First, 9.8 m/s/s is the acceleration of things that fall near Earth’s surface, so the Earth is not pulling the moon with that acceleration, it’s far less. A basic model predicts the moons acceleration to be GM/r^2 where G is the universal gravitational constant, M is the Earth’s mass, and r is the distance between the Earth’s and Moon’s centers of mass.
Second, you have presented a misconception that “orbiting” does not include hovering over the same position relative to a point on a planet. The thing is the planet is not still, it is both spinning and translating. This means in order for the big ship to view the planet as not moving, it also needs to be orbiting around the planet at the same speed that the planet is spinning while translating at the same speed as the planet.
I’m not sure what you’re on about with the second point?
Are you suggesting that because geosynchronous orbits exist they’re always in geosynchronous? We see big ships (imperials 2’s) in all sorts of different elevations. They’re very clearly not orbiting- anything other than geosynchronous for that planet is going to require some kind of lift to keep it at elevation- and probably some amount of lateral/tangential speed to keep above a city.
Their repulsors could do the job (but probably bring in the engines for some reason… but we won’t get into that.)
Or are you suggesting that the orbit around the sun is somehow significant enough to affect the position of a ship able to transit most systems within hours?
It might be in a heliocentric orbit (along with the planet) but it’s still not orbiting the planet unless it’s moving with a tangential velocity roughly equal to the orbital velocity.
My general point is that people’s arguments regarding how star wars simplifies space flight into pseudo-atmospheric flight mechanics is generally correct. It’s not an awful thing though. Space is so foreign to almost everyone on Earth that trying to model realistic outcomes in the movie would probably not make sense to most viewers; so it’s being greatly simplified in order to cause less cognitive dissonance to the viewers.
The physics you presented is very off.
First, 9.8 m/s/s is the acceleration of things that fall near Earth’s surface, so the Earth is not pulling the moon with that acceleration, it’s far less. A basic model predicts the moons acceleration to be GM/r^2 where G is the universal gravitational constant, M is the Earth’s mass, and r is the distance between the Earth’s and Moon’s centers of mass.
Second, you have presented a misconception that “orbiting” does not include hovering over the same position relative to a point on a planet. The thing is the planet is not still, it is both spinning and translating. This means in order for the big ship to view the planet as not moving, it also needs to be orbiting around the planet at the same speed that the planet is spinning while translating at the same speed as the planet.
Uh, you’re right about the acceleration.
I’m not sure what you’re on about with the second point?
Are you suggesting that because geosynchronous orbits exist they’re always in geosynchronous? We see big ships (imperials 2’s) in all sorts of different elevations. They’re very clearly not orbiting- anything other than geosynchronous for that planet is going to require some kind of lift to keep it at elevation- and probably some amount of lateral/tangential speed to keep above a city.
Their repulsors could do the job (but probably bring in the engines for some reason… but we won’t get into that.)
Or are you suggesting that the orbit around the sun is somehow significant enough to affect the position of a ship able to transit most systems within hours?
It might be in a heliocentric orbit (along with the planet) but it’s still not orbiting the planet unless it’s moving with a tangential velocity roughly equal to the orbital velocity.
My general point is that people’s arguments regarding how star wars simplifies space flight into pseudo-atmospheric flight mechanics is generally correct. It’s not an awful thing though. Space is so foreign to almost everyone on Earth that trying to model realistic outcomes in the movie would probably not make sense to most viewers; so it’s being greatly simplified in order to cause less cognitive dissonance to the viewers.