Future Weapons: ?Wait a minute, this is the future. Where are all the phaser guns?? ? Simon Phoenix

Therumancer

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Halyah said:
Therumancer said:
-Snipped-
Given the vast area covered by the republic, the amount of Jedi that would've existed would likely dwarf any modern organization by comparison. So to be honest it's an oddity that the old EU didn't have a lot more of them showing up given there'd be many who wasn't even in republic space at the time.

Of course I doubt George Lucas really understood the sheer scales involved when dealing with things on a galactic level heh. Then again to be fair to the guy, most people don't. I won't claim to understand it properly either.
Well the thing is that this again goes back to the nature of the universe, lack of free will, and intent in the cycles, etc... The idea is that at the time of the movies your dealing with the end of an era of good, the Jedi are supposed to be fairly weak and ineffective as their time has passed, there very little conflict or strife in the galaxy, and little actual need for the Jedi, they effectively operate as a very small group of agents and diplomats for the galactic senate. At this time in the universe the very thought of someone assembling a military and using it to blockade a planet was pretty much unheard of, and the Republic saw no need to maintain anything like a military force for purposes of intervention.

Likewise at this point in the cycle, you might find one force sensitive in a generation on a highly populated planet. Hence why they run around with their little "test" (as ridiculous as they define it, but The Force can appear and allow itself to be tested for any way it wants). Though arguably anyone The Force wants trained will be trained... it's important to note that what people think they are deciding or choosing to happen is an illusion even if they don't realize it.

Going back to things that were based on what Lucas wrote, to the era of the "Old Republic" and such, there were a lot more force users back then as the narrative The Force created was far different. The Jedi also weren't supposed to be quite the same way, remember these are the guys who committed multiple acts of species genocide, and literally wiped out The Sith to the point where as of the end of the next era nobody even knew for sure what a Sith was. To an extent The Exile and Revan mention what had to be done (again this is pretty much canon as it came from Lucas and his notes apparently) and in some ways the whole Jedi order of the time is a bunch of hypocrites because they are trying to erase their past and the magnitude of the things they had to do in order to bring about the peace. Your seeing them transform into the comparative joke that exists at the time of the movies, because after all, that is what The Force wants when it's time for another cycle.

The thing is that we just really can't conceive of the Utopia that The Republic was for a while, we mostly see it in decay. There was no need for any kind of large scale organizations, or so The Force dictated (and without true free will, it can make this happen). For a couple thousand years before the movies and things started to fall apart the whole galaxy might have literally been dancing around singing "This is the age of Aquarius".

That said, your pretty much correct that in a more "balanced" time like the battles taking place between the Sith Empire and Old Republic with swarms of force users on either side, something like "Order 66" wouldn't have worked, and one guy couldn't have pretty much brought down most of the order by wiping out one school. For example the main Jedi Temple in Corscant is destroyed at the beginning of "ToR: Online" and the Grandmaster of the Jedi dies, but all that does is piss the Jedi off and convince them it's time to get serious.... something which arguably The Force wanted and fit it's narrative because the whole point is to bring about the destruction of The Sith Empire. In that game while the player gets involved in certain key planets and operations, the whole galaxy is supposed to be going at it, treaties aside.
 

Therumancer

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Halyah said:
[] I don't really buy the lack of free will idea. Mostly because I doubt the Force, if it is sentient, would really give two shits about farmer joe in random whocaresville and what his impact would be on anything. That's just my personal opinion though and with the EU gone down the toilet, this is probably not true of the Force anymore unless they adopt this part into the new EU.

Yeah I'm aware of the Jedi's behaviour in the old republic(I play swtor and I've played both kotors(second one was best)). Their understanding of how a mind work is rather laughable on top of that given they seem to think avoiding to learn how to actually deal with emotions is actually something that'd work(and if the old EU is anything to go by then it pretty much always ended up failing hard). So yeah basically a hypocrit. The Jedi in the prequels I guess could be summed up as "insular" and "isolated". That said I don't think the republic was much of a utopia. If anything it always came across as corrupt, inefficient and incompetent, but that's just me.

