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The Physics of Space Battles
An anonymous reader writes PBS' It's OK to be Smart made this interesting video showing us what is and isn't physically realistic or possible in the space battles we've watched on TV and the movies. From the article: "You're probably aware that most sci-fi space battles aren't realistic. The original Star Wars' Death Star scene was based on a World War II movie, for example. But have you wondered what it would really be like to duke it out in the void? PBS is more than happy to explain in its latest It's Okay To Be Smart video. As you'll see below, Newtonian physics would dictate battles that are more like Asteroids than the latest summer blockbuster. You'd need to thrust every time you wanted to change direction, and projectiles would trump lasers (which can't focus at long distances); you wouldn't hear any sound, either."
no one can hear you explode.
Go check out the GoG site for the two i-War games which feature "correct" space based combat.
Good old games, that were overlooked at the time.
I seem to recall that the Starfury of Babylon 5 got the physics (more or less) right.
Short bursts of thrust to get around? Wrong! Space is big... very big. Getting around a solar system would take days.
No fireballs in space? Wrong! Spaceship occupants need atmosphere.
Close in naval battles are a no-no? The is the distances lasers might be effective.
OK so we have long range battles... They say sci-fi lasers aren't possible but rockets are? It would probably be much easier to evade a rocket in space (a rocket that will probably fly past you at a crazy speed as it's course corrections have to fight inertia).
...I can tell you another thing about space battles: you don't see anything aside from a few tracks on a computer screen. If you have a telescope pointed in the right direction at the exact right time you see a very unimpressive and quick flash.
The ranges, timing, and velocities involved are far too great for human perception.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Actual space battles would be extremely boring to watch. It would all take place at such distances that nothing could really be observed very well or viewed as a whole. Assuming energy / laser type weapons, it's purely a matter of how sensitive and accurate the telescopes are that identify the enemy ships and direct the weapons where to fire. Stealth and cloaking would be where the real arms race would be.
Better known as 318230.
Demonstrating the physics of space fighters with Kerbals in them:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Book's almost 40 years old and is still spot on...
http://www.amazon.com/War-2080...
Poul Anderson, The Star Fox
Larry Niven, Protector
C.J. Cherryh, Downbelow Station
I can see room for fighters if individual weapons capable of damaging capital ships are made small enough to be carried on them. Or if the cumulative effect of several fighters hitting the same target is equivalent. This makes the reasonable assumption that capital ships cost many, many times more than fighters, of course, who cares if you lose ten fighters at a milliion credits each if they take down a capital ship worth a hundred billion.
Also they'd offer advantages in terms of maneuverability and just plain old being hard to hit due to being smaller. Will they be human piloted? Doubtful, unless humans have managed to engineer themselves to be able to withstand stresses similar to what a machine can deal with, and that's possible. Unmanned drone fighters would have to be mostly autonomous as well, which leads to a whole new vista of electronic warfare.
So why have capital ships at all? Long range transport, also perhaps accelerating to speeds which make fighters useful before they launch, planetary bombardment, that sort of thing.
came pretty close to getting it right. Among more mainstream SciFi space content, they got it as close to right as I've seen. Constant thruster usage, projectiles, no such thing as "up", silence outside of the vehicles.
My favorite notion of space battles came from reading Asimov's "Lucky Starr" series at the library when I was a kid. I just remember one scene where it describes the hero firing a ball bearing with compressed air at another craft, then waiting...
The main problem with lasers is the AIR diffusing them. Obviously, in space they would work incredibly well! Focus isn't a big problem. Sure, if you go far enough then the laser's focus is a problem but if you made a better laser, it would go further. Also you'd want to ideally focus them at the target for maximum damage.
That said, they don't fly like projectiles-- but star trek handled space pretty realistically; especially considering the time period. They purposely called lasers, phasers to avoid such problems. Being tv they had to do sound... but much of the trek sounds are from inside the ship... I'm sure they were fully aware-- after all, they even designed the ship with some thought-- the deflector dish on the ship was to literally deflect atoms away since they were moving so fast it would be a problem. It didn't bother with aerodynamics unlike just about EVERYBODY else.
the beginning gives the impression the newer series of BSG had the space battles closer to reality than anything else. I think they just gave a better warp drive / FTL effect and JJ Abrams stole it for the new Star Trek. (though I do like the twilight Zone effect before the flash!)
