Superficial Scaling Stumbles in Sci Fi Storytelling | Alliterated Articulacy™
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- čas přidán 5. 08. 2023
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this video is a hair directionless but mainly about writing in science fiction. it feels hard for me to give any actual significant backing footage to videos like these most of the time, but this one came together pretty naturally.
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Superficial Scaling Stumbles in Sci Fi Storytelling | Alliterated Articulacy™
• Superficial Scaling St...
big things are coming.
#dnd #dnd5e #pathfinder #worldbuilding #writing #tolkien #lotr #lordoftherings #starwars #starwarsjedisurvivor #jedisurvivor #payday3 - Hry
If you just dont like sci fi just say that.....
sci fi is my favorite genre.
@@cassius_scrungoman I went back and listened to it again, and it STILL sounds like you're shitting on Star Wars and Halo. I think the things you are ridiculing aren't even an issue of superficial scale causing problems in storytelling. Rather an issue of consistency between multiple artists, authors, writers, and directors with variable visions and their impact on a setting. Mind you that'd likely be a whole video or series of videos on its own, but that calls into question even more why you chose the examples you've used here.
I'm not a Clone Wars fan. But your breakdown on the Clones and their effectiveness against the Separatist Droids was terrible. In truth, I think you might have inadvertently discredited the title of the video in that segment alone. 1 Clone had to be as or more effective than 100 billion droids? That doesn't make sense, and not because of the ridiculous numbers involved. It's an oversimplification to an extreme degree. "These problems don't really matter' is followed by (paraphrasing) if you care enough to look into the logistics of things you are already a fan. IE fans don't care about consistency, immersion, and yes, scale. Rather offensive thing to say, really.
Look man, I've never seen any of your stuff before, and I don't have any reason to hate you. But I understand why the first four minutes of this video would set off fans of the subgenres you're lambasting. Perhaps your intentions were good and you thought these cherrypicked and rather bizarre bits of info were useful in making your point. But I think you missed the mark, badly.
Is it offensive to say people generally don't care about consistency and immersion and scale? It seems a raw fact blatantly obvious to everyone. It's why we have nine shit Star Wars movies and one good one. Two, now.
One can like a genre but only like the instances of it that sport internal consistency.
@@HallyVee that was kind of the point of the video. i personally care about it in what I write, but the vast majority of people don't and I honestly think that's fine.
You got it all wrong. Star Wars makes perfect sense. The 501st just got the rest of the 100 billion that other clones missed. 💀
oh fuck I didn't think of that
average Clone efficency actually pretty regular, ClankSlaughterer Rex, who kills 4000 droids every night, is a statistical outlier and should not have been counted
In all fairness, it actually wasn't a simple battle of attrition. The CIS was sabotaged and forced to surrender after Palpatine took dictatorial control of the Republic. He was controlling both sides of the war and just used them to rebuild the Sith empire.
There is that fan theory that ‘unit’ isn’t an individual clone but a batch of some unknown size, but even then the clones are only produced one a single planet and later a handful of others, which still puts a definite upper bound on their numbers.
Edit: yo why am i getting spammed by notifications from this comment six months after i made it the only other time this happened was for something actually important
Now that I’ve finished: good video! The idea of grounded stories, frustratingly enough, always seems like something I have to explain to some of my friends. The alternative viewpoint is that everything in a story happens just because the author wants it to and there’s very little difference between different versions of that unless it’s egregious because we don’t read stories for consistency.
argh. Getting called weird and pedantic for wanting a basic level of consistency more thoroughly researched than Netflix’s Another Life is extremely jarring.
@@anabsentprofessor6120 Grounded vs. realistic is a completely arbitrary distinction. You want crazy fantastical bullshit, but you also... want it to have realistic consequences, I guess? As Cassius said, if a mecha is fired into space, the pilot should be hurt because of the massive G-forces. That's a realistic consequence.
But where do you draw the line? Because the mecha's hips and knees snapping like twigs just by trying to walk around normally, is also a realistic consequence. The mecha being so tall that it can't easily hide behind terrain features, and getting plinked to death by tanks which are short enough that they can actually hide, is also a realistic consequence. The mecha being unable to carry as much ammunition as a tank can because it's a humanoid robot hauling around a giant rifle, while a tank is just a cannon on wheels with a built-in magazine, is also a realistic consequence.
A story that you may think is "grounded", might seem laughably absurd to someone else. Because the story didn't include the realistic consequences that THEY care about. I feel this way, too - I get annoyed at so much military sci-fi, for ignoring a lot of things that I see as "grounded" elements of warfare. Like the issues of logistics and supply, and the vast number of people who are employed by armies to do things other than fight people. Or the fact that a soldier's experience of war is only 1% exciting battles, with the other 99% being spent waiting around, moving from place to place, or doing boring drudgework.
When military sci-fi ignores logistical concerns, and only focuses on cool battles, it doesn't feel grounded to me. It doesn't matter if the mecha are painted in camo patterns, or the pilots are blacking out from G-forces. Logistics and boredom are realistic consequences of warfare, to me. But I doubt you'd be interested in a story exploring the minutiae of procuring and shipping replacement parts for mecha to the frontlines. Or a story about a mecha pilot who spends an entire day standing around in reserve, waiting for the order to advance over a hill and attack. Only for an entire battle to happen out of sight between other forces, his own side winning without any need of him, and the pilot eventually being ordered to return to base without ever firing a shot.
No, you want mecha to be front and centre, and you want to see them get into cool fights. Your desires are every bit as contrived as anyone else'.
For the Clone Wars scale reference, it would make total sense for them referring to "units completed" as actual combat units. They are bred and trained to be soldiers, so it would make sense for the aliens overseeing such an operation to think of their outputs as completed units to put in the field, from NCO commander clones to heavy guns to rifleman etc. When you think of it from that perspective along with a space military "unit" being the size that it would have to as a naval force, and the amount of clones being produced makes a lot more grounded sense in scale. Being produced on a single planet does limit scale, but that still leaves room for billions. Current Earth population is nearing 8 billion with the carrying capacity at current standards and infrastructure being yet more, a city-planet being used as a world-wide clone production facility could reasonably be outputting tens of billions.
@@tbotalpha8133 Feels like your kind of going off for no reason here bubz.
I was having such a good time reading your comment. Then came the random "superiority complex at the end" sigh.
Shame, your entire comment just seems like a pseudointellectual rant now.
@@raidenthekat2444 I posted a slightly revised version of this comment as a standalone in this comment section.
But I stand by my closing statement. The pursuit of "grounded" storytelling is nonsense, because all fiction is ultimately contrived to fit whatever artistic goals its creator pursued. If you think your storytelling is "grounded", it isn't. It's just focusing on the particular aspects of reality that you care about seeing expressed, while glossing over or ignoring many, many others.
Or it might not even reflect reality at all! You, the storyteller, may be ignorant about how reality actually works. So your fiction might not even accurately reflect the aspects of reality that you think you care about.
Clinging to the notion of "grounded storytelling" is just blinding you to what you're actually doing - contriving fiction to suit your tastes, or the tastes of your audience, just like every other storyteller.
"Grounded" sci-fi also has to work backwards.
In the Battletech universe, the materials that the mechs are built out of are themselves a potential source of war and conflict. Which is why they are only very rarely used for non-military applications.
Endo steel and diamond-composite armour have peaceful applications in the building of super high-rises and space habitats and fusion power is pretty much as ubiquitous as the internal combustion engine in our own universe.
However, possessing the infrastructure to manifacture those kinds of materials makes your entire planet a military target for every government, warlord and two-bit pirate outfit for hundreds of light-years.
By comparison, nuclear weapons are shockingly cheap and easy to manufacture and can delete pretty much anything very, very effectively from orbit.
So only the factions who can already defend their entire military-industrial supply chain can build the technobabble stuff at scale. And those same factions have a vested interest in keeping enemy war-planners from seeing their civilian population centers as convenient sources of spare parts for critical military equipment. Which is why they don't use the technobabble stuff to improve the daily lives of their citizens.
All that said, there are planets scattered around which have managed to retain a comparatively high level of tech. And they are *very* dependant on the major powers to stay that way.
