You could add in two extra rules there: 1) Space battles serve the story. Something must occur with relevance to the main plot and characters. By the end of the battle, something must have changed. 2) A space battle IS a story in itself. It has a defined beginning, middle and end. The ships themselves are characters within that story.
When I once said that an object can be seen as a character in a story, everybody looked at me as if escaped from somewhere where people with white coats rules but that is what you get from a place where movies usually don't have characters, just people who talk a lot in a very slow and pretentious way.
The problem witrh most scifi is that we completly forget that Space is huge. We always put ships close together even if they can fire from very far away. Especially when Projectile weapons like torpedos have a theoretical unlimited Range. I think there is no reason why there cant be interresting Storys written with this premise/Idea
Spacedock: ...The Hunt for Red October, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World and The Wrath of Khan. Me: Yes! Spacedock ...almost 20 years since the Battle of New Caprica... Me: Stop making me feel old!
When you use fighters make sure that you show the people inside of them and that a HUMAN dies when one of those blows up. Star wars did it good when the x wings pilots are shown to scream when ever one was shot down
@@rfletch62 That's a good point. Wanna establish tension? Have a named character take a bad hit and lose the radio. Are they lost? Downed but alive? Mostly alright but incommunicado? if they're fine, how to they return if they can't contact flight control? Did they lose IFF and are at risk of friendly fire from the defensive batteries?
@@Halinspark The pilot of BSG (2003) did that well; when the first wave of Galactica's shiny new Mark VIIs are heading towards the (two) Cylon Raiders, and then get hit with the virus; Captain Anders sees his systems go down, and starts telling his XO to take over... but only hears silence until he looks over and see the entire squadron just got turned off. Not to mention, how the Raptor crew (monitoring the flight group) lost comms with them as well. (Actually, they used losing the Radio and Transponder later in Season 1 as well...)
@@SuperGman117 oh yeah! The opening to episode 3 was one of the best space battle I have ever watched. From the two jedi fighter flying around playfully and carefree, and flip! Omg there is a huge battle going on, the clone troopers dying and floating around in space was pretty sad. And it showed Anakins good side, caring about his fellow soldiers
"Tension is better than action." A perfect example of this is when the Galactica faces off against the Pegasus. Not a single shot gets fired yet it was one of the best examples of tension BSG had to offer.
@@NanoBurger Dude, the drums are the best part of it, they set the tempo, they're always clear to hear and distinguish when playing, and they just sound frakking good
Watching Galactica take damage over the seasons was such an amazing payoff. during the final battle you see all the scars, wounds and damage, you hear the ship creaking and breaking as it rams the cylon colony, you see the hull smashing through and breaking to bits . They really made it feel like it was an old boat on it's last suicide mission. I'm surprised you didn't mention that scene tbh.
I love how tough of a ship the story made the Galactica to be, it really felt like an old WWII battleship. No advance tech, just thick ass armor and a hearty frame built to take a pounding, especially after it's found that corners were cut on its construction, so it wasn't even as tough a ship as it was designed to be, and still made it through everything they put it through, including the rescue from New Caprica.
Binge watched the series over the past several months after seeing this very video recommend it. The consistent shots of Galactica's battle damaged hull post-New Caprica were a constant reminder of the fleet's desperate situation: that she was breaking, that humanity had nothing to fix her with, and that her days were truly numbered. The final jump, and Tigh saying she'd broken her back and never jump again, broke my heart. Galactica truly was a character in and of herself.
@@AmandaFessler Funny that one of the major themes of the whole series is about humans loving machines. How many people get yelled at for doing such a thing? Yet EVERYONE loves that ship. I think about that sometimes - loving machines is actually something everyone already seems to do. It's loving people that seems so hard these days.
I don't mind shields. I like there being a self-regenerating buffer so that if you don't make too many mistakes, there's no permanent physical damage. It creates a nice... layering of stakes - while the shields are getting it, that's not ideal, but fine. As soon as hull starts getting it, we know we have problems. Psychologically it's the difference between a bent bumper on a car (even though that doesn't self-regenerate) and any other more damage.
Yeah, without shields its just too innefective. Try writing a whole galactic war where each side has to repair for weeks/months constantly after each and every battle. On screen writing as if it was a Total War game that'd be kind of wierd. Following a single ship for a season Star Trek style could take in-universe quite literally years. Not to mention what's up when they would stuck behind enemy lines, or backwards territory. Which happens quite often with protagonists.
@@Grivehn exactly. it kinda works for a show like the expanse because of how relatively small, tactical and far between the engagements are, and it worked for bsg because of the insanely effective pdc cannons or what was it, and the insanely THICCCCCC armor, literally a bunker, but for any other case, if you want prolonged engagements (ship to ship or empire to empire) you do need some kind of shields, or self-repairing armor, otherwise your only option is to make it into a dodge-fest which... is awesome, but gets old fast...
@@MidnightSt Yeah. In both shows you mentioned, they need to handle having no shields. BSG's entire trope is keeping that one ship going with constant maintenance in space. And in Expanse, they also spend weeks and months repairing - Season 5's entire plot where they split up happened because the Roci needed repair. So yes, on a small scale - and being in a technological decline like BSG, or early space tech like Expanse, it can work well and both those shows managed to do it.
They need consistency in application, though. Not just arbitrary number changes. I think they work best when they protect against light hits and certain weapons, but big hits are merely dampened once or twice before you lose that buffer. Now you don't have to worry about strafing runs, but that attack craft could be an issue and maybe let's not park alongside their capitol ship and exchange protracted broadsides, please. And regeneration of shields is optional, but must be consistent.
@@Halinspark Agreed. When shields are just '80%, 10% etc. thats kind of lazy. I think Star Wars had them work fairly well in some EU material. Basically its what you say - it protects to a point, and not really against a similar enemy. A good example is the Venator-class ship vs. Grievous' Invisible Hand in Ep3. They go toe to toe next to each other and both ships suffer heavy damage, despite having shields.
That moment when Galactica is all but defeated, the crew have given up, nothing works, sustained fire coming in. Camera pans away, the music playing, it's all over. Out of nowhere, KEWs firing and cycling, Pegasus charges in to view unleashing hell. That moment is the epitome of doing sci-fi space engagements right. That scene will stay in my mind for the rest of my life. Severed Dreams from B5 is probably second favourite, though at the time I was too young to understand the complexities of the fight itself there is one stand out moment for me, the Minbari arrive and Delenn lays down perhaps the most impactful line of dialogue in the show so far: "Only one human captain has ever survived battle with a Minbari Fleet. He is behind me. You are in front of me. If you value your lives, be somewhere else!"
Yeah, I have a love-hate relationship with Battlestar Galactica because it raped the original and the proportions of the ships are completely messed up, but that space battle was really done well!
That battle where they sacrifice Pegasus to save Galactica? It's ridiculous to me - they should have transferred to Pegasus and make it the flagship, because it was more modern and capable than Galactica. Then this ploy would be logical, if places of Galactica and Pegasus were reversed.
IMO the B5 civil war was full of amazing battles. Liberation of Proxima III was a giant sci-fi boner from the first to the last minute. And the final battle of the civil war while maybe not as good of a combat sequence than the aforementioned BSG one had great personal moments
Actually I'd submit that one of the best and most tense space battles is one that's never fought - the standoff between Galactica and Pegasus at the cliffhanger between "Pegasus" and "Resurrection Ship" in RDM Season 2 is superbly tense and the viewer is invested in both combatants even though Cain is the obvious antagonist. The fact that a shot isn't fired doesn't actually matter - the tension and the decision-making around the chart tables, with the camera rotating around both while both ships' fighters rotate around each other in the standoff, with those fantastic drums - is one of the series' crowning moments of awesome.
"Starbuck to all vipers do not fire. Repeat, do not fire! I'm a friendly. We're all friendlies! So, let's just be friendly!" Her voice acting in that scene was stellar.
Just imagine what it would've been like for the occupants of the civilian ships watching your two battlestars launch vipers and point their cannons at each other without any context or explanation.
I'll see you on the Galactica/Pegasus standoff, and raise you the battle in BSG "The Final Cut". Where you never even see the battle. The entire conflict is viewed from inside Galactica's CIC and all you see are DRADIS screens and listen to the Viper pilots radio comms while the crew stand tense at their stations watching and listening.
"Less is always more" is why Rogue One has the best space battle of Disney's movies, by far. Also your point about establishing the ships, the stakes, long shots etc, was done fantastically in Rebels, especially during thr battle of Atollon
Im confused, you say Rogue One has the "best" space battle from the Disney movies, i believe the word you were looking for is "only". Totally agree on the battle of Atollon though.
MWBalls, But almost every disney era star wars movie has had a battle in space. A space battle. Episode 8 was technically a space battle even if nothing exciting ever happened, and 9s was technically in atmosphere because bs plot reasons but surely it still counts?
Rebels did an amazing job establishing stakes. Every time a rebel ship blew up, it felt like a real loss because I knew how few ships they had, and had often seen the work that went into getting that specific ship in the first place. Unfortunately, you're taken out of the battles in rebels by how arbitrary ship strengths and capabilities seem to be. I was especially bothered whenever there were ships, usually CR-90s, that had numerous visible weapons and are known in-universe to be well armed, inexplicably failing to fire back at attackers and being treated by characters as though they were helpless. If they wanted a helpless transport for the heroes to have to escort, they should've used a GR-75.
I wonder what he thinks about the battle of Coruscant from revenge of the sith. I always liked that battle, the cgi looks amazing, even today. Especially compared to attack of the clones
"Less is always more." Yes yes yes. As writers ourselves this video was very fun to watch. People are more interesting than ships in a story, and tension is better than lasers.
I disagree, I find a good ship a lot more interesting than its entire crew. But just like racing games, animes and movies, whoever writes good racing and mechanics usually has no clue how to build characters. And worst off for me, whoever builds good, relatable, consistent characters tend to think tire grip levels are powered by believing in yourself xD Ballancing both social and technological matters is what makes The Expanse possibly the greatest space show ever in my opinio, as well as makes Initial D a great racing anime in its first production cycle with real car footage overlaid by digital painting when some precise technique was on display
I feel like the Donnager Battle is an advanced example where some of these rules are broken, but they're broken by people who understand the rules. I didn't always know what was going on, but that was *on purpose*, because the main characters you follow don't know what's going on either. What do those stealth ships actually look like? What do those bright flashes actually mean? However, the tension and stakes are made VERY clear with That One Famous Railgun Shot, You Know which One I'm Talking About. The Donnager Battle and the Battle of Thoth Station are seared into my mind. In fact, pretty much every space battle in The Expanse is incredibly tense, especially after that moment with the PDC shots in the Thoth Station battle. (This has worn off with time since I know the Main Characters probably won't die, but it's still pretty neat.) The Expanse made space scary. Something that I really liked about Babylon 5 battles was who space fights were in sync with the music. Just a fun little side note, there.
There's this Mecha Anime from the early 90s called "Patlabor". In the second movie there's this scene where the good guys (Japanese Air Force) have to intercept the bad guys (which we don't who they are at that point), and the whole tension of the scene is shown through Tokyo landscapes, radar lectures, cockpit shots of the fighters and the planes peacefully soaring through the clouds. You as a viewer have NO IDEA what's happening, because nobody in neither air nor ground has any clue, other than the radar signals. But music, animation, radar shot and face expression is everything you need to know.
And not to mention, in one particular episode of season 5, even watching the battle from the part of the two cleaners, they could still see and recognise who was who in death. Red explosions for the Star Fury's, green for the aliens, as explained by Delenn. Giving people context can be the difference between average and outstanding.
The Donnager battle didn't break many rules. There were only 2 problems - fast jerky 1 second lasting cuts and the fact that there weren't many exterior shots throughout the battle, probably due to low budget. THE BEST things about the Donnager battle were the build up, the mystery surrounding the enemy, the anticipation before things got hot and the twist - the Martians underestimated the enemy because they didn't believe that tiny gunships posed a threat to their battleship.
@@bobmartin9918 Seasons 4 and 5 will certainly be interesting. At first, i had a problem getting through them, but looking back at it, they are excellent.
At one point in my life, I considered The Hunt For Red October to be my favorite movie. I've only seen Master & Commander once, though I've listened to the soundtrack countless times.
@@derekkonigsberg2047 They're not just amazing movies, but they almost represent a progression of battles. Master and Commander: 2D xy-axis naval battles. Hunt for Red October: partial 3D xy(negative z)-axis naval battles. Star Trek II The Wrath of Khan: full 3D xyz-axis naval battle (with a direct reference to using the z-axis!)
4 года назад+8
Master & Commander was criminally under-rated. Would have loved to have seen more of O'Brian's series adapted.
Great Video! Now,I'd like to add a couple points to this myself: 1.Strategy. Most space battles just consist of the two sides approaching each other from opposite directions and blasting everything they have at each other,even though in real battles,strategy wins the day. 2. Think in three Dimensions! Spaceships,unlike regular warships,can move in any direction,so they should try to use this to their advantage.
You actually got me thinking of another genre of ship to ship battles that don't nearly get enough attention when it comes to strategies and tactics. Airship battles. (Steampunk/dieselpunk) I'd assume it would be similar to spaceship tactics but you would have to deal with the range and curvature of your shots, weather, clouds, altitude, drag, etc...
Id look into a lot of the behind the scenes info of the Star Wars Imperial Naval tactics, notably Thrawns tactics, and how he used his ships. Surprising to see any strategy used in Star Wars but its there.
this is why the battle of the tilium asteroid in BSG's "Hand of God" is excellent! We know that the Colonials are Horribly outnumbered. So they use out of the box strategy to win. And, from a narrative perspective, we the viewer get to watch the plan unfold without needing to be spoon fed the steps.
I actually liked the take ender took from the book Enders Game. It isn't just up and down but can be from any direction, North, South, East, West. It also sometimes bugs me when ships have cannons or lasers on top of the ship and other ships never seem to approach from the bottom of the defenseless ship.
Nah not even that, they'd just let that portion of the hull depressurize. Its far easier to just close the bulkheads and let the 150,000 crewmen in there die. Its only 2% of the crew anyways.
They wouldn't waste Guardsmen, mostly because unless it's a transport it won't have guardsmen in it, and because there's plenty of meat on the shit already, whether or not it's filled with Guardsmen.
“Captain! The Gellar Field is compromised!” “Tom? Didn’t you die like…. Three years ago?” *Captain smiles as “Tom” starts morphing into a daemonette of Slaanesh
"Tension is better than action" hoo boy if more studios would take this to heart. I don't care if it's sci fi, horror, action, or thriller, Hitchcock was right: there is no terror in an explosion, only the anticipation of one.
Ledgend of the galactic heroes gets away with ridiculously huge battles by following this with zeal. The opening battle of the series has like 50,000 capital ships in it. In that universe Fleets are the main component a fleet is damaged by losing ships.
@@scottgiles7546 If I remember right, they had to reduce the number of shots with the shark because the animatronic model was so terrible. This actually made the movie better for the reason you mentioned.
Hands down my favourite Space Battle on screen of all time is the Battle of the Supergate in Stargate SG-1, when the Ori send their first ships into the Milky Way. You know all the ships, you get tons of interior shots, and close ups of fighters, and they even then show how futile have the fighters even is. The whole thing is super tense and dramatic, because the Ori ships are basically ultra-destructive powerhouses, and ships you have been seeing for so long as really damn powerful just end up getting shredded to these, and it just leaves you with a sense of dread by the end of it. Additionally, the space battle above Asuras in Stargate Atlantis was fantastic, as there was real stakes, the space battle wasn't even the main mission, and you saw how badly it affected everything. Stargate was great when it came to Space battles, tbh.
Totally agree, stargate space battles are what made me love space combat as much as I do now. Also having Sam watch all the destruction at the super gate in just a eva suit and being completely helpless but to just watch her friends and allies get obliterated by the ori was just insane to me
Space battles in Stargate Universe had even more tension. Only one Destiny against enemies. We know this ship and we care about characters. Battle scenes were brilliant.
DCO: "We've lost hull plating!!" Cpt: "That is an inadequate and overly vague damage report - what compartments have lost how much plating, and what's the estimated time for emergency repairs?" Vs. DCO: "Sir, we've lost external armor on compartments 15 to 35 on deck 13, Complete loss of hull plating on compartment 10-forward, 15% loss of atmosphere" Cpt: "Thank you, DCO, Tactical officer - focus your fire, I want that vessel cored before it can hit us like that again"
Detailed damage is best damage. I don't want to hear: "Sir, we've lost weapons!", I want to hear: "Sir, B turret has been hit and reports a fire!" "Seal it off before it reaches the magazine!"
@@pomeranianproductions647 Damage Control Officer, navy slang for emergency repair persons (second hand information, so any navy guys feel free to correct me)
@@pomeranianproductions647 That's hard to pull off on screen - it turns out people want to see interactions between people in our entertainment instead of watching lights blink and speakers squeal at each other. I suppose you could pull off a Lt. Data or Rommy if you write it well. But if you have AI for DCO, why does the ship have any of us meatbags on it at all?
This reminds me of the Lost Fleet (novel) series by jack campbell, which I personally enjoyed despite some flaws. The narrative follows a fleet stuck in enemy territory, which makes each lost ship a noteworthy event, but what I found more interesting was that almost all battles are made up of flotillas flying past each other at significant fractions of light speed (ftl limited to "jump points" which are in fixed locations per solar system) while computers take care of the almost-instantaneous aiming/firing. ftl is restrained to specific locations ("jump points"), and it ends up making the battles mostly about the commander's decisions in how/when/where to engage, in what formation of their 3 or 4 main different ship types, etc. It might not translate well to a visual medium, but it achieves the goals of keeping most of the focus on the decisions/tension and not the fireworks, and making each set of fireworks noteworthy (did a ship get it's engines shot and need to be defended by the rest of the flotilla lest it get picked off? did a hole get ripped in one corner of the formation, necessitating a re-organization and a plan to not get shredded again? is it better to take a higher risk of losses in order to completely kill an enemy formation before it can reach it's allies? etc). the rest of it is basically space opera with characters throughout the fleet but I love the battles.
It's a very good series (Romantic subplots aside) I always thought of the fleet combat sort of being like medieval knights riding at each other with lances
@@Duchess_Van_Hoof Nothing is wrong about the romance in TLF in my opinion. You might call it cookie cutter, and you can see it coming from ten thousand miles away, but neither characters are cardboard cutouts. What's interesting is how the concerned parties must work around the problem of romance in a military setting. Campbell, a retired LCDR in the USN, knows exactly how stuff is done.
I would say the Battle of Yavin in Star Wars: Episode IV is actually a great space battle from a storytelling point of view. I had watched a video put out by a Star Wars fan (who happened to cosplay in different uniforms from the original trilogy), and in the video, he commented that the Rebel Alliance sending two different types of fighters to attack the Death Star made no sense, since the X-Wings are fast, and the Y-Wings are slow (of course, years later Rogue One would fix this, by having one of the Rebel Alliance's X-Wing squadrons decimated by the Empire over Scariff , but I digress). He thought it would make more sense for the Rebels to send only X-Wings and not bother with the Y-Wings. The problem is, he was coming at it from a real-world logical decision, and not from the needs of storytelling. Of course you'd send your fastest, most manoeuvrable fighters. But what he missed is that by having two models of Rebel Alliance fighters, we have a good idea of who is where, during the battle. We know Luke is flying an X-Wing, and by seeing and hearing them call in, we know Luke is in Red 5. These two pieces of informative inform us where Luke is during the battle. We know he can't be in the first Trench Run, as that's made by Y-Wings. We know he's not one of the X-Wings in the second Trench Run, as the film cuts between the various pilots. Finally, when the other X-Wings are destroyed, from the dialogue and edits, we know Luke is one of the surviving X-Wings, and that he takes the lead during his Trench Run. Meanwhile, because Vader is obviously an important character, and that he leads a flight of TIE Fighters, we can guess he's in the visually distinct TIE. It's not important to know where the rest of the TIE Fighters are - we just need to know where Vader is. Then it's just a case of building the tension, with the Death Star coming into range, Rebel pilots being shot down, etc. That way, we get a real a sense of whare at stake and how close they are to all being killed. We're also shown that the Rebels are individuals, whereas the Empire are a faceless bureaucracy. It's a really good sequence from that point of view.
Exactly, that battle originally had rebel cr-90s and other ships engaging in a ship to ship battle with the DS escorts, while the fighters moved in, but they didn't end up showing that, because it wasn't nessesary for the story.
The Death Star attack was mostly (almost entirely) a reshoot of The Dambusters - even the dialogue was copied word for word. Lucas added reshot scenes of “The Battle of Britain” and “Reach For The Skies” for the dogfighting. It does work very well because of the cuts to the crew and back to the exterior shots, which is something those WWII films did.
Y-Wings kinda make sense since they are bombers, if they could fire their torpedoes downward, like in rogue squadron or the original battlefront II, but if they can't do that then yeah Y-Wings aren't the best idea. I would assume though since they were bombers, they would be better equipped to take the shot.
It's also a great indication of just how desperate these rebels are and how much of a David and Goliath setup there is for this battle. The Rebels probably sent every fighter they had that could technically accomplish the mission: all two squadrons of them. They didn't have the luxury of being picky like that and sending up uniform squadrons. Also, the mix-and-match nature of the Rebel attack highlights the uniformity of the Imperial defense. They can scramble wave after wave of identical TIE Fighters (the one exception being Vader's unique TIE Fighter) to the Rebels' tiny complement of beaten-up fighters with exposed wiring, missing hull panels, and carbon scoring. An endless, faceless, identical legion versus a tiny band of plucky, undersupplied indivividuals fighting for freedom is as classic as storytelling gets.
@@EliWintercross that actually makes sense story wise, i was bothered by the fact that nothing is guarding the Death Star, if it was so important, they could have a small fleet as its escort since the Empire is hiding the DS from the public
Probably refers to either the structural integrity fields being on the verge of collapse, or something like metal fatique or internal support structures failing. Would be much better if they made that clear though.
