The projectile would have to also have a warp-field generator to keep up with the missile tech and surpass it in usefulness.

Not necessarily. Dont forget missiles have an explosive warhead that can be detonated by a shot from an anti misile mystem. Allowing them to go faster than light both, hetps them to get to the target more quickly and avoid being shot down by a pesky droid sentry or what have you.

Also putting a warp generator on a projectile would essentialy turn it into a misile, because the driver would now have a propultion system of its own. Also I despite the great leap in technology they have I dont think that fleets fight each other from too great a distance. Shooting a black hole at someone even a sub luminal speeds is devestating, and how you would attach anything to a black hole anyway is anyone's guess.

I don't think the black hole weapons are black holes compressed in a projectile. They're just equipment that generates a black hole on impact.

You see, the whole point of having projectiles capable of moving faster than light is so that you can actually hit targets that are moving faster than the speed of light.

Mass Drivers fire mass (duh), and, thus, what it fires cannot move faster than the speed of light due to the laws that govern this universe. If it cannot be sent faster through real-space using a warp field, then it won't be able to even catch up with the target, let alone have a chance to hit it (also, without such a thing, the projectile wouldn't even be able to leave the warp field of the launching craft).

Same for the missiles, or rather the torpedoes near the end of the line.

Really, there's not much to keep the mass driver weapon from being deflected by another projectile being shot at it, either, if it supposedly moves at the same or slower speeds as the guided projectiles. It is, in fact, far easier to predict a non-guided projectile's trajectory and thus intercept using another projectile.

I'm just trying to work this out logically, and I'm not sure it's going anywhere.

I dont believe i spent 3 hours reading this stupid thread But here are some stuff i want to add. First of all the tech tree of GC2 is pretty large, but not very sound from scientific points. So it is a kinda free shooting, you can just add or recommend anything you want, say a mechanical hand that b-slaps other ships into embarassing end.

But i am an engineer and i would really like to see more sound weapon descriptions, and a system that gives you more than just linearly increasing damage, and smaller module sizes. (especially after discovering adamantium and such, which has some cool description telling you that you found an armor that does not actually exist etc. and all you get is +1 in terms of game mechanics, anyway...)

Sadly most things about science needs shit loads of assumptions of such magnitute that you wouldnt dare make about your wife of 30 years. But it is these assumptions that takes the science further and further and protect it from being entangled by stagnation. So we must accept the fact that science allows/needs assumptions (the first thing you do to solve an engineering problem is to write your assumptions to one side )

Thus science fiction tolerates even a bigger magnitude of assumptions, much much more actually. I really liked what M.B.M. told thru the thread, he is a kinda guy quite similar to myself i reckon (hammered into place with his xcom lore/love). He told everything in a very scientific and systematic way, very informative, but even he directly ACCEPTS a certain "Warp Field" This field causes the hard wired speed limits of the space/time continuum to waver as long as the field is in place, allowing normal thrusters to be able to accelerate a craft to FTL speeds. Niice. Very neat.
Guys at some point we have to admit we are geeks, we go attend star wars conventions, we know star trek, star wars lore as the back of our hand. Most of us doesnt know the movement equation of simple harmonic motion directly from mind, but we know what a shield harmonic is For us warp drives, teleportation, anti matter drives, phasors, deflector shields, positronic computers, these are real stuff, we just did not invent them yet.

What i really want to say is, SciFitific assumptions are needed if we want to enjoy games like GC2, and enjoy any product of scifi genre. The most basic facts we accept in this extended reality are stuff that has been generated by scifi books/movies and some stand still in place and at some point form the foundations of scifi lore/extended reality becoz of the fact that they endured a natural selection and has been found "SOUND" according to an "extended reality". Most of the stupid things though has been washed away with time - even Marvel is changing the all mighty gamma ray that is the answer to every question about Hulk and marvel universe, after all it was a couple of artists who put the foundations stones of another alternate reality.
I know it is getting boring, but this is the conclusion; we must be encouraged to put rules and make assumptions as long as they dont contradict with real physics rightaway and with that extended physics of our extended reality. SO:

1- no pressure/sonic wave propagation in void/vacuum
2- but feel free to introduce anything about hyperdimensional physics, psyonics and such, since their foundations are far from having been set.

