Battlestar Galactica

[Agelastus]

The starfighter concept is rather unrealistic anyways, at least as presented.  World War II is never coming back.

That's true of most Science Fiction Starfighter concepts though. I can't, offhand, think of one that stands up to close scrutiny.

I think the single most frustrating thing I have ever read in the last few months was an old discussion over on the spacebattles forums where they spoke, in all seriousness, about originial series Colonial Vipers being able to engage in combat at supralight velocities. Even ignoring the fuzzy terminology of the original show, canon (as in what is shown on screen) rather proves the opposite...a number of times fighters approach their target at an angle, and the apparent closing velocities look to be in the hundreds of meters per second at most, not GREATER THAN 300000 KILOMETERS PER SECOND.

And what frustrated me even more was that the discussion was three years old, so etiquette stopped me from posting what idiots I thought they were.

[Neil]

Battletech.

[grumbler]

The military had gone outside of their home system in the series.  They just apparently weren't interested in exploring very far for some reason.

Oh, I can understand why military ships might have FTL, especially the Battlestars, if one makes the assumption that the Colonial navy thought the Cylons might be out-system.  It is merely every other ship in the civilian fleet for which it makes no sense.   That would be like making random cargo ships and airplanes on earth submersible.

[grumbler]

That's true of most Science Fiction Starfighter concepts though. I can't, offhand, think of one that stands up to close scrutiny.

The B5 one is okay, though it suffers from actually considering physics in the design.  Even They moved away from the cool design into something starfighterish in the later models, though.

I liked the launching system as well.

[Neil]

That's true of most Science Fiction Starfighter concepts though. I can't, offhand, think of one that stands up to close scrutiny.

The B5 one is okay, though it suffers from actually considering physics in the design.  Even They moved away from the cool design into something starfighterish in the later models, though.

I liked the launching system as well.

The Star Fury has an excellent design for general spacecraft, but it'd be a little lacking as a combat unit.  WWII is never coming back.

[Queequeg]

What would an actual space battle look like?  I always imagined it would have way more in common with Jutland than Midway, all extremely long-range ordinance and guessing where the enemy is/will be. 

[Josephus]

Is this the geekiest thread going right now? And Jaron isn't even posting.

[Josquius]

What would an actual space battle look like?  I always imagined it would have way more in common with Jutland than Midway, all extremely long-range ordinance and guessing where the enemy is/will be. 

Two drunk hillbillies with shotguns.

[Agelastus]

What would an actual space battle look like?  I always imagined it would have way more in common with Jutland than Midway, all extremely long-range ordinance and guessing where the enemy is/will be.

The descriptions in these books are the ones I've read that I consider most likely. He deals well with the problem of light-speed transmission of information, and how you are trying to outguess your opponent right up to the moment of contact.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dauntless-Lost-Fleet-Book-1/dp/0441014186/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1265292054&sr=1-4

Although even this author cannot resist having fleets interpenetrate, even if for only microseconds. The odds against this actually happening must be astronomical.

[Agelastus]

That's true of most Science Fiction Starfighter concepts though. I can't, offhand, think of one that stands up to close scrutiny.

The B5 one is okay, though it suffers from actually considering physics in the design.  Even They moved away from the cool design into something starfighterish in the later models, though.

I liked the launching system as well.

I like the Starfury design myself; it LOOKS right, which is half the battle for a proper suspension of disbelief. And the launching system of B5 too (although it did make me wonder how exactly they were being stored in the Omegas hangar bays.)

The trouble, in my opinion, comes when you realise that a Starfury has to close to knife range to engage an opponent, given the sheer size of space. There was a battle in the film about the Earth-Minbari war which demonstrated this perfectly (long range energy weapons clawed the fighters out of space before they could close.) In the series, it seemed that they forced everybody to engage at knife range to get a better special effects shot, which made no sense given the armaments packages of some of the capital ships in the series. They seem to have artificially limited sensor technology as a deus-ex-machina move in the same way the early Battletech game did.

