How to Write a Space Battle

[Music] hello everybody I'm Daniel from Spacedock and I want to talk about how to write a space battle this is something that sci-fi writers for TV in particular seem to have down to a science in the 90s though the art seems to have been somewhat lost recently in favor of more spectacle over substance hopefully by breaking down some of the things that I appreciate in a well-written space battle I can help out some prospective sci-fi writers who might be watching and I'd love to hear what you guys think below but let's get right into it first of all if you are a prospective sci-fi writer and you want to write an excellent space battle the first thing you need to do is watch three movies The Hunt for Red October mastering commander and Star Trek 2 the Wrath of Khan it wouldn't hurt to also watch the RDM 2004 Battlestar Galactica especially any episodes featuring both Galactica and Pegasus the reason you need to watch all of these things is because you need to learn that tension is better than action and fewer ships is better than more so get people properly invested into a space battle the audience needs to understand and care about each ship they need to know their names they need to know where they are they need to know what they're up against what they can do what their limitations are it should all be clearly defined it shouldn't be necessary for the audience to read a technical manual or whatever there should be very apparent the fact that the Battlestar Pegasus is a superior ship to the Battlestar Galactica is evident to any audience member even without reading any background material when there are fewer ships involved the audience can understand that geography and the stakes and the scale of the battle it doesn't become this giant soup of a million ships in one place and that allows the viewer to follow along with what's going on having a clear understanding of it all and staying fully invested it stops it from just being a giant screen saver that you're waiting to end for the next dialogue scene to come up in a segue from dialogue onto the next important point these ships have people in them and there can't be a disparity between the interior bridge shots and the exterior CG shots or model shots making it clear that there is an apparent danger to the people in these ships at all times is the best way to maintain the threat good examples of this the Battle of Thoth station from the expanse where we can see PDC rounds whizzing through the Rosie's interior during the battle the Battle of as RT prime from Star Trek Enterprise is a fantastic sequence in clear wonderfully lit cgi where we can see all of the Battle Damage and all of the crazy horror and the fires in the engine room and everything it's all very real the beginning of Star Trek 2009 also excellent with the destruction of the USS Kelvin just making it clear that these people are in a tin box that's being hammered with weapons in the vacuum of space is very very important again you don't want scenes inside a ship screensaver of a space battle they need to be the same thing in the same place further to this shields I don't like shields I understand the necessity for them in fiction but they exist because people back in the day didn't want to have to damage their studio models you can convince the audience that the enterprise is in serious danger by having people shout the shields or at 5% without it being necessary to take a Zippo lighter and burn some holes into the enterprise model that cost however many tens of thousands of dollars and hopefully maintain the illusion of serious stakes this is no longer necessary we live in the world of CGI so if the ship gets hit it should get damaged and it shouldn't be magically fixed between episodes like the USS Voyager always was and that was in the age of CGI they could have done something about it at least in the second half of that show they just chose not to there's nothing tense about people shouting percentages these days we can do better than that and I always thought it was quite amusing that Star Trek was so addicted to this status quo that they didn't know how to write any other way so even when they got to Star Trek Enterprise where they don't have shields they had to make up whole polarization which is just an excuse for people to shout percentages again even though there's no shields people actually shout we've lost hull plating in that show if you've lost whole plating the ship's gone like the whole plating is the walls moving on space fighters you can put space fighters in the setting if you want but they need to be recognized as their own separate kind of space combat that can be tense and well executed when carefully thought-out scar the episode of Battlestar Galactica is an excellent example of this it uses g-force and people suffering from kind of blackouts and turns and stuff the show does that a lot but the fighters operate on their own set of rules that have been carefully developed by the world builders they're not just smaller versions of the big ships if fighters are inappropriate for your setting don't use them they're not there in the expanse and they're largely not there in Star Trek and it works to the point where it looked really weird when Star Trek discovery suddenly broke out loads and loads of attack fliers or whatever in that one space bubble but we'll talk about that later the fighters should be interesting viewpoints there should be some kind of threat and tension behind them they shouldn't just be an excuse to thoughtlessly throw more stuff onto the screen that'll make the battle worse not better the Battle of the Ionian nebula from the third season of Battlestar Galactica is an excellent example of a mixed warship and fighter sequence because we get to see through the eyes of Anders and seelix as the flying around the mass of that battle and it's also made very clear that the fighters are destroying missiles to protect the civilian ships so they have an important involvement in the battle and the stakes are very clear another fantastic example is with Vannevar in the battle in severed dreams in the third season of Babylon 5 which is one of the best put together space battles ever as she's out there for the purpose of morale because they've forced all of the people and the crew to go out and fight this battle against their own people and it's largely the senior staff who conspired to make this happen so she has to go out and show the flag just out of support for the people taking part and again there's a serious clearly laid out involvement as she's protecting b5 s defense grid from attack fighters and we get to see a lot of the battle through her point of view severed dreams includes a significant number of ships and is an example of how a battle featuring a large number of ships within reason can be done very well while there are a lot of ships in that battle you can identify all of them at least until the minbari show up at the end you know the names of those ships and what's going on you even know the names of the captains of most of them and it's made even better by the fact that it's a civil war or the start of one where everyone is having to fire on their own kind there is no easy win here it's all a very grim and dire situation b5 also did a great job of restraining itself as a show with regards to space battles until this big moment the first two seasons have intermittent battles that are largely just a few fighters rounding up some Raiders and scaring them off or something there is no big real battle until this moment so when the hammer finally drops it really really is exciting stuff edge-of-your-seat sequence if you're doing a space battle in a visual medium it should not be rapidly edited it should have long exterior shots moments of tension it should be spaced out