6x03 Force Projection

@dahj also: I'm not sure if I've written this before but I'd say those battle scenes are the most unrealistic part of this show. I'm very glad that this is the case though because I love those awesome space battles the most and realistic ones should be very boring.

On Earth the atmosphere is quite a limiting factor. It limit's the maximum speed of jets, missiles, slows bullets and other projectiles down, etc. The vacuum of space takes this limitation away and therefore battles are possible over very large distances (unlike on Earth where the combat distance between jets is pretty low).

The first problem would be to even get close to a ship. IIRC ships in the expanse are usually accelerating pretty much all the time. For a simple trip from point A to B they're accelerating half the way and then decelerating the other half (by accelerating in the opposite direction). Ships from Earthers could easily accelerate at around 1G while traveling. Belters, with their weaker bones, would want to reduce that significantly for normal traveling (maybe to around 0.5G). So the Pella could only intercept the Roccinante if they already have approximately the same speed and direction. Otherwise they'd have to use a very long hard burn to catch them. And in any case the crew of the Roccinante should probably be able to simply out-accelerate them. We already learned that the acceleration of these ships is usually limited by the crew. In the case of the Roccinante the limiting factor should be Naomi as she's a belter with weaker bones. On the Pella, all of the crew members are belters, so the chance that one of them has a weaker body than Naomi should be high.

Other interesting aspects are:

• Bulltets from PDCs will travel indefinitely or rather until they hit something (luckily space is vast and pretty empty, so the chances of accidentally hitting ships, space stations, planets, etc. are hopefully extremly low).
• Missiles could cover vast (pretty much ulimited) distances and can accelerate much faster than ships (since there are no humans on board :D). Their maximum speed is also not limited as there's no air resistance. So missiles could theoretically catch any ship, no matter the distance. Luckily their fuel is limited and, unless one builds a large enough missile to integrate a fusion reactor, they'll run out of fuel before they can catch a far away ship (which at that point could simply change direction).
• Any objects in space with fixed or predictable positions could be attacked via PDCs, railguns, etc. (and those little pojectiles very likely couldn't be spotted fast enough to react).
  • Earth would have a very signifficant advantage due to it's atmosphere. Such small projectiles should simply burn up when entering the atmosphere (or will at least be slowed down signifficantle - the air resistance increases with the velocity squared).

So I guess this means that there wouldn't be any cool space battles IRL. This isn't a biggie though as battles are of course never cool IRL (duh, war is very bad).