A critique of the Starship Combat Tactics on Star Destroyer

[Lucky]

Federation Naval Tactics

Roman-style boarding tactics are still used. Tractor beams and transporters are clearly analogous to Roman grappling hooks and boarding planks, and it isn't uncommon to use boarders in an attempt to overwhelm a target in the heat of combat. For example, in "Way of the Warrior", we saw Klingon warriors board DS9 and attempt to seize control of the station while it was still exchanging fire with the Klingon fleet. The Klingon warriors even fought using bladed weapons, just as their Roman legionnaire precedessors did. Contrast this with the era of Horatio Nelson and subsequent periods, in which the range and lethality of weaponry became such that it was virtually impossible to approach and board a ship without having to completely disable it beforehand.

This page needs needs proofreading. Was this written before spell check function existed?

In order to board a ship during combat in Star Trek you need to disable the shields, and any other device that would inhibit transporters. That means you almost have to disable the target be it a base, station, or ship before boarding.

Boarding is only used if there is something on the ship or station that the attackers want to capture. In Way of the Warrior the thing that the Klingons wanted to capture was the station it's self.

A Star Base even one as small as Deep Space-9 is not a ship so much as a city, town, or castle.

Modern first world soldiers often carry melee weapons and guns into combat just like the Klingons in "Way of the Warrior". Does that mean real world militaries are using the same tactics as their Roman legionnaire predecessors?

Ramming is still the most powerful weapon available, albeit a weapon of last resort. In "Tears of the Prophets" (described on the Battles page as the Battle of Chin'toka), hopelessly outmatched Jem'Hadar attack ships (ships roughly 70-80% larger than the Falcon) eschewed energy weapons and torpedoes in favour of ramming attacks, which proved to be devastatingly effective against Martok's ships. Contrast this with the era of Horatio Nelson and subsequent periods, in which the range, accuracy and lethality of weaponry became such that the approach necessary for a ramming attack would be suicidal.

The visuals seen in the episode are obviously not accurate since no one has turned on their shields, but since no bug fighter is shown to fire I guess we can go with the assumption that they went straight to ramming.

How does this speak poorly of Star Trek ships, or combat doctrine? It just means that ships that travel near or beyond the speed of light have the defenses need to successfully ram another ship, and possibly survive.

It should be noted that the most destructive ramming events tend to involve the attacking ship's warp core exploding on contact.

Missiles have not dominated the tactical landscape, in spite of their theoretically extreme range. Although they seem to be capable of accurately hitting targets from many thousands or even tens of thousands of kilometres away, fleets do not engage one another with long-range missile exchanges. Instead, they generally approach to gunnery range and then open fire with both energy weapons and missiles at the same time.

Torpedos in Star Trek have ranges in the billions of kilometers. This has been seen on screen repeated when targeting things that do not have ECM or move at faster then light speeds..

So how is it bad thing that energy weapons and torpedos have about the same effective range, and firepower?

Fleet firepower concentration is beyond their capabilities, as seen in "Sacrifice of Angels" and "What You Leave Behind." In those battles, tactics of attrition and the ruthless mathematics of the N-square law didn't apply because battle lines couldn't concentrate their firepower on individual ships. Each ship simply fired at the nearest ship in the opposing wall. Departure from the relative safety of the battle line was suicidal for a capital ship (as seen in "Sacrifice of Angels") because a ship would now be close enough to the enemy formation that multiple ships could concentrate their firepower on it. Only small ships such as fighters and Defiant-class ships could survive departure from the battle line, since the enemy ships could not accurately target them. Another example of their inability to concentrate firepower at long range was seen in "Tears of the Prophets", in which only the handful of ships closest to the "power generator moon" were able to fire on it.

These examples were not standard fleet battles, and the author actually ignores the battle plan seen for attacking Deep Space-9.

Where are these battle lines shown to provide any safety?

