Lack of basic military history in fiction. [Archive]

Tvtyrant

2017-08-26, 10:37 AM

This is a question that always bugs me when watching television, why does no one in universe or out ever seem to be into military history? Or even learn from their own military mistakes?

We get the walking dead, where their forts are nearly always made of slender metal bits or recombobulated fences, and single layer despite having shown multiple successful experimental strategies and having access to backhoes and earth movers at several periods? No efforts to dig a trench around their fort, then back fill dirt behind the wall so it can't be pushed over by trucks/zombies is ever made at either the prison or later, despite them using the "funnel into a ravine" trick frequently.

Ender's Game, where we are informed that the biggest advantage that children have is the willingness to commit genocide (because that one is hard for adults in the future?) Then the only people who feel bad about committing genocide are the children who are supposed to have magic genocide emotional immunity.

And then almost literally every movie and show where shield walls are supposed to be used, and instead everyone fights in open formation where the camera pans around the main characters. Even the 300, which gives a speech about shield walls in the comic books!

Military history buffs are fairly common, but don't show up in any series that I know of. If we get a nerd we get a science nerd of some sort who has no real world knowledge, as if being into computers prevents you from reading books on other subjects. Just once I would like a character who immediately begins rattling off similar battles and how they can employ real tactics in imitation of them.

Rogar Demonblud

2017-08-26, 11:17 AM

Most people of a certain age have a near psychotic aversion to history, as their teachers just rammed reams of names, dates and places down their throats. For military history, you can add dissociative lists of numbers with no real value attached called 'casualties'. These poor people are the ones in charge in Hollywood.

Really, Hollywood makes much more sense when you realize the place is still mired in the 1950s in many ways.

Darth Ultron

2017-08-26, 12:32 PM

Well, first off your average person, as well as your average writer, director, producer, or other fictional creation worker does not know all that much about even basic military history. Or even just history. So they can't do what they don't know.

But the even bigger issue is: Fiction is made to tell a story. So you have story X, and that is the story that is being told. And everything else must bend to that. This is why everything that happens in fiction happens: the story.

For Example:

The Walking Dead: The Group must always be in danger. The danger is part of the show. And this drives all the decisions made by any character (aka the writers) in the show. So this is why they live in places ''sort of safe'' from Walkers and human thugs for a bit, so they can have some soap opera drama, but ultimately will never be safe ever and will always be in danger. So, this is why they don't overly fortify their home, or really use any common sense military tactics.

Also, military tactics makes for bad fiction. It just does not ''look good'' on camera. For any classic type battle, people just want to see the ''mass of combat''....kinda what you always see (humm, so figure?). For more modern battle people like to see just the ''raatattataa'' of machine gun fire and people falling everywhere.....again, mostly what you'd see in fiction.

Of course fights also have to take place in ranges of like a couple dozen feet....as fighting someone like a mile away is not dramatic.

And, of course, even if the character do make a wall or something....the bad guys do magically breech it...as it is in the script.

Out of the bulk of TV shows, Stargate SG-1, might be one of the best for military tactics. Helped, I'm sure, as they had military advisors. Like one episode had the heroes needing to defend a place...so they set up a drone to watch the bad guys movements, snipers and claymore kill boxes....and when the bad guys did attack later, it did not go well for them.

FreddyNoNose

2017-08-26, 12:43 PM

Blackhawk748

2017-08-26, 12:48 PM

I am pretty much a retentive person. This doesn't bother me in the least. The average person doesn't know this information off the top of their heads and won't care about it. Only those who know it care about it and have a personality suited to going nuts over this will be bothered.

BTW, they are just trying to tell a story or sell ads depending on who you talk to. Your "issue" doesn't make for a better story for the average person. Tipping the hat to some perception of history you might have isn't a good ROI. Most people don't care.

I don't know, the fact that Armor doesnt do anything in fiction except be a pretty costume is rather annoying, and its something anyone can notice if you look at it for more than 5 seconds. Seriously, Plate Armor is amazing and swords should be bouncing off of the wearer, not going through them!

gomipile

2017-08-26, 01:17 PM

Also, military tactics makes for bad fiction. It just does not ''look good'' on camera. For any classic type battle, people just want to see the ''mass of combat''....kinda what you always see (humm, so figure?).

How do we know this? What AAA films and shows in the past decade have shown realistic tactics throughout, so that we can properly compare audience reaction?

Kato

2017-08-26, 01:21 PM

While I do agree with the general reply of "it does not make good stories" and can.. Mostly accept it, there are instances when I'm also annoyed by it. I think you can have a decent fight scene between groups even if you include proper tactics. Heck, make a dumb excuse up to have something more exciting, like aragorn and gimli defending the door at helms deep. It's better than either side acting like total idiots all the time.

Sidenote : how is that ender's game example related to military history. Instead of.. Common sense? But I guess the movie had to somehow work around the flaws of the source material.

Velaryon

2017-08-26, 01:25 PM

Most forms of popular entertainment only care about having a surface level (at most) of realism, usually enough to convince those with only casual knowledge on a subject that the movie/show/book knows what it's talking about. Some will obviously care more than others, but at some point the drama needs to take precedence over realism or there is no story.

So yeah, it can be annoying to military history buffs to see that movie battles almost never use anything resembling sound battle tactics. It can also be annoying to martial artists how every martial arts movie is full of wire flying, gratuitous spins and backflips, and that weird thing in wushu where they keep grabbing each other's arms instead of actually punching and kicking. Or how every single crime drama on TV has the magical computer that can infinitely zoom in on an image from a camera and sharpen it to perfect quality so that the investigators have a crystal clear image of the criminal's face. Or how so many movies rely on a generic scientist character to provide any and all science-y sounding exposition, ignoring the fact that nearly all scientists are specialized in a single field of knowledge (this one may not be as bad as it used to be).

FreddyNoNose

2017-08-26, 01:31 PM

I don't know, the fact that Armor doesnt do anything in fiction except be a pretty costume is rather annoying, and its something anyone can notice if you look at it for more than 5 seconds. Seriously, Plate Armor is amazing and swords should be bouncing off of the wearer, not going through them!

They are trying to make money. They are not making a history lesson as you would like it.

Tvtyrant

2017-08-26, 01:50 PM

They are trying to make money. They are not making a history lesson as you would like it.

Those are not incompatible as you are making it out. Historical dramas are now more popular than ever, and realism adds scenarios that artificiality cannot.

Take sieges. Is there anything more anxiety building than being trapped for months or years while the survival margin slowly dwindles? Rushing the walls and blowing up the fortress may be more exciting, but a slow siege can focus the interpersonal conflict and tension far more than a quick assault will.

Cazero

2017-08-26, 02:14 PM

Sidenote : how is that ender's game example related to military history. Instead of.. Common sense? But I guess the movie had to somehow work around the flaws of the source material.
I've not seen the movie, but that nonsense about "predisposition to genocide" makes me think they added a plothole where there was none.

Aotrs Commander

2017-08-26, 02:23 PM

FreddyNoNose

2017-08-26, 03:10 PM

Those are not incompatible as you are making it out. Historical dramas are now more popular than ever, and realism adds scenarios that artificiality cannot.

Take sieges. Is there anything more anxiety building than being trapped for months or years while the survival margin slowly dwindles? Rushing the walls and blowing up the fortress may be more exciting, but a slow siege can focus the interpersonal conflict and tension far more than a quick assault will.

I never said they were incompatible. This is your issue. They don't give a flying F what you are crying about.

Traab

2017-08-26, 04:14 PM

There is also a problem with the basic idea. Its all well and good to go for realism, but its so easy to get bogged down in details, and it also can easily make any scenario contrived as heck. Take the walking dead. Lets say they build their compound like you said. Now they have a 12-18 foot tall wall, backed by hundreds of tons of earth so it cant be knocked down, or burned, and could only be climbed by humans. Now they have no reason to go anywhere or do anything but plant crops and try to wait the whole apocalypse out. Having a sudden army of brigands show up to chase them away in order to create danger or force them to move is just going to be crazy because now that you are going for realism you have to justify it. Where did they come from? Why are they attacking such a heavily fortified location? The more detailed your story gets, the harder it is to keep going because all those details have to be accounted for.

Sapphire Guard

2017-08-26, 06:37 PM

Vinyadan

2017-08-26, 06:43 PM

Strigon

2017-08-26, 07:57 PM

Because, very fundamentally, the object isn't to make good content. It's to make content that will make the most money.
The movies that are hailed as being top-tier are often far more realistic and well thought out than the average drivel shoveled out year after year. Compare, for example, Saving Private Ryan with Top Gun.
Now, while those movies make lots of money, they're also very hard to do. It requires research and a team who knows what they're doing, and directors who care enough to bother. That's quite rare.

On the other hand, a tragically mediocre movie is just as capable of making millions for far less effort. When you're willing to throw away logic and sanity, you can get all kinds of really cool looking shots. This has the double effect of making exciting trailers to draw the audience in, and being more accessible to those who just want to go see a movie on Friday night, without being burdened by such things as critical thinking.

Aotrs Commander

2017-08-26, 08:02 PM

Zombies are a very limited threat once their surprise round is over, so a proper fort would end the story.

If your antagonists can be beaten by tactics that was a given standard for more or less the bulk of recorded history...

Create better antagonists.

Grey_Wolf_c

2017-08-26, 08:31 PM

How do we know this? What AAA films and shows in the past decade have shown realistic tactics throughout, so that we can properly compare audience reaction?

Try watching the Spanish film "Alatriste (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0395119/)". It's not triple-A, but it had sufficient money behind it that it did try to do a realistic depiction of the Spanish Tercio in action.

And it is very boring, as all pike pushes tend to be. So they added an entirely ficticious attack under the pikes, just to have something to show.

More broadly, the answer to the OP about military tactics is three pronged:

1) We do not know the actual historical tactics. This is particularly true the further back we go. How exactly did the roman republic maniple system fight? No-one knows. There are multiple theories, all differing in key details. Some kind of checkered pattern is suggested by the name, but what exactly did that mean? Did they really leave holes between the cohorts? And why do some sources talk about left and right, while others talk about front and back units? Are they interchangeable? What exactly did the fighting front line look like when actually engaged in battle? Even if someone tried to answer all that, there will be people that will be able to point to this or that text and complain that they missed something.

2) It makes for bad storytelling. It takes hours to break a front line. Most battles that were not curbstomps where muddy, bloody affairs with a lot of people making little progress in either direction for hours, until one side or the other managed to achieve a flank, if that. Conveying this in a story without boring the audience is hard.

3) It's not worth the effort. Too few people in the audience will be in a position to even tell that proper tactics are in use, just like few people can tell when doctors are not being proper professionals (e.g. using compressions without breaking the sternum, or using paddles on a flat-line patient). Of those that care, many don't want or care to sit through the realism, even when they can tell. And of course, it is much more expensive since instead of merely a good story writer, you need one of those that also knows the topic - and no, "advisers" doesn't cut it. They can correct broad mistakes, but they can't tell a good story. When the two are in conflict, most of the time one or the other has to "win" - finding a "middle ground" means doing both a disservice.

Grey Wolf

Porthos

2017-08-26, 08:37 PM

If your antagonists can be beaten by tactics that was a given standard for more or less the bulk of recorded history...

Create better antagonists.

I fundamentally disagree. The goal is to tell an entertaining story, not get bogged down in a simulation.

To bring this in to an actual example, Matt Martin (https://twitter.com/missingwords) (one of the folks on the Lucasfilm Story Group) was trying to tell someone this weekend on his twitter feed how much more difficult it would make his job and all of the authors if they were to commit to a hard map with concrete distances of all of the planets in the SW universe and how long it took to get between them (as opposed to the more nebulous fuzzy map they have now where the general location of things is known, but with a lot of elbow room for things to be define as the stories require, as they get written).

It went back and forth quite a bit, but it boiled down to the fact that one person thought it would be neat to have a realistic map and then commit to it forever and ever and ever and the artist replying that it would tie their hands too much to get TOO detailed.

It was brought up in his twitter feed that even the fabled Tolkien allegedly messed up with his intricate world building because it was claimed that his mountains could never have formed with plate tectonics (https://www.tor.com/2017/08/01/tolkiens-map-and-the-messed-up-mountains-of-middle-earth/).

I can already hear the cry of "MAGIC". Well, yes. But the point is more that even people who spend a looooong time on this sort of thing will overlook things.

===

Now before the strawmen get erected, it's not that one should ignore this sort of thing entirely. But it's a matter of perspective and balance. Tactics in SW, for instance, are terrible. Even I realize that. But it IS entertaining. And there's just enough tactics that make surface sense on screen for the entertaining story to be told. And since it isn't billing itself as some sort of military-hard story, it doesn't need to have tactics that make 100% iron-clad sense.

Now I'm quite sure that some people steeped in 3D military tactics tear their hair out watching that sort of thing. But, thing is, they are a distinct minority. It was brought upthread that historical dramas are more popular than ever. Well, sure. But I guarantee you that they have nearly as many inaccuracies as their counterparts, if sometimes in other areas.

To sum all of this up, it's not a question of laziness, but of allocating finite time and resources. If someone wants to spend their time going down those rabbit holes, that's fine. And if it helps them tell better stories, great.

But one look at popular fiction throughout the ages shows that it isn't as necessary as some folks would like it. Not remotely. The most popular franchise of the last 20 years (Harry Potter) should show that this sort of thing isn't remotely necessary to tell an entertaining and worthwhile story.

Might not work for everyone. Then again, name me a story/series that does.

===

EDITED TO ADD: What Grey_Wolf_c said. Agree with each and every word.

Mechalich

2017-08-26, 08:44 PM

There's a lot of reasons why accurate military scenarios are difficult to portray in fiction, especially in visual media like television and movies. Visual forms of storytelling have certain demands and those demands tend to pile up and gradually distort the storytelling more and more. Take a super simple example: helmets. The military reality is that protecting your head is very important in combat and protective headgear has been extremely important in almost all periods of conflict in history. However, characters often go without helmets in many fictional portrayals and especially without full face protection because it looks bad and characters become difficult to differentiate. This even happens in non-combat scenes: like how no one ever wears a hat north of the wall in Game of Thrones despite it being obviously freezing cold there. So that's a sacrifice for visual fidelity. Range is another big sacrifice for the same purpose. A great deal of combat, especially modern combat, plays out towards the edge of effective weapon range which may well be the very edge of visual range or beyond that. Even fairly early in history - as in the Napoleonic Wars and even earlier - you have artillery killing huge numbers of troops that they never saw and that simply does not play out well on screen.

Then there are the issues of actually producing the shot. That includes you ability to do whatever it is you're trying to do, and how much it is going to cost. Showing military conflict with any sort of realism in all but highly specialized circumstances is going to require a bunch of wide-angle shots that encompass a lot and cost a fortune. The opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan is fantastic, and also unquestionably the most expensive part of the movie. Want to perform a cavalry charge? You've got to get trained stunt horses and stunt riders on set and pay them all and you've only got so many takes before you've churned up the ground on wherever you're shooting and you can only show so many scenes overall. When you're more budget constrained, you have real limits on your options. So there's real pressure to maximize the amount of spectacle you can churn out per dollar.

Historical dramas are now more popular than ever

This claim requires support. Out of the top 185 movies of 2017 by worldwide box office (http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?view2=worldwide&yr=2017&p=.htm), very few would qualify as historical dramas where military realism would apply. Dunkirk (#14) is the most significant of those, but after that I'm scrolling all the way down to The Wall (#107) and Churchill (#120) to find anything.

Now, historical fantasy has arguably never been more popular, with three movies in this year's top ten arguably qualifying - Wonder Woman (#5), Pirates 5 (#6), and Wolf Warrior 2 (#7, um, go China), but even then, the type of fantasy films with any interest in presenting combat in a historical accurate fashion is slim. Certainly none of those three films counts.

Oh, and for the record, 2016 was even worse on this tally, with the only historical action epic work talking about at the box office being the Magnificent Seven remake (#32). The biggest historical drama of the year was Hidden Figures (nice film, highly accurate, zero combat).

Misery Esquire

2017-08-26, 08:57 PM

Zombies are a very limited threat once their surprise round is over, so a proper fort would end the story.

They're a limited threat as soon as you lock the front door and refuse to wander out into them. Eventually you might be stuck for food, but as long as the zombies aren't running on literal magic then you'll be able to go to the store again when they all collapse.

(If they are running on magic you're probably dead regardless of anything else.)

Traab

2017-08-26, 09:12 PM

They're a limited threat as soon as you lock the front door and refuse to wander out into them. Eventually you might be stuck for food, but as long as the zombies aren't running on literal magic then you'll be able to go to the store again when they all collapse.

(If they are running on magic you're probably dead regardless of anything else.)

Even if they are baseline human strength that isnt true. Most doors (and windows) these days can be easily broken through with a few solid thumps. You would still have to fort up, even if its only something as simple as blockading the doors and window and living upstairs. True those crazy 12 foot tall walls are only really needed for the huge swarms where the pressure of a thousand zombies trying to reach you means anything less than earthworks behind your walls means they fall, but it wouldnt be as simple as shutting your door. Even a handful could batter their way into the average house.

Blackhawk748

2017-08-26, 09:42 PM

They are trying to make money. They are not making a history lesson as you would like it.

Thats not history, thats basic common sense. Why is someone gonna run around in 50+ lbs of metal armor if it doesnt do anything? And as for the "trying to make money" angle, you dont think a movie that actually has armor work as it should, with arrows and other weapons bouncing off of the dude in Full Plate, wouldnt make money? He'd be a Medieval Juggernaut and that would be cool.

And on another note, why is having armor actually work suddenly a "history lesson" and why does that suddenly preclude them making money?

Edit: Say it with me, Zombies are not an enemy, they are a natural disaster.

Vinyadan

2017-08-27, 05:34 AM

Rodin

2017-08-27, 06:20 AM

Even if they are baseline human strength that isnt true. Most doors (and windows) these days can be easily broken through with a few solid thumps. You would still have to fort up, even if its only something as simple as blockading the doors and window and living upstairs. True those crazy 12 foot tall walls are only really needed for the huge swarms where the pressure of a thousand zombies trying to reach you means anything less than earthworks behind your walls means they fall, but it wouldnt be as simple as shutting your door. Even a handful could batter their way into the average house.

This was something they proved on the Mythbusters, where they had a load of "zombies" in the form of volunteers simply press up against a barred wooden gate to see how much force it would take to get in. They broke in astonishingly easily, and even when they seriously forted the place up the zombies were able to eventually break the door down. And that's with humans that were actually being careful not to crush the ones at the front too much - a real zombie press would be able to be much more aggressive.

The Walking Dead one that really did bug me was the prison. You have a building that is itself heavily fortified, that I don't recall ever seeing them make repairs to. It's surrounded by a relatively flimsy pair of chain link fences, which they don't attempt to reinforce. Heck, they don't even try to put up proper junkyard barricades like the nearby town did.

Then there's the inside. They have a full set of cells with doors that close, which they could lock if they so chose. Nobody does this, because they don't want to get locked in. That's fair, although I think I would prefer the security myself. But they also know that ANYONE who dies will become a zombie, and have no precautions against it. You would think that a nightwatchman guarding the sleeping quarters would be mandatory. Heck, even just headcounts to ensure nobody slipped on a wet patch of floor and turned into a ravenous beast without anyone knowing. And lo and behold, someone dying unexpectedly and going for a midnight snack is exactly what happens.

I can accept a premise that these people are lost lambs in the woods without knowing how to fort up properly. It's when people start acting recklessly stupid and not even taking the most basic of precautions that I start getting annoyed.

Yora

2017-08-27, 06:52 AM

And then almost literally every movie and show where shield walls are supposed to be used, and instead everyone fights in open formation where the camera pans around the main characters. Even the 300, which gives a speech about shield walls in the comic books!

Battle Brawls are the worst. My whole interest in pre-modern warfare started with my constant amazement how anyone would be willing to fight in a battle where you are surrounded by enemies with swords on all sides all the time. It always looked implausibly suicidal.
Having learned a bit about warfare since then, I know that it would indeed have been suicidal and that nobody was fighting like that.

I can't think of a single movie battle that gets this even halfway right.

