I always liked the idea of aliens viewing the earth as a big beef ranch. In the classic Twilight Zone" episode “To Serve Man”-the aliens leave a book at the UN-which turns out to be a cookbook. Really, would humans be all that delicious to alien cannibals?
Maybe not. But surely we’re better than the aliens eating their own species.
Humans would be terribly inefficient as meat animals. We require a high-value diet and grow slowly. Alien cattle rustlers would be more plausible (and more amusing).
Hungry aliens would do better to make us offer them tribute in the form of dressed beef carcasses.
Except if you have star travel, you can grow your own meat in a vat without having to actually kill a cow.
It’s not about the calories, it’s about the style.
You misspelled “classic Damon Knight story.” 
Not so much a Star Wars or Stargate thing, but in Trek: all aliens look just like humans with funny space wrinkles. This became so much a trope it has come to be expected, and many modern Sci-fi fans don’t seem to grasp that aliens almost certainly will NOT remotely resemble humans.
Bilateral symmetry, two legs, two arms with manipulative “fingers”, two eyes, a gut, skin- all seem fairly likely. And not too far from Human size- no bigger than a bear, no smaller than a Chimp. Assuming carbon based life.
But color, fur or no, what sort of teeth, etc- all are up for grabs.
No. If they’re alien cannibals, they eat other aliens. Not us.
What in the name of Henry are you trying to say? Why do you need to “start off” with no acceleration?
And if you’re in a space shuttle that flips over, it does very much matter if the axis of rotation is it’s center or at one extreme end: you’re still feeling acceleration, but the magnitude and direction of the acceleration will vary. You will feel a different directionality of acceleration if the shuttle is flipping around a wingtip instead of flipping around its centerline. In one case, the force shoves you sideways against the arm-rest of your seat; in the other, the force is “outward” from your center, shoving blood up into your head and down into your feet.
I’m not questioning your knowledge of physics (yet) but I’m certainly totally at sea as to what you think you are trying to describe.
Yes, the Force is only a range weapon for Sith. Jedis do not use the Force to attack, only for defense. Thus blocking blaster bolts, but not causing aortas on stormtroopers to pop.*
Many books create wormholes or gateways or whatnot, that provide preferred transportation routes. Thus, planets in the vicinity of those paths have economic advantage over ones without, and control of those paths is an economic advantage.
Using nukes does have the unfortunate disadvantage of polluting the resulting planet. Yeah, on the balance having some radioactive pockets is far superior than being annihilated. However, use enough nukes and the results aren’t substantially different. All well and good to kill the invader, but what do you do when the resulting radiation destroys the biosphere sufficiently to mean no food crops, no safe population zones?
“The Waters of Mars” started with the premise that it was one of those “fixed points in time” that mustn’t be changed. Then he decided to change it anyway, and then the person he saved committed suicide to protect the timeline.
That’s probably true.
You aren’t making sense. To change the direction of motion requires acceleration. You can limit the strength by stretching the duration, but acceleration is the definition of changing motion. Newton’s Laws and all that.
That’s exactly how the Starfuries changed direction. They rotated their orientation to point the thrusters against the direction they wished to travel, then activated the thrusters. Rotation is acceleration, activating thrusters is acceleration.
*Remember when Luke was trapped in the Rancor pit? That was my proposed solution - Force pop the aorta or squeeze the carotids or whatever equivalent. Dead Rancor. For some reason Luke (nor any other Jedi) seems to have had the Force levels I imagined.
Newtons laws are why you have to start with no acceleration. You can then apply acceleration to make the spin. Are you confusing acceleration with velocity? Remember that in space you can be moving very fast (high velocity) yet have no acceleration (change in velocity).
It was from 1959 , i think-anyway, a bunch of handsome teenage males land in suburban Los Angeles-they promptly begin killing humans (they have a device that instantly turns you into a skeleton). Anyway, they fall in love with the local teen girls-aliens in love with humans? that’s a weird meme!:eek:
But, what about the torture?! :mad:
(mst3k)
Ah, we’re talking about different things. I’m talking about going in one direction while pointing in another. Sorry for the confusion.
Wouldn’t it just be simpler to do an Immelmann? :dubious: 
That would be where you pull up until you’re flying upside down and then flip 180 degrees along the long axis (sideways) so you’re flying level again, but now in the opposite direction.
If you do this in space while burning your engines, what happens is that you have now accelerated in the “up” direction for no good reason and you’re still flying mostly in the original direction (i.e., backwards) until you’ve decelerated to a full stop and then begin accelerating in the new forward direction.
So no, that wouldn’t be simpler. What would be simpler is using your attitude thrusters to turn 180 degrees while the main thrusters are off, then fire the main thrusters.
Obviously that doesn’t work for an airplane because those can’t fly backwards. Space ships have no such limitation.
Fictional spaceships, as they generally use imaginary technology, have whatever limitations the writer, director, and FX crew choose. Given that we almosf always see, say, the Enterprise turning around to change direction rather then flying backwards or sideways, it’s a reasonable supposition that backwards or sideways flight is contraindicated for some reason.
Well, duh. The problem is that they’re often doing a bad job.
That’s reasonable. You’d want to have a nice big armored hull to protect the people inside from dust ramming into your ship at relativistic speeds.
But at the same time, their engines are pointed backwards. Can’t have it both ways. At least not while hanging on to any level of scientific credibility.
Your argument seems to be that the makers don’t care about that, but that doesn’t invalidate my complaint that they should.