Scoops???

J

Jason_Ryock

Vice Admiral
Okay, so the Scoops:

We know for a fact that capital ships have scoops. But do fighters have scoops? Until this point I had assumed that they did as well, which admittedly confused me, if fighters have scoops, why do they run out of afterburning fuel?

Recently I picked up my novel of WC4 again. I was reading the part where Blair is examining the Black Lance fighter. He mentions that the fighter has a "smaller anti-matter drive" and that Confed had been trying to produce a smaller version of the "capship" engine for use in the fighters. He then goes on to mention the scoops.

From the way this was written it suggests (at least to me) that the anti-matter drives prior to the Black Fighters in WC4 were to large to be put in fighters and the fighters did not have scoops (there would have been no point to them without the anti-matter drive).

I distinctly remember someone on another thread saying that all the fighters had scoops, even the ones in WC3...so someone answer...you guys have all the answers:

Do all WC fighters have scoops? If not all, then which do and which don't?
 
Afterburner fuel is just that-fuel. Something more like protroluem. And all fighters have scoops and have to have or they would have to constantly be refueled. Do you have anymore questions about anything do you don't know or are uncertain of?
 
Think of scoop-flight as what the fighters do when they autopilot or autoslide (scoops closed). The fighters slow down to combat speeds by opening their scoops when they come out of autopilot. The Excalibur was also a testbed for the fighter m/a-m drive.
 
Blair says in the Novelization (by the way that's where I found this info) that the Excalibour was the first attempt at miniturizing the capship drives, and the scoops fed the m/a-m drives...so how does a fighter use scoops without a m/a-m drive?

Just curious. =P

I like to know how things work.
 
Blair says in the Novelization (by the way that's where I found this info) that the Excalibour was the first attempt at miniturizing the capship drives, and the scoops fed the m/a-m drives...so how does a fighter use scoops without a m/a-m drive?

Just curious. =P

I like to know how things work.
 
The bigger the magnetic scoops are, the more fuel ships can take in. A small fighter doesn't take in much fuel, but it doesn't really need to because of its small mass. When it hits afterburners, though, the scoops are partially closed, and more fuel is expended than is taken in. When that afterburner fuel surplus runs out, no more afterburner.

If a ship closes scoops completely, it can move much faster (anywhere from 3000KPS to 10000KPS to .7c), but it expends every last bit of fuel, taking it away from the maneuvering thrusters. and when the fuel runs out - no more fuel, period. The ship has to sit idle while the scoops scoop up more h-fuel - and since a ship needs to be moving fairly quickly to scoop up[ enough h-fuel, the ship in question will be waiting for a long while.

Capships are much more massive than fighters, but have much larger scoops and can gather fuel faster - in fact, they run at a surplus, so with scoops closed it can actually move faster than fighters. The problem is the ship is so massive, more energy is needed for maneuvering, so the capships move slower when they have to maneuver.
 
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