Anonymouswizard

2017-08-27, 07:57 AM

Writer laziness, especially in an age where information is readily available, "the story says it must happen this way, so damn everything else" has now (and always has been) no excuse and generally makes for bad fiction. I do not, never have and never will take "I can't be bothered to think about it" as an excuse, be that framed in whatever manner you like.

I'm afraid that I take the opinion that if you, as a professional writer of any stripe who is getting paid actual money to do a thing, cannot be arsed to spend at least the same effort in thinking or reasearch as I do when making a forum post, you don't really deserve to be doing your job.

This goes to all levels of writing, fiction or otherwise.

There is no excuse for it, ever. I should not have, at the age of four, been able to point to a segment children's preported educational program and put my hand up with a laundry list of factual errors so basic it was clear the animator had literally never picked up a dinosaur book ever. That was no excuse in the 1980s it sure as HELL isn't an excuse now.

Of course, there is a difference between not doing the research and doing the research but ignoring it for a better story, which is how a lot of science fiction exists in the first place.

But the difference is knowing that your space drive shouldn't be outputting 0.5g for weeks on end but having it do that (what happens in a story I'm writing, although it's actually 0.2g for weeks and a day long burst of 0.5g), and having ships constantly accelerate at >8g because spaceships go fast. Using space stuff here because I don't like military history but I do like space.

There's also this idea of writing to the broadest audience, and therefore leaving out anything remotely technical or unlike what they'd expect. I have literally be told 'use "thrusters" because readers won't know what a plasma drive is'. Therefore people don't use realistic tactics because most people won't appreciate them, don't use realistic starships because most people don't care about the design, don't use realistic hacking because apparently social engineering is boring.

I will note it seems to be a very visual media thing, books and to an extent comics seem to be much better, sometimes to the point of the technology in the book being set up to justify the tactics. It's the difference between Guardians of the Galaxy, where starships move FTL and STL with little fuel because that's what's needed for the story, and the Commonwealth Saga, where FTL requires so much power they have to charge up super batteries while docked to be safe and 'how much reaction mass do we carry' is a real concern and gets altered as starship designs are advanced.

Of course a film has a lot less space to describe stuff, but this also applies to most TV where starships move because they do, and because realistic tactics are more interesting to read about than watch. The problem is there should really be media for both, but it's mainly media for those who don't know (and people interested in military history or science do want to watch military history or science films without it all being wrong).

Darth Ultron

2017-08-27, 08:28 AM

How do we know this? What AAA films and shows in the past decade have shown realistic tactics throughout, so that we can properly compare audience reaction?

Hollywood does not work like that: They know what we like.

But in the last ten years? It gets hard as Hollywood has gotten worse over time.

Restrepo (2010), though this is a documentary film, of course.

Act of Valor, Jarhead and Lone Survivor might be three good examples.

Vinyadan

2017-08-27, 08:30 AM

I think that 300 was actually more like ballet than an attempt to represent a fight. There were just too many hormones lying around to admit it.

Compare:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7js5rNfDeyc

(Notice that zooming in on single parts of the stage is a mistake, since the scene is meant to be seen as a whole).

Visual media will always struggle between realism and giving a great show. The show part is the most important one, however, because cinema movies are meant to entertain above anything else.

Blackhawk748

2017-08-27, 10:36 AM

There's also this idea of writing to the broadest audience, and therefore leaving out anything remotely technical or unlike what they'd expect. I have literally be told 'use "thrusters" because readers won't know what a plasma drive is'. Therefore people don't use realistic tactics because most people won't appreciate them, don't use realistic starships because most people don't care about the design, don't use realistic hacking because apparently social engineering is boring.

But at worst they'll just think Plasma Drive is a fancy name for Thrusters :smallconfused: Seriously, who told you this?

Also i think those who watched SGI appreciated the tactics. It looked cool, it felt nice and it was just awesome. And f course i would like to point out Voyager for an example of a show that went into Starship minutia. (yes a bunch of it is made up, but Star Trek used be reasonably internally consistent)

Traab

2017-08-27, 11:44 AM

Im looking at the 300 movie and honestly, it looks like a decent representation of how shield walls work.
In a phalanx, the man at the right hand of each warrior had an important role; he covered the right side of the warrior next to him with his shield. This made it so that all the shields overlap each other and thus formed a solid battle line. The second row's purpose was to kill the soldiers of the first line of an enemy shield wall, and thus break the line. All the other rows were weight for the pushing match that always occurred when each side tried to break the other's wall. When a wall was broken, the battle turned into a single-combat melee in which the side whose wall collapsed had a serious disadvantage.

In their very first battle this is what happens. They hold the shield wall, win the push battle, and kill enough of the enemy to break THEIR solid mass of troops up, at which point it turns into mostly single combat. Here. (https://youtu.be/HdNn5TZu6R8?t=2m)

Keltest

2017-08-27, 11:56 AM

deuterio12

2017-08-27, 12:08 PM

Thats not history, thats basic common sense. Why is someone gonna run around in 50+ lbs of metal armor if it doesnt do anything? And as for the "trying to make money" angle, you dont think a movie that actually has armor work as it should, with arrows and other weapons bouncing off of the dude in Full Plate, wouldnt make money? He'd be a Medieval Juggernaut and that would be cool.

And on another note, why is having armor actually work suddenly a "history lesson" and why does that suddenly preclude them making money?

Because by rule of drama, if your movie character is immune to basic ranged weapons, they're either a super or an horror monster.

If the medieval villains have bows, the hero in shining armor still needs to worry about them.

If the medieval hero uses a bow, the enemy can't just shrugg it off by wearing good armor.

Also I guess the battle of Agincourt and stuff. Arrows still screwed up people in armor if you fired enough and the enemy was slowed down by a mud field or similar. People used arrows to kill other people for millenia for a reason and only really stopped when guns becamse about as killy while being mass produceable plus demanding a lot less training (whereas crossbows may be easy to use but you it's hard to produce and maintain them by the hundreds/thousands).

Anonymouswizard

2017-08-27, 12:22 PM

But at worst they'll just think Plasma Drive is a fancy name for Thrusters :smallconfused: Seriously, who told you this?

Some who joined a discussion I tried to start on technowriting on a Facebook writer's group. My view was 'but people will just think "it's a drive that uses plasma" and leave it like that', or as you said people will assume it's a fancy name for thrusters (which it is a specific kind of).

The same person also joked about me describing the starship as a cylinder (with a pair of centrifugal life support rings) earlier this morning, so I've decided they're just an idiot. The others in the discussion just thought I needed to spread out the tech talk a bit, and got it on the head that I was really happy about having designed a semi-realistic starship.

Also i think those who watched SGI appreciated the tactics. It looked cool, it felt nice and it was just awesome. And f course i would like to point out Voyager for an example of a show that went into Starship minutia. (yes a bunch of it is made up, but Star Trek used be reasonably internally consistent)

Sure, but I was pointing out how the 'write for the broadest audience' mindset sees it. Heck, most stuff doesn't to into minutia, but I've read multiple books which went into 'the starship had a fusion drive' or 'moves at x gees'. I actually like realistic tactics as much of the next nerd, but there's this idea that your target audience should be 'everyone', rather than say 'those in their 20s who have a grasp of the basic of physics'. Considering that I've heard The Expanse has taken off, the view that you should dumb stuff down surprises me, sure don't lecture about your tech but do give the details that makes those in the know smile.

Traab

2017-08-27, 12:29 PM

Breaking up your own solid mass of troops is just giving away the massive advantage you just fought for. The reason breaking up that mass is important is because fighting in that formation drastically improves the effectiveness of your army.

Im just pointing out that it meshes really well with the wiki blurb about how that formation generally worked. If you want to argue about that being a bad idea thats fine. My main point was just that it seems to have been done exactly as its written to work.

Vinyadan

2017-08-27, 01:15 PM

Im looking at the 300 movie and honestly, it looks like a decent representation of how shield walls work.

In their very first battle this is what happens. They hold the shield wall, win the push battle, and kill enough of the enemy to break THEIR solid mass of troops up, at which point it turns into mostly single combat. Here. (https://youtu.be/HdNn5TZu6R8?t=2m)

Maybe, conceptually, with a huge abstraction from reality?

I mean, hoplites opening their shields to strike forwards? Even in vases, hoplites are shown keeping the shield between themselves and the enemy's. I guess it could happen, but it defied the purpose of having that shield. Throwing their spears? That was a Homeric thing. I also have my doubts about how they win the push, sending a shockwave? Although I guess that extremely well trained people might have done something like that. But I think that winning the push had more to do with walking over the fallen or kneeling enemies, killing and scaring, and being the less tired group (which was easier to achieve if you were more numerous). In general, I don't think that the Persians would have done that sort of pushing deliberately, although being pushed by the lines behind you might have had that as an unintended effect. They weren't hoplites, after all, and their shields were too light.

The shield wall, however, definitely could be more or less deliberately broken to pursue a running enemy, which could turn into a problem if the enemy rallied to a common point, e.g. the city walls, and managed to rebuild a line there. Leonidas used this against the Persians, having his men pretend to run away, so that the Persians would carelessly run after them, at which point the Spartans turned back, joined up into formation and killed them. In general, however, pursue was better carried out by cavalry or light troops.

300 is cool in that there objectively is an attempt at realism in tactics, and there obviously is a lot of research behind it, although it is subordinated to unrealism in equipment and general looks for aesthetic purposes, see the "no armour" policy or the dancing hoplites.

Traab

2017-08-27, 01:25 PM

Maybe, conceptually, with a huge abstraction from reality?

I mean, hoplites opening their shields to strike forwards? Even in vases, hoplites are shown keeping the shield between themselves and the enemy's. I guess it could happen, but it defied the purpose of having that shield. Throwing their spears? That was a Homeric thing. I also have my doubts about how they win the push, sending a shockwave? Although I guess that extremely well trained people might have done something like that. But I think that winning the push had more to do with walking over the fallen or kneeling enemies, killing and scaring, and being the less tired group (which was easier to achieve if you were more numerous). In general, I don't think that the Persians would have done that sort of pushing deliberately, although being pushed by the lines behind you might have had that as an unintended effect. They weren't hoplites, after all, and their shields were too light.

The shield wall, however, definitely could be more or less deliberately broken to pursue a running enemy, which could turn into a problem if the enemy rallied to a common point, e.g. the city walls, and managed to rebuild a line there. Leonidas used this against the Persians, having his men pretend to run away, so that the Persians would carelessly run after them, at which point the Spartans turned back, joined up into formation and killed them. In general, however, pursue was better carried out by cavalry or light troops.

300 is cool in that there objectively is an attempt at realism in tactics, and there obviously is a lot of research behind it, although it is subordinated to unrealism in equipment and general looks for aesthetic purposes, see the "no armour" policy or the dancing hoplites.

Although, it also helps that the entire movie is being told by the equivalent of a spartan bard. It didnt happen that way, thats the way it happened in the exaggerated bardic version of events. Hence all the monsters and demons and magic they dealt with. So of COURSE they managed to hurl an enemy army back through sheer physical might. Of COURSE they carved through the bad guys after breaking their lines. Thats what the ungodly powerful spartan warriors do right? They are barely human they are so strong. Like 300 murderous captain americas. For all we know the ACTUAL fight took hours before their shield wall shattered the defenders and they wiped out the few stragglers that didnt retreat in time. But thats way less awesome of a description to give to the troops you are trying to get fired up. So all in all 300 is a bad choice to complain about military tactics and realism. Or to defend their tactics for that matter. :smalltongue:

Blackhawk748

2017-08-27, 01:38 PM

Because by rule of drama, if your movie character is immune to basic ranged weapons, they're either a super or an horror monster.

If the medieval villains have bows, the hero in shining armor still needs to worry about them.

If the medieval hero uses a bow, the enemy can't just shrugg it off by wearing good armor.

Also I guess the battle of Agincourt and stuff. Arrows still screwed up people in armor if you fired enough and the enemy was slowed down by a mud field or similar. People used arrows to kill other people for millenia for a reason and only really stopped when guns becamse about as killy while being mass produceable plus demanding a lot less training (whereas crossbows may be easy to use but you it's hard to produce and maintain them by the hundreds/thousands).

Or you could just have dudes with maces, now your hero is worried. This goes back to "Write better villains"

Anonymouswizard

2017-08-27, 01:59 PM

Or you could just have dudes with maces, now your hero is worried. This goes back to "Write better villains"

Or in this case 'write prepared villains', but I will note that I've seen a lot of fantasy stories which seemed to avoid armour at all (and you know what? If it's not brought up and the characters aren't soldiers most people won't notice).

For a bit of fun, part of the reason I like Berserk is that it's normally shown that those with bladed weapons get around plate armour by hitting the unarmoured bits (and pretty much nobody is wearing full plate, it's mainly a breastplate, gauntlets, and greaves), only the main character is shown to be freakishly strong enough to slice through armour (and even then not always easily). So you get one guy against whom armour is useless.

Tvtyrant

2017-08-27, 02:11 PM

One in particular that bothers me is Dothraki, who are steriotyped steppe people. They are supposed to be a horse people focused on raiders, but that magically transfers to "better on foot unarmored than armored foot soldiers."

It falls into a general issue here, which is that when you remove any semblance of reality you can't have specialties anymore, just ranks of badassness. Why are Dothraki better at fighting on foot then other people when they spend less time focusing on it? It implies that strength flows from a kind of ubermenschien core, which comes across as more than a little racist.

Vinyadan

2017-08-27, 02:46 PM

Yora

2017-08-27, 02:57 PM

The sad thing is that early on they had a scene that showed very dramatically what a really big deal having armor is. Specifically with a Dothraki who died because his own sword just bounced off his oponent's armor.

Blackhawk748

2017-08-27, 04:19 PM

Or in this case 'write prepared villains', but I will note that I've seen a lot of fantasy stories which seemed to avoid armour at all (and you know what? If it's not brought up and the characters aren't soldiers most people won't notice).

For a bit of fun, part of the reason I like Berserk is that it's normally shown that those with bladed weapons get around plate armour by hitting the unarmoured bits (and pretty much nobody is wearing full plate, it's mainly a breastplate, gauntlets, and greaves), only the main character is shown to be freakishly strong enough to slice through armour (and even then not always easily). So you get one guy against whom armour is useless.

If noone is wearing armor then i don't really care. If only the main character isn't wearing armor i look at it a bit weird unless its a Kung Fu or Swashbuckling movie and thats only because neither of them are trying to be terribly realistic in the first place.

Ah Guts, the man with a cannon for an arm and a sword bigger than most people. Totally fine with him hacking through plate armor.

The sad thing is that early on they had a scene that showed very dramatically what a really big deal having armor is. Specifically with a Dothraki who died because his own sword just bounced off his oponent's armor.

Im going to assume the later scenes happen the way they do because of writer laziness.

Anonymouswizard

2017-08-27, 04:29 PM

If noone is wearing armor then i don't really care. If only the main character isn't wearing armor i look at it a bit weird unless its a Kung Fu or Swashbuckling movie and thats only because neither of them are trying to be terribly realistic in the first place.

Ah Guts, the man with a cannon for an arm and a sword bigger than most people. Totally fine with him hacking through plate armor.

Yeah, I don't think I've met someone who would complain about the lack of armour (and I have a sudden desire to see if I can get Legends of the Wulin out of storage).

The thing about guts is that the story clearly makes him an exception, he still has difficulty doing it, and eventually he has a weapon that's at the very least half bludgeon. He's obviously meant to be freakishly strong, and so nobody has a problem with it, and the only other time I remember armour being pierced is from crossbows (and even then it varies, some seem to pierce plate and others don't). I don't think I've seen an attack in the series from someone other than Guts punches through armour and actually gets a serious wound, even Griffith mainly seems to slash people in the armpit.

Brother Oni

2017-08-27, 04:54 PM

Military Tactics are hard to convey in brief. They're often deliberately intended to be confusing to the enemy, or impossible to convey in any single moment. And if your audience doesn't already understand it, can you fully convey a complex tactic in five seconds of overhead shot?

Since the majority of tactics take longer than 5 seconds to execute, I'd say none.

That said, the simpler tactics are easy to do - if your military expert can't describe how to set up covering fire arcs and forward strongpoints to enable defender enfilade fire on attackers in a simple graphic, then they really don't understand it.

There have been some shows where proper complex tactics have been done - the Brecourt Manor Assault In Band of Brothers is a good example, although I concede all they had to do for that was to follow the memoirs/AAR.

Maryring

2017-08-27, 05:30 PM

t209

2017-08-27, 05:36 PM

This reminds me of when I watched the Prince Caspian movie with my mother, aunt, cousin and grandmother. None of them have any interest in warfare or military tactics whatsoever. Yet everyone immediately reacted when the heroes charged right into their own archery cover fire, remarking on how this makes no sense whatsoever.
And the first movie where they decided to charge and got routed after a disastrous melee rather than holding advantageous height and didn't help that majority of their forces are centaurs, which they could easily surround and even harrass.
Less like "our heroes are doomed", but more "idiot kids who are trying to make things worse".

Lethologica

2017-08-27, 05:46 PM

Brother Oni

2017-08-28, 02:26 AM

This reminds me of when I watched the Prince Caspian movie with my mother, aunt, cousin and grandmother. None of them have any interest in warfare or military tactics whatsoever. Yet everyone immediately reacted when the heroes charged right into their own archery cover fire, remarking on how this makes no sense whatsoever.

To be fair, the Prince Caspian movie then makes up for it in the duel between Peter and the King with an excellent example of how armoured combat should look. The helmets came off after the first bout as neither could breathe and nearly every blow after that was aimed at the head. The shields and armour were used for both defence and attack, plus they grappled when they ended up in binds.

snowblizz

2017-08-28, 06:03 AM

It was brought up in his twitter feed that even the fabled Tolkien allegedly messed up with his intricate world building because it was claimed that his mountains could never have formed with plate tectonics (https://www.tor.com/2017/08/01/tolkiens-map-and-the-messed-up-mountains-of-middle-earth/).

I can already hear the cry of "MAGIC". Well, yes. But the point is more that even people who spend a looooong time on this sort of thing will overlook things.

To be fair, Tolkien couldn't not have known that. Plate tectonics wasn't proven or widely accpeted until the 50s and 60s which is after Tolkien wrote the bulk of the stuff. Generally speaking, let's not get bogged down in dates too much.

Also, he was linguist, and not an author, and that distinction was important to Tolkien. Tolkien's intricate worldbuilding was centered on languages and not so much other stuff he'd have little reason to know much about any more so than the next guy. Now a better example would be him messing up how to pluralise dwarves. Since that was actually in his field of expertise. That said, most of us tend to bow to his authority on that matter, going so far as to ignore the fact he himself pointed out he made that mistake. Cause dwarves just sounds cooler.

One of my biggest gripes come form the LotR movies (and hobbit if I didn't reflexibly wipe knowlege of having watched that form my mind). Battle of Helmsdeep, move elfs, that had no business being there, patiently wait for the uruk-hai to be within *their* x-bow range before exposing themselves to their fire. Instead putting as many arrows as they own into the vast sea of orcs. And then shoot once and bravely charge into clsoecombat in a breach instead of fillign that gap with a solid wall of arrows. Neither which would have altered the outcome but seemed much more reasonable than "we'll shoot when it's too late to get any use out of our bowskill". Bonus poitns for the Rohirrim who likewise wait absurdly long before shooting at the orcs, neatly illustrated by the only intelligent guy there. A teenager too nervous to "hooooold it!" who clearly realised orcs were way within range and they should be shooting like crazy like now guys, come on my puny teenager arms can reach them. There's plenty of orcs for you to kill in close combat Theoden and Aragorn, no need to let in more than you have to.

Tyndmyr

2017-08-28, 06:19 AM

This was something they proved on the Mythbusters, where they had a load of "zombies" in the form of volunteers simply press up against a barred wooden gate to see how much force it would take to get in. They broke in astonishingly easily, and even when they seriously forted the place up the zombies were able to eventually break the door down. And that's with humans that were actually being careful not to crush the ones at the front too much - a real zombie press would be able to be much more aggressive.

The Walking Dead one that really did bug me was the prison. You have a building that is itself heavily fortified, that I don't recall ever seeing them make repairs to. It's surrounded by a relatively flimsy pair of chain link fences, which they don't attempt to reinforce. Heck, they don't even try to put up proper junkyard barricades like the nearby town did.