To be fair the only hard part of making a nuclear bomb (knowledge aside) is the nuclear material. And in our world that is only because we have major controls from an international coalition of governments who agree to limit the materials proliferation.
In space it's basically impossible to do that. Esp with all the major governments hating each other. It's just too big and wide, and the nuclear material is quite common.
@@owlsayssouth The obvious thing though is if you're able to build a spacecraft that can go anywhere near the speed of light at all you already have a weapon far deadlier than a nuke
@@owlsayssouth
Yeah, in BattleTech the reason nukes aren't commonly used is because during historical events people realized that that kind of raw destruction just makes everything worse for everyone, including the winners because there's no prize left for them to actually take.
Mech combat happens not because BattleMechs are necessarily BETTER weapons than nukes, but because you can have the giant robots fight without vaporizing the stuff you're fighting over.
It's a neat solution to the problem of "Why would you spend all of the resources to build a big robot instead of a big bomb?" It doesn't solve ALL of the problems with using mechs instead of other types of military vehicles, but it's a good enough excuse to make the idea plausible.
@@thunderspark1536
Sorry, apparently it's just time for me to infodump about BattleTech, but the way they handle FTL travel is also really neat.
They use technology similar to what's typically called a warp drive, but you don't get to just zip wherever you like. Warping space in that manner is incredibly dangerous and unpredictable due to the various gravitational forces at play. So if you want to actually get where you want without being torn apart in the process, you have to travel in discrete jumps, each starting and ending at very specific points in space where all of the gravity kinda cancels out and makes a pocket of stability.
So you have designated JumpShips that are equipped to make those jumps, and they're used to ferry other ships between jump points. You come out at the closest point to your actual destination, and then you have to do regular sublight travel the rest of the way. So interstellar travel is still nontrivial despite the FTL technology, and you can't just "go to lightspeed" whenever you feel like it to escape a fight or turn your ship into a projectile or any other similar shenanigans.
As a side note, interstellar communication also uses a similar technology to solve the problem of our current communication technology taking literal years to cross interstellar distances.
There's a network of "Hyper Pulse Generators" spread throughout the galactic region, and they use the same space warping technology, but are less bound by the issues of staying in one piece because they don't actually have to transport any matter, they just encode information into the spatial distortions created by rapidly pulsing warp generators, hence the name.
Only a single corporation still has the required knowledge to maintain and operate this network, and since it's essential to any kind of logistics or communication across interstellar empires, they've turned into a quasi-religious semi-neutral force, similar to the Catholic Church's role in medieval Europe, and rationing out use of the communications network forms a standard currency shared by all major factions.
@@radical_rat Cool comments! I didn't know anything about BattleTech, so thanks it was an interesting read.
Corusant does indeed have hundreds of levels; 1700 in fact. A new one get's built UP every few thousand years. Everything below the first few hundred is basically unlivable. As the new one is built the lowest habitable level is filled with trash and toxic waste and the poorest residents are In real peril of being buried alive under it all.
I mean, at some point... don't you hit a ceiling? The air gets thinner... less oxygen for all of those oxygen-breathing species so prevalent in SW.
@@moffjendob6796 They have the tech to fix that as they go
@@elitemook4234 I mean, sealed, sure. But Padme's apartment looked pretty open and fairly high-level. :P
Guess you could be pumping oxygen into luxury apartments constantly so the wealthy get their gale breezes at a breathable pressure.
@@moffjendob6796 Maybe the atmosphere moves up too. The trash fills in the space where the air would go and becomes the new "ground level"
Rip 1313
also 3-10 million is fucking PITIFUL on a galactic scale, the soviet army in world war two was twice that, and that was JUST frontline fighters, don't forget garrisoning germany and poland.
It all boils down to Starsector being a banger in every regard
Space crack
facts
The fact Starsector NAILS scale in space is amazing - the entire sector is split half in half of "hagemony or not hagemony" due to the fact that Chicomoztech is the only planet with over a hundred million souls. The Hagemony doesnt dominate the entire sector soley because of its reliance on external allies, and all of its external threats being smart enough to either ignore each other concerning the Hage, or have other advantages to fight back (Persean having a Prisitine Nanoforge to fight toe to toe against the Hege, the pirates being too spread-out to deal with, the Sindrian being a fortress system etc.)
Bro Starsector can't even decide if ships are printed in the hundreds of millions every month or if a single Eagle-class Cruiser being produced is worth wheeling out the head of an entire faction just to christen it.
My favorite game tbh
The main thing with the clones number versus the battle droids number is that the guy who came up with the battle droid number wanted to win Star Trek versus Star Wars debates on forums. So, when given the opportunity to write official reference books, suddenly point defense guns dwarf the output of ICBM warheads. A strafing run by an X-Wing against Stormtroopers on the ground, like in the Rogue Squadron games, is basically a small war crime/apocalypse.
And so, this author decided that when the Kaminoans said, "units" of clones, they didn't mean a single clone. They meant... a division of 16,000. And so it made perfect sense to this author, based on the huge number of battle droids we saw in the factory scene of Attack of the Clones and careful timing of exactly how long it took to assemble a droid in a special effects shot, that therefore the Separatist droid army battled that 48 billion clones with 10 quintillion droids. Because big numbers give tinglies and put those Trekkies in their place, by gum!
HOWEVER, we ALSO had an edit war--pre-Wookieepedia days so it just happened in the books--with an author who decided the clones loved Mandalorian stuff and Mandos were the bestest evar at everything war... and so wrote that "unit" meant "dude." And novels outranked reference books, therefore... three million clones, and an unaddressed number of droids meaning 10 quintillion. Because MY OCS ARE BETTER THAN YOUR NUMBERS!
actually the yield of star wars weapons is based on what is shown on screen, such as when they blow up asteroids.
Also we are talking a Galactic scale war, big numbers is necessary for ground pounders. individual cities alone can have millions of men on each side fighting. think about a war spanning hundreds or thousands of planets. because galaxies are big. each of those have hundreds to thousands of cities.
BUT NOOO, we got to use small numbers that don't make sense because big numbers are incomprehensible and make my head hurt.
P.S. the droid number was mentioned in a novel too, from the perspective of general grievous (so no, can't pull the its just propoganda).
@@matthiuskoenig3378 Nah, the asteroid numbers were the STARTING point. Those are decent numbers.
Then someone decided to tack on a double extra zeroes because they were uncomfortably close to what a photon torpedo might do! And to suggest MERE megaton-range yield for light, defensive turbolasers swatting at asteroids... BLASPHEMY! :P
@@matthiuskoenig3378It's about to sound really condescending, but please bear with me. Please you can look past the negativity I've written, it's all I can ask.
It's kinda incredible then that real life developments demonstrate how the whole "we must use MILLIONS to take a city!" is already nonsensical. Unless we're just that much better than Star Wars, it would not take millions of Clone Troops using combined arms to take a nation sized target. It took slightly less than a million in manpower to wash over Iraq in 1991. The peak size of the Red Army through a war from 46 years earlier was only 11 million, and despite their comparatively more "Star Wars" level of technological capability they didn't have to dedicate all that on just one or two cities.
Worse so, what you said exactly demonstrates the lack of consideration of how scale would apply to a setting with respect to real life. Star Wars is, or should be, an overwhelmingly an air and naval game. Where the Republic launched a ground invasion to retake Geonosis and remove its production capabilities from the Confederacy, the Allies of WWII used strategic bombing to do the same at a fraction of the required costs in manpower and casualties. Where the Republic launched a massive siege of the Outer Rim to destroy all Separatist strongholds, the US used island hopping to paralyze dozens of Japanese garrisons and fortresses for essentially no cost. And the US chose to do it this way because the PTO was simply too vast to put a fleet of ships and divisions of Marines in every inch of it. Over 6.8 million square miles of ocean, the US achieved total control of the Pacific using 27 Fleet Carriers and less than 100 capital ships total. The Galaxy is indeed colossally, massively bigger than the Pacific, but then that means that trying to solve the size problem by scaling up should be just as impossible for Star Wars as it is in real life.