@@CallanElliott "We have taken approximately 62% of the hits we can take and still survive." Seems plausible, yes. I agree. Matches well with what I said, though, I think? Doesn't seem mutually exclusive at least.
It also helps to know the purpose of the scene you're putting together. A great example of "just way too many ships all smashing together in total chaos" actually working very well was in Serenity, with the Reavers vs the Alliance, with our heroes fighting tooth and nail just to get out of the middle of it, but that's because the scene was *meant* to be utter chaos. Not every space battle should play out like that, but it works if either one or both sides are caught in complete disarray.
They don't say it plainly, but they mean that showing such a chaotic battle well is extremely difficult. As for Serenity, we didn't really care about those ships. The point was that they had to get past the Alliance's blockade. Though the battle has been used wonderfully what a tiny speck the Serenity actually is and how crazy the Reavers are. The Serenity barely makes it through the battle and one Reaver followed her through this. I took my lesson from Alfred Hitchcock. Watch his trailer for Psycho. He practically breaks all the usual rules for a movie trailer and still succeeded. And that's something about art many don't grasp. Rules are good, rules give you a solid framework and you should stick to the rules. But, you can break each and every rule if you know and understand how to break them.
To be fair, in that one, the chaos was sort of the point. The battle was meant to be a distraction and Our Heroes were mostly just trying to survive it long enough to get to the surface, not actually fight in it in any meaningful way.....
@@corwinweber693 Yeah, that was the point I was trying to make. You can pull a lot of different moods out of a space battle, use it to convey a lot of different narrative ideas... but unless absolute chaos is the point (which it *was* in Serenity) then overfilling the screen with ships is usually not the way to go.
BSG had great space battles. No exterior weapon sounds, choreographed symphonic music (you knew it was a battle when it started), and tension. You really wanted the humans to win each time.
In some of the scenes, the sounds of the weapons firing on the galactica sounds muffled and a bit distant, like the sound someone would hear when they are inside the Galactica.
Our modern seagoing ships often have multiple hulls. The space shuttle, when we had one, and the ISS have a foam that automatically bleeds out to seal small holes.
There was this one time in the comments section of an EckhartsLadder starship versus where someone tried to tell me the UNSC Pillar of Autumn was amazing because it could keep fighting at 2% hull integrity. Bruh, at 2% hull integrity the ship's armor is virtually gone, any stray shot from any sort of capital ship is gonna end the battle at that point.
I also thought they made it blue to make the orange explosions look more vibrant. Same deal with lots of movie posters using blue and orange to make a big contrast.
@@alejandroelluxray5298 to be fair space didn't have colors at all since there's no air or atmosphere in space, hence there's nothing for light to reflect (which still a bit wrong since particle still exist on space), the particle in space is small and "seems" to be invisible and didn't reflect light well, i may be wrong though...
suppose the closest real world parallel would be like, a Wasp Class putting all it's amphibious assault vehicles out to sea to use their machine guns, and parking an abrams on the deck to shoot at something (although tbh I would like to see more star-wars-the-clone-wars style "ship uses it's ground attack complement to assist in battle" stuff)
Sir, the enemy has over 100 attack boats! We won't be outdone! Launch all life rafts and dingies! But...Sir...That won't help us do- I SAID LAUNCH ALL LIFE RAFTS SAILOR!
*Earth Force:* Do not force us to engage your ships. *Delenn:* Why not? Only one human captain has survived battle with the Minbari fleet. He is behind me. You are in front of me. If you value your lives... _be somewhere else_
@@modisp Yeah. I am rewatching it now, and I've been waiting since that episode to finally get back to the civil war. The Shadow War for the fate of the galaxy with hundreds of ship just feels disappointing after that.
One thing I hate when watching LOTGH is that a lot of people "expect" that scale of space battle to be dynamic, which is idiotic at best IMO. Some people say there aren't enough fighters and torpedoes or missiles in LOTGH, but they fail to understand that the "normal" engagement range in LOTGH is on light-second level. Which means valkyries and spartanians and anything lower than few% of light-speed would have to be used only when you are within close-quarters range, because on normal range of LOTGH they'd need MINUTES if not HOURS to hit their targets. Same reason explains why ships has to be in formations like that. Because you are trying to hit ONE POINT on a light-second range using few laser canons, making maneuvers and doing hit-and-run tactics on this range is inefficient and stupid.
@@songyani3992 Yeah, there are issues with engagement ranges for sure. Another thing I find strange is how they can be surprised by approaching fleets (the first battle in particular). Are their scouts sleeping on the job? But the again, perhaps there are some stealth tech that isn't fully explained. They tell us that they have advanced jamming tech in any case. Another thing is that when ships are in brawling range, they seem to react so slow to enemy presences; Like not firing their side-cannons and such. But in its defense, it is more focused on narrative and the character's reactions than the mechanical logic of the battles.
When people said "We've lost hull plating" in Enterprise, I interpreted that as the armour plating affixed to the hull being lost. They didn't lose the hull, they lost the hull's *plating*
It was clearly meant as a ships system. Exactly like the shields. After the battles they allways asked Lt. Reid for the plating and he answers that it will function/work/whatever in xy hours again.
Specifically special forms of charged metal plating, the Vulcans refused to share shielding technology with the humans, and thus human ships used a special charged plating to deflect and absorb incoming phaser fire, rather than defective energy shielding. There was an episode or two where they Specifically covered this, as it gave the resident Vulcan on theenterprise, T'pol, a case of, for lack of a better word, radiation sickness
More like Adaptive Armor. There was a energy aspect to the Hull Plating that was not in the form of a bubble shield. More of something that absorbed or spread out the energy along t he plating.
That, or a competitive fireworks display. Get as many flashes, sparkles, and fireballs to literally blanket the space between ships, yet do so little danage that it takes several minutes of sustained bombardment to net a result.
The constant flak barrage of the point defense weapons around Galactica when it's involved in a major engagement was always one of the coolest details to me
Strange that a show made over 20 years ago still has the best space battles depicted. Whenever I want to watch an awesome space battle I watch favor the bold/sacrifice of angels, so good!
The dominon war battles were such a departure from the regular Star Trek pew pew percentage down. Most ships don't even seem to have shields or they are not working well enough when dozens of starships are firing at each other, you can see them fall apart and crumble. Yet it worked, it wasn't jarring at all, it has shown us how the Star Trek space battles on large scale should look like, same in Enterprise and then they throw it all away in Discovery.
My favorite big space battle is the one at the end of Mass Effect 3. Which is in good part because you have worked for three games to get that many ships on your side. Big battles have to earned.
It does also reflect some of the rules mentioned here though. While ME3 doesn’t maintain the pilot perspective of fighter craft, you do have a good understanding of who is captaining every ship and what those ships are capable of. Every time you recruit a war asset you’re meeting someone who will captain one of the ships in the battle of the Crucible, which is particularly powerful when the Quarian Flotilla and the Geth Armada are both part of your fleet: not only getting to know everyone piloting a ship, but also having survived and ended a war between their two people.
To me, both engagements between Reliant and Enterprise in TWOK were fantastic. Each weapons hit had real consequences for the story. I get your point about energy shields, but at least in this example their absence, which is unusual for starship combat in this universe, creates drama by putting the characters in changing situations and demonstrates their value by showing how quickly a ship as powerful as Enterprise can be crippled without them.
Except the shields were present for the most part. It's noted in trek cannon that shield projectors at the time could not project a bubble. Instead they projected a energy skin around the ship. This is why armor was a thing in that era. The sheild generators and armor needed to work together to protect the ship. This also made space battles better because you could see bleed through damage. When the sheilds failed....then you got some good destruction. Then they went with bubbles and ..boy that was crap...making pannels explode from surges made no sense because...how can shields send feedback to the grid.
@@everyonethinksyoureadeathm5773 Not in the Wrath of Khan, Kirk didn't raise the shields in time so the Reliant crippled the Enterprise with the opening salvos. And the shields never really recovered. They were completely disabled due to the nature of the Mutara Nebula and the failed to raise at the Battle of Genesis. "Warning about the Mutara nebula sir, static discharge. Sensors and shields will be useless." "Sauce, for the goose Mr. Saavik. The odds will be even."
agreed, shields are certainly a crutch, but then it also provides an opportunity for when shit suddenly gets real and something actually impacts the ship. The horrific destruction in wrath of khan, or even in shows like voyager when they end up with krenim torpedoes embedded in the ship. Shields keep everything kind of pristine and detached, so when the characters are faced with the bleak, harsh reality of the dangers of the world it can be quite powerful. If you build up the rules of a story world, you can do some truly awesome stuff when you decide to break those rules.
How in the heck do we know what the military will and will not have 200 plus years . Exspecaily since they are working on such things as shields and laser weapons at this very moments. Trek has it's flailing . Shields isn't among them . Plus in star wars their ships have shields. So what's the big deal with shields. The failing I see are unrealistic strategy incorrect uses of ship class in main line engagements exc. I do agree that to many ships are used in battles they shouldn't use more than 20 between both sides basically 8 on one side 12 on the other . Or = numbers between both fighting forces with DD and cruisers and BB or battle cruiser making the internal part of a battle fleet after all your capital ships are expensive and have many crew on board so it makes since you wouldn't want to lose them to easily. All one needs do is look at how Fleets from the age of sail to ww2 are used . From there imagination is your friend
@@leehilton9669 Well it's easy to see why you would send more ships, in a space battle with infinite area to cover more ships offer more opportunities for focus fire, flanking, relief, etc. As a matter of presentation though, keeping your ship numbers down is ideal. Both can be done, but there's a fine balance in making the audience feel for your crew's danger and being able to track what's happening versus showcasing the chaos of battle.
"Like, hull plating is the walls!!!" Yeah, ships are powerful albeit vulnerable units. To use real life examples, look at the devastation of the USS Arizona or HMS Barham in WWII (there's footage of the destruction of both). Powerful battleships blown to pieces by the ordinance within after taking devastating hits. And these ships were armored. The ship I was on was a Nimitz class carrier. Huge ships but not armored like a battleship by any means. They rely on compartmentalization and void spaces to absorb and contain damage. With modern hypersonic anti-ship missiles, their suitability is in doubt in a modern naval battle. A penetrating hit into one of the ships magazines or fuel storage would be problematic. Or a hit in the reactor compartment which breaches the reactor or the steam pipes would really ruin the day of the sailors on board. And by steam I don't mean like from a tea kettle, this is super heated steam at high pressure. This will cook you alive instantly, hopefully. I'd hate to be critically burned from steam AND irradiated. I do appreciate the few Sci-Fi shows that deal with the engine room and not just the important people with plot armor on the bridge.
Well, with the exception of large Russian AShMs like the Moskit and the Ship-Wreck, a WWII battleship could easily take a direct hit from an Anti-Shipping missile like a Harpoon or an Exocet mainly just because those are a large HE charge (which aren't very effective at dealing with armor) detonating against the area of a ship where the armor is the thickest at the water line. The relative immunity to anti-shipping missiles was the main reason the US recommissioned the Iowa class ships in the 80s.
@@spartanalex9006 People really underestimate how tough those old battleships are. They can take SERIOUS hits and still be functional, and their armor can shrug off all but the most devastating attacks. A missile with a shaped charge could probably penetrate their armor, but it wouldn't do enough damage to seriously threaten the ship. You'd need a gigantic anti-ship missile to bring one down. Torpedoes are the real threat, though you'd need to launch them from a submarine, as otherwise you'd be in range of the battleships guns, and being in range of a battleship's guns if you aren't also a battleship is really, really bad.
@@spartanalex9006 Possibly, but I don't know if they could penetrate a battleships deck armor. They used similar (though unguided of course) bombs in WWII and while they could damage a battleships secondary and AA guns, they couldn't breach the citadel.
Takeaway for big space battles: Pick a ship or two and focus on that. You can give the scale and the other ship names, but don't jump around. Think about how WWII battles are described: You focus on the flagships. You focus on the carriers or the battleships. Most people aren't there to hear about all the Destroyer Escorts on picket duty. Alternatively, if you focus on a small ship, focus on how its role in the battle contributes to the battle.
Have a comment related to the battle, "Captain, I think we're doing a good job" "How do you know that?" "Command is sending us towards the group in the middle" "Ah, the usual reward for doing good work, is more work. Take us in"
Actually you focus on the most active ships so most of an Action off Samar movie would take place on the USS Johnston and the USS Samuel B Roberts with a fair amount of time on the other DD's and not a lot of time on the rest of the US ships. The same for the Japanese but more time on Kurita on the Yamato's bridge would be needed because of his impact on the Japanese not doing much against a far inferior opponent.
@@nickkurzy2246 Ships "punching" far above their weight class actions are almost always interesting. I think a good movie could be made about the radar pickets off Okinawa with the focus on the Laffey.
>Think about how WWII battles are described: You focus on the flagships. You focus on the carriers or the battleships. Most people aren't there to hear about all the Destroyer Escorts on picket duty Wrong, read any account of The Battle of the North Cape and the Royal Navy destroyers are extremely important, hell the Royal navy destroyer crews were by and large considered as the ''elite''. Also Daniel's original point still stands, less ships is more and you don't need to focus on the biggest ships out there. Samar has already been mentioned so I won't even go there. Also destroyers are typically not that small in the grand scheme of things, if you have a huge space navy potentially guarding several planets or even several systems most of your ships aren't going to be battlecruisers, battleships and large carriers or supercarriers, they're going to be cruisers, frigates and destroyers. Most navies during the age of sail were primarily made out of 5th and 6th rate ships and a whole slew of even smaller vessels, frigates, not the towering 100+ gun 1st, 2nd or 3rd rates. Same goes for almost any navy throughout history, smaller ships are generally speaking more economical.
re shields: If there are no shields then it is difficult to justify any strike not being utterly devastating. If a setting is *actually* trying to be realistic, then they have to just accept that. In The Expanse or the Honor Harrington novels, where everyone's big gun is either a high-yield nuclear weapon or some super future tech more destructive than that, then just about any ship can kill pretty much any ship if they manage a single direct hit. The energies involved are such that matter simply isn't going to resist them. Now that's fine if that's what you want. But maybe that's not what you want.
thats implying you go for hard sci fi to begin with. There are plenty of ways to make attacks not one hit kills in soft sci fi. You could just play with the yield of their weapons, making them not equivalent to nuclear bombs, but closer to artillery guns. Alternatively you could increase the scale of the ships. A megaton nuclear blast is a devastating blow to a 500ft long destroyer, but what about for a 50 mile long battleship? A Third option is to introduce some super material that is able to stop high yield nuclear bombs, making armor a viable technology.
@@uppishcub1617 If there's a super material that can stop nukes, typically you'd expect someone to make bullets out of it that would pierce that armor. Bullets of a material tend to defeat armor of the same material.
@@afriendofafriend5766 Then you're limited to just poking holes in the enemy ship, as opposed to destroying unarmored ships with a single nuke. That still increases the durability of the ships and makes fights into drawn out things as opposed to one hit kill scenarios.
Not to mention nukes are not limited to _bombs._ You can create high-energy plasma lances out of nuclear warheads by constructing them just right. Basically, you make a nuclear-pumped shaped-charge, and use some heavy metal 'plug' over the 'bore' to act as the energy delivery medium. Anything that is close enough to be hit with a directed energy weapon is close enough to get lanced through by a nuke. Obviously nobody have tried to make them at this point, but as far as I'm aware the math checks out. Most of the work was made already for Project Orion, with the weapon concept mostly being refined on the side, though work stopped much too early to give us anything near a working blueprint.
"Fewer ships is better than more" JJAbrams: "Nah, just copy paste ten thousand ISD I and put them against all the existing rebel 3D models times ten thousand". There was no tension building at Exegol. Where there was at Endor. They could have done the same, with maybe better results by making canon the Eclipse and doing this battle between reb.. sorry resistance and the Eclipse.
Pellenor Fields...In Space! "Shields will be splintered! Phasers shall be shaken! A red day! A batt'leth day! Ere first shift begins!! ...Death!! Death!!!"
i've never felt more heartbroken and ashamed for others than watching Episode 9 ... but even i had to admitt, that it looked cool and epic on the first glance. the second glance made my heart even sank more. there were venators in the rebel fleet! 60 years after the end of the clone wars there are still exist some of those? that added an other plothole to the gigantic pile this film was.
@@ricwalker6600 To be honest I did not notice the venators. However I did notice some other ships of the SWTOR era, but since disney has stole the hammerhead frigate design from this era (and I'm fine with its use in rogue one), that doesn't surprise le
I loved the battles in The Expanse.. the visuals of the ultra-high-speed bullets and projectiles just blasting through everything, and a whole room being completely full of holes instantaneously, and people being randomly alive or dead without even really any significant collateral damage due to the sheer speed of everything was ridiculously terrifying. And even no matter how big and impressive your ship is, the sheer strength of physics meaning that pretty much nowhere was safe. I hadn't ever seen anything quite like that in a show before.
The Expanse is really good at demonstrating physics concepts and explaining what goes wrong when alien super science breaks the rules and then reinstates them.
marschma then one of the donnager ship compliment shreds one of said corvettes in a later battle. It shows how tactics and knowing the enemy really does help.
@@marschma To be fair, those "covettes" where armed with Railguns, that's capital grade ship weaponry that wasn't really supposed to be on ships that size. Once they got into railgun range, it was over. Donnager has two railguns, those corvettes each had one.
@@Chrinik Yep. The Donnager was doomed by a lack of knowledge, not failed tactics per-se. Not even really the captain's fault... Those things were not supposed to exist. I personally loved the scene where the Razorback was being chased and Bobbie explained the weapon ranges. If they got within a certain range, they were dead... otherwise they could dodge. Pretty much a binary and everyone involved knew it.
@The high ground All episodes that showed whole different kinds of ships was a big build-up for future space battles so viewer is 100% knows what is happing and what each ships does.
@The high ground I think there was maybe 1 or 2 examples where weapons were brought in at the last second, like the Dakara ancient life creation weapon, which I think was only mentioned in the last 3 episodes before it was used, but I don't remember for sure. I still really liked the episodes where they built up to using the weapon.
Hull Plating in Enterprise was "Polarize the hull plating", which made the hull harder to damage. When they said "We've lost hull plating" it just meant the polarizing effect had failed, not that their hull had fallen off. Saying that, it was really just shields before they had shields.
Sends this directly to whoever making the next Star Wars movie Actually the way you describe writing one is kind of how Eric Nylund did the space battles in his Halo novels.
I've been taking advantage of current circumstances to repeatedly reread First Strike, and I find myself more impressed by the slipspace battle every time I experience it.
@@BeastlyMussel61 That whole battle sequence is amazing, and like the Red Route 1 scene in Red October, demostrates Keyes' command competence. Which makes his death all the more sad.
I have two rule sets for my universe: Humans are unshielded tin-cans who engage from tens of kilometers with lasers and missile volleys. PDCs are reserved for close range battles with smaller ships and torpedoes. The antagonists are heavily shielded and tend to utilize more fighters. Their intercept craft destroy missiles, and their bombers attack capital ships, while standard fighters and drones produce defensive screens for their attack runs. I have a video on my channel going into more detail for those interested
In mine the Antagonists have full on shielded FTL capable ships while the Humans are stuck with pretty hard sci fi technology but have Psyonics. Meaning they have gigantic gun in the orbit of Sol itself, Earth And Jupiter that use Psyonics to predict hostile movements to shoot the enemy down immediately after they enter the Killzone at the border of the Portal used for FTL Travel. It's only when a single ship it so breaks through that the War council actually authorizes the use of "close quarters combat " (still in the range of Hundred of Kilometers) where they throw thousands of cheeply bouilt Warships at the hostiles to sometimes bring down the Equivalent of Gunship.
"This is the Captain: give me full quality over quantity." "But sir! We cannae achieve quality!" "Well we can't just do nothing! Give me all the quantity you've got."
I would love to hear your thoughts on the space battles in Legend of the Galactic Heroes because on a strategic level they outclass almost every other battle I've seen and while they do cut a whole lot between ships, it makes sure you know the names of the admirals of each fleet and even a few people in particular.
I do think it's hard to have a sense of stakes or consequences with the scale of those battles since we constantly see ships exploding or being hit with no real idea what effect its having on them as a force But there are some good scenes to the contrary like the guys that are left alive on a completely wrecked bridge after a battle or the battle of iserlorn where it feels like every single resource is limited
If, tomorrow, you just uploaded this again, I would watch it again, smash that like button again, and consider it equally essential viewing as I am doing while watching it right now. Spacedock at its finest: not just analysis of ships, but a full on sci-fi public service broadcaster.
Battles in Legend of the Galactic Heroes routinely has ten of thousands of capital ships per side, and hundred thousand capital ships at its peak, and they still managed to make it worked and exciting. Because in this series, the flagship where the protagonists usually resides are not invincible death machine like other Sci-fi works, *they actually has less firepower than the mass produced ship of the line* . But in return they have superb survivability, sensor, communication, countermeasure, you know, all the thing that even Real Life command ship will trade raw firepower for. So there's still a sense of tension like Sci-fi story that fields few ships per side, because losing a fleet in Legend of the Galactic Heroes is just as devastating for the protagonist because 99.99% his firepower and force projection are in there, not his flagship. His flagship is there to command and make sure they win with the least casualties. Also, it's realistic in a sense that planet is not a city. Unless your ship is the size of Independence Day's Giant Saucer, then you'd need as many capital ships as Legend of the Galactic Heroes fleet to actually get down to the planet and pacify the population. Remember, the only way you conquer a territory is when you have your men's boots on that territory and the other guy don't. Hanging a fleet in orbit to bombard the population on the ground won't get you territory, either now, or thousands of years in the future.
Not really though ? I'm pretty sure both Hyperion and Reinart's ship are battleships. Fleet commanders in general have powerful flagships that are usually more heavily armed than anything else in the fleet. Yang's friend Dusty even gets to command the Triglav, a more modern and even more powerful version of the Alliance flagship. The flagships do have powerful comm systems though.
