Largest plot hole in a game?

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Nomanslander

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slowpoke999 said:
ramik81 said:
He did implement him with a fail safe device(or what he thought was one)in the form of a sorta heart virus and did ask him to off himself. But his brain got fixed by the doctor so he couldn't be controlled anymore and he got cured of the heart virus before it killed him(in game it made his max health almost half, so if he took twice as long to find it he would've died).

Fontaine must've also known Jack was invincible or something, because when he fails to kill Jack he gets all jacked up on plasmids because he was probably shitting himself in fear.
Hmmm, been a while since I've played it so I must have forgotten that part, although I still don't get why he didn't implant Jack as a sleeper agent and instead had him run an obstacle course all through out Rapture just to get to Ryan.

That's quite a large gamble with an agent you spent years planning to create and get him ready.

Oh and why didn't Fontaine ask Jack to off himself right after he killed Ryan, instead waited until Dr. Tenenbaum to got to him....a little too to late.

IDK.....I always found the plot twist in BS1 a major let down.
 

Eclectic Dreck

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#3 HAWX - a paramilitary force invades the US in a conventional attack and fights the entire nation's military to a standstill. Inside the first few missions, they lost more planes tanks and men that that of most nations without consequence. In the end, they launched their attack for reasons of ego apparently as there was no strategic benefit to be had regardless of the course the war might have taken.

#2 Modern Warfare 2 - Russia invades the US and achieves complete strategic surprise thanks to magic. While there is a non zero chance the precise moment of an attack could be unknown, the movement of men and material, especially when such movement represent a huge portion of the nation's military, are watched with interest by the entire international intelligence community. Moreover, precisely because single points of failure are stupid for anything made for the military (military equipment WILL constantly be broken, it is only through incredible feats of engineering that there are enough redundant systems to keep them online and functioning most of the time), being able to sabogate a single system would not destroy the capacity to detect such a movement. There was nothing even REMOTELY plausible about the scenario and any defense I have heard lobbied does nothing to close this gaping flaw.

#1 Army of Two - terrorists hijack an Aircraft Carrier. For those unware, an aircraft carrier is BIG. As in the largest vehicles ever made by man big. As in, so big that they have a crew in the thousands. What's more, the ships are built like a FORTRESS and are accompanied by an entire FLEET - cruisers, destroyers and submarines all exist precisely to defend the ultimate arbiter of gunboat diplomacy. To hijack the ship, one must first move past the air cover in some fashion (no easy feat), close through the picket lines of ships (even harder), and then overpower a crew of thousands. Never in history has an aircraft carrier been captured. Destroyed certainly but never siezed. Even if one had the military might required to sweep away the air cover and sink the support ships, they must STILL contend with thousands of armed men and women knowing that a massive gunfight would be required to sieze any of a dozen rooms. Taking control of the command portion might seem reasonable to some, but this just gives you command over the rudder - the engines are controlled in the bowles of the ship ensuring that any attempt to sieze the ship would require literally fighting through every room, every corridor, every door and every sailor and marine on the boat. Were the ship in danger of being seized, it would simply be scuttled. In short, there is simply no way to hijack the vessel - no scenario of surprise or excuse, no level of individual or even collective idiocy, no amount of military badassery will alter this. A carrier can be destroyed but only the most foolish would ever attempt to sieze such a prize.

One last bit about nuclear weapons. In your average nuclear detonation, it all begins with a carefully crafted set of high explosives detonating. This explosion alone is substantial, often including hundreds of pounds of explosive, but in this case it serves a single purpose - to compress the core. You see, all a conventional high explosive is is a vigorous reaction that rapidly produces gas from a solid. This results in a dramatic increase in pressure that can be applied in a destructive fashion. Hand grenades for example simply use this expanding gas to burst the metal shell into high velocity fragments. In most circumstances, producing a very dense material from a less dense material is hardly worthy of notice, but in some cases the effect can be interesting to say the least.

The heart of a nuclear weapon is simply a radioactive metal - either plutonium or uranium. Radioactivity, for those who are unware, is the result of an unstable atomic configuration. In the case of the metals in question, this is the result of exessive neutrons in the nucleus. From time to time a neutron escapes with enormous energy, enough that colliding with another atom can actually destroy the original atom. This is precisely why one gets cancer from radiation - high speed particles are simply punching holes in your genetic structure.

