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Aircraft Carriers In Space
An anonymous reader writes "Real-world military conventions have had obvious effects on many sci-fi books, movies, and TV shows. But how does their fictional representation stack up against the evolving rules of high-tech warfare? In an interview with Foreign Policy magazine, a naval analyst discusses some of the technological assumptions involved in transposing sea combat to space combat, and his amusement with the trope of 'aircraft carriers in space.' He says, 'Star Wars is probably the worst. There is no explanation for why X-Wings [fighters] do what they do, other than the source material is really Zeroes [Japanese fighter planes] from World War II. Lucas quite consciously copied World War II fighter combat. He basically has said they analyzed World War II movies and gun camera footage and recreated those shots. Battlestar Galactica has other issues. One thing I have never understood is why the humans didn't lose halfway through the first episode. If information moves at the speed of light, and one side has a tactically useful FTL [faster-than-light] drive to make very small jumps, then there is no reason why the Cylons couldn't jump close enough and go, "Oh, there the Colonials are three light minutes away, I can see where they are, but they won't see me for three minutes?"'"
Can you imagine what those shows would have been like had they tried to apply science as we know it?
If you'd like a try, there is a series of books about "Black Jack" Geary that has FTL combat. It's actually quite a good read from a naval combat in space perspective with light speed weaponry + kinetic weaponry + trying to shoot at things that are moving up to 0.1c and what not. But, if you're not into that kind of thing it's got to be a horrid thing to read.
But they do address the few minutes away FTL issue, but it's because you can only enter/exit a system at certain points so unless you're going to turn around and leave you can't micro jump at them.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Three light minutes is a long way away, and the Cylons weren't infinitely advanced. They were only somewhat more advanced than the humans, who, aside from their jump drives, aren't much more advanced than us. Could you examine 360x180 degrees of sky for a kilometer long object at 54 million miles away within three minutes? I don't think so. Further, there is a reason they kept jumping away. They would make a few quick jumps and the Cylons would need a trillion times as much manpower to find them.
Of course, there are some violations of physics in B5 too: Shots make noise in space, and you can hear the engine noise of passing ships.
If you think of the sounds of things in space as being enhanced reality injected into your cabin environment by computers that are trying to map electronic sensors into something that human senses can cope with - then it starts to make some sense.
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Joe Haldeman's Forever War seemed good, too.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
To complete the bits you left out, and spoil the story for those who might read it... they decided to wage interstellar ECONOMIC war in combination with political manoeuvring and installed a Quisling government, BEFORE staging what looked like an interstellar war. Which was the point of the story. Once a target planet had an effective guerilla resistance (a.k.a. "insurgent" in modern double-talk), the invasion from a long way away couldn't maintain it's huge expenditure on men, materiel and transport and the invasion failed with an economic collapse in the home country.
Harrison was writing in what - the late 60s or so? So he can't have been referring to this generation's long-distance wars. Perhaps he was referring to some other long-distance war of the 1960s which ended in a damaging defeat for the aggressor nation in the face of a determined guerilla war.
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Not so obvious. It seems you implied the moment the heat was released from the engine it could be sensed instantly by remote craft. That is the biggest obstacle to space battles, the speed at which information travels.
IMO, it is often overlooked because in conventional battles light and sound is transmitting fast enough that information is only delayed by fractions of second, if that.
Additionally, one might be overlooking the amount of information. Take a fighter jet involved in a dog fight in Earth's atmosphere. It's onboard sensors only have to monitor a small area compared to space. Take a fighter jet orbiting Saturn. How much information does that fighter jet need to process to detect heat patterns around Mercury?
Having information of what happened 10 minutes ago is not all that tactically valuable for immediate offensive maneuvers. You would need to gather a lot of data and predict where that fighter would be in the future and coordinate your weapons to arrive on target.
Most weapons are not FTL either, not that it would matter. Firing instantly where they were is pointless unless you are operating under the believe they are stationary. Something that would seem to be suicidal in my book. Even with near light speed weapons like lasers, fusion beams, whatever, you still need to hit a target most likely in motion, and from predicted targeting data with lag time measured in minutes.
Space battles will truly be an example of where information is power. Strength will mostly likely be measured in stealth and information processing abilities, not firepower.