<story><title>Aircraft Carriers in Space</title><url>http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/09/28/aircraft_carriers_in_space?page=full</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jff</author><text>I&apos;m continually amused by the space battles in Star Trek. Two ships pull up within a few ship-lengths of each other, then lob torpedoes and phaser beams at each other. I seem to remember seeing in the old series something about how the phasers really get fired: Kirk gives the order, the weapons guy on the bridge presses a button, a buzzer or something sounds down in the &quot;phaser room&quot;, and a guy down there presses yet another button which does the actual shooting. Similarly for torpedoes, except I seem to remember seeing them manually loading torpedoes into the tubes like it&apos;s a 1940s U-boat or something.&lt;p&gt;Vernor Vinge&apos;s &quot;Marooned in Realtime&quot; has some very interesting space battles, based around the single conceit of &quot;bobbles&quot;: impenetrable force shields which essentially separate their contents from the universe (and from time) for a pre-selected length of time. Space battles then become a tricky game of trying to catch your opponent when he&apos;s un-bobbled, while at the same time avoiding the bobbled nukes and other weapons he has strewn around when you were last bobbled.</text></comment>
<story><title>Aircraft Carriers in Space</title><url>http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/09/28/aircraft_carriers_in_space?page=full</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>csense</author><text>From the article:&lt;p&gt;&amp;#62; For a ship in the water, drag increases as the cube of speed...As your speed increases, your drag increases exponentially...&lt;p&gt;He&apos;s being inconsistent.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;ve actually heard this a lot lately -- people will say something is &quot;increasing exponentially&quot; (i.e. has a curve of the form f(x) = k*b^x) when they really mean a much looser condition like &quot;accelerating&quot; (positive second derivative, which might be an exponential curve, but also might be one of many other curves, e.g. any polynomial of degree &amp;#62;= 2 with nonnegative coefficients).&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s almost as bad as people who talk about the &quot;least common denominator,&quot; but that&apos;s a rant for another post.</text></comment>