Post
by 2046 » Fri Feb 24, 2017 5:55 pm
Like it. He tries to make it sound all tactically amazeballs for TV and even not bad overall, but it was (delightfully) above average for TV and not totally dumb in reality.
He notes that Thrace is a good pilot with tactical and staff skills, noting the rarity of the combo. The belief that pilots are automatically good ship captains is strangely common in the modern US Navy, though I agree it is a weird idea.
He also says "This is the first series of science fiction since Babylon 5 that has tried to show how supply, time, and distance is more important than sheer weight of numbers in battle."
This struck me on two levels:
1. If your vessels are more limited in supplies, speed, and range, such things become very important *all the time* rather than just at the margins.
Certainly it is always fair to make fun of Voyager writers for not really dealing with the logistical realities of Voyager's predicament, but generally speaking Starfleet ships have been in a better logistical position for any given event.
That is to say, the usual constraint for a Trek event is just warping time to get there, a la "Tin Man" and the buildup to the retaking of DS9. The BSG asteroid battle wouldn't have worked if the Defiant was on the Cylon side, for instance. But tactically the Tom Riker theft of the Defiant and Sisko's assessments are as good . . . the Defiant simply wasn't going to run out of gas.
2. Logistics porn is fun as its own thing, akin to plan/timing porn in heist movies a la Ocean's 11 (which are usually the reverse of logistics porn in many cases, e.g. Fast and Furious heist movies where all sorts of toys that would require long development and fabrication time appear from thin air, screen-wise, as if made by Ewoks).
But, at the same time, for storytelling purposes, I am glad not every Trek battle featured the line "Commander, our fuel runs low" or every phaser running out of ammo or the idea of Romulans burning up their engines to outpace the Enterprise-D. It should be part of the story and part of the continuity but doesn't have to be the story unto itself every time.