I’m curious, what can prowls doorwings do exactly?
So I’ve seen a few different takes on the matter but I’ll explain my spin on what Doorwings do.
Blanket statement to say I’m relying somewhat on fictional sci-fi technology tropes to do what I want and spurn the laws of physics.
Essentially, they’re like a kind of Doppler Radar. Doppler radars function by sending out a pulse (a radio wave) and then waiting for the pulse to bounce back. Doppler Radars can use the time it took for the pulse to return to calculate stuff like distance of an object from the sender (in this case Prowl) or with multiple consecutive pulses and measurements, be able to outline the shape, orientation and velocity of an object.
Now actual Doppler Radars have a range of a few thousand miles, which is uh, a bit further than what I usually see doorwings being used to scan. Can they? Probably. But my Watsonian explanation for why Prowl isn’t predicting cloud formations or tracking incoming long range missiles is that having an acute kinesthetic sense of everything happening within 3,000 miles of you is a lot to be processing all the time. That and walls get in the way, so they’d have to tie him to the roof of the ship like a Christmas tree
So Prowl and other mechs with doorwings keep it to like, their immediate vicinity most of the time. This also means they’ve basically got a sixth sense that works in 360 degrees. If one really wanted to, someone with doorwings could go full ATLA Toph and purely navigate via radar, but that would take serious dedication.
As for the little flap flaps and twitches doorwings tend to do, it’s essentially a way to get a more thorough view of things. Getting more variety in the pings sent out and received, it’s kinda like leaning side to side to get a better look at an object without having to get closer.
Mentally, wing scans manifest as a 3D map of their surroundings. It takes an enormous amount of processing power to do so though, so these maps tend to be fairly low resolution. In the scene where Prowl is scanning the war room, all the soldiers appear as vaguely person shaped pixelated blobs moving through the space, with the definite walls and furniture much more clear.
Because they’re effectively sending out short range radio waves, any mech made with doorwings, mostly Praxian Enforcers, can actually “talk” to each other by sending and receiving these scanning pings.
It’s akin to Morse code with an additional range of notes to choose from. It’s technically not something they were designed to do, but culture is indifferent to the intentions of manufacturers. In other words, if you see Prowl and Smokescreen silently twitching their wings in the same room together, they’re probably talking shit.
Now, lore time. Why do Praxian Enforcers have these things?
My take on it based on lore I’ve gathered from elsewhere, is that it’s supposed to make them better cops (much like Tacnet). Praxian Enforcers (which includes Prowl, Bluestreak and Smokescreen) are Cold Constructed Cops made to serve the Functionalist government. And I get the impression there was more than one instance of some rich asshole going “Yeah that looks cool, add that to to final design.” While the R&D team tears out their figurative hair.
The idea was that a bunch of cops with built in Spidey Senses should be really good at chasing down criminals. If they’re on the road, it’s much easier to track where all the other drivers around them are. If they’re storming a building, having a way to instantly know where everything is in the room regardless of lighting, smoke or other obfuscations is ridiculously useful.
There’s two design flaws in that however. One, doorwings are a big flashy target, and because they’re effectively sensory organs, getting shot in the wing is a lot like getting shot in the eye. And unlike teeny tiny very protectable eyes, doorwings are huge panels that can’t even be fully armored because the damn things have to move to work properly. But hey, they look cool so the government officials who commissioned them are happy.
And two, just because you can sense everything in a 360 degree radius, doesn’t mean actually you’ll able to focus on every single thing happening within that radius. Doorwing passive scanning works just like how sight works with our actual eyes, most of our vision is unfocused except for a relatively tiny area that has our active attention. But unlike eyeballs, which can be pointed in a specific direction, wing scans can’t just bring one thing into focus at a time. Either your raising the resolution on ALL of your surroundings, or you’re figuring out what the thing is manually.
I have a lot of thoughts on how Tacnet functions as well, but that’ll come up in a future story.
Thank you for the chance to ramble!
