Would HV ships need an extreme makeover for a TV series?

kzt wrote:

Theemile wrote:
Have the camera show the gun crew prepping to fire - then as they fire, switch to a camera view looking out from the gun port and quickly zoom across the distance to the target and "see" the ship being damaged.

A combination of all the variations would probably be needed to keep the battle's energy up.

And then you zoom in on a jet black ship in darkness masked by a black energy field that blurs out anything behind it.

EXACTLY

Just how little physical material is outside, say the orbit of Earth, that would get energized enough to glow if an grazer beam hit it? And how big would the "normal" inter-planetary particle of disbursed matter likely be----which is the precursor to : How big would a bit of matter caused to "glow" or even disintegrate in a flash of energy need to be to be visible from 50,000km by the human eye even with 100x optics....
Yeah, just shoveling salt water back into the ocean from the incoming tide.

Except for things happening really really closet- like when Hexipuma made a delicate variety of Swiss Cheese out of The Golden Butterfly- dam little is going to be visible in real-time or at all in a space battle. Oh, we had the girl stand-in under a dome on Grayson watching nuclear explosions- pinpricks of light- from the battle with the Faithfull, but 30million KM? Tactical representation from which you can extrapolate loss or fusion bottle containment on a starships power system? Gas and possibly fluid outgassing (almost every fluid on a spaceship would not stay a "fluid" long and at best you would get a "puff" (a big one if you could see it on instruments) but you probably would need your tactical system to guesstimate if it was "air" venting or a fluid with rate of temperature change and dispersion (again, at 30million KM)

Loss of reading on impellers- almost instantaneous change with standard sensors, certainly with military tactical. Changes in in speed and vector based on relative movement of target(s) with impellers from your sensors. Energy flairs (all kinds including gravitational) and, again, relative changes till loss of impeller data. So damage to your targets in space battle are going to have to be from what is shown- and reported to command at the same time by the crew managing the station- on the tactical scanners or a quick point-of-view shift to "close" by the target as it gets ravaged by one or more type of weapons systems hitting it.

Possibly a laser head going off at X distance from an angle you can see it and almost immediately the resulting explosions etc from the damage caused to the target . The resulting compounding and cascading damage of four or more laser head beams hitting a ship and the physical sequencing of the damage along the tracks as they burn through "things" and the fast series of explosions as stuff vaporizing and defeating armor, normal bulkheads and "other stuff" may (or may not) look like cruise missile going though a modern ship. Actually the kind of damage that Eric Flint describes in the 1632 universe of an 8" explosive shell going though a Spanish Galleon would not be far off except not fast enough. Explosions blowing out (including back up the track of the incoming energy beam) of all sorts of places where internal structures fail catastrophicly and then secondary damage from internal things like power spikes. Containment failure is a big bright washout.

Drifting wreckage....well, it's not quite drifting, it's more unpowered ballistic glide..in more or less the direction it was going but altered due to changes in all sorts of things like spin, roll, cartwheeling due to the "venting" of stuff including vaporized metals. And it's got this sort of cloud of stuff that has been comming off of it (but getting thinner and reading out really really quickly as the main hulk leaves behind "stuff" that was propelled outward other than in front of its current vector. Perhaps some lingering puff and burst as stuff continues to fail- pressure differentials, stresses on things it's continuing unstablized movements, all sorts of stuff. And life pods trying to get out.
Hollywood will have a great time with making wreckage.

Brigade XO wrote:Just how little physical material is outside, say the orbit of Earth, that would get energized enough to glow if an grazer beam hit it? And how big would the "normal" inter-planetary particle of disbursed matter likely be----which is the precursor to : How big would a bit of matter caused to "glow" or even disintegrate in a flash of energy need to be to be visible from 50,000km by the human eye even with 100x optics....
Yeah, just shoveling salt water back into the ocean from the incoming tide.

Wikipedia's article on interplanetary medium says it's about 5 particles per cubic cm (5 million per m³) in the vicinity of Earth. If we define a "hair thin" graser beam as a cylinder with an average 1 mm of radius, that's an average cross-section of π mm². Over half a million km, it covered a volume of 1570 m³. That's about 8 billion particles it could have vaporised.

In theory, can they be seen? Yes. In practice, no one will see them with their naked eyes. Whether the sensors can see them, it'll be up for David to decide (it's conceivable). The filming crew cameras are not subject to the limitations of technology, though.

Another detail about the IPM is that sufficient quantity of it WILL show, even to the naked eye. On a very dark night, away from light pollution, you can see the Sun's light reflected back to us. That's the Zodiacal light, which was the PhD subject of Queen's Brian May (see this video).

