Something I noticed about ACtA

[Deimos Anomaly]

Haven't actually watched anything ST for quite a while, but I decided to pull out some video or dvd and whack it on... some of the war era DS9 stuff I always kinda liked. So I wound up watching among other things, A Call to Arms, where they have to abandon the station.

I noticed a somewhat silly scene when the Dominion attacks the station. A horde of ships zoom up to DS9, and it looks like they're all of about 5 or 6 miles away from it, the very next scene has Damar saying "weapons range in one minute". If you think about it, it doesn't really make sense. These space ships should be able to shoot from tens or even hundreds of thousands of miles away, but for some reason it looks like they have to be within a mile or two to open fire.

It kinda annoys me, it's the sort of thing that takes me out of the show a bit, thinking, "eh, that shouldn't be"... y'know?

Anyone else ever notice this?

 

[Michael]

Never really thought about it. And although I think your explanation is technically correct I doubt that dramatically and visually it would really look good when the ships (or stations for that matter) would shoot at each other from such a great distance. I guess as a filmmaker you would want the fighting ships to appear in one frame. So it really just is a compromise.

 

[Shieldsdown]

This is something that has been with us right from the begginning in the original series. The dialogue would go something like "range 4000 kilometres" or such, but the view, either onscreen or outside, would be more like old Sailing Ships getting in to cannon firing range of each other. I see this as necessary poetic licence by the makers in order to keep dramatic affect in a television series. Beyond Visual Range weapons firing would look a lot less exciting, also much more difficult to tell who is firing at who in a battle scene. So yes, a lot less realistic, but a dramatic licence to make the battle look more interesting to the average viewer.

Regards

 

[Smiley]

With ships, it makes some kind of sense. Beyond a certain range, weapons fire is pretty easy to avoid. "Weapons range" is shorthand for "effective weapons range."

For a space station, the concept is harder to justify. Just invent some kind of subspace dissipation factor, though, and it becomes reasonable again.