Electronic Warfare in Science Fiction 

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Some earlier Star Wars novels handwave the dogfights by explaining that everyone's electronic warfare is too good and homing missiles are basically useless, except for all the ones that aren't.

“Cue the Spaceballs clip“ Damn man, that was the perfect combination of timing, delivery, and the clip used. I had to pause the video because I was laughing so hard.

I think the Battletech universe encapsulates the issues best: Yes, EW exists but it's a higher tier of rulesets for more advanced players, while more casual players are free to ignore them.

so a few things to note about a more realistic space combat scenario: 1) there is always signal noise in space, there are very clever ways to filter it out, but if the return signal to noise ratio is too low, the sensor will not find it 2) tracking a target and searching for a target are two completely different tasks. a track will almost always be more stable and less likely to deceive than a search cycle 3) searching in 3D space takes a lot longer than people realize 4) Tracking things farther away takes far more energy, and far larger sensors than people realize 5) EWAR will always be a major part of space combat from this point forward

I remember in Bablyon 5, John Sheridan mention during the war, no Earthforce ship could lock on to any Minbari ship given it had some form of 'stealth' capability. In a later episode, a renegade Minbari cruiser intentionally turned off its stealth as it wanted to fight with humans in a bid to die in battle.

One of my favorite subjects. Electronic Warfare was my Rate in the US Navy. It is easily misunderstood and overlooked.

Electronic Warfare is also used in EVE Online and is even spelled out as a thing some ships specialize in. You got the hood ol fashion Electronic Counter Measures (ECM, or "jams") which jam enemy ships but require specialized jammers as each faction uses different kind of targeting, RADAR won't be affected by a Gravimetric jammer. That also includes Burst Jammers. Multispectrum jammers that hit everyone around them. Pisses the space cops off. Weapon disruption (Tracking and Guidance Disruption) disrupt the guns and missiles ability to hit. Remote Sensor Dampening ("damps") reduces a players ability to target multiple ships at once. and Target Painting which is basically pointing a laser to help everyone shoot it. There is also Electronic Counter-Counter Measures that boosts your ships sensors and amplify tracking but unfortunately there are no mirrors to reflect target painting...

7:35 SEAD is in the true NATO spirit of "scissors beats rock".

I've always loved the dummy balloons in Gundam. Having established a universe where line-of-sight is integral to warfare, making pre-fabricated dummies that instantly inflate in a vacuum that match the silhouette of your ships, Mobile Suits, and sometimes just space debris is such a simple but effective concept that requires no real technological advancement in the setting to work. I never knew navies in the real world were doing something fairly similar with ships using deployable decoys.

The expanse books go into a lot more detail about EW and particularly Naomi's remarkable skill at it that I think it's a shame more of that didn't make it into the TV series (I would guess they couldn't figure out how to make it visually interesting)

The thing with electronic warfare, is that when your side is winning you don't/barely notice it exists, but when the enemy is winning you likely only notice after it's resulted in you get blown up or shot.

since chaff would move along the vector of the vessel it's launched from, its effectiveness in space would likely depend on how long it takes to disperse, and how the vessel that launched it moves around the cloud. if your particles are big enough and moving fast enough, chaff might also double as flak, which may be either good or very bad depending on how much you use and whether you want that orbit to be safe to access after the fight.

I can't believe Nebulous fleet command wasn't mentioned once in this video! EW is a huge part of that game, with you being able to put radar jammers and countermeasures on your ship to disrupt your enemy's detection capabilities and to defeat enemy missiles.

The game Nebulous Fleet Command made me really appreciate EWAR. It isn't very flashy, but it's absolutely critical to being effective and staying alive. You don't quite get it until you see a swarm of incoming missiles suddenly veer away from your ship confused by your jammers!

Two good examples from Star Wars: in a New Hope Han Solo jams the comms of the two Tie Fighters that intercept the Falcon when it emerges from hyperspace over Alderan. The second a bit more arguable example is from Andor when Luthan Rael uses those dart things as a somewhat literal example of destruction of enemy EW assets.

