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That's a good question. I hope you didn't just ruin all space movies for me!

Me too! Sorry if I did.

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There are so many things wrong with most space movies, someone could write a book about the drivel one sees onscreen. For example, most space movies have magic gravity that does not exist in space and their ships magically have it. They also often bank their ships flying in space, as if they were using wings in an atmosphere. They ignore the reality of distances and the impossibility of faster than light travel, the fact that hitting a spec of dust at anything near light speed would obliterate the spacecraft, etc.

Most "science fiction" movies about space are more properly thought of as fantasy films rather than SCIENCE fiction, because they have little to do with science.

I've thought about this as well. I don't think we really know what exactly an oxygen explosion would look like in space. Presumably, it would at least flare up until it disperses in a few seconds.

Might depend on pressure of the vessel, flow rate of the oxygen, etc?

Oh Neil degrasse Tyson probably has written a book or two about it. Nobody loves ruining a good sci-fi movie like him on Twitter.

>Most "science fiction" movies about space are more properly thought of as fantasy films rather than SCIENCE fiction, becaus

Because what!?!! Don't leave us hanging! ^^/s

I pretend it's some sci-fi substance that burns like that in space

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It’s fiction. Assume the earthly rules of physics don’t apply and you’ll be a-ok.

If movies were realistic they wouldn't be as entertaining

Also, Nearly 90% of all aliens speak English with a British accent.

The British Empire extended further than you might think. Also, Doctor Who has spread British ideas throughout the universe in both the past and future.

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Babylon 5 taught me the answer to this!

When a craft explodes it has an atmosphere, or the components necessary to mix and create said atmosphere, in the craft. At the very least mixed around the pilot in some capacity.

Different species with different atmospheres may have different coloured explosions. Example, for us it'd be yellow/orange/red. The typical colours we associate with fire. An enemy might have green explosions, or blue.

This explains how they impacted language patterns a long time ago, in galaxies far, far away. Thank you.

And the sound, in space, no one can hear you scream. I like the Firefly series, they do a good job of this, pity it only ran for one season.

Most real spaceships have fuel with an oxidizer component, so they could explode. I assume movie spacecraft have some sort of power source which could explode, antimatter or some sort of fusion reactor.

Well presumably a space weapon exploding would carry its own oxidant with it, like with rocket fuels. Or alternatively would use a source of energy not dependent on that, for example, nuclear fission/fusion or antimatter.

Great answer. Thank you.

Perhaps the explosives have an oxidizer in it.

The show The Expanse actually does a decent job with space physics. Ships are configured like skyscrapers and create gravity when they thrust. And they actually have to flip and burn the opposite direction to slow down before they reach their destination instead of using magic space brakes. It’s not perfect, but I appreciate the attempt to at least be semi-realistic.

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Almost all conventional bombs and missiles will explode in a vacuum, they don’t use atmospheric oxygen. But they wouldn’t work the same way without the blast propagating through air. A hand grenade will still explode and fling shrapnel around though.

This is where the Expanse was head and tails above other space movies.

Everyone getting strapped in preparing for High-G maneuvers. Locking your tool bays so a hammer doesn't turn into a sabot round when the ship suddenly changes direction. People stroking out to due high G acceleration. Using Acceleration/Deceleration at 1g over massive distances to simulate gravity.

Fictional spaceships are all lined with alchemically pure phlostigon, of course.

> the fact that hitting a spec of dust at anything near light speed would obliterate the spacecraft,

How is this, though? You can hit a bug going 90 mph and it just splatters on your windshield. A rock flies off your fender etc.

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Thats not oxygen fire its Tabana gas from the weapons and drive systems releasing stored energy. Total bs but i like it for head cannon.

Two things: some chemicals don’t need oxygen to burn. Some are better oxidizers than oxygen, like fluorine. It’s actually close to impossible to put out a fluorine fire, since you can’t even smother them, and they’ll even burn things like concrete.

Second, for the sounds of explosions, one way it’s explained in some scifi is that the sounds you are hearing are computer extrapolations. Elite Dangerous is a notable example of this explanation.

Zathras is simple man.

Zathras see Babylon 5, Zathras upvotes.

The speed of light is 300,000 km/s, or about 671,000,000 miles per hour. Quite a few orders of magnitude larger than 90 mph.