The trouble is, even in a very dense metal, you'll find mostly empty space. In normal circumstances, these neutrons escae and rarely hit anything on the way out. Thus we have a problem - a material that is decaying in a fashion that is releasing tremendous energy but it isn't doing it quickly enough to be useful for much of anything. It was found during the manhattan project that simply stacking a LOT of this material together increased the rate of reaction - a good start but simply increasing wasn't enough - it needed a kick in the pants.

This problem is solved when we make the core incredibly dense - suddenly those escaping neutrons are almost certain to hit something on the way out. When they do, the target atom splits and releases even more neutrons and the cycle continues building power at a frightening rate. When you consider that this is taking place at the speed of light across an object compressed to a tiny fraction of it's original size, you realize that the span of time we are dealing with is fantastically short.

The thing is, natively this reaction is producing kinetic energy in the form of high speed neutrons, electrons are being flung asunder, and a highly energetic particle (gamma particle) is produced in abundance. When a gamma particle hits matter, it loses energy creating light particles (a LOT of them), when those hit something they degrade further into the infra red (heat). Thus if there is matter about, suddenly you have produced a tremendous amout of heat - quite simply kinetic energy. This heat results in a massive expansion of air which results in the actual "blast". Intense heat, high energy particles that never hit anything before hand, and this blast are the cause of the initial damage in a blast. The fact that you just mingled a few pounds of highly radioactive material in with the surrounding landscape and threw it a few hundred miles into the air produces the most notable side effect - radioactive fallout.

This leads to the question - what happens when something like a nuclear bomb explodes in space? Without matter to get in the way, the result is nothing more than a LOT of high energy particles being thrown across the universe. Eventually, with no matter in the way, some portion would hit the ISS and the previously described process still holds true. Particles hit something, energy changes forms and eventually becomes kinetic and damage is done. Without anything appreciably stopping the blast, one can roughly model the damage by realizing that the total energy of the blast is known (the yield), and if one knows the distance from the blast and the area of the station, we also know precisely how much energy the station is expected to absorb. Thus, depending upon the yield and the distance, we could make a fairly accurate guess as to the ultimate fate of the ISS. Sadly, neither piece of information is explicitly given so an accurate accounting is not possible.

To the subject of the EMP - this one is a bit trickier. Electic Fields are the result of particular configurations of electic charge. Placing a conductor in an Electic Field will cause electrons to move about in what you would normally consider "current". Thus any time one begins altering the electrical configuration of a large chunk of atoms a field is generated. The thing is - atoms inherently want to be electrically neutral. In all cases excluding noble gasses however, some portion of the electrons are essentially "on loan" and move about freely. If left to their own devices a while a single atom might be electrically unstable, across a medium it will remain electrically neutral. This is where those high energy particles start ruining lives again - and essentially the result aside from head and light is a LOT of electrons flung asunder creating a very powerful electric field. The stimulus retreats rapidly of course so while intense, it is also quite brief.

Electric fields are quite easy to generate at smaller levels. Simply rubbing one object against another is sufficient to do the job. Even traditional explosions create an EF of their own - just much, much smaller. EMP is thus not a part of *most* nuclear detonations but rather *all* nuclear detonations - assuming of course the particles come into contact with matter.

The trouble is, it is fantastically hard to shield against EF. It can be done, but often the engineering steps required to make it happen are incompatible with the resulting product. Most modern military equipment is shielded from such things to an extent, but there is always a strength of EF that can overcome ANY shielding and result in catastrophic voltage fluctuations.
 

Gyrefalcon

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RatRace123 said:
In almost every RPG I can think of has a huge flaw in timed logic.

"Oh, I'm supposed to save the world from the incredibly evil horror that's going to engulf the universe in a few days. OK, just give me some time while I get this guy's laundry."
Lol.

I was thinking of the Raccoon City Police Department. If you need to move statues and burn paintings every time you need to get into the supply closet, who puts it all back and buys the new painting?

Then I wonder about flowers that can attack insects...if only someone were there to pull them out of the ground. Or a sticky ball that manages to make what sticks to it become sticky so it will continue to gather more mass and never fall apart like a snowball being turned into a snowman. But the games were fun, no doubt about it.
 

