Obviously this is science fiction and cannot be reality checked, but in space movies and TV shows we always see the space fighters zip in and out between the battlestars and star destroyers. However, the big ships have engines the size of shopping malls. Couldn’t the big ships just burn out and leave the little dudes in their smoke? Or does all that extra ship that they’re pushing around equal them out?
It would seem to me that a bigger ship would have more economy of scale in which to put in a bigger percentage of the ship’s size towards the engines. But that doesn’t count for the room that the engineering crew needs to work in, while with a fighter they have to pull the panels off and work on them from the outside.
In general the battleships my be technically faster because they are faster than light capable but that acceleration takes a lot of time or they have interest in being there and not bugging out. So the little fighters get to do circles around them.
Except that realistically, computer aimed weapons aren’t as likely to miss like they do in the movies and one punch from a larger ship (where the weapon is often larger than the entire fighter) is the end of the fighter.
And on the other end of the scale, the fighter’s weapons aren’t likely to penetrate the larger ship’s hull or do much actual damage.
It is merely “age of the dominance of aircraft carriers” (ie, right now) translated into space battles. Plucky lone hero in his fighter craft taking on the big bad battleship mythology.
The general idea, in this sort of science fiction, is that the capital ships have such enormous mass that it takes those gigantic engines a long time to accelerate up to the same speed as the smaller fighters, which are essentially rockets with a chair tied to the front.
There’s an argument to be made that this is related to the square-cube law-- the mass of a ship goes up by the cube of the length of the ship. As ships get larger, they get drastically more massive, and so cannot accelerate as quickly.
Yeah, that’s what I was going to say. If the entire back end of a ship (of whatever size) is taken up by engines, and if the thrust of the engines is proportional to their cross-sectional area, and all ships are about the same density, then acceleration will be inversely proportional to length.
The other problem is that, if the fighters go fast, their Delta-Vee (required energy to change direction) is very high, but if they go slow, they make for easy targets. Either way it doesn’t make for interesting cinematic space battles.
Not entirely correct - depends also on just how densely you build your ships - A spindly carbon-fibre construct covered in tin-foil isn’t going to go up in mass as fast as, say, one with a solid neutronium hull.
The battleship theme also ignores that a relatively small space craft can easily carry a ship-killing weapon powerful enough to waste any plausible spaceship. Say, a kilogram of antimatter in a guided package. Or simply a kilo of antimatter, guided and directed by the fighter, then detatched and left to coast the rest of the way to the target…
In general, I find space war as done by Hollywood to be laughably under-armed. It would be like arming Challengers, T-84s, and Abrams tanks with 20mm cannon… Any technolgical base capable of building an interstellar spaceship is capable of building weapons able to destroy any mobile vessel smaller than a small moon in a single go. Oh… Wait. Those are vulnerable too.
In any ‘realistic’ practical space war, stealth, sensors, and firing computors will rule. It’ll be a lot like submarine warfare - First one to get a firing solution wins, though there’ll be a lot of mutual kills. It’ll be incredibly deadly.
Maybe, maybe not. Asking us to correctly predict space warfare in the future would be like asking Horatio Nelson to predict an AEGIS cruiser. We simply have no idea what technology would be involved.
At least submarine warfare would have an illusion of realism. It’s a shame there’s no movies (at least none I can think of) where they strive for some sort of realism in space combat, but I guess people strapped to anti-G-force chairs and computers doing most of the actually work doesn’t translate to the big screen too well.
Right. Claims (one way or the other) about any depiction’s realism are assuming way too much. The most any movie or show can aspire to is surface plausibility and internal consistency.
The Atomic Rockets site has covered virtually every possible debate over space warfare. In general, the balance (if there is one) between capital ships and fighters/torpedo boats will depend on the relative strength of offense vs. defense.
Fairly good, in many respects. I very much enjoyed that series. One thing he went too light on was time dialation/frame of reference. That, and the weapons seemed much too dim-witted, considering the over-all technological level. OTOH, he had the Praxis to blame for such effects, and he showed the beginings of the results of tactical innovation (purpose-built warships somewhat vulnerable to coverted frieghters with massive magazine capacities) after the breaking of the old empire’s stranglehold.
Oh, and he also found a plausible reason for a massive space empire to exist in the first place - Old fashioned, hide-bound, burn-the-heretics religion.
Oddly enough, one movie that got space conflict somewhat right was that eternal stinker of a movie, “Robot Jox”, in that when a warhead detonated in LEO, there was a shockwave/wave-front, but no sound.
God I hate those scenes. You have ships “banking”, wings on ships operating in a vacuum, and a slew of other crap that makes it hard for me to suspend belief enough to enjoy any internal consistency. It’s be nice to have a movie dealing with what real battles would be like. In reality, a beam weapon traveling at the speed of light would never miss. And you mist certainly couldn’t do any evasive maneuvers. As soon as you detected anything you’d need to shoot it.
Aren’t you forgetting light speed delay? At a light-second away, your beam would arrive at where the target was two seconds ago. That makes evasion possible, unless you’re thinking that beams can’t be focused sufficiently until you’re at “point blank” range by lightspeed standards.
Yes and no. You can’t “see one coming” and get out of its way so the delay is of no help there, but you can “serpentine! serpentine!” and hope you get missed. Bonus points for anyone who gets that reference.
