Back from LA with Honorverse move news

clancy688 wrote:

namelessfly wrote:They certainly proved the concept of combat at realistic range in the movie Battleship.

The final scene where the battleship swung around on it's anchor was certainly ridiculous physics plus short range. However; the scene where the DD was taking pot shots at the alien using the oceanographic sensors for targeting definitely had the sense of long range missile combat. The audience in the theatre loved it!

Okay, Battleship was a corny movie. However; the scene where all the old Vets taught the younger punks how to run a Battleship brought back memories of my late friend Big Jack who had his treaty cruiser sunk off Savo island by a Long Lance torpedo that impacted right under his AA mount. He spent three days floating in the water with his intestines extruded out his anus and the doctors gave him only a few years to live when he was finally released from the VA
hospital in 1945. He was the toughest man I ever knew. He would have answered the call and that is what the movie was all about.

So shoot me.

Werrf wrote:There is a space between "fantasy nonsense" and "completely accurate in every detail".

Another way of looking at it is that DW has "magic tech" but it is CONSISTENT "magic tech".

That's what made it interesting to me from a simulations standpoint. There were clearly world-laws governing how ships fought and I made a fair stab at reverse-engineering the first-war outcomes in my simulator, up through Buttercup. (tech moved rapidly enough in second war that my simulations started to break down. It hit stuff where the rounding errors and assumptions at the edge of the bell curve started to dominate the outcomes).

In comparison a story/character-oriented SF author like Bujold only gives cursory attention to the reasons why military forces use tactics the way they do, have the kinds of ships they have, etc. Of course her POV protagonist was largely ignorant of all that and relied on his subordinates to know their trade, so that worked pretty well. Mostly she managed it by having a lot of chokepoints ala Stargate, allowing for a big empire over here, and a tiny but highly skilled military over there, and the tiny guy was able to stand off the big empire by first being too annoying when conquered, then by being all "Israel in the 1970s" on the only approach points.

The tech didn't matter as much as the attitude, if you will. Everybody had roughly the same toys, but very different people operating the toys.

So while DW isn't very high on a "hardness" scale, because of the FTL, compensators, gravitic tech and such (really, nearly everything in his universe goes down to gravitics in some form), his world does operate on a "real world" plane when it comes to technological progression assuming that gravitics exists.

Contrast to the Lensmen, who had a similar arms race, but a "world law" of Doc Smith's writing was that if anyone SAW technology, his culture would duplicate it in bulk in times measured in weeks, not decades. (leading to battles where you can't use your best tech unless you are 100% certain of killing all witnesses....)

namelessfly"quote="clancy688 wrote:

namelessfly wrote:They certainly proved the concept of combat at realistic range in the movie Battleship.

The final scene where the battleship swung around on it's anchor was certainly ridiculous physics plus short range. However; the scene where the DD was taking pot shots at the alien using the oceanographic sensors for targeting definitely had the sense of long range missile combat. The audience in the theatre loved it!

Okay, Battleship was a corny movie. However; the scene where all the old Vets taught the younger punks how to run a Battleship brought back memories of my late friend Big Jack who had his treaty cruiser sunk off Savo island by a Long Lance torpedo that impacted right under his AA mount. He spent three days floating in the water with his intestines extruded out his anus and the doctors gave him only a few years to live when he was finally released from the VA
hospital in 1945. He was the toughest man I ever knew. He would have answered the call and that is what the movie was all about.

So shoot me.[/quote]
The Old Salts showing the young'uns the ropes is not out of the realm of possability. When the USN started recommissioning the Iowas in the early 80's they asked several vets who had served aboard New Jersey in 67-8 and also asked vets who had served in Korea to go backj on active duty.

I am hoping that Evergreen takes a page out the book used by the creators of the Anime Starship Operators when it comes to portraying space combat.

In that show the starships fought at relatively long range and so a combination of close ups camera shots of the different ships, zoom and pull back shots between ships, communication by the bridge crews of the ships involved were used in order to show the flow of a battle and the tactical display’s of the ships were used the convey the relative position and movement of the ships in the battles.

If anyone wants to see what I am talking about the best example from Starship Operators is probably Episode 8. I would provide a link but I am not sure what site policy is an that.

KJakker wrote:I am hoping that Evergreen takes a page out the book used by the creators of the Anime Starship Operators when it comes to portraying space combat.

In that show the starships fought at relatively long range and so a combination of close ups camera shots of the different ships, zoom and pull back shots between ships, communication by the bridge crews of the ships involved were used in order to show the flow of a battle and the tactical display’s of the ships were used the convey the relative position and movement of the ships in the battles.