To be honest even if there were less Jedi at this point, there is no realistic way for "Order 66" to be a complete success in any fashion. Best case scenario for the emperor is that the Jedi involved in the military effort is wiped out and thats about it. Any Jedi not involved directly or thats out exploring(like the Jedi Sentinels IIRC, but dunno if they are still canon) would've had an easier time of escaping. So yeah there'd be bound to be survivors and probably a fair bit of them(relatively speaking, on galactic terms they'd be one step away from being the new dodo bird so to speak).

On a sidenote, the treaties in SWTOR stop counting about halfway through the story and the war restarts. You can probably guess how well it goes for the empire in the end. :p

Err, well this isn't really a theory it's the canon as it's existed up until now. Part of why the EU was such a mess was that a lot of the people writing it never really "got" Star Wars or how it worked, the writers tended to treat it like any other fantasy world and approached it from a western perspective with free will and where the conflicts mattered a lot more rather than people simply thinking they did. As a result it tended to be jarring in comparison to the movies.

The thing is that the whole concept of "Fate" is antithetical to the western way of thinking, yet it's a big part of some eastern societies and religions. The idea is that The Force is everywhere, and in everything, guiding the universe how it thinks is best, as such it's guiding "Farmer Joe" as much as anyone else.

The classic conflict to something like this is how a thief might argue to a noble that it's not his fault that he stole something because he was ordained to do it. Of course the noble would argue that he's going to have the thief's hand chopped off anyway because he was likewise ordained to uphold the laws and see it done. It all still happens like normal, but neither man believes they had agency in what they were doing despite how it might seem, they are just playing roles dictated a long time ago. Every man is held by the strings of fate, and fate has a puppeteer for each of us.

It goes along with the old question in religion about how if God knows everything that will happen, there can be any free will or if it's right for him to throw people into hell when he knows ahead of time they will sin, fail to find redemption, and suffer eternally. How could such a being be good and benevolent? I'm not going to discuss that and various answers, since it will get well off topic, I'm just pointing out that it's a classic question that gets to the root of the whole idea of fate and concepts like The Force, the way The Force is presented is the kind of answer a lot of non-western civilizations arrived at, albeit in a hypothetical universe where no philosophers ever really asked these questions and realized what was going on.

Oddly KOTOR2 which came from Lucas' notes is pretty much an entire "what happens if someone finds out what's going on". The whole plot is that Kreia figures out that The Force is manipulating everything and how the cycles work, and she sets out to destroy The Force specifically to give people free will. How she planned to achieve this goal was debatable since they never finished the game properly, but in the ending it does have it ends with a sort of mind trip when Kreia starts spouting prophecy and shows exactly how everything that happened leads to what The Force was aiming for anyway, raising the question of whether she ever could have succeeded, or if as is likely everything she did including trying to destroy The Force was just it's manipulations anyway... she never could have succeeded, she only had the idea because The Force gave it to her.

Now, it remains to be seen if Disney will maintain this, or go with a more EU-like take. That said the trick to doing Star Wars right is to avoid explicitly spelling it out (or not very often). After all the people in that universe believe they have free will as opposed to the illusion of it. It's very much a universe of prophecy, and one where even in trying to break a prophecy or do the most counter-intuitive things, you make it come to pass because even in resisting everything you do is pre-ordained.

That said "Order 66" actually would work above and beyond the above points (where one can argue it works because The Force decided it does... it's killing the Jedi), because it already did. It was based loosely on the legend of what happened to the "Knights Templar". The basic story is that when The Crusades were going on all the nations involved who had their own conflicts decided to put them aside on those battle fields, and created a sort of international order of knights to hold things together that would have authority over the forces in the region to keep everyone on task. This worked very well, but when "The Crusades" ended these knights came home and still had all of this authority and a well organized order, as well as tons of money and treasure. They got political, and being popular as well as rich and powerful they represented an unexpected threat to kings, nobles, and even church authorities. There were stories about them being into black magic and stuff, and odds are that was largely propaganda, though I have no doubts they probably liked to party and exploited numerous vices as the rich are likely to do (which by the standards of the time could be made to look very similar). At any rate The Knights Templar were wiped out by sealed orders being sent to a bunch of military commanders all through the lands with instructions to open them at the same time, it was done on the down low so the Templars who were very popular would not know. The orders all pretty much said "kill the Knights Templar" so pretty much at the same moment commanders opened their letters, brought large groups of troops against the knights and their households, and wiped them out totally by surprise. It was actually pretty effective, and whether any survived is a matter of discussion and legend. Indeed part of the legend of why "Friday The 13th" is unlucky is because the day this happened was a Friday the 13th... where some of the most fortunate and powerful people ever were all wiped out. More can be said back and forth about this, and The Templar order (it's a popular subject) but basically that's what inspired George Lucas, they died in a way very similar to a bunch of powerful Knights in real life, at the hands of the military receiving sealed/coded orders.