The kinetic energy of an object depends on both its mass and its velocity. A fly against your car is light enough, and the velocity of your car is small enough, that a collision between a car and a fly does nothing to the car. Once you approach lightspeed though, even a speck of dust could wreak havoc

" In space, no one can hear you scream" was actually the tag line for Alien, the 1979 movie. Regardless it's true lol

I will note, though, that the penultimate battle of the sequel movie Serenity incorporated sound effects, but it was visually handwaved because it took place in a space cloud.

Bug soft, so it splats. A pebble at 90 mph WILL crack your windshield, or dent your fender.

Force equals mass times velocity SQUARED: velocity means more to force than mass, so if you have a very high velocity, a very small mass carries a lot of force.

Word correction: should have said energy, not force.

“They mostly scream at night, mostly.” 🤷🏼‍♀️

90 mph is almost nothing.

To help you understand, think about tossing a bullet back and forth with a friend. You can do that without your hand getting hurt at all, because the bullet is not going very fast. However, that same bullet being shot from a gun is going very fast coming out of barrel, and it hitting your hand at that speed makes a very significant difference for how it would affect your hand if the bullet hit your hand.

And the speed of a bullet out of a gun is practically nothing compared with going near the speed of light; the forces involved are vastly greater with vastly greater speed.

I am fine with Loki with a uk accent

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Aliens 1986 the little girl said "they mostly come out at night, mostly"

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What about the fact that laser shots are visible and seem to travel as short segments like bullets that travel at a visible speed. Laser blasts seem to go about as fast as a bullet or tracer round.

And why do laser swords stop at a certain length instead of continuing forward like the beam of a flashlight?

if a craft blows up, its usually safe to assume that vessel has oxygen tanks and everything needed to create a burning environment. things can explode in space if there's oxygen present and in any vessel with breathable air it is

Expanding on the original question, how would a weapon's explosion look in space if there was no atmosphere needed for the explosion, like nuclear weapon compared to a conventional weapon?

>Force equals mass times velocity SQUARED: velocity means more to force than mass, so if you have a very high velocity, a very small mass carries a lot of force.

This is kind of the answer I wanted, thank you.

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I always liked to think the lightsaber was like a plasma torch.

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The lasers you see are actually 2 projectiles bouncing the light of the laser back and forth between each other in order to contain the beam in a more compact space.

The explanation is even the most true to life scifi movies something like Interstellar, trample all over true science, at least as far as we understand it, were talking about a world that has ships that can travel faster than light and not just be reduced to atoms

There is oxygen in space. That's what makes a nebula glow green, it's oxygen.

Engines burn fuel to propel the spacecraft. They could be chemicals, nuclear reactions or unobtainium. When the spacecraft suffers an unscheduled rapid disassembly, the burning just accelerates to the point of maximum exothermal energy.

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Because they’re not lasers. The ammo for firearms is a charged gas (like tibanna from Bespin). Lightsaber blades are plasma.

The light sabers stop after a certain length due to being contained by a field similar to a magnetic field. As for the lasers they're superheated bolts of plasma not beams of light.

It sure was - in the end when the Nostromo detonates there’s no sound just blinding light until the shock wave hits the escape pod. It’s the shock wave rippling through the escape pod that makes the noise.

If you looked it up, "Yes, lightsabers were fully adjustable for any need. The length could be adjusted as well as the thickness of the containing shield. In legends Luke was able to change his into a piton to climb down a curved stone roof, or it could be shortened to become a shoto saber."

“In space, no one can hear you at night, mostly.”

There were actually tests done on this in the Cold War.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime

There's a sci-fi book series, the ember war saga, that actually takes this into account. In the book, when entering combat conditions, they will actually suck all the oxygen in the ship into holding tanks so a hit won't cause explosive decompression and the issue of fires for damage control tapers off. Seems obvious to a point, makes you wonder the viability of the strategy irl.

I did not look up the made up facts

Fire can happen depending what's in the spacecraft. Fire would be round. Sound however will not propagate.

I would assume a grenade would work in a similar manner, but minus the gravity resulting in different speed and different types of dangers in the area, continuous as it may be. The explosion itself would have a smaller radius outside the container. I’m not sure if this would be something visible for longer than a split second depending on how far away you are in space.

At least there is symmetry.

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I pretend it's a movie and think damn, Daisy Ridley is freaking hot

You and I are the only thinkers

You know, I know what you mean because I also have to pretend that it's a movie.

