8 ms·

Next up: How Gondor won despite a complete lack of air support (see: winged wraiths) and superior enemy armor (see: Mumakil).

ghaff 7y ago
There's a lot of military SF (and, I guess, fantasy that I've never read as much of) that wants to mostly restrict the action to ground forces. The result is that they have to either just ignore the decisive power of air support or just come up with hand-wavy explanations for why air powerisn't effective in the hypothetical scenario.
- _Microft 7y ago
  Sounds a bit like things rendering Enterprise's transporters inoperative just when beaming up the away-team would have been the easiest solution. Oh, and to make it less obvious, you better announce a few minutes earlier that a plasma storm is forming in the upper atmosphere.
  - jacobush 7y ago
    Or my favorite order never heard on the bridge of Enterprise "nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure". Fine, often it would go against the ethos of what they are trying to do. But sometimes, they could have beamed home the away team and proceeded to rain fiery death from above with photon torpedoes or whatever.
    - krapp 7y ago
      They have phasers with enough power to boil the oceans of a planet, and torpedoes that can travel faster than light. Yet every conflict takes place at extremely close proximity, often on the same plane, as if they were ships in the age of sail. They have force fields with a critical flaw (harmonic resonance means any energy weapon using the same frequency as the shields can just shoot right through them) but whenever this is even mentioned, the shields have to be re-adjusted manually. Unauthorized people can appear on the ship, and crew can vanish from the ship, and the computer either doesn't notice, or does and never alerts anyone or activates any sort of countermeasures. The first officer can be sucked into a pocket universe and have his organs rearranged by non-Euclidean bug monsters and no one will ever know unless they happen to ask the computer where Riker is at the moment. It's been established that transporter buffers can be used to "back up" a person, even long term (in the TNG episode "Relics," Scotty is discovered having stored himself in a transporter buffer for decades with no ill effect.) Replicators can't do latinum and living tissue, but they work by literally converting energy into matter and assembling it into something atom by atom. At that resolution, there's no difference between anything and anything else, so there's no reason why replicators shouldn't be able to replicate anything. The former two items, along with the holodeck (which can create sentient life on request, BTW) should guarantee that no Federation citizen ever truly ages or dies, or even ever has to exist in a physical body. The Federation should be a post-human, post-singularity society. Yet for "plot reasons," none of these glitches (like the transporters being able to clone people simply by refracting the transporter beam) are ever harnessed for their real potential.
      - Freak_NL 7y ago
        Star Trek: TNG made a teenage me wonder why starships encountering each other always appeared to have matched their orientations. Was there some kind of prearranged signal? A diplomatic code adhered to even by enemies? Just a general preference on all sides concerned preventing headaches and vague unheimlich feelings of discomfort? So many questions… If I was harassing the federation I would keep my ship at an awkward angle relative to theirs at all times just to keep them on edge. I was totally fine with the other plot holes though.
        russellbeattie 7y ago
        That just needs a few lines of plot glue to fix that problem! Like, "Warp drives need to be oriented parallel to the ecliptic plane of surrounding celestial bodies to best calculate navigation and maximize their space bending effect. Naturally, ships keep this orientation at all times just in case."
        pp19dd 7y ago
        Don't think it was necessarily a plot hole, albeit after the fact. Plenty of sci fi authors have taken similar approaches throughout the years. The idea is that in a spiral galaxy the natural tendency would be to stick with the orientation that matched the galactic plane along the right-handed spin (to determine up vs down) and some authors have even extended naval directional signals into space. This is from The Lost Fleet: "Within a solar system, directional references were always made to the world outside a ship so other ships could understand them. Anything above the plane of the system was up, anything below it down. The direction toward the sun was right, or starboard, (or even 'starward' as some urged), while the direction away from the sun was left, or port."
        mcguire 7y ago
