Bandit LOAF
Long Live the Confederation!
The scoop theory certainly clears things up, but where the heck do you find this stuff LOAF?
The scoop stuff has been expanded greatly in the novels over the years... though looking back at the source material in /archives, we now know that the 'Wing Commander propulsion' stuff was actually all established by Origin in a background tech document that started appearing in the series bible around WC2 (which, in retrospect, is why it's so fluid throughout the novels, I suppose).
A fairly 'straight up' text about it, based on the original WC2-era propuslion treatise, can be found in The Confederation Handbook.
I have a nagging feeling I've read about them ramscoops in some WC game manual. One questions that arises here is what exactly is done with the scooped hydrogen?
It's fuel for whatever kind of engine we're using -- there's a pretty lengthy discussion about that in the same sources listed above (bible and Handbook).
BOOM! Yeah, now that I remember it, I read something similar about the scopes in a strategy guide. But do you have an answer for the sound query LOAF? rather, has some piece of WC source material I've never come across explained that?
Not to the best of my knowledge -- but it stands to reason that it's just the fighter programmed to turn things it scans into sounds appreciable by the pilot. It stands to reason that that's essentially how the game works sound, anyway. (And modern fighters have similar systems with collision alarms and whatnot.)
(That said, I seem to recall that the Babylon 5 people did some research to figure out exactly how sound can exist in space in some limited basis back when that series was young. Might look that up, if you want a pseudoscientific possible answer.)