Ship Speeds

Gliderboy said:
No, you can hear nothing in space, nothing. There is nothing for it to go through. Especially in a pressurized cockpit, enough said, just drop it!!!

Jeezus. No one said that it it's possible for sound to go through vacuum. Just that it's posssible that kinetic energy created by a certain event can make an object vibrate and thus create an sound in it. Is that so hard to understand?
 
BenoitBrunet2 said:
And the reason we hear train-tracks make noise is because the tracks themselves vibrate, producing the noise, and the air in our atmosphere carries the vibration right into our widdle ears.

That's not quite what was meant I don't think...

I recall an experiment done on Bill Nye the Science Guy where they put a microphone on a train track and a guy several hundred feet away would hammer on it, and you the viewer could hear two reports... the first one from the sound travelling through the train track and a fraction of a second later the second report travelling through the air.

It was to explain how sound travels faster in more highly compressed matter (like steel train tracks) than more lowly compressed matter (like air)
 
Iceman16 said:
iirc theres a dampening field thing inside the cockpit so the pilot doesnt feel the gs, or at least signifigantly reduces the amount of gs

I think in WC2 it's called "accel absorbers" the strange thing is... I've had them damaged (destroyed) before in a ferret. When I realized it, and that I had since used my afterburners, I wondered if I had whiplash. Or if my head was still attacked for that matter. Does anyone know what the purpose is in-game and what it does when they're destroyed? I would have expected it to slow you down (so you don't kill yourself) or something like that.
 
Lynx said:
Jeezus. No one said that it it's possible for sound to go through vacuum. Just that it's posssible that kinetic energy created by a certain event can make an object vibrate and thus create an sound in it. Is that so hard to understand?
No, it's not!

Sound, heat (except for IR) and kinetic energy are all propagated by molecules "striking" adjacent molecules, passing their energy on. Kinetic energy doesn't propagate through a vacuum either!
 
Vibration, kinetic energy, and shockwaves are not forces in and of themselves. Kinetic energy itself, when you get down to it, is an abstraction used to explain why when the densely-packed molecules of someone's fist hit the densely-packed molecules of your face, the transference of this "energy" causes damage/pain/etc. Likewise, vibrations and shockwaves are not pure, invisible forces themselves; in order for a vibration to be felt, something (a medium) must exist for the vibration to pass through--whether it is the air, water, a railroad track, whatever. Space is effectively empty, and there isn't enough "free hydrogen" (or whatever the fuel-scoops operate on) to bounce around and conduct sound.
 
In an exploding space ship, everything that isn't blown to pieces is turned into light and heat. In an atmosphere there might be a compression shockwave if it was a large explosion, but that is due to the force of the blast pushing away a sphere of air around it and that air goes and knocks into things.

In a vacuum you will find that the ship explodes, some of it incinerates, the explosion stops rather quickly once all the oxygen in the ship is burned up, and the debris propgates outwards in a spherical fashion, with different velocities depending on mass and proximity to the center of the explosion. Without a material medium, there will be nothing but radiation (light and infrared) that passes between the exploding ship and you. Unless you get struck by debris or something but that won't sound like an explosion.
 
Dart said:
I think in WC2 it's called "accel absorbers" the strange thing is... I've had them damaged (destroyed) before in a ferret. When I realized it, and that I had since used my afterburners, I wondered if I had whiplash. Or if my head was still attacked for that matter. Does anyone know what the purpose is in-game and what it does when they're destroyed? I would have expected it to slow you down (so you don't kill yourself) or something like that.

I think damage to the acceleration absorbers makes the ship act more like as it should according to Newtonian physics.
 
The only damage in WC2 that really effected anything, as far as I could tell, were the target track (making torpedo runs officially impossible) and losing weapons/shields.
 
Woohoo, at last some time again to post!

Damage to the Ion Drive (decreases speed) and the Ejection system sure do affect the game as well. Or when your radar screen get's blasted (though that's not an internal system).
I always thought that the "Acceleration absorbers destroyed" was some kind of warning to the player - next time a more vital system might get destroyed.

Dart said:
I think in WC2 it's called "accel absorbers" the strange thing is... I've had them damaged (destroyed) before in a ferret. (...)

HOw did you know - IIRC the Ferret doesn't have a damage VDU. ;)
 
SoulSkorpion said:
No, it's not!

Sound, heat (except for IR) and kinetic energy are all propagated by molecules "striking" adjacent molecules, passing their energy on. Kinetic energy doesn't propagate through a vacuum either!

Maybe I was too vague. Stuff exploding in space consists of matter actually. Vacuum doesn't explode you know. Now if the object that explodes contains gas (and during an explosion/stuff being exposed to great heat certain meterials turn into gaseous form which explosively rushes outward due to the pressure difference between the two media, and in the sci-fi case some fusion reactor or plasma thingy loosing containment resulting in the same, thus creating a shockwave, though rather small due to the relatively low mass of these objects/stuff. If this one hits whatever you are situated in at the moment this object will vabrate and you'd either hear or feel the vibration of strong enough.
 
