See the Whites of Their Eyes: Difference between revisions
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{{quote|''"Drive me closer! I want to hit them with my sword!"''|'''Commisar Fuklaw''', ''[[Dawn of War]]'' <ref>
While current military organizations possess the technology to accurately target things over the horizon or out of visual range (most noticeably in the case of missiles and even in the case of [[Improbable Aiming Skills|snipers]]), most advanced civilizations have lost the secret. Those that ''do'' manage to retain the secret tend to develop the technology to the point of [[Roboteching]].
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Although not exclusively, this presents a particular problem for armed spacegoing vessels, where the loss of this rather useful bit of technology invariably leads to confrontations and battles against other vessels at near-point-blank range. And God help you if your opponent is packing an [[Invisibility Cloak]]. This has also led to a common starship design configuration where most of the ship's weaponry is placed [[Space Is an Ocean|broadside-style]] along the flanks of the ship's superstructure. It has also brought about the need for super-advanced, highly technological warlike civilizations to engage in [[Old School Dogfighting]].
[[Trope Namer|Named after]] the [[Beam Me Up, Scotty|supposed]] famous quote of Col. William Prescott in the battle of [[The American Revolution|Bunker Hill]]: "Don't fire 'til you see the whites of their eyes!" This was justified at the time because they were using notoriously inaccurate 18th-century muskets and they had almost no ammunition, so every bullet had to count. In reality, the command was routinely given to soldiers in many battles: no army had very accurate guns or unlimited ball and
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== Comics ==
* ''[[Action Comics]]'' had fist air fight right on the
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* ''Star Fleet Battles'', the tactical tabletop adaptation of ship-to-ship combat in the ''[[Star Trek Original Series]]'' universe, regularly uses this trope. Well, they don't ''make'' hexsheets in "square lightyear" sizes, do they?)
** Hexes are 10,000 kilometers wide (the earth takes up a three-hex diameter sphere), no ramming allowed and practical combat range is under 20 hexes (one planet at a time on the map).
*** Given that the earth is slightly under 13,000
**** Actually, the earth takes up the center hex, the others are atmosphere (1 hex of planet, 6 of atmo), which is even more stupid, since the Earth's atmosphere is under
***** Earth plus atmosphere is a single hex. Maybe you were thinking of the small gas giant?
**** More like [[Acceptable Breaks From Reality]]. The designers know this (and that ships don't 'orbit' at light speed and that moons are normally more than 10k km from the planetary surface...)
**** Is 10,000
== Video Games ==
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** That said, distances in the battles are measured in tens to hundreds of kilometers. The Mothership itself is something like four to six kilometers on its longest side, for goodness' sake. So this might actually be an aversion - visual range is just a freaking long distance.
** Not even close, hundreds of kilometers is nothing in space.
* ''[[Supreme Commander]]'': The few guns capable of shooting with semi realistic artillery ranges (up to 71
** The prequel, ''Total Annihilation'' is much more forgiving about this sort of thing past the first tier, although tank battles still escalate to a mass of tangled metal if their respective armour is sturdy enough.
** Actually, Supreme Commander was notable for avoiding this trope. Even the weakest weapons have a range of half a kilometer. Additionally, conventional artillery pieces have ranges exceeding one kilometer (for example, the UEF's Duke cannon has a ''minimum'' range of 3
* ''Command and Conquer 3'' includes walking artillery units for the GDI that can fire the length of the map. However, for game balance purposes, they can only do this when a sniper is close enough to paint the target with a laser designator.
** Juggernauts could fire across half the map in their normal attack mode in the last mission of the NOD campaign. This was so they could pound the Threshold tower's defenses, but any juggernauts had this modified range (cue pounding of their ion cannon structure, which is another sidenote altogether...)
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