Lets create a Sci-Fi action movie

[SAMAS]

Alright, no goddamn zombies, werewolves, ninjas or assorted idiocy.

Grunts. Starship porn. Enormous explosions. And for once, I'd like to see the tradition of must-see-heroes'-faces thrown out of the window. If it makes sense for them to wear face-covering helmets, then do so. Let them have some frivolous art on their battlesuits to distinguish them or something, but no goddamn plexiglass visors. Those are for riot police, not soldiers.

And for the spacebattle with Russian opera: I love you. I truly do.

They did this in the Appleseed manga, and it works pretty well, once you give the audience the opportunity to recognize who's in what(and to be on the safe side, get actors with distinctive voices, and just focus the view on the speaker when necessary).

[K. A. Pital]

Russian opera will rule.

What I'd like to see in a sci-fi action is a near alt-future sci-fi with realistic nuclear rocket combat, various laser/projectile countersystems. Imagine thousands of advanced Soviet Burans and U.S. Space Shuttles in a joint operation with huge spaceships that are orbitally-built, like some habitation sphere projects...

[Lord Relvenous]

Russian opera will rule.

What I'd like to see in a sci-fi action is a near alt-future sci-fi with realistic nuclear rocket combat, various laser/projectile countersystems. Imagine thousands of advanced Soviet Burans and U.S. Space Shuttles in a joint operation with huge spaceships that are orbitally-built, like some habitation sphere projects...

When you said "advanced... U.S. Space Shuttles" I immeadiately thought of the Shuttles used in "Armageddon". Hmm maybe there is something wrong with that... they were pretty BA, though.

So when you say nuclear rocket combat etc. do you mena in space between the Burans and Shuttles, or in atmosphere?

[K. A. Pital]

So when you say nuclear rocket combat etc. do you mena in space between the Burans and Shuttles, or in atmosphere?

In space of course. Somewhere near Jupiter. Say, a battle for methane mines of Titan!

[Typhonis 1]

Battle of Saturn would work. You have a nice panoramic of the planet as the two fleets duke it out in 3d. One scene of a doomed ship hurtling into Saturn, firing boarding cables at an enemy ship to drag them down with them.

That might also be something to show...one side boarding another sides ship and how messy that can be.

[Molyneux]

Russian opera is a good idea for the soundtrack...at least once in the movie, though, "Dies Irae" from Mozart's "Requiem" must be used.

Yes, it gets a lot of play, but that is simply because it is the best 'bad things happening' music I've ever heard.

[K. A. Pital]

Imagine fighting on Io or in Saturn's rings.

Quite frankly, there were already scenes with Io (in "Voices of a distant star") and scenes with battle in a planet ring (Titan AE ice ring chase). Both of them were good and in case of Titan AE this scene was probably the best scene in the movie.

Why do battles in the Solar system don't get their due? They could be made very beautiful.

[Karza]

They did this in the Appleseed manga, and it works pretty well, once you give the audience the opportunity to recognize who's in what(and to be on the safe side, get actors with distinctive voices, and just focus the view on the speaker when necessary).

Aye, Appleseed would be a good model. And they did show the heroes' faces there, in a sort of funky "face interlaced with the helmet displays" view (I'm talking about the comics, in case they did it somehow differently in the anime, which I haven't seen), which is exactly what I'm after here.

[Adrian Laguna]

Adrian, while nukes on that scale might seem cool, let's be somewhat realistic about this...who the fuck would nuke their own planet that badly? That many nukes going off in atmo would be an extinction-level-event.

It depends entirely on what it takes to bring-down the troopships. For example, if 20MT nukes can do it then even if they send-up 10,000 (actual number likely to be much less) nukes it's only 200GT. That's enough to wipe France from the map, but most, if not all, of the nuclear initiations would be at very high altitude. If you need nukes an order of magnitude larger, then 2TT is something of a problem, but again most of the incitations would be really high.

Once the troopships get lower they get to contend with waves of conventional missiles and streams of solid munitions and maybe energy weapons.

In a well defended planet there would likely be huge mass-drivers and beam cannons capable of turning a battleship into slag, but those would have likely been destroyed from orbit prior to sending the troopships to land. You can hide missile silos and launchers until the enemy troops start coming down, but the anti-capital ship cannons need to be used as soon as the enemy enters orbit.

[quote="Big Orange"I think he's talking about an futuristic version of Pacific island hopping with the planet being useless anyway but enemy forces are using it as an expendable military outpost, so they wouldn't care if they nuke half the planet and light the atmosphere on fire to get rid of the invading forces.[/quote]

I wasn't, but that would work.

