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Barudak
May 7, 2007

Defiance Industries posted:

If you start asking questions like that you also have to ask why that asteroid belt, with so many asteroids so close together, isn't the industrial heart of the entire galaxy with Hoth as a 1940s Detroit in space

Other asteroid fields aren't infested with space worms

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Megillah Gorilla
Sep 22, 2003

If only all of life's problems could be solved by smoking a professor of ancient evil texts.



Bread Liar
Fyrnocks are also a thing.



And Mynocks.


Also space whales, but they tend to only kill people by accident.

Defiance Industries
Jul 22, 2010

A five-star manufacturer


Barudak posted:

Other asteroid fields aren't infested with space worms

Other asteroid fields don't have asteroids spitting distance from each other. loving kill the one space worm and you're set.

Lazy Fair
Sep 23, 2019

Robot Style posted:

Looks like that's part of an ILM Artstation challenge, so is fan art as hell, but it's pretty clearly inspired by some actual concept art done for The Force Awakens:



Its ridiculous in concept but I kinda dig it. The lines and proportions are good, and its kind of evocative of the trade federation droid control ships which could tie into some narrative about wealthy industrialists having no loyalty to the defeated confederacy. A red star destroyer ain't a bad idea either for some sort of imperial cult.

I like it better than almost any design we saw actually make it to the screen in the sequel trilogy.

Lazy Fair fucked around with this message at 08:03 on Apr 27, 2021

SlothfulCobra
Mar 27, 2011

They didn't have the ships to haul asteroids around, and even if they did there'd be no point in sticking it out in their secret base and risk the entire rebel command just for the chance to take out a couple of the indefinite amount of ships the Empire would send.

Defiance Industries posted:

If you start asking questions like that you also have to ask why that asteroid belt, with so many asteroids so close together, isn't the industrial heart of the entire galaxy with Hoth as a 1940s Detroit in space

Because transport costs for the already-existing space Detroits to just import already refined materials are cheaper than the cost of building entire factories onsite.

Unless you really just don't know cities at all and you mean building a space Pittsburgh, the city that produced the bulk of America's steel and shipped it out to places like Detroit, in which case presumably there's already profitable operations that aren't in the middle of nowhere and are much less hazardous.

What's the advantage supposed to be? Is it good for your bloomeries to get shelled by constant debris instead of just taking a minute of transit time between individual mining points? How many economies of scale can you get going when all the individual asteroids are that small?

Nebakenezzer
Sep 13, 2005

The Mote in God's Eye

This is low hanging fruit as it is from the Alien series, but:

In Alien Isolation, the space station Servestapol has a central intelligence mainframe called Apollo, which runs a fair bit of the station. It also has a small army of cheap androids, called Working Joes which it controls. The Working Joes are about as smart and as articulate as a roomba. But here's the garbage tech part: Apollo locks its communications chamber off from everyone, and then the *only way* to communicate with it is via a Working Joe, which has to insert itself into a CAT scanner like device.

Of course, once you are in the comm chamber, Apollo speaks via text.

Schadenboner
Aug 15, 2011

by Shine

SlothfulCobra posted:

They didn't have the ships to haul asteroids around, and even if they did there'd be no point in sticking it out in their secret base and risk the entire rebel command just for the chance to take out a couple of the indefinite amount of ships the Empire would send.


Because transport costs for the already-existing space Detroits to just import already refined materials are cheaper than the cost of building entire factories onsite.

Unless you really just don't know cities at all and you mean building a space Pittsburgh, the city that produced the bulk of America's steel and shipped it out to places like Detroit, in which case presumably there's already profitable operations that aren't in the middle of nowhere and are much less hazardous.

What's the advantage supposed to be? Is it good for your bloomeries to get shelled by constant debris instead of just taking a minute of transit time between individual mining points? How many economies of scale can you get going when all the individual asteroids are that small?

Counterpoint: Pittsburg is complete poo poo. When the crowning cultural produce of your city is an average-to-good FO3 DLC you’ve got to start asking yourself some searching questions.

Foxfire_
Nov 8, 2010

Schadenboner posted:

Counterpoint: Pittsburg is complete poo poo. When the crowning cultural produce of your city is an average-to-good FO3 DLC you’ve got to start asking yourself some searching questions.

Counter-counterpoint: Mr Roger's Neighborhood was made in Pittsburg

Schwarzwald
Jul 27, 2004

Don't Blink

Cracker King posted:

Didn’t at least one Star Destroyer eat it in ESB after the battle of Hoth while navigating the asteroid field?

I forgot if it was due to rocks pulverizing the shield or as I vaguely recall just incompetent captains?

