a weird explanation that you can find by digging through the CZ where it's F-86 because the Longbow was -76 and the Thunderbolt was -66 and so they must all be supposed to end in 6. You know, except for the one that actually gets a designation in the game So, yes, ignore F-86. Because they gave up updating the "EA Arcade" website is all, unfortunately. I believe the design has to be produced, and named by the government instead of the contractor... so the P-75 Eagle prototype wouldn't count. The F-16 isn't the Falcon II because it's the F-16 *Fighting* Falcon. Very little is known! Although the Phantom was new in Armada, as lame was it was.
Well, it could be still even older so it is an old designation. But as I said, I am equally happy with 42 so I don't mind Argh... I used to have a pretty good memory once. Obviously getting older means that things might slip in any time. I wonder when the capacity will be reached and my favourite childhood memories get replaced by pictures of horrible new TV shows... Thanks for that info. Although it is sad for me. Now I know where my confusion comes from.
I think, Aginor, what your brain (and mine, I do it too), has done is to merge the WC2 manual's comment on the ITTS ("only available on the newer fighters like the Epee and Sabre") into the WC3 manual's comment on the autoslide feature. That said, it doesn't make a huge amount of sense that Douglas Aerospace would introduce the autoslide feature for the Arrow, not bother to include it in the Hellcat design, and then reintroduce it with the Excalibur, unless, I suppose, the Hellcat was supposed to be a cheap space superiority fighter for the colonies (which might explain why the post-war TCSF seems to have switched to it, in reaction to budget cuts?).
Perhaps there's engineering reasons why the Hellcat (or the Thunderbolt, or any other fighter prior to WC3) can't slide. We don't know how autoslide works...it may well have something to do with suppressing acceleration absorption or something that would place enormous stresses on the fighter's structural components, and be especially bad for heavier, larger, or more armored fighters. Maybe this is easy to do with a small light fighter like the Arrow, but very challenging to do on a larger, heavier fighter like the 'Cat, and required some kind of advancement in material science not available when the 'Cat was developed to get a larger fighter (like the Excal) to be able to autoslide. Your cost idea could well play in, too. If the enabling technology for larger fighters is very expensive, it would explain why, in WC4, the Lance/Dragon and Bearcat (both expensive, top-of-the-line fighters) can slide, but not the numerous, affordable Hellcats. On the BW side, the Banshee can slide (it's a relatively small fighter), but not the Vinds or the Avengers...the BW are very cost limited so only their small, light fighter can slide.
The Banshee can slide? I'll have to remember that......where is that stated explicitly? Technically, any spacecraft should be capable of autosliding as it appears in WC3, simply due to the mechanics of spaceflight (as opposed to atmospheric flight). It's just that WC uses an aircraft-like model for flight for most of the games, probably for the sake of the player/programmer.
I think it's in the WC4 game guide. But just try it. I fiddled with it a little. Slide in WC4 seems to work a little differently from WC3, where CAPS toggled slide on and off...in WC4 pressing and holding CAPS puts you in slide, and releasing CAPS turns off the slide. I'm 95% certain that both the Banshee and the Dragon/Lance can both slide. I *think* the Bearcat can as well, but I'm not sure of that. Regarding your second point, that's not entirely true. It's true that your ship should continue on its velocity vector with no other input, even if you rotate yourself around (assuming whatever thrusters you use to rotate produce pure moment and no net thrust). But in the game, when you engage slide, your engines don't shut off. Assuming your ion driver is continuously producing thrust, then turning your ship sideways should add addition sideways vector that sums with your initial velocity vector, which is not the physics behavior of WC3. Even if we assume engaging autoslide temporarily disables your engine thrust, in WC3, when you release slide, your ship INSTANTLY adopts your new velocity vector, allowing perfectly sharp corners, which is not possible in real spaceflight mechanics. A number of years work, I remember reading a (probably fan-generated) description of how the physics of the WC ships might work. The basic idea is that some kind of inertial damping field is generated (hence the "acceleration absorbers" on the Scimitar in WC1) that greatly reduces forces due to acceleration internal to the field, which allows the ships to pull crazy accelerations (kilometers per second squared, as outlined in the fiction) that would normal crush both structures and people, without doing so. The field also shielded the ship from the effects of gravity, explaining how ships could just stop and hover in atmospheric flight. The cost of this is that the field somehow created a "drag" like force that tended to keep ships from sliding indefinitely and explained the atmospheric-type model. Now, this idea has numerous problems with it, both from a real physics standpoint and also in-game continuity, but something along lines something like this may well be the in-universe "truth". The contention here would be if you switched the field off to autoslide, you would be potentially subjecting your ship to much greater stresses than it would normally undergo, and it might not be possible to do so in a heavier ship thatwasn't engineered for it.
