SciFi Writers have no sense of scale

BlackDragon98

Freikorps Kommandant
Banned - Politics
I'd need to watch that again to confirm my memory. IIRC, the Imperial ships were taking damage from asteroids.
The damage is what caused the Imps to break off their pursuit.

Whenever we've sent (admittedly tiny compared to a Star Destroyer) probes into and through the Asteroid Belt they didn't have the ability to dodge due to the minuscule amounts of fuel they carry and not one has come close to an asteroid it wasn't looking for.
The escape pod from Tantive IV is probably bigger than most of our probes. :LOL:
 

bintananth

behind a desk
The damage is what caused the Imps to break off their pursuit.


The escape pod from Tantive IV is probably bigger than most of our probes. :LOL:
That the Imperials were taking damage from instead of avoiding objects traveling in predictable orbits at about 17-19km/s (assuming the Hoth asteroids move at similar orbital velocities as Ceres) which we can detect and track from Earth when they're about the same size as a school bus from at least 15 light-minutes away does not make the SW sensor tech look good.
 

UberIguana

Well-known member
The Hoth asteroid field was billions of times more densely packed than the ones in our solar system. Dense enough it probably has enough local gravity to reform into a planet given a few hundred millennia. Probably less than that, thinking about how dense it was.

On that note, we see large, well developed species apparently native to the surface of a snowball world that really shouldn't be able to support creatures that size given how little food there is. The obvious explanation for this is some kind of major intraplanetary collision some time ago (maybe a few thousand years). Two planetoids colliding would spit out a colossal amount of debris, easily enough to account for such as densely pack field that has yet to pull itself back together. A few millennia would be enough for the debris to fully cool from the impact. The resulting meteorite showers would also have been enough to wreck a far more verdant Hoth's ecosystem by kicking up vast amounts of dust. This would reduce sunlight reaching the surface by enough to freeze the planet and leaving only the handful of surviving animals we see clinging on today.
 

Allanon

Well-known member
In my sci-fi universe there were two classes of warships of importance for the hero empire- Stratodragons and Klee-Fangs.

None are the size of Picard's Enterprise or an Imperial Star Destroyer.

Stratodragons were the larger ones, swift, armored, shielded, and heavily armed as well as having "starburst" ability to take out any nearby fighters. Each could carry 12 fighters and three bombers. They were just big enough to carry solarian bombs and time missiles. They vaguely resembled dragonish pterodactyls.

Klee-Fangs were a smaller class, especially fast and always appeared in packs. They would swarm around enemies, taking bites out of the enemy (figuratively speaking), attacking from all directions at once. They were also meant to terrorize enemies because of their ruthlessness. Each could carry three fighters.

All of these ships were also equiped with missiles and chain guns.

Since that empire was not overly large and they had no interest in expanding their territory the fleet could easily protect the entire empire. Each planet also had its own defenses, including a navy and an air force.

Their main enemy was a race resembling Ancient Greece but high-tech, not unlike "Ulysses 31." The main warcraft they had were not ships but warbases built on asteroids, resembling flattened globes. They carried many Trident, Sword, and Archer class fighters, as well as Minotaur and Satyr walking war machines for invasions. They also carried swarms of mechanical "Harpies," small and very maneuverable. These resembled long-necked bats of bronze and were armed with sonic disruptors and energy cannons (carried). The largest warbase was the Acropolis Command warbase, easily as massive as an Imperial Super Star Destroyer. These warbases were armed with a sort of lightning cannon.

The dimension all of this took place in was a weird void with an endless flat land and atmosphere so normal astrophysics did not apply. It was not possible to fly more than ten miles above any land area.
 

Sergeant Foley

Well-known member
When I came up with the idea which resulted in the story Tintagel I'm sharing here I wanted to avoid a flaw that all too many SciFi writers fall victim to: tossing out numbers which sound impressive but actually aren't.

Fr'ex: One of Babylon 5 movies has a massive fleet defending Earth from a Drakh fleet with a Shadow planet killer. 10,000km is mentioned as too far away to effectively hit anything.

Before I started writing I decided the ancient power (the Llyrians) which has been around for awhile and seen some shit would think of the Virgo Supercluster as basically their back yard and that each of their warships would be a Type I Civilization on the Kardashev scale all by itself while also being so ridiculously tiny that they're basically telling others "to us the laws of physics are merely polite suggestions".

I came up with 600 - only 25 of which are capital ships - as a reasonable number of active warships of all types for them to have.

I just looked up the number of Galaxies in the Virgo Supercluster. If I stick to that number for the size of the their fleet the odds a random Galaxy actually having a Llyrian battleship in it are worse than the odds of rolling a Nat1 on a d100.

I'm guilty of this too, but in the other direction.

Subscribed and following this discussion thread very closely with intriguing interest. Keep up the good work @bintananth
 

ThatZenoGuy

Zealous Evolutionary Nano Organism
I had thoughts about scale when I think of writing a fiction, one conclusion I arrived at is that if ship weapons are much larger than 100 megatons, every planet is going to be unlivable very very quickly.
Mass Effect with its 'even the biggest bads are less than half a megaton per shot' is reasonable in this regard.
You can argue planetary shields and whatnot, but planets are also predictable in movement so you can just bombard them from anywhere and know the exact spot your round will hit.
 

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