        "The direction toward the sun was right, or starboard, (or even 'starward' as some urged), while the direction away from the sun was left, or port."" Ehh. Ahh. "Port" and "starboard" should be relative to the bow/stern axis of the ship. Otherwise you'll have a hard time finding the head.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      Given the strength of Trek weaponry, one photon would do. I remember reading somewhere that a standard photon torpedo carried 1.5 kg of antimatter on board, which is yield-equivalent to a Tsar bomba (almost 60 megaton). However, phasers could have been easily used for close air support, even from orbit - AFAIR Enterprise-D used them once as surgical tools for geoengineering. Most episodes seem to script around the need for air support, but I remember one case where it was at least acknowledged on-screen - one DS9 episode had a ground assault at an enemy position to destroy a under-repair gateway in it, and it was said early on that the surrounding building was strong enough that a torpedo strike from orbit would not necessarily destroy the target. Edit: My personal favorite case of missed opportunity is the use of transporters to beam armed torpedoes directly onto enemy ships. It was used once in a Voyager episode. It's an obvious, but sadly plot-killing tactic, that hasn't been sufficiently hand-waved away in the lore, so one has to wonder why nobody uses it. The StarGate series actually took that option seriously (the series was much smarter when it came to combat). In it, to the dismay of the species that provided humans with transporters, human ships often beamed nuclear warheads onto unsuspecting enemy vessels, achieving seemingly impossible victories.
      - mcguire 7y ago
        "My personal favorite case of missed opportunity is the use of transporters to beam armed torpedoes directly onto enemy ships. It was used once in a Voyager episode. It's an obvious, but sadly plot-killing tactic, that hasn't been sufficiently hand-waved away in the lore, so one has to wonder why nobody uses it." Akshually... Transporters cannot penetrate shield, usually either incoming or outgoing. Usually.
        krapp 7y ago
        Akshually... it depends on the writer, series and episode. The shields have the fatal flaw that anything operating at the same frequency can go right through them, including a transporter beam. That's come up as a plot point more than once.
        TeMPOraL 7y ago
        > Transporters cannot penetrate shield, usually either incoming or outgoing. Usually. Except when they can, due to frequency matching, "technology generation" mismatch between shields and transporters, and countless of other one-off workarounds that happened. Think of every episode in which the Enterprise/Defiant/Voyager was boarded while in combat. But even when considering the regular case of shields blocking incoming and outgoing transport, there's plenty of opportunities to use transporters offensively. They could be used as surprise first strike weapon to initiate hostilities by immediately taking enemy ship out. They could be used to finish off an enemy in a one-to-one fight. They could be used in coordinated fashion in fleet battles, where whenever an enemy ship loses shields, one ship drops their own shields and transports some photons over while other ships cover the vulnerable friend from immediate fire. Etc. All in all, there are plenty of opportunities for offensive transporter use which were never explored in the series.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - zipwitch 7y ago
      In the good old days, of usenet, James D. Nicoll had a signature that read: "Frankly, Captain, I feel interstellar diplomacy is out of our depth." "Ah, hence the nuclear weapons."
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    One piece that never works, to the point that Starfleet should really ask themselves who designed it so badly - warp core ejection system. There's lots of episodes where their main reactor is about to explode, and the emergency safeguard designed to save them from exactly that problem suddenly malfunctions for one reason or other.
- KineticLensman 7y ago
  The Nightmare Stacks by Charles Stross includes (spoiler) an assault on the city of Leeds in the UK by a combined arms Elven battle group. The elves have Battle-tested air-land integration doctrine that sees them using their dragons in a close air support role. The elves use other magical means for ISR of the deep battle. Stross’ elves are somewhat more waffen-SS than Tolkien’s
  - pjc50 7y ago
    This results in a dragon vs. RAF Tornado dogfight. He got an ex-RAF chap to consult on the technical detail too.
    - arethuza 7y ago
      I seem to recall it was a pair of Eurofighter Typhoons rather than Tornados? Oh dear, now I'll have to read it all again just to check. Edit: Superb book, horrifying and laugh out loud funny (although not in the same places). Edit2: BBC/HBO please do a version of the Laundry Files once you are finished with HDM!
