Interesting Links for 16-05-2015

[andrewducker]

• There is no SNP wrecking strategy (and here's what they'll do instead)
  (tags: Scotland snp politics )
• Human Rights Act to be replaced with Warhammer rulebook
  It's the last line that really does it for me.
  (tags: rights warhammer funny viaDraxar )
• On the Taxonomy of Spaceships
  (tags: space scifi categorisation )
• Vince Cable among four senior Lib

Comments

On the Taxonomy of Spaceships

[cartesiandaemon]

Right, that makes a lot of scifi (and history) make a lot more sense. I'm always confused by things like "why isn't a destroyer the most biggest thing" and how hornblower matches up to space battles.

I also wonder, if maybe some of the terms that don't quite have a home refer to concepts that don't exist in naval warfare. Like, maybe a mothership is a ship that launches LARGE ships (not just torpedo boats or fighter planes). We don't have that, because ships travel in convoy with an aircraft carrier, aren't actually launched from it. But if "sailing to the other side of the world" was something that only an aircraft carrier sized ship had the power for, you'd have something like "carrier would take destroyers/cruisers/battleships across the ocean and deploy them".

It also gives me a framework for scenes I didn't always get. Like in Babylon 5, lots of ships/stations seem to be somewhere between battleships and aircraft carriers -- they do have significant weaponry, but if they're not zipping about in hyperspace, they're a lot more powerful with fighters to harry the opposing ships. And I was like "fighters can take out a whole ship?" But in fact, in real life, it's exactly like that -- a fighter jet isn't a match for an aircraft carrier one-on-one, but fighter jet is the means by which aircraft carriers destroy aircraft carriers.

Re: On the Taxonomy of Spaceships

[andrewducker]

Yeah - someone else asked about GSVs, and those are basically mobile bases, which don't have an analogue in the real world.