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Khizan
Jul 30, 2013


I have to go with stormtrooper armor, because it's clumsy full body armor that I don't think has ever stopped a single attack. I can't recall a single time in any of the movies or the Mandolorian when anybody every had to hit a stormtrooper twice, with anything. Blaster, club, rocks, doesn't matter, it won't protect against it.

For all the design flaws of the Stargate, at least it loving works. Stormtrooper armor is just a sign letting you know that you can kill the wearer without feeling bad about it.

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RBA Starblade
Apr 28, 2008

Going Home.

Games Idiot Court Jester

GD_American posted:

They got a lot better when they jumped universes to the Inner Sphere.

I found out the other day that there are really lovely mechs in Battletech that can transform into really lovely jets, closing the circle

mind the walrus
Sep 22, 2006

Khizan posted:

I have to go with stormtrooper armor, because it's clumsy full body armor that I don't think has ever stopped a single attack. I can't recall a single time in any of the movies or the Mandolorian when anybody every had to hit a stormtrooper twice, with anything. Blaster, club, rocks, doesn't matter, it won't protect against it.

For all the design flaws of the Stargate, at least it loving works. Stormtrooper armor is just a sign letting you know that you can kill the wearer without feeling bad about it.

The armor in the Starship Troopers movie does a better job of protecting the wearer. This is known.

Ghost Leviathan
Mar 2, 2017

Exploration is ill-advised.

RBA Starblade posted:

I found out the other day that there are really lovely mechs in Battletech that can transform into really lovely jets, closing the circle

Gundam iirc has a few cases where transforming mechs make for lovely mechs and lovely planes, though usually because they're prototype testbeds for the concept and haven't worked out the kinks.

Taintrunner
Apr 10, 2017

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

RBA Starblade posted:

I found out the other day that there are really lovely mechs in Battletech that can transform into really lovely jets, closing the circle

There's also quad-legged mechs and WiGEs! You know, those long obsolete Russian sea-based planes that could only hover a little bit off the water!



I have no idea how they made it to the 31st century!

Ghost Leviathan
Mar 2, 2017

Exploration is ill-advised.
By looking loving rad, obviously.

El Spamo
Aug 21, 2003

Fuss and misery
Ekranoplan!

Tulip
Jun 3, 2008

yeah thats pretty good


Khizan posted:

I have to go with stormtrooper armor, because it's clumsy full body armor that I don't think has ever stopped a single attack. I can't recall a single time in any of the movies or the Mandolorian when anybody every had to hit a stormtrooper twice, with anything. Blaster, club, rocks, doesn't matter, it won't protect against it.

For all the design flaws of the Stargate, at least it loving works. Stormtrooper armor is just a sign letting you know that you can kill the wearer without feeling bad about it.

Blasters seem to only be dangerous to people wearing storm trooper armor, which is nuts. Leia gets shot in 6 and it's like, not even quite as bad as a rubber bullet, let alone a regular bullet.

I know armies tend to build weapons that are really designed to counter their own armor, but it's pretty nuts to have a weapon that's not even effective against unarmored people.

e: To be clear, I'm tossing in star wars blasters as a contender for shittiest piece of garbage tech

sean10mm
Jun 29, 2005

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, MAD-2R World
Battletech has a few egregious pieces of fail-tech.

The Charger might be the Most Triumphant Example. It's not a failed prototype that's just mentioned in the fluff text like the Matar, it's a mass produced model that weighs 80 tons, has less armament than ordinary mechs half its weight, and the armor protection of something 30 tons lighter. It also costs 50% more than common mechs that are flatly superior, just to add insult to injury. It just exists to be an incredibly expensive piece of poo poo.

General Battuta
Feb 7, 2011

This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.
Actually I expect the Charger is decent in lower-tech timeframes since weapons are poo poo and nobody can hit anything so it's better to just beat your opponent to death with kicks/punches/tree clubs. And the Charger has the tonnage to hit pretty hard.

Ghost Leviathan
Mar 2, 2017

Exploration is ill-advised.
Giant robots made for punching enemies to death- what is this, Pacific Rim?

Sanguinia
Jan 1, 2012

~Everybody wants to be a cat~
~Because a cat's the only cat~
~Who knows where its at~

Ghost Leviathan posted:

Giant robots made for punching enemies to death- what is this, Pacific Rim?

