Battlestar Design discussion

[ML]

I've been wonderingabout something. In BSG, the battlestars weaponry is mainly turreted guns. Why don't the cylons just shoot these gun turrets off? :?

[Ron]

I've been wonderingabout something. In BSG, the battlestars weaponry is mainly turreted guns. Why don't the cylons just shoot these gun turrets off? :?

Merged to relevant thread ;)


I'm no BSG expert, but to judge from modern and semi-modern (since WWI) warships and other military facilities using turreted weapons:

1. The turrets are probably as well armored as the rest of the ship.
2. The turrets are probably smaller targets than some things.
3. There are more critical targets: command, fire control, power train.
4. Just hitting the bloody ship is hard enough.

In short, the basic military policy has been to just hammer the ship and figure any major damage will disrupt the function of some of the weapons. Should you get lucky and hit a storage area for some kind of explosive or fuel, it would do a lot more damage than hits to the actual gun. Trying to target each individual weapon on the ship will just keep your fighters, missiles, or whatever within the ship's firing range longer than necessary, while the total gain will be no greater than what would be accomplished by just firing into the hull.

I would assume this to still be true in BSG, since both the original Battlestar Galactica and Star Wars were based on the WW2 capital ship/fighter plane style of combat. (Unlike Star Trek, where heavy ships pounded each other at short range, more modeled from the days of sail-driven wooden ships... and the weapons were integrated completely inside the hull.) Of course, most really modern combat is done with long-range missiles carrying warheads that few targets could survive ... but that wouldn't make much of a movie or a game. A classic problem of sci-fi, really ... estimates of the unknown are always made off of what is already known.

That's the literary analysis answer.

[Elffin]

@Ron - welcome!

Very good points in regards to capital ship behaviour and relevant to the BSG universe as well.

in addition ....
I think its mentioned by Adama/Tigh that Cylon's would try to board battlestars and try two things...

i) Exhaust the air so crew die..
ii) Try to use battlestar turrets manually against its own ships/fleet..

Explains the boarding party in season 2 and the boarding party in Razor..

I think sopmeone suggested that the cylon's always try to destroy the flightpods first - notice the raider in the flightpod in Razor?
That area would contain enough fuel to blow the ship (mini series)

[Ron]

Boarding parties are an interesting thing to consider. Xtended Mod has a boarding party model more or less working (if you can ever find places to hire more marines), which you may want to borrow and/or build on. But I'm really not much of a coder, so I can't really help with it, except to point you in the general direction.

I do balance issue related stuff in mods, generally aimed toward realism or at least more logical statistics. (I did an experimental increase in ship speeds for XTM, which will hopefully get incorporated into the next version, as well as work on "Mount and Blade" and the "UFO-Afterlight" total rebalance mod.) Therefore, for now, I'm just watching this project until you guys get a working release ... then I can probably chip in with a little more help.

I wish I could get the new BSG series here ... but I teach in China, so what entertainment we get from the western world is hit-and-miss, and BSG is so far one of the misses. (Ironic, since many other movies/television series/etc. are easy enough to get on DVD, and I would have expected BSG to be popular here.) Not having seen much of the new shows does put me at a disadvantage on what I can contribute.

[Sartorie]

The way the Battlestars are designed seems to hint that in case of an emergency the flightpods would not hurt the main ship much or may be even split of from it. There will not be much fuel / weapons stored in there - just what is needed to restock the fighters. The excessive amounts are probably stored deep inside (and in a heavily armored part) of the ship.

From what I understand about carrier / fighters going for the flightpods has 3 reasons. The first is without a flightpod no additional fighters can be launched / landed fighters will be destroyed. Second fighters are designed for high speed combat using as less mass as is possible and therefore will not be able to stay airborne for a long time - a fighter that has nowhere to land / restock is pretty fast a useless / dead fighter.
The last and most important reason is flightpods are heavily exposed and have no armor due to their functions.

[Ron]

Again, literary analysis - the aircraft carrier deck. You hit the deck of an aircraft carrier, and it suspends all flight operations, including recovering aircraft. That leaves the whole battlegroup vulnerable to air attack, since more aircraft cannot be launched, as well as leaving the ones already in the sky stranded.