@@zqfmgb4335 But the point is that they cannot win a fleet battle on their own, unlike protagonist ships in other Sci-Fi which is a one ship army that can do so. Hence why what Spacedock said about "fewer is better" is not necessarily true with example like LoGH.
I mean part of it is that a lot of the excitement sources from the grander strategy of it all rather than individual ships just slugging at it. Plus when one fleet gets out of position everybody dies regardless of what its constituents do, so rather than tens of thousands of ships the viewer instead experiences it as a few fleets that are treated almost as their own entities, and as such viewers can still care about the fate of those in the battle
Thing with planetary assaults is that you don't need that many star ships, just a sufficient amount of them targeting key locations, ie major population centers, military installations, survival bunker complexes that your scanners can pick up, etc. Then you can choose how to subjugate the planet, either through shrewd diplomacy, or through force. You don't need to conquer the whole planet, just the major control centers of it, which can very easily be done with far less ships than you think.
@@WastelandSeven in real life the reason would be because that would make the space ship extremly heavy and as such it would consume huge amounts of fuel to move, aka delta-v In fiction because they have forcé fields and shit like that they don't need armor platting
@@carso1500 depends on frenchise, in the expanse the hullplating to some degree is almost the "walls" and shot fly through the ships and big lumbering battleships probably have some kind of armor plating against smaller projectiles etc
@@Dori-Ma Exactly. And particularly settings without shields usually have their warships have several layers of hull plating. BSG (and Babylon 5's Earth fleet as well) is IIRC a rather good example of that. I also disagree with the video itself. It seems to be equating battles with skirmishes and judges the former by the principles of the latter. It's basically saying that, for example, the Lord of the Rings epic battles should have been just our main heroes being stalked and eventually fighting some Orcs. Obviously, that's not true, there's a place for both those things and large battles can and are made quite well, both in fantasy and in sci-fi. DS9 did it rather well, in addition to several other examples mentioned in the video. But, again, there is a difference between the purpose of a skirmish and a battle. The common thing is that both require good cinematography and clear, stable view, which is sorely lacking in many recent productions.
The only time where the 'lost hull plating' part makes sense is during the battle of Azati Prime. The Enterprise's hull and the ship's walls is literally getting blown apart by the Xindi.
2:54 Space Battleship Yamato 2199 is a perfect example for this: After a huge battle, the battleship hull remained heavily damaged for the next episodes. OR just seek a solution to repair the hull (like in the same series, they found raw materials on the moon of Enceladus, which helped them to repair the hull of the ship).
Are you sure it was Enceladus? Because that moon, like most of the other Saturnian moons, is made almost entirely of water ice. Which would have been fine for repairing the hull of a space-going equivalent of the Habakkuk - the proposed WW2 aircraft carrier which was going to be built from ice, to fill the mid-Atlantic air-cover gap. But any other ship would require metals, or at least ores which could be refined into metals - and you won't find those on Enceladus.
@@lloydevans2900 Definitely Enceladus, watched the series a while ago. We speaking about an anime where fire occurs in space so why they wouldn't find resources on that moon?
@@ConsCruptor If they needed water, sure - or even carbon dioxide or ammonia, since those are present on Enceladus. They could likewise hop over to Titan if they need any liquid methane or other hydrocarbons. For the large moons which are made of rock, they would find metal ores, and possibly even some metallic iron-nickel alloy, which is what some asteroids are composed of. Just not on Enceladus though, since that is a tiny moon, composed primarily of ice and some other frozen gases, with no rock or metals to speak of.
@@lloydevans2900 they said it was cosmonite 90 of sort that is needed because a condenser was broken Edit: wiki said it was a metal so uh... Space Plot armor it seem
Frustratingly, Star Trek Voyager actually had an alternate timeline where Voyager _did_ sustain lasting and critical damage, and the crew fought desperately to survive, every day... but it was used as a straw-man target for a time travel/causality altering ability, and ended up never happening.
I think you’re pretty spot on here. I’d add the battle from Star Trek Nemesis to the list personally, I love that one. I think that battles with big fleets can work, they just need to focus in on particular elements so that it stays coherent, such as in the mass effect 3 battle and the battle for Coruscant, which aside from a couple of wide shots focused in on a smaller group to keep the factors you described present.
True. As a movie it was shit, because everything was just a flimsy setup for this obviously stacked space battle, but the battle itself was actually pretty good.
Mitchz95 that's one instance where shield use is a good thing. They arnt telling us, they're showing us (well and telling) When that nacelle hits the Enterprise it's well done. We really feel like the ship has had the shit wacked out of it cause we see it and we see the shield monitor
The battle in Star Trek Nemesis shouldn't have happened. They had a 'perfect cloak' meaning it should've played out like Wrath of Khan with the Scimitar picking them all off with sniper shots and torpedo barrages _from a distance!_ Having the Enterprise actually survive and succeed (probably using technobabble, but understandably) with the odds so not in their favor would've been quite thrilling and satisfying.
I'd have to disagree. The Nemesis battle very self-consciously apes the ST II and VI battles but still doesn't hold a candle to either. The whole idea of the Scimitar itself is such a prime example of Hollywood escalation too. ST had a Connie vs a Miranda. ST VI had a single Br'el vs a Connie and an Excelsior. Scimitar? It has an absurd laundry list of weapons and special powers. They even made up a new species of vampire aliens to crew the ship as if the thing looking like a giant black bat wasn't subtle enough. If it was written in the style of ST II or VI, the battle would probably have been against a single D'Deridex or something like that.
I think Severed Dreams space battle might take my number 1 spot, though new caprica was great. In B5 we had just met the two captains, knew their names and when Hiroshi sacrifices the Churchil in a ram it is a really meaningful, impactful moment for a character with almost no dialogue.
And if I were the Earth Force Captain that Delenn pointedly told "if you value your life...BE SOMEWHERE ELSE!" I DEFINITELY would've needed a change of underwear...and my crew probably would've welcomed a hull breech to take their minds off the "aroma"!
Change it to "maintain a focus on a manageable number of characters", and it works. You can have big fights, but your audience cannot track all of them, so you have to write around that.
Macross battles were always about following specific characters in the middle of these massive, chaos looking battles between inmense fleets. And you can say the same about almost every single sci-fi anime that involves huge scale space battles... from Macross to Gundam to Uchusenkan Yamato and a very long etcetera.
I would add the 1957 film "The Enemy Below". It has much of the same vibes as Wrath of Khan, 2 equally expert captains facing off in cat and mouse warfare.
First rule: the battles must follow the rules of your universe. Star Wars is horrible in this. Second rule: the audience must understand what is happening, Less is more can be handy for this pourpose but it isn't mandatory if you know what you are doing. Third rule: show the premise of the battle and the decision making inside the bridges.
The problem is that Star Wars refuses to have rules about its universe. Even George Lucas has said he doesnt know how hyperdrives or hyperspace works, and he doesn't care. To him its just a word that explains how people get from one plot location to the next.
Zero rule: Make your damn rules. So by knowing rules, you can follow them, audience can understand what's going on, and characters can take their decisions out of some framed space of variants, not out of their asses, by technobabbling completely new way of warfare just in time.
This is how you do it: get a bunch of geeks to play a multiplayer game, flying random ships. after the battle, work out which of the survivors needs to be what ship, then re-run the battle re-skinning with whatever you need. If you have specific weakness / weapons, get them to play it 100 times until you get the win. Add dynamic camera for best shots, and you have a winner
Also see which ships contributed most to the action. If there was a ship that didn't make it to the end of the battle, but damaged or destroyed the most opposing vessels, or its actions permanently changed the course of the rest of the battle, you could come up with a heroic tragedy story with that ship.
* builds heavily shielded reactor ball with guns on one side * * proceeds to snipe enemy ships from maximum targeting range while statically spinning *
Needs More Babylon 5. Honestly I think every battle they had was top notch. Even at the height of the shadow war, with massive fleets. You knew what was going on. Also. about the Less is More. Star trek 6
I really liked the end battle of "Yesterday's Enterprise" from ST:TNG - lots of bridge shots, action and dialogue made the whole thing pretty suspenseful and exceptional.
Me: *frustrated, writer blocked with a fanfic space battle* Spacedock: *releases a video about proper space battle writing* Me: you've saved us, we're grateful.
I am / was in a similar position. It's surprising how much of this video translates to written medium even though it was clearly aimed at a visual medium. One I always struggled with was damage on the bridge when the ship get's hit and exploding panel syndrome. It is more dramatic but bridges don't work like that and I was never really comfortable with that degree of detachment from the way it would work. However, I did find some decent work arounds. 1) The captain feeling the ship shake and strain under his feet, drawing on an almost empathetic bond with the craft. 2) Using a bridge position toward the back of the ship and up high so he can see the damage to his ship and react to it. 3) If you really need to raise the stakes and have bridge damage, a shot landing near the bridge that could legitimately cause problems on the bridge. You could also cut to a scene (either in the minds eye of the Captain or literally) at the site of the damage to emphasise the chaos even when the bridge is calm.
That will help me a lot with my fanfiction of Star Wars, and although it would have a lot of capital ships and smaller ships, I want to make it like the battle of Endor or Scarif
0:53 The FreeSpace community invented a term for it, the "Battle of Endor Syndrome ". Novice mission writers would build oversized battles and not properly handle the huge quantity of ships within. Doing so would cause graphical slowdown and collision failures, and it disrupted the fun and balance of the mission as the player would be overloaded with objectives and had little influence over the battle. It also impeded the story by throwing in a bunch of ships that have no significance nor investment. Not that massive battles can't be done well, they absolutely can with proper lead-up, investment, and clear & simple objectives. Blue Planet's Universal Truth for example is a work of art!
FreeSpace 2 was such a great game with an emotive and gripping plot and really lament that there was no FreeSpace 3 and think with Elite Dangerous and Star Citizen being fairly popular now would be a good time to re-introduce it.
@@dportass Kinda redundant with FreeSpace going open source and spawning a massive modding community, but if modern Volition or whoever can do something new and cool with the franchise I'm all for it.
Started watching and immediately thought of those Season 03 Enterprise episodes when you brought up your initial criteria and then was pleased to see them included!
The space battles in the honorverse series of books are some of my favourite, because they have a certain groundedness due to their distinct focus on various factors, such as vectors and velocities of combatants being significant issues, as well as the issues with maintaining a solid telemetry link with weapons that are being fired over massive distances and the loss of accuracy that results from the time delay between command inputs and execution. There's also a focus, especially in the earlier novels, of just how vulnerable these ships actually are, and how a single hit might just put a few holes through the armour, or it might blow a hole through the bridge, cause a fusion plant to fail, or disable the inertial compensator causing the crew to become jam, and the ship design and tactics reflect this. The bridge and the power plants are always hidden in the centre of the ship behind the thickest armour, and ships will usually try to avoid direct combat because they know that while they might win, they'll also sustain serious damage unless there's a significant tonnage advantage, and even then it's not a sure thing.
The issue Honorverse battles have though is that they often pull new tech out of their ass(especially bad later on when instead of a conflict being won by tactics or anything, the good guys just got a dozen new techs which cause them to completely outclass their opponents)
The one thing that really dragged me into the Honorverse was the practice of putting the bridge in the middle of the mass of the ship, in an armored ball or box. And then larger ships having a backup bridge just like it, always staffed in a battle. WAY too much sci-fi feels the need to have windows for the bridge, and the bridge tacked on the front of or on top of an office building on, the huge ship. - In a small ship, the forward bridge/cockpit can make sense, but if it is your capital ship, why are you dangling your senior decision makers out for the enemy to obliterate in a first/early shot?
But I mean, it's logical, no? The communication tech, the recon tech, the advances in fabrication and construction are literally all advances we've seen in real life. Then we see responses to them. Sometimes the responses are brute force. Faster planes? Train a soldier to shoot it down with a long rifle using training doctrine (see: Vietnamese soldiers shooting down Phantom's using long rifles). In that universe, advances in technology have outpaced the necessary applications in military hardware, and extended warfare, between the two largest powers outside of the Solarian league, have clearly introduced a necessary need and desire for innovation. I feel like that's a key proponent, and dare I say it, theme of the entire series. Those who stagnate die. Those who adapt, survive. I believe in, In Enemy Hands, Harkness is modifying a game about the last major fleet engagement of the solarian league that involved hundreds of ships. So long ago, that it's become a game. I don't know dude, just food for thought. Where you see tech out of the ass, I see imagination and innovation.
@@chinchilla_desperado I would agree that technological R&D is a theme. Weber repeats and expands on it in his Safehold series. (Apparently, Honor Harrington wasn't Horatio Hornblowery enough, so he made a story that used actual sailing ships with cannons and such.)
The Battle of Coruscant is a good example of a chaotic and confusing battle being done right, because it’s intentionally confusing, as these are Grievous' tactics at work. In the 2003 Microseries, we see CIS ships coming out hyperspace only to immediately collide with Republic vessels.
Especailly since in all likelyhood , there would be alot of them. Like tyranid levels of alot of them. Considering the asteroid belt alone could make an armada that dwarfs most scifi fleets.
@@admiralcasperr I would love if more space battles were fought at the 10,000km range. In the Expanse books, it is frequently mentioned how they can't see visually the enemy because of how far away they are. Unfortunately the TV series didn't do this so still, and end up with close quarters battles.
@@brendan31415 bvr is harder to pull of if you need a bit of spectacle... but they do do an ok job trying to remind you here that even the cqb distances are like several KMs away from each other...
That's because it was lifted from the film "The Enemy Below", which was an excellent destroyer vs sub film. In the film, they cleverly provided an explanation why the "cloaked" ship couldn't simply disengage when it went undetected: they had to go for a rendezvous with a resupply boat, and the captain of the destroyer, after the first few encounters, figured out they had to be going somewhere specific. The sub's captain realized this meant he had to fight because he couldn't allow the destroyer to follow them to the rendezvous, or to continue on that heading and stumble on the resupply. It was a clever way of forcing them to to fight when, theoretically, the sub could have fairly easily disengaged and slipped away, unlike movies or TV shows where two forces square off and fight it out when there's no good reason for one side, or both, to have to fight to begin with.
An excellent commentary . One of the best written space battles I`ve ever enjoyed was the 1st one I ever saw. It involved only 2 ships (if you don`t count the outposts mentioned at the start) It had excellent dialogue, it clearly depicted what was at stake ,and showed the cost involved from the perspective of both parties conducting the battle. I`m referring to the episode "Balance of Terror" from the original Start Trek series.
"Massive" battles can be easily done, in scifi as much as in fantasy as in historical film, etc, but you need to have it as backdrop. Keep it out of the way, to illustrate what needs to be done (as in Battle of Endor) while the main focus remains on those in the foreground. Don't highlight it, as modern producers seem to want to do. "Here, this is the fleet, look how big it is! Can you see it? How about I bring you closer? That better?" I could see it before you mentioned it, thanks, I have a brain.
I wrote a similar comment, at least in terms of the point I tried to make. You did a better job actually making it though...a bit like how Serenity did the big space battle well while Discovery...well it had blue stuff.
Like the final battle over Earth in Mass Effect 3. Sure we had five races, 200 fleets, but you knew where everything was. Reapers looked like squids that fired red beams, good guys had angular ships that shot harmless blue bolts. Your ship the Normandy has specialized guns and armor (no shields) that are distinctive. While defending the Crucible (a giant attachment that slowly loses parts to join with the even larger Citadel space station.) And it cuts between the Normandy's role and Shepard's groundbased strike team.
@@sonoftheviper__4304 One correction to an otherwise good summary: The Normandy has shields, it's just in Mass Effect the proper term is "kinetic barriers" (although everyone in-universe calls them shields anyway), which function by basically detecting an object moving with significant speed and force towards a ship and reacting to deflect or stop it - if you need proof the Normandy does possess them, in Mass Effect 2 you have an optional mission that allows you to upgrade the kinetic barriers to better withstand fire in the suicide mission
@@thomasrevill7723 True, but it was proven that a Reapers main cannon can pierce right through Dreadnought class barriers. Admittedly the Upgraded Cyclonic barriers should be able to take a glancing blow, but still could not match the raw power necessary to take a full blow. So barriers are rendered non-important factors in a Clash of the Titans style brawl, especially with the main tactic of numbers over skill.
Whenever I write sci-fi space battles, I generally like to allude to modern-day naval technology, and ww2 naval tactics, like importance of carrier operations but still retain the big gun behemoth dreadnoughts and cruisers everyone loves For example, like shields are cool and all, but if your ship has the armor of a soda can, you NEED some sort of layered defense system. Modern day Close-In Weapon Systems would work unbelievably well in most sci-fi settings, especially if you take the Russian approach with a combination gun-missile system. They can shoot down incoming meteors, debris, fighters, bombers, and missiles, while leaving the remains to drift in space or harmlessly splash against your shields And there's no air resistance or buoyancy considerations that need to be made: put some damn ARMOR on your ships
Modern anti-missile defenses rely primarily on missiles, with guns only for a last-ditch attempt to shoot down a couple missiles that get through. For some reason, this is never how it works in sci-fi. Regarding armor, if you have Expanse level propulsion (meaning more fuel than you ever need and enough acceleration to kill the crew), you should be loading your warships down with something; more weapons might be more useful, but more armor is certainly cheaper. However, if you're writing harder sci-fi without magitech super-engines, mass is extremely important, determining where the ship can go, how quickly it can get there, and how long its burns take, and spacecraft should be armored like aircraft: at most a few thin plates over the most vital components.
Ships in the book I’m writing are very large but there aren’t that many of them, have multitudes of layered defense; shields that absorb energy from kinetic weapons to strengthen, armored hull plating that’s quite tough, a BSG-like flak screen AND point defense including ciws and short-range interception rockets, and it does all of this without affecting offensive weaponry. I already wrote most of the actual space scenes in my book but I’m glad that they already kinda follow these rules for the most part. obviously there’s some variation but overall I think I did pretty good lol
When I wrote/write space battles for my novels I consider: 'what is enough'. I try to put myself into the shoes of the attacking/defending force. What do I need to achieve my goals? 'Overwhelming force' in a shock and awe moment can have its moment in the spotlight, but most of the time I find that 'just enough to beat the odds' results in the most interesting - because it adds an aspect of 'did we overestimate or underestimate our enemies?' or 'did we account for unexpected circumstances' to the whole thing.
You also have to consider that most planners aren't going to look at intelligence saying the enemy deployed four ships and only deploy four in response. If your numbers are close, establish why. Were the others occupied with other missions? In drydock/refit? Just too far away? Also, unit sizes may play a part. When the US Army found a Tiger in WW2, they attacked it with 5 tanks purely because they had 5 tanks working together. If they had found 2 or 3, they may grab another group to maintain a comfortable advantage and attack with 10.
@@Halinspark it's for reasons like this why a well diversified navy will have some decent rapid response ships. Something fast enough to respond to an attack near by that other craft might not get too in time.
I love the battle in star trek nemesis where the enterprise is just continuously firing it's phases at the scimitar trying to hit it. Then the two romulan ships coming to enterprises aid. Was such an awesome battle especially when the enterprise full rammed the scimitar.
Rogue One's space battle is one of my favorites. It's well lit, easy to follow, different ships have distinct roles and the starfighters use actual tactics like formation flying and utilizing wingmen to great advantage (a lesson that film's "Red 5" learned the hard way).
@@Attaxalotl if all of the scenes with rey were removed from episode 7, it would be so good. I loved the way that poe and finn interacted with each other, and for the most part, the world building was still pretty good.
@@mythitorium "sure in the last movie, nobody showed up when it was like a dozen at-at's, but now that there's 1000 death stars, it just wouldn't make sense for everyone in the galaxy to not show up" - probably j j abrams
@@mythitorium Sad part is JJ did a space fight admirably well in Star Trek 2009, it's not the best space battle ever put to film, but it looks good, has actual strategy, and features a good amount of tension. So we know he gets it. Than we get to EP 9 and just... no.
I know I talk about Halo a lot, and that's just because it's the one I know best, but shields are a notable topic in that universe because they're actually made narratively useful. The presence of shields is probably the most substantial, although certainly not the only, reason why Covenant ships during the war were more combat-effective than their UNSC counterparts. And even when humans do get them, it's still a big deal. In the interest of full disclosure: I am aware that the quality of Halo's writing, with some exceptions, begins to drop off in the post-war era. I will continue to maintain, however, that human ships getting tech upgrades was a good decision.
Yah, shields should never be a straight replacement for actual danger. But at the same time they can be well used and still fit the requirements listed above.
The thing that bugged me was the human-covenant war was supposed to last thirty years. In all that time humanity never developed or reversed engineered shields of their own??? They'd only just got Spartan shield tech. Maybe if the war was three of four years, I'd understand but surely the UNSC would be working flat out to get shields of their own.
@@mattwho81 They did. The MJOLNIR shields are reversed engineered from the Jackals. It took a long time because the UNSC simply didn't understand how Covenant tech worked.
I agree with most of your points. Though I’m disappointed that you didn’t include Honor Harrington as a book recommendation. The battles in those books are some of the best I’ve ever read. Now, only my own experience with space battles... it’s difficult to write. It took me around five or so days to write a around one and half thousand word battles, of which half was only build-up. Writing a space battle is *hard*. Especially when you try to set yourself a goal in regards to ‘plausibility’ (I prefer that term over realism tbh). For a long time I set myself the goal of avoiding something like ‘the ship flew over there, while firing’ and tried to restrict myself to a CIC / OpC only perspective. Didn’t work out all that well. Of course, after the battles (which thankfully take less time now) come the characters... which is even more difficult for me than a battle. I can write about the destruction of that one ship, about those twelve stations holding against the attacking aliens etc. in chapter one... and then I have to introduce the main character. But, yeah. Good video as always. Did kind of ramble on here lol.
