Space battles in movies and holies had always bored me, but watching the real thing held a certain fascination: rather like seeing live coverage of a series of traffic accidents. Actually, the production values for reality - as had doubtless been the case for centuries - were much lower than for even a moderate-budget holodrama. Even with the tremendous energies involved, the overwhelming reaction one had to an actual battle in space was that space was so large and humanity's fleets and ships and dreadnoughts and whatnots were so small. Or