SF Military Tropes II

[LaCroix]

Here's a Youtube of that basic sequence if you don't believe me:

Link to YouTube

For those of you who have no patience; here's the frames to look for:

0:27 to 1:20 -- insane piloting through equatorial ring
2:53 to 3:48 -- break all unmooring regulations

To be fair, he does advise her later, remarking that she (and he) will loose their wings if she exceeds port speed. Probably the other stuff was still ok. I could imagine that you should unhook the umbilicals while backing out, so they can't flail around. The officers indicated her to take controls immediately, and they only grew concerned when they became too taut.

Also, the computer says she cleared it by three meters. which is probably something that only experienced pilots should attempt, as the captain and chief pilot do not comment at all on it.

[Setzer]

What struck me more was the notion that the entire starfleet has the Enterprise as their flagship.

Or rather, that the entire Starfleet would have an overarching flagship in the first place.

Sometimes I think the Enterprise exists more as a publicity piece for Starfleet. It's more there to spread the Federation gospel than to do anything else.

[PainRack]

^ To be fair to Heinlein, trivializing non -Combat Arms work is a failing of many authors.

The thing I find more objectionable about him is his "specialization is for insects" quote. And to think some people still believe he was a "military genius".

In terms of fictional military warfare, he essentially authored one entire way of military warfare, which was elite highly motivated soldiers working together. Think how the Fremen were wanked by Paul and Gurney in Dune.

The other is the "Draenei"(sp?) approach, where you have the super genius approach such as Ender and Thrawn.

His gripe against specialisation however is.... it just doesn't make sense to have that kind of technical maintenance/prepping done by the crew/infantrymen as opposed to dedicated specialists. It takes hours to do so......

We do that for our tanks only because the crew need to be able to do that in the field, but even at base, they do have access to technical support to help them. And certainly not the level of repairs Rico ended up overseeing

[PainRack]

On the topic of intel/operations, here's a great trope:

Every device ever is known to someone who's got science!!! So the enemy has a secret. Easy, call up your super soldier spec ops team, get them to fly their own craft out to an enemy facility. Break into the secure facility and takes one look at the device that they find and not only can they identify it, but then they can hack it/defuse it/steal it without any problems.

In reality, it is going to go more like this:

If they go with plan A) It either explodes in a horrific manner killing everyone, it anti-tampers and destroys itself, they can't figure out how to use it. Or more likely, they don't know what the fuck they're looking for and walk straight past it and grab something that looks suitably shiny, but is in fact nothing important.


In reality:

Weeks, months and possibly years of initial intel gathering to determine that the enemy is using something new for this particular role.

Weeks, months and possibly years of tens to hundreds of boffins from a variety of agencies/organisations trying to figure out the details that they have of it so they know (roughly) what it is, how it works and what it should look like etc.

Weeks etc of further intel gathering to figure out how to get to it without having to drive a fucking carrier battle group to the door to capture it, and in the process burning all those years of precious intel gathering by telling the enemy that you have accessed or captured their super secret goodies.

Days to months of training for the spec ops guys in how to get into said facility without raising alarms, leaving bodies or marks and safely handle/access the device.

And then they go and do it. And probably fail a few times because a janitor is running late doing his rounds or a security guard refuses to fall asleep at his desk or the access that they thought would be clear had a bookshelf up against it.

To be fair, they do do this sometimes. The British Commando raids against Freya is a good example.

[Bottlestein]

Some of the other threads on super-soldiers reminded me of this trope:

Artillery is non-existent, or at best, a mild aid. Even if artillery exists, counter-battery fire and artillery control is an idea that only losers get

Shep, or Skimmer - if you have stats on Russian arty corps in the Eastern Front...

[Steve]

I always presumed the Enterprise's "Flagship" status is more an element of Starfleet tradition, a term of distinction more than function - and where it does meet with function, it's "send the Enterprise on a mission of critical importance".

[Zixinus]

So, a few words instead of many: if you are in a transport, you can tell that your pilot is good by the fact that the flight is very boring.

[eyl]

His gripe against specialisation however is.... it just doesn't make sense to have that kind of technical maintenance/prepping done by the crew/infantrymen as opposed to dedicated specialists. It takes hours to do so......

We do that for our tanks only because the crew need to be able to do that in the field, but even at base, they do have access to technical support to help them. And certainly not the level of repairs Rico ended up overseeing

IIRC, complex repairs would be handled by the ship's engineer (who's Navy, not MI) or, if he couldn't fix them either, back at the base.