Several of the Gundam series have the Mobile Suit power plants double as electromagnetic jammers, usually by emitting some sort of macguffin particle or wave (e.g. Minovsky Particles in UC, GN Particles in 00, Ahab Particles & Ahab Waves in IBO) that prevents the employment of long-range guided munitions.

Bodacious Space Pirates is one of the few anime I've seen that engaged in electronic warfare. This was a fairly normal thing for space pirates to do and an early battle featured one ship trying to take over another ship remotely, with the two sides fighting for control while the attacking ship worked to get closer. EW was important to pirates as they needed to be able to capture their targets without destroying them.

Spent a large part of my USAF career maintaining EW systems for the Wild Weasel squadrons, and later getting deep into the theories / implementation. Great video / content!

Communication jammers are basically THE deciding factor in the Legend of the Galactic Heroes universe too ! Because you can't easily communicate with thousands of ships the commanders of both sides need to keep those rigid formations even in space, a very interesting concept because they need to anticipate what the enemy will even before the battle happens.

The book series Honor Harrington (Honorverse) is really focused on EW, and describes it very well and why it is so important in-universe. - For example a multi-stage EW-component of a missile attack. 1) The missiles approach, usually in swarms of several hundred or thousands (the largest barrage to the point I'm at was several hundred thousand) 2) Then, at the border of point-defense range one type of EW-missile gives a massive short burst of static to make the weapons systems lose lock 3) Then another type of missile scatters into eight parts to mimic fake missiles, causing many of the PD-systems to re-acquire on false targets 4) Missile impact usually using directed bomb-pumped x-ray lasers

In the The Expanse books, electronic warfare plays a somewhat important role, with jamming and laser dazzling being employed. This was mostly Naomi's job on the MCRN Tachi, but the TV show glossed over it, probably because of either screen time considerations or because they thought viewers would have a hard time understanding it. Also, a torpedo getting blown up by PDC fire looks way cooler than a torpedo becoming stupid and vanishing into the void because it lost its target lock due to jamming.

I have my associates in cyber security and one of the topics I really took a shine to was EW even before I knew its name. I remember a very old Kipkay video tutorialing puting IR LED's into a pair of work glasses to jam parazzi cameras. I paird it with retroreflective garb to demonstrate how to sircumvent advaced AI tracking cameras because you show up as a big blob. some of them have gotten smarter since then and only use visible light but others not so much.

Oh, this reminds me of my homeverse's missile tactic. If you're using torch missiles and for some reason try to get a direct hit on the target, you can have the missile turn around and start retro-burning shortly before impact to dazzle or damage sensors, mitigate or completely stop point-defence fire and maybe do some extra damage to the target's protection before the actual warhead hits.

Loved the brief inclusion of EVE Online, would love to see you do videos about analyzing EVE!

Star Trek is pretty big into EWAR as well. Every instance of communications, sensors, scanners, and targetting come to mind. It kind of just falls into it's place of a fight or conflict that all has to be managed to bring the whole set piece together.

Nebulous: Fleet Command imo does a fairly good job modelling EWAR

One of the sci-fi which puts the most focus on EW I can think of is Heavy Gear. Where all of the mechs have some EW equipment as a defensive layer and then most mech squads and companies will have a few dedicated EW platforms for more powerful/specilised/offensive work.

I never thought i'd hear the TREE SHARK and SPY-1 test be brought up by you Hooji but here we are.

How about a video on chemical and biological warfare in science fiction

Gundam (in the UC at least) sorta uses electronic jamming as a basis for the justification of a lot of rule of cool stuff, including the titular mobile suits themselves since the magical pseudosciencey minovsky particle, which seems to be produced in copious amounts by any combat vehicle sorta disables any longer range radar or tracking or even radio, forcing the close quarters combat mobile suits are specially designed for. aside from the awesome mecha themselves though it also gives rise to a lot of cute little things like how the system they use for long range communication sorta looks like Morse code and how most ships still have at least some big guns

There's only one man who dares give me the raspberry. SPACEDOCK!

