Oi - It's Minbari, Not Kilrathi!

IMAGinES

Mongoose
Now maybe I'm missing a shared historical reference here, but being a Wing Commander fan, I couldn't help chuckling when I saw that the name of the Hyperion cruiser pictured on the cover of Babylon 5 Ship Plans: Hyperion is Tigerclaw.

Did anyone else pick up on that? :D
 
You're welcome, Sauron!

If I'm correct, it's actually a Wing Commander movie reference; the ship's name in the computer games was "TCS Tiger's Claw".
 
Considering how bad that movie was the only good cameo in the Bab 5 game would be seeingh a coffin with the Wing Commander directors name on it. ;-)
 
Wing Commander wasn't that bad, I quite liked it, at least it got the spaceflight mechanics of sub light travel reasonably accurate. Better ythan most movies do.

LBH
 
Well. :) It was an okay film, to be sure. It was just disappointing to us game fans; the games were actually better movies! :)

To my tastes, it was a mediocre flick with pretty good special effects. Shame about those Kilrathi, though...
 
IMAGinES said:
Well. :) It was an okay film, to be sure. It was just disappointing to us game fans; the games were actually better movies! :)

Yeah, but Saffron Burrows is worth watching, and I like the fighters.

LBH
 
Tal Hawkins said:
Considering how bad that movie was the only good cameo in the Bab 5 game would be seeingh a coffin with the Wing Commander directors name on it. ;-)

Well said. The games were cinematic and well thought out and the movie was well niether of those. It's almost in the same class as the Dungeons and Dragons movie but at least Wing commander didn't have a guy villain in lipstick.
 
Wing Commander wasn't that bad, I quite liked it, at least it got the spaceflight mechanics of sub light travel reasonably accurate. Better ythan most movies do.


the TCS Tigerclaw was a world war 2 aircraft carrier in space.


Wing Commander was a Carrier movie, and Sub movie in the same film ((I have always love space depth charges)) and come on...they push a fighter off the deck of the carrier IN SPACE, and it falls DOWN!
 
Crosis101 said:
and come on...they push a fighter off the deck of the carrier IN SPACE, and it falls DOWN!

You can just about excuse that (though let's face it this galloping turkey of a movie deserves no excuses - it just plain sucked) given that they obviously had artificial gravity, so who's to say the field doesn't continue past the end of the flight deck a bit (It would allow you to clear the deck in this manner. If the wreck didn't fall off the end, pushing it off the edge would be a Really Bad Thing, as it would merely be moving away from the carrier with whatever minimal momentum you could impart to it, and directly in the line of the fighters taking off and landing)..?

Why you'd do that grud only knows. I mean, why operate your flight deck in a gravity field and an atmosphere if you don't have to. Less energy needs be expended to "take off" for starters, plus you can stack the fighters anyway you want.

If you look at Crusade and the Excalibur, her hanger deck is clearly operated in this manner, and they also get it mostly right in the new Battlestar Galactica. The actual landing area of the hanger pods has no atmosphere and seems to be operating in a Zero or low G environment.
 
Oh my... WC the movie...
Frankly I hated it.

Fighters falling -down- in space?

Nothing compared to hand-loading a torpedo broadside and firing it at visual range!

And the whimpy "pilgrim" storyline - yeach!!!

And to replace the nifty "Rapier" fighter we know from the game with ugly "lets use some old fighter plane wrecks, noone will know" things... (especially when other movies and even TV series did better already

And the Kilrathy shop dying in the end because they are basically too space-short-sighted to miss THAT monster (however did they manage to explore space without crashing half their ships into planets and suns if their sensors are That bad?)

OK, so what if the Kilrathis ship CGI was basically acceptable. That's nothing against the rest of the movie!

I sometimes really wonder why a series of games with that good stories spawned such an pile of grabage that is the movie. Especially when so many others manage to do better...
I mean, the Intro to WC-II was a better movie then the whole WC - the movie!
 
2 points I hated in the movie.

Towards the begenning of the movie Devereaux yells at Blair calling him Leutenant then in the same sentence she calls him Leftenent (pick a country's rank and stay with it. Watch it again and you'll notice all the rank blunders throughout the show).

2nd Sonar and Hold your breath and don't make a sound when the Tigerclaw is hiding in the astroide belt from the Kilrathe. This isn't the Hunt for Red October...it's space for crying out loud. Sonar would be useless let alone making any noice on a ship.

Just my 2 thaughts. I did enjoy the movie even despite those things...heck I even bought it.

Gil
 
Gilvagor said:
2nd Sonar and Hold your breath and don't make a sound when the Tigerclaw is hiding in the astroide belt from the Kilrathe. This isn't the Hunt for Red October...it's space for crying out loud. Sonar would be useless let alone making any noice on a ship.

Sonar might work in soace, if the ships have an exhaust. As JMS points out in one of the B5 commentaries, the JPL guys told him an exploding ship would make a noise as the atmosphere expanded with the explosion shockwave. now I reason something similar would happen with any exhaust gases, and since all the engines in WC rely on ejecting mass, that means there will be a detectable 'noise' from the exhaust plume.

So Sonar would kind of work, but not in the manner suggested in the movie.

LBH
 
Crosis101 said:
...they push a fighter off the deck of the carrier IN SPACE, and it falls DOWN!

I thought I was the only one to notice that one. How about using the Bulldozer to push the crashed ship off the deck so it can fall down and away from the ship so the other fighters can land??

BS
 
lastbesthope said:
Sonar might work in soace, if the ships have an exhaust. As JMS points out in one of the B5 commentaries, the JPL guys told him an exploding ship would make a noise as the atmosphere expanded with the explosion shockwave. now I reason something similar would happen with any exhaust gases, and since all the engines in WC rely on ejecting mass, that means there will be a detectable 'noise' from the exhaust plume.

So Sonar would kind of work, but not in the manner suggested in the movie.

LBH

Sonar uses sound waves, in both active and passive flavors. In order for sound waves to move, there must be some kind of medium to propogate the waves. Also, the medium must be uniform and of a known density so you can determine the speed the waves travel at. If you know the speed and the time, you can get the distance. In space, even if you are in an area where there may be enough dust to propogate sound waves, it won't be of a uniform density, so sonar would not work in space. Radar, which uses radio waves that can propogate on into space, might be a more viable option.

BS
 
OK, the ranging aspect would not work in the same way as radar does, not from an exploding aircraft anyway.

Any passive sonar could be used, from 2 points on then hull, to triangulate position, as direction would be available on both measurements. And activesonar would not work unless in a gas cloud or other suitably dense area od space.

LBH
 
lastbesthope said:
So Sonar would kind of work, but not in the manner suggested in the movie.

Absolutely - only what you'd use is radar and pick up on the minute vibrations in the hull caused by interior noise.

It would have to be bloody sensitive though and over all your best bet is to look for the heat the ship was radiating, which is a passive rather than an active system;
 
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