Battle: Los Angeles Trailer is Out of This World
- Thread starter vansau
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You raise many good points, and reminds me of another awesome book I read once.Therumancer said:
The basic idea was that Newton made some elementary math errors when he was working out gravity, and thus missed the fact that anti-gravity and faster than light travel is actually really really easy.
Flash forward two hundred years, and we've advanced in a load of ways that most alien species never DO. Most alien species figure out how to travel between the stars way earlier, and focus their efforts on expansion and colonization, their technology usually sticking to something close to our 14-18th centuries.
So, in 20xx, alien invasion ships land on Earth, the gangplanks open, and knights on horseback charge out...right into a load of tanks and machine guns.
And then humanity goes on a huge conquest spree, and the entire galaxy is ours!
MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Surely I'm not the only one who thought of Rage Against the Machine [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Battle_of_Los_Angeles_(album)] when seeing the title?
If anything the music is epic or at least really disconcerting, ether way I want it.
If anyone can find the store or site that this is from please message me.
If anyone can find the store or site that this is from please message me.
I missed that one, but that's pushing it a bit.Namewithheld said:
My ramble comes down more along the lines of an episode of say "Star Trek" or another science fiction TV series.
The heroic crew of whatever ship the series is about comes to some relatively primitive planet, and lands. Due to some misunderstanding a fight breaks out and the anonymous crew member they brought along gets blown away, a main character gets captured, or whatever else.
Just as their weapons are hardly ineffective, I don't see why when it's earth being visited our weapons suddenly become useless. Unless they're planning on blowing the planet away from orbit in it's entirety, a bunch of Klingons, Federation Marines, Storm Troopers, or whatever else engaging our military would hardly be unbeatable. Oh sure their weapons ARE better but they aren't immune to dying from very fast projectiles, or explosives. They might win, but they aren't just going to plow through Earth in that kind of an invasion.
I think this explains my point much more clearly and to the point. All of the same reasons we see with technology and what would happen when we vist other planets with more advanced gear and the like, are liable to apply to an alien species. Typically a lot of thought goes into the pseudo-science behind something like "Star Trek" despite the contridictions in any body of work that goes on that long. People can clearly see a lot of the problems in doing things even when you wind up with obtaining the energy requirements to move from planet to planet. Also putting holes in things is putting holes in things, a lot can be said for why say an Energy based weapon is going to be superior to a projectile based one, but that doesn't mean having a bullet hit you is any less effective of lethal. This is to say nothing of science fiction concepts where hard-ammo weapons are still in use, sometimes alongside energy projectors and personal force fields (which still require a portable power supply, and where a solid energy field is going to still obey the laws of physics).
As I said, we have context for the stuff in an Alien invasion, unlike a primitive tribe running into boats, guns, medicine, and similar things. There is no reason why just because they are the aliens coming to earth that suddenly they would be ignoring the stuff we've got on it's own terms due to being more advanced. Kirk, Picard, Hunt (Andromeda), and other TV series heroes would have had much easier careers when they were the "invading aliens" if that was the case.
Oh and even with the space ships, I mean sure they are going to do some massive damage but lacking planet busters and the desire to use them, orbital bombardment isn't nessicarily going to be a guarantee of victory either. In most alien invasion movies/shows, use humans fire nuclear ICBMs into orbit or whatever and the spaceship laughs it off (usually range is acknowleged, chances are if they need to be in orbit to hit us, we can hit them back). In comparison look at a more sensible analysis of the situation where say "The Enterprise" (which is a pretty powerful ship) gets hit by ground based weapons, even from inferior planets. Typically it doesn't just laugh that off. Chances are in an episode if they got hit by ground based missles, they would wind up with half their ship being fried. On plenty of occasions when a crew member has been captured or whatever it seems like the first thing the "primitives" do is shoot the ship and disable it, leading to tense negotiations since the "do what we want or we nuke you from orbit" option is not on the table, or is shown to have not been all that viable to begin with.
If your typical "Space Opera" super ship would run into a problem with the thought behind it (and typically there is a lot as I said) I see no viable reason why Aliens would have it easier.
Something has been bothering me about invasion films for a while, and I didn't realise what it was until I read your post. Chances are aliens would be more technologically advanced than us, but that doesn't make them invincible. If an M1 Abrams shoots soemthing, chances are it's going to fall over, alien or not. I don't think the forcefield excuse really stands up either, although I have no idea how they could possibly work, so that could just be me.Therumancer said:
Another thing that annoys me about these films is that we never spot the aliens until they're at Earth. Take Independence Day for example. Each ship that came down to the planet was 15 miles in diameter, and the mothership was big enough to hold 20 of them. We didn't know it was there until it was at the Moon. Bullshit.