In the Expeditionary Force series, there are a handful of scenes from the POV of some heavily upgraded missiles where they talk to each other (literally) and sacrifice some missiles to blind enemy sensors so the remaining missiles can reach the target, or have one missile blasting out active sensors to provide guidance to stealth missiles so they can get through enemy point defense. A huge part of the series combat is centered on electronic warfare, including hacking enemy ships. IT's an excellent series and well worth the read. One faction in the Lost Fleet series uses computer worms planted in enemy ships to erase any evidence of them being there, giving them the appearance of being very good at stealth.

I find an interesting wrinkle in the evolution of electronic warfare exists in the lore of the Universal Century Gundam series. Early particle researchers working on the reactors that made space flight and even mobile suit construction possible discovered an unintended (at first) side effect; the reactors emit a radiation that, while harmless to humans, is VERY unhealthy for traditional radar and radio signals, and even visible light. This "Minosvski Particle" caused the massive step backwards in EW evolution that brought back close-combat with fighters and suits, as well as space battleships launching, effectively, cannon broadsides at one another at ranges which would be laughably small in other space combat series. It's the entire justification for big robots flying at one another in space, and I believe it's as fair a reason as any to justify them, when in storytelling perspetives, they stand as a metaphor for old infantry combat in general, as much as a revival of it. War gets a lot harder when you have to actually be up close with your target, that's part of the point of the series.

It would be awsome to see SciFi version of wild weasels squadran.

One example that might be used here was in the German Serie Perry Rhodan. During the third cycle, the heroes encounter a race of sentient robot called the Posbis. Aside of their powerful "transformer canon", their main advantage over the heroes was a device that dephased their ships four hours into the future. In short, even if you knew where they were, you still could not hit them, aside of a lucky shot here and there; while they could hit you with impunity.

I've been writing a Star Wars fanfic set in the Sequel Trilogy, and the hero ship is a variant New Republic cruiser covered in sensors and radio equipment. It was originally intended as a command ship that can see everything on the battlefield and effectively order other ships around, but it proved to be a crucial guerilla warfare craft for its ability to jam the First Order's hyperspace tracking technology and turn it against the FO by passively tracking their radar-emitting ships. It also proved useful as a mobile headquarters and broadcaster for a galaxy-wide propaganda war. EW can be great fun for storytelling if the author invests in it.

About wild weasel while it's a funny term i think sead and especially dead which are the official acronyms also sound very good

A relate sci-fi trope would be drive signatures. where ships drives or reactors have a, depending on the setting, a more or less unique fingerprint by which they can be identified. This makes it desirebable to change the drive signature in one way or the other. Or to use decoys if the signature are less specific and/or not know to the enemy.

Reminds me of "A Fire upon the Deep", though a somewhat more aggressive flavour of electronic warfare. Or Giant's Star It seems more broadly literature is more likely to go into that direction.

One of the more creative uses of electronic warfare I know of comes from the Blue Planet mod for Freespace. The main factions use plasma beams for their main guns, but there's a new faction which doesn't have access to them. They lose a lot of ships to beam fire until they realize they can use a pinpoint radio beam to throw off the beam's targeting sensors. The game does some pretty neat stuff with it: the jamming is less effective against "slash beams", which fire in an arc; TAG missiles, which have a radio beacon rather than a warhead, can allow beam lock even through jamming; and the jamming system was improvised from a class of science ship and can't be integrated into any other ship without extensive retrofitting that they don't have the time for, leaving them with a huge tactical liability. The same faction used modified escape pods as sensor decoys early in the war, although that only worked for a few weeks.

You need to include EVE Online. . . .It uses physics, there are a variety of types and sizes of weapons. E-warfare in spades

There is a Polish book series called "Algorytm wojny" where EW often plays a crucial role during ship combat. EW blocks on ships can either be used to guide your own missles, or to try and jam the enemy missles. This combined with stealth, mind games and artifical inteligence makes the setting really engaging in my opinion.