Of all the technology problems inherent in doing battle with ships in space, I think the easiest might be "learning to focus lasers a little better." Given the inherent advantage of using a laser over a traditional projectile (mainly, speed in acquisition of target), the military that develops that technology first will win.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I remember seeing something a few years back that made the case that Ship to Ship space battles would be fought by AI Drones. Due to the extreme 3D maneuverability of small craft with thrusters , humans wouldn't stand a chance against machines capable of making advanced tactical calculations in milliseconds. Whether or not projectiles would trump high powered energy weapons would depend on the sorts of shielding and materials in use to create spacecraft with. However, a rapid fire rail gun does seem like it would be ideal for close quarters combat and require less energy to penetrate shielding and armor. But perhaps more exotic ammo than slugs would be more useful, imagine a round that on impact would release rapidly replicating nano-bots that eat through the ship's hull until there was no ship or deliver an EMP to disable the systems.
My first encounter with realistic space battle physics was with Antares Dawn: a great book by Michael McCollum... Great stuff.
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"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
Play the totally retro, and super fun, Asteroids arcade game and glimpse into the crystal ball...
People love watching these exciting battles in sci-fi movies with colorful explosions, fast moving space ships and witty remarks. Then they come home and talk about it and about how the ships were all moving as if they were in the atmosphere instead of in space. They think, what if those movies had more realistic physics? Wouldn't it be neat to think about what movies would have been like with greater realism? Yeah! Then some buzz-kill points out that if it were real people would be dying, children would loose their fathers, the pilots of damaged ships would have horrible deaths, and we should all be ashamed of ourselves for even thinking about it.
Said Robert Duvall with his dying breath.
Why has hollywood butchered the reality periscopes in submarines? Answer that and you will have the answer to space battles depiction.
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The idea behind the video is awesome, but the execution stays too shallow for anyone actually interested in science.
I'm no physicist myself, but from what I can tell, David Weber's Honor Harrington series of novels does a pretty good job of getting the physics right. Most battles are missile duels, energy weapons are powerful, but short-range, and when they develop a means of giving missiles multi-stage drives, it changes the game significantly, as they no longer have a single burst of maneuvering speed and then come in ballistic; they can accelerate at their target, burn out the first stage, coast in ballistic for many thousands of kilometers, and then activate the second stage for final maneuvering.
The writing is, in my opinion, readable, but not stellar, and he has much too much of a fascination with the French Revolution (to the point that one of the characters is named Rob S. Pierre) and that era in general, but I'm mildly enjoying reading through the ebook versions of the series (after having gotten them out of the library once, then purchased the most recent one, which had a CD with the ebooks of the rest on it, a year or so ago). I do find that I'm skimming large amounts of mostly irrelevant blather this time around, though ;-)
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
It is both modeled on Napoleonic Navel Fiction while at the same time being physically accurate withing the constraints of its sci-fi universe. Accelerate at full speed for an hour in one direction, well then it will take you an hour to come to a stop. Long trips at high fractions of the speed of light have shorted subjective shipboard times. The light speed time lag in sensors and communication plays significant tactical and strategic roles in almost all the battles.
If you love space opera or Aubrey/Hornblower and you like accurate physics then you definitely want to read the Harrington series by David Weber http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
-jon
I was very disappointed in this video. As a stimulant to begin a conversation, it's not entirely worthless, but I expected a few actual examples of plausible scenarios.
From PBS I expected a well researched topic and a linear progression through the history and facts of the topic. It ended up being some random ADD gibberish from a forum of random thoughts on the topic. There were no coherent thoughts on what such battles would actually be like.
Forget all the fancy futuristic weaponry and just figure out their prefix code to lower their shields.
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewardetect.php#id--There_Ain't_No_Stealth_In_Space
Project Rho explains that in detail.
If you cannot move faster-than-light then your engines will give you away every time.
There was a crappy remake of Lost in Space with the actor who was Joey in the "Friends" TV show. I remember that their space battles tried to be a bit more physically realistic. Of course, they had human pilots where we'd probably have computerized drones, since drama demands actors on the screen. But, the craft was a sphere and only had reaction thrusters to swivel around its center of mass and fire its main thrusters and/or weapons. It had a front/back mainly because the pilot faced out along one axis and got spun around like a ball turret gunner.
