I would like to see a realistic space battle. I can imagine it'd look something like me playing Asteroids when I'm drunk.

One thing you can count on if we do make it into space: We will TOTALLY try to kill the shit out of each other.

I'm actually curious about the usage of the music. I noticed in the Sesame Street Star Wars that they didn't have the Star Wars theme, just a close approximation. I figured that was because Disney owns the rights now (so long, days of C3PO and R2D2 getting lost on Sesame Street.) I might just go straight to the Mouse and report this and collect my bounty! Take THAT PBS, that's for interrupting Vicious with a pledge drive!!!

"It's OKAY to be SMART" is the kind of sloagan that we've come to.

EVE Online is probably pretty close. Long periods of fuck all, followed by long periods of just fucking trying to find each other, followed by a short clusterfuck of synchronized mouse clicking and lastly an even longer period spent going home with balls bluer than Neptune.

The most powerful laser = all the energy of all the power plants in the world combined? Huh? Someone explain this?

They could of gone into more details on all the points. Like, a LOT more.

There are millions of words worth of hard scifi exploring these limitations and how they might be overcome this video is a waste of space.

I always assumed real space battles would be basically almost exactly like submarine combat.

I found Mass Effect's story logs of future space combat compelling.

Unlike the cinematic battles witnessed in the game, the logs described an arms race of sensor and stealth technology, waged at hundreds and thousands of kilometers, as relativistic weapons basically made the first shot end the battle.

With our level of technology, i imagine battles of stealth ships running evasive maneuvers with infrequent vector changes. The weapons themselves would have to be stealth and as such, slow as well.

it would be very much like submarine warfare stanleypain thinks, but at much higher speeds and distances, and at the same time much slower rate of events....stealth nuclear torpedoes slowly approaching and scanning for their targets, avoiding detection until in range.




though with how disposable human life is, given sufficient political reason, we'll see poor schmucks in pressurized aluminum cans shooting at each other with space-shotguns before anything that advanced.

The old "Elite" series of games, especially Elite:First Encounters had realistic Newtonian combat. And if that's anything to go by..

It was basically 2 pilots waiting for a week for both of their craft to accelerate onto intersecting trajectories relative to a star or planet, which they let a computer handle so they don't miss a decimal and therefore their opponent by 700 million km. Then a few kamakazie passes with guns and lasers as they hurl past each other at terrific speeds, engines blazing. The fight may also be won by missiles, mines, or Chicken. These fights take weeks to prepare but they happen within seconds and you can usually guess the outcome in advance, so you let a computer do it all, its just programming your thrusters and waiting, just like jousting. Gunnery is really awkward like throwing pebbles at a bat or chasing it with a laser pointer.

Though EVE taught me that it actually feels cool and awesome when it's against real people and it's totally worth staring at spreadsheets for a week and commiserating with excitable nerds for a few moments of totally wrecking somebody's shit so hard they feel it IRL.