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There is a real functional reason to make the captain into a public figure on the ship though. He's the functional dictator of the ship and responsible for the safety of the ship and management of both the crew and passengers in the case of any emergency. You don't want an Oceanos situation where after something goes wrong, the captain and crew just use their own inside knowledge to get out first and it's left to a bunch of entertainers to keep panic from breaking out and organize the emergency response and evacuation.
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Jan 15, 2021 21:10
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:Or you're a piece of poo poo corporation who's keeping costs down and absolutely doesn't give a poo poo that your cramped quarters lead to burn out because there's plenty more rubes where they came from, and what are they gonna do, not get a job? Right but I also think that if you really wanted to mustache twirl you would have those guys slave away at a mining base or starbase instead of potentially messing up your fancy and expensive space ships especially if you can run like a cargo ship or something with just 10 guys. What I think I'm really trying to say here I think is that we need a story about a dockworkers strike but in space. edit: other than the expanse I guess Lawman 0 fucked around with this message at 21:56 on Jan 15, 2021 |
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Jan 15, 2021 21:54
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Or episode 12 of Babylon 5. I feel like there's a lot of sci-fi ideas that have been done once or twice that are so rich with potential that there's still a whole bunch more ways for that sort of scenario to play out.
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Jan 15, 2021 22:57
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SlothfulCobra posted:Or episode 12 of Babylon 5. Well like for example I'm not really aware of any recent sci-fi that really engages with some ideas that are coming out of exoplanet science such as that the Earth might be on the edge of habitability in the first place or that fairly neat system configurations such as ours are not the norm. You could probably get some good mileage out of people cutting corners with technology that lets human visit and/or live on a lush, very geologically active superearth. Edit: Actually has anyone written anything set on a carbon world? That would really let you blend genres in weird ways. Lawman 0 fucked around with this message at 23:58 on Jan 15, 2021 |
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Jan 15, 2021 23:55
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SlothfulCobra posted:There is a real functional reason to make the captain into a public figure on the ship though. He's the functional dictator of the ship and responsible for the safety of the ship and management of both the crew and passengers in the case of any emergency. You don't want an Oceanos situation where after something goes wrong, the captain and crew just use their own inside knowledge to get out first and it's left to a bunch of entertainers to keep panic from breaking out and organize the emergency response and evacuation.
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Jan 16, 2021 16:25
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Would super-soldiers be garbage tech?
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Jan 22, 2021 22:53
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Nebakenezzer posted:Would super-soldiers be garbage tech? As a concept? I wouldn't think so. The ways it's usually executed? Yes, absolutely at least 95% of the time if not more.
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Jan 22, 2021 23:31
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Error 404 posted:As a concept? I wouldn't think so. Yeah I'd say it depends on if you mean "Designing a better Soldier, but for plot reasons only one has been finished when the action scene starts" vs "We put all our resources and equipment on this one guy and sent him out to win the war".
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Jan 23, 2021 11:18
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galagazombie posted:Yeah I'd say it depends on if you mean "Designing a better Soldier, but for plot reasons only one has been finished when the action scene starts" vs "We put all our resources and equipment on this one guy and sent him out to win the war". There's actually a What If describing if the super-soldier project hadn't been a one-off with Steve Rogers and they'd mass-produced them. Unsurprisingly it involves a small army of super-soldiers steamrolling the nazis, and probably most notably a young would-be Magneto being liberated from the camps in time to be reunited with his family.
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Jan 23, 2021 11:34
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Nebakenezzer posted:Would super-soldiers be garbage tech? Super-soldiers are more of a natural evolution of how we create the military.
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Jan 23, 2021 17:37
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We've already had several different versions of "devoting disproportionate resources to elite units" IRL, and from what I can tell most sci fi super soldier programs have at least some roots in the Waffen SS as a concept. As with many things with military organization this is a choice that has as much to do with the culture that makes the soldiers as anything else - in the case of the Waffen SS, Nazi notions of how evolution works, in the case of the Potsdam Giants, an expression of Frederick I's extreme horniness.
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Jan 23, 2021 19:25
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There were no Waffen SS/Allgemeine SS distinction during the war. The Waffen SS literally didn't exist. It was all simply the SS. The lie comes from after the war, when a number of SS veterans needed to distance themselves from the genocides they commited and bing-bong "that wasn't us, we were Waffen-SS, we were at the front and we somehow happened to not do any war crimes there either, coincidentally" so simple. In reality they were all just SS members and there was a constant stream of people going back and forth every which way in the organisation, very very much including the death camps.