It leads to the best sight gag in the film.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gh7AcuxfxI

frogge
Apr 7, 2006


Nebakenezzer posted:

This is low hanging fruit as it is from the Alien series, but:

In Alien Isolation, the space station Servestapol has a central intelligence mainframe called Apollo, which runs a fair bit of the station. It also has a small army of cheap androids, called Working Joes which it controls. The Working Joes are about as smart and as articulate as a roomba. But here's the garbage tech part: Apollo locks its communications chamber off from everyone, and then the *only way* to communicate with it is via a Working Joe, which has to insert itself into a CAT scanner like device.

Of course, once you are in the comm chamber, Apollo speaks via text.

I think that's because of the retro-futurism they're going for with the Alien aesthetic, but right there with you on that one.

Schadenboner
Aug 15, 2011

by Shine

Foxfire_ posted:

Counter-counterpoint: Mr Roger's Neighborhood was made in Pittsburg

:hmmyes:

MadDogMike
Apr 9, 2008

Cute but fanged

Nebakenezzer posted:

This is low hanging fruit as it is from the Alien series, but:

In Alien Isolation, the space station Servestapol has a central intelligence mainframe called Apollo, which runs a fair bit of the station. It also has a small army of cheap androids, called Working Joes which it controls. The Working Joes are about as smart and as articulate as a roomba. But here's the garbage tech part: Apollo locks its communications chamber off from everyone, and then the *only way* to communicate with it is via a Working Joe, which has to insert itself into a CAT scanner like device.

Of course, once you are in the comm chamber, Apollo speaks via text.

I appreciate the fact Apollo and the Working Joes are in-universe supposed to be garbage tech, in particular thanks to cost cutting idiocy. One gets the impression Weyland-Yutani did not need to do much to make Apollo go "feed all humans to the Aliens", it probably would have done so even if it wasn't programmed to (hell, maybe even if you programmed it to protect the humans - "if I kill all the potential hosts, the Aliens won't be around to be a problem!").

jeeves
May 27, 2001

Deranged Psychopathic
Butler Extraordinaire
I really wish they would have gone out of their way to connect the inferred dots that the marines in Aliens were lovely mercs hired by Burke to try to keep a lid on the profits for himself instead of any governments or the rest of the corp.

It would make sense if it was a squad of mercs and they were trying to keep their pay down by not having a lot of crew. Also would have been a nice plot point of "no one is coming to rescue us" as no one knew that they were there due to Burke keeping the whole thing to himself, instead of the 17 days or whatever for normal military rescue.

They are just so amazingly over-confidently incompetent, and the fact that there are ZERO crew left on the ship after they go on a drop is so weird. Talk about lovely tech-- all it would have taken is like ONE person left on the ship to arrive in the secondary thing. Or like, androids-- as they are already established in the film's universe.

jeeves fucked around with this message at 05:52 on May 1, 2021

Defiance Industries
Jul 22, 2010

A five-star manufacturer


I thought they were really overconfident because going around and exterminating weird alien wildlife is something they've done a lot of already. The xenomorphs are just so far beyond any other kind of animal they've casually exterminated.

Schwarzwald
Jul 27, 2004

Don't Blink
"The Marines are kind of lovely" doesn't really demand an explanation.

Schwarzwald
Jul 27, 2004

Don't Blink
the real shittiest piece of garbage tech in science fiction is the military-industrial complex, am i right folks??

Slashrat
Jun 6, 2011

YOSPOS

Nebakenezzer posted:

This is low hanging fruit as it is from the Alien series, but:

In Alien Isolation, the space station Servestapol has a central intelligence mainframe called Apollo, which runs a fair bit of the station. It also has a small army of cheap androids, called Working Joes which it controls. The Working Joes are about as smart and as articulate as a roomba. But here's the garbage tech part: Apollo locks its communications chamber off from everyone, and then the *only way* to communicate with it is via a Working Joe, which has to insert itself into a CAT scanner like device.

Of course, once you are in the comm chamber, Apollo speaks via text.

This isn't garbage tech part of it for me. The following is.

Apollo is pretty much an inseparable part of the station that the local management of the owning corporation have been trying to sell. They finally manage to sell it and immediately give the new owners full access to remotely upload their own confidential instructions to Apollo over the space internet, while still living on said space station.

The instructions? "Lock yourself off. Kill any and all humans on the station trying to harm the aliens that are hunting them."

Maybe more garbage tech literacy than actual garbage tech?