How would you hear radio chatter if there are loads of nukes going off? Wouldn't the radios be full of interference?

I think this is fairly easy to work around. You make you radio signals have a specific pattern of amplitude, frequency, and modulation changes which don't occur naturally (i.e. non-random). Then, you set your radios to ignore all radio waves lacking this pattern.

And I like the visual I get from "turned their own airspace into a bubbling brew of plasma and high-energy radiation." I get goosebumps.

I'm rather proud of that phrase.

[Big Orange]

You forgot Nazis.

And the Soviets and Imperial Japanese - in fact they would be compelling galactic powers and would fit right into spacebound version of WWII. I think there's a old fanfiction where their is the Galactic Reich and Japanese Star Empire duking it out.

[Teleros]

Lovely space battle idea Relvenous . I'd add Wagner to the Russian opera thing, but as Wagner = Ride of the Valyries (Huh? Other work of his? ) it would just be seen as a total rip-off .

Another thing for the space battles: have parts at least where the fighting is on a proper space battle scale - lightseconds at the very least. You can always do something like the Battle of Endor (ie close-range warfare) by forcing the battle near a planet or similar for some in-universe reason after all.
Oh and before I forget: any starfighters must have guns that do little more than scrub capital ship armour clean (unless it's a space opera, in which case they must show awesome heroism and blow up any big evil spherical battlestations ).

As for the ground battles, show the different aspects to it too. You know, invaders land a missile artillery battery, and half a world away a sudden barrage of hypersonic kilo- / mega- ton yield missiles wastes a key defensive base. Then later, special ops sabotaging shield generators or something whilst the tanks roll forwards (with full air and artillery support). Preferably along with a commander's maps showing the overall strategic situation, and at the opposite end of the scale the situation inside a random tank turret / trench / whatever (ie the face of battle).

[Zor]

Howabout a battle inside the bombed out remains of a city composed of several massive arcologies involving VTOL Gunships, Futuristic APCs and Humvee equivelents, rocket artillery, robotic probes and powersuited infantry?

Zor

[Plushie]

[quote=]
It depends entirely on what it takes to bring-down the troopships. For example, if 20MT nukes can do it then even if they send-up 10,000 (actual number likely to be much less) nukes it's only 200GT. That's enough to wipe France from the map, but most, if not all, of the nuclear initiations would be at very high altitude. If you need nukes an order of magnitude larger, then 2TT is something of a problem, but again most of the incitations would be really high.
[/quote]

Or, even more realistically, that single 20 MT nuke is quite enough to blast a large amount of the formation out of the sky. Blowing a bunch of 20 MT nukes, even a few hundred of them, wouldn't do permanent damage on any scale.

[Adrian Laguna]

Another thing for the space battles: have parts at least where the fighting is on a proper space battle scale - lightseconds at the very least. You can always do something like the Battle of Endor (ie close-range warfare) by forcing the battle near a planet or similar for some in-universe reason after all.

The nature of FTL drives and weapons in a sci-fi setting might actually encourage close range engagements, especially if you have a superior fleet. It doesn't have to be light-second ranges, provided it's explained intelligently (instead of ST's "lolz we can't hit shit"), though long-range would be a nice change.

Oh and before I forget: any starfighters must have guns that do little more than scrub capital ship armour clean (unless it's a space opera, in which case they must show awesome heroism and blow up any big evil spherical battlestations ).

Anyone using strike-craft to shoot at capital ships with guns in the first place is an idiot. Strike-craft might be useful in long range engagements by having a sentient being fly missiles/torpedoes close to the enemy fleet before turning the guidance over to it's on-board computer. Any guns they might have is to try and shoot down anti-munitions missiles which might be used against them. In other words, not star-fighters at all but rather torpedo-boats.

As for the ground battles, show the different aspects to it too. You know, invaders land a missile artillery battery, and half a world away a sudden barrage of hypersonic kilo- / mega- ton yield missiles wastes a key defensive base.

Ballistic missiles are ridiculously easy to intercept. The only way you're going to hit something on the other side of the planet is to call the ortillery. In fact, why would you want to land long-range artillery in the first place when you have orbital artillery (your capital ships)? Field artillery to provide your troops with indirect fire-support, yes; but long-range artillery is a waste.

Then later, special ops sabotaging shield generators or something whilst the tanks roll forwards (with full air and artillery support). Preferably along with a commander's maps showing the overall strategic situation, and at the opposite end of the scale the situation inside a random tank turret / trench / whatever (ie the face of battle).

