On Wed, Jul 8, 2015 at 5:56 AM, Richard Aiken <raikenclw@gmail.com> wrote:

> Because I can't imagine a railgun with rails that are only some 5x as long
> as a man is tall are capable of creating enough acceleration to matter,
> unless the ranges in question are VERY short.
>
> Of course, said ranges might well be VERY short. The capital ship combats in
> the show seem to take place at ranges close enough that the combatants
> appear to be visible to one another using the Mark 1 Eyeball.

Yes.  If you can get both ships visible in the TV frame, and neither
appears to be moving relative to the other, you are apparently doing
WW2 naval engagements in space.

The ships themselves teleport with relative ease. They have very
little need for maneuver drives.  If you wanted to get closer to the
target, it would appear to be easier to just plot an FTL microjump and
pop up "over there".

Most of the large ship engagements appear to happen at a fairly low
relative velocity.

The maneuver element is the fighter wing.

I mean, the whole space combat premise appears to be based on ww2
aircraft carrier operations in space.    Ship movement seems to be
based on car chase mechanics.

(Enemy ship appears "way out there" and closes "at the speed of plot"
for long enough to add some dramatic tension, then gets "in range" and
spends 15 minutes "in range" for plot purposes rather than just
blasting on past at whatever speed they closed at.  Vipers appear to
mostly be little A-10s sent out to strafe the other fighters and/or
ship.  I assume the object of that is to scrape off enough point
defense guns on the other ship to allow a nuclear missile a reasonable
chance of getting through the point defense fire....)

--

"Any sufficiently advanced parody is indistinguishable from a genuine
kook." -Alan Morgan