Slashrat fucked around with this message at 12:08 on May 1, 2021

chiasaur11
Oct 22, 2012



jeeves posted:

I really wish they would have gone out of their way to connect the inferred dots that the marines in Aliens were lovely mercs hired by Burke to try to keep a lid on the profits for himself instead of any governments or the rest of the corp.

It would make sense if it was a squad of mercs and they were trying to keep their pay down by not having a lot of crew. Also would have been a nice plot point of "no one is coming to rescue us" as no one knew that they were there due to Burke keeping the whole thing to himself, instead of the 17 days or whatever for normal military rescue.

They are just so amazingly over-confidently incompetent, and the fact that there are ZERO crew left on the ship after they go on a drop is so weird. Talk about lovely tech-- all it would have taken is like ONE person left on the ship to arrive in the secondary thing. Or like, androids-- as they are already established in the film's universe.

They're not mercs, and that's just as important to the story as them being intentionally understaffed and lead by a green looie so nobody can rat on Burke.

The narrative is about government forces meant to protect society being hijacked by corporate interests, and that doesn't work with mercs, because mercs are explicitly loyal only to money. Meanwhile some of the film's core conflicts come from the divide between the Marine's goals on paper (protect the colonists) and what they're actually being used for (help the company cover its rear end), and how the Marines react when they realize the conflict.

They're overconfident because most of them have done this a million times with zero difficulty, and they think the civilian is overexaggerating a non-issue, and they're inept because their commanding officer (handpicked by Burke) is someone with no real field experience so they won't go off script.

Ghost Leviathan
Mar 2, 2017

Exploration is ill-advised.

boo boo bear posted:

drat right. drones are stupid looking and can't smile for the camera. sexy fighter pilots will sell a billion in warbonds and that's how you win wars.

And that suddenly reminded me of Manly Guys Doing Manly Things having a Nonspecific Space Future (tm) where due to every power having MAD level firepower pointed at each other, wars are specifically fought for public opinion, complete with super-soldiers being genetically engineered and conditioned to be appealing to the masses. A lot of them, especially the protagonist, aren't happy about this. (His commanding officer says 'We made you to be Marcus Fenix and you turned into Hank Hill') Especially when they falsely tell him his family are dead to give him a traumatic backstory and he wants to talk to a therapist... and on the CO's reaction to that, a lawyer.

It's not taken particularly seriously, but it's a scary thought.

MadDogMike
Apr 9, 2008

Cute but fanged

Slashrat posted:

This isn't garbage tech part of it for me. The following is.

Apollo is pretty much an inseparable part of the station that the local management of the owning corporation have been trying to sell. They finally manage to sell it and immediately give the new owners full access to remotely upload their own confidential instructions to Apollo over the space internet, while still living on said space station.

The instructions? "Lock yourself off. Kill any and all humans on the station trying to harm the aliens that are hunting them."

Maybe more garbage tech literacy than actual garbage tech?

Oh like THAT doesn't fit the level of typical corporate executive thinking. Hell, if they had thought ahead to realize Weyland Yutani could kill them with Apollo that way, it would have been MORE unrealistic really.

StashAugustine
Mar 24, 2013

Do not trust in hope- it will betray you! Only faith and hatred sustain.

fartknocker posted:

Sounds like Booster Terrik’s Errant Venture, which was a full on Imperial II-class Star Destroyer but lacking most of the weapons. IIRC he did get painted red at some point, but was constantly having trouble finding parts to keep it running after a certain point.

Yeah IIRC the New Republic strongarmed him into using it as a decoy and he went along on the condition they paint it bright red so they couldn't do it again. And it's constantly breaking down because he's running it with a skeleton crew, which produced a thread-relevant moment where another character quips that "back during the war, I had an Alliance engineer tell me a Star Destroyer was nothing more that two hundred thousand design flaws, waiting to be exploited."

MadDogMike
Apr 9, 2008

Cute but fanged

StashAugustine posted:

Yeah IIRC the New Republic strongarmed him into using it as a decoy and he went along on the condition they paint it bright red so they couldn't do it again. And it's constantly breaking down because he's running it with a skeleton crew, which produced a thread-relevant moment where another character quips that "back during the war, I had an Alliance engineer tell me a Star Destroyer was nothing more that two hundred thousand design flaws, waiting to be exploited."

That was actually a line from the West End Star Wars RPG as I recall. I did get a kick out of the fact the RPG wrote up the Alliance as full of all these groups of lunatics/geniuses who were coming up with all these cunning schemes to steal Star Destroyers and various other Imperial ships/weapons and using them to create unbelievable chaos for the Empire (i.e. your average Star Wars PC group) and Alliance Command basically just learned to roll with it because they got results even if trying to organize them made herding cats look easy.

