Ori beam weapon effect should be

[busuan]

Piercing the shield, the hull, then the ship, leaving you cold dead in space.
No sound of explosion (there should NOT be any), only the EM shriek of the particle beams.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5a47t...arch=freespace

This is what a beam weapon should be like.

[2ndgenerationalteran]

uh, there is no sound in space. and that looks like the ori beam (sorta) but what it does looks like what the ancient satalite weapon did to the wraith hive ship

[4574]

if the beam in stargate looked like that, i think i could apply for the special effects job, i can do a better job that. mfg....

and the no sound part is also realistic offcourse but REALLY borring to hear no sound in space battles. No, gimme a less realistic sci-fi world but cooler to look at.

[Bragi]

No, there shouldn't be any noise in space.

And in 2001, Kubrick did the most realistic job for space travel in any movie or tv show.

Unfortunately, it's rather boring to have exterior shots of space battles with no sound. So we add great sounding explosions and TIE Fighter enginges (go baby elephants!) and Warp drive's powering up.

They're already breaking enough rules of physics with the Stargate itself, not to mention everything else. Having sound exist in the vacuum of space is nothing.

[DaCk]

Piercing the shield, the hull, then the ship, leaving you cold dead in space.
No sound of explosion (there should NOT be any), only the EM shriek of the particle beams.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5a47t...arch=freespace

This is what a beam weapon should be like.

Im sorry but has anyone ever heard the noise that EM makes??? Because i havent. There should be no noise whatsoever in space. And the Ori weapons did pierce the hull of the ship but THEN with the rapid decompression everything tore itself apart. Not to mention secondary explosions from within the ship itself.

[busuan]

Im sorry but has anyone ever heard the noise that EM makes??? Because i havent. There should be no noise whatsoever in space. And the Ori weapons did pierce the hull of the ship but THEN with the rapid decompression everything tore itself apart. Not to mention secondary explosions from within the ship itself.

The noise could be heard through someone's headset, eg. Sam's.
Or it could be like this, even better: the crew were shouting that all channels were being jammed/disrupted while watching the beam lightening up their shield then their hull. Fast decompression would not tear the ship apart; the ship does have blast doors.
To do the show, you can certainly make some assumptions, break some rules in physics. That doesn't mean you should break every rule; it makes the scence not convincing. In fact, one should break as less as possible.
I hope that's due to budget concerns only.

[Gilgamesh]

I like the solution used in Firefly. Have no sound in space (a la 2001 A Space Odyssey), but instead of dead silence, you have background music or the sounds from inside the ships before explosive decompression. You could also have radio traffic, and the background sound from that, like explosions, alarms, cries for help, etc.

I'd find that more dramatic than inserting phoney "sounds in space" like spaceships wooshing by, or "hearing" an explosion from an outside POV.

[PG15]

How many space battles did Firefly have?

[Tiret]

I like the solution used in Firefly. Have no sound in space (a la 2001 A Space Odyssey), but instead of dead silence, you have background music or the sounds from inside the ships before explosive decompression. You could also have radio traffic, and the background sound from that, like explosions, alarms, cries for help, etc.

I'd find that more dramatic than inserting phoney "sounds in space" like spaceships wooshing by, or "hearing" an explosion from an outside POV.

It's certainly un-dramatic to have a silent space battle. There are a few ways in which silence can be used for dramatic effect, but not repeatedly. I haven't seen firefly...I should like to see how they did it with only interior sounds and music. Until then I will have to say that I like my phony battle noises and will stick to them, as long as they don't sound totally canned. Although sometimes even primitive sci-fi noises can have their humor...

[Gilgamesh]

How many space battles did Firefly have?

It didn't have any out and out battles, except for a ground battle in the pilot. But they managed to make moments dramatic, such as when Serenity made a sneak attack against a space station with a "stealth" crash run (no lights, radio emissions, or powered flight corrections) onto an air lock. Shown from outside, Serenity crashing against the space station was silent. But inside the space station, all hell was breaking loose after the loud BANG and shakeup from the impact.

Or, when the control room of a web-capture salvage ship was shot out just before Serenity would have been caught. (The web-capture field would have fried everyone aboard Serenity, by the way.) The shooting itself was silent since it was done in vacuum, but from the POV of inside the target, you heard the results.

[PG15]

Yeah, I thought so.

Imagine, if you will, the Camelot battle without any weapons fire sounds.

[Gilgamesh]

Imagine, if you will, the Camelot battle without any weapons fire sounds.

Yes, I was imagining exactly that while writing my prior post. That's the challenge, isn’t it? How do you make a scene more realistic without losing drama?

I've seen the silent treatment done on a smaller scale in Firefly. I think at least some of the techniques could be applied to a scene like the Camelot battle and still maintain the drama. It would definitely not be something most people are used to, but that in itself could make things interesting.

Speaking of dramatic license, how about the rail guns firing in space? Unless every third or so bullet fired has little LED running lights, you would not see a tracer line of fire. Tracer bullets trace because they work in atmosphere. However, if rail guns, as a byproduct of the massively rapid acceleration heat up the slugs they fire to a near molten, glowing mass, that would make me a happy camper.

I don't have time right now to look through tapes for a recording of Battlestar Galactica (it’s late and my brain is going soft), but it seems to me Battlestar Galactica comes closer to a "silent space" environment. Most of the sounds are from an inside-ship POV. There are exceptions. For example, if someone fires maneuvering thrusters while showing an outside view, you hear the thrusters, although some claim can be made what you are hearing is how the thrusters sound from inside the ship. Same thing when weapons are fired.