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General Battuta posted:The Evangelion explanation for 'why build a giant robot shaped like a giant human' is the best one it's literally a giant human...oid in restraints. plus your dead mom's soul probably prefers a human shaped body Eva is definitely the best one about it, that and TTGL which has fairly similar logic. Lancer actively calls attention to this and has a paragraph on "So there was a war where walking mechs proved effective, but really Union liked the aesthetic and is outrageously wealthy." This paragraph rules Lancer, pg 363 posted:
On top of this the Horus mechs look like whatever because gently caress you and good luck asking them any questions. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dm7Lwc1XsAElCJj?format=jpg&name=large
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Aug 25, 2020 20:03
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Lawman 0 posted:Good god does battletech just need a general reboot DARK and GRITTY Battletech with no humor or beliefs. A cynical Battletech that says swears. Battletech by Benioff and Weiss.
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Aug 26, 2020 14:46
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Counter proposal: make the clans more minor league hockey.
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Aug 26, 2020 17:03
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SavageGentleman posted:Just wondering as a non STEM guy: Would such an orbital launching ramp (seen on WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE [1951] ) make any sense or just kill everyone riding the rocket in a very messy way? I'm not sure what is exactly going on but if you're talking about a chain of external boosters (aka bombs) on a fixed rail like a V3 gun, it's actually one of the better ideas to avoid liquifying the crew on a manned mission. E: my phone is making the image look like garbage but that looks like a mass driver + rocket, which hasn't been done for reasons but it's not more likely to kill passengers than a normal rocket. Tulip fucked around with this message at 20:30 on Aug 26, 2020 |
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Aug 26, 2020 20:26
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one of the big divides in SciFi is "space on ship is plentiful" (because space is big and you aren't constrained by gravity) vs "space on ship is constrained" (because all current spaceships are very constrained on account of having to be built on earth and then launched out of gravity). In any event the transporter buffer is a far more limited resource than physical room. CainFortea posted:Any time you can beam security INTO a situation, you could also just beam the assholes into the brig. Or space. Spacing anybody who gets snitched on, immediately, is a very Cardassian solution.
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Nov 5, 2020 17:38
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CainFortea posted:Also transporter buffers are literally bigger than the brig cells. I was torn about the Cardassians, because Garak and the rest of the spies I'm pretty sure would just space people and the rest of Cardassia would be down with it because they're basically a society built around the ethos of 24, but it is true that they love their show trials. The question comes down to "how important is it to a show trial that the accused is alive." There's also more reasons to not just make giant loving ships, such as shielding and construction, I just didn't want to get too exhaustive in a single parenthetical. Which leads me to - I've been playing Hardlight Shipbreaker, and while the tech in the game is explicitly supposed to be poo poo, the really baffling ones are "universal utility keys that are disposable" and "wait why do objects in motion come to rest without an outside force"
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Nov 5, 2020 19:25
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Bootcha posted:Eh, while I chortle at the thought of an elaborate theatre to trick customers, I think the headache of keeping a literal conspiracy/con under wraps with so many moving parts would outweigh the benefits of a few hundred more sales. They could be really big sales though. Also a "fun" IRL precedent is that some guys set up an entire fake traffic court to scam people into paying fees to them instead of the government. They did get super caught.
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Jan 15, 2021 20:38
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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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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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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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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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RBA Starblade posted:Child soldiers are the shittiest garbage tech in science fiction of all Not scifi and also bleak as gently caress: some military commanders consider child soldiers better than adult soldiers, because they're less loyal to their civil community and therefore more loyal to the military, and are less likely to balk at dangerous orders (citation: Dancing in the Glory of Monsters chapter 10). SolarFire2 posted:Alternatively: The Killbot Solution. Engineer your supersoldiers to have a pre-set kill limit at which point they expire. This reminds me that one of the significant advantages of early gunpowder weapons (as in, big rear end iron bombs that you throw from a catapult) was that your opponent can't fire them back at you. "Supersoldiers as very slow missiles" has a certain appeal to it. Foxfire_ posted:Kill limit would be a good backstop for your killer robots. There are only 300 million soviets, so if Skynet has killed 301 million people, something has probably gone and it should turn off. There's no way the kind of person who thinks skynet is a good idea isn't thinking about collateral damage and upping that to a good 600 million.
