Have light second ranges, still prefer to fight at rock throwing distance.

[scvn2812 504]

With a few exceptions like nBSG and B5, this seems to be something that pops up all over scifi.

 

SG-1: Deathgliders can hit nearly the speed of light, Ha'taks have same day travel of AU distances without using hyperspace

 

Star Wars: 30 seconds from surface to orbit, lunar orbit in minutes, the Death Star appears to have been perhaps at lunar orbit when it fired on Alderaan

 

Star Trek: same day in system travel at impulse speeds demonstrated a few times (ST1 was discussed previously), warp speed combat maneuvers in TOS and USS Phoenix took out a Cardassian ship from 300,000 km at one point

 

oBSG: top speeds for the Galactica of just over a light speed, twice the speed of light for Vipers

 

Andromeda: dialog indicating ship speeds generally measured in PSL (percentage speed of light) and ships attacking at ranges as far out as 2 light minutes

 

Yet the visuals for each of these shows routinely show fights with closing speeds of hundreds of meters to single digit KPS, weapons used at ranges of just a few ship lengths. Without exception these shows routinely have fights taking place between ships in the same frame at distances that Jack Sparrow and Horatio Nelson might think are just a bit close.

 

So what is your personal preference for dealing with these issues?

[Khas 12,158]

Um, about the surface to orbit in 30 seconds for SW, yeah, most people reject that, due to one thing: Ram Pressure:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ram_pressure

The ram pressure from taking off at that speed would produce a shock wave that would kill everyone at the Battlefield.

 

And as for the DS, I calced it at being 4 lunar orbits away from Alderaan, due to counting from the time the beam is fired after the other eight beams are focused to the time it hits Alderaan being about 4 seconds. And since Luna is about 1 light-second away from Earth, this would put it at about 4 ls.

 

Still, as for the original point, maybe because it's more exciting than watching ships engage in more realistic space battles. After all, who would want to see ships firing across huge distances at tiny points of light? Hell, for Andromeda, the producers pretty much said that the space battles are only eye candy, and that they don't accurately represent what's going on.

[scvn2812 504]

I look at the surface to orbit issue as exotic propulsion technology as the Falcon doesn't even bother anyone when it takes off, let alone leave the sonic boom in its wake you'd expect from something accelerating rapidly. I'd buy the time compression idea if not for Obi Wan having a conversation in real time as he exits the atmosphere in Attack of the Clones and then speeds past a moon until both planet and moon rapidly shrink in the distance.

 

I know all of the out of universe reasons why ships go at one another age of sail style, I'm more interested in how people regard "real" combat and how or if they consider visuals representative of combat.

[Khas 12,158]

So, an antigrav take-off then?

[scvn2812 504]

Anti grav would explain the lack of interaction with the surroundings at very low speeds but I'm thinking to avoid sonic booms would require a more exotic propulsion method or some way of manipulating the air along the ship's path. Even the Acclamators in Attack of the Clones are moving up at space shuttle speeds without making much of a fuss. I look at it as a problem that would have needed solving once a civilization decided it was desirable to have ships as long as a kilometer plus land and take off in any sort of reasonable time you don't want them killing entire states with the airflow of their passing. How they do it, beats me.

 

Anyway, so to return to the OP. I tend to lean towards the head canon that visuals are the equivalent of animations in a History Channel special and not necessarily perfectly scaled, showing everything going on. Simplified abstractions. Its not a very good model for debating though so it sort of requires keeping personal preference and "real" canon separate.

 

In the latter case, one is still left with trying to figure out why the optimum use of technology in the setting from the outsider point of view isn't actually the best use after all.

[Tyralak 12,068]

Anti grav would explain the lack of interaction with the surroundings at very low speeds but I'm thinking to avoid sonic booms would require a more exotic propulsion method or some way of manipulating the air along the ship's path. Even the Acclamators in Attack of the Clones are moving up at space shuttle speeds without making much of a fuss. I look at it as a problem that would have needed solving once a civilization decided it was desirable to have ships as long as a kilometer plus land and take off in any sort of reasonable time you don't want them killing entire states with the airflow of their passing. How they do it, beats me.

 

 

 

 

This has always been the rub with things. Once you start having to resort to exotic propulsion to account for lack of secondary effects, then the method of calculating power based on acceleration becomes less reliable.

