The Truth About Space Combat

George Lucas and the release of Star Wars in the 1970s unintentionally set a precedent for how almost every single piece of sci-fi media would depict space combat. Small spaceships fighting each other above in the atmosphere is synonymous with the genre, but does the science support this World War II style of dog-fighting in SPACE?

✅ MANDATORY LIKE, SUBSCRIBE, AND TURN ON NOTIFICATIONS

📲 FOLLOW ME ON SOCIETY-RUINING SOCIAL MEDIA:

😎: Kyle
✂: Charles Shattuck
🤖: @ClaireMax
🎼: Mëydan

[Tiltrotortech]

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."

[abbycaldwell]

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

[velzekt]

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.

[YaGirlJuniper]

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.

[insu_na]

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.

[ewen-roberts]

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.

[VistaViews]

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.

[barnisor]

I think people misunderstand sci fi lasers. It’s not a beam of light travelling to you, it’s typically a sort of magnetically contained plasma bolt that EMITS light. The reason you can see it from far away is because the light is reaching you, the reason you can see it move is because the plasma is moving

[stormbelka]

MassEffect 1 had a wonderful Codex Article covering Space Combat, elaborating on how engagements would take place light seconds and light minutes away.
It also touches on heat management in warships and how you cannot effectively get rid of heat caused by weapons systems. It was very detailed but sadly in-game you never saw it in action.

[gamesturbator]

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.

[arx]

In Gundam they solved the problem introducing "Minovsky physics", basically the fusion reactors used scatter a fictional subatomic particle, the Minovsky particle, that messes up with any kind of communication and detection, wich means that combat can only happen within visual range. And the only weapons similar to drones have to be either controlled through cables, or with the extrasensorial abilities of the pilot.

[rippilot]

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.

[halodrednaught]

Probably the best depiction of how "stealth in space" would work, is in the "Helforts War series by Graham Sharp Paul". Most of the first book is them planning and executing a raid using things like plant shadows and regualar orbiting comets to mask the approach and inseartion into a system.

[tizodd]

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

[Nobody_Fn_Important]

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.

[aspacelex]

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.

[FokkerBoombass]

Something I really enjoyed about Battlestar Galactica reboot is that while they did go with the whole space fighter thing, they at least didn't limit them to aerial maneuvers dictated by aerodynamics. They moved about with RCS thrusters, spun around to shoot at pursuing craft etc, it was pretty cool.

[jeffhe]

lol i was thinking of facial recognition missiles or bullets since we already have facial recognition for everything these days. But yeah, piloting would be futile at that point. But this does bring me back to the old days of gundam where fights on earth vs fights in space were just different. One you had old school battleship style and the other you just had scifi robots

[edbangor]

You need to read the Lost Fleet series by Jack Campbell. He went out of his way to try to get the physics for space combat as realistic as possible. Including talking about things and the fact that combat takes place over hundreds of thousands of miles.

[plinyvicgames]

i think all of this is why the warp/jump/wormhole drive or whatever is such a magical piece of sci-fi gear. it not only makes travel over long distance feasible in a meaningful time period, but it would also make it impossible to observe someone move towards you, as the target would be moving at the speed of light (or faster). you literally wouldn't be able to attack or prepare defenses until they drop out of warp on you, making space a highly agressive battlefield.
i really like how the older elite games handled warp. it was only usable between systems, but still tooks years to do. additionally, jumping between systems left a visible wake from where you entered hyperspace, and a ship with faster warp could analyze your warp wake, outspeed you to your destination, and literally just wait for you to arrive and kill you. that was a take i found really interesting on space combat.