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Obviously, this thesis is much more in depth but it reminded me of this fun video titled, "Why Every Movie Space Battle Is Wrong! (Because Science w/ Kyle Hill)

Obviously, this thesis is much more in depth but it reminded me of this fun video titled, "Why Every Movie Space Battle Is Wrong! (Because Science w/ Kyle Hill)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ea89t9U2ZJk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ea89t9U2ZJk

ansible 8y ago
Yeah. As I learned more about science and actual spacecraft, I got increasingly frustrated with science fiction and anything related to spacecraft. But there is a spectrum of realism. For example, with Babylon 5, the fighters had inertia, and would often face in the direction of the enemy while travelling in another direction. In contrast, Star Wars spacecraft fly around as if they were aircraft in an atmosphere, which isn't surprising given that older war movies were an inspiration for its battle scenes. Later, I was reading about molecular nanotechnology, and then considered the idea that un-augmented meatbags like us travelling among the stars is absurd. From an energy expenditure perspective and practically perspective. Basically, if we have the technology to travel to the stars, we won't be humans anymore. And these days, I just look for shows that feature "good writing" in the sense of dialog and overall plot.
- sdrothrock 8y ago
  > which isn't surprising given that older war movies were an inspiration for its battle scenes To add to this, older war movies and actual war footage were directly used to make the storyboards and movement: https://www.starwars.com/news/from-world-war-to-star-wars-dogfights https://www.starwars.com/news/from-world-war-to-star-wars-do...
- pavel_lishin 8y ago
  Science fiction author Charles Stross agrees with you, re: sending canned apes into space.
- mirimir 8y ago
  Egan's Diaspora and Stross' Accelerando get it right about moving meatbags being unworkable. And William S. Burroughs was going on about that back in the 80s.
  - TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
    That doesn't make uploads any more workable. Allegedly, it's quite a hard problem.
- mc32 8y ago
  Problem is you need human-relatable protagonists and antagonists to get people interested in your film, so while realistically people in fighter spaceships in close combat makes little sense, it makes sense from an engagement perspective. If you just had autonomous systems "fighting" without any emotion, or being pathetic in any kind of way, it might be as interesting as watching Mars rovers --cool in some respect but very boring in others.
- Johnny555 8y ago
  In contrast, Star Wars spacecraft fly around as if they were aircraft in an atmosphere Maybe the spacecraft designers made the spacecraft have aerodynamic-like handling in space so pilots that honed their skills within the atmosphere could use those same skills in space battles.
  - koboll 8y ago
    It's more that ships fly around in a way that only makes sense if there is air to provide drag.
  - maxerickson 8y ago
    They would be slaughtered by pilots that practiced for space.
    - skookumchuck 8y ago
      Dogfighting with airplanes is all about energy management (if surprise has failed). Trading altitude for speed, and vice versa. This doesn't make much sense without gravity and atmospheric drag.
- philwelch 8y ago
  > Later, I was reading about molecular nanotechnology, and then considered the idea that un-augmented meatbags like us travelling among the stars is absurd. From an energy expenditure perspective and practically perspective. Basically, if we have the technology to travel to the stars, we won't be humans anymore. Ehhhh... If you place a lot of intrinsic value on being human, as most humans do, then the idea of sending non-humans to space is going to completely miss the point.
  - 3rdAccount 8y ago
    Eh, I agree with the post you're disagreeing with. It could be we develop some new physics soon and hopefully the engineering know how to take advantage of it. In this scenario we've developed space travel with a still primitive understanding of human biology. A far more likely option in my eyes (although still very unlikely as this is all speculation and opinion) is that we eventually develop a way to move into the transhuman era and robot ourselves. At this point space travel can use the traditional method of traveling < speed of light although this isn't interesting. Also, if you can upload your mind onto a server, I wonder how much value you'd place on exploration. Of course the singularity concept is just SciFi right now and probably just as likely as us developing wormholes, but it seems like it should be more likely given another century or two.
    - lsc 8y ago
      See, I think we could make generation ships with current-ish tech, and travel the stars, really really slowly. I mean, it would be a huge effort; it would be a really difficult engineering problem, and the ships would be easy to wipe out, but it would still largely be an engineering problem that could be solved, mostly, with the science of today (and a whole lot of time and money) I think I'd put "uploading" in the same category as 'faster than light travel' - lots and lots of breakthroughs in fundamental sciences need to happen before we get either one of those things. (FTL travel feels less squishy to me, but that's just because the problem can be defined in a less squishy sort of way. I see no evidence that it's actually easier) -