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Jan 29, 2021 23:00
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Who What Now posted:One book mentions that Space Marines have proportionally freakishly small heads, which makes laugh. 
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Feb 4, 2021 18:26
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:We have the technology right now to pilot drones remotely, why aren't we using the same technology for tanks and jet fighters The US doesn't even use autoloaders for tanks at this point.
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Feb 10, 2021 21:31
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I always assume that any time bran didn't tell people obvious useful info it was because doing so would interfere with him becoming king of the shittier version of the polish lithuanian commonwealth.
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Mar 27, 2021 02:21
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CainFortea posted:Wait, what did they do to dreadnaughts? Cause that was a whole thing in the EU and i'm surprised they touched it. 
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Apr 7, 2021 20:34
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wdarkk posted:It has one main turret on the bottom and like twenty anti-starfighter turrets on top. It is some 5km long and has about as many total guns as on of the more upgunned correlian corvettes. star destroyers are comically underarmed and oversupplied and it is very, very funny to me
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Apr 7, 2021 22:32
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THE BAR posted:Well they're ostensibly carriers, and aren't supposed to do any kind of fighting on their own. That makes the imperial designers even bigger morons - this is all Legends stuff so RIP but according to what I can find, an ISD has about twice as much total ship volume dedicated to its main batteries as a WW2 battleship (the main cannons are basically the same but an ISD has 8 and a WW2 battleship would usually have four), but has fewer tie fighters than a WW2 aircraft carrier would have in fighters (72, compared to the USS Yorktown's 90). Star Wars: there is always more and it is always worse.
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Apr 7, 2021 23:05
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CainFortea posted:WW2 Aircraft carriers also couldn't field an infantry division with armored support. Right, that's extremely stupid. Like, evaluated purely in terms of authorial intent with no concern for in-universe logic, there isn't really a problem with Star Destroyers. They're shaped like a big ol triangle because it's menacing and comes to a threatening spear point and you can frame a cool shot where they come in from above and behind the camera and they just keep going. They're a dull, white monochrome because it reinforces the storm troopers skeleton outfit and making them shiny would be both illegible on screen and also probably make them come across as like, luminous and good instead of stark and sepulchral and harsh. Plus those whites have a nice apollo project feel to them, very space age. It all visually conveys what the empire is about. But we're in a thread for evaluating things on an in-universe logic, full of middle-aged online pedants. The basic problem for Star Destroyers is that, well, they're basically just triangles. Kind of the "thing" that makes a warship a warship is that the entire ship is wrapped around its primary weapon system. Triremes are built entirely around a ramming prow and the oar decks, 20th century battleships are really some engines and the main guns and then you just kind of squeeze in crew and secondary guns (e.g. AA) wherever they can fit, and aircraft carriers are basically just a runway that floats. Star Destroyers aren't really built around anything in that way. You could make a ship a fraction the size and crew of a Star Destroyer and have the same amount of guns, which really means that somebody who went out of their way to design a warship could easily outgun the Star Destroyer. Same for any of its other roles. With the implicit constraints that allow an ISD to be built in the first place, nearly anybody who wanted to could design a much deadlier ship.
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Apr 8, 2021 01:18
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wdarkk posted:Star Destroyers explicitly replace the old Venator class, which carried about 420 (ha) starfighters on a smaller frame. I assume the tradeoff is in endurance: the Venator goes out, fights, comes back, but the Imperial-class spends a long time on station doing oppression. I think again just the people who made up star wars stuff didn't think. All of this is just greebles for the story of Anakin Skywalker and his kids. As long as it looks right on camera then it's ready to ship. When the prequels didn't exist, the path of least resistance for Star Destroyers is to see them as converted cargo freighters rather than purpose built warships, given their massive freight capacity relative to their armament. But they're very shortly after, and with clear design continuity from, a very recent period of more intensive warfare, so that particular explanation makes little sense (and the thing its succeeding has, as you mentioned, a fraction of the crew and a multiple of the armament - a massively better warship). Also possible is that this is a case of graft or incompetence, Pentagon Wars times a thousand. Wouldn't be the first time a military deployed a weapon system that just loving sucked. Or, given that what we see of the Imperial Bureaucracy is dominated by preening petty tyrants, somebody high in the naval design bureau was utterly insistent that it's one thing to lose a warship due to battle damage but it's infinitely worse to lose it because its crew starved to death after only four years out of port. A funny thing about the 6 years of supplies is that in fiction, the Battle of Yavin and the Battle of Endor are 4 years apart. And I dunno something is just very funny to me about the Battleship Yamato leaving port with 10 years of supplies.
