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Catamount, on 15 November 2011 - 06:29 AM, said:
Nebfer, that isn't an unreasonable position. I apologize for misunderstanding.
I certainly agree with your treatment of visuals, and yes, I agree, typical combat ranges in BSG are definitely on the extreme short side of things.
With that said, it's also my experience that that's the nature of combat in all of science fiction, regardless of actual combat capability in ships. I'm not saying BSG ships can fire any further than we see, I certainly have no evidence that they can.
I'm just saying that this is one case where absence of evidence is definitely not evidence of absense, because of how VFX is almost always treated (especially keeping in mind that Trek's supervising producer, Ronald D Moore, is the person who developed NBG).
It's kind of like when we see ships travel at absurdly slow speeds. We know why it's done, but of course it's absurd to assert that, say, BSG ships really only travel a few hundred KPH, and yet travel hundreds of thousands or millions of kilometers in a matter of hours, which is what we see. Remember the pilot? Boomer and Helo were out a considerable ways from Caprica, with ships fighting in orbit between them and the planet (so clearly further than typical orbit), and yet at sublight, flying what was clearly only a few hundred kph, and powered down (no FTL), they reached the planet in what was clearly only a few hours. Even if they had managed that in a few weeks it would have been unrealistic.
The point is I'm not saying "BSG ships can fire at X range"; I'd never make such a statement, beyond what maximum we see. I'm just saying that we almost certainly don't know, because maximum observed ranges never, or almost never, correlate to maximum ranges.
I certainly agree with your treatment of visuals, and yes, I agree, typical combat ranges in BSG are definitely on the extreme short side of things.
With that said, it's also my experience that that's the nature of combat in all of science fiction, regardless of actual combat capability in ships. I'm not saying BSG ships can fire any further than we see, I certainly have no evidence that they can.
I'm just saying that this is one case where absence of evidence is definitely not evidence of absense, because of how VFX is almost always treated (especially keeping in mind that Trek's supervising producer, Ronald D Moore, is the person who developed NBG).
It's kind of like when we see ships travel at absurdly slow speeds. We know why it's done, but of course it's absurd to assert that, say, BSG ships really only travel a few hundred KPH, and yet travel hundreds of thousands or millions of kilometers in a matter of hours, which is what we see. Remember the pilot? Boomer and Helo were out a considerable ways from Caprica, with ships fighting in orbit between them and the planet (so clearly further than typical orbit), and yet at sublight, flying what was clearly only a few hundred kph, and powered down (no FTL), they reached the planet in what was clearly only a few hours. Even if they had managed that in a few weeks it would have been unrealistic.
The point is I'm not saying "BSG ships can fire at X range"; I'd never make such a statement, beyond what maximum we see. I'm just saying that we almost certainly don't know, because maximum observed ranges never, or almost never, correlate to maximum ranges.
Sure it's reasonable if you have enough contradicting evidence to assume that the visuals are incorrect one can do so, like you said if we know that it takes them just a few hours to reach location X and the visuals indicate it would take them far longer than it did, we do have the option of saying one of these two is incorrect. One thing to note: If you perform an accelerate and decelerate burn at 1G it will take you about 3.5 hours to reach the moon, thats 400,000km (with externals fuel tanks most B-tech fighters can manage this with ease), at the same rate you can reach Jupiter in under a week.
On the flip side we also have to weigh this with other evidences, for all we know this example could be an outlier.
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I suppose it's neither here nor there anyways; if your numbers on weapon yields are true, then there's little reason to doubt a Leviathan would have a decisive advantage in combat. I'm pretty sure it would win pretty handily.
Well we know that both sides can handle a few nukes, we do not know how powerful the big guns on the battlestar really are (nor do we really know how powerful B-techs are for that matter), they could be more powerful or they could be noticeably weaker. On the other hand a battlestar has never encountered directed energy weapons before in the forms of particle and laser cannons. The battlestars armor my find it self to be useful on handling the kinetic energy weapons of the B-tech ship, but it may find it to be less useful on handling it's energy weapons. But thats a bit of an unknown.
The B-tech ship has a range advantage, just how much is of one is as you put it unknown, but the end result is that the battlestar will likely have to weather a salvo or two before it reaches it's "preferred" combat range (on the flip side it could if it wanted to jump to it's preferred combat range at the get go).
Though their is one interesting factor that the B-tech ship could try... The Leviathan is carrying 225 elementals, send in a number of BA taxis and try a boarding... Just think of what two stars of Elementals could do...
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While we're on the topic of range, if naval PPCs (which the Leviathan carries a large complement of) are in any way similar to typical scifi particle weapons, they might actually be capable of absurd range, especially in a vacuum. Do they dissipate with distance? How fast do they travel?
The only stated range for naval particle cannons is 900km, their is no evidence to my knowledge that indicates that they have a longer range than that. We do know that capital missiles can be launched and then cost to a preplotted point and then go active and attack a target that could be potentially tens of thousands of km a way (they also can be launched at a velocity of 50 hexes a turn + velocity of ship).
Older Aerotech rules, with collaborating fluff (see the Gray death trilogy) give vehicle scale weapons a range of 6,500km per hex but that was changed to the 18km hex about the time when capital weapons showed up, so these numbers are sadly largely obsolete.
As posted in the post above mine (#40), the range is 900km for 50 hexes, with a turn length of 60 seconds, however we also know that they can not take the entire turn traveling to the target, a projectile that takes the entire turn would have to lead the target by kilometers (17.6km for 1G, 35.3km for 2Gs, ect) So the combat length has to be shorter, 10 or 15 seconds is reasonable (at 15 seconds the lead is only 1.1km). At 60 seconds 900km requires a minimum velocity of 15km/s, for 15 seconds 60km/s is required (90km/s for 10 seconds).
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Not truly part of the topic but can be if we have elementals boarding...
Here's a ffew notes on B-tech infantry weapons.
In tactics of duty during the assassination attempt during the big exhibition match (a large scale holographic reenactment of Gettysburg B-tech style) between Grayson and Wolf. A laser pistol was stated to have a yield when fired of 20 grams of TNT (or 100,000 joules -it states both). Latter on in the same book laser rifles where leaving fist sized craters in armor plates, pushing people off walls (via the force of their vaporizing body tissues), they where also exploding heads. In Black Dragon a laser pistol also pushed a person into a wall via vaporization effects. And in a number of novels battletech has a number of sniper rifles that fire projectiles at hypersonic velocity's (the Zeus Heavy rifle has three mentions that indicate these velocity's), though their are mentions of more conventional velocity's for other rifles.