You hear everything that makes your cabin(with the air inside) vibrate.
So you probably can hear the shockwave of a nearby explosion, as micro fragments hit your hull.
My first encounter with realistic space battle physics was with Antares Dawn: a great book by Michael McCollum... Great stuff.
All three books in the series (Antares Dawn, Antares Passage and Antares Victory) are excellent with Newtonian-style in-system travel and battles. There are the usual sci-fi tropes of shields though.
As an aside, Michael McCollum was an engineer by trade and worked on the Space Shuttle Main Engines.
I recommend all his books but the Antares Series and the Gibraltar Series are my personal favourites.
In war-thinking, the general idea is to "destroy" the enemy. In space all you'd have to do is stop their ability to thrust in any given direction, and they're just an object flying through space, waiting for another mass to alter it's course. Essentially destroyed. So EMPs seem to be the weapon of choice here, no?
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
Missiles travel very, Very, VERY slow (in space). Even if they are under constant acceleration.
Lasers travel very, Very, VERY fast. But they lose energy/focus over space-type distances.
So it comes down to how well the writer understands economics and what technological advances they are postulating.
Not to mention WHY there is a war in the first place if both sides have that kind of technology available to them.
The answer to "why ain't it realistic?" is: Rule of Cool.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse-square_law
Energy weapons in space all have the same problem. The distances involved mean that they get real weak real fast.
At best they'd be useful in a fixed-site-defense scenario. Such as putting them on moons to defend against incoming ships.
But then you have the problem where your defeneses are not manoeuvrable. So asteroid bombardment becomes an option.
I would guess they will turn out more like battles between submarines. Whoever gets detected first loses. And one hit and you're dead.
If you're going to have reaction drive style thrusters for maneuvering, you're going to run out of fuel very quickly, dissipating mass, unless your thrusters are thrusting out little bits of mass at VERY high speed, in which case they could be used as weapons themselves. (Sci Fi writer Larry Niven came up with the idea of a reaction drive as a weapon, google the 'Kzinti Lesson' for more info.)
I think it would be interesting to have space battles where several fighters were somehow connected to each other via some sort of tractor beam, so they maneuvered by transferring momentum between each other instead of dissipating mass into the vastness of space; they might look a bit like bolas circling each other but with quick changes snapping in and out as they went in to battle, or maybe they would be tethered to a mother ship, somewhat like World War II aircraft carrier that sends out figher planes to do the fighting. The mother ship would have enough mass to let the fighters seem to be free to zap around easily.
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("Cough Cough") I wrote an unpublished Sci Fi Novel (I did send it to a bunch of publishers at the time, over 10 years ago), where interstellar travel used 'draggers'. There was no faster than light travel so it took years and years to go between even nearby stars, (The travelers themselves would be in an accelerated frame of reference so it wouldn't be so long for them.) In the novel it took a long time to set up a system between two solar systems, similar to the way it takes a long time to set up a railway between two cities, but then you could use it very efficiently. A vessel would attach itself to a dragger, and be quickly accelerated (that's the hard part, dealing with the sudden accleration that would flatten everything against the back wall like you were in a super cream separator), the dragger, much more massive than the vessel, would be slowed down some, but then, at the other end, as the dragger wheeled around a star, the vessel would transfer it's momentum back to the dragger and slow down to become part of the other solar system.
The thing about conservation of momentum is that it means the center of mass of a closed system doesn't change. If two solar systems and the draggers going between them were a closed system, then the center of mass would shift as the vessel moved between one and the other, but, if the vessel returned to the original system again, then the original center of mass would be restored, and the energy used to move between them could be recycled, plus there wouldn't be reaction mass being spewed out all over the place.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
The only two "giveaways" would be the heat signature from its power source (not just propulsion, but life-support) and whatever it accidentally occults as it moves across the background of stars. The heat can be drastically reduced by towing the power source a long way behind the main craft and having it very, very dispersed so the Watts per square metre of I.R. are very small. The occultation problem can be reduced by choosing a path that stays away from the galactic plane.