      - C1sc0cat 7y ago
        I think Charlie has said that they have been optioned - and Felicia Day just has to be cast as Cassie "yes yes"
- _Microft 7y ago
  Fictional battles that are worth to be described in detail might often directly involve the main characters or influential persons and therefore it might be out of question to bombard the battlefield and kill everyone. (wellll... at least as long as you are not G.R.R. Martin and turn everyone and their direwolve into a main character or do not care if a main character dies. When killing main characters, it certainly helps if you have enough of them which brings us back to the first point).
nephrite 7y ago
Flying wraiths lack firepower, so they provide no real air support. Just fast transportation/communication.
- me_me_me 7y ago
  Strafing runs in WW2 were almost completely ineffective but all infantry were reporting huge morale loss when they were happening.
  - saiya-jin 7y ago
    Strafing was quite effective against vehicles, trains, landed aircraft etc. But yes against infantry it didn't make much sense, something about going too fast in shaky airplane trying to hit tiny ants running randomly left and right because they noticed the plane well before plane noticed them
  - lostlogin 7y ago
    saiya-jin notes that this might be true of attacks on infantry but on vehicles and trains the attacks were very very effective. In particular the German army was reduced to moving by night only in Normandy and the railroads were heavily targeted. Things came to a head in the battle of The Falaise Pocket with artillery and the airforces working together and the descriptions of the aftermath are truely horrific.
- HenryKissinger 7y ago
  The film does show them mowing down soldiers with their claws and inspiring terror in others: https://youtu.be/HX4KKkSKZAY?t=197 https://youtu.be/HX4KKkSKZAY?t=197
  - arethuza 7y ago
    I seem to recall that one of the names for Angmar was "The Captain of Despair" - literally a terror weapon.
    - 7y ago
hoorayimhelping 7y ago
They had ghost reinforcements that executed a textbook flank[1]. 1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flanking_maneuver https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flanking_maneuver
- csunbird 7y ago
  In books, the ghost army was used to rout enemy at south and gather (now free to leave the region) soldiers at that region and transport them with (captured) enemy ships to the battlefield. The flanking maneuver is done, but with actual humans, not with ghosts.
b0rsuk 7y ago
Actually the author also has a 3 part article about war elephants https://acoup.blog/2019/07/26/collections-war-elephants-part-i-battle-pachyderms/ https://acoup.blog/2019/07/26/collections-war-elephants-part... He is of the opinion that elephants were okay (not great) on battlefield, but awful in terms of logistics, supply usage and breeding. A horse reaches adulthood in 4 years. An elephant needs 15, and pregnancy lasts over 3 years. There are no known examples of breeding elephants. Supply-wise, you could have 1000 cavalrymen or 54 elephants. He says the main reason India widely used elephants - aside from proximity - was to show off status. Also, don't make fun of J.R.R. Tolkien - he fought in trenches of WW1, on top of strong familiarity with medieval warfare because of all his reading.
- arethuza 7y ago
  Tolkien wrote a lovely letter to a fan about Sam and the soldiers he served alongside on the Western Front: "My ‘Samwise’ is indeed (as you note) largely a reflexion of the English soldier—grafted on the village-boys of early days, the memory of the privates and my batmen that I knew in the 1914 War, and recognized as so far superior to myself." https://johngarth.wordpress.com/2014/02/13/sam-gamgee-and-tolkiens-batmen/ https://johngarth.wordpress.com/2014/02/13/sam-gamgee-and-to...
mcguire 7y ago
If you're not familiar with Corey Olsen (https://tolkienprofessor.com/ https://tolkienprofessor.com/), one of his frequent points is that, while the First Age elves had some air support in the form of Manwë's eagles, Morgoth didn't until he invented winged dragons shortly before the final battle. (Balrogs don't fly.)
- zipwitch 7y ago
  > (Balrogs don't fly.) Them's thar's fightin' words. :) I don't have a copy of the old Usenet FAQ handy, but here's a tiny sample of the debate for any curious readers: http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Balrogs/Wings http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Balrogs/Wings http://www.thetolkienwiki.org/wiki.cgi?FAQ/Do__Balrogs__have__wings http://www.thetolkienwiki.org/wiki.cgi?FAQ/Do__Balrogs__have...
rossdavidh 7y ago
Well not at the siege of Minas Tirith, but they did get saved by air cav at the battle after that (giant Eagles).

