The old SPI Wargame Battlefleet: Mars did a very nice job of respecting space physics. The strategic game depicted a large part of the orbit of Mars (and invward) while the tactical game was in a (projected) 3-D weightless grid.
GDW’s “Mayday” tactical space combat game also incorporated proper Newtonian physics, including the effects of gravity near planets.
I also pumped a lot of quarters into those old vector-graphics video games – one was Asteroids, and I don’t remember the name of the other: two ships orbiting a gravity source, and firing missiles at each other. Darn fun game!
ETA: In literature, “The Mote in God’s Eye” and “The Gripping Hand” by Niven and Pournelle pay a lot of very close attention to gravitational effects and the speed-of-light lag. (Where you see your enemy is not where he actually is right now.)
Thanks. That actually looks more realistic than I remembered. But still, if you look at battle scenes like this, you see the Starfuries with their rear thrusters firing all the time. And they seem to change trajectory without having to spin around and point their thrusters sideways, reminiscent of fighter aircraft.
That was the exact scene I was describing. You have to look really carefully, but there are a few moments where you can extra lights on the side/front of those thruster pods, consistent with lateral or reverse thrusters. At 1:33 there’s a Star Fury that’s doing a sort of barrel roll, and on one of the thruster pods there’s a second light. And at 1:59 you see two of them yawing 180, so that they’re moving “backwards” relative to the rest of the battle. The forward thrusters are glowing the entire time, but you do see a reverse thruster glowing during the yaw, and the forward thrusters get brighter afterwards.
But yeah, mostly a lot of airplane-like maneuvers.
Babylon 5 did have battle scenes where all the ships seem to be oriented in the same direction, e.g. right at the beginning of this clip.
In The Expanse the battles seem to take place at greater distances. I don’t recall any scene where opposing spaceships are shown together. Here’s a clip of the main battle of Season 1 pieced together, if you don’t mind spoilers.
And related to this - most sci-fi spaceships look like their direction of “up” is perpendicular to the direction of thrust. Of course this is because ships and aircraft on earth are designed that way, but it doesn’t make sense for spaceships - especially if the ship does not have artificial gravity.
Again, I think The Expanse did this correctly - you can see a cruiser on this page. Though I don’t understand why the weapons would be located on the top end - seems more useful on the other side, to use while decelerating towards the enemy.
In the Dominic Flandry books and stories, Poul Anderson has computers running the targeting and phasing in and out of hyperspace. Anderson was a physicist in addition to being one of the great science fiction writers of the “Golden Era”.
I’ve read Mote in God’s Eye and thought it would make an excellent movie,and I never really watched Babylon 5 at all so mayhap I will have to do some binge watching. It just never really resonated with me at the time despite all the raves it got from my buddies. I agree Expanse has been doing a good job with the person to person battle scenes but I haven’t seen that whole series from the beginning either.
I’m just really tired of the whole setpiece ST/SW battles that seemed more at home in an atmosphere or ocean…
On Babylon 5, strictly speaking, Earth-Force vessels (including the station) aren’t even oriented the same way up as themselves. The station is basically a big cylinder, and the habitable parts of the cruisers are a pair of modules, in both cases with “up” being towards the center.
Alien vessels with artificial gravity do generally seem to all be the same way “up”, but who knows? Maybe orienting an artificial gravity generator opposed to another one nearby causes unnecessary strain on the systems, or something, so everyone just stays the same way “up” for convenience.
I’ll add David Weber’s Honorverse, which uses the 18th century ‘ship of the line’ tactics but respects the limits of physics (and also displays long-range combat, like in millions of miles distance between combatants, rather than the point-blank stuff of Star Trek/Star Wars).
Wow… I have to disagree…at least in some cases… Anderson sometimes has Flandy, as an expert pilot, manually controlling the phasing, with some double-speak about how the human senses are better than computers for this.
(I agree, though, that Anderson’s space battles are very realistic, given the SF assumptions, and that his physics knowledge makes all the details of his stories more believable.)
(I’m also thinking about Star Wars, where the gunnery aboard the M.F. is done by hand-targeting. Okay, many Han just couldn’t afford a targeting computer…despite the fact that a blessed 8080 chip could do better than a guy holding a handle!)
