An age of duralium ships and plasteel men.
"Space battles are always a lot more exciting on TV than they are in real life."
— Col. John Sheppard, Stargate Atlantis
This is the Super-Trope for many tropes and clichés concerning Epic Ship-on-Ship Actionnote IN SPAAAAACE!!!
Space Fighters have the Old-School Dogfight; capital ships get this trope instead, and you can think of it as a "Very Old School Sea Fight." Founded on the idea that Space Is an Ocean, it harks back to the age of Wooden Ships and Iron Men, when large warships, making up in fire-power what they lacked in manoeuvrability, pounded each other with cannon fire until one finally took enough damage to be forced to withdraw (or until a lucky shot hit a powder magazine). The honour and military tradition of those long-gone days will often be evoked as well.
It may be The Climax of a tense standoff, the conclusion of a Stern Chase, or the outcome of a cunning surprise attack. Two Cool Starships from opposing Space Navies will park within arm's reach of each other, and proceed to fire broadsides of Beam Spam and Macross Missiles at each other's Weak Spots. The Close In Weaksauce System — if it exists — will valiantly try to intercept enemy attacks, and fail. Deflector Shields will flash and crackle as they slowly drop percentage point by percentage point. The Engineer will rush to prevent Phlebotinum Overloads while avoiding the inevitable torrents of burning steam, providing essential Techno Babble all the way. On The Bridge, Bunnies will shout out damage reports while Explosive Instrumentation claims the life of many a Redshirt Ensign. Everyone flails about as each enemy hit brings on a Star Trek Shake. The Captain will sit stoically at the centre of it all, providing important tactical guidance, such as "Reverse the Polarity!" or "Give me more power!"
In a really dramatic battle, they may turn to daring and original plans — attempts at Stealth in Space (to turn the battle into a submarine analogy), aversions of Two-Dimensional Thinking, uncharacteristically creative applications of usually-Misapplied Phlebotinum, etc. Unfortunately, such daring plans will usually Only Work Once.note
Once damage has had some time to accumulate, and the daring plan has had a chance to either work impressively or fail spectacularly, one of the ships will usually find it prudent to invoke the Thirty-Sixth Stratagem and attempt a Hyperspeed Escape. An honourable opponent will let them go; a lowly Space Pirate may get out the boarding hooks instead, and prepare a Boarding Party. If the quarry manages to slip away, there may be a Stern Chase.
If neither side is willing to retreat, sooner or later one of the Cool Ships is likely to suffer a Critical Existence Failure. The crew will scramble for Escape Pods at the last possible second (this step can be skipped if there is nobody important on board), and the subsequent Explosions in Space (with optional Planar Shockwave) will fittingly wrap up the action.
Note that such a confrontation need not be an epic Final Battle. Starship Scuffles are routine in Space Opera, and may be used to establish the setting, throw a minor obstacle in the protagonists' path, introduce a villain, or even just provide a lead-in to other, more important parts of the plot. Of course, epic battles in sci-fi settings often will make use of this trope.
When this trope is averted, it will generally be done in one of two ways: Either large ships will engage in Old School Dogfighting, displaying maneuverability usually reserved for Space Fighters, or combat between spacecraft will actually be shown as a completely new kind of warfare, with weapons and tactics shaped by the realities of the outer space environment rather than by the Rule of Cool or naval parallels. Some of the earliest space battles on what is considered the Ur-Example actually more resembled Hot Sub-on-Sub Action due to the fact that the enemy ship was often unseen (at least onscreen) due to distance.
To see the different kinds of ship likely to be involved, inspect the Standard Sci-Fi Fleet. If the ships are Battlestars, this trope may occur side-by-side with Old School Dogfighting. This trope is not to be confused with Space Battles, though there is certainly overlap.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Anime and Manga
- Gundam:
- Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny: the Archangel and the Minerva, engage each other at close range, and firing their weapons when both ships are about to intersect each other.
- Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin: Briefly seen in the finale of the ova adaptation, where the Zeon fleet engages into a broadside barrage against an Earth Federation fleet during the Battle of Loum. Justified, as this was a deliberate strategy by the Zeon fleet to escape another numerically superior Federation fleet and ambush the second fleet on the way to reinforce the first one. The broadside engagement was a result of the Zeon fleet successfully pulling off the ambush strategy by appearing right in front of the reinforcement fleet with no warning as the Federation radar wasn't able to detect them until the last moment.
- Space Battleship Yamato featured this trope aplenty, especially in the big battle at the edge of the solar system in the very first episode, which was very obviously inspired by World War II naval engagements. It's hard to imagine making the Space Is an Ocean trope any more explicit than this show did...
