@farmerman,
hawkeye10 wrote:I saw a list of errors once, the only two I can remember are sound where there could be no sound and a body went from alive to rock hard frozen meat in a couple seconds, which is way wrong.
EDIT: there was something too about the Clooney character drifting in space, a major part of the plot was him deciding that he needed to die to save the girl, but it was all BS, because the physics were wrong.
farmerman wrote:I was impressed at how they showed us conservation of momentum during the many collisions. I will now have to stream it from Netflix and see hether I could note anything improper.
Of corse the obvious ones were , ever time a collision occurred, there was this huge sound track explosion or crunch sound. I think that was just artistic license to enable us humans to relate with all our senses
My understanding is that the movie acted like everything was in the same orbital plane, just at different altitudes -- sort of like the planets orbiting the sun in the same plane.
But in reality the different orbits look more like a cloud of electrons going every which way around an atom. One orbit might go directly above the equator. Another orbit might be at right angles to that and go over the poles. Other orbits might be somewhere in between "going over the poles" and "staying above the equator".
Orbits going at different angles would only cross near each other at two specific spots. And while both objects would cross the other's orbit quite often, it would only be an occasional occurrence for them to cross simultaneously and actually pass within sight of each other. And when that did happen, they would only be close for a few seconds as they zoomed past each other in different directions.
Also, even if everything was actually orbiting in the same plane as if it were a mini solar system, changing orbits would be far more complicated than what they depicted.
Low orbits go faster, and high orbits go slower. Reaching an object at a different altitude takes a lot more than simply "pointing at the object and turning on your thrusters".
I guess if you only wanted to reach the same orbit as a space station, but didn't care if you ended up a thousand miles ahead of it or a thousand miles behind it, you could simply point at it and turn on your thrusters. But don't expect to be anywhere near the space station when you reach the correct orbit if that is what you do.
