Mistakes in Space battles

[thekillman]

well you could build a higgs-boson annihilator, but i doubt it would do you much good

[s09119]

How do you know that the shots weren't fired at such an angle, that if the Daedalus had moved, they would have hit the jumper? The Daedalus did maneuver itself in such a way that it would stand between the Hive ship and the puddle jumper.

Watch the vid; the jumper is spiraling off at a slight angle, and at the speed it was going, it would have moved far enough away by the time the hive fired that the shots wouldn't have hit it.

[Anubis10545]

Maybe the Daedalus was waiting for the Jumper to land in one of the 302 bays... It was only spiraling because they were going as fast as they could to get away from the Hive. Even still, the delay time for those shots gave the Daedalus an opportunity to get out of the way. I would think Col. Caldwell would be more concerned in saving his fancy ship and the 200 people on board than the small crew of a damaged Jumper. Even if it was Atlantis 1.

[DaCk]

How do you know that the shots weren't fired at such an angle, that if the Daedalus had moved, they would have hit the jumper? The Daedalus did maneuver itself in such a way that it would stand between the Hive ship and the puddle jumper.

It doesn't matter because the puddlejumper was disabled at the moment and was no longer a threat anyways. They were just going to destroy it for snooping on them. But then the Daedalus arrived to block the shot that saved the puddlejumper. And after that the wraith arent going to be targeting a damaged jumper that was out of control and not as big a threat as the Daedalus. I beleive the Daedalus should have been doing some evasive maneuvers from the very beginning but im going to bet that they couldnt do it due to budget constraints, as in every episode where the two ships just sit there and shoot at each other.

[Andru10]

No they don't, they just reduce the effect of the ships mass. The only way to reduce the ships mass would be to cut part of it off. Other than that you make a good point.

The inertial dampener actually reduces the physical mass of the ship. In the Atlantis episode "The Eye" (S1E11) Dr. Beckett says he increases the jumpers mass by adjusting the inertial damepeners so the wind from the storm doesn't blow the ship away. Sorry, I couldn't find a transcript but you can check for yourself in the episode

[jds1982]

The inertial dampener actually reduces the physical mass of the ship. In the Atlantis episode "The Eye" (S1E11) Dr. Beckett says he increases the jumpers mass by adjusting the inertial damepeners so the wind from the storm doesn't blow the ship away. Sorry, I couldn't find a transcript but you can check for yourself in the episode

No it doesn't. What Beckett did was increase the inertia of the PJ, which made it effectively heavier. He made the PJ act as if it had increased mass, he couldn't increase its mass unless he walked outside and brought some rocks inside or welded some scrap metal onto it.

[TheCainer]

Maybe the Daedalus was waiting for the Jumper to land in one of the 302 bays... It was only spiraling because they were going as fast as they could to get away from the Hive. Even still, the delay time for those shots gave the Daedalus an opportunity to get out of the way. I would think Col. Caldwell would be more concerned in saving his fancy ship and the 200 people on board than the small crew of a damaged Jumper. Even if it was Atlantis 1.

The first few hits were nothing to be concered off. It hardly did any damage to the shield. They probably thought that those were best it could shoot.
If they would have moved out of the way, the hive still could have taken a shot at the PJ.
And as I said, at that point, they had nothing to be concerned about. So they sure as hell weren't going to expose the PJ just because they don't want any more weak hits.
They only found out it was capable of much more when it was charging. The comparison with an aircraft carrier and a sub have already been made: You can't just move such a ship out of the way in a split second when it's not moving. All they could do was take the hits and hope it didn't do too much damage. But unfortunately they got cripled.

So moving out of the way to safe themselfs wasn't an option.

+ Even if they could move out of the way in time, the shots would have simply flew straight to the PJ and possibly hit them.
Wanting to save your own ass and sacrifice some of your own people, is very selfish and I doubt anyone would want that on it's conscience. (Nor do I think it would be appreciated by the folks back home (meaning your superiors)).

[Laxian of Earth]

u're forgetting SG-1's series finale UNENDING...the Odyssey flew to attack the Ori ships and to avoid Ori weapons fire. they also took little or no damage at first b/c of the ZPM.

the oddy didn't retain the ZPM....who ever got that rumor out? i mean carter talks about the Asgard powersource all the time (even more after having exhausted it powering the time dialation (hopefully right spelling) for 50 odd years. i guess she would not have had a problem with that if she had a ZPM now would she?

and yes: Moving a ship in a fight is crucial to your efforts, as it makes you harder to hit (enemy tracking and weapon control-computer would have to extrapolate your flight-pattern and fire before you are there as direct fire would only hit if you keep steady or fly directly at something)


greetings LAX
ps: moving is even better if you are the smaller opponent (F-304 is about what? 1/20 of a hive? i'd say even smaller! and so it should fly circles around them while hitting the much slower "whale" like hive)

[SavetheGate]

ROFL, are you trying to say bald commanders are suicidal?