this will actually save money on effect most of the time you can have a lot of interior bridge shots and decision-making the Battle of the Mutara nebula from Star Trek the Wrath of Khan is an excellent example tension decision movements action reaction it's not just a giant colorful display of stuff happening it builds the tension it sets up the actions so that when something happens it's a big important moment finally to wrap this off I'm going to describe two examples both of which are from Star Trek discovery one of which is maybe the worst space battle ever put to screen and the other is actually really really great and I'm surprised the same show did both of them the good one is the battle to save the USS Gagarin in one of the early episodes of season one it's very straightforward it's simple it's well edited it's got close-ups and high detail visuals of the ships involved and it's got simple steaks the discovery uses the spore drive to try and rescue a Federation ship that is in trouble we're told how many Klingon ships are attacking it there are six we get clear information about where the discovery is what it's doing what the condition of the gagarin is the gagarin has clear battle damage on its exterior mobile and on the bridge it's not just shield numbers being shouted and it ends with an exciting sequence where the discovery throws itself into the path of some sort PTO's to try and shield the gagarin from harm isn't entirely successful and the gagarin gets destroyed it's a great slice of life for the klingon war in this sequence it sets up the episode really well it's got sweeping camera angles and excellent incidental music and really sharp military dialogue it looks great and it's tense and it doesn't go over the top and it's just really really well done great job I wish they did this more alternatively we have the Battle of Zaheer from the end of the second season of Star Trek discovery and this is just terrible it's the enterprise and the discovery which remain weirdly stationary for the entire battle against like 50 miscellaneous section 31 ships also some Klingons and some kelp Ian's show up halfway through every ship has a million fighters or like tactical attack fliers or something that they launch the enterprise also launches all of its shuttles and work bees and lander probes and all this stuff in a situation like this more is not really better not just from a visual editing standpoint but also from a tactical standpoint if you launch a personnel shuttle in the middle of a giant space battle it's just gonna die you've just wasted a personnel shuttle you're not a tiny bit better off because that's out there you're just worse off you've lost your shovel because it will not do anything useful so we've got this giant soup of tack flyers fighting drones and ships firing each other and it has this giant like blue color filter over it the discovery does all the time loads of modern shows do this I don't know what it is even the expanse did it in season one and there seem to get over it pretty quickly but there seems to be this weird interest in blue colour filters these days in space battles space isn't blue and I'm surprised that so many people seem to have become vehemently convinced that it is it makes everything a little more unclear and especially when the shots aren't that long because fast editing is popular these days you want to get as much out of these shots as possible and show off the details I actually have the chance to see some of the earlier versions of the donnager battle from the expanse when I was working on force recon which didn't have that blue filter and it's not like a measure to save money or anything because the detail is all there without that filter they're not trying to hide a sort of quickly made 3d model it's all really really good work so I don't see why they need to put this filter over it that kind of diminishes the experience but it's by far at its worst in discovery at the end of the second season you can barely see anything it's this giant headache-inducing soup and there are blue particle effects going on along with it so it's just all the same color again the Battle of Zahir basically breaks every rule I've laid out here the threat to the individual characters on board the ships is not that good well there is one sequence where they have a torpedo stuck inside the enterprise as an actual set piece for the episode that's very good but generally speaking there isn't much ambient danger to the bridge crew just the usual sparks and flickering and not much exterior change to the ship's and really it's just a battle that could have worked with four ships in it the enterprise and the discovery against two very impressive section 31 ships that could have been maneuvering and thought and care and decision-making intention it could have been slow and deliberate like the Battle of the Mutara nebula from Wrath of Khan and the moments of success and failure would have been that much more impactful we've even just had this in Star Trek Picard which I really enjoyed all the way through but we had a sequence at the end mild spoilers where the Romulans want to blow up a small village on the surface of a planet so they send like 250 warbirds to do it even though they're supposed to be on the back foot as a galactic power so I'm not sure whether even got these ships from and then when Starfleet goes to send people to stop them they send another 200 ships and then you've just got a million low res ships on a screen at once viewed from a great distance and it just looks like nothing again they could have sense to Romulan warbirds to do it to Federation ships to stop them tell us the names of everything give us lots of interior shots give us lots of maneuvers and sequences do it all in high-res because you can afford to do that when there's only a few ships and it would have been 10 times better I'm not saying large-scale battles can't be done well the Battle of Endor is excellent but compare the Battle of Endor to the Battle of X a goal from the rise of Skywalker and you'll see exactly why it's important to make sure you keep to these rules because that goes from a well less big battle with interior fighter pilots shots and clear stakes and clear objectives and clear geography to a giant blue mass being force around some static Star Destroyers that they recycled the 3d model off too many space battles these days are either not putting in enough effort into making them work or putting too much effort into the wrong things less is always more in these situations quality over quantity that's why it's been almost 20 years and the Battle of New Caprica from Battlestar Galactica is still probably the best space battle ever put the screen because it was to battle stars and four based stars and we knew what was going on and what ships could do what and how much danger they were in I hope some of these new shows come to learn this lesson and I hope if anyone is listening who intends to produce or write science fiction in the future we'll keep these rules in mind because the genre needs more of this kind of thing done properly and if you disagree with me or you have any other points you want to raise about how space battle should be done please let me know in the comments below this is a really interesting topic that I'd love to hear your thoughts about but that's all from me thank you all for listening this is Daniel from space dock signing off thank you for watching space dock if you're interested in supporting the channel please do check out the links on the screen right now or in the description below for our patreon and channel membership services anything you can pledge goes towards improving our team and our equipment and allowing us to put together bigger and more exciting video projects for you guys on the channel

