Every so often I make a batch of tiny watercolor paintings - just 2.5″x3.5″ - to take to a convention. In honor of being a guest at this year’sSpecial Edition: NYC, I painted up a bunch of my favorite female characters from comics, animation, and film!
L to R, top to bottom:
Imperator Furiosa (Mad Max: Fury Road), Garnet (Steven Universe), Frohawk take on Storm (X-Men);
Catwoman (DCU), Kate Bishop (Hawkeye), Jubilee (X-Men);
Agent Peggy Carter (MCU), Ms. Marvel, Captain Marvel!
I will have all these tiny but fierce ladies with me at my table H-04 in Artist Alley. I’ll also be on panels as well, including CREATING COMICS: THE REAL STORIES with badasses like Annie Wu, Kate Leth, and Becky Cloonan at 2:30 on Saturday. See ya there!
My name is Sand. Technically my ghost says my name is Cassandra. But only he calls me that. I call myself Sand, and so that is my name.
I call my ghost Archimedes, after an ancient human we read about in a rotting old book we found not long after he found me. Some warlock told me that Archimedes was the first human to use Light as a weapon. The book didn’t say anything about that. It mostly talked about him inventing simple machines and once running through the street naked. So I have my doubts. Either way, I reckon it’s a pretty good name.
I asked Arc (he says if my name is Sand, his name is Arc) how he knew my name is Cassandra. He says it just is, and he just knows it, same as how he just knew where to find me, and that he could bring me back. Typical ghost stuff, and not very satisfying, even for a hunter. Of course, I’m a hunter that doesn’t know what she’s hunting. So I probably shouldn’t complain. The warlock I know best–an Awoken named Desdemona–says that ghosts are partly just channels or conduits. That the Traveller can just drop things into Arc’s glowing little brain. And mine too, maybe. It can be hard to tell where one of us ends and the other begins. So sometimes they just know things, because the Traveller knows them. And no one can even guess at what the Traveller might know. Or what it’s forgotten.
I’m having Arc store these notes in the archive, as a kind of record. Not everything in it will be worth much. Maybe none of it will be. But it feels important to do, regardless. We’ve lost so much knowledge that we took for granted, and you can never tell when some seemingly useless thing discovered by someone like me turns out to be important. Or so I tell myself.
Technically, I live in the Tower, like most Guardians. And I love the City, our Last City, with the luminous Traveller hanging overhead. But I live in the Tower in the same way that my name is Cassandra.
My real home is out here, on the edges of the Light, with wild things of this world and others. I live out in the wilds because exploring is what I was made for, so far as I can tell. The City is beautiful, and full of life, and most of my fellow humans. But I’m not really one of them anymore. I’m something else, something called up from beyond death by a power that none us really understand. The people in the City, I think they’re more than a little bit afraid of us, the way we channel the power of the Light in marvelous and terrible ways. How we can brush off death.
On any given day, in any police department in the nation, 15 percent of officers will do the right thing no matter what is happening. Fifteen percent of officers will abuse their authority at every opportunity. The remaining 70 percent could go either way depending on whom they are working with.
That's a theory from my friend K.L. Williams, who has trained thousands of officers around the country in use of force. Based on what I experienced as a black man serving in the St. Louis Police Department for five years, I agree with him. I worked with men and women who became cops for all the right reasons — they really wanted to help make their communities better. And I worked with people like the president of my police academy class, who sent out an email after President Obama won the 2008 election that included the statement, "I can't believe I live in a country full of ni**er lovers!!!!!!!!" He patrolled the streets in St. Louis in a number of black communities with the authority to act under the color of law.
That remaining 70 percent of officers are highly susceptible to the culture in a given department. In the absence of any real effort to challenge department cultures, they become part of the problem. If their command ranks are racist or allow institutional racism to persist, or if a number of officers in their department are racist, they may end up doing terrible things.
It is not only white officers who abuse their authority. The effect of institutional racism is such that no matter what color the officer abusing the citizen is, in the vast majority of those cases of abuse that citizen will be black or brown. That is what is allowed.
And no matter what an officer has done to a black person, that officer can always cover himself in the running narrative of heroism, risk, and sacrifice that is available to a uniformed police officer by virtue of simply reporting for duty. Cleveland police officer Michael Brelo was recently acquitted of all charges against him in the shooting deaths of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams, both black and unarmed. Thirteen Cleveland police officers fired 137 shots at them. Brelo, having reloaded at some point during the shooting, fired 49 of the 137 shots. He took his final 15 shots at them after all the other officers stopped firing (122 shots at that point) and, "fearing for his life," he jumped onto the hood of the car and shot 15 times through the windshield.
About that 15 percent of officers who regularly abuse their power: they exert an outsize influence
Not only was this excessive, it was tactically asinine if Brelo believed they were armed and firing. But they weren't armed, and they weren't firing. Judge John O'Donnell acquitted Brelo under the rationale that because he couldn't determine which shots actually killed Russell and Williams, no one is guilty. Let's be clear: this is part of what the Department of Justice means when it describes a "pattern of unconstitutional policing and excessive force."
Nevertheless, many Americans believe that police officers are generally good, noble heroes. A Gallup poll from last year asked Americans to rate the honesty and ethical standards of people in various fields: police officers ranked in the top five, just above members of the clergy. The profession — the endeavor — is noble. But this myth about the general goodness of cops obscures the truth of what needs to be done to fix the system. It makes it look like all we need to do is hire good people, rather than fix the entire system. Institutional racism runs throughout our criminal justice system. Its presence in police culture, though often flatly denied by the many police apologists that appear in the media now, has been central to the breakdown in police-community relationships for decades in spite of good people doing police work.
Here's what I wish Americans understood about the men and women who serve in their police departments — and what needs to be done to make the system better for everyone.
1) There are officers who willfully violate the human rights of the people in the communities they serve
As a new officer with the St. Louis in the mid-1990s, I responded to a call for an "officer in need of aid." I was partnered that day with a white female officer. When we got to the scene, it turned out that the officer was fine, and the aid call was canceled. He'd been in a foot pursuit chasing a suspect in an armed robbery and lost him.
The officer I was with asked him if he'd seen where the suspect went. The officer picked a house on the block we were on, and we went to it and knocked on the door. A young man about 18 years old answered the door, partially opening it and peering out at my partner and me. He was standing on crutches. My partner accused him of harboring a suspect. He denied it. He said that this was his family's home and he was home alone.
My partner then forced the door the rest of the way open, grabbed him by his throat, and snatched him out of the house onto the front porch. She took him to the ledge of the porch and, still holding him by the throat, punched him hard in the face and then in the groin. My partner that day snatched an 18-year-old kid off crutches and assaulted him, simply for stating the fact that he was home alone.
I got the officer off of him. But because an aid call had gone out, several other officers had arrived on the scene. One of those officers, who was black, ascended the stairs and asked what was going on. My partner pointed to the young man, still lying on the porch, and said, "That son of a bitch just assaulted me." The black officer then went up to the young man and told him to "get the fuck up, I'm taking you in for assaulting an officer." The young man looked up at the officer and said, "Man ... you see I can't go." His crutches lay not far from him.
The officer picked him up, cuffed him, and slammed him into the house, where he was able to prop himself up by leaning against it. The officer then told him again to get moving to the police car on the street because he was under arrest. The young man told him one last time, in a pleading tone that was somehow angry at the same time, "You see I can't go!" The officer reached down and grabbed both the young man's ankles and yanked up. This caused the young man to strike his head on the porch. The officer then dragged him to the police car. We then searched the house. No one was in it.
These kinds of scenes play themselves out everyday all over our country in black and brown communities. Beyond the many unarmed blacks killed by police, including recently Freddie Gray in Baltimore, other police abuses that don't result in death foment resentment, distrust, and malice toward police in black and brown communities all over the country. Long before Darren Wilson shot and killed unarmed Michael Brown last August, there was a poisonous relationship between the Ferguson, Missouri, department and the community it claimed to serve. For example, in 2009 Henry Davis was stopped unlawfully in Ferguson, taken to the police station, and brutally beaten while in handcuffs. He was then charged for bleeding on the officers' uniforms after they beat him.
2) The bad officers corrupt the departments they work for
About that 15 percent of officers who regularly abuse their power: a major problem is they exert an outsize influence on department culture and find support for their actions from ranking officers and police unions. Chicago is a prime example of this: the city has created a reparations fund for the hundreds of victims who were tortured by former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge and officers under his command from the 1970s to the early ‘90s.
The victims were electrically shocked, suffocated, and beaten into false confessions that resulted in many of them being convicted and serving time for crimes they didn't commit. One man, Darrell Cannon, spent 24 years in prison for a crime he confessed to but didn't commit. He confessed when officers repeatedly appeared to load a shotgun and after doing so each time put it in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Other men received electric shocks until they confessed.
The torture was systematic, and the culture that allowed for it is systemic. I call your attention to the words "and officers under his command." Police departments are generally a functioning closed community where people know who is doing what. How many officers "under the command" of Commander Burge do you think didn't know what was being done to these men? How many do you think were uncomfortable with the knowledge? Ultimately, though, they were okay with it. And Burge got four years in prison, and now receives his full taxpayer-funded pension.
3) The mainstream media helps sustain the narrative of heroism that even corrupt officers take refuge in
This is critical to understanding why police-community relations in black and brown communities across the country are as bad as they are. In this interview with Fox News, former New York City Police Commissioner Howard Safir never acknowledges the lived experience of thousands and thousands of blacks in New York, Baltimore, Ferguson, or anywhere in the country. In fact, he seems to be completely unaware of it. This allows him to leave viewers with the impression that the recent protests against police brutality are baseless, and that allegations of racism are "totally wrong — just not true." The reality of police abuse is not limited to a number of "very small incidents" that have impacted black people nationwide, but generations of experienced and witnessed abuse.
The media is complicit in this myth-making: notice that the interviewer does not challenge Safir. She doesn't point out, for example, the over $1 billion in settlements the NYPD has paid out over the last decade and a half for the misconduct of its officers. She doesn't reference the numerous accounts of actual black or Hispanic NYPD officers who have been profiled and even assaulted without cause when they were out of uniform by white NYPD officers.
No matter what an officer has done to a black person, that officer can always cover himself in the running narrative of heroism
Instead she leads him with her questions to reference the heroism, selflessness, risk, and sacrifice that are a part of the endeavor that is law enforcement, but very clearly not always characteristic of police work in black and brown communities. The staging for this interview — US flag waving, somber-faced officers — is wash, rinse, and repeat with our national media.
