I'm not sure, myself.1. With the speed of weaponry and of ships, you'd think that combatants would always be very far apart, at least 1 light second (300,000 km) away. I like how combat was usually shown on TOS. Ships usually were out of eyeball range, such that two ships were rarely seen in the same shot. Ships fired on each other at ranges of tens of thousands of kilometers. In TNG, DS9, and Voyager, on the other hand, ships are usually only a few ship-lengths apart, blasting away at point blank range. Are weapons so poorly targeted and so much weaker than shields that the only chance of causing damage is by firing at a range of a few hundred meters?
2. Speed of ships. Why does combat always seem to taking place at about 100 miles per hour? I know that fighter planes able to fly mach 2.5 dogfight at less than mach 1. This is a function of weapons range and targeting ability. Do starships have a similar problem? To me this is something like having fighter planes taxiing around on a tarmac, chasing each other and throwing grenades. I can understand why combat in orbit or around a space station might be slow, but what about combat in deep space? You'd think that ships would want to go as fast as they can to avoid being hit.
3. Is this what the viewer wants? Are viewers so conditioned from watching Star Wars movies that they expect ship to ship combat to be like a WWII fighter plane movie? Would fans find more realistic combat boring? Is what is shown really what the producers think is happening or is it only a visual style, an artistic representation of combat in which speeds are made to appear lower and ranges are made to appear closer for our benefit?
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When you're in the Sol system, come visit the Starfleet Museum
What makes it worse is that tactical officers can often be heard to say something like "Klingon Bird of Prey 1000km to starboard", and we are promptly shown a point blank flyby, which further insults our intelligence.
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"If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen"
Samuel Adams
When the next movies and series began, the directors simply carried on from here - seeing it as an established precendent - instead of the exception it really was - and ignoring the more "factual" battles from TOS.
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Faster than light - no left or right.
However, to quantify the issue, which would you rather play: Independance War or TIE Fighter? I'm not sure, myself.
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OH NO< THE OLD MAN WALKS HIS GREEN DOG THAT SHOTS PINBALLS!~!!!
--
Jeff K
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Read three (three!) chapters of "Dirk Tungsten in...The Disappearing Planet" and nothing at all will happen.
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When you're in the Sol system, come visit the Starfleet Museum
In my opinion, the defiant-fights (rescuing Dukat, Tom Riker, "Shattered Mirror") are the most exciting battles of Trek. They use interesting and good maneuvers "one hit could finish us. -Let's not get hit then!"
Or the cool observations in Defiant's first encounter. "The Jem 'Hadar will come in slower this time".
These ARE the things we want to hear from battles, that they do care what happens, not just "Fight commencing! We fight for five more minutes, then we win!", and all is well again. Same with "The die is cast", we want to see what's going on, not just "bridge-view", with a few rumbles and sparks signalling that they got hit...
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Don't kill me, I'm charming!
Considering the ships are hundreds of metres in length with hundreds of people on board, it seems a bit silly to have dogfights. The earlier analogy of sailships describes it perfectly, but instead of inaccurate cannons, the weapons involved are precision phasers and photon torpedoes, to which a starship's evasive manouevres should present little difficulty.
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"If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen"
Samuel Adams
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Don't kill me, I'm charming!
But Klingon BOPs, Jem'Hadar fighters, and the Defiant seem to be built for fast manuverability and dogfighting, frankly. I don't understand the beef about their fighting styles.
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Star Trek Gamma Quadrant
Average Rated 8.32 out of 10 Smileys by Fabrux (with seven eps posted)
***
"Oh, yes, screw logic, let's go for a theory with no evidence!"
-Omega 11:48am, Jan. 19th, 2001
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Card-Carrying Member of the Flare APAO
***
"I think this reason why girls don't do well on multiple choice tests goes all the way back to the Bible, all the way back to Genesis, Adam and Eve. God said, 'All right, Eve, multiple choice or multiple orgasms, what's it going to be?' We all know what was chosen" - Rush Limbaugh, Feb. 23, 1994.
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When you're in the Sol system, come visit the Starfleet Museum
1) In many shots the "camera" could be "tracking" in the same direction as the subject ship, albeit at a slightly lower speed. Obviously this is the case when we see a ship pass by at warp or impulse, as it lumbers by far more slowly than the ship "should" be going.
