(CR) Legend of the Galactic Heroes remake

[DragoonKain3]

Originally Posted by Anh_Minh

But the years (decades?) have made me a lot more impatient with "cleverness" that's really "gross incompetence bordering on the suicidal" or "overwhelming tech superiority". The most egregious example here being the way the Imperial fleet seems invisible until in firing range, while the Union fleets aren't.

I personally would just let these things slide. I mean, I can write a lot about these things... actually you know what, I think I will.

1) There is no stealth in space
In episode 1, Reinhardt/Kircheis were talking about that the closest fleet to them is 2200 light seconds away, and they will reach them in 6 hours. Meaning their fleet is moving at ~370 light seconds per hour relative to the other fleet, or 30 million m/s. For reference, that's around 10% of the speed of light (0.1c). Let's say they are going each at that half that speed , so the fleet is moving towards each other at 0.05c each.

Brunhild is 1km long and 250m wide, but no mass has been put in the wiki. A nimitz class aircraft carrier displaces 100k tons, and is about a third smaller (330m long and 70m wide), so let's say Brunhild is about 300k tons. That means it took 8500 megawatt hours of energy to accelerate to 0.05c, equivalent to the energy output of 500 little boy bombs (you know one of the bombs that dropped on Japan). That's a SHIT ton of energy.

(Just one disclaimer, general relativity is beyond me, so these are the lower end of calculations. The faster you are, the more energy you need to increase your speed even more.)

I guess the show handwaves this that they were jamming the enemy ship or something, but comeon, if 40,000 ships started accelerating EVEN more towards you, that's a shit load of energy. If you missed the VERY visible increase in intensity of their exhausts (probably would increase in luminosity of a bright star), there is no way they can hide their signatures suddenly blueshifting. And they had SIX hours to notice this... were all 20k ships all of a sudden sleeping or something?


2) Maneuverablity
Just before the merry go round, you've got Yang's ships letting them through the middle, then performed a maneouvre that had them turn around and follow/shoot their enemy's rear. Assuming the two fleets were going at 0.05c in opposite directions (just like Reinhardt approached the first fleet), that means Yang's fleet had to decelerate 0.05c then accelerate another 0.05c in the same direction for a total 0.1c.

Let's say the anime is the short version of the battle, and that Yang really took an hour to accelerate instead of mere minutes. That means Yang's fleet had an acceleration of 849 Gs (!!!!!!)

To put into perspective, wiki has the record for surviving the highest G acceleration at 214 Gs. Yeah, that's about a quarter of the above amount of acceleration, and the above was sustained for an hour. So yeah pretty preposterous, especially when you considering no one in LoGH is ever strapped to their seats lol.


3) Range
I'm looking at some official numbers, and in LOGH, the longest range cannons were about 40-50 light seconds, or about 38 times the distance between the earth and the moon. Why on earth would they resort to cavalry style charges is completely MIND BOGGGLING.


So yeah, better just suspend your disbelief. LoGH isn't anywhere near what hard scifi space battles look or behave like, especially since fighters in space is already head scratching. Closest anime I know that's closest to hard sci-fi battles was actually Starship Operators, and it is anything but exhilarating lol.

Originally Posted by Anh_Minh

Can someone versed in military history say if Yang's line about that dumbass merry go-round configuration occurring countless times is actually true?

I'm pretty sure it's a relic of real life plane dogfighting. If their thrusters aren't symmetric (as in their forward thrusters are MUCH stronger than their reverse/side thrusters), then this is probably the most realistic part of the show since there's no friction in space.

Have you ever played the game asteroids? If you have any sort of speed, you notice that if you want to turn, your turns are VERY wide. Now imagine two feelts of ships turning trying to get at each other's tails, and you've got a conundrum. If you go faster trying to catch the tail end of the enemy, then your turn will be wider and wider. If you go slower, your turn is tighter, but you risk the enemy behind you catching up to your tail.

There's a mid point where you're fast enough not to be caught by the enemy's front side, but slow enough that your turn isn't so wide as to lose the enemy's tail. (assuming similar mass and thrust for the ships) How realistic this is in LoGH is another story (how many Gs of force is that gonna take?), but this is the logic behind this particular formation.