When you take a job as a police officer, you do so voluntarily. You understand the risks associated with the work. But because you signed on to do a dangerous job does not mean you are then allowed to violate the human rights, civil rights, and civil liberties of the people you serve. It's the opposite. You should protect those rights, and when you don't you should be held accountable. That simple statement will be received by police apologists as "anti-cop." It is not.
4) Cameras provide the most objective record of police-citizen encounters available
When Walter Scott was killed by officer Michael Slager in South Carolina earlier this year, the initial police report put Scott in the wrong. It stated that Scott had gone for Slager's Taser, and Slager was in fear for his life. If not for the video recording that later surfaced, the report would have likely been taken by many at face value. Instead we see that Slager shot Scott repeatedly and planted the Taser next to his body after the fact.
Every officer in the country should be wearing a body camera that remains activated throughout any interaction they have with the public while on duty. There is no reasonable expectation of privacy for officers when they are on duty and in service to the public. Citizens must also have the right to record police officers as they carry out their public service, provided that they are at a safe distance, based on the circumstances, and not interfering. Witnessing an interaction does not by itself constitute interference.
5) There are officers around the country who want to address institutional racism
The National Coalition of Law Enforcement Officers for Justice, Reform and Accountability is a new coalition of current and former law enforcement officers from around the nation. Its mission is to fight institutional racism in our criminal justice system and police culture, and to push for accountability for police officers that abuse their power.
Many of its members are already well-established advocates for criminal justice reform in their communities. It's people like former Sergeant De Lacy Davis of New Jersey, who has worked to change police culture for years. It's people like former LAPD Captain John Mutz, who is white, and who is committed to working to build a system where everyone is equally valued. His colleagues from the LAPD —former Sergeant Cheryl Dorsey, now a frequent CNN contributor (providing some much-needed perspective), and former officer Alex Salazar, who worked LAPD's Rampart unit — are a part of this effort. Several NYPD officers, many of whom are founding members of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, the gold standard for black municipal police organizations, are a part of this group. Vernon Wells, Noel Leader, Julian Harper, and Cliff Hollingsworth, to name a few, are serious men with a serious record of standing up for their communities against police abuse. There's also Rochelle Bilal, a former sergeant out of Philadelphia, Sam Costales out of New Mexico, former Federal Marshal Matthew Fogg, and many others.
These men and women are ready to reach out to the thousands of officers around the country who have been looking for a national law enforcement organization that works to remake police culture. The first priority is accountability — punishment — for officers who willfully abuse the rights and bodies of those they are sworn to serve. Training means absolutely nothing if officers don't adhere to it and are not held accountable when they don't. It is key to any meaningful reform.
Police abuse in black and brown communities is generations old. It is nothing new.
Racism is woven into the fabric of our nation. At no time in our history has there been a national consensus that everyone should be equally valued in all areas of life. We are rooted in racism in spite of the better efforts of Americans of all races to change that.
Because of this legacy of racism, police abuse in black and brown communities is generations old. It is nothing new. It has become more visible to mainstream America largely because of the proliferation of personal recording devices, cellphone cameras, video recorders — they're everywhere. We need police officers. We also need them to be held accountable to the communities they serve.
NSFW, obvs, but features vagina-themed pokemon jokes.
Oh my gooooosh, I am completely in love with this doo-daddy. Matt doesn’t get it, though. Before I even tried it and then afterwards when I was raving about it, he kept pooh-poohing it because he just. didn’t. understand. why it was necessary. But I think that’s because he can see his penis and its responsiveness so he doesn’t appreciate what it’s like to have no idea if your genitals are doing what you’re trying to make them do. (Also he thinks $150 is way too much money for what it does. Which, yeah, that’s pretty steep. Can’t argue with that.)
And it turns out I have a super strong vagina! I had no idea! I consistently get a 10 out of 10 on the strength test :D :D :D Laaaaaaaaaaaaaadies? I know it’s probably bad form to brag about it, BUT OH MY GOSH my self-confidence honestly had a hilariously large boost upon learning this! Grrrr, yeah! I’m packin’ a Cuntnan the Vagarian here! (Matt didn’t understand this joke. It’s a not very good play on the name Conan the Barbarian. Except now it’s about my mighty vagina.)
On another vagina-related note, you all remember my friend Tracy Puhl from my review of the Moon Cup, right? That’s right, she’s the owner of GladRags, my favorite reusable menstrual product company! So she totes knows a thing or two about the vagaroo.
Hearing Mark Sandman always makes me want to play the bass.
00:00 1) The Night 04:48 2) So Many Ways 08:50 3) Souvenir 13:30 4) Top Floor, Bottom Buzzer 19:14 5) Like A Mirror 24:40 6) Good Woman Is Hard To Find 28:54...
A few weeks ago I was asked a question by a twitter follower (@GQuiz) and Sour Mash Manifesto visitor. He wanted to know “if I had $100 to spend, what whiskey(s) would I buy?” Bill over at Modern Thirst thought it would be a good idea to pose the same question to a number of other whiskey enthusiasts, bloggers, and writers in order to get their take as well. The responses are on his website, but below you can find mine.
Over the years I’ve been asked a thousand times to provide a “best” list of whiskey. I’d love to, but that’s just hard. If a whiskey lover can tell you exactly what her favorite whiskey is then I’d say she hasn’t sipped enough whiskey. I sure as hell couldn’t give you a top 10 or 20, much less a top 5. Every whiskey has a personality to fit a certain mood. It’s not much different than having a diverse mix of friends – you enjoy spending time with all of them for different reasons. Even a seemingly innocent question such as the one above becomes very hard when you consider all of the options.
First let me provide some context. There were few rules applied to this question – it could be approached from any possible angle (and I did!). The first constraint I placed on my response was to make certain I only considered American Whiskey. If you’ve visited this website enough I’m sure you know that Made in the U.S.A products are my area of focus. After that, anything goes!
I’ve attacked this question in too may ways. For example, right now I’m sipping a delicious barrel strength Booker’s Bourbon. It’s a delicious whiskey – never fails! If I allow recency bias to go crazy this Booker’s ($55) and Elijah Craig Single Barrel ($35) (for good measure) would wrap this thing up quick (I just cheated but you might want to write those down). Find me on a Tuesday with a hankering for a fabulous American Craft Single Malt, and the St. George Spirits Single Malt 14th release ($80 and a truly incredible pour) along with a handle of Evan Williams Black Label might get the nod (cheated again, but check these out). Get the point? This is a complex scenario. I needed order. I needed a compass to guide me.
The classics are classics for a reason. Can you find better? Perhaps, but you’ll be splitting hairs. The versatility that the classics bring to the table are simply too good to ignore. So, with that, the way I answered this question is I marched into my dining room, which holds hundreds and hundreds of bottles of whiskey, and I looked for the ones I purchased most. What do I buy? Regardless of what I think on a random day, I buy certain whiskeys consistently. And that I suppose is the best endorsement I can give.
If I had $100.00 to spend on whiskey, this is what I’d purchase?
Four Roses Single Barrel ($35): If you love whiskey, please do yourself a favor and type “Jim Rutledge” in the search box on the top right of this website. Feel free to read the background on Four Roses and watch the videos I did with Jim, the Master Distiller, a number of years ago. Four Roses is easily a top 3 distillery in the U.S, maybe the best, but that’s subjective. The way the distillery works with recipes, yeast strains, and aging philosophy is completely different from everyone else. The distillery’s single barrel is the flagship of the lineup – fruity, well structured, bold and vibrant, but extremely well balanced. I have a bottle or two of the Single Barrel on hand at all times. It’s a requirement. Typically I’ll drink it neat or with a cube of ice, but don’t hesitate to make a bourbon-forward cocktail. It’s not against the law with such a good whiskey, and rest assured it will certainly stand up and be accounted for.
Rittenhouse Rye Whiskey ($25): Personally, no home bar is complete without a quality bottle of rye whiskey. Rittenhouse happens to be a bit more versatile than most others. It’s not quite as green and herbal as other popular rye whiskeys, and the value proposition is on point. If you are new to rye whiskey – start here. If you are well acquainted with rye whiskey – stay here. Rittenhouse Rye always delivers.
W.L. Weller 12 year ($30): Forget all of the “it’s the same stuff as Pappy” bull crap. That’s no reason to by it. Buy Weller 12 because it’s an excellent pour of whiskey on its own merit. It’s rich, sweet, but with a healthy oak backbone. Wheated bourbon north of the 10 year mark just becomes special, and Weller 12 exemplifies that. I drink it neat, in an old fashioned, a mint julep, and on ice in the heat of the summer – versatile and delicious. Availability is tighter than the others, but unlike a lot of the limited releases, Weller 12 shows up couple times a year. Talk to your local shop, request a bottle and let me know what you think. I typically by 3-4 bottles a year at my local retailer to make sure I have enough on hand.
Edited Note: While I’ve got a little money left over with the above list, I also took into account price variances depending on area. The above prices are an average for what I see, but Four Roses Single Barrel can push that $40 range at times, and Rittenhouse can move $2-3 north. So the above are ballparks.
There you have it. It may not be sexy, it may not be unique, but it’s what I buy. That is as good a recommendation as I can give. Share with us what you would buy if you had $100 to spend. Just as importantly – tell us why.
When I was 19, I stood on stage and talked about being propositioned by a university professor. I said he was a dirty old man and repeated some of the choice phrases women hear every day in the streets of Egypt.
When I left the theater later that evening, I overheard two men:
“Isn’t she ashamed of herself for saying such dirty words when she’s veiled?!”
Photo Credit: Egypt Today (This is me, fyi)
Fast forward five years. I sat on a panel next to the president of Catalonia, speaking to more than 800 people from over 40 countries. And yet later on that day a man raised his hand after my presentation and said:
“You know, we’re doing you a favor. We’re helping you take that symbol of oppression off your head.”
I’m tired of being the token “omg-look-such-an-articulate-awesome-non-stereotypical hijabi!” I’m tired of hijab taking up so much space in my life. I’m tired of speaking about it. I’m tired of explaining it. I’m tired of defending it. I’m tired of being treated differently. I’m tired of having to prove I’m normal. I’m tired of being thought stupid and backwards. I’m tired of the judgments — from both sides. I’m tired of the opportunities denied. I’m tired of expectations. I’m tired of hijab.