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I painted a space battle scene for a school project. The professor wanted to take points off because on one of the space ships had a small trail of fire. My justification was that A) the space ship cabin is filled with air for the pilot and B) modern space ships use propellants that are flammable in space as they contain their own oxidizers as well as fuel.

I disagree. Interstellar, as an example, is produced by Kip Thorne, a theoretical physicst who has also won the Nobel prize. Him and Nolan worked closely to make sure every detail of the movie is scientifically accurate. That Blackhole sequence took months to produce and the imaging was so accurate, that even science community started using it as a source to illustrate blackholes, since it was many years before we caprured the first ever image of a blackhole. If "entertainment" was the sole purpose, CGI and green rooms could have created visual effects that may have been more engaging but less realistic.

"2001 a Space Oddysey", one of the greatest films of history was shot: 1. Before we landed on the moon, 2. Before CGI and even computers were a thing (computers existed, but that's beside my point). Every detail in that movie is very realistic. There could have been ways to make either of those films more thrilling just for the sake of it. However, priority was given to realism, hence why after more than 50 years since its release, it is still relevant and even more entertaining than all new sci fi that's coming out every year.

There are many factors that can hinder "entertainment", but realism isn't one. And if a movie is realistic but not entertaining, it's not because of the realism of it, but a combination of other factors.

While it was in a still pressurized section, the long-since destroyed space station Mir also had a fire nearly twenty six years ago to the day!

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On Reddit nobody knows what paraphrasing is, mostly.

The sheer power that those vacuum pumps must have had to evacuate a resonable part of a big ass vessel of all the gas in a very small amount of time must be incredibly high even for times with space travel technology. Let alone the power neccessary to operate these things. But this never seems to be a problem due to some new fancy energy source.

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Eh, it can be distracting and disappointing the more you actually know about science (and I’m just a curious layman), but it’s a given that probably most pop culture science fiction movies and television series generally play very fast and loose with actual science. Last week I watched a particularly bad sci-fi movie called “Deus, The Black Sphere”; my Netflix deliveries have been out of whack for a few months now, so I stopped at a local library branch to get a couple movies, and while I’d never heard of this film before, it looked worth trying for free.

It was painfully derivative of a thousand SF movies that have come before it, and filled with so many standard SF bad science tropes, including suspended animation hibernation/“hyper-sleep” pods (these just for the trip to Mars from Earth, to boot), artificial gravity that isn’t at least visually explained by centrifugal force, instantaneous remote communications between Earth and a spacecraft in Mars orbit, people risking shooting solid projectile firearms inside a spacecraft, and undoubtedly a few more I don’t recall right now. The movie was so bad — writing, acting, plot, basic premise — I got probably 80% thru it but cared so little about the characters or story that I finally just turned it off.

It would have to be high explosive to work in a vacuum I think. I'm more concerned with if it can actually destroy anything without an atmosphere to create pressure with.

Your well informed protest is correct. But this one movie is an exeption. Every other sci.-fi. movie or show involving space travel uses some kind of made up bit of technology to work around laws of physics that (atm) makes long distant space travel impossible or at least unbarable.

Just a small correction, not every detail in the movie is scientifically accurate, such as the wormhole scene, which was only accurate on the exterior visuals and not on the inside traversal part. I agree about realism being important though. Interstellar is still one of the more scientifically accurate space movies out there and it's also my favourite movie.

Interstellar has a pretty awesome and realistic space explosion in it.

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You're the one who brought it up. In universe there are explanations for the questions you asked. If you don't care, why bring it up?

I mean. To be fair. Interstellar did have plenty of nonsense.

"Love is the only force that goes beyond gravity, space and time, love is a higher power that supercedes mankind's understanding."

The planet in a stable orbit around a black while is extrodenarily unlikely but not impossible. Somehow, catching up to and landing on that planet, not happening with anything close to the tech in the movie. Even the tiniest error in orbital/entry velocity would send you straight into the black hole. And of course, the whole surviving a fall through a black hole. That's just a no under any reasonable circumstance.

An artificial wormhole that is stable enough for data transfer. Which even in theoretical models requires matter with negative mass.

The frozen clouds that somehow still stay in the sky... yeah.

Don't get me wrong. Interstellar is a good movie. But to say that every detail of the movie is scientifically accurate is wildly inaccurate. Plenty of the movie is scientifically accurate (the imaging of a black hole you mention is a shining moment), but it still takes plenty of liberties as well.

