The Battlestar Galactica is an astonishingly large warship, and I'm here to talk about... its phones 

Cool lore. So his ship takes the disadvantage of non networked computers (slower response times, lack of instantaneous info about the ship) in exchange for being hardened against Cylon network attacks.

@@abelq8008 You can't hack analog via software. Adama goes full old school.

Actually the vipers had a virus already in them. They weren't hacked in combat, but a preloaded virus. It was the lack of resent overhaul that allows others to stay functional.

@@icecold9511 Are you talking about Viper Mk.VII, the latest Colonial Viper, or Viper Mk.II, the Cylon War era Viper.

@@AlexSDU The latest ones were still functional, so long as they didn't have that virus.

Right up there next to not putting the bridge on top of the bullseye of a dartboard or all the way in front behind a giant widow.

Not to mention the whole lack of rocks in the panels.

but the claymore mines are necessary for the explodium panels ships run on.

@@kevinslater4126 The Bucket, is powered by taiko drums.

apparently this fictional universe remembered circuit breakers or fuses.

i think the Jupiter is from the god, as we see various gods ect as a day to day in caprien culture

​@@RamosLuis2550 It's both. Jupiter 2 is the ship in both old and new Lost in Space series. Ronald Moore confirmed that it's a tribute at one point during an interview.

I came to comment the same thing. It's worth noting that some of the non-canonical at-release related indicia listed the oBSG's BSG as Atlantia class. Battlestar is directly equivalent to battleship.

@@WilliamHostman no its not. Battleships do not carry fighter and support crafts. Battlestars are carriers that are armored and armed. Considering the fact that jumpdrives exist makes it sensible enough since you cant play the standoff card that carriers are based around.

@@trazyntheinfinite9895 assault carrier

I think they did that on "Space: Above and Beyond" for the _Saratoga._

Especially considering if you've ever read naval battle logs, a few good hits could knock out the power for considerable periods of time.

Even ignoring the issue of power, the reliability of a system like that comes from multiple facets. First it doesn't require anything external, meaning it'll work when almost everything else is dead. Second, because it's a handset, a cable, and a second handset, it's easy as hell to diagnose and fix issues in that system. Why's the phone not working? It's either you, me, or the cable. All of those could be repaired or replaced by anyone with basic tools and a laminated sheet of instructions, even in a firefight. Finally, like the emphasize in the show, there's nothing to be attacked by an external 3rd party. You can't hack that wire short of actually going up to it and hacking at it with a screw driver.

@@zactron1997 - And, it's EMP proof, which is really important on something like the Galactica, where nukes or EMPs get thrown around a lot.

Not in vacuum no!

That was actually referenced by Commander Tigh in the first episode/miniseries when they were trying to put out the port side fire.

Like they had in the Traveller RPG, where part of battle prep was to don pressure suits and depressurize as much of the ship as possible to avoid explosive decompression in the event of a hull breach.

@@weylins Thanks. I've heard of Traveller (I'm that old), but know very little about it.

@@Hunpecked it's a solid system (in all of its edition), with genuinely interesting setting that while humanocentric is not Earth-centric.

@@rsrt6910 "Eighty-five, dead. Sir. Most of them rookies." "Nobody's a rook anymore, Chief."

Morse code is still worth knowing!

@@sststr But it takes so much time to list all the toppings you want on your pizza.... Then there is always the "shout-loud" mode of communication (before the wired telephones, there were just metal-tubes to shout through (point-to-point)).

Worth watching. Sometimes the story went oddball but great anyways

Ostensibly because the ship can only open a wormhole just wide enough to fit through without putting excessive stress on the ship when they're retracted... and 'cause it looks cool.

@@spartanx9293 using the same jump drive, the Valkyrie's cross sectional area is smaller than the Jupiter class with the pods retracted and the Mercury class has a more advanced jump drive that opens a larger hole than the Jupiter class. I don't know enough about the Minerva to comment on it though.

I record these videos in a state most organics refer to as "drunk", so, yeah, all that.

@@SacredCowShipyards haha Don't you have to be organic to be drunk? I loved the line in Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy. "Travel in hyperspace leaves you feeling unpleasantly drunk" "What's so unpleasant about being drunk? Ask a glass of water."

