Maximum range of turbolasers (Last Jedi spoilers)

[Silver Jedi]

I am not sure why people are putting forward mass drivers as an explanation of why the Supremacy's fire arcs. A mass driver in a vacuum goes in a straight line too.

Would it appear so if all ships are accelerating?
In space, a ship would hold its velocity and could deactivate its engines. It needs its engines only to change its velocity.
And yet the fuel supplies of the Rebel fleet was dwindling.
Ergo: The Rebel fleet had its engines activated the whole time.
Ergo: The Rebel fleet was accelerating the whole time.
Ergo: The First Order fleet was accelerating too.
But if a First Order ship fires a mass-driver-projectile, it would - after leaving the mass driver - fly with a constant velocity while the Rebel fleet and the First Order fleet were accelerating.
Ergo: It makes sense that from the perspective of an observer that has the same velocity as the fleets and thus does not notice the fleets acceleration, the mass driver projectiles would not fly in a straight line.

They are in a chase, one directly behind the other, so what you would actually see (well measure as the distances are too close and the time too short to actuall SEE), is that the projectile would appear to slow its closing velocity as it approached the Raddus.

Its possible that given the beam of the Supremacy that if it was using a weapon's emplacement from one of its "wing" tips, meaning the firing angle does not coincide with the thrust vector of either ship so there would be a curve observed. I don't believe we observe this, or at least not at an offset we would be able to visibly notice it.

Yeah, what we observed makes no sense even if they are under constant acceleration. They're firing more or less parallel to the direction the ships are accelerating in, but the shots are arcing "downward" as if they're under perpendicular acceleration.

[Q99]

It's just a blindingly stupid thing to put in the movie. Either the writers know nothing of how space works or they think we don't. It's one of those things where you wonder how it got through animation without SOMEone saying it was stupid.

My money is on they thought it looked cool.

I liked a fair amount of the character stuff in the movie, but the space and technical stuff was definitely played loose.

[The Romulan Republic]

There are so many things in Star Wars that are at odds with how actual science works, that it seems petty to me to nitpick this particular thing. They wanted a cool visual. They got a cool visual. Insert whatever made-up pseudo-physics you want to justify it.

Now, that's not to say that I give them a free pass on any and all errors. If there were a contradiction with how things are established to work in the Star Wars universe here, that would be a problem, because it would clash with their own setting and show that they don't care about writing a coherent story. But as the arcing weapons are certainly not standard turbolasers, they should not be expected to behave in the same way, so I don't personally see a big contradiction here.

Now, if the film had made a point of them being standard turbolasers, and showed them arcing like that, it would be a continuity error.

[NecronLord]

As this is the slow forum that's hardly thread necromancy so... It's not even that much of a contradiction, there was measurable beam drop in the original ANH.

[The Romulan Republic]

Huh. I never noticed that in ANH, but I'll take your word for it.

Though I'd still say that the weapons show in TLJ pretty clearly behaved differently from standard turbolasers.