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Originally Posted by Taranis
I tend to argree spyone  anyone like to speculate a revised height for the shuttle or the bay ?  |
I'm late coming to this thread, but I'm getting ready to tackle the subject again, so I'll post what I find here.
Something else I've been skulling over:
The aft set of launch tubes are too far back to be as long as the ones in front (if the forward ones are more than a few viper-lenghs long). Here what I'm thinking. The forward three sets are for getting the squadrons launched from the maintenance and launch bay. They provide additional acceleration through some mechanism (magnetic or gravitic acceleration?) to get the fighters out at a higher relative velocity than they could achieve with turbos alone. Otherwise, why have the long launch tubes at all?
But the back tubes are different. These are rapid reload launch tubes. Pilots who need to refuel or re-arm in a hotly contested area might not want to take the time to take his ship all the way in, and have it moved into position to launch in the traditional way. Instead, they land, and taxi directly into one of these tubes, where they are quickly refueled and rearmed while they remain in the cockpit, and then they punch out at full turbo only (no assist). The only reason for the tube at all is to make sure that during combat all craft are launching along roughly the same vector, which eases traffic management.
Just a thought.
--JJR
