Considering it's fiction, there isn't a problem there.

Because any school is automatically bad?
Wow, are you TRYING to troll here? You jump to defending her when your physics trolling proves untenable.

Archetypes work, and actually, he's far more developed than most.

...and it actually wasn't. That's called ignorance.

And that is crap. Obviously details are relevant, and queues are NOT monopolised by any specific group. Read my post again without unquoting the relevant part.
Oh, as for queues being 'mystic' they aren't.

Considering the fact that it's not a native american instrument, more associated with folk music than anything else in a modern context, then no.
She's probably never heard real native american music. Oh, and drums are ancient and non-specific too.

...and that is why the author is not that intelligent, when they could have done so afterwards. But then again, it's a sense of entitlement.

It's a stereotype that they even do it in the first place, and IIRC, the stereotype is different.
The Na'vi have never had any exposure to hat, so it's not copying anything.

1. They're all answered (by me)
2. Anyone can start one for any page :facepalm:. ANY moderately popular film has one.
3. Most of them are people who do not understand something, and have had it answered.

No, I mean she's clearly never watched it and has some ridiculous sense of entitlement that even referencing ideas is wrong (while somehow believing native americans had horses prior to being sold them (WTF?!))

Yet if you read the aforementioned tvtropes page, you'll see that 50% of its population was composed of such people. I couldn't stereotype them even if I wanted to.

Bull****.
I've already pointed out the fallacy of that. The amount of energy is impossible today, but such shifts HAVE happened and will never be the last. If you keep restating tired already-rebutted points, I'm going to consider this thread as having finished because it feels like groundhog day in here.

It doesn't appear to be anything. We have no idea how much energy is available.

And everything works. Everything is possible.

Your original point was that it was.
Also, no, chromosomes can not be transferred neurochemically.

Even if a human had never seen any scifi, and they met a humanoid alien with only minor differences (shorter, skin colour) and demonstrating speech patterns that, while not instantly understandable, were still recognisable as a developed language, they'd have the right idea.

...the exact reason why sending spess mehren robots is a stupid idea.

A computer applied purely can't do anything, it wouldn't make unobtainium obsolete. Anyway, this point was originally about onsite manufacturing - using a fictional material to illustrate your point only makes it even less likely that could ever happen.

At a completely arbitrary cost per kg, yes, especially when we have no idea what the generating capacity is like.

1. Nonhumanoid vs humanoid. Idiot.
2. It wouldn't be, because they know the Na'vi are there when specifically making contact. That means leaving the idiots on the ship.

I thought you didn't want any humans on Pandora :P
In all seriousness, it makes no sense to when humans can survive there, especially when humans are far more likely to be easily accepted and trusted (after some time, obviously) by being far more similar.

Yet again: That does not mean everyone has one. that does not mean it is anything but extremely rare and expensive. It does not mean the marines are going to have cutting edge military hardware for an operation where they are supposed to not be doing damage.
Are you incapable of understanding this point?

Take it up with the UN in Avatar, not me.
Anyway, it's very likely the initial number was smaller and they were trying to build up more thanks to people like Quaritch.
Anyway, remember your earlier point about a weapon: It doesn't have to be one to be used that way. They weren't intended for mass attacks, only for things like basic security around hell's gate.

You were talking about the modern day.
Wanting a petawatt power supply in any kind of portable form just belies the true depths of your ignorance of physics.

My point was that they actually aren't past your 'faraday cages on everything lol', which belongs on trollscience.com

It depends on your frequency range. Also, again, there's no need if there are internal connections to the body.

An aircraft which could be built today with only a few refinements necessary, and has been proven to actually be airworthy.

Just about every other aspect of them, such as accuracy, consistency, and maintenance.

Will you get this into your limited mental capacity?
They are not there to invade. They are not there to scare. They are supposed to be avoiding causing damage.
Again, if you want 'spess mehrens kill everyone', watch something else.

No, it isn't. Such a design is fully possible now. A laser is not in a practical form. Anyway, it's not done by cutoff year, but by appropriateness, not to mention availability, if any pre-Samson/Scorpion designs were unavailable. :facepalm:

Doesn't work if there's a connection (e.g. electrical) to any of them.