- And yet the remake Space Battleship Yamato 2199 succeeded by giving the Yamato's shock cannons the ability to fire both as energy weapons and as standard guns, with Operation M2 having the Yamato land into Pluto's seas before shelling the enemy base.
Comic Books
- There are two space-brawls in Pouvoirpoint: The first one is lived from inside the vibro-cannons room of ship Entreprise-2061, during the ambush by a Proximian swarm from outer space. The second one is seen from outside the ship, when it gets attacked by a pestering coastguard fighter.
Films — Live-Action
- In Serenity, the Final Battle plays out more like a cavalry charge than a naval battle. This may not be a representative example, however; one side consists entirely of Reavers, who are Axe-Crazy Chaotic Evil lunatics straight out of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre IN SPACE! and probably not all that smart.
- The various Star Trek films. Wrath of Khan, The Undiscovered Country, First Contact, Insurrection... Star Trek is essentially the Trope Codifier, after all.
- In Star Trek (2009), we see some beautiful examples, though aversions of Point Defenseless and a general reduction in the amount of Techno Babble from previous Trek incarnations make it a less straight example than most.
- Star Wars: The franchise as a whole gives far more focus to the Old School Dogfights between small fighters than to this trope. Usually when capital ships engage each other it is a brief fight. One side will be attempting a Hyperspeed Escape from the very start, or the fight will be a Curb-Stomp Battle with one side at a huge disadvantage, and in either case there will be little time for this trope to play out. For example, we see many of the elements of this trope brought out in The Phantom Menace when the protagonists' Shiny Looking Spaceship is breaking through the Trade Federation's blockade, but from the start the focus is not on the fight, but on trying to escape it. Despite this, there are at least a few instances in the films where this trope does occur during large scale fleet engagements.
- The best instance of this trope is in the opening battle of Revenge of the Sith, in which a Republic and Separatist fleet are engaged in a gigantic mosh pit melee in orbit over Coruscant where ships are firing in all directions at one another and a Republic and Separatist ship at one point come within point blank range to exchange broadsides.
- The Battle of Endor from Return of the Jedi starts out more as a Battle of Midway-style melee, with fighters and bombers attacking the enemy capital ships, but once the Death Star cranks up its superlaser the Rebel cruisers have no choice but to go in and engage the Imperial Star Destroyers toe-to-toe so that at least the Death Star can't get a clear shot at them. There is even a lampshade in the official novelization of the film:
"The two space armadas, like their sea-bound counterparts of another time and galaxy, sat floating, ship to ship, trading broadsides with each other in pointblank confrontation."
Literature
- Way, way, way averted in the Alliance/Union novels. Combat takes place at such distances - and sufficient fractions of c - that space combat is described as being displayed as an intersecting mesh of tri-D cones predicting where the ships you can see might actually be now, and more importantly might actually be by the time your missiles and inert mass ammunition gets to them. It's explicitly stated in Hellburner that most of the skill of fractional c firefights is being able to predict what your opponent is likely to do - partly on interpreting the data in light of tactical objectives, partly based on knowing them by name and reputation. Even the titular Hellburners (properly called Riderships) avert the carrier equivalent in space as well - they are more like warships in their own right, with a command crew of 4, 30+ operational crew and capable of carrying a contingent of Space Marines. The only things they lack are the Carriers years-long supply stores and Jump Drives. The combat is also fairly well justified. Jump Drives only work if ships are far enough away from stars & planets not to be affected by gravity. Stations tend to orbit planets. Attacking and defending star systems becomes about crossing those distances and threatening to cut your enemy off from his line of retreat through a jump range.
- Dread Empire's Fall both plays this straight with the "Established Doctrine" espoused by the Government committee charged with running the war, and uses the Admiral Nelson angle of innovative tactics from the protagonists.
- Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep has a unique kind of starship combat. All ships use a kind of "stutter drive" for Faster-Than-Light Travel, with ships making many short faster-than-light jumps every second. Maneuvering in combat means trying to synchronize your jumps with those of your target, or throwing off the synchronization of your pursuers, while releasing torpedo-like drones that try to get close to the enemy and blow them out of the sky. This unique form of combat still leaves room for many of the elements of this trope. Because a ship is only in a given location for a fraction of a second before jumping light-years away, getting close to your target becomes important so that your attacks can reach them on time. Shipboard instrumentation simulates things like bright flashes of light from explosions to make the battle more intuitive. The Star Trek Shake and Subsystem Damage make occasional appearances. Perhaps the closest parallel is Hot Sub-on-Sub Action.
