Trigger Happy
but—damn!—you didn’t aim far enough ahead of the fighter. By the time your lazy laser bolts reach their destination, he’s sailed past. Videogames have nearly always displayed lasers in this way, from the simple fire-ahead of Space Invaders or Asteroids to the rainbow-hued pyrotechnics of Omega Boost (1999). But it’s wrong. Firing laser beams is not like skeet shooting, because lasers are made of light,13 and light travels very, very fast, at 300 million meters per second. At the sort of distances modeled by videogames, where fighting spacecraft are never more than a mile or two apart, lasers will take about a millionth of a second or less to hit home. It has been demonstrated that the human mind cannot perceive as separate events things that occur less than roughly three thousandths of a second apart, so you will never have to wait and watch for your lasers to hit home because, to you, they will do so immediately.
But what of your enemy? Say he’s a nippy little xenomorph, flying at thirty thousand feet per second. That’s about twelve times faster than Concorde. Unfortunately, even if he’s two miles away, and flying directly across your sights (perpendicular to your line
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13 Light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation, to be precise.
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