The Final Frontier

Recently I was thinking. Generally, that's a bad thing, but this time I think I hit upon something. This may be something no one else really considers, but I had to commit it to web space and show it to the world so I may be ridiculed.

Anyway, we all know that space as it is depicted in most movies and such doesn't work the way it's depicted. Explosions don't normally occur as huge fireballs, making a lot of noise and causing a ring a fire to emanate out for light years. Hell, noise in general is bad, and if something is going to emanate out, it'll do in in more of a spherical form, not a perfect ring on the flat horizon line.

Those are all peeves of mine, but the one that really gets me are the space ships. Considering that most of this stuff is soft sci-fi, as in little real science required, I shouldn't really spend so much time thinking about it, but I do. The spaceship are unrealistic. They fly unrealistically in space, and don't seem to account for the fact that space is three dimensional.

For starters, space ship would not need to make big banking turns to turn around. That hows aircraft flies in an atmosphere, and that is due to the physics of the planet. But in space, you give yourself a boost, and theoretically, you could go in one direction until you hit something or found the edge of the universe.

As such, to make a turn, all you'd have to do is shoot your ship around in one spot in the direction you wanted to go, give yourself the proper thirst in the opposite direction of your turn to stop yourself, and shoot off in the new direction. I think I've seen one episode of Star Trek that even acknowledges this kind of physics at all.

Beyond that, though, the ships really shouldn't be so thin and stretched. I mean, you look at a Federation starship, the warp nacelles (which I'm sure I spelled wrong) are attached to the main part of the ship by a section of the ship that looks smaller and thinner than the actual nacelle itself. I'm amazed the things don't just fly off in warp travel. You ask me, the should have the thingers much closer to the ship so they can made fast, high-speed turns and be more nimble. Giant ships you have to baby are worthless, in my opinion.

I'm a sad little geek I know, but I really just wanted to vent on this. I may draw up some ship ideas later... but not now.