Then there's the inside. They have a full set of cells with doors that close, which they could lock if they so chose. Nobody does this, because they don't want to get locked in. That's fair, although I think I would prefer the security myself. But they also know that ANYONE who dies will become a zombie, and have no precautions against it. You would think that a nightwatchman guarding the sleeping quarters would be mandatory. Heck, even just headcounts to ensure nobody slipped on a wet patch of floor and turned into a ravenous beast without anyone knowing. And lo and behold, someone dying unexpectedly and going for a midnight snack is exactly what happens.

I can accept a premise that these people are lost lambs in the woods without knowing how to fort up properly. It's when people start acting recklessly stupid and not even taking the most basic of precautions that I start getting annoyed.

"Hey, it's a zombie in a pit, that cannot possibly hurt any of us. Clearly, what we should do is lower one of our number down to him via rope. Unarmed. This is a good idea" - The Walking Dead.

I don't demand perfect realism and optimization in everything. I just expect characters to not be thrown all of the idiot balls at the same time. If it's something that's obviously stupid to a large number of watchers, then yeah, it's going to hurt immersion, and they ought to find a different way to threaten the characters.

Historical, or semi historical strategies would be cool, actually. Braveheart was probably better than most, and historical bits like, yknow, using a literal cloud of arrows from range instead of closing to melee before shooting was awesome. There's nothing wrong with a chaotic melee after plans have been smashed to pieces, but using nothing but the same old melee tactics is repetitive, and most folks enjoy seeing new, cool ****.

It terms of realism, The Martian is extremely realistic. It's an amazing story as a result, despite being literally one dude by himself for 90% of the show. GoT, while not wholly realistic, is probably several times more faithful a representation of medieval politics and combat than most fantasy shows. I've seen endless shows with far less realistic of a fantasy setting, and those mostly were D-list in terms of popularity. GoT is stupidly popular. So, I think there's very little to worry about in terms of audiences hating realism.

One in particular that bothers me is Dothraki, who are steriotyped steppe people. They are supposed to be a horse people focused on raiders, but that magically transfers to "better on foot unarmored than armored foot soldiers."

It falls into a general issue here, which is that when you remove any semblance of reality you can't have specialties anymore, just ranks of badassness. Why are Dothraki better at fighting on foot then other people when they spend less time focusing on it? It implies that strength flows from a kind of ubermenschien core, which comes across as more than a little racist.

Eh, it's a common failing. In the books, the Dothraki are pretty bad at sieging and what not, which makes sense. Situational strengths and weaknesses. This is more of a late season problem. Once they got beyond the parts written by GRM, I think certain aspects of realism have suffered. Makes sense, they've got cliff notes to work with instead of the full thing, so some details are lost.

deuterio12

2017-08-28, 06:32 AM

Berserk also has that flashback battle where young guts fights a fully armored noble and his sword just bounces off, but wins by tripping them so he can go for the eyes.

Still something that berserk and a lot of media does wrong is weapon parry spam. Parrying something like a sword with another sword is hard because you're trying to hit a small target, plus if you can see the blow coming is easier to just dodge. Not to mention, a weapon hitting another weapon will weaken both and will end up resulting in either bending/breaking pretty fast. If nothing else any bladed weapon would lose their edge after a few hits. But instead we usually see coreographies where both sides keep clanging their weapons dozens of times in a row without them getting as much as a scratch, which is plain ridiculous.

Or you could just have dudes with maces, now your hero is worried. This goes back to "Write better villains"

Why bother carrying bulky heavy extra arms?

http://imgur.com/bkhIOZh.jpg
http://imgur.com/tHH39TM.jpg

Fun fact, the verb "pummel" comes directly from the sword's pommel that was indeed usually reinforced so it could be used as a bludgeoning weapon, giving you a two-in-one deal for a single weapon.

Mind you it was still possible to find a chink on the enemy's armor to stab through with the pointy bit of a sword if you hold the blade:
http://imgur.com/Mod7ucr.png

Sadly neither tactic is really seen in media.

However the original point was arrows. You need to get close and personal to stab/bludgeon somebody, but arrows can be unleashed from much safer distances. Like, the top of a wall or over a ravine/mud field. Force the enemy to come to you.

Grey_Wolf_c

2017-08-28, 09:18 AM

One of my biggest gripes come form the LotR movies (and hobbit if I didn't reflexibly wipe knowlege of having watched that form my mind). Battle of Helmsdeep, move elfs, that had no business being there, patiently wait for the uruk-hai to be within *their* x-bow range before exposing themselves to their fire. Instead putting as many arrows as they own into the vast sea of orcs. And then shoot once and bravely charge into clsoecombat in a breach instead of fillign that gap with a solid wall of arrows. Neither which would have altered the outcome but seemed much more reasonable than "we'll shoot when it's too late to get any use out of our bowskill". Bonus poitns for the Rohirrim who likewise wait absurdly long before shooting at the orcs, neatly illustrated by the only intelligent guy there. A teenager too nervous to "hooooold it!" who clearly realised orcs were way within range and they should be shooting like crazy like now guys, come on my puny teenager arms can reach them. There's plenty of orcs for you to kill in close combat Theoden and Aragorn, no need to let in more than you have to.

You do realise this is a siege, right? That the number of arrows is therefore limited? If all you have is a couple of quivers, "filling the air with arrows" when most of them can't possibly penetrate armour is a waste of resources. Waiting until they are close enough you can shoot straight at them makes sense.

The whole battle is based on the Zulu war where the British had to make every bullet count - they couldn't afford to take potshots at maximum range because they needed every bullet to kill one guy, if at all possible.

In the books, the Dothraki are pretty bad at sieging and what not, which makes sense.

It makes sense, but it is also weirdly misplaced. It was the Goth tribes that were terrible at sieging. What made the Huns so terrible for the Roman Empire was that they could take walled cities, which the Goths never really managed to do consistently. The only thing that ever stopped Attila's conquest was the ridiculously impregnable walls of Constantinople. Everywhere else that did not have a triple wall defending it was sieged, assaulted and sacked pretty much immediately. And if you tell me that the Dothraki are instead supposed to be more like the Khanate mongol armies, they too were quite capable of sieges.

Grey Wolf

Keltest

2017-08-28, 09:54 AM

It makes sense, but it is also weirdly misplaced. It was the Goth tribes that were terrible at sieging. What made the Huns so terrible for the Roman Empire was that they could take walled cities, which the Goths never really managed to do consistently. The only thing that ever stopped Attila's conquest was the ridiculously impregnable walls of Constantinople. Everywhere else that did not have a triple wall defending it was sieged, assaulted and sacked pretty much immediately. And if you tell me that the Dothraki are instead supposed to be more like the Khanate mongol armies, they too were quite capable of sieges.

I could be mistaken, but wasn't the Mongol and Hunnic ability to conduct sieges something they acquired through experience attacking people and raiding their cultures rather than something innate to their hordes before they started? its not like Mongolia was exactly filled with giant walled cities for them to develop a long and storied history of siege warfare on.

Grey_Wolf_c

2017-08-28, 10:03 AM

I could be mistaken, but wasn't the Mongol and Hunnic ability to conduct sieges something they acquired through experience attacking people and raiding their cultures rather than something innate to their hordes before they started? its not like Mongolia was exactly filled with giant walled cities for them to develop a long and storied history of siege warfare on.

The record keeping ability of the late Roman Empire pre-Western fall is terrible, so we have no idea of why the Huns were so good at siegeworks. The issue is not so much "where did they learn it?" as much as "Why didn't the Goths know how to do it - their cities had walls, they lived next to the Roman Empire for centuries, and raided them with distressing regularity".

But from what we can piece together, the Huns figured out something no-one else did, because they were probably better than even the Romans themselves at siegeworks (although admittedly by that point the "Roman army" was just Goths with a different uniform).

As to the Mongol hordes, well, they did have access to gunpowder, which may have helped, but I know very little about the Khanate armies, so I'm not going to even speculate.

GW

Keltest

2017-08-28, 10:20 AM

The record keeping ability of the late Roman Empire pre-Western fall is terrible, so we have no idea of why the Huns were so good at siegeworks. The issue is not so much "where did they learn it?" as much as "Why didn't the Goths know how to do it - their cities had walls, they lived next to the Roman Empire for centuries, and raided them with distressing regularity".

But from what we can piece together, the Huns figured out something no-one else did, because they were probably better than even the Romans themselves at siegeworks (although admittedly by that point the "Roman army" was just Goths with a different uniform).

As to the Mongol hordes, well, they did have access to gunpowder, which may have helped, but I know very little about the Khanate armies, so I'm not going to even speculate.

GW

If I were to hazard a wildly speculative and largely uninformed guess, its because the gothic tribes were so fractious that they couldn't afford to invest the time and resources besieging any given city without leaving their own territory ripe for invaders. Sieges sucked for everyone involved, I wouldn't blame them one bit if they didn't want to touch that nonsense with a 10 foot pole.

Vinyadan

2017-08-28, 10:26 AM

You do realise this is a siege, right? That the number of arrows is therefore limited? If all you have is a couple of quivers, "filling the air with arrows" when most of them can't possibly penetrate armour is a waste of resources. Waiting until they are close enough you can shoot straight at them makes sense.

The whole battle is based on the Zulu war where the British had to make every bullet count - they couldn't afford to take potshots at maximum range because they needed every bullet to kill one guy, if at all possible.

To be fair, it's strange that a huge fortress like that, which was the King's refuge, and planned to withstand sieges, didn't have enormous stockpiles of arrows (as well as other weapons).

Grey_Wolf_c

2017-08-28, 10:31 AM

If I were to hazard a wildly speculative and largely uninformed guess, its because the gothic tribes were so fractious that they couldn't afford to invest the time and resources besieging any given city without leaving their own territory ripe for invaders. Sieges sucked for everyone involved, I wouldn't blame them one bit if they didn't want to touch that nonsense with a 10 foot pole.

Unlikely. Yes, sometimes the tribes were fractured, but the big invasions of Roman territory were usually unified groups under a charismatic leader - very much like the Huns under Attila. Politically, the huns were no different from the Goths or the Danes or any of the other groups that had ravaged the northern frontier for pretty much the entirety of the history of the Roman Empire. The Huns had better horses and better bows, but socially and politically there is nothing that particularly suggests they'd be better at sieges than Goths.

Be aware, though, that by the time Attila unified the Hun tribes, they had been squatting in previously Goth territory (which itself had previously been the Roman territory of Dacia) for a couple of generations. The Huns as a group might have been Mongolian in culture (whatever that means), but Attila is unlikely to have been born anywhere near modern Mongolia - more likely, he was born in Eastern Europe somewhere.

ETA:

To be fair, it's strange that a huge fortress like that, which was the King's refuge, and planned to withstand sieges, didn't have enormous stockpiles of arrows (as well as other weapons).

On the other paw, the King had been dominated by a guy that was doing everything in his power to weaken him, so it is not unlikely that the fortress was not properly stocked, and that even if it had been, that the arrows were the wrong length for Elven bows.

Grey Wolf

Tvtyrant

2017-08-28, 10:33 AM

To be fair, it's strange that a huge fortress like that, which was the King's refuge, and planned to withstand sieges, didn't have enormous stockpiles of arrows (as well as other weapons).

They probably do, they just aren't in usable condition due to lack of upkeep (king was nuts). Arrows especially do not keep well because fletchings were glued on and the glue would dissolve over time. Arrows also warp easily, being slender wands, and are hard to make well.

@Huns: There has been a lot of historical analysis of texts regarding them recently, as western experience with steppe archers later on led to miss-characterizing them as mounted soldiers. The Huns were mostly on foot, and consisted of so many impressed soldiers that there is some argument as to whether they were actually an ethnicity or were simply a tribe of Germans.

Grey_Wolf_c

2017-08-28, 10:36 AM

@Huns: There has been a lot of historical analysis of texts regarding them recently, as western experience with steppe archers later on led to miss-characterizing them as mounted soldiers. The Huns were mostly on foot, and consisted of so many impressed soldiers that there is some argument as to whether they were actually an ethnicity or were simply a tribe of Germans.

I don't disagree with that speculation, but I do want to point out that after Attila, the Hun tribes were usually hired to bolster (or more often, be) the Roman cavalry forces, so they must have had a significant number of horsemen.

Grey Wolf

Keltest

2017-08-28, 10:37 AM

To be fair, it's strange that a huge fortress like that, which was the King's refuge, and planned to withstand sieges, didn't have enormous stockpiles of arrows (as well as other weapons).

My recall is that Helm's Deep, and Rohan in general weren't really prepared to be besieged like that. Gondor was the one in proximity to, well, any enemy army. Rohan dealt more with raiders than sieging armies.

Tvtyrant

2017-08-28, 10:38 AM

I don't disagree with that speculation, but I do want to point out that after Attila, the Hun tribes were usually hired to bolster (or more often, be) the Roman cavalry forces, so they must have had a significant number of horsemen.

Grey Wolf

Yeah its an interesting idea but I don't think it totally pans out. More likely crossing the forests and mountains of Europe just killed or lamed most of their horses on long campaigns, they certainly had lots of horses in their earlier invasions of Persia the black sea region.

Grey_Wolf_c

2017-08-28, 10:50 AM

Yeah its an interesting idea but I don't think it totally pans out. More likely crossing the forests and mountains of Europe just killed or lamed most of their horses on long campaigns, they certainly had lots of horses in their earlier invasions of Persia the black sea region.

And like you pointed out, they were joined by plenty of other tribes' armies in the process, since at the time it was common to offer surrendered forces to join the winning army. So it is hard to tell which bits of the Hun army was actual Huns. And I did not mean to suggest that they were pure cavalry, anyway: just that the cavalry they had was likely better than anything the Goths or the Romans could field (the latter of which surprises exactly no-one, since the Roman cavalry was always behind the curve, even after Gallienus established the Mobile Cavalry).

Grey Wolf

Callos_DeTerran

2017-08-28, 10:55 AM

I'm afraid that I take the opinion that if you, as a professional writer of any stripe who is getting paid actual money to do a thing, cannot be arsed to spend at least the same effort in thinking or reasearch as I do when making a forum post, you don't really deserve to be doing your job.

This goes to all levels of writing, fiction or otherwise.

There is no excuse for it, ever. I should not have, at the age of four, been able to point to a segment children's preported educational program and put my hand up with a laundry list of factual errors so basic it was clear the animator had literally never picked up a dinosaur book ever. That was no excuse in the 1980s it sure as HELL isn't an excuse now.

...I...wow...I'm not even sure I can accurately describe how absurd this opinion sounds. Do you consume a lot of fiction? How much of it do you actually enjoy?

Manga Shoggoth

2017-08-28, 11:17 AM

On the other paw, the King had been dominated by a guy that was doing everything in his power to weaken him, so it is not unlikely that the fortress was not properly stocked, and that even if it had been, that the arrows were the wrong length for Elven bows.

If I recall the book correctly: during Helms Deep, Legolas comments that he is reduced to looking for spent arrows. He is also shown at one point (not necessarly at Helms Deep) looking for orc arrows that are longer in the shaft than the normal orc arrow.

They probably do, they just aren't in usable condition due to lack of upkeep (king was nuts). Arrows especially do not keep well because fletchings were glued on and the glue would dissolve over time. Arrows also warp easily, being slender wands, and are hard to make well.

Nitpick: Fletchings were glued and bound on the arrow, not just glued. Binding has been done with anything from Hair, silk thread and linen thread. A well bound arrow is probably still fireable even if the glue has degraded.

I'm not sure how much an arrow can warp before being useless, but arrows do actually deform quite a lot in flight.

This may be of interest: Bind a Medieval Arrow (https://archery.wonderhowto.com/how-to/bind-medieval-arrow-192795/).

Grey_Wolf_c

2017-08-28, 11:26 AM

If I recall the book correctly: during Helms Deep, Legolas comments that he is reduced to looking for spent arrows. He is also shown at one point (not necessarly at Helms Deep) looking for orc arrows that are longer in the shaft than the normal orc arrow.

Wow. I love when my random speculation actually matches book details I have completely forgotten.

GW

warty goblin

2017-08-28, 11:28 AM

To be fair, Tolkien couldn't not have known that. Plate tectonics wasn't proven or widely accpeted until the 50s and 60s which is after Tolkien wrote the bulk of the stuff. Generally speaking, let's not get bogged down in dates too much.

Also, he was linguist, and not an author, and that distinction was important to Tolkien. Tolkien's intricate worldbuilding was centered on languages and not so much other stuff he'd have little reason to know much about any more so than the next guy. Now a better example would be him messing up how to pluralise dwarves. Since that was actually in his field of expertise. That said, most of us tend to bow to his authority on that matter, going so far as to ignore the fact he himself pointed out he made that mistake. Cause dwarves just sounds cooler.

To be really fair, Middle Earth is a divinely made world which has only been a sphere (or at least a sphere in its current configuration, I can't remember if Middle Earth was flat until Valinor was relocated) for a couple thousand years. A lot of the geography is either set up for strategical advantage by either the source of all evil in the universe or his right hand man, or is the result of a literally continent sinking war against said evil that happened, geologically speaking, yesterday.

Complaining about the lack of plate tectonics is dumb. Rather like complaining that the elves can't be ageless and immortal because of entropy, or you can't possibly sail a wood and cloth ship on a straight road out of the world because you can't hit escape velocity and even if you could everyone would perish by the time the ship made it to space.

It's fantasy. Nearly by definition it contains things that cannot exist. Complaining that this gets the science wrong is like shooting fish in an aquarium; at once easy, likely to upset aquarium fanciers, and utterly oblivious to the reason most people like aquariums in the first place. To wit, I like fantasy because it contains dragons. Pointing out that dragons can't exist, or the author didn't think through the market implications of dragons or everybody should already know that cavalry charges against dragons is stupid or whatever is easy, and likely to be annoying.

Which isn't to say that you can't write fantasy - even good fantasy - that has all the plate tectonics and believable watersheds and migration patterns and orbital dynamics and strictly realistic battlefield tactics with dragons taking off from aircraft carriers* and whatever else it is that turns your particular set of screws that you want. It is however weird and reductive in the extreme to make this some sort of requirement for fantasy as a whole. Different things work for different stories! I like a rather poorly known fantasy novel called Firethorn in part because it's not clear that the narrator isn't tripping on mushrooms, I like A Game of Thrones because it's a sort of souped up but sort of realistic take on history with occasional bits of really definite fantasy for flavoring, and I like Tanith Lee's Flat Earth novels which happen on a literally flat Earth with absentee gods, actual demons living under the earth, where kissing an air spirit can cause pregnancy and having sex with seven virgins will break the seal on the well of immortality because symbolism.

And if anything, given how dour, unmagical and politically obsessed a lot of contemporary fantasy seems to be, I'd rather we skew a bit more towards the Tanith Lee end of the spectrum again. Sometimes I just want to read about doomed romances with impossibly perfect robot demigods.

*which is awesome, and I would totally read that.

Aotrs Commander

2017-08-28, 12:00 PM

...I...wow...I'm not even sure I can accurately describe how absurd this opinion sounds. Do you consume a lot of fiction? How much of it do you actually enjoy?

A lot. Including a lot fanfiction.

"Things happen because the story says so" is just bad writing. If the author can't be bothered to show that they spent five minutes providing a credible reason for something to happen, then they are not worth my time, nor anyone else's. There is simply no excuse for not. Thinking. (Actually, this applies to any line of work or life or unlife, not just creative work.)

One only has to look at the very webcomic this forum exists because of to see a good example of how to do it right.

(Rich is a genuinely, unquestionably masterful story-teller.)

At least make some attempt to explain/give reasons/context. Even if the explanation isn't always right, at least show you, the author, have actually THOUGHT about it. In short - show your workings. I can forgive Centurions their occasional silly plot holes because a fair chunk of the time it showed that they writers were trying and thinking, unlike, say, MASK or Thundercats or Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, where often things just happened Because.