No, its Evangelion

BRB making a comically upsized 40 mm pistol for my robot instead of any kind of integrated weapon systems Because Reasons.

McSpanky
Jan 16, 2005






Do ecumenopolises (city-worlds) count as a technology? Because the basic maintenance of someplace like Coruscant would be completely drat absurd. The entire planet's atmosphere and water supply would have to be processed artificially, the ambient pressure and temperature differential between the lowest and highest levels as typically depicted would require its own artificial life support at one or both extremes, dozens of other worlds would have to be dedicated farming colonies shipping out a perpetual harvest to feed the population, the subsequent waste production would be enough to create a moon of poo poo every week... It's one of those things where, if you have the ability to do it, then you wouldn't need to.

banned from Starbucks
Jul 18, 2004




Do they break down Coruscant into smaller neighborhoods or counties or whatever for mail deliveries sake or is it just like "I live on 1533 sith street, Coruscant" and you have to memorize where every street on the planet is.

Ghost Leviathan
Mar 2, 2017

Exploration is ill-advised.

banned from Starbucks posted:

Do they break down Coruscant into smaller neighborhoods or counties or whatever for mail deliveries sake or is it just like "I live on 1533 sith street, Coruscant" and you have to memorize where every street on the planet is.

Do you think cities don't have subdivisions?


McSpanky posted:

Do ecumenopolises (city-worlds) count as a technology? Because the basic maintenance of someplace like Coruscant would be completely drat absurd. The entire planet's atmosphere and water supply would have to be processed artificially, the ambient pressure and temperature differential between the lowest and highest levels as typically depicted would require its own artificial life support at one or both extremes, dozens of other worlds would have to be dedicated farming colonies shipping out a perpetual harvest to feed the population, the subsequent waste production would be enough to create a moon of poo poo every week... It's one of those things where, if you have the ability to do it, then you wouldn't need to.

IIRC, in canon, it has all of those things. Remember Star Wars is a setting where interstellar travel is as casual as catching a bus.

Warhammer 40k also has all of those things, though I think only Terra and maybe Mars are full on city planets.

Tulip
Jun 3, 2008

yeah thats pretty good


Ghost Leviathan posted:

\
Warhammer 40k also has all of those things, though I think only Terra and maybe Mars are full on city planets.

According to the 40k wiki, there are about 32,380 planets that share the designation of "Hive Planet."

Ghost Leviathan
Mar 2, 2017

Exploration is ill-advised.

Tulip posted:

According to the 40k wiki, there are about 32,380 planets that share the designation of "Hive Planet."

For the post part, Hive Worlds are usually worlds that have massive Hive Cities, huge arcologies that stretch high into the sky and below the ground, with most of the planet's surface being polluted wasteland. Actual full-on city planets are rarer.

Schadenboner
Aug 15, 2011

by Shine

Ghost Leviathan posted:

Do you think cities don't have subdivisions?


IIRC, in canon, it has all of those things. Remember Star Wars is a setting where interstellar travel is as casual as catching a bus.

Warhammer 40k also has all of those things, though I think only Terra and maybe Mars are full on city planets.

As of Mechanicum (outbreak of the Heresy) big chunks of Mars were still desert.

:shrug:

GD_American
Jul 21, 2004

LISTEN TO WHAT I HAVE TO SAY AS IT'S INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT!

RBA Starblade posted:

I found out the other day that there are really lovely mechs in Battletech that can transform into really lovely jets, closing the circle

Ahhh, LAMs (Land-Air Mechs). The 69 of giant robots, doing two things crappily instead of one thing well.

I always figured their in-universe crappiness was essentially a gently caress You to Harmony Gold for all the copyright grief that FASA got.



Also, the heart and soul of this thread is this short story by Arthur C. Clarke which should be mandatory reading for every single engineer going through school anywhere, proving that newer and more complex and more capable does not equal better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superiority_(short_story)

Tulip
Jun 3, 2008

yeah thats pretty good


Ghost Leviathan posted:

For the post part, Hive Worlds are usually worlds that have massive Hive Cities, huge arcologies that stretch high into the sky and below the ground, with most of the planet's surface being polluted wasteland. Actual full-on city planets are rarer.

