A thought on MGLTs

[Ender]

I've been pondering the acceleration stats for SW for a bit now trying to see if I can hazard out a way to make MGLT translate reasonably to Gs. The WEG speed system is based off MGLT/12.5=WEG score, so if there was some way to work with it that would be nice. Unfortunately this is not the case - too many ships with wildly different accelerations have the same value. Then I got thinking - what if this isn't a value of linear acceleration, which varies wildly, but of rotational acceleration, or some other measure of turning. We know from previos analysis that an Imoperial Star Destroyer should be able to pull something like 13,000 RPM based off engine positions, but it doesn't. If this is due to the limits of the acceleration compensators for something other then linear acceleration that would make sense - afterall, it is a lot easier to explain constantly applying force in one direction then adjusting it all over, and if you do one would certainly not expect the force applied to be equal. This would also explain similar ratings - the same stock model of acceleration compensator installed in fighters would have the same limit for non linear acceleration. As in, "good for 1 million Gs linear, 5000 Gs in any other direction", thus explaining the same values. MGLT would be a measure of manuverability, not acceleration. This would also make sense in the contest it is used in games.

In that vein, I looked at some of what ships should be able to do and the limits observed of acceleration compensators. While they should not be spinning like tops, the accelerations they pull while turning should be close to what they can do linear. So then I had an idea. With the MGLT people always talk about MeGaLighT, like that means something. What if the M was for Milli? Take for instance the X-wing's rating of 100 MGLT. If it means Milli, then 1 MGLT would be 300 m/s^2. So with a rating of 100, it could do 3,000 G's of rotational acceleration. This is very close to it's linear acceleration, so again it would make sense if this was tied in with acceleration compensation, and it is close enough to the linear value that we would not really notice a difference.

It is late, that was a more or less random though. Opinions?

[Illuminatus Primus]

I don't think you can make something that never meant anything mean something. You eventually add so much "fixing" and "corrective interpretation" that you're changing it to mean what you want, rather than using it as true data.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

The trouble is the physics here. In theory, the only upper limit for a space craft is the speed of light and the craft can continue accelerating forever until it hits relativistic speeds. But WEG does not cater to this and neither do the X-wing games, unless we say there are retrothrusters that slow down the craft and so forth.

[Connor MacLeod]

are you guys sure that Ender is referring to the WEG/Video game usage of MGLT? THere was also the old ILM charts that originally used MGLT.

I believe Ender's idea is to interpret the chartt as lumping"speed/manuverbility" into talking about the same thing, ie the "non-linear" acceleration stuff he was talking about.


I should note that in the video games (especially XvT and IIRC XWA) MGLT was for some reason used as both a measurement for speed AND acceleration, so...

I am not sure about the inertial damper bit though, wouldn't gravitational influences/dangers occur more than just linearly (say, perpendicular to the ship.)

[Batman]

I am not sure about the inertial damper bit though, wouldn't gravitational influences/dangers occur more than just linearly (say, perpendicular to the ship.)

Not at the values we're talking about, at least not unexpectedly. Naturally occurring sources of gravity in the thousands of gs category are usually quite visible from a goodly distance away and easy to avoid.

And if it means milli, 1 MGLT is 300km/sec, not metres, meaning approximately 30,000gs, and thus 100MGLT would be 3 million gs, a value to my knowledge never depicted anywhere in Wars.

[Connor MacLeod]

Ender probably meant MGLT means "micro", not milli. 150 MGLT would be around 45 km/s^2, or close to 5000 gravities.

Of course what would the "G" in MGLT stand for? Gravity?

As for the inerttial damper thing, I'm still wondering. For one thing, wouldn't inertial dampers be important in protecting crews from the lethal effects of things like collisions, weapons striking or exploding against the ship, or recoil? AT the energies SW vessels operate at, the acceleration could be quite significant.

Besides which, if you can "angle" inertial dampers in one direction, why can't you in others? changing the "direction" of effect of a gravity field isn't unkonwn to star wars (repuslors and tractor beams, for example.)

[Ender]

1) Yes, I screwed up Milli and Micro.

2) I went with putting it down to the limits of the interial compensators because otherwise I can't think of why this would be the case - the range of angles that the engines can thrust at is sufficient to far exceed these values. It is an artificial limitation to shoehorn it basically.

3) OTOH, if the vehicles were limited to a rotational acceleration equal to the gravities of their MGLT ratings, it would certainly explain the "dial it down to 95%" thing they do. 95% of 100 Gs means the pilot can experience a maximum of 5, which would give them a fell of the craft.