      - 8y ago
- henrikschroder 8y ago
  I liked the Gap Series by Stephen Donaldson, he gets zero-g and distances right. I can't remember if their weapons were energy or mass, but space battles essentially boiled down to rolling your ship to always present your best charged shields and damage absorbers towards the enemy. I'm also a big fan of the Culture series by Iain Banks, it's a lot of high-high-high-tech technobabble, but he gets some physical basics right, it doesn't matter if your ships is enormously more technologically advanced than someone else's, if they can project enough energy onto you, you will be vaporized. He also gets the timescales and distances correctly, because none of it runs on a human decision-making timescale, it's all sentient weapons and AI's, so a close quarters battle is over in seconds.
  - skookumchuck 8y ago
    > a close quarters battle is over in seconds Reminds of Hollywood sword fights, where it's clang-clang-clang back and forth and leaping about. A real sword fight is two moves.
  - zlynx 8y ago
    I liked that bit where the ship's Mind is replaying the battle in slow motion for the humans. As I remember the story, the actual battle was a loud bang and a violent jerk.
- JoeDaDude 8y ago
  > Star Wars spacecraft fly around as if they were aircraft in an atmosphere, which isn't surprising given that older war movies were an inspiration for its battle scenes. Indeed, the following youtube [1] shows how much the original Star Wars borrowed from old WW2 movies, in particular, from "The Dam Busters" [2], 1955. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNdb03Hw18M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNdb03Hw18M [2] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046889/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046889/
- 3rdAccount 8y ago
  Glad you mentioned Babylon 5. The Earthforce Starfury light fighters are what you're talking about. Basically the human stands up while in a space-suit in a tiny cockpit with two plasma cannons underneath. Four crossed arms stick out with an engine on each arm (not unlike an X-wing). In a dog fight you could actually see the pilots kill the engines on one 1/2 the ship to spin around and stuff. Really cool cgi for the mid 90's. The best part of Babylon 5 (besides the best writing in all of SciFi) was how asymmetric the races could be (makes perfect sense). Earth is pretty powerful among the younger races, but we're nothing compared to the mid-level Centauri Republic & Minbari Federation. We still have to spin mass around our ships for gravity while they've figured out a way around it. So you see the Minbari ships being beautifully designed on the outside and inside (proper living spaces), while Earth ships are almost like old Navy battleships but in space where everything is cramped and people have to where seatbelts in combat as it is so likely for the gravity to be unstable. The ancient races don't even really need to open jumpgates to go into hyperspace, they just phase and have 100% sentient organic ships.
  - arbie 8y ago
    > Babylon 5 [...] the best writing in all of SciFi This is where you lost me.
    - fsloth 8y ago
      Babylon 5 was a whole new ballpark when it came out in the early 90's. Good television is now everywhere, but when B5 came out, it was completely unconventional to have a continuous plot over five seasons. At the time "one plot per episode" was the accepted standard, and while the dramatic arcs of for example Star Trek, the Next Generation (ST:TNG) eventually became longer as the script writers got more confident, the arcs of B5 were supposed to last through the seasons from the beginning. The writing is occassionally weak, and thus it pales in comparison to more younger fantasy productions like Battlestar Galactica reboot, or Game of Thrones. But at it's time it was groundbreaking. The moments of epic were really good since they were preplanned and they could be foreshadowed much in advance. Hence moments like (spoiler alert...) ... Earth falling into totalitarian state, bombing of one of the alien homeworld, the Shadows overwhelming Centauri prime, etc, were nearly unheard of narrative high points due to the buildup to them over the series. There were lot of not-so-high quality filler episodes and so on, which make the series more of a cult classic rather than ... an obvious classic. And yes, I categorized space opera as fantasy :)
- koboll 8y ago
  It's fun to think about what a combat spaceship would actually look/function like. For armor, all you'd need is a large shield in front (similar to the movie Sunshine). You can turn to face inbound enemies quickly enough so that you'd only need to defend one angle. Enemies will try to maneuver missiles around it, which could be shot down with lasers behind the shield, making that an ineffective tactic. Then you'd have your own missile banks with which to attack the enemy's shield.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Most combat would be relatively long-range, and for that you'd like to have: - Guided, smart missiles for punching your opponent. - Lasers/point-defense guns for shooting enemy smart missiles. - Lasers for putting pressure on enemy radiators. - Some way of protecting your own radiators; be it clever ship design, large frontal shield, or mist generators. If, somehow, you'd end up in a short-range battle (short-range meaning your enemy can't move to evade much further than 1-10x ship size without pulping the crew in time it takes your round to fly to them), you might want to add a machine gun, or possibly a howitzer shooting nuclear-tipped shells on time fuse. A battle would be expected to last until one party manages to get a missile through (likely nuclear-tipped), or one party surrenders/disengages due to their radiators no longer being able to cope with the heat load.