- Occasional Fighting Fantasy books with a sci-fi setting, such as Starship Traveller and The Rings of Kether will have you battling enemy starfighters in space combat.
- Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy had space battles between the Foundation and various opponents.
- The Honor Harrington novels play with this. Although ships do tend to throw everything they've got at each other, they tend to do it from as far away as possible. Prior to the pod revolution, however, missiles were viewed as being more for softening up targets, and the only way to be sure to kill a dreadnaught or superdreadnaught was to close to energy weapon range.note
- David Weber was also one of the people behind the space strategy board game Starfire, and the space battles in Honor Harrington, especially early on, are influenced by the game mechanics.
- The development of more effective LACs (basically, corvettes) and dedicated LAC carriers (or CLACs), while not having nearly the same effect as the use of aircraft carriers during World War II (which is lampshaded in the books), still adds a new dimension to space combat. In particular, the new Manticoran LACs have spinal energy weapons normally mounted on capital ships. A squadron of these LACs can easily get in range of an enemy battlecruiser and reduce it to scrap before being blown out of space. It's notable that Manticorans tend to use LACs offensively, while Havenites prefer to use them mostly for anti-LAC purposes. It's coldly pointed out that even the destruction of a squadron of 6 LACs results in significantly less casualties than the destruction of even a single destroyer (60 vs. several hundred), but they do go through experienced officers and enlisted at a much faster rate.
- Of note is that the Honorverse was deliberately designed to hit this trope as hard as possible. The setting is explicitly modelled as the British Empire vs. Revolutionary/Napoleonic France Recycled In Space, and the rules of physics are designed to force battles to take place in the same manner as in the age of sail. Impressively, this was done while still being truer to real world physics, especially relativity, than many other settings. Developments in both politics and technology served to move the setting away from these roots in later books.
- E. E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman series had multiple examples, everything from one-on-one battles to huge space fleets fighting each other.
- It can also get into entirely weird aversions, depending on the technology-of-the-moment (Lensman Arms Race being in full effect, of course). For example, in one battle the good guy ships are divided into defenders with powerful shields and tractor beams, and gunships with big guns and not much else. Their strategy is to form a giant open-ended cylinder, with the defenders on the outside, and then grab bad guys with tractor beams and force them into the end of the cylinder. The gunships on the inner wall of the cylinder can then pound each ship as it comes into the cylinder with grossly overwhelming firepower.
- Played dead straight in The Lost Fleet... until Captain Geary shows up. Due to the length of the war, anyone and everyone who knew how to fight in four dimensions (time is definitely an included factor!) is long dead and ships just charge at each other. Then Geary shows up, lost knowledge and all, and is basically unstoppable despite being in his own words "average" at these kinds of tactics.
- Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained both subvert this trope; space battles happen with nuclear missiles or relativistic projectiles, from many miles away. The crews of the human ships are immersed in the control system, controlling everything through their brains. Maneuvering, if it happens, happens in hyperspace. It still manages to be incredibly dramatic.
- The Starlore Legacy: Most combat scenes in space are Old-School Dogfights, but this trope does get invoked now and then. The most notable examples are the fights in the Ruah between the Immortal fleets, especially in FLIGHT (after the Torian rebellion) and OATH (when the Malakians create a diversion so that Admiral Galec can reach Llyon).
- The Star Wars Expanded Universe gives a lot more attention to capital ship battles than the movies generally did. Among other things The Essential Guide to Warfare has an image of two super star destroyers, the New Republic SSD Lusankya and the Imperial Remnant SSD Reaper, trading broadsides at extreme close range. See here.
◊
- Lampshaded and averted by Harry Harrison in Starworld. The admiral in charge of the rebel colonists shows the protagonist an old space movie before pointing out how real space battles aren't anything like this — spaceships don't fight at close range and energy weapons don't work in the vast distances of space. Although missiles are being used by both sides, the rebels use linear accelerators firing unguided cannon balls to gain the decisive edge, then finish them off with a Flechette Storm of rocket-propelled bullets — all this happens before anyone is close enough to see their opponent.
Live-Action TV
- In Andromeda, another Gene Roddenberry series, capital ships occasionally got close enough to one another to fire Anti-Proton guns at each other. But most of the time they lobbed relativistic missiles at blips on the tac screen several light-minutes away. And due to gravity manipulation most ships could maneuver like fighters anyway.
