# Would a space-war movie/show that used real physics be any good? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [December 28, 2005, 6:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-a-space-war-movie-show-that-used-real-physics-be-any-good/337465 "2005-12-28T18:39:37Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 14\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![RealityChuck](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/realitychuck/32/195_2.png) [@RealityChuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityChuck)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2005, 7:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-a-space-war-movie-show-that-used-real-physics-be-any-good/337465/21 "2005-12-28T19:55:47Z")
Obviously, the answer to the OP is yes. Because what makes a movie work is not the science – it’s the story. Good story and good characters trumps so-so science every day of the week. Now if you’re talking about purely “hard” SF TV, the show that did the best job of staying entirely within known scientific fact was **[Star Cops](http://www.starcops.com/)**. But judging on whether an SF show is good or bad solely on the basis on how accurate it is is like judging a mystery on what type of hat the detective wears. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2005, 7:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-a-space-war-movie-show-that-used-real-physics-be-any-good/337465/22 "2005-12-28T19:57:58Z")
> [@Bryan Ekers](#): > > The 1987 British series _Star Cops_ . . . Hmmm . . . And that brilliant concept only lasted one season? ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2005, 8:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-a-space-war-movie-show-that-used-real-physics-be-any-good/337465/23 "2005-12-28T20:00:02Z")
> [@RealityChuck](#): > > But judging on whether an SF show is good or bad solely on the basis on how accurate it is is like judging a mystery on what type of hat the detective wears. :rolleyes: Look, space opera can be **good,** but it’s still space opera. We’re discussing hard SF here. And hard SF has a value which space opera lacks, and I hope I don’t need to explain to you what it is. ---
**Author:** ![Grossbottom](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/ba8739/32.png) [@Grossbottom](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Grossbottom)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2005, 8:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-a-space-war-movie-show-that-used-real-physics-be-any-good/337465/24 "2005-12-28T20:02:07Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > And given the no-FTL rule, the battle – the whole war and all its combatants – would have to be limited to within our Solar System. Why? Suspending a mammal’s animation isn’t so far away that we can’t foresee its use. Suspended animation is pretty safe ground for even the hardest SF authors, IMHO. An interstellar war can take place STL as long as you’re willing to wait a long time for deployment. Of course, actual engagement would necessarily take place close to a star, so it’s sort of a home- or away-game situation, I guess. With that said, I’d watch it. Some of my favorite parts of Battlestar Galactica are the ‘Newtonian’ physics that the starfighters use, I think they’ve done a decent job making it look cool. The Galactica itself isn’t much for following those rules, though. I mean, if you got nuked in zero-g, I’d think it would push your ship around a little. As would firing hundreds of flak cannons simultaneously on one side of the ship. :dubious: ---
**Author:** ![ElvisL1ves](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/5daacb/32.png) [@ElvisL1ves](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ElvisL1ves)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2005, 8:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-a-space-war-movie-show-that-used-real-physics-be-any-good/337465/25 "2005-12-28T20:18:49Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > 😕 Why is there anything incredible about that? It isn’t incredible, just implausible. As **BrainGlutton** points out, “goodness” comes from stories and characters, not technologies. If the scenario is implausible, the story and characters are going to have a hard time being plausible either. > [@](#): > > Really? I’ve never been entirely clear on what propels their spaceships. I already excepted jump travel from the realm of possibility, and given BSG props for the _rest_. They do need jump travel or there’s no story line, and that’s certainly a small enough price to pay. > [@](#): > > Why? (Remember, I’m talking about real artificial gravity, not a poor simulation of it achieved by spinning a cylindrical ship.) Why? Why not? We don’t yet know that artificial gravity cannot be created, not the way we know FTL or backwards time travel cannot be created. ---
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2005, 8:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-a-space-war-movie-show-that-used-real-physics-be-any-good/337465/26 "2005-12-28T20:19:57Z")
The thing is, I doubt most real space battles would take place on a human time frame. You’re manuevaring in minimum delta-V orbits for months or years, trying to detect the enemy, when you detect the enemy you fire weapons, and either you hit and they die in milliseconds or you miss. Well, there could be drama in this. But a real life space battle would have to play more like a submarine movie rather than a fighter plane movie. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2005, 9:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-a-space-war-movie-show-that-used-real-physics-be-any-good/337465/27 "2005-12-28T21:30:05Z")