Using the asteroid field scene to gauge Turbolaser yields and canonize the figures likewise goes back to the scaling problem. An ISD can apparently vaporize all that solid iron with point defense. So they never use the ramifications of this casual use of firepower again? Why? Because when they do, the Xystons ruin Star Wars by breaking up a planet with several salvos and not even destroying Kijimi completely. That's what you wanted, speculation accurate Star Destroyer power yields, but now it's a problem when put in action.
That doesn't make Star Wars bad. That doesn't mean the writing for Star Wars is objectively bad either. It's only the that under the lens of a deeper dive in story reasoning, less holds up. Numbers are an effective storytelling tool, but as the video means to point out, humans have a hard time comprehending scale (me included). Big numbers don't just make head hurt, when put to paper they can simply make no sense. Like another commenter pointed out: this is a consequence of having a lot of writers who aren't unified in their lore. But that doesn't necessarily mean it is wrong to call out these inconsistencies, especially when otherwise they would have to be taken at face value.
@@moffjendob6796 The bigger numbers (turbolasers with yields in the terratons) come from taking the energy needed for the death star to destroy Alderan(assuming it has the same mass as Earth) than assuming that the Death Star and Star Destroyers produce power on the same principle and that it scales with volume, than you get that you could fit about 10 million star destroyers into the death star and that a single star destroyer has one 10 millionth of the power of the death star.
@@lukatomas9465 As someone who was in that camp, I am familiar with the methodology. Of course, that assumes that everything scales down perfectly...
They love to talk the laws of thermodynamics and entropy on Trek stuff... but "SW science is so advanced that they have mastered everything."
The Star Wars Republic Commando books cover that the reported scale of the CIS is largely propaganda on Palpatine's part to generate war support and justification for the Grand Army to further his plans for more clones. Also, it covered how the majority of the high clone numbers were extremely low quality clones. The number of clones like we see in Clone Wars as characters was much smaller. The Star Wars universe is huge, but still acknowledges realism especially in the grounded books like X-Wing and Republic Commando series.
i don't remember this point but it's been a few years since I read them, that would check out
Traviss coming in to fix everything once again
My favorite part of star wars lore is that half of it is literally just making excuses for how shaky and inconsistent it is
@@cassius_scrungomanidk bout fixes everything, her halo books aren’t that good imo. But hey if you enjoy that its all good.
yeah except the republic commando books did the dumb thing and tried to make the droid army smaller rather than the republic army bigger. the size of the Republic forces makes no sense just from the number of ships we are shown.
@@cassius_scrungoman she actually ruined it though. the orginal source for the large droid number comes from a source that also reinterpreted the clones to be larger number (unit = unit of clones rather than individual), Traviss tried to make both numbers smaller (because big numbers bad!) and since novels outrank source books her clone numbers are canon, unfortunately for her the big droid number was used in the perspective of general grievious in novel meaning its canon and the small number is a mistake her characters made. meaning she made things worse by canonising a small clone number in the perspective of the clones, but the big droid number was recanonised.
also her perspective on the clone wars was it was a quote "small bush fire war" which is just silly.
so for that Halo gun it kind of makes sense or at least could make sense that its range is shorter than it can travel in a second. At that speed maybe the round gets ablated away very quickly and so maximum effective range isnt how far it can go before it loses lethality due to speed loss but how far it can go before you no longer have a bullet at all.
The recoil must be monstrous.
@@moffjendob6796 Nah, it's a coilgun, so you already have a lot less recoil than a conventional firearm. Combine that with the fact that the UNSC has better recoil dampening tech than we do and you get something quite heavy, but without the horrifying recoil of a modern rifle.
EDIT: I just did a quick Google search, and it looks like the planet's curvature might also be a limiting factor for the weapon's range.
@@inquisitorkobold6037 I mean, the muzzle velocity is 15 kps. Depending on what the mass of the projectile is... but for comparison, a one gram projectile will kick about five times harder than a 9 mm bullet.
That's not a coilgun thing, that's a conservation of momentum thing. As someone doing a lot of mathematical modeling on hypervelocity small arms to get reasonable bullet sizes in exchange for reasonable effects... this sounds like "I like big numbers."
The stanchion vents the air out of the sides of the barrel, backward, to help with recoil, and I also imagine that 15kms is the maximum velocity possible, not what they always fire it at.
To be honest I'm more on the guess that 7.5km starts being the edge of the range where you can actually acquire and track a target at with it, but if you wanted to shoot a building that you can see 30km away, you could? for context, I've never read the source material, just spitballing.
Im actually kind of GLAD you didnt touch on Warhammer 40k, because that has INTENTIONALLY bad scaling issues.
"Its not ridiculous, its GRIMDARK"
(Its still ridiculous)
i really like the scaling of 40k. The entire premise of absolutely everything is so rediculous that it all balances itself out. Its not supposed to be grounded, its like watching a story play out in a dream where things are weird and dont make logical sense but feel internally consistent.
saw this on a 40k video about power level; 40k is just sci-fi texas where it and its fans act like everything in it is better because its bigger, even if here are more out of whack settings that would wipe 40k a million times over without thinking.
When it comes to actual numbers Warhammer has one of the most realistic population sizes for any sci-fi universe
@@jakeparker9624 Kinda like Eminence In Shadow really. Dude is so strong it warps around to being "what is this force of nature going to do to us" which is both terrifying and hilarious
@@HD-mp6yy With the exception of catachan, like, I understand it's very dangerous and most kids don't survive but like.... just 10 million? it should at the very least be 1 billion
Coruscant should be way less densely urbanized if it has "only" trillions of people. If it's, say, 5 trillion people, that means everyone has space for their own 10x10 meter plot. Which is not a lot, but then when you consider that 10x10 meter plot extends for thousands of storeys, the average person on coruscant seems to have almost hunter gatherer-like levels of space, all of it indoors.
In other words, depending on how much of devoted to infrastructure and hydroponics, you could probably afford to house everyone in somewhere between 1% and 0.01% of that space, leaving a forest of skyscrapers so tall they need to be pressurized and room between them for, well, actual forests. Basically a giant nature preserve.
There's a lot of uncounted for people, especially in the lower levels
The "quintillion battle droids" is a realistic number for a galactic empire, but 10 million clones would be the expected defense force of a sector on a single planet.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who's noticed this.
There are logistical supply blockages with deploying those massive armies via shipping (droids are still better than people who need life support). But once a planet was infected with droid factories the only way to remove the CIS would be apocalyptic orbital bombardment. They don't like to talk about clones glassing worlds with megatonne lasers but it had to have happened.
not nessiarily. the clones 'won' due to vader turning the droids off. its entirely possible such 'infected' worlds were lost for the war and only 'liberated' by the empire after the shutdown order.
its almost like realism wasnt a priority to the people who made star wars or something. enjoy it on its merits (its themes, its pure spectacle, whatever you like), but its a waste of your energy to deeply analyze it in my opinion.
Yeah about corosaunt, in the lore they acknowledge this ludicrous size and state that the bottom levels are literally uninhabitable because it is to deep for oxygen and light to reach it
Edit: also corosaunt is said to have a 100 trillion or more inhabitants, this is because when the planet became overpopulated they would just build another level around the planet
I think that the greatest piece of art about scale is blame. It feels ridiculous but at the same time you feel all of it.
This is the most correct answer
Walk: The Manga
I was about to disagree, but... Death Star... The nerve of some people to call its design "Stupid" and "Flawed" because it had an exhaust hole- like... People... you DO realise what that hole is for, right? It keeps the station from overheating. And may I remind you, this hole is small enough to fit a football. and the Death star is the size of the moon. Imagine that you're supposed to blow up the moon by finding a single toilet on its surface and take a crap in there... In such a way that it doesnt bump the walls on its way as its falling to the core.
Nevermind the fact that making this sized hole on a Death Star-sized object would make all the heat that's being spat out erupt in a beam of visible heat.... or at least it would bave but, you know... Space, it would need to have a medium, I think the fact it's that small should be praised as a marvel of technical wizardry.