2)Even in the DS9 battles where ships have passed by one another going in opposite directions, the ships are still doing at least 200-300 m/s, based on how quickly they travel a distance equal to the ship's length. That's about 1000 km/h. I don't know many Toyotas that can do that.
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"And as it is, it is cheaper than drinking."
-DT on arguing with Omega, April 30
Ship combat in space is based on our interpretation of the natural laws of the universe and has no precedent in our society. So, I feel the space battles in Star Trek are a speculation of what could happen.
And the only fault I find with the battles is the presence of sound in space. There is a proven fact that there is no sound in space. Other than that, I am content with the battles.
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takeoffs are optional; landings are mandatory
And the distances (a few ship lengths) at which they are following (to allow both ships in the same frame) seems way to close. If they are actually travelling high percentages of c, then only a slight decrease in speed or turning of the lead ship would send the following ship crashing into its rear. Even if they are travelling 1000 kph (which I think is ridiculously slow), the tight maneuvers they seem to making would be unlikely and the following distance is still too close. I don't think that real jet fighter follow each other so closely
Another thing to think about is the blast radius of an exploding warp core: you'd think that anything within a few hundred (or thousand?) meters wouldbe consumed.
This close-range dogfighting paradigm doesn't really fit space combat. But I guess we're stuck with it. Like military commanders who are always preparing to fight the last war, we are still fixated on the idea of fighter planes, but this time in space. In the late 1800s, the form of combat thought to be most likely in the future was between gigantic "land leviathans" or "air leviathans," which were basically dreadnoughts (battleships) bristling with guns but transformed into tracked armoured vehicles or airships. Early science fiction stories also featured similar combat in space between giant spaceships.
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When you're in the Sol system, come visit the Starfleet Museum
Another thing from those episodes is when the Enterprise had to go Warp 8 in the opposite direction, they just activated Warp drive a bit, and that really increased there ability to move. So, maybe the ships are fighting, sometimes, more like fighters because they are using their warp fields to give them an edge. Of course, with any improvement like that, the enemy might have a counter for it. If they do, then the ships could be reduced to a slower mode of combat. Also, in order to run, they have to be facing where they want to go, then hit Warp.
I know this is a far fetched idea, but in the versions of Star Trek I saw, the ships generally followed this rule.
Also, in the movie First Contact, the Borg ship (I hope) didn't proceed to Earth at impulse power when it was engaged in battle. So, that indicates that Warp speed battles still occur, just not within Solar Systems, places with gravity fields, etc. It would be a bit more interesting to see a few more Warp Battles in Star Trek (The Borg cube, chased by about 100 or so ships, firing at it. The joy of Warp, bad evasive action! Would be interesting. )
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-Typed by The Golden Tiger!
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"We have a good arrangement. He supplies the weapons, I use them."
- Blade
Back to the topic, if ships were going at super sonic or hyper-sonic speeds the fight scenes we see we would definately not see. On a race track, you can follow the cars ok right? Imagine that going 10-30 times faster than that. Will you be able to follow them? No. Lasers go at the speed of light, so if phaser are basically advanced lasers then all we would see is a laser show. That's boring.
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When you turn on a light in a room, or a laser pointer during a presentation, can you actually track the light from the time it leaves the source to when ir hits the wall? No. In Star Trek, the laws of physics are broken and you can.
If you were to actually fire a phaser, you wouldn't see the shot charging and then lancing off at the enemy. Impact would be instantaneous! You'd see a sudden beam of light connect the phaser bank with the target and then disappear.
I do agree that some space battles are too slow. Who says that in "close" (and by close, I mean in AU's or ly's) quarters space battles you can't put up the impulse engines to .85 c? They're certainly capable enough.
The reason I don't believe in battles at warp speeds is the fact that meneuverability is apparently nonexistant while a ship is at warp. (Faster than light, no left or right, et al). Also, you can't engage the warp drive while near a gravity well because it would wreak havoc on the local space-time continuum, as I think someone already pointed out. (Although they continually try and disprove this by having shuttles engage warp [or try to] while in orbit and whatever).
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"A celibate clergy is an especially good idea because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism."
-Eleanor Arroway, "Contact" by Carl Sagan
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When you're in the Sol system, come visit the Starfleet Museum
Do we know actual range of phasers?
When you look into the sky when a plane flies over you, can you see it clearly enough to make out what make it is? For the low-flying yes, but the really high-flying ones, no. Tjose planes are only a few miles high too. Multiply that by 100 times and a object twice as large. Would you be able to a see a phaser battle bewteen the two? No.
