?s about fuel, accelerations, stopping, and being awake when making many quick vector changes.

[nicewitch]

1st, why is it that when a WC aerofighter has no fuel it can make facing changes and/or move from a complete stop to moving again? All that makes no sense. In real life, if a spacecraft has no fuel, then it has no thrust to make those movements.

2nd, why is it that a WC spacecraft has a maximum speed whenever it spends fuel instead of said spacecraft's speed increased beyond maximum each time it spends its fuel when desired? That makes no sense because it violates Newton's laws of motion.

3rd, Why is it that a WC spacecraft can stop at any point any time? That's violating Newton's laws of motion. To stop at a point in space, a spacecraft has to rotate its facing 180 degrees and then use its fuel to thrust itself to move itself in an accelerating manner equal and opposite its previous vector and acceleration.

4th, how come I can have the pilot of a WC aerofighter make so many facing changes so quickly without said pilot going unconscious. There should be some kind of automatic facing change negation program installed in the aerofighter's program to negate so many facing changes so quickly.

 

[Ijuin]

The quick-turning-without-blackout is because the fighters have inertial dampers installed which reduce the sensation of G-forces to a tolerable amount. In fact, in WC1, these are one of the systems that can be damaged in combat. It's not Newtonian, but neither is artificial gravity pointing 90 degrees away from the engine thrust on a spacecraft, and all capital ships in Wing Commander have that as well. Given the ability to create artificial gravity, you can have graviton generators "pull" the pilot in the direction that your spacecraft is accelerating, so that if they are working fully, he is in free-fall no matter how much you accelerate.

The answers to your other three questions all revolve around the fact that in Wing Commander, all spacecraft function like Bussard Ramjets, using huge magnetic field "scoops" to grab up interplanetary hydrogen to use as fusion fuel. The scoops gather enough fuel to keep you going as long as you don't use the fuel-hungry afterburners, and presumably the fighter's engine control computer prohibits the pilot from using the very last dregs of his fuel so that there will remain enough to get back up to fuel-collecting speed again.

The maximum speed thing and the ability to come to a dead stop without reverse thrust are also related to these magnetic scoops, because they create a lot of drag force while operating. Turn off the engine thrust and you slow to a stop due to the drag, just like in an atmosphere. The scoops can be closed for faster flight (like while autopiloting), but then they can not collect fuel. Also, the drag of the scoops can be used to steer the spacecraft by adjusting the scoops to be a little larger (producing more drag) on the side that you want to turn toward, like ailerons.

 

[Aginor]

what Ijuin said, plus (from an out of universe perspective) :
- Elite showed that relativistic speeds suck for combat in a space game. That's why Wing Commander didn't do it.
- Wing Commander is WWII air combat in space. Space ships flying like WWII airplanes is much more fun.
- Everyone else does it the same way (Star Wars is even less realistic concerning physics)
- At least they do some cool technobabbel (see Ijuins post) to give it some sense, most SciFi don't do this.

EDIT: The books show that apart from gameplay reasons things work pretty nicely realistic in the WC-universe.