This is my ideal idea of how science fiction as an active entity should work. I welcome any comments of course.

And about the sonic gunazullathingie.

Sonic propagation is equal to vibration in a medium. Vibration is created thru force transmission at an interface when the force is not constant and is not linear upto 2nd degree. If u push something very slowly and if you increase the force evenly along time there wont be vibration. Vibration is the way a system tries to settle/come to a stop when it has been introduced instant kinetic energy, like hitting something with a club, shooting with a bullet. Vibrating some object at random is just vandalizing it, there is no point, u can punch holes to it with bullets instead. The one and only point of using sonic weaponry/induced vibration to an object is making use of its harmonics that is the all famous "natural frequency" to bring it into the allmighty "Resonation" condition.
To make thing a little more easy to grasp, i need to tell what these shit are. Take a 2 lbs steel ball, tie it to the end of a 3 ft rope, tie the other end of the rope to the ceiling. Now pull the ball to one side a few steps and release it. You have vibration here. The time it takes for the ball to leave your hand and come back to the same point and stop there for a split second is called Period (T) and you can calculate it with this.

If i did not get it wrong when you put our values, the period is 1.931 second. As you see the result it completely independent from the mass you put. Just the ropes lenght and gravity. Period is what it takes the ball to make a trip and back, frequency is the number of back and forth trips it makes in a total of 1 second.

f = 1/1.931 sec = 0.517 (1/sec) = 0.517 Hertz

So this is vibration, and in ideal conditions, there is no friction and such, so the pendulum goes back and fort forever at that specific frequency. (say in space, with near 0 friction very thin frame structure etc) But in real world there is friction, and there is dampening. As long as we work in real world there is a dampening action always. That pendulum will stop moving at some point, thru friction with air, or internal friction of the rope or the nail that fastens the system to the ceiling.
Thus we have natural dampening at normal systems and thus when i hit a tank with a hammer the entire body vibrates and then comes to a stop. The displacement i make at one end, travels thru the body and exits from the other sides. As the pendulum when i hit the tank at the same point again and again (not necesarily with the same force), the sound frequency of the sound will be always the same, if i hit harder, the sound will be louder and it will take more time for the tank to stop vibrating. This special FREQUENCY, that is entirely dependent of the geometry and material structure of the object in question is called NATURAL FREQUENCY. It is a specific attribute of every object, it doesnt change (unless geometry and density changes thru temp change or something)

Now we know nearly everything, lastly we need to know what displacement is. Displacement is the amount of distance the ball in the pendulum travels from resting point when it stops momentarily at one side. When hitting a tank, the displacement is much much lower, thus the frequency is higher (our ears can perceive a specific frequency range, the movement the pendulum does is not audible for us, but it maybe for other beasts like elephants) Free mode vibration is a fairly complex subject (which i failed once in undergrad ) but what we are gonna use is one of the most basic concepts, RESONANCE. When you hit the the ball of the pendulum, it begins to swing with a its natural frequency. If you can keep hitting it just with the same frequency as it is ossilating, the displacements you get at each excitation get on top of each other, and when given enough time you keep the exciting the system at its natural frequencty the "displacement" will lead to infinity (this doesnt happen mostly thru physical reasons, such as the natural frequency changing when geometry changes dramatically).
This means you can rip some structure apart fairly easy if u apply the vibration with the right frequency to it.

This is all that is behind the sonic weaponry actually, because normally sound waves really dont carry much energy and they are far far far from being feasable as weapons of destruction, but just this resonance property makes it feasable.

And how do you induce vibration from afar thru void? Actually as i said even when there is a thick athmosphere in between it wouldnt work quite right with capital ships and such. For them you need to exploit other stuff like other remote force transmission methods like magnetism, or gravity. If there is a high charged particle stream in a ship, you can excite it from a far thru magnetic fields. Or you can use the old gravitons, since they are purely theoretical particles(?) you can ASSUME anything about them in a game Feel free to do that.

Wow, it has been a long post, sorry about the bad formatting, i am completely new to this forum business.

You see, the whole point of having projectiles capable of moving faster than light is so that you can actually hit targets that are moving faster than the speed of light.

