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[Parsely]

The infantry even carried tactical nukes to seal holes, and that obviously only served as a delaying tactic. There's nothing stopping them from digging more holes.

There's a huge difference between a tactical nuke and a full sized hydrogen bomb.

Obviously, you don't want to blow yourself up as well. But my point about the enemy being located largely underground still stands. You wouldn't be able to destroy underground nests with nukes, the immediate threat of warriors on the surface would be gone, but their ability to breed would remain. And suddenly you've made it impossible to send in the men who can take care of it, that is to say your infantry.

[acetech09]

Not to derail current conversation, but I finally realized what bugged me about pacific rim.

The actor's walking was never in sync with the jaegers.

*shudders*

That, and 8ish chinooks carrying a 7,000 ton payload. You'd need over 100 chinooks if the weight was right.

I know many, MANY allowances have to be made to make the concept to work, and most of them I was fine with and accept as a fact of life... but is a jaeger jetpack really that hard?

[Bohandas]

The infantry even carried tactical nukes to seal holes, and that obviously only served as a delaying tactic. There's nothing stopping them from digging more holes.

There's a huge difference between a tactical nuke and a full sized hydrogen bomb.

Obviously, you don't want to blow yourself up as well. But my point about the enemy being located largely underground still stands. You wouldn't be able to destroy underground nests with nukes, the immediate threat of warriors on the surface would be gone, but their ability to breed would remain. And suddenly you've made it impossible to send in the men who can take care of it, that is to say your infantry.

What I'm saying that a Tsar Bomba dropped on the surface would probably do more damage to an underground warren than detonating one of those little mini-nukes right in the middle of it.. It is over a million times more powerful. Unless those tunnels go very deep indeed it would force the roof down (as in actively push it down in many places, not just collapse it) and squish anything in them like a giant boot; except for the tunnels near the surface, they would be vaporized along with anything in them.

[Xantalos]

Battle Royale 2: the entire movie.

[Neonivek]

Battle Royale 2: the entire movie.

I never quite got this. Moments where people go "the entire thing".

[Xantalos]

The entire movie was so goddamn confusing I've no idea what happened in it.
So the entire movie was one giant nitpick.

[Parsely]

What I'm saying that a Tsar Bomba dropped on the surface would probably do more damage to an underground warren than detonating one of those little mini-nukes right in the middle of it.. It is over a million times more powerful. Unless those tunnels go very deep indeed it would force the roof down (as in actively push it down in many places, not just collapse it) and squish anything in them like a giant boot; except for the tunnels near the surface, they would be vaporized along with anything in them.

There's a reason the common infantry are equipped with such powerful weapons, because they're most effective when deployed inside these underground areas. A surface detonated anything has limited effect on stuff below the ground (usually the point of surface detonated weapons since if you're deploying these you generally want to hurt stuff on the surface). Most of the force of the explosion moves upwards and horizontally, because there's a big, relatively flat, hard and massive surface (the earth) there to deflect it. You'll get the big crater but it's not big enough to destroy an enemy that's possible hundreds of meters beneath a planet's surface. Also this is assuming they have enough Tsar Bombas to saturate bomb the entire surface of the planet, probably three separate times if they actually wanted to get deep enough to unbury all of them. :v

Also, I'd like to draw a comparison to Americans trying to bomb their enemies in tunnels during Vietnam and how completely and totally ineffective that always turned out to be. :I

[i2amroy]

Rocks are NOT free, citizen.

See I know that was intended for humor, but since this is the nitpicky thread after all...

Spoiler: Nitpicky Response (click to show/hide)

The problem here is that Bursarius Tenathis has been mislead in some of his calculations and thinking, notably in the facts:
1) No need to use a titan class warship. You would be best off using a single ship that consisted of basically just engines and fuel combined with a single warp equipped escape pod. You would then attach the old ship to serve as your new asteroid engine source, and since it's going to be annihilated anyways you don't even need to paint it. (Or if you wanted to Exterminatus in style you could, but it would still certainly be cheaper than the cost of a new coat for a titan class warship).

2) There is no need to perform any large number of tests on the asteroid, only a simple scan to determine its mass which shouldn't take more then a few hours, tops (or at the WH40K level of tech probably only a few minutes) and a double check to ensure that your ship can grasp the asteroid. At the speeds we are going to be going at it doesn't really matter what it is made of or what shape it is, unless for some reason you wanted to specifically have total planet annihilation vs. shattering the planet into big chunks vs. melting the entire surface in a wave of fire.

3) Similarly there's no need to shape the asteroid. Space is empty enough that drag isn't a significant factor, and at the final speeds we're going at Lorenz contraction means that the whole thing just flattens into a pancake anyways.

4) Assuming you do the math right (which we can do with our current computers, easy) there should never be a need for last minute corrections to the path. In a sense by the time you get up to speed it's basically impossible to do last minute corrections, you either did the math right (which should be hands down easy for an inquisitorial mainframe) and hit the target, or did it wrong and missed completely. Also since space is mostly empty there shouldn't ever be a need to move the asteroid at the beginning of the process. Just connect the old ship/new engines with a few solid pitons just in case it starts to slip, draw a straight line from the asteroid to the future location of the target, hit the go button and eject in your fancy escape pod.

5) The object you are trying to detect is about half the size of a single gunship (~524000 ft^3), over 3000 times smaller than even the smallest of space vessels (the smallest destroyers come in at around 1.65538e9 ft^3). And if that isn't difficult enough to detect it's not giving off any engine or heat readings either. It's literally just a cold lump of rock and metal at that point. And if that is still too easy to detect you could always detonate it before it reached it's destination, meaning it's a vague cloud of atoms and most sensor signals will just go right through it (while it still hits just as hard).

6) Even if they did manage to detect it, it's impossible to stop it. Accelerate it enough, and from far enough away, and the only way to stop it would be to throw another planet sized object in the road and let it take the blow. Accelerate it from farther, and go faster, and it doesn't matter what you put in the road, it'll crack through another few planets before hitting the target just fine. At that point the only real defense would be to move the target out of the road. And unless your enemies started around the same time you launched your asteroid all they will be really doing at that point is calling down their own Exterminatus, since there's no way you could provide a large enough acceleration to accomplish that on the planet without some serious consequences.

7) As a result of 5 and 6, there's no need to stand around waiting to counter deflection attempts. I suppose we could have the tech priest and servitor visit for the day to see the explosion, and have done the virtue of including said extra day visit in my cost calculations below.

Two days: Tech Priest pastor - 0.05 M
Two days: Servitor parish - .01 M
Disposable engines - 1 M
Dihydrogen peroxide fuel - .8 M
Bribe for Bursarius Tenathis to break tradition - .04 M
Bribe for the Tech Priest pastor to overlook said break - .1 M

Total cost - 2 M
Savings for the empire per Exterminatus performed - .5 M

Of course this does come with the drawback of requiring months or years for it to actually hit the intended target, and so would be fairly useless in situations that require a fast response. For taking out long-lost planets or planets that have ample time before being overrun it would provide savings of up to 20% for each Exterminatus carried out, and as such performs much better in the realm of cost than current, magna-melta dependent methods.

[lemon10]

What I'm saying that a Tsar Bomba dropped on the surface would probably do more damage to an underground warren than detonating one of those little mini-nukes right in the middle of it.. It is over a million times more powerful. Unless those tunnels go very deep indeed it would force the roof down (as in actively push it down in many places, not just collapse it) and squish anything in them like a giant boot; except for the tunnels near the surface, they would be vaporized along with anything in them.

There's a reason the common infantry are equipped with such powerful weapons, because they're most effective when deployed inside these underground areas. A surface detonated anything has limited effect on stuff below the ground (usually the point of surface detonated weapons since if you're deploying these you generally want to hurt stuff on the surface). Most of the force of the explosion moves upwards and horizontally, because there's a big, relatively flat, hard and massive surface (the earth) there to deflect it. You'll get the big crater but it's not big enough to destroy an enemy that's possible hundreds of meters beneath a planet's surface. Also this is assuming they have enough Tsar Bombas to saturate bomb the entire surface of the planet, probably three separate times if they actually wanted to get deep enough to unbury all of them. :v

Also, I'd like to draw a comparison to Americans trying to bomb their enemies in tunnels during Vietnam and how completely and totally ineffective that always turned out to be. :I

That is a fair comparison, because I'm pretty sure vietnam is some pretty big inspiraton for the work.

