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A mysterious ancient computer at the center of the robot planet that can grant life to robots seems like a pretty straightforward concept to me. Especially since the robots Wheeljack built from scratch were too stupid to live. Of course in I think literally the next episode after that arc, the combaticons show up and there's no explanation for where they came from. And then the key to Vector Sigma can turn Earth into metal for some reason, that's the weird thing. Maybe it implies that Cybertron was terraformed into what it became later? At least it's not robot murder porn. mind the walrus posted:Rewatching some Doctor Who from 2005, the one with Simon Pegg on the giant Rupert Murdoch space station, and while it's intentionally lovely it bears mentioning-- the stupid little hole in a person's head that can be opened by custom audio key and routes light or some bullshit through it so it acts as a giant processor. There are so drat many Doctor Who stories where they live in a horrible corporate dystopias where nothing works. I think one of the top ones was a space station where you were charged for all the oxygen you breathed, and company wound up trying to kill and replace all the workers to save on costs somehow. There was also Paradise Towers, a massive future apartment complex that was used as a shelter when war broke out. They couldn't leave because the computer that designed the place decided to lock the whole thing down and later tried getting the janitorial staff to kill people in the hopes that it could transfer itself to a body. There was also a whole race of squid-faced cyborg butlers, who at first were just extremely susceptible to satanic possession en masse, but it turned out that was probably because they were lobotomized and life was suffering to them.
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Jan 2, 2021 08:42
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It built another machine to generate the question though, and it was worse. The machine was Earth. If you read the books, then humans are the reason why the machine failed, because humans are all descended from a society that sent all their useless people on a ship, which accidentally wiped out the original dominant species of Earth. Deep Thought tried to cover it up by engineering a society to wipe out all life in the universe.
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Jan 4, 2021 05:06
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There is a real functional reason to make the captain into a public figure on the ship though. He's the functional dictator of the ship and responsible for the safety of the ship and management of both the crew and passengers in the case of any emergency. You don't want an Oceanos situation where after something goes wrong, the captain and crew just use their own inside knowledge to get out first and it's left to a bunch of entertainers to keep panic from breaking out and organize the emergency response and evacuation.
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Jan 15, 2021 21:10
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Or episode 12 of Babylon 5. I feel like there's a lot of sci-fi ideas that have been done once or twice that are so rich with potential that there's still a whole bunch more ways for that sort of scenario to play out.
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Jan 15, 2021 22:57
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It's also a theme of a few episodes of Ghost in the Shell and No Gun's Life has a similar premise. To the Abandoned Sacred Beasts is a story about supersoldiers who are steadily going mad and homicidal from their mutations. For some reason a lot of Japanese works are preoccupied with the idea of what veterans would do after returning from an unpopular war despite Japan not having been to war for 70 years.
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Jan 24, 2021 19:31
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If you look at some elite units of soldier in history, there's an issue that focusing a lot of military power into the hands of a relatively small group of people can lead to them taking control in one way or another, like the Praetorian Guard that made a habit of killing Emperors, the Turkish Mercenaries that made a habit of killing Caliphs, or the Janissaries that eventually became a powerful political force of their own in the Ottoman Empire. That's actually reflected in a lot of fictional projects like that going rogue somehow. The Space Marines in 40k were top of the line supersoldiers, and about half of them betrayed the Imperium and hobbled them into being the backwards, disintegrating state they would be for the next 10,000 years, and that's on top of the Orkz apparently being the result of a bioweapon that ran wild after its original creators died off. There's also the TIE Defender, the super-TIE Fighter made by Admiral Zaarin. He took his own superior fighters and tried to take the Empire for himself.
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Jan 25, 2021 06:33
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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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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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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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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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I do think it's interesting how spaceships in Gundam just don't have any gravity. I don't think those hallway carrying poles would really scale will when there's multiple people who need to get through, but it's an interesting solution. They also don't portray how human bodies just kinda start dissolving and deteriorating under zero G, so far as I remember, but not many things do.
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Feb 9, 2021 03:23
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Shirow Masamune seems like a real gearhead and does a lot of work thinking through and designing the technology that the characters use in his stories, but I don't think vehicles are his thing. Like leaving aside the design of the tachikomas that are just so weird it's hard to compare them to anything real, there's Tank Police. If you take a look at the main character Leona's tank here, the Bonaparte, you'll see that there's absolutely no angled armor, the tank will take just about any shots perpendicular to the plating, no deflection. And then there's a bunch of weird design decisions like 4 separate sets of tracks, at which point why not just have wheels, or the weird long tail gatling gun with a very small range of movement. And then there's questions like "why do the police even have a tank" and "why do you need spiky all-terrain treads that will shred up the street" and it's been a long while since I read it, but I think there were a lot of jokes about the tank being pretty horribly suited to most of the police work they were doing. Then you have other tanks that used the tachikoma-style weird orb wheels and still never had a turret with a 360 range of fire. They look neat, but miss the major points of tank design.  GD_American posted:poo poo, he can easily crush his own arms with his own robot arms. Not to mention any tumble or fall and bye-bye fleshy arm. They definitely don't have that range of motion.
