Slashdot Mirror
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?"'"
Star Wars was a cheesy low-budget 1970s movie, not a documentary. Can't you nerds tell the difference? All this slobbering over a dumb old movie and dressing up in plastic costumes 35 years later is really pathetic.
No, the lack of plot that makes me care about anything going in is what made is suck so much.
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...
The point being made is that on a warship, star-ship or cruise ship, the officers and crew have a lot of duties other than watchstanding
Oh yeah? How many starships have you been on? My whole point is that we're talking about Roddenberry's future, not the mundane present. On Human-crewed starships (or for that matter, Vulcan-crewed, etc etc) most of the work has been automated away, and humans have time to pursue goals other than ship maintenance. Since energy is plentiful, they can have excess mass, and thus they can have excess crew so that everyone has lots of free time to read Shakespeare and practice the violin.
Finally, I said "lives not centered around service" and you read "a life". Why don't you work on that? If I sound condescending, it's because when your knee jerks so hard that your reading comprehension suffers, it's usually a sign that you're not operating at the highest level.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"