Ship's Bridges Being Target.

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BunionClad
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Ship's Bridges Being Target.

I've just finished watching Gundam Seed and have watched many other Gundam series and I've wonder why aren't the Ship's bridges the main target.

For long range I can understand because of minovsky or anti beam particles but for mobile suits, why don't they just go straight for the bridge and one-shot every ship? They are so vulnerable and its not like their we'll protected.

Though I've seen numerous times that they do do such things but why not all the time?
ex. Zakus vs Megellans, Yazan with the Radish and other ships.
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MS-05DS
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Re: Ship's Bridges Being Target.

IMO, because it's hard to get close enough to shoot the bridge. all the ship is equipped with tons of anti MS weapon and only a few of handful pilot capable to penetrate the ship's defence and shoot the bridge.
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Zerosystem
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Re: Ship's Bridges Being Target.

It depends heavily on the situation, but most warships designed in the age of mobile suiits (any modern ship in the OYW and after) have a lot of machine gun turrets to stop most mobile suits from getting close in. In the case of Yazan being able to quickly destroy the Radish, keep in mind that Yazan's Hambrabi was a very high performing fast machine for its time, other mobile suits like Hizacks and Marasais wouldn't have been able to destroy the Radish just like that.

Have you seen the movie Char's Counterattack? The massive barrage put up by the Ra Cailum stopped the Neo Zeon mobile suits from getting close enough to deal extreme damage or to take out the bridge. Sure, Rezin managed to take out a chunk out of the Ra Cailum's bow, but later on, her mobile suit is destroyed in a volley of accurate turret gun fire. Although mobile suit armor improves a lot later on, most mobile suits are made for light weight and high mobility, so machine guns are still quite dangerous to them. Most pilots won't risk trying to get so close to score a hit on the bridge, since they'll have to be good enough to get past the warship's mobile suits, then somehow hit the bridge while trying to evade every bit of fire coming their way.

In short, I guess what I'm trying to say is that most warships aren't as vulnerable as they seem, and trying to take down a ship while being chased with machine gun fire from several turrets at once is no easy task.
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Re: Ship's Bridges Being Target.

Zerosystem wrote:It depends heavily on the situation, but most warships designed in the age of mobile suiits (any modern ship in the OYW and after) have a lot of machine gun turrets to stop most mobile suits from getting close in.
And it is also worth noting that by the Gryps War, almost all anti-air weapons on ships are beam guns (Listed as "secondary guns" in the profiles), not just conventional machine guns, making them even more powerful than you'd think. Plus, as shown by the advanced designs like the Ra Cailum and Clop classes, they are placed in the way to be highly effective in keeping MS at distance, and taking them out.

Plus, keep in mind that many ships in UC (By the UC 0090's) have combat bridges that move control towards the center of the ship, rather than the exposed ones, making them harder to hit. Also, every ship has (Or should have) at least one secondary bridge to allow them to continue controlling the ship even if the main one is damaged or lost, so it's not like just taking out the bridge would totally cripple the ship (Or worse, somehow cause the entire ship to explode for no reason at all, something that has also happened in a few Gundam shows :roll:).
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BunionClad
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Re: Ship's Bridges Being Target.

I see your points. Just finishing watching Gundam Seed made me think back on this topic as all the famous ships seem to survive far longer than other ships do.
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JEFFPIATT
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Re: Ship's Bridges Being Target.

mcred23 wrote:
Zerosystem wrote:It depends heavily on the situation, but most warships designed in the age of mobile suiits (any modern ship in the OYW and after) have a lot of machine gun turrets to stop most mobile suits from getting close in.
And it is also worth noting that by the Gryps War, almost all anti-air weapons on ships are beam guns (Listed as "secondary guns" in the profiles), not just conventional machine guns, making them even more powerful than you'd think. Plus, as shown by the advanced designs like the Ra Cailum and Clop classes, they are placed in the way to be highly effective in keeping MS at distance, and taking them out.

