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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8794524" data-attributes="member: 4937">Speaking as a gamer, that's simply not true.  The game space is a shared reality.  We tell fictitious events in it, but there is a noticeable difference between fiction that is gameable or generated within a game and fiction that isn't.  I agree that Star Wars has internal contradictions, especially when it comes to scale and especially those related to visually perceived speed on screen.   And indeed, this is very much tied to the presentation of Star Wars as "World War II in Space", in as much as the movement of snub fighters on the screen mimics that of WWII fighters shooting tracer bullets at each other.   But this I I think a more general problem having to do with people being simply unable to imagine the scale of space and the scale of space making for undramatic combat when it is presented on the screen.  There are similar problems with how close together modern Star Trek combat is presented.  In many ways, TOS is more realistic because the ships are represented as being thousands of kilometers apart and never on the screen at the same time, even though in reality the main reason for that was the limitations of the available special effects.  It just makes for more intuitive space combat if we see a ship moving for several seconds over the hull of a kilometer long ship, instead of the sort of real interception and passing rates we'd expect of space combat when closing speeds might be in dozens or hundreds or even thousands of kilometers per second.   Even sci-fi with a commitment to hard sci-fi like 'The Expanse' has trouble presenting realistic space combat at realistic time frames and realistic distances, and occasionally takes short cuts for dramatic purposes.  So yes, there is a, "Don't think to hard about the space combat." element to Star Wars that is less of a problem in Babylon 5 or the Expanse where in Star Wars ultimately it is impossible to make the scales work if you try to define how fast things are moving or should be moving.  Star Wars simultaneously depicts sub-light travel at a non-trivial percentage of light speed and at 200 mph at the same time depending on the frame of reference. But that's not the same as being 1940's equivalent tech or even 1970's tech.  That's a wholly different problem you'll probably run into with most Sci Fi games set in space.</blockquote>

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