Turning *is* acceleration. Any change of speed or direction (which together are called "velocity") is an acceleration.
In space, if you accelerate laterally in a random direction hard enough to move your actual position one ship width from your predicted position based on data two light trip times ago, a laser shot at you will miss, barring a very lucky guess by the firing ship.
Sent from mobile device; please forgive terseness and typos.
My f16 analogy was weak. My point only being that all the combat maneuvers that I know of use turning and flares or EMC to stop or avoid an attack not acceleration or deceleration. Dogfighting is not something I think we will be seeing in space fights. Spaceships are easy to detect (given current know how) and hard to hide. Say you can move at 20g. You are being shot at by a laser. How fast can the laser track you VS how fast can you try and avoid this shot? If we are close together then you have 0 change of not getting hit. As the range becomes extreme so that speed of light becomes a factor then your acceleration VS the apparent size of the target might limit your contact time with the laser. This is only important if the laser is weak enough to need long contact times or you must be very precise to kill the ship.On Wed, Jun 24, 2015 at 8:27 AM, Richard Aiken <raikenclw@gmail.com> wrote:On Tue, Jun 23, 2015 at 6:15 PM, <tmr0195@comcast.net> wrote:Hello Ethan,May I ask why using general and admittedly imprecise terms is such an issue?Because (unlike in a face-to-face conversation) you aren't able to make facial expressions or wave your hands about or draw on a peice of paper.When you have only the written word via which to communicate your ideas, precision is an inescapable requirement.--Richard Aiken
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