- Babylon 5:
- The series would partake in this or Old School Dogfighting (the latter typically for the fighters, but occassionally for the faster or more advanced capital ships as well). If one side got the jump on the other before they could react (typically by ambushing them as they exited a Jump Gate, or jumping on them from a jump point of their own making once the target had been lured into a predefined killzone in a inversion of the Hyperspeed Escape) then the fight would be spectacularly brief. If both ships had fair warning that a fight was about to ensue, then it would be relatively lengthy, with the ships launching fighters and long-range attacks, using electronic countermeasures or interceptor weapons systems to avoid incoming fire while trying to get close enough to allow their own weapons systems to overcome the enemy's defenses. On at least one occassion, a duel between two enemy warships resulted in both ships being destroyed.
- The first battle of the Earth-Minbari War (after the failed first contact) was near the Vega colony. The Minbari fleet closed to weapons range and waited for the slow Earth ships to take the first shot. The whole battle lasted about 12 seconds with most Earth ships destroyed in the first Minbari volley. Only one ship (a prototype Omega) managed to get close enough to ram a Sharlin war cruiser. Nearly all battles against the Minbari were usually pretty short and one-sided. Oh, and to add more similarities with the Age of Sail, humans had to "eyeball" their weapons at the Minbari (i.e. visual targetting only), as the Minbari stealth systems prevented normal weapons lock.
- One subversion was in the episode "The Long, Twilight Struggle", which featured two fleets of ships engaging from extreme distance. Throughout most of the battle, the two fleets never appear in frame together, with dozens of fighters engaged in Old-School Dogfighting being almost too small to make out in the wide shots of the capital ships.
- Zigzagged in The Expanse. Warships are typically armed with long-range torpedoes/missiles (the terms are used interchangeably) and autocannons for missile defense and CQB (close-quarters battle). Battleships also use railguns as intermediate-range weapons (when the enemy is too close for missiles but too far for autocannons). It's common for ships to be shredded by autocannon fire, as armor does little to stop it. Crews also frequently put on spacesuits and suck out the air to avoid Explosive Decompression during battles. A notable battle in the show is one between the Martian flagship, the MCRN Donnager, and six mysterious stealth frigates. The two sides first exchange missile volleys, with one of the frigates destroyed by a missile hit. The Martians are surprised at how effective the frigates' missiles are, as a number of them make it through the autocannon fire and hit the battleship, doing critical damage to the reactor. The frigates then close in to railgun range. One more frigate is blown up by a railgun hit from the Donnager, but the frigates reveals that they have spinal-mounted railguns as well (the battleship's are turreted). Both sides then close to knife-fighting range, as the frigates are actually trying to board the Donnager. Two more frigates are obliterated by autocannon fire, but the remaining two launch boarding pods and overwhelm the Martian defenders, especially since the reactor damage eventually forces the Martians to cease fire. The Martian captain chooses to initiate self-destruct rather than let the enemy have the ship. The blast takes out the remaining stealth frigates. Another impressive fight is between the formerly Martian frigate Rocinante and one of the stealth ships. In order to avoid being hit by missiles, the Roci drifts close before engaging the drive. Both spray one another with autocannon fire, with the Roci trying to avoid being hit by the enemy's railgun. Eventually, the ''Roci'’ proves to be superior and shreds the enemy (6 guns vs 4) until the enemy crew is dead.
- Firefly is an interesting aversion. The protagonists' Cool Starship is an unarmed transport, not at all designed for battle; when they meet a dangerous foe in space, all they can do is try to outrun it, trick it, or bribe it. In one episode, however, a kind of space battle proves inevitable, as the heroes have to disable a hostile space station. The closest they can come to a standard space battle: One of the characters puts on a space-suit, grabs a rifle, and basically leans out the airlock to take pot-shots at the enemy. (And the rifle has to be partially covered by its own space suit, because it was not meant to work in a vacuum...) Rather than using naval metaphors, Firefly was a Space Western; thus space combat ended up resembling not seagoing ships pounding each other with cannon, but cowboys shooting at each other while riding on horseback or in wagons. The main similarities to this trope were the very short range of the engagement, and the involvement of Phlebotinum Breakdown.
