Series that Depict Long Range Combat? (visual)

[SylasGaunt]

Okay so I was watching Starship Operators again and was reminded once more of how it's one of the few visual medium series out there to really depict combat at multi-light second ranges and do it while looking like an engagement at that distance (i.e. shot travel times, both ships never on screen with each other, etc).

So are there any other series in visual media (i.e. no novels) where similar battles crop up? For the purposes of this discussion Andromeda doesn't count because while the dialogue lends itself to that the actual visuals were done in the usual SW/ST manner most of the time.

[Balrog]

Not exactly light-second range, but Babylon 5 has had a number of battles that take place beyond visual range, i.e. "The Long, Twilight Struggle", where the visuals do depict the two sides blasting at each other where you can't actually see the other side.

[RedImperator]

For budget reasons, TOS Trek never had Enterprise and her target in the same frame. That's not necessarily BVR, though--just further away than "knife fight".

[Uraniun235]

Legend of Galactic Heroes has some BVR combat, and one instance of ramscoop-driven chunks of ice slamming into their targets at a high fraction of c. Sometimes they go toe-to-toe though.

[Sarevok]

For budget reasons, TOS Trek never had Enterprise and her target in the same frame. That's not necessarily BVR, though--just further away than "knife fight".

In the same frame.

That is the key word. Much of the cases of "point blank" range fighting in space I can recall are caused by the writers wanting to place both ships in the same image.

[Nyrath]

In the anime GunBuster, there is a nice long range scene.

The Human starfleet does a broadside of laser cannons. The beams go off into the distance. A few moments later, at the convergence point, you see some twinkling.

Then suddenly a barrage of laser beams arrive from the enemy, and the sky is full of exploding Human starships.

You never see the alien ships in the same scene.

[SylasGaunt]

Well until they start ramming them anyway. But yeah there was lots of BVR in Gunbuster.

So far this list is coming out longer than I thought, though some of the stuff on it is stuff I should have remembered right off (like GB and the couple times in B5).

[tim31]

A lot of spaceship based anime has such juxtaposition; how about Macross, where wave motion guns are seen used from outside visual range all the way down to point blank(like, literally within a few kilometres) on capital ships.

[Ford Prefect]

A lot of spaceship based anime has such juxtaposition; how about Macross, where wave motion guns are seen used from outside visual range all the way down to point blank(like, literally within a few kilometres) on capital ships.

Macross is kind of weird in that regard. In Do You Remember Love, Skull Squadron does actually begin a battle by firing missiles at enemies which are too far away for them to physically see, before engaging in a seriously short ranged dogfight. Gundam is similar: most of the time the battles are short ranged for dramatic effect, but then you get instances of truly stupendous ranges. There's a couple of these in Char's Counterattack.

[Commander 598]

Gundam is similar: most of the time the battles are short ranged for dramatic effect, but then you get instances of truly stupendous ranges. There's a couple of these in Char's Counterattack.

IIRC, there was a colony with a rather large laser or mega particle cannon firing at an asteroid about to fall into Earth's atmosphere. I believe it is quite common in UC for naval engagements to happen with one of the sides having no idea that they're about to get hit as they have neither sensor nor visual contacts. At best it usually works out to something like "I think there's something over ther-"*Explodes*

I believe F90 has a Martian Railgunr that managed one ship kill and was supposed to bombard Earth all from the planet's surface, that's gotta count.

[Ford Prefect]

IIRC, there was a colony with a rather large laser or mega particle cannon firing at an asteroid about to fall into Earth's atmosphere.

Indeed. Amuro also snipes at some Neo Zeon mobile suits when he sorties in the Nu Gundam for the first time from such a distance that he's totally invisible.

[Ilya Muromets]

A lot of spaceship based anime has such juxtaposition; how about Macross, where wave motion guns are seen used from outside visual range all the way down to point blank(like, literally within a few kilometres) on capital ships.

