T.A.C.T.I.C.S.=Thread for Advice and Criticism Towards Improving Combat Scenes

This seems interesting. Is this just for lightsaber combat, because as a RPer I find those to be most challenging. Or can this be hand to hand combat, like translating the fast action of the Bourne trilogy into words?

-B-

 

It says 'combat scenes' in the title, so yes it is for everything (after all, TACTILD=Thread for Advice and Criticism Towards Improving Lightsaber Duels wouldn't have sounded as good). We have been discussing space battles recently.

 

Speaking of space combat, I found an potentially useful page on fighter tatctics. They don't all translate, as aircraft contend with gravity, but in that you've got 3-D to play with, some of these tatctics could be adapted to dogfights.
There's also a page on combat formations, if you go to the index it's easy to find.

 

Oh what a cool site!

Reading "Ender's Game" was also helpful to get myself thinking in 3-D.

 

Great site!

And Ender does have great ideas face, when the gate is down

 

Ender's Game definitely went the extra mile when it came to explaining the potential reality of war in space. Lots of really interesting stuff. Of course, in Star Wars, sound carries in space, air friction and turbulence is apparently a common problem, and 'down' is not relative, as far as I've seen. So realistic considerations of combat in a zero-G vacuum are kind of wasted here.

Best to go with traditional combat techniques. That combataircraft site is really neat.
The scissors maneuvre's a classic, by the way.

 

One of my favourite combat moves was that one in Pearl Harbor where the planes crash into each other, I don't know what move that is though

 

I've never seen Pearl Harbor, but from the description I'd say that sounds like the old 'fly headlong into the other plane like an idiot' maneauver.

 

Sounds like it, but it involves two pilots getting a plane each to chase them then they fly in a wide circle straight towards each other and pull out at the last minute

 

Don't know the move you're talkind about, but you could always make up your own name.

 

Before I figure out why my 'active topic notification' failed, I want to thank Neo for the combat tactics site. It's nice and visual and I can fill in the words about the moves; the only one I knew was the Immelmann. Time for the climactic air/land/sea/space battle and I've gone with the 'few paragraphs per POV, then switch' method. The action takes place back at the PT Temple, too, so I can use 'meanwhile, back at the Temple!' as a device. Such fun.

 

I've worked on the starfighter part of the battle and sadly, have few ideas for overall tactics other than sorties and bombings. If anyone has constructive criticism, I'll be glad to hear it. I'm unsure about if the maneuver description comes through okay.

Far below Plo Koon's starfighter, Dantooine looked as somnolent and pastoral as ever. Is this droid pilot brain part of a new series? It's turning to the left after doing that scissors maneuver perfectly and taking out one of ours. Good that I took out its partner. Plo saw that he was not going to be able to catch up to the droid ship. A Delta-7 with unusual paint pulled up beside him, pacing him effortlessly. "Good, Anakin, we'll take it out together," he said to himself, humming a war chant in his usual monotone. He extended a talon to click on his intership comm.

"Anakin, to me! We'll do this, you and I!"

"Copy, Plo. Boing-Boing Maneuver?"

"Exactly."

"Code name, code name, keep it on the downlowside, take you out, take you out ... now." Plo mumbled and hummed and chanted the Kel-Dor litany as he always did in combat flight. His wingmates were mostly used to it. The droid's Vulture-class fighter curled into a vector that would return it to its Lucrehulk-class Droid Control Ship. Those concentrated fuel slugs only power you for thirty-five minutes, tinnie. The Chosen One and I should be trashing you long before that. Perfectly coordinated with Anakin's Delta-7, differentiated in appearance only by Anakin's ship's sparkling paint job, Plo opted for smaller boing-boings rather than one large one, as he predicted that Anakin would fly. Sure enough, as Plo relaxed his angle of bank slightly before pulling high over the plane of the droid's flight, right before Plo inverted for the third time he spotted Anakin swooping Master-like over him. Plo's speed dropped as did Anakin's and their radius of turn diminished. Both on target to the droid sprinting to its home ship and refueling, Plo and Anakin stuttered their fire. The droid ship blew apart, whether from their fire or from its self-destruct programming because its link to its control ship were severed or both, they didn't know.

"Good job, Plo!" Anakin jerked his smoothly-shaven chin downwards to his shoulder, trying to reactivate his recalcitrant transponder. It lasted me through Tatooine, Ossus, on to the Mid-Rim and now back to the Outer Rim. It's probably losing power and I don't have the time to fix it. He shrugged.

"Think they'll rotate another swarm out?" Plo checked his chrono and couldn't believe that only twenty minutes had passed since the Second Battle of Dantooine began. The stars have brought us luck. If we had not brought our noses up high enough, we'd have overshot it and missed. That is, if we hadn't collided right above it.

"I think so, how about you?"

Plo hummed. "Yes. It's early yet. Seen Siri?"

Master would be sad if she didn't make it. "No, you?"

"She contacted Adi on their private channel as soon as we got here, right before you arrived. Siri says that Adi and the rest are safe in their shelter." We've got to win this one. For their sake. Who knew that the CIS would target Dantooine more than once? It's a peaceful place, or used to be. "There she is!"