Of course I would argue that since the clone troopers aren't supposed to be mindless, and the situation is a lot different than what happened in history (where you were dealing with what amounted to rival political factions, and a military that probably didn't like the Knights as they answered to and served other authorities), that the military probably wouldn't have universally followed those orders since they were after all fighting side by side with The Jedi for a long time. But again, like many things in Star Wars the bottom line is "it has been ordained, so it shall be". It's the same basic reason why Papaltine could defeat multiple Jedi masters, and why Obi-Wan was able to drop Darth Maul with an arse pull of a move... that's how it was fated to happen, none of the people involved were really acting based on their abilities or even their own desires, they just thought they were.
 

Therumancer

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immortalfrieza said:
BiscuitTrouser said:
Well, when it comes to Harry Potter at least the explanations I tend to hear are either that most muggle tech doesn't work that well in the presence of magic, and/or that magic itself is capable of doing all the things current muggle tech can do and then some and have been able to for centuries, thus there's little point in the wizards using any of it. i.e. why bother using a gun when you can set countless people on fire or electrocute them as many times as you want to just by speaking a few words repeatedly, stuff like that.

Whether either of these explanations make any actual SENSE however is another matter.
Actually, I think the guy your talking to is pretty much right. I don't think magic in HP is incapable of adaption as he points out (indeed new spells and such are shown to be being invented, and Fred and George create whole new varieties of Phrank magic) but there is an issue of sheer numbers. Basically if humanity as a whole found out about magic and wizards, and what's more than only specific people were capable of using magic, there is a good chance there would be a lot of fear and rage. Wizards are so comparatively rare, that as they point out Voldemort's "Pure Blood" attitudes would have doomed them to extinction, since breeding with muggles is the only way they could keep their numbers up.

In combat a wand might be flashier, but is it really better than a gun? Well as a general rule with a wand you need to speak a phrase (which might be complicated) and perform a specific motion. With a gun you just pull the trigger. So basically if you had a wizard with a wand, and a dude with a gun in a standoff who would win? Well I think the guy with the gun would blow a hole through the wizard from how things are described. Of course this doesn't mean that in such a matter of discovery magic wouldn't put on a good fight, I mean teleportation, transfiguration, memory modification, and all kinds of things exist that could be used, but at the end of the day sheer numbers would prevail. Not to mention one also has to consider the upper limits of what magic can do, series like say Roger Zelazny's "Mad Wand" and even Palladium's RIFTS RPG have covered this to some extent. In the scope of Harry Potter for example I do not think that Wizards are capable of things like say... space travel, otherwise they would have already been doing it. Nor do I think they can say reach the levels of energy put out by most bombs or missiles. This was an issue explored in RIFTS for example where the gods are very powerful, but when dealing with this relatively new force "Technology" they run into problems. As a result you see the ancient gods putting down some of their magical weapons for ginormous energy guns (while still using magic) and tales of encounters like how Posiadan got run off a planet he was patron god of by "The Mechanoids" when he underestimated them (if I remember they description was he went up into one of their mother ships and started trashing it, and then another ship blew it up on top of him, and he needed to be saved by his son.. Lord Triton... losing the planet in the process).