Also they were able to blow it up since they had access to the blueprints , without it they wouldn't have been able to blow the death star
That exhaust port wasn’t even the only one too it was one of at least *twenty secondary exhaust ports* with a big ol main one at the North Pole. Another thing that’s kinda unrelated but I just get annoyed by is that people say the Death Star was always a bad idea (for the empire) but I really disagree. You got thrawn fans saying they should’ve built more destroyers and better fighters but those things are really only needed if you’re actually at war which at the time of the Death Star the empire wasn’t. It was something that could hold entire planets at gunpoint. If you wanted to oppress an entire galaxy conventional methods like “more warships” and “cooler planes” isn’t going to cut it. Palpatine could effectively live forever he’s evil and spooky and magic like that those short term solutions would not have ensured his reign for eternity.
@@ulforcemegamon3094 they could've not blown the death star, not without the Force.
the sheer concept of a planet destroyer is stupid in a universe with readily available orbital bombardment
What about the resources of building the death star?
anyone who says gunpowder makes swords useless seems to have forgotten the entirety of the age of sail, which was a pretty big part of history. and also the age dnd is set in
Even before that, it's important to note that gunpowder's discovery is _contemporary with Charlemagne._
From a purely eurocetric view aswell, gunpowder arrived in Europe in the 12th-13th century. More or less contemporary to the French crossbows vs British longbows rivalry.
Yet the age of full plate armour, swords and all kind of weapons popular imagination classifies as medieval, lasted all the way to the late 17th/early 18th century. You talked of the Age of Sail as an Age when swords still mattered. But full plate did too. While sailors didn't wear it for obvious logistical reasons, back on dry land the Winged Hussars in full armour and armed with lances routed the musket-equipped Jannisaries at Vienna.
It turns out that discovering a certain mix of powders go boom, doesn't automatically translate in mass producing cheap guns able to reliably pierce full plate armour.
Plus even if they do, remember in fantasy worlds magic often exists. One can easily create rules that make armour and melee weapons more "compatible" with magic. The best examples are ironically the various Warhammer settings. Where melee weapons and armour are older, so more commonly associated with strength and protection in popular imagination, so boosted more easily by Warp fuckery.
@thefirstprimariscatosicari6870 of course. Besides, in real life alot of plate armor was tested by just shooting it with a gun.
Plate armor was absolutely bullet... well, musketball proof.
@@comet.x Before I answer, sorry if I came off a bit aggressive in my previous comment
I mean I was, I was just agreeing aggressively. The target being pop history view of guns.
Anyway yeah, that too. Plate armour while not necessarily increasing in complexity, thickness and quality to keep up with guns penetration (because early guns had less penetrative power than bolts and arrows), was definitely marketed as such.
Real history is complicated, but I don't think guns and and armour mix in a fictional genre. Armour is associated with invincibilty, and we project much more recent designs far back onto people like king Arthur because of this heroic association. Guns are associated with anybody dieing in an instant, like in a western, which is an entirely different genre. Cunning vs power. The symbolic links are just too contradictory, and mixing them automatically pushes you into grimdark because then you have 'invincible' heroes who can die in a moment just like anyone else if a cannon hits them, (In good theming for the wars of the reformation). If dnd is heroic fantasy however it should NOT include guns.
well, critique videos of Guardian Spice ruined the groundedness of the fantasy genre for me or rather their comment sections, I had a long hard think about how magic would affect a world, by the very nature of human advancement magic systems that aren't tirelessly reigned in by the author would cause what we would understand as an industrial revolution within 5 years.
even things like gunpowder can become obsolete, an enchanter and a bunch of electric mages and you could make reliable railguns, by the time we get to the age of sail you've probably had at least 10 generations of enchanters enchanting 2 metal rods not to be affected by heat and friction and 2 metal blocks to store electric power until full, in essence, you could probably have over the horizon weaponry before you even have optics to see everything before the horizon
See funny thing about the clone wars, truth is. The war was rigged from the start
I feel like it's actually solidly believable that of hakas are still a known a thing in the future- especially since Gibby is from that cultural background and he is actively repping his ancient warrior culture in these olympics-like combat events
I'm from NZ and I absolutely agree. The British tried to separate the Maori from their heritage for shy of a hundred years. we have more Maori speakers now in NZ then we did then. Despite everything they have kept their culture alive, and if feel that of any race and culture, the Maori would not lose that to time or tech advancement.
Honestly I kinda expected starsector to be part of the grounded vs realistic tangent. I remembered a quote from one of the devlogs that really sums up that game's worldbuilding: "instead of an approach grounded in science, we’ll go for one grounded in truthiness"
I think the the quintillion battle droid number "could" work since they had hundreds of factories spread amongst multiple star systems in a galactic conflict.
It just depends on their industrial output per planet.
Clones were definitely low balled though when accounting for numbers.
That's how the number was arrived at. Basically, it was calculated assuming that since it was mentioned that 10,000 worlds had joined the Seps, they all had Geonosis-scale factories working 24/5/368 for ten years.
@@moffjendob6796 Glad they got weekends off :)
@@Raquel_Incorporated Nah, the old EU week was 5 days. :P
About the Halo hypersonic rifles short effective range: It might be that at those speeds the bullet doesnt survive for any amount of time, limiting the effective range.
I wont figure out the limits of adiabatic compression heating and drag at those speeds, fluid dynamics already are hard enough for me to comprehend subsonically, so no dice on if it would actually substationally degrade in a fraction of a second, but it at least is plausible. not that the Halo writers care either way
I'm pretty sure the issue is the horizon getting in the way.
@@inquisitorkobold6037 If youre 6ft above the ground the horizon would be there even earlier (5KM), youd get the 4.7 miles horizon limit if youre 15ft above the ground, although that hypersonic rifle might be intended in part for anti materiel duty, including against air targets (idk about the lore; correction: i looked it up and the wiki says its an AM"R"), which would be above the horizon. Plus if youre using a rifle of that power and speed, i think not getting on a high building is kinda stupid.
Given the fact its traveling so fast through the lower atmosphere, it will probably quickly loose energy (and degrade in course and material), so that will definitely hamper its anti materiel capability at further ranges.
I did a python simulation, using a very naiive approach (basic drag equation), but even assuming a phenomenal coefficient of drag of just 0.05, by the time the projectile would reach 3.5 km, it would already be going slower than 10 m/s, so yeah, the projectile probably wouldnt make it as far as youd first think.
@@RepChris to get a drag coefficient low enough that a tungsten-based projectile wouldn't immediately ablate itself into uselessness (be it effective destruction of the projectile or even just veering completely off course), it'd have to have an extremely sharp ogive / spitzer shape - and such an aggressive contour would require an even faster rifling twist rate to achieve stability. This is basically impossible to do with a coilgun. Even if you could somehow get the coils themselves to magnetically rotate the projectile, this would impart enough rotational torque on the gun to rip it out of the hands of the operator. And once the projectile left the "barrel", you'd have to account for extreme spin drift (due to rifling), which would have to be calculated differently for each planet/moon/station. And on top of all of this, you'd still have the extremely obvious muzzle blast, as the gun fills the area with microscopic white-hot tungsten filings. There'd be no way to hide this, because the projectiles themselves would leave obvious trails back to their source.
None of these qualities would lead an actual military to adopt such a weapon for atmospheric and/or handheld use. Velocities would have to be far lower, which would thankfully allow projectile mass to increase. And since the physics would then be back in the realm of sanity/realism, far less handwaving is required. A magnetic launch system is fine, if you insist on achieving velocities beyond what a chemical propellant is capable of (~1500m/s), but not so fast that the thing becomes laughable. Make it a smart/airburst munition. 15km/sec in atmosphere out of a handheld weapon is the sort of number that someone picks when they know absolutely nothing about firearms.
@@124thDragoon I am far from an expert, but i dont think a spitzer shape would be ideal for the speeds were talking here. Aerodynamics change quite a bit at those speeds and afaik you usually want a blunt nose to keep the heat away from the thing going hypersonic (although that might change given the size of our projectile). Drag works quite a bit diffrent at those speeds and its actually adiabatic compression that does almost all of the heating although im mostly going off what i know about atmospheric reentry here.
