History Main / SpaceFriction

* ''Webcomic/SchlockMercenary'': "We are inbound to Sol at point three-six cee, traversal shielding is at fifteen percent, we have insufficient power for full deceleration, and the ship is in two pieces. [[http://www.schlockmercenary.com/d/20090312.html You tell me what we have averted?]]" Though their FTL drive probably still works.
** Probably not. After all, the STIZ is still up.

A form of HollywoodScience. See also SpaceIsAir, SpaceIsCold. Related to FrictionBurn. Contrast FrictionlessReentry.

** In all the Lensman books he made it clear that when you turned off the Bergenholm you instantly reverted to the exact same speed and direction you were going in when you turned it on. What he didn't make clear was what that speed and direction actually was. When you are sitting still on the surface of the earth you are actually going east at up to about 1000 MPH due to the Earth's rotation, about 18 miles per second because of the Earth's revolution around the Sun, add to that the Sun's movement around the Milky Way, etc, etc. Turning off the ''Impeller'' engines, while the Bergenholm is still engaged, causes the ship to come to a complete stop instantly (the moment they bang into that first hydrogen atom in the interstellar medium). Turning off the Bergenholm itself causes the ship to resume its "intrinsic velocity", i.e. the sublight velocity it had before the Bergenholm was engaged.

* While ''TachyonTheFringe'' abuses the trope in normal flight, there is a button you can hold to continue moving in your current direction at the current speed. You can even spin around and fire backwards. A real pedant could use this system to fly the ship in a (pseudo) real fashion!

** Space friction is one of the reasons why the [[{{Ramscoop}} Bussard Ramjet]] isn't the miracle spaceship drive it's often described as: sure, interstellar space is a near-vacuum, but when you multiply that by tens of thousands of square kilometers of intake scoop cross-section, you get a respectable amount of drag.

* Played straight in the episode "A Planet Blown to Pieces" of ''WesternAnimation/IlEtaitUneFois''''... Space''. The freighter in which our heroes are scaping of a star that has gone supernova is hit and damaged by debris of a destroyed[[note]]Complete with two ships [[SpaceIsAir falling like stones]][[/note]] Cassiopeian fleet [[TooDumbToLive sent to savage equipment and men of base in a planet orbiting it]], grinding to a halt even with a puff of smoke until her main reactor has an emergency repair moving then again.

** Also, aside from the obvious need for an infinite amount of energy, one of the limiting factors in attempting to reach the speed of light is that the interplanetary medium does actually begin to have significant friction as an object accelerates towards it (even if it never reaches it).
** Space friction is one of the reasons why the [[{{Ramscoop}} Bussard Ramjet]] isn't the miracle spaceship drive it's often described as: sure, interstellar space is a near-vacuum, but when you multiply that by tens of thousands of square kilometers of intake scoop cross-section, you get a respectable amount of drag.

** It may be a subversion, as ''Excelsior'' is in Earth's orbit. Her engines are no longer providing the thrust needed to achieve escape velocity, so she is losing momentum due to Earth's gravity.

* In the game ''NexusTheJupiterIncident'' the earth designed vessels have huge thrusters on the back, and huge thrusters on the front. When you order you ship to stop, the ones in front fire like mad. In fact, you can clearly see a variety of maneuvering thrusters in operation. This is even true of the later alien vessel you get, which also has forward pointed engines (though far less obvious).

* Justified in ''Spelljammer''. Apart from working with [[AWizardDidIt magic]], the [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin Space Ships]] have an emergency brake in the form of an array of rods that, once activated, are 'immovable' (they suddenly acquire tremendous inertia and thus act as very powerful anchors, decelerating the ship: notably, they're not ''truly'' immovable,'' since objects of infinite inertia would cause the ship to tear itself apart around them in an effort to reach zero speed instantaneously.)

