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Phanatic posted:Which makes it even funnier in the one (I think it was Nemesis) where they try to blow up the ship only for the computer to tell them that the self-destruct mechanism is malfunctioning. gently caress! Even in the future nothing works!
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Dec 8, 2022 04:58
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Also, why is the warp core eject mechanism some kind of electronic switch tied to the computer? That poo poo should be linked to a mechanical handle.
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Dec 8, 2022 21:36
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The self-destruct option should be a Starfleet Berzerker chained up in the warp core room that they release and give an axe to.
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Dec 8, 2022 22:35
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The boy...has been destroyed.
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Dec 8, 2022 23:09
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Presto posted:Also, why is the warp core eject mechanism some kind of electronic switch tied to the computer? That poo poo should be linked to a mechanical handle. The way it's done in Lower Decks is close to that, but yeah, a lot of sci-fi is way too allergic to purely mechanical stuff. I mean, any individual Starfleet ship is a potential weapon of mass destruction - if they cared about safety and, say, preventing the navigator from turning the ship into a relativistic missile, you'd think even going to warp would require a two-key system like in modern missile silos. Ritz On Toppa Ritz posted:Thinking about Freespace 2 and I recall the humans made a ship called the Colossus as an anti-Shivan capital ship. Biggest ship ever made by humans and those other aliens in Freespace 1. Supposed to be a game changer in the universe but it turns out to be a huge waste of time for humanity. Cosigned. Sure, the Colossus wields more firepower than five Orion-class destroyers combined, but wouldn't it have been a lot easier to build five Orion-class destroyers instead? Or fifty? drat thing took twenty years to build while the GTVA was recovering from an apocalypse. We all know the Hecate-class is superior, anyway.
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Dec 9, 2022 00:29
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Buttchocks posted:The self-destruct option should be a Starfleet Berzerker chained up in the warp core room that they release and give an axe to. The self destruct option should be an hourly randomized button, on every console, at all times. Just to, you know, keep the crew on their toes and what not. Can't have the crew slacking off and not checking what buttons they're pressing.
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Dec 9, 2022 00:36
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dr_rat posted:The self destruct option should be an hourly randomized button, on every console, at all times. Just to, you know, keep the crew on their toes and what not. Can't have the crew slacking off and not checking what buttons they're pressing. So THAT'S why the consoles randomly explode in the event of any sort of crisis! They're wired that way to dissuade crewmen touching them too much
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Dec 9, 2022 01:46
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GTD Aquitaine posted:The way it's done in Lower Decks is close to that, but yeah, a lot of sci-fi is way too allergic to purely mechanical stuff. I mean, any individual Starfleet ship is a potential weapon of mass destruction - if they cared about safety and, say, preventing the navigator from turning the ship into a relativistic missile, you'd think even going to warp would require a two-key system like in modern missile silos. I can't remember which it was but I remember in one star trek in an emergency the door had a side panel you could open to manually work a lever to open a door. Maybe it was Babylon.
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Dec 9, 2022 13:50
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Because you'd want to be able to eject the warp core if there's been a lot of damage preventing you from physically getting to it. Say if there's been a weapons hit on engineering.
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Dec 9, 2022 18:56
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I wouldn't complain if there were redundant ejection mechanisms on the bridge, personally - just seems to me that ejecting the warp core is not something that should be doable by a single individual. Star Trek's been good for this with the self-destruct system, and the way I see it, ejecting the beating heart of your starship should be on a similar dramatic level, no matter how casually Voyager kept doing it. Seriously, they did it three times. Guess it's a good thing it just snaps right back in, or something.
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Dec 9, 2022 23:54
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Guyver posted:I can't remember which it was but I remember in one star trek in an emergency the door had a side panel you could open to manually work a lever to open a door. Maybe it was Babylon.
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Dec 10, 2022 01:13
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GTD Aquitaine posted:Cosigned. Sure, the Colossus wields more firepower than five Orion-class destroyers combined, but wouldn't it have been a lot easier to build five Orion-class destroyers instead? Or fifty? drat thing took twenty years to build while the GTVA was recovering from an apocalypse. We all know the Hecate-class is superior, anyway. Hrmmm...
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Dec 10, 2022 02:58
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Guyver posted:I can't remember which it was but I remember in one star trek in an emergency the door had a side panel you could open to manually work a lever to open a door. Maybe it was Babylon. Star Trek 4 has the bit where Kirk has to swim to open the Klingon ship's cargo bay doors and let the whales swim out. It's got a manual lever.
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Dec 10, 2022 06:07
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Thank you that was kind of bothering me. Figures it was space dwarves that thought to have manual door operation.
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Dec 10, 2022 17:53
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Lemniscate Blue posted:It's got a manual lever. "Automatic transmission??! Q'em'Plagh! A warrior drives stick!"