It’s been a long, hard slog. I’ve been veiled for 15 years. I spent years writing about it, justifying it, hating it, loving it, ignoring it, defending it.
I did theater. Spoken word. I represented. I wrote angry critiques of the representation of Muslim women in media. I didn’t let other people speak for this Muslim woman. I spoke for myself. I wrote award-winning editorials like this one. Whoot whoot.
(If you’re interested, the project I loved most is crowdfunding here.)
But then I was done.
I was over having to constantly justify my choices. I was over preaching to the choir. I was over having to prove something.
I realized being thought of as “amazing” was actually insulting. Because the assumption was that being veiled meant I was stupid and very non-amazing.
Hijab is so personal.
And yet it’s so public.
I’ve been told I had to take it off if I wanted to anchor a show. I’ve been told “I wish I could shoot you.” I’ve been refused entry into several venues. I’ve been called a “dirty Arab,” an “ignorant Muslim,” a “stupid whore.” I’ve been asked to sit at the back of a lecture hall. I was just spat at in Paris last month.
You get the picture.
Being a hijabi is tough. It really is. There are days I wish for nothing more than to take it off. Days when I just want to be like everyone else. I don’t want to stick out like a sore thumb. I don’t want to be different.
It’s just covered hair to you. That is all. No more, no less.
The fascination with it is crazy. Behind the veil. Beneath the veil. Unveiling the Muslim woman.
*ooooooooh insert Aladdin music here.*
Let it be. You don’t have to understand why I wear it.
There are many different databases. The most familiar are row-column SQL databases like MySQL, SQLite, or PostgreSQL. Another type of database is the key-value store, which as a concept is very simple: you save a value specified by a key, and you can retrieve a value by its key. One more type is the document database, which instead of storing rows and columns, stores blobs of text or even binary files. The key-value and document types fall under the NoSQL umbrella. As there are mature R clients for many SQL databases, and dplyr is a great generic interface to SQL backends (see dplyr vignettes for an intro), we won't delve into SQL clients here.
What is the difference between SQL and NoSQL (key-value, document)? A diagram may be helpful:
NoSQL is often interpreted as Not only SQL - meaning a database that is called a NoSQL database may contain some notion of row-column storage, but other details diverge from traditional SQL databases. See Wikipedia for more information.
If you aren't already using databases, why care about databases? We'll answer this through a number of use cases:
Use case 1: Let's say you are producing a lot of data in your lab - millions of rows of data. Storing all this data in .xls or .csv files would definitely get cumbersome. If the data is traditional row-column spreadsheet data, a SQL database is perfect, perhaps PostgreSQL. Putting your data in a database allows the data to scale up easily while maintaining speedy data access, many tables can be linked together if needed, and more. Of course if your data will always fit in memory of the machine you're working on, a database may be too much complexity.
Use case 2: You already have data in a database, whether SQL or NoSQL. Of course it makes sense to interface with the database from R instead of e.g., exporting files from the database, then into R.
Use case 3: A data provider gives dumps of data that you need for your research/work problem. You download the data and it's hundreds of .csv files. It sure would be nice to be able to efficiently search this data. Simple searches like return all records with variable X < 10 are ideal for a SQL database. If instead the files are blobs of XML, JSON, or something else non-tabular, a document database is ideal.
Use case 4: You need to perform more complicated searches than SQL can support. Some NoSQL databases have very powerful search engines, e.g., Elasticsearch.
Use case 5: Sometimes you just need to cache stuff. Caching is a good use case for key-value stores. Let's say you are requesting data from a database online, and you want to make a derivative data thing from the original data, but you don't want to lose the original data. Simply storing the original data on disk in files is easy and does the job. Sometimes though, you may need something more structured. Redis and etcd are two key-value stores we make clients for and can make caching easy. Another use for caching is to avoid repeating time-consuming queries or queries that may cost money.
Use case 6: Indexable serialization. Related to the previous discussion of caching, this is caching, but better. That is, instead of dumping an R object to a cache, then retrieving the entire object later, NoSQL DB's make it easy to serialize an R object, and retrieve only what you need. See Rich FitzJohn's storr for an example of this.
rOpenSci has an increasing suite of database tools:
Some of these packages (e.g., rrlite, nodbi) can be thought of as infrastructure, just like clients for PostgreSQL or SQLite, for which other R packages can be created - or that can be used to interface with a database. Other packages (e.g., ckanr) are more likely to be useful to end users for retrieving data for a project.
If you're wondering what database to use:
You may want a SQL database if: you have tabular data, and the schema is not going to change
You may want a NoSQL key-value database if: you want to shove objects into something, and then retrieve later by a key
You may want a NoSQL document database if:
you need to store unstructured blobs, even including binary attachments
you need a richer query interface than a SQL database can provide
SQL databases have many advantages - one important advantage is that SQL syntax is widely used, and there are probably clients in every concievable language for interacting with SQL databases. However, NoSQL can be a better fit in many cases, overriding this SQL syntax familiarity.
There is another type of NoSQL database, the graph database, including Neo4j and Titan. We didn't talk much about them here, but they can be useful when you have naturally graph like data. A science project using a graph database is Open Tree of Life. There is an R client for Neo4J: RNeo4j.
Let us know if you have any feedback on these packages, and/or if you think there's anything else we should be thinking about making in this space. Now on to some examples of rOpenSci packages.
Get devtools
We'll need devtools to install some of these packages, as not all are on CRAN. If you are on Windows, see these notes.
elastic is a powerful document database with a built in query engine. It speaks JSON, has a nice HTTP API, which we use to communicate with elastic from R. What's great about elastic over e.g., Solr is that you don't have to worry about specifying a schema for your data. You can simply put data in, and then query on that data. You can specify configuration settings.
Example
In a quick example, here's going from a data.frame in R, putting data into elastic, then querying on that data.
library("ggplot2")
invisible(connect())
res <- docs_bulk(diamonds, "diam")
About 54K records in Elasticsearch for the dataset.
count("diam")
#> [1] 53940
We don't have time to go through hardly any of the diverse and powerful Elasticsearch query interface, so as an example, let's plot the price of diamonds in $300 buckets using the Elasticsearch aggregations search API
We have a package in developmented called elasticdsl that follows the lead of the Python client elasticsearch-dsl-py to allow native R based ways to specify queries. The package focuses on querying for data, whereas other operations will remain in the lower level elastic client.
There's a similar interface to inserting data within R directly into CouchDB, just as with Elasticsearch above. There's lots more to do in sofa, including adding ability to do map-reduce.
solr focuses on reading data from Solr engines. We are working on adding functionality for working with more Solr features, including writing documents. Adding support for writing to solr is a bit trickier than reading data, since writing data requires specifying a schema.
install.packages("solr")
library("solr")
Example
A quick example using a remote Solr server the Public Library of Science search engine.
solr_search(q = '*:*', fl = c('id', 'journal', 'publication_date'), base = 'http://api.plos.org/search', verbose = FALSE)
#> id journal
#> 1 10.1371/journal.pone.0123754/title PLOS ONE
#> 2 10.1371/journal.pone.0123754/abstract PLOS ONE
#> 3 10.1371/journal.pone.0123754/references PLOS ONE
#> 4 10.1371/journal.pone.0123754/body PLOS ONE
#> 5 10.1371/journal.pone.0123754/introduction PLOS ONE
#> 6 10.1371/journal.pone.0123754/results_and_discussion PLOS ONE
#> 7 10.1371/journal.pone.0123754/materials_and_methods PLOS ONE
#> 8 10.1371/journal.pone.0123754/conclusions PLOS ONE
#> 9 10.1371/journal.pone.0031384 PLoS ONE
#> 10 10.1371/journal.pone.0031384/title PLoS ONE
#> publication_date
#> 1 2015-05-04T00:00:00Z
#> 2 2015-05-04T00:00:00Z
#> 3 2015-05-04T00:00:00Z
#> 4 2015-05-04T00:00:00Z
#> 5 2015-05-04T00:00:00Z
#> 6 2015-05-04T00:00:00Z
#> 7 2015-05-04T00:00:00Z
#> 8 2015-05-04T00:00:00Z
#> 9 2012-02-14T00:00:00Z
#> 10 2012-02-14T00:00:00Z
solr is quite useful in R since it is a common search engine that is often exposed as is, so that you can pop this solr R client into your script or package and (hopefully) not have to worry about how to query the Solr service.
etseed
etseed is an R client for the etcd key-value store, developed by the folks at coreos, written in Go.
This package is still in early days, and isn't exactly the fastest option in the bunch here - but upcoming changes (including allowing bulk writing and retrieval) in etcd should help.
devtools::install_github("ropensci/etseed")
library("etseed")
A note before we go through an example. etcd has a particular way of specifying keys, in that you have to prefix a key by a forward slash, like /foobar instead of foobar.
This is a good candidate for using within other R packages for more sophisticated caching than simply writing to disk, and is especially easy since users aren't required to spin up a server as with normal Redis, or other DB's like CouchDB, MongoDB, etc.
rerddap
rerddap - A general purpose R client for any ERDDAP server.
ERDDAP servers
install.packages("rerddap")
library("rerddap")
ERDDAP is a server built on top of OPenDAP. NOAA serve many differen datasets through ERDDAP servers. Through ERDDAP, you can get gridded data (see griddap()), which lets you query from gridded datasets (see griddap()), or tablular datasets (see tabledap()). ERDDAP is open source, so anyone can use it to serve data.
rerddap by default grabs NetCDF files, a binary compressed file type that should be faster to download, and take up less disk space, than other formats (e.g., csv). However, this means that you need a client library for NetCDF files - but not to worry, we use ncdf by default (for which there are CRAN binaries for all platforms), but you can choose to use ncdf4 (binaries only for some platforms).
Example
In this example, we search for gridded datasets
ed_search(query = 'size', which = "grid")
#> 6 results, showing first 20
#> title dataset_id
#> 11 NOAA Global Coral Bleaching Monitoring Products NOAA_DHW
#> 13 USGS COAWST Forecast, US East Coast and Gulf of Mexico (Experimental) [time][s_rho][eta_rho][xi_rho] whoi_7dd7_db97_4bbe
#> 14 USGS COAWST Forecast, US East Coast and Gulf of Mexico (Experimental) [time][Nbed][eta_rho][xi_rho] whoi_a4fb_2c9c_16a7
#> 15 USGS COAWST Forecast, US East Coast and Gulf of Mexico (Experimental) [time][eta_rho][xi_rho] whoi_ed12_89ce_9592
#> 16 USGS COAWST Forecast, US East Coast and Gulf of Mexico (Experimental) [time][eta_u][xi_u] whoi_61c3_0b5d_cd61
#> 17 USGS COAWST Forecast, US East Coast and Gulf of Mexico (Experimental) [time][eta_v][xi_v] whoi_62d0_9d64_c8ff
Get more information on a single dataset of interest
ckanr - A general purpose R client for any CKAN server.