So most battles would be ones of sneak attacks and defensive fire. It might be possible to devise some sort of A.I. mines, or even simply fire a cloud of sand in the general direction (assuming the relative velocites of target + sand are high enough, that could be all that's needed).
However, I have a feeling that most "wars" in the future, whether in space on on Earth, will be economic in nature and "fought" over decades rather than wham-bam shooting battles.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
If you're going to swallow the idea of FTL drives, tractor beams and shields -- among other things -- then it's not really that much of a stretch to swallow the idea of inertial control, too. Which would make such battles not resemble a game of asteroids at all.
As for sound, presuming your vehicle maintains atmospheric integrity, you'd hear anything that causes the the craft's atmosphere to be jolted into motion. Debris hitting your vehicle, the stress caused by a sealed compartment being ruptured, people screaming when they get fried, crushed or otherwise insulted as a consequence of direct or indirect battle damage or loss of, for instance, inertial damping, equipment failures and power supplies having problems. You would also hear something if a force field of any kind was imposed upon your vehicle in such a way as to deliver any kind of uncompensated-for energy in mechanically coupled framework(s) producing direct or indirect vibrations in the audio range. And furthermore , presuming a ship has sensors to detect things like the energy outputs of other vehicles as they maneuver, seems to me that converting that to audio as a handy sound cue/warning would be hardly any trick at all. Just as one example.
Likewise, perhaps *we* can't focus a laser today, but that's not an inherent limitation of lasers even by today's known physics, that's a limitation of our technology, so that objection is kind of dead on the doorstep, so to speak. Not that a visible future beam weapon is necessarily carrying its punch in the form of light anyway. Could be just a side effect, or an aiming aid. This is the future, we're talking an imaginary scenario resulting from science and technology we don't presently have and so may speculate upon (using current knowledge... pretty boring... we can barely get off the planet's surface, much less engage in space battles... that's why most SF has at least a few pure fantasy elements in it.)
And along the lines of what we accept and what we don't, if you are blase' about the idea of a magic camera floating around your space battle and instantly changing perspective from A to B to C, perhaps it's just a little bit silly to complain about, for instance, a whoosh, or what "lasers" can do. That's entirely outside of what might be realistic in terms of what the movies subjects are up to.
So yeah, it's ok to think, but don't let someone else do your thinking for you. If there are space battles as depicted in most SF(fantasy) movies, the rules as we know them right now have long since been trashed, so there doesn't really seem to be any reason to worry about it.
All of the above is why I can really enjoy Star Wars, Firefly, Trek, etc, btw. Even though I'm fairly well grounded in how we think things work at present.
I have more trouble with obvious errors that don't take into account technologies we already have. For instance, in Red Mars, some of the characters "hide" from satellite surveillance by moving over long distances in a large hollow rock (or perhaps a thing that looks like I rock, I forget), something we would spot in an instant *today* by the simple expedient of image subtraction; Take two shots under the same or similar conditions but separated by time, align them, and subtract them. Everything that's in the same place turns to black; anything that has moved will be bright. This is *trivial* surveillance technology, and has been in use since *at least* the 1970's. And the kicker is this would work even better on Mars than it does here -- thinner atmosphere. Caused me a few snickers, that one did.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The post and the YouTube video are just click baits, no real content or information there. Same goes for other videos of the author.
I remember the sci-fi show Earth and Beyond having pretty good physics for space battles. It was all physical weapons too.
.. is the deadliest son of a bitch in space! https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The reason no one does realistic space battles in movies is that they would violate people's intuitions just to be incredibly boring, at least if you're trying to show the battle. On the other hand, it would be easy and require little/no cgi to actually make a realistic space battle video, but you'd definitely want to focus on the humans at their consoles rather than on the battlefield. It would be little different than a submarine combat video, I would think.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
One of the earliest video games was also one of the most realistic in terms of gravity and movement: Spacewar.
Table-ized A.I.
Any colonization of Space would drop the population density. With out a dense population you cannot support a large military. So you have two scenarios, a very local one and a distant one. This is much closer to the Paleolithic then to any modern or near modern history.
The local one would be like what we have today. If everything is one polity then you have police functions. It there is more then one polity then you have militaries. The Blue and Green colonies of Mars fighting over something. What they are doing is trying to change the nature of how power and resources are controlled by the polities. This is some sort of permanent reshuffling. You have to remember that the instability of the Middle East is driven by large, poor, young, male heavy populations.