I get your point exactly, I'm sort of in the same boat. I think it's easier to try and put elegance and tension into the description of fleet movement, especially focusing on the flips, speed changes, starts and ends of maneuvers, etc, for me it really helps visualize it more, like for instance "the Nemesis-1 fired at the aliens as it moved" doesn't sound as cool as "the Nemesis-1 flipped for a suicide burn, snapping a loose panel with g-forces. Her torpedoes flashed away for a brief second as [insert character] stared down the radar for return fire." Edit and edit, and boom, cool battle. I don't really know enough to say I'm a pro, or even good at writing, but I figured I'd share what works for me. Obviously, it's more important you refine your own style and enforce your narrative.
Yeah. I feel you on the "plausibility" of writing sci-fi combat. Especially when my own tech gets in the way of something the story needs to happen. But much like Honor Harrington, focus mostly on one aspect of the battle. A ship, objective a point in the area, and sort of "watch" the battle from there. You only share what that perspective knows about. So an entire flotilla could go down, and we may not even see it because it doesn't matter to the main perspective. Characters are my specialty, so I'd be willing to offer pointers there if there's a certain aspect you struggle with.
Well he is talking about graphic depictions of battles in movies and shows, writing something and relying on a readers imagination is very different than showing the viewer what he is supposed to see. writing any combat is pretty hard. I tried once and I either got into "this did that" or I had to use retelling of the battle in ideas rather than movements. OR the other times it was simply conversations on the bridge and leaving the battle to the imagination of the reader. Those are my two approaches to space combat in books. For a good example, you can look at War of the worlds depiction of combat.
Agreed. I think Weber, for all his faults, is an excellent space battle writer because of how coherent he is. After reading a few of his novels, you can really start predicting how a certain engagement is going to end and why. And when it doesn't, it's almost always not because of new tech or a stroke of genius (unless Honor is involved, in which case all bets are off) but because one of the two sides is paying more attention to a key detail. I think this was at its best in his earlier books, like the battle of Hancock. He is also really good at describing formations of ships operating as a group, something which most other writers appear to stuggle with.
I still stand by my favorite space battles in fiction being the combat in Eric Nylund's Halo novels. Space battle are slow and high tension. Shields are used well in that setting as well because they result in the Covenant seeming borderline unstoppable which makes human successes that much more exciting.
My favourite 'shields done right' version is from Star Trek VI at the Khitomer battle. The Enterprise tanks the first few torpedoes but you can clearly see (escalating) marks where it was hit as the shields weaken until finally one comes that rips into/through the saucer.
Spacedock: You need to watch three movies Me: Oh these are gonna be random sci-fi movies i've probably never seen Spacedock: Hunt for Red October, Master and Commander, and Wrath of Khan Me: Oh shit those are all great movies and two of my favorites ever!
Battle of Scariff is indeed an awesome Space Battle but it has drawbacks in that we do not see the Capital Ships engaging each other. That said, it is obvious from the script that Admiral Raddus is using his fighters to keep the Destroyers at an elbow; he wants them to fear engaging fighters and the capital ships at the same time.
Jonathan Lundkvist that’s because if the rebel cruisers try to actually engage the star destroyers in a proper fight (similar to the battle star vs base stars in new caprica) then the rebel ships just get shredded. Remember that they only had ONE mon cal cruiser in scariff and it was an early and much weaker version of the ones we see in episode 6. So, in universe, props to admiral raddus for knowing not to put his cruisers on suicide mode. Props to the writers of the movie for recognizing that that would be a stupid tactical move and no one would have done that
I'm still quite disappointed with the battle of Corusant despite how much we see. It's almost entirely from the pov of the two Jedi and half of that is just background fluff. I think it needed the Scariff/Endor treatment of focusing on a few pockets of fighting. Like the RotJ scene around the medical frigate, or the hammerhead pushing the star destroyer, or the high speed dodging of the Y-Wings. In the 2003 Clone Wars cartoon it showed a Jedi general evacuating a crippled Venator to take over a Providence class CIS ship and turning its guns on other CIS ships. Then again that cartoon also had a great planetary battle that we never got to see in the movie.
is just "space battle are part of the story". they must be told just like everything else, with rythm, momentum, using chekhov's gun, etc. must have sense in a literary way using every element and character (yes, ships are characters)
Rewatching this video, and I've realized that, to an extent, you can actually make large fleets work, but it requires a lot of careful effort. The Star Carrier series of books does this well by focusing on the flagship, and specific flight leaders for star fighters. Another thing I've seen done well for larger battles is categorizing units into flotillas with defined purposes. When this is done, I see it often mirroring films like Gettysburg where a larger battle featuring a whole army is broken down into smaller engagements with specific units and goals. A fleet action may easily encompass a whole solar system with ship duels or fleet movements at different locations within the system.
Heck, the Expanse plays this same trick in books 2 and 5, where the large fleet actions were put to scale with the focus being on the individual fighters and ships, with internal dialogue discussing the wider battle
They use an alternative. Handful of ships is replaced by a handful of fleets. Exterior damage and shield percentages are replaced by a fleet having ships destroyed and casualty reports. Captains are replaced with admirals. It's the opposite of a separate theatre for fighters, they go up a level. i would realy like to see Spacedock cover the battle of Vermillion starzone, my Greatest of all time. It has about 60,000 Capital ships present and it works. Works in ways it simply wouldn't if each admiral was merely a captain.
@@eps200 So well explained. The way the show handles such battles is a lot like how Homeworld did for videogames. Homeworld has several tiers of ships, with not only the strike craft, but the smaller captial ships as well being treated as "small" ships which you can field swarms of into a single fight. On that scale, your "hero" ships are the largest of super-capital vessels, the smaller capital ships are the equivalent of fighters in the context of this video, and fighters are basically just a type of projectile being thrown around between the "real" ships.
Well yes, but the ships were just a backdrop for the character stories of the kids running the "training scenarios". They could just as easily have been glowy blobs in a holographic display tank or on a flat video wall.
visually ender's game worked because the fighters were not focused on to any degree the focus was on the capital ships and there were actually not that many of them, and the enemy were more a cloud around a few capital ships rather than actual fighters, by keeping it zoomed out on the grand strategy view it made the battle look smaller and comprehensible even when we do get a close up on the fighters at the end its still clear what they are doing and whats going on
@@Husker5454 I'm more impressed with Babylon 5 (1994-1998) looking fantastic in 2020. Namely: - Severed Dreams (as mentioned in the video) - Battle of Proxima 3 - Battle of Sector 300 (aka advanced omega destroyers)
Throw in the Hippy Griff's extra two rules and I would in one other rule: Let history inspire your conflicts/battles. In many naval battles throughout history, most feature only a handful on each side as oppose to massive conflicts. The Battle of Midway had many support ships, but the key contenders were 7 capital ships and their respective complements of fighter and bomber aircraft. Each battle can be filled with mistakes and errors, fortunes and chance happenings created by decisions made in a moment too soon, too late or just in time. If we allow history to help create the tension and inspire our stories, then the conflict depicted will feel more real and create more of an impact.
Re: Picard's finale battle, what took me out of it was both sides used just copies of one ship. The Romulans aren't known for a lot of ship diversity, but they have had a few variations. Whereas Starfleet having 200 identical ships, especially when Riker said his ship was the newest and toughest, yet for some reason the same as all the rest, made no sense and was a mess visually. Canonically, Starfleet has engaged in battles with 40+ year-old ship designs alongside new models and series regulars. Even Discovery's season finale battle at least had two distinctly different Starfleet ships (against a fleet of completely nondescript ships, but still).
Starfleet battles used to be used with any ship within 20 light years that could fight. Some of the battles in DS9 had Excelsior class ships, which had to be 70 to 80 years old by then. There was even a Constitution-Refit class ship at the battle of Wolf 359.
That "battle" was so stupid to me. The Romulan bitch telling them to target the outpost, then telling them to change target like 3 times. You have 200 ships, there is no way the real, and illusonary ships in their way could fully screen the outpost. The copy paste fleets of both romulan and federation ships made me think of starwars..... The federation fleet really annoyed me though, the federation has always been laughable ill prepared for any sort of fleet on fleet action. They dont have battle fleets just hangin around waiting for a hero to call, their ships are intended to operate alone on a wide variety of missions. You could argue that things changed a lot after the dominion war, the borg, and the mars incident but we never see that, we see one admiral tell Picard to fuck off. How many ships did they pull together to counter a borg cube in first contact? A dozen maybe? You know what would have been fucking amazing, if a Klingon fleet showed up instead of the federation one. It baffles me that Klingons were never mentioned at all in a show that was all about romulans. Instead of talking about a few "member species" threatening to leave, they could have talked about a potential Klingon civil war as a result of their long time allies trying to save their long time enemy, a species that almost everybody hates. A klingon fleet showing up would have been a lot more interesting then Riker waving his dick around.
@Dinowarrior This is my own assessment based on critically watching dozens of action and sci-fi movies. The only ships that ever do anything are Anakin's and Obi-Wan's starfighters, Grievous' ship, and for one short moment a swarm of droid fighters that zip past them. The only fighting that really happens is trying to shake the missiles. Other than that, the battle is nothing but bright light outside the windows. Nobody even mentions what other ships are doing or how the battle is progressing. We don't see a single captain who is fighting in this battle making a single decision about what their ships are doing.
@@Yora21 that was the entire point of the battle though, it was to show off the vast scale of the Clone War, but it was a backdrop and explanation to what Anakin and Obi-wan was doing. It was not the focus of that part of the movie. It mattered so little in scene importance that we never saw the end of the battle, we instead focused on Anakin and Obi-wan landing the remains of the Invisible hand on Coruscant.
@Dinowarrior The what the fuck now? Someone posited that the battle of coruscant involvs numerous vessels. I remarked that while that may be true, we only see what happens to anakins and Obi Wans fighters, and in the end the Invisible hand, the rest serve as a backdrop, or an enviromental hazard at best. Do you belive this is incorrect?
Probably the best example for tension over action is the battle of yavin. The action, outside of the initial dogfights, is relatively basic, three ships flying in a straight line waiting to be picked off while a computer counts down to the optimum launch point of their missiles, but the tension achieved in these moments is excellent. And it’s all in the score. It starts with the Y-Wing run. One of the squadron leaders is joined by two new characters, everything is relaxed, until suddenly "the guns.... they’ve stopped." No music, just the noise inside the cockpits and the nervous chatter between the pilots. Immediately creepy tension is building. One of them says "watch for enemy fighters" and we remember the earlier scene between Vader and two pilots "several fighters have broken off from the main group, come with me," and it’s apparent that Vader is out there somewhere, and he's coming. Then we see the tie fighters, the central one a unique design we have not seen before, Vader's unique ship, and he fires and instantly one of the rebel fighters is dead, collapsing in his seat as his ship explodes around him. Then they turn their attention on the rest and calmly attack them as well. The squadron leader we know is shown panicking, while his comrade urges him to "stay on target", then he dies next. And we cut to the Other squadron Leader radioing in for an update and all he hears is the final pilot's warning, cutting off as he is killed too. No music is played through this entire segment creating an eerie atmosphere, by then end the danger is established for the next pilots, punctuated by a significant (in relation to this battle) character death, meanwhile the Death Star is getting closer (and leia's getting larger). Tension is ratcheting up even further as the next attack run occurs, this one goes slightly better for the rebels in that they launch a missile, but he has missed, just dusting on the surface. Luke tries to rendezvous with the surviving pilot, but he orders him back for his attack run as he knows he is dead, his ship is failing and the ties are on him. As he dies we see a close up of Luke's horrified expression as he realises that he is now the last hope for the rebel alliance, punctuated by the first notes on the score since the first trench run. All slow building tension that makes the entire scene masterful.
Best space battles ever: David Weber's Honorverse. Tense, realistic, internally consistent, involved, even physically plausible. Just great. Not one, not a single other series of books ever comes close to this. Amazing.
Except for the last few books, the Manticorans are *so* technologically advanced over the Solarian League that there is little tension. And I understand what the author was doing, but having practically every officer of the League being a complete moron is a bit of a stretch. Yes, there are officer corps that are terrible but that was pushing it. Overall I agree though, Honorverse novels have great space battles.
I mean that was Battle Soup too...but it was fun battle soup because the way the fleets arrived and engaged each other, with the Reavers coming out of the cloudbank was just like O shit bois. Yall R F U KK E D I loved the wacky ways the ships engaged each other, like the Bola ship. But I wouldnt use this as a great example of space combat. just a really flashy exciting one.
@@Cryogenius333 It absolutely does count as a great space battle though. Because from the perspective of the characters that we are invested in (Serenity & crew) we always have our eyes on the goal, their progress, and how they are doing inside. The battle doesn't matter, getting through it does (just like the storm, and everything the crew of Serenity face) All these ships are just to get us past all those other ships and we don't really care who wins the battle. We even get shots inside the Operative's ship, as the only other character present whom we recognize.
@@PaladinJoshs ...If the battle doesn't matter, then it's not really a space battle, is it? There's no fighting, shooting, or anything; it's just fly through to the other side. The battle remaining behind and the story continuing without real reference to it makes it clear that the battle isn't the point, and thus, the battle isn't really the story, and thus, it's really not a great space battle. It is, however, a great moment of tension, a moment of escape, etc.
Fyi, Hullplating doesnt mean the hull itself. In most ships and modern Tanks you have the ablative armor on the outside that is the actual "defensive" stuff and then the actual bulkhead structure that keeps the ship from being drowned (e.g. Torpedo Bulge) or in a tank its the inner meral sheath.. Even the ISS has that, one is the defensive layer against micro meteroids and other tiny bits like washers and such debries, and the other the survival layer that keeps the astronauts from being sucked out. So in theory its totally plausible that the ablative armor can get damaged so an actor could say "lost hull plating" and that means "if the next shot hits that spot it will go straight into the squishy bits". Obviously you can add tension by showing minor hairline cracks and air leaks. IIRc you can even see the actual armor being mounted in some scenes from various sci fi shows where there is a thin wall on the inside and they mount the armor on a form of superstructure. I would have to rewatch but even BSG (the new series) has this modeled into it, they dont shout it but you can see it on the galactica that she loses more and more armor. In a more dramaturgical sense you can see it sort of as a classic schmup game style. You have a shield and then one life, if your shield is lost you will die on the next hit. This way one (mostly the cgi folks who do all the visual telling) can damage the ship, and show it beaten, but still give it a fighting chance, without having to "instagib" the ship on each hit. I find this a greate way to portray iminent danger by indicating "we lost our portside hull plating on the engine section". Meaning "oh fuck if he hits us again in that area he can easily blow our reactor with a direct hit" This then also leads PERFECTLY into the manouvering and slow paced "turning the ship to show the strongest armor towards the oponent". So whatyou say in "we lost hull plating" means the walls are gone is incorrect - sorry to clarify that as in all other cases i can only agree. Also: I really hate the fast editing these days.... the slow down feature on many players it getting more and more use and thats concerning. Why put in copious ammounts of work into a space battle scene (e.g. an explosion of a ship) to it being over in like 2 seconds....
I only recently got around to watching BSG, and I absolutely adore the space battles in that show. Definitely some of the best in sci fi, and it's a bit of a shame the show is kind of forgotten about (at least in my experience).
You could add in two extra rules there:
1) Space battles serve the story. Something must occur with relevance to the main plot and characters. By the end of the battle, something must have changed.
2) A space battle IS a story in itself. It has a defined beginning, middle and end. The ships themselves are characters within that story.
Great additions. Louis L'Amour used to say in his western novels, that the land itself was a character; if not as much or more, in my opinion.
That second rule applies just as readily to car chases and fisticuffs.
This is what made Wrath of Khan so great. The ships weren't just tin cans, they were the avatars of the crews.
When I once said that an object can be seen as a character in a story, everybody looked at me as if escaped from somewhere where people with white coats rules but that is what you get from a place where movies usually don't have characters, just people who talk a lot in a very slow and pretentious way.
The problem witrh most scifi is that we completly forget that Space is huge. We always put ships close together even if they can fire from very far away. Especially when Projectile weapons like torpedos have a theoretical unlimited Range. I think there is no reason why there cant be interresting Storys written with this premise/Idea
"Hull status?"
"The hull is gone captain!"
*floats off into the vacuum*
OMFG THATS GREAT
"So, she's coming apart at the seams?"
"No, _sir!_ She's coming apart at those big f$@%ing holes punched into the ship!"
@@BogeyTheBear
*Railgun punches a hole straight through the bridge*
"Oh what lovely breeze we got here now"
And that's why you put on your voidsuit before contact.
Better version of that:
"Ship integrity status!?"
"We lost hull integrity in the sectors A4 to B3, the ship is crumbling down!"
Spacedock: ...The Hunt for Red October, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World and The Wrath of Khan.
Me: Yes!
Spacedock ...almost 20 years since the Battle of New Caprica...
Me: Stop making me feel old!
150,020 years of you add conon.
@@Grimloxz no, more like ten years.
Oh god 20 years.
I can remember TV before Star Trek and space movies were monsters movies in space.
Hunt For Red October came out so long ago that if Vasili Borodin were a real man, he'd be dead by now.
When you use fighters make sure that you show the people inside of them and that a HUMAN dies when one of those blows up. Star wars did it good when the x wings pilots are shown to scream when ever one was shot down
The radios were the best built part of the ship. Wings off, engines on fire, that radio still preformed.
@@rfletch62 That's a good point. Wanna establish tension? Have a named character take a bad hit and lose the radio. Are they lost? Downed but alive? Mostly alright but incommunicado? if they're fine, how to they return if they can't contact flight control? Did they lose IFF and are at risk of friendly fire from the defensive batteries?
@@Halinspark The pilot of BSG (2003) did that well; when the first wave of Galactica's shiny new Mark VIIs are heading towards the (two) Cylon Raiders, and then get hit with the virus; Captain Anders sees his systems go down, and starts telling his XO to take over... but only hears silence until he looks over and see the entire squadron just got turned off. Not to mention, how the Raptor crew (monitoring the flight group) lost comms with them as well.
(Actually, they used losing the Radio and Transponder later in Season 1 as well...)
I liked how in Revenge of the Sith, you could see fighter pilots' bodies in space after their ships exploded.
@@SuperGman117 oh yeah!
The opening to episode 3 was one of the best space battle I have ever watched. From the two jedi fighter flying around playfully and carefree, and flip! Omg there is a huge battle going on, the clone troopers dying and floating around in space was pretty sad. And it showed Anakins good side, caring about his fellow soldiers
"Tension is better than action."
A perfect example of this is when the Galactica faces off against the Pegasus. Not a single shot gets fired yet it was one of the best examples of tension BSG had to offer.
That was a classic. The background score was perfect. The dialogue was perfect. The timing was perfect.
@@Taojas I mean, the score of the newer BSG was pretty solid all around.
@@Taojas call it whatever you like, IM GETTING.... MY MEN
@@lewisvargrson Little heavy on the drums at times, but still pretty good.
@@NanoBurger Dude, the drums are the best part of it, they set the tempo, they're always clear to hear and distinguish when playing, and they just sound frakking good
Watching Galactica take damage over the seasons was such an amazing payoff. during the final battle you see all the scars, wounds and damage, you hear the ship creaking and breaking as it rams the cylon colony, you see the hull smashing through and breaking to bits . They really made it feel like it was an old boat on it's last suicide mission. I'm surprised you didn't mention that scene tbh.
The scene of it's final jump brought a tear to my eye first time I watched it.
I love how tough of a ship the story made the Galactica to be, it really felt like an old WWII battleship. No advance tech, just thick ass armor and a hearty frame built to take a pounding, especially after it's found that corners were cut on its construction, so it wasn't even as tough a ship as it was designed to be, and still made it through everything they put it through, including the rescue from New Caprica.
@@brentc2411 Ah yes, The rescue of new caprica. A ship, nearly a mile long, free falling through the atmosphere. Musta been rough on the ol girl XD
Binge watched the series over the past several months after seeing this very video recommend it. The consistent shots of Galactica's battle damaged hull post-New Caprica were a constant reminder of the fleet's desperate situation: that she was breaking, that humanity had nothing to fix her with, and that her days were truly numbered. The final jump, and Tigh saying she'd broken her back and never jump again, broke my heart. Galactica truly was a character in and of herself.
@@AmandaFessler Funny that one of the major themes of the whole series is about humans loving machines. How many people get yelled at for doing such a thing?
Yet EVERYONE loves that ship. I think about that sometimes - loving machines is actually something everyone already seems to do. It's loving people that seems so hard these days.
I don't mind shields. I like there being a self-regenerating buffer so that if you don't make too many mistakes, there's no permanent physical damage. It creates a nice... layering of stakes - while the shields are getting it, that's not ideal, but fine. As soon as hull starts getting it, we know we have problems. Psychologically it's the difference between a bent bumper on a car (even though that doesn't self-regenerate) and any other more damage.
Yeah, without shields its just too innefective. Try writing a whole galactic war where each side has to repair for weeks/months constantly after each and every battle. On screen writing as if it was a Total War game that'd be kind of wierd. Following a single ship for a season Star Trek style could take in-universe quite literally years. Not to mention what's up when they would stuck behind enemy lines, or backwards territory. Which happens quite often with protagonists.
@@Grivehn exactly. it kinda works for a show like the expanse because of how relatively small, tactical and far between the engagements are, and it worked for bsg because of the insanely effective pdc cannons or what was it, and the insanely THICCCCCC armor, literally a bunker, but for any other case, if you want prolonged engagements (ship to ship or empire to empire) you do need some kind of shields, or self-repairing armor, otherwise your only option is to make it into a dodge-fest which... is awesome, but gets old fast...
@@MidnightSt Yeah. In both shows you mentioned, they need to handle having no shields. BSG's entire trope is keeping that one ship going with constant maintenance in space. And in Expanse, they also spend weeks and months repairing - Season 5's entire plot where they split up happened because the Roci needed repair. So yes, on a small scale - and being in a technological decline like BSG, or early space tech like Expanse, it can work well and both those shows managed to do it.
They need consistency in application, though. Not just arbitrary number changes.
I think they work best when they protect against light hits and certain weapons, but big hits are merely dampened once or twice before you lose that buffer. Now you don't have to worry about strafing runs, but that attack craft could be an issue and maybe let's not park alongside their capitol ship and exchange protracted broadsides, please.
