Gil Hamilton wrote:The Silence and I wrote:Gil, I understand basic reaction principles, and Star Wars abuses them. Badly. In space, banking to make a turn exactly resembling an atmospheric turn consumes extra reaction power and mass to pull off that frivolous stunt. There is no good reason to waste power and fuel doing that--especially in circumstances where it makes perfectly good sense to throw it out the window. Assuming weapon and drive parity B5 fighters would chew Star Wars fighters for breakfaste--they can out maneuver SW any day of the week, and use less reaction mass to do so. Claiming SW uses newtonian engine drives is a stretch--it can be done, but really, occam's razor tells me it doesn't all add up.
Shooting hot gas in on direction for motion in the other
is a reaction drive. However, I think you're confusing my position. I'm the first one to note that SW ships move queerly for ships that use reaction drives. In fact, I did exactly that in my first post in my thread, saying that it was unusual to me that despite using what are obviously reaction drives in appearance that they never hit turnover to slow themselves sharply.
You are right, perhaps i should state my position a little more clearly. Earlier I typed a post detailing queer effects of star wars reaction drives, but my argument was not ready and I deleted it. But I think I shall lay out some of the things I've noticed that I had used as part of my position. Ion drives in theory shoot charged particles out their rear end at very high velocity, thus producing thrust--we all know this. Now, I am assuming it makes sense for an engine on high power to be visually different from an engine on low power/off. That is, it makes sense to me that a powerful burn will glow brighter than a weak burn, or no burn at all.
In star wars, if you watch star fighters you will notice their engine glow never varies--running straight down the DS trench at
constant velocity (as evidence I point out McC's excellent work on this) has the same engine glow as dogfighting maneuvers. It's like if the engines are on they glow one color and intensity, and if they are off they don't glow, with no in-between.
No matter what the craft does, no variation happens. Small maneuvering thrusters do not fire visibly, the engine glow is static, yet the craft suddenly takes off in some direction, or slows or doesn't change speed or direction--and that bloody glow is there the whole time.
Only the Falcon AFAIK has ever shown variation in its drive appearance: in ESB, it makes it "attack run" and puts out a large burn when turning around--trouble is the acceleration there was not even looking at the ballpark where inferred accelerations reside.
To put it simply, I am stumped right now, but I am fairly sure ion drives are more involved than we give them credit for.
