nyrath

Another goodie was Independence War from Particle Systems. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-War_(1997_video_game) Full Newtonian physics. None of this silly spaceships-acting-like-fighter-planes nonsense. You learned Newton's Third Law the hard way. The ship would respond to your controls much like an over loaded 18-wheeler at high speed on a road covered with black ice. Karolus10: Multiple posting, rest of post has been removed and merged bellow - please using "Edit Post option", thank You. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - POST_2: Absolutely! But my point is that we have George Lucas to thank for the misconception that combat spacecraft will act like atmospheric fighter planes. Since Mr. Lucas thought it would be cinematically dramatic to use WWI and WWII fighter plane footage as a model for the actions of the X-wings and TIE fighters, this was seared into the minds of SF fans. And latter productions like Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers followed suit. This is similar to the other Hollywood misconception that handguns have magazines containing an infinite number of bullets. POST_3: Heinlein rulz, man. My website is full of his quotes. Frau im Mond is also a classic, for reasons you mentioned. And if I remember correctly, it was the first occurrence of the now standard "count down to zero". Not bad for a 1929 silent movie. POST_4: Yes, _The Reality Dysfunction_ is good. But for scientifically realistic combat I recommend _Through Struggle, the Stars_ and _The Desert of Stars_ by John Lumpkin. http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/atomicnovel.php#id--John_Lumpkin And not just because I gave him technical advice. POST_5: Wow! A Kerbal Starfury! Once again, KSP astonishes me with its physics engine. You used KSP to recreate a starfury, and experimentally discovered their control issues. Cool! This means when B5 fans scoff at your assertion, you can say you speak from experience. POST_6: Well, yes, it is a nice retcon, but it is still a retcon. The point is that there is no need, unless your ship plans on doing belly landings. And the fact it introduces a problem: if the power to the grav plates fails, suddenly the rear wall is the floor, and the control panels are on a pillar halfway up the walls. Why not have the grav plates on the thrustward side of the habitat module, so if the power fails to the grav plates you won't notice? Again, the problem appeared when Matt Jeffries designed the Starship Enterprise, and couldn't shake the "spaceships are boats" fallacy.

Dang! That's a sweet rocket!

Well, delta-V depends upon two things, and two things only: the engine(s)'s Isp, and what percentage of the spacecraft's mass is fuel. You increase the Isp by using a better engine, and you increase the fuel percentage by adding more fuel tanks. You also can increase the fuel percentage by staging. There is a complicating factor, though. Gravity. In space all your acceleration turns into delta-V. But during lift-off, each second while you are climbing into orbit imposes a "gravity tax" of 9.81 meters per second. This means your acceleration has the gravity tax subtracted from it before it is added to your delta-V. Obviously if your acceleration is less than 9.81, your ship is just going to vibrate on the launch pad while burning a hole in the ground. To have lots of acceleration you need a large T/W ratio, which means a high thrust. The dirty little secret of spacecraft propulsion is that systems with high thrust have low Isp, and vice versa. (Except for Zubrin's nuclear salt water rocket, and most rocket scientists are very skeptical that it will actually work. Remember the the Project Orion ship that uses a series of nuclear detonations? Imagine a drive that is a continuously detonating Orion. Ouch) What does this mean? It means that the best propulsion for lifting into orbit is NOT going to be the best propulsion for traveling orbitally from planet to planet. You will want the Kerbal ion engine for orbit to orbit, and the others for lift-off. Especially the atomic rocket engine.

Oh, yes, how could I forget the Luna ? Good catch.

Yes, plus the engines were at the end of long wings. This increased the lever arm that the thrust acts over. They also are the only ships I recall that demonstrated that the rocket does not necessarily have to travel in the direction the nose is pointing. In an early episode, raiders are chasing Garabaldi, and he flips his starfury over and fires right into the raider's face, all the while with the ship's vector unchanged.

