Stardate 20040418.1348

(Captain's log): I recently purchased a boxed set containing the complete run of the anime series Martian Successor Nadesico. (The ship's name is pronounced nah-DESS-sko.) Upon first viewing, I wasn't really all that impressed, but it's been growing on me. It tells several stories simultaneously.

One story is about a war. Another story is about certain characters, and about how they begin to bond with one another. It's about how the Nadesico's crew pulls together and comes to deserve the description "personalities aside, the best crew complement ever". (The subtitle said "best crew compliment", but we'll forgive that.)

One of the things which is handled nicely in the series is how each side (Earth, Jovians) keeps innovating as the war goes on, introducing new weapons and new tactics. One of my favorite episodes is #20. In that episode, a Jovian battleship engages Nadesico one-on-one, using a new and devastating weapon which can bypass all of Nadesico's defenses. In response, Yurika (the ditsy captain who is also a tactical genius) comes up with a plan which was unorthodox, gutsy as all hell, and ultimately successful in preventing Nadesico from being destroyed. Without that plan, Nadesico faced nearly certain destruction. With it, Yurika gave Nadesico about an even chance of prevailing. It was fascinating, and very well handled.

There are a lot of battles in this series. Ship battles are sometimes one-on-one, sometimes between small groups, occasionally one-on-many, and sometimes between large groups of ships. It got me thinking about the entire idea of how fleet actions between space navies might actually be fought, or if such a thing actually even made sense.

I was always very dissatisfied with ST:TNG ship-to-ship battles. With the ship capabilities and weapons capabilities they had, all the emphasis on maneuver and on closing with the enemy made no sense at all. And if anything, the Star Wars battles were even worse. (So far as I can tell, no one in that galaxy a long time ago, far far away, ever invented the missile.)

To predict the future, you look at the past. I started thinking about historical fleet tactics, and it became clear that the tactics used were entirely a function of ship characteristics, and especially a function of the characteristics of ship weapons and the ship's propulsion. Communications and detection technology also were factors.

The earliest fleets I've studied were made up of Greek Triremes. These were galleys, moved by oarsmen. Despite your memories from the movie Ben Hur, the oarsmen were not slaves and were not chained in place. Triremes had square sails which could be used if the wind was blowing the direction they wanted to go, but sails were not used in combat.

They carried bowmen and sometimes had catapults which could fire boulders or incendiary rounds ("Greek Fire") but the primary weapon was the ram, an extension of the ship's keel in front which was often sheathed in metal. If a trireme could crash its bow into the side of an enemy ship, the enemy ship would be fatally holed. Once the attacker pulled out, the enemy ship might not totally sink (they were made of wood) but it would no longer be an effective warship.

Of course, that meant that its crew would not want to stay on board, so if a ship was hit, its crew often tried to board the attacker to take it over. And that's why the oarsmen were not chained in place; during any kind of boarding action they could take up weapons and fight. (Sometimes boarding actions got amazingly complicated, with several ships on both sides involved.)

As a result, fleet maneuver and close coordination of ship movement was critical. A given ship's flanks were its greatest vulnerability and safety lay in having friendly ships there. Effective attacks against the enemy were brought about by maneuver, to place individual ships in position to strike enemies. Since these were galleys, their motive power was internal and ran the same speed (very slow) in all directions. All weapons were short range and the best weapon required direct contact between the ships.

Such fleets were extremely expensive to build and maintain. Generally speaking, for there to be any kind of fleet action you need contending naval powers capable of floating fleets who are willing to fight one another. That's why there were so many such naval battles in the Med in the classic era, what with Phoenicians, Egyptians, Carthaginians, various Greek city states, and Rome all in contention to dominate the region.

Rome won. Once Rome dominated the entire shore of the Med, it was no longer possible for a competing power to create a credible fleet and to get it into the Med to fight against the Romans, and the last great naval battles of that era were during the Roman Civil War.

Elsewhere in the world the necessary conditions did not exist for major war fleets to engage in battle. For a time China was a great builder of ships, but no one else in the region did. The classic Arabs were great sailors, but in the waters connected to the Indian ocean no one else was. In the middle ages, the greatest seafarers were the Vikings, but in war their long ships were used as a way to convey infantry to distant lands for ground action; no one contended with them at sea. And there were two attempts by the Mongols to cross to Japan for invasion, which were stopped by the Kami Kaze, the Wind of the Gods. (They were fort