Text 11598, 101 rader
Skriven 2007-02-05 23:43:46 av Jeffrey MacHott (15037.babylon5)
  Kommentar till text 11571 av rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated (15010.babylon5)
Ärende: Re: Military tactics in sci-fi?
=======================================
Jeffrey Kaplan wrote:
> It is alleged that Jeffrey MacHott claimed:
> 
>>> 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 
> 
> You mean the ones that Sheridan&Co destroyed?  Possible, I guess.

Sure, remember that the last satellite was destroyed by EAS Apollo when 
Leftcourt jumped into the battlefield, so if he was getting tactical 
data from the satellites, including their final orders, he'd have been 
in a position to home in on the last one easily.

>> 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 
> 
> I was thinking more of the fleet actions.  IIRC, the Minbari fleet
> jumped into the middle of the EA forces at the Battle Of The Line
> without any prepositioned spotters.

You forget the scouting party that Alpha 7 (man, who voluntarily takes 
that callsign?) found near the Moon.

>> 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 
> 
> So far as I'm concerned, if you can communicate into realspace, you can
> scan into realspace.  Maybe not with pinpoint accuracy, but at least as
> an aid to navigation.

Probably fair enough.  IIRC, they communicate long distances by opening 
a small jump point and sending a signal through, and when they open a 
jump point for their own transit, their comms thus get blacked out.  I 
imagine you'd have similar problems for scanners, but nothing you 
couldn't work around if you pre-planned the jump.

>> 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.
> 
> Which the Centauri didn't know about until too late to do that.  The
> Centauri ship that Mollari sent was the first Centauri force that could
> be sent.

Hm, didn't recall any mention one way or the other.  Did the Centauri 
ship jump from the jump gate or a jump point?  I suppose if it was a 
jump point, they might have just opened one near the gate itself, 
expecting any loitering ships to be there watching the gate.


>>> 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 
> 
> We did see a Raptor carry a missile.  Boomer was to launch it into a
> Basestar landing bay, but the launcher failed.  Vipers do, or at least
> can, carry missiles and bombs.  We've seen them use missiles against
> Raiders from a longer range in the past, and Apollo used bombs against
> the Cylon Tylium mine.  The guns are simply their preferred weapon. :)

Ahh, so the Colonial warriors borrow pages from the Israeli Air Force. :*D

>> 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.
> 
> Basestars carry long range missiles, too.  We've seen them used
> +often+, especially in the miniseries and early seasons.  Yeah, they
> carry a frelling huge number of raiders, but then again... they don't
> need to also provide crewspace for them since the Raiders themselves
> are their own pilots.  So whereas the Galactica needs hanger space for
> the Vipers and crewspace for the pilots, the Cylons only need the
> hanger space.

True, and the Cylon raiders aren't exactly excessively effective against 
Battlestars without some combat modifier (such as the battlestar being 
disabled or unarmed).  The effect seems similar to a swarm of bees 
trying to attack a SWAT team member wearing urban combat armor and armed 
with a flamethrower.

-- 
--Jeffrey MacHott

"Sola bona lingua est mortua lingua"
--- SBBSecho 2.12-Win32
 * Origin: Time Warp of the Future BBS - Home of League 10 (1:14/400)