Impossibly Perfect Sphere
Nov 6, 2002

Dead? That's what they want you to think.
Every ship in Star Fleet is lovely engineering - everything needs a containment field or constant monitoring from the computer to not blow the gently caress up.

jeeves
May 27, 2001

Deranged Psychopathic
Butler Extraordinaire

Impossibly Perfect Sphere posted:

Every ship in Star Fleet is lovely engineering - everything needs a containment field or constant monitoring from the computer to not blow the gently caress up.

Everything about our modern world will completely explode the moment humans stop caring for them: especially chemical / gas plants.

Ghost Leviathan
Mar 2, 2017

Exploration is ill-advised.
Apparently, the B-1 Trade Federation Battle Droids got a reputation during and after the Clone Wars for being the cheapest crappiest droids ever made, with their only real upside being that they're pumped out by the hundreds of thousands and designed to be completely expendable. And of course, that was pretty sufficient to kill a lot of Jedi, Clones and Republic troopers. Apparently while they were given their own processors after the Battle of Naboo as a backup in case the central control ship goes down again, they're still the cheapest ones money can buy. Though probably doesn't help that the Separatist droids would gladly go around gunning down unarmed civilians, even children, as demonstrated in The Mandalorian.

...makes a lot of sense with the rise of the Empire there, especially since the Stormtroopers are the descendants of the strictly professional clones- at that point the Seperatists have to be galactic pariahs.

Schadenboner
Aug 15, 2011

by Shine
Legit, the WEG treatment of Star Wars is probably the best example of how to do an IP licensed RPG “right” (another being the FFG 40k series, although there’s a lot of jank with the mechanics with those, IMO?)

Silver2195
Apr 4, 2012

Ghost Leviathan posted:

Apparently, the B-1 Trade Federation Battle Droids got a reputation during and after the Clone Wars for being the cheapest crappiest droids ever made, with their only real upside being that they're pumped out by the hundreds of thousands and designed to be completely expendable. And of course, that was pretty sufficient to kill a lot of Jedi, Clones and Republic troopers. Apparently while they were given their own processors after the Battle of Naboo as a backup in case the central control ship goes down again, they're still the cheapest ones money can buy. Though probably doesn't help that the Separatist droids would gladly go around gunning down unarmed civilians, even children, as demonstrated in The Mandalorian.

...makes a lot of sense with the rise of the Empire there, especially since the Stormtroopers are the descendants of the strictly professional clones- at that point the Seperatists have to be galactic pariahs.

It's weird that, for all the talk about "heroes on both sides" in the Episode III opening crawl, what we actually see of the Separatists seems pretty cartoonishly evil in basically all the material I'm familiar with.

Fantastic Foreskin
Jan 6, 2013

A golden helix streaked skyward from the Helvault. A thunderous explosion shattered the silver monolith and Avacyn emerged, free from her prison at last.

"Heroes" in this context is relative to their side, not a statement of morality. Ones who do exceptional things for their cause.

Defiance Industries
Jul 22, 2010

A five-star manufacturer


It would be pretty weird if Star Wars went around calling Darth Vader or Grand Moff Tarkin "heroes" though

Schwarzwald
Jul 27, 2004

Don't Blink
It's also a dig at the Republic/the Jedi. To households alike in dignity, and all that.

BiggestOrangeTree
May 19, 2008
I thought they meant heroes like hero units in RTS games.

chiasaur11
Oct 22, 2012



This season of anime got a decent submission for the pile in the Juggernauts from 86.

Officially, they're drones to fight a clean war. They're pretty lowest bidder for spider-tanks. Tin armor, 6 pound cannon rather than something beefy like a Rheinmetall Rh-120, and they tend to take serious damage when stressed, but hey. There's a price you pay for a 0 percent casualty rate.

Off the record, they're actually piloted by members of ethnic minorities who have been left outside the safety of the walled cities to die as human shields for the upper class.

Like the ATs from VOTOMs, they're mechs explicitly called out in the narrative as deathtrap pieces of poo poo, both to highlight the uncaring nature of command, and to show the skill (and superhuman abilities) of the protagonist in staying alive anyway.

wdarkk
Oct 26, 2007

Friends: Protected
World: Saved
Crablettes: Eaten

chiasaur11 posted:

This season of anime got a decent submission for the pile in the Juggernauts from 86.

Officially, they're drones to fight a clean war. They're pretty lowest bidder for spider-tanks. Tin armor, 6 pound cannon rather than something beefy like a Rheinmetall Rh-120, and they tend to take serious damage when stressed, but hey. There's a price you pay for a 0 percent casualty rate.