Eclectic Dreck

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Outlaw Torn said:
3. Some countries keep their military movements secret, if they were determined to keep things out of the public eye they could easily do so. Even if it means moving loads of heavy equipment between continents, a government that had the motive to do so would find a way.
Small things can be kept a secret - the movement of a few dozen (or even hundred) men can slip past the radard. Mobilizing the entire armed forces of a countery is not a small thing - indeed it is a VERY large thing. Such an act requires the movement of large numbers of vehicles (which people watch) to staging areas, notification of hundreds of thousands of people (at least some of whom will talk), and a whole host of other indicators. Complete strategic surprise is nearly impossible to accomplish in this day - someone or SOMETHING is watching. Small things are generally secret because there aren't enough indications to put the pieces together with, big things are not secret because the overwhelming data present means no analysis is really necessary to make a proper conclusion.

Outlaw Torn said:
4. Governments can shut down communications if they want to, I think Iran recently shut down access to some websites during their election to stop certain candidates gaining popularity. Again, if they wanted to keep things secret they could do so. Although it is plausible that someone could have run across the border and let the news out, provided that the borders weren't also closed and being patrolled (although they are quite big in Russia).
Communications can be shut down certain, but doing so provides an indicator of activity. If something is so important to keep a secret that your whole country suddenly goes dark, people are bound to perk up.

Outlaw Torn said:
5. They don't, unless someone developed a way to turn a regular nuclear device into a more potent EM device.
See my previous post for an explanation on how these things happen. The size of the EF field is a function of yield and density of medium. The largest nuclear weapons carry payloads in the several megaton range compared to the paultry yield of 20 - 30kt that destroyed a pair of cities in WW2. Moreover, in the game it was never asserted that ALL vehicles were shut down, and indeed the entire "invasion" was an airborne incursion supported by aircraft into the capitol. I'm not certain what the russians hoped to gain by siezing this terrain as DC is against the sea and further from any russian ports than any other cities. LA makes a more obivous staging ground becase it provide a beach head from which to ship supplies. One only siezes terrain if it supports their strategic objectives or harms the enemies'. Stalingrad for example was important because controlling the city meant control over the Volga river - a key supplyline for Moscow.

In all reality, it would seem that the entire russian exercise was lost from the start. Shipping reasonable quantties of artillery and armor and men requires sea travel - and the trip would take three weeks or more to complete in the worst cases. The light infantry (that is infantry without armor or artillery in reasonable quantity - paratroopers have tradtionally been light infantry because while 65 men fit into a c-130, only 2 HMMWvs occupy the same space. The largest transport plane in common usage, the c-5 galaxy can only transport a single M1 into theater and it takes at least 12 (9 by russian doctrine) before one has the smallest maneuver element) may sieze key terrain but they would be destroyed long before relief arrived. Even if they did not, they have siezed terrain that houses neither significant military assets, would not have affected the running of goverment or military and in general would have simply thrown their lives away. At best the invasion was designed as a punishment and not an attempt to conquer the US.

Outlaw Torn said:
8. All missiles (at least not home-made ones) will have some kind of remote detonation capability, that's just common sense. If you launched a missile and during the flight realise it's going off course, the people you're planning to kerplode surrender or they just get stolen, you'd want a way to shut them off. Whether it is a ground-to-ground, surface-to-air or any other kind of explosive delight is pretty much irrelevant.
I honestly do not know if nuclear weapons possess a "kill switch". On the one hand being able to "recall" missiles seems sensible enough, but on the other hand it can render one's arsenel impotent if the secret is cracked.

Outlaw Torn said:
10. Organisation and will to fight? Just because people have guns doesn't mean that they are capable or even willing to take up arms against the military. Whilst it's easy to say 'Hey, they'd easily lay down their life to stop a massive invasion force who are out-gunning them. They'd do it. FOR AMERICA!', if it actually happened I'd hazard a guess that most folks, gun wielding or not, would just hole up in their homes and use their guns to defend themselves and not sacrifice their lives for a silly flag.
I can agree with this. A group of well armed citizes is nothing more than an especially dangerous mob. Without heavy weapons, discipline and training, they would serve as little more than fodder.

