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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 it's really a narrative thing. in a way, throwing a shitload of tech at infantry is probably seen as a way of trying to do war on the cheap; it has always cost a lot of money to support troops in the field. you buy a bunch of fancy equipment, yeah you spend a bunch of money up front, but if it saves you from having to deploy double or triple the number of troops it's probably worth it in the long run. but i think the big thing is not racking up a big death count. one of the perceived lessons of the Vietnam War was the body count and the footage of dead soldiers coming home eroding public support. so you spend big - and remember, someone's making those war gizmos, so that's money in someone's constituent's pockets! - and try to minimize that so that people don't get too pissed off about how many Americans are being killed overseas. that said, overwhelming people with tanks was a tech advantage in its own way. or rather, with trucks; reportedly one of the captured Germans at Normandy knew they were hosed when they saw all these mechanized vehicles rolling up the beach and not one goddamn horse. we could drown our logistics problems in oil.
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Jan 25, 2021 21:57
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:i don't think it's really a narrative thing. in a way, throwing a shitload of tech at infantry is probably seen as a way of trying to do war on the cheap; it has always cost a lot of money to support troops in the field. you buy a bunch of fancy equipment, yeah you spend a bunch of money up front, but if it saves you from having to deploy double or triple the number of troops it's probably worth it in the long run. No, I mean the interest in super-soldier stories narratively is a reflection of the wars we see in real life and trying to spin a heroic narrative out of that. An analog to the modern US can't really be the plucky underdog after all.
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Jan 25, 2021 21:59
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oh, derp. sorry for misreading you.
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Jan 25, 2021 22:31
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Oh wait Robocop is a power armor story, Robocop is good and interesting.Defiance Industries posted:Well, I assume if you tried to pet a kitten, you'd crush it. This reminds me, one of the best TTRPGs I've played is "Nice Marines." The players are all space marines in gently caress-off power armor, and if they end up in combat they just win, no possibility of failure. However, the whole point of the game is that you're trying to handle post-conquest diplomacy without the actual dedicated diplomats showing up, so your skills are stuff like "Repairing Buildings" and "Holding Parades," and if you roll too high you get "Success, with minor/dire/catastrophic collateral damage."
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Jan 25, 2021 22:32
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:i don't think it's really a narrative thing. in a way, throwing a shitload of tech at infantry is probably seen as a way of trying to do war on the cheap; it has always cost a lot of money to support troops in the field. you buy a bunch of fancy equipment, yeah you spend a bunch of money up front, but if it saves you from having to deploy double or triple the number of troops it's probably worth it in the long run. Right, like how Janissaries would risk getting shot just so they could grab their dead comrades' bodies and drag them away from the city walls they were sieging, just for the psychological impact of the defenders looking down and seeing that all that effort of repelling the invaders hadn't even produced one visible corpse. That's a morale hit, right there.
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Jan 25, 2021 23:26
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Solkanar512 posted: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. The big loving gun is also the main weapon of the Gundam from the series right before that, which notably doesn't blow its arm off when it shoots it
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Jan 25, 2021 23:35
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I realize I'm gonna get flak for it but giant robots with swords and other melee weapons is pretty garbage tech and I've never heard a compelling reason why that tech exists beyond being handwaved away via the rule of cool instead of just "lots of big guns" like seems more practical.
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Jan 26, 2021 01:16
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It's because people have a lot of brain devoted to emotional responses to the movement and stances of other human beings. So large technology that looks like people is appealing and evocative.
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Jan 26, 2021 01:33
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frogge posted:I realize I'm gonna get flak for it but giant robots with swords and other melee weapons is pretty garbage tech and I've never heard a compelling reason why that tech exists beyond being handwaved away via the rule of cool instead of just "lots of big guns" like seems more practical. Just wait until you realize that you could easily kill any reasonably sized mech pilot simply by knocking them over or tripping them. At work they talk about falls on concrete start being lethal at 10’. The first Gundam is about 60’ tall, so put the cockpit around 45-50’. You knock it down at a decent clip and you’ve just made the pilot go splat. Not to mention poo poo like getting punched or kicked in the torso. So I will say that in IBO, the reason it’s mostly hand to hand is that lasers aren’t used as weapons due to the development of cheap armor coatings that render them useless and that artillery ammo is really expensive. So they do use conventional projectile weapons but a big, gently caress off mace is just going to be cheaper in that economy. But then again, if you want to see realistic space combat, watch The Expanse.
