The Worst Deaths for Ships in Sci-Fi

[adam_grif]

Well the Normandy 1 was never a front line ship, it was purposely built for stealth and recon, it was a scout ship. It got ambushed by a more powerful vessel against which it's stealth capabilties were nullified by more advanced detection capabilities, that it got bitchslapped shouldn't be a surprise.

The SR2 was unnecessary in combat terms, it survived only by virtue of not getting hit at all by the main weapon of their ship (maneuvering, ho!), and was entirely capable of destroying the collector ship (it's like 1.5 km long, I refuse to call it the "Collector Cruiser", codex be damned) without the upgraded guns - it just closes and blasts it with it's normal weapons, which are apparently spec'd to the original Normandy according to Garrus. It still blows up just fine.

Also not too sure about "advanced detection capabilities", it was (and still is) entirely vulnerable to detection from RADAR, LIDAR and optical scans. My pet theory is that since the Geth had been getting slapped around by the SR1, they finally wised up and set an ambush for the ship (which was the only of its class) and used optical detection to track it. Commander Shepard being sent to deal with the Geth was done "to ease public fears", implying it was public knowledge. We also know from Legion that the Geth listen to organic transmissions to gather information.

Regardless, it's a heck of a lot more parsimonious than "magic sensors" or something that I've seen thrown around quite a bit.

Dramatically it also set up the villians as people not to feck around. Unlike most villans, when they identified they're main enemy they didn't mess around with complicated plots, they sent an overwhelming force and blasted them to hell.

Funny you should say that, instead of just blowing up the SR2 when they had the chance, they boarded it and kidnapped its crew of (less than 20) people for use in their human smoothie machine. These are also the same villains whose plan is to park at colonies, unleash insect swarms to sting them, then kidnap them without leaving a trace, so that they can throw them into a blender, the resulting organic puree then being used as a construction material for starships. They are also being led by a race of sentient machines whose brilliant plan to get onto the Citadel was to go on a wild goose chase around the galaxy so they could get a back door onto the citadel, a back door they only needed because their Turian emissary attacked Eden Prime and had his spectre status revoked. Wait, why did he attack Eden Prime again? To find the path to the back door to the citadel that he needed because he attacked Eden Prime. Wait, hang on, something isn't right here...

[2000AD]

The SR2 was unnecessary in combat terms, it survived only by virtue of not getting hit at all by the main weapon of their ship (maneuvering, ho!), and was entirely capable of destroying the collector ship (it's like 1.5 km long, I refuse to call it the "Collector Cruiser", codex be damned) without the upgraded guns - it just closes and blasts it with it's normal weapons, which are apparently spec'd to the original Normandy according to Garrus. It still blows up just fine.

The N2 was a lot better at not getting hit despite being almost twice the size of the N1, a significant upgrade. It also sustained just as much, if not more damage than the N1 and kept on working.
And while the default weapons were enough to destroy the collector ship (despite taking damage on approach), it is the larger power output of the upgraded core compared to the N1 that allows the addition of the optional upgrades to the main weapon systems that are more effective.

Also not too sure about "advanced detection capabilities", it was (and still is) entirely vulnerable to detection from RADAR, LIDAR and optical scans. My pet theory is that since the Geth had been getting slapped around by the SR1, they finally wised up and set an ambush for the ship (which was the only of its class) and used optical detection to track it. Commander Shepard being sent to deal with the Geth was done "to ease public fears", implying it was public knowledge. We also know from Legion that the Geth listen to organic transmissions to gather information.

Except the big hole in your pet theory being it was the Collector ship that ambushes the Normandy 1 at the start of ME2, not the Geth. The 2 Normandies shared the same stealth capabilties and those were shown to be perfectly functional against the Geth in both ME1 and 2. The only ships that were shown capable of detecting the Normandy were the collector ship and IIRC Sovereign. Off the top of my head no none-reaper related technology has ever penetrated either Normandies stealth.