[scvn2812 504]

I don't care for that method myself. Being a fan of torch drive settings, I actually don't have a problem with settings with disproportionate engine power to electrical power available for weapons. My favorite novels of late involve terrawatt torch drives and gigawatt tops lasers. Although they do have nukes which means that they technically do have access to comparable energies for destruction as they do propulsion, it's just not directly relatable to energy weapons.

 

I think it's more reasonable to measure firepower and propulsion separately and break down firepower by weapon type. My preferred method for presuming the power of Star Destroyers for example is working downwards from the Death Star.

 

I sense a greater interest in complaining about the inconsistencies of one specific franchise in this thread than discussion of the topic in the OP.

 

Anyway, in an attempt to steer the thread back, I'm rather taken with Starfleet Museum's Starfleet Battles / TOS vision of warp speed combat and multi light second ranges.

[Vince 520]

People dispute acceleration based on no secondary effects, mentions of mass-lightening, and mentions of 1 million ton (not billions of tons like the ICS version) ISD's. And the extrapolated firepower based on the lack of demonstrated firepower. 
Amazingly acceleration calcs assuming 3000G and mutli-billion ton mass and DS1 scalings both come to the same order of magnitude. That is remarkable isn't it?

[scvn2812 504]

Alright since the OP didn't generate as much dialog as I was hoping, I'll widen the premise.

 

What is your preferred vision of how various universes duke it out? Not necessarily what you think is suggested by the most bits of canon but if you were put in charge, how would you portray combat in various universes?

 

For example, I fins myself torn between the minimally destructive (relatively speaking, it's still pretty destructive just not go for the jugular decisive like B5), high precision combat implied by the TOS movies and the implied combat of TOS with long range, warp speed combat with potent nuclear caliber torpedoes for very long range proximity bombardment when accuracy is low. Aka the model Starfleet Museum uses in its fiction.

[Vince 520]

The turn based BattlefleetGothic [40K] offers an interesting combat style based on 30 - 60 minute turns. Ships travel at tens of KPS with little to no turning capability (45 - 90 degrees over half hour) due to the immense stresses placed on the ships. It becomes notoriously difficult to strike accurately under these conditions so warships must fill space with hundreds of shells in order to catch their prey amongst a shower of firepower. However, a ships shields regenerate fully every turn (a few minutes in lore) so within the time a ship passes another releasing her killpower, she must batter down the shields AND damage the opponent or else all was in vain.

 

Its sorta like ship jousting in space! 

[Vince 520]

As for Star Wars and the OP, I kinda like Brians theory on deflectors. Maybe its much easier for a turbo-bolt to force its way past deflectors at close range. Maybe at a range of thousands of km, deflectors would shunt away the whole barrage indefinitely. 

 

For any that haven't watched the video... 

In the OT most shots that miss the X-wings are coupled with a small white flash away from the hull, usually in a place completely unrelated to the tl bolt, like the other side of the ship. But they occur at roughly the same time.
With the mon cal and ISD nose to nose, two long red bolts miss the ISD, flying above it, this is accompanied by a large shield effect behind the ship also away from the hull. 

Weapons of SciFi should be super accurate, extrapolating from modern Earth. The novel of RoTJ has a heavy turbolaser destroying a tank, on the ground. A demonstration of accuracy. 

 

I can imagine the thousand G accelerations being useful for tight situations though, to get out when things gets hot. They go unused. 

But maybe it could take minutes for a ship to prepare the tensor fields, navigational shields and gravitational compensators for such acceleration. Perhaps these counter measures (along with the propulsion) are very power intensive, and a ship cannot perform in combat while preparing for significant acceleration. Thus we get snail paced warships

 

Actually we have those two ISD's that almost collided, and apparently failed to perform a few G to simply halt. Whats going on there? Curtis theorized that ships have different thrust modes. Low presumably single G, and max. multi-thousand G. Maybe those ISD's didn't have the right precautions in play to perform a higher de-acceleration? 

This kinda suggests different magnitudes of acceleration don't just come at the flick of a switch, and require extensive (maybe minutes) of prep-time.