  - pixl97 8y ago
    There's a series of science fiction books with space battles based on these ideas by John Ringo. While you hit the main idea, he fleshes it out in more detail, such has how to defeat the anti missile systems, and such.
- skookumchuck 8y ago
  > Star Wars has no logic nor reason to it, nor much of any internal consistency. It's loaded with deus ex machina. You've just got to pith your mind to enjoy it. For just one spectacular example: the rebels build a base out of a cave, and put a gigantic armored door on the front to protect it. It evidently never occurred to them to explore the cave to see if there was a back entrance? Which of course there was, as that was necessary for the plot.
- onion2k 8y ago
  Star Wars spacecraft fly around as if they were aircraft in an atmosphere, which isn't surprising given that... ... given that the spacecraft in Star Wars are all used to land on planet surfaces as well as fight in space. :)
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    So what, they all had computers simulating atmospheric flights even in space, to make it less confusing for the pilot? :).
    - onion2k 8y ago
      Sure. Let's go with that. :)
      - TeMPOraL 8y ago
        Having both sides agree to that and not cheat would be an unprecedented amount of coordination; you could probably write a sociology paper just from this observation :).
      - ansible 8y ago
        There's actually a space combat video game which tackles this issue head-on called Void Destroyer. You can pilot your spacecraft in "easy" mode, where it goes in the direction you point it. However, that severely limits its speed. You can also set it to be in full 6-DOF mode (like the Descent video game series), but that takes a lot more practice to do well, and frankly, the interface isn't suited to that. Mostly because with Descent, you are inside a cavern, so that you maintain a good sense of where you are and what direction you are going. That doesn't work as well in outer space, with less "landmarks". https://store.steampowered.com/app/259660/Void_Destroyer/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/259660/Void_Destroyer/
TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
That was fun. The Expanse got a lot of the those things right, and where it didn't at least made an effort to.
Retric 8y ago
He has some decent points, but still made some large assumptions. Rockets / drones / mines could be useful depending on assumptions such as how easy they are to detect. Having a laser or projectile hit your ship could make a huge noise etc. Both sides may or may not have appropriate weapons, so some battles could involve ramming or aiming the engine at the other ship etc. Even just dumping junk out an airlock on a close flyby might. Dissipating heat or solar pannels may involve something that looks a lot like wings.
- codesnik 8y ago
  Those large panels on TIE-fighters make much more sense as radiators, but in most materials they, sadly, are still "solar panels"
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  > Both sides may or may not have appropriate weapons, so some battles could involve ramming or aiming the engine at the other ship etc. Even just dumping junk out an airlock on a close flyby might. The thing missed in the video is that there would be no close flybys, unless both sides royally fucked up. The warring fleets would see each other across half of the solar system at least, much more if under acceleration. From there until the end of the fight, one would expect the space between them to be like one huge rave party, pretty much saturated with laser light. > Dissipating heat or solar pannels may involve something that looks a lot like wings. Yup, with current technology, that would be the most recognizable part of any ship, as all interesting functional parameters of the ship itself scale with radiator surface area.
  - Retric 8y ago
    > saturated with laser light You’re assuming these ships have weapons. That may not be the case at the start of a civil war where both sides just have civilian craft. Or what happens when two prospectors booth find a very valuable resource. Even today in an age of nuclear weapons and drones etc, people still occasionally beat each other to death with sticks.
yourapostasy 8y ago
A page I refer to now and again about space battles in terms of science as we know it today is Atomic Rockets' INTRODUCTION TO SPACE WARFARE page [1]. And even before that, I remind myself to read Stross' The High Frontier, Redux [2] and Space Cadets [3], and ponder upon our gravity well's sheer massiveness standing in the way of putting enough people into space to even hold an envisioned battle. We're struggling with the energy demands as it is as a species just to move ourselves terrestrially; thinking about moving around in space with the extravagant energy expenditures that accompany war seems a bit premature to me at this juncture. [1] http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewarintro.php http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewarintro.p... [2] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high... [3] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/08/space-cadets.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/08/space-ca...

