Ship Speeds

The scoop theory certainly clears things up, but where the heck do you find this stuff LOAF?

The scoop stuff has been expanded greatly in the novels over the years... though looking back at the source material in /archives, we now know that the 'Wing Commander propulsion' stuff was actually all established by Origin in a background tech document that started appearing in the series bible around WC2 (which, in retrospect, is why it's so fluid throughout the novels, I suppose).

A fairly 'straight up' text about it, based on the original WC2-era propuslion treatise, can be found in The Confederation Handbook.

I have a nagging feeling I've read about them ramscoops in some WC game manual. One questions that arises here is what exactly is done with the scooped hydrogen?

It's fuel for whatever kind of engine we're using -- there's a pretty lengthy discussion about that in the same sources listed above (bible and Handbook).

BOOM! Yeah, now that I remember it, I read something similar about the scopes in a strategy guide. But do you have an answer for the sound query LOAF? rather, has some piece of WC source material I've never come across explained that?

Not to the best of my knowledge -- but it stands to reason that it's just the fighter programmed to turn things it scans into sounds appreciable by the pilot. It stands to reason that that's essentially how the game works sound, anyway. (And modern fighters have similar systems with collision alarms and whatnot.)

(That said, I seem to recall that the Babylon 5 people did some research to figure out exactly how sound can exist in space in some limited basis back when that series was young. Might look that up, if you want a pseudoscientific possible answer.)
 
Bandit LOAF said:
(That said, I seem to recall that the Babylon 5 people did some research to figure out exactly how sound can exist in space in some limited basis back when that series was young. Might look that up, if you want a pseudoscientific possible answer.)

From JMSNews . It's also on one of the DVD commentaries. I usually just chalk it up as "it's not *that* hard of sci-fi." And WC is downright marshmallowy, in that sense :)

To me, the sound of your own weapons firing, or other weapons impacting your ship, makes perfect sense (you have a path for the vibration). Hearing other ships fly past...er, bogus, but it's a cool effect. And being able to hear your shots hit the other ships, also bogus, but very useful from a gameplay perspective.

Anyhow, there is sound in space in some sense; sound waves can propagate, just rather poorly and the intensity is likely to be very, very low, especially over the distances involved. Magnetohydrodynamic waves are far more effective.

If you define "sound" as "compression waves with pressure as the restoring force," then there's sound in space. If you define it in terms of something that humans perceive (with or without electronic aid), then it's much more limited.

And yes, IAARS.
 
Err...

What's the "speed" relative to anyway?

As there's no point of reference in space how can you have a discrete measurement of speed unless you're measuring distances between locales and how fast you're doing that distance?(Hence the term "all stop" is silly for example in Star Trek.)
 
Why isn't there a point of reference in space? There's stars and planets and nav buoys and other ships and so forth.
 
Bandit LOAF said:
Why isn't there a point of reference in space? There's stars and planets and nav buoys and other ships and so forth.
The problem with using planets as points of reference is that they are moving at a pretty good clip too, just in a circle. Or, you could use them how we do with the space shuttle. Whe say how fast the shuttle goes relative to the speed the earth orbits, so instead of saying the shuttle is zipping around several thousand miles an hour around the sun, we state its speed relative to the earth.
 
I know that sound would carry along the body of the fighter (gun noises etc...) What I do remember, and I'll have to wait til I'm home next week to look into it, is in some WC Guidebook it mentioned that fighters employed a series of speakers to simulate noises which would help pilots function. This might be a false memory, but it might be legit.
 
The nav computer is really detailed in distances, and references like suns, planets and capships help the computer to maintain a continous frame of reference.

Also, suns don't move. Well technically they do, but that is not a consideration in references because the center of the universe is not known and it is a huge, big ol' number of light-centuries away.

*basically what Loaf said but more detailed* :p
 
BenoitBrunet2 said:
I know that sound would carry along the body of the fighter (gun noises etc...) What I do remember, and I'll have to wait til I'm home next week to look into it, is in some WC Guidebook it mentioned that fighters employed a series of speakers to simulate noises which would help pilots function. This might be a false memory, but it might be legit.