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Apr 8, 2021 02:52
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SlothfulCobra posted:It sort of makes sense to have one heavily armed mult-purpose carrier from the perspective of how the biggest threat to the Empire was surprise attacks on logistical centers, but then it does mean that most of your assets are too expensive to deploy in proportion to the problems that you need to respond to. Also might explain why Imperial command staff are always so pissed at their subordinates when they show up with the big guns. Having a Star Destroyer is proof that you're a big dog in the Empire, and all the smattering of other Imperial capital ships are weirdly shameful and pushed off to weird corners that nobody cares about. It also adds an interesting layer of dysfunction to the Empire itself. The more independent your subordinates are, the less able you are to control them, basic identity property of management. When those subordinates are military this leads very rapidly to major structural dysfunction, see "the whole medieval period." The EU (which is of course our source for most of this stuff) had this come up - tons of Imperial commands operating like petty warlords. There's even a decent canon support for this: in Ep4 we see a veteran naval commander tell Vader to his face that he thinks Vader and the Emperor are full of poo poo. Hell looking at the scene in question reveals some further cracks in the Empire: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_Z99MN9Qcs (I'm copying quotes from https://8flix.com/assets/screenplays/s/tt0076759/Star-Wars-Episode-IV-A-New-Hope-1977-screenplay-by-George-Lucas.pdf because I don't wanna transcribe) quote:TAGGE The "your" is doing a lot of work here - clearly Motti does not consider the Death Star and either the Navy in general or Tagge's specific fleet to share a common interest and safety! quote:
This is how you get an An Lushan Rebellion! No wonder your whole government's got 4 years left from this point!
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Apr 8, 2021 21:26
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Fantastic Foreskin posted:The only Star destroyer to go down in the entire trilogy is the super star destroyer that gets kamikazed. They never even try to attack them before that battle, they just run from them. Even then they don't expect to do anything to them, they're just trying to stop the death star from firing. They get disabled by the ground batteries in Empire Strikes Back. We do not see a lot of actual combat performance by them in OT. Endor is the only significant action we see them take part in and in that battle the Rebels take fewer capital ship casualties than the Empire (2:5). Lazy Fair posted:The movies go to great lengths to depict Star Destroyers as an overpowering force that crush anything they encounter in a fair fight. They're only taken down by the rebels being so darn plucky. The idea that they're "undergunned" is incompatible with the impression they're supposed to give in every on screen appearance. Do they? Like I can't think of any fights that are suggested to be fair fights. In ANH they tractor beam in Leia's ship, in ESB they get disabled by ground batteries and otherwise float around menacingly, and in Endor the rebels win decisively despite being ambushed. In any event the actual argument I have is that they are undergunned compared to their own volume. Nothing about how they might be armed relative to competitors, just relative to their visual profile. Purpose built warships are very visibly built around their weapon systems, whether that weapon system be a ramming prow, multiple decks of cannon, modern naval artillery, or a flight deck. Star Destroyers are built to look like triangles, which accomplishes several things for the films (notably the sick introductory shot to ANH), but is very funny if we try to stretch the implications past the cinematography. And kind of a bigger question - do people think the Empire was really that competent? I've been around Star Wars nerds almost my entire life and I thought the consensus was that the Empire was pretty doomed. Frequent rebellions, delusional managers, infighting, low morale - not signs of a healthy political organization. If nothing else they got clobbered by Ewoks. Asterite34 posted:I mean, it IS a giant warship capable of casual FTL travel, I'd be shocked if it wasn't full of something dangerously energetic. The EU explanation for Star Wars FTL was that the FTL system physically doesn't operate when you get too close to large gravity wells, which leads to the Empire making a specialized ship that creates big artificial gravity in order to prevent opposing forces from using FTL to escape. Which is fair enough because just chucking an empty X-wing at many times the speed of light into a planet would be an incredibly potent WMD and I can get why you wouldn't want to have the war system be "anybody who has can replace x-wings somewhat regularly effectively has the death star." So that's why at least the propulsion systems themselves aren't superweapons. https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Hypermatter/Legends is what Wookiepedia turns up for the fuel source used in SW and I gotta say, that's some crazy poo poo.
