If you want capital ship battles, look nowhere else! Some of the best stuff I’ve ever seen, and doesn’t look fake like B5. Then again, B5 was ten years ago and this is now, but alas …
Search for “stargate battle” on youtube, there are a ton of clips. One of the biggest capital ship showdowns since the Federation took on the Borg happened at the end of Season 9 as the Ori (new bad guys of SG-1) brought four unstoppable warships through a massive “super gate” in outer space and proceeded to wipe out every starship in a recently established alliance of all the (previously warring) factions in the SG-1 story. It was a classic battle royale, even though the good guys didn’t have a chance.
Jeez, now I see… "The Star Trek episode “Balance of Terror” followed the plot of The Enemy Below fairly closely. The major differences occur at the end. The Enterprise doesn’t ram the other ship, and the Romulan commander blows up his disabled ship (with all aboard) rather than be taken prisoner."
Sorry, Voyager, I thought you’d just gotton the titles mistaken. Enjoy the show!
In most ST battles they lob phasers at each other like WW I battleships. I actually think this is going to be more accurate, since a computer controlled energy weapon on a capital ship is going to make short work of any lightly shielded “fighter.” (In the real world Han and Luke would push a few buttons, not shoot like WW II antiaircraft gunners.)
But Schneider made it a bit more interesting in this espisode, since the Romulan ship was mostly invisible, like a submarine, relatively slow, and had far fewer resources than the capital ship, the Enterprise. Notice how the bridge of the Romulan ship was designed to even give the feel of a submarine. Yeah it was a copy, but a particularly good one.
Now I’ve got to run off and add The Enemy Below to my Netflix queue.
No doubt, Stargate and BSG both benefit from modern day SFX that B5 didn’t have access to in 1994, but of course, when I watch B5, I don’t really NOTICE the proverbial strings holding the ships up in the really good space battles (the music helps a lot). I have seen some SG1/Atlantis, and I love the humans’ battlecruisers. Fast, well-armed, not really capable of fighting much of anything on even terms, but able to take a beating long enough to do their thing before running like hell.
I also get a kick out of the fact that they bear a strong resemblance to Battlestars.
Well, on DS9, we get to see some fighters, but only in a couple of episodes. Essentially, they’re about as big as Runabouts (so even bigger than shuttles), and appear to be about 90% engines by volume. Very fast, very agile, enough sheilds to protect them from maybe one hit, and they use swarming tactics while launching barrages of photon micro-torpedos (basically much smaller photon torpedos, stored on launch racks attached to a smaller ship’s hull). Mostly Starfleet used them to harass enemy ships to try and get them to break formation.
For the most part, space combat in Star Trek seems to resemble old sailing ships, maybe around the beginning of widespread steam power. Ships close to short range and hammer away at eachother with high-yield weaponry. Starfleet ships are relatively unique in that they can fire broadsides (as seen in both Star Trek II and the DS9 episode “Sacrifice of Angels”; you don’t want to be on the pointy end of a phaser broadside at spitting distance)
I stopped watching DS9 before they got to that point. I don’t remember a broadside in ST II, but it makes sense. They got criticized for phasers only firing forward.
The real problem with fighters (and the British had this problem in 1940) is not the craft but the crew. It is a lot easier to make a new fighter than to train a new pilot. For humans, anyhow. In a book I’ve plotted, but am nowhere close to writing, the bad guys use fighter swarms, but they are large, mean, bunny rabbits who are very prolific. I’d expect that capital ships would soon sprout lots of relatively small energy weapons for this kind of attack, while keeping the big ones for other capital ships.
As for being at spitting distance, the battle at the end of ST II was very cool, but in general I’d expect ships to not get that close without being shot up, except in special circumstances. In that case there were special circumstances.
In contrast, space combat in Star Wars resembles the kind of battles that occurred in the Pacific Theater of World War 2. The large capital ships will slug it out if given the chance, but having adequate fighter cover is crucial to victory. Indeed, the superiority of the Rebel’s fighter core was one of their key advantages.