If anyone wants to see what I am talking about the best example from Starship Operators is probably Episode 8. I would provide a link but I am not sure what site policy is an that.

Just added SO to my Netflix queue. Will have to check it out when it gets to me.

Corny is not sufficiently descriptive of how awful the movie was. Especially the plot elements dealing with the characters. Some of the worst screenwriting of the/that year. And that is why I am so very concerned about the HH script. We know the plot, we know the characters and we know what they said and did. But that was the book, and screen dialog can be literate, natural and effective with matching action or it can be absolutely horrid!

namelessfly wrote:snip...
Okay, Battleship was a corny movie. However; the scene where all the old Vets taught the younger punks how to run a Battleship brought back memories of my late friend Big Jack who had his treaty cruiser sunk off Savo island by a Long Lance torpedo that impacted right under his AA mount. He spent three days floating in the water with his intestines extruded out his anus and the doctors gave him only a few years to live when he was finally released from the VA hospital in 1945. He was the toughest man I ever knew. He would have answered the call and that is what the movie was all about.

So shoot me.

Disagreement on a film is not sufficient grounds for murder!

Bill Woods wrote:As I recall, this wasn't stealth, but a bug in the aliens' target evaluation software:
'shooting at me' = 'a threat to me'; therefore
'not shooting at me' = 'not a threat to me'.

(I confess, I rather enjoyed the flick. )

Well, sure, but the Aliens never seemed terribly upset about this mishap. It simply looked as if they didn't care, or if they had the same bug in their brains... ^^

As for the movie as a whole: I was literally dancing on the table when I first heard that there's a movie called "Battleship" being produced, with 200 million budget nonetheless!
While watching the film then, I was literally weeping. There surely must be a movie which I found worse during my life, but so far I haven't been able to come up with a single example...

dewdrops wrote:Very exciting stuff. Thank you, Mr. rfc, for sharing on the thought process of turning the world we all love into something the whole world can see and get. The points about Peter Jackson's work on Lord of the Rings are reassuring to me.

My big question is prolong. Can it stay in the storyline? It seems to me the implications of prolong's life extending properties are pretty central to the Honorverse. The casting and visuals, especially over multiple films(we hope)can be tough to keep people looking as if in their twenties.

Welcome to the forums. It seems that there are plenty of people out there offering suggestions to improve the movie. With the effort to keep RFC in the loop, we can hope.

Oh I don't know. Think of the "fun" of when this "Jar-Jar" Nimitz goes "Old Testament" on the assassins at the Protector's Dinner.

Seriously, I hate characters that exist only to be laughed at but I enjoy humorous characters that can be seriously deadly when it's called for.

Grabthar's Hammer wrote:
It's marvelous to hear about the progress to date, congratulations for your endeavours, may they reap a fruitful harvest.

But.

Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please DON'T, let them Jar-Jar Binksify, Nimitz.

Think it through people.

The title of the movie is Battleship

The movie is very blatantly intended to be a commercial to promote the latest reincarnation of the classic game.

The premis of the movie Is that Aliens invade and an Iowa class battleship is called upon to combat them after the aliens neutralize modern destroyers armed with Harpoon missiles and our aircraft carriers as well as shore based aircraft.

Given such a contrived scenario motivated totally by marketing, do you really expect it to be at all realistic?

Would the movie be any less unrealistic if the BB was engaging from a range of 25 miles rather than point blank range?

Would you be stupid enough to presume that aliens who can intercept long ranged Harpoon missiles couldn't intercept projectiles from 16" guns?

Either accept the movie for what it is intended to be so you can enjoy it, or stay home.


Of course I can think of some alternative variants of the scenario that might seem more realistic. Perhaps the BB has a full bag of projectiles and propellant that it can use ton exhaust the Alien's supply of AA projectiles? How do you explain that? Perhaps the BB armor will not be penetrated by the alien projectiles which shred newer ships?

clancy688 wrote:

Bill Woods wrote:As I recall, this wasn't stealth, but a bug in the aliens' target evaluation software:
'shooting at me' = 'a threat to me'; therefore
'not shooting at me' = 'not a threat to me'.

(I confess, I rather enjoyed the flick. )

Well, sure, but the Aliens never seemed terribly upset about this mishap. It simply looked as if they didn't care, or if they had the same bug in their brains... ^^

As for the movie as a whole: I was literally dancing on the table when I first heard that there's a movie called "Battleship" being produced, with 200 million budget nonetheless!
While watching the film then, I was literally weeping. There surely must be a movie which I found worse during my life, but so far I haven't been able to come up with a single example...