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atgxtg
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 Posted: Sat Aug 27, 2011 1:26 pm Post subject: |
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| Bren wrote: | | If you suppress the explosion you end up with what is in effect a dud round. |
Not true. To be technical, there is no explosion. If there were, firearms wouldn't work. Firearms are gas expansion weapons. The power does not explode, but burns. The burning powder releases gas, and as mnore and more gas builds up, the pressure increases until it is great enough to start moving the bullet.
You can indeed Suppress the sound of the shot. It is hard to completely do so, but ususally most of the sound can be suppressed.
But if the bullet fired is supersonic, it will make a noise as it travels through the air. |
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atgxtg
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| Posted: Sat Aug 27, 2011 1:29 pm Post subject: |
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| jmanski wrote: |
True and True. But in most cases a flash suppressor is more important than a noise suppressor. |
You are thinking like a solider/sniper.
I think that sound supression is probably more important, since it allows one to kill without attracting attention. This allows one to kill people in hotel rooms, private residences, and refreshers without getting caught. In such cases, flash supp@ession is of secondary importance. |
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ZzaphodD
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| Posted: Sat Aug 27, 2011 2:07 pm Post subject: |
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| atgxtg wrote: | | Bren wrote: | | If you suppress the explosion you end up with what is in effect a dud round. |
Not true. To be technical, there is no explosion. If there were, firearms wouldn't work. Firearms are gas expansion weapons. The power does not explode, but burns. The burning powder releases gas, and as mnore and more gas builds up, the pressure increases until it is great enough to start moving the bullet.
You can indeed Suppress the sound of the shot. It is hard to completely do so, but ususally most of the sound can be suppressed.
But if the bullet fired is supersonic, it will make a noise as it travels through the air. |
Well, to be technical explosions also 'burns'... The burning of the explosives both creates gas and also heat up both gases and air creating an explosion. Really no difference, only that the firearm focuses the energy of the 'explosion' to propel the bullet.
Also, theres really no difference between 'sound' and expanding gasses. On the contrary sound is only the registration of vibrations either in the air or the ground. Expanding gasses is vibrations. The suppressor cant suppress the sound without slowing the expansion of escaping gasses so its really the same thing.
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jmanski
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| Posted: Sat Aug 27, 2011 6:47 pm Post subject: |
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| atgxtg wrote: | | jmanski wrote: |
True and True. But in most cases a flash suppressor is more important than a noise suppressor. |
You are thinking like a solider/sniper.
I think that sound supression is probably more important, since it allows one to kill without attracting attention. This allows one to kill people in hotel rooms, private residences, and refreshers without getting caught. In such cases, flash supp@ession is of secondary importance. |
I do agree that sound suppression is important in some cases. But since real suppressors muffle the sound (so it sounds like something else), maybe thats the direction a suppressor in game should take. So that when a suppressed blaster was fired the difficulty to detect it would be higher, as well as a difficulty to identify it.
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Fallon Kell
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| Posted: Sat Aug 27, 2011 9:21 pm Post subject: |
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I'm still not sure why we're discussing suppressors on the scopes thread, but I guess it's more applicable than relativity, so I'll play along.
When you fire a modern gun, you ignite the propellant in the cartridge, which deflagrates (explodes subsonically) creating a hot cloud of gasses that want to expand. The easiest way for them to expand is by pushing the bullet down the barrel and out the gun's muzzle. Then those gasses are free to expand with a loud bang, while inertia carries the bullet down range. If there is a suppressor on the end of the gun, that loud bang gets caught in a series of baffles and suffers a significant noise reduction (IIRC, sometimes as much as 64 dB). The bullet continues on, possibly suffering some velocity loss due to friction with the suppressor. If the bullet leaves the muzzle of the suppressor at faster than the speed of sound it will produce a "ballistic crack", (a small sonic boom).
| Bren wrote: | | Fallon Kell wrote: | | We can see the last frame the blaster is aimed at the target and count frames until the target is hit and the sparks fly out. That shows relatively slow bolts, compared to firearms. |
And the assumption in doing a frame count is that what you see on the screen is an accurate depiction of SWU reality. But then if what you see on the screen is an accurate depiction, then what we hear during the film is also likely to be an accurate depiction of SWU reality. In which case sound travels in a vacuum. Most of us would tend to see that as a contradiction. Therefore what hear (and see) in the film must not always be an accurate depiction of SWU reality. So counting frames may not be valid for judging speed. |
Aside from the fact that you can count sound in space in the same category as score and voiceover, I've also come up with some pretty cool explanations for hearing sound in space combat.
Weapons fire: Blaster-type weapons and other directed energy weapons could reasonably have powerful magnetic fields that vibrate the hull of a starship, causing the occupants to hear sound.
Engines: Fusial Thrust and Ion engines both depend on powerful magnetic fields as well, and they also expel matter which can make sound as it impacts the hull of a spaceship.
Explosions: Explosions go bang in an atmosphere because a massive overpressure suddenly hits your eardrums. In space, the ambient pressure is effectively zero, and an explosion near you would fill the area with a rapidly expanding gas cloud. Even if this cloud weren't dense enough to cause an audible overpressure, it would probably moving fast enough to slap your hull loudly.
