Gorton wrote:Right, thanks for the clarification, from an earlier post I got that impression somewhere
I'm aware that having thrusters on opposite sides of the wings helps turning speed, but the same effect is caused by having a thruster fire left at the back of the viper, and at the front fire right. I'm also going to go out on a limb here and say that the starfury requires significantly more thrust to move, as it has more mass.
Aside from that, if you were already moving significantly fast, I don't think a starfury could in fact turn and accelerate in a different direction (without pivoting the main engines into use) - I googled it quickly and all the fans say it can, yet when I go find video clips, the fighters turn themselves (very nicely, i'll admit) to the back engines. That's pretty reasonable, and as to why - those smaller engines on the wings are certainly not going to be able to provide enough thrust to counter the velocity they've already achieved due to those larger engines along the back, unless they're not going very fast.
Probably a fundamental difference in what the writers thought was required to fight - in bsg they moved fast, in babylon5, not so much
I'm done, btw . I'd rather leave the theorycrafting battles to people who care
Also, I really want more good scifi shows (
I appreciate the sentiment. No point arguing about things which are the subject of personal opinions.
The BSG Viper is a nice looking craft and I wont say otherwise.
Though when it comes to space manoeuvre this is where Newtonian physics comes into effect.
1. An object will remain in constant motion until acted upon by a force.
2. That force is equal to the mass of an object multiplied by its acceleration.
3. For every force there is an equal and opposite reaction force.
So what this means is that when a spaceship turns it's thrusters off it will not stop, but it will continue with precisely the same speed and heading indefinitely - until acted upon by another force. So it can continue moving in one direction while pointing it's nose somewhere else and both the Viper and Starfury have this capability.
Now there is also another tradeoff for the spacecraft designer, which is that to achieve the best acceleration you need a high thrust to weight ratio, and this means you need to be carrying a minimum of dead weight. The problem with the Viper is that it is using a completely different set of thrusters for attitude control, and when it is accelerating in a straight line, those attitude thrusters are doing nothing. They are dead weight - and this poses a problem for the Viper designer... If they make the RCS engines too small the craft will not turn fast enough. If they make them too big then they will be carrying a lot of excess weight... Unlike a civilian spacecraft, military ones need fast turn rates and therefore powerful turning engines.
The B5 Starfury gets around this problem by using the main engines for both attitude control and forward thrust... The downside of the Starfury is that by moving the engines away from the centre of mass like this the designers have also increased the
Mass Moment of Inertia (just like a flywheel). So that the craft now needs more torque to generate the same amount of spin. They have also increased the stresses on the airframe which means that the structure is probably heavier than the Viper.
Turning arguments aside, there is one critical difference between the Viper and the Starfury. The Starfury is capable of thrusting in any direction without the need for rotation. This includes the ability to apply retro-thrust. The Viper is only capable of thrusting in the same direction which it is shooting. For it to apply retro-thrust, or thrust in any other direction, this means coming about - which would likely mean that it cannot fire. In is a big disadvantage in manoeuvring combat.
One looks like a race car, with small silhouette and high speed . The other is blocky, turns on a dime and has more manoeuvring options. Impossible to say how these two fictional craft would actually perform...