The fleet in Tears of the Prophets was engaging a large number of satellites that they had thought going in were each powered individually rather then being beamed power, and had tried to destroy as many as possible before they could be activated.

Since we know that Federation ships don't engage in combat at 500 meters or less anything that shows them doing it must be wrong unless they talk about being dangerously close to the enemy.

The only examples of fleet firepower concentration occurred where encirclement (a ground combat term) was possible. For example, Klingon and Dominion fleets in "Way of the Warrior" and "A Call to Arms" fired on DS9 only after approaching to ~10km and encircling it.

But visuals and dialog from other episodes tells us that it wasn't 10 kilometers.

We know Cardassian war ships have effective ranges of about 300,000 to 200,000 kilometers from visuals and dialog in "TNG: Wounded" for targeting star ships. There is no reason for Cardassian war ships to suddenly have lower ranges, and torpedo ranges should go up when dealing with a target that by the setting's standards can't move.

We know from "Deep Space:9 The Search part 1" that Dominion ship weapons have effective ranges greater then 100,000 kilometers.

In "A Call To Arms" the attacking fleet only say they are out of range of of Deep Space-9. This means that either the visuals are not reliable, or there is something creating an optical illusion. The exact same thing is seen in "TNG: Suddenly Human".

Some would counter these statements by referring to technobabble theory, but when theory and reality fail to intersect, theory is wrong. Non-canon speculation about very long effective ranges (either for phasers or torpedoes) sound nice, but it fails to explain why the tactics of Federation starship combat invariably follow the tactics of short-ranged weapons. If these unsubstantiated claims about very long effective ranges were true, then one would be left with no alternative but to conclude that the naval officers of all the major Star Trek navies are either suicidal or certifiably insane for refusing to take advantage of those ranges.

What theory is the author talking about? The theory that Star Trek visuals don't match dialog by a ratio of something like 1 to 100(or possibly more) in many episodes like in "TNG: Suddenly Human", or the idea that on screen feats are canon?

Odd how the author forgets canon facts like ships surrounded by fields that do nothing other then warp space/time.

Going by the author's logic we should disregard the visuals do to them being less consistent then dialog.

Imperial Naval Tactics

Boarding is not a useful combat tactic, and only occurs after the target vessel has already been disabled (as seen in ANH), or has already surrendered.

This is no different then the Klingons boarding Deep Space-9 in Way of The Warrior.

The CIS had special boarding thumbtacks.

Ramming is not a useful combat tactic, and is never used or even attempted in any of the canon films. Three ISD's accidentally rammed the Executor while decelerating from hyperspace (ref: SWE), but they merely exploded against its shields. Official literature describes "robot ramships", but these weapons (essentially huge guided missiles) are designed for deceit and piracy rather than wholesale warfare, and were used once in battle, against a light cruiser.

Ramming is a commonly used tactic in Star Wars combat.

In TESB the captain of a Star Destroyer was scared Han would ram his bridge tower and destroy it.

In ROTJ we see ramming used repeatedly by fights on both sides and even see an A-Wing disable a Super Star Destroyer by ramming the bridge.

In "Storm Over Ryloth" we see Vulture droids destroy one of Anakin's Republic Attack Cruiser, damage a second possibly beyond repair, and damage a third with only ramming and their blasters.

Again in "Storm Over Ryloth" we see Anakin take the nearly destroyed(a burning reck) Republic Attack Cruiser, and ram the flagship at low speed, a Lucrehulk-class battleship destroying both ships before the CIS fleet could destroy it, or get out of the way.

The list goes on.

Battle lines are not used. Fleets travel in formation which break up when combat is joined, as seen in ROTJ. The Rebel and Imperial fleets began exchanging long-range fire without any regard for formation, although Emperor Palpatine's decisions ultimately led to an Imperial defeat despite what was probably superior firepower. Piett's ships engaged long-range fire with the Rebel fleet as described in the ROTJ novelization, but they apparently targeted smaller ships before larger ships for the purpose of prolonging Palpatine's dramatic demonstration. Even Jerjerrod chose his targets in the same manner, aiming the first superlaser blast at the Liberty rather than the far more massive and heavily armed Rebel flagship Home One. On the other hand, Ackbar wisely concentrated his fleet's firepower on the Imperial flagship Executor first..

