I just rented the Battlestar Galactica miniseries premiere I and wondered about those world war II - style dogfights in space. They were on some kind of asteroid or space station shooting big ol' cannons with big 'ol torpedo things at the Cylones. I said "is this really possible?"

If you are in a small jet-fighter in space and you shoot projectiles, isn't the kick-back going to slow your momentum or even throw you off course?

Secondly, how about those fiery explosions? Would any sort of incendiary weapon really burn in vacuum?? Would those fiery 'tracer bullet' type patterns really occur?

When the projectile hits the target, is it the oxygen atmosphere inside the target ship that causes the fiery explosion? If a Cylon ship gets hit, does it burn? Do the Cylons breathe oxygen, or anything at all?

I'm new to the series, I'm going to rent all the DVDs. It's a dull summer....

But ever since I saw Star Wars something about space battles bothers me. I'm pretty sure you couldn't hear the explosions go "WHUMP.." in vacuum.

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Swami Beyondananda's 2007 State of the Universe address

Well, no to almost all of them.

Shooting a projectile would cause a reaction, but it would depend on the mass of the projectile. For a bullet, the reaction wouldn't be very much, and for a ship under thrust like a Viper it would probably not be visibly noticeable.

Fire in space; no. Just no. Purely a visual convention. An explosion in space would be spherical, and dim. It also would not happen from a bullet, unless you hit both a fuel tank and pure O2 tank at the same time, and something caused a spark.

As for sounds in space, hey, that's just one of the perks of the Omniscient Audience Viewpoint.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
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Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
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"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

I'm not sure there has ever been a realistically portrayed space battle on-screen. It would be too dull for most people.

The gun on the front of an A-10 fires 30mm-diameter uranium bullets at 70 per second. Its recoil force is somewhat greater than the maximum thrust from one of the plane's two jet engines.

The solution: the firing system is connected to the throttle control in such a way that the jet engines, which normally cruise at a fraction of their potential anyway, increase output to cancel the recoil whenever the gun fires and then throttle back down when it's not firing, without the pilot having to do anything.

Space shows portraying WWII-style dogfights is no different than any action show portraying a car "vaulting" over the back of another one, cheap security cameras 'magically cleaning up the video and zooming into someone a quarter-mile away', or martial-artists flying over buildings.

'Course its not real .... it's called 'theater'....

And you would be bored by the real thing. Even in todays dogfights the jet pilots rarely see each other and mostly push a button at a blob on a screen.

(I always hated in Star Trek where they protrayed all the nuclear-charged battles taking place at a range of 100 yards!!)

And speaking of nuclear scenes that aren't realistic.

There is a scene where the fighter pilots land in a field just after the Cylons have nuked the planet. It is a nice green field and there are several large mushroom clouds just standing there nearby like big ol' trees. Hello??!!! First the mushroom clouds would expand very Evil-ly and then there would be a great big blast of force knocking everything over. Mushroom clouds don't just "stand there". At least not any of the ones I'm familiar with from back in the 60's "nuclear scare' times.

Movies: just something to focus your eyes on while you eat popcorn.

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"I am happy to report that once again the universe is doing just great, thank you, purring with perfection, ever-changing same as always. Light is still cruising along at 186,000 miles per second, and the expanding universe shows no signs of contracting. At this rate, it won't be long before they'll have to let the photon belt out another notch."
Swami Beyondananda's 2007 State of the Universe address

The A-10's are based here at D-M AFB. I've heard them described as a "plane built around a gun".

I just figure we're being shown a display of the scene in which the ships are represented with symbols that look like the real ships but are blown up in size so that the "real" thing would be just a point somewhere inside the middle of its symbol, as if the ship were projecting a giant image of itself in space and we were watching THAT. It's just a more graphically sophisticated version of blips on a radar screen, or generals pushing statues around on a table with a map on it to represent army movements, or videos converted from infrared or ultraviolet to visible light, or night-vision light-enhanced videos of dark scenes... or maybe even videos taken by cameras mounted on robots going someplace humans can't go.

This handles the problems of distance between them, speeds (possibly including phaser/laser travel speed as well as ship travel speed), visibility of coherent energy beams (because the representation could be set up to show us weapons fire in a visible form), visibility of the ships themselves even when they're not very close to a star and even on the shaded side (because the representation wouldn't work if we couldn't see the ships), and possibly even sound in space (because the representation could be set up to give us audio cues about events as well as video cues).

<<I'm not sure there has ever been a realistically portrayed space battle on-screen. It would be too dull for most people.>>

"No weeeeeeow? No boom-boom? What is this #$%!@ ?!"

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so, every space battle scene in Star Trek was actually just a simulated recreation in a holodeck? even the cool battle scenes where the Borg cube was tearing thru the federation fleet on it's way towards earth?

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Another convention for the benefit of the viewers. Even when the ships are described as being so-and-so thousand kilometers away, they still show them close, because otherwise it would look boring.

"See that tiny dot of light? Fire!"

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

The whole of Star Trek is a simulation.

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441!!!! :)

I always got a kick out of the old Japanese anime series Starblazers where they sent the resurrected Japanese naval battleship Yamato up into space to duke it out among the stars. So you got this warship with in line gun turrets designed for the relatively flat trajectory environment of the ocean fighting in the three-dimensional environment of space. What the hell. Looks cool anyway.

Well, as long as they had the Wave-Motion Gun, you never had to wonder how an episode would end...

__________________
"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Ah yes...the wave motion gun. Sorry captain...gotta point the entire ship at the enemy. Just a minute.

Come to think of it I think that ship had anchors too.

And firing it depowered the entire ship, so they had to save it for the last minute. What, they never thought of putting in a backup generator??

__________________
"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Probably made for great drama for Japanese kids...they've deployed their "trump card"....will they recover in time?