Fighting near large celestial bodies means falling to them, because they have gravity
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· 4 years ago
There's always gravity in space regardless of distance, it is always there you could be billions of light years from earth but the gravity from it still exists but it would be so weak it would be practically negligible
Yes. When you are in orbit of Earth, you’re really throwing yourself at the planet over and over but missing on purpose. One can think of being on an orbiting space station like falling forever without hitting anything (hopefully anyway...) That is what “orbital corrections” are. You need to make sure you are on the right path at the right speed to be close enough to “fall towards the planet” at an angle, but not so far as to miss by enough to head off into space.
That's the thing. All those space ships are in orbit, so if they get blasted from the bottom, that moment should push a lot of debris past escape velocity and out into the nothingness... but it all just comes crashing down every time.
Even as high up as an orbital space station the effects of earth’s gravity are up to 90% what we feel on the surface- if an object weren’t in orbit it would simply fall to Earth. The “weightlessness” of orbit is in simple terms... falling. When you want to change elevation of orbit- you don’t need to pitch “up/down” like an aircraft- you simply reduce speed to lower orbit or increase it to gain orbit. Gravity will cause an arch in your path as you are still being “pulled down” and the speed you are going controls the angle of the arch. If you increase speed enough you will break orbit and no longer be “falling” towards earth.
Gravity is not one of the most well understood things in science. The current leading theory is general relativity. In this theory- gravity doesn’t “extend forever..” it doesn’t really extend at all. It is a distortion in the “fabric” of space time- like stretching a blanket and placing a bowling ball in the center- that part will sag towards the ball. If you drop marbles on the blanket near enough to the bowling ball, they will seem to be “pulled towards it.” Once you get away from planets and stars and black holes far enough- you aren’t being influenced by their gravity any longer, this is theoretically why the universe expands. The stretches of space without enough local mass expand causing galaxies to move away from each other. There likely isn’t a repulsive force- just that space/time in absence of gravity expands.
BUT- everything with mass has some type of gravity. Even you. So if you somehow found yourself in far flung space out of the influence of all the planets and black holes and stars etc... you have gravity. Your ship and equipment, even the tiny flecks of dust likely floating about all have gravity. It’s weak. As said- it likely won’t be noticed without precise equipment and effort- but there would still be gravity of some form. Next to a ship- you’d probably have the most massive gravity of any object- and that gravity wouldn’t likely have any observable effect on anything else- but still. Gravity is interesting. Mass and distance are the two things we observe to impact if most. Gravity falls off very quickly over distance- or I should say the ability of gravity to “pull” other objects does. In cosmic terms you don’t have to go too far to get out of gravitational pull of any given body- but in our terms we are taking many many thousands of miles in general.
IMO, it should have been a 3+ hour epic, if not split up into 2 or more movies to truly cover the material.