CKAN is similar to ERDDAP in being an open source system to store and provide data via web services (and web interface, but we don't need that here). CKAN bills itself as an open-source data portal platform.
nodbi - Like the DBI package, but for document and key-value databases.
nodbi has five backends at the moment:
Redis
etcd
MongoDB
CouchDB
Elasticsearch
nodbi is in early development, so expect changes - but that also means it's a good time to give your input. What use cases you can think of for this package? What database do you think should be added as a backend?
devtools::install_github("ropensci/nodbi")
library("nodbi")
Example
We'll use MongoDB to store some data, then pull it back out. First, start up your mongo server, then intialize the connection
No surprises here. These neoniotnoid seed coatings are so dumb. They add almost no value for farmers, almost certainly damage the soil fungal community, and their systemic expression is injurious to bees of all stripes, and probably lots of other non-harmful insects as well.
Two papers published in the journal Nature earlier this week are causing quite a stir in the bee world. The first, “Seed coating with a neonicotinoid insecticide negatively affects wild bees” by Rundlof et al. is unique in that the authors were able to perform controlled field experiments. This is often difficult to do because […]
It’s about time that someone clearly and succinctly wrote about the “bee problem.” And someone finally did. Gwen Pearson, known for years as the Bug Girl, has a story in yesterday’s Wired that says it all, “You’re Worrying about the Wrong Bees.” I’ve been a fan of Gwen and her writing for a long time, […]
It's really crazy that this process works as well as it does.
Since I’ve written many posts about Taranov splits, I’m not going to belabor the whys and hows. Still, I’m always amazed that it works so well. For me, it is the best way to split into non-compatible equipment. In this case, I was splitting a top-bar hive into a Langstroth. I had thought this hive […]
Nocturnal pollination is something I seldom think about, but this fascinating article by Paul Manning at Poky Ecology describes a host of nighttime pollinators in lowbush blueberry. Really, I had no idea how busy a berry bush in the dark could be. In a series of experiments, researchers found that as much as one-third of […]
Five years ago I wrote a post about what beekeepers burn in their smokers. Earlier today, Bill Reynolds of Minnesota added a comment to that post, recommending adding a handful of green grass to a fast-burning smoker to cool down the smoke and avoid singeing wings. Good point. When I re-read my post, I was […]
As someone who has used silver in multiple ways, I miss the days of $7/oz
Here is a historical chart of the price of silver that shows the more recent spike in prices, and then the collapse. Although plastics and sensitizing dyes can be as costly as the silver used, all film is subject to price spikes when and if the price of silver spikes. As you can see, it did that. Like oil, the price of the final product is quick to rise, and very slow to fall.
What bugs me is when it appears that liberal, left-leaning Buddhists are trying to mix Buddhism with their political agenda in precisely the same way people like Pat Robertson mix Christianity with their conservative political agenda. This just makes us all look bad to everyone except lefty types who already agree with whatever cause is being espoused. Nobody is going to be convinced to change their views on militarism or global warming because they saw a photo of a bunch of weirdos in costumes they associate with cult members holding a banner outside of the White House. It’s an exercise in vanity, which can only serve to help entrench people’s previously established views.
It’s never as easy as you would like. To say Buddhists should not be involved in politics is obviously silly. But to say that all Buddhists should share a certain specific set of political views is also ridiculous.
A few years ago I was giving a talk at the Houston Zen Center. Gaelyn Godwin, who runs the center, took me aside before the talk and said, “We have a lot of conservatives in our group. So if you say anything political, it’s best not to assume the audience here is liberal.”
I had not intended to talk about politics at all. But maybe she’d seen this sort of thing before with visiting speakers. A lot of Buddhist centers in America have a very strong left-leaning political bias. I often see stuff for liberal causes tacked up to bulletin boards at the Buddhist centers I visit and it always bugs me. But maybe not for the reasons some of you would assume.
I find it amusing that, after my post I Wish I Could Agree, I’m seeing myself labeled as a “conservative Buddhist.” I’m really not. I’m fairly apolitical. But when it comes to most issues I tend to side with the more liberal, left-leaning views.
Zero Defex EP
I am, after all, a member of the hardcore band Zero Defex, who have songs that address topics like the dangers of nuclear proliferation (Drop the A-Bomb On Me ), global warming (Armageddon), fracking (National Sacrifice Zone), unregulated capitalism (Competition), the horrors of war in general (This Means War, War Zone), and the hazards of dobermans sticking their noses up your butt when you’re trying to heat up a bagel (Swine Hunt Doggen). One of our songs was even used in the Ralph Nader presidential campaign a few years ago. No. I am definitely not a “conservative Buddhist.”
But I am concerned whenever I see any mixing of religion and politics. When I was a youngster I was aghast at seeing Christianity mixed with conservative politics, with the implication that Jesus himself wanted you to vote Republican. If we respond to that with the equivalent of, “No! Buddha wants you to vote Democrat!” I don’t see how that’s any better.
I understand when Buddhists are concerned with issues like militarism and global climate change. These are urgent matters that affect all of us. It’s just that it rankles me to see people representing themselves as the “leaders” of Buddhism and presenting their views as if they are the consensus views of all Buddhists.
I can’t count how many times I’ve had to explain that there is more than one form of Buddhism to people who seem surprised at this revelation. Or how many times I’ve had to tell someone that not every Buddhist considers the Dalai Lama to be their commander and spokesman. Or how many times I’ve had to explain that all Buddhists do not have a unified political agenda. Then something comes along like the meeting at the White House that I wrote about in my blog post and I have to start explaining it all over again.
Which is fine. I like explaining things.
What bugs me is when it appears that liberal, left-leaning Buddhists are trying to mix Buddhism with their political agenda in precisely the same way people like Pat Robertson mix Christianity with their conservative political agenda. This just makes us all look bad to everyone except lefty types who already agree with whatever cause is being espoused. Nobody is going to be convinced to change their views on militarism or global warming because they saw a photo of a bunch of weirdos in costumes they associate with cult members holding a banner outside of the White House. It’s an exercise in vanity, which can only serve to help entrench people’s previously established views.
This is not the same as saying Buddhists should never be involved in politics. If you’re a Buddhist and you want to get mixed up in that circus, be my guest. I don’t really care. Just please don’t represent yourselves as the leaders of Buddhism and your specific views as the correct ones for Buddhists to hold.
For my own part, I try to keep my political views out of what I do in my capacity as a teacher of Buddhism. I don’t want my politics to be seen as somehow “Buddhist.” It’s very easy to send a mixed up message.
For example, I’m a vegetarian. I really believe in vegetarianism. I think it’s a great thing and I’d like to see more people become vegetarians. I believe it’s an important issue in terms of personal health, environment, and ethics.
Yet I am very aware that a lot of people who don’t know much about Buddhism tend to believe that all Buddhists are vegetarians and that Buddhism requires its adherents to abstain from eating meat. This is not true. My friend Gesshin wrote a really good blog piece recently about this. In a nutshell, lots of Buddhists eat meat, and the historical Buddha never required his followers to be strict vegetarians.
Because I see the dangers of confusing people on this issue and making them think that Buddha will send them to Buddhist Hell for eating at McDonald’s (I think he should but he won’t), I tend to avoid making too many overt statements about my vegetarianism. And when I do talk about it, I always make sure I explain that vegetarianism is a personal choice, not something mandated by my Buddhist practice.
(Interestingly, I found that in Japan — where they should know better — I could simply say “I’m a Buddhist” and people would quickly accept my vegetarianism without any further need for discussion.)
I feel that Buddhists with strong political convictions would do better to approach their political convictions the same way. In America, Europe and the rest of the West, Buddhism is very often seen as going hand-in-hand with leftist political views. As is the case with vegetarianism, lots of folks who know little about Buddhism tend to assume Buddhists will have a leftist political bias.
Those people on the Interwebs who referred to me as a “conservative Buddhist” obviously knew that there was a general feeling that it was unusual to be a conservative and a Buddhist at the same time. Actually, it’s not that weird. Just like there are millions of liberal Christians, there are also millions of conservative Buddhists.
I think it’s unfair to take advantage of misunderstandings about Buddhism and its relation to politics in order to advance a specific agenda.
I don’t like it when religion gets mixed up in politics even when it’s a religion I follow and a political agenda I tend (mostly but not always) to agree with.
A little Bauhaus, a little Joy Division, some post-rock.
http://KEXP.ORG presents Fufanu performing live at Toppstöðin power station in Reykjavik during Iceland Airwaves. Recorded November 3, 2014. Songs: Now Wire ...
I've arrived in a "divided brain" state. One part of my brain falls totally for all the stupid things in the movie, and gets emotional, while simultaneously the other part picks them apart, and shouts obscenities.
(and below, you will find some spoilers, so you are very much warned)
Over here, you have Max Max: Fury Road, a film that may not have won the box office this weekend, but did a pretty Herculean effort ($45 million) for an R-rated film based on a very fringe franchise with aesthetics that go well against what anybody would think would sell actual tickets.
In the other corner, one of the most popular television shows on at present: Game of Thrones. Pseudo-medieval epic fantasy serialized for pay cable, also very R-rated (well, TV-MA, I guess), and perhaps also a surprise that it connects so well with the popular consciousness.
Both are, in their own way, very similar worlds.
One is post-apocalypse. (Though exactly how or why, we do not know.)
One is pre-apocalypse. (“Winter is Coming,” remember.)
Both are brutal, backward worlds. All too often harsh and unforgiving. The GoT world is probably more advanced than the Mad Max one, in a lot of ways — at least socially. In GoT you’ve got pretty gardens and big cities and varied climates. Mad Max eschews all of that. It’s basically a dust-fucked hell-hole. Occasionally damp, mostly dry and abrasive. Society has dissolved. People are not so much people as they are animals and zealots only. It’s all just sand in your chastity belt.
