Re: cm scale - cinematic collisions ?

>Yes this talk about Cms vs Inches and tabletop clutter reminds me of
>just about any SF battle you see on television movies these days. I
>recap:
>Starship troopers: Ships so close together they're getting nailed left
>and right by plasma, and having to evade ramming eachother.
>B5: Captain Sheridan is always deciding to ram somebody.

He does??

>Startrek, and ST:TNG, and Voyager: For some reason ships feel like thye
>have to get within 100meters of each other before they can hail
>eachother.
>ST:DS9. ANybody see the battle against teh dominion last week? That was
>the most ships per cubic kilometer I ever saw, really absurd.

Hollywood eye-candy. I don't much go for it, but your general populace
wants to see that, and the makers of get a better dramatic visual by
having the ships all in the same viewing area than scattered about half
a solar system. Plus the visual impact is greater if the ships are in
tighter quarters, to give you the feel of a 'massive fleet of ships'
(that is a photographic technique, too, btw; an effective way to
represent
an entire forest, for example, would be to image a few trees, or one or
two
trees, up close and personal from that forest; I would refer you to
Galen
Rowell's "Mountain Light" book for examles of this; if you are curious
to
his work, you can see some of his pics online at:

	   http://www.mountainlight.com/home.html

and go to the 'gr gallery' link)

B5 at least did address the issue of close-quarters ship combat a few
times
and does have battles in which the enemy ships *aren't* a few hundred
meters
away from each other...

Mk
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Daune: "How can you be asleep and getting ready at the same time?"

Indy: "I'm multi-tasking..."