space warfare are far too many to list, but popular examples include Star Trek (in all of its forms), Star Wars, Halo, Stargate, Warhammer 40,000, Babylon 5, Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Battlestar Galactica, Mass Effect, Freespace and many comic book franchises. Video games often touch the subject; the Wing Commander franchise is a prototypical example. Few games try to simulate realistic distance and speed, though Independence War and Frontier: Elite II both do, as does the board game Attack Vector: Tactical. Many authors have either used a galaxy-spanning fictional empire as background or written about the growth and/or decline of such an empire. Said empire's capital is often a core world, such as a planet relatively close to a galaxy's supermassive black hole. Characterization can vary wildly from malevolent forces attacking sympathetic victims to apathetic bureaucracies to more reasonable entities focused on social progress, and anywhere in between. Scifi writers generally posit some form of faster-than-light drive in order to facilitate interstellar war. Writers such as Larry Niven have developed plausible interplanetary conflict based on human colonization of the asteroid belt and outer planets via technologies using currently known physics. See also Asteroid impact avoidance Beijing–Washington space hotline Militarisation of space Space force Space weapon Sun outage Related to specific countries and facilities: Department of Defense Manned Space Flight Support Office European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company Joint Functional Component Command for Space and Global Strike (US Strategic Command) National Missile Defense Pine Gap (Australia) United States Air Force Space Command United States Army Space and Missile Defense Command References Further reading Hobbes, D (1986): An Illustrated Guide to Space Warfare Salamander Books Ltd. . Macvey, John W.: Space Weapons, Space War. New York: 1979 Stein and Day (written by a professional astronomer). David Jordan: Air and Space Warfare, pp. 178–223, in:Understanding modern warfare. Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge 2008, . John J. Klein: Space Warfare: Strategy, Principles and Policy. Routledge, Oxford 2006, . Joan Johnson-Freese: Space Warfare in the 21st Century – Arming the Heavens. Routledge, Oxford 2016, . Warfare