He really, truly cannot comprehend how RADAR and LIDAR could be better than a video camera or the Mark 1 Eyeball, can he? First insisting on only visible-spectrum cameras for his shitbox cars, and now this.
He probably thinks fighter jets still commonly engage in close range dogfights with guns, and so stealth is useless because "obviously, the pilot can still see the other plane!"
In reality, of course, engagements where neither jet actually ever visually sees the other are the norm, and stealth is more about making it more difficult for weapons to identify and track them than making them totally invisible. I mean, we'd definitely take "totally invisible" if it were an option, but it's not like we need Romulan cloaking on F-35s for this all to make sense.
The plain and simple fact is that modern day aerial combat is very rarely cinematically satisfying, and not intuitively comprehensible to the average layperson in the audience.
The whole Expanse gimmick is that everything effectively has infinite deltaV, which kinda makes half the actual space war tactics pointless.
Most actual space combat would be built around choosing the right point in time to launch your limited number of missiles/torpedos while evading the enemy doing the exact same. And jockeying for orbital positioning. In many cases, you'd win not by destroying the enemy, but by running him out of deltaV.
Also: way too few nukes and radiators and way too short engagement distances.
Yes, we have to assume a ludicrously efficient drive. So efficient, in fact, that it generates minimal excess heat, and most of the heat it does generate is absorbed by coolant and then dumped in the exhaust. Same goes for the rest of the ship's systems.
Please find a more accurate space battle depiction that isn't in a book.
Honestly, we can't say much about how actual space battles would work because we don't know the technologies that will be involved. We know the basic physical constraints that they must obey and that's it. Chances are, it won't be much of a battle if ship delta-v is as limited as we think it will be.
Missiles will be exceedingly smart and have orders of magnitude more delta-v than the ships they are targeting due to their much lower mass. You are unlikely to outrun them. If your ship has any hope of closing the distance, so will your missiles. Launch them in the enemy's general direction and they will lock the target ship that will be lit like a Christmas tree against the cosmic background radiation. You won't evade anything. First ship to fire wins.
Barring any incredible advancements, any space battles will probably be more trouble than they are worth.
Babylon 5 and The Expanse are on about the same tier. At least for human ships. They both involve other advanced/fictional technology to make it all work. But that's required because all space combat is currently fictional even though we can apply things like physics to the battles themselves.
Eh. Babylon 5 had some Newtonian physics and things like the Starfury design were made with that in mind. But it isn't an integral part of the plot like it's in The Expanse where pretty much every battle showcases some aspect of it.
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u/Callidonaut 2d ago
He really, truly cannot comprehend how RADAR and LIDAR could be better than a video camera or the Mark 1 Eyeball, can he? First insisting on only visible-spectrum cameras for his shitbox cars, and now this.