Or, "Why real space battles would look more like the game Asteroids than Star Wars".

*SIIIIIGH* if it were meant to be real we wouldn't call it fiction.

meh.

2004 BSG did a pretty good job with the vipers specifically. If you haven't seen BSG then you need to get your priorities in order! Skip to 4:15 for the glory.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6G9t0OFHSWg

2004 BSG did a pretty good job with the vipers specifically. If you haven't seen BSG then you need to get your priorities in order!

This.

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Really this physics thing here, I guarantee 90% of this board knows what role RCS, thrust and momentum play in movement in space.

Lol optimism. Of course there will be wars in space, war is part of the human condition. A crappy part, to be sure, but 10,000 years of human history shows that mankind can no more give up war than we can give up being social animals that instinctively self-organize into tribal groups.

Babylon 5, about 10 years before the BSG reboot, did space battles pretty well.

I quite like the Honor Harrington series of books space battles.

Also The Lost Fleet has great space battles that seem realistic within that universe. It was written by a former US Navy Lt Cdr and is a very realistic view of how militaries actually work.

Also maneuvering taking time delay due to the limit of the speed of light is very interesting.

I guess I never really thought we could blame the bad physics of Sci-Fi space battles on Lucas!

That being said, very informative!

lol that's great

*SIIIIIGH* if it were meant to be real we wouldn't call it fiction.

Just because it's fiction doesn't mean we have to disregard all laws of physics. I like a good story as much as the next guy; but if you can also do it realistically, so much the better. Babylon 5 was definitely one that I believe did both well. However, it's not like I don't enjoy SW, even if they throw away physics.

Star Wars is space opera, which genre notoriously throws the book on physics out the airlock.

It is nice though to have some shows and movies actually incorporate honest-to-goodness physics into the special effects.

I really enjoyed the way Star Trek did space battles, oh wait I shouldn't have said that on this forum.........

I really enjoyed the way Star Trek did space battles, oh wait I shouldn't have said that on this forum.........

I don't see why not. A lot of us are Star Trek fans.

I really enjoyed the way Star Trek did space battles, oh wait I shouldn't have said that on this forum.........

No you shouldn't have.

You shall be reported to the nearest Imperial Commando squad.

:(

The thing we all need to take from this is, of course, Stormtrooper Hot Pockets.

Also The Lost Fleet has great space battles that seem realistic within that universe.

Really enjoyed those books for that reason. Was a nicely fresh take on sci-fi fleet battles and alien encounters. Had aliens that weren't just humans with cosmetic differences, the aliens were well and truly Alien.

I'm having a lot of fun devising a tabletop game with Newtonian mechanics for capital ship combat.

Partly for the fun of game design, and partly because it's a great way to test out how space combat would actually work for novels I am writing. Games are great for testing out unusual models of combat, so I've always been interested in the idea that actually simulating space combat with talented players could give as much insight as simply trying to look at the history of combat alone.

Kinda similar to how MMOs are now being used as pseudo-case studies to study the spread of contagions (WoW's blood plague) and economic systems (EVE springs to mind).

Why just try and guesstimate future history when your guesstimates can be simulated =D

Project Who is a GREAT website worth your time. That has a lot of quotes about the nature of war. Long story short, IMO, as long as there as resource disparities (be those water, oil, helium-3, lebensraum or some yet unknown MacGuffinite) and idealogical differences that can be fought over, there will be war, aliens notwithstanding (but I guess they fall under the above categories?). Which is sad, but at least it keeps one of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse employed.

I'm having a lot of fun devising a tabletop game with Newtonian mechanics for capital ship combat.

Check out the vector version of the Full Thrust rules.

I have found Atomic Rockets to be a pretty good reference on realistic space battles.

Atomic Rockets is great, http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/ is also a great resource for discussions on this sort of thing.

I'm having a lot of fun devising a tabletop game with Newtonian mechanics for capital ship combat.

I have thought about that as well, but you would end up needing a huge table because of momentum. If someone just keeps going in one direction, then the distance traveled is proportional to time squared. You would very quickly need a gymnasium to have enough space.

If an A-wing went straight 5 every turn, and the velocity was cumulative, then after 10 turns it would be moving 6.5 feet per turn, and would have traveled 36 feet. It would take 127 turns to travel a mile, with a velocity to that point of 83 feet per turn. That's with a 5-straight template that is 20 cm long.

and probably a dead pilot from the forces put on them if they manouvred in any way ?

and probably a dead pilot from the forces put on them if they manouvred in any way ?

Nope. With constant thrust you have constant acceleration, so the force is constant and in the same direction. If you stop thrust then you are at zero-g regardless of what your velocity is. If you change the thrust direction then you simply change the direction of force, not the magnitude.

You are probably thinking of maneuvering in atmosphere, where flight control surfaces (wings) generate force.