For the infrared jamming present on IRCM systems, it's typically messing with the control systems guiding the missile, and not just luring it away. Many ATGMs are semi-actively guided by the vehicle which fired it tracking the IR signature of the missile and providing it commands based on that IR signature. The IRCM systems fool the vehicle's sensor into tracking the wrong IR source

I'm surprised EDI wasn't mentioned more because Electronic Warfare was one her main duties on the Normandy (not just only hacking).

Would a chaos sorcerer summoning a warpstorm to disriupt communications and travel be considered electronic warfare xD?

Surprised you didn't mention the use of electronic anti-hijacking measures, such as Kirk's infamous use of the USS Reliance's prefix code to remotely trigger the other ship to drop their shields. Seems like a major pertinent example of electronic warfare in scifi.

EW comes in to play in the Honorverse, both the signature reduction to get closer in the ambush at Hancock Station and also the active where the untrained Masadans put the active EW on auto to confuse the missiles till the Weapons officer catches on and smashes contact nukes into the transmitters by having them seek the jammers since they were repeating a pattern.

Ships and drones of The Culture do this to an extreme extent, using their effectors to take control of security systems, other ships or even the nervous systems or brains (the GCU Grey Area) of people

Very funny to include the Unicorn Gundam's NT-D system here, because, despite its usual function of increasing the performance of the mobile suit when active in response to a Newtype, at higher outputs(?) of the system, its pilot has taken control of enemy remote weapons in a manner similar to hacking, with less computers and more psychic powers. Interestingly enough, a better example of electronic warfare in the Gundam Franchise is in The Witch From Mercury, in which multiple mobile suits, most notably the Aerial Rebuild in conjunction with Quiet Zero (whose function would most likely be defined as an electronic warfare platform), make use of 'data storms' to disrupt and take control of enemy weapons.

Star Wars may have a fighter called the electronic Warfare. In The Clone Wars when they used to stealth ship they fired flares. In the Stargate Atlantis season 3 final when they launch the weapon housing the nuclear warheads at the replicators homeworld it had decoy weapons also.

Hehe, Electric warfare fly's under the radar. Hehe.

That hovering rocket looks like my first attempt at a proper rocket in space engineers

EW can be very interesting. From my personal experience, it's not just aircraft that deploy flares and chaff like you normally see, but warships as well. Nulka is pretty awesome and has even saved one of our ships from getting damaged. In my story writing, ships have just about everything they can use for EW, including countermeasure decoys. The one catch is alien tech and human tech aren't always compatible, requiring extensive time to configure things for each other, and are generally useless against each other when it comes to hacking.

One great example of EW was in the Battle of Chintaka in Deep Space Nine. The used their own systems to trick the weapon platforms into reading the power station as an enemy combatant.

The ECM/ECCM arms race between the Manticoran and Havenite forces in the Honorverse went into some details of the Electronic Warfare- as well as other angles, like the Keyhole and Apollo systems, (deployed sensor platforms and missile system which had a sensor relay platform "missile" with the damaging missiles in the swarm)

Lancer has pretty advanced EW that you even get to play with yourself with entire frames like the Goblin dedicated to it. Though in Lancer EW goes a bit further as the paracausal tech used with it can actually rewrite reality.

Nebulous Fleet Command has some excellent EW mechanics. A powerful jammer can overwhelm enemy sensors and hide your ships, enabling you to move in relative stealth, although the enemy will absolutely know they are being jammed. Jamming is also effective at both decreasing the accuracy of enemy missile salvos, and also at screening your own missiles by hiding their signature from enemy fire control radars. Some expensive missiles even carry their own radar jammers and chaff decoys to overwhelm enemy fire control radar and screen for the missile salvos.

I've seen chaff used in space in Gundam Iron Blooded Orphans, even in Gundam 00 they use electronic warfare due to the nature of the GN Drives

In scifi settings EW is expanded to include all sensors a species may use, not just electromagnetic ones. The Honor Harrington series is rife with EW examples, which include spoofing FTL gravitic sensors. In universe avoiding detection is very difficult, so there is focus on getting the enemy to misidentify ships so as to cause tactical missteps, generate surprise and secure advantage.