And regeneration of shields is optional, but must be consistent.
@@Halinspark Agreed. When shields are just '80%, 10% etc. thats kind of lazy. I think Star Wars had them work fairly well in some EU material. Basically its what you say - it protects to a point, and not really against a similar enemy. A good example is the Venator-class ship vs. Grievous' Invisible Hand in Ep3. They go toe to toe next to each other and both ships suffer heavy damage, despite having shields.
Spacedock: show that the crew is in constant danger.
Star Trek: exploding consoles, it is.
ROCKS EVERYWHERE
ROCKS
Hey don't forget about "that one lightning effect"
“The Starboard Plasma Coil!”
Dont forget about those poor fuckers who man USS PC World...The unluckiest ship in Star Fleet
That moment when Galactica is all but defeated, the crew have given up, nothing works, sustained fire coming in. Camera pans away, the music playing, it's all over. Out of nowhere, KEWs firing and cycling, Pegasus charges in to view unleashing hell. That moment is the epitome of doing sci-fi space engagements right. That scene will stay in my mind for the rest of my life.
Severed Dreams from B5 is probably second favourite, though at the time I was too young to understand the complexities of the fight itself there is one stand out moment for me, the Minbari arrive and Delenn lays down perhaps the most impactful line of dialogue in the show so far: "Only one human captain has ever survived battle with a Minbari Fleet. He is behind me. You are in front of me. If you value your lives, be somewhere else!"
That BS moment is just a orgasm point for all space battle fans..
Yeah, I have a love-hate relationship with Battlestar Galactica because it raped the original and the proportions of the ships are completely messed up, but that space battle was really done well!
That battle where they sacrifice Pegasus to save Galactica? It's ridiculous to me - they should have transferred to Pegasus and make it the flagship, because it was more modern and capable than Galactica. Then this ploy would be logical, if places of Galactica and Pegasus were reversed.
Thanks for reminding me how great B5 was, should really break out the DVD's again :)
IMO the B5 civil war was full of amazing battles. Liberation of Proxima III was a giant sci-fi boner from the first to the last minute. And the final battle of the civil war while maybe not as good of a combat sequence than the aforementioned BSG one had great personal moments
Actually I'd submit that one of the best and most tense space battles is one that's never fought - the standoff between Galactica and Pegasus at the cliffhanger between "Pegasus" and "Resurrection Ship" in RDM Season 2 is superbly tense and the viewer is invested in both combatants even though Cain is the obvious antagonist. The fact that a shot isn't fired doesn't actually matter - the tension and the decision-making around the chart tables, with the camera rotating around both while both ships' fighters rotate around each other in the standoff, with those fantastic drums - is one of the series' crowning moments of awesome.
"Starbuck to all vipers do not fire. Repeat, do not fire! I'm a friendly. We're all friendlies! So, let's just be friendly!"
Her voice acting in that scene was stellar.
Just imagine what it would've been like for the occupants of the civilian ships watching your two battlestars launch vipers and point their cannons at each other without any context or explanation.
@@firestorm165 "uhmm why are mommy and daddy fighting??? ;_;"
@@TheKurtkapan34 hope they were wearing their brown pants lol
I'll see you on the Galactica/Pegasus standoff, and raise you the battle in BSG "The Final Cut". Where you never even see the battle. The entire conflict is viewed from inside Galactica's CIC and all you see are DRADIS screens and listen to the Viper pilots radio comms while the crew stand tense at their stations watching and listening.
"Less is always more" is why Rogue One has the best space battle of Disney's movies, by far. Also your point about establishing the ships, the stakes, long shots etc, was done fantastically in Rebels, especially during thr battle of Atollon
Im confused, you say Rogue One has the "best" space battle from the Disney movies, i believe the word you were looking for is "only". Totally agree on the battle of Atollon though.
MWBalls, But almost every disney era star wars movie has had a battle in space. A space battle. Episode 8 was technically a space battle even if nothing exciting ever happened, and 9s was technically in atmosphere because bs plot reasons but surely it still counts?
Rebels did an amazing job establishing stakes. Every time a rebel ship blew up, it felt like a real loss because I knew how few ships they had, and had often seen the work that went into getting that specific ship in the first place.
Unfortunately, you're taken out of the battles in rebels by how arbitrary ship strengths and capabilities seem to be. I was especially bothered whenever there were ships, usually CR-90s, that had numerous visible weapons and are known in-universe to be well armed, inexplicably failing to fire back at attackers and being treated by characters as though they were helpless. If they wanted a helpless transport for the heroes to have to escort, they should've used a GR-75.
I wonder what he thinks about the battle of Coruscant from revenge of the sith. I always liked that battle, the cgi looks amazing, even today. Especially compared to attack of the clones
@@cpt.riptide473 I love this one as well despite it not following any of the rules. I don't know why it works so well.
"Less is always more."
Yes yes yes. As writers ourselves this video was very fun to watch. People are more interesting than ships in a story, and tension is better than lasers.
we've lost hull plating but some how we are still alive not sure how captain🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
I disagree, I find a good ship a lot more interesting than its entire crew.
But just like racing games, animes and movies, whoever writes good racing and mechanics usually has no clue how to build characters.
And worst off for me, whoever builds good, relatable, consistent characters tend to think tire grip levels are powered by believing in yourself xD
Ballancing both social and technological matters is what makes The Expanse possibly the greatest space show ever in my opinio, as well as makes Initial D a great racing anime in its first production cycle with real car footage overlaid by digital painting when some precise technique was on display
I feel like the Donnager Battle is an advanced example where some of these rules are broken, but they're broken by people who understand the rules. I didn't always know what was going on, but that was *on purpose*, because the main characters you follow don't know what's going on either. What do those stealth ships actually look like? What do those bright flashes actually mean? However, the tension and stakes are made VERY clear with That One Famous Railgun Shot, You Know which One I'm Talking About. The Donnager Battle and the Battle of Thoth Station are seared into my mind. In fact, pretty much every space battle in The Expanse is incredibly tense, especially after that moment with the PDC shots in the Thoth Station battle. (This has worn off with time since I know the Main Characters probably won't die, but it's still pretty neat.) The Expanse made space scary.
Something that I really liked about Babylon 5 battles was who space fights were in sync with the music. Just a fun little side note, there.
There's this Mecha Anime from the early 90s called "Patlabor". In the second movie there's this scene where the good guys (Japanese Air Force) have to intercept the bad guys (which we don't who they are at that point), and the whole tension of the scene is shown through Tokyo landscapes, radar lectures, cockpit shots of the fighters and the planes peacefully soaring through the clouds. You as a viewer have NO IDEA what's happening, because nobody in neither air nor ground has any clue, other than the radar signals. But music, animation, radar shot and face expression is everything you need to know.
And not to mention, in one particular episode of season 5, even watching the battle from the part of the two cleaners, they could still see and recognise who was who in death. Red explosions for the Star Fury's, green for the aliens, as explained by Delenn.
Giving people context can be the difference between average and outstanding.
If the books are anything to to by, we ain't seen nothing yet when it comes to space battles in the expanse. Can't wait for season 5 and beyond...
The Donnager battle didn't break many rules. There were only 2 problems - fast jerky 1 second lasting cuts and the fact that there weren't many exterior shots throughout the battle, probably due to low budget.
THE BEST things about the Donnager battle were the build up, the mystery surrounding the enemy, the anticipation before things got hot and the twist - the Martians underestimated the enemy because they didn't believe that tiny gunships posed a threat to their battleship.
@@bobmartin9918 Seasons 4 and 5 will certainly be interesting. At first, i had a problem getting through them, but looking back at it, they are excellent.
"You need to watch three movies..." *lists off movies, gets an instant like*
I just wish some clips from 2 of those 3 movies actually got included. (Though I'll admit they weren't space movies.)
At one point in my life, I considered The Hunt For Red October to be my favorite movie.
I've only seen Master & Commander once, though I've listened to the soundtrack countless times.
About time, space is not blue!!!!
@@derekkonigsberg2047 They're not just amazing movies, but they almost represent a progression of battles.
Master and Commander: 2D xy-axis naval battles.
Hunt for Red October: partial 3D xy(negative z)-axis naval battles.
Star Trek II The Wrath of Khan: full 3D xyz-axis naval battle (with a direct reference to using the z-axis!)
Master & Commander was criminally under-rated. Would have loved to have seen more of O'Brian's series adapted.
Great Video!
Now,I'd like to add a couple points to this myself:
1.Strategy. Most space battles just consist of the two sides approaching each other from opposite directions and blasting everything they have at each other,even though in real battles,strategy wins the day.
2. Think in three Dimensions! Spaceships,unlike regular warships,can move in any direction,so they should try to use this to their advantage.
You actually got me thinking of another genre of ship to ship battles that don't nearly get enough attention when it comes to strategies and tactics. Airship battles. (Steampunk/dieselpunk)
I'd assume it would be similar to spaceship tactics but you would have to deal with the range and curvature of your shots, weather, clouds, altitude, drag, etc...
@@therealist3495
Well nothing like (realistic) space ship battles. It would be more akin to the space ship battles you norm see in mainstream sci-fi.
Id look into a lot of the behind the scenes info of the Star Wars Imperial Naval tactics, notably Thrawns tactics, and how he used his ships. Surprising to see any strategy used in Star Wars but its there.
this is why the battle of the tilium asteroid in BSG's "Hand of God" is excellent! We know that the Colonials are Horribly outnumbered. So they use out of the box strategy to win. And, from a narrative perspective, we the viewer get to watch the plan unfold without needing to be spoon fed the steps.
I actually liked the take ender took from the book Enders Game. It isn't just up and down but can be from any direction, North, South, East, West. It also sometimes bugs me when ships have cannons or lasers on top of the ship and other ships never seem to approach from the bottom of the defenseless ship.
Wh40k be like "captian the hull is compromised!" "FILL THE CRACK WITH GUARDSMEN UNTIL ITS SEALED WE ALL KNOW THESE ARE STANDARD PROCEDURES "
Nah not even that, they'd just let that portion of the hull depressurize. Its far easier to just close the bulkheads and let the 150,000 crewmen in there die. Its only 2% of the crew anyways.
Yeah, oftentimes one ship could serve as a planetary scale nation by itself. They also always seem to be tarduses
They wouldn't waste Guardsmen, mostly because unless it's a transport it won't have guardsmen in it, and because there's plenty of meat on the shit already, whether or not it's filled with Guardsmen.
Theyd use the slaves first.
“Captain! The Gellar Field is compromised!”
“Tom? Didn’t you die like…. Three years ago?”
*Captain smiles as “Tom” starts morphing into a daemonette of Slaanesh
"Tension is better than action" hoo boy if more studios would take this to heart.
I don't care if it's sci fi, horror, action, or thriller, Hitchcock was right: there is no terror in an explosion, only the anticipation of one.
Ledgend of the galactic heroes gets away with ridiculously huge battles by following this with zeal.
The opening battle of the series has like 50,000 capital ships in it. In that universe Fleets are the main component a fleet is damaged by losing ships.
Go all the way back to JAWS, (why yes, I have become old now thanks for noticing), it was much more effective when the shark was IMPLIED not shown.
@@scottgiles7546 If I remember right, they had to reduce the number of shots with the shark because the animatronic model was so terrible. This actually made the movie better for the reason you mentioned.
We need mexican standoffs between ships to happen more often.
@@gabriel300010 Gunboat diplomacy at its most direct!
Hands down my favourite Space Battle on screen of all time is the Battle of the Supergate in Stargate SG-1, when the Ori send their first ships into the Milky Way.
You know all the ships, you get tons of interior shots, and close ups of fighters, and they even then show how futile have the fighters even is. The whole thing is super tense and dramatic, because the Ori ships are basically ultra-destructive powerhouses, and ships you have been seeing for so long as really damn powerful just end up getting shredded to these, and it just leaves you with a sense of dread by the end of it.
Additionally, the space battle above Asuras in Stargate Atlantis was fantastic, as there was real stakes, the space battle wasn't even the main mission, and you saw how badly it affected everything.
Stargate was great when it came to Space battles, tbh.
Totally agree, stargate space battles are what made me love space combat as much as I do now. Also having Sam watch all the destruction at the super gate in just a eva suit and being completely helpless but to just watch her friends and allies get obliterated by the ori was just insane to me
Space battles in Stargate Universe had even more tension. Only one Destiny against enemies. We know this ship and we care about characters. Battle scenes were brilliant.
@@lazy_riveN And for most of it they didn't even have control over Destiny which just added to the back foot-ness
Jason Wilhelm the cgi on it is dated but it is still really cool. That battle breaks the raging maelstrom rule but it does it well.
The first few seasons of sg-1's space battles weren't great tho. It was the cliché throwing numbers around with not much going on
DCO: "We've lost hull plating!!"
Cpt: "That is an inadequate and overly vague damage report - what compartments have lost how much plating, and what's the estimated time for emergency repairs?"
Vs.
DCO: "Sir, we've lost external armor on compartments 15 to 35 on deck 13, Complete loss of hull plating on compartment 10-forward, 15% loss of atmosphere"
Cpt: "Thank you, DCO, Tactical officer - focus your fire, I want that vessel cored before it can hit us like that again"
Detailed damage is best damage. I don't want to hear: "Sir, we've lost weapons!", I want to hear:
"Sir, B turret has been hit and reports a fire!"
"Seal it off before it reaches the magazine!"
DCO?
@@pomeranianproductions647 Damage Control Officer, navy slang for emergency repair persons (second hand information, so any navy guys feel free to correct me)
@@muninrob Ah okay thank you. But couldnt an AI just take over that "office" in a ship crew since its proably faster and better at reporting.
@@pomeranianproductions647 That's hard to pull off on screen - it turns out people want to see interactions between people in our entertainment instead of watching lights blink and speakers squeal at each other. I suppose you could pull off a Lt. Data or Rommy if you write it well.
But if you have AI for DCO, why does the ship have any of us meatbags on it at all?
This reminds me of the Lost Fleet (novel) series by jack campbell, which I personally enjoyed despite some flaws. The narrative follows a fleet stuck in enemy territory, which makes each lost ship a noteworthy event, but what I found more interesting was that almost all battles are made up of flotillas flying past each other at significant fractions of light speed (ftl limited to "jump points" which are in fixed locations per solar system) while computers take care of the almost-instantaneous aiming/firing. ftl is restrained to specific locations ("jump points"), and it ends up making the battles mostly about the commander's decisions in how/when/where to engage, in what formation of their 3 or 4 main different ship types, etc. It might not translate well to a visual medium, but it achieves the goals of keeping most of the focus on the decisions/tension and not the fireworks, and making each set of fireworks noteworthy (did a ship get it's engines shot and need to be defended by the rest of the flotilla lest it get picked off? did a hole get ripped in one corner of the formation, necessitating a re-organization and a plan to not get shredded again? is it better to take a higher risk of losses in order to completely kill an enemy formation before it can reach it's allies? etc). the rest of it is basically space opera with characters throughout the fleet but I love the battles.
It's a very good series (Romantic subplots aside)
I always thought of the fleet combat sort of being like medieval knights riding at each other with lances
@@SerPinkKnight What about the romantic subplots? I have been eyeing that series but this is the first time I have seen it mentioned in the wild.
@@Duchess_Van_Hoof Nothing is wrong about the romance in TLF in my opinion. You might call it cookie cutter, and you can see it coming from ten thousand miles away, but neither characters are cardboard cutouts. What's interesting is how the concerned parties must work around the problem of romance in a military setting. Campbell, a retired LCDR in the USN, knows exactly how stuff is done.
Love the fight sequences in those books.
And honestly, if the romabtic subplots bother you, you can just skip them pretty easily.
I would say the Battle of Yavin in Star Wars: Episode IV is actually a great space battle from a storytelling point of view. I had watched a video put out by a Star Wars fan (who happened to cosplay in different uniforms from the original trilogy), and in the video, he commented that the Rebel Alliance sending two different types of fighters to attack the Death Star made no sense, since the X-Wings are fast, and the Y-Wings are slow (of course, years later Rogue One would fix this, by having one of the Rebel Alliance's X-Wing squadrons decimated by the Empire over Scariff , but I digress). He thought it would make more sense for the Rebels to send only X-Wings and not bother with the Y-Wings.
The problem is, he was coming at it from a real-world logical decision, and not from the needs of storytelling. Of course you'd send your fastest, most manoeuvrable fighters. But what he missed is that by having two models of Rebel Alliance fighters, we have a good idea of who is where, during the battle. We know Luke is flying an X-Wing, and by seeing and hearing them call in, we know Luke is in Red 5. These two pieces of informative inform us where Luke is during the battle. We know he can't be in the first Trench Run, as that's made by Y-Wings. We know he's not one of the X-Wings in the second Trench Run, as the film cuts between the various pilots. Finally, when the other X-Wings are destroyed, from the dialogue and edits, we know Luke is one of the surviving X-Wings, and that he takes the lead during his Trench Run.
Meanwhile, because Vader is obviously an important character, and that he leads a flight of TIE Fighters, we can guess he's in the visually distinct TIE. It's not important to know where the rest of the TIE Fighters are - we just need to know where Vader is.
Then it's just a case of building the tension, with the Death Star coming into range, Rebel pilots being shot down, etc. That way, we get a real a sense of whare at stake and how close they are to all being killed. We're also shown that the Rebels are individuals, whereas the Empire are a faceless bureaucracy. It's a really good sequence from that point of view.
Exactly, that battle originally had rebel cr-90s and other ships engaging in a ship to ship battle with the DS escorts, while the fighters moved in, but they didn't end up showing that, because it wasn't nessesary for the story.
The Death Star attack was mostly (almost entirely) a reshoot of The Dambusters - even the dialogue was copied word for word. Lucas added reshot scenes of “The Battle of Britain” and “Reach For The Skies” for the dogfighting. It does work very well because of the cuts to the crew and back to the exterior shots, which is something those WWII films did.
Y-Wings kinda make sense since they are bombers, if they could fire their torpedoes downward, like in rogue squadron or the original battlefront II, but if they can't do that then yeah Y-Wings aren't the best idea. I would assume though since they were bombers, they would be better equipped to take the shot.
It's also a great indication of just how desperate these rebels are and how much of a David and Goliath setup there is for this battle. The Rebels probably sent every fighter they had that could technically accomplish the mission: all two squadrons of them. They didn't have the luxury of being picky like that and sending up uniform squadrons.
Also, the mix-and-match nature of the Rebel attack highlights the uniformity of the Imperial defense. They can scramble wave after wave of identical TIE Fighters (the one exception being Vader's unique TIE Fighter) to the Rebels' tiny complement of beaten-up fighters with exposed wiring, missing hull panels, and carbon scoring. An endless, faceless, identical legion versus a tiny band of plucky, undersupplied indivividuals fighting for freedom is as classic as storytelling gets.
@@EliWintercross that actually makes sense story wise, i was bothered by the fact that nothing is guarding the Death Star, if it was so important, they could have a small fleet as its escort since the Empire is hiding the DS from the public
"HULL INTEGRITY DOWN TO 38%!" Are you telling me 62% of the ship is gone right now???
Sc-fi's version of the warranty expiring.
Probably refers to either the structural integrity fields being on the verge of collapse, or something like metal fatique or internal support structures failing.
Would be much better if they made that clear though.
@@theuncalledfor spot on
@@theuncalledfor Could also be read as a kind of shorthand for the commander to know at a glance just how badly damaged the ship is.
@@CallanElliott
"We have taken approximately 62% of the hits we can take and still survive." Seems plausible, yes. I agree. Matches well with what I said, though, I think? Doesn't seem mutually exclusive at least.
It also helps to know the purpose of the scene you're putting together. A great example of "just way too many ships all smashing together in total chaos" actually working very well was in Serenity, with the Reavers vs the Alliance, with our heroes fighting tooth and nail just to get out of the middle of it, but that's because the scene was *meant* to be utter chaos. Not every space battle should play out like that, but it works if either one or both sides are caught in complete disarray.
A similar chaotic scene happened in Andromeda when the Commonwealth was betrayed a second time and nearly destroyed a second time.
They don't say it plainly, but they mean that showing such a chaotic battle well is extremely difficult. As for Serenity, we didn't really care about those ships. The point was that they had to get past the Alliance's blockade. Though the battle has been used wonderfully what a tiny speck the Serenity actually is and how crazy the Reavers are. The Serenity barely makes it through the battle and one Reaver followed her through this.
I took my lesson from Alfred Hitchcock. Watch his trailer for Psycho. He practically breaks all the usual rules for a movie trailer and still succeeded. And that's something about art many don't grasp. Rules are good, rules give you a solid framework and you should stick to the rules. But, you can break each and every rule if you know and understand how to break them.
To be fair, in that one, the chaos was sort of the point. The battle was meant to be a distraction and Our Heroes were mostly just trying to survive it long enough to get to the surface, not actually fight in it in any meaningful way.....
@@corwinweber693 Yeah, that was the point I was trying to make. You can pull a lot of different moods out of a space battle, use it to convey a lot of different narrative ideas... but unless absolute chaos is the point (which it *was* in Serenity) then overfilling the screen with ships is usually not the way to go.
I actually disagree. I completely forget about that scene until someone brings it up. It had so little impact on me emotionally.
BSG had great space battles. No exterior weapon sounds, choreographed symphonic music (you knew it was a battle when it started), and tension. You really wanted the humans to win each time.
In some of the scenes, the sounds of the weapons firing on the galactica sounds muffled and a bit distant, like the sound someone would hear when they are inside the Galactica.
I actually enjoy exterior sounds, even though they are not accurate, it gives a little bit more impact on the "they are shooting that guy" thought
"If you've lost the hull plating the ship is gone! THE HULL PLATING IS THE WALLS!" lol so true
I remember sf debis saying the same thing
However there can be partitions to the ship. In fact there should be, just like it is the case with naval vessels.
Our modern seagoing ships often have multiple hulls. The space shuttle, when we had one, and the ISS have a foam that automatically bleeds out to seal small holes.
