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.
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