We try!

For TV shows and movies, yeah, it's pretty much just The Expanse and the 2004 Battlestar Galactica. Novels wise, the Honor Harrington books get pretty in depth about the damage control during their battles.

Lost Fleet by Jack Campbell. B5 mentioned it once then left it, though those ships are meant to take a pounding anyway

While a great design philosophy, by itself has some flaws. Galactica has its Bridge and CIC in one room in the bow, meaning if said bow takes significant damage that the particular room starts taking damage, the entire warship is partially disabled or worse disabled. The Battle of the Colony is a good example. Pegasus on the other hand, while I'm guessing in the bow as well, has both the Bridge and CIC separate, I think, so either one doesn't completely disable the ship when damaged. What makes shake my head is that Colonials didn't take this design philosophy even further by adding more CICs and Bridges in the bow and midsection so that if the primary is damaged, the backups can take over. And while space is indeed harsh, having at least one external (backup) Bridge might not be a bad idea. The reason for this, if the Cylons were smarter than what's portrayed in the series they would extensively make use of ECM to disrupt the DRADIS on the Colonial ships, reducing their combat efficiency, forcing the CIC to relay on visuals from the turrets, Vipers, Raptors, and other ships who all will be very busy fighting. So having some spotters relaying data to the CIC when Cylon ECM is present would be beneficial.

It was bound to happen eventually.

This is incorrect: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound-powered_telephone The growler exclusively serves as an alerting system, not a powering system.

I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

It really, /really/ boggles the mind once you start thinking about it.

That explains the depth of the details.

RDM spent a month during his freshman year of college aboard USS W. S. Sims (FF-1059) and was going to college on a Naval ROTC scholarship before he dropped out.

Sound-powered phones are favored by any species that communicates by modulating sound frequencies through an atmosphere.

@@SacredCowShipyards Thanks for your reply. Multiple redundancies would also be available on spaceships as space faring species will appreciate from experience.

No. Sound-powered phones, by design and implementation, require no external nor additional power source to operate.

@@SacredCowShipyards They do when communicating with Vipers and Raptors, and making ship wide announcements. Pretty sure that requires dedicated power.

If you're going to deliberately conflate "sound-powered phone" with "radio transmissions" or "the 1MC", there really isn't any further point to this conversation.

@@SacredCowShipyards They have used them interchangeably which is my point of amusement. My guess is they simply forgot they were supposed to use a different phone.

Ship-powered phones wouldn't work then either.

@@SacredCowShipyards i have wondered if a maintenance box system like USAF heavies use wouldn't work better (or a hybrid) Through out the aircraft there are Maintenance net boxes that can have a hand set or you can plug into (they are usually co-located with low pressure O2 bottle refill ports) Aircrew fire fighter gear and standard oxygen systems can both be plugged in for coordination during smoke /fire and depressurization events. The system is connected emergency power. Future damage control crews would probably have inter-team radios but that requires sophisticated repeaters for coordination and deconfliction during operations. A call box set up would allow the Damage control center(s) to coordinate with team leads in a degraded comms situation.

Yeah, I'm not really sure why the frames of the ship are on the exterior, but it does look cool.

The background for that look is that the Galactica had had most of its armor removed prior to its decommissioning.

@@jasonpeacock9735 ah OK. I didnt know it had been decommissioned. It's been years since I saw the series and I must have missed that part.

I don't believe nu-BSG had any kind of energy weapons, at least among the humies.

@@SacredCowShipyards I know. I'm not happy about it though. Especially the excuse I heard they gave which was viewers wouldn't undertsnad how they work. The problem is most viewer would undertsnd somewhat and its not like were are all experts on how projectile weapons work.

The Galactica is a Jupiter Class. Pegasus is the Mercury Class one.

Eh. I'm one of those oddballs who didn't hate it.

Never knew that, but suspected as much.

Roddenberry and a bunch of the old school Trek guys were Navy vets too.

This is old tech. Works great, it should continue to be used on Starships or Battlestars.

