My grandfather worked on the SR-71 program up at Edwards Air Force Base and there are so many things about it he still can't talk about. Loved the callout of the platform you made here!
"The SR71 Blackbeard with a velocity of mach 5 and a maximum altitude of over 80000 feet" "You sure seem to know a lot about it" "DO YOU EVEN READ MY CHRISTMAS LIST?"
I would love to see a deep dive into the jamming technology in Star Wars, as we are rarely given any details. Depending on how it works, It could very well give an explanation as to why guided munitions such as missiles are severely lacking in combat
it could also provide an explanation for why most ships in star wars is designed with their control bridges in a tower, rather than inside the ship itself. the expectation is that you can secure the bridge, but keep tabs on the battlefield through cameras or other devices. But if Jamming Technology is advanced enough, it could potentially be used to knock out any such method. Keeping in mind that when the Trade Federation invaded Naboo during Phantom menace, it also knocked out all communications on the planet. Theoretically, the Star wars Galaxy may have Jamming Technology that does the same to cameras/other devices, which would explain why most ships place their command deck on some sort of tower. A ship that relies on cameras, would be blinded, possibly for several minutes, and scrambling for information, possibly even ramming into another ship or station because they couldn't respond in time.
In Legends novels, authors like Timothy Zahn referred to a system called the “etheric rudder” that allowed starfighters to fly as if they were in atmosphere while in space. Like you said, the technology used by ships in Star Wars is beyond our understanding, but technically, since it’s really fantasy and not science fiction, it doesn’t need to make sense. People also misunderstand escape velocity all the time. You don’t have to be going any particular speed to escape a gravity well as long as your engines are more powerful than the force of gravity. If you accelerated to 2 miles per hour, balanced the thrust of your engines to counteract the force of gravity, and had unlimited fuel to keep your engines running, you would escape the gravity well. In Star Wars, they don’t seem to cut their engines to conserve fuel like we have to with real world rockets. Presumably, their engines are far more efficient than ours.
Huh? That's not how physics work. You need to accelerate faster than gravity pulls you which will result in increasing speed. Earth gravity is 9.81m/s2 so if you "set you engines" to that amount of acceleration you would float in place. If you set it to 10m/s2 you would gain 0.19meter/sec speed every sec and very slowly would gain enough speed to leave earth gravity well.
Yeah, star fighter pilots might not have real gravity to work with, but they still have to worry about G-forces from acceleration and deceleration. So they can only endure turns and speed ups or slowdowns that we could endure under Earth’s influence anyway. And dogfights and ship engagements only make sense when everyone was at about same relative speed anyway.
People who watch The Expanse know all about inertial dampners after the infamous "Belter Soup" incident. But I am guessing even Kongo, (Hi Kongo, when are we getting you onscreen again?) couldn't get that clip past youtubes guidlines!
As a starfighter pilot, I know that the reason I bank in space during combat is tactically irrelevant. The reason we do it is because it just looks so damn cool!
Thank you for this video Alan! I feel like this is something that EVERY critic of Star Wars needs to be educated on! I shall fervently pass on the wisdom you have bestowed upon us this day!
In my head canon, the Star Wars galaxy is saturated with gasses. Not only are planetary atmospheres a LOT deeper, but there's likely pockets of gasses that coalesce at random, likely dissipating in just a few decades before they have a chance to start forming a gas giant. I have to go, so I'll have to edit this later, but I have some theories on the subject I'd like to elaborate on.
There is support for this idea. In legends, Star Wars ships had an etheric rudder, which acts on luminous space to turn like in atmosphere. Ekhart made a great video about this, too.
Gotta geek check you on this one Allan - sorry ... The repulsor lift was a fiction created to enable atmospheric flight and 'float' near large gravitational masses. Manoeuvre was actually achieved through a device called an 'Aetheric control surface' The Aetheric control surface was a device that interacted with a fictional phenomena known as the 'Aether' or 'Ether' to create changes in momentum much like wind resistance in real life. ... Timothy Zhan used this in his books, so did Mike Stackpole in the Rogue Squadron books ... the Aetheric rudder, for example, acted like a real rudder and allowed dramatic manoeuvres that added suspense. Fun fact - the Ether was actually a pseudo scientific principle from Victorian times - Scientists actually thought that the space between planets was occupied by a mysterious substance - the nature of which we did not know ... but it was invisible and hence probably similar to a gas, vapour or ... ether.
In Victorian times Aether theory was science, not pseudo science. It was based on the idea that waves needed a medium in which to move (eg sound in air or water). They didn't know at that time that light was an electromagnetic wave that could move in a vacuum.