X-COM music by Michael McCann, right? You gotta update the descriptions in your recent videos because they still say Battlezone II Music by Carey Chico.

In the Halo novels, it's said that Cortana was made for hacking.

An interesting take on scifi EW comes in the form of Eldar holofield and cameleoline tech. Both obviously have visual-based elements, a cameleoline cloak is basically an active-camo cape for a soldier to hide under meanwhile holofields are, well, hologram emitters that hide the ship and project an image of it in a different location. The EW aspect comes in when we consider that in 40k, auspex (equivalent to radar/sonar) is widely used across imperial forces, from navy sensors and weapon targeting to handheld infantry versions to vehicle-mounted arrays. Holofield emitters contain targeter-confusing and auspex-baffling technologies, meaning you're essentially firing blind and looking for auspex "ghosts" (partial/glitchy returns, which only appear intermittently if at all), meanwhile on the infantry level, cameleoline has nanotech weaved into the physical cloak itself which distorts all but the most powerful auspex returns making it almost impossible to find the wearer simply through scanning. In both cases you're forced to either try and eyeball it (hard enough in an infantry fight, basically impossible in a starship battle), or make educated guesses AND know what you're looking out for, OR know exactly where the eldar are hiding and focus all detection efforts on that area.

YES! Finally! I waited for this. Thanks in advance im sure its Amazing 🤩.

I just want to commend you on a very good and well presented video. I am a retired US Air Force Electronic Warfare Officer with over 30 years served. Your explanation of the basic concepts was outstanding. Due to the sensitive and otherwise highly classified nature of the subject I have struggled to explain my job to others. I think for now on I will just show your video. Thank You.

That boer war example is sooo fascinating

EW is mentioned in Star Wars often enough. for example, in Return of the Jedi, Calrissian realizes they are being jammed when they are unable to detect the status of the Death Star's shielding (immediately before the famous "it's a trap" scene).

There's tons of examples today of cyberwarfare done without deliberate backdoors, ranging from just crashing remote systems to deny service, all the way up to using advanced infiltration techniques to attack high value systems by jumping through low value systems. Imagine a sci-fi spaceship where the internal systems are networked together and someone finds a flaw in the system's communications software that can be remotely exploited with a speciality crafted signal sent to the ship, they could then use their remote access to the comms system to control or attack other systems in the ship.

In the 2000s Battlestar Galactica, there are a few distance shots of the battle of the resurrection ship, showing both the battlestars and the baseships. In one of these, you can clearly see a missile headed toward Pegasus - and then suddenly flying off in a random direction. I appreciate the discretion they used at that moment - you can see that the missile was countered (either by a Raptor or Pegasus), but they resisted the urge to have someone scream over comms "missile jammed/countered!" and just let the visual explain itself to those paying attention.

My buddy was talking about Nebulous Fleet Command that has basics of Electronic Warfare including jamming. Gundam had the Plavsky Particles, which was just a world building element to explain why the sci-fi franchise wasn't using more advanced self guided munitions and WWII tactics but it was a consistent element used in much of the franchise. Battletech likewise has Electronic Warfare but it's incredibly simplicity as the original creators of the franchise ether hand waved or flat out ignored then modern prevalence of such technology and it's future implications (it's the one thing that has always dated the franchise but hey, giant stumpy robots)

I was kinda expecting "NEBULOUS: Fleet Command". A selling point is that it was created by people from the navy, and considering the immense focus on radar and electronic warfare of various kinds, at least one of them worked with those systems specifically. Essentially, where as many space games have WW2 ships in space, Nebulous has modern ships in space.

i've messed a bit with the idea of some form of remote hacking, not so much to take over the target like BSG but more to just degrade the targets combat capabilities and interfering with targeting. Also since space tracking is going to heavily rely on tracking targets via heat sources such as IR i've pondered things like massive space flares during which the targeted ship switches off its drive(s) and uses low heat thrusters or rcs to nudge itself onto a new course. We see similar in the Expanse where ships kill transponders and drives and sneakily maneuver onto a new course, but without the "flares"