I probably didn't clarify my point very well; most real-life spacecraft wouldn't be running their main engine continuously (because their inertia would continue to carry them along the same vector due to the relative lack of drag in space). And you're right; in real-life, there's no way to get a crisp, instantaneous turn when you kick a new engine on (you can get close with an oomph much greater than your current delta-v along a neighboring axis, but there'll still be some curvature to the motion). I can accept the notion of an acceleration absorber or inertial dampener field - you'd have to have it simply to keep the pilots alive at the accelerations and velocities implied as normal for WC craft. Call the whole WC universe physically unrealistic and leave it at that; fine by me.
Technically everything can perform a slide, even in WC1, if you afterburn and kill your engines, you seem to keep some level of the momentum as you rotate your ship. However, the true "slide" features from the arrow and excalibur allow you to continue on at thesame speed and manouver your craft's firing arc so you can fly through a carriers hull and blast everything inside(It works, but I do not know if it actually affected the carrier or it's wings in the gameplay of WC3&4, actually the idea of blowing up a "catbox" from the inside was performed by Maniac himself in the Academy cartoon series). As for those saying that the banshee and dragon can autoslide, are you using alternate flight mode or regular?
Ships in WC3/4 can't really slide though, because of the relative rates of acceleration and turning in those games, if you try to perform an afterburner slide your ship always flies more or less in the direction it's pointing. In the Vision engine you can slide (at least, I'm pretty certain you can; I'm sure I've done it in Standoff and think I've done it in Secret Ops), but it's much much harder to pull off than in WC1/2, and generally not worth it.
Well now, I'm sure the US designation system is full of chaotic and confusing things... however, the fact that it contains lots of exceptions doesn't mean that it doesn't follow a set of rules . For each exception, there's usually a more or less sensible explanation. In particular, when it comes to the Roman numerals. Yes, they're hugely inconsistent. But again, that's because names are supposed to be evocative, not encyclopedical. The Thunderbolt II doesn't carry a II to remind people that it's the second Thunderbolt out there, it carries a II to suggest to people that this plane is going to be as awesome as the first Thunderbolt. It's more about marketing than logic or accuracy. I'll give you an example far crazier than any of the ones you pointed out: the Corsair. There were no less than four different Corsairs, (O2U: 1926; SBU: 1934; F4U: 1940; then a long break, and the A-7 arrives in 1963) all produced by the same manufacturer, and three of them named Corsair, while only the last one was Corsair II. Crazy, isn't it? Well, it's not, if you think about how the first two Corsairs were totally unknown (they're interwar planes, never had a chance to see any combat in the US Navy, though the O2U Corsair actually did see quite a lot of action elsewhere in the world), and how the third Corsair became really, really famous, it makes sense that the first two were overlooked, and it's only with the fourth Corsair that a reference to a previous Corsair was deemed worthwhile. Again, you want the name to make pilots feel awesome about flying the plane, and the public to feel awesome about paying for the plane. That being considered, you probably wouldn't want to remind them that hey, this happens to be the third plane named Corsair, and the previous two were utterly forgettable . Incidentally, it seems that the US Navy didn't really name planes in the 1920s and 1930s. I'm not sure when they did start naming them, but up to a certain point in time, it seems that it was the manufacturers who came up with names (so, yeah, Vought really liked "Corsair" ). This also means that some planes had designations only, because the manufacturer did not give them a name. I'm only mentioning this because we're talking about Vought, whose letter code in the USN designation system was "U". Consequently, the very first Vought fighter to enter Navy service was entirely nameless, but carried an utterly awesome designation: FU. "So, you're a fighter pilot, Lieutenant? What kind of aircraft do you fly?" "FU, Admiral..."
Hehe , pretty interesting points ! I can agree with most of them Quarto ! Oh well Spaceships designations,Service dates etc was always confusing I just try to simplify things and try to accept them the way they are . In the end its fiction and except of some facts everyone has its own perspective!
Hate to dig this thread up again, but...on the subject of autoslides - does anybody happen to know which craft in Prophecy can autoslide?
None of which I know. They all slide a bit, like in WC2 gameplay, especially the Panther and Vampire, but autoslide like the Arrow or Excalibur isn't possible IIRC. (or I just never used it...)
I never used it either, but I was looking again this morning at Prophecy's reference card and the autoslide controls are listed on the keyboard...