@@tektrixter Good to know thankyou! ... A good reminder that I shouldn't apply pejorative terms to Victorian science. I always saw Aether as a placeholder theory for later experimental confirmation ... much life dark matter / dark energy ... we cant see it, but the maths suggests it might be a solution.
I m a hobby author and my current project is a sci-fi story. Orbital mechanics take part in this endeavour. The vessels in my story don’t follow orbital mechanics while in combat to preserve reactor life spend. When in combat, they just brute force it with insane amounts of thrust (if they have the technology of cause).
Writer here too. My book is set in and around space as well and I’m still debating whether to give the navies in my setting fighters or not😂 Thing is most wars in my world are fought in space between ships, most worlds have marine corps for boarding actions but the ships do follow orbital mechanics to a degree.
My favorite argument against “that’s not realistic” in science fiction is “how do we know?” You think people in 1900 knew what war or the tech level in general would like in 2000 or even 1950? How would we know what things would like in settings set hundreds or thousands of years in the future or in different galaxies? Yeah you don’t want to pull everything out of your behind and need things to make at least some form of sense, but we need to remember this is also fiction, not everything is going to make sense by today’s standards.
Most scenes in space around a planet in Star Wars are not actually in orbit. They are just hovering above the planet by using antigravity. It's also much easier to bomb a target on the surface if you are stationary above it instead of zooming past it at 17,000 mph. So there is really no such thing as 'orbital bombardment', just 'high altitude bombardment'.
Geosynchronous orbit, a fixed point in orbit above the planet's surface where the object manages to stay in sync with the planet's rotation. So thereby having orbital bombardment actually being real
What if Starfighters having less storage and fuel use lower speeds for more fuel lifetime ? They can jump to longer and far longer distances too , and tactical short jumps too , so to save space and consume less fuel they use less powerful engines
OR (if they are deployed mid battle like TIEs) they can go full speed, even if they only get 2 hours of flight time, but since they will be more effective going at 100% instead of 70% speed they will shoot down more X wings. Yes they need to return to base to refuel but in the meantime they shot down 0.3 more X wings
Absolutely nerdy discussions on sci-fi: perfect. :D A few notes, though. First, being in orbit simply means that we are moving sideways fast enough compared to the surface that, while we are falling and being dragged towards the object we're orbiting, we are simply missing the surface. For the most part, the reduction in the pull of gravity with distance doesn't make that much of a difference. It comes into play only when another heavy object's gravity overwhelms whatever gravity you are experiencing from the object you were orbiting. For example, you can orbit a planet that does not have an atmosphere from very close to its surface, as long as you clear the terrain and any obstacle. With that out of the way, the repulsor lifts don't necessarily play such a big a role in keeping fights slow and close. They explain why you can hover a spacecraft over a landmark, even at hundreds of kilometers in altitude out in space. You could have relatively slow fights around objects in orbit around a planet if all of the ships involved in the fight essentially share the same orbit. We do achieve to dock two objects out in orbit, after all. In time, objects at different speeds/altitudes would see their orbits diverge, and probably converge again later. But the thrust of Star Wars spacecraft are probably enough to make turning fights possible in orbit. Instead, two things that make Star Wars fights seem unrealistic are: the distances, considering the vastness of space, and planetary blockades, possible thanks to hyperspace lanes exiting right over the same spot of a planet, despite planets spinning on their axis and orbiting their star. Explanations for the second one usually touch on the fact that lanes are generally constantly kept up to date, for both safety and convenience reasons. That said, a determined attacker should be able to calculate a different hyperspace exit location near a planet, allowing them to make landfall while completely bypassing any blockade in space. Now, disregarding the above point, the real reason why Star Wars battles kinda work is thanks to faster than light travel. Without FTL, you cannot get close to your target without being spotted from very far away, at least much further away than what we see on screen in Star Wars. The other way to make it work without FTL, like in the Expanse, is to have enough stealthy ships on the offensive that the target of an attack does not have enough time to destroy all of the attacking vessels before some of them get close. Couldn't have been done to a nicer vessel, poor Donnager. But with FTL? You can jump in right by your enemy, unleashing shots that are nearly impossible to dodge at such a close range. And under such conditions, fighters and large brawling battleships do make a lot more sense. This FTL reasoning also applies to other settings, like Star Trek, Starfield, Homeworld...
