Scott Manley explaining the crackle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdCizNwLaHA

Making a video about a specific sound, talking through the whole (first?, hopefully) example.

The video showing the distortions from the shockwave off the jet are pretty amazing

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.

https://youtu.be/KbmOcT5sX7I?si=aYfzx3CScYnQYiqK

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.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220831190741id_/https://asa.sc...

"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."

The lead author of this paper is a friend of mine and an expert in non-linear acoustics, particularly jet and rocket noise.

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.