See the Whites of Their Eyes/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: Armies that should have beyond visual range (BVR) weapons fight at short ranges.

  • Straight: Starships exchange fire at a few kilometres' range.
  • Exaggerated: Starships fight at mere metres' range and have to move to avoid crashing into each other.
  • Justified:
    • Heavy electronic warfare measures and lack of FTL sensors make hitting anything at more than short range very difficult.
    • Dominant FTL travel method is point-to-point instantaneous jump without "No Warping" Zone a la Battlestar Galactica. The only way to attack anything FTL-capable that isn't stuck in a defensive posture is to jump in at close range and strike before the other can jump out.
    • One side has individually superior ships that can destroy a number of the other side's, but the other side has better fire coordination. The former side thus must get into close range where its individual superiority can seize the day; again a la Battlestar Galactica on the Colonial side whose battlestars can beat the crap out of baseships one on one.
    • Both sides avert Point Defenseless in a setting that only has viable projectile weaponry. Starships need to get close so that their munitions don't simply get intercepted out of hand.
  • Inverted: ???
  • Subverted: Two sides appear to go into the usual visual-range engagement, and then one side's starships start getting blown up by BVR fire from the other side's new "sniper" ships.
  • Double Subverted: ???
  • Parodied: Starships have giant arms and legs and engage in brawls and grapples.
  • Deconstructed: The side that has weapons with very short effective range and lacks the acceleration, defences, stealth or tactical FTL to close the distance gets blown away by the side that outranges it.
  • Reconstructed: The tactically inferior side starts using signals trickery to fool their foes into wasting shots, revealing themselves by firing prematurely, causing friendly fire, or worst of all, making an enemy of a hitherto-neutral superior force. To minimise the likelihood of recurrence, the foe is forced to return to visual range and properly identify what it's attacking.
  • Zig Zagged: ???
  • Averted: The starships fight at properly long ranges where they cannot see each other.
  • Enforced: "It's not entertaining to our viewers if all they see of space battles is dots disappearing from radar screens."
  • Lampshaded: Starship combat scenes are prefaced by either notes to the viewer or in-universe acknowledgement that ranges of engagement are orders of magnitude greater than depicted.
  • Invoked: One side develops high speed heavily-armed and -shielded or stealth ships to close with an enemy that is not as effective in "knife fighting".
  • Defied: One side develops an effective means of BVR combat.
  • Discussed: ???
  • Conversed: ???
  • Played For Laughs: ???
  • Played For Drama: ???

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