I explain it in my roleplay games that the engines are programmed to simulate atmospheric flight because most pilots know how their ships handle there and probably learned to fly in an atmosphere. So them flying the same way in space helps with the learning curve. You could also say that the repolsar lifts cause a certain amount of drag on the ship and is limited to how fast it can accelerate them.
i also have a theory similar to this on why -in star wars, we can hear in space. normally, Sound travels through the vibration of atoms and molecules in a medium -like air and water, to our ears which registers it as noise. that is why you cannot normally hear in space, because it lacks such things my suspicion is that there exists a small device in all spaceships that is designed to detect the vibrations emitted by vessels and explosions in space, and translates those vibrations into noise inside the starship. This would be valuable to all pilots, who likely depend on sound when they fly. The Star wars Galaxy is supposed to be leagues and bonds ahead of earth's own technological abilities, so it wouldn't be too far fetched to envision them having created such a device
In my head canon ships in SW have a limitation in their inertial dampeners technology that requires them to be pointed as close to their vector of velocity as possible in order to keep dampening the craft's inertia and not turn passengers into goo. I came to this conclusion after trying to recreate a starfighter flight characteristics in Kerbal Space Program (nice mention btw!). If you tell your craft's SAS to keep pointing Prograde, and you use RCS translation controls (IKJL and HN) without turning with WASD, your craft will start flying and turning like a starfighter, with its nose pointed in the direction of travel! So in the movies, when characters do crazy maneuvers, it can be explained as them intentionally turning off inertial dampeners and enduring extremely high Gees for just a few moments before turning dampeners back on.
I can hear Yoda telling padawans... Stop you must, mmmm... Or force blind, you shall be. I rarely comment on anything but that line about turning the dark side & the force stranger was hilarious.
I've also heard that the "space" in Star Wars contains something called the ether which kind of acts like air in that it lets the ship's control system and allows the ship to maneuver like a WWII fighter.
I never really understood how artificial gravity actually works in most scifi, whether Star Trek, Star Wars, Stargate or Farscape. I understand the practicality of it, but not how. That’s one of the things that I liked about the Expanse. They compensate for the low or no gravity with either magnetic boots on metalic plates, or centrifugal force or constant acceleration, for when gravity was lower than places like Ganymede, because the human body needs that type of resistance even for dealing with a bad injury. No gravity + internal bleed or even from a gun shot could be a death sentence because without gravity, the blood just pools up.
Antigravity is easy. You just attach a slice of buttered toast, which always lands butter side down, to the back of a cat, which always lands feet first. Ethics aside, it's the perfect perpetual motion engine.
Walter Jon Williams's The Praxis contains space battle that DO seem to conform to the ideas of orbital mechanics, and was a good bit of space opera to boot! 😁
As an aside, inertia compensator and inertia damper technology affects not only the pilot, but the machine as well, with an effect similar to drag. Fighters in SW perfectly illustrate this with this assumption. In turn, any context that does not illustrate this effect as SW does is peculiar.
You could probably manuever a spacecraft like a fighter jet, but that’d be incredibly fuel inefficient. Also when they are close to a planet like at Scariff I think they would definitely be monitoring their velocity because if they lose to much speed while manuevering theyd get pulled into the atmosphere.
If you have the fuel, you can leave the Earth's gravity over a couple of hours at a low speed of 10-80 mph. A lot of things can leave the gravity well if you have the fuel, but the higher Thrust to Weight can make that time of a couple of hours end up in the range of a couple of minutes. That is why we have a higher Thrust to Weight for objects on earth with our technology. If you ask about the balloons we let go for them to go to space, here's the thing, the helium they have does end up freezing over and leaving the balloon as it gets closer to the edge of space, so it never makes it.
Because a realistic orbital velocity would look like a blurry smudge for two frames if you're lucky. That's boring. Battlestar Galactica comes close to realistic battles by using RCS thrusters to turn sideways in space, but even those vipers are traveling way slower than they should be.
They don’t need to beat the planet’s gravity as they have achieved mastery over gravity and control where the pull of gravity (center of gravity or has the most mass) at will. Thats what turbolifts and other “antigravity” devices do. There’s no such thing as antigravity but you can achieve the same effect by controlling where the center of gravity is with the right technological knowledge.