A strange model for a space war, realistically, since a space craft should be able to more or less stop in space and be hauled aboard through any door, or serviced by spacewalk or link to another small craft... the very concept of needing a dedicated landing strip is really very 20th century. But from the standpoint of making a good work of fiction, the idea of needing to protect the carrier/landing strip is a very common military theme and one a lot of people can relate to. This makes it a very solid basis for tactics in a sci-fi universe, even if actual NASA engineers might question how they came to design something like that.

Hope I didn't kill anybody's fun by over-analyzing ... but I teach college, so I get paid to look at things this way. Getting people thinking about game mods like planning a work of literature usually helps the creative process.

[Elffin]

Carry on guys ... I think this topic merits further discussion in its own thread...

Some things I did find unusual (sci-fi wise) in Razor were... the external landing area on the Pegasus.
http://img198.imagevenue.com/loc369/th_40226_pegasus7_122_369lo.jpg (http://img198.imagevenue.com/img.php?loc=loc369&image=40226_pegasus7_122_369lo.jpg)

Scorpion Shipyards.... external landing areas/runway....
http://img125.imagevenue.com/loc799/th_06852_viper_alley_122_799lo.jpg (http://img125.imagevenue.com/img.php?loc=loc799&image=06852_viper_alley_122_799lo.jpg)http://img214.imagevenue.com/loc515/th_06395_raptor_alley_122_515lo.jpg (http://img214.imagevenue.com/img.php?loc=loc515&image=06395_raptor_alley_122_515lo.jpg)

Probably added for dramatic effect.. and to exaggerate the feel of the surprise attack.... (echoes of Pearl harbour as well)

[ML]

1. The turrets are probably as well armored as the rest of the ship.
2. The turrets are probably smaller targets than some things.
3. There are more critical targets: command, fire control, power train.
4. Just hitting the bloody ship is hard enough.

Well actrually, the rail gun turrets are quite large and the cylon's really don't have problems hitting a battlestar, trust me. ;)

[Ron]

It's always a problem to hit an enemy warship - be it historical, modern, or fictional. Smallish things like fighters and torpedo boats have too high a chance of being torn to bits, plus most of their weapons are not really adequate to effectively damage something that much larger than them (or they only have one or two shots of weapons large enough to do the job). Long range missiles have a similar problem - they can be shot down or decoyed. Larger stuff, like other warships, probably can't approach all that fast ... so they will probably end up doing most of their firing from beyond preferred range. and the enemy ship will be moving and returning fire during this time as well. There's more to hitting an enemy craft than just target practice.

Gun turrets on any historical warship (and so, on sci-fi ones as well) are not "small" in the sense of being hard to see at a distance, but compared to other things considered targets (like the entire surface of the upper deck, or the hull at or below the waterline, or the conning tower), they're not the easiest things to pick on either. Plus the actual turret is a relatively small part of the overall structure that could be hit to disable the weapon - fire control, ammo, and sensor systems also must be functioning for the weapon to work ... and most of those things are harder to armor than a gun turret. So seldom is it worth anyone's time to specifically target the gun itself. That's the historical model ... and that's the one most sci-fi writers tend to follow.

My real combat/historical expertise is in hand-to-hand combat, not ships ... but the same thing applies. Most people don't realize that surviving an attack has very little to do with punching hard enough to break a board, but very much to do with avoiding being gutted like a fish before you can even swing. That's because a real danger isn't like a sport tournament or a schoolyard scuffle - the threat is real, and you can't just take a few hits and go on. Same is true with naval and air war (and so sci-fi space as well) - shooting at a target dummy is a world of difference from approaching under fire. Sure they could hit the ship, if they could get there ... but getting there isn't like dusting crops, because "there" shoots back. And even if they do get there, the idea is to shoot at the easiest target and get out of there (even if the attack itself is suicide and you're talking about collectively getting your remaining ships out of there). That's the difference between being able to hit something and actually hitting it.