ansible 8y ago

Yeah. As I learned more about science and actual spacecraft, I got increasingly frustrated with science fiction and anything related to spacecraft. But there is a spectrum of realism. For example, with Babylon 5, the fighters had inertia, and would often face in the direction of the enemy while travelling in another direction. In contrast, Star Wars spacecraft fly around as if they were aircraft in an atmosphere, which isn't surprising given that older war movies were an inspiration for its battle scenes. Later, I was reading about molecular nanotechnology, and then considered the idea that un-augmented meatbags like us travelling among the stars is absurd. From an energy expenditure perspective and practically perspective. Basically, if we have the technology to travel to the stars, we won't be humans anymore. And these days, I just look for shows that feature "good writing" in the sense of dialog and overall plot.

sdrothrock 8y ago
> which isn't surprising given that older war movies were an inspiration for its battle scenes To add to this, older war movies and actual war footage were directly used to make the storyboards and movement: https://www.starwars.com/news/from-world-war-to-star-wars-dogfights https://www.starwars.com/news/from-world-war-to-star-wars-do...
pavel_lishin 8y ago
Science fiction author Charles Stross agrees with you, re: sending canned apes into space.
mirimir 8y ago
Egan's Diaspora and Stross' Accelerando get it right about moving meatbags being unworkable. And William S. Burroughs was going on about that back in the 80s.
- TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
  That doesn't make uploads any more workable. Allegedly, it's quite a hard problem.
mc32 8y ago
Problem is you need human-relatable protagonists and antagonists to get people interested in your film, so while realistically people in fighter spaceships in close combat makes little sense, it makes sense from an engagement perspective. If you just had autonomous systems "fighting" without any emotion, or being pathetic in any kind of way, it might be as interesting as watching Mars rovers --cool in some respect but very boring in others.
Johnny555 8y ago
In contrast, Star Wars spacecraft fly around as if they were aircraft in an atmosphere Maybe the spacecraft designers made the spacecraft have aerodynamic-like handling in space so pilots that honed their skills within the atmosphere could use those same skills in space battles.
- koboll 8y ago
  It's more that ships fly around in a way that only makes sense if there is air to provide drag.
- maxerickson 8y ago
  They would be slaughtered by pilots that practiced for space.
  - skookumchuck 8y ago
    Dogfighting with airplanes is all about energy management (if surprise has failed). Trading altitude for speed, and vice versa. This doesn't make much sense without gravity and atmospheric drag.
philwelch 8y ago
> Later, I was reading about molecular nanotechnology, and then considered the idea that un-augmented meatbags like us travelling among the stars is absurd. From an energy expenditure perspective and practically perspective. Basically, if we have the technology to travel to the stars, we won't be humans anymore. Ehhhh... If you place a lot of intrinsic value on being human, as most humans do, then the idea of sending non-humans to space is going to completely miss the point.
- 3rdAccount 8y ago
  Eh, I agree with the post you're disagreeing with. It could be we develop some new physics soon and hopefully the engineering know how to take advantage of it. In this scenario we've developed space travel with a still primitive understanding of human biology. A far more likely option in my eyes (although still very unlikely as this is all speculation and opinion) is that we eventually develop a way to move into the transhuman era and robot ourselves. At this point space travel can use the traditional method of traveling < speed of light although this isn't interesting. Also, if you can upload your mind onto a server, I wonder how much value you'd place on exploration. Of course the singularity concept is just SciFi right now and probably just as likely as us developing wormholes, but it seems like it should be more likely given another century or two.
  - lsc 8y ago
    See, I think we could make generation ships with current-ish tech, and travel the stars, really really slowly. I mean, it would be a huge effort; it would be a really difficult engineering problem, and the ships would be easy to wipe out, but it would still largely be an engineering problem that could be solved, mostly, with the science of today (and a whole lot of time and money) I think I'd put "uploading" in the same category as 'faster than light travel' - lots and lots of breakthroughs in fundamental sciences need to happen before we get either one of those things. (FTL travel feels less squishy to me, but that's just because the problem can be defined in a less squishy sort of way. I see no evidence that it's actually easier) -
    - 8y ago
henrikschroder 8y ago
I liked the Gap Series by Stephen Donaldson, he gets zero-g and distances right. I can't remember if their weapons were energy or mass, but space battles essentially boiled down to rolling your ship to always present your best charged shields and damage absorbers towards the enemy. I'm also a big fan of the Culture series by Iain Banks, it's a lot of high-high-high-tech technobabble, but he gets some physical basics right, it doesn't matter if your ships is enormously more technologically advanced than someone else's, if they can project enough energy onto you, you will be vaporized. He also gets the timescales and distances correctly, because none of it runs on a human decision-making timescale, it's all sentient weapons and AI's, so a close quarters battle is over in seconds.
- skookumchuck 8y ago
  > a close quarters battle is over in seconds Reminds of Hollywood sword fights, where it's clang-clang-clang back and forth and leaping about. A real sword fight is two moves.
- zlynx 8y ago
  I liked that bit where the ship's Mind is replaying the battle in slow motion for the humans. As I remember the story, the actual battle was a loud bang and a violent jerk.
JoeDaDude 8y ago