Love that of all things, Gundam does address this-the Minovsky particle is widely deployed by both sides of the conflict to cut off radio communication allowing for ambush and attack to catch the enemy totally off guard. They can be detected, but they linger so a sudden increase in Minovsky density can't be cause for alarm. Whomever has chosen the battlefield (be it ambushers lying in wait or a besieged base or fortified position) will have set up robust alternate comms before the battle began to try and reduce the impact of Minovsky pollution pm their faction, and this detail is depicted now and then so that you know it's a standard consiteration. Anime so typically handwaves away all science (even techtech science), so it's a nice attention to detail. I mean so much of the rest of it is total crap as you'd expect, but still. All sci-fi has its "Yeah right" moments, it's part of what makes the genre fun!

It’s funny because one of the few Sci-fi factions that I know of that use dedicated electronic warfare Ships is the imperium of man from 40K.

The Honor Harrington book series makes great use of EW in space fleet battles. For a time, long range missile exchanges dominated, overshadowing much shorter range beam fire. EW was king with vast arrays of decoys and such giving the hi tech advantage. The lower tech side eventually countered with the "Triple Ripple", a barrage of crude nuclear warheads with no target at all beyond X volume of space. Not enough to damage heavily shielded ships, sure, but all the external/remote fancy electronic doodads in that volume ate sht. This turned the subsequent battle into a low tech analog slugging match.

Glad you mentioned the Defence Onion, because it also applies to hacking. Apparently no one on Caprica was familiar with that concept LOL. System backdoors can be mitigated by firewalls. See also, Colonial Fleet could simply have turned their radios off. Backdoor no longer accessible. Of course they'd be less effective without comms, but sure beats being a sitting duck.

I love the EW in The Last Angel series, very fun, especially the upper levels of hyper advanced powerful yet ‘dumb’ computers vs nimbler and adaptive AI’s

The Aeldari of Warhammer 40k, instead of using shields on their ships and mechs, use a hologram-like technology that prevents enemy weapons from detecting them with enough precision to hit them.

David Weber's Honorverse was a masterclass in EW escalation and countermeasures. I need to reread the books, at least to book 12.

3:46 , That Battlestar Galactica shot was just amazing

In Battlestar Galactica, battle scenes where the Pegasus was involved showed incoming missiles going haywire when in proximity of Pegasus. This would've been due to their ECM systems, and was a subtle way of showing how much more advanced the ship was than Galatica.

I'd say anti-Gundam Antidote system from Witch From Mercury counts as EW. It's a jamming field that interferes with the mind-machine data format Gundams use to operate, although IIRC it's never explained how it works. Since the GUND format is doing some quantum entanglement space magic stuff, antidote must be pretty exotic too.

Nice video, i like it. I got the doubt though, so i asked Bard: "While cyber warfare and electronic warfare might sound similar, they're actually two distinct disciplines with significant differences. Here's a breakdown: Target: Cyber Warfare: Targets digital infrastructure and information systems like computers, networks, and databases. Think infiltrating servers, stealing data, disrupting operations, and spreading malware. Electronic Warfare (EW): Targets the electromagnetic spectrum (EMS) used for communication, navigation, and radar. EW aims to disrupt, deny, or deceive by jamming signals, spoofing information, or destroying electronic devices. Tools: Cyber Warfare: Relies on software tools like viruses, worms, trojans, and hacking techniques. EW: Employs specialized hardware like jammers, decoys, and directed energy weapons to manipulate the EMS. Effects: Cyber Warfare: Can cause data breaches, financial losses, operational disruptions, and even physical damage through manipulated control systems. EW: Can blind radars, disable communication systems, and hinder navigation, creating confusion and impairing military operations. Similarities: Both can be used for offensive and defensive purposes. Both exploit vulnerabilities in their respective domains. Both play an increasingly important role in modern warfare. Both can sometimes overlap, with EW targeting computer networks or cyber attacks utilizing the EMS. Here's an analogy: Think of cyber warfare as attacking a castle by breaching its gates and manipulating its internal systems. Electronic warfare is more like firing arrows at the castle walls to blind its defenders and disrupt communication, making it easier to breach."