That said Harry Potter is one of those series that doesn't lend itself well to apocolyptic and grim overthinking, it's one of those things I tend to want to read to get away from my more disturbing thoughts. :)
 

Johnny Impact

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Vorkosigan series
Nerve disruptor. If I remember correctly (and I'm sure someone will counterpost if I'm wrong) it's a short-range weapon with a wide beam. Any tissue it touches, the nerves simply die. Permanently. Get your opponent's head anywhere in the cone of projection, his brain is wiped and he becomes a vegetable. Doesn't require aiming, and armor/helmet doesn't protect at all. It's technically a nonlethal weapon. They also have stunners, which have the advantage of being totally harmless.

Honor Harrington
Gravity lance, X-ray torpedoes. The gravity lance is just what it sounds like: it projects a spike of ultragravity at the enemy. The one in the book was a short-range prototype but it punched holes through the enemy ship like an elephant gun does with a human. Space battles in Honorverse are a contest between defense lasers and nuclear torpedoes. Both ships launch as many missiles as possible, while stabbing as many enemy missiles as possible with point-defense lasers. If you launch enough birds, a few get through the enemy's grid to burst in deadly disco-balls of high-powered X-ray lasers that pass completely through the enemy ship, slagging components and cooking personnel in their boots.
 

immortalfrieza

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Therumancer said:
I think BiscuitTrouser was referring to why the wizarding world of Harry Potter doesn't use and seems incredibly ignorant when it comes to muggle tech, rather than it's actual effectiveness against magic, and that's what I was responding to.

For the record, I'd say in Harry Potter magic is superior to guns in many ways from what I know about it. It's advantages are namely that many spells including combat ones require little more than pointing the wand at the target and saying the magic words if that much, magic has a massive number of possible effects providing a great deal of versatility for both attack, defense, and escape, are 100% accurate without a magical counter of some sort, can be fired off as rapidly as the wizard can say the words, and spells can apparently be fired off endlessly without anything needed to be restored or replaced to allow for it (i.e. no need for anything like bullets). The only way a halfway competent wizard would be killed by a gun is either by surprise or by several firing off at once. The reason wizards hide in the Harry Potter universe is because there's so few wizards and so many muggles they would be crushed by sheer numbers if they went to war, not because guns are better.

Of course, this is all under the assumption that the laws of physics function in even remotely the same way as it does in real life in the Harry Potter universe or any other universe with magic in it, including Star Wars, which might render the issue moot anyway.
 

Therumancer

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immortalfrieza said:
Therumancer said:
I think BiscuitTrouser was referring to why the wizarding world of Harry Potter doesn't use and seems incredibly ignorant when it comes to muggle tech, rather than it's actual effectiveness against magic, and that's what I was responding to.

For the record, I'd say in Harry Potter magic is superior to guns in many ways from what I know about it. It's advantages are namely that many spells including combat ones require little more than pointing the wand at the target and saying the magic words if that much, magic has a massive number of possible effects providing a great deal of versatility for both attack, defense, and escape, are 100% accurate without a magical counter of some sort, can be fired off as rapidly as the wizard can say the words, and spells can apparently be fired off endlessly without anything needed to be restored or replaced to allow for it (i.e. no need for anything like bullets). The only way a halfway competent wizard would be killed by a gun is either by surprise or by several firing off at once. The reason wizards hide in the Harry Potter universe is because there's so few wizards and so many muggles they would be crushed by sheer numbers if they went to war, not because guns are better.

Of course, this is all under the assumption that the laws of physics function in even remotely the same way as it does in real life in the Harry Potter universe or any other universe with magic in it, including Star Wars, which might render the issue moot anyway.
Oh, it is, and that seems to be enforced. I suspect it might have something to do with what happened to the flying car, which clearly developed it's own intelligence when enchanted (more clearly in the book than the movie). That said it was never spelled out specifically. I'm guessing if they ever elaborate on it officially (which seems unlikely) it will be something like how the more complex a device is before enchantment, the more autonomous it eventually becomes when it's enchanted. Thus wizards confine themselves to very basic technologies and use magic for most things and only enchant relatively simple objects.

