Post by jadegreen on Jul 12, 2020 17:35:10 GMT
I deleted the rant about me and BW's RP. Some people said it was not as interesting as the one with raptor. And i realized it was more akin to of an angry email that someone writes to vent their frustrations and then doesn't send.
In defense of overpowered armies:
Hear me out. Militaries in science fiction being crazy overpowered isn't a bad thing. Don't get me wrong there are a lot of bad ways to write overpowered things; mainly when the world building and logic isn't really thought through.
If you will, imagine an medieval castle at the center of a city state. They could have a ten thousand spearmen and archers, hundreds of knights on horseback, and a skilled commander or general in charge. They could have the finest steel armor and walls two meters thick that laugh at catapults and trebuchets. In any medieval context; this would probably be considered pretty much unstoppable.
Now imagine how laughably they would preform against our modern military and how many things they would shit themselves trying to counter. They might be able to point to infantry and determine that they had armor and some kind of weapons that worked at range. They might be able to point to a tank and identify it as some kind of metal siege machine. But imagine how ridiculously one-sided a battle would be between a few squads of well supplied marines and this entire kingdom.
An entire column of spearmen or archers could be mowed down by one or two guys in a machinegun nest. The tank could bulldoze the front gate of their castle and just drive right in. The marines can talk with radio; the king's men are restricted to word of mouth or maybe some horns on the battlefield. If they were lucky, smart, or exceptionally brave; a few archers might be able to overwhelm and kill some marines at a heavy cost. But more than likely they would end up routing after the first battle and surrender unconditionally to the modern marines.
And that's not even scratching the surface. Imagine if they decide fighting man-to-man is not worth it. The modern army could finish the job with one F-35 bunker buster (or nuclear device) and more or less mop the entire kingdom. There's not really anything viable to defend against it.
So if you imagine the jump between medieval times and the jump between modern times and an army another thousand years ahead. Is it really bad if said scifi faction's basic infantry are genetically augmented power armored super soldiers that look at someone shooting them with an M14 the same way a modern marine would look at someone in a gambeson charging them with a spear? And is it really that bad if they could park a cruiser out at the orbit of the moon and snipe infrastructure and industry the same way an apache helicopter could go to town on a medieval kingdom?
On huge ships:
So scifi tends to use big ships. Really big ships. And I'm not about to criticize this fact. But how sometimes big ships can be potrayed as being woefully underpowered for what they should be. If only because of the square cube law.
Let's make this comparison. The Nimitz class aircraft carrier is 333 meters long. A huge ship by today's standards. Cruisers in ancerious tend to be around three-four kilometers or about ten times longer than the modern aircraft carrier. Which assuming they are ten times wider and taller and have a similar amount of negative space within that zone would mean 1000 times the internal volume, mass and size.
I recognize the comparison of spacecraft to sea fairing vessels is a little bit apples to oranges but this helps me to make a point.
A Nimitz class carries around 90 aircraft of varying types at full capacity. A ship 10 times longer with a similar amount of space turned over to carrying should; in theory be able to carry 90,000 aircraft. Which is way more fighters than we see on even the largest super carriers in science fiction. Even if we assume a radical inefficiency of space (maybe most of it is taken up by fuel and space-y components); it would be pretty rare to see a 3km ship carrying 9,000 fighters.
The Nimitz also has 6,000 crew. Assuming crew requirement scales linearly with size; a scifi ship in the 3km range could in theory have 6,000,000 crew. (Take notes; anyone who is building a troop carrier.) You can have an order of magnitude less (600,000) which is still a ridiculously big crew and make a lot of space for automation, ship components or allow them to live in relative luxury with private cabins afforded to everyone.
That's just my rebuttal to anyone who complains about me having single super carriers with more troops, fighters and armored vehicles than entire nations on earth.
In defense of overpowered armies:
Hear me out. Militaries in science fiction being crazy overpowered isn't a bad thing. Don't get me wrong there are a lot of bad ways to write overpowered things; mainly when the world building and logic isn't really thought through.
If you will, imagine an medieval castle at the center of a city state. They could have a ten thousand spearmen and archers, hundreds of knights on horseback, and a skilled commander or general in charge. They could have the finest steel armor and walls two meters thick that laugh at catapults and trebuchets. In any medieval context; this would probably be considered pretty much unstoppable.
Now imagine how laughably they would preform against our modern military and how many things they would shit themselves trying to counter. They might be able to point to infantry and determine that they had armor and some kind of weapons that worked at range. They might be able to point to a tank and identify it as some kind of metal siege machine. But imagine how ridiculously one-sided a battle would be between a few squads of well supplied marines and this entire kingdom.
An entire column of spearmen or archers could be mowed down by one or two guys in a machinegun nest. The tank could bulldoze the front gate of their castle and just drive right in. The marines can talk with radio; the king's men are restricted to word of mouth or maybe some horns on the battlefield. If they were lucky, smart, or exceptionally brave; a few archers might be able to overwhelm and kill some marines at a heavy cost. But more than likely they would end up routing after the first battle and surrender unconditionally to the modern marines.
And that's not even scratching the surface. Imagine if they decide fighting man-to-man is not worth it. The modern army could finish the job with one F-35 bunker buster (or nuclear device) and more or less mop the entire kingdom. There's not really anything viable to defend against it.
So if you imagine the jump between medieval times and the jump between modern times and an army another thousand years ahead. Is it really bad if said scifi faction's basic infantry are genetically augmented power armored super soldiers that look at someone shooting them with an M14 the same way a modern marine would look at someone in a gambeson charging them with a spear? And is it really that bad if they could park a cruiser out at the orbit of the moon and snipe infrastructure and industry the same way an apache helicopter could go to town on a medieval kingdom?
On huge ships:
So scifi tends to use big ships. Really big ships. And I'm not about to criticize this fact. But how sometimes big ships can be potrayed as being woefully underpowered for what they should be. If only because of the square cube law.
Let's make this comparison. The Nimitz class aircraft carrier is 333 meters long. A huge ship by today's standards. Cruisers in ancerious tend to be around three-four kilometers or about ten times longer than the modern aircraft carrier. Which assuming they are ten times wider and taller and have a similar amount of negative space within that zone would mean 1000 times the internal volume, mass and size.
I recognize the comparison of spacecraft to sea fairing vessels is a little bit apples to oranges but this helps me to make a point.
A Nimitz class carries around 90 aircraft of varying types at full capacity. A ship 10 times longer with a similar amount of space turned over to carrying should; in theory be able to carry 90,000 aircraft. Which is way more fighters than we see on even the largest super carriers in science fiction. Even if we assume a radical inefficiency of space (maybe most of it is taken up by fuel and space-y components); it would be pretty rare to see a 3km ship carrying 9,000 fighters.
The Nimitz also has 6,000 crew. Assuming crew requirement scales linearly with size; a scifi ship in the 3km range could in theory have 6,000,000 crew. (Take notes; anyone who is building a troop carrier.) You can have an order of magnitude less (600,000) which is still a ridiculously big crew and make a lot of space for automation, ship components or allow them to live in relative luxury with private cabins afforded to everyone.
That's just my rebuttal to anyone who complains about me having single super carriers with more troops, fighters and armored vehicles than entire nations on earth.