There's good reason they forego realism in this aspect. Imagine watching a scifi movie where every scene where the camera is in vacuum is dead quiet.
this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2025
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Screw that, Firefly was awesome.
The Expanse has 6 seasons worth of quiet vacuum. The battle scenes are epic and scientifically accurate.
The show is So accurate that they have weird scenes like this
Huh, I should rewatch it. I'm not sure I even noticed that these scenes are quiet. Maybe there's a sound track but no sounds of explosions etc?
Often no soundtrack
The noise you do get is from inside the ships when they are hit. The first 3 episodes are slog but once someone looses their head while in the brig, that when the series takes off.
This is what I want Every scene filmed POV in air, give me the correct sounds. Vacuum POV? That's silent
The first scene in the new Star Trek was brilliant. Crashing sound effects inside the besieged ship, cuts to the outside, silence.
BSG? Firefly?
I loved when Interstellar made that one explosion quiet. Couldn't have been a better scene IMO.
If you were designing a cockpit and wanted to relay positional data to the pilot, 3D audio would be a great way.
So my head canon is that the sounds are generated in the cockpit, for the benefit of the pilots.
I remember Wing Commander III having that explanation in the manual: sensors pick up what is happening outside the ship and simulate positional sound to increase pilot awareness.
Such an awesome game! I played that as a kid, I wonder if that's where this idea came to me from.
I still remember being in awe because of the whopping 4 CD-ROMS it came on, in a time where CD-ROM drives weren't even standard yet. Damn, I feel old now. 😂
It was so much ahead of its time. The storyline, the cinematic characters... I got a fighter jet joystick because of that game, sunk countless hours on it. Thanks for the memories!
Like electric cars having a fake noise for nearby pedestrians.
Star Wars is one of those franchises that depend on ideas like this. Thank you doing your part soldier! 🫡
It's been quite literally canon since A New Hope, aka 1977
Whether they or the fans came up with it is still a question though.
Gotta put the willhelm scream in there, but make it not too obvious.
But don't change it so much the nerds can't recognise it
Have you ever seen the "the cheese is under the sauce" meme video?
The mics are in the spaceship.
To me the greatest dealbreaker is that they brought aerial flight mechanics into space. It makes no sense
The sound of spaceships come from the same place the music comes from
In my mind we are just hearing the radiation, not directly but some system is converting x rays to sound, etc
Or any other kind of interference with the audio recording devices, like they did to create the lightsaber sounds.
Hot take: I'm fine with this. Film, TV and games are audio-visual mediums, they depend on the sound just as much as the image. All the awesome space battles would lose from being dead silent. No sound, no music. You're in a vacuum, where's the music coming from?
The silence of vacuum should be used when it would enhance the drama and impact of the scene, not for a slavish adherence to realism.
Interstellar and For All Mankind benefit from the silence because they're not about the excitement of space, they're about the drama of space and the characters. In those, space is a character all on its own. Star Wars and Star Trek are about the adventures and the action. Space is just the setting. And in that context, silence is jarring.