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Dec 10, 2022 23:33
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There's a lot of videogames that take advantage of sci-fi sliding doors failing or breaking to try making areas seem bigger but oh no we totally rendered that room/corridor the door is just broken so you can't investigate.
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Dec 11, 2022 03:27
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SlothfulCobra posted:There's a lot of videogames that take advantage of sci-fi sliding doors failing or breaking to try making areas seem bigger but oh no we totally rendered that room/corridor the door is just broken so you can't investigate.
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Dec 11, 2022 04:38
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 John Q. Spacemarine; his malfunctioning sliding door pants could not be removed and he pooped himself to death.
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Dec 11, 2022 05:24
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SlothfulCobra posted:
lol
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Dec 12, 2022 01:16
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Actually that reminds me, the BFG 9000 probably belongs in this thread. So you've got a big loving gun. It charges up, shoots a big green blob, and when the blob hits something it makes a big explosion. Cool. But then! The moment the blob explodes - not when you pull the trigger, not at launch, but when it strikes an object - the gun (not the blob) emits a spread of invisible rays in the direction the gun was facing when it fired, which themselves constitute most of the destructive force released with each trigger pull. Why? Why the heck would UAC design a weapon that behaves like that? Sheer madness. Youtube user decino has a neat video that really dives into the game mechanics, even the underlying source code, of the BFG 9000's behavior: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsCqLQJ1EOc
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Dec 12, 2022 17:53
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Those guys opened a portal to hell via demon worship on Mars. Did you really expect their gun to make sense?
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Dec 12, 2022 19:03
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The BFG9000 is stupid but super effective. I’d vote the chain gun is pretty lovely since it’s an ammo hog. A fun ammo hog but still an ammo hog. And therefore is a lovely piece of garbage tech.
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Dec 13, 2022 02:00
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GTD Aquitaine posted:Cosigned. Sure, the Colossus wields more firepower than five Orion-class destroyers combined, but wouldn't it have been a lot easier to build five Orion-class destroyers instead? Or fifty? drat thing took twenty years to build while the GTVA was recovering from an apocalypse. We all know the Hecate-class is superior, anyway. That's just history repeating itself. The Imperial Japanese would have been better off using the resources needed to build two super-battleships to instead build four or five aircraft carriers. Germany would have been better off building 50 submarines instead of Bismarck and Tirpitz. Et cetera.
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Dec 13, 2022 02:41
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GTD Aquitaine posted:The way it's done in Lower Decks is close to that, but yeah, a lot of sci-fi is way too allergic to purely mechanical stuff. I mean, any individual Starfleet ship is a potential weapon of mass destruction - if they cared about safety and, say, preventing the navigator from turning the ship into a relativistic missile, you'd think even going to warp would require a two-key system like in modern missile silos. The Colossus KINDA makes sense in that it was a pure anti-Sathanas weapon, because the first time a Sathanas showed up, the humans (or Vasudans) had no way of actually killing it outside of a hail mary air strike plan inside of an FTL portal.
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Dec 14, 2022 06:21
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Fivemarks posted:The Colossus KINDA makes sense in that it was a pure anti-Sathanas weapon, because the first time a Sathanas showed up, the humans (or Vasudans) had no way of actually killing it outside of a hail mary air strike plan inside of an FTL portal.  Point of order, the Colossus was built to counter hypothetical future Lucifer-class ships showing up after the end of the first. The much larger Sathanas-class was only encountered in the second war after it was already built (and it turned out to be inconsequential because the Shivans had dozens of Sathanas-class ships on hand).
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Dec 14, 2022 13:35
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It's an extremely common thing in sci-fi and real life to pour tons of money and resources into a fuckoff big impractical superweapon that usually gets blown up after like a day operational but at least it looks cool on the posters. See also the Death Star.
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Dec 14, 2022 16:29
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Ghost Leviathan posted:It's an extremely common thing in sci-fi and real life to pour tons of money and resources into a fuckoff big impractical superweapon that usually gets blown up after like a day operational but at least it looks cool on the posters. See also the Death Star. I mean to be fair if you're basing your bad guys off the nazis, the nazi's did do exactly that, to similar ineffectual results. I'm guessing the trope is more just because it makes an easy to understand threat and straight forward goal for the hero to overcome at the end but there is historical precedent!
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Dec 14, 2022 16:37
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Also the Colossus killed the poo poo out of the first Sathanas, and a bunch of other things besides. Blowing up Shivans isn't that ship's problem, it's that this kilometers-long ship can somehow turn on a dime. It looks awful and presumably reduces anyone in the far ends of the ship to paste every couple of missions.