Siri began without preamble as another starfighter identical to Plo's flew at his left wing. "Adi's going to try something new. Ever hear of the battle meld?"

above excerpt from fanfiction; Star Wars belongs to George Lucas; no profit is made by this. pronker

 

For dogfights in Star Wars - to create plausability and immersion and the tactical dimension of things - I'd draw upon world war 2 tactics, seeing as that is what George Lucas did for the OT. For that, I'd highly recommend In Pursuit which gives an excellent view of this. It is intended for online air combatsims, but the manoevers and tactics are pretty much the same as for real life pilots. It's also a very immersive book and a fun read!

 

Still trying to sucker more marks into your WWII flight sim, eh my apprentice?

I tend to ignore the absence of gravity in my space combat writing, just like ole' Georgie would have wanted me to. Actually I ignore all things gravity in ship to ship combat. I think I've mentioned "inertial compensators" all of twice in all my writing, and one of those mentions haven't even been posted yet. Not that I've had a WHOLE lot of experience writing battle scenes, but hey. I rule at SW Battlefront 2, so obviously I know what I'm talking about. Everybody wondered how I could take out so many little interceptors in a bomber. That was before my joystick died, though. Now I'm just average, since I can't quite get the hang of flyin' on mouse control. Uhh. Anyway.

In my little rabbit mind, it's more of a hinderance to keep things realistic in our utterly unreal situations. I mean, who wants to hear how nausiating it is for pilots to jerk starboard, roll around a while, decelerate and roll to port. Well, unless they're writing a comedy, anyway. And of course not everybody is affected by motion sickness like that--my father LIKES being on a ship that's bouncing like a 5 year old on a bed. I kinda do too, but only for the first 15 minutes or so.

Anyway, my thought is, as long as your readers can tell what's happening without going back and re-reading what you've written, you're doing an okay job in my book. Even if you're stuck in a 2-D pattern, as long as there's lots of intelligent descriptors in there, you can succeed moderately.

Just my two credits worth, anyway.

 

My thanks to Danaan for the link; I got this out of one part in particular:

"In order to progress up the SA ladder, you must first master your aircraft and grasp the
fundamental concept of Energy. Having a bunch of bandits at your six is not a problem if
you KNOW that they don?t have any closure (i.e. are not closing to guns range) and KNOW
that if you just keep trucking you?ll eventually lose them. A rookie pilot however is quite
likely to make the poorest possible choice in that situation - such as burning his energy by
excessive turning or panicking by diving out."

So in other words, don't panic and make certain that you know who your pursuers are and their ships' capabilities. If they are bigger/faster than you are, then panic.

And also to Jedi_Perigrine, a nod for the thoughts. I think that, upon rereading, some exposition is necessary and shall add something to get the 3D idea across, maybe like:

the droid fighter's vector = like a recumbent letter C
plo's ship = starts to follow at the beginning of the letter but cuts out the middle part and goes right to the end of the letter
anakin's ship = goes far high in an arc above plo's arc and they both are inverted in relationship to the droid ship, which merrily hightails it for its mother ship

WWII flight sim? My dad piloted a B26 in WWII in the ETO.

 

I always want to spread the joy of my favve game to everybody else - I mean, people have a right to know! . Oh, and as a note, [rave] it is not ONLY a flight sim, it is, in fact a WAR sim - you can play any kind of weapon, inf/tank/atg/flak - on 1 single map 1:2 scale of NE France and the BENELUX countries giving it an actual strategic dimension and campaigns that go on for weeks and months [/rave] . I just happen to be a sucker for the flying part

To get back on topic I personally think you made an awesome job with your descriptions in A-Wing academy. The difficulty in a a world like Star Wars, is that you want to make things "realistic" - i.e. suspend the readers disbelief, with battles taking place in space but George Lucas totally threw realistic physics out the window by making his dogfights total WWII style dogfights.

So, arguably, the pilots won't be fighting gravity (cuz there is none), but the fights also won't be, say Battlestar Galatica dogfights where the crates spin around without loosing any E whatsoever, still travelling in the original direction (i.e. start flying backwards). Such moves are totally plausblie in space, but they NEVER happen in the Star Wars movies, because of the WW2 feel that Lucas wants, and such manoeuvers would never happen in WW2, cuz of the Gs. So mr Lucas did hand us some interesting balancing issues, for sure.

In In Pursuit, I think the most interesting bits are when Mr Kylander (who happened to be my CO when I started in ww2ol) point out the important of SA and how to harness the performance capacities of different crate models. Those two dimensions could be really usable, and, of course, the overview of Air Combat Manoeuvers make for excellent inspiration for what kind of stuff we could describe when wanting to make the reader aware that a balls-to-the-wall, hell-for-leather dogfight between total uberaces is going on.

Just throw out matters like Gs and drag, keep Energy and the inertia of the respective crafts, relate that to the acesness of the pilot and the handling of the craft (which is pretty much what you did, my Master), and I'm sure the text's gonna be at least halfway there. Then the text just have to be put in words that are attractive and exciting for the reader - but that's artistic skill, and I'm not claiming to know anything about that.