I'm just going off the wiki; a lot of the Hive Worlds have populations of 20-25 billion, which is small compared to Earth ('unknown, hundreds of billions') but perfectly comparable to Mars, which is 20 billion. AFAIK there's no special canon designation for "larger than Hive World" - Earth is also a "Hive World" though apparently it can be called a "super Hive World."

Mars, obviously, is not a Hive Planet at all, because it is Forge World (and a ludicrously huge one at that - the only other Forge World I found population for was Agripinaa, which was is 0.08 billion).

Ghost Leviathan
Mar 2, 2017

Exploration is ill-advised.
I was just guessing on Mars, so okay, fair.

Most sci-fi basically treats planets as... countries is often generous, more like individual cities, Warhammer at least is self-aware about it.

Tulip
Jun 3, 2008

yeah thats pretty good


Ghost Leviathan posted:

I was just guessing on Mars, so okay, fair.

Most sci-fi basically treats planets as... countries is often generous, more like individual cities, Warhammer at least is self-aware about it.

Yeah it's a definite improvement over Star Wars, where each planet is apparently a four block area tiled endlessly without variation.

I rather liked Warframe's handling, where the one solar system on representation is a significantly contested series series of zones. It doesn't do that good at like, making most of them feel alive or like an actual planet, but it's nice that they don't just say 'it's fractious,' they put in the legwork.

Also going to submit "most of Warframe" for shittiest sci-fi tech. Of the 4 most impressive and incredible Orokin inventions, 4 of them became autonomous and revolted against the Orokin, including 2 that were explicitly weapons to protect the Orokin.

Schadenboner
Aug 15, 2011

by Shine
There's actually more to Mars than "parts of it were still desert": IIRC during the Dark Age of Technology (M15-M25) Mars got terraformed green but most of it either broke or got broken during Old Night (when the AIs turned against humanity and the subsequent Butlerian Jihad: M25-M30*), by the Heresy (M30) they had fixed enough of it to make it mostly breathable, more-or-less.

Also they somehow got volcanism going again, probably as part of the terraform?

:shrug:

*: Probably caused by the influx of the warp caused by the Fall of the Eldar, this is also why psykers got increasingly common among humanity?

McSpanky
Jan 16, 2005






Ghost Leviathan posted:

IIRC, in canon, it has all of those things. Remember Star Wars is a setting where interstellar travel is as casual as catching a bus.

Sure, it's just so extraordinarily wasteful. Someone decided it would be a good idea to pave/plow over whole star systems' native environments to support a living monument to bureaucratic self-congratulation, probably in the name of "progress".

Oh, I get it. Coruscant is Space Brasilia.

DrBouvenstein
Feb 28, 2007

I think I'm a doctor, but that doesn't make me a doctor. This fancy avatar does.

McSpanky posted:

Sure, it's just so extraordinarily wasteful. Someone decided it would be a good idea to pave/plow over whole star systems' native environments to support a living monument to bureaucratic self-congratulation, probably in the name of "progress".

Oh, I get it. Coruscant is Space Brasilia.

TBF, it's possible Coruscant was uninhabitable before it was turned into a giant city-planet.

Like, a Mars type planet, or worse.

OR, comedy option, it's an actual Hollow-World and the inside is a vast ecosystem full of plants and animals.

Groke
Jul 27, 2007
New Adventures In Mom Strength

Ghost Leviathan posted:

I was just guessing on Mars, so okay, fair.

Most sci-fi basically treats planets as... countries is often generous, more like individual cities, Warhammer at least is self-aware about it.

"It was raining on Planet Mongo that night."

Also an awful lot of planets look suspiciously like this disused quarry an hour's drive from the movie or TV studio.

SlothfulCobra
Mar 27, 2011

For American shows and movies, they're not so much about quarries and instead they prefer to film within the 30 mile zone where union work is a lot cheaper. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yy16KFzM4XU

Of course, with space colonization, it's plausible that only a very small area of the planet is colonized and the rest of the planet is unpopulated, so there basically is a very small area of the planet worth visiting.

And then there's space colonies, where it's a very neat idea to make a giant installation floating out in the void, but seldom do works make a reason why people built and live in them in the first place. The biggest reasons I've seen are using them as a hub for transport without having to enter in and out of a gravity well and as a platform for space mining, but otherwise, most people are built for living on planets and would be better off to continue living on the planet.