As mentioned before, the MI's "everyone fights" setup is a bit of a cheat - they "outsource" all duties which need non-combat personnel to other branches of the military or to civilian employees.

[weemadando]

It's pretty clear that the MI is just the Rumsfeld/Cheney approach to war writ large. Soldiers are soldiers, everyone else is a disposable civilian contractor on someone else's books.

[weemadando]

To be fair, they do do this sometimes. The British Commando raids against Freya is a good example.

That's the point, in real life these kind of missions take forever to formulate, gestate and plan. In SF it's usually something absurd like:

Step 1, after a battle starts going pear-shaped someone immediately declares: "The enemy is using secret super science to defeat us!" - note how they just know this, rather than having to spend months trawling through AARs, intel and other reports to determine "hey, something doesn't stack up." And then go onto many more months and years of intel gathering to determine just what the fuck is actually happening.

Step 2, Super special alpha male team hop into their hot shit chromed-up space jet and fly themselves directly to an enemy facility without diversions, support or any form of cover and attack it. Somehow they always manage to completely luck out and a) go to the right facility, b) know exactly where to go within that facility (as if the enemy has a pre-fab base structure that is absolutely immutable and the blueprints are available for free), c) kill everyone within the facility that they encounter and d) get away scot-free having tampered with/stolen the super science. Whereas in reality, there's no guarantee that enemy outpost #5460 is going to have what you're looking for. If you dive straight in the deep end like this then there's no guarantee that your guys know what they are looking for. And then if you fucking kill a single person even close to the super science, steal it, or even leave evidence that it's been at all diddled with, then the enemy will assume it's compromised and alter it's usage or stop using it entirely and there goes your entire operations purpose. Sure you can reverse engineer it and gain some advantages of your own, but really, by leaving a trace you've just fucked yourself good and proper.

There's a reason that those Freya missions took many months to come to fruition, from the original detection of the transmissions, to determining their purpose and consequent value. Then determining their origin and utilising months of recon flights and local assets to get as much detail as possible on them. And even then, after the raid the German's switched up their operating procedures for the units as well as beefing up physical defenses. R.V Jones autobiography is quite illuminating on these matters and just how long the timeline for these events was.

[keen320]

I always presumed the Enterprise's "Flagship" status is more an element of Starfleet tradition, a term of distinction more than function - and where it does meet with function, it's "send the Enterprise on a mission of critical importance".

I Think it's like the HMS Hood. Before it was sunk by the Bismark during WW2, it was the "flagship" of the British fleet in that they sent it everywhere they wanted to impress people, and it was the pride of the British fleet.

Step 1, after a battle starts going pear-shaped someone immediately declares: "The enemy is using secret super science to defeat us!" - note how they just know this, rather than having to spend months trawling through AARs, intel and other reports to determine "hey, something doesn't stack up." And then go onto many more months and years of intel gathering to determine just what the fuck is actually happening.

Well, to be fair, sometimes it's pretty obvious. Like if the war has been fought with projectile weapons and suddenly someone starts using a raygun.

Step 2, Super special alpha male team hop into their hot shit chromed-up space jet and fly themselves directly to an enemy facility without diversions, support or any form of cover and attack it. Somehow they always manage to completely luck out and a) go to the right facility, b) know exactly where to go within that facility (as if the enemy has a pre-fab base structure that is absolutely immutable and the blueprints are available for free), c) kill everyone within the facility that they encounter and d) get away scot-free having tampered with/stolen the super science. Whereas in reality, there's no guarantee that enemy outpost #5460 is going to have what you're looking for. If you dive straight in the deep end like this then there's no guarantee that your guys know what they are looking for. And then if you fucking kill a single person even close to the super science, steal it, or even leave evidence that it's been at all diddled with, then the enemy will assume it's compromised and alter it's usage or stop using it entirely and there goes your entire operations purpose. Sure you can reverse engineer it and gain some advantages of your own, but really, by leaving a trace you've just fucked yourself good and proper.

Even if you only make the enemy stop using something, that's still better than before. Also, there are a lot of "super secret tech" things that the enemy can't nullify once you have them. Like a better space drive or infantry weapon system (aforementioned rayguns).
A worse trope is how they frequently seem to put the stuff into production within months or weeks, when it would probably take a year or so to reverse engineer, let alone figure out how to produce. Also, how do you hide a special ops mission to break into a military base and steal the tech? The only time I can remember a plausible way of doing that is in John Scalzi's Ghost Brigades, where they drop on asteroid within the bast radius of a base they raid (though not right on top of it) to blow it up and make it look like an accident. They also had some tech to get the base plans without tipping somebody off or relying on magic blueprints. Espionage is probably more likely to be kept secret, if you can carry it off at all.