Also of note from the book (not the movie): At the start of the war bombing them wasn't a option, simple nuclear bombs weren't strong enough to wipe out tunnels miles(?) underground, especially considering that as long as the queen survives your bombing is useless and that they are also sentient, so the queens room could probably be specially reinforced. But by the end of the war things are different, they get planet-buster bombs and they simply use them whenever then encounter a bug planet.

[Sebastian2203]

Oh I just stumbled upon this thread and this might be my favorite soon..

I am heavy nitpicker and I see everything as weird/unrealistic ( mainly about military movies)

Eh lemme show some kind of example.
Hero of the military movie moves around the field being shot on and manages TO NOT get hit while exposing himself for VERY long time. But watch out, bad guy goes out of cover for 1 second and is insta killed.
Then I could go on and on... but my memory is weak but I will sure return to this thread when I sort all my memories and post them here.

Well I wanted to say I understand movies bend a lot of things so they are more interesting and cool, because no one would watch movies if everything was too realistic/simple. BUT that does not stop me from bitching here about it.

[itisnotlogical]

Any sort of science-fiction control panel that is just unlabeled buttons and blinky switches, or something that doesn't even look like an interface. Any time I see it I think "How is anybody supposed to use that?". LCARS from Star Trek is the worst offender; most buttons are completely unlabeled, and people somehow enter complex information without any sort of keyboard/pad or even distinguishable number keys.

[Jopax]

Godzilla.

Most of the movie qualifies tbh, but two parts stood out quite a bit.

When the female MUTO broke out of the nuclear waste bunker you'd think some sort of security would notice the giant gaping hole in the mountain made by a giant cockroach. Nope, they drive up to said mountain and only by checking every single bunker do they realise one of them is blown open.

You'd think nuclear waste disposal sites would have more security.

Second, they use a train to transport the nuke that's supposed to kill the monsters that feed on radiation (because this one is bigger it'll kill them, honest). Said train is going very near the route of the monster that detects and feeds on radiation, no bad ideas there, except it does find them and wrecks their shit and also eats the nuke they were transporting.

Except it doesn't somehow and the nuke is picked up by a helicopter which then flies it to LA.

Why the fuck didn't they transport it by air from the start? How did the nuke survive being eaten?

[i2amroy]

Any sort of science-fiction control panel that is just unlabeled buttons and blinky switches, or something that doesn't even look like an interface. Any time I see it I think "How is anybody supposed to use that?". LCARS from Star Trek is the worst offender; most buttons are completely unlabeled, and people somehow enter complex information without any sort of keyboard/pad or even distinguishable number keys.

It's all actually cybernetic eye implants in every crew member. Because the physical buttons aren't labeled it lets any button be relabeled on the fly depending on both the context of the current menu and the authority of the button presser, and it helps keep a valuable military weapon out of enemy hands since they can't control it.

[smjjames]

Any sort of science-fiction control panel that is just unlabeled buttons and blinky switches, or something that doesn't even look like an interface. Any time I see it I think "How is anybody supposed to use that?". LCARS from Star Trek is the worst offender; most buttons are completely unlabeled, and people somehow enter complex information without any sort of keyboard/pad or even distinguishable number keys.

It's all actually cybernetic eye implants in every crew member. Because the physical buttons aren't labeled it lets any button be relabeled on the fly depending on both the context of the current menu and the authority of the button presser, and it helps keep a valuable military weapon out of enemy hands since they can't control it.

To be fair to the first generation Star Trek, it was a low budget deal because 60s.

For TNG and onwards, no idea, maybe because such a detail would be too small to see on film/tv?

[DJ]

Maybe they just use the buttons so much the labels wear out. I've used a computer keyboard like that until the spacebar broke.