WC2 Armaments

[Spertallica]

On an aside- the fact that space isn't particle free is why I've always thought that "block shaped" spacecraft are a somewhat silly idea- any thoughts? To loop WC into this- I always wondered why Confed or Kilrah would ever build a capital ship or fighter that wasn't at least somewhat aerodynamic, because space travel through nebulas (clouds of gas in space) seems to be a somewhat regular occurence and a valid tactical manuever in the WC universe.

 

[Justice]

What ever happened to the law of inertia? This whole alleged lack of a shockwave by a nuclear blast in space doesn't square off against it. To my knowledge (which is admittedly somewhat limited, as I have never studied nuclear physics), nuclear reactions don't require a medium to travel (such as air), because the atoms split to create the nuclear reaction themselves create the shockwave...

The only reason shockwaves die out in space is because space (especially in solar systems) isn't truly empty- there are still particles there (even if oftentimes these particles are microscopic) to stop the shockwave's inertia.

In theory, if space was truly empty, the sun would indeed send out shockwaves to infinity- and, depending on your definition of what a "shockwave" is, it nearly does- what do you think star light or solar radiation is?

Its not that a shockwave goes away, or even loses much energy - the total energy generally remains the same. However, it is spread out over an area of 4*pi*r^2 (surface area of a sphere), so at a 1 km distance a 1 m^2 area experiences only 1/12566370 of the total energy (that's around 0.000008%) of the blast. Make that 10 km, and you've got 0.00000008%. Eventually, it gets too small to be detectable as anything more than background noise over all the other radiation sources in the universe. The light we recieve from other stars is like this; a very, very tiny percentage of the stars' total output.

 

[Justice]

On an aside- the fact that space isn't particle free is why I've always thought that "block shaped" spacecraft are a somewhat silly idea- any thoughts? To loop WC into this- I always wondered why Confed or Kilrah would ever build a capital ship or fighter that wasn't at least somewhat aerodynamic, because space travel through nebulas (clouds of gas in space) seems to be a somewhat regular occurence and a valid tactical manuever in the WC universe.

Look at the craft from WC2; I can't think of any block-shaped fighters. Most of em are pretty rounded. Some of the capships are too. And nebulas really aren't very dense AT ALL. Any kind of performance gains/profile reduction/cost savings for making something blocky vs rounded would almost certainly outweigh the benefit of reducing mostly insignificant drag forces while traveling through a nebula, since very long distance travel is done through jump gates.