Unfortunately while i see your point this still doesn't explain how in a vacuum like space even in the gravity well of say a death star they flip and spin infact if you rewatch your video you don't even address how they would be doing it, you only mention the repulser lift and the thrusters but unless they use incredibly powerful RCS thrusters physics still states this isn't possible if you created a bubble of anti gravity in space that doesn't suddenly make you maneuver like you aren't in space, because, well your still in space gravity or not how would they move around like they do unless their vehicles were just covered aft to stern in rcs thrusters, a great suggestion you pointed out is KSP in space it points this problem out, yes you no longer have to deal with the forces of gravity great now now do you turn like a plane? how do you maneuver? a great example of this is Space engineers, if you build a fighter in that game and fly it around you can spawn away from the reaches of gravity in a perfect vacuum but inertia does not care about gravity or atmosphere and in a vacuum with no gravity its forces are way more exaggerated if you fly forwards for example, then flip around you'd be facing backwards relative to the direction of travel then in order to stop you'd have to use an equivalent amount of force to come to a stop, einstien baby every action, so what specifically in the star wars lore could you attribute to this, happy to say its alien tech and entertainment, but if we are to agree on a correct reason as to how they can do it lets imagine what technology they would need to use, something the could use is the opposite or invention of polarity with the repulsor lift instead of a anti gravity bubble they create a constant pull in the direction the ship is facing this way every time the fighter turns or maneuvers the gravity will pull the ship into that direction this could tie in to why space craft still have inertia/G force damperners as using this system would basically mean you are constantly falling forwards or another way of doing it would be to have the ships use dark matter as their mediums something like a coating on the surface of the ships so that space acts like a dragless medium where they swim through dark matter scattering it as they push through causing no drag as the particles simply bounce away but in imparting that energy from the ship to the dark matter they now can "swim" in space
space battles in star wars , are not relying on thrust alone, ...the repulsors are utilized to do the "fine detailed maneuvers i don't think you are correct about a "limit" to repulsors also ...in atmosphere , the" un - aerodynamics " of star wars vehicles is due to that same repulsor field around the vehicles.. it provides an nice slick aerodynamic , friction free surface to fly through.. (this technology is ubiquitous, meaning you can find it in everything from star destroyers, to speeder bikes , to mandalorian jetpacks) in a funny twist giving a vehicle a "flying disc " profile , and perhaps could be the only thing that can be detected by certain primitive cultures' technology ..(hmmmm) anyways... the other thing that gets me is the silly speeds assigned to ships in the star wars fiction ..in reality of,, even the the things seen in movie ,, these vehicles are moving crazy amounts faster than listed! (even the busses in coruscant traffic )! lol. i then realized , that IF these were there "acceleration rates" , rather than the "max" speed the actual math would work out better .. and of course you're like "acceleration rate? to what?" well, escape velocity, of course. EVERY vehicle NEEDS TO get to escape velocity , therefore at SOME POINT or another EVERY ship WILL REACH THE SAME escape velocity to reach orbit. i believe the speeds written in canon ,,are a the rate at which you get there .. then you ask , well what the he!!'s escape velocity? and answer is ,,, that's not the important part...the escape velocity on bespin will be different than the escape velocity dantooine . the important choice to make is , would you rather do it in a an old tug , or the millennium falcon ? lol. b@tc hat my idea all you like.,... it's my idea, and it's how sort out the i mess of lucasfilm junk science .. so there ..lol😉🙃🙃🙃
Because George isn't a scientist or engineer. He's an entertainer.
Correct. i recall he himself stated, that Star Wars is "Science Fantasy" instead of being "Science Fiction"👍🏼
My grandfather worked on the SR-71 program up at Edwards Air Force Base and there are so many things about it he still can't talk about. Loved the callout of the platform you made here!
"The SR71 Blackbeard with a velocity of mach 5 and a maximum altitude of over 80000 feet"
"You sure seem to know a lot about it"
"DO YOU EVEN READ MY CHRISTMAS LIST?"
The Starfuries from Babylon 5 were designed with realism in mind. In the show they move the way you would expect them to in zero-G and no atmosphere.
I would love to see a deep dive into the jamming technology in Star Wars, as we are rarely given any details. Depending on how it works, It could very well give an explanation as to why guided munitions such as missiles are severely lacking in combat
it could also provide an explanation for why most ships in star wars is designed with their control bridges in a tower, rather than inside the ship itself. the expectation is that you can secure the bridge, but keep tabs on the battlefield through cameras or other devices.
But if Jamming Technology is advanced enough, it could potentially be used to knock out any such method.
Keeping in mind that when the Trade Federation invaded Naboo during Phantom menace, it also knocked out all communications on the planet.
Theoretically, the Star wars Galaxy may have Jamming Technology that does the same to cameras/other devices, which would explain why most ships place their command deck on some sort of tower. A ship that relies on cameras, would be blinded, possibly for several minutes, and scrambling for information, possibly even ramming into another ship or station because they couldn't respond in time.
Raspberry!
In Legends novels, authors like Timothy Zahn referred to a system called the “etheric rudder” that allowed starfighters to fly as if they were in atmosphere while in space. Like you said, the technology used by ships in Star Wars is beyond our understanding, but technically, since it’s really fantasy and not science fiction, it doesn’t need to make sense. People also misunderstand escape velocity all the time. You don’t have to be going any particular speed to escape a gravity well as long as your engines are more powerful than the force of gravity. If you accelerated to 2 miles per hour, balanced the thrust of your engines to counteract the force of gravity, and had unlimited fuel to keep your engines running, you would escape the gravity well. In Star Wars, they don’t seem to cut their engines to conserve fuel like we have to with real world rockets. Presumably, their engines are far more efficient than ours.