I'm sure you haven't read the survival guide.
"Hundreds of orbiting factories on Earth's moon, Mars, and the asteroid belt were in operation just a few decades after it formed"
"THese rights were granted to the RDA in perpetuity by the Interplanetary Commerce Adminstration with the stipulation that they abide by a treaty that prohibits weapons of mass destruction and limits military power in space"

Want me to continue? You're just embarrassing yourself here.

Try watching the film for once!
There are six in the shuttle and six in Quaritch's. There are never more than 4, maybe 5, on screen at once after that scene.
You have clearly not watched Avatar.

That's already done. Stop restating the obvious.

Actually, no. Again, watch the film.
It's called Selfridge being a spineless idiot, not him taking an order.

Essentially infinite.

Actually, we don't.
It's like if we wanted a material that allowed FTL travel by its existence. that is not enough to create a structure either.

It's still sufficient.

Yes.
Could humans plausibly engineer a feature in an entire species?
There are numerous examples of designs taken directly from evolution-directed features, which is even the entire concept of genetic algorithms.

Yet it doesn't stop at any particular distance.

That was exactly my point - FLT was only to illustrate its real age. It makes very few departures, and only the ones necessary to avoid plot-killing elements such as an x year wait between systems.

Neither is your continual fallacious reasoning and ignoring my repeated explanations.

Yet it doesn't make everything all suddenly perfect as you seem to believe.

The sun?
As I said, "however, we don't need to assume so or not so".

An average modern one (and average not meaning 'the mean of all examples' but a typical recently-installed single example), not the average in-use one, many of which are decades old.
Even if you want to go by decades old examples, that's a 160fold increase.

So there are no interdependent theories? Nothing that has a prerequisite in knowledge to be formulated?
Wow :facepalm:

Ah, no.
Genetic engineering is not just 'copy A to B'.
LEGO Genetics - Television Tropes & Idioms
"Remember, genes are not blueprints. This means you can't, for example, insert "the genes for an elephant's trunk" into a giraffe and get a giraffe with a trunk. There are no genes for trunks. What you can do with genes is chemistry, since DNA codes for chemicals."

Until this post you SPECIFICALLY said nonhumanoids.
Stop moving the goalposts again.

That's a tautology in absence of a point. All it does it makes you look stupid.

Because it's 3 hours long already? Because it's extraneous to most people's interest? Because it will take ~ 6 years for that to even start?

People do that at this very moment. they're paid to do a job, not fight a completely safe invasion with ridiculous spess mehren lazors.

You said Earth has too much energy, I pointed out that the energy source for the ISV's fuel is never specified so could be any as required or practical.

This has gone off the deep end.

A terminator did come back in time to try to kill John. I saw it with my very own eyes.......on tv.




:xD:

These posts need to somehow be consolidated.

Or split off. I'll get to the actual physics discussion tommorow.

This ****'s getting ridiculous. It's a goddamn movie, can you both just pack it in already FFS?

Guys, nobody's forcing you to read the thread. :P

We're still talking about ion engines, right? Because the best part of 1 (edit: ) 100 grams of fuel per atom of payload is pretty unworkable no matter how much technology you have. For one thing, your fuel eventually tries to form its own planetary body. :P

If we want to be excessively realistic about this, food isn't an issue if you have such huge quantities of energy avaliable. Hydroponics aren't used ATM because it's cheaper to actually farm things. That's not true when you have so many exawatts avaliable for cheap.

Sort of. The plot doesn't follow from the world completely.

I think I know what I originally meant to say. And if you mean in general, then there's no reason they couldn't be transmitted electrically. A cell is basically a Von Neumann universal constructor, after all.

There is no Na'vi H.G. Wells. They aren't shown to have any concept of astronomy. How could they possibly arrive at anything approximating the right idea?

See earlier. Non-Pandoran "creatures" are probably going to confuse them equally, regardless of whether they're humanoid or not.

Some sci-fi authors have suggested that sufficiently powerful computers could be used to launch attacks against reality itself. :awesome:

Computronium is only "fictional" to the extent we don't know what it is ATM. Thre has to be some configuration of matter for optimum processing power.