I really liked the battles in B5, by the way, but they don't entirely stand up to logical scrutiny. They'd almost have been better off if they'd shown that everybody was using projectile weapons and missiles as they are in the new Battlestar Galactica. That would explain the knife-range combat shown perfectly.

[grumbler]

What would an actual space battle look like?  I always imagined it would have way more in common with Jutland than Midway, all extremely long-range ordinance and guessing where the enemy is/will be. 

So it would look more like Midway than Jutland?  Midway featured far longer-ranged ordnance (though ordinances were probably no longer in 1942 than 1916) than Jutland, and the success or lack thereof in guessing where the enemy was drove the decision-making in the battle.

I think Weber in his Honor Harrington books does a decent job of trying to make space combat realistic, though he leaves out some obvious counter-ploys (presumably because they would ruin the drama).

[Agelastus]

I think Weber in his Honor Harrington books does a decent job of trying to make space combat realistic, though he leaves out some obvious counter-ploys (presumably because they would ruin the drama).

He bases his space combat in an environment where as long as ships are using their main drive system, you can always tell exactly where they are using a particular type of FTL sensor (barring countermeasures.) This could almost be described as a deus-ex-machina to get round the problems of being limited to light-speed transmission of data at best.

With that proviso though, I agree that his space combat scenes are very good. Even the one case I can think of of a fleet effectively interpenetrating is carried off in believable fashion (at Fourth Yeltsin.)

The books I pointed at don't have the "get out of jail free" card of supralight sensors though, which is why I find their descriptions so interesting.

[Ed Anger]

I think Weber in his Honor Harrington books does a decent job of trying to make space combat realistic, though he leaves out some obvious counter-ploys (presumably because they would ruin the drama).

And the infodumps to explain them would double the size of the book.

As the battle raged, Honor turned to her flag captain and spent an hour explaining her stragtegy. BLAH BLAH BLAH Treecats BLAH BLAH BLAH Grav Lance BLAH BLAH BLAH Haven socialists suck BLAH BLAH BLAH Internal Manticore politics BLAH!

BLAH x250

[grumbler]

The trouble, in my opinion, comes when you realise that a Starfury has to close to knife range to engage an opponent, given the sheer size of space. There was a battle in the film about the Earth-Minbari war which demonstrated this perfectly (long range energy weapons clawed the fighters out of space before they could close.) In the series, it seemed that they forced everybody to engage at knife range to get a better special effects shot, which made no sense given the armaments packages of some of the capital ships in the series. They seem to have artificially limited sensor technology as a deus-ex-machina move in the same way the early Battletech game did.

The Minbari didn't have to close to fight, and they didn't do so.  Earthforce ships had to, because their weapons were particle weapons and thus could be intercepted if the range was long enough (though in cases where the target had no interceptors, the show rightly had engagements occur at much longer ranges).  There is no doubt, though, that ships were shown closer than pure physics would necessitate, in order to make the shots look better.

I really liked the battles in B5, by the way, but they don't entirely stand up to logical scrutiny. They'd almost have been better off if they'd shown that everybody was using projectile weapons and missiles as they are in the new Battlestar Galactica. That would explain the knife-range combat shown perfectly.

Actually, the BG battles weren't particularly realistic, IMO.  Getting hit by nuclear weapons and shrugging them off made no sense to me.  The fighters behaved pretty much exactly like atmospheric fighters.

[grumbler]

I think Weber in his Honor Harrington books does a decent job of trying to make space combat realistic, though he leaves out some obvious counter-ploys (presumably because they would ruin the drama).

And the infodumps to explain them would double the size of the book.

As the battle raged, Honor turned to her flag captain and spent an hour explaining her stragtegy. BLAH BLAH BLAH Treecats BLAH BLAH BLAH Grav Lance BLAH BLAH BLAH Haven socialists suck BLAH BLAH BLAH Internal Manticore politics BLAH!

BLAH x250

Yeah, the later books certainly bogged down with these and other manifestations of author ego-gratification.