Feature Requests: Engine Wash & Explosion Damage

[Dax SharkFinn]

Currently if you fly right behind a large vessel (like an Anaconda) there's no rumble at all.
I expected to get a fair amount of 'turbulence' from putting my face right in the very powerful engines of such a large ship and am always pulled out of the game when that doesn't happen. If anyone remembers, Conflict Freespace had this. A warning indicator would show up on your HUD saying "Engine Wash" and you'd get a crazy shake going on. Elite D's flight model is far superior (at least for me) but this feels like an odd omission and would be cool in a future update.

Secondly

Being in close proximity to an exploding Anaconda (or any large ship?) seems to have no effect on your ship. We have a very cool effect in the game already that causes the ship to spin during a crash drop. Seems to me like something similar (along with some kind of hull/system damage) would be appropriate for small ships that get too close to other ships as they go boom.

I've been playing since Premium beta and thought I should finally start voicing some suggestions. Great work so far, FD.

 

[xxThe_Dice_manxx]

Currently if you fly right behind a large vessel (like an Anaconda) there's no rumble at all.
I expected to get a fair amount of 'turbulence' from putting my face right in the very powerful engines of such a large ship and am always pulled out of the game when that doesn't happen. If anyone remembers, Conflict Freespace had this. A warning indicator would show up on your HUD saying "Engine Wash" and you'd get a crazy shake going on. Elite D's flight model is far superior (at least for me) but this feels like an odd omission and would be cool in a future update.

Secondly

Being in close proximity to an exploding Anaconda (or any large ship?) seems to have no effect on your ship. We have a very cool effect in the game already that causes the ship to spin during a crash drop. Seems to me like something similar (along with some kind of hull/system damage) would be appropriate for small ships that get too close to other ships as they go boom.

I've been playing since Premium beta and thought I should finally start voicing some suggestions. Great work so far, FD.

Yer sounds good to me, make it so!

 

[schmolywar]

Bumping this. Absolutely.

 

[Comrade Napoleon]

Honestsly ? Seriously ??

Turbulence and sound reverberating in vacuum ??!!
Exploding shock waves in vacuum !!!!???

Seriously !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!?

No never !, not Ever , NOT EVER !

IMO

Cheers Cmdr's

 

[Defacto]

Honestsly ? Seriously

Turbulence and sound reverberating in vacuum ??!!
Exploding shock waves in vacuum !!!!???

Seriously !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!?

No never !, not Ever , NOT EVER !

IMO

Cheers Cmdr's

Our ships eject stuff from the rear of our ships.
Stuff ejected hits your windshield.
You now have engine ejecta in contact with your windshield, in contact with the ship internal atmosphere. That is not a vacuum.

(although something with your use of emoticons tells me you are joking)

I agree. We need this.

 

[xxThe_Dice_manxx]

Honestsly ? Seriously

Turbulence and sound reverberating in vacuum ??!!
Exploding shock waves in vacuum !!!!???

Seriously !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!?

No never !, not Ever , NOT EVER !

IMO

Cheers Cmdr's

Explain please, I'm not a rocket scientist.

Would you not hear the roar of an engine so big at close range in space???

Surely the law of every action has an equal and opposite reaction applies to the wash off the engines of a conda? meaning the closer you get the more it would push you away.

Sorry if I'm an idiot but I can't get my head around this stuff, especially how sound works in space.

 

[Comrade Napoleon]

Explain please, I'm not a rocket scientist.

Would you not hear the roar of an engine so big at close range in space???

Surely the law of every action has an equal and opposite reaction applies to the wash off the engines of a conda? meaning the closer you get the more it would push you away.

Sorry if I'm an idiot but I can't get my head around this stuff, especially how sound works in space.

Sound is not carried in space at all, so therefore no sound wawes, as sound uses air to travel in.
Shock wawes fron a explosion propagate by pushing air, and therefore have a effect, of course and direct hit will affect your ship but out side gas explosion radius : nothing

Cheers Cmdr's

 

[Comrade Napoleon]

Our ships eject stuff from the rear of our ships.
Stuff ejected hits your windshield.
You now have engine ejecta in contact with your windshield, in contact with the ship internal atmosphere. That is not a vacuum.

(although something with your use of emoticons tells me you are joking)

I agree. We need this.

No I do NOT joke.

A gaseous wawe would disperse almost immediately. But it will give thrust at the point of ejection , the rocket nozzle.
In theory you could have a point, but you would have to be TOOOOO close to the Conda, to hear something

Cheers Cmdr's

 

[Comrade Napoleon]

Even when there is thrust from a rocket engine it would disperse rather quickly as the is nothing keeping it together : no air

However...

I am sure the ships are not fitted with rocket motors, more like theoretical field displacers. A rocket motor is simply too inefficient.

Cheers Cmdr's

 

[xxThe_Dice_manxx]

Sound is not carried in space at all, so therefore no sound wawes, as sound uses air to travel in.
Shock wawes fron a explosion propagate by pushing air, and therefore have a effect, of course and direct hit will affect your ship but out side gas explosion radius : nothing

Cheers Cmdr's

Thanks , makes sense.

So how come I can hear ships buzzing around me then? and ships exploding when I destroy them?

 

[Dax SharkFinn]

Sound is not carried in space at all, so therefore no sound wawes, as sound uses air to travel in.
Shock wawes fron a explosion propagate by pushing air, and therefore have a effect, of course and direct hit will affect your ship but out side gas explosion radius : nothing

Cheers Cmdr's

Following that logic engine wash should at least have some kind of turbulence-like effect on your ship, not nothing.

As for there being no explosive force in reality to justify explosions damage, I want it in for the same reason we have top speeds and optimal turning speeds in a space game.