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other post:

Yeah, from an engineering standpoint, the external landing areas look really funny. But again, figuring the literary theme of the 20th century aircraft carrier/airstrip, it makes sense. Pearl Harbor, or the Japanese carriers being caught with the deck full of unfueled aircraft at Midway, or the beginning of the German air attacks on British airfields - they all looked like that.

Science fiction is usually a lot more fiction than science. (Then again, a lot of what is called science is more fiction than anything else, so it shouldn't be a surprise.)

Which is a valid issue for a mod ... do you plan to copy the odd-looking quirks from the shows, or try to correct them? Why or why not?

Personally, I liked the simplicity of the ships and weapons from the OLD Battlestar Galactica (same as the old Buck Rogers TV series - pretty good writing, despite the limitations of the 1960's special effects) ... but I've only seen a little of the newer ones, so I didn't really get time to adjust to their fictional tech curve.

--------------------

Hope my ranting is helpful. There's a bunch of junk rattling around in my head - history, literature, sociology - but getting it out in any useful format can be a challenge. (My students often tell me this.)

[ML]

It's always a problem to hit an enemy warship - be it historical, modern, or fictional. Smallish things like fighters and torpedo boats have too high a chance of being torn to bits, plus most of their weapons are not really adequate to effectively damage something that much larger than them (or they only have one or two shots of weapons large enough to do the job). Long range missiles have a similar problem - they can be shot down or decoyed. Larger stuff, like other warships, probably can't approach all that fast ... so they will probably end up doing most of their firing from beyond preferred range. and the enemy ship will be moving and returning fire during this time as well. There's more to hitting an enemy craft than just target practice.

I know there's more to cap ship warfare than just firing your big guns. On a real historical and modern stand point, I whole heartedly agree with you.

But in the show, whether it's a battlestar hitting a base ship or the other way around, hitting the other ship is really not a problem. Have you watched the revisioned BSG, Ron? Just take the miniseries, or Resurrestion Ship part 2, or Exodus Part 2, or any other episode that has a battle in it for that matter. Or you can go on YouTube, there's plenty of stuff there. Be it that the base ships have a little more trouble hitting the mark with a battlestars flak guns and them just using ship-to-ship missiles, they can still do some pretty good damage. And if overwelmed, raiders can do a bit of damage as well. A cylon raider can carry nukes. So given the right circumstances, a whole bunch of raiders carrying nukes can really hurt yuh. Can carry up to three per ship as far as we know. And the most nuke hits a battlestar can take I believe I read is like two or three.

The speed at which both battlestars and base ships travel is actually pretty fast when compared to other cap ships from other sci-fi shows (except for Star Trek). Also the range at which they stay apart varies from battle to battle. Take Exodus Part 2 for example. The three base ships were pretty close to the Galactica. Probably because they were trying to overwelm the Galactica and the odds were in their favor, but close none the less. And in Resurrestion Ship Part 2, even though the two base ships and the Peg and Galactica stayed pretty far apart, each ship suffered hits. Same thing at the end of the miniseries as well.

[ML]

Gun turrets on any historical warship (and so, on sci-fi ones as well) are not "small" in the sense of being hard to see at a distance, but compared to other things considered targets (like the entire surface of the upper deck, or the hull at or below the waterline, or the conning tower), they're not the easiest things to pick on either. Plus the actual turret is a relatively small part of the overall structure that could be hit to disable the weapon - fire control, ammo, and sensor systems also must be functioning for the weapon to work ... and most of those things are harder to armor than a gun turret. So seldom is it worth anyone's time to specifically target the gun itself. That's the historical model ... and that's the one most sci-fi writers tend to follow.

Okay I can see what you're saying and I agree that there are better and more important targets to hit. I'm just curious as to why the turrets haven't been hit anyway with as much fighting there's been.

[-Mox-]

Like almost all SF series its kind of pointless to go into a debate on ships their roles and design simply because -no matter how well thought of- there's always something to raise the odd eyebrow upon.
That said, its still incredible tempting to go that road so here's my 2 cents:

Battlestars seem to incorporate the best of 2 worlds. On one hand you have yourself a nice juicy carrier and on the other a beefy battleship.
'Seem' cause anyone with at least some notice on history will know these kind of hybrid designs have always been a major disaster.
There simply is too much overhead generated by incorporating a dual design philosophy into a single ship and it always, always! backfires.