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Feb 9, 2021 07:39
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THE BAR posted:We already have some super capable eggheads in this scenario. Splash some razzle dazzle paint over it if you have to. They did, they used their egghead razzle dazzle to stick a human body inside the robot body while still giving the pilot a whole free range of movement, despite the relative small size of the mech. It gets really weird when you get bizarrely selective about what physics you want the author to ignore.
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Feb 9, 2021 17:27
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If you're using the human brain's natural motor controls, it makes remote control even worse because human brains do not like latency issues or occasional blackouts from the rest of the body. Although I guess arguing "why not just not risk soldiers directly" is almost on the level of "why not just not have any war" so far as criticisms go.
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Feb 11, 2021 19:05
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I though the implication wasn't that there was a singular canon to the prior XCOM, but just that XCOM2 happens after an XCOM game where you lost. Because the alternative would mean maybe trying to remake Terror from the Deep, and they didn't want to do that. Enemy Unknown was kind of part of a renaissance of mechanically-driven games with much more barebones stories and emergent gameplay like the original XCOM games. And in some ways XCOM2 still didn't have the same complexity and emergent systems as its spiritual predecessor X-COM Apocalypse
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Mar 28, 2021 19:51
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Bootcha posted:We talking about the one in 50's? That's The Bureau: XCOM Declassified. I like that one even though it's a bit of a mess from going through development hell, and it got a lot of outrage over not being a tactical turn-based game like the rest of the series (and nobody actually knew that Enemy Unknown was in development, so they thought the The Bureau heralded the death of the genre instead of its renewal). It had tactical squad shooting like Mass Effect and a pretty neat little plot.
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Mar 29, 2021 17:28
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There's also y'know, that one terraforming tool that's actually a bomb.
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Apr 6, 2021 06:07
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It's literally a more simplified star destroyer, practically deconstructed into just a flat triangle with a rectangle on top, and the only feature they added is the GIANT HOLE in the middle begging for people to attack it. I think the issue is also intensified by how the space scenes kinda just have bad cinematography so they don't convey as much scale or movement.
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Apr 7, 2021 19:53
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Star Destroyers are supposed to be a weird hybrid carrier/battleship combination. There's some EU fluff about how the whole point was so that they'd have easily manageable singular units to do all your oppression at once without having to manage a supply chain to keep it going. An uppity planet? Just send in a mobile oppression palace. Maybe a couple if they're armed.  It was also an administrative thing where they could keep a smaller amount of elite officers in line and if any of them did try going rogue, they've just got the one ship, with no real opportunity to take control of a larger fleet. That helped with the repeating theme of large singular targets getting destroyed by diverse groups of underdogs representing the larger population. Or really was more extrapolated after considering what kind of Later wargames would identify that as a tactical issue and fill out fleets with various ships that in theory existed during the time of the movies just offscreen. Also games and stories would figure out smaller targets for smaller challenges. Sometimes they just grab something weird from the background or some artist's weird off-model choices and put some fluff around that. 
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Apr 8, 2021 02:01
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If Star Wars had started out as a TV series, it would've used more implied transit time to pad out or pace things, but instead it was a media format that has to squeeze everything into two hours before it gets tedious, so people eventually extrapolated that into basically no transit times.
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Apr 8, 2021 02:47
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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's a fun for writers or nerds to flesh out the niches of various ships or try dredging up obscure things out of the EU to fill a niche that they needed, but it's gotta be a bit soul-destroying to be a visual designer on one of these big projects and every time your job is mainly to replicate the same thing. Possibly because the company doesn't want to be obliged to give artists any extra credit or money and it's cheaper to pull up some old EU material.
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Apr 8, 2021 20:38
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There's ways that Star Destroyers could be way worse. I think that Earth might only have the one warship too that they keep having to repair. Although Futurama is littered with garbage technology in a garbage world. I think one of the worst is probably the transport tubes. Farmer Crack-rear end posted:I feel like commenting on an Impstar being "undergunned" is a bit odd in a setting where the weapons are at least partly energy based. Like, if you doubled the gun count, would the reactor even be able to support firing them all? Is it more effective to increase the number or size of your turbolasers? Most lasers in Star Wars are some kind of packets of supercharged gas, however that works. I wouldn't be surprised if there was some kind of diminishing returns from just increasing the size and output which is why they go for more units. The Death Star laser seems to be some kind of different thing.
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Apr 9, 2021 03:47
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Tulip posted: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. 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. The old EU Empire was clogged thick with tales of incompetence and infighting, but I feel like a lot of the new Disney stuff is pretty shallow on that. Sometimes ends up a little heroes-on-both-sides-y, especially when paired with edgier rebels. And the sequels really diminish the accomplishment of conquering the galaxy.
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Apr 9, 2021 19:11
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I liked Star Control 2's take where hyperspace was all jumbled around compared to how things are arranged in truespace, which let them rearrange the galaxy however they liked and make the game reliant on a physical paper item back in the days of copy protection. And then later on in the game you can get into Quasispace, another parallel dimension where there's a cluster of near-together portals that can shortcut across hyperspace.
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Apr 9, 2021 21:14
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CainFortea posted:Can you imagine if they built ISDs the way the nazis built panzers? loving hand crafted individual bits so parts are rarely interchangeable? Aren't massive battleships generally made to order? I'm not sure how interchangeable massive sections of a Star Destroyer could be. Although I would sure love to see a story where there's some massive factory or dry-space-dock where they literally cut ships into big chunks that they swap out.
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Apr 10, 2021 01:57
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I wouldn't be surprised if one of the novelizations said something about Ties not having shields. Or maybe one of the reference books or roleplaying guides. Otherwise, it doesn't really seem like something I'd expect Zahn to write about, so it's pretty possible the X-Wing videogame could've been the first. It was real early on in the EU and shaped a fair bit of lore. They did establish in the movies that X-Wings were perfectly capable of scooting across the galaxy on their own while Ties couldn't, although the particular phrasing was ambiguous. They said that the Tie from the Death Star must've come from some base or "from a convoy" which could mean a lot of things, but the eventual explanation that X-Wings have hyperdrive but Ties don't and fit pretty well. It was at least evident that Ties were in some way lesser than X-Wings (in addition to being much smaller). Ghost Leviathan posted:Comes to mind the Gelgoog in one of the Gundam series, a high-performance suit built around the skills of aces but that was introduced late enough in the war that they're mostly being piloted by rookies who are barely able to use them. I think it came up before, but interesting to have a piece of technology that's quite good by objective metrics, but used in the worst possible situation and way. They also put a lot of energy into custom-made mobile suits for psychics among other superweapon projects. Zeon started the war with the technical advantage on mobile suits with the Zaku, but none of their elaborate projects could match the simple reliability of the Federation's GM.
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Apr 10, 2021 21:56
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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. It's pretty clear from the subtext of the scene that Darth Vader sees the officers aside from Tarkin as just as expendable as the senate was, especially if they're gonna stand up for the dissolved senate or mock his power. Tulip 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. This be it. I think there's a couple ways you could interpret the exchange, but definitely Ties can't go long distances on their own. Lacking hyperdrive is a sensible explanation.
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Apr 11, 2021 01:11
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Silver2195 posted:Also, prior to ESB, there was actually no indication that Jabba was an alien. I think there was plenty indication. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cw1gkNd6Z_8
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Apr 12, 2021 00:26
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It seems to me more like "this scene with Jabba was written and filmed but after it was cut from the movie the later movie didn't take it into consideration at all and designed a totally different Jabba from scratch". Maybe a novelization stuck it back in, the novelizations did a lot of weird stuff. Like it's a cool thing that they could take the deleted scene and CGI it into fitting back into the rest of the canon, but even without the visual quality issues, Jabba's nothing like he was in the other movie. Deleted scene Jabba has a whole nice guy routine where he's paternalistic towards his victims and weirdly micromanages his subordinates. RotJ Jabba is a disgusting hedonist who openly murders peoples at parties and doesn't really seem inclined or even able to extract himself from his den of cronies to go make veiled threats in person.