Funny you should say that, instead of just blowing up the SR2 when they had the chance, they boarded it and kidnapped its crew of (less than 20) people for use in their human smoothie machine.

Well they attacked at a time when they were vulnerable due to a trap they set up and again attacked with an over whelming force. If it wasn't for EDI, an upgade over the N1, then they probably would have finished off the ship after taking the crew.
My initial statement was also made in regards to the N1, which they successfully destroyed with minimal fuss.

These are also the same villains whose plan is to park at colonies, unleash insect swarms to sting them, then kidnap them without leaving a trace, so that they can throw them into a blender, the resulting organic puree then being used as a construction material for starships.

They needed a resource, they aquired that resource with minimal damage inflicted to either themselves or said resource and also without leaving a trace of who they were, all in all I'd call that an effective operation. They may have used a swarm of robotic insects as a way to incapacitate people but it was a method that was very effective.

They are also being led by a race of sentient machines whose brilliant plan to get onto the Citadel was to go on a wild goose chase around the galaxy so they could get a back door onto the citadel, a back door they only needed because their Turian emissary attacked Eden Prime and had his spectre status revoked. Wait, why did he attack Eden Prime again? To find the path to the back door to the citadel that he needed because he attacked Eden Prime. Wait, hang on, something isn't right here...

Yeah something isn't right, you missed another blatently explained plot point from the games again. ME1 Spoiler: Spoiler

The reason they needed the back door was because the Protheans messed with the Citadel Keepers so the Reapers couldn't activate the Citadel as a mass relay remotely, they needed direct access, hence the back door in so that Saren could disable Citadel's defences to let Sovereign get to The Citadel. Even as a spectre Saren didn't have access to shut off the defences, he needed to make a surprise assault and he wouldn't have been able to get his Geth allies into the Citadel in the numbers he needed any other way, hence the back door that no one but the Reapers and the long dead Protheans knew about.

[Darth Lucifer]

Add to the list...Spaceball One/Mega Maid being taken out by Dark Helmet crashing headfirst into the self destruct. At least her head made for a great Planet of the Apes joke

[adam_grif]

The N2 was a lot better at not getting hit despite being almost twice the size of the N1, a significant upgrade. It also sustained just as much, if not more damage than the N1 and kept on working.

The drive core in both ships is of identical proportions to the size of the ship, and the SR1 had a smaller profile. The SR1 should be a harder target to hit by any measure, we can easily dismiss the SR2 avoiding incoming fire by it taking the collector vessel by surprise, when the reverse was true and Joker only had a second to maneuver before getting shit in their first encounter.

And while the default weapons were enough to destroy the collector ship (despite taking damage on approach), it is the larger power output of the upgraded core compared to the N1 that allows the addition of the optional upgrades to the main weapon systems that are more effective.

Nope, the Thanix gun installed on the Normandy is explicitly stated to be able to be installed on fighters and regular frigates. This kind of makes sense given how small it is proportional to the length of the ship.

Except the big hole in your pet theory being it was the Collector ship that ambushes the Normandy 1 at the start of ME2, not the Geth.

"They" are "The Reapers", not the Geth. The heretic geth and collectors both serve the same masters. It's a perfectly serviceable hypothesis that they shared data with each other. The other key part of this is that the Collector vessel was laying in ambush, whereas when you slip past the Geth in ME2 they aren't expecting you. The point is though, they don't need magic to see the SR1 or 2 coming, they just need to be looking the right way, and they know that passive thermal sensors must not work because they've been dogged by a Stealth ship captained by Shepard for the whole first game, a ship they can never the less see with their own eyes every time it flies directly over the top of them.

Like I said, this is a way for the plot to work without resorting to magic sensors that we have no other reason to believe exist. If they don't need to exist, we shouldn't assume that they do given they're never mentioned anywhere.

They needed a resource, they aquired that resource with minimal damage inflicted to either themselves or said resource and also without leaving a trace of who they were, all in all I'd call that an effective operation. They may have used a swarm of robotic insects as a way to incapacitate people but it was a method that was very effective.