They only had dumbfires as far as I remember and they're more or less useless in long range space combat

Jamming systems are not foolproof though. And a lot of Sci Fi writers, BSG and Star wars included fall into the trap of thinking, oh Jamming exists, well now all guidance systems are useless, lets go to close range broadsides now. This is absolutely not the case. Jamming can be overcome through something as simple as good operator training, but more interestingly, jamming can also be overcome through an Anti Radiation missile, a missile designed specifically to home in on Jamming, as well as radar and wireless communication sources. No amount of jamming is going to stop an Anti radiation missile from doing very nasty things to your jammer, other than turning the thing off and hoping the missile doesn't have a backup guidance system. Other methods to overcome jamming is to frequency hop your radar and radio, as Jammers have a limited amount of power and jamming does no good if the Jammer is on the wrong frequency, other than telling the enemy your there. Which is the other drawback of Jammers. Jammers work by overpowering the signal strength of enemy signals with a stronger one. But this has the downside of telling everyone within range of the thing that your there in the first place. These are not stealthy devices in the slightest. So yeah Jammers arent foolproof at all. They are useful in certain situations like any piece of military hardware, but they are not unbeatable. But a lot fo writers whom dont understand how and why they work and their counters just tend to use them as a plot device to justify close range ship to ship broadsides or old school dog fighting in space.

Can't hack taiko drums, neither.

@@ryuukeisscifiproductions1818 The antagonists in BSG are AI. Add that fact to the fact that they both protagonists and antagonists are technologically superior to us, and you can likely just take what you said and throw it in the garbage. The guns of August all over again.

@@michaelgillman2505 AI, doesn't matter, Technological superiority, doesn't matter. Why, because jamming technology is highly related to and very dependent on the sensor technology in use. As a result you will never get a situation where jamming technology is so superior to sensor tech that miltiaries are force to go back to old school close range broadside tactics or old school dogfighting. Especially not in space that bothers to even pay the slightest attention to realism, where spaceborne sensors are more likely to be LIDAR, thermal, or even ridiculously high magnification optical systems, none of which give the slightest damn about jamming attempts. There are other potential developments that can cause guns to become a dominant ship to ship weapon again and cause missiles to lose dominance, but jamming is not one of them. For example, insanely efficient point defense systems that can only be beaten by ridiculously high velocity railgun rounds firing armored projectiles would very much bring the big gun ship back into dominance. But it would also wipe the fighter out too.

Also it turned out to be pretty hard to change the trajectory of a few tons of metal flying towards you.

Yeah, the Basestars definitely seem like strike craft/missile carriers. They’re not frontline battleships or cruisers like they’re used. And they *absolutely* shouldn’t be used to fight a ship COVERED IN FLAK GUNS AND INTERCEPTORS!

Yup, and don't forget Starfleet's lack of seatbelts. And when you're sending a ship out to explore dangerous new stretches of space (and get in battles at least once a week), make sure to send lots of families with their children. All those scenes with the bridge crew getting knocked around and thrown from their chairs... I always wondered what was happening in the daycare center and the classrooms.

I like to charitably imagine that an explosion from a ship is its air supply getting ruptured, because no one would be dumb enough to power ships, war or otherwise, with explosive reactors, right?

Fuses are apparently a lost technology

We dont just have GPS though, we have like 4 different redundant non-overlapping technological methods. Sextants on a fishing ship? sure, sextants on military craft? you are tripping.

We had one of those in the shop when I was in the Air Force... we used it and the box it was in as a door stop. Was pretty cool though.