Outlaw Torn said:
16. Because otherwise the level wouldn't be even remotely as controversial and the game wouldn't get the free advertising from shocked Australians. It may also be that there were more people involved that just weren't in the elevator, killing them would just piss off those guys and if you were the only one left standing they might be a bit suspicious. Plus you'd get arrested for killing people in an airport.
Your assertion is correct but fails to resolve the plot hole. The man was dangerous and clearly needed to be stopped. A character had an excellent opportunity to do the stopping but refused to do so. The only plot related explanation is that there was a plan in the works that did not rely on Makarov being alive that needed to be uncovered.

Outlaw Torn said:
19. They could have a shut off valve or they just give off less hot air after a while as the pressure has dropped.
A reasonable explanation if I've ever heard one.


Outlaw Torn said:
20. That depends where it is, in a closed space then it should but outdoors the gas would diffuse too much over a longer period of time and you wouldn't see much more.
Getting gas to explode is surprisgly hard as it requirse a fairly specfic mixture with air before combustion will occur. Combine that with the irregular input and you have a recipe for nothing terribly interesting happening.

Outlaw Torn said:
21. Heart rate monitors exist for numerous reasons. A heart beat sensor could just be a directional microphone, which also exist.
There are any number of ways that such an object could work. My money is on high intensity low frequency sound waves - essentially a long ranged ultrasound machine. The challenges inherent are numerous however - first one has to have a way of distinguishing the rather subtle motions of the heart, second one must be able to filter out interference, and third, a whole host of complications must be resolved (position and motion of the sensor for example)

Outlaw Torn said:
23. You'll probably be warmer in a desert, so you're body temperature would be higher. Although whether or not thermal cameras would be able to distinguish between warm air and a warm person is debatable.
If the air temperature is very close to that of a person's body, then it is difficult at best. Luckily, people tend to wear clothing and whatnot that virtually ensures a variation in their thermal signature. It isn't a perfect system - IR bloom (extremely high ambient IR signatures) makes it difficult if not impossible to distinguish targets at times. Thus why IR is generally relegated to nighttime use when temperate differences between men, machinery and environment are easier to detect.

Outlaw Torn said:
26. You can get attachments that allow you to pump them single handed, by using a leg/ledge/kitten/the other gun for leverage instead of your hand. Either that or he is a jedi.
In general, the latter explanation is the most rigorous.

Also, with respect to IFF in turrets in Bioshock. While locomotion may be provided by steam, nothing says an on board battery and IFF gear cannot also be located therein. As to the specifc technology in play I couldn't render a guess. Giving a robot the ability to issue it's own kill order is something we are just barely scratching the surface of today and most are uncomfortable with. That said, given the technolgy present in general in the city, I suspect the problem had been resolved and the regular moral lapses on display indicate the potential hazards would be readily ignored if pragmatism required it.
 

JoshGod

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Brad Shepard said:
JoshGod said:
why in ME didnt the asari on the concil share your memories of the vision like liara did?
because she thinks she knows it all, besides, sex is a personal thing for the asari, except the Arduct Yakshi im guessing.
erm sex isnt required, liara does it 2 times without sex.
 

GloatingSwine

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Eclectic Dreck said:
#
#1 Army of Two - terrorists hijack an Aircraft Carrier.
TBF, the aircraft carrier hijacking was a setup, it's escorts were clearly absent, and the terrorists had assistance from a US Senator. It's much less clear in the sequel how the bad guys get all this military hardware into range of Shanghai without the PLA noticing them at all.

This leads to the question - what happens when something like a nuclear bomb explodes in space? Without matter to get in the way, the result is nothing more than a LOT of high energy particles being thrown across the universe. Eventually, with no matter in the way, some portion would hit the ISS and the previously described process still holds true. Particles hit something, energy changes forms and eventually becomes kinetic and damage is done. Without anything appreciably stopping the blast, one can roughly model the damage by realizing that the total energy of the blast is known (the yield), and if one knows the distance from the blast and the area of the station, we also know precisely how much energy the station is expected to absorb. Thus, depending upon the yield and the distance, we could make a fairly accurate guess as to the ultimate fate of the ISS. Sadly, neither piece of information is explicitly given so an accurate accounting is not possible.
The effect of nukes in space are more complicated than that. There wouldn't be much kinetic energy, what would happen is that the exterior surface would be heated by irradiation and the thermal expansion shock would propagate through the material and actually cause the damage. (For an experiment, pour boiling water into a non-heatproof glass tumbler and watch as the uneven heat expansion causes it to crack and shatter).
 

