Posted by: sloanjh
« on: January 19, 2012, 08:02:16 PM »I know that I am new here (so, this section is not good to begin with), but I find a consistency problem (not the mechanism itself, but the physics).
In the 10th tutorial, we see how to design a beam warship. To do that, we need some researches as laser. The problem is in the description of the improvement of laser range. It's said that with an higher wavelength, the range of the laser is also higher (which is true because hence, we have less loss of energy with the distance). But, in the same time, we begin with infra-red laser, we upgrade it into a visible laser, next into a near ultraviolet laser . . . etc which is not a good thing because an ultraviolet light have a shorter wavelenght than a infra-red light.
Maybe, explane that we need more power to have greater range, and a laser with a shorter wavelenght is a result of this increase of power ? Or a mix between both explaination (with more power we turn the laser in ultraviolet, and to increase even more the range, we manage to turn it in visible wavelenght, for exemple) ?
Sorry if it is not in the good section, but i didn't see "physical consistency of aurora" topic, or something like this. It's not really usefull and necessary, but if you want the game to be even more reallistic we can begin with simple physic inconsistency
This is a typo in the tutorial - it should have said "higher frequency" (i.e. smaller wavelength). This has always seemed like reasonable techno-babble to me, although I admit I never thought "oh wait - there really is such a thing as a laser that might not behave that way". That being said, I suspect Steve has the sign of the effect correct - my intuition says shorter wavelengths are probably "better" than longer wavelengths. Even if you keep power and aperture the same, there's another subtle effect - dispersion (amount the beam spot has spread at a given distance). The dispersion should go like some function (I suspect linear) of (wavelength/aperture) - big apertures will lead to the beam staying collimated longer than small apertures. Since a beam with half the dispersion will require twice the distance to reach the same spot size as a reference beam, it makes sense for frequency effect to go as indicated.
Note sure how much of the above analysis went into Steve's actual decision process....
John