Both are, you could argue, male-driven worlds. Grotesque, feudal places lorded over by grotesque, wretched men. You’ve got Immortan Joe and the Bullet Farmer. You’ve got Joffrey and Bolton and a gaggle of other spectacular assholes. Both in fact feature comically evil men. Like, so evil it’s just fucking ridiculous. In Mad Max, you might argue it’s less evil and more straight-up lunacy, but you don’t get the feeling these are bad dudes with good sides. They’re just monsters. And guys like Joffrey and Ramsay Bolton are so eeeeevil that the show affords us every chance to watch them plucking wings off of butterflies (metaphorically). Which, admittedly, maybe gets a little old, but what the hell do I know? It certainly works to make you hate them.
If both are male-driven worlds, you can then take a pretty good guess how women are viewed in these worlds? Spoiler warning: it ain’t good. Women ostensibly have a higher position inside Game of Thrones, where they are at least viewed as more than just “things.” In Mad Max, women are objects. They are sources of production, more or less — animals for breeding, for milk, and for all that we can guess, meat. They are post-apoc livestock.
Some folks will say — okay, there are topics and subjects you can’t write about. Which is nonsense, obviously. Everything is the domain of fiction. Nothing is forbidden, everything is permitted. It must be, for fiction to maintain its teeth. Fiction only has meaning when everything is permissable. Rape and sexual assault is one such topic — some will say it’s off the table. Which again: it can’t be off the table. That’s a very good way to ensure silence around the subject, isn’t it? Saying you can’t speak about it in fiction is adjacent to saying you can’t speak about it for real, which is already a problem that doesn’t need worsening by made-up rules of fiction.
So, take that subject, and filter it through the lens of Game of Thrones and then Mad Max.
Both use sexual assault in the storyworlds.
In Mad Max, you can’t accept women as “things” or livestock without then making the leap to say, mmmyeah, it’s probably not by choice. Okay? They didn’t sign up for it. That’s frankly the whole point of the movie, isn’t it? (Again, see the art above quoting the movie: WE ARE NOT THINGS.) If you leave Fury Road and look back upon the series, you see a few powerful women here and there (Aunty Entity, and, erm, that one lady with the crossbow?), and you also would get to see an on-screen rape scene in The Road Warrior – one viewed through spyglass at a distance, but it’s very clear what’s going on. The confirmation of women as object is shown when one of the women in Fury Road is cut open so that the child inside her can be seen, even though it may not be alive.
In GoT, rape is part of the fabric of life. It’s woven right in there. It’s almost background noise — I’m pretty sure if you turn on the show and zoom in, it’s like Where’s Waldo or trying to find Carmen Sandiego. There’s maybe always a rape happening on-screen somewhere, at some point? “Did you find the rape happening in every episode?” (It’d be like a really super-gross party game.) Characters talk about rape. They do it and exposit scenes while they do it. They accept it and expect it. Folks will say this is based on medieval history, though really, it’s based more on medieval myth, and of course, once you throw dragons and active godly magic into the mix you pretty much signal that you don’t have to base your fantasy (key word: fantasy) story on anything, really. (But “it’s based on history!” is always a good crutch for lazy storytelling, so whenever an editor or critic challenges you, don’t forget to say loud and say it proud.)
So, two very popular storyworlds.
Two portrayals of a world where women hold dubious power and are seen as “things.”
One of these is roundly criticized for it.
One of them is roundly celebrated for it.
Game of Thrones catches hell for its portrayal of women and this subject.
Mad Max is wreathed in a garland of bike chains and hubcabs for it.
What, then, is the difference?
Let’s try to suss it out.
In Game of Thrones:
- rapes often happen on-screen-ish
- they happen semi-often
- they happen to POV characters (Dany, Cersei, and now, Sansa Stark — given that there are six total assumed major female POV characters in the series, that means 50% of them have undergone active sexual assault on-screen)
- twice the rapist is a character we like (Drogo, Jamie)
- often used to motivate characters or sub in as character development
- seemingly meant to shock, often male-gazey
- history of it in the show
In Mad Max: Fury Road:
- the assault is implicit, not explicit, happens way off-screen
- not a focal point, per se, of character development
- though does provide seeds in the bed for character development — meaning, the event is hidden so that we don’t see it, but what grows up out of the dirt still suggests that it happened
- not much history of it — but again, Road Warrior has an explicit instance?
- we are never on the side of the rapist
- not male gazey because not on-screen and because of female POV (Furiosa)
I don’t know that this tells us enough yet, so let’s unpack it some more.
Frequency is an issue, for one: in GoT, we see rape and sexual assault again and again. In four seasons, we have three (ugh this sounds horrible to even put it this way) “major” rape events used as plot devices and character motivational tools (and that sounds even more horrible and icky). In Mad Max, we never actually see it at all. In Got, it happens often enough that you begin to wonder if there is a well-worn, oft-punctured notecard for the GoT storyboard that has written upon it: I DUNNO, PROBABLY RAPE?
Which also suggests that another issue is point-of-view. Where do you put the camera? Where do you place the narrative? Fury Road begins well after any actual assaults have occurred (with the exception of the “cutting out a baby” thing, which is more a byproduct of sexual assault rather than an explicit sexual assault). And none of it is on-screen. The story happens after. In Game of Thrones, the rapes are — man, this will never not sound gross — “ongoing.” It’s an ever-unfolding rape carnival, a parade of sexual assaults. (Here, by the way, someone will surely say something about why are we so concerned about the rape but, say, not concerned about murder or Greyjoy’s “dick removal scenario.” To which I would respond, frequency again becomes an issue: if every season contained one major dick removal scenario, you’d probably start to say, “Hey, Game of Thrones writers, maybe cool it on the cock-chopping. It’s feeling like you have a thing against dicks. Do you hate dicks? Why do you hate dicks so bad?” And here we could ask the same about women. Do you hate women? Why do you hate women so bad? Do you have a thing against them?
Of course, they don’t hate women. That’s absurd and we can’t really assume to be true — both Mad Max and GoT posit a world that hates women, though, so again, what’s the difference? GoT gives us the pain and suffering of women as part of a larger pattern meant to motivate characters. In some cases, male characters — in the assault on Sansa Stark, I have been repeatedly told that it “explains” what Theon Greyjoy does. I have no idea what that is, but I can guess that it’s something against Ramsay Bolton, and there I’d like to suggest that Theon (the subject of the earlier “dick removal scenario”) probably needs no more motivation to do ill against the Boltons given the aforementioned fact of his man-wang being turned into dick salad. Nor does Sansa require “motivation” to hate the family who literally murdered members of her family. We don’t actually need more, there. We do not require further “character motivation,” and if rape is the only way you can motivate your characters, you may want to go back to Writer’s School because I think you skipped a few crucial 101 classes.
What it then comes down to is a question of agency. (Here: a post on agency and women characters and how “strong female characters” are really nothing without agency and the ability to push on the plot more than it pushes on them.) Where you place the narrative camera and how you choose to affect the characters leads to the question of — what does assault do for the character’s power and choice in the story? Placing the events off-screen and before the film begins, Fury Road buries it well enough to explain why the characters are doing what they’re doing. The arc of those characters — the women — in Mad Max is one of going from zero to one. From a loss of power to a gain of power. The story is about the reclamation of agency — it’s them saying with great and violent effort: we are not things.
But in Game of Thrones, the opposite occurs. We witness powerful women undercut by assault. It removes their agency. (That is, quite explicitly, what sexual assault does.) They are robbed of power to motivate them, to make men feel bad, to make the audience feel sympathetic. But they go from one to zero. They go from something to nothing — from agent and actor upon the plot to victim of the plot. You might say that Dany is motivated to become the queen by the act, but first, that’s gross, and second, it’s also not true. She’s motivated only to become a wife and a lover at that point. Cersei is changed by the act — it would seem to begin her descent. And Sansa is just at a moment when we start to believe she has agency and power. She’s tougher. Harder. She’s taking on a whiff of Littlefinger’s machinations. The show wisely made it seem like reclaiming Winterfell was at least in part her choice. Her hair is dyed black. She appears a grim, death-like specter of vengeance. And she even says the right things: she indicates her lack of fear, she impresses her power on others. It’s a turning point for a character who for so long has basically been a whipping girl. She’s been a can kicked brutally down the road. And finally, finally you think — ahh. Here it is. Here she is claiming her power. Finding her agency. Here she will at last become, like Arya, a mighty force for change and no woman and no man will ever again dominate her and –
Oh. Oh.
She gets the black dye removed from her hair and it’s like Samson with his locks cut. Because along comes Ramsay Bolton — who is so eeeeevil I’m surprised he doesn’t have a sinister mustache to twist and a puppy to eat — to take that all that away as he gleefully assaults her. All as we focus on the poor weepy face of dickless Theon Greyjoy, who by the way is a child-murderer so wait why do we care about Theon Greyjoy again?
It’s not that GoT is poorly-written. That’s actually the shame — it’s often so well done. The show is really one of the best television shows around right now. It’s part of the Renaissance of hella good storytelling going on the tube at present. If it was a garbage-fire of a show, we wouldn’t even care. We wouldn’t expect better. But me? I’d like to expect better. Because its creepy fascination with hurting and marginalizing its women characters is increasingly gross and lazy.
Listen –
This isn’t about being shocked.
This isn’t about being offended.
It’s about something larger and lazier and altogether nastier.
It’s really about rape culture. About how this seeps in like a septic infection. About how it’s illustrated and handled with little aplomb, how it’s a default, how it forms an overall pattern.
Rape and sexual assault are fraught topics. To say you can never use them in fiction is, as noted, a terrible thing. We must be allowed to talk about bad things. We must be allowed to explore them from nose to tail to see what it means. Fiction is best when it doesn’t turn away from pain and suffering. It must embrace trauma. But that also means treating it and the characters who suffer it with respect. Make it an organic part of the story, not a “plot device.” A plot device is crass, cheap, lazy. Sexual assault is not a lever you pull to make people feel bad. It’s a trope because it keeps showing up — that’s not a good thing. Women are constantly fridged in these stories to make male characters feel something — to make the audience feel something. The problem isn’t in individual instances, you see? It’s in the pattern. It’s in how this keeps showing up again and again, a lazy crutch, a manipulative button the writers mash with greasy mitts, a cheap trick to rob agency and push plot. Meanwhile, you have actual rape victims in the audience who are like, “Hey, thanks for turning my trauma into cheap-ass plot fodder.”