[xt828]

Enterprise-D may be the pride of the fleet, but (AFAIK) Star Trek heavily fostered the dissociation between "Flagship" and "Flag Officer" - there are only a handful of TNG episodes with a flag officer on board the ship, but it's nearly universally referred to as the flagship.

[lance]

To be fair, they do do this sometimes. The British Commando raids against Freya is a good example.

That's the point, in real life these kind of missions take forever to formulate, gestate and plan. In SF it's usually something absurd like:

Step 1, after a battle starts going pear-shaped someone immediately declares: "The enemy is using secret super science to defeat us!" - note how they just know this, rather than having to spend months trawling through AARs, intel and other reports to determine "hey, something doesn't stack up." And then go onto many more months and years of intel gathering to determine just what the fuck is actually happening.

Are there any instance of this actually happening? I can maybe think of radar towers and maybe the A-bomb from WW2. Edit-maybe guns and repeaters,

[weemadando]

Cryptography, sonar, satellites, radio/laser/other guided weapons and into the future anti-infrastructure cyberwarfre are all other good examples here.

[MKSheppard]

I can remember a plausible way of doing that is in John Scalzi's Ghost Brigades.

I really do hate that book series. It starts off with a completely wrong premise -- that Humanity is so behind in the biological arms race behind alienoid monsters, that the only solution is to create a super genetically engineered body that can breathe acid or whatnot, then upload old peoples' brains into them.

The author attempts to justify the need for his supergenetically engineered bodies is that there's a galactic universal pact against using higher level technologies against lower tech races (i.e. humanity); but it really does not stand up -- since the Alienoids could just build replica mortars from their past and use them against the green humans -- if the craboid is 2.5 times stronger than a human in hth; why not just use that ability to have a Craboid keep dropping 160mm mortar bombs into a manpacked mortar?

[Balrog]

Shep, or Skimmer - if you have stats on Russian arty corps in the Eastern Front...

Well, I don't have any fancy graphs, but this relates to something that should be brought up since so often SciFi just ignores the role of artillery in combat. It really was artillery that won the Eastern Front, and not just the fact that the Soviets had a shit-ton to throw around (though it certainly helped: when they launched their Belorussia offensive in June '44, there were 166 divisions with a combined total of 31,000 artillery pieces of 76mm or greater caliber. It took 150,000 rail cars hauling 3 million tons of ammo at a rate of 50 trains per day just to supply that offensive). Compared to Verdun in WWI, which had about 160 artillery pieces per kilometer of front, it was not unheard of for the Russians to place anywhere up to 500 pieces per kilometer of front.1 The Germans had believed their own propaganda about how maneuver warfare could conquer all, and their artillery was dispersed and decentralized; by the time they got around to making their own dedicated artillery division, it was too late.

By 1943, there were about 5 Soviet artillery corps in total; each one had two divisions of regular artillery plus a division of rocket artillery. That's a total of over 1500 pieces per corps, and this was in addition to forty separate artillery divisions running around at the time. By 1945 there were 90 artillery divisions, each one with 288 pieces, in addition to 140 artillery brigades.2 And that's just dedicated artillery formations.

This continued all throughout the Cold War, NATO simply couldn't match the Soviets for firepower on a conventional scale. In the late 70s, the theoretical weight of total firepower British I Corps could launch in one minute was 55.6 metric tons; that includes everything from heavy mortars to M109s and above. Your typical Soviet army of five divisions could fire 367.6 metric tons.3

1Field Artillery and Firepower, pg341
2Ibid, pg342
3Ibid, pg461

[Simon_Jester]

What did they give up by going in that direction? I'd think the emphasis on massive artillery formations would have undesirable effects on other arms, or at least reduce the available percentages.

[Bottlestein]

What did they give up by going in that direction? I'd think the emphasis on massive artillery formations would have undesirable effects on other arms, or at least reduce the available percentages.

This is actually a fairly difficult question. Afghanistan and Chechnya v. 1.01 demonstrated that the Soviets had some operational weaknesses, obviously. However, whether or not this is because of artillery focus is debatable. For any sort of "expected losses" - it's best to remember 2 important things:

1) Any "Fulda Gap" battlefield before the mid 80's would undoubtedly be NBC-rich, and thus actually there would be a chance of more losses for both sides than predicted.
2) The Soviets had a very large reserve. There's no getting away from that - so soaking more losses for taking higher value targets is not necessarily a sign of doctrinal weakness, given their situation.