It seems to me (fanwank hat on) that the biggest disadvantage the Imperial fighter corps had was that their ships were not hyper-capable. They had to fight near a base or operate from a mothership, while Rebel fighters could hop in and out of the battlefield, staying to fight only when they chose to and not directly exposing their own bases to attack. If the Rebels caught word of a lightly escorted convoy, they could drop an attack force on them, destroy everything, and run like hell before the Imperial forces could retaliate. We’ve seen Imperial pilots and Rebel pilots match up fairly evenly once battle was joined, with the TIEs being more maneuverable and the Rebel fighters somewhat more rugged and heavily armed.
I am just guessing , but it would seem to me that the imps standardized their fighers on one design and then buy a couple of million probably depending on the volume of space they are tasked to defend.
The imps can afford lots of capital ships to haul the snubs around and stand and fight when they choose, while the rebs have to pick and choose the moment that they do engage so it made sense for them to buy self deploying deep strike fighter/bombers/scouts.
As we have seen from Battlestar Galactica, you dont need a through deck carrier to haul the snubs around, a freighter in a pinch will do for a base to supply life support and basic maitenance facilitys and R and R.
I personally like the design concept , a hot gun fighter rather than a missileer. I could see the duke flying one.
Eh, because the Imperial pilots were expendable clones and their TIE fighters were built dime to a dozen by the cheapest bidder? The Rebellion fighters, conversely, were a rag tag collection of ships with better shielding, armor, and pilots. That and they have the Force, of course.
It’s just a question of which side in a battle stands a better chance of winning when one side has weaker units but strength in numbers, while the other side has stronger units but fewer numbers. It’s pretty reasonable that whichever side has more targets to take down is at a disadvantage, regardless of how much firepower they have. That’s why the Rebels were always getting pushed back on all fronts and had to be more strategic and resourceful, rather than tactical.
I think by the time of a new hope , the imps were using normal humans, none of the star destroyer bridge scenes that we glimpsed had clones and Han was kicked out of the academy while Luke was hoping to get in.
The rest , yeah.
The three things that make up the big picture for me are the books , the games and the movies and really its a made up universe that you try to figure out why something was done in reality as a plot device and convert it into a reasonable doctrine.
By the time of A new hope , the imps had come out with the experimental tie design that Darth Vader tried to shoot down Luke in the trench run, which was hyper capable and in the games, the gunboat had made its appearance. So it sounds like the empire was adapting to circumstances of the rebellion and evolving its own forces, just happened that they lost.
As Declan said, we have no particular indication that the Imperial pilots as of A New Hope were clones so much as happening to be the same size (incidentally, I’m told that most fighter pilots you see nowadays tend to be short slim guys anyhow, and how different do you think any of them look in flight suits, helmets, and masks?
The big reason the Rebels emphasize hyper-capable ships seems to be that they have a far more limited capacity for building capital ships to serve as carriers, whereas the Empire can build all the star destroyers they want. The movies show X-Wings and TIEs as being fairly evenly matched (indeed, even Y-Wings, when allowed to move freely, do pretty well for themselves).
In the prequels, almost all of the starfighters were non-hyper ships. If they needed to go into hyperspace, they used a large clumsy apparatus that they’d dock with to get to where they were going. The few hyper-capable ships we see are rather large clumsy beasts. It would seem that in the intervening years, technology improved for miniaturizing hyperdrives, but most sources that comment on it suggest that the TIEs still tend to be faster and more agile in realspace than their hyper-capable opponents, if only because they have less deadweight to haul around (Hyperdrive is nice, but it’s just one more heavy thing to carry with you in a dogfight)
The USS Reliant, as commandeered by Kahn, mounts a broadside attack against the Enterprise. This was Kirk’s first indication that the Reliant was going to be a problem. The broadside crippled the Enterprise and it was Kirk and Spock’s use of the Reliant’s command codes that saved the day.
IIRC, the Reliant didn’t really use a broadside, since it was using forward-firing phasers aimed at an angle. The Enterprise fired a broadside at some point, however, using phaser banks mounted on the sides of the saucer.
