Secret Ops Fighters
- Thread starter Jason_Ryock
- Start date
SabreAce
Rear Admiral
Epees were sent out to destroy a Kilrathi listening post in the Tesla system. Blair was originally going to fly the mission, but Angel reassigned him to the morning patrol mission with Stingray, due to other pilots grumbling about the relationship blossoming between Angel and Blair.Viper61 said:
So we never actually saw the Epee carrying a torp in WC2.
Quarto
Unknown Enemy
Very much so. The UE Epee is much upgraded (at a heavy price; UE Epees are much more costly to maintain, and their frames wear out much faster - in line with what we know of Pliers' upgrades of Blair's Thunderbolt in the WC4 novel).Iceblade said:
Personally, I don't see why the WC2 Epee's performance would suffer with a torpedo. We know what happens to the Sabre's performance when it carries six torpedoes - absolutely nothing. Besides, if the Epee design includes a torpedo loadout, it's logical to assume that this design is good enough to handle such a loadout without performance loss - if the price of the Epee's torpedo was the speed and manoeuvrability of a medium or heavy fighter, they just wouldn't bother. On the other hand, if you put a torpedo on a fighter not designed to carry one in any loadout, then performance loss is to be expected, since there's obviously a reason for its inability to carry the torpedo in the first place (that's why we made UE's Scimitar perform worse when carrying torpedoes).
Quarto said:
I'll just make a gamble and say that a Sabre shouldn't be able to mount 6 torpedoes. I know it does in the game, but considering that it can carry more than the Broadsword, Longbow, the Crossbow, and the Thunderbolt, maybe we should revaluate the proper torpedo capability of the Sabre...say maybe only 2..?
Bandit LOAF
Long Live the Confederation!
Six torpedoes *should* cripple the Sabre's maneuverability -- there's a couple of mentions of this happening in the novels... it's just that it's not the sort of thing they'd care about when making a game fun (G)
Bandit LOAF
Long Live the Confederation!
Objects appear 'weightless' in space. That's not the same thing as mass being irrelevant, especially in terms of things like propulsion.
Jason_Ryock
Vice Admiral
So....there's not really any interest in making the fighters smaller, just lighter....Yes?
Bandit LOAF
Long Live the Confederation!
In terms of propulsion, you want to make a ship less massive... but that's not the only factor that would go into fighter design: you also want the smallest possible radar cross section, for instance.
Jason_Ryock
Vice Admiral
Why would that be LOAF? Oh say, to maybe counter those SWAC's craft we see flitting about?
Rader signals have to uniqe factors. First, the angle the strike can help control how much radar energy is reflected (IE: The closer to 90 degree the larger the cross seciont) and the second is how much the radar beam is absorbed by the fighter (to counter this second effect, wings are usually doubl layed |0| with the 0 being some sort of radar absorbing material).
Take a look at say the F-117a Stealth Bomber. The whole plane is a series of angled metal sheets to deflect the radar signal away from the ship.
In WC however (and this is just a speculation) it would seem that there would be more then one detection method.
For example, you could use a traditional radar such as we use on Naval Vessels, but some sort of heat sensor would be quite useful in space because of the inherant cold background. Based on the output of the heat signiture, you could even guess the generic size and possibly the engine number and speed too.
What that suggests is that things like Radar Cross Section really don't matter very much in space.
You could also (as we see in End Run) do a communications scan and determine somethings location based on that.
Also, before the invention of the SWACs there was no mobile radar, which means that when approaching a ship or a planet you don't have the same need for a reduced Radar Cross Section. You don't have to worry about detection until your relativly close to the ship. The Nephilim or Kilrathi for example don't have miles and miles of Radar stations scattered through space, that would be costly and ineffective (especially if one broke down) given the area of space they would need to be covered.
So now that the SWACs is in production, the need for Radar Cross Section reduction becomes more apparent. You could place one of these far away from a carried (in terms of radar range) but close (in terms of communication range) allowing an incoming strike to be picked up on Radar sooner (later if they had the reduced Radar Cross Section).