- Being an Homage to Star Trek, The Orville has a few of those, usually between the titular ship and a larger (and more powerful) Krill warship. As a rule, the fights start out with this trope in mind, until the crew of the Orville realizes their weapons are no match and hardly do any damage to the other ship. Meanwhile, the Krill ship is pounding at the Orville's deflectors. After a bit of this, Old-School Dogfighting comes into play, with the Ace Pilot Lieutenant Malloy or, in a rare case, the navigator Lieutenant LaMarr starting a serious of maneuvers, circling the larger ship, avoiding its Fixed Forward Facing Weapons. The methods of defeating the enemy usually involve a barrage of plasma torpedoes, although the pilot episode involves a Trojan Horse of sorts that ends up splitting the Krill destroyer in half. Notably, in the episode "Krill", The Captain has Malloy skim the atmosphere of the planet in order to throw up a contrail that acts as a smokescreen, so the pursuing Krill ship has trouble locking on. In addition, the maneuver also strains the deflectors of both ships, and The Captain has the weapon's officer prepare all the torpedoes for launch on command. The ship then flies straight up. With the "smokescreen" still obscuring the Orville, the torpedoes are launched backwards at the Krill ship, whose deflectors have been weakened by the atmosphere, obliterating the Krill. A proper large-scale battle is shown in the second part of "Identity", where a large fleet of Union ships is engaged with the Kaylon. There are heavy losses on both sides. Fortunately, the Krill arrive just in time and help the Union fleet drive the Kaylon away. The episode showcases several things: ships flying in close formation can damage one another if destroyed or damaged, ships can continue flying in the same direction while turning around and firing backwards, debris from destroyed ships continues traveling in the same direction as the ships.
- Stargate SG-1 and its sequels started to feature space battles that fit this trope perfectly once the Tau'ri developed their own spacecraft using Imported Alien Phlebotinum. Boarding Parties often played an especially large role, however, and early on the still-experimental human ships were more prone to Phlebotinum Breakdown.
- The episode "The Queen" of Stargate Atlantis involved Teyla pretending to be a Wraith Hive queen. She ends up starting a fight with another Hive ship, which involves both ships floating alongside one another (mind you, each ship is several miles long) firing powerful energy bolts at each other, while hundreds of their Dart fighters go at each other. Todd, acting as her Number Two, realizes that Teyla is intentionally trying to get as many Wraiths killed as possible. In the end, Teyla's Hive only survives because the rest of the team sabotage the other Hive. Teyla then turns to Todd and berates him for questioning her tactics. Said tactics were, apparently, straight out of 18th century (minus Darts) without even any maneuvering or volleys.
- Star Trek: Star Trek is arguably the Trope Codifier. This sort of space combat shows up with frequency in all its incarnations. In the later series, the trope is sometimes averted by having giant capital ships engage in an Old-School Dogfight, but it's still played straight very, very often. It was considerably less common in TOS, but that was mainly for budgetary and special effects limitations reasons (combining a Star Trek Shake with a character reporting weapon fire was cheap. Moving two models on screen at the same time while also adding in weapon and impact effects, not so much).
- Star Trek: The Next Generation: In the episode "Conundrum", the Enterprise-D hints at an aversion of the franchise's usual Point Defenseless battles, while simultaneously demonstrating why there aren't many fighters to be found when Enterprise destroys a half-dozen in under two seconds in a casual, almost offhanded salvo of phaser fire. That episode might not be the best example, since the fighters they destroy are stated to be technologically inferior to the Federation, but the Borg also swat Federation fighters aside just as easily as they approach Earth, and it's shown that, generally speaking, the relatively-tiny Maquis ships are helpless against Federation and Cardassian capital ships and only good for raiding transports. Capital-grade weaponry is both powerful enough that only another capital ship or fortified installation has the defensive power to weather the hit, and accurate enough that evasive maneuvers aren't reliable enough to avoid being hit.
- Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
- The episode "Sacrifice of Angels", shows a Galaxy-class starship passing the bow of a Cardassian Galor-class, firing to the side as she bears. This is a seagoing battleship-era maneuver called "crossing the T".
- DS9 had a tendency towards ludicrously crowded and close-in fleet battles during the Dominion War story episodes. Not only was ramming a common Dominion tactic, but accidental collisions and simply being caught in the explosions of other ships frequently inflicted more Federation Alliance casualties than actual weapons fire did. The above episode and Tears of the Prophets were the worst offenders.
- The episode "Sacrifice of Angels", shows a Galaxy-class starship passing the bow of a Cardassian Galor-class, firing to the side as she bears. This is a seagoing battleship-era maneuver called "crossing the T"
Tabletop Games
- BattleTech's space combat spinoff, BattleSpace / AeroTech has this as one of its core mechanics. WarShips brawl with each other at ridiculously close ranges. The battles are very brutal and reminiscent of sea battles from the age of sail. However, it has advanced rules for Newtonian flight physics instead of the Old-School Dogfight style physics, and three dimensional movement is important. Likewise, the fiction usually averts this, with direct combat between capital ships typically fought entirely by instruments and mathematics.