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Jan 23, 2021 20:58
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Bloody Pom posted:I really need to back into reading the Culture novels. Probably in text this time, trying to follow Use of Weapons' chapter layout in audiobook format broke my brain. Reading it was just as wonky until halfway through when I realized it was two sets of chapters, one going in normal order, the other in reverse until they line up at the end. I might be misremembering but apparently Banks' had kept trying to use that gimmick and it kept getting shut down by publishers until he was a little more popular and was given the greenlight.
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Jan 23, 2021 21:12
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The problem I have with supersoldiers is that they almost always seem to follow the same formula of bullet sponges who slowly walk towards the enemy while carrying heavy weapons. They're basically tiny meat mechs.
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Jan 24, 2021 01:34
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SlothfulCobra posted:There is a real functional reason to make the captain into a public figure on the ship though. He's the functional dictator of the ship and responsible for the safety of the ship and management of both the crew and passengers in the case of any emergency. You don't want an Oceanos situation where after something goes wrong, the captain and crew just use their own inside knowledge to get out first and it's left to a bunch of entertainers to keep panic from breaking out and organize the emergency response and evacuation. There is a mild real-life precedent for the Avenue 5 situation, too: In the 1920s many of the major shipping lines operating liners on the Atlantic found that the dual responsibility of the captain to be both commanding officer to the crew and host to the passengers was causing neglect of both roles - the increasing opulence and scale of passenger liners meant that more and more of the captain's time was spent dealing with 'hotel' matters and the service part of the crew (pursers, stewards, maids, cooks, entertainers etc.) were hugely outnumbering the less visible but arguably more vital sailors who kept the ship safely going on its way. But the captain also had a duty and responsibility to be seen by, and interact with, the passengers - hosting the lucky guests at 'captain's table' being only part of his social role. All of which kept him away from his duties as master mariner. As liners started to become destinations in themselves rather than just means of transport, and especially when lines began offering cruises to the Caribbean and South America to combat the effects of the Depression where onboard life and service was the whole point, this problem became more acute. So companies began appointing 'Staff Captains' (sometimes also called 'Vice Captains') who were fully qualified master mariners but who would deputise the appointed ship's captain and be responsible for all the 'hotel' aspects of the ship and all the social and ceremonial parts of the captain's role. Leaving the captain free to concentrate on the safe conduct and navigation of the ship. It helped that in the midst of the Depression there were lots of qualified mariners without ships who would happily take a subordinate position that none the less involved a lot of dining and socialising at the company's expense. Some shipping lines were more forthcoming about the presence and role of a staff captain than others - I'm sure that on some ships the passengers had a very Avenue 5-like experience of being thrilled to meet 'the captain' while the actual captain stayed well behind the scenes.
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Jan 24, 2021 04:47
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Nebakenezzer posted:Would super-soldiers be garbage tech? In all honesty they probably would. Imagine trying to reintegrate guys and gals with presumed super ptsd, basically no interaction with regular society for years and still presumably having whatever enchantments that couldn't be taken away.
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Jan 24, 2021 16:39
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https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_Hunted_(episode)
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Jan 24, 2021 17:29
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Lawman 0 posted:In all honesty they probably would. Imagine trying to reintegrate guys and gals with presumed super ptsd, basically no interaction with regular society for years and still presumably having whatever enchantments that couldn't be taken away. That's actually the premise behind Violet Evergarden. I hear it's pretty good.
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Jan 24, 2021 17:59
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David D. Davidson posted:That's actually the premise behind Violet Evergarden. I hear it's pretty good. I should check that out I guess
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Jan 24, 2021 18:18
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It's also a theme of a few episodes of Ghost in the Shell and No Gun's Life has a similar premise. To the Abandoned Sacred Beasts is a story about supersoldiers who are steadily going mad and homicidal from their mutations. For some reason a lot of Japanese works are preoccupied with the idea of what veterans would do after returning from an unpopular war despite Japan not having been to war for 70 years.
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Jan 24, 2021 19:31
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dagwood was a skilled undersea janitor
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Jan 24, 2021 20:21
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Tulip posted:We've already had several different versions of "devoting disproportionate resources to elite units" IRL, and from what I can tell most sci fi super soldier programs have at least some roots in the Waffen SS as a concept. As with many things with military organization this is a choice that has as much to do with the culture that makes the soldiers as anything else - in the case of the Waffen SS, Nazi notions of how evolution works, in the case of the Potsdam Giants, an expression of Frederick I's extreme horniness. I think that some concepts are also rooted in the shift of US military doctrine from "we will overwhelm our enemies with the sheer number of tanks and bullets we build" to to one leveraging technological advantage as the main edge. The amount of technological doo-dads that a modern infantryman has access to would probably feel like "devoting disproportionate resources" to someone rooted in older US tactics, but it's more reasonable to us because we've internalized that's how modern first-world infantry look. Maybe part of it is trying to reframe a narrative about war when you are now the overdog, not the underdog; okay so you are technologically way ahead of the other guys, BUT there's not many of you!
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Jan 24, 2021 22:13
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SlothfulCobra posted:It's also a theme of a few episodes of Ghost in the Shell and No Gun's Life has a similar premise. To the Abandoned Sacred Beasts is a story about supersoldiers who are steadily going mad and homicidal from their mutations. I think a lot of that sort of thing is imported tropes from American media about Vietnam vets, although there is also a (sometimes a bit exploitative) interest in former child soldiers, often from Southeast Asia, that I can't think of a parallel to in non-Japanese media. (Sosuke from Full Metal Panic, Maiya from Fate/Zero, various characters in Magical Girl Spec Ops Asuka, etc.)
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Jan 25, 2021 02:33
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Defiance Industries posted:I think that some concepts are also rooted in the shift of US military doctrine from "we will overwhelm our enemies with the sheer number of tanks and bullets we build" to to one leveraging technological advantage as the main edge. The amount of technological doo-dads that a modern infantryman has access to would probably feel like "devoting disproportionate resources" to someone rooted in older US tactics, but it's more reasonable to us because we've internalized that's how modern first-world infantry look. Maybe part of it is trying to reframe a narrative about war when you are now the overdog, not the underdog; okay so you are technologically way ahead of the other guys, BUT there's not many of you! I don't think that's really a good example of what "super-soldier" means. Basically when everyones a super-soldier, no one is, that's just the new paradigm for what soldiers are. So the modern U.S. infantryman doesn't really qualify. Super-Soldier denotes that the soldier is some kind of experimental one-off or at most part of a limited run like a spec-ops division.
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Jan 25, 2021 02:34
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I always liked A Dry Quiet War (seriously one of my favorite short stories of all time) and in it while not fully elucidated there are clear heirarchies and tiers of super soldiers that are so beyond a normal person that something a higher tier can effortlessly destroy is so dangerous as to be like a god to normal humans.
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Jan 25, 2021 04:31
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Jan 25, 2021 05:47
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If you look at some elite units of soldier in history, there's an issue that focusing a lot of military power into the hands of a relatively small group of people can lead to them taking control in one way or another, like the Praetorian Guard that made a habit of killing Emperors, the Turkish Mercenaries that made a habit of killing Caliphs, or the Janissaries that eventually became a powerful political force of their own in the Ottoman Empire. That's actually reflected in a lot of fictional projects like that going rogue somehow. The Space Marines in 40k were top of the line supersoldiers, and about half of them betrayed the Imperium and hobbled them into being the backwards, disintegrating state they would be for the next 10,000 years, and that's on top of the Orkz apparently being the result of a bioweapon that ran wild after its original creators died off. There's also the TIE Defender, the super-TIE Fighter made by Admiral Zaarin. He took his own superior fighters and tried to take the Empire for himself.
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Jan 25, 2021 06:33
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There's a fuzzy line especially in ancient times between 'super-soldiers' and how an organised military force with proper training, standardised equipment, and organised tactics would run roughshod over armies that were basically everyone bringing whatever they could afford. That said, it's the kind of thing that became pretty obsolete once you get the industrialisation and mechanisation of war with gunpowder, armour, artillery and planes. There's a reason most 'super-soldiers' tend to evoke ancient times (40k Space Marines in particular, and Gundams busting out swords and scythes and such while the Zakus all use guns) and 'modern, grounded' takes on them tend to be the most dull and uninspired.
