Luckily they all wear that standard issue armour which stops all the kill-o-blast rounds that normally get squirted all over the place.
Stars, planets and other Sci-Fi peeves
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Luckily they all wear that standard issue armour which stops all the kill-o-blast rounds that normally get squirted all over the place.
Klimax
NWO Cyborg 5960x (subversion VPUNPCKHQDQ)
Maybe size sufficient for curvature to be masked by high speed, locally insignificant and maybe by surface things.
HansMustermann
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Well, more to the WTH point about armour in movies, the corolary is that IRL you only put up with those restriction BECAUSE it works to keep you alive. You don't keep it just to look cool.
IRL when muskets became commonplace and they started going right through a gothic armour, people ditched the gothic armour in favour of just a thick breastplate and helmet that could still stop a ball. When firearms further evolved to make even those obsolete, people just ditched both altogether. Because it makes no sense to encumber yourself with a lot of steel that does nothing to protect you.
The most recent examples of that clearly in action are as recent as WW1, actually. And yes, it's a plural.
- The Germans started with that lobster-armour to protect from bullets, except it was heavy, and it didn't stop a rifle bullet. So the soldiers just ditched it.
- The Canadians, bless their souls, started with a spade with a hole in it, so you could put your rifle through it and be shielded from bullets. Except it was crap as a shield, since again it wasn't nearly thick enough to stop a rifle bullet, and it was crap as a spade, since it was too heavy and it had a big hole in it. So again, that got phased out in favour of something that didn't even pretend to stop a bullet, but was lightweight and did the job of digging a trench.
- Almost all nations had some big metal shields, sort of like half a pillbox of sorts, that went over the front and top of their Maxim machineguns. Except what it did in practice was signal your position to every single sniper and artillery spotter out there. And it didn't really protect against either. So again soldiers either ditched it, or placed it somewhere 100m away where nobody was hiding behind it. Sure, shell THAT position with your artillery, thank you very much.
Etc.
Invariably, across all human history, when armour didn't do the job, it didn't stay in use.
Which really is the actual WTH about armour in fiction. The actual WTH isn't that some armour might not stop bullets or blaster shots. The big WTH is that people still use it, in spite of its doing worse than nothing in that universe.
If stormtrooper armour actually doesn't stop bullets, AND it blocks your vision, then WHY encumber your troops in it? If whatever banded armour that legion got in The Eagle was so bad that a lightweight thrown axe can hit diagonally across the bands and go right through, then same question: why encumber the legion with it?
You'd think that after the first few get killed in some skirmish due to their armour offering no protection, people wouuld want
A) some other armour, and
B) the armour merchant's head on a pike
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Devil's Advocate.
Is the Stormtrooper getup ever explicitly called armor? Maybe it's just a uniform.
I mean the Empire doesn't really seem to put much value on individual troopers. They seem to have a Zerg Rush / Quantity over Quality philosophy to most things.
Is the Stormtrooper getup ever explicitly called armor? Maybe it's just a uniform.
I mean the Empire doesn't really seem to put much value on individual troopers. They seem to have a Zerg Rush / Quantity over Quality philosophy to most things.
dasmiller
Just the right amount of cowbell
As far as i can tell, stormtrooper armor is there to protect everyone slse from tbe stormtroopers.
It's pretty effective.
It's pretty effective.
HansMustermann
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Whatever you call it, the problem is the exact same: unless it provides SOME advantage that outweighs the disadvantages AND cost, then any sane people wouldn't use it.
Essentially there's a reason nobody issues full suits of gothic plate as uniforms. They're heavy, they're expensive, the helmet resticts your vision severely, and they don't really do anything for you that some clothes wouldn't. Just calling it a uniform instead of armour doesn't remove the issue that it's not a practical thing to wear in combat.
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HansMustermann
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Well, I'm returning to this with yet another peeve, and this time it really is a peeve. It's where I've flat out stopped watching Ascension: the idea that scientists not only normally work isolated in some ivory tower, but that they work BETTER if you put them in a tin can with no contact to the outside world to distract them.
Look,
- scientists also work better with access to the latest scientific information (as opposed to at best 2.5 years later because that's where a starship would get it, but most likely none is the idea I'm getting from Ascension.)
- they work best with a wide pool of the best quaified team members, as opposed one single medical doctor for the whole ship, and whatever inbred twit (it's only 600 souls in that can, and it's divided into the upper and lower decks, who don't interbreed) was the least bad to take as an apprentice. Normally someone qualified to even be in the post-grad program, much less a researcher, is from skimming a pool of millions, not just whoever was the brightest inbred twit from about 100 candidates most from the equivalent of a small isolated mountain village.
- they also work best with whatever equipment and materials are needed for their research and testing. Those costs in the million for some research topics aren't just salary for one smart guy thinking it all up. You're not going to whip up an electron microscope, or yes an MRI since they explicitly mention that in Ascension, from junk salvaged around a sealed spaceship.
- they also work best with statistically significant populations (whether of people, animals, rocks, whatever) to test their theories on.
