That's an interesting article--this bit in particular.
Quote:
CW: There are so many that are so bad. Star Wars is probably the worst. There is no explanation for why X-Wings [fighters] do what they do, other than the source material is really Zeroes [Japanese fighter planes] from World War II. Lucas quite consciously copied World War II fighter combat. He basically has said they analyzed World War II movies and gun camera footage and recreated those shots. Battlestar Galactica has other issues. One thing I have never understood is why the humans didn't lose halfway through the first episode. If information moves at the speed of light, and one side has a tactically useful FTL [faster-than-light] drive to make very small jumps, then there is no reason why the Cylons couldn't jump close enough and go, "Oh, there the Colonials are three light minutes away, I can see where they are, but they won't see me for three minutes?" C.J. Cherryh's novels address this a bit with the idea of "longscan," where you predict where they are going to be, but you might not know for some period of time what they actually did.
FP: So a universe of faster-than-light travel favors surprise attacks?
CW: It really, really does. You can go and mug somebody and they never see it coming. Of course, not all faster-than-light drives in fiction work the same way, but the Cylon drives certainly had that attribute.
These tactics occurred to me early on watching that series.
I tried to explain it a few times to people on the BSG fan boards, but they either could not grasp the physics or they were just being internet douche bags... Because nobody else "got it."
To be fair though, I think BSG did use the jump drives tactically. Early in the series the Cylons would jump in close to the fleet without warning all the time... Also, how many times did ships jump away just before the nukes got there?
And for the ultimate tactical jump, who can forget this?
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdkCpnGMyGw[/youtube]
There's an old PC game called X3: Reunion that uses jump drives like this too. During sector defense missions enemy carriers would constantly jump in, dump their fighters and jump away before you could destroy them. That was damned annoying, but fun and smart too.
X3 (heavily modded) is worth playing to get a feel for BSG style combat.
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No man is free who is not master of himself.~Epictetus
14 Oct 2012, 11:46 am