The stupid thing is that humans are the resource, something which is stupid on so many levels it's physically painful. It's also confusing as to why they were even doing what they were doing, since the Reapers in darkspace didn't start moving until after this "plan" had failed.

I'm not sure what this plan was, though, since we're lead to believe that they need to attack Earth to finish the Reaper off, but that isn't going to happen because there could not possibly be enough seeker swarms to disable a planet of 11 billion (plus orbitals) without people fighting back, not to mention that to get there they have to go through the Arcturus relay and an entire fleet of starships, any one of which has the firepower necessary to destroy said collector ship. Which is a ship they apparently only have one of. But whatever, I'll assume they can build a whole bunch of ships and just opted not to build a fleet of superships during the Rachni wars and for the attack on the Citadel in ME1 because it just didn't occur to them.

The reason they needed the back door was because the Protheans messed with the Citadel Keepers so the Reapers couldn't activate the Citadel as a mass relay remotely, they needed direct access, hence the back door in so that Saren could disable Citadel's defences to let Sovereign get to The Citadel.

Saren had to upload a file to a data terminal which would unlock the relay. Which Shepard subsequently undid with Vigil's counter file before it performed its voodoo and manually opened the station.

This also fails to take into account the infinite number of super alternate plans that they could have put into effect, my personal favorite being "Hey look council, I just found an in-tact Prothean Dreadnought. I'm just gonna park it here. Oh hey look guys it was made to be parked at the top of the Citadel! I'm going to just come up and give you a report. What am I doing at this console? Oh I'm just checking facebook."

Obviously not literally that order, but it's not difficult to come up with a plan that is better than the one they implemented. Not least because said plan involves Sovereign twiddling his thumbs after the Rachni wars didn't work out for them, something that happened over a thousand years prior to the events of the game.

I'm expecting more plotholes to the effect of "well if it only took 2 years to fly here, why didn't they fly to the outer-most relay of the galaxy like a thousand years ago and then warp straight to the Citadel, it only takes like 2 jumps" to crop up in ME3. Not that they can't be avoided, it's just I don't really have any faith in the writing staff.

[The Yosemite Bear]

The Stardestroyer in ESB that got punked by A ROCK

[JudgeKing]

The entire Nimitz battle group in Stargate SG-1: Lost City (S7E21-22). Getting destroyed and having the deaths of over 6,000 people covered by stating the entire task force was killed by falling rocks. And all so that the SGC could be kept secret a bit longer.

[Coalition]

So the Churchhill died so that Sheridan could hide his alliance with the Great machine, but reveal his alliance with the people who nearly wiped out humanity?

Hoshi didn't exactly "Decline" to get off the ship, it blew up while she was being told to evacuate, and the Churchhill obviously didn't sail into the system on fire, it kind of got that way during the pointless battle Sheridan had them fight.

Whats more, Sheridan was using defensive fire at the onset of the battle, instead of attacking the ships. He forced the two on two situation entirely, on the assumption that "Well obviously you schmucks are fucked, but maybe they'll think twice about attacking us.

Then he replenished his fighter losses from the survivors just to twist the knife a little further

My guess is that if Sheridan used Draal to help defend, Clark would use the data to pump his propaganda to show that Sheridan was being controlled by aliens. By keeping it a pure human fight, Sheridan kept that part of the propaganda from happening. Similar to the end where Sheridan was trying to use only human (and human/Minbari) crews to fight Clark. Sheridan's speech to Earth is focused around the humans on the fleet being still loyal to Earth. That battle has Delenn in hyperspace with the other alien ships waiting for Sheridan's signal, while he fights against the satellites. When they get reset to fire on Earth, then he calls in Delenn.

