Why Catapults?...

Originally posted by -<Stiletto>-


Well, hey! Look at the WC movie. Sonar in space...
:D

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Sound doesn't travel in space but it's a fact that other types of energy waves do. Why couldn't there be one that bounces of of other objects (star treks sensors for example) and return the information to the ship?! With that in mind any characteristic that would make a ship apear different from a floating hunk of rock would give it away. Thus high energy signatures from electric systems and engines... maybe even the excess vibration caused by the sounds of a noisy crew!! They obviously wouldnt hear them... but maybe they can detect the change in noise level in that way. It my be implausible but not impossible.

"Scan that piece of debris"
"sir it's a little warm but I think its just a big asteroid"
"very well change course, scan the next object, every single crater!!"
"Wait sir, As soon as we moved off it started vibrating! It's hull is oscilating at a frequency consistent with human speech."
"What?! Target that ship! Fire torpedoes"

-AD
 
Ehh, the movie doesn't really say that the Kilrathi will *hear* them. Paladin tells everybody to stop cheering because he notices that a Kilrathi destroyer is still following them...
 
True enough, but so many people seem to assume that they are implying it because of the submarine analogies... so it doesn't hurt to have another possible explanation to show the ignorant.
 
Originally posted by -<Stiletto>-

Methinks he's talking about Cold Fusion, which is the safe kind supposedly, not the stuff we've been able to accomplish so far with super-heating lasers and all kinds of other interesting stuff.
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nope the current forms of fusion both MCF and ICF are safe, if containment is lost the superheated plasma quickly cools down before it can cause any real damage
 
Yeah, but I don' want to see you try to put a regular fusion reactor into a tiny fighter. The extreme temperatures involved in "normal" fusion would make it quite impossible. That's why we need cold fusion.

BTW, can someone remind me at what temperature (kelvin or celsius, I don't understand shit about fahrenheit) cold fusion theoretically takes place?
 
Originally posted by AD
Sound doesn't travel in space
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Not in our universe, it doesn't. However, I remember hearing or reading something somewhere about how there was sound in space in the Star Wars universe. For all we know, the Wing Commander universe could be similar in that respect.
 
I don't think I could go for that one.

However, A pilot in his fighter would hear the sound of his own guns firing, the sound of his ship being hit by enemy (and friendly) fire, as well as the sound of being bufeted when he fly's too close to an exploding enemy and especialy capship explosions... and momentarily I suppose he could theoreticaly be in a gas cloud as it escapes a dying vessel and could hear for a second because off it... plus anything coming in over the coms would obviously be heard (duhh).

But no they wouldn't hear everything as in the movie. But what is shown in the movie is really just a representation of these events.
 
Unless there's sound in space in the Wing Commander universe...

I'm just suggesting this idea because it fits. As you've shown, we hear sounds all the time even though we're in the middle of space. By saying that there's sound in space, we eliminate any conflicts. After all, how else are we supposed to explain it?
 
Ok?????
But I will asume that WC is our universe in the distant future...

I can accept the Star Wars is a different univers as there really isn't anything to connect the two (our universe and the star wars one), save for the statement "a long time ago in a galaxy far far away..."

If WC is our universe then the space battle scenes are just representativeof the real thing giving you an overall picture, kinda like god mode. I mean, even if you were sitting in on all the conversations shown, in real life you wouldn't see the edits and cuts as the camera focuses on different people.
 
Originally posted by Talyn 83
Yeah, but I don' want to see you try to put a regular fusion reactor into a tiny fighter. The extreme temperatures involved in "normal" fusion would make it quite impossible. That's why we need cold fusion.

BTW, can someone remind me at what temperature (kelvin or celsius, I don't understand shit about fahrenheit) cold fusion theoretically takes place?
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cold fusion is AFAIK a myth what is being tryed is mearly to get a fusion plant where more power comes from the fusion then is being put in, this would be possible if the reaction (for want of a better word) could be maintained and made to be continuous since currently they can only get fusion to go on for a few seconds at the most.

and why would the heat have anything to do with the size of the fighter? an effective insulatior could be found, or since it is the heat that is generated which is where the power comes from, it would be used to generate power.
 
according to "scientific" study:p space is a vaccum and sound does not travel in a vaccum. course the star wars universe and the WC universe are fictional and the creaters of these universes can do anything they please.
 
heres another thought. radio waves are able to travel through space. otherwise how would we be able to communicate with the space shuttles or space stations. same thing with satellites. they reflect radio waves that are transmitted form earth.
 
