Space battles

[Wallace]

Battlestar Galactica did have some realistic physics to be seen, the vipers were steered by RCS thrusters in the tips of the wings and nose, and they would spin about freely during flight to fire backwards etc, and would do a turn then burn their engines rather than swooping about like a plane like you usually see in scifi.

The vipers did always come in to land the wrong way though, they should have come in engine first so they could brake, I guess that would have looked a bit weird to most people, but they did make an effort with most of it though.

One thing that always annoyed me in Star Trek was space was 2D, when they met another ship it was coming from ahead or the left, and was was always 'upright'. A ship never came up from below their plane of reference and was never the other way up, or on it's end in relation to them. Even Borg cubes looked like they were sat flat on some invisible surface, you never saw one diagonally in relation to the starfleet ships' horizontal plane or with a corner pointing at them.

[Sma]

Well, enterprise "falling" into the earth when being in mun SOI is at least questionable... most likely they would crash on moon.

I guess it would depend on their velocity. If they were going fast enough I would imagine they could escape the Moon's (being as that it was star trek and not KSP SOI. Plus also remember in real life, you have Multi SOI's acting upon everything, so even though they would have been in the moons SOI, Earths gravity might have had more pull on them, combined with whatever velocity they already had (slingshot maybe). As I said in another comment I've only seen it once so I'll have to see it again (oh....darn...lol).

Now I can't watch any " loose sci-fi" movies without dying a little. Spacecraft with engines on all the time, "fighters" turning and changing their directions in a second. Artificial gravity that can be toggled with a switch.....Damn you KSP!

That's what graviton particles are for...I think. See what Star Trek does to the vague idea of phyics? lol. Anyway, I had one of the technical manuals from Star Trek Next Generation, and in it they explain the gravity generators as being devices with super dense superconducting parts that IIRC spun really fast. As such they generated a gravitational field around them. Then I guess they'd put them throughout the ship, and link them so as maintain a given gravity. Those could be toggled with a switch (cause you know....that whole idea is legit...... ).

More realistically though, and theoretically possible with current technology is the ring type space station (I'm sure it has a name, I just can't think of it off the top of my head). Once it's spinning you have what could be considered artificial gravity, which could then be flicked off with a switch firing thrusters in the opposite direction of the spin. Granted it would take some time to slow down though.

Anyway with all the non-sense I spouted, however factual (or not), if thats possible, I agree with the last part in your post....for many reasons, such as eating into the time I should be using to sleep haha.

[Unistrut]

I've found that it really depends on how seriously the rest of the movie takes it. If the film is trying to be all HARD REAL SCI-FI and then they completely screw up the orbital mechanics I get annoyed (Yes Prometheus, I'm looking at you). If the film is just "Whoooo! Things exploding in SPACE!" then I'll roll with it and eat my popcorn.

Seriously though, KSP gave me my first warning that I wasn't going to like Prometheus.

A: they do their de-orbit burn facing the wrong way.

B: they just drop down into the atmosphere without spending any time mapping the surface (or checking to make sure the atmosphere isn't Venus-style superheated acid).

C: they then just happen to fly past the alien goo factory.

Having gone off in search of the various anomalies on Kerbin (and elsewhere) even having the ISA mapsat dot back in 0.18 still meant a lot of flying around going "okay ... where is that bastard...." You didn't just drop out of orbit and go "Well hello there building!"

[air805ronin]

Being a fan of 18th century naval warfare, I have to admit I think it would translate to space quite well with one person trying to execute a timed transfer behind the other craft and predict whether the other captain would decrease or increase speed to counter. Naval battles in the Age of Sails had much the same as both had to rely upon the same source of propulsion (the wind) and the battle could include a chase that lasted hours. Often such a long chase the ship being hunted may be trying to just stay out of range until darkness when it could slip away and take a new course away from it's hunter.

Obviously the space analogue of this wouldn't be able to wait for nightfall..... (or would it?)

Plus I think missiles would still be quite useful in space combat. So much for epic rows of cannons along the hull of my starship. Though if Squad wants to get the rights to make a Battlefleet Gothic game next, I'm totally cool with it.

[littlebattler]

Star Wars isn't sci-fi anyways. It's actually a fantasy genre set in a futuristic setting.

Being a fan of 18th century naval warfare, I have to admit I think it would translate to space quite well with one person trying to execute a timed transfer behind the other craft and predict whether the other captain would decrease or increase speed to counter. Naval battles in the Age of Sails had much the same as both had to rely upon the same source of propulsion (the wind) and the battle could include a chase that lasted hours. Often such a long chase the ship being hunted may be trying to just stay out of range until darkness when it could slip away and take a new course away from it's hunter.

Obviously the space analogue of this wouldn't be able to wait for nightfall..... (or would it?)

Plus I think missiles would still be quite useful in space combat. So much for epic rows of cannons along the hull of my starship. Though if Squad wants to get the rights to make a Battlefleet Gothic game next, I'm totally cool with it.

Interesting. This reminds me of the Gundam series, where battles are limited to visual range because of magical pixie dust minovsky particles blocking radar and targetting systems. And still, they have more realistic space battles despite (or maybe because) of using humanoid robots instead of fighter planes.

[BrightBritches]

One thing I did like about it though was the engine room/warp core. It looked more realistic, like something we'd actually come up with.

Fun fact: that's because it actually is some real life science thingy (I wanna say particle reactor but I'm probably wrong) that they borrowed and dressed up to make it look like the inside of a space ship

[Sma]

Fun fact: that's because it actually is some real life science thingy (I wanna say particle reactor but I'm probably wrong) that they borrowed and dressed up to make it look like the inside of a space ship

Yeah, I had seen it before the movie, forget who but they're using it as a fusion reactor. In the middle is supposed to be a pellet of deuterium I believe. They then fire a bunch of super powered lasers at the pellet. There is also a Canadian group doing something similar but with liquid metal, and steam powered pistons. The pistons fire to create a vortex(i think thats what I read) in the middle of the liquid metal. Plasma injectors in the top and bottom inject magnetized deuterium and tritium plasma into the vortex. The steam pistons then fire to collapse the vortex, which supposedly compresses the two plasmas together and science (fusion in this case) happens. The heat is then transferred to the liquid metal (assuming it doesn't vaporize, I guess the size of the reaction is too small for that to happen then the heat is transferred from the liquid metal to make steam, half of which is used to run the pistons again, the other half runs turbines to make power.

Apparently they're on track to test the plasma injectors by 2015, and I think I read they may have a prototype reactor by 2020...but we'll see.

[Comrade Jenkens]

Very few people know even the slightest about orbital mechanics. Even though they are intelligent and getting degrees in science based subjects they don't know what an orbit is or how objects move in space.