For B5 only using defensive fire, Sheridan was also responsible for ~250,000 sentient beings. If he uses offensive fire, the ships attacking are free to defend themselves against him (aka take out B5). Clark can spin it as Sheridan going rogue to the other alien empires when the complain about the losses. However if Clark's ships fire heavily on B5, they are potentially declaring war on all the alien races present. I'd see the Clark ships trying to use precision shots to remove B5's sensors, comms, and other similar equipment so it can't contribute to the battle (or prevent their boarding operations). B5 is trying to keep its effectiveness as an electronics platform going as long as it can.

[2000AD]

The drive core in both ships is of identical proportions to the size of the ship, and the SR1 had a smaller profile. The SR1 should be a harder target to hit by any measure, we can easily dismiss the SR2 avoiding incoming fire by it taking the collector vessel by surprise, when the reverse was true and Joker only had a second to maneuver before getting shit in their first encounter.

I can't find any official comparisons of size between the 2 drive cores, so given that the SR2 was based on the SR1 I have to assume there is parity on proportional size, so I concede on that.
However, given that the SR2 was already under attack from sentries for several minutes (link to video) it seems unlikely that the Collector vessels innacuracy during the final mission can be put down to surprise.
With regards to the SR1 (link, action starts about 3 mins in) I was going to say that Joker had already started evasive manouvers and the collectors initially missed before correcting their aim, but on re-watching it looks more like Joker mistakenly flew them back into the line of fire after initially sucessfully evading the beam. After the initial damage there appears to be no more evasive moanouvers so presumably that first attack seriously impaired the SR1s manouverability.
So we have the SR2 successfully dodging 2 beam attacks (even in the unupgraded version) and the SR1 dodging only half of one, probably due to piloting error. While Joker was surprised during the initial attack it's debatable how much of an effect that had as he had already started evading. While IMO we can't draw any serious conclusions from the limited data there is, it does appear that the main reason the SR1 was hit and the SR2 wasn't was piloting error, not upgraded performance, so I tentatively concede the point.

Nope, the Thanix gun installed on the Normandy is explicitly stated to be able to be installed on fighters and regular frigates. This kind of makes sense given how small it is proportional to the length of the ship.

Checked the codex entry and you're right, conceeded

"They" are "The Reapers", not the Geth.

Well why didn't you say "The Reapers" instead of "They"?
When you say:
"My pet theory is that since the Geth had been getting slapped around by the SR1, they finally wised up and set an ambush for the ship (which was the only of its class) and used optical detection to track it"
it seems that you're talking about The Geth, since you don't mention the Reapers at all.

The heretic geth and collectors both serve the same masters. It's a perfectly serviceable hypothesis that they shared data with each other. The other key part of this is that the Collector vessel was laying in ambush, whereas when you slip past the Geth in ME2 they aren't expecting you. The point is though, they don't need magic to see the SR1 or 2 coming, they just need to be looking the right way, and they know that passive thermal sensors must not work because they've been dogged by a Stealth ship captained by Shepard for the whole first game, a ship they can never the less see with their own eyes every time it flies directly over the top of them.

Like I said, this is a way for the plot to work without resorting to magic sensors that we have no other reason to believe exist. If they don't need to exist, we shouldn't assume that they do given they're never mentioned anywhere.

Given that the SR1 wasn't using a Relay to travel to the system in the ME2 intro there's no way of predicting where it would exit FTL. What are the odds of the collector ship just happening to be looking the right way, at the right time?
Since the Reapers are more advanced it's hardly a massive leap in logic to assume they, and by extension their creations the collectors, have more advanced sensors.

With regards to the Heretic Geth / Collector collusion it's possible, but it's mentioned in the intro by Pressly that ships have been going missing in that system already, so it could just be that the Collector's attacked those to bait Shepherd into an ambush. But how the ambush was set up, whether it was collusion or just the Collectors, is moot, the SR1 was clearly ambushed. The point being debated is how the Normandy was detected to spring the ambush.

There's also the other point I was bringing up that the reason the SR1 was destroyed was not just to get a new ship, but also served a dramatic point, but it would appear you dropped arguing against that.

