Movie Space ships compared to the real deal

[Sleipnir]

Hey everyone,

this one has been occupying my mind for some time so here it goes:

Since I started playing KSP I have learned a lot about space flight assuming that it is based mostly on the real deal (especially the orbiting and trajectory part in space). Nonetheless it has changed my view on space especially how trajectories and flying in general works out. It also makes me wonder how the movie spacecrafts like from starwars or startrek compare to real life space "flying". I am not talking about warp drives or wormhole travel but about how they orbit and approach things. If anything in KSP is true then meeting up with a craft, approaching and docking seems like quite the ordeal IRL with lots of engine burns, aligning/maneuvering, RCS maneuvers etc, yet in movies (like the above mentioned) smaller "starfighters" seem to be able to race around starbases and motherships quite easily with high speeds and agility, something that appears to be impossible to replicate in KSP without crashing into an object or getting completely off course. Is the entire movie thing with small "starfighters" zooming about big spaceships in battles just a Hollywood thing or could this become reality? Maybe if we have faster and specialized engines?

Maybe someone here has an answer.

Thanks in advance.

Dan

[Specialist290]

Generally, movies tend to get things very wrong. I seem to be linking to this site a lot lately...

Space fighters in particular get argued about a lot. This page (warning: TV Tropes) has a fairly comprehensive discussion of the pros and cons, but I'd say that the biggest blow against them is the fact that there's effectively no horizon in space. Your weapons are only limited by accuracy, not absolute range, and bigger ships would have the space for both bigger weapons and better targeting computers.

But yes, you're not likely ever going to see space fighters turning like airplanes in space, no matter how good the engines get. Spaceflight just works differently from atmospheric flight, to keep things short and sweet.

[8bitbeard]

Inertia and momentum doesn't seem to apply in the movies. Most don't even mention it, but Star Trek at least tries to explain it away with the magic-powered "Inertial Dampeners".

[magnemoe]

As movies has very long time and serious problem with getting the numbers of bullets in an revolver right, just basic rocket science will cause some confusion in the same way an nuclear bomb is noisy.

[Flixxbeatz]

By simply knowing that there's no such things as air, drag, and friction in space, and the presence of gravitational pull and spheres of influence, you'll already know that space (and spacecrafts) doesn't work like that in movies.

[Mufasa]

Ever noticed how in star wars, ships fly directly out from a planet like everyone did on their first flight in KSP? No gravity turns, just straight up. Everyone here can speak for themselves but, I think we've all done that one once.

So yeah, no, no, not at all. KSP has got it right, it's funny watching star wars or other such movies and thinking (oh man they got it so wrong).

[Alephzorg]

The starfury fighters in Babylon 5 tried to get it right at least, making 180° turns on RCS.

[Tommygun]

I always liked the concept of system defense boats over Space fighters.

Basically short ranged mini spaceships probably something like space faring PT boats.

Maybe a very small command ship with several unmanned but semiautonomous attack boats.

I think you will need a manned ship somewhat close by to minimize radio time delay to the attack craft.

Basically no dogfighting, just get close enough to make a hit first or have enough extra craft for multiple attacks and the last man standing wins.

[Awaras]

Ever noticed how in star wars, ships fly directly out from a planet like everyone did on their first flight in KSP? No gravity turns, just straight up. Everyone here can speak for themselves but, I think we've all done that one once.

So yeah, no, no, not at all. KSP has got it right, it's funny watching star wars or other such movies and thinking (oh man they got it so wrong).

If (and it's a BIG if) you had a drive that could accelerate continuously at 1G you could pretty much point straight toward your target, accelerate for half your trip and decelerate the rest of the way.

It would get you from Earth to Mars in 2 days, so you would need to aim slightly ahead of the planet to get there but you would be flying in an almost straight line.

And ST and SW ships are capable of much more than 1G, with their fancy antimatter powered drives, inertial dampeners and other handwavium near-magitech...

Edited May 1, 2013 by Awaras

[Nibb31]

Have you noticed also that in movies, even the most primitive computers always speak and never use a mouse? And car seats never have headrests (that one always bugs me since the day I noticed it)...

Hollywood is dumbed down entertainment for the masses. 99% of it is implausible or unrealistic.

[Kerbface]

Even 2001: A Space Odyssey made some mistakes. The Discovery had no radiators (which apparently was actually an intentional choice to go against logic so audiences wouldn't think they were "wings") and by most estimates, the centrifuge on the Discovery would have been a pretty terrible habitat. It had a 5m radius and went at 5rpm, look what that gets you on spincalc. www.artificial-gravity.com/sw/SpinCalc/ There would be a huge pressure distance from your head to your feet, the coriolis effect would have been terrible, you only get moon level gravity and if you walk the wrong direction you would get almost nothing because you'd be eliminating too much rotation.

Still really cool though.

[Awaras]

Have you noticed also that in movies, even the most primitive computers always speak and never use a mouse? And car seats never have headrests (that one always bugs me since the day I noticed it)...

Hollywood is dumbed down entertainment for the masses. 99% of it is implausible or unrealistic.

I was always fascinated with hollywood computers that have only a command line interface but can understand commands written in plain english...

[Tw1]

If you have anti-gravity tech, then you aren't so dependant on orbital physics. You don't need to be going as fast to orbit, if you can turn gravity down.

If you have practically infinite Delta V, then you don't need to worry about doing a hohmann transfer. Especially if you have a warp or hyperdrive as well.

Though you still would follow a ballistic trajectory, like we do in KSP.