Special-ops sabotaging a shield generator sounds like wankery to me. If the defenders are smart, the only way the shields are going down is through massive bombardment, which could very well destroy what's below the shield, or having your ground troops advance under it and fight their way to the generator.

[Sarevok]

Imagine fighting on Io or in Saturn's rings.

Quite frankly, there were already scenes with Io (in "Voices of a distant star") and scenes with battle in a planet ring (Titan AE ice ring chase). Both of them were good and in case of Titan AE this scene was probably the best scene in the movie.

Why do battles in the Solar system don't get their due? They could be made very beautiful.

Most excellent point. Why do so much of scifi battles seen onscreen have to take place on Earthlike terrain ? An invasion of Saturns moons, fighter duels in upper atomsphere of Jupiter, tank battles on martian deserts... they would be awesome to watch and a refreshing change from the norm. Infact a story does not need to include fantastic propulsion like faster than light technology to feature amazing terrain. As you said the solar system alone is an amazing setting for a science fiction film.

[kinnison]

I don't think you could do better for a ground/space battle than the one at the end of Triplanetary (Lensmen 1). Fleets of spaceships, huge energy beams and thousands of nuclear weapons going off. Lovely.

(Incidentally, the fact that GP beams are not lasers disposes of the "can't see the beams in space" problem).

As for music, I submit two pieces to include; Toccata in Fugue by Bach (this would work much better in a cinema - gotta love those 64 foot pipes) and the Mars theme from the Planets Suite. The latter makes me jump when it starts up, and I've heard it dozens of times.

The music for Battle Hymn of the Republic might make it into the mix, too.

[Big Orange]

If we're all opting for a military space opera we could make certain things realistic on a certain level:

1) Infantryman should always be in armoured space suits and are armed with compact anti-armor or anti-aircraft weaponry (like railguns).

2) Mechsuits are merely infantry based weaponry and don't replace aircraft, tanks or APCs completely.

3) Fighters are only deployed in the orbit or possible atmosphere of planets. They would likely not even need pilots and be AI drones instead.

4) There is no artificial gravity that doesn't need a spinning centrifuge, you would ALWAYS need a spinning centrifuge for weak gravity.

5) No sound in space.

6) Warships engage in combat completely out of sight from each other, many hundreds of thousands of miles apart with no cover, firing long ranged missles and railguns at each other.

7) Many warships, deep space outposts and orbital weapon platforms could be totally automated by AI systems.

[Teleros]

Ballistic missiles are ridiculously easy to intercept. The only way you're going to hit something on the other side of the planet is to call the ortillery. In fact, why would you want to land long-range artillery in the first place when you have orbital artillery (your capital ships)? Field artillery to provide your troops with indirect fire-support, yes; but long-range artillery is a waste.

Eh, there might be a situation like Hoth. Mainly though I was thinking of (actually highly manoeuvrable not ballistic) missiles at long range as a change from all the visual range stuff you usually get.

Special-ops sabotaging a shield generator sounds like wankery to me. If the defenders are smart, the only way the shields are going down is through massive bombardment, which could very well destroy what's below the shield, or having your ground troops advance under it and fight their way to the generator.

Maybe a little, but it wouldn't have to be the shield generator - I was thinking more of them doing something important as part of the overall plan (replace shield generator with radar if you prefer).

[K. A. Pital]

1) Infantryman should always be in armoured space suits and are armed with compact anti-armor or anti-aircraft weaponry (like railguns).

That would actually rock. Railguns FTW.

2) Mechsuits are merely infantry based weaponry and don't replace aircraft, tanks or APCs completely.

Even a rag-tag infantry highly saturated with supersonic guided penetrators makes ordinary tanks kinda the wrong choice. See recent Hezbollah vs. Israel, record of killed tanks. I would believe that an infantry sufficiently saturated with AT weapons would call for new types of tanks or even diminish the possible use of tanks alltogether. So far the sword is stronger than the shield. Even considering active protection.

3) Fighters are only deployed in the orbit or possible atmosphere of planets. They would likely not even need pilots and be AI drones instead.

Why UAVs? Why not have atmospheric supersonic fighters duke it out if it's in the atmosphere anyway? And having "fighters" in space, I mean space planes like Shuttles or Burans would look awesome, it's just a matter of making their combat look realistic, not with dogfights and other atmospheric maneuvers but with laser shots, multiple missile/countermissile firing... All that cool stuff.