- In a bit of a twist, with the exception of rare and expensive WarShips with special compact jump cores the average fleet "mothership" is a sitting duck in combat — plain JumpShips spend so high a mass fraction on their faster-than-light drive system that they have basically no tonnage left over to invest in armor, mobility, firepower, or even significant cargo, and recharging the drive for a second jump back out of a hostile system can take on the order of a week or more. As such, while they're key to strategic mobility (DropShips and fighters aren't FTL-capable and so need to hitch rides to do anything more than patrol the system where they were originally built), they rarely play much of a role in tactical combat.
- Also, JumpShips are so astoundingly rare and important to the functioning of the galactic economy that it was written into the Ares Conventions that attacking a JumpShip was a war crime. Though by the time of the FedCom Civil War this was largely ignored and when the Word of Blake Jihad broke out, war crimes of so much greater magnitude were committed so often that "destruction of a Jumpship" ceased to be a noticeable offense.
- Ground Zero Games's Full Thrust plays this trope straight. Optional rules provide varying degrees of aversion.
- Task Force Games: Star Fleet Battles and Starfire. The latter influenced the portrayal of space battles in the Honor Harrington books, as one of the creators of the game was also the novels' author, though how the two universes actually use this trope differs.
- Enforced in Stars Without Number by the side-effects of Spike Drive, the combination FTL and Reactionless Drive employed by all star-faring civilizations. It's continual phasing of the surrounding space makes it impossible for guided missiles to lock on and disables nuclear fission reactions, forcing ships to close to "knife-fight" range and shoot plasma and railguns at each other.
- The Warhammer 40,000 spin-off game Battlefleet Gothic is a tabletop game built on this trope. To its credit, while combat mostly occurs by ships firing broadsides at each other, they at least do it over realistic distances, several million kilometres apart. The models representing the ships are completely out of scale with the rest of the game, as otherwise you'd either be playing with microscopic models, or would need a decently sized city to play in.
- Additionally, 3D combat is handwaved as "just another range modifier", and since most of these battles take place over such insane ranges, the planar weapon distribution could even be structural, only requiring maneuvering rockets to aim in the z-axis (from the frame of reference of our 2D game surface).
Video Games
- Artemis: Spaceship Bridge Simulator often plays out like this, complete with bow-to-bow gun runs, preceded by long-distance missile firing as they close distance to beam weapon range. Skilled crews often use tactics based more on maneuvering around the enemy to strike weakspots than simply closing range and engaging in a slugfest, but novice crews often resort to simplistic scuffle tactics.
- Averted hard in Children of a Dead Earth. The game prides itself on being the most scientifically accurate space war simulator to a literal molecular level. Instead of the standard starship battle, you get what amounts to relativistic jousting.
- Done in Dreadnought all battles are done with in short range, and ships firing broadside salvos at each other. At the very least it averts the 2D space combat.
- Battles in Endless Space feature very little player input (the only input is in the form of battle cards that can be employed prior to each phase). Visually, they feature both fleets moving in standard battle lines towards a planet on converging vectors. During the second, third, and fourth phases of combat, broadsides are exchanged. Missiles are more effective at long range (second phase), lasers are best at medium range (third phase), and kinetics are most accurate at "melee" range (fourth phase). Even if neither fleet is completely destroyed by phase 5, the battle ends and an After-Action Report is displayed. The Disharmony Expansion Pack adds fighters and bombers, which spend phase 2 getting into range and then attack for the next two phases (fighters go after enemy fighters first, then bombers, then ships; bombers go after ships).
- FTL: Faster Than Light: this is the main game mechanic. While the ships are assumed to maneuver around each other (as evidenced by the weapon fire coming in from random directions on both ships) you don't see much of it. Point defense only exists on some ships with defense drones, and the basic models are only useful against torpedoes. Of note is that unlike in most sci-fi universes, teleporters pass straight through shields so both explosive teleporters and boarding parties can be used anytime (assuming your ship has a teleporter).
- Gratuitous Space Battles was explicitly designed to provide a pure fix of Standard Starship Scuffle visuals. The player designs a fleet of fighters, frigates and gargantuan battleships then pits them against another fleet in a firestorm of technicolour glory. If you want to see Deflector Shields shimmering under the onslaught of Beam Spam while Tractor Beams struggle to pin elusive microfighters, this is the game for you.
- Fights between anything larger than fighters in Haegemonia looks like a typical slugfest between ships floating in space and firing at one another without any regard for tactics. While the game gives you the option of targeting engines or weapons instead of just the hull, it doesn't have much of an effect on the battle.