> [@ElvisL1ves](#): > > I already excepted jump travel from the realm of possibility, and given BSG props for the _rest_. But it’s the slower-than-light propulsion I was talking about. Both the Colonial and the Cylon ships – just like ST and SW ships – appear to move around without expelling reaction mass. That’s the big limiting factor in space propulsion. At present, space travel consists of giving the spaceship one big push in the desired direction, and then letting it drift in free-fall until it gets there. We can’t build a **constant-boost** space drive because there’s no practical way to carry that much fuel/reaction-mass on board the ship with you. There are theoretical ways around that – e.g., the Bussard Ramjet ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bussard\_ramjet](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bussard_ramjet)) – but BSG doesn’t appear to use any of them; they just have spaceships that seem to have solved the problem in a black-box way. > [@ElvisL1ves](#): > > Why? Why not? We don’t yet know that artificial gravity cannot be created, not the way we know FTL or backwards time travel cannot be created. AFAIK, nobody has even a theoretical line on manipulating gravity without using an actual gravity-generating mass (which presents its own problems). “Gravitons” might be manipulated, somehow, but they are theoretical and, as yet, undetected. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graviton](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graviton) ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2005, 9:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-a-space-war-movie-show-that-used-real-physics-be-any-good/337465/28 "2005-12-28T21:38:47Z")
> [@Grossbottom](#): > > Why? Suspending a mammal’s animation isn’t so far away that we can’t foresee its use. Suspended animation is pretty safe ground for even the hardest SF authors, IMHO. An interstellar war can take place STL as long as you’re willing to wait a long time for deployment. Of course, actual engagement would necessarily take place close to a star, so it’s sort of a home- or away-game situation, I guess. S.M. Stirling’s _Drakon_ opens in the 25th Century – five centuries after the Final War between the Domination of the Draka and the Alliance for Democracy, which the Draka won, but the Alliance won the local battles in the Asteroid Belt and gained enough time to send a colonization ship (bearing suspended-animation colonists and frozen embryos or cell samples of most Earth life-forms) to the recently discovered planet of Samothrace in another star system. The Draka and the Samothracians remain enemies, and are in race to plant the most colonies in the immediate stellar neighborhood, but, given the distances involved – “Interstellar war was just as preposterous as interstellar government” – they never actually fight, not until FTL technology is developed (at the beginning of the story). ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2005, 9:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-a-space-war-movie-show-that-used-real-physics-be-any-good/337465/29 "2005-12-28T21:45:25Z")
Re the above: Stirling (speaking through the musings of the protagonist/villain, Gewndolyn Ingolfsson), notes (pre-FTL), “In theory it was possible to _destroy_ planets from an interstellar distance, though not to conquer them. Nobody had ever thought it worthwhile, when preparations were easy to spot and retaliation in kind just as easy.” ---
**Author:** ![Bryan\_Ekers](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bryan_ekers/32/183_2.png) [@Bryan\_Ekers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bryan_Ekers)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2005, 9:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-a-space-war-movie-show-that-used-real-physics-be-any-good/337465/30 "2005-12-28T21:51:01Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > Hmmm . . . And that brilliant concept only lasted one season? Not even as many episodes as _Firefly_, tragically. ---
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2005, 9:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-a-space-war-movie-show-that-used-real-physics-be-any-good/337465/31 "2005-12-28T21:54:57Z")
That’s the problem with interplanetary war. All you have to do is drop a rock on the enemy planet and the whole point of the war goes away. How do you have a war with someone who can drop dinosaur-killers on Earth any time they like? ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2005, 9:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-a-space-war-movie-show-that-used-real-physics-be-any-good/337465/32 "2005-12-28T21:55:04Z")
> [@Bryan Ekers](#): > > Not even as many episodes as _Firefly_, tragically. **BAD** BBC! **BAD!** ---
**Author:** ![Grossbottom](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/ba8739/32.png) [@Grossbottom](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Grossbottom)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2005, 10:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-a-space-war-movie-show-that-used-real-physics-be-any-good/337465/33 "2005-12-28T22:40:07Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > “In theory it was possible to destroy planets from an interstellar distance, though not to conquer them. Nobody had ever thought it worthwhile, when preparations were easy to spot and retaliation in kind just as easy.” Haven’t read the book, but I’ll answer the substance of the quote. The assumption that preparations would be easy to spot is presumably qualified in the book, though in a true STL universe that’s going to be nonsense. C is the maximum speed anything may travel, including information. If I build and launch interstellar weapons in less than the time it takes light to travel from my location of preparation to the target’s location, my preparations cannot be detected prior to completion. In other words: they might know I’ve thrown a punch before it hits them, but they \*\*can’t \*\* know in time to stop me from swinging my fist. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2005, 10:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-a-space-war-movie-show-that-used-real-physics-be-any-good/337465/34 "2005-12-28T22:45:16Z")
> [@Lemur866](#): > > That’s the problem with interplanetary war. All you have to do is drop a rock on the enemy planet and the whole point of the war goes away. How do you have a war with someone who can drop dinosaur-killers on Earth any time they like? Don’t start an interstellar war It has no helpful uses When people ask you, “What’s it for?” You’ll only make excuses If thirty trillion folks get hurt You’ll go to bed with no dessert! Don’t start an interstellar war – From “Never Set the Cat on Fire” by Frank Hayes. [Pegasus Awards - Frank Hayes](http://www.ovff.org/pegasus/people/frank-hayes.html) [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-a-space-war-movie-show-that-used-real-physics-be-any-good/337465.md?page=1)