In a distant scenario you get hit and run tactics. Mars colony wants the ore that Europa colony has, so it launches a raid. Grab the ship and go. It doesn't try to change the nature of Europa's or it's own polity. This is what you see for most warfare in most of human history. This means a totally different kind of technology and tactics.
I tend to think that Firefly got it most right. Space Wars are Civil Wars and the military exists to maintain the status quo. Fighting will take place within the Polity.
I had been doing development of a true space action game for quite a while. One of the things that I wanted to do is make is realistic, but the fact that people are so taken in by Hollywood's version of reality that it became almost impossible to do. Every one that I allowed to play the game became annoyed at how things worked. They expected their ships to speed up, slow down, turn left or right, go up or down as if it were an aircraft; explosions in the void of space need to be heard, etc.
And none of that accounts for the vast distances that are simply mind boggling. Light speed?? 'Warp 10?' Forget it unless you want to sit for a decades to centuries to travel from one location to another. Think more of Warp 10,000. Not much fun.
After four months I decided to follow the status quo. Shortly after that we gave up as making a realistic game was our agenda and we had fooled ourselves into believing that reality is as good as fantasy.
The most unrealistic thing in space operas is the notion that the human crew could do anything in terms of gunnery or navigation better than a computer.
Even worse is having the computer count down when to take a shot, and then have a human insert a random second or two while they manually operate the control.
Is there a good site for space battles animations? I used to go to spacebattles.com but they haven't added any content in many years.
You guys are forgetting the inevitable deployment of the most powerful weapon in the Universe: Laser Cats!
I recommend The Lost Fleet book series by Jack Campbell to anyone interested in realistic space battles, that take into account relativistic aspects and the speed of light. Also the 90's TV show Babylon 5 nailed newtonian physics, but the ships engaged in close battle for the sake of visual entertainment. You can see Starfuries and White Stars strafing like the Asteroids video game.
You read comic books and eat Cheetos, don't you?
Ask the Nazi scientists what happened when they threw away Einstein's model of physics in WW2 and came up with their own unique physics paradigm.
Oh that's right, that information is suppressed and now Nazis run America through technical blackmail. See project paperclip.
If we are to ever advance we need to stop pigeon holing ourself to Einsteins precious.
The usual problem of warfare is getting the enemy to fight.
Paradoxically, you may want to send up up flares saying "here I am come get me."
> image subtraction
blink comparator
Clyde Tombaugh used one to discover Pluto in 1930
It wasn't new then.
After the first missile blows your airplane to pieces, just how many more were you expecting to be able to survive?
Or were you actually referring to mammal battles?
Unfortunately space combat is all but inevitable, humans are a long way (probably thousands or hundreds of thousands of years) from outgrowing our stupidity as the events of the last few decades make quite clear. It definitely won't be anything like Star Trek/Star Wars but some form of combat is likely, either that or we're going to become extinct on this planet. A few shows/Anime have tried to imagine what space combat would be like (Babylon 5, Starship Operators, Planetes, etc), but most forsake some level of reality for story telling (sound effects for example). As with most things it will probably vary with the technology & tactics of the time. At times it will probably be stand off battles with groups of large ships pecking away at each other from a distance with railguns/energy weapons. A few decades later it might be stealth battles with smaller individual ships sneaking around trying to locate the opposing ships or decimating the other sides resources. A few decades later it might be long range missiles. Each side will come up with a weapon and the other will counter it and vice versa.
Poul Anderson, The Star Fox
Larry Niven, Protector
C.J. Cherryh, Downbelow Station
Niven nailed it in my opinion, battles took years, often waiting days to see if anything happened.
"think of it as evolution in action"
Where there are people, particularly in large groups separated by distance (and by proxy culture), there will be war. The harshness of the environment or emotional and physical costs to the soldiers, history has proven, is irrelevant.
Combat ships will be largely unmanned, with several (for redundancy) manned "overseers" nearby to give the drones a sentient strategic advantage. Remote oversight wouldn't be able to respond quickly enough due to communications lag, although the overseers would be in two-way communication with more distant officers coordinating the combat groups general strategy.