> Star Wars spacecraft fly around as if they were aircraft in an atmosphere, which isn't surprising given that older war movies were an inspiration for its battle scenes. Indeed, the following youtube [1] shows how much the original Star Wars borrowed from old WW2 movies, in particular, from "The Dam Busters" [2], 1955. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNdb03Hw18M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNdb03Hw18M [2] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046889/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046889/
3rdAccount 8y ago
Glad you mentioned Babylon 5. The Earthforce Starfury light fighters are what you're talking about. Basically the human stands up while in a space-suit in a tiny cockpit with two plasma cannons underneath. Four crossed arms stick out with an engine on each arm (not unlike an X-wing). In a dog fight you could actually see the pilots kill the engines on one 1/2 the ship to spin around and stuff. Really cool cgi for the mid 90's. The best part of Babylon 5 (besides the best writing in all of SciFi) was how asymmetric the races could be (makes perfect sense). Earth is pretty powerful among the younger races, but we're nothing compared to the mid-level Centauri Republic & Minbari Federation. We still have to spin mass around our ships for gravity while they've figured out a way around it. So you see the Minbari ships being beautifully designed on the outside and inside (proper living spaces), while Earth ships are almost like old Navy battleships but in space where everything is cramped and people have to where seatbelts in combat as it is so likely for the gravity to be unstable. The ancient races don't even really need to open jumpgates to go into hyperspace, they just phase and have 100% sentient organic ships.
- arbie 8y ago
  > Babylon 5 [...] the best writing in all of SciFi This is where you lost me.
  - fsloth 8y ago
    Babylon 5 was a whole new ballpark when it came out in the early 90's. Good television is now everywhere, but when B5 came out, it was completely unconventional to have a continuous plot over five seasons. At the time "one plot per episode" was the accepted standard, and while the dramatic arcs of for example Star Trek, the Next Generation (ST:TNG) eventually became longer as the script writers got more confident, the arcs of B5 were supposed to last through the seasons from the beginning. The writing is occassionally weak, and thus it pales in comparison to more younger fantasy productions like Battlestar Galactica reboot, or Game of Thrones. But at it's time it was groundbreaking. The moments of epic were really good since they were preplanned and they could be foreshadowed much in advance. Hence moments like (spoiler alert...) ... Earth falling into totalitarian state, bombing of one of the alien homeworld, the Shadows overwhelming Centauri prime, etc, were nearly unheard of narrative high points due to the buildup to them over the series. There were lot of not-so-high quality filler episodes and so on, which make the series more of a cult classic rather than ... an obvious classic. And yes, I categorized space opera as fantasy :)
koboll 8y ago
It's fun to think about what a combat spaceship would actually look/function like. For armor, all you'd need is a large shield in front (similar to the movie Sunshine). You can turn to face inbound enemies quickly enough so that you'd only need to defend one angle. Enemies will try to maneuver missiles around it, which could be shot down with lasers behind the shield, making that an ineffective tactic. Then you'd have your own missile banks with which to attack the enemy's shield.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Most combat would be relatively long-range, and for that you'd like to have: - Guided, smart missiles for punching your opponent. - Lasers/point-defense guns for shooting enemy smart missiles. - Lasers for putting pressure on enemy radiators. - Some way of protecting your own radiators; be it clever ship design, large frontal shield, or mist generators. If, somehow, you'd end up in a short-range battle (short-range meaning your enemy can't move to evade much further than 1-10x ship size without pulping the crew in time it takes your round to fly to them), you might want to add a machine gun, or possibly a howitzer shooting nuclear-tipped shells on time fuse. A battle would be expected to last until one party manages to get a missile through (likely nuclear-tipped), or one party surrenders/disengages due to their radiators no longer being able to cope with the heat load.
- pixl97 8y ago
  There's a series of science fiction books with space battles based on these ideas by John Ringo. While you hit the main idea, he fleshes it out in more detail, such has how to defeat the anti missile systems, and such.
skookumchuck 8y ago
> Star Wars has no logic nor reason to it, nor much of any internal consistency. It's loaded with deus ex machina. You've just got to pith your mind to enjoy it. For just one spectacular example: the rebels build a base out of a cave, and put a gigantic armored door on the front to protect it. It evidently never occurred to them to explore the cave to see if there was a back entrance? Which of course there was, as that was necessary for the plot.
onion2k 8y ago
Star Wars spacecraft fly around as if they were aircraft in an atmosphere, which isn't surprising given that... ... given that the spacecraft in Star Wars are all used to land on planet surfaces as well as fight in space. :)
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  So what, they all had computers simulating atmospheric flights even in space, to make it less confusing for the pilot? :).
  - onion2k 8y ago
    Sure. Let's go with that. :)
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      Having both sides agree to that and not cheat would be an unprecedented amount of coordination; you could probably write a sociology paper just from this observation :).
    - ansible 8y ago
      There's actually a space combat video game which tackles this issue head-on called Void Destroyer. You can pilot your spacecraft in "easy" mode, where it goes in the direction you point it. However, that severely limits its speed. You can also set it to be in full 6-DOF mode (like the Descent video game series), but that takes a lot more practice to do well, and frankly, the interface isn't suited to that. Mostly because with Descent, you are inside a cavern, so that you maintain a good sense of where you are and what direction you are going. That doesn't work as well in outer space, with less "landmarks". https://store.steampowered.com/app/259660/Void_Destroyer/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/259660/Void_Destroyer/

TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago

That was fun. The Expanse got a lot of the those things right, and where it didn't at least made an effort to.

Retric 8y ago

He has some decent points, but still made some large assumptions. Rockets / drones / mines could be useful depending on assumptions such as how easy they are to detect. Having a laser or projectile hit your ship could make a huge noise etc. Both sides may or may not have appropriate weapons, so some battles could involve ramming or aiming the engine at the other ship etc. Even just dumping junk out an airlock on a close flyby might. Dissipating heat or solar pannels may involve something that looks a lot like wings.

codesnik 8y ago
Those large panels on TIE-fighters make much more sense as radiators, but in most materials they, sadly, are still "solar panels"
TeMPOraL 8y ago
> Both sides may or may not have appropriate weapons, so some battles could involve ramming or aiming the engine at the other ship etc. Even just dumping junk out an airlock on a close flyby might. The thing missed in the video is that there would be no close flybys, unless both sides royally fucked up. The warring fleets would see each other across half of the solar system at least, much more if under acceleration. From there until the end of the fight, one would expect the space between them to be like one huge rave party, pretty much saturated with laser light. > Dissipating heat or solar pannels may involve something that looks a lot like wings. Yup, with current technology, that would be the most recognizable part of any ship, as all interesting functional parameters of the ship itself scale with radiator surface area.
- Retric 8y ago
  > saturated with laser light You’re assuming these ships have weapons. That may not be the case at the start of a civil war where both sides just have civilian craft. Or what happens when two prospectors booth find a very valuable resource. Even today in an age of nuclear weapons and drones etc, people still occasionally beat each other to death with sticks.

yourapostasy 8y ago

A page I refer to now and again about space battles in terms of science as we know it today is Atomic Rockets' INTRODUCTION TO SPACE WARFARE page [1]. And even before that, I remind myself to read Stross' The High Frontier, Redux [2] and Space Cadets [3], and ponder upon our gravity well's sheer massiveness standing in the way of putting enough people into space to even hold an envisioned battle. We're struggling with the energy demands as it is as a species just to move ourselves terrestrially; thinking about moving around in space with the extravagant energy expenditures that accompany war seems a bit premature to me at this juncture. [1] http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewarintro.php http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewarintro.p... [2] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high... [3] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/08/space-cadets.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/08/space-ca...