posted
I was wondering, has anyone speculated on the reason why Vipers have to come into the landing bay at full speed even when they're not trying to get the frack outta there? The most recent episode "Final Cut" showed Cat making multiple runs at the deck, but it was not a combat situation. Maybe it's a waste of fuel to decelerate and come to a stop, so that might be a reason. But at the point Cat was at, it would be more fuel-costly to send her around again.
There is one time that we've seen a Viper come to a stop before landing, and that was Apollo's Mk VII in the mini when he first arrives at the Galactica. All the other times, they've used "combat traps" (at least I think that was the term Apollo used in "33").
posted
Oversight, IMO. They just ignore the notion that they're in space because high-speed landings look cooler. The kicker is that under null-gravity conditions, the energy transferred from the Viper to Galactica in the landing has to go SOMEWHERE, though I guess the gravity generation cancels a lot of that out.
posted
The only thing that springs to mind for me on this one is that Apollo's fighter in the miniseries was a mark VII with Baltar's command navigation program running. Given that the mark VII seems to incorporate "Angular exhaust nozzle design..." which would seem to "...suggest possible thrust-vectoring." (according to the article on the Battlestar Wiki" maybe soft landings were only possible with the CNP co-ordinating all the systems and working with the pilot? Thus the surviving mark VIIs (that had the CNP removed) and the older mark IIs (that never had it fitted in the first place) have to rely on landings that have a little more bump! :-)
Of course that doesn't explain why the ace pilots like Apollo and Starbuck couldn't still manage soft landings - after all we've seen their "A" games and they're very good.
Hope this gives you something to go on anyway.
FD
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posted
The other possibility is that this was a training maneuver... although that wasn't explicitly mentioned. (Wait, didn't they mention that Kat was out on patrol or something? Then this definitely wouldn't be a training thing.)
I'm guessing that this must have been an oversight by the writers, who were thinking a bit too much about the aircraft carrier analogy and forgot that they could maneuver slowly in zero-gee.
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posted
The tech terms are way too much current navy terms.
CAP - Combat AIR Patrol. Now, why would the Galactica have an air patrol when there is no air to patrol? Colloquially they could call space "air" but come on!
One thing I do miss from TOS is the unique terms and phrases that marked the Colonial culture a little different than ours.
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posted
Vipers fly fast. They usually don't have time for the same slow appreach we see with other ship's landing bays. The flight pods of the Galactica are open on both ends and if the Viper needs to, it can fly through and keep going.
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Presumeably, the colonies had, at one point, wet-navies, possibly on Kobol. Presumeably, certain terms carried forward to their space navies. In any case, CAG sounds better than CSG.
posted
Having just rewatched the first part of the miniseries, I notice that Apollo has to carry out a "hands on approach" when he first arrives on Galactica, so the CNP program couldn't have been working simply because Galactica didn't have an auto-landing system for it to interface with.
I would tend to agree, BJ, that it might be a fuel conservation issue. When Apollo soft-lands, he uses a lot of propellant to decelerate, turn around and land gently on the deck. Would it use less fuel to scrape along the deck and allow friction to kill off any forward momentum?
As for the naval terms thing, I agree that they are probably a holdover from the days of seagoing navies on the colonies. Hell, just look at how many words there are in English today that are archaic, or otherwise born from situations/jobs/customs that long since became outmoded: no reason why the Colonials shouldn't be much the same.
FD
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posted
I'm trying to figure out what the "trap" is and how it works. I gather its supposed to catch the fighter and manuever it to an elevator which will take the fighter to the hanger deck, but I'm just guessing.
posted
I thought the term Apollo used in "33" was "combat drops" but it might have been "traps", will have a watch at it with the subtitles on and see what it says.
FD
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posted
The term they usually use is "combat landing", not "combat trap." I'd imagine the goal behind a combat landing is just to get the fighters onto the landing deck so the entire landing pod can be retracted -- once thats done, fighters can be taken to the hanger deck.
posted
On present day aircraft carriers the planes have a hook on their bellies. This hook catches onto an arresting cable strung across the deck. This slows the plane down quickly. In addition, there are catch nets that catch the planes if they overshoot.
If a plane really overshoots and misses the catch cable completely, the pilot goes full throttle, gains altitude and comes around for another pass.
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1. Unless the bay can vary gravity, the moment you fly into the bay you suddenly go from zero G to 1 G, so the ship would drop like a rock the moment it got inside the bay at low speed, so your ship's nose would fall down and hit...wacky.
2. Even flying fast this would be a problem, UNLESS you postulate that the lift from the wings will counteract the gravity, which necessitates a fast entry.
Most likely they didn't think about it.
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posted
Moore's commentary for this episode suggests that by Adama's orders, all viper landings on Galactica are combat landings, hands on approach as stated in the mini-series. I can see the value in this since it gives the pilots, especially the nuggets, plenty of practice so they're less likely to screw it up when it really matters. The incident with Kat is a prime example, better that she freak out during a routine mission than during a fire fight. This way she's only putting her life at stake.
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