You da man or lady, whatever

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What do you want?

IMHO a highly energy release in a ship could cause a ship's atmosphere to react with various materials on board.

It's plausible to me

Further - there would be sound. There is a hot ball of expanding gas coming from the explosion, moving in all directions. It wouldn't be as loud as an earth explosion would be, but certainly some air particles from the explosion are going to hit your eardrums

So much of modern ballistics is based on this model it's shocking it isn't more widely known.

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My headcanon is that blaster bolts are some kind of heated carbon pellets. That would explain why they throw sparks (even when hitting a matterless force field) and leave black soot marks (on surfaces that don't contain carbon)

Still doesn't explain how they deflect and ricochet in one piece

They did this in The Expanse as well. Prior to starting combat operations they’d suit up and pump air to tanks. Space being large they’d typically have plenty of time to see trouble coming or start some.

Why'd you bring it up in the first place then?

I did not look it up. That’s all

>What do you want?

​Vir, "I'd like to live just long enough to be there when they cut off your head and stick it on a pike as a warning to the next ten generations that some favors come with too high a price. I would look up at your lifeless eyes and wave like this."

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Just here to say that I liked that you said, "Thanks Nerds!"

It's so strange, I'm starting to suspect these movies are fictional.

Due to distances involved though, any sound would be delayed similar to a lightning strike on earth, but much worse because there is no real medium for the sound waves to propagate through but rather the atmos and molecules themselves moving through mostly empty space.

Also, at best, you might hear a thud rather than an explosion due to you being contained in a sealed, pressurised container (aka a ship). And even then, it'd more likely be from solid debri rather than from the very sparse (comparatively) atoms and molecules of an explosion.

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A normal fire cannot burn in space - correct.

Can things still explode in space, with a fireball - yes. If some oxidation agent (like oxygen) is present in the gas mix.

Would it look like it does in the movies - probably not.

Explosions in space movies aren't actually that unrealistic. If you're talking SW, realistically, those ships would use antimatter propulsion. If containment fails, boom. If anything, those explosions are too small.

In case of low-tech / current-tech sci-fi - as you've noted there's no fire in space, so in order to burn their engines ship need to carry their own oxygen (or other oxidiser) - if ship is damaged and they mix boom.

"You still wake up sometimes don't you? Wake up in the dark and hear the screaming of the aliens."

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Stop ruining movies. They are supposed to be fun, not a documentary.

Im here to save the day! You are absolutely right and if it bothers you I VERY STRONGLY ADVICE YOU to watch The Expanse tv series on Amazon Prime, which is one of the most scientificaly correct sci-fi tv show ever filmed.

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even in an atmosphere, proper high explosions (as opposed to combustion) are too fast to consume atmospheric oxygen anyway, they are fueled mostly by their own payload oxidizer, so they can happen in vacuum just fine if proper ignition and oxidizer is provided (or if they are nuclear-based)

More concerning is that barely any movies represent correct orbital mechanics and space ships. They often just took planes and made them fly in a dark void where everything's close and slow.

Explosions would be the same, but would spread out much faster due to lack of resistance, at pretty much orbital velocities perhaps, and therefore just looking like a flash with a cone of gas for 300ms or so, then some more particles and depressurisation. Also, very sudden change in velocity, explosion working like a thrust.

Also, you'd hear them a bit if they're close or if you're touching a medium like ship hull

Only through the initial gas wave, but it'll disperse very close.

Hypervelocity fragments ?

I’m more put off by the sound effects. In space there would be no sound.

Presumably the ships are compartmentalized. You only need vacuums powerful enough to vacate a single compartment, then you just need as many vacuums as compartments.

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we have those now; uranium bullets.

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You can though, if you sat behind a rocket firing its engines and didn't get vaporized, you'd hear the waves in the particles it spat towards you

Realistic space battle would be very boring to watch.

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What bothers me more is how the ships "fall" after getting destroyed. Take out an imperial ship and it falls off screen as if there was gravity heh

Hard sci-fi , at least novels (which I’m sure some space movies are based on) try to stay in the realm of what’s actually possible.

Hah same thing happened to me, expect the other way around. I got points taken off a painting because there wasn't an explosion!

They shoot superheated gas.

Essentially, they are plasma weaponry

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We had a physics class in college (private art school) that used movies as learning experiences and we had to discuss what can’t really happen. I still think lasers go pew pew though.