Babylon 5 was made to be a transport hub and a neutral meeting place. The Gundam franchise I don't think ever clarifies their reasons, which it seems relevant because all those space colonies are always wanting independence. Sonic Adventure 2 had a space colony that was just abandoned for some reason.

Tulip
Jun 3, 2008

yeah thats pretty good


Space stations are a pretty good conceit if you're in a fiction where habitable planets and terraforming are not significant/easy, but when you've got like, DS9 and Star Trek tech, it mostly raises more questions than it answers.

Droyer
Oct 9, 2012

SlothfulCobra posted:

For American shows and movies, they're not so much about quarries and instead they prefer to film within the 30 mile zone where union work is a lot cheaper. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yy16KFzM4XU

Of course, with space colonization, it's plausible that only a very small area of the planet is colonized and the rest of the planet is unpopulated, so there basically is a very small area of the planet worth visiting.

And then there's space colonies, where it's a very neat idea to make a giant installation floating out in the void, but seldom do works make a reason why people built and live in them in the first place. The biggest reasons I've seen are using them as a hub for transport without having to enter in and out of a gravity well and as a platform for space mining, but otherwise, most people are built for living on planets and would be better off to continue living on the planet.

Babylon 5 was made to be a transport hub and a neutral meeting place. The Gundam franchise I don't think ever clarifies their reasons, which it seems relevant because all those space colonies are always wanting independence. Sonic Adventure 2 had a space colony that was just abandoned for some reason.

Gundam has "overpopulation but terraforming isn't a thing" as a reason and in SA2 the colony was a weapons research station that got shut down because the government grew suspicious of the head researcher.

galagazombie
Oct 31, 2011

A silly little mouse!

McSpanky posted:

Do ecumenopolises (city-worlds) count as a technology? Because the basic maintenance of someplace like Coruscant would be completely drat absurd. The entire planet's atmosphere and water supply would have to be processed artificially, the ambient pressure and temperature differential between the lowest and highest levels as typically depicted would require its own artificial life support at one or both extremes, dozens of other worlds would have to be dedicated farming colonies shipping out a perpetual harvest to feed the population, the subsequent waste production would be enough to create a moon of poo poo every week... It's one of those things where, if you have the ability to do it, then you wouldn't need to.

Trantor, the planet from Asimov's Foundation Books that Coruscant is based on, not only more or less invented the city-planet but ironically pointed out how it was a bad idea for all the reasons you pointed out, complete with a dozen factory-farm planets needed to feed it. In the series the whole planet collapses and is abandoned precisely because those issues became impossible to address once the Empire of the setting can no longer waste resources keeping it running.

SlothfulCobra
Mar 27, 2011

All the logistical issues with a city planet are the same as the logistical issues of a city in general. People value physical proximity to eachother enough to overcome the difficulties, and it's not that much of a stretch to think that in the some huge galaxy-spanning empire would have a massive planet-sized capital city shipping in food from other planets just like how Rome shipped in most of its food from Egypt.

You also in the real world see powerful cities fall into decay once the money starts to dry up, and they're left struggling to survive, dying from the same aspects that once made them so great. Most notably, Venice is now constantly flooding from being built on stilts in the sea, which was what once made it so powerful in the medieval world.

Droyer posted:

Gundam has "overpopulation but terraforming isn't a thing" as a reason and in SA2 the colony was a weapons research station that got shut down because the government grew suspicious of the head researcher.

Overpopulation doesn't seem to really jive with the fact that there's so much empty land for the Gundam to fight in and for White Base to scoot across on Earth in Universal Century. At least G Gundam has the excuse that Earth is all hosed up from war and still being used as a giant fighting arena for mobile suits.

I think Gundam Seed had a lot of empty space too, but all I remember about Gundam Wing's earth terrain is there being a bunch of cliffs over the sea.

nine-gear crow
Aug 10, 2013





galagazombie posted:

Trantor, the planet from Asimov's Foundation Books that Coruscant is based on, not only more or less invented the city-planet but ironically pointed out how it was a bad idea for all the reasons you pointed out, complete with a dozen factory-farm planets needed to feed it. In the series the whole planet collapses and is abandoned precisely because those issues became impossible to address once the Empire of the setting can no longer waste resources keeping it running.