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Apr 9, 2021 15:34
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Nebakenezzer posted:As a veteran of old Star Trek threads, I can tell you that FTL travel and normal space need to be exclusive. Past 80% the speed of light, the amount of energy needed to propel a given object faster climbs exponentially, so that at light speed, the amount of energy needed to drive any mass is infinite. (I think this is why only pure energy can move at the speed of light in normal space; no mass.) The even weirder implication of this is if the Sisko threw a baseball at light speed, the baseball would have infinite energy potential, and I'm not exactly sure what happened when a baseball hits an asteroid with infinite energy, but it is not good. So any FTL tech can't be used kinetically. The gravity restriction makes sense, then, because FTL is passing through low-mass objects and stopping well before high mass ones. Yep! FTL is an extremely hosed concept and it's probably for the best to just keep it at an abstract narrative level 'this lets us change environments radically and quickly' use.
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Apr 9, 2021 17:10
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SlothfulCobra posted:Eh, I've seen much less competent fascists out there. I'd like to think that keeping large masses suppressed is already a bit of a doomed enterprise to begin with, but the Empire managed to have a decent run at it. The Rebel Alliance's path to victory seems pretty harrowing what with having to stay on the move constantly, hide in obscure corners of the galaxy, and scrounging for supplies. Oh yeah there's much dumber fascists, for sure. Lucas for his part was drawing a lot of inspiration from a couple of major sources - Westerns, WW2 films, and 30s pulp scifi being the obvious ones - and that WW2 influence comes through pretty clear with the Empire. They're supposed to look like and feel like Nazis, and Nazis were incompetent as hell. It's not at all a problem for the story if they're scary but beatable. This is me being speculative and interpolating based on stuff outside the text, but Lucas I think wanted Star Wars to have an unambiguous, straightforward morality. There's Good Guys, and there's Bad Guys, and the Bad Guys can be scary but they can't actually win. And this is where Star Wars being mostly a drama between family members causes some stumbling for the larger morality of the work, because I don't suspect that Lucas was going to let the Death Star plan work, because I don't think he believes that fear and force is enough to sustain a whole government's legitimacy. The Empire's plan is that they'll just scrap the bureaucracy and republican norms and all the things that make the government work and just replace them with fear of overwhelming collective punishment. And that's dark side crap and the dark side is weaker than the light side, so even if the Alliance lost the Battle of Yavin or Endor the Empire would still have repeated constant rebellions (though the only way this really makes it on screen is that Leia doesn't crack, which is an individual character moment but given the other characters in the film seems to be a 'what any good person would do' - which is common enough that one of the big moments is Han, the scoundrel, coming back to risk his life). And I think this is part of why Endor plays out the way that it does: the most important part is that Anakin flips and embraces his son and throws off the Dark Side, but the rebels also win the ground and space battles happening at the same time. The bad guys can be scary for sure but they are destined to lose when good people stand up for what's right. Farmer Crack-rear end posted:I think the issue there is that it breaks too many norms and is too big a gamble. Like at the time of the first book, inter-house warfare is already very narrowly proscribed so as to minimize civilian casualties; setting up a nuke-sized blast, even if it was technically a lasgun-Holtzmann effect, is going to kill a lot of bystanders. Also if a house uses atomics against people they'll have the entire Imperium coming down on them and annihilating them, so there's the possibility of the Landsraad just saying "yup, looks like atomics to us, gently caress 'em!" Yeah the norms and house politicking are huge components of why characters do what they do in Dune. Paul's outside the rules in a lot of ways. Tulip fucked around with this message at 20:44 on Apr 9, 2021 |
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Apr 9, 2021 20:41
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The one significant advantage the X-wings have is internal life support - TIE pilots wear their life support while the X-wing pilots just have helmets. I'm pretty confident this is just to provide a contrast where the Rebels have faces and the Imperials are faceless.