Huh? That's not how physics work. You need to accelerate faster than gravity pulls you which will result in increasing speed. Earth gravity is 9.81m/s2 so if you "set you engines" to that amount of acceleration you would float in place. If you set it to 10m/s2 you would gain 0.19meter/sec speed every sec and very slowly would gain enough speed to leave earth gravity well.
Does q ballon gain speed? @@TPWR1337
My headcanon is that Sudden Movements could damage the pilot thanks to bloodflow being disrupted.
This is why they should fly like they're in gravity.
Yeah, star fighter pilots might not have real gravity to work with, but they still have to worry about G-forces from acceleration and deceleration. So they can only endure turns and speed ups or slowdowns that we could endure under Earth’s influence anyway. And dogfights and ship engagements only make sense when everyone was at about same relative speed anyway.
People who watch The Expanse know all about inertial dampners after the infamous "Belter Soup" incident. But I am guessing even Kongo, (Hi Kongo, when are we getting you onscreen again?) couldn't get that clip past youtubes guidlines!
"Belter soup"? You mean that guy who got instantly stopped at a stargate trying to do a high speed stunt?
The most aerodynamic ship in the franchise, the N-1 Starfighter, has the same aerodynamics as a car.
And let's not talk about the TIE fighter.
lol
This whole video was just an excuse to play with a lego tie fighter.
And I'm all for it.
As a starfighter pilot, I know that the reason I bank in space during combat is tactically irrelevant. The reason we do it is because it just looks so damn cool!
Having little enough traffic to go 70mph on the FDR drive feels like a miracle, because it is.
Thank you for this video Alan! I feel like this is something that EVERY critic of Star Wars needs to be educated on! I shall fervently pass on the wisdom you have bestowed upon us this day!
In my head canon, the Star Wars galaxy is saturated with gasses. Not only are planetary atmospheres a LOT deeper, but there's likely pockets of gasses that coalesce at random, likely dissipating in just a few decades before they have a chance to start forming a gas giant.
I have to go, so I'll have to edit this later, but I have some theories on the subject I'd like to elaborate on.
Like if their galaxy is still a bit younger than our galaxy
@sumukhvmrsat6347 Well it was a long time ago... And far, far away. 🤷😁
There is support for this idea. In legends, Star Wars ships had an etheric rudder, which acts on luminous space to turn like in atmosphere. Ekhart made a great video about this, too.
That actually matches the events of Empire Strikes back.
Also how do they make sounds in space
Also clapping underwater in the Mon Cala arc
I'm pretty sure that just for the audience
Simulated positional audio in the cockpits to help with spatial awareness.
The Dark Side of the Force is a Pathway to many abilities that are scientifically impossible (I don't know)
Pew pew pew
6:18 I half expected him to say you’d dislocate your arm but if you didn’t you’d swing around.
Gotta geek check you on this one Allan - sorry ... The repulsor lift was a fiction created to enable atmospheric flight and 'float' near large gravitational masses. Manoeuvre was actually achieved through a device called an 'Aetheric control surface'
The Aetheric control surface was a device that interacted with a fictional phenomena known as the 'Aether' or 'Ether' to create changes in momentum much like wind resistance in real life. ... Timothy Zhan used this in his books, so did Mike Stackpole in the Rogue Squadron books ... the Aetheric rudder, for example, acted like a real rudder and allowed dramatic manoeuvres that added suspense.
Fun fact - the Ether was actually a pseudo scientific principle from Victorian times - Scientists actually thought that the space between planets was occupied by a mysterious substance - the nature of which we did not know ... but it was invisible and hence probably similar to a gas, vapour or ... ether.
In Victorian times Aether theory was science, not pseudo science. It was based on the idea that waves needed a medium in which to move (eg sound in air or water). They didn't know at that time that light was an electromagnetic wave that could move in a vacuum.
@@tektrixter Good to know thankyou! ... A good reminder that I shouldn't apply pejorative terms to Victorian science. I always saw Aether as a placeholder theory for later experimental confirmation ... much life dark matter / dark energy ... we cant see it, but the maths suggests it might be a solution.
Let's be real, if it was realistic most people wouldn't want to watch it.
Expanse : Excuse me , should I be insulted or humoured ?
I m a hobby author and my current project is a sci-fi story. Orbital mechanics take part in this endeavour. The vessels in my story don’t follow orbital mechanics while in combat to preserve reactor life spend. When in combat, they just brute force it with insane amounts of thrust (if they have the technology of cause).