In fact, let’s dissect that a little bit — RAINN suggests that 1 in 6 women have been the subject of some kind of sexual assault. A TIME study noted that, on campus, that number is 1 in 5 women. These are consequential numbers. Huge, scary, terrible. Now, realize that Game of Thrones gets some of the highest ratings on cable television — roughly seven million people watching. And in 2013 it was roughly 42% women who made up that audience. If you go low enough to accept the 1 in 5 number, you accept that roughly 588,000 sexual assault victims are watching the show. Even if you think that number is inflated — even if you assume it’s not 20% of all women but only 5% — that number still becomes 147,000. It’s a not insignificant number. It’s a marrow-curdling number. And it’s a number where each person affected has others who have been affected in turn — family, friends, other loved ones. Trauma is not a stone thrown against hard ground. It’s a stone thrown into water. It has ripples.
Ask yourself again: Game of Thrones versus Mad Max.
Would you rather see a world where the women declare in a barbaric yawp: WE ARE NOT THINGS?
Or do you want to be subjected to one where again and again it’s proven: WE ARE ONLY THINGS…?
Do we really not see the difference?
Do you not see why one would be celebrated while the other is excoriated?
Yup, spaceships again. Between Star Citizen, the new Halo, the new Star Wars, a couple of key mods for Sins of a Solar Empire that I keep up with and have done some voice work on, and Destiny, my mind has been buzzing with them. I’m a huge nerd who thinks of things in my free time like “if I were a shinigami what kind of Zanpakutō would I have?” and “I wonder if I’d rather be a ranger or a mage” and “ff I were a Jedi in the New Jedi Order, what kind of ship would I have?” And alongside that sort of inane theorycrafting and imagination comes obvious questions, like “would I want to captain a cruiser or a carrier?” But then, what exactly is the difference?
It would be a stolen and recommissioned Imperial II-class Star Destroyer named Sanguine, by the way. In case you were actually wondering (I bet you weren’t).
There are lots of different ship classes in science fiction, and I’m not talking about the designated name for a particular frame (like Victory-class or Firefly-class). I’m talking about classification of ship roles. You have your cruisers, your destroyers, your frigates and corvettes, your dreadnoughts, and all sorts of other roles. But something that always confused me is exactly what the differences are between them. If you had shown me two ships and claimed one was a destroyer and one was a cruiser I wouldn’t have really understood what that actually means and what roles they employ in a battle. How is a battleship different from a battlecruiser? Is there any difference between a star cruiser and an assault cruiser, and if so what is it?
So like any good geek I did research and actually enjoyed doing it! And the knowledge I’ve gained I want to spread for anyone who is interested, whether that be due to simple curiosity or you’re developing a story or RPG setting. Because knowledge is power.
Before we get to the meat of the topic let’s look at a bit of history. When science fiction writers were exploring space they drew a natural comparison between space travel and the maritime Age of Sail; both feature long voyages on large vessels through “alien” terrain that human beings can’t freely traverse. As such, naval terminology entered the lexicon very quickly, and as a result spaceships are classified by similar naval systems. That’s also likely the reason why the branch of the military that deals with spaceships in fiction is very commonly called the Navy.
Naval warfare, particularly way-back-when in the 17th Century or so, was rather stringent and refined. The British in particular had very strict guidelines on ship classification, roles, and tactics. As time went on the definitions for particular warships and roles blurred until we hit modern day navies. Back in the day, like 17th Century back, a common tactic was the naval “Line-of-Battle,” introduced by the Portuguese in the 15th Century. The idea is that your fleet would very literally line up in a single-file row and turn their broadsides toward the enemy. This gave all ships within the line free sight to fire on the enemy fleet without fear of hitting an ally. Battles could play out with enemy fleets sailing parallel to each other and firing into one another, though the ideal situation had your line slicing perpendicularly through the enemy’s line at some point. Ships that could survive standing within the line were thus referred to as “ships of the line (of battle)” or “line-of-battle ships.” Other ships existed that were not ships of the line, and they usually had other tactics to employ and jobs to fulfill. (This is important information for later; I promise.)
“Everyone just shoot to the left!”
Let me touch a bit on capital ships and flagships. William S. Lind explains the concept of a capital ship extremely well; “These characteristics define a capital ship: if the capital ships are beaten, the navy is beaten. But if the rest of the navy is beaten, the capital ships can still operate. Another characteristic that defines capital ships is that their main opponent is each other.” In short, a capital ship is a ship that doesn’t need the rest of the fleet to function, and can operate independently of a fleet while being the main target of other capital ships (not that they are impervious to the fire of other ships, but that generally capital ships will seek each other out for direct confrontation). Note that this definition refers strictly to independence in a large-scale engagement. Plenty of other vessels can operate independently in other scenarios, such as patrol, but in a large-scale battle they would not be able to combat the enemy fleet if the capital ships fell. Capital ships are generally some of the largest and most heavily armored ships in a fleet. However, they should not be confused with flagships. A fleet can have multiple capital ships within it; the term simply describes the capabilities of a particular vessel. But an individual fleet will only ever have one flagship at a time, the “lead” ship, which the admiral/general/fleet commander resides on and operates from. Flagships are often capital ships (as they generally want to be the biggest, most powerful ship in the fleet), but by definition whichever ship has the fleet commander on board will fly the flag and thus be considered the flagship. Usually, this is a specifically designated vessel but the title can jump around as needed between ships.
So, from here on out I’ll be explaining the various classes of ships, their histories, and how I would personally define what the role a spaceship of that kind would take. I’ll also provide specific examples of each ship type as I go. A word of warning, though; even in the real world rules are and were constantly being broken. Ships technically designed as one type of vessel may perform the operations of another type equally well, or some countries may have different rules from each other and thus classify two vessels of almost identical capability differently. Not only that, but as technology improves the various classes can become so alike that it can be very difficult to draw a line. A further problem (which comes up very often in sci-fi) is technological superiority; that is, a ship classification in one species’ navy may not be equal to the ships of the same classification in another species’ navy. For example, one navy’s corvette may be large enough and powerful enough to be more than a match for another species’ destroyer or cruiser. What’s important when we talk about ship classification is the comparison of ships within the same navy. So while that corvette may be a cruiser as far as the alien race is concerned, what’s important is that the species that built it considers it a corvette.
Just remember that this guide exists as just that; a guide. It is not a strict law, the rules of which can never be broken. Feel free to break these rules if it makes sense for you to do so.
Let’s go from the smallest ships to the relative largest. For each class I’ve bolded particular characteristics that stand out to me and help cement the ship’s role. I’m just going to be going over warships, so things like freighters or single-pilot ships will not be getting the once-over.
Corvette
The word “corvette” comes from the Dutch word corf, which means “small ship,” and indeed corvettes are historically the smallest class of rated warship (a rating system used by the British Royal Navy in the sailing age, basically referring to the amount of men/guns on the vessel and its relative size; corvettes were of the sixth and smallest rate). In complete honesty I have not found much information on what role corvettes tended to employ; or at least nothing extremely concrete. By all rights, early corvettes are essentially just smaller, less effective frigates; they were more lightly armored and armed than frigates, while not being as quick or maneuverable. They were usually used for escorting convoys and patrolling waters, especially in places where larger ships would be unnecessary. Corvettes could also be used for taking out larger vessels already crippled by other ships, almost making them akin to scavengers. Later corvettes in modern navies (around WWII) started filling a niche as antisubmariners, minesweepers, and trawlers (it might be more accurate to say that those kinds of vessels started being called corvettes, but the effect is the same). In many ways, corvettes existed just to have a ship or two (or ten) available; being smaller and more lightly armed meant that they were cheaper to construct, and that is important when discussing anything in history. It takes money and resources to build things, so you can’t just build a bunch of the best thing.
The Tantive IV, a CR90 corvette, was the famed consular ship owned by the Royal House of Alderaan. It’s the blockade runner first seen in Star Wars: A New Hope. This is a perfect example of technological superiority; the Imperial I-class Star Destroyer Devastator, despite being a much larger vessel of a more combat-oriented variety, was able to outspeed the corvette relatively easily and capture it. (Star Wars)
In Sci-Fi – Corvettes would be the smallest warships, designed for escort and patrol, anti-mine, or anti-stealth. They would be used where larger ships with more firepower are not deemed necessary (such as backwater worlds or low-risk areas) or where a larger ship would be unsuitable for deployment. Corvettes might be outfitted to have some sort of stealth or cloaking system for reconnaissance or spec ops missions; naturally it would be easier to cloak a smaller ship than a larger one (though plenty of examples of large stealth ships exist). In some series they are likely to be diplomatic vessels due to their small size and speed, particularly seen in Star Wars, and can commonly act as blockade runners (again; their small size and speed makes them ideal for slipping through a blockade, where a larger ship presents more of a target). They would, ideally, never be used for direct combat in large scale engagements due to their extremely light armor and weapons, but may be employed in a battle to lay down or destroy minefields, uncover stealth ships, act as stealth ships on their own (for whatever purpose needed), or for dispatching already crippled vessels.
An SDV-class heavy corvette of the Covenant Empire, notable because it is the only Covenant warship known not to have shields. In Halo: Reach we encounter a small advanced fleet composed of approximately 4 SDVs and a single CSO-class supercarrier; the corvettes were thus acting as an escort group for the larger capital ship. The Covenant’s technological superiority meant they could send such vessels against the UNSC without much fear (even though destroyers would traditionally fulfill that role better), and in fact we see corvettes acting as an advanced fleet again in Halo: Forward Unto Dawn when most of humanity had no idea of the Covenant’s existence. (Halo)
Frigate
“Frigate-built” was a term used in the 17th Century describing a warship that was built to be quickand maneuverable. They were often too small to stand in the “line of battle” and usually had only one weapons deck (but sometimes two). By the 18th Century the term had been modified slightly to include ships that may be as long as a ship of the line but were still designed for speed and had lighter weaponry, making them useful for patrols and escorts. The 19th Century brought armored frigates to the world, which were actually regarded as being the most powerful warships at the time. They were still known as frigates because they were lightly armed with only one deck of guns. Modern frigates are generally used as escorts for other warships and convoys. As I mentioned earlier, frigates and corvettes really are very similar in their designs and roles; frigates just tend to be larger (and thus more expensive to build) and had more firepower, so they could engage in direct combat more effectively.