That was good. But the ship from Avatar was pretty good as well. It even had heat radiators.

I mean it has what Kerbal calls a RCS Thruster Block, but no propulsion systems. So it cannot change its vector very much, but it can spin in place for the purpose of aiming its shrapnel warhead at the target. Well, first off, this is a railgun launching a projectile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Railgun_usnavy_2008.jpg Good luck insulating the projectile so its 2.7 K temperature stays intact. Coilguns are almost as bad. Second off: unless you are hiding behind a planet, there is no horizon to hide behind. The coilgun launch will be visible over most of the solar system. Your opponent will notice the launch, paint you with active radar, and notice the projectiles. If you are hiding behind the planet, you cannot launch the projectiles at your target. Also: hiding behind the planet presumes your opponent does NOT have space stations, observation posts, and spy satellites scattered all over the solar system. The more they have, the harder to be "behind the planet" with respect to all of them. Third off: the farther away you launch your projectiles, the more you are depending upon your opponent to travel exactly the way you want. The longer the travel time, the bigger the chance the target will make a course correction, a trajectory change, or something that will put the target outside of the projectiles engagement envelope. Fourth off: hiding an "invisible" weapon inside a cloud of visible weapons is counter-productive. Or in "terrain". The target will see the visible weapons, avoid them, and in doing so also avoid the invisible weapon. For more, read the link I sent.

That depends upon the range. On the other hand, you can replace dumb rocks with smart rocks. Throw kinetic weapons that have no propulsion, but they do have targeting sensors, an attitude control system, and a spacecraft sized shotgun shell on the nose. With these you do not have to fill an area with dumb rocks to create terrain. The weapon's engagement envelope fills out the terrain. sigh, here we go again. There ain't no stealth in space http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewardetect.php#id--There_Ain't_No_Stealth_In_Space

That is because the space battles in A New Hope were based on filmed World War I and World War II dogfights. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_sources_and_analogues#Film (ninth point)

The missile would also have the advantage that its design does not have to include mass for a life-support system, consumables, a habitat module, crew members, or propellant to return to base. The target does not have that luxury. So if you shot the missile at the target, it could follow the target through the entire solar system, for months. And it would eventually catch the target because it has a much better mass ratio. The only thing the target can do is try to take out the hostile missile with antimissiles or a point-defense system.

I gather you were not a big fan of Saving Private Ryan? That one was so close to reality that it induced flash-backs in veterans.

And be sure to check out the various pages on space combat.

Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but the first moon ship, the Apollo Comand/Service module and the Lunar module, did not particularly look like an airplane.

In some spacecraft combat simulations I've seen, kinetic energy weapons are not weapons so much as they are terrain. The idea is that you spew a hail of shrapnel or buckshot into the vectors that you want to discourage your target from using. You are sort of using them to herd your target in the direction you want it to travel, counting on the fact it wants to dodge away from the weapons fire. Generally there is no terrain in space other than the odd planet or two, but clouds of kinetic weapon fire will count as such. Directed energy weapons, kinetic energy weapons, and missiles. Ken Burnside compared it to a policeperson armed with a service revolver, a shotgun, and a police dog. The revolver (beam weapon) cannot be dodged or outrun, but can miss. The shotgun (kinetic weapon) is more likely to hit, but with reduced lethality. The dog (missile) can be dodged or outrun (or shot, that would correspond to point defense), but the blasted thing will chase you, and will always hit unless you actively prevent it. (Holger Bjerre begs to differ. He points out that kinetic weapons are less likely to hit since it can be dodged, beam weapons lose lethality with range just like shotguns, and kinetic weapons do not lose lethality with range just like revolvers. Well, no analogy is perfect...)