Writer here too. My book is set in and around space as well and I’m still debating whether to give the navies in my setting fighters or not😂 Thing is most wars in my world are fought in space between ships, most worlds have marine corps for boarding actions but the ships do follow orbital mechanics to a degree.
I’d actually feel bad for the TIE pilot when his fighter gets shot down while flying on the surface of the battlefield
Tell that to Tie Striker pilots.
My favorite argument against “that’s not realistic” in science fiction is “how do we know?” You think people in 1900 knew what war or the tech level in general would like in 2000 or even 1950? How would we know what things would like in settings set hundreds or thousands of years in the future or in different galaxies? Yeah you don’t want to pull everything out of your behind and need things to make at least some form of sense, but we need to remember this is also fiction, not everything is going to make sense by today’s standards.
Most scenes in space around a planet in Star Wars are not actually in orbit. They are just hovering above the planet by using antigravity. It's also much easier to bomb a target on the surface if you are stationary above it instead of zooming past it at 17,000 mph. So there is really no such thing as 'orbital bombardment', just 'high altitude bombardment'.
Geosynchronous orbit, a fixed point in orbit above the planet's surface where the object manages to stay in sync with the planet's rotation. So thereby having orbital bombardment actually being real
Orbiting is falling down, but missing.
What if Starfighters having less storage and fuel use lower speeds for more fuel lifetime ? They can jump to longer and far longer distances too , and tactical short jumps too , so to save space and consume less fuel they use less powerful engines
OR (if they are deployed mid battle like TIEs) they can go full speed, even if they only get 2 hours of flight time, but since they will be more effective going at 100% instead of 70% speed they will shoot down more X wings. Yes they need to return to base to refuel but in the meantime they shot down 0.3 more X wings
@@KaizerKlash111 Plus no repair costs!
Either you survive and need fuel/recharge/BASIC maintenance, or you're blown to smithereens!
Absolutely nerdy discussions on sci-fi: perfect. :D
A few notes, though. First, being in orbit simply means that we are moving sideways fast enough compared to the surface that, while we are falling and being dragged towards the object we're orbiting, we are simply missing the surface. For the most part, the reduction in the pull of gravity with distance doesn't make that much of a difference. It comes into play only when another heavy object's gravity overwhelms whatever gravity you are experiencing from the object you were orbiting. For example, you can orbit a planet that does not have an atmosphere from very close to its surface, as long as you clear the terrain and any obstacle.
With that out of the way, the repulsor lifts don't necessarily play such a big a role in keeping fights slow and close. They explain why you can hover a spacecraft over a landmark, even at hundreds of kilometers in altitude out in space. You could have relatively slow fights around objects in orbit around a planet if all of the ships involved in the fight essentially share the same orbit. We do achieve to dock two objects out in orbit, after all. In time, objects at different speeds/altitudes would see their orbits diverge, and probably converge again later. But the thrust of Star Wars spacecraft are probably enough to make turning fights possible in orbit.
Instead, two things that make Star Wars fights seem unrealistic are: the distances, considering the vastness of space, and planetary blockades, possible thanks to hyperspace lanes exiting right over the same spot of a planet, despite planets spinning on their axis and orbiting their star. Explanations for the second one usually touch on the fact that lanes are generally constantly kept up to date, for both safety and convenience reasons. That said, a determined attacker should be able to calculate a different hyperspace exit location near a planet, allowing them to make landfall while completely bypassing any blockade in space.
Now, disregarding the above point, the real reason why Star Wars battles kinda work is thanks to faster than light travel. Without FTL, you cannot get close to your target without being spotted from very far away, at least much further away than what we see on screen in Star Wars. The other way to make it work without FTL, like in the Expanse, is to have enough stealthy ships on the offensive that the target of an attack does not have enough time to destroy all of the attacking vessels before some of them get close. Couldn't have been done to a nicer vessel, poor Donnager. But with FTL? You can jump in right by your enemy, unleashing shots that are nearly impossible to dodge at such a close range. And under such conditions, fighters and large brawling battleships do make a lot more sense.
This FTL reasoning also applies to other settings, like Star Trek, Starfield, Homeworld...
We could argue that the deathstar has its own gravity.
.... for good space battle... watch "the expanse"
Because it looks cool on screen.
I explain it in my roleplay games that the engines are programmed to simulate atmospheric flight because most pilots know how their ships handle there and probably learned to fly in an atmosphere. So them flying the same way in space helps with the learning curve. You could also say that the repolsar lifts cause a certain amount of drag on the ship and is limited to how fast it can accelerate them.
