Starship Operators - Space Combat Par Excellence
There is already a lot of anime featuring capital ship space combat, ranging from the hilarious Muzekinin Kanchou Tylor to the deadly serious Seikai no Senki. However, methinks the latest series in this flavor, Starship Operators, deserves its own mention.
First off, SO ships adhere to real physics comprehensible in 21st century technology level (well, mostly). No capital ship in this series can turn like a dime - with the enormous mass of the battleships, limited structural strength and human ability to sustain excessive G forces, and the relatively small power side vernier thrusters generate it takes an awful lot of time to make a full turn. Inertia combined with high speeds makes SO combats one-pass affairs - miss your approach and you’ll have to turn in thousand-kilometers radius to have your enemy back in sight. Shields? What shields? Thick and heat-dissipating armor technology are what’s keeping SO warships from their demise, not some fancy force fields without even the slightest basis in real physics. Even the fictional warping has its Einsteinian physics limitation in place - warping in too near to a gravity well and you’ll risk warping out somewhere you don’t want to be (like the core of the nearest star).
Also, SO combatants are already exchanging fire from a LONG distance away from each other - like THOUSANDS of kilometers - as they should be considering the long range and power of their weapons. Star Trek warships, for example, seems to prefer to have the enemy in front of their noses first before they shoot. Seeing ST starship battles, I can’t help thinking that all Federation officers are either blind or near-sighted ^_^;
But enough dissing ST - even without the intricate political intrigues, captivating personal relations, tragedies, and romance, as well as the finely woven storyline, the excellent capital ship battles alone are more than enough to make Starship Operators a must-watch for any sci-fi afficionados out there. All hail Shinon!
