Hey everybody Daniel from Spacedock here,
How many times have you been watching Sci-Fi
Film & TV or playing a Sci-Fi game, and you’ve
seen a sequence like this: A pilot is trying
to shake off a missile or torpedo that’s
following his or her ship, and after a lot
of evasive manouveres, they’ll pull some
kind of extremely sharp turn, and the missile
will run wide trying to follow and meander
off into space, leaving the pilot to escape.
Now this kind of sequence seems to appear
in both high and low realism sci-fi stories,
which is interesting because in actuality,
it is simply not possible to shake off a missile
in deep space. If you’re piloting a spacecraft
and a guided missile is launched at you, you
have four options. You can point straight
at the missile in the hopes of shooting it
down before it strikes, you can employ chaff,
flares, ECM and other countermeasures, you
can jump to FTL if you’re in a Sci-fi universe
where that’s an option, or you can try to
lead the missile into another ship or a piece
of free floating debris, which is of course
not possible in the areas of totally empty
space that make up most of the universe. The
one thing you absolutely can’t do, is shake
the missile off through fancy sublight manouveres.
A missile or torpedo is always going to be
extremely small and light compared to anything
large enough to hold a pilot, and It’s thrust
to weight ratio for both manoeuvring and forward
propulsion is going to be far more favourable.
No matter how hard you turn, the missile will
always turn harder, and no matter how fast
you run, it will always catch up to you. The
trope of evading missiles comes from modern
aerial combat, where air resistance and less
advanced missile tracking means that pilots
can sometimes shake off an incoming missile,
missiles in space are of course not effected
by air resistance, and in most science fiction,
missiles are constantly scanning in all directions
or using scans provided by the craft that
launched them to track their target.
So, the next time you’re attacking the Death
Star in Battlefront, and a TIE Fighter shakes
off your proton torpedo by doing a gentle
roll to the right, you’ll know that you’ve
been short-changed by the game, and that TIE
Fighter should be a cloud of vapour by now.
This is Daniel from Spacedock, signing off.