Eclectic Dreck

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GloatingSwine said:
Eclectic Dreck said:
#
#1 Army of Two - terrorists hijack an Aircraft Carrier.
TBF, the aircraft carrier hijacking was a setup, it's escorts were clearly absent, and the terrorists had assistance from a US Senator. It's much less clear in the sequel how the bad guys get all this military hardware into range of Shanghai without the PLA noticing them at all.

This leads to the question - what happens when something like a nuclear bomb explodes in space? Without matter to get in the way, the result is nothing more than a LOT of high energy particles being thrown across the universe. Eventually, with no matter in the way, some portion would hit the ISS and the previously described process still holds true. Particles hit something, energy changes forms and eventually becomes kinetic and damage is done. Without anything appreciably stopping the blast, one can roughly model the damage by realizing that the total energy of the blast is known (the yield), and if one knows the distance from the blast and the area of the station, we also know precisely how much energy the station is expected to absorb. Thus, depending upon the yield and the distance, we could make a fairly accurate guess as to the ultimate fate of the ISS. Sadly, neither piece of information is explicitly given so an accurate accounting is not possible.
The effect of nukes in space are more complicated than that. There wouldn't be much kinetic energy, what would happen is that the exterior surface would be heated by irradiation and the thermal expansion shock would propagate through the material and actually cause the damage. (For an experiment, pour boiling water into a non-heatproof glass tumbler and watch as the uneven heat expansion causes it to crack and shatter).
Last time I checked, heat IS kinetic energy, or rather, a measure of the average molecular kinetic energy present. The effect this has is based largely upon precisely how much energy the station is asked to absorb over a given period of time. If we are talking the fairly absurd amount that would be present at a few dozen miles from the point of detonation, the result would in fact the delightfully catastrophic. My assertion was not a model of what would occur - for that we need to know how much energy is in play. Instead, I simply pointed out that if we know how much energy was present in the detonation, AND we know how far away from the detonation we are, it is trivial to calculate the energy per unit area.
 

Quaxar

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Eclectic Dreck said:
#3 HAWX - a paramilitary force invades the US in a conventional attack and fights the entire nation's military to a standstill. Inside the first few missions, they lost more planes tanks and men that that of most nations without consequence. In the end, they launched their attack for reasons of ego apparently as there was no strategic benefit to be had regardless of the course the war might have taken.
That. But to be fair I didn't really miss it too much, because flying the jets was so much fun.

Also I think KotOR II has a massive hole at the end, because the game was never really finished. And apparently they didn't bother patching the rest in...
 

ejb626

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topsyturvy said:
On the MW2 level No Russian, how did everyone on the last floor before you exit onto the airstrip die before you get there? I'm pretty sure they started to arm themselves on an elevator and didn't exit near the airstrip.
Theres a whole bag of plot holes in No Russian
1. All of your fellow terrorist have Russian tatoos of hammers and sickles not only would these be seen on the airport's security cameras but two of them are killed, wouldn't their bodies be investigated as well and the tatoos discovered?
2.What makes Russia think, the terrorists and directly related to America, even if theu were American they could just be terroists who also happen to be American
 

GloatingSwine

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Eclectic Dreck said:
Last time I checked, heat IS kinetic energy, or rather, a measure of the average molecular kinetic energy present.
Technically, but it's not useful to think of it that way because it's material stress that causes the damage, not the energy of an impact.

If we are talking the fairly absurd amount that would be present at a few dozen miles from the point of detonation, the result would in fact the delightfully catastrophic.
A few dozen miles? The effect would be negligible, thanks to the inverse square law. Practicably, nukes in space would be effective at sub 1km from the detonation, much further than that and the energy intensity has dropped too low for any practicably constructable weapon.
 

Baneat

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In the Gulag, Ghost magically manages to survive the bombing even though he was working the computers, and that was really far from any exit.

*Bioshock 2 Spoiler*








It doesn't ever explain how the little sister revived you with a vita chamber, when the chambers were in alpha stage and set only to work with Ryan's genetic code (hence why Jack and Andrew Ryan himself only could use them and not splicers). If they changed this, why can't splicers use them in Bioshock 2?
 

