A good video on the probable reality of hard Sci-Fi space battles. I like Kyle Hill’s other videos also!
However, I do hope they’re not seriously trying to criticize any existing renditions of Sci-Fi space combat as “wrong”, because those usually already understand the problems being brought up in this video and patch them with soft Sci-Fi FTL drives and magic cloaking devices etc. If they didn’t, space combat would be so boring that it might as well not be included in the story.
While there’s a few misconceptions (Star Wars didn’t invent or codify science fiction, it just popularized the “space opera”) and misinterpretations at play in the video (you actually can have a form of stealth in space, just not passive stealth like what most people are used to. Think of it less as “making yourself invisible” and more “making yourself hard to look at”), he’s actually the first person I’ve seen that gives any serious consideration to missile-based combat at orbital distances, which is what you generally end up with as the most viable method whenever you simulate combat in a realistic orbital space sim like KSP. I’ve seen too many people discount that in favor of “huge fucking lazorz” or relativistic railguns at still beyond visual range but much shorter distances simply because they think that anti-missile defense grids are somehow infallible.
My one big complaint is his discounting of smaller vessels in general. Obviously anything we know of as a fighter is too small, but big ships take a LOT of time to maneuver unless you decide to either ignore inertia or fuel efficiency, because you have a LOT of mass to move. If you give your ship enough thrust to execute a hard burn at 1G (like in The Expanse), you’re going to need to either make most of the ship fuel storage or you’re going to have almost no range. There’s a couple exceptions but they tend to be massive, imprecise and dangerous designs like the infamous nuclear pulse drive. Smaller ships might lack range but they’re going to be able to react quicker with shorter burn times for less fuel expenditure.