Plus, keep in mind that many ships in UC (By the UC 0090's) have combat bridges that move control towards the center of the ship, rather than the exposed ones, making them harder to hit. Also, every ship has (Or should have) at least one secondary bridge to allow them to continue controlling the ship even if the main one is damaged or lost, so it's not like just taking out the bridge would totally cripple the ship (Or worse, somehow cause the entire ship to explode for no reason at all, something that has also happened in a few Gundam shows :roll:).
also of note is the fact that the issue was addressed by AE with it's Argama class with its retractable bridge the clop and Ra Cailum classes enhanced this by allowing the bridge deck to lower in to
a battle bridge.
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Dark Duel
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Re: Ship's Bridges Being Target.

also of note is the fact that the issue was addressed by AE with it's Argama class with its retractable bridge the clop and Ra Cailum classes enhanced this by allowing the bridge deck to lower in to
a battle bridge.
An interesting thing to note is that, while the late-UC has a couple of examples of ships addressing the vulnerability to attack of the bridge in the event a mobile suit is able to slip through its point-defenses, this flaw is unaddressed for the most part in CE designs - none of them have any such feature, except for the Minerva. Not even the Archangel.
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Re: Ship's Bridges Being Target.

If we are to follow UC technology principles, however, it makes absolutely no sense that post-OYW bridges would be placed the way they are.

Despite their solid defense systems, a lot of bridges in UC ships keep being placed in the 'tower' configuration, with the bridge at the tip. Consider that by UC 0087, we have panoramic cockpits, which collect solid information from dozens of small cameras dotted all over the body of a Mobile Suit (the main cameras being important, but not crucial, to MS operation as we have seen countless times).

Thus one would expect it'd be possible in a warship, where making systems compact is less of an issue, to have a solid network of cameras dotted around the ship, which could project solid strategic data into a bridge/CIC that is located in middle of the ship. Think a combination of the CIC placement in the Galactica, and the kind of display shown in Legend of the Galactic Heroes. This should be possible with UC technology, if we assume they have cameras and computers accurate/powerful enough to create the panoramic display. It makes little sense that, by the time of Zeta, we still have bridges with windows to space, no matter how much they enjoy putting armor over those windows.
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Re: Ship's Bridges Being Target.

To be fair though, it's not just a trait found in Gundam, but in sci-fi in general on both sides of the larger pond. Macross bridges are just as guilty as those in Gundam and in Star Trek, the bridge of the Enterprises as well as virtually every other ship design (alien as well as federation designs) have a similarly exposed bridge on the outside of the hull. The Borg seem to be the lone exception to the general rule who don't have a "bridge" at all.
And of course there's the Imperial Star Destroyer and it's huge bridge tower area.
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JEFFPIATT
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Re: Ship's Bridges Being Target.

it's left over Navel tradition in order to depict fleet battles in space they tended to design space battleships in the same configuration as there naval counterparts. Gundam was animated post star trek, star wars and it's ships keep to the classic look. CE kept the ships in an neo UC style while the 00 gundam ships are more modern looking in a sci-fi sense.
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azrael
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Re: Ship's Bridges Being Target.

Wingnut wrote:To be fair though, it's not just a trait found in Gundam, but in sci-fi in general on both sides of the larger pond. Macross bridges are just as guilty as those in Gundam and in Star Trek, the bridge of the Enterprises as well as virtually every other ship design (alien as well as federation designs) have a similarly exposed bridge on the outside of the hull. The Borg seem to be the lone exception to the general rule who don't have a "bridge" at all.
And of course there's the Imperial Star Destroyer and it's huge bridge tower area.
However, Macross is slowly moving away from that trend where the bridge action took place in Battle Frontier/25's CIC.

RDM's Battlestar Galactica also broke with tradition by moving their "bridge" action to CIC.
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Re: Ship's Bridges Being Target.

In concern to ce warships the bridges aren't as vulnerable as one might think especially ships like the archangel. Take notice that most of the archangels CIWS emplacements are clustered around the bridge tower and as shown can put up a amazing volume of fire. This placement was considerably effective in that only three machines ( two of which where armored in phase shift) made it into position to attack the tower. Also in the first few episodes of seed the bridge tower takes repeated beam rifle shots from the blitz and comes away with only a good scorch mark. This tells me the tower was well armored leaving the glass as the only real area of high vulnerability.

I think it's also important to note that CE ships, especially alliance vessels in particular seem to suck more and more with the passing of each episode. In the beginning of seed they where able to take their share of hits and weren't prone to blowing up when the bridge was hit. During the battle with the 8th a couple of ships actually have their bridges destroyed and attempt to flee the battle before being taken out by rau's ships. This instance also proves the existence of secondary bridges for alliance vessels. But by the end of seed and from the start of destiny all alliance vessels are reduced to sheet metal armored cans seemingly packed with as much explosive for the biggest boom possible so take that for what it is.

ZAFT vessels on the other hand actually lack the bridge towers save for the Minerva. The Nazca class is really the only one with what could be called a bridge tower and it's fairly low in profile.