There was this one time in the comments section of an EckhartsLadder starship versus where someone tried to tell me the UNSC Pillar of Autumn was amazing because it could keep fighting at 2% hull integrity.
Bruh, at 2% hull integrity the ship's armor is virtually gone, any stray shot from any sort of capital ship is gonna end the battle at that point.
Its why I couldn't stand Enterprise.
Spacedock: "Space is not blue"
Writers: "Oh...yeah..shit."
Clearly writers had played Wing Commander :D
But what if... Nebula?!
Twilight Imperium space is blue, tho.
Coloring space as blue is comparing outer space as the vast ocean of earth, which is just a novelty notion that doesn't hold water.
I also thought they made it blue to make the orange explosions look more vibrant. Same deal with lots of movie posters using blue and orange to make a big contrast.
"space actually isn't blue"
You just made a enemy today Pink Skin
The Andorian Mining Consirtium runs from no one.
Shran, get off the internet! You're not even supposed to be born for another century.
Wasn't the Space black? I mean I always see it as Black in Star Wars and Space documentaries
@@alejandroelluxray5298 to be fair space didn't have colors at all since there's no air or atmosphere in space, hence there's nothing for light to reflect (which still a bit wrong since particle still exist on space), the particle in space is small and "seems" to be invisible and didn't reflect light well, i may be wrong though...
@@twddersharkmarine7774 the only color comes from planets, moons and stars
imagine if the USS Enterprise IRL started launching life rafts and dingies as attack boats during surface engagements. lol.
Great cannon fodder!
suppose the closest real world parallel would be like, a Wasp Class putting all it's amphibious assault vehicles out to sea to use their machine guns, and parking an abrams on the deck to shoot at something
(although tbh I would like to see more star-wars-the-clone-wars style "ship uses it's ground attack complement to assist in battle" stuff)
@@1967sluggy if you had a bunch of ocean zombies that would work
Sir, the enemy has over 100 attack boats!
We won't be outdone! Launch all life rafts and dingies!
But...Sir...That won't help us do-
I SAID LAUNCH ALL LIFE RAFTS SAILOR!
well, you can load life rafts with C4 and use it as branders
Man i love that B5 episode..
"Take us in helmsman"
_"Take us in _*_where_*_ captain?"_
"Right down their *throats!* >:) "
*Earth Force:* Do not force us to engage your ships.
*Delenn:* Why not? Only one human captain has survived battle with the Minbari fleet. He is behind me. You are in front of me. If you value your lives... _be somewhere else_
Probably pinnacle of B5 plot. All 3 seasons boiled to that episode. Ill go watch it again.
I never get tired watching it.
@@AlexSDU Fantastic show. This battle was just the beginning. So many more good ones later.
@@modisp Yeah. I am rewatching it now, and I've been waiting since that episode to finally get back to the civil war. The Shadow War for the fate of the galaxy with hundreds of ship just feels disappointing after that.
"Fewer ships is better than more"
*Legend of the Galactic Heroes wants to know your location*
But it does do at fleet level mostly what is suggested here at ship level.
I prefer LOTGH battles over every other Sci-Fi battle due to the scale.
One thing I hate when watching LOTGH is that a lot of people "expect" that scale of space battle to be dynamic, which is idiotic at best IMO. Some people say there aren't enough fighters and torpedoes or missiles in LOTGH, but they fail to understand that the "normal" engagement range in LOTGH is on light-second level. Which means valkyries and spartanians and anything lower than few% of light-speed would have to be used only when you are within close-quarters range, because on normal range of LOTGH they'd need MINUTES if not HOURS to hit their targets. Same reason explains why ships has to be in formations like that. Because you are trying to hit ONE POINT on a light-second range using few laser canons, making maneuvers and doing hit-and-run tactics on this range is inefficient and stupid.
@@songyani3992 Yeah, there are issues with engagement ranges for sure. Another thing I find strange is how they can be surprised by approaching fleets (the first battle in particular). Are their scouts sleeping on the job? But the again, perhaps there are some stealth tech that isn't fully explained. They tell us that they have advanced jamming tech in any case.
Another thing is that when ships are in brawling range, they seem to react so slow to enemy presences; Like not firing their side-cannons and such.
But in its defense, it is more focused on narrative and the character's reactions than the mechanical logic of the battles.
@@RainbowDevourer The remake helped fix the first battle.
When people said "We've lost hull plating" in Enterprise, I interpreted that as the armour plating affixed to the hull being lost. They didn't lose the hull, they lost the hull's *plating*
Then they couldve said: we lost hull armour plating. Not hull plating
It was clearly meant as a ships system. Exactly like the shields. After the battles they allways asked Lt. Reid for the plating and he answers that it will function/work/whatever in xy hours again.
Like explosive reactive armor?
Specifically special forms of charged metal plating, the Vulcans refused to share shielding technology with the humans, and thus human ships used a special charged plating to deflect and absorb incoming phaser fire, rather than defective energy shielding.
There was an episode or two where they Specifically covered this, as it gave the resident Vulcan on theenterprise, T'pol, a case of, for lack of a better word, radiation sickness
More like Adaptive Armor. There was a energy aspect to the Hull Plating that was not in the form of a bubble shield. More of something that absorbed or spread out the energy along t he plating.
“Tonight, it’s a swarm of bees versus a swarm of bees!”
“There you have it, folks! A close victory by bees!”
NO NOT THE BEES *garbled nicholas cage screaming*
That, or a competitive fireworks display. Get as many flashes, sparkles, and fireballs to literally blanket the space between ships, yet do so little danage that it takes several minutes of sustained bombardment to net a result.
Our bees will fight their bees while our capital ships stand off and shout "pew pew pew" at each other.
God damn cockpit bees!
This is the escalator pitch for this video's plea.
The constant flak barrage of the point defense weapons around Galactica when it's involved in a major engagement was always one of the coolest details to me
Deep Space Nine space battles had me on the edge of my seat every single time.
Me too. Still very exciting even after watching the same battles multiple times.
Strange that a show made over 20 years ago still has the best space battles depicted. Whenever I want to watch an awesome space battle I watch favor the bold/sacrifice of angels, so good!
"The Valiant" had one of the best battle sequences.
The dominon war battles were such a departure from the regular Star Trek pew pew percentage down. Most ships don't even seem to have shields or they are not working well enough when dozens of starships are firing at each other, you can see them fall apart and crumble. Yet it worked, it wasn't jarring at all, it has shown us how the Star Trek space battles on large scale should look like, same in Enterprise and then they throw it all away in Discovery.
Farscape also had some pretty amazing battles. Less is always more.
My favorite big space battle is the one at the end of Mass Effect 3. Which is in good part because you have worked for three games to get that many ships on your side. Big battles have to earned.
It does also reflect some of the rules mentioned here though. While ME3 doesn’t maintain the pilot perspective of fighter craft, you do have a good understanding of who is captaining every ship and what those ships are capable of. Every time you recruit a war asset you’re meeting someone who will captain one of the ships in the battle of the Crucible, which is particularly powerful when the Quarian Flotilla and the Geth Armada are both part of your fleet: not only getting to know everyone piloting a ship, but also having survived and ended a war between their two people.
“This is the admiral, all hands, brace for turbulence”
I remember watching that, and thinking "Hold up... WOT????!"
"Altitude 99,000, and falling like a rock!"
"Standby FTL."
To me, both engagements between Reliant and Enterprise in TWOK were fantastic. Each weapons hit had real consequences for the story. I get your point about energy shields, but at least in this example their absence, which is unusual for starship combat in this universe, creates drama by putting the characters in changing situations and demonstrates their value by showing how quickly a ship as powerful as Enterprise can be crippled without them.
Except the shields were present for the most part. It's noted in trek cannon that shield projectors at the time could not project a bubble. Instead they projected a energy skin around the ship. This is why armor was a thing in that era. The sheild generators and armor needed to work together to protect the ship. This also made space battles better because you could see bleed through damage. When the sheilds failed....then you got some good destruction.
Then they went with bubbles and ..boy that was crap...making pannels explode from surges made no sense because...how can shields send feedback to the grid.
@@everyonethinksyoureadeathm5773 Not in the Wrath of Khan, Kirk didn't raise the shields in time so the Reliant crippled the Enterprise with the opening salvos. And the shields never really recovered. They were completely disabled due to the nature of the Mutara Nebula and the failed to raise at the Battle of Genesis. "Warning about the Mutara nebula sir, static discharge. Sensors and shields will be useless." "Sauce, for the goose Mr. Saavik. The odds will be even."
agreed, shields are certainly a crutch, but then it also provides an opportunity for when shit suddenly gets real and something actually impacts the ship. The horrific destruction in wrath of khan, or even in shows like voyager when they end up with krenim torpedoes embedded in the ship. Shields keep everything kind of pristine and detached, so when the characters are faced with the bleak, harsh reality of the dangers of the world it can be quite powerful. If you build up the rules of a story world, you can do some truly awesome stuff when you decide to break those rules.
How in the heck do we know what the military will and will not have 200 plus years . Exspecaily since they are working on such things as shields and laser weapons at this very moments. Trek has it's flailing . Shields isn't among them . Plus in star wars their ships have shields. So what's the big deal with shields. The failing I see are unrealistic strategy incorrect uses of ship class in main line engagements exc. I do agree that to many ships are used in battles they shouldn't use more than 20 between both sides basically 8 on one side 12 on the other . Or = numbers between both fighting forces with DD and cruisers and BB or battle cruiser making the internal part of a battle fleet after all your capital ships are expensive and have many crew on board so it makes since you wouldn't want to lose them to easily. All one needs do is look at how Fleets from the age of sail to ww2 are used . From there imagination is your friend
@@leehilton9669 Well it's easy to see why you would send more ships, in a space battle with infinite area to cover more ships offer more opportunities for focus fire, flanking, relief, etc. As a matter of presentation though, keeping your ship numbers down is ideal. Both can be done, but there's a fine balance in making the audience feel for your crew's danger and being able to track what's happening versus showcasing the chaos of battle.
"Like, hull plating is the walls!!!"
Yeah, ships are powerful albeit vulnerable units. To use real life examples, look at the devastation of the USS Arizona or HMS Barham in WWII (there's footage of the destruction of both). Powerful battleships blown to pieces by the ordinance within after taking devastating hits. And these ships were armored. The ship I was on was a Nimitz class carrier. Huge ships but not armored like a battleship by any means. They rely on compartmentalization and void spaces to absorb and contain damage. With modern hypersonic anti-ship missiles, their suitability is in doubt in a modern naval battle. A penetrating hit into one of the ships magazines or fuel storage would be problematic. Or a hit in the reactor compartment which breaches the reactor or the steam pipes would really ruin the day of the sailors on board. And by steam I don't mean like from a tea kettle, this is super heated steam at high pressure. This will cook you alive instantly, hopefully. I'd hate to be critically burned from steam AND irradiated. I do appreciate the few Sci-Fi shows that deal with the engine room and not just the important people with plot armor on the bridge.
"Plot armor below 20%!"
Well, with the exception of large Russian AShMs like the Moskit and the Ship-Wreck, a WWII battleship could easily take a direct hit from an Anti-Shipping missile like a Harpoon or an Exocet mainly just because those are a large HE charge (which aren't very effective at dealing with armor) detonating against the area of a ship where the armor is the thickest at the water line. The relative immunity to anti-shipping missiles was the main reason the US recommissioned the Iowa class ships in the 80s.
@@spartanalex9006 People really underestimate how tough those old battleships are. They can take SERIOUS hits and still be functional, and their armor can shrug off all but the most devastating attacks. A missile with a shaped charge could probably penetrate their armor, but it wouldn't do enough damage to seriously threaten the ship. You'd need a gigantic anti-ship missile to bring one down.
Torpedoes are the real threat, though you'd need to launch them from a submarine, as otherwise you'd be in range of the battleships guns, and being in range of a battleship's guns if you aren't also a battleship is really, really bad.
@@zoro115-s6b Well, modern bunker busters could also make deadly effective and accurate AP bombs and end a BBs cruise right there.
@@spartanalex9006 Possibly, but I don't know if they could penetrate a battleships deck armor. They used similar (though unguided of course) bombs in WWII and while they could damage a battleships secondary and AA guns, they couldn't breach the citadel.
Takeaway for big space battles: Pick a ship or two and focus on that. You can give the scale and the other ship names, but don't jump around. Think about how WWII battles are described: You focus on the flagships. You focus on the carriers or the battleships. Most people aren't there to hear about all the Destroyer Escorts on picket duty.
Alternatively, if you focus on a small ship, focus on how its role in the battle contributes to the battle.
"Most people aren't there to focus on the destroyer escorts on picket duty."
*USS Samuel B Roberts would like to know your location.*
Have a comment related to the battle, "Captain, I think we're doing a good job" "How do you know that?" "Command is sending us towards the group in the middle" "Ah, the usual reward for doing good work, is more work. Take us in"
Actually you focus on the most active ships so most of an Action off Samar movie would take place on the USS Johnston and the USS Samuel B Roberts with a fair amount of time on the other DD's and not a lot of time on the rest of the US ships. The same for the Japanese but more time on Kurita on the Yamato's bridge would be needed because of his impact on the Japanese not doing much against a far inferior opponent.
@@nickkurzy2246 Ships "punching" far above their weight class actions are almost always interesting. I think a good movie could be made about the radar pickets off Okinawa with the focus on the Laffey.
>Think about how WWII battles are described: You focus on the flagships. You focus on the carriers or the battleships. Most people aren't there to hear about all the Destroyer Escorts on picket duty
Wrong, read any account of The Battle of the North Cape and the Royal Navy destroyers are extremely important, hell the Royal navy destroyer crews were by and large considered as the ''elite''. Also Daniel's original point still stands, less ships is more and you don't need to focus on the biggest ships out there. Samar has already been mentioned so I won't even go there.
Also destroyers are typically not that small in the grand scheme of things, if you have a huge space navy potentially guarding several planets or even several systems most of your ships aren't going to be battlecruisers, battleships and large carriers or supercarriers, they're going to be cruisers, frigates and destroyers. Most navies during the age of sail were primarily made out of 5th and 6th rate ships and a whole slew of even smaller vessels, frigates, not the towering 100+ gun 1st, 2nd or 3rd rates. Same goes for almost any navy throughout history, smaller ships are generally speaking more economical.
re shields: If there are no shields then it is difficult to justify any strike not being utterly devastating.
If a setting is *actually* trying to be realistic, then they have to just accept that. In The Expanse or the Honor Harrington novels, where everyone's big gun is either a high-yield nuclear weapon or some super future tech more destructive than that, then just about any ship can kill pretty much any ship if they manage a single direct hit. The energies involved are such that matter simply isn't going to resist them.
Now that's fine if that's what you want.
But maybe that's not what you want.
thats implying you go for hard sci fi to begin with. There are plenty of ways to make attacks not one hit kills in soft sci fi. You could just play with the yield of their weapons, making them not equivalent to nuclear bombs, but closer to artillery guns. Alternatively you could increase the scale of the ships. A megaton nuclear blast is a devastating blow to a 500ft long destroyer, but what about for a 50 mile long battleship? A Third option is to introduce some super material that is able to stop high yield nuclear bombs, making armor a viable technology.
@@uppishcub1617 If there's a super material that can stop nukes, typically you'd expect someone to make bullets out of it that would pierce that armor. Bullets of a material tend to defeat armor of the same material.
@@afriendofafriend5766 Then you're limited to just poking holes in the enemy ship, as opposed to destroying unarmored ships with a single nuke. That still increases the durability of the ships and makes fights into drawn out things as opposed to one hit kill scenarios.
@@uppishcub1617...that's not how projectile physics work. Relativistic slugs are going to leave exit wounds the size of the target's broadside.
Not to mention nukes are not limited to _bombs._ You can create high-energy plasma lances out of nuclear warheads by constructing them just right. Basically, you make a nuclear-pumped shaped-charge, and use some heavy metal 'plug' over the 'bore' to act as the energy delivery medium. Anything that is close enough to be hit with a directed energy weapon is close enough to get lanced through by a nuke.
Obviously nobody have tried to make them at this point, but as far as I'm aware the math checks out. Most of the work was made already for Project Orion, with the weapon concept mostly being refined on the side, though work stopped much too early to give us anything near a working blueprint.
"Fewer ships is better than more"
JJAbrams: "Nah, just copy paste ten thousand ISD I and put them against all the existing rebel 3D models times ten thousand".
There was no tension building at Exegol. Where there was at Endor. They could have done the same, with maybe better results by making canon the Eclipse and doing this battle between reb.. sorry resistance and the Eclipse.
Lemaire Yves iirc the Rebel fleet was literally procedurally generated
@@nicholasharvey4393 I bet they even took model from the swtor fleets.
Pellenor Fields...In Space!
"Shields will be splintered! Phasers shall be shaken! A red day! A batt'leth day! Ere first shift begins!! ...Death!! Death!!!"
i've never felt more heartbroken and ashamed for others than watching Episode 9 ... but even i had to admitt, that it looked cool and epic on the first glance. the second glance made my heart even sank more. there were venators in the rebel fleet! 60 years after the end of the clone wars there are still exist some of those? that added an other plothole to the gigantic pile this film was.
@@ricwalker6600 To be honest I did not notice the venators. However I did notice some other ships of the SWTOR era, but since disney has stole the hammerhead frigate design from this era (and I'm fine with its use in rogue one), that doesn't surprise le
I loved the battles in The Expanse.. the visuals of the ultra-high-speed bullets and projectiles just blasting through everything, and a whole room being completely full of holes instantaneously, and people being randomly alive or dead without even really any significant collateral damage due to the sheer speed of everything was ridiculously terrifying. And even no matter how big and impressive your ship is, the sheer strength of physics meaning that pretty much nowhere was safe. I hadn't ever seen anything quite like that in a show before.
The Expanse is really good at demonstrating physics concepts and explaining what goes wrong when alien super science breaks the rules and then reinstates them.
@@jlokison not just that, also the Donnager, mightiest, biggest and most modern warship blown to shreds by 6 corvettes.
marschma then one of the donnager ship compliment shreds one of said corvettes in a later battle. It shows how tactics and knowing the enemy really does help.
@@marschma To be fair, those "covettes" where armed with Railguns, that's capital grade ship weaponry that wasn't really supposed to be on ships that size.
Once they got into railgun range, it was over. Donnager has two railguns, those corvettes each had one.
@@Chrinik Yep. The Donnager was doomed by a lack of knowledge, not failed tactics per-se. Not even really the captain's fault... Those things were not supposed to exist.
I personally loved the scene where the Razorback was being chased and Bobbie explained the weapon ranges. If they got within a certain range, they were dead... otherwise they could dodge. Pretty much a binary and everyone involved knew it.
I liked the Battle of Asuras in Stargate: Atlantis. It had a lot of ships, sure, but it was very clean and you could see what everyone was doing.
@The high ground All episodes that showed whole different kinds of ships was a big build-up for future space battles so viewer is 100% knows what is happing and what each ships does.
@The high ground I think there was maybe 1 or 2 examples where weapons were brought in at the last second, like the Dakara ancient life creation weapon, which I think was only mentioned in the last 3 episodes before it was used, but I don't remember for sure. I still really liked the episodes where they built up to using the weapon.
@@fould13 And of course the titular object from Stargate: The Ark of Truth, which came out of bumfuck nowhere.
@@jaffarebellion292 that movie was a mess, both were honestly...
@@hulmhochberg8129 Continuum was fun. Time-travel and alternative realities are really cool stories...
Hull Plating in Enterprise was "Polarize the hull plating", which made the hull harder to damage. When they said "We've lost hull plating" it just meant the polarizing effect had failed, not that their hull had fallen off. Saying that, it was really just shields before they had shields.
Sends this directly to whoever making the next Star Wars movie
Actually the way you describe writing one is kind of how Eric Nylund did the space battles in his Halo novels.
Eric Nylund wrote some damn good space battles. I would say the best is the Keyes Loop sequence.
@@BeastlyMussel61 Dear biased content gods; GIVE US AN ANIMATED KEYES LOOP PLEASE
I've been taking advantage of current circumstances to repeatedly reread First Strike, and I find myself more impressed by the slipspace battle every time I experience it.
@@BeastlyMussel61
That whole battle sequence is amazing, and like the Red Route 1 scene in Red October, demostrates Keyes' command competence. Which makes his death all the more sad.
Next movie? LOL
I have two rule sets for my universe:
Humans are unshielded tin-cans who engage from tens of kilometers with lasers and missile volleys. PDCs are reserved for close range battles with smaller ships and torpedoes.
The antagonists are heavily shielded and tend to utilize more fighters. Their intercept craft destroy missiles, and their bombers attack capital ships, while standard fighters and drones produce defensive screens for their attack runs.
I have a video on my channel going into more detail for those interested
That's similar to how space battles in Halo are.
You'll like homeworld.
In mine the Antagonists have full on shielded FTL capable ships while the Humans are stuck with pretty hard sci fi technology but have Psyonics. Meaning they have gigantic gun in the orbit of Sol itself, Earth And Jupiter that use Psyonics to predict hostile movements to shoot the enemy down immediately after they enter the Killzone at the border of the Portal used for FTL Travel. It's only when a single ship it so breaks through that the War council actually authorizes the use of "close quarters combat " (still in the range of Hundred of Kilometers) where they throw thousands of cheeply bouilt Warships at the hostiles to sometimes bring down the Equivalent of Gunship.
@@highgrounder5238I've has my eyes on Homeworld for a while. I'm waiting for the new one to release so I can buy them as a set.
@@karlfranzemperorofmandefil5547 got any google doc links or something?
"This is the Captain: give me full quality over quantity."
"But sir! We cannae achieve quality!"
"Well we can't just do nothing! Give me all the quantity you've got."
I would love to hear your thoughts on the space battles in Legend of the Galactic Heroes because on a strategic level they outclass almost every other battle I've seen and while they do cut a whole lot between ships, it makes sure you know the names of the admirals of each fleet and even a few people in particular.