Alan doing peak content again!!
i also have a theory similar to this on why -in star wars, we can hear in space.
normally, Sound travels through the vibration of atoms and molecules in a medium -like air and water, to our ears which registers it as noise. that is why you cannot normally hear in space, because it lacks such things
my suspicion is that there exists a small device in all spaceships that is designed to detect the vibrations emitted by vessels and explosions in space, and translates those vibrations into noise inside the starship.
This would be valuable to all pilots, who likely depend on sound when they fly.
The Star wars Galaxy is supposed to be leagues and bonds ahead of earth's own technological abilities, so it wouldn't be too far fetched to envision them having created such a device
In my head canon ships in SW have a limitation in their inertial dampeners technology that requires them to be pointed as close to their vector of velocity as possible in order to keep dampening the craft's inertia and not turn passengers into goo.
I came to this conclusion after trying to recreate a starfighter flight characteristics in Kerbal Space Program (nice mention btw!). If you tell your craft's SAS to keep pointing Prograde, and you use RCS translation controls (IKJL and HN) without turning with WASD, your craft will start flying and turning like a starfighter, with its nose pointed in the direction of travel!
So in the movies, when characters do crazy maneuvers, it can be explained as them intentionally turning off inertial dampeners and enduring extremely high Gees for just a few moments before turning dampeners back on.
I can hear Yoda telling padawans... Stop you must, mmmm... Or force blind, you shall be.
I rarely comment on anything but that line about turning the dark side & the force stranger was hilarious.
I've also heard that the "space" in Star Wars contains something called the ether which kind of acts like air in that it lets the ship's control system and allows the ship to maneuver like a WWII fighter.
I never really understood how artificial gravity actually works in most scifi, whether Star Trek, Star Wars, Stargate or Farscape. I understand the practicality of it, but not how.
That’s one of the things that I liked about the Expanse. They compensate for the low or no gravity with either magnetic boots on metalic plates, or centrifugal force or constant acceleration, for when gravity was lower than places like Ganymede, because the human body needs that type of resistance even for dealing with a bad injury. No gravity + internal bleed or even from a gun shot could be a death sentence because without gravity, the blood just pools up.
X wings
Antigravity is easy. You just attach a slice of buttered toast, which always lands butter side down, to the back of a cat, which always lands feet first. Ethics aside, it's the perfect perpetual motion engine.
Nice video! :) Also, Star Wars is never meant to be realistic. :)
Wait, you mean there was never a Galaxy far far away that was at constant war a long time ago?! The hell?
Walter Jon Williams's The Praxis contains space battle that DO seem to conform to the ideas of orbital mechanics, and was a good bit of space opera to boot! 😁
As an aside, inertia compensator and inertia damper technology affects not only the pilot, but the machine as well, with an effect similar to drag. Fighters in SW perfectly illustrate this with this assumption. In turn, any context that does not illustrate this effect as SW does is peculiar.
It's because it's a movie.
You could probably manuever a spacecraft like a fighter jet, but that’d be incredibly fuel inefficient. Also when they are close to a planet like at Scariff I think they would definitely be monitoring their velocity because if they lose to much speed while manuevering theyd get pulled into the atmosphere.
If you have the fuel, you can leave the Earth's gravity over a couple of hours at a low speed of 10-80 mph. A lot of things can leave the gravity well if you have the fuel, but the higher Thrust to Weight can make that time of a couple of hours end up in the range of a couple of minutes. That is why we have a higher Thrust to Weight for objects on earth with our technology. If you ask about the balloons we let go for them to go to space, here's the thing, the helium they have does end up freezing over and leaving the balloon as it gets closer to the edge of space, so it never makes it.
Please do a video on The Force Stranger and other secret Jedi hobbies.
A force stranger lol force waking from the other side
Force stranger lol I love it! And that is a valid point you could pull one off anywhere the only give away would be your Oface and wet spots
Because a realistic orbital velocity would look like a blurry smudge for two frames if you're lucky. That's boring. Battlestar Galactica comes close to realistic battles by using RCS thrusters to turn sideways in space, but even those vipers are traveling way slower than they should be.
I always figured it had more to do wit the fact they don't have reverse thrust.
Simple answer acceleration, deceleration, hard turns etc still produce G forces
They don’t need to beat the planet’s gravity as they have achieved mastery over gravity and control where the pull of gravity (center of gravity or has the most mass) at will. Thats what turbolifts and other “antigravity” devices do. There’s no such thing as antigravity but you can achieve the same effect by controlling where the center of gravity is with the right technological knowledge.
3:47 same
Star Wars: The Phantom Stranger.
The one show that I know of that did it right. Was Babylon 5.
I gave this video a like specifically due to the “force stranger”. Dave would be proud… although he’s not dead, so maybe he is proud?
