What really bothers me about space battles is the close quarters they take place in. Imagine WWII battle ships trading broadsides at 17th century navel battle distances. Now take space ships armed with thermo-nuclear warheads lobbing them at that distance. Sheesh.
At 04:05 PM 5/31/2003 -0400, you wrote:
Fred commented: > Even more astounding to me (and this is true not just of Star Trek > but is true of any sci-fi show or movie that I can think of) is that > it's a universe in which every spaceship approaches every other > spaceship ~rightside-up~ !!!
I've got a mental list of things to do/not-do ifwhen I ever make a science fiction movie. Having ships approach each other in "funny" orientations is near the top of the list.
But it's worse than that: most battles mimick either naval battles -- the ships in this huge 3-d space maneuver more or less as though they were on a flat surface -- or a really simplified approach to airplane combat -- they maneuver in three dimensions, but it's clear that the director is still thinking in terms of _reference_ to some invisible "down". The most obvious exception to this that comes to mind felt more like a submarine situation (and, in fact, was from Star Trek), where the Enterprise "dropped" below the plane that another ship (uh, Romulans?) was searching in, inside some sort of cloud, then "rose up" behind the other ship after it had passed "overhead". It was notable for being, at the time, one of the few examples of 3-D maneuvering in a large-ship space battle (as opposed to fighter-scale dogfights), but _also_ for making it clear that the _characters_ were _explicitly_ locked into the same "it's like a naval battle" mentality that the writers and director were.
(ISTR some passing shots in one or more of the Star Wars movies having large ships pass at odd angles, but I'm not sure.)
-- Glenn
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read. --Groucho Marx