While their are a lot of holes which get incredibly bigger over time CE really didn't do so bad in terms of actual bridge defense. At least in my opinion.
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Re: Ship's Bridges Being Target.

It would make more sense to have the bridge inside like in Battlestar Galactica

with cameras and sensors you don't need to see out, guess like submarines
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Re: Ship's Bridges Being Target.

tHeWasTeDYouTh wrote:It would make more sense to have the bridge inside like in Battlestar Galactica

with cameras and sensors you don't need to see out, guess like submarines
Yeah, but even in the original BSG the bridge of the Galactica was located at the forward slope of the bow, with the ability to close the windows in case of enemy attack.

Even moreso, as was mentioned before, it's a byproduct of traditional ship design--the command area has to be situated in the place that would provide the best view of the combat zone. I suppose that would still even apply in space, despite instruments that would supposedly render such an advantage useless.

But that begs the question--in long range fire fights between warships, wouldn't it be exceedingly easy to just "headshot" the bridge with a line of sight weapon?
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Re: Ship's Bridges Being Target.

prince_of_zeon wrote:But that begs the question--in long range fire fights between warships, wouldn't it be exceedingly easy to just "headshot" the bridge with a line of sight weapon?
Nope. As MS IGLOO episode 1 showed, it's a royal PITA to try and shoot a long range weapon accurately enough to hit a ship at all at those ranges, let alone snipe the bridge of one in a combat level Minovsky particle enviroment. By the time you're close enough to get that kind of a shot, you're close enough to go straight for a main body kill shot and sink the other ship outright.
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Re: Ship's Bridges Being Target.

Igloo is not a terribly good example of how battles should be fought in space. Amusingly, it fits thematically because the Salamis and Magellan were clearly patterned off WWII wet-navy ships, rather than being built in a way which makes sense for space (the Musai does a better job for that).

However, physics being what it is, there's no reason the Federation couldn't plink Zeon's colonies from Luna II, despite being on the far side of the Earthsphere.

On the other hand, while the US Navy developed the Combat Information Center in the ship-design frenzy leading up to WWII (based on, of all things, Doc Smith's Lensman stories!), the Japanese continued to command their warships from their pilothouses and bridges, which left their command staffs (more) vulnerable to enemy fire. And as we all know, much of how the EFSF operates is based on the Imperial Japanese Navy and Army.

The fact that killing the bridge seems to destroy the ship is a conceit of the entertainment medium, as there are many examples of warships in history having their bridges shot away still functioning (Commander Evans of USS Johnston at Leyte Gulf was eventually reduced to directing his ship from the fantail, where he yelled rudder movements down an open hatch to the manual-steering compartment of his destroyer).
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Re: Ship's Bridges Being Target.

I believe Bablyon 5 doesn't fall into this problem with most of the ships shown. Most bridge crew aren't shown to be in any kind of exposed bridge. And the only ones that I can think of are the Whitestar class and Victory class ships, they seem to have exposed bridges, but I can't confirm that.
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Re: Ship's Bridges Being Target.

Also the various Hyperion knockoffs, and also the Olympus-class corvettes. But, really, it's mostly EarthForce which suffers from this, the Minbari clearly have good VR-based CICs. We never see enough of most other species' ships to get a feel for where their command centers are located.
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Chavelo
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Re: Ship's Bridges Being Target.

Yea a VR room able to render the entire battle as it is happening. Sheridan was practically giddy. xD
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Re: Ship's Bridges Being Target.

Black Knight wrote:The fact that killing the bridge seems to destroy the ship is a conceit of the entertainment medium, as there are many examples of warships in history having their bridges shot away still functioning (Commander Evans of USS Johnston at Leyte Gulf was eventually reduced to directing his ship from the fantail, where he yelled rudder movements down an open hatch to the manual-steering compartment of his destroyer).
The only times I can immediately remember such a thing NOT happening (bridge destroyed = whole ship explodes) would be Victory Gundam with the Jeanne D'Arc which, despite having its bridge shot out and being extremely damaged everywhere else, it was still clearly being aimed and operated as it re-appeared for its collision course with the Zanscare Fleet after the Reinforce.

On a slightly lesser note, the Reinforce was also like that in that it had its bridge destroyed shortly before its own kamikaze impact, but it still kept going without the entire ship blowing up too. (Though not really operated like the Jeanne D'Arc was after, but it didn't matter with their close proximity anyway.)
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