That said while it's too "grim" for Harry Potter a sequel where they are adults and say someone enchants something like a computer which becomes smart enough to do magic itself and then enchants other objects, many of which in turn (depending on complexity) start doing magic... you could have a sort of "Rise Of The Machines" scenario when enchanted objects decide to get rid of their piddly organic creators... :)

That said I'm not denying Magic is more versatile, I'm just talking about in a straight confrontation. A wizard doesn't just have to speak, he also needs to be able to perform the right motions with his wand. Basically from a "dueling" stance you'd have to say move your wand back, spin it in a half circle, and point while saying the world. All the wizards spend a lot of time practicing their techniques. If some guy has a gun already pointed though all he has to
do is move his finger...
 

Nimzabaat

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Jack T. Pumpkin said:
Nimzabaat said:
You are right of course, but... that's a Sterling SMG. It's a real weapon and that is what the stock looks like. It does make sense that we never see it extended.

As for the Stormtrooper armor, I was working on a re-write (sigh, fan fiction) where I tried explaining it. Basically the white armor was refractive and you'd need a direct hit for a blaster to harm them. I am a bit interested in how the JJ Abrams Stormtroopers are going to be depicted.
I'm not sure that really works though. Blasters are plasma weapons, as someone mentioned before. The bolts they fire do damage by bursting open on contact and covering whatever they hit in plasma. Being refractive wouldn't help much against that.
Remember the "magnetically sealed" garbage compactor? Also I don't think blasters being plasma weapons was canon, after all then they'd just splash when they hit a lightsaber instead of being deflected.
 

The Heik

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thaluikhain said:
Nope, you really haven't. 40k has it's own Warp weapons...only when you get sucked into the warp, you don't instantly die, or sometimes all at. The Warp isn't merely hyperspace, it's more or less hell (Event Horizon is joked at being a 40k movie). Alternatively, you don't suck people in, you let something out.

The weapon you describe sounds very quick and painless.
Ah yes, Distort Cannons. Gotta love em'

That being said, I think we may be coming from different directions on the interpretation of scary. Not that I'm saying your interpretation of it is wrong by any means, as getting soul-raped for the next bajillion years is truly a terrifying thought. It's simply that I feel that the EftA version has a more terrifying combo of how it can be utilized rather than simply what it does.

To compare, Distort Cannons are not only short range, but in fluff they're inaccurate as all hell. They're also fairly rare and hard to utilize on the field (pretty much vehicles and Wraiths are the only things that can mount them), and things like shields (Storm shields, Iron Halos etc.) can potentially take the hit and protect you. Then there's of course the possible, but by no means likely, chance to survive the Warp by being something it can't effect ie the fluff-wrecking cheesemonger that is Kaldor Draigo. So overall, Distort Cannon (and their little Wrathcannon Cousins) can be worked around. Certainly scary, but if you play your cards right or you're properly equipped to deal with it, you reduce the likelihood that it will affect you.

The EftA Warp Gun on the other hand is pinpoint accurate, has LoS range and can be given to literally every soldier in the 5th Empire's military (Seriously, this universe has matter-convertors. Logistics mean nothing to them). Imagine being against an army who have these guns, and having to fight in battlefields where every second has the chance where you cease to exist simply because one dude on the other side spotted you. And there is absolutely no way of getting around it. No armor, no shields, no cover, no strength of will or special abilities. Nothing. You get hit with this, you're gone and you're not coming back. That is one hell of a morale blow to any force.

Again, not trying to discount your opinion in any respect, just making my case.
 

Axzarious

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I have 3 points to make in regards to this.

The movie starship troopers is supposedly a lot different than the novels. If I recall my reading right, in the Novels, everybody was outfitted with power armor, and they removed this detail in the movie. Ever wonder why they had no armour or anything else? Power Armour basically made things like tanks obsolete, and everybody in the 'infantry' was kind of like iron man. (They even had another race that the movie hadn't showcased)

Secondly, I believe in warhammer 40k, I believe any visibility of the las weapons was in regards to the rules of perception - it looks cool.

Thirdly? I see a lot of arguments that Predator weapons are ineffective. What a lot of people seem to forget that the predators are doing this for 'sport' instead of actual warfare. They are intentionally giving themselves a handicap. Most of the weapons they are using are probably deliberately made weaker or obvious - or are likely outdated. The fact that they don't seem to take Humanity OR the Aliens as anything more than sport probably speaks volumes about their actual potential if they were serious.
 

