| abstract
| - 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 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. 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 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. Named after the supposed famous quote of Col. William Prescott in the battle of 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 powder -- or arrows, for that matter. The saying is famed, and associated with Bunker Hill, by Americans because it was the first battle of the nascent American nation. Not to be confused with Eye Lights Out or By the Lights of Their Eyes, for literal eye lights. There are four discernible reasons for this phenomenon:
* The trope is often a function of practical visual cheats by filmmakers rather than a mistake. Star Trek often refers to a vessel being "300,000 kilometers away and gaining" but still presenting a real threat to the Enterprise. A representation of this actual distance is near impossible without some sort of visual trickery. Television is also a visual medium that emphasizes "Show, Don't Tell". In order to get a sense of the size of the two or more spacecraft they need to somehow be next to each other. The cheat may be required to get around logistical problems in portraying a situation accurately: in the case of Star Wars, special effect technological innovations during the time of the original trilogy hadn't reached the point where one could plausibly represent the flight path of missiles through a vacuum other than in the most rudimentary way.
* Many filmmakers hearken back to naval or submarine combat as the closest metaphor for space combat available, and consequently use visual devices and images consistent with the representation of eighteenth-century seagoing vessels shooting at each other to place space battles on film. Of course, they might do that just because they know Space Is an Ocean. As it is, naval vessels have had the capacity to engage with guns at ranges of tens of thousands of meters since the late nineteenth century, albeit it took a while for fire control to make firing at said ranges accurate rather than spray and pray. Even torpedoes, relatively slow and short-ranged weapons, have had 10-20 kilometer ranges since at least the 1940s. Nowadays guided/homing missiles give the capacity to engage targets at hundreds of kilometers.
* Averting this trope probably isn't much fun to watch, as a battle between starships where the enemy ship isn't blown up right before your eyes can be a bit dull. In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode 'The Wounded', two ships fire at each other at a range of over 100,000 kilometers. The characters watch the exchange on a screen with little symbols representing the ships and the shots. The fight is, needless to say, quite boring. Andromeda uses this and gets around it somewhat by showing the eventual collision of the missiles with the ship (sometimes. Other times, the dot representing the other ship just disappears), or just showing the battle if they're close enough for Anti-Proton blasts (less than 5 light seconds away, usually).
* The trope may also have a tactical justification as follows, as drawn from Mass Effect: most ships aren't going to start shooting each other in deep space for no reason; they'll start shooting at each other because one ship stands between the other ship and something it wants. For the ship on defense to actually defend its charge, it can't go anywhere. By contrast, space battles where the combating ships are the only factors will usually take place at extreme ranges. Some examples on this page fit this situation; notice that in the Babylon 5 instance of aversion, the objective of the aggressors is to destroy the ships. Of course, this is still an imperfect explanation when the setting features FTL independent of fixed nodes, which Mass Effect has in the form of Mass Relays. The example of aversion in Star Wars regarding the ion canon below illustrates this problem, where the Star Destroyer comes out of lightspeed anywhere it damn-well pleased, but the Star Destroyers or other ships in freeform-FTL settings still approach the target very closely instead of firing on the defending ships from afar.
* Similarly, because space is so huge, no weapons that don't approach the speed of light would actually hit the enemy within a reasonable amount of time, assuming there isn't any countermeasures that can be deployed in the 15 minutes between being fired upon by a sublight missile and actually being hit. And even at the speed of light it is still about 8 minutes to get to the sun and several hours to exit the solar system. Space is big. When the phrase is used, is often changed to reflect the enemy. For instance, in Transformers, it's "the wires of their optics". See Short-Range Long-Range Weapon for more generalized examples of this trope. Examples of See the Whites of Their Eyes include:
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