Eclectic Dreck

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GloatingSwine said:
Eclectic Dreck said:
Last time I checked, heat IS kinetic energy, or rather, a measure of the average molecular kinetic energy present.
Technically, but it's not useful to think of it that way because it's material stress that causes the damage, not the energy of an impact.

If we are talking the fairly absurd amount that would be present at a few dozen miles from the point of detonation, the result would in fact the delightfully catastrophic.
A few dozen miles? The effect would be negligible, thanks to the inverse square law. Practicably, nukes in space would be effective at sub 1km from the detonation, much further than that and the energy intensity has dropped too low for any practicably constructable weapon.
In general, the total energy at a given area can be calculated (with the simplyfying assumption that the intervening space is empty and the detonation is close enough to uniform in nature, is simply the total energy of the detonation spread across a spherical surface calculated as 4*pi*r^2 (Or, to put it explicitly - energy/meter = yield/(4*pi*r^2) - which you may recognize as the inverse square you cite) 1 megaton nuclear detonation released 4.18*10^15 J (simple unit conversion from TNT/ton to Joule). At 36 km (qualifying as a few dozen kilometers) the surface of our sphere has a total area of 16,282,944 m. This means we have a total energy average of (4,180,000,000,000,000/16,282,944) 2.6*10^8j/m. TO put this in perspective, a .45 ACP round (the famed manstopping round fired by the M1911) has, on average, 450 - 500J.

Obviously this is not entirely accurate as factors do exist that will modify this (downward) by a relatively small factor. At the altitude of the ISS it is not a vacuum even by normal space standards, but it is close enough that you can rest assured that energy is dissipating mostly as a function of distance more than anything else. You will note that this example, using a common warhead yield and applying the inverse square law results in enormous energy being directed against the ISS. This example holds no rhetorical merit however since the distance of detonation is utterly unknown and may be several hundred if not a thousand or more miles away. The total area energy density decreases incredibly rapidly as a function of distance as you note and mild inconvience and certain death can readily be measured in a fraction of a KM.
 

Alarien

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Actually, for me, the biggest plot hole in MW2 was:

How in the hell did Price manage to sneak onto a submarine and launch a nuke in a matter of minutes? Don't all modern countries with nuclear launch capable submarines require things like launch/arming codes in order to fire and activate a nuclear warhead? Did he steal these from the gulag? Hide them in his arse? When did he enter in the firing solution to give the thing a destination? Or did it just happen to be magically pre-aimed towards Washington, DC?

I mean, really, this game was full of plot holes (a couple of those mentioned by above posters aren't actually plot holes, just science... nukes still work in space) but that plot hole was, to me, the most egregious.
 

raunchious

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Halo 3. At the end of the game, Master Chief activates one of the halos to kill all life in the vicinity and starve Gravemind and the Flood. Then he drives off the halo into the back of a ship piloted by the Arbiter. The Arbiter flies the ship through a portal back to Earth that is about to close. Unfortunately, the portal closes while the ship is halfway through and Master Chief's half of the ship is stranded right next to the halo that is about to fire, which supposedly destroys all life for light years in any direction. The halo fires and Master Chief is fine. Aroo?
 

GloatingSwine

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Eclectic Dreck said:
At 36 km (qualifying as a few dozen kilometers) the surface of our sphere has a total area of 16,282,944 m.
4*3.14*(36000)^2 is 1,628,601,316m^2. Your energy density calculation is off by a factor of a thousand. This means that the actual energy density of a 1Mt warhead at 36km is 256661j/m^2. A hell of a lot less. Assuming a 1cm thick aluminium skin, that's enough to raise the skin temperature by around 10 kelvin, which is not going to cause significant thermal shock effects, though it may damage the solar panels and blind any external cameras pointing at it.

Really, to start causing significant damage you need to set nukes off close to things. At 1km the energy density of the nuke would be 330 million j/m^2, which would cause a skin temperature increase of 11000K, and that would cause some damage (the material stress of sudden uneven heating would cause the ISS to tear itself apart from inside, and metallic spalling would kill everyone inside.
 