Etc.
The idea that complete isolation is BETTER for progress is... let's just say, it's how China got from having cannons and all sorts of crazy tech at the start of the Ming Dynasty, to polearms by the "Great" Qing dynasty. It's how Japan was still using obsolete matchlock arquebuses 200 years after they got the already obsolete design from some Dutch. It's NOT what accelerates progress.
Look,
- scientists also work better with access to the latest scientific information (as opposed to at best 2.5 years later because that's where a starship would get it, but most likely none is the idea I'm getting from Ascension.)
- they work best with a wide pool of the best quaified team members, as opposed one single medical doctor for the whole ship, and whatever inbred twit (it's only 600 souls in that can, and it's divided into the upper and lower decks, who don't interbreed) was the least bad to take as an apprentice. Normally someone qualified to even be in the post-grad program, much less a researcher, is from skimming a pool of millions, not just whoever was the brightest inbred twit from about 100 candidates most from the equivalent of a small isolated mountain village.
- they also work best with whatever equipment and materials are needed for their research and testing. Those costs in the million for some research topics aren't just salary for one smart guy thinking it all up. You're not going to whip up an electron microscope, or yes an MRI since they explicitly mention that in Ascension, from junk salvaged around a sealed spaceship.
- they also work best with statistically significant populations (whether of people, animals, rocks, whatever) to test their theories on.
Etc.
The idea that complete isolation is BETTER for progress is... let's just say, it's how China got from having cannons and all sorts of crazy tech at the start of the Ming Dynasty, to polearms by the "Great" Qing dynasty. It's how Japan was still using obsolete matchlock arquebuses 200 years after they got the already obsolete design from some Dutch. It's NOT what accelerates progress.
HansMustermann
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So I decided to resurrect this thread to throw around one more bit of information for whoever might benefit from it when writing or discussing SF: the best stars for life (well, at least for human colonist life) are really those like our sun. The more you deviate, the crappier things start to be.
The problem at both sides of the spectrum are flares.
And they're really the worst for red dwarfs. Which ironically were often considered the best chance for long term colonization, because they tend to burn their fuel very slowly and could easily last a couple trillion years on the main sequence. So theoretically you could jolly well live there until the Big Rip... if it weren't for the part where it's actually impossible to live there.
The scenario that makes it a problem starts with them being both smaller AND cooler. Which means the energy put out is first limited by surface emitting it AND the energy flux from the surface. Well the first is proportional to the square of the radius, while the latter is proportional to the fourth power of the temperature. Both radius and temperature are lower than for our sun, so when you factor both in, a habitable planet would have to be VERY close to the star. We're talking distances measured in single digit millions of km, or 10 to 50 times closer than our Earth is to the Sun.
In fact, as I said at the beginning of the thread, despite being a dwarf, it would look huge in the sky of a habitable planet, because it needs to be that much closer.
Which creates the first problem: tidal lock. Just like the moon shows the same face to Earth, Mercury does the same with the Sun, and your habitable zone planet would do the same with its red dwarf sun. Which ought to create huge temperature differences between the two sides, and likely winds that can sandblast through face-hardened steel.
But that's the least of problems.
The next big problem is that the vast majority of red dwarves tend to be flare stars. With less pressure to keep things together, they are likely to throw really big flares. Which might be inconventient if you were far away from them, but you're not. A habitable planet would have to be real close to the star. A well aimed flare could literally nuke the surface facing the sun, and possibly even blow away a good portion of the atmosphere.
But wait, it gets even better.
The real big problem is that all red dwarves are convective stars. They have very strong magnetic fields, and rather unpredictable ones at that. The magnetic field component added by convection, compared to the rotation of the star, is massive, and can add up to massive peaks in the equatorial plane or random other directions. Long story short, they tend to pretty much periodically BLOW UP. Well, not the whole star, but think quite the mega-flare explosion on the surface, emitting massively more energy as light than usual and quite the flux of charged particles.
We've actually observed such a massive explosion on Proxima Centauri some 2 years ago, where the massively bright outburst lasted only a couple of seconds, but could be seen with the naked eye from Earth. The explosion would have completely sterilized Proxima Centauri B, a planet in its habitable range, as well as probably blown off most of the atmosphere if it had any. (But likely previous explosions took care of that.)
So yeah, no, colonies around red dwarfs are not really gonna happen.
The problem at both sides of the spectrum are flares.
And they're really the worst for red dwarfs. Which ironically were often considered the best chance for long term colonization, because they tend to burn their fuel very slowly and could easily last a couple trillion years on the main sequence. So theoretically you could jolly well live there until the Big Rip... if it weren't for the part where it's actually impossible to live there.
The scenario that makes it a problem starts with them being both smaller AND cooler. Which means the energy put out is first limited by surface emitting it AND the energy flux from the surface. Well the first is proportional to the square of the radius, while the latter is proportional to the fourth power of the temperature. Both radius and temperature are lower than for our sun, so when you factor both in, a habitable planet would have to be VERY close to the star. We're talking distances measured in single digit millions of km, or 10 to 50 times closer than our Earth is to the Sun.