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Jan 25, 2021 08:33
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muscles like this! posted:In that vein there's the Avenue 5 from the TV show Avenue 5. It is a big fancy space cruise ship with a control room out of Star Trek, except all that stuff is just for show because outside of the passenger area the ship is dingy and utilitarian, including the actual control room. They even have a fake bridge crew and captain who are actors hired for their looks. As someone who did many maintenance jobs in shipyards on cruise ships, this is actually stunningly accurate
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Jan 25, 2021 08:37
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Silver2195 posted:I think a lot of that sort of thing is imported tropes from American media about Vietnam vets, although there is also a (sometimes a bit exploitative) interest in former child soldiers, often from Southeast Asia, that I can't think of a parallel to in non-Japanese media. (Sosuke from Full Metal Panic, Maiya from Fate/Zero, various characters in Magical Girl Spec Ops Asuka, etc.) Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron Blooded Orphans spends pretty much all of its time dealing with several flavors of this. Child soldiers sold as slaves, others who join up to avoid crushing poverty and so on. Then they combine that with the whole super-soldier concept by introducing a nanomachine surgical procedure in the spine that either gives them a direct interface to their mobile suits and enhanced spatial awareness or cripples them for life. Then we find out later that pilots in emergencies can remove the safeties in their interfaces, overload their connections to vastly increase the speed of their mobile suits but it basically strokes them out leaving permanent loose of limb usage and so on. Fun! As far as lovely tech is concerned, there’s a mobile suit in the main Gundam series known as the “Silver Bullet Suppressor”. It’s standard armament is a big loving gun and four extra right arms. See, they could bother to design the thing to actually handle the shock of firing its gun, so every time the gun fires, a new arm is pulled out of its backpack, installed and the gun can fire again. Brilliant? Solkanar512 fucked around with this message at 09:04 on Jan 25, 2021 |
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Jan 25, 2021 09:01
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Silver2195 posted:I think a lot of that sort of thing is imported tropes from American media about Vietnam vets, although there is also a (sometimes a bit exploitative) interest in former child soldiers, often from Southeast Asia, that I can't think of a parallel to in non-Japanese media. (Sosuke from Full Metal Panic, Maiya from Fate/Zero, various characters in Magical Girl Spec Ops Asuka, etc.) Some of it might be an occasional subgenre that you sometimes more recently see in Western media of 'what happens when the kid hero grows up', which is usually at least mild trauma. Apparently the writers regretted how that episode ended with basically a standoff and the crew leaving the planet to their fate. Seems especially wasted opportunity given the analogues to the Augments of human history. Also comes to mind DS9's episodes with the defective augments, basically the results of shoddy back-alley genetic augmentation that turn out... honestly uncomfortably clear analogues to people with mental disabilities, who also all happen to be idiot savants. DS9 also has one case of a super-soldier that turned out too well; that one Jem'Hadar who turned out not to have the dependency on Ketracel-White that's engineered into the rest of his species as a failsafe in case they go renegade.
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Jan 25, 2021 11:37
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I mean taking the space marines from 40k as an example you question whether they really have any actual connection to humanity anymore.
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Jan 25, 2021 15:55
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Barudak posted:I always liked A Dry Quiet War (seriously one of my favorite short stories of all time) and in it while not fully elucidated there are clear heirarchies and tiers of super soldiers that are so beyond a normal person that something a higher tier can effortlessly destroy is so dangerous as to be like a god to normal humans. I liked it right up until the end when I got to part with the sexual violence against the main character's lover for no goddamn reason. Too many science fiction authors have a real love-love relationship with rape and degrading/torturing women characters. Especially strong independent ones.
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Jan 25, 2021 18:15
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Megillah Gorilla posted:I liked it right up until the end when I got to part with the sexual violence against the main character's lover for no goddamn reason. "The authors barely disguised fetish" and it's mega 
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Jan 25, 2021 18:43
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Honestly it would be neat if someone showed power armor as anything but something that turns you into a superman. You know something with actual material drawbacks.