Well, we do have a floor for how cheap it is: 2.20GJ/cent. (49kgc^2/$20m)

Allegedly, some of the Mexican peoples confused Cortez's men with centaurs, to the point where they were ordered to sleep and eat on their horses to not spoil the facade. I don't know how true that actually is, but it's a lot more understandable when there are actual aliens involved. :P

I thought this was in the case you randomly came across a Na'vi? If you're speciifically meeting them, you use an Avatar.

I don't, but I don't know enough to jury-rig the FTL to do that. :P

Humans can't survive there unprotected.

They have Scorpians, which you mentioned earlier were penultimate generation hardware. Since energy weapons are part of RL research, that'd seem to imply laser guns are older than Scorpians, therefore almost certainly more avaliable. Also, you don't need the latest and greatest laser weapons, just usable ones.

If it isn't supposed to be used that way, why not use a civilian helicopter instead? Or take out the anti-tank rockets? It seems somewhat excessive when your "basic security" can take down a tree 300m tall. :P

Except I know enough physics to take advantage of the loophole in the definition of power. :P If you can deliver 1J fast enough, the power output will technically be measured in pe****ts. (Though you will never need 1PW except for silly physics experiments. 1GW will do fine as a weapon.)

Also, boom.

Not sure what you mean. Did you mean that EMP weapons are effective?

Avoiding connections to the othermost layer of the body seems fairly easy to integrate into the design. (And if you have to, you can put in air/optics gaps if it's important, or just let it fry if it isn't.)

...Really? I have absolutely no idea how you could know that.

I don't really understand how they'd be more accurate, and consistency depends on the engineering involved. Though for all I know, electromagnets are easier to make precisly than explosive mixtures. Arguably, they're less maintanable, since as you mentioned earlier, normal guns are manufacturable in any metalworking shop. Electromagnets are harder.

They are there to defend the mining... things. Intimidating the Na'vi does that. They don't need to fire a shot at the Na'vi.

A laser is just as appropriate as a gun, and the earlier models will be easier to get than modern firearms. (Why would less advanced models be harder to make?)

So make sure the cage is electrically insulated from everything inside the craft?

Well, no, I've seen the film. It's not really a good idea to hide background-critical detail in the manual.

As I said, I did, close to a year ago now. I don't remember the number of mechs precisly.

They're not exactly distinguishable. The end result is that Selfridge does as Quaritch says, paper chain of command be damned.

Well, since the concept of superconductivity has been around less than 100 years, I think it's far faster than that.

...Yes, we (they) do? They have evidence of a superconducting substance on Pandora, ergo it exists?

What, to make an arbtararily-sized fusion reactor? Engineering doesn't work that way.

...Yes? I mean, if you give us 140 years of biology research, we'll definitely get somewhere. And that was my point originally: you don't implant alien organisms wholesale, you just steal the interesting bits you find and integrate them into your own custom-made oraganisms.

It gets steadily weaker until it's negligible compared to weight, atmospheric pressure, etc.

But that's because Star Trek is almost as soft as you can get, and isn't supposed to be at all rigirous. If "bounce a graviton particle beam off the main deflector dish" (NSFW language) level of science was Cameron's aim, then he didn't establish it very well. I'm sure you'll agree it wasn't, and because of that, he has to play by real physics unless he puts up an explicit sign post that says, "Technobable."

It makes it closer.

Derp. I meant significant power sources. (Large solar collectors make a conspicious non-appearance in the film.)

M'kay. 13,505 / 160 = 85 to the nearest integer. OK, so we've moved down from "fraction of planet" to "small country." :P

...More dakka. :awesome:

Did I say it was? I said you copy algorithms and solutions, not individual bases.

Apologies for dropping the inference: Therefore you want the most versatile weapon avaliable.


It is fairly plot-relavent what happens to the main anatagonist.

What, delibrately skimping out on peoples' safety when they could easily fix it?

