[chief1983]

Well, unless it functions like a similar existing game mechanic (such as afterburner), the AI wouldn't even know what to do with it, so it would at least be relegated to human player only.

[Galemp]

I had suggested that exact same thing, actually, way back when in the scripting forum--have the Afterburner key close s-foils, lock weapons, give a small speed boost, and have unlimited fuel.

[chief1983]

I'm not saying I suggest it, that was just an example.  In fact I really don't think the S-Foils make much sense acting like an afterburner.  The same key could be used to do it but without similar functionality the AI would do it for no apparent reason in the middle of a fight.

[EtherShock]

S-foils would add to the authenticity of the environment, having X-wings, B-wings, and any other craft where they apply fly with them closed while on patrol and before entering and while leaving hyperspace and hangars, and Lambda shuttles, gunboats, Sentinel landing craft unfolding their wings as they enter and leave hangars if possible. I believe there was a discussion about this already.

Can't think of any other examples, but if nothing else, like Galemp said, it just looks cool!

[chief1983]

Using the effect when entering and exiting a mission would be pretty cool, I don't know how much we'll be using hangars though, but if we do that would probably also qualify as entering/exiting a mission, so we might be able to work something out there.

[Dragon]

I think hangars should be used just because all fighters need to land somewhere and i never liked FS concept of  jumping to carrier and off-screen landing. I think landing with open s-foils is going to be hard if not impossible in "real life" and you can safely make them impossible in game ,at least for human players ( i don't know how to trigger animation for AI in mission ).
As for Headhunter faux pas ,according to "The Essential guide to vehicles and vessels" headhunter is old an had moving wings in recent version ,so when i saw x-wing-ish fighters with moving wings in old republic era i thought they were recent Headhunters. Also ,what was those fighters ,if not Headhunters? And do you want to include these? (Headhunters or not i can try animating them). And what was the way the wings moved on Z-95?

[brandx0]

There is no single source for what the Headhunter can and can't do.  It seems throughout Star Wars literature there are about 6 different fighters named "Z-95 Headhunter" built by Incom and Subpro...  Some have X-Wings, some have swing wings, some have straight wings, some have swept wings, and anywhere between 1 and 4 engines...

There are so many conflicting sources on the Headhunter that you can pretty much say it's whatever you want.

As for the fighters in Ep3, they're ARC-170s

[Dragon]

It's Headhunter cousin ,and i could have mistaken in the heat of battle.
I hope you want to include it.
I can try to make ARC-170's wings move like in movie if they movement isn't too complicated for animation code to handle ,but i think they are awesome even without moving wings.
Your Headhunter will be most likely a more recent version without moving wings anyway.
I can also animate Lambda and Sentinel imperial shuttles though i had no chance to try because IA lambda is a single object and only Lambda available for me.Same for escort shuttle. I have no sentinel.

[b_i_d]

Hey, your're doing a SW game. Shouldn't you know a bit about SW Technology before? 

No, seriously. I don't know that much about it, but judging from three books I have, that AFAIK aren't available anymore (one from an old SW game, a "tech giude" and one that came out when SW - ROTJ hit the big screens):

- The main reason for the folding wings was obviously to look sexy on the screen (just like the shuttle).

The two reasons the model makers came up with:

- The wings have to be closed for atmospheric flight to they work as real "wings".

- The wings have to be open for combat, because the two lasers on each side are too close together, when the wings are closed. Because of the radiation they would simply overheat. So the wings are opened to cool the weapons. And as a security measure the weapons can't be fired when the wings are closed.

That still doesn't explain, why they would be closed during space flight, but that are the two "facts" I know.

[Something]

Yet, in some SW books, some atmo fights took place with X-Wings. I know some don't consider the books to be canon, but I felt I had to add this.

[b_i_d]

Yet, in some SW books, some atmo fights took place with X-Wings. I know some don't consider the books to be canon, but I felt I had to add this.

Yeah, I remembered that too after posting.

My "wild guess" is that it with the wings closed, the X-Wing is able to fly like a plane, while with wings open it has to "hover" using its engines, resulting in way higher power consumption. But that's just my 2cents...

[Narvi]

If you don't want people to use the s-foils as cheap afterburners, you could have the ship become a flying brick during conversion, making anybody who uses it during a combat situation much more likely to get shot down as they wallow about like a legless duck.

[EtherShock]

There is no single source for what the Headhunter can and can't do.  It seems throughout Star Wars literature there are about 6 different fighters named "Z-95 Headhunter" built by Incom and Subpro...  Some have X-Wings, some have swing wings, some have straight wings, some have swept wings, and anywhere between 1 and 4 engines...

