Space Battles – How Science Fiction Failed Us

June 2, 2010 - By Phineas Delgado

So for the past few weeks, we’ve delved into some of the deeper and more truly scientific concepts tackled by science fiction. Of course, since the main point of science fiction is to entertain an audience, and (let’s be honest) most people could give a Ewok’s hind end about the science, all too often the realistic is replaced with the fantastic. The end result can vary from the surreal to the sublime to the ridiculous, but often, regardless of the quality, far from the mark. This is probably the most true when it comes to the climax of most any science fiction epic: The Space Battle.

Now, most geeks already know the major problems with depictions of battles in space: the noise and explosions. Since space is a vacuum, and sound waves require substance to perpetuate them, the sounds would never be heard, even within your own cockpit or flight deck. The most you might hear is a bit of noise when you fired your weapons, but you would never hear enemy fire (we’ll address the issue of lasers in a moment). Imagine the Battle of Endor where the only sounds you heard in the space battle were the actors talking, the drone of the engines and the occasional hum of their lasers firing. No “pewpew” no Alderaan-shattering “KABOOOOOM!” Just silence. Boring to say the least.

Star Wars: Battle over Coruscant

As for the explosions, they would require oxygen, which again, is largely absent in said vacuum of space (not very nice places, those vacuums). You see, fire requires a specific balance of four things: fuel and oxygen to start, a heat source to raise the fuel/oxygen combo to its flash point, and enough of those three to produce a sustainable chain reaction to maintain the fire. Eliminate one of the four, and the fire goes out. Since space is a vacuum and the ships would largely be pressurized with breathable oxygen, there could be flashes when they were destroyed, but they would wink out very quickly… if they appeared at all. It’s far more likely that the oxygen would disperse so quickly that a chain reaction would never begin. Or that the heat would dissipate so fast in the frozen cold of space that fire would never start in the first place. What you would end up with little Tie Fighters (which, by the way, are not pressurized) just blowing into little pieces in a flash of light.

Now the larger vessels like, say, the Enterprise, or a Battlestar, contain copious amounts of oxygen and could foster internal explosions like the surface of earth could. Such explosions could be seen from another vessel, provided they ruptured the exterior hull. They wouldn’t last long, mind you, but they would probably be spectacular by comparison, especially if there was combustible fuel on board. Still though, no boom and certainly no massive fireball.

This is all basic physics, though. Physical science even. There are other aspects of battle in space that never sat quite right with me, too. Take space fighters, for instance. In all my years of watching Sci-Fi movies and television, only one show came remotely close to depicting how a small craft would have to move in the void (and even still there was more F-16 in their movements than space would allow for). That show was Babylon 5. Their fighters could be seen using thrusters to change their facing direction, and there was a lot of drift. They also limited their in-space explosions and often had exterior shots in space with no sound, so as to simulate the real effect of being in space. Comparing that to the Asteroid Belt chase in The Empire Strikes Back, a scene in which the rather large Millennium Falcon was seen spinning wildly, then straightening out instantly and turning on a dime. Unless there is some technology that is never explored, that type of movement just isn’t possible. You see, to get spinning, you would have to apply a lot of energy over a period of time. According to Newton’s Laws, in order to stop spinning, you would have to apply an equal amount of force and you spent getting up to that speed in total. SO if you applied 10 pounds of force per inch over 4 seconds, you would have to apply 160 pounds of opposing force to stop the movement cold. For a ship that size, the amount of energy involved would be tremendous and would likely break the ship in half for the effort.

At least Star Trek invented the fictional “inertial dampeners”, which do exactly what they say; they limit the effect Newton’s Laws of Motion have on the ship, making it possible to stop quickly, turn fast, and has the added bonus of keeping the crew from facing tremendous force when the ship performs these maneuvers. They also added a “structural integrity field” which acts as a sort of covering for the exterior of the ship, protecting the hull from the shearing forces of high stress movement and warp travel. I think Star Wars stole a Federation ship and just forgot to mention it…

The final aspect I’ll address today is the weaponry. I think we all know how fast light travels (pretty darn fast to cover 93 million miles in just over 7 minutes). So why is it that the weapons in Star Wars, Star Trek and other worlds have to lock on or track targets? Isn’t light traveling nearly instantly?  Even if a target is 10km away (the maximum range for Star Trek), you’re pretty much going to hit right where you aim. Now the projectiles and missles, I get, but lasers are point and shoot. Babylon 5 again hit the nail pretty close to the head by depicting beam weapons that were sustained and used mainly for cutting enemies apart. This opposes the Star Wars model which uses a principal that involves excited gas particles to punch holes in targets, so it’s conceivable that there would have to be leading and aiming, and perhaps even a stream of excited material you could see (lasers would usually be invisible to the unaided eye). Star Trek does something similar; Phasers create particles called “nadions” that affect objects on the atomic level while Disrupters excite the molecular bonds of an object. The shielding of ships is actually designed specifically to disperse these types of radiation (there is no other word for it really); which is why when they encounter new weapons, they are usually powerless against them.

Here’s how a space battle would really go down. The weapons would most likely be either powerful lasers (that would hit a target instantly and be invisible… sounds like a perfect weapon to me), rail guns (which launch projectiles using magnetic fields instead of explosions, which are impossible in space) and to a lesser degree, missile weapons (it’s possible that they would be too slow to catch space targets, or that the launch would negatively affect the trajectory of the launching ship as to make it only viable on extremely large vessels). It would be slow (at least it would look slow) and it would be quiet. And if lasers really were involved, chances are, everyone involved would be dead before they knew what hit them. I know this doesn’t make for good TV or movies, and we need to have exciting, engaging space battles (let’s face it, everyone like a little pew pew now and then), but let’s take the path of Babylon 5 and some of the newer additions to the genre and make it as realistic as we can. Honestly, I think it’s more compelling that way. And for the record, Star Trek would win in a battle against Star Wars. So there.