Paris-class heavy frigates of the UNSC Navy above the planet Reach. We see a multitude of frigate types in the series. Paris-class were designed almost exclusively for direct space-based combat rather than escort, but the Stalwart-class light frigates and Charon-class light frigates are more variable in their roles, able to carry a compliment of marines and other troops for planetary defense as well as fleet defense. (Halo)
In Sci-Fi – Based on their history, space frigates would probably be best defined as smaller vessels with light armament and armor (but more powerful and larger than a corvette), suited for speed and maneuverability. They’d often act as patrol and escort vessels, whether for a merchant convoy, a single capital ship, or a fleet. Their agility and maneuverability means they can move to redeploy and protect other ships better than larger, slower moving vessels. You’d likely see a strength-in-numbers strategy with them. Frigates, unlike corvettes, would more commonly see direct battle and would probably not be found with stealth drives in most settings; they are simply getting too large by that point.
Captained by Commander Shepard, the Normandy SR-2 was a frigate built after the design of the SSV Normandy SR-1. Like her predecessor, the Normandy SR-2 was a stealth ship, able to completely mask its heat signatures at sub-light speeds (though visual identification was still entirely possible). Like all frigates the Normandy SR-2 was extremely fast and maneuverable, able to weave through the debris of a battlefield with little effort. (Mass Effect)
Destroyer
Destroyers are comparatively modern ships. Historically, they were designed after the emergence of torpedo boats (quick, frigate-like ships which employed newly invented self-propelled torpedoes as their main arms) in the late 1800s. Torpedo boats were faster and more maneuverable than larger ships, able to bear down on a battlecruiser and take it out with its torpedoes. Destroyers were originally designed as, and named, torpedo boat destroyers, but at some point became referred to simply as destroyers when their roles expanded. They went through many iterations, but were essentially smaller cruisers designed with the sole purpose of hunting down and destroying torpedo boats, and had much more powerful weaponry as well as torpedoes to fulfill this purpose. As such, they were employed as escorts for larger, slower warships (to protect those warships from torpedo boats). They were designed to have the long range and speed to keep up with their fleet, and over time this fact plus their multi-purpose capabilities meant that destroyers began seeing more use as advanced scouts for a fleet as well as direct fleet combatants, anti-submariners, and anti-submarine patrol. Destroyers operated in destroyer divisions or units composed of multiple destroyers in order to carry out these tasks. By WWII destroyers began filling in a niche as (what I’ll very simply call) anti-everything vessels, extremely powerful high-value targets due to the number of guns they would field. In fact, this pushed several countries to develop smaller corvettes and frigates as anti-submariners in order to take some of the heat off of destroyers.
Galor-class ships are Cardassian vessels that have long skirted the classification between cruisers and destroyers, but ultimately have been classified as destroyers by Starfleet. They most often operate in a destroyer group of three vessels. (Star Trek)
In Sci-Fi – Destroyers would be much like their naval counterparts; ships smaller than cruisers (and usually larger than frigates, though not always) but armed to the teeth with a multitude of weapons. They’d mostly act as escorts for larger fleets (and likely not for single warships, but exceptions would certainly exist) but can be seen operating in destroyer-only divisions as well. You could expect to find destroyers fulfilling all sorts of roles because of how multi-purpose they are, even roles that could be fulfilled by other classes that are designed for that purpose. It would, however, be rare to find a destroyer acting on its own in most circumstances; destroyers are not capital ships and do not operate as patrol craft. They do not operate independently as a rule, though I know of at least one case in fiction where a super-destroyer acted as an independent ship. Science fiction, as I mentioned previously, breaks a lot of rules.
The CPV-class heavy destroyer of the Covenant navy. These vessels are used by the Covenant largely for ship-to-ship engagement and glassing operations (that is, a form of bombing or scorched earth tactics). CPVs also have the capacity to function as occupational vessels if needed, cementing their worth as multi-role vessels. We see entire fleets (read; destroyer groups) in Halo Wars. (Halo)
Cruiser
In the Age of Sail “cruiser” was a term used to describe ships which underwent “cruising missions;” that is independentscouting, raiding, and commerce protection missions. These “cruiser warships” were normally frigates and sloops because there simply wasn’t anything else available at the time. By the mid 1800s ships began being constructed that were specifically designed for this sort of work, and as such were called “cruisers”. They could be smaller, like a frigate, or larger, but it was not until the 20th Century that they were consistently scaled to be larger than a destroyer but smaller than a battleship.
The original Enterprise was a Constitution-class heavy cruiser. It’s capacity for extreme range and independent operation made it a perfect vessel for deep space exploration, but the ship still had the firepower to put up a fight when needed. (Star Trek)
Cruiser roles in the late 20th Century included anti-air defense, shore bombing, and commerce raiding, depending on the navy. However, the increasing firepower of aircraft made it so that individual cruisers could no longer operate safely, pushing navies to have their cruisers operate in fleets. Because of this, cruiser fleets were also specialized for particular roles (like anti-submarine or anti-air) and the generalized cruiser fell out of use.
In Sci-Fi – Cruisers are medium-sized vessels, able to operate independently but also commonly seen within a fleet. They would have the capacity to be used as anti-fighters, planetary bombers, raiders of enemy supply lines, and scouts. However, they would also be the class of ship most likely to engage in non-combat roles such as exploration or even colonization due to their ability to operate independently for extended periods. I would not expect cruisers to commonly be used in front-line assaults of an enemy fleet; that role is better left to other ships. However, they have the firepower, size, and better defensive capability to go up against other ships when needed and it’s not uncommon to see cruisers making up the bulk of fleets in some settings. It is however, in my admittedly amateur opinion, not the ideal choice; better to fill in that space with destroyers or battlecruisers and battleships. Cruisers can be considered capital ships in some settings (and in fact, some settings treat any ship over a certain size as a capital ship, regardless of role).
The Pillar of Autumn was a modified Halcyon-class light cruiser. It’s redesign inspired a new class of vessel known as the Autumn-class heavy cruiser. The UNSC is a good example of a navy whose fleets were comprised mostly of cruisers. This was likely due to the kind of warfare that the UNSC dealt with before the Human-Covenant War; most combat was against small Insurrectionist groups, and so extremely powerful and formidable warships were unnecessary. Thus, when the Covenant attacked it was cruisers that had to do most of the fighting. The UNSC did have at least one class of battleship commissioned after the Human-Covenant War. (Halo)
Battlecruiser and Battleship
Battlecruisers (or battle cruisers) are the first vessels in this article to commonly be considered capital ships. They are similar to battleships, having a similar armament and size, but were generally faster and not as heavily armoredby comparison. Originally fielded by the UK in the early 20th Century, battlecruisers were designed to combat and destroyer slower, older armored cruisers through heavy gunfire. As time went on (around WWI) they began seeing use as general-purpose ships alongside battleships by all manner of countries. Unfortunately, battlecruisers were generally inferior to battleships, and in the Battle of Jutland this was perfectly exemplified as both navies lost battlecruisers but no battleships; the light armor of the battlecruisers made them easier targets for heavy guns. As technology improved battlecruisers were designed with heavier armor. At the same time, battleships began becoming faster. These similarities would ultimately cause a blurring between the two classes, and by 1922 the Washington Naval Treaty considered battlecruisers and battleships functionally identical. The Royal Navy continued to refer to pre-treaty battlecruisers as such, and WWII saw a re-emergence of modernized “cruiser-killer” battlecruisers. However, only one such vessel actually survived the war, cementing again their general inferiority to battleships.
The CCS-class battlecruiser forms the backbone of the Covenant Navy, and as such provides a powerful example of a battleship-like battlecruiser. They are still considered capital ships despite the fact that they were often fielded in extremely large numbers (but then, battleships in our day were actually fielded in very large numbers as well). (Halo)
The term “battleship” is a contraction of phrase “line-of-battle ship” from the Age of Sails. If you remember, ships of the line were the largest and most powerful ships that a navy could field and were strong enough to stand within the line of battle. Modern battleships arose from ironclad battleships in the late 19th Century, and battleships were for decades considered the most powerful type of naval warship. They were characterized by very heavy armor and large-caliber guns, making them key capital ships. So influential were they that treaties such as the Washington Naval Treaty were designed, partially, to limit the number of battleships that a particular country could have. They represented naval might and power, and battleships were so influential in their strength that the simple existence or presence of a fleet, even without leaving port, could create psychological victories for a navy (called a fleet in being). Battleship tactics often saw other vessels, such as destroyers or cruisers, employing scouting and raiding missions in order to locate enemy fleets before the battleships came in to sweep aside the enemy. Despite these strengths, battleships were susceptible to smaller weapons such as torpedoes, mines, and aircraft missiles (and thus required the presence of smaller escort ships such as frigates and destroyers to protect them; it’s all circular). If your battleships fell the fleet would fall, as is the accepted definition of a capital ship. Presently there are no battleships currently in service anywhere in the world.
Imperial-class Star Destroyers, despite their name, are really more akin to battlecruisers or battleships; they represent the technological might of the Empire, and even the presence of one in a system could instill enough fear in a population to quell any potential uprising. They form the backbone of the Imperial Navy, much like the CCS for the Covenant, and they are also able to operate independently when needed; all rather un-destroyer-like characteristics. (Star Wars)
In Sci-Fi – Despite their unfortunate history, battlecruisers in space tend to operate similarly to battleships, and I would argue there is not much distinction between the two owing, partly, to the blurring of both vessels in our history. Battlecruisers and battleships, thus, often act as the heavy hitters in a fleet; they are the main combatants and are protected by other vessels such as frigates and destroyers. Being that they are capital ships, an engagement is usually won through battlecruisers and battleships. If a distinction is made between the two classes then battlecruisers would likely be quicker and less heavily armored than battleships, and in some settings are not even considered capital ships at all. But again; rules can be blurry and broken at the whim of any author. Regardless, battlecruisers and battleships are the truly massive, anti-“large vessel” ships in a fleet. They are meant to take a lot of punishment and dish out that punishment in kind. One particular term I see fairly often is “star cruiser.” In my mind, a star cruiser could either be the equivalent of a cruiser or a battlecruiser; that distinction is likely decided by whether or not star cruisers are considered capital ships, since that then determines the general capabilities of those vessels. As a general rule I would be bold enough to claim that star cruisers are equivalent to battlecruisers, and named as such because space.
