- Imagine a sci-fi space battle.
It's pretty easy to picture the ships
screaming through empty space,
shooting lasers at each other.
Now, consider a scientifically accurate space battle.
Not so easy,
not just because there's never been
an actual battle in space
but because no TV show or movie
has really taken the time to get it right.
And I'm not faulting pop culture here.
I know that sometimes science
has to take a backseat to the story.
I'm just here to say that
a real space battle
would look a bit different.
Half a century of the most loved space based pop culture
has ingrained in our subconscious
what space battles look like,
quick moves, laser blasts, cool looking ships,
instant communication, and so on.
But an accurately portrayed space battle
would have none of this.
So, what would it have?
Let's start with the ships themselves.
If you draw it poorly, Disney can't sue, I think.
Now, unless you are a spaceship
that enters an atmosphere regularly,
there is no reason for you to have wings.
Wings provide lift when they encounter air,
and so, if you spend most of your time in space
as it looks like most spaceships in pop culture do,
then in reality a spaceship would look more like
a box with guns.
- [Fox] All-range mode.
- No, Fox, I just said it doesn't matter in space.
This is why Slippy died.
Speaking of talking to annoying crew members,
depending on the size and the location of the space battle,
communication would be complicated.
Let's say that a space battle breaks out around Jupiter,
and pilots from Earth are trying to get strategy
from Earth command about how to deal with the
incoming alien armada.
If we wanted to give our pilots there a strategy,
there would be at least a 33 minute delay,
or 1961 seconds because our signals can only travel
at the speed of light,
and Jupiter is 600 million kilometers away.
A real space battle would have to take this time delay
into account and instantaneous communication
like you see in movies and TV shows
would be impossible.
- This is where the fun begins.
This is where the fun begins.
- Speaking of talking to people who make sounds,
a real space battle would be silent.
I know you've all heard in space no one can hear you scream,
but this applies to explosions too.
In space, there is no air to carry pressure waves,
which is what sound is.
So, even the Death Star blowing up would sound like this.
And that's it.
Unless some debris rattled your ship,
a space battle would sound like
nothing.
For a real space battle,
even the interior of the spaceships would have to change.
Beep, boop.
I'm not doing that just for fun.
This is how a starfighter's controls would really look.
If you're in a space battle,
you're going to be accelerating,
and your weight depends on your mass
and how much you are accelerating.
So, if you are pulling high g maneuvers in a space battle,
your weight will literally change.
Now, imagine having a throttle like they do in Star Trek
and operating it when your hand and your fingers
become three or four or five or 10 times
as heavy.
Nah, you can't do that precisely.
That's why a real starfighter's controls
would allow for movement just of the fingertips to work.
Beep, boop.
Just the fingertips, bop, boop.
And while you're beeping and booping,
your crew around you won't be sitting in the starfighter
like you may assume.
Most spaceships that you've seen
have their thrusters at the back like this, right?
Well, the only way to give yourself gravity on a ship
aside from spinning is to use this thrust
and accelerate in the opposite direction
that you want to feel your weight acting.
- This is where the fun begins.
(Kyle groans)
- So, if a spaceship like this
accelerated in this direction most of the time,
the floors and the people on those floors
would have to be oriented perpendicular to the acceleration
to feel their weight and operate normally
as if they were under gravity
and not be oriented parallel to the acceleration
like you've always seen.
And then there's the battle itself.
A real space battle wouldn't look like an aerial dog fight.
It look more like asteroids.
In space, because there's no air
for either pressure waves or screams,
bombs wouldn't be nearly as effective,
but projectiles would.
Because there's no air resistance in space,
if you apply any amount of force to some mass,
that projectile will continue off in a straight line
at some constant velocity forever
until it hits something.
Why do they let him keep doing this?
No.
Guns and rail guns and not torpedoes and bombs
would be a real starfighter's armaments,
but the science doesn't stop there.
Because everything with mass and velocity has momentum
and momentum is conserved,
if you fire mass away from you in the form of weaponry,
it can speed you up or slow you down.
So, in a real space battle,
you wouldn't always see spaceships
only firing directly forwards
in the direction that they are trying to accelerate in
because that would rob them of velocity
due to the conservation of momentum.
More likely you would see ships firing
not along this acceleration vector
because if they lose velocity,
that means they have to use precious fuel.
But the biggest thing you would notice
about a real space battle is how the ships moved.
In space, there's no air to slow you down,
so if you accelerated in one direction,
you would continue on at some constant velocity
in a straight line forever.
Unless you applied some deceleration to your craft,
you would whiz past your target
or smash into a space station.
You would have to spend just as much time
slowing down as speeding up.
This is why unless their designs changed,
a sci-fi ship like the X-wing
would be doing a lot of that,
which we can all agree looks ridiculous.
So, if every space battle you've seen is wrong,
what would be right?
Well, you'd see box shaped ships
firing projectiles silently
in directions that wouldn't rob them of velocity
according to directions they got on a time delay
from some command in a way that they could input
onto touch based screens.
If you see any of that in a movie or video game or TV show
and you're a nerd like me,
you know that
this is where the fun begins.
Because Science.
Thank you so much for watching.
Make sure to follow me on Twitter at @Sci_Phile,
where you can suggest ideas for future episodes,
and on Facebook, where I have posted
a very special edition of this episode today
on Nerdist's Facebook page.
If you're a fan of hard sci-fi,
I think you're gonna like it.
Go check it out.
And on Instagram under the same name,
where I'm now posting mini episodes.
Bye.
When you're on Earth,
if you're in a dog fight in an airplane,
it makes sense that you'd be facing each other
like this in the air
because there's a common reference point of where down is.
But if you're in space for a space battle,
there's no down.
Technically, every direction could be down.
So, why is every spaceship
when they meet in a battle like this?
Like in Star Trek, they always meet like this.
In reality, if they're supplying their own gravity somehow,
they should be able to meet like this,
and it wouldn't matter.
But they don't.
Maybe because it makes it look weird
when you try to gesture it.