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I think he's talking about how the dogfights are showed. A Star Wars type dogfight uses techniques that only apply in an atmospheric craft. Ever played a spaceflight dogfighting game with real vacuum and no gravity mechanics? It's vastly different than a flight sim.

A ship firing speed of light weapons should always be able to hit a fighter or bomber at the ranges they are fighting at unless you can get inside of a firing arc or are going faster than the guns tracking speed relative to your position, which would mean you're literally right on top of them.

And a hull breach in a space ship with properly constructed bulkheads is actually less of an issue than a hull breach on a bulkheaded water ship. They just seal of the breach and continue on, all it does is deny them immediate access to that section of the ship, in all likelihood the electronics in the decompressed section would still work barring damage from the weapon itself.

That's a problem with all fiction though. Nearly every explosion which is survived on television or in movies should have killed the lot of them.

 Laughing Man wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
Time Travel OTOH has very hard barriers not related to physics.

Only if you assume causality actually works, which isn't neccessarily true. Relativity has a lot more evidence going for it, and between the three (FTL, relativity, and causality) you can only have two.


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 Grey Templar wrote:
The Grandfather paradox too.


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 Laughing Man wrote:

 insaniak wrote:

 Laughing Man wrote:
Ignoring FTL for the moment due to handwavium.

Again, FTL is no longer considered the realm of handwavium.

Yes yes, just because it now only requires a minimal energy expenditure equal to the entire mass of Jupiter instead of the mass of a couple universes makes it feasible. Not to mention the problem of getting out of a bubble once you make one, or causality violations meaning ships coming home for repairs before you finish building them.

Wrong, NASA's latest calculations put the energy required in the realm of what a Fusion reactor could generate. Which is more than viable.

Source?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive#Mass-energy_requirement second paragraph. Estimations put it about 700kg of mass energy.

Rule of Two? I rather liked both of the Bane books personally.

 Alfndrate wrote:

 Ratbarf wrote:
Rule of Two? I rather liked both of the Bane books personally.

The concept that there can only be 1 master and 1 apprentice at any one time in the universe...


>_> If I remember correctly.

There are two Darth Bane books, one of which is called Rule of Two. I was asking if he didn't like either books, just the one, or the whole concept. Rule of Two does make a certain amount of sense as has been stated. It also allowed the Sith to go underground, as the Jedi thought them extinct.

Vaerros wrote:

 Compel wrote:
Not to mention if the only ranged weapons that can penetrate a shield have a slight tendancy to cause a gigantic nuclear explosion...

Whereas the slow blade....

Which universe are you talking about here?

It's the Dune universe, where the only weapons that can penetrate shields are lasers, but when a laser hits a shield you get an explosion ranging in the low kilotons iirc. So they use knives and hand to hand combat for nearly all ground fighting. It's actually a pretty cool idea when you think about it.

Oh and the reason they don't shoot the lasers because it causes massive explosions is their equivalent of interplanetary law. No nukes allowed!

Also, hand to hand fighting and close combat weapons are still used and taught today amongst the infantry. And hand to hand fighting as a staple of infantry fighting isn't exactly that far away historically either. In WW1 many infantry men used their rifles as clubs or bayonet delviery systems, and if Erich Maria Remarque is to be believed the Germans generally went over with nothing but a trench trowel and a bag full of Grenades. Also, hand to hand combat is also still the primary way of quietly eliminating enemy sentries if movies/books/videogames are to be believed.

AndrewC wrote:You also miss the fact that all these melee weapons are found in media that is primarily visual, and it looks so much better having a close in melee as opposed to simply shooting your opponent. I think that the closest I can find to two such opposing styles meeting faithfully is Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Cheers

Andrew

True, though the Raiders of the Lost Ark scene you're talking about was actually not intended. It was just something that Harrison Ford did that the stunt guy went along with and ended up being in the movie.

Trasvi wrote:
Yeah, its Dune.
In Dune, they have laser weapons and shield generators. However, when a laser weapons when fired at a shield generator cause a nuclear explosion in both the weapon and the shield. However, shields protect against projectile weapons, but not slow-moving objects.
Solution? Soldiers wear mini-shield generators and charge into combat with hand weapons. When attacking with hand weapons, the strategy is to move very quickly on defence (to increase the relative speed between you and the attacker and thus activate the shield gen), and be fairly slow on attack so that you're slow enough to get through the shields.

Which was a pretty cool justification. I just don't understand (or didn't read far enough) why they didn't use automated laser-robots as tactical nukes against shielded targets...

In the Dune universe it's illegal to have non human guided ai. I forget exactly what the war was called but apparently it was long and bloody and AI are now a sure way to earn yourself a Galaxy wide perma ban.

 Vaerros wrote:

 Ratbarf wrote:


Also, hand to hand fighting and close combat weapons are still used and taught today amongst the infantry. And hand to hand fighting as a staple of infantry fighting isn't exactly that far away historically either. In WW1 many infantry men used their rifles as clubs or bayonet delviery systems, and if Erich Maria Remarque is to be believed the Germans generally went over with nothing but a trench trowel and a bag full of Grenades. Also, hand to hand combat is also still the primary way of quietly eliminating enemy sentries if movies/books/videogames are to be believed.
.

I'm not talking about soldiers receiving basic training in hand-to-hand and the occasional use of such techniques to subdue enemies, but a much more specialized approach than that. And no, that kind of approach hasn't been taken in warfare for a very long time.

100 years in western warfare, a lot less in some parts of the world.

I thought the Borg were the Galactic bogey men? But you really want to see a one trick race? The Hrojan from Voyager. All they do is hunt, all the time, even though it's making them extinct. It's all kinds of dumb really.

Isn't the queen the original borg? And honestly, the scene where they introduce her in Voyager is probably one of the coolest scenes in star trek.

This is the closest I can find to a version of it. It's the first 45 seconds or so. Though the voice actor cuts in and kind of ruins the scenes gravitas.