Text 11550, 105 rader
Skriven 2007-02-05 03:40:24 av Jeffrey MacHott (14989.babylon5)
  Kommentar till text 11546 av rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated (14985.babylon5)
Ärende: Re: Military tactics in sci-fi?
=======================================
Jeffrey Kaplan wrote:
> It is alleged that Jeffrey MacHott claimed:
> 
>> One that came up quite a bit on B5 was the Jump-and-Hit attacks, where a 
>> warship would come out of hyperspace and immediately open fire on a 
>> target (this of course only worked if they had prior knowledge of where 
>> the target would be before they exited hyperspace, but it could be 
>> managed in a number of ways, including having a spotter already in 
>> realspace sending target info back into hyperspace.  Notable examples 
>> included the Centauri hit on G'Kar's ship in In The Beginning, and the 
>> G'Tok launching a similar attack on a Shadow Battlecrab, defeating 
>> superior technology with surprise and raw overwhelming firepower.
> 
> Well, in B5, they apparently can scan from hyperspace to realspace as
> needed.  There have been at least two distinct times when this is
> obvious.  First, in "Walkabout" when G'Kar finally shows up with a
> mini-fleet to help Sheridan in his test against a Shadow Battlecrab,
> and again in "Endgame" when Lefcourt specifically says "We've been
> monitoring the situation"... when he was in hyperspace.
> 
> In both cases, it would require the ability to scan the realspace area
> in order to target your jump in to be in position to come out firing at
> the right place.
> 
> It's also strongly implied in "In The Beginning" when reference is made
> to the Minbari's superior navigation abilities to come out of
> hyperspace where they can do the most damage.

Well, in all of the cases, it's entirely possible for the force in 
hyperspace to have some kind of spotter on the other side signaling 
them.  In the case of Leftcourt, it could easily be the G.O.D. 
satellites themselves that he was getting the information from, for the 
Black Star, they outright stated that the Minbari flyer was acting as a 
spotter, signaling when Lexington's squadron was in the kill zone.  The 
only really problematic one was G'Kar's fleet, since we didn't see any 
indication that the White Star was knowingly sending tactical info to 
anyone else.

We've seen ships able to communicate from hyperspace to real space and 
back, but we've not seen them use sensors that way, though in the case 
of In The Beginning, the Centauri surprise attack couldn't easily work 
unless they COULD scan from hyperspace, unless we assume they had set up 
a covert listening post on the planet before Sheridan arrived.

>> And of course, the style of combat on B5, with opposing forces often 
>> jumping out of hyperspace in close proximity to eachother, makes a 
>> dedicated space carrier highly vulnerable, while a dedicated cruiser, 
>> having no capability to launch it's own fighters, finds itself at a 
>> disadvantage as swarms of enemy fighters attack it's weapons placements 
>> while it's distracted with fighting the enemy warships.  Thus, we have 
>> heavily armed warships with expansive hangar bays, such as the Omega 
>> Destroyer and Narn Starcruiser.
> 
> For single ship combats, yes.  But if you fight as a fleet, then you
> can use single-purpose ships as we do now in the modern wet-navy.  The
> US Navy is, I believe, currently built around the carrier.  The carrier
> has the bulk of the aircraft, certainly all of the fixed-wing aircraft,
> and moves with the cruisers, battleships, and their several and various
> escort vessels.

Minor nitpick, the CVN's in the US Navy don't operate all of the Navy's 
fixed wing aircraft.  Larger planes like the C-40 Clipper, C-130 
Hercules, and the P-3 Orion are all land-based, along with various other 
non-combat planes such as trainers and aggressors (For a while, the Navy 
and Marines even operated three squadrons of stripped-down F-16Ns 
specifically for aggressor training, rigging them for maximum speed and 
agility without any of those drag-inducing weapons or hardpoints.)

> Strategically, it makes more sense to do it that way.  The group as a
> whole would be prepared for essentially any type of mission needed
> whereas a single JOAT vessel will always be deficient in something.
> That the Omegas in B5 were never shown to be would be due to the fact
> that everyone else was using the same behavior model.

Of course, the USS Enterprise has a negligible chance of having the 
Kirov appear 5 miles away and lobbing missiles at her without warning, 
so she need not have any particular anti-ship ability beyond her air 
wing.  Submarines, being more akin to cloaked warships like the Klingon 
Birds of Prey, are a different matter, but unlike StarFleet, the US Navy 
also has cloaking devices (well, submarines anyhow).

> The same can be said too about the Battlestars in BSG, though since
> those ships are just so fracking huge, they can carry internally a
> wider assortment of specialized troops, smaller ships, and other
> equipment (forex, we've actually seen them dock other ships in their
> refugee fleet inside the hanger pod - Colonial One is small only in
> comparison).

Heh, the BattleStars are just kinda fun to figure out.  In their case, 
the fighter wing seems to exist purely for defense and recon, having 
limited strike capability itself (although it WOULD be kinda cool to see 
a Raptor or a Viper carrying a torpedo or something), with the 
BattleStar's own armament providing the primary butt-whupping 
capability.  The Base Stars, meanwhile, seem to derive most of their 
offensive power from their fighter wing, carrying massive numbers of 
Raiders.  Deprived of their fighter wing, a Cylon Basestar gets beaten 
to a pulp by a Battlestar similarly devoid of fighter protection, as we 
see in later seasons of BSG.

-- 
--Jeffrey MacHott

"Sola bona lingua est mortua lingua"
--- SBBSecho 2.12-Win32
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