** That's actually a potential aversion. Crichton presumably learned to fly in familiar Air Force fighter jets. Space combat would be extremely different to jet combat, regardless of what ''Star Wars'' shows us -- consider the Starfuries on ''Babylon 5'' and the way they coast, reverse, spin on their axes, and move ''nothing like any aircraft on Earth''. Just because Aeryn's ship can fly in an atmosphere doesn't mean she's going to be ''any good'' at it. When you have the capacity to raze entire cities to the ground from high orbit atmospheric dogfighting probably isn't high on your list of training priorities, and her atmospheric flying experience most likely consists of ship-to-surface and back again.

** The Spaceball One, however, "brakes for nobody."

For that matter, the entire notion of only having enough fuel to travel so far is a little suspect: if you've got enough fuel to reach top speed, you've got enough fuel to go anywhere; once you reach top speed, you can just shut the engine off and coast, though this is assuming you're flying along a ballistic trajectory. Of course, it would become a problem if you [[ComingInHot don't have enough fuel to ''stop'' at the end]] -- or if, for whatever reason, you have to turn somewhere, or if your engine fuel doubles as power generator fuel, which would cause a black-out in your ship (which, if it comes up in a SpaceFriction plot, generally means the crew has a few hours to restore power before running out of air). Even so, this would result in a broken-engined ship perhaps missing its target or crashing into another, not stopping dead.

* The film ((Armegeddon}} references physics nicely when one of the NASA astronauts explains physics to our drilling team by pointing out that if she [[GroinAttack kicked one of them in the balls]], he'd float away. "Rock Hound" asks [[DeadpanSnarker when they start training for that.]]

* The dogfights in the ''Film/StarWars'' film series were [[WordOfGod intentionally]] choreographed around old WorldWarII dogfight footage, and thus visibly obeying this trope. The most noticeable application of SpaceFriction however occurs whenever a ship explodes in mid-flight: its explosion will be motionless despite whatever inertia the ship had previously. One instance where this can be seen very clearly is when the Y-Wings are making their trench run in close formation in ''Film/ANewHope''. One of the Y-Wings explodes, and the other Y-Wing suddenly leaps forward, leaving that explosion behind him.

* Justified in the ''Literature/{{Lensman}}'' stories: the key to interstellar flight is a device that cancels a spaceship's inertial mass, so top speed is determined by the point at which a spaceship's thrust is exactly counterbalanced by the friction of the interstellar medium. With sufficiently powerful Impeller engines, this counterbalance speed can be many times the speed of light. Since a spaceship doesn't have inertia, turning off the engines causes it to come to an instant stop. Creator/EEDocSmith can't seem to decide if a spaceship is completely dead in space without its Bergenholm (the magic get-rid-of-inertia gadget) or if it still has its original speed achieved before starting the "Berg". However, with the speeds you can get with a Bergenholm, ''any'' possible "inert" speed is full stop by comparison.\\
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In all the Lensman books he made it clear that when you turned off the Bergenholm you instantly reverted to the exact same speed and direction you were going in when you turned it on. What he didn't make clear was what that speed and direction actually was. When you are sitting still on the surface of the earth you are actually going east at up to about 1000 MPH due to the Earth's rotation, about 18 miles per second because of the Earth's revolution around the Sun, add to that the Sun's movement around the Milky Way, etc, etc. Turning off the ''Impeller'' engines, while the Bergenholm is still engaged, causes the ship to come to a complete stop instantly (the moment they bang into that first hydrogen atom in the interstellar medium). Turning off the Bergenholm itself causes the ship to resume its "intrinsic velocity", i.e. the sublight velocity it had before the Bergenholm was engaged.

* [[http://www.freeallegiance.org Allegiance]], a multiplayer-only space combat sim originally made by Microsoft and later made open-source and free, provides a partial aversion -- a compromise between realistic physics and SpaceIsAir. Ships have inertia, and turning your ship will ''not'' instantly change your direction of movement. In combat, your ship will usually be facing (and shooting) in one direction, and traveling in another. Competent players will use this to great effect, but it can also be a pain when you need to come to a quick stop to avoid ramming a [[AsteroidThicket wayward asteroid]]. There's even a retro-booster that a player can fire to slow down in a hurry at the cost of fuel, and although it's a rarely used piece of equipment, some veteran players swear by it. On the other hand -- and this is where the compromise with RuleOfFun comes in -- there is ''some'' space friction, and turning off your ship's engines will make you slowly glide to a stop (although how slowly depends on your ship's mass, and it often isn't enough to save you). In addition, each ship model has a maximum movement speed for gameplay balance reasons in addition to different rates of acceleration, and some ships rotate faster along certain axes than others (for example, Rixian Unity ships have fast yaw, but slower pitch).