No mention of Wraith jamming the Asgard beaming tech? Disappointed! 😂

I have been waiting for this since it was announced! So excited!

"Of course they are jamming us, do you expect our enemies to stop behaving like enemies, why do you think we have assigned courier shuttles?" -Kaiser Longarm Von Reinhard of the Galactic Empire.

Battle of Yavin: the briefing warns of the immense jamming, and during the battle the TIE fighters successfully approach the Rebel fighters without being noticed until they're already in gun range.

In a sci fi world building thing im doing the hero ship, a former science and scout vessel, isnt great for combat even though it has weapons. But a science ship with great sensors, lots of power and space for cusromization? Perfect for Electronic Warfare! Think putting off enemy aiming, jamming comminications, false returns and the like.

Didn't see it mentioned, and it only shows up as a short clip in the video. Many Gundam series operate on the premise that there's so much jamming and chaff that close range combat is common, and that long range coms don't work. Often with the idea that it's some invincible device or a particle that acts like chaff mixed with flares along the entire EM spectrum.

@Spacedock there is an Anime series "Bodacious Space Pirates" that brings EW front and center repeatedly in the plot and is much better than you might initially expect. Particularly Episodes 3-5 center around a battle that is 95% fought using electronic warfare going as far as utilizing social engineering as part of their EW efforts. Their are a lot of very well thought out concrete tactics and potential consequences of using EW in a battel discussed and or implemented in this series. for example there is a discussion where they talk about possibility that if you loose at EW an enemy ship might just open all of your ships external airlocks, and it doesn't matter how good your armor and weapons' are if that happens.

Makes me happy to see that even some Babylon 5 footage was included in this. :)

I think a good example of electronic warfare in star wars is the imperial interdictor cruiser.

Electronic warfare is a major part of space combat in Honor Harrington. My favorite are the Manticoran Dragon's Teeth EW platforms, they are basically missles that create the illusion of dozens of other missles to fool counter missles and laser clusters.

Megatron: Soundwave, jam that transmission! 😠 Soundwave sends his cassettes to physically attack Blaster 😆

The best example is that star wars rebels episode when chopper used his wireless charging feature across space and time and electrocuted an imperial cyborg on his own ship... Lol

Great vid! (Old head USAF B-52 crew dog here). EW back in the day was meant to buy time and not necessarily to defeat enemy defenses. If the EW equipment confused the enemy system/system operator long enough to either enable us to exit the enemy's engagement envelope OR pop off a weapon, then that was win.

One of my favorite examples comes from Neal Asher’s Polity Universe (if you remember Snow in the Desert from Love Death Robots, that was written by him and is a short story in that universe or a version of it). Their electronic warfare is literally just the logical extreme of combining hacking and the em warfare, they can transmit and assemble viruses and other attacks with lazers by i think manipulating the quantum states of computers. Super cool.

In a sci-fi setting I'm building, everyone takes EW to heart. They're heavy on mosaic warfare and everything that looks like a wing or blade on a ship is a transmitter or receiver. Ships daisy-chain comms lines and datalinks together to get through noise that blankets the whole battlefield, and the bigger a ship is, the better its sensors and the more of the battlefield it can influence. And of course, such oversized directionalized emitters can be used as powerful weapons to burn through enemy networks once you've figured out who to blind first. They're so big on fighters partly because you can see and influence a huge section of space for relatively cheap with wings of them on the same network.

3:04 Only one man would dare to give me the raspberry! LO..O..O..NESTAR!

One example is from the movie Wing Commander, where the Killwrathy fire a torpedo the Cloaks travels to its target while from time to time uncloaking to gets it bearing.