4) There is no artificial gravity that doesn't need a spinning centrifuge, you would ALWAYS need a spinning centrifuge for weak gravity.

YES. That's certainly a given. Having battle crews of spaceplanes sitting in various positions in zero G would also add cool looks.
5) No sound in space.

6) Warships engage in combat completely out of sight from each other, many hundreds of thousands of miles apart with no cover, firing long ranged missles and railguns at each other.

More like several dozen km. Would still be realistic enough but more visually stunning and usable for a movie. I mean, you should allow for course correction.

7) Many warships, deep space outposts and orbital weapon platforms could be totally automated by AI systems.

Quite so. In fact I would love to see somthing like drone swarms used as a passive weapon a-la "space mines" on, say, space routes inside the Solar system.

[CaptHawkeye]

Could pin point lasers potentially make guided weapons such as cruise missiles and nukes useless in space combat?

Space combat ranges can take place in any range, but ships can start trading accurate fire as early as, say, a half a lightyear? Perhaps several lightyears if we really want to get into it?

I'm not sure what type of body armor soldiers should wear. Light, kevlar, fabric style armor has its advantages. Solid, futuristic english plate armor can have its advantages. If said armor is really light and/or power assisted.

Sound in space is hard for me to let go of. I know it's a blatent insult to physics to have it, but damn, i'm going to miss those explosions and boiler room ship sound effects pretty fast....

Soldiers should use some kind of gun technology which is a little more advanced then what we have today in some aspects. Granted, humanity used swords for over 3000 years with little noteworthy change for that time. But advancement still occured.

Perhaps super armor piercing rounds which can cut through foot upon foot of solid matieral?

PLEASE remember to keep combined arms tactics going. I hate to see every man on the squad carrying a single type of weapon. (Damn you DS9 writers...) Squad Automatic Weapons, carbines, rocket launchers, all exist for a reason.

How do we discourage losing sides from just BDZing a planet they've lost or are losing? I'd certainly hate it if every time I took a planet it just got vaporized by the disgruntled enemy fleet.

[CaptHawkeye]

Ghetto Edit: You know what? Scratch that "super armor piercing bullets" thing. Stupid brain fart I don't like looking back on.

[Adrian Laguna]

Could pin point lasers potentially make guided weapons such as cruise missiles and nukes useless in space combat?

It's always possible to launch so many munitions it overwhelms point-defence. Whether this is economical is another matter.

Space combat ranges can take place in any range, but ships can start trading accurate fire as early as, say, a half a lightyear? Perhaps several lightyears if we really want to get into it?

Depends entirely on the nature of the weaponry involved. The Culture has battles taking place over several light-years and being resolved in fractions of a second. If you're limited to say, lasers, then you can't have combat at greater than light-second ranges.

Perhaps super armor piercing rounds which can cut through foot upon foot of solid matieral?

The main problem with those, and railguns, is conservation of momentum. The recoil's going to be a bitch, if not outright fatal, in any weapon capable of that kind of damage. Unless we're talking about energy weapons, in which case you run into cooling problems.

How do we discourage losing sides from just BDZing a planet they've lost or are losing? I'd certainly hate it if every time I took a planet it just got vaporized by the disgruntled enemy fleet.

If you're stupid enough to try and take a planet without first establishing orbital superiority, you deserve to have your armies destroyed from orbit.

[LaserRifleofDoom]

I disagree with Big Orange's 4th point. Not having artificial gravity is just a gimmick, centrifuges look ugly onscreen, and it's hard to do for a movie.
That said, the art gravity has to be internally self-consistant and make sense.

Humans are fighting aliens over a world with 'ancient technology' that neither side can reproduce. So there's an excuse to have a few hero units for the story to focus on (IE people with Ancient powerarmor and captains with Ancient stardrives on their ships), and their bug-eyed counterparts (Same but with bug-eyes and scales instead of well-defined chins and smokin hot bodies). Then as a finale/hook for the sequel, you can have the ancients come back and be soul-eating monsters.

Also, I've had the classical music in space idea for years, and I'm consistantly surprised that no movie maker has used it.
As for rings:
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3s.html

[CaptHawkeye]

It's always possible to launch so many munitions it overwhelms point-defence. Whether this is economical is another matter.

Well, what's stopping enemy ships from just loading their gun decks full of point defense lasers?

In this case, I think we can agree that dumb munitions and gun based weapons are not only realistic, but a tactical requirement. Which will kind of help to make naval combat look World War 2ish. Awesooooome.