In fact, as I said at the beginning of the thread, despite being a dwarf, it would look huge in the sky of a habitable planet, because it needs to be that much closer.
Which creates the first problem: tidal lock. Just like the moon shows the same face to Earth, Mercury does the same with the Sun, and your habitable zone planet would do the same with its red dwarf sun. Which ought to create huge temperature differences between the two sides, and likely winds that can sandblast through face-hardened steel.
But that's the least of problems.
The next big problem is that the vast majority of red dwarves tend to be flare stars. With less pressure to keep things together, they are likely to throw really big flares. Which might be inconventient if you were far away from them, but you're not. A habitable planet would have to be real close to the star. A well aimed flare could literally nuke the surface facing the sun, and possibly even blow away a good portion of the atmosphere.
But wait, it gets even better.
The real big problem is that all red dwarves are convective stars. They have very strong magnetic fields, and rather unpredictable ones at that. The magnetic field component added by convection, compared to the rotation of the star, is massive, and can add up to massive peaks in the equatorial plane or random other directions. Long story short, they tend to pretty much periodically BLOW UP. Well, not the whole star, but think quite the mega-flare explosion on the surface, emitting massively more energy as light than usual and quite the flux of charged particles.
We've actually observed such a massive explosion on Proxima Centauri some 2 years ago, where the massively bright outburst lasted only a couple of seconds, but could be seen with the naked eye from Earth. The explosion would have completely sterilized Proxima Centauri B, a planet in its habitable range, as well as probably blown off most of the atmosphere if it had any. (But likely previous explosions took care of that.)
So yeah, no, colonies around red dwarfs are not really gonna happen.
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Bikewer
Penultimate Amazing
I’ve criticized the storm-trooper armor many times. Not only does it seem to offer little protection (even from sticks and rocks...) It’s issued in a nice, glaring white.
In the forest scenes in Empire Strikes Back, the poor troopers stand out like a sore thumb.
I’d think an advanced suit of armor would be mimetic... blending into the background much as the “Predator’s” outfit did.
But Lucas apparently likes big battles staged much like Revolutionary or Napoleonic war battles, with big groups of closely-spaced fighters blasting away at each other. Seldom does anyone hide or dig a foxhole.....
In the forest scenes in Empire Strikes Back, the poor troopers stand out like a sore thumb.
I’d think an advanced suit of armor would be mimetic... blending into the background much as the “Predator’s” outfit did.
But Lucas apparently likes big battles staged much like Revolutionary or Napoleonic war battles, with big groups of closely-spaced fighters blasting away at each other. Seldom does anyone hide or dig a foxhole.....
Mercury shows the same face to the Sun? Per wiki
For many years it was thought that Mercury was synchronously tidally locked with the Sun, rotating once for each orbit and always keeping the same face directed towards the Sun, in the same way that the same side of the Moon always faces Earth. Radar observations in 1965 proved that the planet has a 3:2 spin–orbit resonance, rotating three times for every two revolutions around the Sun. The eccentricity of Mercury's orbit makes this resonance stable—at perihelion, when the solar tide is strongest, the Sun is nearly still in Mercury's sky.
Whereas the Rebels do have appropriate colours.
I also think Lucas wanted for the Empire to consciously be black and white:
Darth Vader - Black, Death Star uniforms - Black, Stormtroopers - Black, Star destroyers - White. Whilst the Rebels had more naturalistic colourschemes.
HansMustermann
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Well, looks like my information was severely outdated. Thanks for the correction.
You're correct that Mercury is tidally locked, but it's not synchronous. I suppose however that the exoplanets which are much closer to their primary stars than Mercury is do indeed always show the same face to the star.
yes, I can suspend disbelief around physics but evolution is so fundamental that natural selection would happen any universe where there are finite resources, and imperfect self-replication.
And I just caught an episode of Star Trek - Enterprise yesterday where they had a teleological view of evolution. Two humanoid species on a planet and one had reached its time so was degenerating to allow the younger species to have its turn.
Lots wrong with that.
Wudang
BOFH
As much wrong as the Voyager episode where someone breaks warp 10 so experiences the next 10,000 years of human evolution? FFS.
Look at my threads where I was disagreeing with Articulett and Cyborg (amongst others) over whether evolution was deterministic for my view on that.
Or don't bother - adaptation occurs to the environment but the manner and particular adaptation is not predetermined and can take many forms, and the whole selective landscape is subject to feedback looks and random changes.
The Outer Limits did it first with "Sixth Finger".
Elagabalus
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What about questionable or antiquated Psychology Therapy. In Star Trek TOS 'Wolf in the Fold" they take Scotty down to Argelius so he doesn't develop a total resentment of women because he was injured in an accidental explosion caused by a women! (Those lousy, broads! Why I oughta'!)
It makes perfect sense!
http://www.chakoteya.net/StarTrek/36.htm