Wiggy's Quote: "You see contrails because you are looking at the leftover "energy" that your engines produce...im guessing that the leftover energy would appear in this 'darkmatter' "

I did read what you typed...now maybe you should.



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I'm sick of seeing all your signatures and not having one of my own


Edited by - bbrock81 on 15-04-2003 00:52:24

They are there because they look good - no more no less.

Same as laser sounds and exhaust sounds.

Just remember - space is a vacuum - it carries sound waves but does not allow then to be audible as our ears need a resonance to hear.

I've always thought that all ship designers added two or more little nozzels that pumped out some of the waste from the engines to add a real stylish effect when in flight...

A corpse is a corpse of course of course, unless that corpse can talk of course, and then of course that talking corpse is the famous Mr. Dead.

Cool - well my Sabre has 6 of these 'venting' nozzels then.

No wonder I'm a Junker with that much trash being exhausted into space

I known for a fact that wihtout a medium sound cannot travel through space, but in Freelancer you have to assum all ships have a life support system genreating oxygen for the plilot. Well if you get close enough to an enemy ship then the sound waves woud have to travel through the carbon dioxide being vented from your ship which whould create a sound. As for the contrails it is most likley the energy from thn fusion reactor int he craft kind of similar to the solar flares of a sun.

Ok, here's how it all works:

When ship designers starting building vehicles for space travel, they realized that people are accustomed to several things that we normally take for granted. Those being, sight and sound. They figured that the trauma of travelling through space would be bad enough without having to deal with the sudden loss of visual and audio clues that most "atmosphere" pilots were used to.

Therefore, when creating the ships, they installed special devices that would discharge gases from the wing-tips to give the appearance of contrails. They installed similar devices in the engines and muzzles of the guns, creating all those visual effects that pilots were used to, even though most of these effects would never occur natually in space.

Once that was completed, they installed state-of-the-art optical and sensory equipment that monitored the surrounding environment and used a sophisticated computer program to determine what the surround environment would "sound" like to the pilot. Complicated algorithms and formluae were used to extrapolate all the data and feed it through the internal speaker system in the cockpit, which generated "sound" as though it were coming from outside the ship. These computer generated sounds included explosions, engine noise, "air" moving over the spacecraft.

Thus, with these visual and audio features incorporated into their space craft, the engineers were now ready to send man into space without fear of sensory depravation.

Any other questions?




Those are my thoughts, not yours, I'm WapCaplet[!

dont mean to be pedantic, well actually
im doing a level physics at the moment and reading the blurb on h-fuel etc they are using the rather strange deuterium (hydrogen with extra neutron) He3 fusion, which is, a)odd because it is diffcult to acheive and
b) strange because it produces either He and a proton or Li-5 which is extremely unstable and would decay by radiation (dont fly in someones exhaust if this is the case...)
so onto contrails, the ones on the wingtips...no idea
however the exhaust as it were will be the vented He+p or the Li-5 at around 10 to the 7 kelvin. sadly barely any of the energy released in fusion is released as charged particles i.e. ones that could be magnetically directed to give thrust. so 80% of this energy is usally coming off as very fast neutrons which would go straghit through all of the containers, ur ship and you, leaving rather a lot of mess when they occasionally intereacted with your dna.
hope this helps : )
btw yes i am this sad, i love physics.
p.s. you dont want to get me started on tachyons...

shut up and play

I don't get any contrails?? Are they enabled or something via a tick box?

Thanks

Chances are you reduced the detail levels. Try fiddling with them until you get them.

to Blueskin:

I was under the impression that Tritium (3H) is easier to fuse rather than stock hydrogen (1H), which was why H-bomb warheads need tritium to work (and why brown dwarfs could not ignite into full-blown stars because they couldn't fuse 1H once their 3H supplies are depleted).

Also, I thought the reason why thermonuclear reactions are so-called because they release thermal neutrons-- Neutrons with less than 1 electron volt of energy. The fast neutrons are products of nuclear fission if I remember correctly.

Just the ramblings of another physics enthusiast heh heh...

too true my friend, my mistake on the neutrons, although thermal neutrons are still uncharged and cannot be used to produce thrust directly. stock hydrogen is harder to fuse than tritium although the easiest nuclear fusion reaction (easiest, lowest energy requirement) is the tritium-deterium reaction used in research nuclear fusion reactors around the world. this is H-2 and He3 if i remember right (not often this happens) and produces He and what,... um a proton, must be, unless the quark composition changes...hmmm yeah i tihnk thats what happens, the neutron from the H-2 gets grabbed by the He-3 and the lone proton turns into a positive neutrino of some sort and a neutron goes flying off (thermally )
ok ive probs bored u all enough now.
one last thought, freelancer uses laser weapons which travel a bit slowly for realism, unless we play it in 5X speed. also the tachyon based weapons shouldnt have to "travel" at all, seeing as they are faster than light particles and all.....