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what really annoys me is how trek portrays ground combat....now throwing together a bunch of guys with rifles hows is that any more improved than our current fighting by marines?
quote:
You'd see a sudden beam of light connect the phaser bank with the target and then disappear
Wrong, you wouldn't even see a beam. A flashlight's or laser pointer's beam is only visible if there is fog or smoke. In space, there is nothing that could scatter the light beam and divert some photons into your eye.
You could only see an explosion on the target, not knowing what caused it. Quite frankly, I'm happier with multi-colored slow phaser beams making noise than with invisible ships firing invisible weapons at each other.
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"Great is okay, but amazing would be great!" - Bender
****
USS Allegiance LCARS Database
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"A celibate clergy is an especially good idea because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism."
-Eleanor Arroway, "Contact" by Carl Sagan
I don't mind that Trek does it, after all we aren't alone. Battlestar, Star Wars, etc all do it. Star wars has an 'excuse', they say its for visual reference for the pilots. In Trek, our excuse is so GOD can watch.
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By and large, Star Trek is far behind conventional sci-fi when it comes to concepts for space combat, we all accept that. I suppose we should just live with it and enjoy the other aspects of the show.(ie. 7 of 9 
)
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"If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen"
Samuel Adams
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"A celibate clergy is an especially good idea because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism."
-Eleanor Arroway, "Contact" by Carl Sagan
Remember "The Man With The Golden Gun"? Lee fucked up Bond's airplane with that harnessed sunlight cannon, in the beginning of the end.
They were sensible enough not to make a shining beam that time, and it cost them less money too. They only had to insert the sound effect at the right place.
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Don't kill me, I'm charming!
The episode was "D Minus Zero."
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You know, you really should keep a personal log. Why bore others needlessly?
The Gigantic Collection of Star Trek Minutiae
As far as TOS is concerned, their "more realistic" look, i.e. less ships, etc. resulted from a lack of money, not interest in realism!
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Kryten: Pub? - Ah yes. A meeting place where people attempt to achieve
advanced states of mental incompetence by the repeated consumption of
fermented vegetable drinks. - Red Dwarf "Timeslides"
I wonder if you guys ever played the game Independence War. Not only is this perhaps the most realistic simulation of space combat I have yet seen in a game, but it also turned out that you can have great fun doing it.
I consider the NSO-929 Dreadnaught class Corvette to be one of the greatest ships ever concieved in fiction or game.
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Don't kill me, I'm charming!
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Wes Button � [email protected]
TechFX Studios � The United Federation Uplink �
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I don't like Wesley Crusher.
[This message has been edited by Wes1701E (edited May 22, 2001).]
As you can see, this dramatically decreases, uh, drama. So it's not like we support realism in battles, but some semblance of balance between realism and dramatic effects.
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"A celibate clergy is an especially good idea because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism."
-Eleanor Arroway, "Contact" by Carl Sagan
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"Babies haven't any hair;
old men's heads are just as bare;
between the cradle and the grave
lies a haircut and a shave."
Samuel Hoffenstein
1. At the speeds these ships should be traveling they shouldn't be more than momentary blurs to stationary observers. Probably not dramatic per-se, but there are creative ways would can indicate ships are are great speed and far apart and yet still slugging it out. We did it in te opening animation for a computer game I worked on years ago. One ship swooshed by the camera, and one star waaay off in the distance emerged from the background and roared in in a matter of seconds and then flashed by...revealed to be a pursuing spacehip.
A good example of how to use speed in the Enterprise A's approach to Khitomer in ST6...the ship flashes past the camera, which whip pans around after her, only to see her waaaay off in the distance. It gave a great impression of speed.
2. Beams don't have to be shown to be dramatic. We don't see bullets in motion, after all. You could show flashing hits on shields and it would just as exciting as machine-gun fire in a contemporary film.
3. It's more dramatic to show the immense power these weapons would have than to minimize it. Let's face it, we all know that a single phaser hit on an enshields ship should blast it apart. The one shot I always wanted to see was a full power phaser blast flaring like a nova against a weakened deflector, and seeing a few sparks get through, and watch THOSE blow holes in the hull. This would scare the pants off the audience who then sees that 99% of that enegry is barely being withstood, and can visualize that will happen if it gets through.