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Apr 17, 2021 02:44
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A roller coaster themed around an outer space vacation service that breaks down and goes horribly awry. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWEdlLwvKOM
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Apr 19, 2021 05:47
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There's a multitude of private ship companies, but generally if you want your products to be sold in places that follow a system of law, you gotta follow the regulations for their manufacture. There was a whole thing where the Empire was taking direct control over a lot of corporations as part of its reign, like they confiscated the corporate holdings of the companies that were part of the CIS after the Clone Wars, and the Empire was trying to nationalize the Incom Corporation and the day before it happened as a big gently caress you a lot of the staff and scientists defected to the Rebellion and helped steal as many vehicles and factory equipment as they could (which is where X-Wings come from). There was also a whole thing where the New Republic managed to take control over the company responsible for Star Destroyers by buying up the bulk of the shares from stockholders because they had become basically worthless while the Empire had total control over the company. So when the Imperial remnants slipped up the New Republic intimidated them into following their corporate rules despite the corporate headquarters being a total fortress. Not ideologically satisfying, but kinda neat.
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Apr 19, 2021 23:47
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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?
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Apr 27, 2021 08:43
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It wasn't a court, it was just a weird party.
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Jul 12, 2021 21:49
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I'd say that the aesthetic of Alien seems pretty similar to the aesthetic of Star Wars in basic principle, just the way Star Wars does it, everything being being run-down and broken gives sort of a nostalgic and homely feel, while Alien is meant to have everything being run-down as a result of the world being hostile and not built right for the people in it. Although I personally sure do love old beige and grey computers from the 90s. Subnautica heavily borrows the underlying concept of Alien's aesthetics, except it's expressed with 2000s Apple aesthetics with smooth, rounded white plastic covering everything. It's the same basic worldbuilding as Alien, but it's meant to be more depressingly impersonal and sterile more than hostile. It's also contrasted against the beauty and terror of the natural world. Also with Subnautica, only one lifepod actually works, so that seems like a poo poo design.
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Dec 27, 2021 19:50
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The issue was not getting into the ocean, it was that most of them apparently didn't deploy their airbags properly to float. Only the player's and one other lifepod managed to deploy floatation devices, and the other one landed upside-down. The lifepods that landed too deep had no power because they were supposed to be solar-powered. On top of that, one pod had its fabricator bug out so it could only make toys, one somehow managed to kill its occupant in the process of landing, and one apparently had a fuel line in a place where it could be ignited by an occupant fooling around with a flare.
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Dec 27, 2021 22:15
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Consider the taser, a tool meant to pacify people without doing long-lasting damage, but it's complicated and there's a lot of ways that it can go wrong, and the barbs can be nasty. Now imagine if you invented a perfect taser that doesn't even break the skin? And what if you managed to somehow calibrate it so that it'll work on any species? The perfect way to stop somebody without harming them. Now imagine duct-taping it to a gun.
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Jan 26, 2022 04:46
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I do have a theory that maybe Big Guy's failed AI system is still around as a voice filter to turn everything the pilot says into ridiculous Americana. Because so much of what Big Guy says is talking about Uncle Sam, apple pie, helping out taxpayers, Americana and propaganda, and sometimes they cut to the pilot inside saying things that Big Guy says, but the show never actually depicts Jim Hanks, the pilot, saying any of the ridiculous Americana stuff himself. Even a more simple verbal tic like Big Guy's tendency to say "for the love of Mike" as an expletive, Jim Hanks never says that himself.Ghost Leviathan posted:That really seems like something you'd think they'd have figured out in testing. Well, they did. That's why they mothballed him until Rusty pulled him out of storage because he was a lonely child robot, and both the commanding military guy and the corporate boss trying to maximize his profits as a contractor didn't listen to the scientist lady when she said it was no good. I think Rusty is the only reliable AI in the show, despite having the mindset of a dumb kid. All the other AIs either end up being really stupid in some way or they decide to rise up and conquer humanity.
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Jan 28, 2022 17:09
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AEwFhB9WTk While it's obvious what's wrong with blackmailing somebody to perform complicated surgery to insert cyborg bits into loadbearing parts of your body, I question the utility of knee-mounted chainsaws.
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Jun 20, 2022 15:54
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imperiusdamian posted:If there's one thing Trek should have NEVER introduced, it was the loving holodeck. The holodeck would've been fine if the writers had any self-control about the holodeck randomly overcoming all limits to keep unexpectedly creating a fully sentient holograms.
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Jul 21, 2022 13:55
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Look, if you took away the ability of technology to somehow malfunction, there goes like 60% of Star Trek plots. I guess in TNG they mostly were so overawed by just the sheer concept of the holodeck they didn't really bother thinking much about it past the base concept. I'm not sure if even 80s audiences were impressed by the idea, it seems pretty late in the development of sci-fi. The episode where Ryker and Picard are just hanging out in a holo jazz bar and Ryker somehow falls deeply in love with a holo-woman because she doesn't hate his trombone playing is boring as hell, but I think it may be the first holodeck-central episode.
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Jul 21, 2022 18:25
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