ghaff 7y ago

There's a lot of military SF (and, I guess, fantasy that I've never read as much of) that wants to mostly restrict the action to ground forces. The result is that they have to either just ignore the decisive power of air support or just come up with hand-wavy explanations for why air powerisn't effective in the hypothetical scenario.

_Microft 7y ago
Sounds a bit like things rendering Enterprise's transporters inoperative just when beaming up the away-team would have been the easiest solution. Oh, and to make it less obvious, you better announce a few minutes earlier that a plasma storm is forming in the upper atmosphere.
- jacobush 7y ago
  Or my favorite order never heard on the bridge of Enterprise "nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure". Fine, often it would go against the ethos of what they are trying to do. But sometimes, they could have beamed home the away team and proceeded to rain fiery death from above with photon torpedoes or whatever.
  - krapp 7y ago
    They have phasers with enough power to boil the oceans of a planet, and torpedoes that can travel faster than light. Yet every conflict takes place at extremely close proximity, often on the same plane, as if they were ships in the age of sail. They have force fields with a critical flaw (harmonic resonance means any energy weapon using the same frequency as the shields can just shoot right through them) but whenever this is even mentioned, the shields have to be re-adjusted manually. Unauthorized people can appear on the ship, and crew can vanish from the ship, and the computer either doesn't notice, or does and never alerts anyone or activates any sort of countermeasures. The first officer can be sucked into a pocket universe and have his organs rearranged by non-Euclidean bug monsters and no one will ever know unless they happen to ask the computer where Riker is at the moment. It's been established that transporter buffers can be used to "back up" a person, even long term (in the TNG episode "Relics," Scotty is discovered having stored himself in a transporter buffer for decades with no ill effect.) Replicators can't do latinum and living tissue, but they work by literally converting energy into matter and assembling it into something atom by atom. At that resolution, there's no difference between anything and anything else, so there's no reason why replicators shouldn't be able to replicate anything. The former two items, along with the holodeck (which can create sentient life on request, BTW) should guarantee that no Federation citizen ever truly ages or dies, or even ever has to exist in a physical body. The Federation should be a post-human, post-singularity society. Yet for "plot reasons," none of these glitches (like the transporters being able to clone people simply by refracting the transporter beam) are ever harnessed for their real potential.
    - Freak_NL 7y ago
      Star Trek: TNG made a teenage me wonder why starships encountering each other always appeared to have matched their orientations. Was there some kind of prearranged signal? A diplomatic code adhered to even by enemies? Just a general preference on all sides concerned preventing headaches and vague unheimlich feelings of discomfort? So many questions… If I was harassing the federation I would keep my ship at an awkward angle relative to theirs at all times just to keep them on edge. I was totally fine with the other plot holes though.
      - russellbeattie 7y ago
        That just needs a few lines of plot glue to fix that problem! Like, "Warp drives need to be oriented parallel to the ecliptic plane of surrounding celestial bodies to best calculate navigation and maximize their space bending effect. Naturally, ships keep this orientation at all times just in case."
      - pp19dd 7y ago
        Don't think it was necessarily a plot hole, albeit after the fact. Plenty of sci fi authors have taken similar approaches throughout the years. The idea is that in a spiral galaxy the natural tendency would be to stick with the orientation that matched the galactic plane along the right-handed spin (to determine up vs down) and some authors have even extended naval directional signals into space. This is from The Lost Fleet: "Within a solar system, directional references were always made to the world outside a ship so other ships could understand them. Anything above the plane of the system was up, anything below it down. The direction toward the sun was right, or starboard, (or even 'starward' as some urged), while the direction away from the sun was left, or port."
        mcguire 7y ago