@@BartJBols #inertialnavigation

@Bart Bols Like 4??? Vague much?... (Pardon the mental image of you doing the Keanu "Dude" face) Since I "must be tripp'n," so allow me to be your humble tour guide to reality & how it can apply to fiction. The point was that isolated systems are unable to interrupt operation of other non-networked systems. No power, computer cannot be hacked. Physical disconnection from communications, no internet penetration. Put your system in a Faraday cage, no RF in or out. (Called it TEMPEST back in the day.) SCS was making the point that older technologies are useful because they work. The BSG reboot shows some of the best of current design philosophy for warships and applies the same to their concept of a space warship. Sound powered phones are just one example. Near the end of my career they were begining to replace the Gyroscope-based INS out of the B-52H. Not because the RLG-based (Ring Laser Gyro) system was better... It was to use the older, more stable, and better INS for the Space Shuttle! We fly with paper charts (maps, but accurate enough for navigation) for crying out loud. We still teach navigation by dead-reckoning to all Navigator/WSO/CSO or whatever they are called now. Compass heading, airspeed, and wind data yield your course. The occasional look out a window to update (fix) your location to a visible spot on the chart, and you are good to go. Please Google aircraft periscope sextant. That is the thing you stick up a port in the top of the aircraft to get a celestial fix on your position. Readings+lots of math= You were here at that time. Without any way to jam it... There is a tendency to believe that new is better. It is often just easier. But reality shows this is not always true. I worry about the US Military's obsession with "Net-centric Warfare." It is wonderful, until your system gets disabled/MIJIed/hacked. Simple concept: The goal of war is to kill people and break things until your opponents do what you want. (Not as elegant as Clausewitz, but easier to remember.) This requires that your side's gear works. Not that it is the best. Survival kits don't include electrical arc type lighters, they have matches because they work. Every Army in the world issues knives, because they work. The basic technology of the small arms we use has only seen small changes in implementation since the introduction of metallic cartridges in the 1800s. This is the tyranny of merit. You use what works, because it works. And in BSG, what works in reality also is a good choice there.

I can think of two ways to jam the stars: 1) Sunlight 2) Clouds You do make a valid point, though, about including multiple options to accomplish the same task, in case any single option is unavailable at any given moment.

I was going to ask if you guys were allowed weapons training and we're able to carry fire arms? You said something about having mercenaries? I've watched videos of merchants carrying cargo thru pirate infested water, and all they were allowed was fire hoses, and types of boards & things they could throw over the rails so grappling hooks wouldn't easily hook But had zero firearms. I'm like, screw that, especially at night.

@@masstv9052 In most civilized western countries Merchant Ships aren't allowed to carry weapons. Also crews usually have no weapons training unless they had it before. So what you described is the "standard" defense against pirats. There were exceptions made for the Gulf of Aden. When passing that area Vessels are allowed to take mercenaries on board to defend them. And those of course are armed.

@john smith lol Nice! Maybe they should have choosen a safer profession or at least learn to swim! Thanks for your service John and stay safe! Keep the sandbags and barbed wire between you and them! If you go back please feel free to pass on my "best regards!"

@john smith Oh and I hope you don't feel offended by me calling you guys mercenaries! That term is just something the landlubbers understand! For them a security guard is the guy at the mall!

@@sarahogrisseck4965 - Private contractors, security contractors... Nah. I'd rather have a few good private security boys (and girls) watching out for me with their gucci Glocks and other toys than not having any backup. :D

BONG BONG BONG "Set Condition One"

That's not true tho, BSG had plenty of sounds in space.

@@XBrain130 True they were muted as if you were hearing it as the pilot hears it.

From what i heard, they at first want to make the space scenes quiet for accuracy but later on they thought that it would be very awkward for the viewers and decided to just simply put subtle firing sounds in space

Firefly also had very physics based everything in that show.

It has FTL and artificial gravity that's just hand waved away. The main fuel is magic technobabble. Actual gods (not even explained as hyper evolved beings but straight up *gods* ), prophecies, and a flawed but magically resurrected messiah/ghost are the driving forces of the whole storyline. And it's mainly about sociology, psychology, philosophy, and theology... nah it's soft sci-fi. It's just a really good example of it. Hard doesn't mean "feels more realistic" and soft doesn't mean trash. Alistair Reynolds is generally hard sci-fi and Ian M Banks is generally soft but as much as I personally love Reynolds stuff Banks's soft sci-fi is more realistic and plausible feeling.

Good idea equipping a flashing light, but if you can't hear then I think a telephone would be not particularly useful to begin with. Although maybe you can hand the phone to someone who was blinded but can still hear? I dunno.

