Destiny's weapon grid

[KEK]

It could be a lot worse. Instead of technology we can't understand it could be like BSG, with people who have the ability to build space ships much more advanced than anything possible today, but with weapons systems that are stone-age by comparison. I mean seriously? One round from a large railgun would rip a battlestar in half, not to mention the laser technology we have now that would be able to take those nukes out with relative ease. You've just got to suspend your disbelief with this sort of thing, it's really not that important.

[nx01a]

The system's pretty sick! Surround [sound] weapons are always sensible [to me, anyway] in space where the enemy or asteroid or whatever won't always be coming in right in-front of you. Now... for surround Asgard plasma beams on the 304s...

[Phenom]

The guns looked great...however I thought it a bit odd that all it takes to use just under half power on Destiny is to shoot them off for 10 minutes or so. Even if it was 30 minutes it doesn't seem to be a lot.

Old ship I guess.

[jcainhaze]

The guns looked great...however I thought it a bit odd that all it takes to use just under half power on Destiny is to shoot them off for 10 minutes or so. Even if it was 30 minutes it doesn't seem to be a lot.

Old ship I guess.

Yeah no kidding. I thought the same thing.

[Ouroboros]

It could be a lot worse. Instead of technology we can't understand it could be like BSG, with people who have the ability to build space ships much more advanced than anything possible today, but with weapons systems that are stone-age by comparison. I mean seriously? One round from a large railgun would rip a battlestar in half, not to mention the laser technology we have now that would be able to take those nukes out with relative ease.

It falling victim to this tired genre cliche was really a shame as it did seem like they were trying for more realism by intentionally not using things like lasers and the ubiquitous glowing blob. I can even recall reading an interview where it was stated by someone involved with the show that they went with missiles and shells specifically because they wanted the combat to seem more realistic and less pie in the sky sci-fi.

The fact that this cliche of the spitting distance combat ranges and near stationary ships can still creep in when a production is actually going out of it's way to try and be more realistic just goes to show just how pervasive it is. It never even occurred to these guys that any solid projectile in space should actually have an effectively infinite maximum range, and a viable combat range determined mostly by how fast the enemy ship can see it coming and either get out of the way or somehow react to shoot it down before it hits them.

I really loved how some idiot decided that the large explosive shells the battlestars would fire just absolutely needed to glow to. "But, but, but, if it doesn't glow and slowly crawl across the screen the audience will be too stupid to understand how a gun works!".

You've just got to suspend your disbelief with this sort of thing, it's really not that important.

I've suspended my disbelief for years on this and now it's really more of a "come on not this **** again" thing for me than it is a "that's totally not realistic!" thing. Sure it's obviously not realistic but lots of things in sci-fi can be unrealistic without making me hate them. I don't hate this because it's so unrealistic, I hate this because it's ridiculously unrealistic and it's repeated so often that it's as if no one even tries to think about another actually original way of doing it. It's taken for granted that that's what space combat is now, glowing blobs flying back and forth between near stationary ships close enough together that they mind as well use swords and boarding planks". Basically I've seen it so often now it's just boring more than anything else to keep seeing it again and again and again.

[reddevil18]

Drones are better than blobs certainly, they're basically missiles, but they still seem to be slow moving and overly short ranged. Even the shots where they attack from ground to orbit don't exactly show off impressive ranges in space combat terms, though the speeds do generally tend to improve in those scenes, but even that's more down to lazy FX inconsistency than it is to any kind of deliberate intent.

It's a problem with the whole way space combat is depicted. Lumbering or stationary ships a few ship lengths apart shooting slow moving colorful crap of some kind at each other until one of them explodes like it was full of gasoline.

Space combat as a whole, as portrayed in most sci-fi is ridiculous. The very notion that you'd cram hundreds of giant vessels into a relatively small place and have some of the capital ships just zipping by is retarded. To me, BSG has(sometimes) had what is most likely the real stance the military would adopt in space warfare. The capital ships are a huge distance away, pounding away at each other with their main weapons, and using small fighters.
To me, the kind of space battle that we saw in Deep Space 9, with the huge armadas, as cool as it may look, is pretty much ridiculous.
But hey, it's sci-fi. Who knows?

[reddevil18]

The guns looked great...however I thought it a bit odd that all it takes to use just under half power on Destiny is to shoot them off for 10 minutes or so. Even if it was 30 minutes it doesn't seem to be a lot.

Old ship I guess.

Oh, for the love of...
Why are you assuming it's 10-30 minutes?
It could have been hours. We have no way of knowing.

[reddevil18]

No TV show, or movie, that I know of has really taken a 'science-fctioni*' approach to space combat in terms of extrapolating from what we know to attempt to determine what combat in space would really be like. Very few deal with the fact that energy weapons travel at light speed and I don't think any deal with the fact that mirrors make effective shielding against light. So we get naval battles in space

Yup. If I remember correctly, the Vorkosigan Saga, in terms of written sci-fi dealt with the whole mirror system.
We need to be honest with ourselves and realise it'll be a long time before the human race is capable of space warfare, but I think most of us realise it'd be nothing like what we see in movies or TV shows. And, well, that's because it'd most likely be friggin boring. It looks cool, it sells. End of story. And I can live with that. I'm more interested in good writing in terms of plot and characters than the realistic approach to action in sci-fi.