Channel: Spacedock

Views: 423,233

Keywords: Spacedock, spacedock, space dock, battle, space battle, writing, how to write, how to write a space battle, star trek, star wars, mass effect, battlestar galactica, babylon 5, pegasus, galactica, master and commander, hunt for red october, mutara nebula, wrath of khan, lore, history, analysis, review, breakdown, summary, retrospective, specifications, news, update, reveal, 2020, gaming, gameplay, trailer, teaser, videogame, discovery, star trek discovery, picard, disco, dsc, good, bad

Id: _3jzNHwJ0Nc

Length: 11min 56sec (716 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 02 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/ZeroBANG]

disclaimer: not my video, just sharing
(Star Trek comes up in the video more than enough, even if Galacitca is on the thumbnail)

but the man is telling it how it is and SciFi writers and CGI people for that matter should listen to this.

[u/jb91263596]

Fuuuuck yes this was articulate.

[u/AreYouSureDestiny]

Wow.

I watched the Picard space scenes with much indifference. Seeing this vid makes me realise how utterly terrible they were.

I mean we had a friggin BORG CUBE turn up into battle..we should have been jumping up in the air cheering, or picking up our jaws from the floor.

At the end there was a Romulan fleet about to engage a Starfleet fleet..sadly they didn't stir enough emotions.

[u/Hamilltap]

Romulan fleet about to battle with the Federation who rescued most Romulans less than 20 years ago?

[u/TokenMenses]

This guy is so spot on. CGI has brought many great things to entertainment, but it has also led to a big quantity over quality issue. I’d make the same criticism to battles in general in recent movies.

I do take issue with the critique of the last battle in Discovery season 2. It just makes sense for an AI to attack with a huge swarm and to respond in kind. I felt like they did a good job there balancing the scales of the individual stories and the larger conflict.

[u/Magnus64]

Nail, meet head. This is spot on. I'm convinced that whoever made that atrocious battle at the end of Disco season 2 has clearly never seen a Star Trek episode in their life. That is not how space battle work in Star Trek. Tactically, it was almost as bad as The Long Night in GoT. Less is more.

[u/pdgenoa]

We stopped watching The Expanse after season one - not because we didn't love it, but because we didn't have time. And we're about to jump into it in the next couple of weeks.

I noticed no one has commented on that show. Is it because the space battles have been good?

[u/originalmaja]

That was amazing. Subscribing.

[u/comment_redacted]

This is great commentary, and I always think of those same examples of great space battles in movies and TV.

I honestly feel like there is some kind of turf war going on between the Orville CGI folks and our CBS CGI folks... ever since that interview where the crews from the Orville were going on and on about having the biggest space battle ever in their last TV show I feel like everyone else is trying to one-up them.

Directors gotta direct these CGI goofballs.