Macross is kind of weird in that regard. In Do You Remember Love, Skull Squadron does actually begin a battle by firing missiles at enemies which are too far away for them to physically see, before engaging in a seriously short ranged dogfight. Gundam is similar: most of the time the battles are short ranged for dramatic effect, but then you get instances of truly stupendous ranges. There's a couple of these in Char's Counterattack.

It only gets weirder when you remember that one of the short range attacks involved the SDF-1 essentially punching enemy ships so it could pretty much inject an internal point-blank missile massacre.

[Adrian Laguna]

Legend of Galactic Heroes has some BVR combat, and one instance of ramscoop-driven chunks of ice slamming into their targets at a high fraction of c. Sometimes they go toe-to-toe though.

It's not uncommon for fleets to begin engagements at low light second ranges. In the Battle at Kifeuser one of the commanders comments that the enemy is firing beyond their effective range, and then orders his fleet to open up at 6 million kilometres, or 20 light-seconds. During that the start of the battle you basically see one side firing/taking fire, and then the same on the other side, with no shots showing both fleets, except for the tactical displays. Later on a small detachment from one fleet tries to kill the enemy commander by exploiting a gap in his formation, and that part of the battle is fought within spitting distance.

There Battle at Doria also has long range and close range components. It starts out with one side ambushing (coming out of FTL I think) the other at 6.4 light-seconds distance. Then the ambushing fleet sends one of its units forward to cut the enemy formation in half, which leads to a point-blank fire fight. The commander of that unit laughs and boasts that with enemy ships everywhere they don't even have to aim, and then admonishes his subordinates that if they shoot something they'd better hit it. Knife fights between warships in Legend of the Galactic Heroes are very deadly precisely for that reason, at close range it's kind of hard to miss a kilometre long target when you're shooting with dozens of neutron cannons. Once the ambushed fleet is cut in two, it once again becomes a long range battle. At that point some of the scenes show groups of ships firing into the distance, and while you can see the explosions from the hits, the targets they're shooting at are too distant to discern.

[Netko]

Andromeda had a mix with smaller ships and fighters going into knife-fighting range, but larger ships (like Andromeda herself) usually fought it out at light-second ranges.

As with all things Andromeda, the disclaimer is that this was the situation before the nitwits took over the show in late season 2, so who knows what it was by the end. Of course, this was, out-of-universe, a cost saving attempt, since Andromeda used single-ship (or Nizchean fleet) stock footage a lot.

On the anime front, Tytania also has a mix. There are several battles where the fleets are really far apart, but there are also knife-range engagements. Still, it doesn't dissolve into the kind of sillyness Macross tends to do.

[Ilya Muromets]

I just remembered that episode 11 of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya featured long-range space combat sequences where different fleets shot at enemy fleets well away from visual range. Though, I don't know if it counts since it was technically just the imaginations of the characters playing a space combat RTS.

[Peptuck]

Interestingly, Halo seemed to depict battles usually happening at longer than visual ranges, at least in Halo and Halo 2. In Halo 3 the battles were shown at shorter ranges, though those seemed more because of the situation (i.e. emerging from the Forerunner portal right into the middle of the enemy fleet) than visuals.

[Patrick Degan]

Star Blazers/Space Battleship Yamato depicted quite a few battles taking place at either extreme visual range or out of visual range altogether —particularly during the Comet Empire War series. Episode 19 featured the showdown battle between the Earth Defence Force fleet and the Comet Empire fleet at Saturn, in which the enemy deployed a particularly nasty surprise —the Burst Energy Instant Transport Canon (a combination of a wave-motion gun and SMITE, the Gamilon external warp transmitter), which outranged Capt. Gideon's wave motion guns and forced him to withdraw his ships to Saturn's rings. That fight saw little to no visual contact between the opposing forces.

[Uraniun235]

There were a couple of battles in Space Pirate Captain Harlock which involved the Arcadia trading salvos at long range with Mazone battleships, although more of the battles tended to be at close range (and some of them ended with Arcadia deploying a blade in the bow and ramming through the enemy ship!).