Except for things happening really really closet- like when Hexipuma made a delicate variety of Swiss Cheese out of The Golden Butterfly- dam little is going to be visible in real-time or at all in a space battle. Oh, we had the girl stand-in under a dome on Grayson watching nuclear explosions- pinpricks of light- from the battle with the Faithfull, but 30million KM?

That girl was Abigail Hearns.

I'm arguing that we can't see the graser beams themselves with our naked eyes, but almost everything else about combat should be visible. The graser mounts firing, the beams impacting and melting armour too, missiles exploding to produce grasers and ships exploding. I don't know which one would be brighter: the bomb-pumped graser emission by the missile or a ship's reactor going critical. Per unit of volume, the missile wins handily, but there's much more mass in the ship's reactor.

To be decided: graser beams hitting sidewalls and wedges. Do they light up? If they light up and distribute the energy over their full area, that's also going to be very bright.

Loss of reading on impellers- almost instantaneous change with standard sensors, certainly with military tactical. Changes in in speed and vector based on relative movement of target(s) with impellers from your sensors. Energy flairs (all kinds including gravitational) and, again, relative changes till loss of impeller data. So damage to your targets in space battle are going to have to be from what is shown- and reported to command at the same time by the crew managing the station- on the tactical scanners or a quick point-of-view shift to "close" by the target as it gets ravaged by one or more type of weapons systems hitting it.

I don't think we're going to see any of that. It's too brainy. For the same reason, we need to see the battles from the outside. It's too "clinical" to just see a tac plot.

I'd like to see nice displays showing a lot of detail. More than Okudagrams that are meaningless, show actual plots. But the audience will still need someone to explain what they're seeing.

I have this tendency to not remember words when I read, but I remember images. Like building pictures in my mind of what I am reading. So Madame Defarge knitting in Tale of Two Cities...well there is this hard used, somewhat angry older woman knitting not quite absently as she records the names of people to be eliminated.
I do see the words, I just run an image in my brain. Watched all those monster and space alien movies growing up (50's early 60's) and literally can't go back and watch them now. O M G, they were awful. Not so bad at the time but AARRRRRRGH. now. Last time I went back and looked for something was when it came out that Lenord Nemoy had a role in Plan 9 from Outer Space or some such movie- and then I was watching for him, not the iffy actual content of the movie.
My opinion (which nobody cares about) of most historical fiction and "documentaries" of history is unprintable. The stuff that comes closest to what anybody who wants to do the Honorvers is possibly what they did with Babalon 5...and that was at-for the Honorverse- closer than point-blank range. But at least it made sence with what they were describing (before, at the time, eventualy) what they were going in combat.
Hollywood....mostly....hawk, spit.

We just need to get Ruin Johnson on board as director and Alex Kurtzman as producer. They have lots of experience with SciFi, they will do to David's work what they have done for George Lucas and Gene Roddenberry's work. I'm sure it will be great.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Brigade XO wrote:Just how little physical material is outside, say the orbit of Earth, that would get energized enough to glow if an grazer beam hit it? And how big would the "normal" inter-planetary particle of disbursed matter likely be----which is the precursor to : How big would a bit of matter caused to "glow" or even disintegrate in a flash of energy need to be to be visible from 50,000km by the human eye even with 100x optics....
Yeah, just shoveling salt water back into the ocean from the incoming tide.

Wikipedia's article on interplanetary medium says it's about 5 particles per cubic cm (5 million per m³) in the vicinity of Earth. If we define a "hair thin" graser beam as a cylinder with an average 1 mm of radius, that's an average cross-section of π mm². Over half a million km, it covered a volume of 1570 m³. That's about 8 billion particles it could have vaporised.

In theory, can they be seen? Yes. In practice, no one will see them with their naked eyes. Whether the sensors can see them, it'll be up for David to decide (it's conceivable). The filming crew cameras are not subject to the limitations of technology, though.

Another detail about the IPM is that sufficient quantity of it WILL show, even to the naked eye. On a very dark night, away from light pollution, you can see the Sun's light reflected back to us. That's the Zodiacal light, which was the PhD subject of Queen's Brian May (see this video).

Except for things happening really really closet- like when Hexipuma made a delicate variety of Swiss Cheese out of The Golden Butterfly- dam little is going to be visible in real-time or at all in a space battle. Oh, we had the girl stand-in under a dome on Grayson watching nuclear explosions- pinpricks of light- from the battle with the Faithfull, but 30million KM?

That girl was Abigail Hearns.