So, don't say "magic/technology did it", at least try to provide some level of thought behind it; no-one - not even me - expects you to be able explain how FTL works except in general terms - but you DO need to explain in general terms. ("She breathes through her skin" is a pretty terrible justification that feels more like an excuse than a reason, but I can at least give it the small benefit of not being just "because." It is a pretty cruddy explanation, but it IS an explanation, which has some relation with plausiblilty.)

I'm sorry for being perhaps more testy on this subject than on many others, but the one thing I absolutely cannot STAND in any walk of life is people who cannot be arsed to actually think or try. Double especially for people whose JOB it is to do those things.

Closet_Skeleton

2017-08-28, 12:32 PM

And it is very boring, as all pike pushes tend to be. So they added an entirely ficticious attack under the pikes, just to have something to show.

Pikes probably didn't push at each other and they did have skirmisher's protecting them. The whole point of a Tercio is that its a mixed weapon formation. The pikes are more there for area denial and deterring cavalry charges than for taking out other pike blocks.

Be aware, though, that by the time Attila unified the Hun tribes, they had been squatting in previously Goth territory (which itself had previously been the Roman territory of Dacia) for a couple of generations. The Huns as a group might have been Mongolian in culture (whatever that means), but Attila is unlikely to have been born anywhere near modern Mongolia - more likely, he was born in Eastern Europe somewhere.

Attila's armies were mostly made up of Germanics while Hunic mercenaries served in lots of armies, its not known if Attila ever 'united' the Huns, its even possible that there were Huns on both sides of the wars he thought against the Romans. In fact, Attila's 'Hunic' Empire was really a Germanic empire with a Hun descended dynasty as well as Sarmatian and other minor elements.

Attila's court probably mostly spoke Gothic along with various Turkic languages and all the writing part of his administration was done in Gothic, despite most of the famous Gothic tribes not being under his rule.

I don't disagree with that speculation, but I do want to point out that after Attila, the Hun tribes were usually hired to bolster (or more often, be) the Roman cavalry forces, so they must have had a significant number of horsemen.

Before Attila's reign. Attila reigned around 434-453 while the heyday of Hun mercenaries was around 370 to 410. After Attila the Huns pretty much disappear as the various subject peoples revolted against his heirs.

All descriptions of Hunic culture is basically just rehashed versions of Greek writings on the Scythians of eight centuries prior so all the information on their tactics is pretty unreliable. Its not just fiction that turns everything into a badly researched cliche, much of history, even or 'primary' sources are just as bad.

The Glyphstone

2017-08-28, 12:39 PM

Which isn't to say that you can't write fantasy - even good fantasy - that has all the plate tectonics and believable watersheds and migration patterns and orbital dynamics and strictly realistic battlefield tactics with dragons taking off from aircraft carriers* and whatever else it is that turns your particular set of screws that you want.
*which is awesome, and I would totally read that.

Ever read Naomi Novik's Temeraire series? Napoleonic Wars WITH DRAGONS adding a WW1-analoguous air combat element. They have large, flat-topped transport ships primarily meant to ferry dragons from one combat zone to another, but that also end up being used as impromptu carrier platforms for their cargo from time to time.

Grey_Wolf_c

2017-08-28, 12:57 PM

Before Attila's reign. Attila reigned around 434-453 while the heyday of Hun mercenaries was around 370 to 410. After Attila the Huns pretty much disappear as the various subject peoples revolted against his heirs.

Majorian's heavy use of Hun armies to support his reign disagrees with your assessment.

GW

deuterio12

2017-08-28, 02:09 PM

Ever read Naomi Novik's Temeraire series? Napoleonic Wars WITH DRAGONS adding a WW1-analoguous air combat element. They have large, flat-topped transport ships primarily meant to ferry dragons from one combat zone to another, but that also end up being used as impromptu carrier platforms for their cargo from time to time.

Pretty good books, but it's a bit strange how the rest of the military still work pretty much the same. Still big blocks of infantry and still lots of cavalry despite being explicitly stated that horses are terrified of dragons.

Also the air element is a lot more significant than any WW1 air force since you either have a counter for the enemy dragons (bring your own or heavy artillery) or you get wrecked, no exceptions. Doubly so because even if you try to dig in for cover the dragons are perfectly happy to land and claw you out.

And considering how on the books only gunpowder based weapons really pose a threat to dragons outside of other dragons, one has to wonder how did wars go before in that setting.

Contrast with Game of Thrones, where the guy who got dragons to work for him basically conquered the continent until his family line ran out of dragons. Then one of their descendants gets dragons again and she procceeds to basically roflstomp everybody else that dares to get on her path.

Traab

2017-08-28, 02:33 PM

Pretty good books, but it's a bit strange how the rest of the military still work pretty much the same. Still big blocks of infantry and still lots of cavalry despite being explicitly stated that horses are terrified of dragons.

Also the air element is a lot more significant than any WW1 air force since you either have a counter for the enemy dragons (bring your own or heavy artillery) or you get wrecked, no exceptions. Doubly so because even if you try to dig in for cover the dragons are perfectly happy to land and claw you out.

And considering how on the books only gunpowder based weapons really pose a threat to dragons outside of other dragons, one has to wonder how did wars go before in that setting.

Contrast with Game of Thrones, where the guy who got dragons to work for him basically conquered the continent until his family line ran out of dragons. Then one of their descendants gets dragons again and she procceeds to basically roflstomp everybody else that dares to get on her path.

I read a series awhile back that was set in basically ancient egypt where they also had dragons. The thing is, they dont breath fire, they just fly so they werent quite as much of a game changer as classic dragons. They were used to drop firebombs (clay pots full of pitch or oil with burning rags mostly) scout for their side from the air, or even to drag officers from the enemy side into the air and drop them. They tended to joust, like ye olde knights in medieval fiction with each other, only without much in the way of armor (that stuff is heavy) But yeah, despite the addition of dragons, it honestly didnt change overall army tactics that much aside from "Hey, look up from time to time, if you see a dragon.... SHOOT IT!"

The interesting thing was that within the main story there was debate on things like if dragons were even worth the effort it took to use them. They had to be captured, drugged into compliance, and excessively trained. Plus they ate a LOT. So the argument was, "are they contributing enough to the war effort to justify the expense? Or should we scrap the program and work on making stronger bows to shoot down their dragons instead?"

Closet_Skeleton

2017-08-28, 02:38 PM

Majorian's heavy use of Hun armies to support his reign disagrees with your assessment.

GW

That's only 6 years after Attila's death and doesn't contradict the exploits of Hun mercenaries decades earlier. I didn't say the Huns vanished immediately, just that Attila is the end not the start of their importance.

I just thought that your post implied that the Huns started becoming mercenaries because Attila died which is really not an accurate picutre.

Tyndmyr

2017-08-28, 02:47 PM

It makes sense, but it is also weirdly misplaced. It was the Goth tribes that were terrible at sieging. What made the Huns so terrible for the Roman Empire was that they could take walled cities, which the Goths never really managed to do consistently. The only thing that ever stopped Attila's conquest was the ridiculously impregnable walls of Constantinople. Everywhere else that did not have a triple wall defending it was sieged, assaulted and sacked pretty much immediately. And if you tell me that the Dothraki are instead supposed to be more like the Khanate mongol armies, they too were quite capable of sieges.

Grey Wolf

Per author, they're a synthesis of many such cultures. Different aspects from all.

Given that they don't have a ton of walled cities to take, and those that do exist will cheerfully pay tribute to not deal with them, it does sort of make sense that the Dothraki are less practiced at sieging. They mostly don't have to deal with that aspect of Westerosi combat. They've literally never come to Westeros before.

There's a few things that change given the necessary changes from RL into fantasy worlds, and I'm generally okay with that. Folks changing strategy due to say, Dragons, is not only reasonable, but NOT doing so would hurt credibility/realism. We don't need a documentary instead of fantasy, we just want our fantasy to appear convincing.

Gnoman

2017-08-28, 03:11 PM

Which isn't to say that you can't write fantasy - even good fantasy - that has all the plate tectonics and believable watersheds and migration patterns and orbital dynamics and strictly realistic battlefield tactics with dragons taking off from aircraft carriers*

*which is awesome, and I would totally read that.

Have you ever heard of Harry Turtledove's Darkness series? It is essentially WWII - except fought with magic instead of technology. There's dragon-carrier ships in it.

Ever read Naomi Novik's Temeraire series? Napoleonic Wars WITH DRAGONS adding a WW1-analoguous air combat element. They have large, flat-topped transport ships primarily meant to ferry dragons from one combat zone to another, but that also end up being used as impromptu carrier platforms for their cargo from time to time.

Thanks a lot. I saw the first book of this series several years ago, intended to check it out, and forgot what it was. Now I can add it to the list when I start buying books again.

deuterio12

2017-08-28, 03:47 PM

I read a series awhile back that was set in basically ancient egypt where they also had dragons. The thing is, they dont breath fire, they just fly so they werent quite as much of a game changer as classic dragons. They were used to drop firebombs (clay pots full of pitch or oil with burning rags mostly) scout for their side from the air, or even to drag officers from the enemy side into the air and drop them. They tended to joust, like ye olde knights in medieval fiction with each other, only without much in the way of armor (that stuff is heavy) But yeah, despite the addition of dragons, it honestly didnt change overall army tactics that much aside from "Hey, look up from time to time, if you see a dragon.... SHOOT IT!"

The interesting thing was that within the main story there was debate on things like if dragons were even worth the effort it took to use them. They had to be captured, drugged into compliance, and excessively trained. Plus they ate a LOT. So the argument was, "are they contributing enough to the war effort to justify the expense? Or should we scrap the program and work on making stronger bows to shoot down their dragons instead?"

In the Temeraire series there's many different races of dragons each with their own characteristics and stuff like acid/fire breathing are pretty rare. However everybody and their mother uses the "ride on top of dragon and throw nasty stuff at the enemy below".

Logistics, in particular eating, are also heavily discussed too. Animals in Temeraire seem to reproduce/grow a lot faster since there's stuff like African dragons regularly eating elephants, which should've driven elephants extinct by now, but I guess it's possible they evolved otherwise with such a predator around. In Europe cattle production seems to be at almost industrial levels, and the number of dragons you can maintain in your army is basically directly proportional to how much meat you can produce to feed them.

Still dragons are always worth it because they fly fast and far away and that alone is a massive game changer. Small dragons are used to carry messages and small packages, the bigger dragons can carry hundreds of fully geared soldiers.

Also virtually immune to bows I guess. Even handguns will only sting them unless you get a really lucky shot in an eye.

Grey_Wolf_c

2017-08-28, 03:55 PM

Per author, they're a synthesis of many such cultures. Different aspects from all.

Given that they don't have a ton of walled cities to take, and those that do exist will cheerfully pay tribute to not deal with them, it does sort of make sense that the Dothraki are less practiced at sieging. They mostly don't have to deal with that aspect of Westerosi combat. They've literally never come to Westeros before.

There's a few things that change given the necessary changes from RL into fantasy worlds, and I'm generally okay with that. Folks changing strategy due to say, Dragons, is not only reasonable, but NOT doing so would hurt credibility/realism. We don't need a documentary instead of fantasy, we just want our fantasy to appear convincing.

Oh, I have no problem with the Dothraki, as their own culture. I'm complaining about every reader who goes "oh, those are Huns/Mongols, therefore they should X, Y and Z" when from where I sit, other than "have horses", they don't really fit either army type all that much.

GW

Lethologica

2017-08-28, 04:26 PM

Novik's dragons start out weird due to being forced into the Napoleonic Wars naval analogy. Way more useful for troop transport and way less useful for being dragons than one would expect, until one remembers that they're basically ships. The role of dragons rapidly evolves through the course of the series due to the alternate history tourism, though.

Ronnoc

2017-08-28, 04:50 PM

A lot. Including a lot fanfiction.

"Things happen because the story says so" is just bad writing. If the author can't be bothered to show that they spent five minutes providing a credible reason for something to happen, then they are not worth my time, nor anyone else's. There is simply no excuse for not. Thinking. (Actually, this applies to any line of work or life or unlife, not just creative work.)

One only has to look at the very webcomic this forum exists because of to see a good example of how to do it right.

(Rich is a genuinely, unquestionably masterful story-teller.)

At least make some attempt to explain/give reasons/context. Even if the explanation isn't always right, at least show you, the author, have actually THOUGHT about it. In short - show your workings. I can forgive Centurions their occasional silly plot holes because a fair chunk of the time it showed that they writers were trying and thinking, unlike, say, MASK or Thundercats or Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, where often things just happened Because.

So, don't say "magic/technology did it", at least try to provide some level of thought behind it; no-one - not even me - expects you to be able explain how FTL works except in general terms - but you DO need to explain in general terms. ("She breathes through her skin" is a pretty terrible justification that feels more like an excuse than a reason, but I can at least give it the small benefit of not being just "because." It is a pretty cruddy explanation, but it IS an explanation, which has some relation with plausiblilty.)

I'm sorry for being perhaps more testy on this subject than on many others, but the one thing I absolutely cannot STAND in any walk of life is people who cannot be arsed to actually think or try. Double especially for people whose JOB it is to do those things.

First things first, an author's job is not to think about and research history, that's an historian's job. An author's job is to tell an engaging enough story that a publisher is willing to gamble on it selling well. From a publisher's perspective verisimilitude is all well and good but it takes a distant fourth place behind engaging characters, a satisfying plot payoff, and spectacle when it comes to selling stories. Authors have to weigh how much time their spending on any aspect of their work against that list of priorities. Forum posts, fanfiction, even to a much lesser extent OotS, don't have to worry about making a publisher's deadline. You can spend all the time on research you want, that doesn't hold for authors if they want to stay professional.

Now based off of the authors I've spoken with at conventions if you want to make a living as a professional writer you need to sell roughly two books a year. When working on a book at most you can spend a month on outlining, research, and worldbuilding. Any more than that and you're not going to make your two books goal. Well established authors can stretch this a little but not much. Now research and outlining time is mostly frontloaded, this is to avoid rampant continuity errors or re-writes later in production when you catch something. This does mean though that it's harder to accommodate changes later in the writing process or changes that you have to make for your editor (which will happen). Beta readers can take some of the load off but even then, things get missed.

All of this is much worse in television writing where the realities of production often means that scripts are still being revised within a week of filming. Even once the script is finalized you are still at the mercy of your director's and editor's artistic sensibilities.

This isn't to say that research and verisimilitude aren't worthy things that we should look for in fiction, they are, but their absence isn't a sign of laziness.

Traab

2017-08-28, 05:46 PM

In the Temeraire series there's many different races of dragons each with their own characteristics and stuff like acid/fire breathing are pretty rare. However everybody and their mother uses the "ride on top of dragon and throw nasty stuff at the enemy below".

Logistics, in particular eating, are also heavily discussed too. Animals in Temeraire seem to reproduce/grow a lot faster since there's stuff like African dragons regularly eating elephants, which should've driven elephants extinct by now, but I guess it's possible they evolved otherwise with such a predator around. In Europe cattle production seems to be at almost industrial levels, and the number of dragons you can maintain in your army is basically directly proportional to how much meat you can produce to feed them.

Still dragons are always worth it because they fly fast and far away and that alone is a massive game changer. Small dragons are used to carry messages and small packages, the bigger dragons can carry hundreds of fully geared soldiers.

Also virtually immune to bows I guess. Even handguns will only sting them unless you get a really lucky shot in an eye.

In The Dragon Jousters by Mercedes Lackey they come in one standard size, basically, large enough to fly you comfortably, but capable of lifting up to another person as well for short bursts. And lets face it, even without breath attacks, air superiority is very important. In this series they basically set things up like this. Its egypt, there are a lot of gods, they all require sacrifices, and in a capitol city that is a LOT of dead meat that has to go somewhere. So they get mostly subsidized on food through the priesthood, though they still have to produce some of their own. The fliers also get a sort of semi nobility in that they have the authority to demand just about anything from a citizen short of undue burden. For example, if you owned a flock of geese he could demand one for a snack for his dragon. If you had one goose you used to guard your property, they couldnt take that from you. So there was also the cultural issue involved. These guys are treated like near royalty, take obscene amounts of funds to keep going, and are a serious pita to train since they are basically like falcons that can and will kill you if they "wake up" enough to get aggressive. The dragons are wild animals only kept under control with drugs. So even though they are very useful in numerous ways, there will always be a faction griping about them being "worth it"

Blackhawk748

2017-08-28, 09:07 PM

MURDER STROKE!!

I love Half Swording and Murder Strokes, though i was talking about Archers and they could totally have Maces as their side arm.

Chives

2017-08-28, 09:50 PM

I've not seen the movie, but that nonsense about "predisposition to genocide" makes me think they added a plothole where there was none.

Seconding this. The description makes it sound like the movie is heavily divorced from the books.

snowblizz

2017-08-29, 02:21 AM

To be really fair, Middle Earth is a divinely made world which has only been a sphere (or at least a sphere in its current configuration, I can't remember if Middle Earth was flat until Valinor was relocated) for a couple thousand years. A lot of the geography is either set up for strategical advantage by either the source of all evil in the universe or his right hand man, or is the result of a literally continent sinking war against said evil that happened, geologically speaking, yesterday.
That's the Watsonian explanation. Which at several points here has been criticised, as "it's magic!" means no explanation required.
That's another argument.

It's fantasy. Nearly by definition it contains things that cannot exist. Complaining that this gets the science wrong is like shooting fish in an aquarium; at once easy, likely to upset aquarium fanciers, and utterly oblivious to the reason most people like aquariums in the first place. To wit, I like fantasy because it contains dragons. Pointing out that dragons can't exist, or the author didn't think through the market implications of dragons or everybody should already know that cavalry charges against dragons is stupid or whatever is easy, and likely to be annoying.
I however, was replying to the argument that the story was bad because Tolkien had not provided a Doylist explanation he could not have known.
If complaining about the science in fantasy is wrong, isn't it even more so to complain that the science is wrong because it hasn't been invented yet when the story was penned?

DataNinja

2017-08-29, 02:22 AM

Seconding this. The description makes it sound like the movie is heavily divorced from the books.

It is, but that's mainly due to the fault of the much-reduced timeframe, and difficulty of conveying what's going on inside a character's head in movies. They basically skipped the whole isolation and self-reliance parts altogether. So, yeah... the movie was definitely lackluster in that regard (and basically all of them, besides perhaps cool visuals) compared to the book.

Closet_Skeleton

2017-08-29, 03:40 AM

That's the Watsonian explanation. Which at several points here has been criticised, as "it's magic!" means no explanation required.
That's another argument.

I however, was replying to the argument that the story was bad because Tolkien had not provided a Doylist explanation he could not have known.
If complaining about the science in fantasy is wrong, isn't it even more so to complain that the science is wrong because it hasn't been invented yet when the story was penned?

Plate tectonics is a feature of earth's geology, its unknown how it applies to other planets but many of them don't appear to have the same geological structure or appear to have ceased being geologically active. There are competing models for the early geology of earth and none of them involve the plate tectonics that developed latter.

The forces involved in the creation of middle earth is not "a wizard did it", there's a full creation story that is reflected in the setting's metaphysics. Porting materialistic assumptions into a setting where the main source of daylight completely changes every epoch stretches credulity far more than evoking magic does.

Slartybartfast claims to have made the fjords of Norway, saying that Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy is inaccurate because it was actually glacial action would be missing the point.

gomipile

2017-08-29, 04:45 AM

Hollywood does not work like that: They know what we like.

Is that even true, though? In terms of practical applied philosophy I mean.

It seems to me that "They [Hollywood] know what we like." cannot be completely true, since the number of things and qualities of "what we like" is infinite in several ways.

I'll grant you that they have some information about what their audience has liked in the past, but that is nowhere near enough to possibly completely describe "what we like" in detail.

The Extinguisher

2017-08-29, 05:43 AM

Brother Oni

2017-08-29, 06:31 AM

And if you tell me that the Dothraki are instead supposed to be more like the Khanate mongol armies, they too were quite capable of sieges.

Only after they captured some Chinese kingdoms and started becoming the Yuan Dynasty.

In their early days before gaining access to Chinese siege engineering, they had significant issues taking their first cities in the Western Xia kingdom. One fortification they took by retreating which fooled the garrison into leaving to chase after them; when they besieged the capital of Western Xia, they pretty much failed (including a messed up flooding attempt, which ended up putting the Mongol camp underwater) and the defenders only surrendered to stop further damage to their kingdom (paying tribute would have been cheaper than repairing all the destruction).

