The Physics of Space Battles

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1. you didn't cover railguns, obviously, it would need counter thrust. but what else am I forgetting? ideas would be cool. sorry if you guys have already covered this...
2. anyone else thinks joe looks like william dafoe?.
3. Nice broad strokes over the basic issues of space battle, briefly touched the main problem: information. Anyone who's played an online shooter knows that killing enemies isn't nearly as hard as finding them. And with the vastness of space, the relative minute size of spaceships and the limitations of the speed of light on any scanners and you have something difficult to impossible to find once it's traveling at hi speeds. Probably space battles, if any, would be focused around immobile points of interest which had to be defended, and the advantage would be seriously with the attacked based on knowledge of any type of stationary (or predictable, like satellites) defenses. By the time a rescue fleet came the attackers could lay waste and move on.
4. You also See space dogfights in low Planet orbits a lot. If you maneuver like that and change your Direction all the time you are very likely to lose your Orbit and get into the atmosphere. Especially the 180 degree Direction changes annoy me. And all the motherships stay "planetstationary" although they are in low Orbit. I guess real space battles would just be not that interesting to watch, as everyone dies and the Kessler effect prevents any further battles later :D
5. =) AWESOME!!!
6. You obviously havnt heard of the em drive that produce 12 m/s of speed without a thrust which breaks newtons 2nd law also the blast I don't think are lasers i actually think there positronic blasts therefore being visible and more damaging and as for the ships movements the could be powered by an alcubiere warp drive which basically warps the space around a person in stead of moving the Person through space, basically creating a mini bubble in which you could move at fast speeds, and with a form of quantum entaglment you could send data instantaneously so it's not that much possible
7. For a trek-style space opera, Andromeda was surprisingly good at this: space battles were led at the distance of light seconds thorugh the use of unmanned drone fighters, relativistic kinetic kill missiles, and point defense lasers. Every important system in the ships was redundant and the ships were huge, but with a lot of empty spaces to make hits less devastating. No shields, IIRC, but point defens lasers and I think kinetic weapons plus ablative armor. The maneuvers also looked less like dogfights, at least for the bigger ships, with turning in spot without changing movement direction, in one episode this was even being used to lauch some junk as kinetic impactors from mostly unarmed freighter's cargo bay, with the freighter turning the bay towards the target, opening it and reverse-thrusting hard to let the package flying.
   
   I haven't seen B5, but Andromeda had the most realistic space battles I've seen, all things considered.
8. i don't understand why all such videos undermine explosive power in space. Sure, explosions wouldn't be as fancy to look there, but the destructive power should still be same. Actually, contrary to many sci fi movies and even some popular science documentaries, i think energy weapons like lasers would be most ineffective. Laser even if it is really well focused, can be made ineffective by many different ways.. by cooling the hull of the ship, by mirroring the beam, etc. What most people don't seem to understand, is that actually in space you don't have to do great destruction.. even if you shoot a tiny hole into the hull or start a fire on board of enemy ship, they are pretty much screwed. So, basically railguns should be great or whatever projectile with great impact.. but any explosion should also be able to damage hull enough to depressurize the ship and probably ignite the air. And nukes would also create EMP, leaving enemy absolutely without power and unless their ships use mechanical systems not electric, they would be completely defenseless
9. A way to make super efficient fighters would be to have a axis mounted turret, and a eps tank the size of the fuel tank.
   Of course, they would need to be launched by a carrier
10. Mass Effect lore has also a lot of things right about space combat.
    
    They talk about lasers, saying the problems of spreading (though better optics would help) and also they talked about the choice of the wavelength, infrared hardware needing fewer replacement than ultraviolet, but spreading more.
    They talked about kinetic impactors fired with railguns-like guns at a fraction of lightspeed. Being light enough they do not almost push the firing ship (they are massive, like scaled up versions of nowadays cruisers) and can easily penetrate the fired ship, transfering little momentum but damaging critical systems.
    
    But the aspect I enjoyed the most reading about was heat management.
    Vessels would have large radiators to get rid of the waste heat from the powerplant, but during combat those are an easy target to hit, so they would have to be inbuilt in the hull, so that taking less surface area and needing higher temperatures to radiate the same heat, turning bright white on high power demand times.
    Combats would be very energy demanding, not being the radiators able to dissipate all the waste heat. That way engagements would be quick, even more near a sun, shooting while crew zone temperatures slowly rise. You win or scape before getting too hot (or loosing). And being on a hurry in the middle of a battle they talked about systems like releasing some liquid sodium, which would give an enormous surface area, from the front of the ship, and recovering most of it thanks to some mechanism on the rear.
11. Fight in......space? Are you insane or are you pulling my leg? Have you any idea of the true distances out there? You fire a laser against someone on Jupiter from earth orbit and they will receive it how many days later? Will they even be where you are aiming? And if a meteor passes between you and the target then what? Try again? Close orbit battles maybe, sub orbital combat for the right to land yes, but true deep space battle? Impractical to say the least. Suicidal certainly. You hit them they hit you you both die.
12. I think the reimagined Battlestar Galactica series is the closest to reality out of all the others. When you see Vioers and Raiders zipping around in the vacuum, you can see them flying like they are in space. They can flip their ships on a dime with a quick burst of a thruster. There's no broad sweeping turns like you would see in Star Wars or on Earth.
13. Anyone interested - check Children of a Dead Earth. Its a space combat simulator developed to be as realistic as possible.
14. Not sure if anyone commented this before, But. How effective would Rail cannons be? Flinging a metal slug with magnets/electro magnets?
15. Oh id say we will find a way to fight in space ☺
16. The Honorverse does a decent job.
17. hi excellent channel earnt a new sub
18. What happens when we encounter alien civilizations that are not exactly peaceful? That might be a "good" reason for space warfare...
19. Babylon 5 used the best space battle physics I'm aware of in TV or movies, though it was vastly compressed in terms of distances involved. It kind of has to be, though, to have any entertainment value. If the jump gate were actually a realistic orbital distance away from the station, both would be basically invisible to each other, which isn't very fun to watch. So distances are short, and plasma weapons travel really, /really/ slowly. Like maybe... 4 m/s slowly. But they do use Newtonian physics, with short thruster bursts, maneuvering thrusters on the corners of X-shaped craft for maximum torque, and tactics that such physics enables, such as spinning around to glide backwards under momentum, while shooting at an enemy that was 'behind' before flipping around.
    
    I've never seen any popular media deal with real orbital mechanics, however, and that's not too terribly surprising, as they're so counterintuitive most people would yell at the screen about how stupid it looks to thrust completely the wrong way most of the time. XD
    
    The best space combat in a video game was probably Independence War 2. And of course, for real space flight mechanics, it's tough to beat Kerbal Space Program. ;)
20. No windows, would be another thing, if warships come to pass. They would only be structural weak points, and serve no purpose, since battles would take place across vast distances.