Yes, light speed lag does complicate things. It can put an upper limit on the maximum percentage chance to hit the target. It depends upon the target's cross section, the target's current maximum acceleration, the range to the target, and the velocity of the weapon you are firing at the target. Equation here: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewardefense.php#id--Evasive_Maneuvers That's what I thought as well, until I learned about the dreaded Casaba Howitzer. Nuclear detonations do have their destructive potential fall of drastically with range, due to the fact they are radiating all their destruction spherically. Inverse square law is a harsh mistress. But what if you could make the blast radiate in one direction. A nuclear shaped charge. This changes everything. Among other things is can make armor more and more pointless. http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacegunconvent.php#id--Nukes_In_Space--Nuclear_Shaped_Charges I'd like to find more details about the casaba howitzer, but after fifty years the blasted thing is still classified.

Thanks! Forum says (You must spread some reputation around before giving it to Rune again)

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/respectscience.php#id--"So_What_If_I_Broke_Twelve_Laws_Of_Physics?_It's_Only_Science_<em>FICTION</em>"

Apparently they used Telemachus on the Mission to Duna, and they said they could not have completed the mission without it.

Wow! They did a second mission to Duna! http://imgur.com/a/09Isa

Things I try to do on my website to make it understandable and engaging: Break up walls of text with lots of amusing pictures Understand the concepts enough so you can translate them from Science-ease into Colloquial English (though USA slang will confuse international readers) Use humorous images in your explanations Give some examples of practical consequences of the abstract principles Add a few sarcastic jokes when appropriate Example: Hydrogen gives the best exhaust velocity, but the other propellants are given in the table since a spacecraft may be forced to re-fuel on whatever working fluids are available locally (what Jerry Pournelle calls "Wilderness re-fuelling", Robert Zubrin calls "In-situ Resource Utilization", and I call "the enlisted men get to go out and shovel whatever they can find into the propellant tanks"). Example (where the kinetic energy weapon equation is illustrated by the deadly effect of used kitty-litter impacting at 12.24 kilometers per second): http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacegunconvent.php#id--Kinetic_Kill_Weapons--Equations

This has probably been posted already, but I cannot seem to find it with the search function. http://imgur.com/a/sW3Tz A group of avid Kerbal Space Program fans wondered if you could launch a pilot to the Mun and back using maths rather than the in-flight orbital planning. The pilot flies upstairs, locked in cabin-view (IVA) while mission control directs him via skype downstairs. Hijinks ensue. So the pilot was playing the game on his computer, locked in cabin-view. The mission control team had no access to the computer. They used a large white board, lots of math, and tools like Innsewerants Space Agency's ISA Mapsat readouts to calculate where the pilot and his ship was, and directed him to a save touch-down on Mun. This would be an incredibly educational exercise for a group of gifted students.

No they didn't (and don't say the "M" word). It only worked because KSP is so close to reality. The way I understand it, the pilot was locked in a room with the computer playing KSP. He locked the game into IVA mode, where he could only use cockpit controls and see using a small viewport window. Meanwhile, the mission control people were in a separate room, with synchronized watches. They had a big white board, and tools like Innsewerants Space Agency's ISA Mapsat readouts. They also had a web cam aimed at the pilot, and a cell phone. The mission control capsule communicator was the only member of the team who could use the cell phone to communicate with the pilot. The mission control people just used mathematics to calculate the required trajectories, and passed the settings to the pilot. They had no access to the computer running KSP. Read the link for details. It worked quite well. And this would be incredibly educational for a group of gifted students. http://imgur.com/a/sW3Tz

I feel for you. I could not play KSP at all until recently. My antiquated computer was not even up to the task of assembling a spacecraft in the first tutorial (the parts would drag very slowely). But my new computer has the power.

Every day I find something new and astonishing about KSP! In this case, it is how the original poster intuitively stumbled over the need for orbital fuel depots. You can try teaching people about such things, but it sort of bounces off their brains. But here, playing KSP, it soon becomes obvious as a natural extension of playing the game. Such "self discovered" knowledge sticks with the player. http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/infrastructure.php

Sigh. http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/respectscience.php