Assuming the technology to efficiently and compactly generate incredible amounts of power has progressed equally with all other fields relevant to space colonization, energy weapons would be favored over more conventional chemically-propelled/detonated ordinance like bullets, missiles and bombs. Conventional ordinance requires mechanical fidelity and precision to fire, is limited in quantity to due to the mass required to be effective, travels slowly over great distances, may be easily impeded by other ordinance or energy weapons, suffers from intertia and can result in friendly fire if it is disabled, misses its target, or is fragmented by defensive countermeasure. Energy weapons reach their target nearly instantaneously, may track their target for sustained, precision delivery, and use only enough energy to obtain the desired effect. Their vector can be controlled non-mechanically, allowing sensors to maintain a lock on a rapidly and unpredictably moving target. They may not be impeded by other energy weapons and travel too quickly to be countered by dynamically-deployed mass-based countermeasures.
The precision and accuracy of combat drones' movement and energy weaponry combined with the tiered progression from automated drone to human overseer would, with the exception of any extreme tactical choices by central command, product a general lack of chaos that is atypical of conventional battles. The primary focus would be to edge out the opponent by obtaining slight defensive advantages through technological superiority, use of unique environmental factors (planets, moons, stars, gravitational or radiological fields, asteroids), the purposeful introduction of unpredictable or chaotic elements (literally gambling that the increase in chaos will be favorable), or psychological tactics such as deliberate attacks on civilians, propaganda and public (broadcast) executions and torture.
The bottom line is that less people would die. Once the enemy drones have been decimated there's really no reason to go on slaughtering the general public. Once that happens the first few times, history will keep the losers of the future in line outside of the inevitable (but manageable through surveillance and information control) insurgencies.
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Why have a battle in space anyway?
You need to work backwards (and the forwards again) from that to get an answer that isn't some variation on an old-fashioned boy's pirate adventure on sailing ships.
To do a little bit of middle-school logic ... since space is so big (spacy), the likelihood of individual ships (much less fleets of ships) meeting in space is impossibly unlikely, unless they arrange to meet. And even then, unless they arrange to meet at the same vector of motion (i.e.: speed and direction), any encounter will last only a fraction of a millisecond. Long distance missiles will find it hard too, and even short distance missiles will find it hard to collide.
What's more, in order to determine what kind of defensive measures you can take, you first have to imagine practical offensive measures. In short, what is there in space worth building offensive measures against ... in particular, what is there in space that you can find to blast that makes building the blaster worth it?
For the most part, the stuff in space that's going to be findable and worth building a blaster for is going to be closely associated with human habitats that are too big to be maneuverable. I.e.: planets and stuff in orbit around planets. Anything that can move will probably be too hard to find, unless it blazes with radiation (heat.)
Another question to answer is that of the purpose of the blasting. Do you simply want to deny the thing? That'll be relatively easy to do with most structures in space. Kinetic kill with rocks (lots of rocks), or nearby nukes would do that. Planets will be harder. However, if you want to take possession of the thing being blasted, that'll be hard to do with structures in space (and easier with planets - provided you have bring along your own methods for getting on and off planet.
I'm not so naive as to think warfare in space is impossible - just that it isn't going to look like a Rudyard Kipling novel. Without anything but speculation to go on, our story-tellers are letting the demands of the narrative to dominate.
Someone needs to write an Eve Online client in the form of a KSP plug-in, sit back, and wait.
You hear the EMP "ringing" YOUR hull.
Didn't Babylon 5 had pretty realistic combat and ship movement.
Even some NASA folks were interested in the Star Fury designs, as I recall.
Ad Astra Games makes a tabletop wargame called Attack Vector: Tactical that features 3d Newtonian movement and detailed interactions of lasers, projectile-firing coil guns, submunition-dispensing missiles, nukes, decoys, and point defences. Reaction mass, power generation, and heat radiation all get tracked too for added detail. I can't say it's the easiest game I've ever played but I like it and it's definitely mentally stimulating . Cool "realistic" ship designs too.
How do these scientists know what will be realistic?
If you make the analogy with ocean going vessels, and naval warfare, humanity is at the stage of making a small raft with logs and rope, and gently pushing it out onto a lake, hoping it wont fall apart. If we can't make spaceships well enough to even vaguely contemplate a space battle, how can this lot possibly know what is realistic to expect in some far future space conflict?