The second time the Mongols came back to Western Xia to punish them for their betrayal, the fortifications weren't an issue.

I love Half Swording and Murder Strokes, though i was talking about Archers and they could totally have Maces as their side arm.

While they could, they would be more likely to have knives, swords and other more common weapons as archers tend not to be as rich as knights or other proper men at arms. I do concede at the Battle of Agincourt, the English archers did use mallets for tent pegs to finish off the French knights stuck in the mud.

Vinyadan

2017-08-29, 06:43 AM

Is that even true, though? In terms of practical applied philosophy I mean.

It seems to me that "They [Hollywood] know what we like." cannot be completely true, since the number of things and qualities of "what we like" is infinite in several ways.

I'll grant you that they have some information about what their audience has liked in the past, but that is nowhere near enough to possibly completely describe "what we like" in detail.

I think "they know what we'll pay for" is more correct.

comicshorse

2017-08-29, 06:53 AM

While they could, they would be more likely to have knives, swords and other more common weapons as archers tend not to be as rich as knights or other proper men at arms. I do concede at the Battle of Agincourt, the English archers did use mallets for tent pegs to finish off the French knights stuck in the mud.

I wouldn't be surprised if they used the tent pegs as well :smalleek:

Tyndmyr

2017-08-29, 07:55 AM

I think "they know what we'll pay for" is more correct.

Same thing.

If I say I like a kind of movie, but buy tickets for another kind of movie instead, well...clearly I like the second kind of movie more.

Doesn't matter if it's critically acclaimed or "good" or any of that. Money's a pretty decent metric of what movies people enjoy.

Now, Hollywood's knowledge isn't perfect, mind you. They *often* make movies that people hate, so clearly they're not omniscient. It's just that profitability really is a reasonable bar for them to use. People like Avengers movies, as shown by piles of money? Make more Avengers movies. Angry posts on the internet mean little compared to the vast crowds who are perfectly content to shell out to see another one.

Manga Shoggoth

2017-08-29, 12:15 PM

Slartybartfast claims to have made the fjords of Norway, saying that Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy is inaccurate because it was actually glacial action would be missing the point.

Actually, Slartibartfast used glaciation to create the fjords in Norway, and intended to do the same thing for Africa (his assignment in Earth V2). When the mice tell him that they will no longer be needing Earth V2 his response is along the lines of "You can't mean that! I have hundreds of glaciers poised to run over Africa"

Lethologica

2017-08-29, 01:27 PM

That's the Watsonian explanation. Which at several points here has been criticised, as "it's magic!" means no explanation required.
Not exactly. "It's magic" means the magic is the explanation, and it can be a good or bad explanation. It's a bad explanation when the magic's development is grossly inadequate to the narrative need it's supposed to satisfy, but that's often not the case. Brandon Sanderson, for example, routinely crafts his plots around features of his magic systems--"it's magic" is technically the explanation for most things in the Mistborn trilogy, but the magic is fleshed out enough that it actually explains what's happening. Tolkien treats his magic very differently than Sanderson does, but it's equally (if not more) developed in its own way, and a more than sufficient in-world explanation for the question posed.

Your answer is of course correct from an out-of-universe perspective, as far as it goes. However, even if Tolkien didn't know about plate tectonics, he could still observe the real-world shapes/behaviors of mountain ranges, so absent an in-world explanation there would still be the question (albeit much diminished) of why some of Arda's mountain ranges don't match those behaviors.

Anonymouswizard

2017-08-29, 01:39 PM

If Tolkien tells you something is magic it's not going to have a direct effect on the story. If Sanderson tells you it's magic it's the centrepiece of the story. In the former case magic is vague (although IME magic items seem rather well defined in Tolkien, an item will do a thing because it's magic but it won't suddenly shoot fire), in the latter it's specific, but you won't get it used as a handwave for plot important stuff (other than 'how does the ring work').

Also, in Tolkien's universe almost everything happens because of magic, magic just seems to be 'what men and hobbits can't normally do'. It's just that magic generally seems to at least have intent behind it.

Lethologica

2017-08-29, 02:09 PM

Tolkien has magic directly affect (and effect, for that matter) the story all the time. Even more so in the Silmarillion, but it's all over the place in LotR and the Hobbit, too. I think you're working too hard to build the contrast between Sanderson and Tolkien (though a significant one does exist), and perhaps taking Sanderson's laws a bit too seriously.

Aotrs Commander

2017-08-29, 04:38 PM

The fact that you hold up Order of the Stick as an example of what you're talking about shows that it's not actually as important as you think. Oots is such an example of "things happen because the story says so" that narrative is an in universe force and genre savyness is an incredibly powerful ability. I guarantee you that The Giant doesn't think about things beyond "what makes the best story" (this is not a bad thing)

Considering how carefully planned and executed OotS is (and plans changing or be adapted on the fly is still planning), I have to completely disgree with your here. It is very clear to me Rich does quite a lot of planning. (One only has to read a few pages of the forum release strip to see people often analysing this and that from this and that strip hundreds of strips ago or something.)

There is a big different between planning what (events/tactics/characterisations) makes a good story and having things happen just because the story says they have to. (See: large numbers of bad movies/adaptions (let's say, a Uwe Boll movie) where things just happen because the script says there needs to be a conflict now, nevermind the sense of it.

Maybe I'm not being clear enough, so let me grab the example that I can think of from a recent Cinema Snob review on the Sex in the City movies, set after the series (which, I have to say, I have absolutely no knowledge of whatsoever, but Brad most certainly did). In that, two gay characters were getting married; Brad informs me that these two characters (both from the show) apparently hated each other in the show, but in the movies they were paired off just because. That's the sort of thing I'm talking about. Things that don't make sense given prior context, which are just done in the moment to serve the story (but in fact usually do the reverse).

To do the same OotS would have to, I dunno... Have Belkar start and affair with V or something; or maybe Haley, because our hypothetical-not-good-writer-Giant decides that Elan getting into a feud with Belkar and/or Haley is Drama that needs to happen or something. Or... I can't even think of a tactical one pertinent to the thread... Maybe V casting a summoning spell (Conjuration being of of V's banned schools) for the duration of one fight with no explanation. (The point being, it would not be hard, if that latter was required, to work around it; V has a scroll and makes a successful UMD check (or have Haley or Elan use a scroll for the same reason of something. Explaining things doesn't have to be rocket science or complicated, just the effort of showing the writer cares enough about the audience to make the attempt.)

Sapphire Guard

2017-08-29, 06:26 PM

Tolkien's worldbuilding repeatedly has various deities raise or destroy mountains in the Silmarillion. That's more than enough justification for odd mountain structures.

There's a middle ground. At some point you have to take the word of the character in the story as to how magic works and what it can do, otherwise your story ends up looking like a rules sourcebook. A non earth world doesn't have to run completely by earth rules, although it usually can't just be completely random either.

I generally use a rule of thumb that a character who lives in a universe and for whom its rules are life and death knows the rules of the system better than I do by reading one book/watching one movie, and unless a glaring issue arises, I'll take their word that they know what they're doing.

Olinser

2017-08-29, 08:15 PM

Jay R

2017-08-29, 10:28 PM

My experience is that Hollywood productions about making a movie or putting on a show are usually quite accurate. They know how to make movies and put on shows.

Fighting battles? Not so much.

Scarlet Knight

2017-08-29, 11:16 PM

You mean how in the Battle of 5 Armies movie the elves leap OVER a perfectly good shield wall to fight the orcs that the shields were protecting them from instead of raining arrow hell on them?

gomipile

2017-08-30, 04:27 AM

I think "they know what we'll pay for" is more correct.

They know what we have paid for and failed to pay for in the past. That isn't the same as knowing what we will pay for in the future. It is a good bit of information to base guesses on, but it isn't complete.

Jay R

2017-08-30, 10:15 AM

They know what we have paid for and failed to pay for in the past. That isn't the same as knowing what we will pay for in the future. It is a good bit of information to base guesses on, but it isn't complete.

Yes, of course statistical results are incomplete. The entire basis of statistics is that all such answers are incorrect. The best you can hope for is to be pretty sure you're pretty close. So it is important to estimate how sure and how close - which is what confidence intervals and significance levels are for.

They don't need "complete" information. They only need sufficient information to continue to generate industry-wide profits - which they clearly have.

Sapphire Guard

2017-08-30, 11:48 AM

I mean, as somebody who was in the military, yes, it grinds my gears that so many movies have cringe-inducing military tactics and use of weapons, but quite frankly its not particularly worse than the egregious errors Hollywood makes about other professions because they're too lazy to do actual research.

Medicine, forensic science, law, space travel, genetics, physics, martial arts, video games, religion, all of these areas frequently have utterly LUDICROUS errors in them that a basic google search or a five-minute conversation with somebody in the community could have fixed (not even an expert just an average joe who is involved in the subject).

Hollywood is just utterly terrible at doing research about ANYTHING.

Oh, they know. It's just often too hard to fit in because of budget, time, or story constraints.

Much military tactics is built on 'don't give away your position', which makes it harder for the audience to understand what's going on.

Saving Private Ryan, which is more accurate than usual, still has some problems.
The right thing to do would have been to blow the bridge immediately and replace it later, but then you avoid the big climactic battle, which wouldn't be storyline satisfying enough.

One on one fights tend to be over in ten seconds or less, but that isn't always dramatically appropriate.

Police usually won't get dramatic confessions in the box, but cop shows need a way to wrap up the episode. Boring and practical doesn't necessarily make good drama.

Realism is a means to an end, not an end in itself, unless you're making a documentary.

Gnoman

2017-08-30, 12:00 PM

Saving Private Ryan, which is more accurate than usual, still has some problems.
The right thing to do would have been to blow the bridge immediately and replace it later, but then you avoid the big climactic battle, which wouldn't be storyline satisfying enough.

In a tactical sense, that might be reasonable.

In a strategic sense, there's a high chance that the necessary delay would give the Germans time to marshal their forces and lead to tens of thousands of extra Allied casualties. You never, ever, ever blow up a bridge in the direction your army is moving (in the very near future) unless you have no other choice.

rs2excelsior

2017-08-31, 11:40 PM

I think it's almost more frustrating when things make an effort to be realistic, but then horribly, horribly miss the point. Like battle at the end of The Patriot. The Continentals are charging in the typical willy-nilly fashion you see all over Hollywood and hardly ever among well disciplined troops of the time. They see the British suddenly. They stop and reform the line, for the express purpose of BEING SHOT AT, then immediately break their ranks to resume the willy-nilly charge, and the Brits do likewise. They tried to show that armies fought in battle lines, but completely and utterly missed the point about why. Charging in a blob instead of a line is idiotic to begin with, STOPPING a charge for the express purpose of letting the enemy shoot you is even more so. Carry the attack home and either disrupt their fire or cut off their chance to fire at all. It's not like being in a straight line makes you more resistant to bullets.

It's fantasy. Nearly by definition it contains things that cannot exist. Complaining that this gets the science wrong is like shooting fish in an aquarium; at once easy, likely to upset aquarium fanciers, and utterly oblivious to the reason most people like aquariums in the first place.

Would you mind if I sigged this? This made me laugh more than anything else I've read today.
Also I was totally going to recommend the Temeraire series but I was beaten to it.

warty goblin

2017-09-01, 09:47 AM

Would you mind if I sigged this? This made me laugh more than anything else I've read today.
Also I was totally going to recommend the Temeraire series but I was beaten to it.
Go right ahead.

Algeh

2017-09-01, 01:58 PM

I mean, as somebody who was in the military, yes, it grinds my gears that so many movies have cringe-inducing military tactics and use of weapons, but quite frankly its not particularly worse than the egregious errors Hollywood makes about other professions because they're too lazy to do actual research.

Medicine, forensic science, law, space travel, genetics, physics, martial arts, video games, religion, all of these areas frequently have utterly LUDICROUS errors in them that a basic google search or a five-minute conversation with somebody in the community could have fixed (not even an expert just an average joe who is involved in the subject).

Hollywood is just utterly terrible at doing research about ANYTHING.

I don't think it's just lack of research, because shows about schools get a lot of details about schools wrong too, and I assume that most of the writers went to 7th grade at some point.

Most rules and procedures in various industries and professions are put in place to keep big, dramatic, time-and-resource-wasting things (explosions, arguments, whatever) from happening in various ways. Generally, when some big, dramatic thing does happen, we get one or more new rules afterward to try to keep it from happening again.

It makes better stories when dramatic things happen.

Making a story about dramatic things happening within a system with sensible rules put in place to keep drama from happening all the time will involve a story with a lot more moving parts, side notes, and long explanations than one where you ignore those rules and go ahead and have the straightforward drama.

Anonymouswizard

2017-09-01, 02:16 PM

Making a story about dramatic things happening within a system with sensible rules put in place to keep drama from happening all the time will involve a story with a lot more moving parts, side notes, and long explanations than one where you ignore those rules and go ahead and have the straightforward drama.

Sometimes the second story is better, sometimes the first story is better, it all depends on the writer. Although I haven't read his other works I found the infodump in Snow Crash to blend in rather perfectly because of how it was handled, to the point I didn't realise it was blatant until after I've read it. Peter F. Hamilton manages to write interesting stories while staying away from some of the classic 'things happen' space opera tropes (and playing the others so straight they just work, I've never seen space elves as cool as the Silfen or sufficiently advanced aliens as awesome as the [minor spoiler]). At the same time, a pulpy 'space is like an ocean because that's easy' story can be just as good, if the author approaches it in the right way.

With regards to realistic military tactics, I suspect they work much better in a book where you can have a little bit of discussion about why they work and easily fast forward through the boring battle. Because strangely, if done right, a bunch of people talking about the battle they're commanding can be interesting in and off itself. It takes a different skill set and you've got to make the dialogue interesting, but following the big battle scene loosely and at a high level can work. So can having a cool disorganised charge.

I'd actually love to see someone attempt a war movie where the only shots of battles are the generals and other high level people talking about them, rather than the fights we've come to expect. It'll be a different movie for sure, but it'll still be interesting to see if it can be done.

Brother Oni

2017-09-01, 06:52 PM

I'd actually love to see someone attempt a war movie where the only shots of battles are the generals and other high level people talking about them, rather than the fights we've come to expect. It'll be a different movie for sure, but it'll still be interesting to see if it can be done.

Isn't that what Ender's Game tried to do?

I'm trying to think of a movie where most of the fighting is fairly high level (maybe an old war movie from post WW1 to post WW2 period?), but the closest I can think of at the moment is a manga/TV series (Kingdom which covers the Warring States period of China and between the Dynasty Warriors level slash-em-up fighting has some discussion of troop movements and strategic/tactical planning).

Lethologica

2017-09-01, 07:10 PM

Isn't that what Ender's Game tried to do?

I'm trying to think of a movie where most of the fighting is fairly high level (maybe an old war movie from post WW1 to post WW2 period?), but the closest I can think of at the moment is a manga/TV series (Kingdom which covers the Warring States period of China and between the Dynasty Warriors level slash-em-up fighting has some discussion of troop movements and strategic/tactical planning).
Ender's Game is somewhere between "squad leader" and "player of video game" in terms of its characters' viewpoints on battles. Even in theory, Ender isn't doing the strategic job of deciding what battles to fight, only the tactical job of how to fight them. And in practice, Ender basically micromanages every battle through the video-game interface. Oddly, placing the battle at the distant remove of the ansible in some ways only brings us closer to the fighting.

Wardog

2017-09-02, 04:53 AM

Algeh

2017-09-03, 02:57 AM

I think that can be solved quite easily, by just finding an in-story reason (including explicitly "someone was an idiot") for the proper rules to be broken.

Want a major accident in a factory resulting in explosions? Someone ignored safety procedures / the owners refused to pay for necessary repairs / etc.

Want army A to get utterly trounced by army B? Have army A commanded by an incompetant noble who uses standard Hollywood tactics, and army B commanded by an experienced officer who uses proper tactics.

Need people to not properly secure their fort against zombies? Make it clear that the fort is too undermanned, and/or the people too exhausted or injured to check or fix all weakpoints properly.

This is true, but takes time and exposition. (And some stories just flat aren't realistic scenarios so it would take major re-working to explain how we got there from here - I could make a long list of Things That Happen In Teen Dramas That Wouldn't Fly In Any School District I've Worked In, Even The Really Dysfunctional Ones, but that's a different thread.) It's a trade off between explaining why the situation was ripe to go wrong versus getting to the interesting drama bits more quickly. This is probably why TV/movies (which are really time limited, particularly TV where shows have to come in to a specific minute exactly in the final edit) tend to skip the background exposition whereas books are more likely to take the set-up time and add the complexity.

Anonymouswizard

2017-09-03, 06:46 AM

This is probably why TV/movies (which are really time limited, particularly TV where shows have to come in to a specific minute exactly in the final edit) tend to skip the background exposition whereas books are more likely to take the set-up time and add the complexity.

Which is really the basis of the 'books are better' argument, they're not but they have the ability to get a lot more information in there.

Now I adore visual storytelling, but I do sometimes think TV shows and movies focus too much on action and not enough on explanation. While for some films that works (I adore Dredd) for a lot it can lead to it being a bit unsatisfying. The goal is really to take advantage of visual shortcuts to reduce the amount of explanation you have to do, which can fall flat when the audience doesn't recognise the visual shortcuts (as can happen when you do something different to normal).

(Hilariously this is the opposite of their other advantage, 'not limited by a special effects budget', where a book can have bigger action scenes because you can write 'a thousand fleets of a thousand ships' much more easily than you can shoe a million ships._

t209

2017-09-03, 11:22 AM

You mean how in the Battle of 5 Armies movie the elves leap OVER a perfectly good shield wall to fight the orcs that the shields were protecting them from instead of raining arrow hell on them?
Compared to charging at horde of goblins that would seem stupid if not for Goblins' natural fear against Elves that caused them to rout and run into shield wall of humans and dwarves before the Goblins rallied and began to win the war of attrition.

Darth Ultron

2017-09-03, 05:47 PM

I don't think it's just lack of research, because shows about schools get a lot of details about schools wrong too, and I assume that most of the writers went to 7th grade at some point.

It makes better stories when dramatic things happen.

It would make far better stories if they did both. Do the research, put the right stuff in and make it dramatic.

Now I adore visual storytelling, but I do sometimes think TV shows and movies focus too much on action and not enough on explanation. While for some films that works (I adore Dredd) for a lot it can lead to it being a bit unsatisfying. The goal is really to take advantage of visual shortcuts to reduce the amount of explanation you have to do, which can fall flat when the audience doesn't recognise the visual shortcuts (as can happen when you do something different to normal).

Battlestar Galactica the re-image was famous for this. I guess as they wanted to be so anti-Star Trek.

A great example was the battle in the episode Exodus. The Galactica Jumps into a planets atmosphere to launch their fighters 'under' the enemy ships, then the Galactica jumps away(before it crashes into the planet). They do explain this a bit and it makes sense. But then we see the Galactica in space, right above the planet just sitting there and getting pounded by Basestars, and for some reason damaged. To a lot of viewers this did not make any sense. To some of us with ''fictional'' knowledge we did get the vague idea that the ship could not 'jump' too far out of a gravity well of a planet and that would cause damage. But the visual of this shot is just bad and does not convey the whole idea. And like most things, 15 seconds of talk of someone saying ''just like we thought, the gravity well cut our jump short. We barley cleared the ionosphere" would have been nice.

Porthos

2017-09-03, 06:33 PM

One of the things I take issue here is the repeated idea that creators are 'lazy' if they don't take the time to do so-called* basic research.

* More on this below.

It's not that they're lazy by and large, though like in all walks of life some undoubtedly are, it's that they care about different things. Plot consistency, emotional resonance, character progression to name just a few. Or, for other types of movies, how the sets are staged, how the action visuals pay off and just what is the best way to get something to go kerplooie. And of course, other creators care about a whole host of different issues relevant to them.

Don't get me wrong, I had my own pet peeves for a long time. How computers were depicted back in the day on TV series, for instance. The way hacking and viruses were shown visually on computer screens for another.