Any discussions about projectile shape also are futile since the Halo team already shot them selves in the foot by publishing the canon shape (and chemical makeup - tungsten) of the projectiles which look a lot like a scaled down version of the M829's penetrator (flechette looking) , which if im being honest is close to the worst possible shape.
Even if the entire projectile was made from some heat-immune unobtanium the huge drag forces would slow it down extremely quickly. If you look at me subcomment i did the math on that and its not looking good for whoever approved the budget for this.
Funnily enough, this is exactly why I thought the suicide lightspeed ram in The Last Jedi was a terrible scene. Cool on its own, but it absolutely disregards the nature of the story it is in. Star Wars is a pseudo-science fiction series that is so light on grounded worldbuilding elements that it's essentially a fantasy, with space wizards and space swords. For fucks sake, this is a story that resolves one of its main conflicts by having a single bomb destroy an entire artificial moon. A moon that would make no goddamn sense to build if FTL projectiles were possible, by the way. It doesn't even
matter if there's a way to explain that one use-case away because by opening this pandora's box, it has opened up the entire Star Wars universe to that level of scrutiny, and there are too many holes in the boat for the world-building to stay afloat. This is also why the Force-empowered deus-ex ending of Rogue One works super well. It is consistent with the standard of explanation and realism set by the series.
I don't know where the line is drawn for when a series's worldbuilding should be taken seriously and when it shouldn't. I have watched mech-shows that don't give a single fuck about technology. I have read fantasy parodies that put in more logistical legwork than the series they make fun of. There doesn't seem to be an external attribute that lets me know one way or the other. Perhaps it's one of those things we just shouldn't worry about as authors.
I never thought Halo's scaling was all that bad and in fact I always found it to be one of the better sci fi series as far as scaling goes. However, since 343 took over I've pretty much ignored everything Halo so my knowledge of it is over a decade out of date now.
A projectile with a muzzle velocity of 15km/s can have an effective range of 7.5km as air resistance can conceivably slow down the projectile over the 7.5km range, though it would depend very much on the ambient atmospheric density and assuming standard earth atmosphere it would be incredibly dramatic to witness.
tbh it'd probably less slow down and more disintegrate, with that kind of muzzle velocity
the maximum effective projectile velocities currently estimated in-atmosphere tend to be in the order of 2-3km/s, so the projectile would probably just melt ridiculously quickly as a result of the projectile impacting the air and punching through it
it would definitely be terrifying, could probably just kill people that are just near the projectile's path through shockwaves or molten slag, and might never actually hit its intended target as the projectile either scattered all over the place, or was deviated as it deformed throughout its movement
it's a nasty speed
If you read the Halo books...well let's just say 343 was just following a trend that started back around or a little before 2006. The books fuck with the scale and logic of Halo so bad it almost ruined the whole experience for me as the games were coming out. The Flood can infect machines...and the machines can infect you via talking to you. Also they can infect you by just being in proximity of you even in an environmental suit.
Meanwhile the books at the time also made the covenant so brain damaged it's a miracle the humans ever struggled at all because the brainless nitwits of the Covenant were more intent on killing themselves and getting their fleet destroyed than they were ever about fighting the humans and routinely forgot that their most obvious and basic advantages (like shields and slip space jumps) even existed.
Something a lot of the HALO writers seem to have overlooked as well is how energy scales with speed. Double the speed doesn't equal double the energy, rather the energy in creases with the speed squared as per the equation: Kinetic Energy = (Mass/2) * Velocity ^ 2. This has extreme implications for a lot of the very high speed projectiles. I did an extreme lowball estimate for the mass (22 grams, lowballing the dimensions from visual schematics and assuming iron, when it's obviously something much heavier) and got 2.4 Megajoules . For comparison, APFSDS from a 120mm main battle tank cannon pushes 12 Megajoules, and the Stanchion seems somehow capable of making a significant fraction of that kind of recoil seemingly vanish into thin air.
Don't get me started on the mac cannons, last time I've done math on it, several tons of metal flying at relativistic speeds turned out to be world-ending amounts of energy, and covenant shielding can just... take it, somehow.
Considering 4.5" apfsds already goes well above 2km/s, thats definitely not the upper range of achievable.
The USN railgun project went for 6km/s.
@@egoalter1276 Worth noting that a man-portable weapon that isn't single-shot is being detailed here.
Mostly good video that I agree with, my main problem would be that I don't think mechs are impossible (ok anime space mech nonsense is never going to happen) but rather just mostly impractical compared to tanks. Kind of like how airships, hovercraft and monorails are totally possible to build in our world, but impractical compared to normal planes, trains and ships.
mechs are almost certainly physically impossible because of the square cube law
@@cassius_scrungoman I was going to say something about scaling it down to more practical sizes with known materials, until I realized I'm describing something more akin to powered armor from fallout or the space forklift walker from alliens than mechwarrior. I don't think it's impossible to build a vehicle capable of carrying a human being which is driven by mechanical legs instead of wheels, just that there's little reason to do so instead of just using wheels like a normal person.
in the topic of anime mechs, the most grounded one I have seen so far was patlabor. The mechs (labors) are mostly used for civilian work, with the weaponized variants being no stronger than conventional military vehicles.
@@cassius_scrungoman the square cube law isn't as much of an issue; elephants can exist and are most likely larger than the kind of mechs you'd want to make anyways, and they aren't made of graphene and various composite materials, but still can reach 40km/h for up to 6 tons of mass
a mech is probably far easier to build than a power armour, given you don't need horribly complex systems to fit the limbs of the user inside of the limbs of the robot, but instead just need a cockpit, so you'd likely see small mechas in the 2.5-4m height range appear before any kind of power armour
similarly, ground pressure isn't as much of an issue for something with legs as it is with tracks/wheels, as legs can lift straight up, and wouldn't dig themselves into mud like a rotary motion does
for the "less practical than a tank" aspect, the flaw imo is trying to replace tanks with mechs, when they fundamentally don't really provide anything better for that specific task, while they could be a lot more practical in urban warfare scenarios, due to being much less vulnerable due to increased height (if they are taller than your tanks in the first place), and potentially serving as heavy infantry
mechs can definitely be plausible, as long as you don't go the stupid gigantic target practice with battletech-style designs, or the giant robot flying space ninja anime mecha route
except most of the mecha you presented in the video, the titan fall ones at least, are ones that would actually be able to exist relatively easily within the square-cube law. The scale issues with that are honestly more an issue for living beings like Kaiju in fiction than they are for operational equipment, there are TONS of ways you can work things so that they can withstand the forces put on them, or we wouldn't have things like aircraft carriers and large jets.@@cassius_scrungoman
For the point about the humanoids in star wars is kind of a set limitation, since a lot of the characters were human actors
Corruscant actually has the tip of a mountain all the way on the surface, but I don't know how tall it's supposed to be
Hopefully it's less tall than Everest, since you can't actually breathe up there. :P
@@moffjendob6796
It's actually probably taller, given Coruscant's scale, but they've artificially expanded the atmosphere a fair bit.
in star wars i has been hinted at in other star wars media that the 3 million units of clones that where mention actually meant as battalions(1,728,000,000 clones),a regiment(2,764,800,000 clones) or a legion(18,000,000,000)which would make alot more sense since the rebublic had ten thousands of venator star destroyer and other ship crewed by clones alone .until they give us further information this would make the most sense for a galactic war with thousands of star systems since the clone war had hundreds or thousands of battlefields at any time.
The clone wars is unique in which every criticism can all be blamed on the entire thing being rigged by an evil space wizard. The droids were numerous, and tactically should have won on every single level, but they were being controlled by the chancellor’s apprentice and thus lost the second the CIS was created
everything was fine until I saw a clip of someone playing project wingman with simple controls enabled
shrug emoji
I think one of the most grounded Sci-Fi Series I watched is the Expanse. I liked how the belters, Martains and core systems had very distinct cultures from one an other. The belter accent (to me at least) sounded rather inspired from the South African accent. Probably is one of my fav sci fi shows. I'm looking forward to the upcoming game where I think you play as Drummer!