I know what you mean, but that's not a shockwave.

A shockwave defined by merriam-webster is
a compressional wave of high amplitude caused by a shock (as from an earthquake or explosion) to the medium through which the wave travels

A shockwave cannot travel without a relatively undisturbed medium through which to travel.

But I digress.

Matter rushing outward from an explosion is just that... you don't get killed by vibrations like in a shockwave... you instead get killed by being pummelled with debris like in a hurricane or tornado. Or superhot gasses.
 
MamiyaOtaru said:
If the compuer creates sounds wen guns fire, my only question is where did the sound for the steltek gun come from? Did your computer make it up on the spot the first time it saw the drone fire? Or did it base it off of what it heard (through the hull) when you fired your own 'tek gun?

Isn't the gun sound in-game the same sound file as one of the other guns? Or is my head screwed on backwards? If that's the case, I'd lean towards your first answer, and if not, towards the second.

And just to muddy the original issue a little further here... What about Privateer? Moving at so-called "combat speeds" in Privateer can get you from planet to planet within a few minutes, off autopilot. (Although I'm not sure if there ever were two planets - ag. or pleasure - in the same system. Two bases, yes of course, but that's not the same thing.)

Although, hidden in here is a good explanation for why your shields don't regenerate on autopilot - they literally don't have time to, because you've closed the scoop fields and bugged across the system at the speed of Fast.

How many of you have played Independence War or its sequels? It had some good methods for dealing with "space sim" physics, IIRC. Like, your reaction drive could accelerate you up to Really Fast, but it was really only good for up to about 1000 Speed Units (you know, standard space sim combat speeds), after which point you were going too fast to be of any use in a fight. To get up to Really Fast in a reasonable amount of time, there was a second drive that ate all your weapon power. You could actually see reaction thrusters firing, too, and even turn off "assisted turning" to make it like near-newtonian physics.
 
Gliderboy said:
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.

you can use planets, stars, quasars, pulsars, asteroids, anything as a reference point. you use a frame of reference to figure out your speed relative to a chosen point. logically all terran computers use one point of reference (eg Earth or the Sun) to figure out the ships speed so that the numbers match other ships speeds.
 
Would you really feel the Gs in a weak gravity inviroment, and would the gs pull harder on you if you got closer to a larger object (planet, ship, etc). If I was building a space fighter I wouldn't want artifical gravity in my ship, as long as I'm strapped to the seat I'm not going anywhere and my hands are on the stick before I leave the gravity on the hanger bay. Ofcourse I used to think that gravity was nothing more than centerfigual force anyway (till I tested the bick on a rope next to wall thing).
 
you would certainly feel the pull in the direction of the gravity well

And Gs really aren't an indication of gravity (as in, being pulled towards the center of a gravity well) as much as they are an indication in the change of velocity. If you're in deep space and whip your fighter around in less than a second, you've created your own artificial gravity within the confines of your ship that will likely smear you against one of the walls of your cabin.

Instead of you falling into the ground, it's more like the ground is rushing up at you. Either way the results are still the same.
 
That's not quite the case, I'm afraid - what you "feel" and what you'd experience are two separate things, dependent on your craft's velocity and acceleration at the time. Because your immediate physical reference frame is the ship, you have to take into account what it's doing, and what you're doing.

If your ship was in free-fall (ie not thrusting at all), you'd feel, well, like you were falling, even though you're experiencing gravitational pull. If your ship was thrusting to perfectly counteract that gravitational pull, then you'd feel the gravitational acceleration on your own body as the ship acted against it. (This is the same feeling you experience everywhere on land, and on airplanes that are not ascending or descending. We are constantly resisting one gravity - 1g - acceleration, due to the simple fact that our feet can't pass through the floor.)

And in a combat situation, with widely varying acceleration vectors, your experience would be roughly the same as your ship's, but what you feel would be a different matter. The immediate analogy is, of course, air combat - load up a modern fighter game and watch the G-meter change. 1g is normal - you feel like you would on the ground. 0g is freefall, >1g makes you heavier, <1g tries to smear you on the canopy. Granted, it's all relative to the bottom of your aircraft, since that's the plane in which jet fighters maneuver best - in efficient space combat, the thrust vectors come from every-damn-where. And there's still the gravity well.

A proper artificial gravity would have to: 1. Provide a "down" in a convenient direction, like towards your bum when you're in your chair. 2. Negate acceleration vectors felt by the pilot due to ship motions. What most people take into consideration with inertial dampers. 3. Negate acceleration vectors due to local gravity wells. Acceleration due to gravity is still significant at orbital altitudes (indeed, it's why orbits happen), and for atmospheric flight it might as well be equal to ground level.
 
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