John Hemry’s books have very realistic space combat. The JAG in Space books being near future and limited to the solar system and slow speeds.
His Jack Campbell Last Fleet universe books have massive interstellar human empires fighting. There are FTL jumps between solar systems, but combat takes place at slower speeds in the systems.
All the weapons are fired by computer control because the slower speeds are still beehive what humans can react to. The ships can reach high fractions of the speed of light, but combat can’t happen faster than .2 lightspeed because the computers can’t control the weapons well enough to hit anything at higher speeds.
Remember, though, that interstellar travel in B5 is done via warp gate. So it’s not like you spend six months thrusting towards Alpha Centauri, then flip around and spend six months thrusting away. Instead, you pop out basically on top of your destination. And I could very well be forgetting something, but I don’t think we ever saw a ship actually slow down and stop outside of the station (or a planet, or wherever). You’d usually get a big fx shot of the ship coming out of a gate, then radio communications between the ship and the station, and then cut to the captain (or whoever) being greeted at the docking bay by one of the series regulars. How the ship stopped (or even if it stopped) usually didn’t come up.
I think you have to give them a little leeway for budget and time constraints. The show very clearly established how the fighters were supposed to act, and generally stuck pretty close to it, especially when it was directly plot relevant. If sometimes the fx artists didn’t get it quite right, and there wasn’t time or money to fix it, that’s more of an art error than a contradiction. Like sometimes you’ll be reading a comic and they accidentally color Superman’s cape blue in one panel.
Alas, no, I can’t be specific. My memory is telling me it happens in A Stone in Heaven, but I’m just not sure.
(I also sometimes wonder about the shipbuilding and naval architecture behind Hooligan. It has upgraded engines, so it can go faster than most ships, it has an advanced weapons suite…and it still has enough empty space for a dining room. Seems a little too good to be true…)
(Again, I’m being way nitpicky; I adore Anderson, and think the Flandry series is some of the best SF ever written!)
if you have the tech to travel near the speed of light, a devastating weapon would be a small ship that goes past you without slowing down, having first fired out clouds of expanding sand. The ship passes you before you know it’s there, and then suddenly you’re vapour.
A single grain of sand going 99% the speed of light has an equivalent energy of about 500 tons of TNT. Imagine a 20 mile wide disc of such sand coming at you with a density of, say, 50 grains per square meter… And since it’s going .99c, you won’t have much time to manoever.
Heinlein was always great when it came to space combat. Starship Troopers was awsome. The opening battle against the ‘skinnies’, starting with the drop of armored soldiers from orbit in ablative capsules, is just fantastic.
“The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” depicted the inevitable use of gravity weapons, when the colonists on the moon fight back against Earth by simply dropping rocks on them, fired from mass drivers buried under the regolith with their muzzles designed to look like nondescript craters. But it also had space battles with miners on the surface trying to bring down spaceships with laser drills, and hand-to-hand combat in which unfamiliarity with low gravity combat by one side was a deciding factor. Great book.
Any NAFAL ship (assuming the “you” in there is another ship) that doesn’t have shielding against interacting with NAFAL particles isn’t going to exist for very long, is it? And absent that, what’s going to happen to the attacking ship when it slows down, and the cloud (now with extra enemy ship chunks!) catches up with it? Or some other neutral structure in the vicinity?
IMO, any society that has NAFAL or FTL travel should treat anyone using untargetted kinetic impactors the same as use of CBW weapons planetside, and for the same reason. “Spray and pray” isn’t justified on the streets of Baghdad. Much less so when the potential collateral damage radius could fill a solar system.
During the brief, hours-long air war between Israel and Syria in 1982, the IAF destroyed 90 Syrian MIG fighters taking minor losses.
The IAF did this without seeing the enemy planes at all. It was all radar/etc. controlled.
This is how most* modern air battles are fought. You see a blip on the screen and you push a button to make that blip go away.
The close in battle depicted, for example, in SW:EP4 when they escape the Death Star is ridiculous. Designed to imitate WWI (not even WWII) air battles. They had frickin’ lasers**! How do you end up fighting at close quarters if you have lasers? Why are you aiming without computers? (And not even telescopic sights!)
But not all. A few traditional dogfights took place during the Iraq invasion.
