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Originally posted by KarTaniK: **gee, i hope this does not turn into a flamewar.
second, there are diffrences between a rocket, and a torpedo. a torpedo does not use rocket fuel like a rocket does to propel itsself through space. a rocket propels its self by rocket fuel, or another variation of rocket fuel.
third, no hyperspace? no warpgates? unrealaistic? duh. of course its unrealaistic. having lasers in space is unrealalistic. hell, a space ship capable of space combat is unrealalistic. sheilds is unrealalistic. treveling to other star systems is unrealalistic. if it was realalsitic to accual space, very very few people would want to play it. it would be just way to boring.
**
It looks like the war is called off for lack of interest. But at risk at starting it again;
"Torpedo" was first used to refer to floating mines (Damn the Torpedoes!). Now it generally assumes a self-propelled weapon of neutral bouancy; it operates just under the surface of water and is usually thrust forward through the intermediary of a propeller. There is no inherent reason why an only slightly similar weapon (a hyperspace missle, for instance) could not inherit the name. After all, we rarely complain about the terms "Battleship," "Destroyer," and "Cruiser" which all have had specific definitions of type of sail and number of guns in the past.
"Rocket" means simply that it it propelled by thrust from a nozzle; a Lox/Lhyd engine, a solid fuel booster, and a tank of inert gas with the valve knocked off with a hammer are equally valid rockets. They are purely Newtonian and need no medium to operate in, much less to "thrust against."
The only unrealistic aspect of interplanetary travel is the economic one. Currently our civilization is having trouble exploiting anything past Earth orbit, and no independent, non-government entity has yet to launch a manned spacecraft into orbit, much less land it on Mars. Many authors find the transplantation of the personal car/long distance trucker/tramp steamer/luxury liner models to interplanetary travel unrealistic in the extreme.
Also, there are extrapolations of modern physics that do permit violatations of the light-speed limit. Again, the problem from the point of veiw of the writer is that these extropolations do not permit a small, humming black box in the middle of your SUV-sized spacecraft. They instead rely on polished conductive spheres several A.U. across, or upon stretching a super-dense neutron star into an infinately long cylinder then spinning it at near light-speed...
Oh, yes; in responce to earlier post, if lasers as weapons, or space-based weapons, are unrealistic no-one has told the US Air Force. Such systems have been tested (on airborne targets) and are still being worked on. And missiles (generally taken as a term to mean a rocket with guidance mechanisms, and these days, assumes a fairly high degree of sophistication in the onboard electronics), are a concept that is expected to hold up for a long time yet. Just like bullets are a really good way to deliver kinetic energy from a compact chemical power source on to a distant target (in terms of hand weapons, that is).
So EV is not based on anything physics finds that implausible. Where it is implausible, again, is in the social and economic assumptions, and given the right scientific developments those could become plausible again. In terms, however, of personally-owned FTL-capable ships operating on a "tramp steamer" analog, in line-of-sight dogfights, in WWII model engadgements...in the small number of planets, moons, and planetismals, the lack of (in most TC's), suns, the restriction of game activity to one plane, and the presence of sound as part of the play experience.... these are cheerful violations of a long and honorable history, from Buck Rodgers and 1930's pulp and Daily News cartoons, of Star Wars and Star Trek and all the rest of what has been recognised and labelled as "Space Opera."
Violation of a single rule does not give carte blanche. The cardinal sin of science fiction (and fantasy, too) is to say "Anything goes." Anything does NOT go. We are allowed certain licenses and these are usually well-established and long-accepted conventions (like the convention that people in an opera or American musical will burst into song at odd moments, or for that matter the stage convention that most people most of the time will happen to be facing the audience). For all the rest we are allowed, nay, encouraged, to give "realism" a voice and to try to find creative ways of delving into the rich resources of the real world.
------------------ "As a weapon of war it leaves much to be desired; but as a spectacle it takes much beating." -- a General observing the disastrous test of the JATO-assisted "jumping" tank.
Oh, yeah.
As a practicing theater sound designer I would love to have a more powerful engine in Nova. Not just support for higher-quality sounds, and different compression formats, but, say, support for background loops, for engine sounds, for spacial cueing (aka distant weapons fire has direction and depth), for event-triggered sound files, even for some fun sounds like tracking and homing sounds for incoming weapons.
I'd settle for support of higher-quality files, esp if implemented via Quicktime to permit a variety of formats and compressions. But there is a little law of bandwidth and storage that states that if it can be used, it will be used. We like to say that "Oh, the people with dial-up won't need to download huge sound files" but the sad reality is that they will. No designer of a plug-in will be able to resist making the biggest files they can personally get away with, and few will create a lower-quality alternative for the dial-up folk.