[Mister Oragahn]

In Unending, the Oddy moves. If it didn't move it would be dead

It should have been dead anyway, the Ori ships had plenty of fast firing pulse batteries all around at Camelot that were conveniently forgotten for the rest of the show.

Yay for the top writing.

[Ouroboros]

This thread only makes me think of this.

http://www.traileraddict.com/clip/fa...ship-maneuvers

This is great and even ties into what I think is going on here. You see back in 1977 making a ship list lazily to the left was about all you could expect in terms of dynamic motion. Everything was done with scale models on rails and you could only shoot from certain angles that would hide the various rods/cables actually holding things up.

This also was the case for shows like star trek TNG, which is why you never really saw the enterprise do anything other than face the badguy of the week and shoot at it.

I figure that whoever's working on stargate's FX, or possibly whoever's directing the shots, is just mentally stuck in that era in terms of what they expect a space battle to look like and is either unwilling or uninterested in trying anything else, even though with modern computer effects the old limitations are no longer an issue.

There's been a few cases in atlantis when they did show some manuverabiliy but by and large it's been the old, "park infront of the massive enemy warship" strategy. I'll admit I really enjoyed watched them get lambasted the way they did in enemy at the gate, just because the beatings as depicted prior to this resulting from this stupid failure of tactics were nowhere near severe enough to be believable.

I still think the absolute worst example was the Ori satellite though. Here we've got a target that's actually stationary and armed only with a slowly propegating beam weapon taking on a fully mobile ship armed with guided nuclear missiles.

The Prometheus should never have been in any serious danger even from 1000 of those platforms. They simply shouldn't be capable of hitting it at range if it's moving, while they on the other hand, being stationary targets with slow firing weapons, really have no way to NOT get hit by incoming nukes it fires back at them.

The confrontation as depicted in that episode, assuming competance on both sides, should only end one of really two ways.

-The Prometheus doesn't have sufficient nukes to deplete the platform's shields and destroy it, prometheus has to withdraw. Result = draw

-The Prometheus launches a salvo of nukes from outside beam range, the platform fires, destroys one of them, and the others impact it while it's weapon is recharging, destroying it.

I don't remember how much warning they got before it fired the first shot but even if they got none absolutely NOTHING can excuse the sheer stupidity inherent in approaching an unknown threat that closely and then remaining perfectly still directly infront of it.

They should have been circling it from a few thousand kilometers away and maybe sending in fighters if for some stupid reason their sensors, which are perfectly capable of scanning from at least orbital ranges, can't get a proper reading on it.

This episode was a terrible example of how sheer writer/director/fx ignorance created a situation that broke suspension of disbelief so badly for basically no good reason other than pure unadulterated "didn't do the research" style laziness. This was like what, 8 years into SG-1 to as I recall, so you'd think that after spending a better part of a decade writing/directing about space and space battles someone would be able to find some time for a 15 minute google search into how it's actually supossed to work so, even if you are going to decide to make trade offs for increased drama, you don't make a complete bumble**** of stupidity out of it.

This was basically stupidity on the same level as a guy with a gun being killed in the story by a guy with no legs, who's tied to a chair, and can only swing his knife once per minute thanks to a debilitating muscle disease. Would anybody seriously expect an audience to swallow that sort of bull**** in anything other than a deliberate comedy scenario meant to poke fun at the sheer amount of staggering ineptitude that would be necessary to actually get killed in such a way?

[tjoflojt]

sounds like a monthy python sketch

[Rasunda]

In "Camelot" the Korolev and the Odessey aren't moving becaus that the Odessey losses it sublight and the Korolev losses main power but this shulden't take out the impulse.
Just rememberd that the Korolev only lose it's hyperdrive.

[jnadreth]

Perhaps they were of limited range and so were innefective against distant ships. Also Asgard shields held against their largest cannon so the smaller ones would have made little difference

[Dragon_Heart]

ok just to clarify, inertial dampners do NOT increase or decrease the ships mass, they do however create a force equal to the force acting on the ship, therefore cancelling out the g force. Think of it like this, if youre in a car, going at say 150 mph, and you swiftly turn left, you get jolted to the right of the car, inertial dampners would completely stop this.