I believe you! Let’s agree that when I say “720 degrees”, it’s shorthand for “41253 square degrees, as per @chenille’s helpful and descriptive post.” 
1 Like
Good way to have a stroke, but effective
TV Alex learned that lesson the hard way
1 Like
Definitely “Surface Detail”. Just checked - it’s in the final scene where Veppers (the rapist and wealthy industrialist) is about to suffer death by tattoo.
“ The fucking battleships. They had chemical guns. There were explosives, rockets, grenades, bullets; all that stuff, there. He couldn’t think of anything else. He ran for the battleship area. He looked back briefly. The figure sprinted out of the archway, heading towards him, then seemed to slow, looking about.”
3 Likes
3 Likes
Probably not the best example of optimal gun placement on a spaceship. Once you take the configuration of a seagoing vessel into three-dimensional space the underbelly becomes a pretty damn big blind spot.
4 Likes
Droids at the back of the bus and no one better ever let one have a gun.
1 Like
Grapeshot ?
That is some knife edge piloting of that Arilou skiff. That last Ur-Quan almost had it, I think the pilot got greedy and hung around just a fraction of a second too long right near the end. He definitely wasn’t shooting those fighters out of the sky either, he was just drawing them out of position by teleporting and then racing away in the opposite direction to wrap around the map and tag the Ur-Quan. But you have to do it perfectly like 10 times in a row because the laser is so weak and energy hungry and almost any screwup is fatal.
2 Likes
Nice to see everyone has the key points well covered here. Great job, as always, BB commentariat. It boils down to “most sci-fi is not hard sci-fi, therefore lazy air/water analogs”.
One plausible hard sci-fi classic that I’m surprised hasn’t had a mention yet is Mote In God’s Eye. The proposed combat there is simply ships sitting still and heating each other with lasers until one of them has a structural failure. It can take hours. With the real physics of space flight being what they are, this is one of the very few genuinely plausible forms of combat. In reality, ships would probably not fight in space at all. The velocities are too high and the distances too vast for them to ever have any meaningful form of encounter.
That said, The Expanse’s form of hard sci-fi combat is awesome and pleasantly plausible.
I wrote a whole reply to this very good point, then realized you wrote “missiles” not “ships”. There’s a decent argument to be made that their ships don’t need to be long slender shapes either, so I’ll respond to that straw man instead. Otherwise I got all dressed up for nothing here.
I think there are a couple of plausible reasons for this:
-
Given the drive is the only source of gravity and they fire them nearly all the time at 1G, they want the entire mass of the ship “above” the drive. This means that the wider the cross section relative to the drive, the stronger the cross section of the structure has to be. A tube the same diameter as the drive has a lot less forces on the structure for the same acceleration. The only price you pay for doing so is slightly increased moment of inertia when flipping for a retro burn, and that’s a rare moment anyway. I guess the other “price” is every ship interior ends up feeling like a split level house, but that ends up being a cool detail that they lean into.
-
Many of the smaller ships in the show are atmosphere-rated, so they do need to be built to push air to some degree.
Okay, that’s the end of my thinly veiled excuse to talk about The Expanse. 
11 Likes
Could it be ‘Use of Weapons’. I’ve read ‘The Player of Games’ twice and don’t recall that. As you think Banks sadistic it could certainly be ‘Use of Weapons’ with its artisinal chair.
2 Likes
An argument you could make for the missiles is that a tube heading towards a ship equipped with defensive guns presents a smaller cross section to hit compared to a sphere of the same volume.
I also wonder whether you can get away with weaker and therefore lighter and cheaper attitude thrusters if you take advantage of the lever effect of a tubular shape compared to a spherical one?
A third reason, btw, could be simple conservatism in design. If you have always built rockets this way (since the days of atmospheric combat) and changing the design doesn’t give you any or only negligible advantages, why change it?
But really all of this is post hoc rationalisation for a detail that simply wasn’t thought through by the author.
3 Likes
For large space craft in a realistic battle there will only be two factors: Fire power and armour. Whoever has the firepower to penetrate the opponent’s armour first wins. If you can build a space going battleship you can certainly also build an auto-aim computer…
Most space battles in games and films are way too much based on naval battles or dog fights but in space there is for example no up or down, or left or right nor are there factors like stall in play.
For example in a space dogfight there is nothing stopping the guy in front of you from turning 180 in one go while remaining on the same trajectory and speed… (Very hard in an F16 
)
All that looping and weaving is pointless, again: Firepower and armour.
I always thought too that it might decrease the cumulative damage over time on ships from micrometeor/debris fields, etc. Possibly too in space battles in terms of the missiles; a glancing, "aero"dynamic hit from oncoming debris instead of a flat-on impact.
1 Like
See Babylon 5, as the Starfuries already show that orientation does not have to equal movement vector. Think instead of how the protagonist ship in Asteroids moves, and that ships only fire their engines to accellerate, decelerate, or otherwise change their Δv.
One other thing that Babylon 5 actually did show better than other sci-fi space battles was explosions in space: expanding clouds of luminescent gas may look cool, but they need an atmosphere to behave like that.
2 Likes
Time for ice cream…
I get having a railgun fixed along a ships main thrust axis just for structural integrity reasons, maximizing barrel length, and reducing lateral G’s on the occupants. However, it just occurred to me that you could have a rail gun with a fixed barrel that fires forward OR backwards, depending on which end the projectile starts in and which direction you propagate the B field. I don’t think I ever saw that before, but I am geeking out about it now.
2 Likes
2 Likes
B5 also had a comment in one episode (the Lower Decks ones I think) that the invading ships exploded in a different color because the aliens had a different atmospheric composition.
3 Likes
In the Mote in God’s Eye the space battles were predicated on having those nigh-impenetrable energy shields. The only way to defeat them was to overheat the enemy ship. The Moties of course realized they could make the system work better by expanding the bubble to greatly increase the surface area to dissipate more heat.
2 Likes