@@deusexaethera the engine room is a big space with lots of separate spaces, big engines and pumps, if your working on the far side of a space and wearing your ear plugs you might not hear the growl but the flashing light will get your attention, remember the most terrifying thing at sea is fire so yea a flashing light will get your attention

We used them in the Army. You would run a spool of wire from location to location and hook up a couple of hand sets. When you needed to get in contact with your NCOIC or Officer, crank the handle, hold down the button, and talk away. They are a bit of work to set up; but, they're safer than using a radio for communication. Plus it keeps the radio traffic to a minimum.

In the end, they blew holes in the hull to extinguish the fire.

BSG provides the closest-to-real-life Navy experience for science fiction shows, and The Last Ship provides the best experience for modern-period shows... though both had issues with how they handled physics.

Adama served for several days on a Submarine for Command Quals prior to taking command of the Galactica

Especially when they made shipwide announcements for personnel working EVA, of action stations, DC announcements, etc.

@@SacredCowShipyards Agree on BSG (esp the crew endurance during the chase), not so much on TLS (esp later seasons). But I might be biased because they shot my old ship (played a role as enemy-vessel) in TLS. The naval-engagements were full of plot-holes/-armour as I remember.

@@DreadX10 While true, they at least filmed it on actual ships, which required some camera angles where I was constantly trying to figure out where they /put/ the camera, and that kind of immersion was impressive.

Wait the batteries for the sound powered phones is real? What else did the army have? Blinker fluid?

@@danamoore1788 Grenade cleaning kits... Yes, those were real too... And as i said, the batteries were only used when you were plugging into powered network... reason being, if you turned the crank... thats nothing but a hand cranked generator. that sends a high power pulse through the line... well modern phone lines don't like that one bit... and.... you blow out ciructes all over the place doing it... hence.. the batteries :)

@@jenniferstewarts4851 Wow. This gets me because getting batteries for the sound powered phones, blinker fluid, prop was, and flight line. Were all things used to haze newbies sent to supply. Finding some are actually real is rather surprising.

@@danamoore1788 oh yeah.. though it wasn't anything special, i think it was just 2 d-cells. if you look at pictures of the Candian field phones... you can actually see the battery cover cap on the top. Right in the center. Though we like Never had to use them. We were told IF.. IF we had to... just pull the batteries from our flashlight. cuz we weren't ever issued batteries for them either.

@@danamoore1788 Oh, and don't forget to have your ID-10-T form signed and stamped.

God bless the snipes, keeping the hunks of metal going so the deck apes can look pretty.

I loved this show, right to the end. and then it pulled the OG game of thrones level ending.

@@AC3handle correction: it was fantastic right up until they introduced The Final Five BS. Then it went to hell QUICK.

The whole god thing put me off

@@ab5olut3zero95 It did feel very...out of the blue. But at least they rolled with it, and made it work. Sort of. It was the very end that killed it for me.

@@mackgriffin7397 That part actually made a whole lot of sense on many levels. You have the humans, with multiple gods, and then the cylons, who directly oppose them, with just ONE god. It was also a mirror in a sense, of our current theological situation IRL. Which I notice is why many people disdained that aspect.

It doesn't "only" work for that reasons. It may not be optimal otherwise (fleet + inaccurate FTL). However given the propensity for the use of nuclear warheads, that much armor on ships of the line makes sense. We saw the Galactica take a lot of damage, that would have otherwise killed it, and none of that had to do with it having to form up after FTL translation. That being said, in the show, a hundred ships seem to jump pretty close to each other, accurately and consistently.

Heavy warship design in space designed to produce a wall of fire works pretty well if your engagement are around "stationary" targets, like stations or planets. This modern sci-fi idea that space ship will be making high speed passes launching volleys and returning to do so again when engaging in combat in space makes very little sense actually. When you need to soak incoming damage, armor helps. Dumb matter that can take it is usually a good idea for an armor. When you need to deliver damage, combining firewall with precise missiles also works. Vipers, however, don't really. They would rather use dumb 3d-printed drones to launch them en masse, have them come as close as possible to launch missiles then kamikaze into freshly made holes.

@@gabriellang7998 drones would have issues, namely if its remote controlled, jamming: the farther from the mothership (and signal source) the more likely your signal is going to get cut off and the drone rendered uncontrollable, and that's for short range. any significant distance you want to launch those from and you run into lag becoming more and more of a problem. and if you're going instead to AI controlled drones, well, what was the Galactica facing again?

@@lordhylia5745 You don't have to remote controll single shot drones. Have them basic instructions on board and just swarm the target. One shot, not re-programmable, fire and forget, print new ones.

@@gabriellang7998 so a missile, not a drone.

I get people's complaints about the finale, and I agree that it could have been handled a /lot/ better, but the show as a whole was still better than it had any right to be.

@@SacredCowShipyards So true!

I liked the cut corners on paper. Silly small thing, doesnt realy make sense, but it added alot to the feel of the world

@@KamiRecca for the pilot the production crew were told they had to "cut corners " to t get the show out on budget lol, that's what they did as a joke. When the series were made all the paperwork and books had to have cut corners and it cost a fortune to do it.

@@KamiRecca I always wondered if that was their version of a dot-matrix-printer's traction holes, but the real-world explanation is far more hilarious.

I did appreciate that there was at least a nod at the Skittles.

As a bullet sponge sailor (destroyer class) I still get it, they did seem to take care to make analogs for modern day navel things

@@SacredCowShipyards Well, it truly was an adventure. There's a reason the young ones do 90% of the work on the flight deck.

I think Ronald D. Moore spent some time on a naval ship as an observer. It might have been R.O.T.C. or something -- I can't remember. Anyway, he mentions it every now and then in some of the BSG podcasts.

@@OneEyedJack1970 He was in ROTC with the goal of being a Naval aviator. But he was medically disqualified.

Sounds about right for the Navy.

@@SacredCowShipyards Don't get me wrong, I loved being in the Navy. I've been water crazy since I can remember. Not only did I get to see places most Americans have only heard of, but being out in the middle of the Pacific at night, when the ship has all exterior lights extinguished, was one of the best times of my life. Unless you've seen it for yourself, you can't imagine how many stars the human eye can see when there is nothing but absolute darkness from horizon to horizon. I spent a lot of hours just lying on the deck of the Fo'c'sle staring up at the show, with a P-Coat for a pillow and a Trenchcoat on the deck to lay on. But that trip, OMG it sucked balls.

Thank you for your service. And sharing the good stories.

That is the kind of story I'd love to see adapted to a sci-fi series.

It wouldn't be so salty if the offspring didn't keep raiding the medicine cabinet and fridge.

bonus addition, ONLY the box itself needs to be intact, you can get another headset from somewhere else, every station has spares and even if the circuit is cut it will still function uninterrupted with anything else its still connected to and there are massive cables all over the ship that can be used to reconnect the boxes and restore the comms loop, there are even special cables that can connect the comms circuits between ships. in summary, the sound powered system will still be either working or serviceable long after the ship has sunk

@@nickolaswilcox425 pretty sure sunken sound powered sets have been retrieved and they still worked

Damage control decisions are almost always hard.

Pretty dammed sure there was a carrier captain that had to make a similar decision IRL.?

Thanks!

Well, the pulse pistols / rifles / cannons are pretty pew-pew-y, and jump gates / hyperspace are... pretty magical, even though your species has at least scientifically hypothesized them before.

@@SacredCowShipyards Go watch BSG (2004 TV series) again carefully. NO lasers, NO ray guns. Ship-to-ship combat is by kinetic weapons (autocannon, etc) and missiles - explosive ordinance and nuclear. ALL sidearms/rifles are regular automatic weapons that use cartridges. Even the shiny new improved Cylon Centurions shoot bullets. So there you have it, a sci-fi show set in space with a grand total of NO ray guns whatsoever.

Wharblegarble, my fault. Too many comments on a B5 post today. You're right - no ray guns in BSG. Instantaneous FTL though? That's pretty majik-y.

@@SacredCowShipyards high science is indistinguishable from high magic, only the power source is different

@@SacredCowShipyards Name a science fiction show that doesn’t have some kind of Clark tech. And I don’t think BSG was unpopular. Most people I know loved the 2004 series.

Not perfect, the wires could be cut (shrapnel or sabotage) and the dial or switches could get 'stuck' between 'neutral' and 'connected' and nobody could call you (this happened due to an impact or explosion).

How's the phone supposed to work in a vacuum? Not that anyone without a breathing suit is going to carry a conversation for long...

A better engineered version of two cans and a string.

@@michaelarreola4201 The sound isn’t carried through the air. It’s carried along the wire.

@@gawainethefirst the sound cannot reach the phone in a vacuum because there is no air to travel through to reach the receiver. Damage control parties working in a vacuum would need comm units like the pilots wear in their vipers/raptors.

Do not forget the savety belts!

Not forgetting that all transmissions and computing are photonic in Star Trek. Maybe they should run their terminals on USB. In my opinion Star Trek space battles not up to what they could be with micro-jumps at warp one (light speed) making them capable of playing real spatial convergence ... switching position within 300,000 Km in a second. Seeing close formations of ships makes me cringe. Ships should be at least half a million kilometer apart.

@@mikecimerian6913 Well when your max range for your beam weapons is like 5km, you gotta get close. Of course that means any real navy would use a lot more torpedoes.

@@vederianl9723 There is dispersion for directed energy weapons but kinetic ones can be used with deflection. I would opt for stealth and rail guns as primary and missiles for heavies and maybe lasers for close in defense. Star Trek close ship formations exist only for the visual impact. We also have to take micro-jumps into account. Getting close in for a salvo then warping out of target lock makes more sense for me at least. The Picard maneuver should be canon and text book in Star Trek, not something exceptionally brilliant. :)

@@mikecimerian6913 Star Trek Humans don't have our level of viciousness. Now the Mirror Universe on the other hand... They managed to stomp all the other powers in our half of the galaxy _at once._

@@JoshSweetvale Yes they bring their family and kids along for the battle. We don't bring our kids in main battle tanks so I credit us with more common sense. :D I still enjoy the original series but the other series are damned by the general audience rating. Had they opted for an older age group we could have seen Star Trek in its full glory. The big turn off for me is all the the groping and partnering sagas. Jumpsuits are mostly a device for teens avid of shapely bodies. I have never seen such a soapy rotating bedfellow saga in Babylon 5 for instance. Let's be real, Vulcans have a copper base hemoglobin (less efficient) yet they can breed true with humans. Lol, they lose me there as I am cursed with too much scientific knowledge which is the chief enemy for suspension of disbelief. Michelle Forbes was formidable as admiral Cain in BSG. Ah, but BSG had a PG rating. :)

Yup. Any sound powered phone with that rotary switch on the front has a a wire to each destination marked on that switch. And some of those rotary switches have /lots/ of options...

Suborbital insertion is all the new craze.

Yep, some ships are even aware of this and strand themselves in narrow canals in an attempt to avoid the ocean ..... I thought sea-sickness was something that only happened to other people until the North-Atlantic threw up a Beaufort 9-10-11 storm; after 18 days of that, I knew it was not just other people... The five ships of the flotilla all had storm-damage. Oceans take their toll on soft- and hard-ware!

That comparison seems to be becoming a theme.

Accurate saying over here in Michigan too. Michigan and Huron loves you, Erie doesn't care, but Superior is a demonic Queen who wants you GONE

The trick is NOT to yell, because of the inertia of the armature on the phones diaphram, higher pitches tend to vibrate the diaphram without fully cycling the armature and the output is clipped causing it to sound distorted. The best way to be heard understood is to speak clearly and forcefully in a low tone.

Aren't astrolabes still taught at Annapolis? I know officers going into subs are still trained to use twine to stop/slow some leaks, so why wouldn't the 'labes? If it ain't broke, don't fix it (a VERY rare philosophy in the military these days)

Sextant are what are used. At least in the fleet. Astrolabes went out several hundred years ago.

In space where the only limit to construction is how much resources you're willing to invest into it, jack-of-all-trades type things can be masters of both, and the fact that any space ship will need anti-asteroid/space-junk guns, and large ships will need hanger/docking bays for smaller craft, battle-carriers seem an inevitable design.

I figured dropping sound-powered phones and damage control stations on people was enough. Compartment addresses are a /whole/ episode, by themselves.