40K is a good representation of a setting where battlecruisers may not be considered capital ships; at the very least in the Ciaphas Cain novel The Traitor’s Hand it is blatantly stated that a particular lord general had to temporarily use an Armageddon-class battle cruiser as his flagship as “none of the capital ships were ready to break orbit in time.” (Warhammer 40K)
Carrier
Aircraft carriers, like destroyers, are very modern classifications. They are the one vessel in today’s navies that almost anyone can pick out at a glance without fear of mistaking them for something else. This is due to their extremely obvious design; a very large, flat deck suitable for landing and deploying aircraft. Put as simply as possible, carriers carry aircraft (whether plane or helicopter depends on the ship). Historically, the concept of utilizing seagoing vessels for airborne operations was considered as far back as the early 1800s (though with balloons rather than planes). It was not until the early 1900s, with the invention of seaplanes, that actual aircraft launched from a ship become prominent. Back then, an aircraft with floats was launched from a modified cruiser or capital ship with a catapult, then recovered by a crane after it would later land in the water. Semi-successful uses of ship-borne craft in 1914 showed the world how effective such assets could be in war, and heavier-than-air craft started becoming more valuable for the world’s navies. By 1922, with the Washington Naval Treaty, battleships and battlecruisers (which most navies had too many of to be legal under the new treaty) were being converted into carriers. The flat-topped design did not become prominent until the late 1920s.
The CAS-class assault carrier is particularly well armed for ship-to-ship combat. However, the vessel’s extremely large size and multiple hangers allow it to carry hundreds of fighter craft, troop dropships, and boarding craft. Being an assault vessel and capital ship it needs to have the extra firepower to personally punch its way through a blockade in order to disperse its payload onto the planet’s surface. It very well exemplifies the Covenant’s technological superiority over the UNSC; a giant ship with a nearly unending amount of fighters that can also rip apart anything the UNSC throws at it. (Halo)
No one can deny the value of single-fighter aircraft. Planes provide a new dimension from which to attack and defend, and can carry payloads ranging from missiles to bombs to supplies for ground troops. Aircraft were extremely effective compared to even the best guns as they were more accurate and had the benefit of extreme maneuverability. That said, carriers suffered from a lack of personal offensive and defensive ability, and relied on their aircraft or the rest of their fleet to protect them. Even so, their aircraft can be considered an extension of themselves and the reign of the battleship was brought to a close when U.S. ship-borne craft sunk numerous Japanese super battleships, the largest battleships ever made.
In Sci-Fi – Carriers tend to be some of the largest capital ships around due to the need to hold and transport large numbers of fighters, bombers, and other craft. Typically, though not always, their hull-mounted armaments are light; carriers usually rely on the large numbers of fighters they carry (when operating solo) or their fleet for defense and attack of other ships. The ability to carry craft does not make a ship a carrier by default; many frigates and cruisers, for example, will carry a compliment of fighters or a few ground vehicles. In order to be considered a true carrier the vessel’s main role needs to be the transport and deployment of smaller craft (or troops; as far as I’m concerned not all carriers are extremely large and I would classify troopships and assault ships as small carriers).
Dreadnought
It’s difficult to talk about historical dreadnoughts without also talking about battleships. The first dreadnought was the Royal Navy’s HMS Dreadnought, a large and heavily armored battleship that ran on steam turbines (and thus made her the fastest battleship at the time). Dreadnought operated on an “all-big-guns” philosophy, giving her more heavy-caliber guns than any other ship at the time instead of smaller, quicker-to-fire secondary guns. Her creation was extremely influential in her time, and she spawned a new variant of battleship called “dreadnoughts” (and battleships made before her were designated “pre-dreadnoughts”). Thus, strictly speaking, dreadnoughts are just particularly large and powerful battleships. As such they carry the same characteristics of battleships; they are capital ships, represent naval power and influence, and would need a fleet to protect them from smaller vessels and weaponry.
The Executor-class Star Dreadnought, also known as the Executor-class Super Star Destroyer, was one of the largest (if not the largest) warships fielded by the Imperial Navy. Over 11 times as long as an ISD (that’s 19km), the Executor was Darth Vader’s personal flagship and inspired fear wherever it went. It was, unfortunately, taken down by a single pilot in a doomed fighter, but this just shows the vulnerability of larger vessels to smaller, quick-moving craft. (Star Wars)
In Sci-Fi – Dreadnoughts are a just about always gigantic ships; massive vessels that dwarf even the largest battleships or battlecruisers. The role they fulfill is exactly like a battleship or battlecruiser; complete dominance and superiority. Intimidation, even more so than with battleships, is the name of the game when it comes to dreadnoughts. When you have a multi-mile long ship bearing down on a fleet you know the enemy’s morale is precarious at best. Due to their large size they can often carry a large number of secondary craft, like a carrier, but their extremely powerful armament would tend to exclude them from that definition. A dreadnought carries a bunch of craft because it can, and this adds to its lethality. But its true strength is its overwhelming firepower, plus its usually resilient armor.
Other Terminology
Whew. We’re about 5000 words in and I’m starting to lose steam, but let’s go over a few other things before I end today. You may have noticed some terms floating around that I’ve used but not really elaborated on, like “heavy” and “assault.” Those terms actually mean something, and so I’m going to take the last part of this article to explain them.
Armored: This is very self-explanatory and I don’t think I have to spend many words on it. An armored vessel is one with more resilient-than-normal armor than others of its classification. They can, theoretically, take more punishment.
Assault: By definition, an “assault” in warfare is usually the first phase of any particular attack. You can have aircraft assaults, or spaceship assaults. However, sci-fi lexicon also seems to borrow the term from the concept of amphibious assaults. These are operations where ships land ground (or air) forces upon a particular location through some sort of landing site like a beach; D-Day is a prime example of this. Assault vessels, therefore, are designed for assaulting an enemy planet, installation, space station, etc. They are usually designed to carry large numbers of troops, vehicles, drop ships, supporting aircraft, and the like; they assault the planet by being the first ships to touch down and dispense their payload and then get the hell out of dodge while the ground forces do their thing. Sometimes they need the brunt force of a fleet to allow them to get to the planet in the first place, but then you have ships like the Covenant’s CAS-class assault carrier that can do that job themselves.
Acclamator-class assault ships were used during the Clone Wars to great effect, allowing for the rapid and powerful deployment of clones onto a planet. Acclamators are a good deal larger than frigates, which classifies them as cruisers or even small carriers (considering their transport role). Despite their main function as troop transports a fleet of Acclamators could engage in a Base Delta Zero, the bombardment and total surface destruction of an entire planet. A single ISD, by comparison, could do that by itself in less than a day. (Star Wars)
Light and Heavy: I described the Halcyon-class (from Halo) as a light cruiser, while thelater Autumn-class is a heavy cruiser. So what’s the difference there? Generally speaking, whether a particular vessel is light or heavy refers to the payload of its weapons. Sometimes the resilience of its armor may come into play (again; exceptions exist), but overall a vessel’s status as light or heavy is dependent on its guns. A light vessel has a lighter armament, while a heavy vessel, naturally, has a heavy armament. As such, you’d expect heavy vessels to be more useful in an engagement. Light vessels, meanwhile, would probably see more use in non-combat and support roles. At the very least they are less specialized for direct large-scale engagements. The various frigate classes in Halo are perfect examples of this; the Paris-class is a heavy frigate and very specialized for space combat. The Charon-class and Stalwart-class light frigates, meanwhile, were more jack-of-all-trades ships that saw more use as ground-support vessels and fleet support. Of course remember; sometimes you gotta make do with what you have available.
Super: I think this one is fairly self-explanatory as well. A super vessel is, for lack of a better word, just a bigger version of whatever classification of vessel it is we are talking about. Because of their increased size they almost always have much better armor and much stronger weapons than the “normal” variant.
The Covenant’s CSO-class supercarrier is the largest non-Forerunner ship we’ve seen in the series. Visually based very similarly on the assault carrier (and I really don’t like that, if I’m to be honest) it was almost 29 kilometers long and powerful enough to take on entire fleets on its own. Super indeed. (Halo)
And there you have it. Hopefully you have a better understanding of space combat and ship classification. I know I learned a lot by doing this; already I’ve starting thinking about things differently. Just the other day I finished the Ciaphas Cain: Hero of the Imperium omnibus and I had a better appreciation for some of the scenes in the last book (The Traitor’s Hand) that described a battle taking place in the planet Adumbria’s orbit.
Please don’t hesitate to use this information however you see fit. I hope it brings a sense of realism and authenticity to your games and I hope you appreciated my attempt at a comprehensive guide to ship taxonomy. With any luck it did someone somewhere some good.
I’ve written before about how much the evolution (or de-evolution) of Max’s costume is my favorite part of the original Mad Max trilogy, but seeing Fury Road this weekend had me wanting to more thoroughly document all the basic changes I’ve noticed to Max’s gear throughout the first three films, especially since the costume (and Max’s poor V8 Interceptor) is the only really consistent thread of continuity between any of the movies.
My buddy Mike Russell pointed out that with every Mad Max sequel being a story retold by someone else as a kind of “history of future past”, continuity between each these films isn’t important, but it *is* nice to see how much attention to detail George Miller’s costumers have paid to Max’s gear during his journey from MFP Headquarters, to Broken Hill, to Thunderdome and beyond….
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Rittenhouse Rye Whiskey ($25): Personally, no home bar is complete without a quality bottle of rye whiskey. Rittenhouse happens to be a bit more versatile than most others. It’s not quite as green and herbal as other popular rye whiskeys, and the value proposition is on point. If you are new to rye whiskey – start here. If you are well acquainted with rye whiskey – stay here. Rittenhouse Rye always delivers.
W.L. Weller 12 year ($30): Forget all of the “it’s the same stuff as Pappy” bull crap. That’s no reason to by it. Buy Weller 12 because it’s an excellent pour of whiskey on its own merit. It’s rich, sweet, but with a healthy oak backbone. Wheated bourbon north of the 10 year mark just becomes special, and Weller 12 exemplifies that. I drink it neat, in an old fashioned, a mint julep, and on ice in the heat of the summer – versatile and delicious. Availability is tighter than the others, but unlike a lot of the limited releases, Weller 12 shows up couple times a year. Talk to your local shop, request a bottle and let me know what you think. I typically by 3-4 bottles a year at my local retailer to make sure I have enough on hand.
It’s never as easy as you would like. To say Buddhists should not be involved in politics is obviously silly. But to say that all Buddhists should share a certain specific set of political views is also ridiculous.