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Jan 26, 2021 01:51
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frogge posted:I realize I'm gonna get flak for it but giant robots with swords and other melee weapons is pretty garbage tech and I've never heard a compelling reason why that tech exists beyond being handwaved away via the rule of cool instead of just "lots of big guns" like seems more practical. I think it makes more sense when they're not just a very sharp piece of metal, like with laser swords or an axe with a super-heated blade. In Gundam they do have the justification that the suits are somehow armored better against guns than it is against special cutting tools. I think there's also a justification in space that they need weapons without a chance for damaging nearby colonies. There is a lot of fictional science justification for how most of the things in Mobile Suit Gundam work, with a lot of stuff about Minovsky particles.
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Jan 26, 2021 02:53
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Solkanar512 posted:But then again, if you want to see realistic space combat, watch The Expanse. No orbital closing velocities, no radiators. I dunno.
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Jan 26, 2021 03:01
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General Battuta posted:No orbital closing velocities, no radiators. I dunno. I remember there was a space board game that had both of these I think (attack vector: tactical?) What I mostly remember from it is that combat would be over quickly because you would have to either unfurl your radiators after your cooling packs over whatever were used up or you know burn to death horribly. 
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Jan 26, 2021 05:31
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Putting legs on your tank is basically the epitome of lovely garbage tech Especially if that tank is in space
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Jan 26, 2021 05:55
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Lawman 0 posted:I mean taking the space marines from 40k as an example you question whether they really have any actual connection to humanity anymore. There's actually a thing with the Tau where while they see humanity having promise as a subject species and even the Imperium despite its completely insane everything can sometimes be reasoned with, they really aren't sure whether to consider Space Marines to be human in any meaningful sense so much as living, sentient weapons. Tulip posted:Oh wait Robocop is a power armor story, Robocop is good and interesting. That's a fun one I need to play sometime, where its entire ruleset fits on a single page. And the idea of 'power armour as a life support system' is also a thing in 40k, of course, with Space Marine Dreadnoughts, basically mortally wounded war heroes put into a walking tank. Similar things pop up in a lot of settings- as said, Robocop is arguably an example, the line between cyborg and power armour can get pretty fuzzy, though the Robocop remake does make it clear in the most horrifying possible fashion that he's basically the bare minimum of human organs stuck into a machine, which is also pretty heavily implied in the original.
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Jan 26, 2021 06:07
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Gundam Iron Blooded Orphans got mentioned and I gotta say the ending of the show being logistics>super soldiers was unexpected.
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Jan 26, 2021 06:23
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In 40k they also have a procedure where they scoop out enough key bits of humanity out of a person so that what's left is either a mindless drone capable of performing basic menial tasks or a personality-less processing machine. They have a prohibition against AI, but it's never really clear how advanced Imperium computers are allowed to get before they have to be plugged into a scooped-out human skull. Some machines literally get taken over by various warp-entities to keep them running, although the Dreadclaw drop pod apparently was consciously evil enough on its own that even demons are scared to possess them?
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Jan 26, 2021 07:45
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Ghost Leviathan posted: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. There was another one where the scientist who made the super-soldier formula wasn't killed right after Steve Rogers' experimental procedure, and they put the serum into mass production. The government reasoned that if they gave the serum to everyone, then an entire nation of super-soldiers would be impossible to invade and by default have more and better soldiers than anyone else could ever hope to bring against them. But how to guard against rebellion? Weaken the formula enough to require periodic treatments to maintain the effect. Oh, and also make it addictive so everyone must stay on the formula! When Steve Rogers got unthawed in this timeline, his reaction was "...What in the living hell is going on here??" and led a revolution against the whole scheme.
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Jan 26, 2021 09:24
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SlothfulCobra posted:In 40k they also have a procedure where they scoop out enough key bits of humanity out of a person so that what's left is either a mindless drone capable of performing basic menial tasks or a personality-less processing machine. Machine smart enough to say the imperium is wrong is a machine that gets a brains scooping. The Dreadclaw Drop Pod that was born on a mountain and raised in cave? Totally fine.