Now, the Colonials are of course much more advanced then any present day warbird so one could argue certain inpracticalities have been overcome by more modern tech.

The series however pulls multiple funnies in that regard.
Biggest catchers are the fact that (all?) Colonial armaments seem to be ammo-based. This is a tall order to sell in a age where FTL has done its bidding, vast ships can be constructed that are more then a mile long and that you can assume of are capable of bringing to bear a power-source that isn't like anything in existence today or even close to it.

If however one looks at todays research into energy based weaponry and the fact SOME energy based weapons already exist and mass-production is only held back by costs and the inability to come up (for now) with a more practical generator/power source of some kind, the Colonials having none of the above becomes almost impossible to hold on to and should be regarded a director-teams tweak into a 'refreshed BSG-Universe' more likely then anything else.

Grid:
Well, lets not go there.
Galactica has one of the worst main defence grids I've ever seen layed out
and to top things off, Pegasus' (more advanced!) is even worse :?
Again, one could argue Pegasus guns are automated so it doesn't really matter that much how much guns you stick and where you stick them
but come on....

Individual Weaponry:
Railgun turrets with 3 rails look cooler then with 2.
Railgun turrets require incredible heavy slugs and therefore a nifty ammo-supply system.
The one thing for such a supply system you would NOT do is to put the Z-axis pivotting part (the barrels) of the turret on the outside of the main turret body right? Well, wrong! cause they are.

How are they coping with ammo-supply against the vacuum of space?
That must be one hell of a fancy movable conveyorbelt to keep those slugs coming to the guns in elevated position!
Alternative; the guns need to be leveled before reloading.
This could work but would be the sum of stupidity designwise but I've never seen a railgun fire twice in the same shot so dunno?

Flightpods:

We've seen raiders fly into the pods (both on Galactica and Peg) on a number of occasions.
Put a nuke in one of them and your pod is gone.
Worse, halve your flightwings are gone on Pegasus and (if you aim for the right one on Galactica) ALL your Vipers and Raptors are gone.
Again, it looks cool to have flightpods but logistically they'd be a total nightmare (try simply swapping a flightleader from Pod A to Pod B when it would be numbers crunchtime or have a most-wanted sparepart brought over etc :-)

*Sigh* thats just my tip of the Iceberg.
What can I say, it could have been better but can't it always?
Despite the above it's one frakking cool series isnt it ;-)

[ML]

Frak yah! :shock:

[Ron]

I stated earlier that I cannot really get the new shows where I am. I saw one or two of them, but I simply do not have access to the others at this time.

That is why I have qualified all my statements as being literary analysis, and repeatedly stated that I was not a BSG expert.

[Jey 16]

Flightpods:

We've seen raiders fly into the pods (both on Galactica and Peg) on a number of occasions.
Put a nuke in one of them and your pod is gone.
Worse, halve your flightwings are gone on Pegasus and (if you aim for the right one on Galactica) ALL your Vipers and Raptors are gone.
Again, it looks cool to have flightpods but logistically they'd be a total nightmare (try simply swapping a flightleader from Pod A to Pod B when it would be numbers crunchtime or have a most-wanted sparepart brought over etc :-)

*Sigh* thats just my tip of the Iceberg.
What can I say, it could have been better but can't it always?
Despite the above it's one frakking cool series isnt it ;-)

The original series shows this better: the Galactica is able to retract the flightpods and normaly they did this during fight when all fighter are out and they open the flightpods when the vipers are going to land ...

[-Mox-]

The original series shows this better: the Galactica is able to retract the flightpods and normaly they did this during fight when all fighter are out and they open the flightpods when the vipers are going to land ...

Which -from as far as I can recall- has GOT to be the most retarded explanation and overcomplicated solution for something of this magnitude EVER explained in a sf series (The Saucer-section of a Galaxy-Class ship in STNG being able to separate from the rest of the hull coming in a close second :lol:)

[Ron]

Which comes back to the mod question ... do you guys plan to replicate the show(s) (old, new, or otherwise), with all its bugs, or do you plan to make changes?