- Halo:
- Halo Wars: In one of the cutscenes, the Spirit of Fire briefly engages in a broadside barrage with a Covenant ship when she enters the inside of the Forerunner Shield World. This is justified because both ships were completely surprised by the sudden appearance of the other. It was only after narrowly avoiding a direct collision that the two ships opened fire on one another while they were still side by side.
- Halo: Reach: The Frigate UNSC Savannah engages in a broadside with a Covenant Corvette during Operation Uppercut, using only her 50mm autocannons. Justified since the entire point of the operation was to capture the Covenant ship intact via a boarding party so that the UNSC could use her to deliver a makeshift bomb to destroy the Covenant Supercarrier. The Savannah was there to provide a distraction for the boarding party and, as such, deliberately avoided using her other weapons in order to not accidentally destroy the ship. This ends up costing the Savannah and her crew since the Covenant ship does not have the same limitations, and the Savannah ends up being destroyed with the loss of all hands by the end of the operation.
- In the Homeworld series you plan and fight these as a part of gameplay, as this is a space Real-Time Strategy game and your task is not only to ensure that there are enough resources and ships to throw into combat, but to manage combat itself. Which is harder than it seems because the games completely avoid 2-D Space.
- Battles between capital ships often fit this trope closely, as large ships can't manoeuvre very well, and have fairly short-ranged weapons. They will often slowly drift past each other, or park within arm's reach of each other, and trade beam and cannon-fire until one of the ships bursts into flames and explodes... You can even order the ships into formations, one of which takes the traditional sea-bound Line of Battle and transforms it into a 3D Wall-of-Battle for much the same effect!
- Mass Effect: This trope is normally averted in the lore, as the in-game encyclopedia, called the Codex, goes into great details about how space battles are fought. However, all of the major space battles depicted in the in-game cutscenes play this completely straight, with every battlenote consisting of two fleets engaging in a gigantic confused mosh pit of ships mixing it up with one another, firing at everything around them, and overall being completely devoid of any coherent strategy or tactics. Some instances of this, such as the Battle for Earth in the finale and the battle between the Quarian fleet and the Geth dreadnought fleet, can be arguably justified by the in-game lore if one looks at the battles as one side deliberately closing the distance in order to avoid the main guns of the enemy capital ships.note However, the real reason is simply the fact that the games are focused on soldiers fighting on the ground and not on space battles. This is even acknowledged by Word of God stating that the cutscenes were created by the development team simply for the sake of Rule of Cool and the Codex descriptions are the canon way space battles are supposed to be fought.
- Nexus: The Jupiter Incident is a game designed around this concept. While there are fighters in the game, they're useless until the enemy's flak lasers are disabled. All fights are big slugfests, especially the climactic fight in the penultimate mission, where the player's fleet must fight against the constantly incoming enemy fleets. Lasers are specifically used to knock out enemy systems but don't do much physical damage. The other weapons are meant to damage the hull (mass drivers) and shields (energy shells).
- Fixed Forward Facing Weapons are the exception, not the rule. Most guns are turreted and located all over the hull, so you will often see ships rotating to bring additional weapons to bear while the ones currently facing the enemy are recharging.
- The Final Battle in the game, while smaller in scale than the Decisive Battle in the penultimate mission, is definitely not much easier. Essentially, you have to slug it out with one of the most powerful ships in the game without your fleet. You also have to do it inside a Negative Space Wedgie that could suck your ship in if you're not careful. If you focus on disabling the enemy engines, though, then the fight becomes easier, as the enemy will then fall into the anomaly.
- Star Trek:
- Star Trek: Legacy, Star Trek: Bridge Commander and the Star Trek: Starfleet Command games all feature this heavily, as their respective settings mostly lack Space Fighters. Most Trek games are like that.
- The second Starfleet Command game is the only one of the series to feature fighters. They aren't a tremendous help but can tip the scales in a close battle, especially for the Lyran's who get the best ones.
- Bridge Commander does allow you to take direct control over the ship and treat it like a fighter, especially if you're piloting a Bird-of-Prey (they only have forward-firing weapons).
- True to form, in Star Trek Online duels between starships armed with beam arrays tend to work out this way. Beam arrays have a 255-degree firing arc, so being side-on to your target means you can hit with all your energy weapons at once. Among ships armed with dual cannons (most escorts) or dual beams, it works out more like an Old-School Dogfight, albeit one where the combatants also have tailguns (turrets on the rear mounts); and some of these weapons have special versions that expand their firing arcs.