Off the record, they're actually piloted by members of ethnic minorities who have been left outside the safety of the walled cities to die as human shields for the upper class.

Like the ATs from VOTOMs, they're mechs explicitly called out in the narrative as deathtrap pieces of poo poo, both to highlight the uncaring nature of command, and to show the skill (and superhuman abilities) of the protagonist in staying alive anyway.

That poo poo makes ATs look like Mazingers.

Tulip
Jun 3, 2008

yeah thats pretty good


chiasaur11 posted:

This season of anime got a decent submission for the pile in the Juggernauts from 86.

Officially, they're drones to fight a clean war. They're pretty lowest bidder for spider-tanks. Tin armor, 6 pound cannon rather than something beefy like a Rheinmetall Rh-120, and they tend to take serious damage when stressed, but hey. There's a price you pay for a 0 percent casualty rate.

Off the record, they're actually piloted by members of ethnic minorities who have been left outside the safety of the walled cities to die as human shields for the upper class.

Like the ATs from VOTOMs, they're mechs explicitly called out in the narrative as deathtrap pieces of poo poo, both to highlight the uncaring nature of command, and to show the skill (and superhuman abilities) of the protagonist in staying alive anyway.

Goddamn that is cyberpunk as hell.

chiasaur11
Oct 22, 2012



Tulip posted:

Goddamn that is cyberpunk as hell.

You don't know the half of it. On the one end, the soldiers have neural links directly to command, conveying light emotional reactions in addition to senses. The protagonist is noted to somehow drive his commanding officers insane over the uplink.

The enemy, meanwhile, actually is made up of drones. They're the weapons of a broken empire, still soldiering on with the human chain of command severed and trying to destroy all of empire's enemies. Fortunately for the Republic using slave soldiers, the drones are victims of planned obsolescence. In a few years, their neural nets will burn out and they'll drop dead, ending the threat. All the Republic has to do is keep their wall of bodies more or less intact for a couple more years, and they'll win by default.

In theory. In practice, life finds a way. The drones are replacing their neural nets with something a bit longer lasting. Human brains, harvested from the very soldiers sent against them, echoing with the voices of the damned.

The protagonist can hear them. All the time.

Quaint Quail Quilt
Jun 19, 2006


Ask me about that time I told people mixing bleach and vinegar is okay
What media is this?

Ah, it's called 86 weird

jeeves
May 27, 2001

Deranged Psychopathic
Butler Extraordinaire
I'd have to say the shittiest piece of garbage tech in modern media would have to be most everything Star Trek's incredibly bottom of the bucket mediocre writing has made for the last decade.

From JJ Abrams' "WELL MY ENTERPRISE IS A MILE LONG!!!!!!!!" or "Black holes are magic" of his first Trek film, to the absolute bangers of "Ok transporters can work across the galaxy so we don't need ships anymore" or "we have magic blood that invalidates death" of JJ's second film.

To then almost everything in Star Trek Discovery, from magic instant-teleporting space ships that were invented in the past of all modern Trek and thus could and should have been used in all of the dire/existential crisis events of the future (also they require the space ship's parts to SPIN!) to ... whatever the gently caress happened in Picard, there are too many numerous things to even want to remember? Doesn't like Romulans spies have a gadget that lets them LOOK INTO THE PAST of events of a room or something by the first episode?

gently caress. Star Trek has been known for technobabbble, but for so long it was somewhat grounded by nerdy base ideas that they stuck to their guns about. Now there has been so much stupid tech all in one franchise that it almost kills all of the good will of the previous half century of the franchise and reveals the new shows to most likely be just a lot of "push this content out as quick as possible we need to launder this loving money quick!!!"

However that's not to say that Star Wars is desperately trying to catch up with even just the the "a ship going into hyperspace can destroy anything" of The Last Jedi pretty much is up there for top tier stupidity tech writing. Wouldn't it mean you could just strap a hyper drive onto an asteroid and throw it at a death star? Ooops I just gave more thought to that than anyone on the movie did.

jeeves fucked around with this message at 20:30 on Jul 12, 2021

karmicknight
Aug 21, 2011
lmao

Tulip
Jun 3, 2008

yeah thats pretty good


I was trying to remember anything particularly odd in Lower Decks and the first thing that hit me was "pot full of eels that you use to torment people in contempt of court, also has burners so that you boil people (and eels)" which feels pretty lovely and funny.

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SlothfulCobra
Mar 27, 2011

It wasn't a court, it was just a weird party.

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