The Truth about Space War

[Music] Wow Wow what was that on screen ah captain we meet just tell me what you want Mirror me that goatee is ridiculous I've come to tell you about the realities of space war it wouldn't look like anything you're closer that's enough I don't want to indulge him but he's right despite the vast number of space stories that we have in popular culture almost none of them depicts space war accurately or at least get close to how science might predict that they would actually go down popular culture has trained us to think that space war will look like world war ii dogfighting or stealthy submarine battles but in reality space war would look so much weirder and more interesting than that the reality of space war is something science fiction authors have been covering for decades but these more hard sci-fi takes haven't taken over pop culture like TV and movie franchises have instead Star Wars shows us space pilots making daring evasive maneuvers and Star Trek shows us space battles happening close enough to see out a window this is what we think would happen without really thinking about it so in honor of those books and shows that do make the effort like the expanse I thought it was time for yet another installment of how science would make that space thing you like different but better first maybe the biggest difference would be distance on earth the distance that two armies can be apart from each other is limited but they can't always directly target each other so for example if you are an average height and you are looking at me and I walk about five kilometres away in any direction just because of the curvature of the earth I will then be hidden by the Earth's horizon there is no direct shot at plus bullets and other projectiles on earth or on another planet are pulled downwards towards the surface by gravity and slowed down by atmospheres even more advanced weaponry like lasers had a lot of obstacles to overcome on terra firma military-grade lasers can be a hundred percent blocked by rain in empty space there is no horizon there's no air there's no rain and there's no significant gravity wells in most of it out here a bullets effective range goes from a few kilometers to theoretically infinity if nothing interacts with it along the way and even though lasers don't have infinite range in space their range still extends friend of the show and hard sci-fi bloggers matter beam points out that using current technology a high-powered space laser may have an effective deadly range out to tens of thousands of kilometers again using current technology a space laser could board this deep into a solid steel plate in just the time it took me to say this sentence from a thousand kilometers away that's the distance between Chicago in New York hey that's my plate over here get out get out of here I'm floating here what this massive range extension in space is likely to do for its participants is force them very very far apart opposed to the large-scale space battles you've seen in Star Wars and Star Trek extraterrestrial engagements are likely to happen so far apart from such distance than looking out of a window you wouldn't be able to see anything not friend not foe just light seconds of space in every direction if you were to see anything it might just be a brief flash as some unseen enemies homing nuclear device turns your eyeballs into cosmic fire even if there was a space conflict that was close quarters for some reason it wouldn't look anything like what Poe Dameron is used to let's say that I'm black leader and I get targeted now because of the ferocious velocity of weaponry like laser beams if they have me now and they pull the trigger that's it I'm done if a person firing a laser beam at you can see you there is no dodging that attack right can cover an entire kilometer in just three microseconds this makes all daring evasive maneuvering pointless in a space war that uses laser beams even spinning which is admittedly a pretty good trick maneuvering pointless or not gets even weirder in a space war in general on screen we all know that space is traversable in three dimensions XY and Z but in almost all of our space stories they've adopted two-dimensional naval type warfare as their metaphor for space warfare but space has no set battle planes and so engaging enemies from any and all directions is just as valid if not even more so for its many potential advantages it means that when we meet there is very little reason to be faced if they stick where is he sir he's beneath us how many of you are there forget it evasive two-dimensional maneuvering makes even less sense when you think about how spacecraft would actually move in space so imagine here that there's an x-wing making a trench length if it cut its engines at any point it would continue on at a constant velocity in a straight line forever but because of this in space the ship could now use tiny thrusters to turn itself around to travel forwards while facing backwards in fact most ships in space would have to do this or be able to do this because they'd also have to slow down in space that he's on your tail trope wouldn't really work in a more realistic space war because at any point the fighter that was escaping its tailor could just flip around 180 degrees and spire my retinas corneas no and in a more realistic space war you might not even have to destroy enemy ships to defeat them heat might do that for you humans are hot things your skin temperature for example ranges from between 32 to 35 degrees Celsius and here on earth that heat leaves your body in three different ways the first is convection or an object's heat loss through interaction with a fluid around that object on earth that's your body and the air so if my hand was in air air molecules are constantly hitting it and circulating away taking energy away from my hand lowering the temperature of my hand through tiny collisions this cools my hand down the second is radiation everything with a temperature emits infrared radiation which serves to cool the object down over time and the final way is through conduction where two objects are touching each other typically solid objects and they are losing heat through the tiny collisions between their molecules whose hand is that know in the void though there's no air so no convection and nothing to touch so no conduction the only way you lose heat in space is through radiation which is the slowest and least efficient form of heat transfer for example you know that space is super super cold right only a few degrees Kelvin but if I through your naked body into space it wouldn't immediately freeze using the stefan-boltzmann law here in some estimations the human body might take longer than a day to freeze in the vacuum of space and that's just down to the sky heat is very hard to lose in space ever wonder what those big white panels in the International Space Station are those are radiators just to get rid of excess heat it is so easy to overheat in space that the determining factor in a space war might indeed be heat management think of all of the different ways our warship would be producing heat during a battle every engine maneuver adds heat our electronics work best at higher temperatures our crew needs to stay warm to stay alive every shot that we take from a laser or kinetic projectile adds heat to the armor of our ship red alert at some point in the heat of battle there will be a point at which we are generating heat faster than we can lose it and we will have to surrender or else we will literally cook inside of the hull of our spaceship which would be also melting in space we give up nice try realistically many if not most space battles can end this way so factoring in the science space war is likely to look very different from what popular culture has trained us to think it would look like for one you probably wouldn't see anything tearing an engagement the ships would be too far away and if you could see anything it would look more like a game of asteroids than star wars and battles might not necessarily end between enemy fleets with ships destroyed and floating everywhere but instead just a bunch of red-hot ships that have to surrender or else they will boil this is different from what we are used to but I think it is just as cool factoring in the real world science imagine the tension of traversing deep space not knowing when and where an enemy strike could come from then being suddenly hit by a space laser and having to deploy giant geometric radiators so that you don't the vaporize inside your ship like a space hot pocket this these are real and fascinating problems that have real and narratively interesting solutions I think depicting all of this right we'll be the final frontier of sci-fi because science oh it was me the whole time what is that evil [Music] if you do the math differently on how long it would take a human body to freeze solid in space and you assume that there's a Sun nearby and then it is hitting you with its photons and heating you up there is a certain point where the amount of sunlight that could be hitting you is equaling the heat that you were losing to space and you will remain the exact same temperature and you wouldn't ever freeze in space in that situation but you would still need to you know breathe and drink and eat so you need a special setup I'm just describing a spaceship that's where the spaceship does oops thank you so much for watching Thomas another big shout out to at tough SF on Twitter who helped me a lot with this episode and you can go over to project ro those guys have written down so much nerdy hard sci-fi stuff that it is a literal treasure trove for people like me so go check out that website and if you like this video go back to nerdist.com for more of me for a Squatch or the space program on project alpha comm where if you sign up for alpha for a free 30-day trial you can get this show to days earlier than everyone else and you can follow because science and me at these handles thank you so much [Music]