On the question of clone vs droid numbers that is an issue of scale prefferences between autors, since the one who first mentioned a quintillion battle droids didn't think that the number of clones was only in the millions and also the clone troopers and the jedi are not the only ones fighting against the seperatists on the side of the republic. Also if we were looking at it realistically the clone wars would mostly depend on which side could produce and fuel the most starships, not the one with the most infantry. The issue of scal also exists in just the number of millions of clones since it's so small compared with the scale of a galaxy spaning conflict with at least tens of thousands of planets which the clone army would need to fight over.
On the question on Coruscants population just triillions is actually very low for just a planet spaning city with even contemporary population densities of large cities. The number would be in the hundreds of trillions at the least even before taking into acount the hundresds or thousands of levels, probably puting the total population somwhere in the tens or hundreds of quadrillions.
Fastest bullets (or fired projectiles anyway) have reached orbital velocity as far as I know. Not that they're used in fighting though, they are purely for researching what kind of damage orbital velocities do when things hit other things. Like, I dunno, debris hits satellites.
Also, you're mostly talking about *species* in the mid part. Race is a subclass of a species, and there's NO WAY the creatures in SW are just different races.
Coruscant has god knows how many layers which keep getting built on top of the last and the older ones are sealed off and abandoned (im not sure why) and im pretty sure that the undercity you mentioned would be around halfway down to the surface, and if i remember correctly theres a plaza on the top layer containing the planet's last uncovered mountain peak
That rifle from Halo is actually just a big fancy shell around the Magnum from the first game.
Remember the summit tallest mountain on the original coruscant peeks out on the top level and is seen as one of the few remnants of that planets nature .
The reason guns don't exist in the Forgotten Realms is literally because the gods don't really allow it. Black Powder as we know it does not exist, and in its place is something very similar to yet distinct from black powder that is deliberately inconsistent. You can use the same amount of black powder sourced from the same exact place and its explosive potential will vary under the exact same conditions. Basically, Gond does it because the other gods would fucking kill him if he didn't since he's the god of invention and it would all fall under his purview. It's weird.
Corusant does indeed have hundreds of layers and the "city" keeps getting built over the lower levels.
Meaning the lower you go the more and more society falls into dystopia (I'm sure it's supposed to be symbolism for the republic/empire or something)
Whoa, this video flew by! I was taken aback when the end screen came up. That's quality there!
"If you can use [harness ghost power] you can probably [invent reliable firearms]" I'm not really following your logic here, that's like saying if you can navigate your boat by the stars then you can end world hunger with genetically modified beans. Totally different tech levels of totally different fields of study dependent on totally different resources and supply lines with absolutely no overlap whatsoever. I'm actually a big fan of mixing tech levels, I just don't think that's the checkmate of an argument you think it is.
Well, for one, they didn't say "reliable firearms", they said "firearms", which is not at all that farfetched. Hell, China had developed *and refined the recipe for* gunpowder during the existence of the Roman Empire. During a time when most of the world was navigating their boats by the stars (the compass wouldn't play a significant role in navigation until some 400-500 years *after* the fall of Rome)
That is to say, gunpowder and guns really isn't all that advanced of a technology. Sure, maybe not along the same lines of thinking as "using mystical ghost powers" but still.
@@vedritmathias9193 Fireballs already exist in the Elder Scrolls. also rule of cool says magic is cooler than guns in fantasy setting. We can argue about that, but that's the consensus on the genre.
@@TanitAkavirius"Consensus" my ass. There's plenty of fantasy settings where magic coexists with guns. Warcraft has guns, and so does Warhammer Fantasy, Pathfinder 2e, etc... Some of the biggest fantasy IPs out there have guns, and they're doing just fine. "Dwarves with big guns" is practically a fantasy trope of its own.
I'm not saying every fantasy setting needs to have guns, in the same way that not every fantasy setting needs to have elves or dwarves. But the idea that fantasy shouldn't have guns because it "doesn't fit the aesthetic" or "doesn't feel fantasy enough" is just completely inane and clearly comes from a place of historical illiteracy - people don't realize that firearms actually preceded full plate armor by more than a century.
@@whatisthisayoutubechannel I didn't think of warhammer because i never played those games. I don't disagree that guns can exist in medieval fantasy they're cool and i wish early firearms like handguns, arquebus and cannons were more common in them.
And despite this, TES does indeed have firearms. They are simply not useful, because masses of untrained peasant levy mhsketeers are not a useful answer to a martial noble knightly class.
TES does in fact not have a knighly class.
There is no incemtive for the mass adoption amd manifacture of personal firearms.
Naval cannon is widespread.
I like how you bring up being a pedant about a work you're invested in. I'll always advocate for thinking the logistics of your lore through, but if you can get your audience invested enough in the characters and the story, they will gloss over it and suspend their disbelief. In the words of Harisson Ford: "It ain't that kind of movie. If people are looking at your hair, we're all in big trouble".
I guess another way of putting this is that you should be intentional about how ridiculous your lore is, or at least about where it is ridiculous, not fleshed out or not well-grounded, because your audience needs to feel like you're taking them seriously one way or another.
the 7.5km range of the stanchion would presumably be because the friction caused from the speed would quickly destroy the bullet.
If you want an answer for your Coruscant problem, in the lore, the planet has a little over 5,000 layers which would explain why the tunnels are so long. If you want an answer for why nobody is suffering from oxygen loss, then take a page from Asimov and Foundation and imagine that layer 1 is deep underground but yeah.. why hasn't Coruscant collapsed yet?
It's constantly collapsing; the lowest layers are uninhabitable and often suffer cave ins.
I feel like the nature of the CIS with the droid command stations and the fact Palpatine manipulated both sides into making the republic win in order to become the empire makes that number more believable. Droids operate the ships, droids are the footsoldiers, droids do everything. Clones are mostly just ground forces. A unit's probably a large number, anyways. But no, the CIS almost certainly would have won if not for Palpy's whole thing
Love the Victory class Star Destroyer in the thumbnail.
People use the Imperial class Star Destroyer, the ones you see in th eoriginal trilogy, way to often.
I think you are missing the scenes in 'Revenge of the Sith' where Darth Vader is sent to end the Seperatists and end the Clone Wars. The Clonetroopers DIDN'T need to outfight the droids... they just needed to outlast them.
That's absolutely incorrect. This logic can only be applied to the Seps. The CIS has to outlast the Republic, because the CIS make droids which are quick and easy to produce.
The Republic on the other hand grow clones that take a decade to mature. If it wasn't for Sith meddling, the CIS would have won through attrition alone. With just time, they would have successfully seceeded.
Wait... logical or logistical? Those are very different.
Gunpowder predates HEAVY PLATE ARMOR. Guns have been around longer than the zeitgeist image of the medieval knight.
In most thing revolving around space most spaceships work like normal planes and such. However, because there is no air in space this wouldn't work. A real spaceship would have thrusters on all sides because there needs to be a way to stop the spaceship from moving and to turn around. Because in space, there is no air and no air means no air resistance. This means that if you were to fly into one direction you will keeping going that direction until you apply an opposite force to slow down, stop, or go the opposite direction.
The Expanse does this and other aspects of orbital combat correctly, but it is the only series I can think of right now that does.
why did youtube label this as a star citizen video
Your opening statements about the clone numbers is just filled with so many variables its not even worth mentioning.
I could literally go on for days about the billions of different scenarios that took place justifying those numbers.
And yes, for each of these scenarios we could try to (in vain) do the math to also attempt to justify it.
Your attempting to explain away AN ENTIRE FUCKING UNIVERSES LORE, yet your tunnel visioned on one singular example. That being there is a set number of clones and droids"
Are you trying to act like they had one massive battle with ALL OF THOSE TROOPS present..?? Are you accounting for vehicles, bombs dropped, garrison forces, entire fucking divisions of men lost to space accidents, etc etc etc etc etc.
Ironically, the world building in the Gundam anime - ignoring the actual Gundams themselves - is *extremely* realistic. It's about as close to hard sci-fi as you can get in anime as long as you don't pay attention to the main thing it's about! If we just imagine the Gundams are a visual metaphor for each faction's war machinery, it's basically The Expanse.
"If the differences between them are almost nothing but aesthetic, they would intermingle without issue"
That's a quote and a half
That one genuinly made me laugh. Have bro seen real life? We're live in a globalised society where we are all one single species with nothing but aesthetic differences, and we *still* struggle with intermingeling and integration without any issues.
I can’t really talk on the other sci-fi you talk about here but I do know Star Wars. Firstly the clone wars was engineered, the clones won when they needed to and the droids won when they needed to, in the comics there were times where clones question why there aren’t more battle droids. Also, yes coruscant is huge somewhere in the range of a population of 2-10 trillion people and the layers of coruscant to continuously to the very core of the planet
The effective rifle range *can* make sense, FWIW. "Effective range" isn´t just how far the bullet can go, it´s how far away you can expect to hit something, given your ability to aim the rifle.
The most important thing to keep in mind when considering gunpowder in "medieval fantasy" setting, is that firearms began at least in 11th century. Hair dyeing was also a thing - there is an 11th century work about it.
A good example of how to integrate prophecies into the story, is Percy Jackson. Prophecies are expected from a story based on Greek mythology - and they are integrated as mysteries to guess at, as something that will only ever make sense when all the puzzle pieces fit together at the end. Furthermore, it is stated that they don't really dictate the future and can come to life in very different ways.
Back to gunpowder: early firearms weren't as effective as one would expect, so in a world where they get compared to fireballs and divine interventions, warlords might be reluctant to adopt this new and not very effective thing unless they have no other choice. It only gets good with a lot of further development - and for that development to happen, it needs to offer an edge at the very start. This, is my reasoning for why there's no guns in Avatar, despite there being a lot of other related tech - and guns being known as a principle.
Oh, come on! If Invaders (a codex astertes-compliant chapter) can destroy an entire eldar craftworld, and Francisco Pizarro can bring down the entire Incan Empire of literal MILLIONS with just 168 conquistadors, surely the clones can fight a force of billions of droids! If anything it speaks volumes not only about good strategic targeting of important position but also how bad separatist logistics were! It doesn't matter if you have quadrillions of droids if they're not where you want them to be!
can't believe I didn't think of that
Francisco Pizarro didn''t destroy the Incan empire with 168 conquistadors. He destabilized it, and exploited the chaos of civil strife to his and the spanish's gain. Francisco Pizarro first reached Inca territory of 1526. He kidnapped, ransomed, and killed the Inca emperor Atahualpa in 1532 and 1533. Resistance against the spanish in general did not end supposedly until 1572. Francisco Pizarro did not spend 46 years straight fighting Inca with 168 guys.
The Inca had just gotten out of a civil war before the Spanish got there, and Atahualpa was captured because he was trying to secure his new rule with a political stunt against the Spanish, and his guards weren't armed. Many Inca, or rather natives, weren't hostile to the Spanish at all. Spain didn't take over until after decades of trade, Spanish-encouraged infighting amongst the native population and disease that ravaged the locals until eventually the Spanish sent a viceroy over to formalize their control.
Also, never use 40k as a metric of reasonable logistics. Ever. I don't care what example you try to use, they're all ridiculous and that's the whole point. There is an entire solar system they use to store paperwork. That ran out of room.
@@markcasassa3025 (just for the record: I started with obscure and nonsensical (and technically wrong) 40k example to highlight that I don't mean the rest of the post to be taken seriously).
@@VieneLea Then I am a fool and victim of Poe's Law.
@@markcasassa3025 No, I just wasn't clear enough. Sorry!
I agree that scale needs to be internally consistent, but, we shouldn't mistake this for being consistent with our current knowledge of science. If a sci-fi universe establishes that there's tech capable of firing projectiles at 50x the speed of light, and it's consistent with how the rest of that universe works, it's not fair for us to say "That's not how it works in real life".
Yeah, finally someone esle says it! Trying to demand that settings have to be "realistic" is such a bad take. Just as a prime example, FTL is a staple in the sci-fo genre yet most doen't complain about that being a thing despite that nothing with mass can go faster than the speed of light. That's not realistic and still we give it a pass so long as it remains consistent in its application and use. Yet we're going to complain about some numbers or tech not having developed the same way ours have?
What is needed to a setting was never some kind of subjectively percieved "realism," but consistency. And in my opinion, one can safely ignore those who demand "realism" because they either don't know enough to know what really is realistic, only what they perceive as "realistic," or they're being anal about it.
the fact that there's different species in ftl that have different effects actually made me interested in the videogame
I think for starwars, its said somewhere that the battledroids, standard models are suppose to be solely about price and numbers, and they were being mass produced, yes clone troopers were sturdier than battledroids, but the shear volume and idea is overwhelming.
Comprehending scale can be difficult for some, but it does remind me how the smallest unit in Homeworld Desert of karak, is the size of a house.
And sure it seems odd but in the game the vast desert is your ocean and teh large vehicles are your ships.
There are over 5000 levels on Coruscant
4:00 Holy hell, that's fast enough to launch bullets *into orbit* around Earth (escape velocity of Earth is ~10km/s).
I'm a fan of Battletech, and one thing that kinda strikes me about it is that after you get past the overly efficient engines, the mechs (the main draw, after all), and the applied phlebotium that is their FTL system, it's got a lot of grounded stuff. Especially in space, where it really doesn't need to. But it more a function of Brandon Sanderson's 2nd Law of Magic; it's chock full of limitations because that makes the setting interesting. Getting from point A to point B can take weeks or months, because they can only hop ~30 parsecs at a time, and then need to spend upwards of a week recharging. There's no magic gravity; gotta accelerate or spin to recreate that.
It's still plenty ungrounded in many other ways, but I was just always struck by how hard some of the space stuff is in the setting.
Was hoping for something related to actual scaling but still a good video on world building.
Quite shocked to see the FTL boss ship in the thumbnail, cool!
The stanchions range oh my god 🤣
A unit of clones is not 1 clone, its the smallest completely independent group of clones. While we dont know 'exactly' how much that is, we can assume its somewhere around 1 and 50 thousand. also you don't need to beat 'all' the drones to win the war, just have to take out the leadership (which is what they did). A ton of drones were also destroyed by fighting the home guard militaries of the planets they invaded (think naboo in epi 1)
I was just introduced to your channel, and I like it a lot. I just subscribed, in fact.
I did want to point out an issue in what you said about guns towards the end of this video, which I feel is worth mentioning. While it is true that most fantasy settings that have been produced recently are set in the late medieval period to the colonization period, a lot of my writing is set further back, largely aiming at the migration era "dark age". In my setting, magic is rooted more in the machinations of gods rather than a hidden science, and thus it makes sense for ethereal magic to appear before gunpowder because some person was told the secret by a god, and they simply passed it down. Just wanted to point out a nuance, but I love the points you make.
Should have mentioned the sole use of the stantion in halo was to snipe a guy. Through the roof of the truck stop he was in. Through a building the bird Johnson was on was hiding behind. That 4 and a half mile range is probably due to the projectile disintegrating under the forces involved
The silly Halo rifle is firing at 15,000m/s that is 15km/s. Earth's escape velocity is 11,4km/s, the planet's gravity well is not a problem for it.
Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri is a pretty giid sci-fi game.
I think with star wars it makes more sense if you know that the war was fabricated by Palpatine.
I just ran into this video and I feel like we can get along well.
Very interesting video approach and I appreciate the consistency in your take. I'd like to see how your thoughts on scale come up if you were to read the manga Blame.
DnD has the gunner feat, and the artificer gets proficiency with firearms if they are in the setting.
The real issue is that DnD does not incorporate firearms in its main setting, thus it cannot make a class for them as it assumes they are optional.
A way bigger (and related) problem in my opinion is that base DnD 5e has close to 0 weapon varience. You can just pick a any crossbow and reflavor it as a gun. Musket? Heavy crossbow. Pirate Flintlock? Hand crossbow. They even have the loading property that you can ignore with your favorite feat.
Fuigting out this stuff is my favtiotr part of writing!
the hypersonic halo rifle would have the neat side effect of every round being a tracer round, because of the hypersonic heating. they would also probably explode, and be blunt so the shockwave doesn't melt them in 2km.
