The Physics of Space Battles

We’ve seen space wars fought in movies and TV shows for almost a hundred years now, but what would a real-life space battle be like? It wouldn’t be like the movies, that’s for sure!

In principle, yes, your enemy could come at you from any direction at all. In practice, though, the Buggers are going to do no such thing. At least, not until someone invents an FTL drive, and we can actually pop our battle fleets into existence anywhere near our enemies. The marauding space fleets are going to be governed by orbit dynamics – not just of their own ships in orbit around planets and suns, but those planets’ orbits. For the same reason that we have Space Shuttle launch delays, we’ll be able to tell exactly what trajectories our enemies could take between planets: the launch window. At any given point in time, there are only so many routes from here to Mars that will leave our imperialist forces enough fuel and energy to put down the colonists’ revolt.

That’s just the beginning of the difference we would see between a movie battle and what would happen in the outer space we have. Read more at Gizmodo. Link -via Digg