Hard Light Productions Forums
Hosted Projects - Standalone => Fate of the Galaxy => Topic started by: Topgun on July 09, 2007, 03:49:15 pm
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I've got it covered. :nod:
EDIT: I mean the sound
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seismic charge is prequel special effects nonsense.
what do you have?
perhaps it could be made into something practical.
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As much as it is in the prequel, I'm not entirely sure it'd be such a bad idea to use it later on in the timeline, by other rogue types and bounty hunters. It would be an interesting weapon, that's for sure.
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I'm going to agree with whoever said it was ridiculous. Think about it: why would you mount a weapon with primarily defensive purposes on a bounty hunter's ship? Setting traps and ambushes? Pah! *blows smoke to avoid criticism*
p.s. If you could think of something convicing to explain how they work, and a gameplay mechanic to make them work, they might be pretty cool.
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I'd like to add; how would a seismic charge travel through a vaccum?
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how can you hear things in a vacuum? why doesn't your ship overheat in a vacuum?
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I'm sure a Star Trek writer could come up with an explanation for that. Something like "Phased quantum wavefront fluctuations from the energy release interface constructively with the tertiary hyperflux array of the subspace drive, causing synchronous vibrations in the hull that are percieved as sound by the human ear". Oh, and magical radiators.
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If you could think of something convicing to explain how they work [...] they might be pretty cool.
Very nicely done Shade.
As to the sound, I'm thinking "simutaneous simulation of sound based on data collected in realtime and transmitted through the in cockpit vox sytem" or "SSSBDCRTTCVS"
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Well there isn't any indication that the actual inshow/film characters hear sound, and space is 'Freezing! Heat can be radiated, there's no need for a medium. The sun's heat does a pretty good job of getting to us.
I really don't want to be having this argument but the word seismic by todays standards needs a medium (yes I used the word vaccum originally).
But regardless of that, I don't care, it was a throwaway comment, and I have no problem throwing away the laws of physics (to some degree) when it's blatant the aim is just entertainment.
Of course if said product doesn't entertain.... well then.
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Want some technobabble? :drevil:
Oscillating gravitic distortions cause the fabric of space-time to vibrate, which effectively acts as a medium of mechanical wave motion from the source to everything else in area, causing the objects to oscillate and thus you would actually hear, or rather feel sound from a really fricking huge explosion or singularity weapon in space. Essentially anything that causes a huge mass to shift or vibrate very fast would cause a spreading distortion to space-time continuum, so in a strictest sense of sci-fi, sound in space movies is not *impossible*, just means that what goes on is damn much more poverful than the visuals would let assume.
Think being in a vacuum room with a big subwoofer - you wouldn't hear the sound with ears, but you could possibly feel the floor vibrating. It's just a matter of how strong the explosions/vibrations are.
Obviously, that is presuming your ship is not ripped apart by the strong oscillations of space-time fabric (essentially tide forces) being too strong, or that your ship doesn't immediately ionize due to intense radiation.
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The explanation I've always heard about sounds in space is simply that the ship produces them on its own based on data it collects as an aid for pilots to give them more spacial awareness.
The real reason of course is because it'd be pretty boring if there was no sound for half a movie.
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Due to the nature of subspace/hyperspace/warp drives, they are always "on" and connected to the NTH dimension, to allow for faster FTL jumps, as if they were switched off, they would take a long time to latch onto a stable mininode bridge to the NTH dimension... all vibrations etc are transmitted from the ship to this dimension as a byproduct, and all other ships connected to this dimension therefore pick up these vibrations in their hull...
Absolute gobbledygook, but whatever....
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Simple answer: radio interference
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Want some technobabble? :drevil:
Oscillating gravitic distortions cause the fabric of space-time to vibrate, which effectively acts as a medium of mechanical wave motion from the source to everything else in area, causing the objects to oscillate and thus you would actually hear, or rather feel sound from a really fricking huge explosion or singularity weapon in space. Essentially anything that causes a huge mass to shift or vibrate very fast would cause a spreading distortion to space-time continuum, so in a strictest sense of sci-fi, sound in space movies is not *impossible*, just means that what goes on is damn much more poverful than the visuals would let assume.
Think being in a vacuum room with a big subwoofer - you wouldn't hear the sound with ears, but you could possibly feel the floor vibrating. It's just a matter of how strong the explosions/vibrations are.
Obviously, that is presuming your ship is not ripped apart by the strong oscillations of space-time fabric (essentially tide forces) being too strong, or that your ship doesn't immediately ionize due to intense radiation.