Depends entirely on the nature of the weaponry involved. The Culture has battles taking place over several light-years and being resolved in fractions of a second. If you're limited to say, lasers, then you can't have combat at greater than light-second ranges.

I usually thought of a combination of energy weapon which can have partial use of what ever faster then light technology exists. This would be extreme handwavium though.

The main problem with those, and railguns, is conservation of momentum. The recoil's going to be a bitch, if not outright fatal, in any weapon capable of that kind of damage. Unless we're talking about energy weapons, in which case you run into cooling problems.

Then perhaps a high powered incendiary? Loaded in conjunction with a shaped charge? Given futuristic technology, would it be totally impossible to design a combine SABOT and HE round? I think a problem someone here described once was how does one go about designing an incendiary round that knows to explode AFTER it penetrates its target?

If you're stupid enough to try and take a planet without first establishing orbital superiority, you deserve to have your armies destroyed from orbit.

Very true. But suppose the enemy fleet during battle realizes the jig is up? And they just...well they'd be killing a substantial portion of their army. And their is always the chance that the ground army could hold off an invasion. But i'm wondering, what's stopping the enemy fleet in orbit from just precision bombing the ground forces to death? Would the Vietcong's tunnels and hidden bunker tactics fare well agaisnt an enemy with space age weapons? Oh perhaps theatre shields which cover a radius of a thousand square miles?

As much handwavium is in with that, I frankly like it. Ground war's long term objective is primarily to capture or destroy the shield generator facility. This is often quite the campaign if the enemy is another full scale ground army. Thus, ground war.

[Big Orange]

1) Infantryman should always be in armoured space suits and are armed with compact anti-armor or anti-aircraft weaponry (like railguns).

That would actually rock. Railguns FTW.

We could depict jetpacks or suited up marines spilling out of armored landing crafts on the surface of a barren moon. And railguns make sense with space infantry for some reason and would be standard issue on the open battlefield (regular small arms would only be used in the confines of ships, spacestations or buildings).

2) Mechsuits are merely infantry based weaponry and don't replace aircraft, tanks or APCs completely.

Even a rag-tag infantry highly saturated with supersonic guided penetrators makes ordinary tanks kinda the wrong choice. See recent Hezbollah vs. Israel, record of killed tanks. I would believe that an infantry sufficiently saturated with AT weapons would call for new types of tanks or even diminish the possible use of tanks alltogether. So far the sword is stronger than the shield. Even considering active protection.

There is this constant "paper, rocks and scissors" game with the arms race and armoured vehicles would still have their place on the battlefield of the future. Modern infantry is still highly exposed to the tank and most portable weapons still cannot take out MBTs outright (in Southern Lebanon IDF tanks were misused and anti-tank weapons were dug in).

3) Fighters are only deployed in the orbit or possible atmosphere of planets. They would likely not even need pilots and be AI drones instead.

Why UAVs? Why not have atmospheric supersonic fighters duke it out if it's in the atmosphere anyway? And having "fighters" in space, I mean space planes like Shuttles or Burans would look awesome, it's just a matter of making their combat look realistic, not with dogfights and other atmospheric maneuvers but with laser shots, multiple missile/countermissile firing... All that cool stuff.

Space fighters make little sense and having pilots is slightly goofy - giant AI drones that could fly in the atmpshere as well as planet boundries sounds much better.

4) There is no artificial gravity that doesn't need a spinning centrifuge, you would ALWAYS need a spinning centrifuge for weak gravity.

YES. That's certainly a given. Having battle crews of spaceplanes sitting in various positions in zero G would also add cool looks.

I'm not so sure about LaserRifleofDoom's opinion of centrifuges looking "ugly" - I'm fed up of seeing people stand up in normal gravity with stacked decks. If we could avoid Babylon 5 centrifuge designs for some Earth ships, we could be fine.

6) Warships engage in combat completely out of sight from each other, many hundreds of thousands of miles apart with no cover, firing long ranged missles and railguns at each other.

More like several dozen km. Would still be realistic enough but more visually stunning and usable for a movie. I mean, you should allow for course correction.

There should be this one shot one kill for space naval engagements and giant nuke blasts in space would a common site during space combat.

7) Many warships, deep space outposts and orbital weapon platforms could be totally automated by AI systems.

Quite so. In fact I would love to see somthing like drone swarms used as a passive weapon a-la "space mines" on, say, space routes inside the Solar system.

Certain warships for important battles would be more fully manned than necessary, lest that we make the same mistakes made in Aliens with the USS Sulaco where they had no crew at all and less than ten marines.