And while the most egregious examples still prick a little, I more or less got over it. Mostly because I realized that the 'magic box' was a plot device to get things moving to the important parts.

It's also not like these things are static in storytelling. The Magic Enhance Button (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EnhanceButton) has been ridiculed for so long, that it seems to be if not falling out of favor, not nearly as woefully overused as it once was. So there is hope for those whose teeth are in danger of breaking from grinding so much.

...

I suspect we'll be hearing pewpewpew sounds (not to mention seeing starships banking) in SciFi films for a loooooooooooong time. So maybe those folks should invest in a good dental plan. :smalltongue:

==

The other point I want to quickly bring up is the so-called easy of research to address these issues. Even if this is something that could be solved with 'five minutes of Googling', which is a claim I don't fully buy, all of these research things add up. For an historical drama one wants to make the military tacticians happy? Still have the clothing experts getting their licks in. Make them happy? The political historians might start questioning things.

And so on and so on.

And that doesn't even get into areas where basic facts are disputed.

Again, this doesn't so much mean ignore it all and do nothing in regards to research and thinking about things. It's more a spectrum. But as I said at the top, it's a question of marshaling resources and time.

tl;dr: It's called "artistic license" (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ArtisticLicense) for a reason.

Lord Raziere

2017-09-03, 08:04 PM

The other point I want to quickly bring up is the so-called easy of research to address these issues. Even if this is something that could be solved with 'five minutes of Googling', which is a claim I don't fully buy, all of these research things add up. For an historical drama one wants to make the military tacticians happy? Still have the clothing experts getting their licks in. Make them happy? The political historians might start questioning things.

And so on and so on.

And that doesn't even get into areas where basic facts are disputed.

Again, this doesn't so much mean ignore it all and do nothing in regards to research and thinking about things. It's more a spectrum. But as I said at the top, it's a question of marshaling resources and time.

tl;dr: It's called "artistic license" (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ArtisticLicense) for a reason.

Yeah, at some point you just have to accept that you can only do so much, only please so many people, best to include what you can to enhance the story. focus on the important things. at some point, this has got to get on the page, at some point, a story must be told, and something must happen for that story to be told, and it might not be completely realistic, might not be completely accurate to some real world thing, and you just have to hope the cost was worth what you get for it.

Anonymouswizard

2017-09-03, 08:16 PM

I suspect we'll be hearing pewpewpew sounds (not to mention seeing starships banking) in SciFi films for a loooooooooooong time. So maybe those folks should invest in a good dental plan. :smalltongue:

The main reason this annoys me is REALISTIC SPACECRAFT LOOK COOL. Heck realistic space movement can look awesome, nothing is better than a Starfury spinning around to shoot the ship directly behind it. A starship shouldn't need to bank, a starship turning while keeping it's vector looks awesome and instantly says 'this is space'.

This is less 'artistic licence', you got that card when you had the ship design be completely inefficient, this is just ignoring how physics works to make it look LESS cool. I can accept that you don't always play everything realistically to make for a better story, but a starship banking does not make for a better story, does not look cooler, and does not make it easier to follow. It's breaking realism for no benefit, instead of using space to do new stuff you're using space to do stuff you can do in an atmosphere.

It's even more annoying when starship banking exists in the same universe that uses flip and burning. Those require two completely different travel mediums, and probably two very different engines. It's not like this stuff is hard to find, it's discussed in almost every serious attempt at 'basic spacecraft design'.

(Oddly I can accept sound in space a lot more as a computer generated shorthand for crew members. The ships is sorting through a lot of data from it's sensors and displaying it as both images and sound to make piloting and targeting easier.)

Grey_Wolf_c

2017-09-03, 09:36 PM

This is less 'artistic licence', you got that card when you had the ship design be completely inefficient, this is just ignoring how physics works to make it look LESS cool. I can accept that you don't always play everything realistically to make for a better story, but a starship banking does not make for a better story, does not look cooler, and does not make it easier to follow. It's breaking realism for no benefit, instead of using space to do new stuff you're using space to do stuff you can do in an atmosphere.

Actually, you will find that to the vast majority of viewers - everyone that is unaware of how spaceships really work - banking is necessary for them to both follow the action and retain suspension of disbelief. Nothing breaks suspension more than a ship behaving in an unexpected and to them unexplainable manner. Heck, I know what's going on and it still looks goofy and more than a little bit unreal when I see it happen in, say, Kerbal space program.

Again, as I said before, compare whatever it is that bugs you because you do know the subject to how much it doesn't bug you when they get it completely wrong in the topics you do not know about.

GW

Porthos

2017-09-03, 11:36 PM

Again, as I said before, compare whatever it is that bugs you because you do know the subject to how much it doesn't bug you when they get it completely wrong in the topics you do not know about.

GW

This, exactly.

To give an example of this in action, I was reading up on the Artistic License - Military (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ArtisticLicenseMilitary) page over at TV Tropes earlier today. There are soooooo many things there that cause me to not bat an eyelid that probably annoy more than a couple of folks in the US Armed Forces. Like saluting protocol. Or the style of dress someone is wearing. Or addressing someone by the wrong short hand of rank.

Each and every one of these things is almost exactly at the same level of wrongness as banking in space. Why? Because the vast majority of folks not only don't know the difference, they expect the 'wrong' thing.

Now, sure, maybe having a military advisor on staff might get rid of some of those things. But they're still so relatively innocuous as to be trivial for the type of story being told.

Still, maybe one day 'banking in space' will seem to be utterly silly and stupid in media. An artifact of days gone by. But given how entrenched things are, I somehow suspect it won't happen until society is regularly moving things around in outer space. Hence my suggestion that folks who grind their teeth at this sort of thing should plan on visiting the dentist quite a bit. :smalltongue:

Lord Raziere

2017-09-03, 11:51 PM

And by then, people will no doubt find a million more ways to be completely wrong about something else. just like, discover real life versions of something completely fantastic and awesome and the first media about them will get it completely wrong then experts will then start complaining about the inaccuracies.

Mechalich

2017-09-04, 01:06 AM

This, exactly.

To give an example of this in action, I was reading up on the Artistic License - Military (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ArtisticLicenseMilitary) page over at TV Tropes earlier today. There are soooooo many things there that cause me to not bat an eyelid that probably annoy more than a couple of folks in the US Armed Forces. Like saluting protocol. Or the style of dress someone is wearing. Or addressing someone by the wrong short hand of rank.

Each and every one of these things is almost exactly at the same level of wrongness as banking in space. Why? Because the vast majority of folks not only don't know the difference, they expect the 'wrong' thing.

Now, sure, maybe having a military advisor on staff might get rid of some of those things. But they're still so relatively innocuous as to be trivial for the type of story being told.

Still, maybe one day 'banking in space' will seem to be utterly silly and stupid in media. An artifact of days gone by. But given how entrenched things are, I somehow suspect it won't happen until society is regularly moving things around in outer space. Hence my suggestion that folks who grind their teeth at this sort of thing should plan on visiting the dentist quite a bit. :smalltongue:

Someone wearing the wrong uniform is not even close to the same level of wrongness as banking in space!

Making errors with regard to largely trivial pieces of information is not even the same category of error as violating fundamental physical laws to produce imagery that cannot actually occur. you could make even an incredibly obvious error with regard to military doctrine - like making a Vietnam War movie and giving all the US troops Ak-47s instead of M16s - and it wouldn't make a big difference because the two weapons do similar things when it comes to actual performance.

Banking in space is a fantasy. It is an act of taking actual laws of physics and flatly ignoring them for the purpose of storytelling, not simply glossing over them because one failed to research deeply.

Now, space is probably the ultimate example of how the viewing public is totally uninterested in accurate representations of what ships can do and would rather watch a fantasy. Even Cosmos, with freaking Neil DeGrasse Tyson, pulled a 'ship of the imagination' out to glide through the visuals. The laws of physics, as currently known, are essentially a glass panel that you have to smash in order to pick up the 'space war' storytelling option.

Porthos

2017-09-04, 02:03 AM

Someone wearing the wrong uniform is not even close to the same level of wrongness as banking in space!

Making errors with regard to largely trivial pieces of information is not even the same category of error as violating fundamental physical laws to produce imagery that cannot actually occur. you could make even an incredibly obvious error with regard to military doctrine - like making a Vietnam War movie and giving all the US troops Ak-47s instead of M16s - and it wouldn't make a big difference because the two weapons do similar things when it comes to actual performance.

Banking in space is a fantasy. It is an act of taking actual laws of physics and flatly ignoring them for the purpose of storytelling, not simply glossing over them because one failed to research deeply.

Now, space is probably the ultimate example of how the viewing public is totally uninterested in accurate representations of what ships can do and would rather watch a fantasy. Even Cosmos, with freaking Neil DeGrasse Tyson, pulled a 'ship of the imagination' out to glide through the visuals. The laws of physics, as currently known, are essentially a glass panel that you have to smash in order to pick up the 'space war' storytelling option.

Bolded two points.

But that's exactly why it is the same when it comes to telling a story. If someone was trying to see themselves as telling something accurate, using space as a backdrop, then sure. "Hard SciFi", for instance.

When it comes to telling a story, this is not fundamentally different than the wrong type of sound for a silencer or the wrong type of recoil (none or exaggerated) or a hundred different things that are fundamentally physically impossible but used in storytelling all the time. Mythbusters made a living out of showing just how physically impossible some things are.

But as impossible as they might be, they're still entertaining. Which is kinda the point for these types of stories.

Anonymouswizard

2017-09-04, 08:22 AM

Someone wearing the wrong uniform is not even close to the same level of wrongness as banking in space!

Making errors with regard to largely trivial pieces of information is not even the same category of error as violating fundamental physical laws to produce imagery that cannot actually occur. you could make even an incredibly obvious error with regard to military doctrine - like making a Vietnam War movie and giving all the US troops Ak-47s instead of M16s - and it wouldn't make a big difference because the two weapons do similar things when it comes to actual performance.

Banking in space is a fantasy. It is an act of taking actual laws of physics and flatly ignoring them for the purpose of storytelling, not simply glossing over them because one failed to research deeply.

Now, space is probably the ultimate example of how the viewing public is totally uninterested in accurate representations of what ships can do and would rather watch a fantasy. Even Cosmos, with freaking Neil DeGrasse Tyson, pulled a 'ship of the imagination' out to glide through the visuals. The laws of physics, as currently known, are essentially a glass panel that you have to smash in order to pick up the 'space war' storytelling option.

This pretty much explains my annoyance. I'm fine with banking spaceships when it's obviously meant to be a fantasy. I mainly get annoyed when everything else tries to be accurate to a reasonable degree, and then you get banking spaceships rather than vector movement.

Banking spaceships is like showing WW2 soldiers armed with rapid fire plasma cannons. It works if it's been established that this book is enough of a fantasy to have developed rapid fire plasma cannons before 1940, but if you're trying to do a realistic war story about the horrors faced by the average Tommy, why have you given him a rapid fire plasma cannon.

Artistic Licence is how I can except that a ship would be incredibly inefficient, a high thrust reaction drive burning for thousands of hours at a time, and so on. It stops being acceptable when it's not major details of how it works (the military rank structure, when you salute, so on) but rather the very basics (to me spaceships banking is as bad as soldiers going into battle in neon orange jumpsuits).

Traab

2017-09-04, 08:58 AM

Keltest

2017-09-04, 09:58 AM

Anonymouswizard

2017-09-04, 10:15 AM

Or its possible that banking space ships are like many other things in entertainment. Done that way because doing it the way it actually works would feel counter intuitive to the the other 90% of the viewers who dont know how space works. Cars bank, boats bank, airplanes bank. Everything they have ever seen moving at high speeds has to bank, they cant just pivot on their own axis at speed, so seeing a space ship do it would actually break THEM out of their suspension of disbelief because its not how things "always work".

Except it literally takes one minute of searching to find out that this is not how things 'always work'. One minute. And there are plenty of examples of media where spaceships don't bank (just working off the top of my head so these might be a bit wrong, and limiting myself to visual media, Babylon 5, Legend of the Galactic Heroes, and Space Battleship Yamato 2199*, as well as Schlock Mercenary). Why can Babylon 5 succeed with pivoting spaceships and people still go 'but people won't exist pivoting spaceships'.

We're talking about a lack of atmosphere (in practice) where there's essentially no friction, all changes of vector should be turn and burn (different from flip and burn, which is about the accelerating to your halfway point, flipping over, and accelerating in the opposite direction). The only reason people expect it is because they're always shown space as acting like air you can't breath, rather than a near vacuum, except of course when it's convenient to have no friction. Yes, realistic space combat is relatively boring, realistic space movement doesn't act like fighter jets, but you can work around those. Realistic space combat should be about tension, you launch your beam weapons and missile and wait to see if they hit while looking for your opponent's beam weapons and missiles, which changes in your vector in order to throw off your opponent's aim. I can expect that writers will speed it up, sometimes you want ships blasting at each other instead of launching weapons at heat signatures, but you can have that with ships moving along their vectors and spinning.

What's even more annoying is when ships sometimes bank and sometimes spin, when as far as they're concerned there's no difference between moving at 10m/s and moving at 10000m/s. If you're going to be wrong at least be consistently wrong, I can at least laugh at the 'stationary' ships banking when they turn.

* I'm thinking about one scene in particular, in hyperspace where the Yamato spins in order to bring her weapons to bear. Otherwise it's generally better than average but not perfect, it seems to be better with larger ships and worse with smaller ones.

Flickerdart

2017-09-04, 10:30 AM

Except it literally takes one minute of searching to find out that this is not how things 'always work'.

Nobody who doesn't already know is going to do that search, because they don't know it's wrong.

Vinyadan

2017-09-04, 11:03 AM

LUKE
The Force?

BEN
Well, the Force is what gives a Jedi
his power. It's an energy field
created by all living things. It
surrounds us and penetrates us. It
binds the galaxy together. It allow sounds
to travel across empty space,
and it causes starships to bank.

Anonymouswizard

2017-09-04, 11:16 AM

Nobody who doesn't already know is going to do that search, because they don't know it's wrong.

True, but how spaceships move isn't some hidden information that only NASA, the ESA, and other space agencies know, it pops up in discussion of science fiction quite a bit. 'It's annoying because the ship doesn't move realistically, it moves like a plane'. Anybody doing basic research on spacecraft will discover that they work on Newton's laws of motion and that friction isn't a concern (below relativistic velocities), which obviously changes how they operate. And yet we don't even get ships flipping in order to decelerate, despite that being the most basic thing (even before 'no banking'). This isn't your average person, but it is your average science fiction fan (beyond a certain age). Then there is media that shows it correctly without this massive outcry that apparently happens when spaceships don't bank, but that doesn't count because reasons and people cannot accept that space might be slightly different to air.

Heck, spaceships moving via Newtonian physics was in the first space opera story (where instead of flipping the craft they could just move their reactionless engine). Lensman established exactly why spaceships acted as if there was no friction and had to move to their landing velocities under Newtonian acceleration. In more modern stories ships flip around to the facing they need to change their vector without a problem, unless they have a drive that directly controls the vector (rare, and still doesn't result in banking). Spaceships moving correctly is the older idea, but no apparently we can't except it if the Star Destroyer doesn't bank, or if the Star Destroyer acts correctly the X-wing has to bank because small ships carry air with them while larger ships don't.

Porthos

2017-09-04, 12:02 PM

Why can Babylon 5 succeed with pivoting spaceships and people still go 'but people won't exist pivoting spaceships'.

This is narrow definition of 'succeed'.

Influential it may be, but it was incredibly niche when it aired and is even moreso now.

But even if I count that as a success, the point is we're talking about "Artistic License". I say there is nothing fundamentally different regarding "Artistic License" when it comes to physics or history or politics or anything else. It's just that it bugs you more than those do.

No more, no less.

I mean, there are arguments (which I REALLLY don't want to get into here) about FTL and causality. Should we throw all FTL stories on the bonfire because they violate physics?

If the answer is "No, because that's central to the story and thus acceptable" then perhaps "Naval Combat IN SPACE/Aerial combat IN SPACE" is central enough to the type of stories those folks want to tell.

In short, even if I accepted the argument that the masses accept realistic spaceship movement without reservation it doesn't follow that every creator should because it would interfere with the type of stories they want to tell.

Now, maybe one day enough of the masses will agree with you and find banking in space to be so silly as to only be acceptable in the most space opera of films.

But, as I have implied several times, don't hold your breath as it might be a while. Like a few decades, if not longer.

Traab

2017-09-04, 12:17 PM

Except it literally takes one minute of searching to find out that this is not how things 'always work'. One minute. And there are plenty of examples of media where spaceships don't bank (just working off the top of my head so these might be a bit wrong, and limiting myself to visual media, Babylon 5, Legend of the Galactic Heroes, and Space Battleship Yamato 2199*, as well as Schlock Mercenary). Why can Babylon 5 succeed with pivoting spaceships and people still go 'but people won't exist pivoting spaceships'.

We're talking about a lack of atmosphere (in practice) where there's essentially no friction, all changes of vector should be turn and burn (different from flip and burn, which is about the accelerating to your halfway point, flipping over, and accelerating in the opposite direction). The only reason people expect it is because they're always shown space as acting like air you can't breath, rather than a near vacuum, except of course when it's convenient to have no friction. Yes, realistic space combat is relatively boring, realistic space movement doesn't act like fighter jets, but you can work around those. Realistic space combat should be about tension, you launch your beam weapons and missile and wait to see if they hit while looking for your opponent's beam weapons and missiles, which changes in your vector in order to throw off your opponent's aim. I can expect that writers will speed it up, sometimes you want ships blasting at each other instead of launching weapons at heat signatures, but you can have that with ships moving along their vectors and spinning.

What's even more annoying is when ships sometimes bank and sometimes spin, when as far as they're concerned there's no difference between moving at 10m/s and moving at 10000m/s. If you're going to be wrong at least be consistently wrong, I can at least laugh at the 'stationary' ships banking when they turn.

* I'm thinking about one scene in particular, in hyperspace where the Yamato spins in order to bring her weapons to bear. Otherwise it's generally better than average but not perfect, it seems to be better with larger ships and worse with smaller ones.

Babylon 5 was literally the only example you gave I had even heard of, and I hadnt watched it. And since my experience = everyones experience, that means your little art house film festival movie or whatever it was clearly was a miserable failure due to its stupid pivoting spacecraft. veni vidi vici loser. :smallbiggrin: You cant see it but im doing pelvic thrusts of victory. Basically this (https://youtu.be/2bz-Qet4BDM?t=8s) scene right here.

Keltest

2017-09-04, 12:29 PM

This is narrow definition of 'succeed'.

Influential it may be, but it was incredibly niche when it aired and is even moreso now.

But even if I count that as a success, the point is we're talking about "Artistic License". I say there is nothing fundamentally different regarding "Artistic License" when it comes to physics or history or politics or anything else. It's just that it bugs you more than those do.

No more, no less.

I mean, there are arguments (which I REALLLY don't want to get into here) about FTL and causality. Should we throw all FTL stories on the bonfire because they violate physics?

If the answer is "No, because that's central to the story and thus acceptable" then perhaps "Naval Combat IN SPACE/Aerial combat IN SPACE" is central enough to the type of stories those folks want to tell.

In short, even if I accepted the argument that the masses accept realistic spaceship movement without reservation it doesn't follow that every creator should because it would interfere with the type of stories they want to tell.

Now, maybe one day enough of the masses will agree with you and find banking in space to be so silly as to only be acceptable in the most space opera of films.

But, as I have implied several times, don't hold your breath as it might be a while. Like a few decades, if not longer.

The problem isn't that its unrealistic, the problem is that its strictly worse than reality. There is no good reason to make a space ship bank. It doesn't work like that in reality and theres no real reason we would want to make it work like that. The science is an important part of science fiction (hence the name).

Anonymouswizard

2017-09-04, 12:42 PM

...I mean, there are arguments (which I REALLLY don't want to get into here) about FTL and causality. Should we throw all FTL stories on the bonfire because they violate physics?

If the answer is "No, because that's central to the story and thus acceptable" then perhaps "Naval Combat IN SPACE/Aerial combat IN SPACE" is central enough to the type of stories those folks want to tell...