4. You don't need sound effects in space, but some kind of sound on the soundtrack can make it more dramatic. I proved this to a friend by putting my lasredisc of TWOK on and killing the sound, then synchronized the CD of the score to the video. The music acted as all the sound effects, and it was no less dramatic.
My two forints worth.
quote:
2. Beams don't have to be shown to be dramatic. We don't see bullets in motion, after all. You could show flashing hits on shields and it would just as exciting as machine-gun fire in a contemporary film.
You obviously never saw Blakes 7. There the guns had a clear muzzle that lit up (it was bloody torch, basically), and where it hit would just be a little flash and a puff of smoke. INDESCRIBABLY undramatic!
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"If Morden is afraid of green penguins, and Draal is shown to have
access to them, a speculation would be that Draal will use them
against Morden in the future. However if Draal only has a purple
moose, saying that he could use it against Morden would be a story
idea."
- rastb5m FAQ
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"'I don't CARE who started it, I'm tired, and I WANT QUIET!!!!! Or I'm going to come up there and flatten the BOTH of you!' And he meant it. And we'd stop. Or he would." --Foreign policy as laid down by First of Two's dad
Are citing the exceptions, not the rule. Plenty of exciting gunfights in a century of movies and no bullet-trails are required. Just because Blake and Logan's Run did it badly doesn't mean it can't be done well.
And, getting back to the point of my earlier posts, it's energy and momentum that give life to an action sequence -- plus doing the unexpected. There are numerous (and relatively realistic) tactics that can and could have been tried in SF shows and movies but haven't been done. All kinds of interesting and dramatic camera angles and POVs that don't require two ships to be racing around like two Indy cars trying to pass each other. It's just that the producers and effects people are stuck in a rut and not trying to push the envelope.
As far as a shot being instantaneous, not necessarily. The Galaxy Class' Type X phaser has a range of 300,000 km. So in that extreme there would be a period of about a second (at light speed) between a phaser shot being fired, and the impact on the target.
Also, perception of the speed of a vehicle is relative. In a regular space scene you have no solid background information with which to form a tangible frame of reference for a ships relativistic speed. The camera is supposedly only interpretting what the eye would purportedly see if it were veiwing the scene. But it has to be flexible enough to show what's going on without going overboard for drama's sake.
You either show the ship flying by at warp 1 in the way we expect and are familiar with, or you show a red Doplar shift blur for a fraction a milisecond, with all the time dilation effects thereof. Which isn't much fun. So without being ridiculously phoney like Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon, and without being Nth degree sceintifically true like 2001, (as brilliant as that movie was) Trek is the perfect marriage between the two, delivering satisfying, sensible FX.
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"Synthetic scotch, synthetic Commanders...."
-Scotty
http://www.trekmania.net
Sure, no one knows if a "phaser" beam would show up in a vacuum, but I'm supposing for it to show up as a superhot glowing beam the particles within it would have to be radiating photons, which implies elements of the beam are themselves colliding and releasing energy in visible wavelengths, and also means at least some tiny fraction of the beam's energy is lost in the process.
I suppose one could argue that phaser beams are made up of several kinds of particles that interact with one another, producing the characteristic "glow".
"Have we ever seen a laser emission in space to know what we'll see? Not really no. As far as the beam being visible, who knows."
Ye gods... That has to be one of the most misinformed statements I've ever heard. First off, in a laser, or any beam of light, the only way for you to see it is if the light goes into your eye. If the laser isn't pointed at your eye, the only way for the light to get there is to reflect off something. If you shoot a laser in space, there isn't enough matter to reflect enough light for you to see it. If there were, the same matter would reflect sunlight, and you'd be able to see the matter.
Also, I'm fairly certain laser beams have been bounced off the moon from Earth. So, yes, lasers have been shone through space, contrary to your opinion.
Now phasers, that isn't exactly a moot point. PHASER is supposedly an acronym for PHASed Energy Rectification. Anything involving energy in that sort of sense I assume involves electromagnetic radiation. That one of the few (possibly only, but I'm not sure) types of energy that can travel in a vacuum.
Electromagnetic energy is invisible to the naked eye. That's what composes a laser after all. It's the release of discrete energy packets called quanta, or photons, by electrons as they jump up and down through their various shells. Therefore, we can assume that any "beam" composed of EM radiation or quanta would also be invisible, no? Am I not making sense?