[RDNexus]

Originally Posted by xellos2099

So far most of the female look way better than the original ova counter part. To be fair, most of the female in ova doesn;t look that great beside Annerose, her friend and Karen.

Yeah, I forgot to mention that one too. I'm also digging the females' designs in comparison to the classic series

[kuromitsu]

Originally Posted by DragoonKain3

I personally would just let these things slide. ... So yeah, better just suspend your disbelief. LoGH isn't anywhere near what hard scifi space battles look or behave like, especially since fighters in space is already head scratching.

Especially considering that Tanaka freely admits that he was mostly going for coolness factor. As per his interviews, he first set out to do research on how battles in space would go, but as he read more and more about the topic he found that none of the publications he read agreed on the specifics (remember, this was back in the early '80s, hot on the heels of Star Wars, and this is a writer with a boner for Chinese lit, not a hard sci-fi guy). So he just said "whatever, it's not like anyone has seen an actual space battle before" and decided to write whatever he thought was cool.

I haven't seen episode 2 yet, but going by the screencaps... I'm really wonder where they're going with this series. Like... are they aware they have only 10 episodes left? With this pace how much ground can they cover in that time?

[RDNexus]

Maybe they'll rush of skip a few minor things of the plot and focus on the most important? I guess?

[kuromitsu]

Even so there's a ton of material to cover, and here they're wasting two episodes... Even if they want to make sure to establish the characters and the setting they still could have done it faster and in a more concise way...

[RDNexus]

Gotta wait and see. They may have done it this way for a reason...a good one, I hope...

[kuromitsu]

Yeah... let's hope for the best. Certainly 12 episodes should be enough to cover the first two volumes, but with this pace I'm having serious doubts.

[RDNexus]

Only 2 volumes? I don't know, I'm expecting a more accelerated pacing from here onwards.

[AntonKutovoi]

Remember, that it serves as a prologue to the movies.

[RDNexus]

Gotta wonder if they plan to go through all 10 volumes or only through Part1 of the story.

[kuromitsu]

I don't think they'd go further than the first two volumes in the TV series... definitely not with this pacing. But even without that, the event that happens at the end of this arc and its immediate repercussions are so momentous and heavy that continuing beyond that in a single cour would be seriously anticlimatic.

(Come to think of it, I wonder how this story will handle the Westerland incident. The OVA changed that in a way that didn't really work and didn't feel organic, so I wonder if this new team has the guts for a straight adaptation.)

Originally Posted by AntonKutovoi

Remember, that it serves as a prologue to the movies.

Even so this is an entire cour so it has to present a full story. And the movies will have only 12 episodes' worth of time so it's not like they can just take their sweet time now and get to the meat of the story in the movies. (Even if what follows the first arc is the meat of the story, in a way. The first two volumes practically serve as a prologue to volumes 3-10.)

[Kanon]

So they spent half the episode showing us how things went on the Alliance's side. It felt like a real waste of time given the number of episodes they have to work with. And why did they treat Lao as if he was going to be important? (Attenborough replaced him there in the OVAs) I don't remember him at all. Is his role different in the novels?

[Anh_Minh]

Originally Posted by DragoonKain3

So yeah, better just suspend your disbelief. LoGH isn't anywhere near what hard scifi space battles look or behave like, especially since fighters in space is already head scratching. Closest anime I know that's closest to hard sci-fi battles was actually Starship Operators, and it is anything but exhilarating lol.

1) I liked Starship Operators, thank you very much.
2) Suspending disbelief would be easier if they all had similar (if improbable) capabilities. Instead, again, the Imperials see everything while the Allied fly blind.

I'm pretty sure it's a relic of real life plane dogfighting. If their thrusters aren't symmetric (as in their forward thrusters are MUCH stronger than their reverse/side thrusters), then this is probably the most realistic part of the show since there's no friction in space.

