If, on the other hand, your story is about a nation, a war, or a leader rather than a simple soldier it has different requirements.

In this situation frantic dogfights with wheeling fighters, explosions, and hair-raising manoeuvres will probably serve the story quite well. Say you are producing something along the lines of Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica with main characters who fly fighters, and with a story that focuses on the personal element that they bring into the tale, rather than the grand strategy of admirals and kings. If the battle is part of a story then it has to show the story or it is ultimately pointless.

While you might think that a discussion of physics or technology would be the most important part of this blogpost, there are other aspects to creating a space battle equally important. A lost of this sort of thing comes down to the exact details of the setting so I will focus on fairly broad issues, things that are unlikely or impossible given our current understanding of physics. For each I'll try to look at why they are shown the way they are, why they are inaccurate, and how they can be changed for greater realism. I'm going to discuss some of the more common elements of space battles in visual SF, although by no means all of them. For those of you that do worry over these details, read on. While someone unconcerned with how a space battle might actually look given the technology concerned it is a simple matter to add some glory lasers and explosions, copying what has worked in other franchises like Star Wars or Star Trek. The problem is acerbated for those how prefer SF that falls onto the 'harder' end of the spectrum, as they lose many inaccuracies usually used because they make the telling of the story easier. This is especially prevalent in visual media such as movies, games, and comics/animation. One of the biggest problems in creating a SF story in any medium is the concessions that have to be made to the medium in which the story is told.

World of warships cant do space battles