Re-thinking Sci-Fi Space Battles
Wed 06 May 2026
I don't watch a lot of YouTube anymore, and I'm trying to bring my TV watching down by a lot and read more.
But one of my guilty pleasures is Retro Badger Gaming. This guy uses variants of the Bridge Commander series of games/mods to put together intriguing, insane, and often hilarious battles in the Star Trek Universe and beyond, and to showcase truly innovative and often bizarre starship creations done by the community.
After flipping through his videos on my TV several nights in a row, I found myself thinking about the nature of space battles as seen on TV and in film, and the obvious lack of accuracy.
Now, we all (should?) know that there's no sound in space, so a lot of the "PEW! PEW! PEW!" sounds you hear would be gone in a realistic space battle. One of the most chilling things about some of the scenes in 2001 is how utterly silent they are, while very dramatic things are happening onscreen. The realism there actually enhances the suspense, rather than dulling it.
So, in thinking about how a truly realistic space battle would look onscreen, let's start by considering the obvious major bodily senses that would apply: sight, sound, and touch, and the move on to more abstract issues, such as station-keeping and orbital mechanics.
Sight
One thing I noticed is that the ships in space battles are often extremely close to each other, and moving about in dogfighting style. I'll talk about station-keeping and orbital mechanics later, but first off the bat, it's very unlikely that space battleships would remain so close to each other. They would start firing from a long way off for the best chances of both the navigation of active missiles and the avoidance of other's missiles and beam weapons. This would mean that a space battle, to the naked eye, would be very uninteresting. The vessel being fired upon might not even be visible at all. Only directed energy weapons work better up-close. The Inverse Square Law makes no exceptions.
The other thing I realized is that there would be no visible beams in space! First of all, it's not at all a given that any sufficiently advanced directed energy weapons would even have a visible light component or side-effect, but even if they did, there simply isn't enough interstellar dust or matter of any kind to produce a beam effect. The most you would have is some reflected light or radiation (assuming it's visible) seen on the other vessel, followed by charring and burning, or an explosion. That makes for space battles that are a lot less visually interesting, but also scarier, because instead of being warned by a beam or bright flash of light, the vessel would just spontaneously start displaying the effects of overheating or radiation. That's kind of terrifying. ;)
Sound
Of course, there's no sound in space. But sound is carried and even amplified within a vessel by the vessel's walls and such. I could imagine something akin to the sound of a thyristor circuit slowly charging and suddenly discharging as the power supply for a directed energy weapon is ramped up and suddenly dumped as it repeatedly fires. On the receiving end, there wouldn't be much sound generated, but the suspense/danger of the situation could be accentuated by alarms as the overheat/radiation conditions are detected. Missiles would also create sound as they are fired as a great deal of gas is released in a fairly small space, and the impact of a missile on the receiving end would be very loud within the vessel.
Touch (haptics)
This covers a couple different areas, mainly artificial gravity and inertial effects. I recently saw a humorous video by Adam Schwartz about how artificial gravity somehow never fails in Star Trek. Now, I learned really quickly not to make the mistake of referring to Star Trek as "hard sci-fi", and this is one of the reasons why 😁. Not only is artificial gravity a difficult topic to tackle if you're going for realism (just spinning the ship isn't a perfect solution, either, as Tom Scott demonstrated. But the more critical issue with space battles is what to do with the fragile humans while the ship is experiencing inconceivable acceleration during space battles, course corrections, and especially accelerating up to and down from faster-than-light or even high sublight speeds. Star Trek offers a hand-wavey explanation of an "Inertial Dampening System," but somehow the crew isn't reduced to chunky salsa when it goes offline, nor are there even seat belts on the Enterprise most of the time.
Because of this, I'm thinking that most space battles would be fought by intelligent drones that don't need to worry about fragile human cargo, while humans would be transported on large colony or freighter ships that could gently accelerate towards their destination at a smooth 1G, obviating the need for spin-gravity and magical inertial dampening systems when doing maneuvers. Each large human-carrying ship could be accompanied by a swarm of defensive ships, rather than putting the humans in the battleships, where they could both be easily injured, and impose very strict limits on acceleration that would make a potential battle less successful.
Station-keeping
This is something that Star Trek and Star Wars get hilariously wrong, but other sci-fi franchises like Babylon 5 get fairly right. Simply put, while it's not impossible for a spacefaring vessel to make gently curved or dogfight-y maneuvers in empty space, it's mind-bogglingly inefficient to do so. It's far more effective to point in the right direction from the very beginning and burn in a straight line, than being burning in one direction, and making constant course corrections perpendicular to the direction you're travelling to give the effect of a curved trajectory. It looks crazy elegant for ships to do curly-Qs and acrobatics in space, but it makes no sense from a scientific/efficiency standpoint. Even given nearly unlimited fuel to do so, there's just no reason to.
Even this added complexity begs the assumption of the battle happening in open space, and not near any solar systems. As soon as planetary gravity enters into play, the situation becomes much more complex.
Orbital Mechanics
Space battles in orbit of, or even near stars and planets would be far more complex than what's seen onscreen. It's difficult to describe exactly why, but the best advice I can give is to get a copy of Kerbal Space Program 1.x or the upcoming Kitten Space Agency game and try it for yourself. Burning in a straight line towards your target does not ever give you the anticipated outcome, unless the object is very close to you, or you are far from any gravity wells (planets or stars). Orbital Mechanics is less like aerial flight, and is much more like driving on a busy racetrack. A space battle in orbit of a planet would be very challenging to plan and execute. In most circumstances, a ship would only get a single shot at firing on another ship as it crosses the other ship's orbital plane at just the right time (and at extremely high relative speeds). A space battle in orbit is nothing like one in the sky, it's more like (forgive the road-ragey analogy) someone driving 70 mph / 110 kph trying to shoot at another car as you're both going in opposite directions. Actually changing orbits to match the orbit of the other craft in order to have more time to stop and shoot them multiple times would require an extreme amount of fuel usage, and would also ruin the element of surprise and make the attacker more susceptible to reprise.
The Solar Nations series of videos actually demonstrates realistic space battles with Orbital Station-Keeping using the physics engine of Kerbal Space Program, and it's... very fiddly.
Category: Entertainment Tagged: Entertainment Gaming Hobbies Non-religious post Non-technical post Science Fiction Video
