Originally published at: The aerodynamics of Star Wars starfighters - Boing Boing
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There is an invisible flat plane in Star Wars, and everybody flies in line with it. They’re always the same way up.
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I’ve long come to understand that “space” in the Star Wars universe has very different physical properties from the space that we’re familiar with. It’s far noisier, for one thing.
Not the only franchise with that odd phenomenon.
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Don’t forget the engines always burning, pushing them forward through the friction-less vacuum… and how those ships can quickly stop and even reverse course, using only those rear-facing engines!
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I don’t have time to watch the video right now, but it sounds like they’re comparing their performance in atmosphere to real life planes. I suppose there’s a case to be made for how efficient their aerodynamics are for fuel consumption or whatever, but if the argument is “they wouldn’t be able to fly”, that completely ignores how they’re shown to work in the movies- there’s obviously some kind of anti-gravity technology going on. When Luke’s X-Wing takes off from the ground, it doesn’t zoom down a runway to achieve lift with its wings, it literally floats straight up vertically with no obvious means of propulsion before aiming upward and blasting off into space.
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This is something I loved about Babylon 5’s starfuries - thrusters in all directions, and were frequently shown flying in a “swarm” around a target. Because, as you say, “no way is up” in space!
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Yeah, I was thinking about Babylon 5 and also the ships in The Expanse, which take it a step further by forgoing windows. Which is practical since visually looking for dark objects in space against a dark background would be pretty pointless. I appreciate the thought that the creators of those “hard sci-fi” shows put into getting the physics right and such, but overall the moviegoing public seems to have spoken with their wallets in favor of the “space fantasy” version of sci-fi. There’s obviously room for both, though.
And if you want to get really realistic but boring when it comes to space battles, having the ships be human-piloted at all is pretty unlikely. Drones would have far better reaction times and be able to pull maneuvers that would flatten any human occupants.
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That’s because they put lead weights in the bottoms of the ships.
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The in-universe term is “repulsorlift”.
There’s always sort of the vague implication that things further away from the ground are mostly working with some combination of aerodynamics and reaction engines; you always see ships doing full burns toward space once they hover into the appropriate orientation(even when they are still so far inside the gravity well as to be effectively indistinguishable from being on the ground; the tech is supposedly antigravity but is played a lot like it is more of a force field that depends on proximity to ground rather than gravitational field) and things like Luke’s speeder use it for hovering but seem to rely entirely on thrusters for actual movement at speed; but it’s absolutely canon that some sort of antigravity tech is relatively common, cheap, and reliable down even to civilian applications.
For reasons that probably mostly relate to either the limits of 70s special effects or what looks cool it’s just weirdly absent in some applications(there are a lot of slow and dodgy looking droid leg assemblies that seem to be begging to be swapped out; but you only ever see 3 droid designs that do just hover and call it good; because they apparently love maintenance the empire uses walkers rather than armored agravs; etc.) but the amount of hovering going on is sufficiently undeniable that it is counted as an in-universe tech rather than suspension of disbelief and also x-wings.
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I enjoy EC Henry’s Star Wars technical videos. Space Dock’s sci-fi tech videos are a lot of fun too.
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“Windows are structural weaknesses; Geth do not use them.”
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B5 did space combat mostly right by modern physics; The Expanse did entirely right and with brick wall limiters on how space combat would work, including gravity and the Second Law of Motion (at least the book did…) Same with the Honor Harrington series of books, which is “beam weapons are stupid, small projectiles are also stupid, just use missles / torpedeos and cram the battleships clean full of them.”
You want windows? use a big-ass display and cameras mounted on the exterior of the hull; this way you can also overlay sensor scans on top of it.
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Never mind aerodynamics. I’m wondering how Luke gets from Hoth to Dagobah without a galley and a head.
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“How you get so big eating food of this kind?”
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IIRC the battles in those books did also make plenty of use of directed energy weapons such as point-defense lasers and “grasers” (directed gamma-ray weapons).
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The world isn’t ready to learn about Jedi diapers.
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indeed. but they forgot one important measurement: the aerodynamic drag of a jedi in flight
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I was hoping for some more insight as to how the Millenium Falcon made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs.
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