* ''WesternAnimation/TransformersTheMovie'' had a variation of this; Astrotrain, in space shuttle mode, pleads to his passengers to "jettison some weight, or we'll never make it to Cybertron". This seems to be an excuse to throw the other, dying Decepticons out of Astrotrain, but note that his engines were still on and burning brightly for some reason. Parodied [[http://knoledge.org/mormegil/rfc-tftm.php here]].

* ''Series/RedDwarf'' did this in "Demons and Angels" when the ''Dwarf'' temporarily explodes and the crew narrowly escape in a ''Starbug''. The nearest asteroid with an "S3"[[note]]"Solar 3," i.e. Earth-like and breathable[[/note]] atmosphere is six hours away, but they only have enough fuel for five hours' flight. That's not the last bit of fridge logic in this scene. ''Red Dwarf'' also ditched SpaceFriction in a later episode (see below).

* In ''SwordOfTheStars'', Human, Tarka, Hiver, Zuul and Morrigi ships, while using some form of FTL to travel through interstellar space, use regular Newtonian reaction thrusters for tactical combat. Destroying the engine section of the ships of these races will cause them to drift helplessly away from the battle, at whatever speed they're going at, in whatever direction they're going at. They sometimes end up crashing into a planet or an asteroid, and get destroyed. Liir ships, however, don't use regular thrusters at all -- they use "stutter warp" (a propulsion method involving fast, repeated short-range teleportation) for both interstellar and tactical movement. Destroying their stutter warp engines will cause them to halt wherever they are.

* In the MMORPG ''VideoGame/EveOnline'', this is taken to rather ridiculous extremes for an otherwise acceptably scientific game. Not only does space have friction in EVE, but avid fans have actually done the math and determined that space in the EVE universe has the consistency of WD-40. When paired with the fact that a ship traveling on traditional propulsion methods actually has a top speed and an acceleration curve, it strains SuspensionOfDisbelief.

* In the MMORPG ''EveOnline'', this is taken to rather ridiculous extremes for an otherwise acceptably scientific game. Not only does space have friction in EVE, but avid fans have actually done the math and determined that space in the EVE universe has the consistency of WD-40. When paired with the fact that a ship traveling on traditional propulsion methods actually has a top speed and an acceleration curve, it strains SuspensionOfDisbelief.

* In the {{Xbox 360}} game ''Project Sylpheed'', your ship steers as if there's air resistance in space, with this becoming more pronounced in atmosphere. In a related note of bizarreness, cutting the engines and coasting works even in atmosphere, despite the fact that the ship should fall out of the sky if it's not done in an effectively zero-G environment.

* ''Series/BabylonFive'' portrays spaceships moving realistically according to Newtonian physics, with ''Babylon 5'' even showing damaged vessels with no engines gliding helplessly out of range of help. Ships with gravity-based technology can move in a more ''Franchise/StarTrek'' or ''Film/StarWars'' manner; watch the ''White Stars'' dart around the comparatively lumbering Earthforce Omega Destroyers which, having no gravity-based technology, maneuver far, far more like spacecraft we have today.

* Averted to hell and back in the 2000 space combat/trading [[NintendoHard simulator-with]]-a-[[HardCore capital-SIMULATOR]] ''{{Terminus}}''. The game uses painfully realistic physics -- to the point where the ''extremely'' common fate of new players is to simply have to quit and restart, because they are drifting endlessly through the infinite emptiness of space, having burned just ''slightly'' too much fuel on an earlier acceleration or correction.