Making a realistic feeling space game is not actually about 'realism'. Realism is much less useful than most think, due to no one here knowing what space dog fighting feels like.

So the goal is verisimilitude not realism.

 

[neamerjell]

I agree

No I do NOT joke.

A gaseous wawe would disperse almost immediately. But it will give thrust at the point of ejection , the rocket nozzle.
In theory you could have a point, but you would have to be TOOOOO close to the Conda, to hear something

Cheers Cmdr's

By the time you are close enough for the exhaust from an engine as massive as you all say it is (I'm new to the game and have yet to see this ship) your little Sidewinder would be barbecued... Probably explode from the heat alone.

 

[en1gma]

Remember this is a game and should be fun. If I want real life, I walk out the door.

Regardless of whether there shouldn't be shock waves in space, an exploding anaconda or anything for that matter will eject debris at an incredibly high velocity and this should affect your ship. Realistically, an exploding ship could affect anything in the instance although if you are further away you're certainly less likely to be hit. Probably a bit hard to program persistent debris

OP +1

 

[BigBossLucas]

I like this IDEA, and...

... Well I really love the idea to be as close as possible to real Scientific Laws, but for that we should start removing every sound when out the stations, that will be kind of boring for some cmdrs.

So are we or aren't we orthodox with Physics?

Interesting propossal for a poll dont you think? ... How purist do you want to play ED in Scientific therms?

 

[Dax SharkFinn]

Again, I really didn't want to make this a realism vs verisimilitude argument but I guess that was unavoidable.

I don't see why it's so hard to imagine that a large ship's reactor could cause some sub system damage on a smaller ship (with failed or low shields for example) when it's reactor is destroyed.

From a purely physics stand point I could understand an objection to hull damage but this isn't a game about pure physics. Not by a long shot.

 

[InverseFalcon]

Thanks , makes sense.

So how come I can hear ships buzzing around me then? and ships exploding when I destroy them?

I'm not going to search for it for you, but I believe in dev documents they acknowledged that sound can't travel in space, but the lack of sound in game (and for an actual pilot, if this were real) would be both hard to get used to, and would deprive you of useful information.

The in-game explanation is that the ship computer monitors action around it, and artificially recreates sound to provide useful and expected feedback for the pilot.

 

[Sandmann]

Sound is not carried in space at all, so therefore no sound wawes, as sound uses air to travel in.
Shock wawes fron a explosion propagate by pushing air, and therefore have a effect, of course and direct hit will affect your ship but out side gas explosion radius : nothing

Cheers Cmdr's

My immediate.thought was to agree.... Sound is vibrations in air affecting our eardrums therefore no air in space equals no sound. In space noone can hear you scream etc.

But... Let's think about it for a second.

Firstly, wash. Space vessels move by applying Newton's third law and basically "chucking something out the back to make the ship go forwards". FDev doesn't tell us exactly what our ships are "throwing out the back" but we can see it happening. Whatever it is, it MUST have mass to cause a ship to move, and since mass doesn't just disappear it must instead be disappating, unless it continues to careen around the universe forever. Given that ED ships leave a smoke trail and smoke is just a collection of particles we can assume it's disappating but that it takes some time to do so. Another ship encountering this mass almost immediately after ejection (and therefore before it's had time to disapate) in what is otherwise a vacuum would surely exprience shock, just as it would if it encountered any other form of mass such as a rock.

Ok, space noise. This bugged me for ages... Why could I hear noises in supercruise/hyperspace etc? Why could I hear ships (not mine) blowing up?/No atmosphere should mean no transfer of sound....

But...

Above we looked at how Newton's third law moved ships about and determined that energy can remain in ED space for a period. This is due to the law of conservation of energy... You can't create or destroy energy, you can only change it's form. So... If we have all this energetic mass being expelled from ships and bouncing around the galaxy till it disapates it's also reasonable that violent expulsions of energetic mass - such as would happen in an explosion - might collide with the ship's hull causing it to vibrate. Similarly, the frameshift drive folding space and moving the ship through it would cause vibrations on the ship's hull. This would in turn cause the ship's atmosphere to vibrate, and since we know that sound is just vibrations in air impacting eardrums, we've just discovered space sound. It's true that if I shout in my ship that you won't hear it in your ship, but if my ship blows up close enough to impact your hull you'd hear that.

 

[Moritasgus]

The noise has already been explained by the devs, its your ship recreating sounds to aid the pilot not you actually hearing sounds in space.
That's why when your cabin gets breached you hear nothing except your own breathing until you get inside a station and have air around you.

 

[starjump]

Even if not realistic i think some immersion is never wrong as long its not made over the top. Passing a massive ship with its thrusters on could cause some small shaking together with its mighty thruster sound.

But yeah in real life it all needs air to cause sounds and turbulence.

 

[Silent Run]

Sound is not carried in space at all, so therefore no sound wawes, as sound uses air to travel in.
Shock wawes fron a explosion propagate by pushing air, and therefore have a effect, of course and direct hit will affect your ship but out side gas explosion radius : nothing

Cheers Cmdr's

Sound will not travel in space like it ussualy travels through an atmosphere and reach your ears, but the energy producing the sound will, its waves will and then they will reach your shile dand your cockpit and the amosphere inside it producing events maybe not similar to the sound of an explosion heard through a normal atmosphere but they will produce smthing. In the case there is a very good shielding from events it doesn;t mean that one way or another energy is not transfered through the shielded environment or at least that it does not propagate elsewhere but relevant to the shielded environment.

We could just say for the sake of fun and special effects that sound from an explosion in space could still be felt inside an Elite ship cockpit because of blah blah blah ...whatever.

and there you have it! Sound from an external event can be heard iside an Elite ship cockpit.