Slightly off topic here, but I also have the same issue with Zombie films. They always depict the military getting overrun in days. No way in hell would that happen. We're talking well trained, highly skilled soldiers with incerdibly effective equpiment going up against a large, unorganised mass of soft, unarmed targets. There is no way in hell the military would lose against that.
On a completely different note, I'd like to just say that your posts are awesome. Every time your name comes up in a thread I know I'm going to be reading, a long, well thought out, intelligent reply. It can amke a nice change sometimes.
Thanks for the compliment.Rusty Bucket said:
As far as Force Fields go, I've read a few science fiction novels that have explained theories on how they could work. Typically the idea is to suspend particles so they won't move in a given area.
If you think about air as like a "sea" of sorts that we swim through, displacing it as it moves, imagine if for example the air molecules themselves, or the particles being carried in the air could be made so they won't move at all. Sort of like freezing ice or whatever. There are various ways scientists can isolate, examine, move (or suspend) molecules and particles as it is, but it's very difficult and energy intensive. I don't pretend to understand particle physics, or much about molecules beyond what I learned in school. The actual "force field" is usually based on being able to make a device that will be able to manipulate countless particles and molecules at once and render them unmoving or "solid".
Various people have come up with differant definitions, but that's one of them for how something like that might work on a very basic level. Of course when you consider it's a massive undertaking to create things like hadron colliders and the like, it's pretty obvious that we can't play around with anything on that level right now. One of the biggest obstacles is of course our abillity to generate energy.
More advanced than what we can deal with, but the point here being that it's not totally out of context to our civilization.
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As far as the zombie thing goes, despite it going out of context, I agree that a lot of zombie fiction is utter crud nowadays. It's not thought through very well because with "Zombie Mania" people care more about the icky corpses (or infected people) than the actual logic behind the situation or how it could progress that far.
In many scenarios, there is no way the military would be overrun, the details being glossed over for the sake of engineering the nessicary drama and shambling hordes of zombies. In others it makes sense.
If the military could be deployed in force, even "fast" zombies or ultra durable "must be hacked to pieces" types would be decimated. Largely because the military can respond with a lot more than a few dudes with assault rifles and maybe a Jeep. There isn't much even the biggest horde is doing to a tank (which could deal with the horde just by driving). Not to mention carpet bombing, field artillery, and dozens of other things.
On the other hand if the infection is one that hits everywhere more or less simultaneously or has wide distribution before people know what it is, the military itself could be affected. If large numbers of soldiers were infected, along with large portions of the command structure, the military could be surprised, and overrun before it had a chance to ever mobilize.
A "slow burn" situation is also likely to acheive this. If your dealing with a virus where the initial infection had a long onset time, and had tons of sick people overflowing civil services to the point where they were using all the other emergency facilities to house/treat them, like schools, military bases, fire stations, and the like, when the first zombies started to turn they would be right there to finish off/zombify other people with the illness to accelerate the process and you'd have hordes with total surprise right in the midst of the emergency infrastructure. With this kind of scenario, the big "protectors of humanity" would be the first ones down when it got moving and ironically that is where the majority of zombies would start moving from.
Then of course you have a supernatural explanation. If the zombies are caused by some curse, evil spell, or something similar the first places hit might very well be the authorities, especially if an intelligence is guiding things. This is doubly true if the zombies themselves aren't totally mindless, but simply very feral... like the possesed people from say "Evil Dead" or John Carpenter's "Ghosts Of Mars" and "Prince Of Darkness".
It's been done well in a lot of places, with all those explanations, but also done very badly as I said.
scarab7 said:
The post from you two actually points out something pretty interesting that is common in all types of fictitious media. Why is it that the most popular of big cities are used for stories like this? Any marvel fan knows that Marvel loves to use New York and most of the settings of our movies are in this city along with L.A. and others. Why can't an epic be stagged in a small town or a rural area? Why can't a romance flick take place in an inner city setting instead of the beach or the mountains all the time?To any journalist of this site who may be perusing this thread: This would be a great topic for an article (Looking at you Yahtzee and Movie Bob). If it already has been done, then I apologize for my ignorance.Rigs83 said: