Name: The Physics of Space Battles
Uploaded: 2016-06-19T16:36:00.000Z
Duration: 6 min 3 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

In the distant cosmos, an unknown future, where anything is possible… of course we're

still blowing each other up. But remember, in space, no one can hear you

Adverbs of manner

scream, about how scientifically inaccurate that space battle is.

Why am I blasting through the cosmos at at full afterburner?

An object in motion stays in uniform motion unless acted upon by an external force. So

that means if I'm moving I'll keep moving in the same direction, even with my engines

Real space fighters would probably only engage their engines for short bursts to accelerate,

slow down, or maneuver. But how would I maneuver?

Let go, Joe, and ask yourself, does any of this actually make any sense?

A spaceship in motion has momentum. To move in a different vector, force must be applied

Today's spaceships use steerable thrust to orient the ship in three dimensions.

But maneuvering thrusters would be vulnerable to enemies.

What if they used internal gyroscopes near their center of mass, harnessing angular momentum

to orient the spacecraft, then applying bursts of thrust to accelerate!

What about weapons? In space, with noatmosphere to create a shockwave, explosive weapons are

kind of useless. And do I need to say it?

Nukes! They could still deliver blasts of radiation energy. Their intensity would decrease

with blast radius, but within a few hundred meters of a spaceship they could spontaneously

Neutron radiation could pass straight through spacecraft armor

And it would radioactively cook any humans inside like Stormtrooper hot pockets.

But missiles and guided weapons suffer from the same Newtonian limitations as we talked

Real high energy lasers would be invisible since they operate outside outside the visible

But remember, over long distances lasers are difficult to focus.

True. Lunar rangefinding lasers fired from Earth at reflectors on the moon are over 6

Don't forget energy! A weapon like the Death Star is equivalent to all the energy released

And there's no atmosphere to dissipate all the heat. Honesty, if you want to destroy

a planet, you'd be better off throwing an asteroid at it or something.

Heavy thing moving fast make spaceship go boom.

A different battlefield calls for different tactics.

Close in, broadside naval battles look cool, but not gonna happen.

In space combat, the speed of light could be our greatest advantage . . .

That's true! If Earth's orbital defenses are engaged in battle with the rebel Europa colony,

each side would be firing at each other's shadow. Because of the time it takes light

to travel, they'd only able to know what the other was up to like half an hour earlier.

In some ways, realistic space combat would be closer to the 18th century than it is today,

with days-long communications delays and battles fought with cannons and musket balls… except

It makes you wonder, why is so much of what we see so wrong?

Right. It's George Lucas' fault. The ship-on-ship combat of Star Wars, which has gotta be the

most influential space combat fiction out there, was based on WWII dogfighting… like

take the attack on the Death Star, based on a British WWII film. Most space battles haven't

Why is the inevitable outcome of human space exploration war?

That says more about our own fears and history than anything else.

A lot of 20th century science fiction was warnings about 20th century wars. In reality,

space combat is just so impossibly difficult, deadly, and impractical that it's worth wondering

I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without

repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours.

If you subscribe, I will spare you the firepower of this fully armed and operational YouTube

Listen, lots of very smart people have spent lots of time writing lots of words about this

very subject, I put lots of links in the description for you to check out and discuss.

What you think: What will space battles look like in the future, will we even be fighting

in space? And do any of your favorite books and movies get the physics right? let me know