That said, in both the old abandoned Star Wars EU and the new Sequel Canon, the Republic also basically abandons Coruscant. In the Sequels they just vaguely tell it to gently caress off and install a rotating capital world system because lol we didn't think this poo poo through, while in the old EU it's abandoned after an extra-galactic alien invasion drops a terraforming bomb or something on it and the Republic just goes "You know what... you guys keep it, we're good."

Ghost Leviathan
Mar 2, 2017

Exploration is ill-advised.

Tulip posted:

Space stations are a pretty good conceit if you're in a fiction where habitable planets and terraforming are not significant/easy, but when you've got like, DS9 and Star Trek tech, it mostly raises more questions than it answers.

Deep Space Nine is specifically an ore refining facility and basically watchtower over Cardassian-occupied Bajor, and after the pilot becomes the checkpoint for the Bajoran wormhole. It's basically a frontier fort slash port town.

Starbases have been a thing since TOS, with the sensible reason that it's much easier to dock and maintain a starship at them than to land on a planet, especially given many Star Trek starships were never meant to enter atmosphere, let alone land.

Hodgepodge
Jan 29, 2006
Probation
Can't post for 273 days!
40k hive worlds will very explicitly starve if cut off from agricultural worlds; it's one of the things that caused the pre-imperial human civil8iation to collapse.

and the lower levels being bottomless helps is the basis of one if the most popular spinoffs. The lower levels also have lost technology, mutants, gangs, etc, etc, and are one of the more interesting places in 40k.

Tulip
Jun 3, 2008

yeah thats pretty good


Necromunda's cool.

Ghost Leviathan posted:

Deep Space Nine is specifically an ore refining facility and basically watchtower over Cardassian-occupied Bajor, and after the pilot becomes the checkpoint for the Bajoran wormhole. It's basically a frontier fort slash port town.

Starbases have been a thing since TOS, with the sensible reason that it's much easier to dock and maintain a starship at them than to land on a planet, especially given many Star Trek starships were never meant to enter atmosphere, let alone land.

Ore refining is such a weird thing to do in orbit that it raises really confusing questions.

Really the issue here is that DS9 in particular can't decide if resource scarcity matters or not. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't, who knows!

mind the walrus
Sep 22, 2006

It's especially funny in the Mirror Universe episodes where suddenly DS9/Terak Nor is this awful hellpit.

Sanguinia
Jan 1, 2012

~Everybody wants to be a cat~
~Because a cat's the only cat~
~Who knows where its at~

mind the walrus posted:

It's especially funny in the Mirror Universe episodes where suddenly DS9/Terak Nor is this awful hellpit.

This sentence reminded me of that episode where we go back in time to see what Terok Nor was like during the occupation but its actually just Odo's memory because he's guilt-ridden over being party to Cardassian fascism despite being held up as a neutral arbiter of justice both sides respected.

One thing that I find really interesting about that episode is how Odo's memory paints Quark as this cold, vindictive exploiter of the Bajoran slave laborers without an ounce of empathy, which is at odds with most of what we hear about his thoughts on the Cardassians and the occupation later. It makes one curious about how accurate that memory is, and how much of it is Odo's personal grievances against Quark warping his perception of the past.

Ghost Leviathan
Mar 2, 2017

Exploration is ill-advised.

Tulip posted:

Necromunda's cool.


Ore refining is such a weird thing to do in orbit that it raises really confusing questions.

Really the issue here is that DS9 in particular can't decide if resource scarcity matters or not. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't, who knows!

There might actually be real world precedent because metal does different things in zero gravity


mind the walrus posted:

It's especially funny in the Mirror Universe episodes where suddenly DS9/Terak Nor is this awful hellpit.

There's episodes that flash back to what Terok Nor was like during the occupation and the joke is that mirror Terok Nor is exactly the same except humans are explicitly slaves in place of Bajorans

Schadenboner
Aug 15, 2011

by Shine
This person is an literal geologist, they/them also wrote the excellent Blood Binds The Pack: https://www.tor.com/author/alex-acks/, they/them has thoughts on single-biome planets, they/them also takes a blade to Tolkien's lovely cartography.

Schadenboner fucked around with this message at 17:18 on Jun 10, 2020

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General Battuta
Feb 7, 2011

This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.
I think Alex is they/them.

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