Clone wars isnt like the name suggests one massive war, it was several smaller wars on several smaller planets. Meaning those numbers start to equalize more, as Droids has to deal with smaller armies,factions and states alot more than just clones. Who can deploy where they want and whenever they want pretty much.
I was wondering if you could include what games/media you are showing in your videos, as I've just found you and quite like the videos, but I would like to know for example that the game at 6:09 is
Hol up about the clone wars. While the canon numbers are a bit unclear, legends did ultimately state that the CIS couldn't have had more than a few trillions at best and while the clones were are between a few million, there were still billions of organic soldiers fighting for the Republic and doing all the non combat roles. Also there are the spartan clones which were introduced at the end of the war but were in the billions.
my Stanchion rheory is that the effective range is so relatively short because that's how long it takes for the bullet to literally burn apart in the air its flying through, which would retroactively make the gun cool as hell
There actually is a gun (of sorts) that fires projectiles at around the 15 km/s of the stanchion. NASA built it to study asteroid impacts, and later to study how to protect against micrometer impacts. It's a bit larger than a rifle, though. It's also surprisingly easy to armor against small projectiles moving at that speed, basically just tinfoil and a gap.
Coruscant DOES canonically just have hundreds of different levels, and not just "upper city" and "undercity"
At the bottom IS the original planet. At the "surface" there's a particular point that's one of the last pieces of natural land left on the planet, and it's basically the Coruscant equivalent of Mount Everest, just barely poking out from the ground of the city. To my knowledge, no official height has been given, but even so.
While I do take your point with the permanent infrastructure, the Senate Building does have to go SOMEWHERE. I imagine they've probably been done expanding Coruscant for a while now though, probably reaching the limits of what's possible to safely build.
I'd just assume they switch out senate buildings (and other important infrastructure) every few centuries or (as it grows larger and larger and slower and slower) millenia.
We here on earth switch buildings all the time. If one is centuries old that's often marked as a special feature.
3:48 I believe that because by the time it gets there most of the bullet is probably vaporized by aerodynamic heating
the effective range of the halo rifle is probably limited by 2 factors:
1. the horizon, you cant shoot further than you can see.
2. the ability of the person to hit the target.
1. you can, warships have been doing it since WW2
2. that's probably the actual reason but they have super advanced power armor so who knows
@@kyrtap7197 yes, with high explosives on large targets and with balistic calculations.
Not gonna happen ith a rifle.
@@kilixior yeah, you'd definitely need some kind of guidance system, but we have guided .50 cal bullets irl so they could probably manage indirect rifle fire 500 years in the future
@@kyrtap7197 no, because the gun is operated by a human and they have only limited accuracy. A machine could do it no doubt, but only if there is no wind, or the wind is considtent across the whole range.
On these distances even hald a millimeter will cause you to be way off target.
The effective range on the Stanchion is honestly quite reasonable. A standard modern rifle like an AR15 firing a 5,56 round has an effective range of about 400 meters, while the round travels at 800 m/s.
But with 7 km being the effective range, people could literally hide behind the curvature of the earth for protection.
Mach 2.6 for a 22 caliber rifle somehow seems too high.
Coruscant has more than 4000 levels. Insane
11:51 funny thing, Tamriel from TES does have firearms in setting. Specificaly, naval cannons and rockets are mentioned in several books.
I believe we also see some naval cannon in morrowind in the east empire ocmpany dock at ebonheart.
I don't know if we should ever mention TES in a movie about things like this, because if there is one thing TES lacks, it's consistency. Shit, it's kind of to the point where the fact that some things don't stay consistent is a core theme of the setting, even having a fucking official name for paradoxes existing at the same time with the Dragonbreak. They took inconsistency and made it fucking canon.
I'm pretty sure that 9 miles per second is more than enough for earth's escape velocity
Escape velocity is 11.2 Km/s so yes.
Mech are not "impossible" they are "improbable"
the problem with mechs at the end of the day is the time and cost to maintain them.. not because they defy some sort of law of physics.
The scale I hate is when a ship or space ship is a certain length width and height but the shuttle it carries is tiny when launching but the same size as the ship it launched from, the Captain Harlock first season/series is terrible when it comes to this.
I dont want to sound like a nerd but id like to adress a few things on the start of the video cuz i feel like the clones are a really bad example,
1 the clones are superior to B1 battle droids, the only droids that came close to clone trooper levels was the BX-Commando Droid which the creators admited to being a droid that if the CIS could produce on mass it would win them the war, but it was too expensive to make hence why we only see them as body guards to seperatist senators or infiltrator units,
2 the clone wars where design with a CIS loss from day 1, the entire war was orchestrated by Palpatine as he manipulated both sides, the war was never going to end with a seperatist victory cuz the CIS was created to fail from the begining
3 just to reinforce the sheer difference between the quality of troopers between droids and clones, Season 1 Episode 5 (i think) Rookies, where we see Cody and Rex going to inspect an outpost that is being operated by rookies, shortly after the outpost falls, Rex and Cody (at this point a veteran Captain and Commander) take Fives, Echo and Heavy (who later sacrifices himself) and they tale back said outpost, downing a full squad of BX commando droids and a a small army of B1 battle droids and B2 Super Battle droids, that where being deployed from a C-9979 landing craft which without going into specifics, Grivous orders a platoon to be sent to the outpost
Edit: Reguarding Corussant, i think it was in the Endor show, they show a rock in the middle or a public square, and they show the plaque showing info about it, that "rock" is the tip of the plannets highest moutain, Corussant is literally a planet that has been burried in a planet wide mega city
I mean the HALO gun makes sense, at that hypersonic speed the bullet the Stanchion somehow manages to fire is probably melting the second it leaves the barrel. So its effective range is the distance at which the bullet completely melts and disintegrates/burns away. It'd be a phenomenal gun to use in a low or zero atmosphere setting where that would be less or not an issue.
The funny thing is starsector STILL has scale issues. Chicomoztoc is approximately 45% of the sectors entire population and still only has the population of roughly modern day earth, because it is the only size 8 colony in the game, making its population at *least* 10x larger than any other planet in the game
Regarding races in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy genre, I believe the best portrayal of the societal influence of different races is in the Shadowrun universe. While the races exhibit distinct inclinations, such as Trolls being very strong and durable but considered "ugly" and less intelligent, they remain integral to society. Orks often face exploitation due to being perceived as inferior, Elves typically reside in high society due to their beauty and affinity for magic, and humans are scattered across various roles. Despite their differences, these races usually coexist within one of the many nations, sharing their cultures and leading their lives.
To be fair, something can happen in a plot because of character motivation. Which can make a story far more engaging then something happening due to lore. Fantasy books like the Drizzt series are a good show of this as multiple times does that story break the lore of forgotten realms for the sake of its characters.
Now I also recognize character motivation can't fix some things, but it can fix a lot. Take the sequel trilogy space scene with Leia. Just thought it was worth a mention.
*Spoilers for those who care*
When Drizzt's father Zaknafein was killed, he was brought before the priests of Lolth who brought his corpse back as a Revenant. A type of undead that seeks its query without hesitation. However when he caught up with Drizzt, his son, Zaknafein hesitated and scarified himself to protect his son from what he had become.
This completely breaks forgotten realms lore. I wouldn't have it any other way and the story is better for the lore break giving us a pretty amazing scene.
To be fair it's not like they destroyed every droid in existance, or even most of them. A lot of the droid army was basically in storage, and most of it was disabled via a shut down command. The reason the numbers don't make sense is because:
1: B1s are *really* bad. One clone can in fact take out hundreds of B1s in their service life, more if they're particularly silled or use... artillery.
2: The droids were made to lose.
3: Most fighting wasn't even done by clones, but local defense forces.
Halo rifle’s bullets casually breaking escape velocity
TBF,
Building a no-OSHA-compliance nightmare pit that takes 30+ minutes to reach the bottom of at terminal velocity IS a very palpatine thing to do.
He really is that petty.
I don't get the obsession with representation in video games based on race and gender. I feel far more kinship to characters that share my left-handedness or have a similar personality to how I see myself. If a character has a very dissimilar mind set to mine, I don't feel represented even if they share my race and gender.