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Apr 10, 2021 19:34
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CainFortea posted:
I mean that's something that I'm used to hearing from EU stuff, and we have been discussing a bunch of EU stuff, but when people talk about TIE's having the same defenses as X-Wings that's done by moving the conversation back to film-only rules, and in the films I don't recall any references, verbal or visual, to TIEs lacking hyperspace. It's totally possible I just have no recollection. Within EU the TIEs' lack of hyperspace is interesting, because the logic given is often that they explicitly and deliberately do not want pilots to operate independently of their carrier. They want to continue to exert top down control over their whole battle plan even if it gets pilots killed if the battlefleet gets separated or the TIEs survive past their carrier. And earlier we talked about how ISDs can operate independently for longer than the entire lifespan of the Empire, and at first that seems somewhat discordant but there's an explanation I think from the best scifi video game of all time: Colonel Corazon Santiago posted:A ship at sea is its own world. To be the captain of a ship is to be the unquestioned ruler of that world and requires all of the leadership skills of a prince or minister. Reading excessively far into it, the combination of hyper-independent carriers with highly dependent fightercraft suggests a political dynamic where the Empire is not a powerfully centralized and unitary organization, but a patchwork of proto-aristocrats who are generally loyal to the emperor but in a position to both jockey with each other and renegotiate their standing. Personally I like this as a vision of the empire: not one tyrant but dozens. And it plays into one of the most famous traits of the Empire from the films: Vader's tendency to physically assault his subordinates. Political organizations that are secure and confident about their internal power structures don't resort to casual, public force, and it's not just binary but scaling: the more violent and casual, and the less dramatic the insubordination that provokes it, the weaker the organization. Vader casually executed an Admiral in the middle of a battle for a tactical error, which makes Vader look both ruthless and incredibly insecure.
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Apr 11, 2021 00:13
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SlothfulCobra posted:I think it's worth noting that Vader's the only one who does that sort of reprisal, and his particular position in the Imperial hierarchy is pretty vague. Some kind of senior, they call him "lord" a couple times, but he's very much not the guy directly calling the shots in A New Hope, that's Tarkin. And Tarkin is the one who tells Darth Vader not to kill Tagge. And of course when the dumbass fucks up the Hoth attack, Tarkin's not there to stop him. Thank you! I felt like I was missing a scene. As for Vader being seemingly the only officer that beats his subordinates - he's also like 90% of the officer work we see (and yeah he doesn't kill Tagge but he still starts choking a dude out in the middle of a meeting for insulting his religion - that's still loving crazy). Like trying to think about the Empire beyond it being a macguffin for Luke's relationship to Anakin and Obi Wan means doing a lot of exegesis, cuz really the films are not political science textbooks, they're drama.
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Apr 11, 2021 02:55
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CainFortea posted:You need standardization before you can do the mass production. You don't need mass production to do standardization. One of the reasons we could make 37 sherman tanks per every tiger tank is that standardization. This is very much begging the question. Whether or not the existence of 25k ISDs is enough to infer a specific industrial process rests on multiple other pieces of knowledge: is an ISD a fixed concept beneath its shape? Is 25,000 of them a particularly large number compared to the scale of the resources the empire can muster? Is the Empire even in a position to impose standardization on its local governors and contractors? There are a fairly wide variety of alternative explanations that are perfectly viable. The question of imperial resources is one that I think this thread comes back to fairly frequently - like that question earlier about TIE Pilots. I personally think it's quite unclear what the Empire's ability to muster manpower really looks like - we basically know two things about the Imperial government: it lacks a bureaucracy and it is very unpopular, both things that tend to make it hard to get a large number of motivated soldiers. BUT we also know that the Empire is the largest polity in the galaxy, implying that the base they're working from is huge. BUT in the OT here are the non-ship spaces we actually see: Tatooine, Yavin IV, Hoth, Bespin, Dagobah, and Endor; Tatooine is the most urbanized of those and it is "Wyoming-esque" to be generous. BUT outside of those movies we do eventually see Coruscant and Naboo which seem pretty populated, and Alderaan is implied to be at least modestly populated (2 billion people is both an absolute shitload but Earth already has several times that and we're presumably quite a bit less advanced, I did check and Earth and Alderaan have drat near exactly the same size). Anyway my point is that as hard as it is to talk about the physical science of Star Wars, the social science of Star Wars has if anything more gaps. Which is great if you want to write fanfiction tbh.