Have you ever played the game asteroids? If you have any sort of speed, you notice that if you want to turn, your turns are VERY wide. Now imagine two feelts of ships turning trying to get at each other's tails, and you've got a conundrum. If you go faster trying to catch the tail end of the enemy, then your turn will be wider and wider. If you go slower, your turn is tighter, but you risk the enemy behind you catching up to your tail.

There's a mid point where you're fast enough not to be caught by the enemy's front side, but slow enough that your turn isn't so wide as to lose the enemy's tail. (assuming similar mass and thrust for the ships) How realistic this is in LoGH is another story (how many Gs of force is that gonna take?), but this is the logic behind this particular formation.

Except it would be much faster to just pivot your ship. There's no air resistance in space, the axis of your ship doesn't have to correlate to the axis of your motion. In fact, you'd need to pivot to turn anyway, and get your thrusters angled from your trajectory. Unless you just want to decelerate.

[Haak]

The second episode felt more of the same. Interesting but not quite gripping. The lack of context hurts here, but I'm guessing this was meant to be a "pilot story" of sorts and the real thing starts now.

[Kanon]

Originally Posted by Anh_Minh

1) I liked Starship Operators, thank you very much.
2) Suspending disbelief would be easier if they all had similar (if improbable) capabilities. Instead, again, the Imperials see everything while the Allied fly blind.

The FPA soldiers see just as much as the Imperials. Only their communications were jammed. They could see the 4th feelt was under attack, but they assumed they could hold the enemy long enough so they still could use their original plan. Instead of regrouping as Yang suggested, the two remaining fleets stayed separated and navigated to different locations, making them easy pickings. It was shown in this episode that the real reasons for this debacle were the incompetence and overconfidence of the people in charge.

[leongsh]

Originally Posted by Anh_Minh

Except it would be much faster to just pivot your ship. There's no air resistance in space, the axis of your ship doesn't have to correlate to the axis of your motion. In fact, you'd need to pivot to turn anyway, and get your thrusters angled from your trajectory. Unless you just want to decelerate.

Pivoting would be the same mistake that Reinhard mentioned. The ships are narrow and long because they aee designed for front facing shoot-oit battles. The narrower profile makes it a smaller area to target. Pivotting would show the length of the ship and make it a bigger target area to be successfully hit.

In any case, the in-universe space mechanics/physics as it relates to the movements of these space battleships/cruisers/destroyers is similar to our Earth-based naval maneuvers except for availability of the 3rd dimension space to add options. Trying to overanalyse in relation to hard physics will just be counter-productive.

[Anh_Minh]

Originally Posted by Kanon

The FPA soldiers see just as much as the Imperials. Only their communications were jammed. They could see the 4th feelt was under attack, but they assumed they could hold the enemy long enough so they still could use their original plan. Instead of regrouping as Yang suggested, the two remaining fleets stayed separated and navigated to different locations, making them easy pickings. It was shown in this episode that the real reasons for this debacle were the incompetence and overconfidence of the people in charge.

If that was the case, the Allied would have seen the Imperials coming and all three fleets would have adjusted their trajectories accordingly. Instead, they weren't aware of the Imperials until it was too late.

Originally Posted by leongsh

Pivoting would be the same mistake that Reinhard mentioned. The ships are narrow and long because they aee designed for front facing shoot-oit battles. The narrower profile makes it a smaller area to target. Pivotting would show the length of the ship and make it a bigger target area to be successfully hit.

Yes, but for how long? Because with the merry-go-round, they spend quite a lot of time presenting their rear, and as you said, they should present their front. For that matter, in a real space merry-go-round, you'd still be presenting your flank to turn, unless you have powerful side thrusters.

[Heibi]

Originally Posted by Anh_Minh

If that was the case, the Allied would have seen the Imperials coming and all three fleets would have adjusted their trajectories accordingly. Instead, they weren't aware of the Imperials until it was too late.

Remember, the admirals on the FPA side were arrogant thinking that no matter what they'd surround and annihilate the enemy like they did over a century before. But Reinhard learned from history and did the unexpected. Also remember, by the time you've detected where the enemy is in space they aren't there anymore at those distances. Everything is predicted by their computer models and they acted on it.