Besides, what we see in the films is the best representation we have to go on. If it's not considered to be accurate, we can't be sure a Star Destroyer is bigger than a TIE fighter. ILM wasn't perfect, but they did consistently and intentionally depict visible bolts of energy that can be seen in transit before striking targets and doing damage. Now they did make some mistakes, like the variable size of the Executor, but they didn't seem to go out of their way to represent starships as having variable size. They did seem to go out of their way to represent blasters as shooting bolts, not beams, and those bolts having to hit their target to do damage.
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Esoomian
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| Posted: Sun Aug 28, 2011 2:10 pm Post subject: |
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One theory that we've considered for sound in space combat is that people found it too disorienting fighting in silence so the sensor system was rigged up to detect what was going on and then play sounds in a home theatre style fashion so you could tell what was going on without having to actually look at a sensor panel.
Of course this would mean that if your sensors went down you're back to silence or worse perhaps the sound effects file would be scrambled.
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jmanski
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| Posted: Sun Aug 28, 2011 2:41 pm Post subject: |
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I think the most likely explanation is that realistic combat in space would be very boring to watch. It's cinema, folks, not realism.
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ZzaphodD
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| Posted: Sun Aug 28, 2011 5:20 pm Post subject: |
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| jmanski wrote: | | I think the most likely explanation is that realistic combat in space would be very boring to watch. It's cinema, folks, not realism. |
Which we should also keep in mind when determining the speed of plaster bolts from the movies..
It would be very boring if the blast travelled so fast we almost couldnt see them, in fact it would just be a blink.
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jmanski
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| Posted: Sun Aug 28, 2011 5:57 pm Post subject: |
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Exactly my point. Movies are made to be visually pleasing, not realistic.
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Fallon Kell
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| Posted: Mon Aug 29, 2011 5:42 am Post subject: |
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| jmanski wrote: | | Exactly my point. Movies are made to be visually pleasing, not realistic. |
That's true, but we as SW RPG players are trying to build a coherent and operational universe out of these movies, and as I said before, what we see in the films is the best representation we have to go on.
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Bren
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| Posted: Mon Aug 29, 2011 1:14 pm Post subject: |
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| jmanski wrote: | | I think the most likely explanation is that realistic combat in space would be very boring to watch. It's cinema, folks, not realism. |
THIS! |
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atgxtg
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| Posted: Tue Aug 30, 2011 1:13 pm Post subject: |
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| Esoomian wrote: | One theory that we've considered for sound in space combat is that people found it too disorienting fighting in silence so the sensor system was rigged up to detect what was going on and then play sounds in a home theatre style fashion so you could tell what was going on without having to actually look at a sensor panel.
Of course this would mean that if your sensors went down you're back to silence or worse perhaps the sound effects file would be scrambled. |
I've considered the idea that both sound as the "laser flash" of weapons fire is a computer enhancedment done as an aid to the pilot (and gunners). Much like the way bullet paths and waring alerms work in modern fighter jets.
An egenine sound, based on type and with a doppler effect, would be an useful way of quickly presenting movment and target ifno to a pilot without his having to look at the sensor displays.
Yeah, it's justa bunch of Sci-Fi movies, but there is some possible "in universe" rationale for the sound. |
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Bren
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| Posted: Tue Aug 30, 2011 2:30 pm Post subject: |
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| atgxtg wrote: | | Yeah, it's justa bunch of Sci-Fi movies, but there is some possible "in universe" rationale for the sound. |
Except we hear the sound and see the bolts even in the wide shots where our point of view is not in the cockpit or even with a specific character.
Personally I am fine with just going with "looks and sounds better" as an explanation. I take it as just part of the genre. The technology emulates E.E. "Doc" Smith Lensman series or the Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon serials.* It's not supposed to be hard Sci-Fi. Just like if I were playing a game based Battletech I wouldn't get too worked up about the plausibility of heat as the major resource constraint for Mechs or if I was playing a superhero game I wouldn't get too worked up about the fact that when the superstrong guy tosses a bus half a mile the opposite newtonian force should shatter the pavement and pile drive his feet a meter or more into the ground.
But hey, enjoy the exercise if you like it. 
* I guess we should also include Nictzin Dyalhis' When the Green Star Waned from 1925 since he/she apparently coined the term "blastor" [sic]. |
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Fallon Kell
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| Posted: Tue Aug 30, 2011 3:01 pm Post subject: |
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| Bren wrote: | | if I was playing a superhero game I wouldn't get too worked up about the fact that when the superstrong guy tosses a bus half a mile the opposite newtonian force should shatter the pavement and pile drive his feet a meter or more into the ground. |
Are you kidding? That's the best part. (The worst part is when you realize that in real life, the supervillain's clothes would not survive everything his body would...) 
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Bren
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| Posted: Tue Aug 30, 2011 3:38 pm Post subject: |
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Well and then there are those purple "stretch" pants that Dr. Banner wears.  |
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