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Jan 26, 2021 09:31
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This reminds me that the modern Deus Ex's are about this and that's why they are more interesting than the old ones
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Jan 26, 2021 10:45
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RBA Starblade posted:Putting legs on your tank is basically the epitome of lovely garbage tech The only time it makes sense* is when you have genetically engineered, living vehicles. Meat wheels being rather hard to design. Tyranids, of course, spring to mind:  * for a given value of sense Megillah Gorilla fucked around with this message at 15:17 on Jan 26, 2021 |
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Jan 26, 2021 15:15
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SlothfulCobra posted:In 40k they also have a procedure where they scoop out enough key bits of humanity out of a person so that what's left is either a mindless drone capable of performing basic menial tasks or a personality-less processing machine. Even the Imperium isn't clear on it- AIs evil, 'Machine Spirits' are good and sacred. Key thing is that humanity has no loving idea how a lot of its more advanced technology even works, with the primary tech organisation being the Adeptus Mechanicus who literally treat technology as sacred.
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Jan 26, 2021 18:13
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Most of the Titanicus fiction I remember was about how the "Machine Spirits" were barely controllable, and immediately engaged in a clash of wills with any Princeps who dared try to pilot it.
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Jan 26, 2021 18:27
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Yeah, I think it's been implied that there could be a lot of AIs running around Mars, but then there's also the Void Dragon somewhere in there that supposedly has power over technology and maybe the Emperor imprisoned it there in a myth to help tame technology? And of course, while most warp entities are horrible demons, there's also benign or benevolent beings powered by imperial faith, that could have some part in things. And so Machine Spirits could be any of the above, or they could be a personified characterization of nonsentient user interfaces by people who don't understand them and probably don't even speak the same language as when it was designed 20,000 years ago during the wondrous dark age of technology.
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Jan 26, 2021 18:35
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SlothfulCobra posted:Yeah, I think it's been implied that there could be a lot of AIs running around Mars, but then there's also the Void Dragon somewhere in there that supposedly has power over technology and maybe the Emperor imprisoned it there in a myth to help tame technology? And of course, while most warp entities are horrible demons, there's also benign or benevolent beings powered by imperial faith, that could have some part in things. And its also been implied that the void dragon is actually a c'tan, and the most powerful of them at that, while the champions /heroes/gods of the eldari during their defining apocalyptic war was actually the drat Chaos gods. Khorne the blood god literally/allegoricly? fighting the c'tan+necron at the head of a troop of eldar bullshit 40k is beautifully bananas so very, very often https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVXGSaiVhhw
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Jan 26, 2021 19:13
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RBA Starblade posted:Putting legs on your tank is basically the epitome of lovely garbage tech Indeed. I totally get why mechs are a thing (as a kind of superhero analog) but hell, RL tanks need to operate supported by infantry or it goes badly for them. It's why armored formations are half tanks and half APCs. Now mechs that transform into space F-14s on the other hand----- SlothfulCobra posted:There is a lot of fictional science justification for how most of the things in Mobile Suit Gundam work, with a lot of stuff about Minovsky particles. I've seen only a little Gundam, (I watched about half of Iron blooded orphans but noped out when I thought things were just getting dumb) but I do appreciate how efforts are made to justify why war is done this way. I figured fighting mechs were natural growths from space suits advancing into exo suit like armatures. ThisIsJohnWayne posted:This reminds me that the modern Deus Ex's are about this and that's why they are more interesting than the old ones You and I are in some ways very different Also re: super soldiers, it occurs to me a theme you see in Phillip K Dick and Gene Wolfe novels is the dangers of making people distant from the rest of humanity. In that novel I was recapping earlier this year, fame, power, and the wealth that comes with it isolates the main characters from the mass of humanity, and warps them in various unwholesome ways. It's only when one character has identity wiped (in a ludicrous way) that he actually becomes sorta decent.
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Jan 26, 2021 20:47
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With Mechs I just think about the fact that by having the same (or more!) mass concentrated onto a smaller contact with the ground, you have substantially less terrain that you can reasonably traverse due to, y'know, sinking. This did make me think about how in the greatest mech game, Armored Core, there's just like dozens of existential superweapons lying around unmaintained from back before humans hosed themselves underground. Like half your missions are "uhhh so terrorists/our corporate rivals have taken control of a nuclear weapon+++ that nobody ever got around to decommissioning, and are holding a city hostage, can you kill them all?"
