Star Knight missile salvo experiment

[Charles Oines]

I'm playing around with a missile trail fx idea based on the stills I did for the Honor Harrington Ships of the Line calendars. The Honorverse uses reactionless drives for just about everything, so doing the usual hypervoxel smoke trail wasn't appropriate.

Xvid avi: http://irrationaldesigns.com/StarKnight_salvo.avi (534k)

[McGig]

Ah ha! The Charles Oines! Nice to see you around here.

[efritsch]

Damn! Those look cool! You should write a tutorial on how you did that!

[Eoraptor]

not bad at all, though I am reminded of the third law of thermodynamics "For every action..."

so what is keeping the ships in place against the back blast of their own missles?

[Aescapulius]

They're reactionless drives. They use gravity impellers to move through space. I always remember the books as referring to the visual effect of the impeller ring as the top of the vehicle going a strange red colour (redshift of the light) and blue underneath.

Hope that's slightly helpful.

[Charles Oines]

Never picked up on that detail, myself. I guess I could go back and reread when there's time. The missile trail's overall look when I did the calendar art was inspired by the novel covers.

As far as a tutorial, it'd be pretty short. What I'm doing here is actually really simple. See if you can figure it out

[mcooney]

Would you even see missiles fire?

I thought the space drives in those books was like a reactionless 10000G's acceleration. The missles would just blip out of view maybe with a single frame of them being extremely stretched/motion blurred. kinda like going to warp but not as colorful?

[Beowulf]

AH its nice to see more honorverse stuff here.. after my own failed attempt..
:-(
Looks real good. also i coudl see some justification to seeing the trail effect..
local gasses and dust super heated by the 10,000 G acceleration would leave a glow.. ...for a bit..

[Charles Oines]

Originally Posted by mcooney

Would you even see missiles fire?

I thought the space drives in those books was like a reactionless 10000G's acceleration. The missles would just blip out of view maybe with a single frame of them being extremely stretched/motion blurred. kinda like going to warp but not as colorful?

You know, I thought about that, and then decided that it wouldn't be interesting to look at, so I compressed the scale way the hell down. If I kept to the stated scales in the book, I could animate every battle in the books by panning across an empty starfield

After I did the first calendar, someone asked me what the missile trails were. I told him they were the molten remains of the launch mechanism.

[Aescapulius]

Okay, got the band here.

Missiles are capable 46,000 G acceleration (prior to the advent of multiple stage missiles), over 180 seconds, before the impeller drive burns out. That works out as roughly six million kilometers of powered flight time, or just over (rounded down) 33000 Kps at full velocity, unless my math is terribly bad. But the average accel rate (from complete relative standstill, and the equivalent of a straight run from the tubes without course change) is 183.3 kilometres per second squared.

In other words, ****ing fast.

The only time you'd be able to actually see these things is before they start to accelerate, so just when Star Knight starts pumping them out. They'd then practically disappear to the human eye.

Perhaps calculate a time key when the impeller drive goes on, where you momentarily see a red and blue glow (perhaps lense flares?) before the missile goes bat-hell-out-of. It'd look like warpspeed, but it's the best I can come up with.

Hope this helps.

For reference, I used the wikipedia article Weapons Technology in the Honorverse for my suppositions. If you find fault with my math (which I admit is terrible by any standards) please tell me.

Also, here's reference for the Impeller drive's red/blueshift effect: Impeller Drive