Did the author even watch the movies? The standard tactic seen in Star Wars is to line ships up next to each other, and then fire in the general direction of the enemy, and hope you hit them. Isn't that what we see in ROTJ?

Tactics of maneuver are non-existent. Capital ships simply exchange fire with enemy capital ships, without regard for formations or "flanking", "encirclement", or "breakthrough" maneuvers.

So the basic capital ship tactic in Star Wars is to just sit there, or move in straight predictable lines, and hope the other guy misses you?

• Torpedoes are not used in capital ship combat. Despite apocryphal descriptions to the contrary, there are no canon sightings or descriptions of any capship missiles. Capital ship combat seems to be conducted exclusively with turbolasers, which isn't surprising given the lack of damage caused by proton torpedoes in ANH (Red Leader's torpedoes barely scratched the DS exhaust port surface structure) and TPM (Naboo torpedoes were ineffective against the TradeFed battleship).

Why use weapons that are weaker then fighter scale blasters? We see the X-Wing's blasting the Death Star's armor to bits don't we?

Fighters exist but they are incapable of carrying the fight to the enemy unaided, so a fighter attack can only complement the big guns, rather than replacing them. This was seen most strikingly in the beginning stages of the Battle of Endor, when hordes of Imperial fighters and bombers attacked without support and swarmed over the Rebel fleet, but were unable to destroy or seriously damage a single warship. It was seen again in TPM, when the Naboo fighter squadron fought a hopeless battle to destroy a TradeFed battleship (a battle that Qui-Gon obviously expected them to lose) despite having the element of surprise (the battleship didn't launch its own fighters until the attackers were already within naked-eye visual range).

I seem to recall the problem in TPM was that the torpedos the Naboo had were lower yield torpedos then what they could have had, and because of that they feared the plan would not work. The N-1 fighters I thought had substandard weapons, and should have been upgraded?

ROTJ T.I.E. Fighters are a credible threat to the Rebel fleet.

Destroy the Malevolence arc we know that Y-Wings with proton torpedos could destroy the bridge of the Malevolence, and even though they lost most of the squadron they could still disable it's main weapon.

Down Fall of A droid shows us fighters rape capital ships.

Storm over Ryloth shows fighters and Y-wings rape capital ships.

It's a numbers game, and the fighters just need to number in the lower double digits.

Combat can occur at very long visual ranges (made longer by the sheer size of Imperial warships, which makes them easier to see at a distance), as seen in TESB when the Rebel ground defenses engaged Imperial ships in orbit. It was seen again in ROTJ when Rebel and Imperial warships exchanged fire at long visual range and then closed to less than 10 km ("point-blank range") as the battle intensified.

So long ranges are low single digit thousands of kilometers?

Again, some might counter these arguments with technobabble theory, but again, what you see is what you get. They have fighters, but they can't use them the way terrestrial navies used them. They have torpedoes, but as anyone can see from ROTJ and TPM, they're obviously not ship-killers the way they were for submarines. They have guided missiles, but those missiles didn't turn space combat into long-range affairs of duelling missile platforms, the way they did for terrestrial navies and aircraft. It's not enough to affix a label to a particular weapon and assume it's precisely analogous to terrestrial equivalents; you must look at the way it's used, before you can begin to guess what it can do.

Star Wars fighters are seen killing capital ships without capital ship support.

The Author does not seem to realize that real world capital ships are designed to be able to take several torpedos from torpedo bombers.