What did he say? :P
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I once heard about a test from the US Airforce that tried to see if its possible to add some kind of "lasergun" to current fightercrafts.
They didn't get more power then the basic laserpointer but it was just a could we do it thing.
Anyway they found a very unaspected problem....no sound. Lasers make no sound compared to maschine guns or missiles. Pilots allways got confused if they are still firing or not. That was also to the fact that its hard to see a laser normaly. You must have the luck to have some smoke or something in the air.
So what did they do? They added a lasersound FX and a visual line to the HUD so that the pilots had something he is used to have ^_^
I wouldn't wonder if they do it the same way when we would fight in space. Humans are just used to hear their surounding. I mean just turn off the sound and play....you will get crazy after a short time.
PS: That dosn't mean that "seismic" would make any sense because of that but could explain that you hear anything at all in space beside the sound that you own ship makes.
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What did he say?
Okay, here goes.
The shape (volume, if you will) of space-time can change, usually due to mass. This causes phenomena like gravitation and (likely) inertia.
Now, not only space is affected by mass, but mass is naturally affected by the "form" of space - that's what gravity is all about, actually. The interaction of masses via the form of space-time continuum.
Okay, we've established that shape of space and time can change. Furthermore, the changes in it propagate through vacuum much like ripples in the surface of the water, and most likely at the speed of light.
Now comes the important part - theoretically, these propagations can be detected since they affect the shape of space-time, and thus affect gravitational fields slightly. Gravitation moves stuff around, thus gravitational waves move stuff around, so to say. Or more accurately, distortions of space cause distortions, tension and other stuff in objects that reside in the changing space.
Harmonic changes in space-time would make the objects in space oscillate.
Usually, gravitational waves caused by celestial bodies rotating each other are so long and weak by the time they reach us that it's really hard to detect the small changes, but it's obviously possible. If you want an example, here goes - tidal waves. The Moon orbiting Earth changes the time of tides in 27.5-day cycles. It is a real example of gravitational waves in effect.
More drastic changes in space-time could be easily detected. For example, should a large mass transmutate to radiation in very short time, or be dispersed to wide area, the change would propagate through space-time and affect everything on it's way. So theoretically speaking, let's put a 500 kg (250:250, obviously) matter - anti-matter bomb in space and you at a distance of, say, 100 km from it. The bomb goes off, 500 kg suddenly transmutes into gamma radiation and suddenly a relatively large mass is spreading away as massless fotons. This causes a tension in space-time to go off - not unlike pressing a large drum membrane down and then lifting your finger, which removes the tension and causes the membrane to "smooth out".
In space, the change is similar - but it happens in three space dimensions as opposed to only two of a more easily comprehendable membrane. The key point is that this relief of tension will cause a spreading change in the fabric of space, and that change will slightly affect things that it goes through. Strong enough, it'll splatter and crack everything in it's way. Weaker, it would perhaps be felt as a "whack" or something like that. And it would cause a mechanical shockwave in your ship/planet also, so that would be heard as well if it was strong enough. Even weaker, you could likely weakly hear it as a slight pop.
...mind you, 500 kg is a really small mass as far as gravity is concerned, but the energy of a 500kg anti-matter bomb is something I don't really want to think about.
The gravitational shockwave would be the absolute least of your worries at distance of 100 km... but assuming you were shielded enough to survive, the theoretical basis for "hearing" the explosion is valid, at least that's how I see it.
The same applies to swiftly disintegrating and dispersing a large concentration of mass (say, a space ship) from small volume to large volume, kinda like what explosions inside the ship would do. It wouldn't be as drastic as anti-matter bomb with full mass->energy conversion, but it would cause a small distortion. Most likely undetectable though.
Or, if the ship was using, say, singularity as part of it's generator (Minbari, anyone?), that going off would definitely be heard/felt for a long distance.
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Man that was alot of words.
If it's actually plausible, I congratulate you for propelling this forum into the realm of quantum mechanics.
If it's all just technobabble, I still congratulate you 'cause it was pretty cool sounding. Like good Star Trek.
Also, I was under the impression that nobody understood exactly how gravity works yet.
And how would these ripples or whatever in space/time be converted back into sound waves when they hit a cockpit?
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If it's actually plausible, I congratulate you for propelling this forum into the realm of quantum mechanics.
Not quantum mechanics... general relativity, rather. :p
If it's all just technobabble, I still congratulate you 'cause it was pretty cool sounding. Like good Star Trek.