This is where that Shrike missile comes in handy. =P
(And yes, I am somehow going to drag every thread back to my series of unanswered questions about SWACs craft)
Rader signals have to uniqe factors. First, the angle the strike can help control how much radar energy is reflected (IE: The closer to 90 degree the larger the cross seciont) and the second is how much the radar beam is absorbed by the fighter (to counter this second effect, wings are usually doubl layed |0| with the 0 being some sort of radar absorbing material).
Take a look at say the F-117a Stealth Bomber. The whole plane is a series of angled metal sheets to deflect the radar signal away from the ship.
In WC however (and this is just a speculation) it would seem that there would be more then one detection method.
For example, you could use a traditional radar such as we use on Naval Vessels, but some sort of heat sensor would be quite useful in space because of the inherant cold background. Based on the output of the heat signiture, you could even guess the generic size and possibly the engine number and speed too.
What that suggests is that things like Radar Cross Section really don't matter very much in space.
You could also (as we see in End Run) do a communications scan and determine somethings location based on that.
Also, before the invention of the SWACs there was no mobile radar, which means that when approaching a ship or a planet you don't have the same need for a reduced Radar Cross Section. You don't have to worry about detection until your relativly close to the ship. The Nephilim or Kilrathi for example don't have miles and miles of Radar stations scattered through space, that would be costly and ineffective (especially if one broke down) given the area of space they would need to be covered.
So now that the SWACs is in production, the need for Radar Cross Section reduction becomes more apparent. You could place one of these far away from a carried (in terms of radar range) but close (in terms of communication range) allowing an incoming strike to be picked up on Radar sooner (later if they had the reduced Radar Cross Section).
This is where that Shrike missile comes in handy. =P
(And yes, I am somehow going to drag every thread back to my series of unanswered questions about SWACs craft)
Quarto
Unknown Enemy
No, just to avoid getting detected by the radar mounted on every WC fighter.Jason_Ryock said:
On the contrary, a heat sensor would be *less* useful in space. Space having a temperature of absolute zero, would mean that heat does get very far before it dissipates (plus, there's the whole question of how well heat gets transmitted in near-vacuum... I don't remember much from physics, but I'd guess not very well). So, heat-seeking equipment would have a pretty short range.
But then, a fighter not communicating would need to be detected by other means
.Exactly what do you mean by that? We have no idea when the SWACS was first developed, so there's no way you can assume that SWACS came before radars were developed for ordinary space fighters. And, if the history of SWACS is anything like the history of AWACS, then you can be pretty sure that radars on ordinary fighters came first.
TC
SubCrid
Quarto said:
There isn't convection or any heat transfer of that sort, but bodies all still radiate heat in a vacuum. A heat sensor would *probably* work depending on the amout of heat energy emitted, the range and how much background radiation there is... You could probably work out some ballpark figures using the Stefan-Bolzmann law and such, but I don't really care enough to do it.
Either way, this has the same limitation as radar, in that it travels at, approximately, the speed of light. Wing Commander sensors are probably neither heat based, nor RADAR, in the actual meaning of the acronym. Sensors have been seen to travel faster than the speed of light and are, as a result, probably something entirely different and are refered to as RADAR for historic reasons, just as we've seen people refer to sensor pulses as 'pings'
overmortal
Bearded Person
Quarto said:
Uhh . . . Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think space is absolute zero. Danged cold, sure, but I absolute zero is terribly hard to achieve, considering that any heat at ALL is above absolute zero. Just thought I'd point that out. Carry on.
Nick Blitz
Heat seeking missiles IIRC, have very little to do with heat or absolute zero. No heat can transfer in space due to very few particles there. What heat seeking missiles do (including modern ones) is target high volume infared sources. Our atmosphere blocks out alot of radiation, but space is extremely hot with all kinds of background radiation. If you are trying to get a transmission from a sateillite in orbit, one of the factors you have to consider is the relative temp of the space your looking at, basically a gauge as to how much cosmic background radiation there is. I'm not sure what the infared spectrum looks like in space thogh.overmortal said:
C-ya