Matter/Anti-Matter Power Plant

S

Sgt_thomson

Spaceman
I was wondering if anybody could tell me how the matter/anti-matter power plants that are in Dragons and cap ships work in the Wing Commander universe. Is it like a mini warp core like the ones in star trek or does it work another way? Ive read about the fuels scoops in the novels and picking up stray particales of hydrogen in space to be used as fuel(matter?) for the matter/anti-matter power plant but what about the anti-matter? Would the Dragon have anti-matter storage pods or something? I am not even going to ask about dilithium crystals :D but i was just wondering if there was more info on the subject.
 
6and7eighths said:
No, not really. Wing Commander is largely free of ridiculous technobabble.
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I would hardly say that it is "ridiculous technobable". Alot of the science in science fiction has a basis in fact. For example, anti-matter was in Star Trek long brfore they created the first particles of anti-matter (anti-hydrogen I think?) in real life.
 
Yeah, Wing Commander engines work on the less ridiculous notion of antigravitons (or a polarized stream of decelerated tachyons, in early models) creating a field that encapsulates a ship in antigraviton flux. If your navigator has a sufficient comprehension of Parallel Tonality and multidimensions, plotting a course through such a node is easy.

Sgt_thomson said:
I would hardly say that it is "ridiculous technobable". Alot of the science in science fiction has a basis in fact. For example, anti-matter was in Star Trek long brfore they created the first particles of anti-matter (anti-hydrogen I think?) in real life.
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Yeah, well and as such, some of the same basic theoretical principles are assumed when you have something called a matter/anti-matter drive, whether it's in Star Trek or Wing Commander.
 
ChrisReid said:
Yeah, Wing Commander engines work on the less ridiculous notion of antigravitons (or a polarized stream of decelerated tachyons, in early models) creating a field that encapsulates a ship in antigraviton flux. If your navigator has a sufficient comprehension of Parallel Tonality and multidimensions, plotting a course through such a node is easy.



Yeah, well and as such, some of the same basic theoretical principles are assumed when you have something called a matter/anti-matter drive, whether it's in Star Trek or Wing Commander.
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Are you talking about navigating a jump? What i want to know more about is how does it actually work in a Dragon just to power its systems eg, guns, afterburners and shields etc... Also what parts of the power plant is there in the Dragon like anti-matter storage pods, the reactor itsself and things like that.
 
ChrisReid said:
If your navigator has a sufficient comprehension of Parallel Tonality and multidimensions, plotting a course through such a node is easy.
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Like a pilgrim?
 
My thing is... why didn't they incorporate it into future fighters like the Prophecy ships? Infinite afterburn at the expense of those thick, thick sheilds sounds good to me. You could probably install a seperate power plant for the engines too.
 
They didn't, because it would really hurt the gameplay. You don't want the player to have infinite afterburners, because unless he's flying a Devastator (in which case, he's in God's hands anyway :p ), infinite afterburners will keep him alive infinitely.
 
Pretty much, in anything running the Vision engine I've always seen my afterburners, rather than my shields, as an indication of my overall health. Seriously. :p
 
Quarto said:
They didn't, because it would really hurt the gameplay. You don't want the player to have infinite afterburners, because unless he's flying a Devastator (in which case, he's in God's hands anyway :p ), infinite afterburners will keep him alive infinitely.
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Which is the entire point of inventing a reason for a few rare ships to have it in the first place. People need to conceptualize how the game world sits in relation to the real world. Confed doesn't develop a technology so that all their ships will be superkickass. What's really happening is that Origin developers are inventing a reason for a few rare occasional ships to be the delicious desert in a game.
 
the principle of jump drives is explained on the universe map that came with prophecy. some other tech details you can get from the game manuals....

Maybe the dragon was simply expensive to make?
 
Sgt_thomson said:
For example, anti-matter was in Star Trek long brfore they created the first particles of anti-matter (anti-hydrogen I think?) in real life.
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Some people have actually created anti-matter in the real world? Wow!

ChrisReid said:
Yeah, Wing Commander engines work on the less ridiculous notion of antigravitons (or a polarized stream of decelerated tachyons, in early models) creating a field that encapsulates a ship in antigraviton flux. If your navigator has a sufficient comprehension of Parallel Tonality and multidimensions, plotting a course through such a node is easy.
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Wha??? :confused:
 
I'm pretty sure he was being cute because I claimed that Wing Commander was a technobabble-free zone, whereas it probably would've been more accurate to say that Captain Eisen never told anybody to reverse the polarity on the deflector array's phase inducer.
 
That's because most every problem can be fixed by mounting a bigger bomb or stronger laser. It's a different type of sci-fi. The bigger bombs and guns have their own made up technological foundations, such as the matter/anti-matter subject that originated this thread.
 
Are you talking about navigating a jump? What i want to know more about is how does it actually work in a Dragon just to power its systems eg, guns, afterburners and shields etc... Also what parts of the power plant is there in the Dragon like anti-matter storage pods, the reactor itsself and things like that.
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There's nothing spectacularly interesting about the "matter/antimatter" powerplants mentioned in Wing Commander IV -- the Lance (and the Excalibur) have advanced powerplants which can generate ramscoops large enough to take in fuel as fast as their engines/afterburners can use them. Capital ships have 'always' (from our perspective) used this type of drive to maintain a similar fuel-intake-to-speed level.

(Note that jump drives involve a matter/anti-matter reaction, to generate antigravitons; this isn't related to what Wing Commander IV is talking about in terms of powerplants.)

Funny, I don't recall any of the games ever going into such detail about parallel tonality or multidimensions.
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Yeah, but Star Trek episodes rarely spend time explaining how warp drive works -- it's a magic element that the fiction uses. Like Star Trek, Wing Commander also has an incredibly complex "technical manual" explanation as to how its engines work that's wholly separate from in-game dialogue.
 
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