But spaceships that fly like planes, as if they're turning with fins, really annoy me. Same when things seem to just sit there in space, rather than orbiting properly.

I did some experiments back in 0.18 to see if I could get a spaceship to behave like a sci-fi ship, using the infinite fuel cheat.

This was the basic design. "The Long Ranger"

It needed a TWR on Kerbin of about 20. It could do a 180 inclination change in something like 50 seconds, and do a powered landing (horizontally) on even Eve.

I didn't manage to do a Star Wars prequels style landing, where you fly in horizontally, stop in midair without turning retro, and then go straight down. Mainly because I had no retro thrusters.

Trying to hover was a pain. ASAS or mechjeb would cause the RCS to fight my every move, but without them it would fall from the air. I had something like thirty thrusters per side before I gave up.

I also started a caravan park on Eve.

I landed them all in only one spot, so the rest of the planet could be explored in my "real" save.

Edited May 1, 2013 by Tw1

[Kerbface]

What always does annoy me though, is the constantly used "Spaceship's engines are always on when it's moving" thing. Space is not the air, you don't slow down if you turn off your engines, and if they're always on, you're constantly accelerating. Yet an X-Wing fighter will simply maintain constant velocity while the engines burn. And then it'll go and do a turn while the engines are running and gradually turn in an arc as the ship rotates, killing their velocity in one direction without ever firing in the other one.

[Flixxbeatz]

Check out the game X-COM Interceptor, where engines are always on while in space, and throttling up/down will cause your spaceship to move faster/slower just like a car moving on a road (and keep in mind, the setting is in deep space).

But that's not all what it can offer. You can also have the option to turn your engine off, which will totally stop your spaceship like it was on some surface and will just remain like that until you'll turn the engines back on. Oh - and they've got fireworks in space, too.

[brooksy125]

I seem to remember a game called Nexus: The jupiter incident, its fighters used reaction thrusters (think of a op RCS system) to make them appear realistic and the mother ships were often more realistic than movie designs as they all had a centrifuge system and most of the combat involved the large motherships rather than fighters. (these were only really used to shoot down crew transports)

Ps Just remembered Scot did a lets play of it not long ago,

[Scotius]

What gets to me personally is distances between ships during space battles. Starships are armed with multi-gigawatt energy cannons, relativistic missiles, quantum combat computers - and yet they still fight at distances of couple of kilometers at best. During WWII in Pacific theatre American and Japanese squadrons almost accidentally fought each other at a distance of about 2 kilometers, in a completely messed up formations that merged into one brutal and chaotic melee. This battle is famous to this day, because warships designed to fire and hit targets at dozens of kilometers fough basically at a knife-fight range. It is also considered one of biggest cluster****s of the entire war. And still Hollywood insists on showing us space battles pulled straight out of the Nelson era.

[Kerbface]

Like the opening of Star Wars episode III

[Awaras]

What gets to me personally is distances between ships during space battles. Starships are armed with multi-gigawatt energy cannons, relativistic missiles, quantum combat computers - and yet they still fight at distances of couple of kilometers at best. During WWII in Pacific theatre American and Japanese squadrons almost accidentally fought each other at a distance of about 2 kilometers, in a completely messed up formations that merged into one brutal and chaotic melee. This battle is famous to this day, because warships designed to fire and hit targets at dozens of kilometers fough basically at a knife-fight range. It is also considered one of biggest cluster****s of the entire war. And still Hollywood insists on showing us space battles pulled straight out of the Nelson era.

Well, seeing tiny poins of light exchanging invisible laser beam shots over distances of several thousand kilometers wouldn't be terribly exciting...

[Scotius]

LOL. True, Awaras. Wouldn't be much to show. Books are usually better at describing space battles - but not by much in too many cases, i'm afraid.

[Richy teh space man]

I do think Hollywood contributes to a lot of ignorance about just how space travel really works, but I think if they did do it realistically then it wouldn't have the same kind of theatrical impact.

Another thing that always irks me is how various space faring races are depicted as being on very similar technology levels, when in fact it's a lot more likely that they would be quite different, along the lines of putting the current US navy up against a fleet of Roman galleys.

Sometimes when watching these I just have to switch off my brain and watch the pretty explosions , otherwise I'd just end up annoying all my friends by pointing out the errors.

[Awaras]

I do think Hollywood contributes to a lot of ignorance about just how space travel really works, but I think if they did do it realistically then it wouldn't have the same kind of theatrical impact.

Another thing that always irks me is how various space faring races are depicted as being on very similar technology levels, when in fact it's a lot more likely that they would be quite different, along the lines of putting the current US navy up against a fleet of Roman galleys.

Sometimes when watching these I just have to switch off my brain and watch the pretty explosions , otherwise I'd just end up annoying all my friends by pointing out the errors.

Given the timescales involved it's more like the current US navy vs. one guy sitting on a floating log.

[Scotius]

Heck, given the timescales it could be like a super-carrier cruising past a floating jellyfish.

[Richy teh space man]

Yeah that's probably true too lol.

Another example of Holywood ignorance is the movie Armageddon, iirc Nasa managers watch that to see just how many errors there are and they have come up with more then a few.

Deep Impact was a more realistic portrayl of a similar kind of disaster.

[Awaras]

Yeah that's probably true too lol.

Another example of Holywood ignorance is the movie Armageddon, iirc Nasa managers watch that to see just how many errors there are and they have come up with more then a few.

Deep Impact was a more realistic portrayl of a similar kind of disaster.

Deep Impact got almost everything right EXCEPT the ending...