Proper Space Battles

[Arpy]

Trek's been terrible at depicting space battles. In what ways have you noticed their being wrong, or right? Nevermind budgetary concerns and tired apologetics. Forget space-fantasy -- this is a science-fiction question.

1. The positions of ships are usually way too close to one another.
2. Ships should maneuver differently in space than in water/atmosphere (no banking to turn).
3. Ships/armadas can appear to just sit there instead of dizzying the eye with constant future-y movement.
4. Weapons don't appear to be nearly as destructive as they should -- judging by the explosions and their effect on unshielded targets.
5. Explosions don't look like they should in outer space.
6. Different weapons techs of different aliens should appear/explode differently.
7. Weapons travel too slowly (phasers should at light speed and torpedoes at FTL).
8. Weapons miss too often or are not smart enough to retarget and try again.
9. Weapons don't fire often enough.
10. Weapons don't fire from enough weapons ports.
11. There should be far more varieties of ship present -- especially if they reuse ships from a century prior.
12. We should be seeing more exhaust from impulse engines and thrusters, especially during extreme combat situations.
13. We should see more distortion in atmosphere from wind, clouds, heat, and sonic boom.

Keep the list going...

 

[ALF]

Wow, I never thought it possible to nitpick all the problems with space battles in Trek. I'll bet if you edited together the best bits of all the space battles across all the series', you'd have one perfect space battle. Arpy, I think you're better off with Star Wars than Star Trek if this is truly what satisfies your sci-fi itch.

DS9 seemed to do space combat the best, although I actually think Enterprise did it most often. There is a ton of ship/ship combat in both. What was that joke I heard about all the best TNG battles happened off-screen?

Here's one for the list:

14. Space battles should unfold in complete silence to reflect the lack of sound in space.

 

[Ithekro]

Star Trek is not exactly a war type show most of the time. It usually avoids it as part of the social commentary.

You want space battles with more impact, likely candidate is Space Battleship Yamato 2199 and Yamato 2202, if you don't mind it being in Japanese and animated.

 

[wayoung]

Every element of combat in Trek is ridiculous when you try to apply logic to them, from Kirk-fu to people dodging phaser fire to ship to ship combat to Interstellar war. None of it makes a lick of sense, and it breaks its own rules series to series, episode to episode, moment to moment.

It would be cool to see a series try and make it realistic but I think that would result in something visually uninteresting as I can't see it being much more than ftl capable missiles (no warhead even needed) being lobbed across star systems at each other.

 

[Arpy]

Wow, I never thought it possible to nitpick all the problems with space battles in Trek. I'll bet if you edited together the best bits of all the space battles across all the series', you'd have one perfect space battle. Arpy, I think you're better off with Star Wars than Star Trek if this is truly what satisfies your sci-fi itch.

You have no idea "what satisfies my sci-fi itch," bill. The attitude is not appreciated.

DS9 seemed to do space combat the best...

DS9 is possibly Trek's worst offender in this specific area.

What was that joke I heard about all the best TNG battles happened off-screen?

What was that saying about it being better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt?

14. Space battles should unfold in complete silence to reflect the lack of sound in space.

Good one. Maybe they only used sound in atmosphere, or within ships, and let background music do the rest.

It would be cool to see a series try and make it realistic but I think that would result in something visually uninteresting as I can't see it being much more than ftl capable missiles (no warhead even needed) being lobbed across star systems at each other.

Didn't the Centauri use illegal mass drivers against the Narn homeworld in the final battle on Babylon 5? Trek could have addressed why this was or wasn't an issue in its universe. Maybe planetary defenses grew sophisticated enough to deal with such projectiles in the more advanced civilizations, yet they were still a concern for less advanced ones that say also used cryogenics to travel long distances?

Another good question is why slingshot-around-a-sun time-travel wasn't used all the time by baddies. The Reeves-Stevenses suggested an in-universe physics reason in their DS9 Millennium Trilogy, but I can't remember the details atm.

 

[somebuddyX]

15. They should use the transporter to rip apart enemy ships or beam explosives onboard or beam the enemy crew into the cruel darkness of space except transporters don't exist so they should probably not use transporters.

 

[Tenacity]

but I think that would result in something visually uninteresting

Long on dialog, short on special effects. More along the lines of the battle in Journey to Babel, than Sacrifice of Angels.