I do think it's hard to have a sense of stakes or consequences with the scale of those battles since we constantly see ships exploding or being hit with no real idea what effect its having on them as a force
But there are some good scenes to the contrary like the guys that are left alive on a completely wrecked bridge after a battle or the battle of iserlorn where it feels like every single resource is limited
If, tomorrow, you just uploaded this again, I would watch it again, smash that like button again, and consider it equally essential viewing as I am doing while watching it right now.
Spacedock at its finest: not just analysis of ships, but a full on sci-fi public service broadcaster.
Battles in Legend of the Galactic Heroes routinely has ten of thousands of capital ships per side, and hundred thousand capital ships at its peak, and they still managed to make it worked and exciting. Because in this series, the flagship where the protagonists usually resides are not invincible death machine like other Sci-fi works, *they actually has less firepower than the mass produced ship of the line* . But in return they have superb survivability, sensor, communication, countermeasure, you know, all the thing that even Real Life command ship will trade raw firepower for.
So there's still a sense of tension like Sci-fi story that fields few ships per side, because losing a fleet in Legend of the Galactic Heroes is just as devastating for the protagonist because 99.99% his firepower and force projection are in there, not his flagship. His flagship is there to command and make sure they win with the least casualties.
Also, it's realistic in a sense that planet is not a city. Unless your ship is the size of Independence Day's Giant Saucer, then you'd need as many capital ships as Legend of the Galactic Heroes fleet to actually get down to the planet and pacify the population. Remember, the only way you conquer a territory is when you have your men's boots on that territory and the other guy don't. Hanging a fleet in orbit to bombard the population on the ground won't get you territory, either now, or thousands of years in the future.
Not really though ? I'm pretty sure both Hyperion and Reinart's ship are battleships. Fleet commanders in general have powerful flagships that are usually more heavily armed than anything else in the fleet. Yang's friend Dusty even gets to command the Triglav, a more modern and even more powerful version of the Alliance flagship. The flagships do have powerful comm systems though.
@@zqfmgb4335 But the point is that they cannot win a fleet battle on their own, unlike protagonist ships in other Sci-Fi which is a one ship army that can do so. Hence why what Spacedock said about "fewer is better" is not necessarily true with example like LoGH.
I mean part of it is that a lot of the excitement sources from the grander strategy of it all rather than individual ships just slugging at it. Plus when one fleet gets out of position everybody dies regardless of what its constituents do, so rather than tens of thousands of ships the viewer instead experiences it as a few fleets that are treated almost as their own entities, and as such viewers can still care about the fate of those in the battle
Thing with planetary assaults is that you don't need that many star ships, just a sufficient amount of them targeting key locations, ie major population centers, military installations, survival bunker complexes that your scanners can pick up, etc. Then you can choose how to subjugate the planet, either through shrewd diplomacy, or through force. You don't need to conquer the whole planet, just the major control centers of it, which can very easily be done with far less ships than you think.
"HULL PLATING IS THE WALLS"
-Spacedock, 2020
Yeah, makes you wonder why people don't put more hull armor on their ships?
@@WastelandSeven in real life the reason would be because that would make the space ship extremly heavy and as such it would consume huge amounts of fuel to move, aka delta-v
In fiction because they have forcé fields and shit like that they don't need armor platting
@@carso1500 depends on frenchise, in the expanse the hullplating to some degree is almost the "walls" and shot fly through the ships and big lumbering battleships probably have some kind of armor plating against smaller projectiles etc
@@Dori-Ma Exactly. And particularly settings without shields usually have their warships have several layers of hull plating. BSG (and Babylon 5's Earth fleet as well) is IIRC a rather good example of that.
I also disagree with the video itself. It seems to be equating battles with skirmishes and judges the former by the principles of the latter. It's basically saying that, for example, the Lord of the Rings epic battles should have been just our main heroes being stalked and eventually fighting some Orcs. Obviously, that's not true, there's a place for both those things and large battles can and are made quite well, both in fantasy and in sci-fi. DS9 did it rather well, in addition to several other examples mentioned in the video. But, again, there is a difference between the purpose of a skirmish and a battle. The common thing is that both require good cinematography and clear, stable view, which is sorely lacking in many recent productions.
The only time where the 'lost hull plating' part makes sense is during the battle of Azati Prime. The Enterprise's hull and the ship's walls is literally getting blown apart by the Xindi.
2:54 Space Battleship Yamato 2199 is a perfect example for this: After a huge battle, the battleship hull remained heavily damaged for the next episodes. OR just seek a solution to repair the hull (like in the same series, they found raw materials on the moon of Enceladus, which helped them to repair the hull of the ship).
Are you sure it was Enceladus? Because that moon, like most of the other Saturnian moons, is made almost entirely of water ice. Which would have been fine for repairing the hull of a space-going equivalent of the Habakkuk - the proposed WW2 aircraft carrier which was going to be built from ice, to fill the mid-Atlantic air-cover gap. But any other ship would require metals, or at least ores which could be refined into metals - and you won't find those on Enceladus.
@@lloydevans2900 Definitely Enceladus, watched the series a while ago. We speaking about an anime where fire occurs in space so why they wouldn't find resources on that moon?
@@ConsCruptor If they needed water, sure - or even carbon dioxide or ammonia, since those are present on Enceladus. They could likewise hop over to Titan if they need any liquid methane or other hydrocarbons. For the large moons which are made of rock, they would find metal ores, and possibly even some metallic iron-nickel alloy, which is what some asteroids are composed of. Just not on Enceladus though, since that is a tiny moon, composed primarily of ice and some other frozen gases, with no rock or metals to speak of.
@@lloydevans2900 they said it was cosmonite 90 of sort that is needed because a condenser was broken
Edit: wiki said it was a metal so uh... Space Plot armor it seem
Frustratingly, Star Trek Voyager actually had an alternate timeline where Voyager _did_ sustain lasting and critical damage, and the crew fought desperately to survive, every day... but it was used as a straw-man target for a time travel/causality altering ability, and ended up never happening.
I think you’re pretty spot on here. I’d add the battle from Star Trek Nemesis to the list personally, I love that one.
I think that battles with big fleets can work, they just need to focus in on particular elements so that it stays coherent, such as in the mass effect 3 battle and the battle for Coruscant, which aside from a couple of wide shots focused in on a smaller group to keep the factors you described present.
True. As a movie it was shit, because everything was just a flimsy setup for this obviously stacked space battle, but the battle itself was actually pretty good.
Mitchz95 that's one instance where shield use is a good thing. They arnt telling us, they're showing us (well and telling) When that nacelle hits the Enterprise it's well done. We really feel like the ship has had the shit wacked out of it cause we see it and we see the shield monitor
The battle in Star Trek Nemesis shouldn't have happened. They had a 'perfect cloak' meaning it should've played out like Wrath of Khan with the Scimitar picking them all off with sniper shots and torpedo barrages _from a distance!_ Having the Enterprise actually survive and succeed (probably using technobabble, but understandably) with the odds so not in their favor would've been quite thrilling and satisfying.
I'd have to disagree. The Nemesis battle very self-consciously apes the ST II and VI battles but still doesn't hold a candle to either. The whole idea of the Scimitar itself is such a prime example of Hollywood escalation too. ST had a Connie vs a Miranda. ST VI had a single Br'el vs a Connie and an Excelsior. Scimitar? It has an absurd laundry list of weapons and special powers. They even made up a new species of vampire aliens to crew the ship as if the thing looking like a giant black bat wasn't subtle enough. If it was written in the style of ST II or VI, the battle would probably have been against a single D'Deridex or something like that.
I think Severed Dreams space battle might take my number 1 spot, though new caprica was great. In B5 we had just met the two captains, knew their names and when Hiroshi sacrifices the Churchil in a ram it is a really meaningful, impactful moment for a character with almost no dialogue.
And when you thought it couldn't get better, came the breaching pod.
And if I were the Earth Force Captain that Delenn pointedly told "if you value your life...BE SOMEWHERE ELSE!" I DEFINITELY would've needed a change of underwear...and my crew probably would've welcomed a hull breech to take their minds off the "aroma"!
Spacedock: "The fewer ships, the better"
Macross: "Hard pass on that suggestion"
Legends of the Galactic Heroes: I'll pass too
but the better fights in Macross are with a few Veritechs against two or one zentraedi cruisers.
Change it to "maintain a focus on a manageable number of characters", and it works. You can have big fights, but your audience cannot track all of them, so you have to write around that.
Macross battles were always about following specific characters in the middle of these massive, chaos looking battles between inmense fleets. And you can say the same about almost every single sci-fi anime that involves huge scale space battles... from Macross to Gundam to Uchusenkan Yamato and a very long etcetera.
@@MrPoporucha except LOGH though
I would add the 1957 film "The Enemy Below". It has much of the same vibes as Wrath of Khan, 2 equally expert captains facing off in cat and mouse warfare.
Balance of Terror, Star Trek the Original Series.
@@thitsugaya1224 Indeed.
"Balance of Terror" is in essence a remake of "The Enemy Below". 🙂
First rule: the battles must follow the rules of your universe. Star Wars is horrible in this.
Second rule: the audience must understand what is happening, Less is more can be handy for this pourpose but it isn't mandatory if you know what you are doing.
Third rule: show the premise of the battle and the decision making inside the bridges.
The problem is that Star Wars refuses to have rules about its universe. Even George Lucas has said he doesnt know how hyperdrives or hyperspace works, and he doesn't care. To him its just a word that explains how people get from one plot location to the next.
Yeah you are right i am also no fan of the clone wars space battles.
Zero rule: Make your damn rules.
So by knowing rules, you can follow them, audience can understand what's going on, and characters can take their decisions out of some framed space of variants, not out of their asses, by technobabbling completely new way of warfare just in time.
Star wars rules of the universe was fine until the sequels.
@@jamesjung8931 more or less I agree with you.
This is how you do it:
get a bunch of geeks to play a multiplayer game, flying random ships.
after the battle, work out which of the survivors needs to be what ship, then re-run the battle re-skinning with whatever you need.
If you have specific weakness / weapons, get them to play it 100 times until you get the win.
Add dynamic camera for best shots, and you have a winner
Also see which ships contributed most to the action. If there was a ship that didn't make it to the end of the battle, but damaged or destroyed the most opposing vessels, or its actions permanently changed the course of the rest of the battle, you could come up with a heroic tragedy story with that ship.
I like the way both of you think
Genius
this is canon from now on.
for everything
* builds heavily shielded reactor ball with guns on one side *
* proceeds to snipe enemy ships from maximum targeting range while statically spinning *
Needs More Babylon 5. Honestly I think every battle they had was top notch. Even at the height of the shadow war, with massive fleets. You knew what was going on. Also. about the Less is More. Star trek 6
It even had a boarding action!
I really liked the end battle of "Yesterday's Enterprise" from ST:TNG - lots of bridge shots, action and dialogue made the whole thing pretty suspenseful and exceptional.
Thank you! I loved starting it with "Tension is better than action." You rock.
"Fewer ships is better than more"
Legends continuity during the Yuuzhan Vong War: *innocent whistling*
I mean... when it's galaxy vs galaxy, you expect millions if not billions of ships fighting
Yuuzhan Vong is when the SW Legends jumped the shark
@@BoroMirraCz it resulted in the coolest wookiepedia articles though
@@DogsRNice How so?
@@BoroMirraCz "Jumped the shark?" What does that mean?
Me: *frustrated, writer blocked with a fanfic space battle*
Spacedock: *releases a video about proper space battle writing*
Me: you've saved us, we're grateful.
Did you finish writing the space battle? I think I would like to read it.
I am / was in a similar position. It's surprising how much of this video translates to written medium even though it was clearly aimed at a visual medium. One I always struggled with was damage on the bridge when the ship get's hit and exploding panel syndrome. It is more dramatic but bridges don't work like that and I was never really comfortable with that degree of detachment from the way it would work. However, I did find some decent work arounds. 1) The captain feeling the ship shake and strain under his feet, drawing on an almost empathetic bond with the craft. 2) Using a bridge position toward the back of the ship and up high so he can see the damage to his ship and react to it. 3) If you really need to raise the stakes and have bridge damage, a shot landing near the bridge that could legitimately cause problems on the bridge. You could also cut to a scene (either in the minds eye of the Captain or literally) at the site of the damage to emphasise the chaos even when the bridge is calm.
I feel you
well, its not like fundamental truths have been revealed here.....
That will help me a lot with my fanfiction of Star Wars, and although it would have a lot of capital ships and smaller ships, I want to make it like the battle of Endor or Scarif
You could add the Star Trek episodes, "The Doomsday Machine" and "Balance of Terror", to the list of good examples.
0:53 The FreeSpace community invented a term for it, the "Battle of Endor Syndrome
".
Novice mission writers would build oversized battles and not properly handle the huge quantity of ships within. Doing so would cause graphical slowdown and collision failures, and it disrupted the fun and balance of the mission as the player would be overloaded with objectives and had little influence over the battle. It also impeded the story by throwing in a bunch of ships that have no significance nor investment.
Not that massive battles can't be done well, they absolutely can with proper lead-up, investment, and clear & simple objectives. Blue Planet's Universal Truth for example is a work of art!
The people in charge of the big sci-fi franchises know 1/1000000th about the sci-fi genre of what the Freespace community does.
Massive space battle EVE Online granted the server slows down but yeah you get the drill
FreeSpace 2 was such a great game with an emotive and gripping plot and really lament that there was no FreeSpace 3 and think with Elite Dangerous and Star Citizen being fairly popular now would be a good time to re-introduce it.
@@dportass Kinda redundant with FreeSpace going open source and spawning a massive modding community, but if modern Volition or whoever can do something new and cool with the franchise I'm all for it.
Freespace
Started watching and immediately thought of those Season 03 Enterprise episodes when you brought up your initial criteria and then was pleased to see them included!
The space battles in the honorverse series of books are some of my favourite, because they have a certain groundedness due to their distinct focus on various factors, such as vectors and velocities of combatants being significant issues, as well as the issues with maintaining a solid telemetry link with weapons that are being fired over massive distances and the loss of accuracy that results from the time delay between command inputs and execution. There's also a focus, especially in the earlier novels, of just how vulnerable these ships actually are, and how a single hit might just put a few holes through the armour, or it might blow a hole through the bridge, cause a fusion plant to fail, or disable the inertial compensator causing the crew to become jam, and the ship design and tactics reflect this. The bridge and the power plants are always hidden in the centre of the ship behind the thickest armour, and ships will usually try to avoid direct combat because they know that while they might win, they'll also sustain serious damage unless there's a significant tonnage advantage, and even then it's not a sure thing.
The issue Honorverse battles have though is that they often pull new tech out of their ass(especially bad later on when instead of a conflict being won by tactics or anything, the good guys just got a dozen new techs which cause them to completely outclass their opponents)
@@florac1995 As much as I love the Honorverse books, I agree,
The one thing that really dragged me into the Honorverse was the practice of putting the bridge in the middle of the mass of the ship, in an armored ball or box. And then larger ships having a backup bridge just like it, always staffed in a battle. WAY too much sci-fi feels the need to have windows for the bridge, and the bridge tacked on the front of or on top of an office building on, the huge ship. - In a small ship, the forward bridge/cockpit can make sense, but if it is your capital ship, why are you dangling your senior decision makers out for the enemy to obliterate in a first/early shot?
But I mean, it's logical, no? The communication tech, the recon tech, the advances in fabrication and construction are literally all advances we've seen in real life. Then we see responses to them. Sometimes the responses are brute force. Faster planes? Train a soldier to shoot it down with a long rifle using training doctrine (see: Vietnamese soldiers shooting down Phantom's using long rifles).
In that universe, advances in technology have outpaced the necessary applications in military hardware, and extended warfare, between the two largest powers outside of the Solarian league, have clearly introduced a necessary need and desire for innovation. I feel like that's a key proponent, and dare I say it, theme of the entire series. Those who stagnate die. Those who adapt, survive.
I believe in, In Enemy Hands, Harkness is modifying a game about the last major fleet engagement of the solarian league that involved hundreds of ships. So long ago, that it's become a game.
I don't know dude, just food for thought. Where you see tech out of the ass, I see imagination and innovation.
@@chinchilla_desperado I would agree that technological R&D is a theme. Weber repeats and expands on it in his Safehold series. (Apparently, Honor Harrington wasn't Horatio Hornblowery enough, so he made a story that used actual sailing ships with cannons and such.)
I always loved the Battle of Courscant personally, I also feel that games like Halo did space battles pretty well
Yeah. Star Wars and Halo also show that shields aren’t invincible.
The Battle of Coruscant is a good example of a chaotic and confusing battle being done right, because it’s intentionally confusing, as these are Grievous' tactics at work. In the 2003 Microseries, we see CIS ships coming out hyperspace only to immediately collide with Republic vessels.
"Fewer ships is better than more"
United Nations Cosmic Navy: "FIRE WAVE MOTION CANNON AT THIS HERETIC!
2199 is far better than 2202, for that very reason
@@battleoid2411 Indeed, but 2202 is so ridiculously fun to watch
The Covenant armada would like to know your location
Especailly since in all likelyhood , there would be alot of them.
Like tyranid levels of alot of them. Considering the asteroid belt alone could make an armada that dwarfs most scifi fleets.
lulz
A sense of scale and distance is very important as well.
Something that B5 didn't have the means to communicate. There's that one scene where Narns are firing at a shadow like 10000km away. That was nice.
@@admiralcasperr I would love if more space battles were fought at the 10,000km range. In the Expanse books, it is frequently mentioned how they can't see visually the enemy because of how far away they are. Unfortunately the TV series didn't do this so still, and end up with close quarters battles.
@@brendan31415 bvr is harder to pull of if you need a bit of spectacle... but they do do an ok job trying to remind you here that even the cqb distances are like several KMs away from each other...
54 years later "Balance of Terror" from the first season of Star Trek is my favorite Space Battle
That's because it was lifted from the film "The Enemy Below", which was an excellent destroyer vs sub film. In the film, they cleverly provided an explanation why the "cloaked" ship couldn't simply disengage when it went undetected: they had to go for a rendezvous with a resupply boat, and the captain of the destroyer, after the first few encounters, figured out they had to be going somewhere specific. The sub's captain realized this meant he had to fight because he couldn't allow the destroyer to follow them to the rendezvous, or to continue on that heading and stumble on the resupply. It was a clever way of forcing them to to fight when, theoretically, the sub could have fairly easily disengaged and slipped away, unlike movies or TV shows where two forces square off and fight it out when there's no good reason for one side, or both, to have to fight to begin with.
An excellent commentary . One of the best written space battles I`ve ever enjoyed was the 1st one I ever saw. It involved only 2 ships (if you don`t count the outposts mentioned at the start) It had excellent dialogue, it clearly depicted what was at stake ,and showed the cost involved from the perspective of both parties conducting the battle. I`m referring to the episode "Balance of Terror" from the original Start Trek series.
"Massive" battles can be easily done, in scifi as much as in fantasy as in historical film, etc, but you need to have it as backdrop. Keep it out of the way, to illustrate what needs to be done (as in Battle of Endor) while the main focus remains on those in the foreground.
Don't highlight it, as modern producers seem to want to do. "Here, this is the fleet, look how big it is! Can you see it? How about I bring you closer? That better?" I could see it before you mentioned it, thanks, I have a brain.
I wrote a similar comment, at least in terms of the point I tried to make. You did a better job actually making it though...a bit like how Serenity did the big space battle well while Discovery...well it had blue stuff.
Like the final battle over Earth in Mass Effect 3. Sure we had five races, 200 fleets, but you knew where everything was.
Reapers looked like squids that fired red beams, good guys had angular ships that shot harmless blue bolts.
Your ship the Normandy has specialized guns and armor (no shields) that are distinctive. While defending the Crucible (a giant attachment that slowly loses parts to join with the even larger Citadel space station.) And it cuts between the Normandy's role and Shepard's groundbased strike team.
Alternatively, focus on those in command, and the methodical chess game with a hundred thousand lives as the pieces on the board.
@@sonoftheviper__4304 One correction to an otherwise good summary: The Normandy has shields, it's just in Mass Effect the proper term is "kinetic barriers" (although everyone in-universe calls them shields anyway), which function by basically detecting an object moving with significant speed and force towards a ship and reacting to deflect or stop it - if you need proof the Normandy does possess them, in Mass Effect 2 you have an optional mission that allows you to upgrade the kinetic barriers to better withstand fire in the suicide mission
@@thomasrevill7723 True, but it was proven that a Reapers main cannon can pierce right through Dreadnought class barriers. Admittedly the Upgraded Cyclonic barriers should be able to take a glancing blow, but still could not match the raw power necessary to take a full blow. So barriers are rendered non-important factors in a Clash of the Titans style brawl, especially with the main tactic of numbers over skill.
Whenever I write sci-fi space battles, I generally like to allude to modern-day naval technology, and ww2 naval tactics, like importance of carrier operations but still retain the big gun behemoth dreadnoughts and cruisers everyone loves
For example, like shields are cool and all, but if your ship has the armor of a soda can, you NEED some sort of layered defense system. Modern day Close-In Weapon Systems would work unbelievably well in most sci-fi settings, especially if you take the Russian approach with a combination gun-missile system.
They can shoot down incoming meteors, debris, fighters, bombers, and missiles, while leaving the remains to drift in space or harmlessly splash against your shields
And there's no air resistance or buoyancy considerations that need to be made: put some damn ARMOR on your ships
Modern anti-missile defenses rely primarily on missiles, with guns only for a last-ditch attempt to shoot down a couple missiles that get through. For some reason, this is never how it works in sci-fi.
Regarding armor, if you have Expanse level propulsion (meaning more fuel than you ever need and enough acceleration to kill the crew), you should be loading your warships down with something; more weapons might be more useful, but more armor is certainly cheaper. However, if you're writing harder sci-fi without magitech super-engines, mass is extremely important, determining where the ship can go, how quickly it can get there, and how long its burns take, and spacecraft should be armored like aircraft: at most a few thin plates over the most vital components.