I'm arguing that we can't see the graser beams themselves with our naked eyes, but almost everything else about combat should be visible. The graser mounts firing, the beams impacting and melting armour too, missiles exploding to produce grasers and ships exploding. I don't know which one would be brighter: the bomb-pumped graser emission by the missile or a ship's reactor going critical. Per unit of volume, the missile wins handily, but there's much more mass in the ship's reactor.

To be decided: graser beams hitting sidewalls and wedges. Do they light up? If they light up and distribute the energy over their full area, that's also going to be very bright.

Loss of reading on impellers- almost instantaneous change with standard sensors, certainly with military tactical. Changes in in speed and vector based on relative movement of target(s) with impellers from your sensors. Energy flairs (all kinds including gravitational) and, again, relative changes till loss of impeller data. So damage to your targets in space battle are going to have to be from what is shown- and reported to command at the same time by the crew managing the station- on the tactical scanners or a quick point-of-view shift to "close" by the target as it gets ravaged by one or more type of weapons systems hitting it.

I don't think we're going to see any of that. It's too brainy. For the same reason, we need to see the battles from the outside. It's too "clinical" to just see a tac plot.

I'd like to see nice displays showing a lot of detail. More than Okudagrams that are meaningless, show actual plots. But the audience will still need someone to explain what they're seeing.

No beam weapons have "hair thin" beams - the laser on a pinnance is 2-3 CM diameter. Destroyer broadside lasers are 15 CM and greater, Grasers START at ~80 CM and go up to 550 CM or greater - you can fit an SUV in a Super Dreadnaught Graser beam.

Sidewalls are nothing more than bands of Gravity, which bend the beam. But, any thing that bends a light beam should give some reflectivity at the boundary interfaces. The Gravity region should cause internal back scattering on the internal boundary changes, so the entire field should light up with internal scattering.

However, Grasers are in the Gamma ray region and Lasers are X-rays - we can't see them with the human eye even in an atmospheric scattering environment because the beams are so far outside of visible range, so reflection scattering would not be visible.

Theemile wrote:No beam weapons have "hair thin" beams - the laser on a pinnance is 2-3 CM diameter. Destroyer broadside lasers are 15 CM and greater, Grasers START at ~80 CM and go up to 550 CM or greater - you can fit an SUV in a Super Dreadnaught Graser beam.

Is that the mount's size or the beam? The two don't have to be the same radius. I think of them as lenses, so they focus the beam into a narrow (lightly divergent over long distances) thin stream of particles.

However, Grasers are in the Gamma ray region and Lasers are X-rays - we can't see them with the human eye even in an atmospheric scattering environment because the beams are so far outside of visible range, so reflection scattering would not be visible.

Well, sufficient gravity can redshift those x-rays and gamma rays into visible light.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
Well, sufficient gravity can redshift those x-rays and gamma rays into visible light.

In theory, but light in a vacuum is invisible unless it illuminates a physical object. So a person on the target might see the graset, but a petanoule of red light will still vaporize you.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Theemile wrote:No beam weapons have "hair thin" beams - the laser on a pinnance is 2-3 CM diameter. Destroyer broadside lasers are 15 CM and greater, Grasers START at ~80 CM and go up to 550 CM or greater - you can fit an SUV in a Super Dreadnaught Graser beam.

Is that the mount's size or the beam? The two don't have to be the same radius. I think of them as lenses, so they focus the beam into a narrow (lightly divergent over long distances) thin stream of particles.

That is the beam size.

kzt wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
Well, sufficient gravity can redshift those x-rays and gamma rays into visible light.

In theory, but light in a vacuum is invisible unless it illuminates a physical object. So a person on the target might see the graset, but a petanoule of red light will still vaporize you.

So basically you (observing from other than the target) are not going to see the interaction of gamma and/or x-ray beams on the target but the your own ship's sensors certainly should--see something, if nothing more than the damage or lack of it depending on if you hit the target and burn through the sidewalls. If you just hit the sidewalls and don't burn through it should "light up" the target though you won't know that till the time it takes for the sensors to get the data back from the target. Find.

So Hollywood is going to just have to figure out how to show that in a "close up" from a point of view where you can actually see a million tons of warship getting hell-fire thrown at it from quite a few millions km away with something you can't see. Piece of cake....it's Hollywood.

At least with the missiles they can show all those nuclear flashes of the warheads going off....a fair distance from the target and then........the reaction (or lack of it) from the target depending on if you miss or don't burn through or just impact on the wedge. Sigh.....back to the Piece of Cake. Mostly stuff blowing off and or out of the hull of said target (or not). CGI budget will be interesting....big smile. Lots of fire and explosions and damage inside (not so much CGI there).