It's actually not technobabble... though it could be. But, considering that the only difference between fact and fiction is that fiction needs to make sense to be believable while reality doesn't have that predicament, it's not surprizing that in science fiction, facts beat fiction.
Also, I was under the impression that nobody understood exactly how gravity works yet.
Actually, we have pretty accurate theories on how it works, starting from Mr. Newton, but not exactly why.
Einstein's general relativity is pretty accurate model of gravity in macroscopic distances, and it predicts gravity waves as ripples in space as described earlier.
And how would these ripples or whatever in space/time be converted back into sound waves when they hit a cockpit?
Your ship resides in space, thus the shape of space affects your ship... If the ripples are strong enough (and mind you they need to be really frakking strong to be detected!), they will theoretically cause your ship to slightly change it's shape. Which causes a mechanical stress to the ship and can be felt to varying extent.
If you want to visualize how the shape of space affects physical reality, think of a cube. It has sides the length of a, arbitrary length.
Now, in normal (ie. euclidian) space, the volume of space inside the cube is exactly V=a^3. That's pretty simple. Now, when things such as great local mass cause distortions to space (ie. gravity fields), the changed curvature of space means that the volume of space inside that cube is no longer constant. In case of positive curvature, the volume inside said observed cube will be V > a^3; in case of negative curvature it'll be V<a^3. Generally, objects with mass cause positive curvature to space-time, as long as I've understood this stuff even slightly correctly, which naturally isn't guaranteed. :drevil:
These changes are extremely small, however. For example, Earth's mass curves the local space so little that it causes only a few cubic inches of variation in scale of the planet itself.
But if you for example look at black holes, you need to understand that the closer you get, the more distorted space becomes, which means that it's volume increases exponentially as you close on to the event horizon. It's kinda freaky, but hey, who said that reality makes sense. If you wanna scratch your heads a little more, let's move to quantum computers... They're fun fun stuff. ;7
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It's almost done... :drevil:
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As to the use of it, I think that there are various ways of applying them in game. The most basic one would be as an effective anti fighter weapon, especially if you use several of them against a wing or two chasing your ship.
Also due to the nature of the Star Wars universe, there are lots of pirate ships, bounty hunters, smugglers, etc. that can use that kind of weapon, and I´m also sure, that many fredders can come up with very nasty ideas on how to use them :drevil:, specially if they have a wide range of campatibility with the ordnance of most ships, (say even cruisers and destroyers!!). Of course, there´s not much info on their uses, except maybe the movie, but for that weapon we could make an exeption perhaps :wtf:, depending on how we plan on using it.
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p.s. If you could think of something convicing to explain how they work, and a gameplay mechanic to make them work, they might be pretty cool.
videoGAME
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videoGAME
lol
But seriously, I do want to have convincing explanations of technology for most of the stuff in the tech room, either that were already established in canon, or that we have to retcon or something. I don't think it has to be terribly convincing, but most sci fi geeks expect a bone thrown to the attempt, or at least for it to sound like it's over their heads. We can't go around saying there's air in space or anything.
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*cough* http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Seismic_charge
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That still sounds pretty bad, and fails at actually trying to explain how it works. It's just a statement of what it appears to do. Which is stupid too, because it says "briefly detonate into a blue ball, which appears to have the unusual side-effect of removing all sound from a given area around it." There wasn't any sound around to begin with, it's space! They just tried to describe what it looks like it does in the movie. But yes, I know that games and movies all show sound in space. It has to do with immersion obviously. But actually saying there's a weapon that capitalizes on this immersion gimmick and further perpetrates this falsehood? I have no problem with the shockwave effect, but saying it has to do with sound just seems too corny. However we write it up in the tech room, it won't mention that. I like the part about the star going supernova better. That could be useful for describing it.
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Some of the info in the Wikia is just plain wrong, anyways, like how it says Han Solo was in Attack of the Clones.
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Folks, folks.... let's all calm down here. If we start omitting sounds in space, we'll have to start omitting things like how a TIE Fighter can fly in an atmosphere despite having issues with simple aerodynamics and the like.
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It's magic!
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I don't want to eliminate all the skews in reality, but the concept of an item whose sole existence is explained by one of those skews in reality is just a bit odd. I'm not saying eliminate it either, just don't say, directly, in the _tech_ room, that there's sound in space. That's where the hardcore nerds are going to want to see how good a job we're doing sticking to the technical aspects.
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Hey, I have an idea:
Since it's called the seismic charge, we could just say that it got it's name from the effect it has when detonated near, on, or under a planet's surface. For that purpose, it's just a big bomb and you would only need to explain how it causes "a good bit of fracas."