Elementary - Dear Watson

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Wow... There is some serious 'reading too far into things' on here... Surely the whole Harry Potter thing is that it's a book written with a child audience in mind. They were written initially in a way that would imply to a child that this could all be happening and could all exist right now, and they wouldn't know. That's it. Trying to find ways to explain things about it does something Rowling didn't want to do in the first place.

In terms of futuristic weapons, I am always annoyed by the outcome. Why is it always something handheld that you aim at someone and shoot? Why is it not something automated that is just fed some information? We have weapons now that can recognise targets through imagery. We have weapons that can recognise a type of vehicle/target through milimetric radar. We have things that home on radar waves or IR signatures.

Whats to say that in the future a small munition can't home on a mobile phone signal, or to a specific IP address? That they can't recognise a specific car, or even a person? That we will even need to have a person in the vicinity? Wars of the future will be fought with remote/automated weaponry delivered by expendible resilient robots!
 

dragoongfa

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Elementary - Dear Watson said:
Wow... There is some serious 'reading too far into things' on here... Surely the whole Harry Potter thing is that it's a book written with a child audience in mind. They were written initially in a way that would imply to a child that this could all be happening and could all exist right now, and they wouldn't know. That's it. Trying to find ways to explain things about it does something Rowling didn't want to do in the first place.

In terms of futuristic weapons, I am always annoyed by the outcome. Why is it always something handheld that you aim at someone and shoot? Why is it not something automated that is just fed some information? We have weapons now that can recognise targets through imagery. We have weapons that can recognise a type of vehicle/target through milimetric radar. We have things that home on radar waves or IR signatures.

Whats to say that in the future a small munition can't home on a mobile phone signal, or to a specific IP address? That they can't recognise a specific car, or even a person? That we will even need to have a person in the vicinity? Wars of the future will be fought with remote/automated weaponry delivered by expendible resilient robots!
Sadly incorrect.

I won't go into details but I said something similar when I was in the army an year ago. My commanding officer laughed at my face and pointed the Electronic Warfare jeep that was parked nearby.

"That thing alone can blanked a square kilometer with so much static and electronic interference that nothing electronic will work."

In an exercise they turned the damn thing on and all the cellphones just shut down and even the mil spec radios threw a tantrum each time someone tried to say something.

In short, Electronic Warfare negates a lot of the advantages modern technology offers.
 

Elementary - Dear Watson

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dragoongfa said:
Elementary - Dear Watson said:
Wow... There is some serious 'reading too far into things' on here... Surely the whole Harry Potter thing is that it's a book written with a child audience in mind. They were written initially in a way that would imply to a child that this could all be happening and could all exist right now, and they wouldn't know. That's it. Trying to find ways to explain things about it does something Rowling didn't want to do in the first place.

In terms of futuristic weapons, I am always annoyed by the outcome. Why is it always something handheld that you aim at someone and shoot? Why is it not something automated that is just fed some information? We have weapons now that can recognise targets through imagery. We have weapons that can recognise a type of vehicle/target through milimetric radar. We have things that home on radar waves or IR signatures.

Whats to say that in the future a small munition can't home on a mobile phone signal, or to a specific IP address? That they can't recognise a specific car, or even a person? That we will even need to have a person in the vicinity? Wars of the future will be fought with remote/automated weaponry delivered by expendible resilient robots!
Sadly incorrect.

I won't go into details but I said something similar when I was in the army an year ago. My commanding officer laughed at my face and pointed the Electronic Warfare jeep that was parked nearby.

"That thing alone can blanked a square kilometer with so much static and electronic interference that nothing electronic will work."

In an exercise they turned the damn thing on and all the cellphones just shut down and even the mil spec radios threw a tantrum each time someone tried to say something.

In short, Electronic Warfare negates a lot of the advantages modern technology offers.
Conventional warfare maybe, but when did we last do that? There is already a push for more automation my most of the large weapons manufacturers like Raytheon, MBDA, BAe and Rafael. I suppose I am thinking from nearly entirely an Air Force perspective, because that's what I know. Ground wise all I know is that reach and accuracy is what is in weapons developers minds, with a greater emphasis on defensive systems. That and ways of trying to protect against bloody IEDs!
 