Originally posted by I'm thinkin...
heres another thought. radio waves are able to travel through space. otherwise how would we be able to communicate with the space shuttles or space stations. same thing with satellites. they reflect radio waves that are transmitted form earth.
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This is completely different. Sound is pressurewaves reproducing in a medium (like air or water). Radio is electromagnetic waves and doesn't require a medium.
Historical note: For a long time scientists believed that light and other EM-waves like radio also require a medium. Experiments however proved that it wasn't air, as pumping a tube with a light in it vacuum didn't prevent us from seeing the light. After this is was thought that some other sort of omnipresent medium must exist. This theoretical medium was called ether. Although we now know it doesn't exist and EM doesn't use a medium, the word is still in use.

Oh, and edit for this sort of thing in the future.
 
But if ether does exist it is not a medium across which sound travels...


cold fusion is AFAIK a myth what is being tryed is mearly to get a fusion plant where more power comes from the fusion then is being put in, this would be possible if the reaction (for want of a better word) could be maintained and made to be continuous since currently they can only get fusion to go on for a few seconds at the most.
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Seems to me that's what I read.
As for an enclosed reactor... it would sure beat detonating H-bombs behind yourself and trying to ride the wake!
 
Well, obviously it's a myth. But my physics teacher from 2 years back once told me there was an objective-temperature of 9500° Kelvin or something like that. (then again, the guy was a complete goofball, so...):D

If ya want to produce fusion, you need a tokamak. That's a giant (giant, as in the size of a small factory) round reactor thingy. Then ya have to heat the plasma inside the tokamak to a couple of tens o' millions o' degrees to turn the deuterium or tritium into plasma. Then you need to avoid the plasma touching the tokamak. In order to do that, you need a big EM-field. Now, to generate that EM-field, you need super-conductors which only operate at approximately 0° Kelvin. Now, your gonna need damn good (read: impossibly good) insulation-material to keep those temperatures isolated in a tiny fighter (not to mention the fact that ya need a Tokamak, which is, as I've already stated HUGE).
They are however trying to develop another system called "inertial enclosure" which would eliminate many of these problems, but not all. (and saying that, I haven't even said that this is even more experimental
then regular fusion)

As for the sound: maybe some kind of inverted sonoluminescence, but why anyone would want that and create a system on a fighter that would enable that, beats the hell out of me...:D
 
currently Tokomak (MCF fusion plants, there are other kinds ICF, and also a way where frozen deuterium pellets are struck with lasers and forced to fuse from extreme heat, whereas in MCF fusion plants it is pressure from the magnetic fields that leads to fusion, though there is extreme heat involved as well) are reletivly large but theoretically they could get smaller as technology gets better
 
I might be on crack but. . .

I seem to remember a passage from one of the novels or perhaps a theory on the internet where the sound was explained. The theory stated (based on the assumption the WC universe was the same as ours and there is no sound in space) that there was what you might call the equivalent of SoundBlasters EAX on each fighter. It was a sound system designed to contribute to the pilot's awareness of the situation by using a computer to interpret sensor readings and using those intepretations to create an audio environment within the cockpit matching what took place in space.

I really wish I could remember where this came from now because looking at the Pelius missions from WC4, this really can't be the case because the sound was there despite the sensors being down. Anyone else read this anywhere?
 
That's pretty much the general explanation for why you hear sound in any sort of a space battle anywhere. And it makes a lot of sense, since similar systems exist on modern-day aircraft.

The naysayers will say nay, though, and rant that because you can hear things in Wing Commander the game must not actually exist. After a point you just have to stop listening to those guys.
 
Yeah, or maybe it's just that nobody would buy a space combat game without sound in it. I don't think we need to explain movies and games of this nature which have sound. It's entertainment, and it's for our benefit. It doesn't necessarily mean that if we were actually *in* the cockpit of a WC fighter, we'd hear much of anything at all.
 
Originally posted by AD
I don't think I could go for that one.

However, A pilot in his fighter would hear the sound of his own guns firing, the sound of his ship being hit by enemy (and friendly) fire

I suppose he could theoreticaly be in a gas cloud as it escapes a dying vessel and could hear for a second because off it...
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To some degree, sound would be able to be heard in the cockpit. This is because of the very close relationship that exists between sound & vibration. You'd "hear" yer engines revving up, "hear" a blast go outta yer lasers, etc., becuz these things would generate vibrations, which in turn would be processed at a low level in yer melon and interpreted as some type of sound (This is rather similar to the very close relationship that exists between smell & taste).


Also, the "gas cloud" in a fighter exploding would likely generate a momentarily visible "fireball" (for lack of a better term), cuz the pressurized gases needed to breathe in the cockpit would ignite as they "exploded" after the canopy had been breached (then dissipate very quickly into the vacuum of space).

Granted this is all theoretical, but it's a reasonable stretch for sci-fi fans to make (as well as movie and space-sim designers!).
 
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