The Truth About Space Combat

Thanks for watching space dorks!

also keep in mind that you're not going to detect a laser weapon that is targeted at you until it has already hit you, as is the nature of light speed.

My favorite space combat story was a book called "The Forever War". One of the "battles" was simply, "We've detected an enemy missile. I will impact us in about a week."

My dad loved Star Wars, and he watched it by himself before he even told me about it. His enthusiasm could not have been more intense! But he always bemoaned the concept that people were even needed to fight in space, especially in such an advanced civilization. He said that computers would handle everything infinitely better than humans could. Some years later I read a short story (I think it was in Omni Magazine) where wars between planets and systems were merely calculated by computers to determine which side was the winner, thus avoiding so much unnecessary bloodshed.

I never called Star Wars a "Science Fiction" movie series, I called it "Space Fantasy" since it had a lot of magic and was just high fantasy just set in space.

Realistic space combat runs into the same problems that face realistic sword fights: the fights would be short and largely determined by who lands the first hit. There can still be suspense, but it's a lot trickier to keep an audience's attention when taking any hit means the fight ends and the other party will die. You can make it work for books quite well, examinkng the thoughts going through each fighter's head with each action, but in more visual media like movies or shows, that flexibility of time to draw out a short fight through mind games and such is a lot harder to pull off

With regards to frail meat bodies and maneuvering, I liked how in Halo 3 one of the terminals talked about a space battle where an A.I. in control of a large combat vessel basically disregarded the humans on board in order to more effectively maneuver the ship and that the A.I. was fleetingly aware of how the former occupants were now basically splatters of gooey matter sloshing around inside the ship.

Expanse have pretty great space combat vision Also there is Honor Harrington series, written by navy officer. There are great takes on different types of weaponry, tactics, strategy and formations in fleet to fleet, fleet to space station+fleet, fleet to planet with orbital defences. Also, there are great takes on swarms of small vessels in combat, stealth in space and at war in general, pricy high-tech vs low-cost low-tech strategies and tactics.

The way FTL handles space piracy is honestly pretty cool. They answer the question of how pirates would board your ship with "teleportation," and "they ram a robot through the hull, causing a breach that sucks all the air out, and then the robot kills everyone aboard," and, "lol they don't, they blast your ship with enough radiation to kill your crew," and so on.

I think that the Expanse's combat is fairly realistic

The Expanse handled this really well. Everything from acceleration changes, to quick maneuvers had to be planed and prepared for in advance.

There's a game called "Children of a Dead Earth",which attempts to make orbital combat as realistic as possible. The most notable feature are orbital mechanics just like in KSP

Gundam sorted this out in the combat in the 70s. Ambushed in asteroids, and use special sensor jamming particle generators to be harder to detect. The small ships, and even the robots, were mainly used to fight the enemy big ships at close range while said big ships were busy fighting the other big ships.

The issue with locating something small, like the Voyager probes, over a large distance is that you need to know exactly where to look. Space is big. Really big.

This video actually makes me appreciate the way Dune's space travel is done even more, especially for a story of that era. Space travel in Dune is very expensive, especially when traveling to different star systems, and there is no combat in space because all space travel is controlled by one entity. Battle is still done within the atmosphere of planets and as such it follows the same laws of physics as modern day war but with more advanced technology.

The "Lost Fleet " series by Jack Campbell handles intership combat pretty realistically. They do use special pleading devices, such as inertial dampening, and two different versions of faster than light travel (hyperspace and teleportation of entire fleets of ships) But the in system battles take light speed lags of sensor information and intership communications as well as the physics of turning craft around to re-engage opponents while traveling at one tenth the speed of light. And the ships carry "rocks" ballistically shaped chunks of dense metals that they launch at planetary targets from the edge of star systems. The author maintains the suspense in the combat scenarios, but I'm not sure they would translate well to films or games.

I'd also like to add an additional combat problem: Heat. I was listening to a NASA engineer talking about this. Despite space being quite cold it, because there is no atmosphere it is actually quite difficult to properly dissipate heat. So if you are using laser weapons against your opponent the heat you are imparting on their ship is way more of a problem then slicing a piece of it off. Eventually the staff on board one ship or the other would give up or pass out from heat exhaustion.

This is why i have a serious appreciation of the television show The Expanse. They have their own stretches on physics but they paid a great deal more attention to details than pretty much any other show or movie.

Mass Effect 1 has a codex entry describing the complications of fighting in space, there's so much thought and lore put into it. The cutscenes don't really reflect how interesting that entry is, but it's nice that it's there.

The expanse had space combat pretty well nailed. A fleet downing another fleet halfway across the solar system. Rogue factions hurtling asteroids at earth. Small raiding ships with rail guns and nuke torpedos. What a show it was.