I believe Mark Minasi's book claims this -- but while excellent, it's not an official guide.
 
BenoitBrunet2 said:
I know that sound would carry along the body of the fighter (gun noises etc...)
However, the lasers wouldn't make any noise to begin with, and things like Mass Drivers would make a little wooshing noise through the air. Something you would be unable to notice, especially in the cockpit with a helmet on.
 
Why, Douglas Aerospace, of course. And don't ever let anyone tell you that there could be *other* companies in the Wing Commander universe. :)
 
"no no no, that's all wrong. What we're going for here is more of a sleak 'whoosh.' none of this 'varoom' crap! The contract is cancelled!"

Maybe some pilots turn it off, preferring instead the soothing sounds of Confed-approved light jazz.
 
The whole 'no sound in space' nitpick has never really made any sense to me. A person in WC is never actually *in space*, but rather a confined environment in space. This environment could be a helmet, a cockpit, or even a giant observation deck... and in any one of these environments sound waves do travel (even sound waves created by forces external to that environment).
 
Say your ear is point A, the outer edge of your compressed cockpit is point B, the enemy fighter exploding is point C.

Sound requires some sort of medium to travel through... solid, liquid or gas. Sound has no problem travelling between point A and point B and vice-versa. If you had someone outside your cockpit tapping on the canopy, you would hear it inside.

However, between point B and point C there is (virtually) vacuum, with little to nothing for sound waves to travel through. This B<->C area is this space "no sound in space" refers to. Sound waves from C must first pass through B to reach A, and in this example that is not possible.

Anyway the general idea is that silent explosions and silent flybys in space in sci-fi are not very exciting.
 
Think of how much more taxing dogfighting under those conditions would be. The only things you hear are com-chatter, your own guns/missiles and the sounds your shields and armor make when they take hits. Especially combat against stealth fighters. You're alone, 40k away from the Claw and suddenly you think you see something, but just for an instant, and then it's gone. No fuzzy "decloak" fizzle, just your own engines and a whole lot of nothing. Time passes, leaving you completely alone with your thoughts when the com explodes with "Mayday...TCS Tiger's Claw in need of assistance..." and then nothing. That would be a long flight home.
 
Say your ear is point A, the outer edge of your compressed cockpit is point B, the enemy fighter exploding is point C.

This is a great way to explain it, the problem is you missed my entire point. Nobody would dispute that sound waves cannot travel between points C and B, but other forces *can*, and those forces would *create* sound waves that would travel between points B and A.
 
As long as we're nitpicking about physics, I have to ask, what exactly is coming out of the barrels of your guns when you pull the trigger? It has to be a projectile of some sort because if you were actually firing lasers or some other kind of energy weapon that travels at the speed of light, there would be no need to lead an enemy fighter. Just put the crosshairs on the target and fire.

Ironically, the one gun that may actually be an energy weapon is the WC4 stormfire that requires no lead to hit a fast moving target.

It may be the lateness of the hour, but Corsair's above post isn't making sense to me. What are the "other forces"?
 
It may be the lateness of the hour, but Corsair's above post isn't making sense to me. What are the "other forces"?

Any force that would cause vibration in the boundary between points "C" and "B", which in turn would create sound waves at "point B", that would travel inside the confined space of a cockpit to be audible at "point A". Some examples: heat, light, magnetism, etc...

Edit: As for the gun issue... now THAT may be a legitimate nitpick... I seem to recall Armada's Voices of War attempting to explain the physics of some of the guns... but I don't remember any specifics. This makes me want to play Armada again...
 
Iceblade said:
Also, suns don't move. Well technically they do, but that is not a consideration in references because the center of the universe is not known and it is a huge, big ol' number of light-centuries away.
Local galactic rotation is 220 km/s. Suns move. Fast. Relative to each other. Measuring your speed relative to one star will likely be tens of kilometers per second different from the speed relative to another star.

The Universe has no centre.
 
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