Talk:Craft
OK! Well past time to theorize on the capabilities of X-Com's air force. The Interceptor, the fastest thing humans can build in X-Com's 1998, has a maximum speed of "2100".
As Arbitrary Game Balance Units that is obviously incalculable so I will never use AGBUs again. Instead, I will translate variations of English and Metric units into oh-so-fun Mach numbers - the speed of sound. In dry air with a temperature of 21 °C (70 °F) the speed of sound is 1130 feet per second, 1230 kilometers per hour, 770 miles per hour or 344 meters per second. (I know the Skyranger page says that its speed is in "knots", but Mach 1 is 2277 knots. That makes both craft subsonic. I'm gonna go change that right now.) As for the other numbers, in order of increasing speed...
2100 feet per second doesn't break Mach 2. Come ON! The SR-71 Blackbird(the current record holder for manned supersonic flight) was built in 1964, and it broke Mach 3! (Hmm... the F-100 Super Sabre broke Mach 1 only a decade earlier in 1953... The Roswell crash was in 1945... what if ALL jet aircraft are based on alien technology... Hey! Get that straight jacket off me!)
2100 kilometers per hour STILL doesn't break Mach 2.
2100 miles per hour doesn't break Mach 3. A single-seater pseudo-Blackbird after thirty years of development. Joy. Maybe it's realistic; that would make Lockheed about as good at R&D as another government contractor - NASA. Thirty years to build a better toilet.
2100 meters per second breaks Mach 6. Finally! That's around the flight regime you'd expect from "dual pulse detonation engines".
Thus, in meters per second, the Mach numbers of your craft in X-Com: UFO Defense would be;
Skyranger: 2.2
Interceptor: 6.1
Lightning: 9
Firestorm: 12.2
Avenger: 15.7
The UFOs clock in at;
Small Scout: 6.4
Medium Scout: 7
Large Scout: 7.8
Supply Ship: 9.3
Abductor: 11.6
Harvester: 12.5
Terror Ship: 14
Battleship: 14.5
I have GOT to get me some of these! Somebody call Roland Emmerich! I WANNA SEE THESE BIRDS FIGHT!
Tempting as it is to say you know nothing about anything, I'm just going to say that you have a hideously inflated idea of how fast these craft should be. The [Blackbird] was pretty much designed purely for speed at very high altitude (80000 feet in round numbers). At that altitude,the speed of sound is much much lower than at sea level (Density and temperature effects) and its absolute speed was around 1900 knots.
Since the knot or nautical mile is rather longer than a statute or land mile, a speed expressed in knots is 'lower' than that speed expressed in mph. The speed of sound is closer to 669 knots than 2100. So even taking the Interceptor's listed speed as being in knots, it is faster than the Blackbird and the Skyranger is supersonic.
In any case, if we want to get away from the game's arbitrary units, the best method is to time various craft as they fly between two given points separated by a well-known distance. Say, crossing the USA from east to west at given latitude.--Dumas 20:34, 28 March 2008 (PDT)
- I get all of my numbers from Wikipedia. But the description of nautical miles seems to have thrown me - not just a different unit of measure, but also a different unit being measured. And what do you mean "hideously" inflated? There's maybe one X-Com base per continent, yet interceptors chase UFOs clear across the planet. Hypersonic speeds seem to be the best way to define that kind of maneuvering - at the very least. Anyway, keep talking. Constructive criticism is why I started this discussion - I'm just a geek punching keys, and I wanted to visualize the kind of craziness these dogfights would be. --Kalaong 0:16, 29 March 2008 (EST)
The nautical mile is defined as 1852 meters, or one minute of latitude along any meridian (neglecting the funky shape of the Earth). A statute mile is somewhere around 1600 meters. For reference, moving at 2100 knots gets you about 35 degrees of latitude an hour flying north/south, which is rather more than a third of the distance from either pole to the equator.
You seem to be conflating speed and range. Sure, interceptors can go halfway around the Earth, but how quickly are they doing it? Unless we time a few of the buggers, this is just going in circles. The Skyranger takes hours to get anywhere and even the Avenger takes a while to get from, say, somewhere in China to Indonesia.
Edit: Just timed a couple short flights. A Firestorm takes one hour and fifteen minutes of game time to fly from Equator to Pole (I have a base in Africa that's close to the Equator). An Avenger makes the trip in one hour. 90 degrees of latitude (Equator to Pole) is 5400 knots, so I think that taking the craft speeds as being listed in knots is correct.--Dumas 23:02, 28 March 2008 (PDT)
- Better if you make a separate page discussing the real-life issues regarding X-COM's craft than to be adding/changing measure units to the craft's pages. Since the original game does not mention anything regarding which measure applies, extrapolating into reality should be kept separately, otherwise you're adding things to the original game. And my 2c for this discussion: Dumas's in game observations regarding the equator to pole travel time pretty much resolve the issue of which measure should be used. The fun thing is to try to figure out why X-COM would use subsonic interceptors. Several points could be made: dogfighting takes place at subsonic speeds, supersonic burns a lot of fuel (decreasing range), etc. Hobbes 07:18, 29 March 2008 (PDT)