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Dec 15, 2022 08:00
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grassy gnoll posted:Also the Colossus killed the poo poo out of the first Sathanas, and a bunch of other things besides. Blowing up Shivans isn't that ship's problem, it's that this kilometers-long ship can somehow turn on a dime. It looks awful and presumably reduces anyone in the far ends of the ship to paste every couple of missions. "angular momentum isnt real," i assure myself as i close my eyes and do donuts with my lovely supership
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Dec 15, 2022 12:15
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grassy gnoll posted:Also the Colossus killed the poo poo out of the first Sathanas, and a bunch of other things besides. Only after the Sathanas was defanged of its anti-capital ship weapons by a single stealth fighter. That said, the Colossus does more or less shrug off an Orion crashing into it on a suicide run. Sure, you could build five Orions instead but the Colossus could probably kill them.
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Dec 15, 2022 14:25
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grassy gnoll posted:Blowing up Shivans isn't that ship's problem, it's that this kilometers-long ship can somehow turn on a dime. It looks awful and presumably reduces anyone in the far ends of the ship to paste every couple of missions. And don't even get me started about how the sixty fighter and bomber wings housed in its vast hangar can be taken out of action by damage to its fighterbays. The Colossus is the epitome of "ship that needs to do everything and so is sub-optimal at all of it." It was a product of fear. Imagine if they'd gone with a design only big enough for six Lucifer-class destroyers to fit within its massive hull, and built two of them! Or if they'd built more Hecate-class destroyers!
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Dec 17, 2022 02:16
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GTD Aquitaine posted:And don't even get me started about how the sixty fighter and bomber wings housed in its vast hangar can be taken out of action by damage to its fighterbays. The Colossus is the epitome of "ship that needs to do everything and so is sub-optimal at all of it." It was a product of fear. Imagine if they'd gone with a design only big enough for six Lucifer-class destroyers to fit within its massive hull, and built two of them! Or if they'd built more Hecate-class destroyers! Hey, you remember that mission testing the GTA stealth fighters in the nebula and how the Aquitaine blows up in like thirty seconds if you don't scramble to take out that cruiser? Just thinking about it, for no reason, really.
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Dec 17, 2022 02:52
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I think the intro movie for the Colossus rattles off a whole bunch of contractors and sub contractors between the terrans and vasudans. Largest spacefaring warship in history, yadda yadda yadda. It's another overspec'd, under-built mic grift machine.
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Dec 18, 2022 15:58
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I'd go so far as to say every GTVA ship that isn't a corvette is terrible. How much of that is a function of plot and how much is a result of needing spectacle objects little bitty fighters can destroy is inherently unknowable.
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Dec 18, 2022 20:55
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The GTVA ships in Blue Planet are actually very not lovely. This becomes a problem.
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Dec 19, 2022 21:48
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grassy gnoll posted:I'd go so far as to say every GTVA ship that isn't a corvette is terrible. How much of that is a function of plot and how much is a result of needing spectacle objects little bitty fighters can destroy is inherently unknowable. The Aeolus is real good though. (Canonically built in very small numbers for some reason, ofc).
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Dec 20, 2022 01:41
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General Battuta posted:The Aeolus is real good though. (Canonically built in very small numbers for some reason, ofc). That's pretty fair, although for how they otherwise nail the full-sensory experience of getting hammered by all kinds of ordinance, flak's awfully unimpressive. Playing crunch.wav played every burst doesn't help, for certain.
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Dec 20, 2022 09:03
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Kamel posted:I think the intro movie for the Colossus rattles off a whole bunch of contractors and sub contractors between the terrans and vasudans. Largest spacefaring warship in history, yadda yadda yadda. It's another overspec'd, under-built mic grift machine. Yeah, that's the thing about the Colossus: it fulfills a major psychological role. In a few years, mankind has had to make peace with a longterm alien enemy and discovered that space holds great and terrible things that we are practically helpless against. In addition to that, both mankind and the vasudans have lost their homeworld in different ways. So yeah, the Colossus is just a giant gun for use against the alien threat. But it and it's construction are also a clutch that gives a sense of control in a universe that is chaotic and full of dangerous godlike things that hopefully wont notice us or pay us much attention, because that could instantly drive our species to extinction. Not to mention that this joined venture probably helped keep the peace between humans and varudans as well.
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Dec 22, 2022 12:23
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Something to be said for diplomacy via sunk cost fallacy. And now I'm loosely reminded of Schlock Mercenary, and an arc that ends up with the characters realising 'they built a city into the barrel of a superweapon so it wouldn't be fired'. And yes, how bad an idea this is comes up and is a major plot element.
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Dec 23, 2022 08:28
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Something to be said for diplomacy via sunk cost fallacy. To be fair, it turned out to be a bad idea because they didn't anticipate that technology would develop to the point where it would become trivial to safely teleport the entire city and its population to some other location while leaving the superweapon intact I kinda like that about Schlock Mercenary. It extrapolates the consequences of crazy-advanced technology to their logical endpoint without getting particularly grimdark about it.
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Dec 23, 2022 14:54
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