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In the series, the premise is that an alien. Oalition sends an envoy to earth to help prepare them to sidestep destruction by an extrgalactic extinction event. Part of this is the sharing of advanced technology so you could go from modern day tech to gauss weapons, space navies, and 15' combat robots with human integrated controls. So they probably could easilly bullshit an excuse up for the vacuum.

Don’t they just depressurize? I never heard anything about pumping air in to tanks.

There would be no sound in the vacuum of space unless the two ships were next to each other. The gas molecules would dissipate rapidly. The density of the gas ball would fall off at around 1/r^3. The energy of the wave front would normally expand at 1/r^2 in an atmosphere which provides a medium for energy transfer. However, in space and without a gas medium, the “sound” must travel with the gas or other materials from the explosion and they dissipate rapidly (r-cubed) or stay as chunks of broken spaceship.

So, unless a chunk of exploded spaceship hit your ship, you wouldn’t hear any sound.

Theres Oxygen in the space ship thats exploding as well as chemicals

Same reason there is dynamite on every gas tank of every car that goes over a cliff. It looks cool on screen.

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What’s bothered me more is that any armada engagement in space - all the ships seem to approach each other on the same plain as if space had some form of gravity necessitating a specific orientation.

Wait until you realize you shouldn't be able to hear space ships or explosions in space movies.

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What do you think the “fi” in Sci-fi stands for?

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Good question. In depressurizing, you have effectively 2 options. Vent your atmosphere into space, or pump it into tanks. In The Expanse, there isn’t a technology to manufacture atmosphere. Venting atmosphere into space would make it unrecoverable and would be very bad for everyone involved. The only option would be storing it in tanks for later repressurization.

Like I say to my wife when she points out flaws in movies... "it's all make-believe".

One show that was very realistic was The Expanse:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3230854/

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What’s wrong with planet orbiting black hole though?

Badly researched movies physics wise, stop trynna find in-universe explanations, its just lazy/fantastical writing. I mean, wonder woman rode an RPG shell in her newest movie, dont see me trynna calculate her bodyweight and relative fps of the rocket. That's just hollywood.

Explosions are possible (Solar Flares are explosions), fire needs an oxidizer (Oxygen is not the only oxidizer). Fire would look different in space though.

https://www.scienceabc.com/nature/universe/can-spaceships-actually-explode-like-they-do-in-movies.html#:~:text=In%20space%2C%20there%20is%20no,once%20they%20%E2%80%9Cblow%20up%E2%80%9D.

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This is what gets me about that damn Starkiller in the new stars wars movies. Not only it is financially infeasible asf but also the laser could've hit a million things on the way. Also killing off an entire solar system is peak overkill and would actually greatly hinder the galaxy's economy. Don't even get me started on the physics of that thing.

The billowy puffy cloud effect we're are used to would not be present because it is the atmosphere pushing back that causes it. In space, each bit of debris would basically keep going in a straight line. Really an orbit around the local gravity well, but it would look like a straight line.

Watching the LEMs take off from the moon looked funny to me as a kid. The initial blast didn't billow. It didn't look like a blast so much as a bunch of sparks. I've been thinking about this get a while.

Actually, there could be a little of billowing, depending on how the ship blows up. If the blast starts with a relatively slow expanding has cloud and then later (possibly just a fraction of a second later) there is a faster expanding cloud, there might be some billowing when the fast has catches up with the slow. That could happen if relatively low energy stuff like the hull, cargo, life support, for example blows up first, and then high energy stuff like fuel and weapons blows up. Besides moving faster, secondary blast would probably be hotter and brighter.

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You might hear something at the same time you see it. That would be the sounds your ship makes when a whole bunch of electromagnetic energy hits it suddenly. Maybe a rattle or thud as your hull abruptly and unevenly expands just a little bit from heat. Maybe some weird noise if your ship is accidentally a radio receiver. A lot of things are accidentally radio receivers if the signal is strong enough.

It has to go really fast, which means you have to go really fast to land on it.

In Interstellar they literally went out of their way to remove the doppler effect from the black hole's accretion disk to "avoid confusing the audience", there's a traversable and stable wormhole, and it seems no one who worked in it there knows what a Tesseract is.

Interstellar has very little in terms of scientific accuracy, feels like a movie made by someone who just had a spark of curiosity over space and just read bits and pieces of a bunch of Wikipedia articles.

The only accurate thing in it was the original black hole model, and that they refused to use it.

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