Ships in the book I’m writing are very large but there aren’t that many of them, have multitudes of layered defense; shields that absorb energy from kinetic weapons to strengthen, armored hull plating that’s quite tough, a BSG-like flak screen AND point defense including ciws and short-range interception rockets, and it does all of this without affecting offensive weaponry. I already wrote most of the actual space scenes in my book but I’m glad that they already kinda follow these rules for the most part. obviously there’s some variation but overall I think I did pretty good lol
When I wrote/write space battles for my novels I consider: 'what is enough'. I try to put myself into the shoes of the attacking/defending force. What do I need to achieve my goals? 'Overwhelming force' in a shock and awe moment can have its moment in the spotlight, but most of the time I find that 'just enough to beat the odds' results in the most interesting - because it adds an aspect of 'did we overestimate or underestimate our enemies?' or 'did we account for unexpected circumstances' to the whole thing.
You also have to consider that most planners aren't going to look at intelligence saying the enemy deployed four ships and only deploy four in response. If your numbers are close, establish why. Were the others occupied with other missions? In drydock/refit? Just too far away?
Also, unit sizes may play a part. When the US Army found a Tiger in WW2, they attacked it with 5 tanks purely because they had 5 tanks working together. If they had found 2 or 3, they may grab another group to maintain a comfortable advantage and attack with 10.
@@Halinspark it's for reasons like this why a well diversified navy will have some decent rapid response ships. Something fast enough to respond to an attack near by that other craft might not get too in time.
I love the battle in star trek nemesis where the enterprise is just continuously firing it's phases at the scimitar trying to hit it. Then the two romulan ships coming to enterprises aid. Was such an awesome battle especially when the enterprise full rammed the scimitar.
Rogue One's space battle is one of my favorites. It's well lit, easy to follow, different ships have distinct roles and the starfighters use actual tactics like formation flying and utilizing wingmen to great advantage (a lesson that film's "Red 5" learned the hard way).
"It doesn't become this giant soup of a million ships in one place..." looking at you Star Wars:The Rise of Skywalker.
The sequel trilogy had so much potential.
7 was pretty good, and it looked like we were getting set up for something awesome.
@@Attaxalotl if all of the scenes with rey were removed from episode 7, it would be so good. I loved the way that poe and finn interacted with each other, and for the most part, the world building was still pretty good.
J. J. Abrams: More rebel ships, more star destroyers! THE ENTIRE SKY FILLED WITH THEM! GIVE THEM ALL DEATH STAR LASERS! YEEEAH!
@@mythitorium "sure in the last movie, nobody showed up when it was like a dozen at-at's, but now that there's 1000 death stars, it just wouldn't make sense for everyone in the galaxy to not show up" - probably j j abrams
@@mythitorium Sad part is JJ did a space fight admirably well in Star Trek 2009, it's not the best space battle ever put to film, but it looks good, has actual strategy, and features a good amount of tension.
So we know he gets it. Than we get to EP 9 and just... no.
I know I talk about Halo a lot, and that's just because it's the one I know best, but shields are a notable topic in that universe because they're actually made narratively useful. The presence of shields is probably the most substantial, although certainly not the only, reason why Covenant ships during the war were more combat-effective than their UNSC counterparts. And even when humans do get them, it's still a big deal.
In the interest of full disclosure: I am aware that the quality of Halo's writing, with some exceptions, begins to drop off in the post-war era. I will continue to maintain, however, that human ships getting tech upgrades was a good decision.
Yah, shields should never be a straight replacement for actual danger. But at the same time they can be well used and still fit the requirements listed above.
The thing that bugged me was the human-covenant war was supposed to last thirty years. In all that time humanity never developed or reversed engineered shields of their own??? They'd only just got Spartan shield tech. Maybe if the war was three of four years, I'd understand but surely the UNSC would be working flat out to get shields of their own.
@@mattwho81 They did. The MJOLNIR shields are reversed engineered from the Jackals. It took a long time because the UNSC simply didn't understand how Covenant tech worked.
@@Dark_Fusion19 But... that's what reverse engineering means.
@@highgrounder5238 I know, i'm replying to the other comment asking why the UNSC never reversed engineered shields, when they did.
“Fewer ships is better then more.” The Imperium during the Battle of Cadia would like to have a word.
and that would be the joke, regarding the Imperium
I agree with most of your points. Though I’m disappointed that you didn’t include Honor Harrington as a book recommendation. The battles in those books are some of the best I’ve ever read.
Now, only my own experience with space battles... it’s difficult to write. It took me around five or so days to write a around one and half thousand word battles, of which half was only build-up. Writing a space battle is *hard*. Especially when you try to set yourself a goal in regards to ‘plausibility’ (I prefer that term over realism tbh). For a long time I set myself the goal of avoiding something like ‘the ship flew over there, while firing’ and tried to restrict myself to a CIC / OpC only perspective. Didn’t work out all that well.
Of course, after the battles (which thankfully take less time now) come the characters... which is even more difficult for me than a battle. I can write about the destruction of that one ship, about those twelve stations holding against the attacking aliens etc. in chapter one... and then I have to introduce the main character.
But, yeah. Good video as always. Did kind of ramble on here lol.
I get your point exactly, I'm sort of in the same boat. I think it's easier to try and put elegance and tension into the description of fleet movement, especially focusing on the flips, speed changes, starts and ends of maneuvers, etc, for me it really helps visualize it more, like for instance "the Nemesis-1 fired at the aliens as it moved" doesn't sound as cool as "the Nemesis-1 flipped for a suicide burn, snapping a loose panel with g-forces. Her torpedoes flashed away for a brief second as [insert character] stared down the radar for return fire." Edit and edit, and boom, cool battle. I don't really know enough to say I'm a pro, or even good at writing, but I figured I'd share what works for me. Obviously, it's more important you refine your own style and enforce your narrative.
Yeah. I feel you on the "plausibility" of writing sci-fi combat. Especially when my own tech gets in the way of something the story needs to happen. But much like Honor Harrington, focus mostly on one aspect of the battle. A ship, objective a point in the area, and sort of "watch" the battle from there. You only share what that perspective knows about. So an entire flotilla could go down, and we may not even see it because it doesn't matter to the main perspective.
Characters are my specialty, so I'd be willing to offer pointers there if there's a certain aspect you struggle with.
Well he is talking about graphic depictions of battles in movies and shows, writing something and relying on a readers imagination is very different than showing the viewer what he is supposed to see.
writing any combat is pretty hard. I tried once and I either got into "this did that" or I had to use retelling of the battle in ideas rather than movements. OR the other times it was simply conversations on the bridge and leaving the battle to the imagination of the reader. Those are my two approaches to space combat in books. For a good example, you can look at War of the worlds depiction of combat.
Agreed. I think Weber, for all his faults, is an excellent space battle writer because of how coherent he is. After reading a few of his novels, you can really start predicting how a certain engagement is going to end and why. And when it doesn't, it's almost always not because of new tech or a stroke of genius (unless Honor is involved, in which case all bets are off) but because one of the two sides is paying more attention to a key detail. I think this was at its best in his earlier books, like the battle of Hancock. He is also really good at describing formations of ships operating as a group, something which most other writers appear to stuggle with.
@@francescogreggio6712 the early books were great, it's a good thing he didn't go past the ending of the Manticore-Haven war
"But we'll talk about that later."
We could just... Not. Let's not.
I still stand by my favorite space battles in fiction being the combat in Eric Nylund's Halo novels. Space battle are slow and high tension. Shields are used well in that setting as well because they result in the Covenant seeming borderline unstoppable which makes human successes that much more exciting.
My favourite 'shields done right' version is from Star Trek VI at the Khitomer battle.
The Enterprise tanks the first few torpedoes but you can clearly see (escalating) marks where it was hit as the shields weaken until finally one comes that rips into/through the saucer.
Yeah. Shields aren’t invincible. I think the game Elite Dangerous does shields pretty well too.
Spacedock: You need to watch three movies
Me: Oh these are gonna be random sci-fi movies i've probably never seen
Spacedock: Hunt for Red October, Master and Commander, and Wrath of Khan
Me: Oh shit those are all great movies and two of my favorites ever!
I think the Battle of Scariff is another great example, and ranks up there with the battle of New Caprica and Severed Dreams
Battle of Scariff is indeed an awesome Space Battle but it has drawbacks in that we do not see the Capital Ships engaging each other. That said, it is obvious from the script that Admiral Raddus is using his fighters to keep the Destroyers at an elbow; he wants them to fear engaging fighters and the capital ships at the same time.
Jonathan Lundkvist that’s because if the rebel cruisers try to actually engage the star destroyers in a proper fight (similar to the battle star vs base stars in new caprica) then the rebel ships just get shredded. Remember that they only had ONE mon cal cruiser in scariff and it was an early and much weaker version of the ones we see in episode 6. So, in universe, props to admiral raddus for knowing not to put his cruisers on suicide mode. Props to the writers of the movie for recognizing that that would be a stupid tactical move and no one would have done that
I'm still quite disappointed with the battle of Corusant despite how much we see. It's almost entirely from the pov of the two Jedi and half of that is just background fluff. I think it needed the Scariff/Endor treatment of focusing on a few pockets of fighting. Like the RotJ scene around the medical frigate, or the hammerhead pushing the star destroyer, or the high speed dodging of the Y-Wings. In the 2003 Clone Wars cartoon it showed a Jedi general evacuating a crippled Venator to take over a Providence class CIS ship and turning its guns on other CIS ships. Then again that cartoon also had a great planetary battle that we never got to see in the movie.
is just "space battle are part of the story". they must be told just like everything else, with rythm, momentum, using chekhov's gun, etc. must have sense in a literary way using every element and character (yes, ships are characters)
Rewatching this video, and I've realized that, to an extent, you can actually make large fleets work, but it requires a lot of careful effort. The Star Carrier series of books does this well by focusing on the flagship, and specific flight leaders for star fighters. Another thing I've seen done well for larger battles is categorizing units into flotillas with defined purposes. When this is done, I see it often mirroring films like Gettysburg where a larger battle featuring a whole army is broken down into smaller engagements with specific units and goals. A fleet action may easily encompass a whole solar system with ship duels or fleet movements at different locations within the system.
Heck, the Expanse plays this same trick in books 2 and 5, where the large fleet actions were put to scale with the focus being on the individual fighters and ships, with internal dialogue discussing the wider battle
The Honorverse's "wall of battle" always made me facepalm.
Daniel of Spacedock: "...the fewer ships, the better..."
Legend of the Galactic Heroes: "Hold my beer."
They use an alternative. Handful of ships is replaced by a handful of fleets. Exterior damage and shield percentages are replaced by a fleet having ships destroyed and casualty reports. Captains are replaced with admirals.
It's the opposite of a separate theatre for fighters, they go up a level.
i would realy like to see Spacedock cover the battle of Vermillion starzone, my Greatest of all time. It has about 60,000 Capital ships present and it works. Works in ways it simply wouldn't if each admiral was merely a captain.
Nice.
Prosit!
@@eps200 So well explained. The way the show handles such battles is a lot like how Homeworld did for videogames. Homeworld has several tiers of ships, with not only the strike craft, but the smaller captial ships as well being treated as "small" ships which you can field swarms of into a single fight. On that scale, your "hero" ships are the largest of super-capital vessels, the smaller capital ships are the equivalent of fighters in the context of this video, and fighters are basically just a type of projectile being thrown around between the "real" ships.
@@eps200 Ditto on a video about that battle! =^.^=
8:30 reminds me of enders game.
Speaking of which, I think they did a good job with those battles despite their being a billion things flying around.
The book was better.
@@jfangm it was so, so much better
Well yes, but the ships were just a backdrop for the character stories of the kids running the "training scenarios". They could just as easily have been glowy blobs in a holographic display tank or on a flat video wall.
visually ender's game worked because the fighters were not focused on to any degree the focus was on the capital ships and there were actually not that many of them, and the enemy were more a cloud around a few capital ships rather than actual fighters, by keeping it zoomed out on the grand strategy view it made the battle look smaller and comprehensible even when we do get a close up on the fighters at the end its still clear what they are doing and whats going on
"It's been almost 20 years and the battle of New Caprica..." It's been what? Are you calling me old, sir?!
i was so confused when he said that .. then i remembered it was out in 2003 holy fuck
Suddenly I feel old.
The Battle of New Caprica is from 2006.
@@JAnx01 true but thats still 14years and it looks that good
@@Husker5454 I'm more impressed with Babylon 5 (1994-1998) looking fantastic in 2020. Namely:
- Severed Dreams (as mentioned in the video)
- Battle of Proxima 3
- Battle of Sector 300 (aka advanced omega destroyers)
OST's "Balance of Terror" is an excellent example of how you only need two ships wiith two smart commanders to make a great battle story.
Throw in the Hippy Griff's extra two rules and I would in one other rule:
Let history inspire your conflicts/battles.
In many naval battles throughout history, most feature only a handful on each side as oppose to massive conflicts. The Battle of Midway had many support ships, but the key contenders were 7 capital ships and their respective complements of fighter and bomber aircraft.
Each battle can be filled with mistakes and errors, fortunes and chance happenings created by decisions made in a moment too soon, too late or just in time.
If we allow history to help create the tension and inspire our stories, then the conflict depicted will feel more real and create more of an impact.
Re: Picard's finale battle, what took me out of it was both sides used just copies of one ship. The Romulans aren't known for a lot of ship diversity, but they have had a few variations. Whereas Starfleet having 200 identical ships, especially when Riker said his ship was the newest and toughest, yet for some reason the same as all the rest, made no sense and was a mess visually. Canonically, Starfleet has engaged in battles with 40+ year-old ship designs alongside new models and series regulars. Even Discovery's season finale battle at least had two distinctly different Starfleet ships (against a fleet of completely nondescript ships, but still).
Starfleet battles used to be used with any ship within 20 light years that could fight. Some of the battles in DS9 had Excelsior class ships, which had to be 70 to 80 years old by then. There was even a Constitution-Refit class ship at the battle of Wolf 359.
@Darren Munsell then why did star fleet show
they cheaped out, look at the space battls in TNG, DS9 , theresa lot of copies of ships, but there loads of variety too
@Darren Munsell that was only for Rios ship, not all the romulan and starfleet ships, it was a cop out, nobody cares, the show was terrible.
That "battle" was so stupid to me.
The Romulan bitch telling them to target the outpost, then telling them to change target like 3 times. You have 200 ships, there is no way the real, and illusonary ships in their way could fully screen the outpost.
The copy paste fleets of both romulan and federation ships made me think of starwars.....
The federation fleet really annoyed me though, the federation has always been laughable ill prepared for any sort of fleet on fleet action. They dont have battle fleets just hangin around waiting for a hero to call, their ships are intended to operate alone on a wide variety of missions. You could argue that things changed a lot after the dominion war, the borg, and the mars incident but we never see that, we see one admiral tell Picard to fuck off.
How many ships did they pull together to counter a borg cube in first contact? A dozen maybe?
You know what would have been fucking amazing, if a Klingon fleet showed up instead of the federation one. It baffles me that Klingons were never mentioned at all in a show that was all about romulans. Instead of talking about a few "member species" threatening to leave, they could have talked about a potential Klingon civil war as a result of their long time allies trying to save their long time enemy, a species that almost everybody hates.
A klingon fleet showing up would have been a lot more interesting then Riker waving his dick around.
"Fewer is better than more"
Battle of Coruscant: *Am I a joke to you*
I think it's perhaps the weakest aspect of that movie. Too many ships that tell no story.
@Dinowarrior This is my own assessment based on critically watching dozens of action and sci-fi movies.
The only ships that ever do anything are Anakin's and Obi-Wan's starfighters, Grievous' ship, and for one short moment a swarm of droid fighters that zip past them. The only fighting that really happens is trying to shake the missiles. Other than that, the battle is nothing but bright light outside the windows. Nobody even mentions what other ships are doing or how the battle is progressing. We don't see a single captain who is fighting in this battle making a single decision about what their ships are doing.
@@Yora21 that was the entire point of the battle though, it was to show off the vast scale of the Clone War, but it was a backdrop and explanation to what Anakin and Obi-wan was doing. It was not the focus of that part of the movie. It mattered so little in scene importance that we never saw the end of the battle, we instead focused on Anakin and Obi-wan landing the remains of the Invisible hand on Coruscant.
In the battle of coriscant we follow three ships total. The rest is the backdrop.
@Dinowarrior The what the fuck now?
Someone posited that the battle of coruscant involvs numerous vessels. I remarked that while that may be true, we only see what happens to anakins and Obi Wans fighters, and in the end the Invisible hand, the rest serve as a backdrop, or an enviromental hazard at best. Do you belive this is incorrect?
Probably the best example for tension over action is the battle of yavin. The action, outside of the initial dogfights, is relatively basic, three ships flying in a straight line waiting to be picked off while a computer counts down to the optimum launch point of their missiles, but the tension achieved in these moments is excellent. And it’s all in the score.
It starts with the Y-Wing run. One of the squadron leaders is joined by two new characters, everything is relaxed, until suddenly "the guns.... they’ve stopped." No music, just the noise inside the cockpits and the nervous chatter between the pilots. Immediately creepy tension is building. One of them says "watch for enemy fighters" and we remember the earlier scene between Vader and two pilots "several fighters have broken off from the main group, come with me," and it’s apparent that Vader is out there somewhere, and he's coming. Then we see the tie fighters, the central one a unique design we have not seen before, Vader's unique ship, and he fires and instantly one of the rebel fighters is dead, collapsing in his seat as his ship explodes around him. Then they turn their attention on the rest and calmly attack them as well. The squadron leader we know is shown panicking, while his comrade urges him to "stay on target", then he dies next. And we cut to the Other squadron Leader radioing in for an update and all he hears is the final pilot's warning, cutting off as he is killed too. No music is played through this entire segment creating an eerie atmosphere, by then end the danger is established for the next pilots, punctuated by a significant (in relation to this battle) character death, meanwhile the Death Star is getting closer (and leia's getting larger).
Tension is ratcheting up even further as the next attack run occurs, this one goes slightly better for the rebels in that they launch a missile, but he has missed, just dusting on the surface. Luke tries to rendezvous with the surviving pilot, but he orders him back for his attack run as he knows he is dead, his ship is failing and the ties are on him. As he dies we see a close up of Luke's horrified expression as he realises that he is now the last hope for the rebel alliance, punctuated by the first notes on the score since the first trench run.
All slow building tension that makes the entire scene masterful.
Best space battles ever: David Weber's Honorverse.
Tense, realistic, internally consistent, involved, even physically plausible. Just great. Not one, not a single other series of books ever comes close to this.
Amazing.
Except for the last few books, the Manticorans are *so* technologically advanced over the Solarian League that there is little tension. And I understand what the author was doing, but having practically every officer of the League being a complete moron is a bit of a stretch. Yes, there are officer corps that are terrible but that was pushing it.
Overall I agree though, Honorverse novels have great space battles.
the space battle in Serenity is my all time favorite..."I am a leaf on the wind, watch me soar"
I mean that was Battle Soup too...but it was fun battle soup because the way the fleets arrived and engaged each other, with the Reavers coming out of the cloudbank was just like
O shit bois. Yall R F U KK E D
I loved the wacky ways the ships engaged each other, like the Bola ship.
But I wouldnt use this as a great example of space combat. just a really flashy exciting one.
@@Cryogenius333 It absolutely does count as a great space battle though. Because from the perspective of the characters that we are invested in (Serenity & crew) we always have our eyes on the goal, their progress, and how they are doing inside. The battle doesn't matter, getting through it does (just like the storm, and everything the crew of Serenity face)
All these ships are just to get us past all those other ships and we don't really care who wins the battle. We even get shots inside the Operative's ship, as the only other character present whom we recognize.
@@PaladinJoshs ...If the battle doesn't matter, then it's not really a space battle, is it? There's no fighting, shooting, or anything; it's just fly through to the other side. The battle remaining behind and the story continuing without real reference to it makes it clear that the battle isn't the point, and thus, the battle isn't really the story, and thus, it's really not a great space battle.
It is, however, a great moment of tension, a moment of escape, etc.
Fyi, Hullplating doesnt mean the hull itself. In most ships and modern Tanks you have the ablative armor on the outside that is the actual "defensive" stuff and then the actual bulkhead structure that keeps the ship from being drowned (e.g. Torpedo Bulge) or in a tank its the inner meral sheath.. Even the ISS has that, one is the defensive layer against micro meteroids and other tiny bits like washers and such debries, and the other the survival layer that keeps the astronauts from being sucked out. So in theory its totally plausible that the ablative armor can get damaged so an actor could say "lost hull plating" and that means "if the next shot hits that spot it will go straight into the squishy bits". Obviously you can add tension by showing minor hairline cracks and air leaks.
IIRc you can even see the actual armor being mounted in some scenes from various sci fi shows where there is a thin wall on the inside and they mount the armor on a form of superstructure.
I would have to rewatch but even BSG (the new series) has this modeled into it, they dont shout it but you can see it on the galactica that she loses more and more armor.
In a more dramaturgical sense you can see it sort of as a classic schmup game style. You have a shield and then one life, if your shield is lost you will die on the next hit. This way one (mostly the cgi folks who do all the visual telling) can damage the ship, and show it beaten, but still give it a fighting chance, without having to "instagib" the ship on each hit. I find this a greate way to portray iminent danger by indicating "we lost our portside hull plating on the engine section". Meaning "oh fuck if he hits us again in that area he can easily blow our reactor with a direct hit" This then also leads PERFECTLY into the manouvering and slow paced "turning the ship to show the strongest armor towards the oponent".
So whatyou say in "we lost hull plating" means the walls are gone is incorrect - sorry to clarify that as in all other cases i can only agree.
Also: I really hate the fast editing these days.... the slow down feature on many players it getting more and more use and thats concerning. Why put in copious ammounts of work into a space battle scene (e.g. an explosion of a ship) to it being over in like 2 seconds....
I only recently got around to watching BSG, and I absolutely adore the space battles in that show. Definitely some of the best in sci fi, and it's a bit of a shame the show is kind of forgotten about (at least in my experience).