Abize

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dragoongfa said:
Power armor as is usually envisioned in sci-fi is the type that reads the movement of the wearer and enhances them without straining the body. W40K power armor falls in this category as there are a lot of people who wear it and they are not space marines.

In reality the concept will land somewhere between the two.

The wearer must be trained on how to use it properly and the armor must be calibrated for each individual wearer in order not to strain him too much.

If you can find the 'All you need is Kill' light novel you will see what I mean.

PS: Edge of Tomorrow just butchered that light novel, the good part though is that we got to see Tom Cruise die a lot.
To nitpick, the Sororitas power armour [http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Power_Armour#Space_Marine_Power_Armour] (and imperial power armour) does work like you describe and is only used by the elite amongst non-astartes forces, who are usually trained significantly more than your average imperial guardsman (inquisitors etc). /40k-nerd

I actually think that the reality will be closer to astartes power armour (though probably not the black carapace) we can easily read brainwaves and I can't imagine why that wouldn't be used to guide the suit, it obviously would require some calibration but nowhere near as much as a suit that reads the physical movement of the wearer and it wouldn't require training so much as familiarization
 

Jack Action

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Nimzabaat said:
Remember the "magnetically sealed" garbage compactor? Also I don't think blasters being plasma weapons was canon, after all then they'd just splash when they hit a lightsaber instead of being deflected.
The compactor thing slipped my mind actually, forgot about that. But for the lightsabers, no, not really, depending on how they work (or not). See the point I made to Evilthecat; if lightsabers also have magnetic containment, the explanation could be that it's the magnetic fields of the blaster bolts and lightsabers that bounce off eachother.
 

dragoongfa

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Elementary - Dear Watson said:
Conventional warfare maybe, but when did we last do that? There is already a push for more automation my most of the large weapons manufacturers like Raytheon, MBDA, BAe and Rafael. I suppose I am thinking from nearly entirely an Air Force perspective, because that's what I know. Ground wise all I know is that reach and accuracy is what is in weapons developers minds, with a greater emphasis on defensive systems. That and ways of trying to protect against bloody IEDs!
Don't underestimate EW even against the airforce, some of the new tricks include ways to trick ballistic missiles to miss the target by hijacking the GPS signal. When your opponent knows the weapons you are using he will come up with counter moves. Hell, with the anti satellite weaponry both the Russians and Chinese are fielding it is entirely feasible for them to bring down the entire GPS network.

In the grand scheme of things nukes are the main deterrent for the big boys but conventional warfare is still the main tool of the trade for smaller powers.
 

rcs619

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dragoongfa said:
Camouflage always matter, if you look at the US army they have a camo pattern for every conceivable environment and urban setting. The plates don't even have to be modular, they could be painted over by droids in a matter of minutes which from a logistics side is far more efficient than having numerous camo uniforms for each soldier something that many modern militaries practice.

This is something that Lucas overlooked and it just looks stupid to anyone who has gone through basic military training.
It matters in almost every situation. I still think that, in a future sort of scenario, camo is not really important when boarding a starship. Well, it depends on the tech of the day. If we're talking Star Wars where ships are mostly corridors and relatively small spaces, you don't really need to worry about camo. If ships have huge, sprawling internal spaces (or if you're assaulting a space station) then, yes, something akin to urban camo is probably useful in that context. I just feel like most boarding actions would be over too quickly for it to matter. If you can't seize the bridge and engineering ASAP, the op has more than likely failed.

Painting over the plates by droids is actually a good idea that I hadn't thought of though.

Another option (that some friends and I use in a sci-fi setting we're developing) is having the plates be coated in an electro-reactive meta-material. It changes how it interacts with light when a tiny electric current is passed through it So, all you'd need is a small power-source in the suit (a tiny battery or something), and you could literally alter your plates' camo pattern at the press of a button. Especially in the case of space-based infantry, where you're already wearing a full-on vac-suit anyway, with its own internal power and life-support. The same tech could easily be scaled up to starships too, not that it really matters for anything besides looks, since distances are so vast.