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Jan 26, 2021 21:21
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Tulip posted:With Mechs I just think about the fact that by having the same (or more!) mass concentrated onto a smaller contact with the ground, you have substantially less terrain that you can reasonably traverse due to, y'know, sinking. The flip side to that, and the justification why the Empire in Star Wars has such a hard on for walkers, is that walking vehicles can traverse much rougher terrain than wheeled/tracked vehicles can. Does it make sense? Maybe, for something specialised (like a modern day walking forestry machine), but not for the core of a military force.
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Jan 26, 2021 21:48
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Here’s something dumb with war machines that keeps coming up- there’s always some special “powered up” mode where suddenly hatches and panels open up and tons of thrusters pop out for extra speed and whatnot. So you mean to tell me that for this entire time, these mechs were carrying around dead weight in terms of engines that were never used? Capacity that could have been used for more fuel, ammo, weapons or just left empty for greater efficiency? Come on.
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Jan 27, 2021 01:03
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Not to mention that those transformation sequences are invariably elaborate and complex with tons of moving parts. So not only is there all this dead weight, there's now a million points of failure where if any one panel or motor gets jammed, the whole thing doesn't work.
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Jan 27, 2021 01:47
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Defiance Industries posted:Well, I assume if you tried to pet a kitten, you'd crush it. There's actually a 40k short story that has a similar, if less depressing drawback, to power armor. A few years back, one of the Primarchs (progenitors to the space marines, they're unique 9ft tall metahumans more similar to demigods from ancient myth than the child soldiers turned brutish freaks of their 'sons') returned but due to some space-magic injury was locked into his power armor as a life support system. The story is a slice-of-life look into his day where it's made clear having to live in power armor is absolutely terrible. At one point a piece of paper falls onto the floor from his desk and he has to call a servant to pick it up, all while he's fuming that he can literally punch through tanks with his innate strength + power armor but due to the armor now also lacks the mobility and dexterity pick up small objects off the floor or other everyday tasks. I assume that includes petting kittens.
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Jan 27, 2021 02:01
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1000 Brown M and Ms posted:The flip side to that, and the justification why the Empire in Star Wars has such a hard on for walkers, is that walking vehicles can traverse much rougher terrain than wheeled/tracked vehicles can. Does it make sense? Maybe, for something specialised (like a modern day walking forestry machine), but not for the core of a military force. It makes even less sense given everything in Star Wars can just float. I don't just mean things like land speeders and hoverbikes, even the bloody star destroyers have no problems sitting just above the ground with no apparent effort.  I always assumed the reason the empire liked walkers was for their intimidation factor. The scenes in Empire Strikes Back where the walkers are approaching the rebel base and you can hear the big heavy stomping getting slowly closer and closer and things start falling off the walls would definitely have an impart on the morale of the people you're about to attack. It's not just fear of their battlestations that keeps people in line.
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Jan 27, 2021 04:35
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I always figured that the "float just above a gravity well" vehicles worked on a different engine and fictional physics principle than flying through space. At least, Rogue Squadron depicted it like that, with the snow speeders only being able to go so high. And then presumably legged vehicles could be more efficient at carrying large loads.
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Jan 27, 2021 05:25
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Tulip posted:With Mechs I just think about the fact that by having the same (or more!) mass concentrated onto a smaller contact with the ground, you have substantially less terrain that you can reasonably traverse due to, y'know, sinking. The NEXTs in Armored Core 4/4A are definitely garbage tech - they run on nuclear reactors of a sort that spew "kojima particles" everywhere while the mech is on. This killed the ecosystems of most of the planet and triggered mega global warming. Oops! There are also "Arms Forts", which are giant mechs if mechs were also gigantic military bases, and are explicitly described as obsolete pieces of poo poo only valuable because ten thousand guns shooting in the same direction at once is useful still, or would be, except one of them is destroyed by shooting the guns off. In Armored Core 5 there are more "standard" robots instead and the final boss of Verdict Day is a rebuilt White Glint NEXT. It's three times your size. The implication is that you're running on cleaner, but shittier and weaker, power sources that won't kill the world a second time
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Jan 27, 2021 05:52
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1000 Brown M and Ms posted:Not to mention that those transformation sequences are invariably elaborate and complex with tons of moving parts. So not only is there all this dead weight, there's now a million points of failure where if any one panel or motor gets jammed, the whole thing doesn't work. And if we’re talking a “real robot”, those servos and panels are all going to be produced by different suppliers using prison labor at the lowest cost and it’s going to work out very well for the shareholders.
