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Space warfare has served as a central theme within the science-fiction genre. One can trace its roots back to classical times, and to the "future war" novels of the nineteenth century. An interplanetary, or more often an interstellar or intergalactic war, has become a staple plot device in space operas. Space warfare has a predominant role in military science fiction.
Technology
Weapons
Usually, lasers are used rather than bullets. Willy Ley claimed in 1939 that bullets would be a more effective weapon in a real space battle.
Destruction of planets and stars
Destruction of planets and stars has been a frequently used aspect of interstellar warfare since the Lensman series. It has been calculated that a force on the order of 1032 joules of energy, or roughly the total output of the sun in a week, would be required to overcome the gravity that holds together an Earth-sized planet. The destruction of Alderaan in Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope is estimated to require 1.0 × 1038 joules of energy, millions of times more than would be necessary to break the planet apart at a slower rate.
Fictional space warfare tends to borrow elements from naval warfare, often calling space forces as space navies or simply navies. David Weber's Honorverse series of novels portrays several of such space navies such as the Royal Manticoran Navy, which imitate themes from Napoleonic-era naval warfare. The Federation Starfleet (Star Trek), Imperial Navy (Star Wars), Systems Alliance Navy (Mass Effect), UNSC ("Halo") and Earthforce (Babylon 5) also use a naval-style rank-structure and hierarchy. The former is based on the United States Navy and the Royal Navy. The United Nations Space Command in Halo fully echoes all ranks of the United States Armed Forces, even the pay-grade system. Naval ship-classes such as frigate or destroyer sometimes serve as marker to show how the craft are assembled and their designed purpose.
Some fictional universes have different implementations. The Colonial Fleet in Battlestar Galactica uses a mixture of army and navy ranks, and the Stargate universe has military spacecraft under the control of modern air forces, and uses air-force ranks. In the Halo universe, many of the ranks of the current-day United States Military are used in lieu of fictional ranks. In the Andromeda universe, officers of Systems Commonwealth ships follow naval ranking, but Lancers (soldiers analogous to Marines) use army ranks.
Literature
Lucian
In his second-century satire True History, Lucian of Samosata depicts an imperial war between the king of the Sun and the king of the Moon over the right to colonise the Morning Star. It is the earliest known work of fiction to address the concept.
Future war: the precursor to space warfare
The first "future war" story was George T. Chesney's "The Battle of Dorking," a story about a British defeat after a German invasion of Britain, published in 1871 in Blackwood's Magazine. Many such stories were written prior to the outbreak of World War I. George Griffith's The Angel of the Revolution (1892) featured self-styled "Terrorists" armed with then-nonexistent arms and armour such as airships, submarines, and high explosives. The inclusion of yet-nonexistent technology became a standard part of the genre. Griffith's last "future war" story was The Lord of Labour, written in 1906 and published in 1911, which included such technology as disintegrator rays and missiles.
H. G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds inspired many other writers to write stories of alien incursions and wars between Earth and other planets, and encouraged writers of "future war" fiction to employ wider settings than had been available for "naturalistic" fiction. Wells' several other "future war" stories included the atomic war novel The World Set Free (1914) and "The Land Ironclads," which featured a prophetic description of the tank, albeit of an unfeasibly large scale.
Space opera
The modern form of space warfare in science fiction, in which mobile spaceships battle both planets and one another with destructive superweapons, appeared with the advent of space opera. Garrett P. Serviss' 1898 newspaper serial "Edison's Conquest of Mars" was inspired by Wells and intended as a sequel to "Fighters from Mars," an un-authorized and heavily altered Edisonade version of The War of the Worlds in which the human race, led by Thomas Edison, pursues the invading Martians back to their home planet. David Pringle considers Serviss' story to be the very first space opera, although the work most widely regarded as the first space opera is E. E. "Doc" Smith's The Skylark of Space. It and its three successor novels exemplify the present form of space warfare in science fiction, as giant spaceships employ great ray guns that send bolts of energy across space to shatter planets in a war between humans and alien species.
David Weber's Honorverse novels present a view of space warfare that simply transplants the naval warfare of Horatio Nelson and Horatio Hornblower into space. The space navy battle tactics in the Honorverse are much like those of Nelson, with the simple addition of a third dimension.
Late 20th century depictions
More recent depictions of space warfare departed from the jingoism of the pulp science fiction of the 1930s and 1940s. Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, was partly a response to or a rebuttal of Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers, wherein space warfare involved the effects of time dilation and resulted in the alienation of the protagonists from the human civilization on whose behalf they were fighting. Both novels have in the past been required reading at the United States Military Academy.