Technical Ramifications

The use of battle lines, ramming tactics, and balanced short-range gun/missile attacks in Star Trek leads us to the following conclusions:
1. Anti-ship weaponry in Star Trek is not combat-effective at ranges exceeding ~10km, because battle lines form up at those ranges and cannot employ fleet firepower concentration without encirclement (also at that range). Torpedoes and phasers can physically travel farther than that, but targeting difficulties can limit effective range even when theoretical range is very large.
2. Hulls, shields and structural forcefields are insufficient to nullify the effectiveness of ramming, because ramming attacks were so effective against undamaged, fully shielded Klingon warships in "Tears of the Prophets" (even when undertaken by miniscule 70m long ships). This suggests large disparities between Star Trek ships' ability to handle kinetic energy and electromagnetic energy.
3. Combat maneuverability of capital ships is high enough to permit Nelson-style tactics of maneuver (hence the flanking maneuvers attempted by Jem'Hadar ships), but not high enough to permit fighter plane tactics (hence their use of combat formations).
4. Based on the parallel use of phasers and photon torpedoes, the effective range of missiles seems to be far lower than their theoretical range. A likely explanation is that their limited AI and ECM (in addition to poor maneuverability) makes them easy to shoot down at long range, where the defenders have a lot of time to see them coming.

1) Has the author actually watched Star Trek? I'm not sure where to begin it's so bad, and he has to ignore his own sources it seems like.

2) Does the author realize that the Dominion fighters are almost the same size as the Klingon ships they ram? The largest Klingon ship they ram is only about twice as long, and possibly has less mass. going by the visuals.

The author also ignores the fact the Dominion ships have to overcome the Klingon navigational deflector, and then blow themselves up like bombs

3) Combat maneuvering can be at faster then light speeds in Star trek, and accelerations are about a thousand kilometers a second for prototype warp capable ships made in a mildly post apocalyptic setting.

Star Fleet has demonstrated many different tactics on screen often zipping around like fighters.

To only use the unique assaults on fixed defensive platforms is dishonest.

4) On screen maximum combat ranges are in the billions of kilometers for Federation torpedos(Voyager: Basics). Photon Torpedos are faster then light weapons.

What evidence is there that Photon Torpedos have poor maneuverability?

Photon Torpedos have powerful shields, travel faster then light, and seem to be heavily armored, and that ignores the protonic shock wave that happens if you shoot them down. ECM and the targets being able to easily dodge seems like the logical answer

The use of concentrated gunnery tactics in conjunction with fighter harassment in Star Wars leads us to the following conclusions:
1. Anti-ship weaponry in Star Wars is combat-effective at ranges of at least several hundred kilometres based on the unimportance of battle formations, even at long visual ranges such as those seen in ROTJ. This was demonstrated when the Rebel ion cannon engaged ISD's in the Battle of Hoth, and again when the DS2 superlaser engaged Rebel cruisers in the Battle of Endor.
2. Weapons based on turbolaser technology dominate the battlefield in Star Wars, with scalability ranging as low as a hand blaster and as high as the awesome planet-destroying Death Star superlaser. Torpedoes are relatively unimportant, and seem to serve only as starfighter weapons.
3. Starfighters, by virtue of their weak armament, cannot successfully attack capital ships without capship support. There is some apocryphal literature to support the opposite notion, but it originates entirely from the notoriously propagandistic New Republic descriptions of the exaggerated exploits of Wedge Antilles and his X-wing squadron. Canon support for this notion is nonexistent, and in the Battle of ROTJ, the fighters were used merely to "finish off" ships which have already been disabled by turbolaser cannonade, such as the Imperial communications ship and the Executor (also see the novelization, in which we heard Ackbar informing his bridge crew that "if we can knock out their shields, our fighters might stand a chance against them"- a far cry from the apocryphal nonsense of fighter squadrons pummeling the shields of warships).

1) Several hundred kilometers is the maximum range seen.

2) There is no evidence that the Death Star's Superlaser uses blaster/laser cannon/turbolaser technology.

