If you were designing a cockpit and wanted to relay positional data to the pilot, 3D audio would be a great way.
So my head canon is that the sounds are generated in the cockpit, for the benefit of the pilots.
this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2025
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I remember Wing Commander III having that explanation in the manual: sensors pick up what is happening outside the ship and simulate positional sound to increase pilot awareness.
Such an awesome game! I played that as a kid, I wonder if that's where this idea came to me from.
I still remember being in awe because of the whopping 4 CD-ROMS it came on, in a time where CD-ROM drives weren't even standard yet. Damn, I feel old now. 😂
It was so much ahead of its time. The storyline, the cinematic characters... I got a fighter jet joystick because of that game, sunk countless hours on it. Thanks for the memories!
Like electric cars having a fake noise for nearby pedestrians.
Star Wars is one of those franchises that depend on ideas like this. Thank you doing your part soldier! 🫡
It's been quite literally canon since A New Hope, aka 1977
Whether they or the fans came up with it is still a question though.
Gotta put the willhelm scream in there, but make it not too obvious.
But don't change it so much the nerds can't recognise it
To me the greatest dealbreaker is that they brought aerial flight mechanics into space. It makes no sense
There's good reason they forego realism in this aspect. Imagine watching a scifi movie where every scene where the camera is in vacuum is dead quiet.
The Expanse has 6 seasons worth of quiet vacuum. The battle scenes are epic and scientifically accurate.
The show is So accurate that they have weird scenes like this
Huh, I should rewatch it. I'm not sure I even noticed that these scenes are quiet. Maybe there's a sound track but no sounds of explosions etc?
The first scene in the new Star Trek was brilliant. Crashing sound effects inside the besieged ship, cuts to the outside, silence.
Screw that, Firefly was awesome.
BSG? Firefly?
This is what I want Every scene filmed POV in air, give me the correct sounds. Vacuum POV? That's silent
The sound of spaceships come from the same place the music comes from
Have you ever seen the "the cheese is under the sauce" meme video?
The mics are in the spaceship.
What about lasers going pew pew?
Do you understand that you need only 3-5 seconds to find a good enough realistic explanation for that?
Please explain
Spaceships do make sounds ..... inside the spaceship
Everything else on the outside is dead quiet
In the Star Wars novels (IIRC this was established as early as ANH) sounds are generated by the computer to help you keep track of ships around you.
Yeah that's a common justification it seems. Elite: dangerous also has the same one. When your canopy gets blown off it actually stops the sounds too (and there's a giant hole in your HUD because it's also responsible for that)
Elite handled its hard sci-fi really well. I was never taken out of the immersion due to lore or believability.
Well, that would be a god-level acoustic set.
There was a fan explanation (which I maybe saw somewhere in novels), that they sort of listen to some band in the clear like analog radio (in situations where binary-encoded communication is not available), and that working engines and shooting blasters make lots of interference there. Filtered enough to save the pilot's hearing and sanity.
I mean, that's similar to what you said, just better IMHO, cause sounds are not "generated", but derived from signals around.
I mean, they treat FTL as a commute.
In the EU that's a few days or weeks. As if in the movies that time were just skipped.
And doesn't contradict too much how it's shown in the movies, if it seems like more than an hour or two before they jump to hyperspace, and in hyperspace there's enough time for lightsaber training, then maybe it's a few days.
And then the Disney canon jumps between systems in minutes or seconds and has Han manually time an exit from hyperspace lol
Disney made a point of building an original Star Wars plagiarism based on the majority stereotypes, as opposed to fan stereotypes. So where the common stereotype and the fan stereotype would diverge, they deliberately chose the common one. Like the whole thing being about space wizards and pew-pew.
I think sometimes that maybe the "second generation", after the original creators get old or full of fans' shit, is usually not very talented, so all it does is grab money and take revenge.
I wonder sometimes if in the framework of that logic all KK was doing was taking revenge on Star Wars fans for upsetting George, and similarly all Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg and such were doing was collect power based on what Sun Microsystems mastodons and Unix fathers and such have done, and take revenge on the wide populace which didn't value it all.
As in - your typical fan of it all blames MS, Google and such for the way tech became shitty, while the tech bosses blame the populace for choosing shitty and making the good companies bankrupt, and think they are humiliating that populace deservedly. Similar with Disney Star Wars.
You don't even need the ship to have active acoustics, just that the other ships whizzing by using "insert sci-fi techno babble force here" affect space and matter around them in such a way that energy waves from that sci-fi force moving silently through the vacuum and turn into sound when they interact with the technology/structure of your own ship or spacesuit. Like a microwave generating sparks and a crackling noise across metal foil.
Ok, most trivial and naive one: the listener doesn’t fly in space with their ass naked. The listener is in the spacesuit, or ship, or something. And that suit detects other emissions (light for example). And then translated it to the sound for convenience. For easier orientation. I heard that even electric cars have a special sound emitter for pedestrians. Or those cars would be too quiet and dangerous.
In my mind we are just hearing the radiation, not directly but some system is converting x rays to sound, etc
Or any other kind of interference with the audio recording devices, like they did to create the lightsaber sounds.
maybe their thrusters are burning with air, or some other catalyst medium that propagates far as vibrational energy and we're hearing that?