George Lucas and the release of Star Wars in the 1970s unintentionally set a precedent for how almost every single piece of sci-fi media would depict space combat. Small spaceships fighting each other above in the atmosphere is synonymous with the genre, but does the science support this World War II style of dog-fighting in SPACE?
One point he missed was that your biggest issue will be heat. It’s hard to disperse heat in a vacuum and it added up quickly.
Best depiction of highly advanced space combat I’ve read is in The Culture series. Extraordinarily brutal, measured in milliseconds and hundreds of kilometers apart at minimum, but usually more like AU apart.
There’s one scene where a human(ish) woman is aboard a true warship during a near-equivalent tech engagement. The human is strapped down, armored, and pumped full of exotic nanite foams just to survive the momentum changes, and has to have the combat played back to her over minutes to understand what happened.
I’d say its fairly realistic within it’s own world building, but that world building is supposed to represent a type 2 civilization in it’s prime, capable of manipulating higher dimensions, so not hard scifi.
If any one wants an idea of how hard actual space combat would be. Spend sometime playing Kerbal Space program.
Or Children of a Dead Earth.
Tl:dr it’s going to be more like submarine combat, or maybe long range middle duels… But slower.