There are so many conflicting sources on the Headhunter that you can pretty much say it's whatever you want.

As for the fighters in Ep3, they're ARC-170s

The Z-95s many iterations have been explained as a number of models over a long time, so depending on the model, you can have a very different craft. Theoretically, you can make quite a few different Z-95 models for the project based on this.

Hey, your're doing a SW game. Shouldn't you know a bit about SW Technology before? 

No, seriously. I don't know that much about it, but judging from three books I have, that AFAIK aren't available anymore (one from an old SW game, a "tech giude" and one that came out when SW - ROTJ hit the big screens):

- The main reason for the folding wings was obviously to look sexy on the screen (just like the shuttle).

The two reasons the model makers came up with:

- The wings have to be closed for atmospheric flight to they work as real "wings".

- The wings have to be open for combat, because the two lasers on each side are too close together, when the wings are closed. Because of the radiation they would simply overheat. So the wings are opened to cool the weapons. And as a security measure the weapons can't be fired when the wings are closed.

That still doesn't explain, why they would be closed during space flight, but that are the two "facts" I know.

Probably the best explanation is laser power is diverted to the engines for "cruise mode," but not that BS Rogue Squadron afterburner feature. This would also act is a safeguard against accidental fire as well. I doubt they work as actual wings because they're not airfoils. They are straight-edged. No way they'll create any lift, but I guess with repulsorlifts, aerodynamic wings aren't as big of an issue, plus you have deflector shields, so if you have them on, the air would never push on the craft. Of course, I don't think there's need for a cruise mode in this conversion. I doubt FS2 can include those kinds of distances in missions.

[Herra Tohtori]

I doubt they work as actual wings because they're not airfoils. They are straight-edged. No way they'll create any lift, but I guess with repulsorlifts, aerodynamic wings aren't as big of an issue, plus you have deflector shields, so if you have them on, the air would never push on the craft. Of course, I don't think there's need for a cruise mode in this conversion. I doubt FS2 can include those kinds of distances in missions.

Of course they are aerofoils. Crudely shaped and unoptimized, but with some angle of attack they would provide lift just as any piece of plate traveling through air does... Symmetric aerofoil can provide lift with angle of attack (the key is of course that angle of attack makes it unsymmetric in relation to the airflow), otherwise aerobatic planes wouldn't be able to fly at all. Moreover I think the crudeness of the wings is more related to the designers not bothering to make them look like aerofoils, not that they wouldn't be aerofoils. Shape of the wing in airplanes is designed the way it is to minimize drag and maximize the lift, and an unsymmetric drop shape is thus most often used as basic aerofoil profile since the unsymmetry (or curve or whatever) means it will now generate lift without any angle of attack, which is good since increasing angle of attack increases drag much more than designing the wing to produce lift while traveling through the air at zero AoA.*

The problem with X-Wings and Z-95s is that they would be longitudinally overstabile darts at least without canards, and there's also some doubts about lateral stability since they don't have anything to provide aerodynamic vertical stabilization except maybe the X-Wing in open-winged mode since the wings point not only to sides but a bit up and down as well... With using repulsor technology aka magic (or pufferjets even) for active stabilization, they could both fly, it's not a question of lacking wing area to generate lift...

*As a more technical description of the problem of lift: It could be said that any aerofoil that forces an action to the air that passes it gains an opposite reaction (also called lift). Much like putting a spoon on the water fall coming out of a tap, the spoon will bend the waterflow to one direction and be pulled to opposite direction. However, since air can be treated as uncompressable fluid in most atmospheric questions, there's nowhere for the air to bend as the water does; there's air everywhere to prevent it from bending so the airflow doesn't really change it's "direction" as it passes the aerofoil. The wing does try to change the direction of airflow, but can't, and instead the attempt to divert the airflow manifests as pressure zones around the wing (higher pressure below, lower pressure above) and analyzing this pressure differential to define the amount of lift is easier than the raw analysis of the immediate reactions to the airflow so many explanations of lift oversimplify the problem to either direction - "just" the generation of pressure zones without explaining why the pressure zones are generated and how, or "just" the action-reaction principle of changing the direction of the airflow... which creates a lot of confusion from a fundamentally simple principle of fluid dynamics and newtonian laws of kinetics.

</physics debate bait>

[CountBuggula]

The problem with X-Wings and Z-95s is that they would be longitudinally overstabile darts at least without canards, and there's also some doubts about lateral stability since they don't have anything to provide aerodynamic vertical stabilization except maybe the X-Wing in open-winged mode since the wings point not only to sides but a bit up and down as well... With using repulsor technology aka magic (or pufferjets even) for active stabilization, they could both fly, it's not a question of lacking wing area to generate lift...