If the ships were going to move around like that ufo theyd need to build them like that practice ball that shot at baby yoda. Lukes training ball.
😂😂😂thanks for the last bit im laughing like a special seal now. I think it's just most pilots train in atmosphere so they fight how they train
They should try spinning. That's a good trick
My gripe with the SW dogfights is that thry don't use missiles. Just look at the X-Wing trilogy.
Don't worry man, Kitten Space Agency soon, HarvestRs making it.
Tie Fighters do hover in atmosphere.
I agree, KSP 2 was a mess. there is a new one coming soon, with cats instead of kerbals.
Hmmm, sometimes we, the fans, think of things the author doesn't.
it also has to do with air resistance the dr-71'a outer skin was hot enough tool cook a steaK at mach 3
Star Wars is WWII in space. George Lucas has no concept to proper space flight physics.
Kerbal space program!!!
Although it's for entertainment I think it would look more awesome if they would make it look more like in space
I hope nothing important was said after "Force Stranger", because I became deceased.
MUSTARD!!!!!!
“Force strange”?
😆😆😆😆😆😆😆😆😆
Unfortunately while i see your point this still doesn't explain how in a vacuum like space even in the gravity well of say a death star they flip and spin infact if you rewatch your video you don't even address how they would be doing it, you only mention the repulser lift and the thrusters but unless they use incredibly powerful RCS thrusters physics still states this isn't possible if you created a bubble of anti gravity in space that doesn't suddenly make you maneuver like you aren't in space, because, well your still in space gravity or not how would they move around like they do unless their vehicles were just covered aft to stern in rcs thrusters, a great suggestion you pointed out is KSP in space it points this problem out, yes you no longer have to deal with the forces of gravity great now now do you turn like a plane? how do you maneuver? a great example of this is Space engineers, if you build a fighter in that game and fly it around you can spawn away from the reaches of gravity in a perfect vacuum but inertia does not care about gravity or atmosphere and in a vacuum with no gravity its forces are way more exaggerated if you fly forwards for example, then flip around you'd be facing backwards relative to the direction of travel then in order to stop you'd have to use an equivalent amount of force to come to a stop, einstien baby every action, so what specifically in the star wars lore could you attribute to this, happy to say its alien tech and entertainment, but if we are to agree on a correct reason as to how they can do it lets imagine what technology they would need to use, something the could use is the opposite or invention of polarity with the repulsor lift instead of a anti gravity bubble they create a constant pull in the direction the ship is facing this way every time the fighter turns or maneuvers the gravity will pull the ship into that direction this could tie in to why space craft still have inertia/G force damperners as using this system would basically mean you are constantly falling forwards or another way of doing it would be to have the ships use dark matter as their mediums something like a coating on the surface of the ships so that space acts like a dragless medium where they swim through dark matter scattering it as they push through causing no drag as the particles simply bounce away but in imparting that energy from the ship to the dark matter they now can "swim" in space
gyroscopes and G-forces are my excuse. How about the rest of you?
Wow
space battles in star wars , are not relying on thrust alone, ...the repulsors are utilized to do the "fine detailed maneuvers
i don't think you are correct about a "limit" to repulsors
also ...in atmosphere , the" un - aerodynamics " of star wars vehicles is due to that same repulsor field around the vehicles.. it provides an nice slick aerodynamic , friction free surface to fly through.. (this technology is ubiquitous, meaning you can find it in everything from star destroyers, to speeder bikes , to mandalorian jetpacks) in a funny twist giving a vehicle a "flying disc " profile , and perhaps could be the only thing that can be detected by certain primitive cultures' technology ..(hmmmm)
anyways...
the other thing that gets me is the silly speeds assigned to ships in the star wars fiction ..in reality of,, even the the things seen in movie ,, these vehicles are moving crazy amounts faster than listed! (even the busses in coruscant traffic )! lol.
i then realized , that IF these were there "acceleration rates" , rather than the "max" speed the actual math would work out better .. and of course you're like "acceleration rate? to what?"
well, escape velocity, of course. EVERY vehicle NEEDS TO get to escape velocity , therefore at SOME POINT or another EVERY ship WILL REACH THE SAME escape velocity to reach orbit.
i believe the speeds written in canon ,,are a the rate at which you get there ..
then you ask , well what the he!!'s escape velocity? and answer is ,,, that's not the important part...the escape velocity on bespin will be different than the escape velocity dantooine . the important choice to make is , would you rather do it in a an old tug , or the millennium falcon ?
lol.
b@tc hat my idea all you like.,... it's my idea, and it's how sort out the i mess of lucasfilm junk science .. so there ..lol😉🙃🙃🙃
Because non of it is real? Going out on a limb here I know, but... 😉