The stupid thing is that humans are the resource, something which is stupid on so many levels it's physically painful. It's also confusing as to why they were even doing what they were doing, since the Reapers in darkspace didn't start moving until after this "plan" had failed.
I'm not sure what this plan was, though, since we're lead to believe that they need to attack Earth to finish the Reaper off, but that isn't going to happen because there could not possibly be enough seeker swarms to disable a planet of 11 billion (plus orbitals) without people fighting back, not to mention that to get there they have to go through the Arcturus relay and an entire fleet of starships, any one of which has the firepower necessary to destroy said collector ship. Which is a ship they apparently only have one of. But whatever, I'll assume they can build a whole bunch of ships and just opted not to build a fleet of superships during the Rachni wars and for the attack on the Citadel in ME1 because it just didn't occur to them.

I'm not sure of the whole plan either, presumably it'll be explained in ME3. I'd hazard a guess that since they were using the human goo stuff they made to make a new reaper they were doing a test run for using humans in their reproductive cycle.
IIRC the Collector/Reapers next target being Earth was speculation on the part of the Normandy crew and there was also no time line given so more preparations would presumably have been made.

Saren had to upload a file to a data terminal which would unlock the relay. Which Shepard subsequently undid with Vigil's counter file before it performed its voodoo and manually opened the station.

This also fails to take into account the infinite number of super alternate plans that they could have put into effect, my personal favorite being "Hey look council, I just found an in-tact Prothean Dreadnought. I'm just gonna park it here. Oh hey look guys it was made to be parked at the top of the Citadel! I'm going to just come up and give you a report. What am I doing at this console? Oh I'm just checking facebook."

Obviously not literally that order, but it's not difficult to come up with a plan that is better than the one they implemented. Not least because said plan involves Sovereign twiddling his thumbs after the Rachni wars didn't work out for them, something that happened over a thousand years prior to the events of the game.

.........

Your personal favourite alternative idea is one that relies on everyone in authority on The Citadel being pants on head retarded?

The plan they implemented wasn't that bad, in fact it wasn't for Shepherd messing with the Prothean aretfact on Eden Prime then it would have worked like a charm. Shepherd and his crew were the only ones that were a threat and they only narrowly suceeded.

[adam_grif]

While IMO we can't draw any serious conclusions from the limited data there is, it does appear that the main reason the SR1 was hit and the SR2 wasn't was piloting error, not upgraded performance, so I tentatively concede the point.

Yeah there isn't really much on this issue one way or another, but the Codex entry says that because the SR2 is twice the siz, it needed an even larger drive core to compensate. There's a comment from Joker about how he needs to trim up the drive output and then "it will be like we never lost her", which seems to imply identical handling (within reason, anyway). On the other side of the fence we have the info (forget which codex entry its from, might be the Kodiak shuttle or SR2 entry?) about how the SR2 being larger means that it can no-longer land on all of the planets like SR1 could, so it has to use the shuttle to cover the planets that it can't enter (high grav worlds I think). But yeah, it's not really strong evidence either way.

it seems that you're talking about The Geth, since you don't mention the Reapers at all.

I didn't think it was very necessary since Collector = Geth = Reapers, they're all on the same team. Or more accurately they are all slave races of the Reapers. The geth making an observation and "wising up" means that the Reapers and presumably collectors have that information too. As I said, this means they had to have been in contact, although it's possible that the Collectors or Reapers made this deduction not the Geth, although tbh it doesn't matter who made it.

Given that the SR1 wasn't using a Relay to travel to the system in the ME2 intro there's no way of predicting where it would exit FTL. What are the odds of the collector ship just happening to be looking the right way, at the right time?

If you watch the intro, Pressley says that they haven't found anything despite patrolling "up and down this sector" for four days. It is of course improbable that they would look at precisely the right place at the right time (although if they are using automated optical sky scans this becomes more likely), but they may well have crossed paths a dozen times already at this point, and this was just the time when they happened to luck out and spot the SR1.

I agree that it's not beyond the Collectors/Reapers to have some alternate detection method (something that detects active drive cores or whatever), but I don't believe they do until we get some kind of actual mention of their magical detection capabilities, as opposed to just kind of secondarily inferring it like we are here.