- With the introduction of Carrier Ships, the tactics blend closer. A dedicated Carrier (two hangers) can spam two groups of small fighters. One fighter won't be enough against a capital ship... but a group is enough with the secondary group tasked to defend the mother ship. Between a small weapons compliment for broadsides and a typical science specialty (generally science is focused on crowd control, buffs, and debuffs), a carrier can essentially park at far range of the main battle and weaken the ships/buff the fighters enough to make the fighters a threat.
- Star Trek: Legacy, Star Trek: Bridge Commander and the Star Trek: Starfleet Command games all feature this heavily, as their respective settings mostly lack Space Fighters. Most Trek games are like that.
- Sword of the Stars battles play out this way at the dreadnought and leviathan level. Smaller spacecraft try to maneuver, but don't have the agility needed for an Old-School Dogfight.
- Computer-controlled Liir like to swarm your ships at close range and will try to surround-and-pound each of your vessels, even if they are using dreadnoughts. If you were counting on a battle line, good luck.
- Early battles involving only destroyers do tend to look like your typical scuffle, with ships passing one another while trading shots, especially since destroyers are unlikely to have missiles and tend to only have small turrets.
- The Honor Harrington mobile game Tales of Honor: The Secret Fleet plays the trope even straighter than the novels. When ships battle they just sit there in parallel positions lobbing missiles at each other until one is destroyed. At most they might "roll" to use their impeller wedges at shields occasionally.
- VGA Planets fights battles by having any involved ships attack in order, one on one, nose to nose, blasting away with any available weapons. This is all done automatically, the player can only order their ships how they want, send them into the fight, and watch the results.
- Although most of the combat in the Wing Commander series is Old School Dogfighting, there are a few exceptions:
- In one mission in Wing Commander III, you're escorting a pair of human destroyers that will engage Kilrathi destroyers in the area if given the opportunity.
- One cutscene late in Wing Commander IV features a very unusual melee between two space carriers, with the TCS Vesuvius (a brand-new supercarrier) in a stern chase with the BWS Intrepid (an old destroyer modified into a light carrier). The fight is soon joined by TCS Mt St. Helens (a second supercarrier of the same type as Vesuvius, recently hijacked and coming to the aid of the Intrepid), and the two heavy carriers duke it out. Mt St. Helens is quickly knocked out of the fight due to her being under-crewed and not fitted out for combat.
- One cutscene in the successful mission tree of Secret Ops shows an engagement between a Plunkett heavy cruiser and a Hydra cruiser. The losing mission branch version of the scene shows the Plunkett being swarmed by Nephilim fighters, however.
- The X-Universe games often feature slug fests between capital ships at fairly short ranges, even though the weapons will reach out 8km, they're too slow to kill the enemy before they close to sneezing distance. Battles between the player capital ship and AI capital ships usually end with the player plowing his ship into the AI ship. AI vs AI capital ship battles sometimes result in them both smashing into each other (if the player is speeding up time) due to the poor maneuverability of capital ships and the slow reaction time of sped-up AI.
Web Comics
- Averted in Outsider. When the Loroi and Umiak engage in space combat, their fleets are face to face with each other at considerable long distances, as Loroi weaponry is effective at roughly the distance between Earth and the Moon. The Umiak attack via Zerg Rush and missile spam, while Loroi fight with carefully coordinated Beam Spam attacks.
- Starslip has a few instances of this trope, usually with humorous lampshading of the various associated clichés.
- Played with in Schlock Mercenary, where the author's commentary averts this trope by noting the ways in which space combat has unique variables and considerations, and then goes on to admit the comic itself will play it straight by noting how audiences wouldn't enjoy or comprehend it, so here's a bunch of shots of Stuff Blowing Up. The realities of space-born combat do at times make it on-panel, however. Some battles occur at incredible distances with full use of the physics of space in effect, and considerable detail has been spent describing measures, counter measures, counter-counter measures, etc. In one case, Tagon's crew watch an engagement that had been decided days ago play out in "real time" due to the time it took the light to reach them. After "long gun" technology comes into use it becomes rare for any but the most petty fights to be between ships that are even in the same solar system.
- One of the fillers for S.S.D.D. explains why real life space battles wouldn't look like the movies.
Western Animation
- Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Most of the large-scale space battles between the Republic and the Separatists consists of two fleets engaging in direct head on broadside fire without any real strategy.
- Il Était Une Fois... Space features several over the span of the series, most notably in the episode "A Planet Blown to Pieces" the fighting between the Omega ships that are escorting civilian ships requested to save people in a planet orbiting a star that has gone supernova and a Cassiopeian Nautilus-class warship and especially the titanic battle between the Cassiopeian and Humanoid fleets, in which the former is almost entirely annihilated.
