*scifi

Adding video to channels (Scifi) - requested by kulpims.

The first Mass Effect game had a fantastic writeup on combat in space, and why it was supposed to be a more anti-hollywood, incredibly boring event in that universe.
Most encounters could be resolved in seconds from hundreds of thousands of kilometers (well outside visual range), and it only took a single shot to end the encounter, either through instantly disabling critical systems, or overheating the heatsinks onboard (which were constantly venting excess cosmic and solar radiation as it was), causing any sort of energy shielding to be impractical for similar reasons.
Nearly all military encounters in space were ultimately stalemates, because things could be resolved so immediately and with such deadly finality, it forced the space-faring civilizations to ask questions first and shoot as a last resort. I can't remember the exact description, but essentially a "fight" in space was two or more opposing ships simply showing up and sitting around doing nothing until the situation resolved itself, or one side had clearly more guns than the other (but there may have even been reasons for why the latter result wasn't common either, but it's been so long I can't recall).
Regardless, I love that vision of space travel and hypothetical military maneuvers because it portrayed the reality of such events from a really hardcore scientific approach. Obviously the rest of the writing team was unable to work around those limitations, since the rest of that game and the rest of the series pretty much resorted back to the Star Wars formula almost immediately. I wish their writers had been as talented as the guy who constructed the universe and it's laws, because it was an amazingly refreshing take on sci-fi space travel.

I got me a nice new shiny Bronze Star !!!

I think you'd really enjoy the "Ringworld" stuff by Larry Niven, especially the Man-Kzin wars series.

There's a strong emphasis on what you are describing whereby space weaponry by it's very nature is so accurate and long ranged that what we might think of as conventional warfare is not really an option anymore.

e.g. a typical beam weapon could just invisibly cook the enemy crew alive in their own ship from the other side of a solar system.

To the point that the human race had pretty much given up on the idea of warfare entirely before they encounter the Kzinti.


I might argue that with Drones, Lasers, Tesla howitzers and god knows what else we on the verge of inventing we might well hit a similar wall in real life.

i.e. We get so good at doing war that we spoil it for ourselves and make even tactical level conflict pointless. (much like nuclear weapons did at the strategic level)

One can but hope....