Kirk's kill shot in Journey to Babel was from over forty-six thousand miles.

 

[Stoo]

It's kind of ridiculous how close ranged battles are. But Trek is not hard scifi. Wrath of Khan was 18th century naval combat in spaaaace and later Trek never moved far from that.

 

[Scotchy]

There have been times where Trek has come up with a decent space battle.
I liked Yesterday's Enterprise. The final confrontation with the Klingons actually shows the Enterprise's phasers burning through the Klingon shield, striking the hull, burning through that and blowing up the ship. A lot of detail for a sequence that lasted maybe 30 seconds.
Best of Both Worlds had the Enterprise fire from multiple weapon ports. They even fought when the ship was split in two. The Borg slicing into the hull was good as well.
Conundrum did a good job of showing how the Enterprise could handle multi-targeting.

That being said, I do enjoy more dynamic space battles that are depicted on shows like Babylon 5. I also think the space battle aspect is one area JJ improved in the new Trek films. JJ's got debris fields, explosive decompressions, and rapid maneuvering.
Let's be honest, though, showing space battles costs money and most of the time the network cheaped out. That's the real reason a lot of those conflicts happened off screen.

 

[wayoung]

I prefer the naval style to the fighter style. I think it makes more sense considering the distances involved and the weaponry used, along with the types of vessels we see engaged in combat. The combat is more tense, more engrossing, less cluttered, easier to follow.

 

[C.E. Evans]

I think the "close range" distances we see in space battles is more a result of the screen limitations of TV with dramatic license very close behind. "In-universe," those ships are probably many hundreds or thousands of kilometers apart, but since no one has a TV or movie screen that big, the alternative is to eliminate showing ships actually engaging one other, and just show what happens on their bridges. That can definitely be done, but the question is would that work with most audiences today?

As far as ships banking like they do in either water or space, an argument could be made that such wide maneuvers are necessary not only to avoid enemy salvos, but also because inertia dampers can't handle stop-on-a-dime turns (entire crews could wind up passing out or having broken bones, even with seat belts).

IMO, a proper space battle would only involve small, unmanned craft probably not much bigger than a military drone.

 

[1001001]

What was that saying about it being better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt?

No reason to make personal comments.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

Trek's goal is not to make realistic space battles, Trek's goal is to make battles that entertain and be comprehensible to people who don't share your knowledge of physics.

I agree it'd be cooler to have ships flying at different orientations and things like that to make them a little more realistic, but a realistic high tech space battle you wouldn't be able to see, would last under a second and probably wouldn't involve any manned ships. One thousandth of Trek's audience would think that was good TV.

 

[The Grim Ghost]

I'd like to see a greater variety of weapons. Maybe some ECM type stuff going on as well.

 

[Shawnster]

Different weapons techs of different aliens should appear/explode differently.

Why should they look different? Physics is physics. Explosions on Earth all look the same. They all take a mushroom cloud shape of some sort. The differences are only due to the type of weaponry. Alien tech still follows universal laws of physics.

 

[Forbin]

Why should they look different? Physics is physics. Explosions on Earth all look the same. They all take a mushroom cloud shape of some sort. The differences are only due to the type of weaponry. Alien tech still follows universal laws of physics.

But aliens my have a different type of weaponry.
Different volatiles, maybe; different fissionable materials; black hole bombs; laser warheads... things that would make different colored explosions, flameless explosions, black holes, explosions that shoot out destructive beams in a lovely flower pattern...

 

[Forbin]

I'd like to see a greater variety of weapons. Maybe some ECM type stuff going on as well.

Being actually in the ECM business, I often laugh at the primitive state of Trek combat tech.

 

[Ithekro]

Explosions was one thing they did think of from time to time in Babylon 5. The color of the explosion might change depending on which races' ship was exploding due to their preferred environment. Species that did not breath oxygen would have a different flame/glow than the Earth ships when they explode.

 

[Tracy Trek]

I don't know what others thought of it. But I thought Voyager pulled off a pretty good move getting away from the Borg ship while rescuing Icheb in Child's Play. That was computer animation instead of models wasn't it?

 

[Kevin Thomas Riley]

15. An inexplicable lack of point defence weapons and counter-measures.