Channel: Because Science

Views: 877,944

Rating: 4.891098 out of 5

Keywords: Nerdist, Fvid, Because Science, Kyle Hill, star wars, star trek, the expanse, space battle, x wing, fleet, physics, sound, heat transfer, movies, tv

Id: 9Xs3mGhQGxM

Length: 12min 10sec (730 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 12 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/ianyboo]

If you like that... (and I did too, that was awesome! thank you for sharing!) ...you are going to absolutely love Isaac Arthur's videos on Space Warfare. This is a good one to start with: https://youtu.be/xvs_f5MwT04

[u/FlavivsAetivs]

Heat is one of the few things elite Dangerous gets right. So is "jousting."

Regarding his statement about lasers:

Lasers have a much, much greater effective range in space but are still limited by the inverse square law. (Irradiance = (1/tan² (theta)) * (Power/(pi*r² )). In other words if you take a standard metal cutting laser capable of cutting through 1mm of steel (0.16mm radius, 9.4 um wavelength, 1000 Watts), it has a divergence angle of 0.0187 milliradians or 0.00197 degrees. After 8.5 millimeters, this is the angle at which the radius of the laser increases linearly. At this scale we can more or less ignore the nonlinear bit before. Effectively at this point the radius of the laser can be calculated like a triangle using the distance we want to target, let's say a kilometer, and our two angles (0.00107 and 90 degrees) and that gives us an increase from 0.00016m to 0.0187m in radius.

From there you can figure out using the Irradiance that the power of the laser is going to be about 35,557,150,416,238,162,678 W*m² at its Rayleigh range. If you take that and multiply it by the area at 1km away, you get that it would a 4,161 watt laser to have the same efficacy at that distance and radius.

And that's just to cut through a millimeter of carbon steel (About the thickness of Roman segmented plate armor). So despite people's skepticism, Elite's ranges are actually probably pretty accurate.

[u/RadioActiveLobster]

SURPRISE LIGHTSABER!!!!

[u/CMDR_Burgerking]

What a hairstyle 8-o

[u/LeChevaliere]

And, of course, in a real military spacecraft we would not be wasting space, mass, energy, shielding and sacrificing manoeuvrability on crew.

And the craft would probably not look traditionally "cool" and would instead be ugly clusters of engines, fuel tanks, radiators and weapons strapped to the backsides of small asteroids and chunks of comets, anything that can absorb weapon energy (radiation and impacts) without significant delta-v.

Even if we go for more traditional end-to-end manufactured combat spacecraft they would likely be needles, long and narrow to reduce their profile, everything lined up behind a thick slug of aluminium or ice, constantly rotated to point at where the enemy might be.

The more you reason out "space battles" the less sense they make.

[u/Xygen8]

Realism? You mean realism as in ships being magically limited to a certain top speed and slowing down after boosting even when flight assist is off and the thrusters aren't firing?

Or ships somehow being able to pull a hundred gees without crushing the pilot?

Or cockpits being completely exposed to attacks because they're on the surface of the ship and have huge windows?

Or the ridiculously efficient radiators? Cooling things in space is HARD. With current technology, even my efficiency engineered DBX would require radiators half the size of the ship itself.

Realism my ass.

[u/Spallboy]

The enemy's gate is down.

[u/RFCB]

It’s the Armageddon and the Abbadon right there?

[u/Mr_Lobster]

Shout-out to Children of a Dead Earth for accurately depicting all of this.