Just before going to sleep, you have pointed an interesting point PaladinStorm. Since you shatter the commendment "Thou shalt not go faster than the light" yourself, you have to come up with an explanation yourself about how your induced warp field behave. All those debates about relativistic speeds (hence the name) are all about how you cannot exceed lightspeed, and proly why, and since it is the hardwired limit, what kinda freaking things occur when you turn on a flash light when you are going at the speed of light etc.

Since the old but handy "Warp field" warps the reality and lets us accelerate more than it has been hardcoded into the reality, what happens to you when that field ceases to exist instantly when you are at hyperluminal speeds. Feel free to come up with a good explanation, it is your fathers warp field after all

And setting fun aside, for the sake of story and sound lore, you have to come up with these stuff.

If a ship traveling at warp speed were to drop out of the warp field, it would probably move at FTL speed in normal space, and soon collapse into itself and produce a mini black hole that would become saturated(assuming the theory of singularity saturation is correct) in a short time. Well, that's atleast how I picture it.

Nice point. From a mechanical engineering point of view (I put this note here not to be liable for anything and look like a dumbass if a really physicist drops by to this thread ) I may say if we hold conservation of energy with one hand, totally energy of an object travelling at the speed of light is E=m * c^2 where m is the mass of the object and c is the speed of light (in which this case will be more than the speed of light as we know it). Since the known universe has a limitatition for the speed of the object, if it falls from say 10xc (10 times speed of light) speed to real space the energy must be balanced by the mass. Thus the mass of the object will grow 100 fold if it droppes to real space out of a warp field while travelling at 10xc.

I can easily say, if you use a dense material, put a warp field on it, and drop it into real space without decelerating first, there will be a helluva explosion. And in the case the speed drop is dramatic enough (note that the expansion of the mass is a function of the square of the "new speed" / "light speed" ratio. If the object is dense enough, like neutonite, then i guess the mass wont be able to expand fast enough, and rather than exploding will implode and form a singularity, thus a black hole (of questionable properties, will it be temporal, or permanent etc?)

My, I messed alot, but Hello Ranafuineluva. Glad to see you enter this discussion we're having here.

But i am an engineer and i would really like to see more sound weapon descriptions

You're an engineer that's pretty interesting actually. I guess you could call be an aspiring engineer, as I'm taking up engineering in college. I completely agree with you about the descriptions. I would also love to see the weapon systems as well as the other techs with more scientificly sound descriptions than they have now.

but even he directly ACCEPTS a certain "Warp Field"

Can you blame me though? It's not like I wanted to, but since the warp drive in game has no real explination as to how it works I kind of had to.

Guys at some point we have to admit we are geeks,

*raises hand* Yup, I admit it. I'm a geek and darn proud of it to.

I know it is getting boring, but this is the conclusion; we must be encouraged to put rules and make assumptions as long as they dont contradict with real physics rightaway and with that extended physics of our extended reality. SO: 1- no pressure/sonic wave propagation in void/vacuum 2- but feel free to introduce anything about hyperdimensional physics, psyonics and such, since their foundations are far from having been set. This is my ideal idea of how science fiction as an active entity should work. I welcome any comments of course.

I agree with you we have to make some assumptions in a sci-fi universe you can't avoid it. Sometimes those assumptions just turn out to be accurate ones in terms of science.

As for your long post about sound, I would pick it apart, but I agree with every thing that you said. I think I covered most of it in this thread as well, including the part about resonance. You have explained in in much more detail though as well as all in one place. It makes for a good referance point for any further discussions about sonics in the future in this thread or elsewhere. Thanks for that. The only thing I said different from you is that I called the Natural Frequency, the Resonance Frequency. Close I guess, but of course in science and engineering accuracy is key. i never did like the concept of gravatons though. Don't know why I just never liked them very much. I think that was the one with no mass and 2 units of spin as well... But anyway I think magnetics would be a better choise for the manipulation of the charged particle stream but thats just me.

Moving on to how the "warp drive" works. To explain the "warp drive" I want to use hyperdimensional physics to explain it, as to add a different point of view to your discussion about but thinking in extra dimensions is making my head hurt right now, so i'll come up with it later.

hehe, i just barged into the subject directly, as i said i am new to the forum business, i dont have the manners yet Hello everyone.