There's also the other point I was bringing up that the reason the SR1 was destroyed was not just to get a new ship, but also served a dramatic point, but it would appear you dropped arguing against that.

I don't think I ever did initially, I just said that the SR2 didn't really have to happen for the plot to happen the way it did. However I kind of felt that it was a cheap intro mainly because of Shepard's death. He should have escaped but been mortally wounded or something like that and stuck in a coma for 18 months. But having him dying and resurrected after colliding with a planet (whose gravity and atmosphere is definitely present, you get the stats on the planet with the Normandy crash site DLC...) raises a lot of questions about how, exactly, he could possibly be brought back to life months after dying, when according to Jacob he was "meat and tubes" when they recovered him. With memories and skills in-tact, no less.

Your personal favourite alternative idea is one that relies on everyone in authority on The Citadel being pants on head retarded?

But it doesn't. Sovereign even needing to be there is just something I'm assuming to be generous, that he somehow has to do something while on the top to make it go, as opposed to just the datafile unlocking it. But the events of ME1 could have gone like this if they didn't attack Eden Prime:

1. Saren gets datafile to manually open from Sovereign.
2. Saren schedules a meeting with the council, for whatever reason
3. Saren is on board, talking to the council about something, then suddenly Sovereign warps into the Citadel, rushes past the ships guarding it and attaches himself to the top of the Citadel to do whatever he needs to do. At approximately hte same time, Saren uploads the datafile to the console (which takes like 2 seconds).

The console that Saren needs to upload the file too is literally right at the place you address the council. They won't even know he's doing something wrong until it's already too late, and nobody on the citadel has Vigil's datafile to coutneract that thing.

You can make adjustments to this plan as you see fit, i.e. if something they found on Eden Prime was somehow necessary for Sovereign to know what he had to do (even though you'd think manually opening the relay that the Reapers built would be something they know how to do), he can still get it done before he was stripped of his status. If you think that Sovereign alone wasn't enough to rush past the Citadel defense fleets (even though after he was already attached to the top he could sit there and tank bombardments from the entire Arcturus fleet for like 10 minutes and only died because his shields dropped when Robo-saren died), then you can still include the Geth assault in this plan, with all of those Geth ships attacking simultaneously.

The central issue with the plot is that they never explain why it is that Sovereign couldn't have done something exactly like this prior to finding the Conduit. Obviously after Saren got his spectre status revoked it was the only option, but the point is he had an easier option that was open to them for decades. They could have done it at any time after Saren found Sovereign, which happened ~20 years prior to ME1. They could have easily patched this hole by including something about how Sovereign only conjured up the open-relay datafile after they raided Vigil's databanks on Ilos or something like that, but Sovereign wasn't even on Ilos, he was away with the Geth fleet poised to strike the Citadel and Saren was just rushing to the Conduit and never even noticed that Vigil existed (because Vigil only revealed himself to Shepard and Co).

An alternate plan involving Saren claiming that Sovereign is an in-tact Prothean dreadnought is an amusing thought experiment. Any science team that goes onboard to investigate it for any length of time will become indoctrinated, after all. And unless Sovereign starts talking to people, they have no reason to believe it's an A.I. starship, or that it is a Reaper. Getting it to form part of the Citadel defense fleet, or parking on the Citadel shouldn't be very hard as long as Saren/Sovereign are patient (and given that Sovereign waited 1000+ years already, he must be!).

[JME2]

The entire Nimitz battle group in Stargate SG-1: Lost City (S7E21-22). Getting destroyed and having the deaths of over 6,000 people covered by stating the entire task force was killed by falling rocks. And all so that the SGC could be kept secret a bit longer.

Yeah, I always hated how SG-1 was moving towards ending the masquerade in Seasons 7-8. Anubis' attack should have been the beginning of the end. Then they basically abandoned that plot and kept it going through the closing years, SGA, and even into SGU.