Sunday 27 December 2009

Space Battles!

Let's face it: space battles are inherently cool. io9 have a nostalgic look at some of the better space battles of yesteryear, with a focus on DS9, Babylon 5, Farscape and the various StarGates, whilst their sister site Gizmodo runs a parallel article on the physics of how 'real' space battles would work, with reference to those SF works that do a good job of depicting realistic space combat (Peter F. Hamilton's Night's Dawn Trilogy with its space battles relying on orbital trajectories and unmanned combat drones gets a shout-out). Some interesting stuff there, though interestingly both are light on references to the new Battlestar Galactica, despite its (sometimes faltering) attempts to use real physics and its use of kinetic weapons rather than lasers.

7 comments:

Joe Abercrombie said...

Space battles are inherently cool? Clearly you've never personally witnessed attack ships on fire off the shoulder of orion.

Dennis Sørensen said...

Thanks for the links, Adam.

Oh, and nice one, Joe.
Made me laugh.

red snow said...

Amazed that the new BSG doesn't get more credit. Some of the space battles in that show were of movie quality; Exodus part II for example.

Space above beyond also had some nice moments.

Adam Whitehead said...

I think the article was focused on big, stately space battles with lots of smooth long shots. At one point they say they weren't including BSG because BSG uses lots of steadicam-effect shots and crash-zooms, which look cool but sometimes make it a little harder to work out what's going on.

Anonymous said...

As far as books go, the epic, dreadnaught space battles that Jack Campbell is doing in the Lost Fleet series are good stuff...

Anonymous said...
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Thadlerian said...

For a more science-heavy account of realistic space battles, check out Atomic Rockets at http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/index.html
Note that the site is nearly as harmful to your free time as TV Tropes.