

You can even use far more outlandish possibilities if you set them up properly. You have a lot of freedom in what options your space combatants use, as long as it has some plausibility. They might even sweep arcs of laser fire through the void like swords, trying to score a hit.

Or your ships might employ powerful prediction algorithms to guess at where the enemy is going to be and then fire at that spot. Ships in your setting might fire volleys of long-range missiles that can track the enemy once they close the distance. This makes shooting difficult and calls for unique solutions. By the time the light * bounces off them and reaches your sensors, they’ve already moved. At space distances, it’s impossible to know exactly where your enemy is. It takes light one second to travel 186,282 miles, so by the time you see something happen that far away, it actually happened one second ago. This means that combatants will be engaging across millions of miles or more.Īt those distances, the speed of light is no longer effectively instantaneous. It’s also really empty, meaning that hostile ships will probably see each other from a long way off. So big that it’s difficult for our puny meat brains to comprehend. It’s time to explore some tips on keeping your space battle engaging. So strap in to your favorite spaceship and spool up the FTL drive. It’s easy to drown your audience in endless technical details, fill page upon page with ships firing ineffectually at each other, or leave the audience wondering why the battle was set in space at all.įortunately, we storytellers are clever folk, and we have methods at our disposal for ensuring our space battles keep the audience on the edge of their seats. How could that not be engaging? But it’s harder than you might think. Space battles have hyperdrives and torpedoes and lasers, oh my.

Space battles are an important aspect of science fiction, especially space opera, and we want them to be engaging.