This isn't science, it's futurology.
Unlike most fictional versions of space war, the real thing will likely be a one-hit, one-fight battle, simply because spaceships are typically sensitive machines that don't tolerate damage too well. Even an armored space battleship would still have weaknesses, namely in whatever it uses for sensing and aiming.
In a battle scenario where missiles or even lasers were used, these sensors and other equipment would likely take on significant damage and immediately be rendered inert. The attacked ships might be so deaf or blind they might be unable to fight back even if they wanted to. Repair facilities would be weeks or months or years away, and spare parts probably not an option given how long it takes the ISS crew to plan, train, practice, and actually execute even simple repairs.
It would not take a formal battle to accomplish this either, merely a first salvo surprise attack of some time, perhaps a surprise only in that the target didn't see it coming until it was too late rather then a significant sneaking operation. The attacker would be able to do this at a huge distance and maintain their own safe condition at the same time, so it would present little risk to them to try it. Which means they would be that much more likely to give it a go.
So in summary, it will be easy to damage enemy ships at the start of a fight, there will be little consequence to doing so, and there will be no way for the losing side to repair and resume the fight. Thinking as a military commander, it would be much better to keep forces on the planet where trading bullets or bombs results in significant tactical opportunity to change the battle. No commander would like a battle where one salvo ends it. There is no fun in that. There is no tactics in that.
Who wins comes down not to planning or anything valued by traditional military colleges but instead because a factor only of who fires first and perhaps has the best results hitting a target.
Sig for hire.
...in "Lost in Space" 1998 at the beginning of the movie. Physics just like for a free form flight.
Suppose Mars declares space war on Earth. What is the most expedient method of defeating the enemy? Well planets are huge, and slow, and predictable - and all his civilians live there. Launch a massive cloud of interplanetary nukes at his population centers and wait until he is dead or surrenders. Hopefully your point defense system is good enough to avoid the same happening to you.
Suppose Ship A declares space battle on Ship B. What is the most expedient method of defeating the enemy? Launch a cloud of nukes in his general direction that run cold until near enough to detect a heat signature. Unfortunately, missiles are an engine and a warhead so your much more complicated ship can't outrun them (more mass), and is almost assuredly doomed. Fortunately, he's doomed as well - the time it takes his missiles to hit you is a matter of days. More than enough time for you to launch an equivalent salvo in retaliation before you die.
The only time you'd see SPACE COMBAT like mentioned by the video is a major power bullying some nobody country who can't retaliate in kind. Like what happens today.
what happened when they threw away Einstein's model of physics in WW2
They missed the opportunity for inventing the nuclear bomb and turning the outcome of WW2 over.
If you are going to send a projectile, shape it in to the "hopeless diamond" and cover it in Radar Absorbent Material. Think F117.
Radar does not help, spot the black thing in space.
I remember the first time I saw the scene of an Earth Alliance "Starfury" fighter being pursued by an enemy. Rather than pull the typical "immelman" in atmosphere free space. It simply fired thrusters to rotate 180 degrees, and shot the enemy behind it as it continued to drift at speed.
Because unlike most science fiction shows, B5 was aware of physics - that an object at rest remains at rest, but an object in motion remains in motion.
=)
Most timely intercept geodesics would result in extremely high relative impact velocities...you don't even need missiles embedded in your cloud of the flak. The impact from even fairly small objects would probably be catastrophic. Just make sure the the target passes through your cloud.
I am no laser scientist, however I think much of the issues with lasers is that of power consumption, in that in order to get something useful a lot of power would be required. If one is willing to presume more less easy space travel, and the monumental energy expenditures that would require, applying some of that to the coherency of a laser would probably be trivial by comparison.
In the Gene Autry and Buck Rogers serials, the "Space Ship" sounded just like a DC-3, the major airliner back in the day.
Also the "laser" weapons sound like machine guns
Always liked in BSG the detection of radioactive missiles inbound...
Though I liken the effect you describe as detailed in Star Trek Voyager I think, which profiled "Skipper" Torpedoes. Of course in the TV show, it used cloaking technology, would pop into detection, adjust course, and re-cloak. Though I expect the same would be true that anything would only really be detectable during burn, but once coasting might be pretty much invisible until another burn sequence is required.
without having watched it yet I call bullshit on projectiles trumping lasers. you would need anti projectile thrusting to avoid launching yourself off course. and if by the time this matters, if lasers cannot focus long distance then somewhere along the line our science severely fucked up lens technology.
