Also: “they ambushed the blockade protecting it”. What? How do you ambush a static defence?
The show is turning into a meme come to life.
I don’t remember the details or exact context for your quote, but if they’re following a naval war analogy, you can certainly picture the British fleet beating back and forth trying to keep the French from coming out of port. It’s a blockade, but it’s not really static. One can image setting up an ambush somewhere along the path of the blockading ships.
Noooooooo!
Oh FFS.
Yeah, so episode 4 was more garbage. I hope their drive thingy malfunctions and it becomes Sliders with a starship. That’s the only way it’ll get good.
And wait, are they saying the show is visually stunning – which it isn’t – or the actress? If it’s the latter, they can jog on.
- teleports to middle of V’ger. It’s one of our old probes guys.
- teleports behind Khan. Bang your dead.
- teleports behind that wall in space. It’s not a god it’s a prisoner. Teleports out.
- Wormhole not needed. DS9 closed down.
- Voyager teleports home.
Seems to me if there’s enough time between ships passing a point to set up an ambush, it’s not really a blockade. They could just sail out of the port in that time.
Garbage? Such a strong word. Disagree with that. It might not be the Star Trek show we know / expected, but I’m enjoying the evolving story line and the fact characters don’t get reset every episode. Overall, I’m loving it.
Maybe I’m not invested enough in the Trek canon as a whole (and I’m speaking as someone who has been watching since TnG), but I’m enjoying the series on their own.
If people want more TNG, Voyager etc, then go watch that again. There’s litterly hundreds of episodes of Star Trek “procedural is space” to watch. No idea if this ultimatly pans out but I like that this is a new take not just TNG restarted with modern effects.
So do I. I absolutely don’t want a procedural in space. But I’d like the characters to behave vaguely plausibly. Early signs aren’t encouraging.
Historically that is how blockades worked, and occasionally ships did slip out, particularly when the weather turned bad. Here’s an example from the war of 1812::
In 1812 a French admiral managed to slip four ship-of-the-lines and two corvettes through a blockade of Lorient in the dead of night. In 1805 the French got an entire fleet past Lord Nelson’s blockade of Toulon.
Also if you consider that the Klingons can turn their ships invisible, the idea of ambushing a blockading squadron seems quite plausible.
I don’t care if it’s a procedural in space, I care if it’s well-written, has likeable/relatable characters and feels at least tangentially consistent with the larger Trek universe.
Just the one for now; hence by Kor had to go and steal it.
I’m with Ginger_Yellow on this one. The idea of ambushing a blockade is nonsensical.
Sneak past a blockade? Sure. As you said, it can certainly happen, there’s even a term for it: blockade-runner.
Attack a blockading force? Sure. Sail out from the blockaded are and engage them or if an outside relief force engages the blockading force.
Ambush a blockade? Huh? Ambush means attacking, by surprise, from hiding. A blockading force shouldn’t be surprised—the whole point of them being out there is because they’re expecting to intercept ships. Also, as Ginger noted, having the time to hide/conceal yourself to the degree needed to execute an ambush takes a ton more time than just running the blockade.
It just sounds like a really bad choice of terminology (particularly “blockade”) to describe the whole situation. Would have been better to call it ambushing a patrol or something, which implies much less thorough and dense coverage than a blockade.
Well most of Science Fiction space fighting is a lot of hand waving nonsense that’s based on analogies to real historic naval or air battles. (As an aside here’s a fun interview with a Naval Analyst which discusses various analogies to real life naval combat used by different science fiction shows.)
If their analogy for how a blockade works is Napoleonic Naval Warfare, then for sure, it’s easy to imagine executing a surprise attack on them. The basic idea here is that the amount of space you have to cover to prevent someone running your blockade is too large to completely just plunk down a line of static ships. It’s pretty easy to imagine this happening as space is pretty big. So you end up having your ships beating back and forth patrolling the area. In order to cover maximum amount of area and prevent blockade runners, you’ll have to separate your forces.
In order to ambush the blockading forces, you just need to have some idea of where their patrolling forces are going and then show up with much greater force than they’re expecting and pounce on them. In real life you could take advantage of islands or headlands to surprise them. In “science fiction” one can imagine taking advantage of moons or asteroid belts to gather overwhelming force and surprise the blockading forces. As the blockading forces are spread out to maximize their coverage, you can defeat individual detachments of them, and if they don’t stop to concentrate their forces and instead throw them in piecemeal, you could end up defeating them in detail, even if their overall force strength is larger than your own.
Ambushing in space seems essentially silly. Because sensors and vast open spaces and no terrain. Sure, sure, cloaking, fine, whatever. But really it’s not ever going to happen otherwise unless someone decides that they will approach a planet at high speed without sending a probe to see what’s on the other side.
But regardless, ambushing is laying in wait for someone in transit, so you just can’t ambush a blockade. You can attack by surprise, maybe, if the blockade force is incredibly stupid and/or technologically outmatched, but not ambush.
My main concern with episode 4 was the security chief’s actions. They were just jarringly stupid.
You guys are great, this is a fun discussion to read.
ALARMINGLY stupid.
Look, they had to open up a slot on the bridge crew, somehow …