Which would hurt your feelings more - copying the retarded parts, or making changes unilaterally?

(Don't look at me ... I'm just asking questions. Someone else has to decide.)

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Although extending the flight pods doesn't seem that unreasonable if you assume that the fighters will be coming in fast... getting their line of approach out away from the hull would greatly increase the chances of recovering them safely, instead of splattering a few against the side of your own ship. Then retracting them again, to streamline the ship and save on armor ... not THAT crazy.

Of course, why they need to come in fast is still a hole in the plot, a leftover from fixed-wing aircraft landing on a carrier, where stall speed is an issue. But again, it makes for workable fiction even if the science parts are shoddy... carriers recovering fighters is a theme people can relate to.


But the break-apart transformer ship in Star Trek ... there was just no excuse for that. That plan was apparently cooked up by six-year-olds. Whatever you guys do, don't do something as hair-brained as that.

[ML]

I got it! The flight pods break off to form two mega torpedoes! Oooo, or they transform to form two gigantic swinging arms!

Karate chop action battlestar, anyone? :shock:

[Ron]

Dumber things have been tried. Consider the use of helium blimps as carriers for biplanes ... extensively tested shortly after WW1, until changes in aircraft design made it genuinely infeasible. Their landing hooks really were designed to reach out and karate chop an airplane. Or the Apollo lunar missions, where the ship had to come apart, turn around, and stick back together, before the flight could continue. The dumb part ... both of those worked.

Never underestimate the absurdity of what engineers will come up with.

[barty911]

Woo, my first post.

The original series shows this better: the Galactica is able to retract the flightpods and normaly they did this during fight when all fighter are out and they open the flightpods when the vipers are going to land ...

In both series, the Galactica needs to retract its flightpods in order to jump. The Pegasus does not, purely cos its more advanced and pretty badass.

The external docking spaces on the Pegasus are not too bad of an idea. In peacetime operations, there is no point sheltering the Raptors inside the flightpod, especially when time is short (rescue or evac ops). The distance a ship would have to fly to dock is significantly reduced.

@Ron

The Battlestars are filled with remnants of Air Group operating procedures... take the position of CAG for example. It stands for Commander, Air Group. I guess the colonials are pretty conservative.

As for why they come in to land fast, I think its mainly due to combat recovery speeds; a faster flying fighter will take less time to fly down the flightpod and be recovered. Why are the flight pods so long? So more fighters can be recovered at the same time (or at least kept in the safe hangar until recovery, whats the point in having a defenceless bird in the air) during combat. The only peacetime landing weve seen was in the mini series, where Lee calmy flies down the flight pod and lands on the lift, without skidding like crazy.

[apollo]

Hi Barty911, welcome to the forums.

[ML]

Plus the flightpods can host medium sized colonial liners. ;) So they need to be long...

Yo, Barty911! :wave:

[myrmedon]

in combat, space or otherwise, moving faster than your opponent is crucial. So you would think that in an engagement, where there is no "final outcome" in the sense that your retreating, your fighters are moving pretty darn fast. To slow down and make a carefull landing in something other than a long runway would:

a) take time, which you don't have
b) expose the fighters to thier pursuing enemies. Which you can't afford.

I dunno, i like it when things are more "believable", then again, in space wtf would ships need to be sleek? a sphere would probably be the best design for a warship... anyways fun topic :) and FRAKING awesome series :grin:
Myrmedon

[ML]

I think sci-fi flicks and cool looking ships come hand in hand. It's just part of the whole, "in space" experience.

[apollo]

Yeah, as long as it looks good who cares :)

[myrmedon]

i understand that apollo, and frankly couldn't agree more for a scifi show, but while we're on topic of why does this ship have this and not that, might as well put in my two cents about spheres :P

Myrmedon

[apollo]

Yeah, plus, the heart of gold from Hitchikers was awesome...the jump drive (infinite improbability or something) was nice...if only the X3 jump effect was as er...special ;)

[ML]

lol

Yah, keep dreamin', apollo! :lol:

[apollo]

lol

Yah, keep dreamin', apollo! :lol:

Hahahaha ;)