User:Sharkface217/spacewarfareinfiction

This page is for improvement to the currently-deleted Space Warfare in fiction article. I plan on recreating the article later when it is properly sourced. Feel free to make construtive edits to this page. Thank you. S h a r k f a c e 2 1 7 20:25, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

Space Warfare

Space warfare in a fictional context appears in many science-fiction films and books such as Star Wars and Star Trek focus a great deal of attention on fictional space combat. Such battles typically involve large spaceships (for instance, a Star Wars star destroyer is described as over a kilometre in length.) armed with energy weapons attempting to destroy each other. They may also involve space versions of fighter jets, typically pitted against each other around larger ships (such fighters may deliver a protagonist to an enemy ship or station to carry out an operation there). Examples of these starfighters include the Starfury in Babylon 5 and the Colonial Viper in the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica TV series (see below).

The actual spacecraft used in space warfare vary widely depending on the media. Ranging from gigantic Star Destroyers from Star Wars, to the smaller and more maneuverable vessels from Stargate and Star Trek. In the Star Wars Expanded Universe, Venator-class Imperial Star Destroyers are stated to be 1,137 meters long.

Naval influences

In general, fictional space warfare borrows a lot of elements from naval warfare, in addition to traditional dogfights. David Weber's Honorverse series of novels, in particular, portrays several "space navies" such as the Royal Manticoran Navy; these imitate many themes from Napoleonic-era naval warfare. Starfleet (Star Trek) and the Imperial Navy (Star Wars) also use a naval-style rank structure and hierarchy.

The Death Star is an example of a fictional space based weapon.

Destruction of planets and stars

Destruction of planets and stars is another aspect of interstellar warfare that has been explored exhaustively in fiction, from the Death Star (from Star Wars) pictured above to the Planet Killer in Star Trek. The energy required to destroy a planet or star is without a doubt well beyond our current scientific means; it has been calculated that overcoming the gravity holding together an Earth-sized planet takes on the order of 10³² joules of energy, or roughly the total output of the sun in a week. More detailed estimates place the violent destruction of Alderaan (appearing in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope) as requiring 1.0 × 10³⁸ joules of energy, or on the order of millions of times more than necessary to permanently break the planet apart. This is the equivalent of from 1.1 × 10¹⁸ to 1.3 × 10¹⁹ tonnes of resting matter converted directly into energy (by Albert Einstein's formula, E = mc²).

On the TV show Stargate SG-1 a star was completely destroyed as a means of destroying the opponent's fleet and preventing the resources of that solar system from falling into enemy hands.

Television and Movies

[[Image:NonFreeImageRemoved.svg<|thumbnail|right|250px|The USS Enterprise (NCC-1701) from Star Trek]]

Star Trek

In Star Trek, the principal weapon used for space combat is the phaser, a light-based weapon. Hand-held phasers have a variety of settings, able to either "stun" or kill, and also able to vaporize large swaths of material. They can also be set to fire in "Wide Beam" mode, to defeat multiple targets at once. The phasers mounted on the USS Enterprise also can fire a stun blast capable of incapacitating groups of people on a planet's surface.. Another weapon deployed against ships is the photon torpedo. A photon torpedo is a torpedo weapon armed with an antimatter warhead. Photon torpedoes appear as red, orange, yellow or blue blobs of light when fired. There is no evidence of the use of starfighters for combat purposes in Star Trek, as there is in other series such as Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica.

Battlestar Galactica

Starfighters are a major component of space warfare in both the original 1978 series and the 2004 re-imagining of Battlestar Galactica. The eponymous vessel Galactica carries a complement of Colonial Vipers, which figure prominently in a number of episodes. Nuclear weapons also appear in some episodes.

Books

The book Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card looks closely at how traditional strategies and tactics would be modified in space warfare. Particularly, the lack of gravity allows a freedom of orientation - there is no up or down - which is not intuitive, but must be taken into account by anyone commanding a fleet of spacecraft.

Video Games

In video games, such as Homeworld and Star Trek: Armada, "terrain" such as nebulae and asteroids fields are used to add additional depth to the strategy. In Freespace 2 many missions take place within a nebula and as such RADAR efficiency and visibility is reduced. All practical considerations of using the "landscape" of space in warfare have been explored in fiction.

In the Halo video game series, the United Nations Space Command uses ships armed with reactor powered magnetic coilguns, which launch extremely large projectiles at high speed.

See also

• Space warfare
• Space combat
• Star Trek
• Star Wars
• Ender's Game
• Stargate
• Halo
• Homeworld 2
• Directed-energy weapon
• Space colonization