[scvn2812 504]

I rather like the model from Hull No. 721 where Star Destroyers and Mon Cal ships use random thrusts to throw off accuracy and turbolasers are used at long ranges to create patterns of fire that ships have to try to navigate through, sort of like how kinetics are treated in harder scifi. Targets are hosed down with light gun fire to try and get lucky to hit when a hole in the shields opens to let fire out. Shields aren't perfect and well timed fire can let shots through even if the shield hasn't failed. Heat management is also a limiting factor on how much of a pounding ships can take.

[the atom 0]

Star Wars: 30 seconds from surface to orbit, lunar orbit in minutes, the Death Star appears to have been perhaps at lunar orbit when it fired on Alderaan

 

 

My theory is that due to the slower nature of turbolasers, as well as the fact that they're pretty much the single most power capital ship weapon availible, closing to well within a few dozen kilometers or less becomes pretty much necessary even if ships can go incredibly fast. It would just be impractical and nobody would ever accomplish anything. Like Brian said though, it could also be an issue of the way turbolasers interact with shields at range. 

Star Trek: same day in system travel at impulse speeds demonstrated a few times (ST1 was discussed previously), warp speed combat maneuvers in TOS and USS Phoenix took out a Cardassian ship from 300,000 km at one point

 

From what I saw in the warp speed combat scenes posted by Brian, maneuvering to line up a shot took waaay more time, and then the rate of fire consequently suffered. I imagine ships would probably find it more convenient to simply drop to STL speeds and let the other guy have it whilst tanking the return fire as best as possible. I believe Sisko's son also mentioned that excessive maneuvering at warp caused could cause stress on a ship's frame. As to why they close to knife-fighting ranges when at STL, I might attribute that to jamming or something.

So what is your personal preference for dealing with these issues?

My preference is to rationalize and reconcile perceived contradictions where possible.

[Ted C 12]

With lightspeed weapons and ships moving at thousands of meters per second, targeting is an issue.

 

Your weapon may be able to hit something light-seconds away, but if the target moves more than a ship length in a second, it may be gone by the time your energy beam arrives. You can try to predict the target's position and fire to hit it, but evasive maneuvers and ECM can make your predictions unreliable.

 

So, if you want to more reliably score hits, you close the range when targeting anything that can move fast enough to evade a shot that takes a second or more to propagate to the target.

[Tyralak 12,068]

With lightspeed weapons and ships moving at thousands of meters per second, targeting is an issue.

 

Your weapon may be able to hit something light-seconds away, but if the target moves more than a ship length in a second, it may be gone by the time your energy beam arrives. You can try to predict the target's position and fire to hit it, but evasive maneuvers and ECM can make your predictions unreliable.

 

So, if you want to more reliably score hits, you close the range when targeting anything that can move fast enough to evade a shot that takes a second or more to propagate to the target.

 

Not to mention, that for the most part, Sci-Fi weapons aren't anywhere near light speed. Especially Turbolasers.

[Ted C 12]

Not to mention, that for the most part, Sci-Fi weapons aren't anywhere near light speed. Especially Turbolasers.

 

The problem gets worse if your sensors only operate at light speed. If the target moves a ship-length per second and is a light-second away, a laser fired directly toward your sensor image is already off target, and it will only get worse in the propagation time of the beam. Add another second of delay if you're using active sensors for targeting.

[enigma 521]

I agree. While ST\SW\whatever ship's weapons can or could attain multi light minute ranges, any combat beyond a light second would be almost futile against a moving target and the attacker's weapons are STL.

 

Long range combat with any decent accuracy would work mainly against stationary targets.

 

Having FTL sensors do help but only to show how futile it would be to fire on an opponent who is a light minute away but your weapons can only do sub-light speeds.

[Strategos 0]

Electronic Warfare and Jamming. Otherwise at the ranges they fight, just put a camera looking down a visual scope and hand gunnery or to some kid in his quarters.

[Praeothmin 532]

So this just shows how shitty combat sensors and computers are in all Sci-Fi...

I would think one of the jobs of the targetting computer would be to account for the trajectory and speed and maneuvering capabilities of your target, using computers that should, at least by Sci-Fi standards, be able to perform trillions of calculations per second...

[Strategos 0]

EM warfare brah. Is one of those things that stupendous processing power can be used for.

[Praeothmin 532]

You have ECM, they have ECCM, you have ECCCM, they have ECCCCM, you have a huge headache, they get tired and leave the fight...