Babylon 5
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closest thing i've found to realistic is how Chris Roberts is implementing his space physics, fun first but without completely throwing realism out the window https://robertsspaceindustries...
J J Abrams gave real physics a nod in the 2009 reboot - did any of you notice?
SPOILER ALERT!
During the initial battle scene with the Enterprise, one of the torpedo hits causes a section to depressurise. As a hapless crewmember is blown out into the void, the soundtrack goes silent to reflect the fact that sound doesn't propagate in a vacuum. Even the music stops. Just for an instant. Then dramatic license takes over again and we're back to Hollywood physics.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
I read something a while back about the degree of focus you'd need with a laser to be able to do significant damage to a target in a short window at ranges in the thousands or tens of thousands of kilometers and the thinking at the time is that you would require something like gravitic lensing (which implies control of gravitational fields) to get the kind of focus that would make that possible. I am unsure if modern science has advanced to make that perspective incorrect, but there was math to back it up at the time.
It is unlikely we'll use any form of kinetic projectile at significant distances. The amount of reaction mass that would have to accommodate a manouvering projectile would largely kill that idea and a strictly ballistic launch still raises the issue of hauling around the projectle mass on your space platform at a cost in reaction mass. Of course, if you have magical reactionless thrusters, then you may of course freely ignore many inconvenient aspects of actual physics.
The best interpretation of space battles in the short run likely involve orbital, near orbit, or orbit-to-ground (or the reverse) engagements near planetary bodies (or other 'points of interest'). There, ranges can be from the few kms out to about a couple of thousand kms at the furthest, more often being in the tens or low hundreds of kms. This limits the reaction mass required and makes targeting feasible with optical or other sensor systems available today if coupled to a decent computer. At shorter ranges, kinetics might be feasible (as missile warheads or small short-ranged craft armament). Lasers would be an option assuming we can solve the 'delivered power' issue with sufficient focus and energy density. Presumably there are some railgun options or possibilities for bomb-pumped lasers and for some particle weapons as well. EMP weapons may be possible, but the issue is that creating a good directional EMP with any sort of range is tough (power falls off rapidly) and contact hits in space at any distance are non-trivial for projectiles or effects like EMPs or exploding nuclear weapons.
Stealth is not going to be much use shortly. What we can do with optics and infrared already pretty much rules it out. All you have to be is a few fragments of a Kelvin off of the stellar background and you can be picked up. And hiding a thermal signature by some techniques like sinking the heat internally or attempting to radiate it away in other directions is a) both very technically difficult and b) hard to do without detection while also c) making your stealth perhaps directional and d) definitely making it only work for a short time before your thermal countermeasures are unable to continue operating effectively. [I have several friends who work with NASA and other space programs, one of whom is a specialist in such sensor systems]
Fights will tend to occur where you would naturally have congregations of assets (both military and 'of interest to protect or as targets') which means that planets and perhaps planetoids/asteroids might be sensible places. The fights there can be reasonably short ranged and the vehicles consequently of reasonable sizes/mass/expense. This also means ground-based installations or space-based satellites or stations may be participants.
As space colonization seems likely to happen as a token multinational effort, you may see a fair few nations having a stake. On the other hand, the big players will get the biggest say and have the biggest military presence in space, so it will look a bit like the colonial era all over again perhaps.
Conflicts will probably be fairly limited because an all-out conflict across our star system would be tremendously damaging for all concerned. Typically, like the late 20th century and the early 21st, it will be large players beating up on smaller players (a safer fight, more sure outcome, more likely to produce a useful 'win' with resource or other gains).
It's a bit unclear how far off we are from having civilian populations not carefully selected
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
But exactly how are ginormous starships realistic in purely newtonian physics?
Time to let go of your version "realism" and grasp the fiction part of all of this, or possibilities that the fictional devices that alow them to do that may just not be at all fictional but "real".
Newtonian models are fun once in a while by being able to vector in one direction cut thrust and flip 180, but really thats it, the rest of it is about as fun as watching grass grow, paint dry, etc.