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Jan 27, 2021 05:53
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Solkanar512 posted:And if we’re talking a “real robot”, those servos and panels are all going to be produced by different suppliers using prison labor at the lowest cost and it’s going to work out very well for the shareholders. It's a minor plot point in Gundam that the company that made the Earth Federation's giant robots and the company that made Space Nazi Germany's giant robots had a merger at one point
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Jan 27, 2021 05:56
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Megillah Gorilla posted:It makes even less sense given everything in Star Wars can just float. It's because the people making the Original Trilogy used their brains and the people making the lovely Trilogies were not using their brains.
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Jan 27, 2021 06:04
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RBA Starblade posted:It's a minor plot point in Gundam that the company that made the Earth Federation's giant robots and the company that made Space Nazi Germany's giant robots had a merger at one point I totally forgot!
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Jan 27, 2021 06:08
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Solkanar512 posted:Here’s something dumb with war machines that keeps coming up- there’s always some special “powered up” mode where suddenly hatches and panels open up and tons of thrusters pop out for extra speed and whatnot. 1000 Brown M and Ms posted:Not to mention that those transformation sequences are invariably elaborate and complex with tons of moving parts. So not only is there all this dead weight, there's now a million points of failure where if any one panel or motor gets jammed, the whole thing doesn't work. Oh man, shmup bosses are often just hilarious for this, Sonic Wings/Aero Fighters in particular comes to mind. At least in most cases, the thrusts and such are usually implied to be for emergency use. Transformers: Fall of Cybertron also comes to mind with how apparently literally everything on Cybertron is absurdly overengineered and sucks up Energon by the ocean, but it's implied it's only become a problem recently because Megatron used evil Dark Energon to poison the planet's core and Cybertron is becoming unable to support its native techno-organic life that relies on the stuff. Especially when they suggest using a massive Energon transport to move a huge Energon supply they found, but the argument's brought up that it uses almost as much fuel as it carries... and turns out to have, among other ridiculous amounts of redundancies and defenses, a full on flight mode. And while Metal Gear could probably support a few posts itt, one special favourite comes to mind: the loving Cocoon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2LZOpWv7CY Which is probably one of the few cases where you get a 3D version of a shmup or Metal Slug boss, in all its completely absurd glory. It has so many systems and moving parts, and 100%ing the game even requires focusing on specific areas and weapons at a time to unlock their circuit boards. One can only imagine what the gently caress Huey was thinking, though my own guess is 'What do we do with all the leftover guns and tank and battleship bits? Just throw 'em all together.' I think a goon in the Lets Play thread guessed that it probably has an operational range of about five miles from the factory that built it- which at least is consistent with its use in the game. Tulip posted:With Mechs I just think about the fact that by having the same (or more!) mass concentrated onto a smaller contact with the ground, you have substantially less terrain that you can reasonably traverse due to, y'know, sinking. The funny thing is this reminds me that Ork Gargants are the most practical and realistic designs for super-heavy mechs in Warhammer 40k, relatively speaking. They have wide, squat designs with large feet or treads to avoid sinking into the ground, often skirt-like armour to protect the legs while giving them room to move and be maintained, and large crews with dedicated teams for individual sections.
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Jan 27, 2021 10:49
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Solkanar512 posted:Here’s something dumb with war machines that keeps coming up- there’s always some special “powered up” mode where suddenly hatches and panels open up and tons of thrusters pop out for extra speed and whatnot. there's a real world analogue here in War Emergency Power. not whole extra engines but forcing the engine to produce additional power for a limited time.
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Jan 27, 2021 13:23
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RBA Starblade posted:It's a minor plot point in Gundam that the company that made the Earth Federation's giant robots and the company that made Space Nazi Germany's giant robots had a merger at one point It worked for Daimler-Chrysler!
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Jan 28, 2021 21:52
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