General > General Technical Chat

SciFi movies and pathetic misconceptions of tech failing for the story line.

<< < (21/42) > >>

David Hess:
This discussion reminds me of something I wondered about in the movie Aliens.  Why did the "Colonial Marines" exist and why were they armed the way they were, including nuclear weapons?  What threat justified their existence?  Were they regularly fighting other aliens or humans?

coppercone2:
I think they make sense because if you say hijack a ship and program something like a Nostromo to crash into a planet at high speed, it could be a country destroyer, easy bargaining chip for separatists or terrorists. I imagine you would want to nuke something like that. Explains the whole self destruct thing too.

And I think they had nations all over space, it seems part of MAD.

And you need to figure asteroid weapons are probobly popular by then, i.e. after piracy scrap a space ship then mount engines to asteroids to make kinetic energy weapons. If there are nukes floating around space then enemy leaders know they might get wiped out if they try something big.. and it seems that when you are spread out on alot of worlds, having anti asteroid capabilities is important.

Standard procedure for.. liberating a colony might be to steal nearby ships, turn them into massive kinetic energy weapons, decapitate the colony government and then start making demands to the major players. That is like becoming north korea overnight without the giant R&D program. If you design big things that can move through deep space in a reasonable amount of time, that can be misused. The hardest part for me is to imagine the issues which cause the desire for this behavior, but if I know humans, they can always find SOMETHING. I figure it has something to do with supercorporations and corruption though, you figure something like WY is NOT popular with everyone. Maybe they raised the retirement age to 82 on one of the less profitable colonies. One thing I imagined is if humans are so spread out, you might have government funded travel. Like part of pension is a guarantee to have so many trips off world per year, to stay in touch with family and stuff like that. The only thing I figure from that universe is that metal is very cheap. 

coppice:

--- Quote from: David Hess on April 10, 2023, 11:49:00 am ---This discussion reminds me of something I wondered about in the movie Aliens.  Why did the "Colonial Marines" exist and why were they armed the way they were, including nuclear weapons?  What threat justified their existence?  Were they regularly fighting other aliens or humans?

--- End quote ---
The whole tone of the conversation between the marines in that movie makes it seem like they are quite experienced with encountering and fighting a variety of aliens. The conversations between everyone else makes it seem like encountering an alien is a huge novelty. Things never quite seemed to gel.

coppercone2:
What quotes are you talking about?

I thought they were used to fighting people like pirates and PMC and stuff. The comic books and games lean towards HEAVY PMC activity in the known alien universe. It was in the 80's so I imagine they imagined communist guerillas, space pirate locations like african coastline in space, religious colonies (thats not hard to imagine!) banana republics and other 'problems'.

The motion trackers and other gear seem very well suited towards finding sabatours, squatters and so forth in space infrastructure equipment (company relays, seldom used space stations/ports, etc).

mendip_discovery:
"Just another bug hunt"

They seemed to be at the whim of a private company so they would be very well kitted up and be used to quash the revolts etc that would possibly happen on the mining worlds.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page

There was an error while thanking
Thanking...
Go to full version
Powered by SMFPacks Advanced Attachments Uploader Mod