Eclectic Dreck

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GloatingSwine said:
Eclectic Dreck said:
At 36 km (qualifying as a few dozen kilometers) the surface of our sphere has a total area of 16,282,944 m.
4*3.14*(36000)^2 is 1,628,601,316m^2. Your energy density calculation is off by a factor of a thousand. This means that the actual energy density of a 1Mt warhead at 36km is 256661j/m^2. A hell of a lot less. Assuming a 1cm thick aluminium skin, that's enough to raise the skin temperature by around 10 kelvin, which is not going to cause significant thermal shock effects, though it may damage the solar panels and blind any external cameras pointing at it.

Really, to start causing significant damage you need to set nukes off close to things. At 1km the energy density of the nuke would be 330 million j/m^2, which would cause a skin temperature increase of 11000K, and that would cause some damage (the material stress of sudden uneven heating would cause the ISS to tear itself apart from inside, and metallic spalling would kill everyone inside.
1,628,601,632 is inded the number - looks like I fat fingered the wrong exponent into place, which does significantly alter the conlclusion. Worse still, if we take a simplyfying assumption that the total mass of a given module (Say the US Destiny Lab module) is all aluminum skin, this is nearly 4cm thick! Of course, this simplyfying assumption IS decidedly false, but regardless the conclusion remains the same. There is a surpsing difference 2.56*10^5 and 2.56*10^8. The former seems absurdly large (and it is) but spread across a square meter your conclusion is entirely accurate. A few degress kelvin, even if changed suddenly, probably is not sufficient to cause catastrophic damage.

Of course, as I said, there is no real way to tell WHAT the distance is nor do we know the yield. That said, the orbit of the ISS DOES take it quite close to washington DC if Nasa's orbit tracker is to be believed so there is a non-zero chance that it may have been coincidentally close enough to be destroyed. This is not terribly likely obviously, since the total danger zone around the nuclear weapon is small enough that the odds of being in the lethal space at the right time is laughably small.
 

MR.Spartacus

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Here's a quick question. What happened between Halflifes one and two to make Gordon Freeman be seen as a messiah? That has always bothered me.
ti11man21 said:
The Russians are clearly coming in from the Atlantic anyway, and just because one ACS module got nicked doesn't mean that the US and every other world power lost all things like radar, or in the case of Non-USA countries, their fucking satellite capabilities.

Plus, this is bloody America people. They don't have one defence system, nor do they tend to keep it going and trust that it still works after it has been captured. The USA would have contingency plans for something like that going missing, and they would have never trusted data that had been captured by a hostile country.

Just accept it as a plot hole. Like how a nuke can cause a shockwave in space, or how a nuke can be launched from a submarine into space, or still work in space.

Or how the hell Price ended up in that Gulag and never took the opportunity to escape before.
Tons of tactical nukes are on submarines dude. thats pretty much known to everyone.
Price was obviously using the chaos going on in order to make an escape. The invasion force was created in a matter of days, making it nearly impossible to see coming. You have very few points that are actually valid.
Yeah sure because ICBMS are designed to go off in a way that MINIMIZES damage. I think that was the problem.
Formica Archonis said:
I would like to put forth the entire plot of Shaq Fu as being one giant plot hole.
That's easy. He's actually unconscious in a bathtub full of ice sans kidneys. It's all just a hallucination.
 

Tomster595

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Aug 1, 2009
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DBoome said:
wax88 said:
sasquatch99 said:
Well, seeing as it is never explained, how the Russians got to America undetected in MW2.
And I will now prepare to be told how by someone hopefully.
and explain it, i shall-remember in "cliff hanger" where you were told to retrieve an ACS module captured by the russians? that ACS module is a key component in the surveillance systems for the US. and probably the russians were able to crack it, thus allowing them to freely bypass the american surveilance systems.
I just might be incredibly retarded but I thought you and Soap get the ACS module, how did the Russians get it? Unless I'm an idiot and Soap works for Russia.
How they snuck by doesn't even matter.. where did they get the resources!?
 

Quiet Stranger

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Feb 4, 2006
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Super_Nintendo_Chalmers said:
I was wondering yesterday which game I have has had the biggest plot hole, and I realised that it was probably in Super Mario Sunshine.
Princess Peach was Baby Bowser's mother? What was up with that?
So come on people, what do you think was the biggest plot hole you've ever seen in a game?
Thats not a plot hole at all (somebody all ready said this) but why do you think Bowser kept capturing Peach?