[Lord Hurin]

I was pretty disappointed to see "slow moving glowing balls of... something" repeated again as a weapon system.

I figured they were going for a more pseudo realistic type feel for this show, and this definitely put a dent in that feel. Come on, can't they think of anything else other than the glowing blobs of slow moving goo again? I would even have been happy with ancient satellite type beam weapons but this was just the same old cliche for the billionth time being trotted out again.

"Look at our bad ass ship! Just don't try to fight us from more than a few kilometers away or we'll be completely helpless."

Every ship in stargate suffers from this problem. The closet they ever got to a viable weapon system for space warfare was 304 nuclear missiles, but they were way too slow and they failed to use them correctly.

This glowing blobs of goo thing though, this needs to end, and not just in Stargate either. It's a genre wide megacliche that's persisted since at least the original star wars in 1977.

I had to laugh at this since it's pretty true. Unfortunately, the way a lot of people on here are (wanting to write off SGU as a rip of the series that came before it) if we'd had reddish "phaser-like" beam weapons, we would've gotten a lot of "I toldz u this wuz StarGate Voyager! The gunZ r tha sayme!"

Plus, as others have said, we haven't gotten a look at the "main" weaponry in action yet, (which I appreciate, since you probably need that command code to get those up and running,) so I'm hoping they won't just be large versions of the smaller cannons we saw here.

As one last question, how far do you want the range to be? I mean, certainly it would be bad if Destiny fires and misses the target only to have the beam hit Earth in a couple billion years or so...

[Jeff-B]

My wild speculation was that they were going to drop out of FTL, and just open fire wildly. What if there had been an alien ship of some kind right there when they opened fire? The alien ship just happens to be sitting there, minding its own business, then suddenly a huge unidentifiable ship shows up out of nowhere and opens fire? Not going to make the Destiny many friends out there.

[Phenom]

Oh, for the love of...
Why are you assuming it's 10-30 minutes?
It could have been hours. We have no way of knowing.

Time in SGU seems to pass at a fairly normal rate and it just didn't feel like hours and hours had passed before they had run out of power.

[reddevil18]

Time in SGU seems to pass at a fairly normal rate and it just didn't feel like hours and hours had passed before they had run out of power.

Events don't occur in real time. Air through Light was like 3 days, but Water was 3 weeks after that. We have no idea how long the guns kept firing.

[Eternal Density]

Also we have no idea how much power was in each of those shots. They might have packed an incredible amount of energy into each blob, which is of course still inferior to drones because they can't be steered so you waste a lot of energy if you miss

Probably a fleet of ships. That and the Destiny running into rouge space objects...

Maybe it was the Rouge Angles of Satin?

[Ouroboros]

As one last question, how far do you want the range to be? I mean, certainly it would be bad if Destiny fires and misses the target only to have the beam hit Earth in a couple billion years or so...

Right now I'd be satisfied with any range that was beyond visual range really. Basically just show that it is possible for one ship in space to hit another even if the people at the windows can't see the people in its windows waving back at them.

If you were dealing with something more realistic like true laser weapons, or anything else that propagates at or near light speed, you'd be looking at ranges likely of at least a light second or more so long as the focusing method isn't ****e. With lasers it's more about how well you can focus the beam and how much power you can throw behind it that will determine its range as a weapon.

A light second is a little less than the distance between the Earth and the moon.

With solid projectile weapons like missiles and rail guns though there is really no such thing as a maximum range. Once you fire something off in space it'll keep going and going and going just like an asteroid or comet, until it either hits something, falls into a gravity well somewhere or comes to some other calamity.

This is also true of a missile. As long as you can shut the engine down it can boost itself up to whatever speed and coast forever saving whatever remaining fuel it has for maneuvering in to attack something. You could theoretically bombard a fixed or predictable target like a planet from the outskirts of the solar system it was in if you were willing to wait for your missiles to get there. If the missiles accelerate as fast as the various ships or faster at sub light speeds this needn't even be very long.

Vs another ship a solid projectile weapons effective (not maximum) range is going to be limited more by how fast the projectile travels, any stealth or evasion capabilities it has, and how fast the other ship can see and react to it incoming, either by getting out of the way or shooting it down somehow. Your effective range will be different against different types of targets in other words. Small nimble ships with good sensors and alert crews you'll need to get closer to hit reliably, a big wallowing freighter with a second rate auto pilot flying in a straight line you can probably fire at from a distance it'll take your shots minutes to cover and still nail the thing. Unlike with a laser there's no "maximum" range where the beam will scatter too much to really be viable as a weapon anymore.

[kirmit]

I remember someone saying a GIF should be made of the ship firing, so here you go.