It's pretty minor but whenever they fly the ship up to a nebula like it's a cloud that would have discernable shapes and edges on the same scale as a space ship. Especially when it's like a storm cloud with lightning or something. Real nebulae are very big and very thin and very dim. I think they're probably invisible up close, and they certainly wouldn't have any discernable features up close, whatever they look like would be very very flat when you're thousands of light years closer.
Basically the same thing about flying through an asteroid belt. They often show it as a chaotic dangerous mess of rocks. There's a lot of objects at that distance from the sun but you would probably fly through that region without seeing anything, space is still mostly empty.
asteroid belt. They often show it as a chaotic dangerous mess of rocks...
When I was a teenager - The Empire Strikes Back led me to believe that. And I didn't even realize the misconception deeply lodged in my unconscious until ~35 years later when I saw a reddit comment explaining how the filmic trope is great for plots and there can be fantastic spaceship chase scenes but it's total nonsense. It's funny how we - cough - astronomically simplify the universe to match our earth-bound reality.
I guess if it was a realistic chase scene where the ships encountered an asteroid would be like watching snails chase each other down a very straight highway mile after mile after mile. The scene would last an eon. Hundreds of hours? Not exactly riveting cinema.
It's pretty minor but whenever they fly the ship up to a nebula like it's a cloud that would have discernable shapes and edges on the same scale as a space ship. Especially when it's like a storm cloud with lightning or something. Real nebulae are very big and very thin and very dim. I think they're probably invisible up close, and they certainly wouldn't have any discernable features up close, whatever they look like would be very very flat when you're thousands of light years closer.
Basically the same thing about flying through an asteroid belt. They often show it as a chaotic dangerous mess of rocks. There's a lot of objects at that distance from the sun but you would probably fly through that region without seeing anything, space is still mostly empty.
When I was a teenager - The Empire Strikes Back led me to believe that. And I didn't even realize the misconception deeply lodged in my unconscious until ~35 years later when I saw a reddit comment explaining how the filmic trope is great for plots and there can be fantastic spaceship chase scenes but it's total nonsense. It's funny how we - cough - astronomically simplify the universe to match our earth-bound reality.
I guess if it was a realistic chase scene where the ships encountered an asteroid would be like watching snails chase each other down a very straight highway mile after mile after mile. The scene would last an eon. Hundreds of hours? Not exactly riveting cinema.
Millennium Falcon Asteroid Field Scene - The Empire Strikes Back 1980
Well, you see, space is like an ocean...
I actually like old-tymey sci-fi that takes this literally and gives us shit like space whales and, by extension, space whaling
Counterpoint: it's way cooler.