Sorry, I should make it clear I was specifically overarguing in order to make a point, my main problem is where there's no attempt to justify it (so I'm okay with Honor Harrington being 'Naval Combat IN SPACE' because the fictional technology is set up to justify it).

And even then my main solution is to just not consume the media that disagrees with my taste. My actual argument is not 'no banking spaceships' but 'can we please have some visual medium SF where spaceships don't bank*'. Just like how you can have biotech WW1 novels alongside realistic WW1 novels, we can have the same with banking spaceships, it's just outside of novels you don't get the realistic spaceships (conversely you don't get biotech WW1 in film, which is a mighty shame it sounds like a fun movie).

If it sounds weird, as soon as I see a banking spaceship I don't actually cry foul, I just file it as 'fantasy'. Space fantasy is also a fun genre.

* I have not watched The Expanse yet, I plan to do so after I've finished the first book, but I'm hopeful that it will get it right.

Porthos

2017-09-04, 01:13 PM

The problem isn't that its unrealistic, the problem is that its strictly worse than reality. There is no good reason to make a space ship bank.

Sure there is. Here's one: It sets up the type of battles one wants to show. That's a very good reason.

The science is an important part of science fiction (hence the name).

Hence the division between "Hard SciFi" and "Soft SciFi" (which is more a continuum/sliding scale, but I digress). Science Fiction/Fantasy/Opera is a big enough genre to hold all sorts of different things. Including banking in space.

Sorry, I should make it clear I was specifically overarguing in order to make a point, my main problem is where there's no attempt to justify it (so I'm okay with Honor Harrington being 'Naval Combat IN SPACE' because the fictional technology is set up to justify it).

And even then my main solution is to just not consume the media that disagrees with my taste. My actual argument is not 'no banking spaceships' but 'can we please have some visual medium SF where spaceships don't bank*'. Just like how you can have biotech WW1 novels alongside realistic WW1 novels, we can have the same with banking spaceships, it's just outside of novels you don't get the realistic spaceships (conversely you don't get biotech WW1 in film, which is a mighty shame it sounds like a fun movie).

If it sounds weird, as soon as I see a banking spaceship I don't actually cry foul, I just file it as 'fantasy'. Space fantasy is also a fun genre.

* I have not watched The Expanse yet, I plan to do so after I've finished the first book, but I'm hopeful that it will get it right.

Fair enuf. :smallsmile:

I would add that if this type of mass media becomes popular enough, sooner or later the feedback loop kicks in and it becomes predominate. One of the reasons the Western is dead* is that folks by and large couldn't take it seriously anymore without it being heavily deconstructed or parodied on some level. Entertainment tastes moved on, in other words. This is the feedback loop tearing something down.

* It really isn't, of course. But it is nowhere near as popular as it once was.

Getting back to becoming popular enough, take B5 for instance. That had a chance to open the door for the type of media you're looking for. Except its legacy was in being a vanguard for serialized storytelling and opening the door for more military-inspired takes on Space Opera/Science Fiction. The more realistic takes on starship movement never really took hold for whatever reason.

Another example is Andromeda. Before the Sorbo inspired coup happened, it sold itself on being one of the hardest SF TV shows ever put to film. They took great pride in it, as a matter of fact. While they, of course, broke physics when they wanted to, they made a conscious effort to be as realistic as they could be within certain parameters.

The show barely made a ripple in the collective consciousness, even without the shenanigans of Team Sorbo. A good deal of that was circumstance (extremely low budget, lack of TV presence/promotion/wrong age for syndication), but one does have to wonder how popular it would have been even if it had more marketing muscle behind it.

Still, won't know until more folks try, I suppose.

Traab

2017-09-04, 01:30 PM

I liked andromeda so much. The whole idea behind it was an excellent one and I loved it. Yeah it got wonky towards the end though. Ive honestly been suggesting a similar setup to any new star trek series for some time now. Time travel is a very well established thing that certainly happens in star trek, so having a flagship vanish for several hundred years then show back up and try to pick up the pieces of the federation would make for an awesome series. It would allow for all sorts of far greater expansion of the various alien races beyond what amounts to cliff notes. You know, spend a season on the klingon home world trying to convince them to rejoin, go to the vulcan world for a season, the cardassians, whatever.

Lethologica

2017-09-04, 04:47 PM

Again, as I said before, compare whatever it is that bugs you because you do know the subject to how much it doesn't bug you when they get it completely wrong in the topics you do not know about.

GW
In addition: compare how much it bugs you when you know they got it wrong to how much it bugs you that they wasted time explaining how this thing you don't care about isn't as wrong as it might have been.

Anonymouswizard

2017-09-04, 05:12 PM

In addition: compare how much it bugs you when you know they got it wrong to how much it bugs you that they wasted time explaining how this thing you don't care about isn't as wrong as it might have been.

Massively to barely, learning new stuff is interesting :smallsmile:

jayem

2017-09-04, 05:25 PM

* I'm thinking about one scene in particular, in hyperspace where the Yamato spins in order to bring her weapons to bear. Otherwise it's generally better than average but not perfect, it seems to be better with larger ships and worse with smaller ones.
Hypothesis:
(Big) Space ships don't bank but don't ascend/descend
(Small) Space planes do bank but do go up/down (which itself is a problem)

Jay R

2017-09-04, 06:01 PM

I find that to be a particularly flimsy excuse.

It's not an excuse at all. It's a reason.

If they will lose a lot of viewers, and therefore a lot of money, by not having it bank, and they will cause Keltest to complain, but still get just as much money, then the only intelligent decision is to have the spaceship bank.

They are not making documentaries. And they don't care how much we complain. They are producing fiction to make money. The correct decision is the one that maximizes how much money they expect to make.

Spaceships aren't cars, boats, planes, or any other atmospheric vehicle. If people expect ships to bank, its because that's how ships have been portrayed, not because other vehicles do it.

I find this assertion to be so unconvincing that I have to ask what your evidence is.

My experience is that people over-generalize all the time. For instance, many people expect boats to have brakes. Most people don't blink at revolvers in movies set in the early 1830s.

What tests about how audiences will treat spaceships that don't bank do you know about?

Grey_Wolf_c

2017-09-04, 07:56 PM

My experience is that people over-generalize all the time. For instance, many people expect boats to have brakes. Most people don't blink at revolvers in movies set in the early 1830s.

That reminded me of another example:

How many times would a "classic old West" Sheriff be able to shoot a 1860-ish Smith and Wesson revolver before reloading?

Five. Those things didn't have a safety, so no-one ever loaded them fully. The last space would be left deliberately empty so the hammer would rest on it without a chance of misfire.

I have never seen a film that acknowledged this fact - I learnt it in QI myself - and yet I don't see anyone rending their garments over it, despite it being as ahistorical as other examples in this thread.

GW

Gnoman

2017-09-04, 08:13 PM

Olinser

2017-09-04, 08:23 PM

Grey_Wolf_c

2017-09-04, 08:53 PM

They were perfectly capable of holding six rounds, and somebody who was expecting to use it would probably do so. Turning the gun into a five-shooter was the most common practice for long-term carriage, but even then there were exceptions.

Even in the OK corral gunfight, the number of shots were 5 per person. If that wasn't a "expecting to use it" situation, I don't know what is.

In any case, "there were exceptions" is true for everything. But films regularly, not exceptionally, portray "six-shooters" as holding six bullets. My point stands.

GW

Keltest

2017-09-04, 09:04 PM

Even in the OK corral gunfight, the number of shots were 5 per person. If that wasn't a "expecting to use it" situation, I don't know what is.

In any case, "there were exceptions" is true for everything. But films regularly, not exceptionally, portray "six-shooters" as holding six bullets. My point stands.

GW

At worst, that makes film characters exceptionally reckless though. Its not like they couldn't hold six bullets should the shooter choose to load that many.

If they identified them as six shooters and then had somebody fire a dozen bullets out of one without reloading, then THAT would be a problem.

Grey_Wolf_c

2017-09-04, 09:13 PM

At worst, that makes film characters exceptionally reckless though. Its not like they couldn't hold six bullets should the shooter choose to load that many.

If they identified them as six shooters and then had somebody fire a dozen bullets out of one without reloading, then THAT would be a problem.

And doctors can use paddles on a flatline. And astronauts can tilt their ships while performing a turn. And Generals can tell their troops to break formation when they make contact with the enemy and engage them in one-on-one combat.

Given that this topic was initiated by someone complaining about ahistorical battle tactics, I fail to see why you think your argument that "it is physically possible" makes it any kind of rebuttal.

GW

comicshorse

2017-09-05, 04:46 AM

That reminded me of another example:

How many times would a "classic old West" Sheriff be able to shoot a 1860-ish Smith and Wesson revolver before reloading?

Five. Those things didn't have a safety, so no-one ever loaded them fully. The last space would be left deliberately empty so the hammer would rest on it without a chance of misfire.

I have never seen a film that acknowledged this fact - I learnt it in QI myself - and yet I don't see anyone rending their garments over it, despite it being as ahistorical as other examples in this thread.

GW

Interestingly I remember watching an episode of an old Black and White TV series (Gunsmoke I think) where this was implicitly addressed. A seasoned gunslinger claimed he couldn't have murdered a man because the victim had been shot six times and he was too experienced a gunman to have a bullet under the hammer

Anonymouswizard

2017-09-05, 05:04 AM

Hypothesis:
(Big) Space ships don't bank but don't ascend/descend
(Small) Space planes do bank but do go up/down (which itself is a problem)

Actually no, big ships (the Yamato in particular) are shown to tilt in order to ascend/descend. It's weird that the characters in universe keep making ships with their guns all on the top, space battles are more three dimensional than average. They don't do it as much as they move forwards/backwards, but it does happen. Anyway, ascend/descend is meaningless in space, we've got no reference

Also, now people are pointing out the gun thing I'm going to start getting annoyed at it.

Darth Ultron

2017-09-05, 07:56 AM

Actually, you will find that to the vast majority of viewers - everyone that is unaware of how spaceships really work - banking is necessary for them to both follow the action and retain suspension of disbelief. Nothing breaks suspension more than a ship behaving in an unexpected and to them unexplainable manner.

This is way too true. People in general like for flying things to zoom around and go 'woosh' and bank and climb and all that....even in space. Not to mention fights that happen at a distance of a couple yards.

Actually no, big ships (the Yamato in particular) are shown to tilt in order to ascend/descend. It's weird that the characters in universe keep making ships with their guns all on the top, space battles are more three dimensional than average. They don't do it as much as they move forwards/backwards, but it does happen. Anyway, ascend/descend is meaningless in space, we've got no reference

Also, now people are pointing out the gun thing I'm going to start getting annoyed at it.

Well, at least Star Trek gets this right. The Starships have phasers that can shoot all around. This is even better once you get to the Next Generation and the Galaxy class has phaser banks on the top/bottom/sides of the ship. And we only get to see it like once ever, but Galaxy class ships do have like 12 phaser banks so the ship can shoot in any direction.

Grey_Wolf_c

2017-09-05, 08:54 AM

I mean, as somebody who was in the military, yes, it grinds my gears that so many movies have cringe-inducing military tactics and use of weapons, but quite frankly its not particularly worse than the egregious errors Hollywood makes about other professions because they're too lazy to do actual research.

Medicine, forensic science, law, space travel, genetics, physics, martial arts, video games, religion, all of these areas frequently have utterly LUDICROUS errors in them that a basic google search or a five-minute conversation with somebody in the community could have fixed (not even an expert just an average joe who is involved in the subject).

Hollywood is just utterly terrible at doing research about ANYTHING.

There are three basic things a Hollywood writer must spend its time working on:
1. Characters
2. Plot
3. Pacing

Every minute not spent improving one or more of those during the course of making a film is a minute that has been wasted unless all three of those are as good as they can get. Spending "five-minute conversation" with a SME in any way connected to the subject of the film is a waste of time, if it comes at the detriment of the writer's effort on the basic three.

Lets take the most infamous "historical" film: Braveheart. I'd be hard-pressed to point out a historical detail they got right. But the characters are great, the plot is quite interesting and above all, the pacing is spot-on. If the film makers had spent more time getting the Battle of Stirling Bridge right, they would have had to take time from doing all of the above. The end result, almost certainly, would have been a worse film, not a better one.

The bottom line is that time is a finite resource. Time NOT spent on improving story, characterisation or pacing will not make the film any better.

Grey Wolf

gomipile

2017-09-05, 10:14 AM

This is narrow definition of 'succeed'.

/shrug

They got more money and years out of FOX than Firefly did, by a large margin.

Lethologica

2017-09-05, 01:03 PM

Actually no, big ships (the Yamato in particular) are shown to tilt in order to ascend/descend. It's weird that the characters in universe keep making ships with their guns all on the top, space battles are more three dimensional than average. They don't do it as much as they move forwards/backwards, but it does happen. Anyway, ascend/descend is meaningless in space, we've got no reference

Also, now people are pointing out the gun thing I'm going to start getting annoyed at it.
I'm dubious about the necessity of omnidirectional fire for verisimilitude. Lots of other kinds of fighters would benefit from having weapons pointing every which way, but don't do so because they benefit from concentrating fire/shields in certain orientations, or because they're maneuverable enough that firing backwards is not a huge advantage over turning and firing, or because it's more cost-effective to build two units with oriented fire than one unit with omnidirectional fire, etc. Space removes some of the reasons not to have omnidirectional fire, but not all of them.

There are degrees, of course.

Porthos

2017-09-05, 01:58 PM

/shrug

They got more money and years out of FOX than Firefly did, by a large margin.

Ehhh, syndication from a fledging pseudo-network that imploded. Different rules applied there than a show on a Top Four major network. A better comparison would be Andromeda, I think.

More to the point, when B5 did go to a 'real' network (TNT - Season 5), it had even worse ratings than when it was syndicated (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylon_5#Broadcast_history), if marginally. And I think it's fair to say its successor series Crusade imploded.

For what it tried to do (get a bloc of syndicated programs across different markets), it did well enough. But PTEN never did what WB wanted, mostly because the era of first-run syndication was already dying a slow death.

Again, B5 has a very strong legacy when looked at in the proper context. But I stand by my comment that it was niche then and even more niche now.

Sapphire Guard

2017-09-05, 02:57 PM

It might take five minutes to Google how something is done wrong. Doing it correctly, however, takes a good deal more effort. I mean, Gravity marketed itself on being as realistic as possible, but it had to abandon realistic physics on the scale of how far away satellites are from each other, because doing it realistically would be too complicated and hard to understand.

Anonymouswizard

2017-09-05, 03:53 PM

I'm dubious about the necessity of omnidirectional fire for verisimilitude. Lots of other kinds of fighters would benefit from having weapons pointing every which way, but don't do so because they benefit from concentrating fire/shields in certain orientations, or because they're maneuverable enough that firing backwards is not a huge advantage over turning and firing, or because it's more cost-effective to build two units with oriented fire than one unit with omnidirectional fire, etc. Space removes some of the reasons not to have omnidirectional fire, but not all of them.

There are degrees, of course.

Sure, the problem is the Yamato can quickly defend if attacked from every angle except back (which makes a bit of sense, as most of that is engines) and down. For the Yamato it makes a bit of sense, but for later ships they keep the massive design flaw that caused the Yamato problems.

It might take five minutes to Google how something is done wrong. Doing it correctly, however, takes a good deal more effort. I mean, Gravity marketed itself on being as realistic as possible, but it had to abandon realistic physics on the scale of how far away satellites are from each other, because doing it realistically would be too complicated and hard to understand.

What's so hard to understand about 'probably can't see them'.

I didn't like that film, but I at least respected it's attempts to remain accurate, I'm okay for the writers to fudge distances. I hated Interstellar, and I'm going to stop there.

Killer Angel

2017-09-05, 06:17 PM

And doctors can use paddles on a flatline. And astronauts can tilt their ships while performing a turn. And Generals can tell their troops to break formation when they make contact with the enemy and engage them in one-on-one combat.

Given that this topic was initiated by someone complaining about ahistorical battle tactics, I fail to see why you think your argument that "it is physically possible" makes it any kind of rebuttal.

GW

there's a difference between "it fired 6 shots, probaly they should have been only 5", and "those soldiers talked so much about fighting side by side as a single man, and the first time they enter melee, they start fighting all by themselves breaking formation".

There are different levels of "mistakes", and not all of them break the suspension of disbelief.

It's not that hard to show a battle that at least seems realistic (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7MYlRzLqD0). And it's cool because of it.

Some people cannot stand unrealistic storytelling just "because it's cool, verisimilitude be damned"
Some people will say "COOL! I don't care about realism if the rest of the story is interesting"

Grey_Wolf_c

2017-09-05, 07:54 PM

It's not that hard to show a battle that at least seems realistic (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7MYlRzLqD0). And it's cool because of it.

I don't find that a realistic depiction of late Roman Republic tactics. Or gallic tactics, for that matter. It's cool, but it's not historical.

GW

Lord Raziere

2017-09-05, 07:58 PM

I don't find that a realistic depiction of late Roman Republic tactics. Or gallic tactics, for that matter. It's cool, but it's not historical.

GW

.....even thats not realistic? dude, thats more realistic than a vast majority of the things I've seen in fiction, its so focused on the realistic consequences and what they'd actually do, that hardly anything cool happened in it all, if thats not realistic, what is? I'm honestly confused.

Grey_Wolf_c

2017-09-05, 08:34 PM

.....even thats not realistic? dude, thats more realistic than a vast majority of the things I've seen in fiction, its so focused on the realistic consequences and what they'd actually do, that hardly anything cool happened in it all, if thats not realistic, what is? I'm honestly confused.

Remember, my position here is that historical realism is not required to enjoy a film. And that the more you know of a topic, the more such situations you will notice. But that you shouldn't let lack of historical accuracy get in the way of enjoying a film, because (like Anonymouswizard showcased earlier) if you do, then I have only got bad news for you: the more you learn, the less you will be able to enjoy stories.

As for what is unrealistic: no spears. The Roman army in the Late Republic was built around the spear as the primary melee weapon (like, pretty much, every other army* in history until the invention of the bayonet, which in turn combined the gun and the spear). But spears have never been photogenic so they don't get all that much love.

And honestly, I can't imagine that the Gauls were that stupid in their tactics, although I have a lot less education on that front. But if they really simply charged at enemies without carrying shields of their own, then I can't imagine why Julius Caesar took more than a couple of weeks to conquer all of Gaul (when he in fact took a few years, and involved a lot of playing one tribe against another, because Rome couldn't take all of Gaul at once).

ETA2: Yep, a quick search suggests that Gauls would have had helmets (of course), shields and chainmail at the very least. And they almost certainly used spears as well.

Grey Wolf

ETA:
* Heck, for all that I made fun of Braveheart above, at least they got that part a bit right. Once. Except for the bit with the horses charging into them.

Brother Oni

2017-09-06, 06:36 AM

As for what is unrealistic: no spears. The Roman army in the Late Republic was built around the spear as the primary melee weapon (like, pretty much, every other army* in history until the invention of the bayonet, which in turn combined the gun and the spear). But spears have never been photogenic so they don't get all that much love.

I was under the impression that Late Republic legionaries still used the gladius and pilum. While the pilum could be used as a spear, it was typically thrown at the enemy before ranks were closed.

Edit: Some googling indicates that only the Triarii still carried spears (hastae) by the time of the Late Republic. The Triarii were the elite heavy infantry used in decisive situations so by by the time they got involved in the battle, things were really coming down to the wire. I guess the video linked were showing Hastati fighting rather than the Triarii depicted on Trajan's column.

One realistic, or at least logical element, is how the legionaries worked in teams - the soldier at the front concentrated on killing the enemy in front, while the soldier stopped him from wandering out of position by physically keeping hold of him.
This tactic still persists today - there's a video of South Korean riot police practicing their drills against an OPFOR: link (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbFSVh1mmiw).

The other true element are the names - we know Pullo went out of formation during that battle, because the event and soldier was specifically mentioned in Julius Caesar's writings.

As for spears not being photogenic, it depends on the film and the culture. The Jet Li film Hero, has plenty of spears, while the large majority of the major characters in any Three Kingdoms era drama will have a polearm of some sort.