Unstable, yes, but not unflyable, as proven even with today's technology:


Granted that project (RQ-3 Darkstar) was cancelled because the aerodynamic instabilites became too much of a problem, but would hardly be a problem for Star Wars technology levels.

I'll take that physics bait and raise you one random aviation trivia

[chief1983]

I just read up on the real reason for lift and the top-longer-than-bottom fallacy the other day.  Good stuff to know.

[Herra Tohtori]

Yeah, we had a long and vivacious discussion about it with Snagger on GameWarden back in the day when BtRL was all the rage (I'm starting to feel old when I say stuff like that). At that time I was not as good as I am now in explaining my point of view on the matter which pretty much served to lengthen the debate at that point...

Buggula - X-Wing and Z-95 wouldn't be unstable, they would be overstable at least as long as pitch is concerned, since the center of gravity would be way ahead of the center of lift without any kind of aerofoils on the nose to counter the pitch-down tendency. A good example of an aerodynamically overstable object would be a dart, or an arrow. With a canard setup both the T-65 and Z-95 would be viable planes actually, with yaw being dealt with by spoilers. Or Star Wars handwavium/magic. Or if you assume that the nose of the hull is built so that it can produce some lift, that would work as well I guess (though it doesn't look like it would be a viable explanation). Like that example seems to have leading edge extensions combining to a semi-lifting body design (Ironically it looks like a Naboo spaceship from the prequels, in a way).

A-Wing is just a dead ringer for lifting body design, and B-Wing would work beautifully as an unsymmetric airplane - the main wing would probably be horizontal in atmospheric flight mode with the cockpit turned 90 degrees to the right (or left) although it's a really bad place to put a cockpit on since the pilot would probably become disoriented by being so far off the center of gravity (around which the ship would pivot), but it would fly all right.

The question of Star Wars ships being atmospheric capable is pretty void nonetheless since all the ships in Star Wars (excluding the big capital ships which can't enter atmosphere) are capable of hovering seemingly without any significant limits on fuel/energy consumption, and have more than ample amount of thrust to simply propel them into orbit ballistically if necessary. So debating about stability is more or less a curiosity - obviously Star Wars ships can fly in atmosphere. So discussing about that would actually have more merit on an RC airplane board where someone was asking about the viability of Star Wars designs as strictly aerodynamic fliers. And to that question, the answer is - with small modifications (some kind of control surfaces/canards on the nose, or perhaps leading edge extensions) and gyro controlled pitch and yaw stability X-Wing and Z-95 would probably be viable, B-Wing definitely although controlling it would be a bit exotic due to unsymmetry (and pitch stability might be a bit problematic), A-Wing probably with powerful enough engines and some modifications on the hull design (to actually make it generate lift), TIE's would be all but hopeless along with the Y-Wing.

[Archaic]

feasible reasons for X split:
-all fighters in SW have an inertial compensator, so "split" the IC probably draws a bit more power to expanding the field to relieve stress at the wing joint.

-the engines are mounted on the wings so they put a great deal of stress on the joints, when in cruise mode these stresses are shared through both joints, reducing the overall stress. also, when split, the engines are spread farther apart, allowing thrust vectoring systems to produce greater agility in the craft. this is real 3D combat, remember? not encumbered by the need for lift and the lack of anything to react against, TV would be nessesary

-from what i know (read almost all post-prequel EU novels), the wing lasers can be fired in cruising position. however the split allows a greater targeting area and greater chance to hit your target.

              1)cruise     :     {}     :
             
              2)combat   .              .
                                      {}
                                .             .

in conclusion: greater firing spread+greater maneuverability+reducing power consumption long range+reducing stress on the "air frame" during long range flights
                               

[Scourge of Ages]

I think, from a gameplay perspective, there are a few things we can all agree on:

1) S-foils are cool when they open and close
2) In the movies and games, the only times S-foils open or close are at the beginning or end of missions (flying to the Death Star was just getting to the mission)
3) An automated SEXP/Script (both combined? I'll leave that to people who know about stuff) should be sufficient for every theoretical purpose.
4) While it would be cool if players could open and close S-foils at will, it would probably be too much work to be worth all the pain. Unless it's already done, then I won't bring you down.

From a tech nerd perspective: I always figured there were just tiny, invisible manuvering thrusters or etheric rudders mounted on the trailing edge of all wings/wing-like structures.
So, moving the wings further apart would improve manuverability much more than if they were together on all craft with S-foils, and would explain the need for those vertical fins on the A-Wing, and why the Y-Wing turned like a drunken manatee

[MR_T3D]

better ether resistance.

the entire SW galaxy is encassed in ether.
simple.