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What colour is the wedge?

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Re: What colour is the wedge?
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Mon Apr 13, 2020 7:44 am

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ZVar wrote:Again I'm reading just in time. From Echoes of Honor..

[snip]

So blue lightning, or blue sun. That's translation though and not impeller wedges. For wedges it's red shifted...


Thanks for the quote! Yes, sails are circular and visible, bleeding energy after use. That should be an awesome sight on TV.

For wedges, the excerpt you posted says that: a) light gets redshifted and b) it doesn't blur the image, just shift position, like a prism. Now, it was talking about shifts with relation to a punctual source, like a far away star; it's still possible that it shifts differently in different parts of the wedge, producing an aberration image.

Going back to redshifting: that means visible light goes towards red and red goes into infra-red, but it also means ultraviolet comes into visible. So redshifting does not imply you see red, since it depends where the peak of the light is and if there's enough coming into visible to still stimulate your eyes into seeing white. However, since F-type and bigger stars are less than 3.75% of all stars, you should see most stars red through a wedge.

Finally, there's such a thing as a magnifying grav lens in the observation blister. So the TV series producers could claim that their cameras have them too.
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Re: What colour is the wedge?
Post by kzt   » Mon Apr 13, 2020 12:07 pm

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ThinksMarkedly wrote:Finally, there's such a thing as a magnifying grav lens in the observation blister. So the TV series producers could claim that their cameras have them too.

"Accuracy" isn't something that usually dominates how a movie or TV director, cinematographer, or the set/prop/costume designer thinks about. It's not absent, but it rarely is all that important compared to other elements.

From the point of view of a guy who both makes historically accurate weapons and has a career advising movies about armor and weapons - why are movie swords always wrong?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mF1VFlCnLQ4
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Re: What colour is the wedge?
Post by George J. Smith   » Tue Apr 14, 2020 4:50 am

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I have always thought of the wedge like the shimmer off an asphalt road in the summer sun, you can't actually see it, only its effect
.
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Re: What colour is the wedge?
Post by munroburton   » Tue Apr 14, 2020 5:43 am

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Invisible, invisible, invisible.

The difficulty with bringing the Honorverse to a visual medium is that a lot of the interesting stuff should be invisible. Wedges, sidewalls, X-rays and gamma rays. To make it competitive with the Expanse, quite a lot of the book's mechanics have to go out of the window.

So wedge fields become white. I also think they could ditch the flat planes and use fields which look like a negative-curvature universe - a saddle shape, basically.

Image
[>=ship=<]
[above image, flipped vertically]

This would allow them to act a bit more like sails visually, bulging one way or the other.
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Re: What colour is the wedge?
Post by Joat42   » Tue Apr 14, 2020 11:07 am

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Wouldn't photons exiting the wedge at the back-edge be blue-shifted since they where accelerated through the whole length of the the wedge?

Ie, the edge of the wedge would most likely have a blue corona that gets stronger the further back you go - almost like Cherenkov radiation (which still needs a medium to be seen).

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Re: What colour is the wedge?
Post by cthia   » Tue Apr 14, 2020 1:17 pm

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munroburton wrote:Invisible, invisible, invisible.

The difficulty with bringing the Honorverse to a visual medium is that a lot of the interesting stuff should be invisible. Wedges, sidewalls, X-rays and gamma rays. To make it competitive with the Expanse, quite a lot of the book's mechanics have to go out of the window.

So wedge fields become white. I also think they could ditch the flat planes and use fields which look like a negative-curvature universe - a saddle shape, basically.

Image
[>=ship=<]
[above image, flipped vertically]

This would allow them to act a bit more like sails visually, bulging one way or the other.

This is a really cool notion. Turned vertically it truly looks like a sail. I wondered how sails would be handled in a movie before.

When books are adapted to film, they have to use special effects to grab ticket buyers. Which is why the question was posited in two parts. My visualization of red-hot or white-hot seems to have a high probability of being the actual colors.

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble. —cthia's father. Incident in ? Axiom of Common Sense
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Re: What colour is the wedge?
Post by drothgery   » Tue Apr 14, 2020 8:41 pm

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For visual effects purposes, I imagine you'd treat it (and sidewalls) like "shields" in other movie and TV SF and so invisible but translucent when something hits it.
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Re: What colour is the wedge?
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Tue Apr 14, 2020 9:48 pm

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drothgery wrote:For visual effects purposes, I imagine you'd treat it (and sidewalls) like "shields" in other movie and TV SF and so invisible but translucent when something hits it.


The cover art for the books never shows wedges, so sure, why not...
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Re: What colour is the wedge?
Post by Erls   » Tue Apr 14, 2020 9:55 pm

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So, a few thoughts:

I've always pictured the wedge as having an appearance similar to a very translucent fogged glass - that is a complete distortion of what is seen on the other side but minimal coloration. There may also be (and maybe should be) small, local golden flashes (think of an active thunderstorm) to indicate the power of the wedge crackling in space.

For graser/laser fire, I would think a combination of shades of blue would work. A deep, brilliant navy would be the most powerful graser, while less powerful lasers (missile defense clusters) could be almost aqua.

That combination would then allow for the oranges and reds for use in explosions, as the oxygen on ships reacts to the fire and generates explosions. It would also allow for greens to be used to signify a graser/laser hitting and disappearing into the wedge.

One benefit to the Honorverse is that there is absolutely zero "starfighter" scenes - that is your classic Star Wars X-Wing zooming around. The greater scope and scale of most Honorverse naval battles would certainly create a difficult challenge in terms of film, but if done right potentially groundbreaking. Think of watching a scene on the bridge of a ship leading up to the firing of missiles, with the camera then refocusing on the missiles being launched and "swinging" through space into the bridge on the other side, capturing the reactions and counter moves. The camera then could 'follow' a missile as it reaches attack range, with CMs striking other missiles in brilliant golden flashes, and then the CM lasers fire and the laserheads rip into the ship.

Of course, some of those early Peep engagements would be even better, with the close(r) range missile and energy fights.
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