I'm late to this conversation, but I think that it's fine if the science isn't good in a story, as long as it's internally consistent, that's all that maters. While there are a lot of people who like hard sci-fi where the science is really good, there is equally a lot of readers who enjoy softer sci-fi, and I'd argue that actually makes up the more popular media in science fiction. Dune, Star Trek, Star Wars, Alien, and on and on the science is more or less gibberish. They use what sounds interesting but don't sweat the details. The only thing that I've seen create real problems with readers is when it isn't internally coherent. As long as you make rules and stick to them and explain those rules well to the audience, that should be enough.
It looks cool on the screen. In reality space warfare would be two ships shooting at each other from several thousand miles away, and making fewer hits, since changing course a few yards moves the target from being easily sighted in at those extreme ranges. Also taking into account that even a laser will take a few seconds to travel that far, and possibly hit nothing. Which would significantly look fairly close to two submarines trying to shoot at each other from opposite sides of an ocean. Not impossible, but certainly not very practical.
And not very exciting. Hence visibly moving blaster-bolts in Star Wars that move like slow bullets, and make noise even in the depths of space. The first rule is don't bore the audience. I suppose it could work better in a book though. You don't need sound effects and visceral motion in a book.
Yeah, I think it would be a tense affair since there would be no way of knowing except on the receiving end, or moving closer to find the enemy ship disabled or destroyed.
Biggest problem in space would seem to be processing target signals, given the distances. Speed of light limitations to a radar/sensor system and whatever communication is necessary deliver a weapon, no matter how fast a weapon moves. I imagine it would be very much like the sonar nets used in submarine warfare where dozens of arrays are constantly triangulating target signals and bouncing data off each other. I'm not a military tactician, but I'd imagine you'd have to drop guided missiles in a general area and hope they can pinpoint the target on their own. My dad designs sonar targeting systems (the data analysis part) for the Navy, and he basically says about space warfare is that you'd need a lot of sensors spread over a large area, a lot of data processing, and a lot of warheads to overcome the margin for error.
So, basically, that side will win who can build the better AI into their missiles and has the better anti-missile shields for their own ships? ... Which would probably lead to that side winning which has MORE missiles and whose anti-missile shields last longer. ... Which would then lead to that side winning which has the better economy and more resources. ... Which would then lead to floating, fully automated missile factories following right behind the warships. And every asteroid will be appropriated and processed into missiles. ... Which would then lead to that side winning which has more usable matter in their occupied space. Unless one of them can capture all the debris from the opponent's missiles and process that into new missiles. This could end up like WWI, where the two opposing sides are moving nowhere for a long time. Movement may occur when one side runs out of stuff to turn into missiles or out of shielding for some reason.
This all seems logical but I think it still includes a somewhat terrestrial bias and some of the implied premises are probably wrong (which most audiences wouldn't mind). I think space warfare, if it existed would be centered around a valuable planet or energy source or functioning Dyson sphere. I think in deep space, it's just too vast for the type of warfare shown in movies to be practical. But I think what you're suggesting is probably how something may go down between hostile civilizations: maybe put a bunch of atomic mines around some space travel routes (which would be huge 3 dimensional areas) with some proximity fuses so if anything of a certain size is detected without a friendly code, it goes off. But even then, the distances involved would require powerful bombs. It would be interesting what game theory has to say about this considering the advanced tech needed to even conduct warfare in space. That's my thought anyway.
That would be my guess. You'd have to be able to defend fixed installations, like planets, space stations, comm relays, or whatever else sits in space and needs to be protected. I imagine it would be very 18th century. Like, you've got a fort on a beach (planet), and there's a bunch of ships in the middle of the ocean (space), but whi cares about the ships until they actually have to attack the beach. As soon as you see em, you send your own ships out. Or have your coastal patrols intercept.
A well calculated trajectory, a kinetic missile can be 'thrown' at planet or other relatively large target, and nobody would know until it smacks them. We're talking possibly a planet away, to potentially another star system away. It may take a while to get there, but when it does it will wreak havoc on the target.
A well calculated trajectory, a kinetic missile can be 'thrown' at planet or other relatively large target, and nobody would know until it smacks them. We're talking possibly a planet away, to potentially another star system away. It may take a while to get there, but when it does it will wreak havoc on the target.
I think science fiction is in a bad place at the moment. The post-1966 buzz wore off a generation ago, but the new generation produces decadent stuff that hasn't learned the lessons of the 1970s. The good has been crushed out by the popular - and the generation who grew up thinking of Star Wars as an 'epic' now zoom out too far into science fantasy/space opera without realizing what a dead end it all is. Rather than stories that explore "What would happen to the whole world/galaxy/universe if humanity made x, y, z advancements?", I prefer the Ray Bradbury approach of looking at advancements that might be small and not be that far off, but whose consequences might be far-reaching. Technology might not expand fast enough to keep that going as a genre, and the premises often struggle to fill a novel without being terribly padded. "What if an AI in your glasses could tell if the other person was lying?" "What if someone found an exploit that let them harvest social credits by returning library books?" "What if microblogging disrupted the unity of an alien hive mind?" I bet someone's already turned those into short stories though. I don't think 'science fiction' needs to be hard all the way through, but... the creative licence, the "woo", the things invented for the sake of the story... should be tightly-contained, concise, set out clearly. Hell Divers as the OP describes it sounds like 'science fantasy'. The science doesn't matter to those stories... and the harsh/unfair criticisms might stem from its being pitched at slightly the wrong genre or received by an audience with the wrong expectations. Science fantasy's problems as a genre are interconnected with those of science fiction, but also it's more impacted by the way the zeitgeist has moved on since the moon landings. The fact that (the books of) Star Wars, Dr Who, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica (and a few others) splendidly ignore the overall direction of the rest of human literature and their own creative expiry dates doesn't mean anything else can. They're relics from a time when things moving on screens was impressive. Dune is much better, but it's also a sixty-year-old overrated behemoth that the genre wasn't able to evolve from. Warhammer 40k must be shifting a few units too nowadays - but après them le déluge. But with Hell Divers there might also be a problem that its storyworld is too artificial. Are characters confined to airships because otherwise the writer couldn't plausibly keep them in the room together to say the dialogue he wants them to say? Are the mutated nasties there because the confinement-to-airships-due-to-storms got too restrictive and the author wanted a mobile plot device that could turn up whenever he wants to re-confine the characters into dialogue again? Is the nuclear war there to cover for the mutants, who are there to cover for the storms, which are there to cover for the airships, which are there to cover for the characters not having convincing internal motives?
That's a lot of accusations! Maybe the author wrote Hell Divers that way because he simply wanted to write a story about people living in airships above a ravaged earth.
When I was younger I read mostly science fiction. Stuff like Asimov, Clark, and Heinlein. These guys were all scientists themselves, and they inspired me to go into science (engineering) after high school. Every one of them knew, and understood, what Einstein said about faster than light travel, and used it in their stories anyway. Good SF has at its core commentary on the human condition. Sometimes the story calls for taking liberties with the science. I could easily blast the above scenario as BS (bad science,) but there is an underlying truth that nuclear war would be bad. So bad in fact that our species would be more likely to go extinct than to experience such a post apocalyptic culture. The thing is that there is no story in that. Warp drives are BS, and I knew it. Nonetheless I was glued to the TV every Thursday night whe Star Trek came on.
This is something I have noticed as a more active reader, which just kind of happened to me once I started writing regularly. If the story and characters are interesting, it doesn't really bother me if something scientifically makes no sense. A novel I finished reading today made mention of moving asteroids using nuclear explosions. In my own work, I also used nuclear weapons in space. I was thinking about explosions and vacuum one day and looked it up - yeah they don't work at all the same in vacuum. But I don't think it's a big deal. Will a general audience care about such a thing? I doubt it. If it's entertaining, people will keep reading and won't care so much about picking apart things like that. Another similar example, not science fiction: I recently read The Skystone and it's sequel. Historical fiction. In both books it's made mention that Roman soldiers in Britain were eating corn. I just shook my head and kept reading, because I was enjoying myself. If anything, this tidbit might just be fun to bring up in a conversation about writing. Certainly didn't ruin the books for me.
Weird, I really want to change an "it's" to an "its," but when I try to edit my comment it says, "Your content can not be submitted. This is likely because your content is spam-like or contains inappropriate elements. Please change your content or try again later. If you still have problems, please contact an administrator." Oh well. Please don't roast me over the "it's"
Itz ok, I do it all the time in heer. Plus I mix up they're and their, and I have a tendency to type 'the the' instead of 'to the'. And tranpsosing those lettres, it seems to be my wrost porbelm. We won't hold you to the same standards in here as we would for a fully edited manuscript.
If you haven't heard of this, and I think you probably have, it's worth a look. https://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/about/fs21grc.html I have read stories that used it. The novel The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle makes use of a similar concept called a Light Sail.
That's really weird. I always thought if you put the nuke slightly into the surface, it would vapourize a part of the rock, thereby causing an outgassing that would work like a rocket drive... Anton made a video about nuking asteroids a while ago, let's look... ... ...aaaand they had the same idea as I did. Yeah. We could probably nuke asteroids for deflection. Lol. Just pretend they were eating Korn. ("From Middle High German korn, from Old High German korn, from Proto-West Germanic *korn.") Korn = grain = puls = standard Roman food
Okay that's a little freaky, that's actually the novel I finished today. Quite good. The realistic physics reminded me of The Expanse. I've heard of the light sail concept before, but I wondered if this was the first, being 1974 and all.
Oh, so there is indeed a way to push it without air. I read that it'd basically just be a lot of bright light and intense radiation. Very creative solution re: corn.
Oh neat, you and QueenOfPlants are correct. "Corn" in English is indeed a catchall term for grain! I am glad I learned that now before I had any chance to discuss that series with anyone haha Learn something new every day.
I remember reading that in Olde English (or maybe Middle) lumps of grain were referred to as Cornes. Or was it Kornes? Wish I could find that again, I remember it being fascinating. Was that also when I discovered that all children were called Gurles and wore dresses (for convenience's sake) until a certain age? I learned both at about the same time anyway.