        "The direction toward the sun was right, or starboard, (or even 'starward' as some urged), while the direction away from the sun was left, or port."" Ehh. Ahh. "Port" and "starboard" should be relative to the bow/stern axis of the ship. Otherwise you'll have a hard time finding the head.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Given the strength of Trek weaponry, one photon would do. I remember reading somewhere that a standard photon torpedo carried 1.5 kg of antimatter on board, which is yield-equivalent to a Tsar bomba (almost 60 megaton). However, phasers could have been easily used for close air support, even from orbit - AFAIR Enterprise-D used them once as surgical tools for geoengineering. Most episodes seem to script around the need for air support, but I remember one case where it was at least acknowledged on-screen - one DS9 episode had a ground assault at an enemy position to destroy a under-repair gateway in it, and it was said early on that the surrounding building was strong enough that a torpedo strike from orbit would not necessarily destroy the target. Edit: My personal favorite case of missed opportunity is the use of transporters to beam armed torpedoes directly onto enemy ships. It was used once in a Voyager episode. It's an obvious, but sadly plot-killing tactic, that hasn't been sufficiently hand-waved away in the lore, so one has to wonder why nobody uses it. The StarGate series actually took that option seriously (the series was much smarter when it came to combat). In it, to the dismay of the species that provided humans with transporters, human ships often beamed nuclear warheads onto unsuspecting enemy vessels, achieving seemingly impossible victories.
    - mcguire 7y ago
      "My personal favorite case of missed opportunity is the use of transporters to beam armed torpedoes directly onto enemy ships. It was used once in a Voyager episode. It's an obvious, but sadly plot-killing tactic, that hasn't been sufficiently hand-waved away in the lore, so one has to wonder why nobody uses it." Akshually... Transporters cannot penetrate shield, usually either incoming or outgoing. Usually.
      - krapp 7y ago
        Akshually... it depends on the writer, series and episode. The shields have the fatal flaw that anything operating at the same frequency can go right through them, including a transporter beam. That's come up as a plot point more than once.
      - TeMPOraL 7y ago
        > Transporters cannot penetrate shield, usually either incoming or outgoing. Usually. Except when they can, due to frequency matching, "technology generation" mismatch between shields and transporters, and countless of other one-off workarounds that happened. Think of every episode in which the Enterprise/Defiant/Voyager was boarded while in combat. But even when considering the regular case of shields blocking incoming and outgoing transport, there's plenty of opportunities to use transporters offensively. They could be used as surprise first strike weapon to initiate hostilities by immediately taking enemy ship out. They could be used to finish off an enemy in a one-to-one fight. They could be used in coordinated fashion in fleet battles, where whenever an enemy ship loses shields, one ship drops their own shields and transports some photons over while other ships cover the vulnerable friend from immediate fire. Etc. All in all, there are plenty of opportunities for offensive transporter use which were never explored in the series.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - zipwitch 7y ago
    In the good old days, of usenet, James D. Nicoll had a signature that read: "Frankly, Captain, I feel interstellar diplomacy is out of our depth." "Ah, hence the nuclear weapons."
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  One piece that never works, to the point that Starfleet should really ask themselves who designed it so badly - warp core ejection system. There's lots of episodes where their main reactor is about to explode, and the emergency safeguard designed to save them from exactly that problem suddenly malfunctions for one reason or other.
KineticLensman 7y ago
The Nightmare Stacks by Charles Stross includes (spoiler) an assault on the city of Leeds in the UK by a combined arms Elven battle group. The elves have Battle-tested air-land integration doctrine that sees them using their dragons in a close air support role. The elves use other magical means for ISR of the deep battle. Stross’ elves are somewhat more waffen-SS than Tolkien’s
- pjc50 7y ago
  This results in a dragon vs. RAF Tornado dogfight. He got an ex-RAF chap to consult on the technical detail too.
  - arethuza 7y ago
    I seem to recall it was a pair of Eurofighter Typhoons rather than Tornados? Oh dear, now I'll have to read it all again just to check. Edit: Superb book, horrifying and laugh out loud funny (although not in the same places). Edit2: BBC/HBO please do a version of the Laundry Files once you are finished with HDM!
    - C1sc0cat 7y ago
      I think Charlie has said that they have been optioned - and Felicia Day just has to be cast as Cassie "yes yes"
_Microft 7y ago
Fictional battles that are worth to be described in detail might often directly involve the main characters or influential persons and therefore it might be out of question to bombard the battlefield and kill everyone. (wellll... at least as long as you are not G.R.R. Martin and turn everyone and their direwolve into a main character or do not care if a main character dies. When killing main characters, it certainly helps if you have enough of them which brings us back to the first point).