Science fiction writers from the end of World War II onwards have examined the morality and consequences of space warfare. With Heinlein's Starship Troopers are A. E. van Vogt's "War against the Rull" (1959) and Fredric Brown's "Arena" (1944). Opposing them are Murray Leinster's "First Contact" (1945), Barry Longyear's "Enemy Mine," Kim Stanley Robinson's "The Lucky Strike," Connie Willis' "Schwarzchild Radius," and John Kessel's "Invaders." In Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, the protagonist wages war remotely, with no realization that he is doing so.
Several writers in the 1980s were accused of writing fiction as part of a propaganda campaign in favour of the Strategic Defense Initiative. Ben Bova's 1985 novel Privateers has been given as an example.
Television and film
Early television productions such as Captain Video and His Video Rangers (1949) were severely constrained by the available special effects technology, and effect sequences were typically difficult to set up. This, combined with the fact that early shows were often live productions, meant that space action sequences were usually short and simple.
Production techniques improved throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and most programming moved to pre-recorded productions. This allowed more complex effects to be used, and increased the ability of producers to show action sequences such as space warfare. Star Trek is from this period. While the future presented in the original Star Trek series was not one of open warfare, the machinery of war was ever present, and was used in many episodes. Ships carried missiles armed with antimatter warheads, known as "photon torpedoes", and deflector shields for defense. Battles were shown on screen, but the expense and difficulty of advanced special effects meant that most battles were short and involved few craft. The costs of special effects dropped dramatically over the years, but remained high enough that larger battles showed relatively few ships firing and/or being hit. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993) used computer graphics developed in part by Industrial Light & Magic, and could show battles between numerous classes of ships using tactics developed by military strategists.
George Lucas' 1977 film Star Wars broke new ground in its depiction of space warfare. Advances in technology, combined with the film's comparatively high budget, allowed Lucas to create long, complex space action sequences. The battle sequences were modeled after World War II-era tactics from films such as The Dam Busters, and were a major milestone in fictional space combat.
A number of more ambitious films and television series soon followed, including ABC's Battlestar Galactica (1978). Battlestar Galactica used expensive effects influenced by those of Lucas' film and followed his lead in concentrating on battles between starfighters. It, and contemporary shows such as Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, set new standards in television space battles. The series primarily used laser-type energy weapons in defense and offence on battleships, although analogues to ballistic weaponry are present in several episodes. The 2003 "re-imagining" of Battlestar Galactica uses more conventional weaponry, such as guns and missiles mounted on the primary capital ships and starfighters, and use pure Newtonian physics to achieve a more realistic representation of how space warfare would actually appear.
In 1979 Mobile Suit Gundam was released in Japan. The series was famous for revolutionizing the giant robot genre due to the handling of mobile suits as weapons of war as well as the portrayal of their pilots as ordinary soldiers, as opposed to the previous style of portraying hero pilots.
James Cameron's Aliens, the 1986 sequel to the 1979 film Alien, used Starship Troopers as the basis for its military. The movie involves a small unit of the United States Colonial Marine Corps who provide emergency response to a planetary colony in 2179. The film showed futuristic twists on many modern types of military vehicle and gear, including a dropship, 10x25mm caseless "Pulse" M41A1 rifles, flamethrowers and machine guns, and realistic body armor and tactical equipment.
The 1993 television series Babylon 5 chronicled a turbulent time in galactic politics, which involved several inter-species wars. Political and humanitarian aspects were explored, such as atrocities against civilian populations, and telepathy was used as a weapon. The series made an attempt to faithfully depict the physics of combat in a vacuum, instead of using motion modelled on aeroplanes within our atmosphere.
The 1995 American TV series Space: Above and Beyond centered around the "Wildcards", a group of marines in the 2060s who serve as both infantry and fighter pilots. The show attempted to depict technology that was near-future, but based on research. It also explored the alienation of deep space warfare, the horrors of loss and survival on the battefield, the bonds that form in combat, and a fight against an enemy of which they knew little. Space: Above and Beyond differs from many other military science fiction works in that its soldiers use weapons that fire bullets, and fight in space suits in alien environments.
The British TV series Doctor Who, has numerous instances of this. Frontier in Space, set in 2540, mentions a war between Earth and Draconia, fought 20 years earlier. This story involves renegade Time Lord the Master trying to start another war on behalf of the Daleks, who plan to conquer the Galaxy. The Time War is a major plot point in the revived series, during which the Time Lords, the species of the Doctor, fought the Daleks. This war seems to have ended with the destruction of the Time Lord planet Gallifrey, which the Doctor did hoping the Daleks would also be destroyed.