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Jan 25, 2021 18:48
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Defiance Industries posted:I think that some concepts are also rooted in the shift of US military doctrine from "we will overwhelm our enemies with the sheer number of tanks and bullets we build" to to one leveraging technological advantage as the main edge. The amount of technological doo-dads that a modern infantryman has access to would probably feel like "devoting disproportionate resources" to someone rooted in older US tactics, but it's more reasonable to us because we've internalized that's how modern first-world infantry look. Maybe part of it is trying to reframe a narrative about war when you are now the overdog, not the underdog; okay so you are technologically way ahead of the other guys, BUT there's not many of you! Ghost Leviathan posted:There's a fuzzy line especially in ancient times between 'super-soldiers' and how an organised military force with proper training, standardised equipment, and organised tactics would run roughshod over armies that were basically everyone bringing whatever they could afford. That said, it's the kind of thing that became pretty obsolete once you get the industrialisation and mechanisation of war with gunpowder, armour, artillery and planes. There's a reason most 'super-soldiers' tend to evoke ancient times (40k Space Marines in particular, and Gundams busting out swords and scythes and such while the Zakus all use guns) and 'modern, grounded' takes on them tend to be the most dull and uninspired. Well, military organization is never really that separate from the values of the civil society that created the military. The civil sphere of the US has become more inegalitarian since WW2 - and if you can have a 10x engineer why not a 10x soldier? Of course if you think that 10x engineer concept is silly you likely also think the 10x soldier concept is pretty silly too. For that modern era shift from knights+levies to mass infantry blocks, the changes in civil administration are at least as important as the changes in arms & armor - those medieval knights retained that high degree of independence and insulation from consequences on and off the battlefield, and the mass infantry armies of the modern era were simply not possible to build without changes to censuses, banking, and recruitment that all changed governance from being about personal relationships to more regimented bureaucracies. I say "at least" because we have an example of that military change happening without anything like firearms or industrialization (the Qin during the Warring States Period moved from an aristocratic cavalry context to a big gently caress-off blocks of infantry military with just halberds and crossbows). Lawman 0 posted:Honestly it would be neat if someone showed power armor as anything but something that turns you into a superman. You know something with actual material drawbacks. I mostly encounter it in strategy games where it's...not really a cure-all? Zone Troopers in C&C3 were just...fine I guess. Starcraft Marines are mostly kind of a punchline that are as good as the player's micro. 40k Space Marines are, contrary to the fiction, very middle of the road most of the time. Usually though the drawback is just "it's loving expensive and you may not have the facilities to make it at all." Which isn't that interesting. I'm not really sure what would make it particularly interesting though maybe I'm just not feeling very creative.
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Jan 25, 2021 19:29
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Well, I assume if you tried to pet a kitten, you'd crush it.
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Jan 25, 2021 21:20
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Lawman 0 posted:Honestly it would be neat if someone showed power armor as anything but something that turns you into a superman. You know something with actual material drawbacks. I imagine it'd be sort of terrifying actually. Either you're unaware of a lot of what's happening around you (because you are encased in armor) and yet horribly strong (and thus prone to terrible clumsiness), or you ARE aware of everything happening around you because your brain is jammed with an overwhelming number of sensors. And if it stops working you're helpless. And if it works too well it might break the fragile human thing inside. The only part of the most recent Predator movie I liked was when the guy accidentally blows his own head off with the shoulder cannon.
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Jan 25, 2021 21:43
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Lawman 0 posted:Honestly it would be neat if someone showed power armor as anything but something that turns you into a superman. You know something with actual material drawbacks. There are tons of mecha series where the mech will take over/go into overdrive/etc, rendering the human pilot little more than a passenger and likely multiple stroke victim due to whatever mcguffin the author comes up with. There are also variants where a commanding officer elsewhere takes over control and forces the pilot to sit there and accumulate PTSD while their mech commits horrible war crimes and the like right in front of them. IBO has a guy who was severely injured to the point of only being able to survive in a tank of some sort, so they turned the tank into a cockpit and locked him in a mech. He was actually thrilled at the idea.
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Jan 25, 2021 21:44
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Apparently the writers regretted how that episode ended with basically a standoff and the crew leaving the planet to their fate. Seems especially wasted opportunity given the analogues to the Augments of human history. i'm not sure how else you'd end it. i guess by having a big shootout and a bunch of people getting killed? it's actually a pretty surprising ending for TNG now that i think about it: the episode basically endorsed violent uprising when the government is unjustly imprisoning a whole segment of the population. like yeah the episode ends with the implication that the government will finally sit down and actually try to work out an acceptable solution, but the vets got there by holding the government at gunpoint. though really while the supersoldier thing is the sci-fi conceit, the negative consequences of failing to hold up your end of the bargain with your army is a pretty old story.
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Jan 25, 2021 21:45
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