Very loud, bring ear protection! The crackling of the engines will make your entire body shake. Other than that just comfy clothes you can walk on the sand in. It's a real unique experience, you're in for a treat!
> The crackling of the engines will make your entire body shake.
I've never heard it IRL but I absolutely love this sound, also from back then when the Space Shuttle launched. IDK why, but it is just such a perfect sound to me. As if it were the best indicator of the tremendous amount of energy being released there.
There’s an entire portion of this that’s missing in the audio tracks from any launch I’ve watched on tv, YouTube, etc.
The deep bass notes go soo low and have this wild elastic ringing tonal quality to them. Like someone is playing a huge kit of koto drums or something. You can really start to hear acoustic dispersion effects as well.
I have generally been annoyed by the lengthy take off animations in Starfield, but the one thing I find satisfying every time I see one is that crackle of the engines. I can't think of any other game I played that would have this sound, so it immediately struck me as nice attention to detail.
The crackle of the air moving back and forth during a shuttle launch would be so fast and intense that the friction of the air (near the launch pad) would set the grass on fire.
That was such a delightful fact that I had to source it. Tragically, it is not true.
Gee, K. L., Mathews, L. T., Anderson, M. C., & Hart, G. W. (2022). Saturn-V sound levels: A letter to the Redditor. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 152(2), 1068-1073.
"While this peak level represents acoustic amplitudes that
would propagate nonlinearly to rapidly form shocks and
result in perception of jet “crackle” (e.g., see Gee et al.,
2016), will it melt concrete or set grass or one’s hair on fire?
It will definitely not."
When I was young I had relatives that lived near Heathrow airport in London. Whenever Concorde would take off, the windows in the whole house would end up shaking.
The total power output of Concorde was around half that of a 747, but for takeoff Concorde needed to use after burners - which I guess is the same mechanism at play here.