Knights didnt have to hide from bullets but I am glad you agree :p

What you are describing are modern tactical vests, in short a soldier wears his camo uniform and over it he wears a tactical vest which is modular and provides exactly what you say, here is a RL example:

http://images.military.com/media/equipment/personal-equipment/improved-outer-tactical-vest-iotv/improved-outer-tactical-vest-004.jpg
Pretty much, yeah. Although I think the introduction of more plates is probably going to be inevitable as weapons increase in power. There's going to be more shrapnel, applied in ever more powerful and nastier ways. It really depends on the way that weapons wind up developing though, more than anything, but yeah, a lot of it is just about aesthetics too. Which I'm usually fine with. If you want to take some liberties with aesthetics, that's fine, just try to have some real reasoning behind it.

Like, with stormtroopers in particular, I don't mind the armor itself. There are ways to construct it differently to enhance movement, and the coloring is an issue, but the basic idea could be made to work. The helmets though, jesus those are terrible. I know they're iconic, but they both look silly and are terribly designed from a practical standpoint. I'm a fan of fully-enclosed helmets for infantry, especially as battlefield tech becomes more advanced, and things like HUDs, and more sophisticated communications networks become standard-issue, but the guys wearing them should actually be able to see, lol.

I agree, in one of my novel proposals to GW for a W40K novel (sadly denied) this was the basic weapon of the regiment.

http://dragoongfa.deviantart.com/art/Caledonian-Highlanders-262904709?q=gallery%3Adragoongfa%2F28258413&qo=6

And a direct quote: between a cauterized wound and a bleeding wound, the bleeding one is preferable.
I'm... going to have to give that a full read :D Got through the first few pages, and it seems pretty good. Too early on my end to really get into reading yet though. Still waking up.

My personal view of energy weapons though, I'm not a fan of them in an anti-personnel role. Like, anti-vehicle, that's great. But, unless an energy weapon is just outright powerful enough to kill the target, I'd rather have a kinetic weapon that is going to pierce, and rip, and tear and do crippling damage if it doesn't secure an outright kill.

With futuristic materials and coatings, it's (in theory) much easier to armor something against an energy weapon than it is to protect them from a kinetic one.

I already commented on how Power Armor has it's issues, look at my previous posts
Yeah, I've missed a few since I last checked the thread.

I'll say that my main issue is that far too many sci-fi settings treat powered armor like, well, just a suit of armor. In practice, it's really more like a micro-vehicle than it is body armor. It's a complex, highly-technical system that is going to require a lot of maintenance and training to really get the most out of. You can't just, like, store it in a closet and pop it on when you need it.

In short space ships that are traveling at a fraction of the speed of light cannot be targeted due to relativistic effects, you simply cannot know where they are at a given point. Missiles fired at such long ranges will inevitable miss and the only way to hit the enemy is to clash with each other at ridiculous speeds in extremely short ranges.

It may sound ridiculous but that's the only way for relativistic effects to be nullified. Give at least the first book a spin and you will see how even this style of combat can be awesome.
Under completely normal conditions, I'd actually say that makes a lot of sense. I know in the Honorverse books, Weber gets around that due to the ships' propulsion systems. They use an extremely powerful gravity-based drive, and while gravity waves only propagate at the speed of light, in that setting they also radiate ripples along the lowest boundary of hyperspace that travel FTL and can be detected by ships in real-space. So, they can actually monitor the location of an enemy ship in real-time. The main issue with extreme range engagements in that setting is how wildly inaccurate missiles get the further out you shoot, since they have to rely on their internal AI's more and more, as the lag from the host ship increases.

In the sci-fi setting I help with, ships get around that by using recon drones. There's no way to sense a ship faster than the speed of light, but FTL communications do exist, so if you can get a recon drone in range and shadow them with it, it can relay what it sees back to the host ship using its onboard FTL comm to kind of circumvent relativistic issues. Of course, the enemy *is* going to be looking for them to try and pop them, and sending out drones of its own to find you. Our engagement ranges are much shorter than the Honor books though, we just don't have the same level of insane gravity drives to send missiles out that far. 1 light-second is about average for a ship-to-ship brawl, but they can go shorter or longer ranged sometimes.

I'll have to look into those books though. Always looking for some good sci-fi to read ^^