Torpedos used by fighters are a major threat to ships in Star Wars when used in the, and fighters with only blasters have been repeatedly shown to destroy capital ships.

3) We have seen repeated that fighters are a major threat to capital ships even in Return of the Jedi. Star Wars The Clone Wars repeated shows that Star Wars Capital ships are killed only by fighters., and that capital ships are often traveling airfields.

[Mike DiCenso]

Those pages were written by Michael Wong himself, and are at least eight years out of date.

As with all things Wong, he grossly underestimates the size of ships seen in the Trek franchise (assuming he even paid enough attention to take any notes). The JH attack ships are at least 100 meters long as indicated by the wreck full-scale visuals and Chief O'Brien's dialog in DS9's "The Ship", in which he stated that the crashed attack ship was buried 90 meters into solid rock. At least 20 meters was still visible sticking out. Suffice to say, an 80 percent larger number is way out of whack for comparison with the linear, never mind volumetric measurements between a JH attack ship and the Millennium Falcon.

At minimum, the 100 meter JH attack ships are 285 percent larger than the 35 meter long Falcon. Volumetric-wise, the attack ships are on average some 16 times larger in over all, and because of Trek ships' unusually dense construction, it is at least 36 times more massive.

You cannot compare them, they are in two completely different starship size categories.
-Mike

[Praeothmin]

Yeah, we all know Wong ignore things he hates, like the fact that you can actually board a ship or station in ST while fighting with it because of Transporters, and that you may wish to do that because taking over the target before your ships do too much damage is also a viable option, for those without limited minds... :)

[Lucky]

Those pages were written by Michael Wong himself, and are at least eight years out of date.

I see other people being credited on various pages so I don't want to assume only one person wrote that.

I more posted this so people could critique my critique.

As with all things Wong, he grossly underestimates the size of ships seen in the Trek franchise (assuming he even paid enough attention to take any notes). The JH attack ships are at least 100 meters long as indicated by the wreck full-scale visuals and Chief O'Brien's dialog in DS9's "The Ship", in which he stated that the crashed attack ship was buried 90 meters into solid rock. At least 20 meters was still visible sticking out. Suffice to say, an 80 percent larger number is way out of whack for comparison with the linear, never mind volumetric measurements between a JH attack ship and the Millennium Falcon.

At minimum, the 100 meter JH attack ships are 285 percent larger than the 35 meter long Falcon. Volumetric-wise, the attack ships are on average some 16 times larger in over all, and because of Trek ships' unusually dense construction, it is at least 36 times more massive.

You cannot compare them, they are in two completely different starship size categories.
-Mike

I know, I'm not sure the authors of those pages actual watched Star Trek.


Do you want to take a crack at one of those pages?

[Lucky]

Yeah, we all know Wong ignore things he hates, like the fact that you can actually board a ship or station in ST while fighting with it because of Transporters, and that you may wish to do that because taking over the target before your ships do too much damage is also a viable option, for those without limited minds... :)

It seems like the author never heard U-505, and why it's capture was important, or the relevance of the captured Zeros.

Care to try your hand at this?

[Praeothmin]

I really do not want to take time to do so...

Wong ingores many things, it's been said a million times, and I don't feel the need to go over this again (I,ve never been over this here, but I have been on TFC when it existed)... :)

[Mike DiCenso]

I see other people being credited on various pages so I don't want to assume only one person wrote that.

I more posted this so people could critique my critique.

No, Wong wrote those pages himself. He credits people for giving him information, just as Curtis Saxton does Wong, Brian Young, Wayne Poe, and many others for his pages. But he collated and wrote up that information himself.

Do you want to take a crack at one of those pages?

Not really, no. I'm fairly busy, and the SFJN forum has a vast amount of information accumulated and archived over these past five and a half years that pretty much do just that. So take the time to go through it and all will be answered.
-Mike