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Apr 20, 2021 15:05
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chiasaur11 posted:This season of anime got a decent submission for the pile in the Juggernauts from 86. Goddamn that is cyberpunk as hell.
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May 16, 2021 03:08
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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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Jul 12, 2021 21:18
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dr_rat posted:No, no, no, that was clone horror. Clone drama would of been if the dinosaurs suddenly started getting into soap opera'esq romantic and family situations. Here's clone romantic drama: https://store.steampowered.com/app/949060/Love_Thyself__A_Horatio_Story/
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Jun 22, 2022 04:53
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Worf posted:it would be awesome if a conduit blew up and instead of pre alpha ensign lynch eating poo poo, the ship basically shits its pants in some random deck where, i guess, noncom lynch has to deal with it genuinely surprised i can't remember this being a recurring joke on lower decks
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Jul 19, 2022 16:32
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Hillary 2024 posted:As with a lot of Trek tech if they wanted consistency then they should have set out the limitations first and then worked the stories around that. Instead they let the writers do whatever they wanted for their episode and tried to justify it later. Wouldn't have been a problem if the viewing conceit that existed well into the 2000s had persisted, where you just see episodes individually with only a vague impression of the ultimate logic. Of course trekkies were obsessive nerds memorizing and collating episode details before binge watching went mainstream, making "trekkies" the actual problem and therefore the worst tech.
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Jul 25, 2022 02:52
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my favorite detail about deus ex heavy weapons is that the flamethrower counts as silent takedowns my least favorite is the experience of using the plasma gun
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Jul 27, 2022 00:19
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Ritz On Toppa Ritz posted:All the dudes screamed exactly the same in Deus Ex. Making using the prod even sillier. That audio file is burned into my memory. If you mean the swim skill it's actually preferred skill of speedrunners lol dr_rat posted:Goon 1: hey why is goon 3 screaming and suddenly on fire? 1) yes lol its very funny 2) yeah that's basically the gist of it, it's just very disappointing and with a lot of build up. The GEP gun you just ask for and it rules!
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Jul 27, 2022 02:54
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General Battuta posted:Yeah the first edition of that game was (for a while) pretty much ruined by the Phantom Menace. lmao why would that even occur to you like tbf i've played other tabletop games where that kind of thing was done and worked fine (decoys in Infinity comes to mind), but in a game where predicting maneuver is like the mechanic that's just absurd i was kind of like 'whats the big deal, there's only like 2 movie tie ships so you gotta start makin up some bullshit' but lmao no
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Oct 20, 2022 18:10
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ThisIsJohnWayne posted:i know star trek isn't I've never heard of a good John Wayne opinion and that record remains unbroken.
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Nov 28, 2022 21:14
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Phanatic posted:Which makes it even funnier in the one (I think it was Nemesis) where they try to blow up the ship only for the computer to tell them that the self-destruct mechanism is malfunctioning. You’ve already established that the ship is about 3 seconds and a loud sneeze away from spontaneous catastrophic disassembly at all times, everywhere, but on the one occasion you want it to blow up it can’t even do that right. The ship's computer just really hates its crew.
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Dec 7, 2022 17:45
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grassy gnoll posted:Also the Colossus killed the poo poo out of the first Sathanas, and a bunch of other things besides. Blowing up Shivans isn't that ship's problem, it's that this kilometers-long ship can somehow turn on a dime. It looks awful and presumably reduces anyone in the far ends of the ship to paste every couple of missions. "angular momentum isnt real," i assure myself as i close my eyes and do donuts with my lovely supership
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Dec 15, 2022 12:15
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Slashrat posted:To be fair, it turned out to be a bad idea because they didn't anticipate that technology would develop to the point where it would become trivial to safely teleport the entire city and its population to some other location while leaving the superweapon intact The only thing I still remember about it is that one guy uses teleporter cloning to briefly but exponentially make enough copies of himself that "clones of this one guy" becomes a major demographic unto itself. I want to make some sort of joke about Endless Space's Horatio but TBH I can't really think of too much tech in ES that's actually lovely. Even the really goofy stuff apparently more or less works, like the thing where AI simulacra of the Emperor get put into every citizen's apartment. It is pretty whacky that FTL civilizations in ES2 have to do additional research to figure out how to make planes and tanks.
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Dec 23, 2022 16:29
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