By the time they got the information on the 4th Fleet being attacked via courier shuttles it was far too late to react. And as you noticed both of the admirals restrained their actions to old ways of thinking and loyalty to a fellow admiral thinking he would hold out in a nearly 2 to 1 fight. Yang and Lapp both told their commanders that the timing wouldn't work to save the 4th Fleet.

[DragoonKain3]

Originally Posted by Anh_Minh

1) I liked Starship Operators, thank you very much.

As a hard sci-fi fantic reader during my younger years, I agree with you very much. I absolutely LOVED Starship Operators.

But I still stand by what I said; realistic space fights would be more like submarine warfare than aerial or battleship warfare, and that is anything but fast paced excitement. XD

2) Suspending disbelief would be easier if they all had similar (if improbable) capabilities. Instead, again, the Imperials see everything while the Allied fly blind.

Yeah, they handwaved it. Not one, BUT two fleets were caught off guard by Reinhardt's aggressive blitz tatics. I almost spat out my drink when it was shown that one of the officers of the second fleet died WHILE eating in the dining hall. Even if one fleet had been surprised (can't really 'ambush' in space), the second/third fleets should have known that the Imperial Navy engaged much earlier than anticipated. As such, they should have been on alert already knowing the Navy's gameplan is to aggressively and swiftly engage them, and should have already anticipated them coming early.

But again, it's your call. I personally largely forgive these somewhat bizarre situations, since realistic space fighting would bore the general audience to tears. (I personally like the suspense, but most people like exciting battles) I understand the need to spice it up a bit, and that's ok for me because I think LoGH's strengths aren't in the battles, but in the politics and the conflict of two different ideologies. If you decide to drop LoGH because of the battles, it's understandable for me, but I stuck around because it is more than just the battles.

Except it would be much faster to just pivot your ship. There's no air resistance in space, the axis of your ship doesn't have to correlate to the axis of your motion. In fact, you'd need to pivot to turn anyway, and get your thrusters angled from your trajectory. Unless you just want to decelerate.

Oh I agree completely (apart from needing pivot to turn; they've shown these ships have reverse and side thrusters). It's like 1000x easier to change the orientation of your ship than it is to change your direction, especially with capital class ships. I'm just telling you the rationale behind the formation, since you specifically asked for historical basis of the merry go round. And the answer, it is inspired by aerial dogfights, and then applied to 'asteroid' mechanics.

"Can someone versed in military history say if Yang's line about that dumbass merry go-round configuration occurring countless times is actually true?"

[Anh_Minh]

Originally Posted by Heibi

Remember, the admirals on the FPA side were arrogant thinking that no matter what they'd surround and annihilate the enemy like they did over a century before.

Unless they were arrogant enough to order their sensors turned off, that's not enough to explain what happened.

But Reinhard learned from history and did the unexpected. Also remember, by the time you've detected where the enemy is in space they aren't there anymore at those distances. Everything is predicted by their computer models and they acted on it.

They didn't need to know exactly where the Imperials were. They just needed to know they'd accelerated in an unexpected way.

And again, my problem isn't that the Allies were blind. It's that they were blind, while the Imperials weren't. And that the series tried to sell it as Reinhard being a genius.

Originally Posted by DragoonKain3

As a hard sci-fi fantic reader during my younger years, I agree with you very much. I absolutely LOVED Starship Operators.

But I still stand by what I said; realistic space fights would be more like submarine warfare than aerial or battleship warfare, and that is anything but fast paced excitement. XD

It wouldn't be like that either. No stealth in space, as you pointed out. Barring some FTL component, I suspect realistic space fights would be about both sides spending inordinate amounts of effort just to get within firing range of each other.

And submarine fight may not be fast paced, but it's tense!

But really, my complaint isn't about realism. I wouldn't mind if space fights were like antique marine fights and they had to ram and/or board each other to fight it out with swords and axes. It's about consistency. I want both sides to have similar capabilities (or, if there's a disparity, I want them to show it unambiguously) and both sides to use those capabilities with a minimum of competence. Some stupidity is fine, even at the highest levels, but there are limits.