And honestly, I can't imagine that the Gauls were that stupid in their tactics, although I have a lot less education on that front. But if they really simply charged at enemies without carrying shields of their own, then I can't imagine why Julius Caesar took more than a couple of weeks to conquer all of Gaul (when he in fact took a few years, and involved a lot of playing one tribe against another, because Rome couldn't take all of Gaul at once).

ETA2: Yep, a quick search suggests that Gauls would have had helmets (of course), shields and chainmail at the very least. And they almost certainly used spears as well.

You're making the assumption that these particular Gauls were A) rich enough to have mail and helmets (some of them do have shields), B) are part of a disciplined army which fights in formation, and C) are actually trained fighters and not farmers/villagers conscripted to fight the invading Romans.

Surprisingly, the last two points are emphasised in the film 300 of all places: "I brought more soldiers than you did (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIr8u0j08gU)".

Vinyadan

2017-09-06, 10:31 AM

Personally, I'm interested into Roman-era depictions of spears being used in melee, if someone has them.

EDIT: Well, here's one, from the trophaeum Traiani. https://i.pinimg.com/originals/8f/89/15/8f8915e27a1511b13aa0ac2ae9b4ffa9.jpg

Grey_Wolf_c

2017-09-06, 11:09 AM

Personally, I'm interested into Roman-era depictions of spears being used in melee, if someone has them.

Trajan's column (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trajan%27s_Column) is the logical place to start. I'd imagine that Triumph arcs will also provide good bass-relief of combat, but none of those roll of the tip of my tongue.

E.g.

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/trajan-column/img/pinchZoom/pinch.jpg

ETA: Link (http://www.nationalgeographic.com/trajan-column/) to the National Geographic interactive site from which that image is sourced

GW

pendell

2017-09-06, 11:11 AM

I would suggest that it is better to use Hollywood to spark interest in real-life military and historical things; but it can't be trusted to accurately report real-life events in any discipline save their own.

For instance, you see a movie where soldiers with swords charge into a mass willy-nilly rather than doing the dull, practical thing that actually works. If I see a move like 300 (say), then if I really want to know the real history then the movie should be a jumping off point to Thucydides, Herodotus, real experts and youtube videos who can put together the most fascinating presentations on the real history and the real weapons used.

So Hollywood is an appetizer to perk your interest. It is not the main course, and I suspect never will be.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

darkrose50

2017-09-06, 11:14 AM

darkrose50

2017-09-06, 12:12 PM

"Hey, it's a zombie in a pit, that cannot possibly hurt any of us. Clearly, what we should do is lower one of our number down to him via rope. Unarmed. This is a good idea" - The Walking Dead.

Perhaps a zombie RPG should have a "save versus stupidity" mechanic where if you fail, then you do something stupid. To be fair this could be a fear check.

Gnoman

2017-09-06, 12:39 PM

The original Dawn of the Dead made it pretty clear that fighting the zombies wasn't all that hard (early on, they show a redneck group that was casually dispatching any zombie that got close to their barbecue, and the handful of main characters killed every zombie in the mall off-screen with ease), with the implication that it went so bad due more to suddenness than anything else (the only people to get bitten on-screen were either caught by surprise or their own stupidity).

In a very real sense, the first zombie works were far more realistic than their follow-ons - especially the follow-ons that tried to be realistic and came up with some of the stupidest notions I've ever seen in print.

darkrose50

2017-09-06, 12:54 PM

My favorite stupid move from The Walking Dead was when they had an empty moving truck, but decided to sleep in tents instead . . . and gone and got themselves eaten.

Tyndmyr

2017-09-06, 01:37 PM

Why cannot anyone in a zombie movie discover some sort of protective covering that is resistant to human teeth?

What about shield and spears in a phalanx?

What about basic hunting rifles? One cannot throw a stone in America without hitting a hunting rifle, or a store that sells hunting rifles.

What about traps? These zombies in most movies are rather quite dumb.

I wish to see a zombie movie in which the protagonist finds a domicile that cannot be pushed or bitten through. This seems possible. Yknow, houses are actually generally modestly difficult to get into when your weapons are "teeth" and "no intellect".

Then, all that remains is to find a firearm(this is America, right?) and an upper window or the like.

But no, everyone insists on charging in headlong with a baseball bat or something. And these are portrayed as the few who were clever enough to survive, while like, 99% were WORSE, and thus, are now dead. Most zombie movies are difficult to take seriously.

Killer Angel

2017-09-06, 02:54 PM

Remember, my position here is that historical realism is not required to enjoy a film.

Which is perfectly fine. It boils to personal tastes, after all.

My position is different.
Sometimes, i don't require realism to enjoy a movie... and this often happens when the film is explicitly made to be over the top. example (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBIiz_rR3V0)

But when a film or a work of fiction, pretends to be an example of "gritty realism", I expect that it keeps some level of realism, otherwise my suspension of disbelief shatters.

GOOD: Example (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRYM6B7CTs8) of a fight that shows some level of that realism, if not for the fact that armor matters.

BAD: Example (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GojRmNcL5oY) of a fight that just let me say "Oh, well, let's go read some book"

I'm not saying that this is the "right" take on the matter, I'm just trying to clarify how i see the issue.

Vinyadan

2017-09-06, 03:12 PM

Trajan's column (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trajan%27s_Column) is the logical place to start. I'd imagine that Triumph arcs will also provide good bass-relief of combat, but none of those roll of the tip of my tongue.

Thank you for the image. For some time I had been wondering what weapons the soldiers could have been using, since the actual pieces representing them aren't there any more to see (I guess they were made of bronze and got reused). So I had wondered if the motion could have shown a sword being used to chop from overhead (there are a few such images), but lances make a lot more sense. The soldiers here are auxiliarii, they have a different armour from the legions (and some auxiliarii fight without a top and have beards, and some guess that these represented axuliarii from Germania. The legions are represented to the left of this image, and, while their spears are also lost, the position of their hands make it very likely they were holding on to them or to the pila.

Grey_Wolf_c

2017-09-06, 03:19 PM

Thank you for the image. For some time I had been wondering what weapons the soldiers could have been using, since the actual pieces representing them aren't there any more to see (I guess they were made of bronze and got reused). So I had wondered if the motion could have shown a sword being used to chop from overhead (there are a few such images), but lances make a lot more sense. The soldiers here are auxiliarii, they have a different armour from the legions (and some auxiliarii fight without a top and have beards, and some guess that these represented axuliarii from Germania. The legions are represented to the left of this image, and, while their spears are also lost, the position of their hands make it very likely they were holding on to them or to the pila.

Be aware that Trajan's column is freaking massive. There should be other depictions of the armies of Trajan. That was simply the first google result for the column with spears I could find. The link I provided should take you through the whole thing.

That said, by Trajan's time, the legions were less than 50% italian - a beard does not necessarily indicate auxiliary forces. Heck, Trojan's successor and adopted nephew, Hadrian, wore a beard himself.

GW

Traab

2017-09-06, 03:22 PM

I wish to see a zombie movie in which the protagonist finds a domicile that cannot be pushed or bitten through. This seems possible. Yknow, houses are actually generally modestly difficult to get into when your weapons are "teeth" and "no intellect".

Then, all that remains is to find a firearm(this is America, right?) and an upper window or the like.

But no, everyone insists on charging in headlong with a baseball bat or something. And these are portrayed as the few who were clever enough to survive, while like, 99% were WORSE, and thus, are now dead. Most zombie movies are difficult to take seriously.

I have seen a number of films like that. The dawn of the dead remake for example. They got into that mall and were able to stay there despite what looked like the entire population of a city outside trying to get in. The only reason they had to leave was lack of resources. As for guns, meh, they do the job perfectly well, but ammo is a major problem. This isnt 90s action movie land, guns run out of bullets. As for finding guns, yeah yeah, murica and all that. The problem with that idea is, they dont grow on trees (yet, the nra is working on it) and most guns already have owners. Owners who likely wont want to part with them. And they have the gun to enforce that desire to not part with them. And gun and ammo shops, again arent on every street corner, and much like the local walmart, will likely be raided really quick. Also there is the noise issue. It seems fairly prevalent that loud noises attract zombies. Short of using a chainsaw, you arent going to kill zombies in a more attention grabbing way than with guns.

As for domiciles that cant be pushed through. It can be done, but it takes a lot of reinforcing. Here, https://youtu.be/N5hiGvEW0Gk?t=14m58s is a mythbusters clip. They took 100 "zombies" and had them walk towards a barn door. Smash. They didnt even slow down. They added some reinforcement? Smash. barely hindered them. It took a lot of extra lumber and a lot of long screws and careful placement to reinforce those doors enough to hold out against the zombie horde. Yeah that has some caveats like, they wont be constantly pushing in unison, but it still shows how sheer weight of numbers can wreck your safe house. And considering the damage the reinforcement took, its not certain how much longer a brainless horde that doesnt give up easily would have been held off. And you gotta do that for all the doors and windows on the ground floor. Might as well use it to build a damn treehouse instead. :smallbiggrin:

Sapphire Guard

2017-09-06, 03:45 PM

Just throw stones. Toasters, heavy books, whatever. You'll miss a lot, but also won't draw a horde.

Anonymouswizard

2017-09-06, 04:33 PM

Perhaps a zombie RPG should have a "save versus stupidity" mechanic where if you fail, then you do something stupid. To be fair this could be a fear check.

I'll admit, I'm a big fan of mechanics that can efficiently cause players to act in genre. The problem with them is trying to work out what in genre is. Let's take Space Opera, are we brave explorers, dedicated military officers, space cops, or something else. Conversely cyberpunk requires different behaviours for the corporates and the lowlifes.

It's not impossible, but you have to define what you're going for. Zombie is one of the cases where it's strangely easy, if you can keep the players from having time to plan they won't be able to make these preparations, at least without planning between sessions.

Then again, acting outside of genre can also be fun. Not even in the 'I want to be the guy who shoots the villain during his monologue' way, but in the 'space cops in a military setting' way.

Blackhawk748

2017-09-06, 05:06 PM

The reason people use melee weapons in Zombie movies is because they dont want to attract a horde, cuz a horde will suck. Otherwise i agree. Get a backhoe and dig yourself a moat, then build a wooden fort. Congrats, you're zombie proof.

Vinyadan

2017-09-06, 05:15 PM

Be aware that Trajan's column is freaking massive. There should be other depictions of the armies of Trajan. That was simply the first google result for the column with spears I could find. The link I provided should take you through the whole thing.

That said, by Trajan's time, the legions were less than 50% italian - a beard does not necessarily indicate auxiliary forces. Heck, Trojan's successor and adopted nephew, Hadrian, wore a beard himself.

GW

The troops with that equipment are pretty much universally identified as auxiliarii, though. (While I am not clear on the situation of the shirtless, long-bearded, club-bearing troops, which are identified as Germani and are recurrent across the column, but may have been either proper auxiliarii with unusual equipment or allied troops that did not belong to the Roman army).

There actually is one part of the column in which the spears were not made in bronze and just sculpted, and they were preserved: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7e/008_Conrad_Cichorius%2C_Die_Reliefs_der_Traianssäu le%2C_Tafel_VIII.jpg

They probably are held by praetorians, in this case. They also seem very long. It's interesting that, much later, part of Massentius' regalia were six-bladed spears.

In this image https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c0/070_Conrad_Cichorius%2C_Die_Reliefs_der_Traianssäu le%2C_Tafel_LXX.jpg
there are auxiliarii to the left and legionnaires to the right (with the Dacians suffering everywhere in between). The legionnaires must have been holding spears, otherwise their arms would be off.

So I'll now join the "Roman spear as main legionnaire weapon" group :smallwink:

Jay R

2017-09-06, 09:58 PM

Why cannot anyone in a zombie movie discover some sort of protective covering that is resistant to human teeth?

The dead don't walk. They really don't. Once you've accepted zombies, complaining about how unrealistic the movie is seems pointless.

These zombies in most movies are rather quite dumb.

No wonder they want brains.

Killer Angel

2017-09-07, 05:57 AM

No wonder they want brains.

Sadly, they usually end eating people that sleep in tents, or that wander alone, or that wait too much while the slow zombies crawl toward them...

That's probably their hidden superpower: zombies irradiate invisible mental waves that force living people (usually smarter than a brainless corpse) to act in a foolish way.

Jay R

2017-09-07, 08:40 AM

I have never seen a film that acknowledged this fact - I learnt it in QI myself - and yet I don't see anyone rending their garments over it, despite it being as ahistorical as other examples in this thread.

GW

In The Shootist, John Wayne explains this to Ron Howard.
Wayne: Put five slugs into that tree.
Howard: Why not six?
Wayne: Keep your hammer on an empty chamber, for safety.
Howard: Unless you're goin' after somebody?
Wayne: Well, load six if your insides tells you to.

Jay R

2017-09-07, 08:50 AM

That's probably their hidden superpower: zombies irradiate invisible mental waves that force living people (usually smarter than a brainless corpse) to act in a foolish way.

My experience is that invisible mental waves aren't usually necessary to make people act foolishly.

Killer Angel

2017-09-07, 05:17 PM

My experience is that invisible mental waves aren't usually necessary to make people act foolishly.

eh, I cannot disagree... :smalltongue:

Sapphire Guard

2017-09-07, 05:21 PM

But not all of the people, all of the time, which is what is needed for most zombie apocalypses to gain traction.

Traab

2017-09-07, 07:11 PM

But not all of the people, all of the time, which is what is needed for most zombie apocalypses to gain traction.

Meh, panic is a common thing. Say someone collapses and dies of a heart attack during the boston marathon. They pop back up as a zombie surrounded by people trying to help and he starts biting everyone. There is a major panic, those people start turning and biting and suddenly its a riot. The people nearby are trying to avoid being bitten, the ones further back dont know whats going on exactly. By the time its identified as a zombie outbreak there could be hundreds spreading out into the tightly packed crowd with noone knowing what to do. By the time a response is made, there could be thousands spreading all over boston as those who arent yet aware of the outbreak get attacked. Long term a zombie outbreak isnt going to last, but I can see it getting going fairly easily. And thats just a patient zero setup. If we go night of the living dead where literally everyone dead rises as zombies at the same time, we now have a world wide outbreak that again will take time to identify and bring under control. No the world still wont end and society still wont crumble but there will probably be a few days of high death tolls before its mostly eradicated.

Sapphire Guard

2017-09-08, 03:27 AM

It's very rare that they turn that quickly. And even so, you don't need to know what zombies are to want to avoid being bitten by somebody. People will defend themselves, the zombies won't have it all their own way. So, the first person turns, tries to bite his neighbours, gets restrained, any victims feel sick and go to the hospital. They turn, bite, get restrained. Whoever does the restraining feel sick and turn, hours later. They in turn get restrained, the hospital notices the trend and goes into quarantine or restrains the bitten on principles. Even if that chain fails, the victims hit dozens tops, because you don't have to know what a zombie is to want to avoid being bitten.

If we go night of the living dead we have decent numbers of disproportionately old, sick, frail, and injured people that can't navigate locked doors, are likely to be either widely spread or securely locked in mortuaries or hospitals. There will still be casualties, but hordes either don't happen or get crushed quickly. That's why most stories skip the start of the outbreak, because it's so hard to write convincingly.

Mechalich

2017-09-08, 06:24 AM

A 'realistic' zombie outbreak is just a peculiar form of pandemic and would in some sense actually be easier to contain, since you can't shoot superflu in the head. Maximum damage occurs if the outbreak starts in a highly dense and also highly impoverished area with limited response capabilities, but also the capability to widely jump borders via air travel. So the worst location is probably something like Mumbai. Regardless, the outbreak should run its course in a matters of weeks or months, since the zombies would be subject to both break down or rot and also to starvation, and in the absence of abundant human populations to spread it to fortified regions could easily sustain themselves.

Most long running zombie franchises have magical immortal zombies that never suffer any damage and need no sustenance - Resident Evil is fairly up front about this, refreshingly.

Grey_Wolf_c

2017-09-08, 07:43 AM

A 'realistic' zombie outbreak is just a peculiar form of pandemic and would in some sense actually be easier to contain, since you can't shoot superflu in the head.

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/cells.png
(link (https://xkcd.com/1217/))

GW

Anonymouswizard

2017-09-08, 08:28 AM

Most long running zombie franchises have magical immortal zombies that never suffer any damage and need no sustenance - Resident Evil is fairly up front about this, refreshingly.

Resident Evil (the games) have a specific level of zombie toughness, they threaten the city but not the world. They're tough enough to stay around, but not enough that sufficiently prepared people can't defeat them. Which is nice, after a while people actually start being able to deal with zombies without nuking the town.

Jay R

2017-09-08, 09:13 AM

But not all of the people, all of the time, which is what is needed for most zombie apocalypses to gain traction.

Actually, you only need one movie-full of people, panicking for two hours, to generate the behavior we're complaining about.

Tyndmyr

2017-09-08, 10:14 AM

Resident Evil (the games) have a specific level of zombie toughness, they threaten the city but not the world. They're tough enough to stay around, but not enough that sufficiently prepared people can't defeat them. Which is nice, after a while people actually start being able to deal with zombies without nuking the town.

They also have special undead, which significantly pumps up the threat level from shamblers. Shamblers only, well, that's a great deal easier to defend against. Throwing the occasional crazily mutated whatever into the mix allows the protaganists to take reasonable precautions, yet still be in danger without being offensively stupid.

Anonymouswizard

2017-09-08, 10:34 AM

They also have special undead, which significantly pumps up the threat level from shamblers. Shamblers only, well, that's a great deal easier to defend against. Throwing the occasional crazily mutated whatever into the mix allows the protaganists to take reasonable precautions, yet still be in danger without being offensively stupid.

Even the basic shamblers in the older games were dangerous enough that if you release a couple into a crowd they could in theory turn the whole crowd in a panic. They're not that hard to beat if you have a firearm, but in a crowd it would be easy for a zombie to take you down between seeing them and drawing your weapon (assuming this is America and you have them). Once they've hit a crowd they'll then have enough specials to actually be a threat.

My point was though that, although RE zombies are explicitly tough enough to actually be a credible threat, while weak enough that they're not the end of the world.

Tvtyrant

2017-09-09, 10:12 AM

Sadly, they usually end eating people that sleep in tents, or that wander alone, or that wait too much while the slow zombies crawl toward them...

That's probably their hidden superpower: zombies irradiate invisible mental waves that force living people (usually smarter than a brainless corpse) to act in a foolish way.

This is one of the few cases where the walking dead is actually good. Everyone is already infected by the zombie virus, it only turns you once you die. However it is heavily implied the virus itself inhibits rational behavior, which is why so many people ended up dead.

Bohandas

2017-09-13, 08:11 PM

Of course fights also have to take place in ranges of like a couple dozen feet....as fighting someone like a mile away is not dramatic.
And the one battle that comes to mind that does occur at enormous range is the final showdown in Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, in which the combatants are on an even more enormous scale (there's one scene where the mechs are on opposite sides of a galaxy but both mechs are the size of a galaxy; and I think they get even vigger before it ends)

Foeofthelance

2017-09-16, 09:51 PM

Why cannot anyone in a zombie movie discover some sort of protective covering that is resistant to human teeth?

Such stories do exist!

Islands of Rage and Hope, Chapter 17
Faith had, meanwhile, strolled up the road with PFC Funk.

“Zombies cannot even begin to harm you until they are at arm’s length, PFC,” Faith said. She had her radio “open” deliberately this time. “Which was why you wait until they’re close, generally, to fire. You hit them that way and you can be sure that they are zombies and not survivors or fellow Marines.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the Marine said nervously.

And in this gear, they can’t get to you at all,” Faith said. “Last but not least, they are not the walking dead. Are they Corporal Douglas?”

“No, ma’am,” Derk yelled.

“So they can be killed in various ways that don’t require shooting them in the head,” Faith said. “Unless you’re using a ---- Barbie gun. In which case…well…check fire, check fire, check fire,” she shouted just to be sure.

She’d heard the zombie closing in the darkness. She let it charge and slam into her from behind. She flipped it across her shoulder and onto the ground, then let it have her left arm to bite.

“Notice that he’s not gaining an inch,” Faith said, drawing her kukri. “Human teeth cannot penetrate this bunker gear. And…” she reached across his arms and chopped downward. There was a spray of arterial blood. “They are not hard to kill."