Space, the last frontier?
Just saw this fark.com link to space battle wallpapers -
Years ago when I started fiddling with the Bryce 3D graphics program, I had hopes of using it to model space scenes like these and perhaps doing some animation. But I slammed headlong into the problem of scale. To quote the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - "Space," it says, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindboggingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space. Listen ...".
This became evident as soon as I tried to accurately scale planets, space ships and such. Then it fell apart even more so when scaling the distances between battling spaceships. When done to scale, the planet dominates all and the spaceships aren't even specks. Not even dust. On the screen they don't even use a pixel. Unless of course one uses a point of view that's very, very close to one ship. In which case the opposing ships become less than pixels.The movie people know this but don't care about accuracy, since the viewing public could give a rat's patootie about it.
Me? I'm uncomfortable about such things. They nag at me. Perhaps it's my engineering paranoia left over from the days when overlooking tiny details could spell disaster on a project. But I can't feel good about blowing the scale. And when I start in to make a scene in Bryce, it becomes so perfectly clear space battles are impossible. The distances and scales defeat any and all weapons and navigation systems. In an engagement it could take days to complete just one close pass near earth. You can do a lot of dodging in a day. Assuming you could see the other guy coming. Radar/Lidar isn't that great at seeing things over space scale distances. Nothing is.
Oh, don't get me wrong. I enjoy reading science fiction. David Weber's Honorverse books probably have the most exciting space battles. He does a creditable job of maintaining scale, but still it takes a long time even at 650Gs to get close enough to your target for a hit, with either beam weapons (inverse square law means you have to be on top of it to do any damage - did you know there's a limit on how much energy you can pack into a bit of space?) or bumping fenders to score a hit with anything solid like a bullet or a missile.
The problem is the speed of light. It affects everything. Look at your PC. Would you believe the performance it has is now limited by that? It is. It takes about a nanosecond for an instruction cycle, and that's about a foot of distance the signals have to travel. Internal CPU data and instruction caching has cut the distance down to a few millimeters, but still you have to get input from and the results out to the outside world. It takes many thousands of instruction executions to do any four-space navigation and aiming changes. So computing course corrections in time to hit a moving target means your target's relative velocity has to be incredibly slow and you have to be stone throwingly close to it.
This is why we still can't reliably knock down an incoming warhead at piddling distances of a few miles much less the thousands of miles of low orbit space maneuvering. (Remember the Star Wars Defense Initiative of the Regan admin? I'm sure the engineers knew it couldn't be done, but the money was good - better to go through the motions and still have a paycheck!)
Reality is such a pain.
Years ago when I started fiddling with the Bryce 3D graphics program, I had hopes of using it to model space scenes like these and perhaps doing some animation. But I slammed headlong into the problem of scale. To quote the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - "Space," it says, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindboggingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space. Listen ...".
This became evident as soon as I tried to accurately scale planets, space ships and such. Then it fell apart even more so when scaling the distances between battling spaceships. When done to scale, the planet dominates all and the spaceships aren't even specks. Not even dust. On the screen they don't even use a pixel. Unless of course one uses a point of view that's very, very close to one ship. In which case the opposing ships become less than pixels.The movie people know this but don't care about accuracy, since the viewing public could give a rat's patootie about it.
Me? I'm uncomfortable about such things. They nag at me. Perhaps it's my engineering paranoia left over from the days when overlooking tiny details could spell disaster on a project. But I can't feel good about blowing the scale. And when I start in to make a scene in Bryce, it becomes so perfectly clear space battles are impossible. The distances and scales defeat any and all weapons and navigation systems. In an engagement it could take days to complete just one close pass near earth. You can do a lot of dodging in a day. Assuming you could see the other guy coming. Radar/Lidar isn't that great at seeing things over space scale distances. Nothing is.
Oh, don't get me wrong. I enjoy reading science fiction. David Weber's Honorverse books probably have the most exciting space battles. He does a creditable job of maintaining scale, but still it takes a long time even at 650Gs to get close enough to your target for a hit, with either beam weapons (inverse square law means you have to be on top of it to do any damage - did you know there's a limit on how much energy you can pack into a bit of space?) or bumping fenders to score a hit with anything solid like a bullet or a missile.
The problem is the speed of light. It affects everything. Look at your PC. Would you believe the performance it has is now limited by that? It is. It takes about a nanosecond for an instruction cycle, and that's about a foot of distance the signals have to travel. Internal CPU data and instruction caching has cut the distance down to a few millimeters, but still you have to get input from and the results out to the outside world. It takes many thousands of instruction executions to do any four-space navigation and aiming changes. So computing course corrections in time to hit a moving target means your target's relative velocity has to be incredibly slow and you have to be stone throwingly close to it.
This is why we still can't reliably knock down an incoming warhead at piddling distances of a few miles much less the thousands of miles of low orbit space maneuvering. (Remember the Star Wars Defense Initiative of the Regan admin? I'm sure the engineers knew it couldn't be done, but the money was good - better to go through the motions and still have a paycheck!)
Reality is such a pain.