nephrite 7y ago

Flying wraiths lack firepower, so they provide no real air support. Just fast transportation/communication.

me_me_me 7y ago
Strafing runs in WW2 were almost completely ineffective but all infantry were reporting huge morale loss when they were happening.
- saiya-jin 7y ago
  Strafing was quite effective against vehicles, trains, landed aircraft etc. But yes against infantry it didn't make much sense, something about going too fast in shaky airplane trying to hit tiny ants running randomly left and right because they noticed the plane well before plane noticed them
- lostlogin 7y ago
  saiya-jin notes that this might be true of attacks on infantry but on vehicles and trains the attacks were very very effective. In particular the German army was reduced to moving by night only in Normandy and the railroads were heavily targeted. Things came to a head in the battle of The Falaise Pocket with artillery and the airforces working together and the descriptions of the aftermath are truely horrific.
HenryKissinger 7y ago
The film does show them mowing down soldiers with their claws and inspiring terror in others: https://youtu.be/HX4KKkSKZAY?t=197 https://youtu.be/HX4KKkSKZAY?t=197
- arethuza 7y ago
  I seem to recall that one of the names for Angmar was "The Captain of Despair" - literally a terror weapon.
  - 7y ago

hoorayimhelping 7y ago

They had ghost reinforcements that executed a textbook flank[1]. 1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flanking_maneuver https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flanking_maneuver

csunbird 7y ago
In books, the ghost army was used to rout enemy at south and gather (now free to leave the region) soldiers at that region and transport them with (captured) enemy ships to the battlefield. The flanking maneuver is done, but with actual humans, not with ghosts.

b0rsuk 7y ago

Actually the author also has a 3 part article about war elephants https://acoup.blog/2019/07/26/collections-war-elephants-part-i-battle-pachyderms/ https://acoup.blog/2019/07/26/collections-war-elephants-part... He is of the opinion that elephants were okay (not great) on battlefield, but awful in terms of logistics, supply usage and breeding. A horse reaches adulthood in 4 years. An elephant needs 15, and pregnancy lasts over 3 years. There are no known examples of breeding elephants. Supply-wise, you could have 1000 cavalrymen or 54 elephants. He says the main reason India widely used elephants - aside from proximity - was to show off status. Also, don't make fun of J.R.R. Tolkien - he fought in trenches of WW1, on top of strong familiarity with medieval warfare because of all his reading.

arethuza 7y ago
Tolkien wrote a lovely letter to a fan about Sam and the soldiers he served alongside on the Western Front: "My ‘Samwise’ is indeed (as you note) largely a reflexion of the English soldier—grafted on the village-boys of early days, the memory of the privates and my batmen that I knew in the 1914 War, and recognized as so far superior to myself." https://johngarth.wordpress.com/2014/02/13/sam-gamgee-and-tolkiens-batmen/ https://johngarth.wordpress.com/2014/02/13/sam-gamgee-and-to...

mcguire 7y ago

If you're not familiar with Corey Olsen (https://tolkienprofessor.com/ https://tolkienprofessor.com/), one of his frequent points is that, while the First Age elves had some air support in the form of Manwë's eagles, Morgoth didn't until he invented winged dragons shortly before the final battle. (Balrogs don't fly.)

zipwitch 7y ago
> (Balrogs don't fly.) Them's thar's fightin' words. :) I don't have a copy of the old Usenet FAQ handy, but here's a tiny sample of the debate for any curious readers: http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Balrogs/Wings http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Balrogs/Wings http://www.thetolkienwiki.org/wiki.cgi?FAQ/Do__Balrogs__have__wings http://www.thetolkienwiki.org/wiki.cgi?FAQ/Do__Balrogs__have...

rossdavidh 7y ago

Well not at the siege of Minas Tirith, but they did get saved by air cav at the battle after that (giant Eagles).