That said, some of the battles in Afghanistan and Chechnya were debacles.

[Void]

The Soviet Army was not an artillery focused army, it was a maneuver focused army with lots of artillery. The distinction is significant.

[Bottlestein]

^ What precisely do you mean? Deep operations obviously entail some sort of maneuver. "Artillery focus", at least the way I understood it, simply means they deployed their artillery units up to corps sized units.

[Talhe]

I really do hate that book series. It starts off with a completely wrong premise -- that Humanity is so behind in the biological arms race behind alienoid monsters, that the only solution is to create a super genetically engineered body that can breathe acid or whatnot, then upload old peoples' brains into them.

The author attempts to justify the need for his supergenetically engineered bodies is that there's a galactic universal pact against using higher level technologies against lower tech races (i.e. humanity); but it really does not stand up -- since the Alienoids could just build replica mortars from their past and use them against the green humans -- if the craboid is 2.5 times stronger than a human in hth; why not just use that ability to have a Craboid keep dropping 160mm mortar bombs into a manpacked mortar?

Huh? It's been awhile since I read the series, but the impetus behind the genetically engineered bodies was because normal human soldiers weren't tough enough. And there really isn't a pact, either; pretty much anything goes in warfare, and the weaker/less-technologically advanced races are wiped out.

[ShadowOfMadness]

I really do hate that book series. It starts off with a completely wrong premise -- that Humanity is so behind in the biological arms race behind alienoid monsters, that the only solution is to create a super genetically engineered body that can breathe acid or whatnot, then upload old peoples' brains into them.

The author attempts to justify the need for his supergenetically engineered bodies is that there's a galactic universal pact against using higher level technologies against lower tech races (i.e. humanity); but it really does not stand up -- since the Alienoids could just build replica mortars from their past and use them against the green humans -- if the craboid is 2.5 times stronger than a human in hth; why not just use that ability to have a Craboid keep dropping 160mm mortar bombs into a manpacked mortar?

Huh? It's been awhile since I read the series, but the impetus behind the genetically engineered bodies was because normal human soldiers weren't tough enough. And there really isn't a pact, either; pretty much anything goes in warfare, and the weaker/less-technologically advanced races are wiped out.

Correct. The super-advanced race 'evens the playing field' tech-wise because it is a religious thing. I think that is the source of his confusion.

[Uraniun235]

What struck me more was the notion that the entire starfleet has the Enterprise as their flagship.

Or rather, that the entire Starfleet would have an overarching flagship in the first place.

Consider: it's not called the "Starfleet flagship", it's called the "Federation flagship". The Enterprise is not a flagship on which a fleet commander is stationed and directs other ships from; it's the best and most prestigious starship which the Federation has to offer. It's also not a member of a current naval force, so expecting a direct correlation in standards and protocol might be slightly silly.

Put another way, there are today such things as flagship stores and flagship broadcasting stations and flagship products. I don't see fleet commanders stationed in/on any of those, either.



(Also I'm not at all sure how this is a "sci-fi trope" when the only instance I can think of it occurring in is Star Trek.)

[Sea Skimmer]

Shep, or Skimmer - if you have stats on Russian arty corps in the Eastern Front...

Not handy sorry, but not a lot is standard about a Soviet Artillery Corps in WW2 anyway; they formed those out of independent artillery divisions as required for specific operations. So you could see anywhere from two to five artillery divisions as well as independent brigades and regiments, observer units and support troops being grouped together. IIRC they had around nine or ten artillery corps and over thirty artillery divisions at the peak. Also they had more then one kind of artillery division, some for example had nothing but rocket launchers and were grouped other purely rocket launcher units to form whole rocket launcher corps. Others had only guns, or hoards of heavy mortars. In the absence of a corps Artillery divisions were generally directly controlled from the Front Level, with the assignments handed out from the top of the military.

I do have stats handy for a 1991 Soviet Artillery Division, though once more, actual establishments varied. This example is only partly modernized. It has 408 artillery pieces or multiple rocket launchers plus 36 more anti tank guided missile vehicles. A WW2 era division would have had a similar number of individual artillery weapons, 400 or so, but in endless variations of caliber and model.

[PainRack]

(Also I'm not at all sure how this is a "sci-fi trope" when the only instance I can think of it occurring in is Star Trek.)

Not really. There are a couple of other minor sci-fi universes where this popped up, possibly motivated by Star Trek........