Except if it was significantly more powerful than fusion, Earth would use that instead.

boys have a penis and girls have a vagina

Sorry, I had to. Been looking for a place to plug this other than the hilarious videos thread for a while. I just...had to. :P

That ain't physics, that's physiology. :P

Although those parts of the human body really have nothing to do with this thread, they do have mass. So yeah...physics :P

Everything is physics :stare: That's why I love it :D

Wow some of you guys managed to derail this thread for a while. :P

*pokes a bulletproof helmet on a stick out of his bunker and waits*

*when nothing happens, retrieves stick and tosses this link out, before slamming the door of the bunker*

Hydroponics still need resources.
Food isn't an issue, it's just very nasty due to being mass produced for billions of people.

It does - I've spent the last eight pages watching you abandon point after point as it is proven to be total crap.

...yes, it's arguably physically possible. THAT DOES NOT MEAN IT HAPPENS HERE. Either way, the several metres of DNA in a cell would take a lot of time to reliably transmit.

As I said, Even if a human had never seen any scifi.
There are other moons and a gas giantwithin visual distance of the naked eye, idiot. Telescopes are not necessary for a basic understanding as they are on Earth. You'd realise this if you had actually watched the film, at all.

Confuse, yes, but they're going to see a being with many broad similarities as something worth knowing about.

Some people have suggested all sorts of rubbish through out history (e.g. that a heavy object has a higher rate of gravitational acceleration). It doesn't make either true.

Of course, but that has zero relevance to your trolling here. On the other hand, it does not make any kind of measure of power infinite, even if too high to measure by conventional means.

Try reading my post first.
$20m/kg is essentially arbitrary, because we have no idea how much $1 is at that time.

So you're back to the old standby of 'call the Na'vi stupid'?
IF that is true, it's because of horses, not humans.

This WAS about first contact until you realised you're fighting a losing battle and moved the goalposts. Discovery and first contact predates the avatar programme.

Protection != invasion.

Emphasis on 'you need usable ones'. Even then-current gen technology does not have reliable usable ones, as gauss weapons are the pinnacle of technology - yes, one may well be usable mounted on a vehicle, or with a 3 shot battery in a form usable by a person, but it's impractical and expensive.

I've already answered this one, pay attention.
I am talking about what they are allowed to use, not the numbers they built (clearly excessive), the way the marines used them, or what ammunition they built for it.

1J isn't enough to warm up the air past the end of the emitter, as you well know.

Do you have any idea how big the NIF laser is? This one is bigger.

Yes, and that a faraday cage is not a magic bullet which protects anything from everything, especially not when any internal connection renders it useless.

Not if you want any semblance of aerodynamics, any sensors (which would be required as windows would compromise it), or any movable surfaces.

It's a multirotor aircraft, with the two not superimposed (tandem transverse - the prominent real example is the V-22 when taking off and landing, and several other designs when in level flight). They exist. The main difference past that is that they are ducted, smaller bladed, and capable of independently pitching.

Accuracy/consistency: Recoil is known, not subject to varying with each round, and is not directed upwards.
For maintenance, there is less physical wear on parts as depending on the design, although yes, it is harder to initially construct, clearly.

[quote]They are there to defend the mining... things. Intimidating the Na'vi does that. They don't need to fire a shot at the Na'vi.[quote]
They are also explicitly forbidden from doing so by the entire basis they are allowed there in the first place.

Go on then, see if anyone these days can make WW1/WW2 era aircraft on an industrial scale :P
1. Lasers aren't available in terms of general use personal weapons (YET AGAIN)
2. Normal firearms as still available do the job as well as advanced hardware that may not even exist at all.

...so you have no flight surfaces?
:facepalm:

The film is already nearly 3 hours long. SHOWING Earth would add at least another 10-15 minutes in order for it not to appear completely redundant. The majority of people would not get why such a point would need to be made.

If you want to argue about anything, you do your research. You find out about the background. Within a film hat is already ~50% longer than most films, you CAN NOT explain everything if you want an actual plot.

I don't feel the need to go onto forums for dr who and troll just because I don't like it, but if I ever did, you can be sure I'd research the background properly before doing so.

I said there were twelve (12 with marines, Quaritch's was a 13th)
You said there looked like more.
I gave you an exact count with accounting of each one.
I pointed out that you never see them all on screen at once.
You THEN said you don't remember the number - then why did you start this in the first place?!

Quaritch still says to Selfridge what he wants to do, who then agrees for Quaritch to do it. Ergo, Selfridge technically tells him what to do, and is merely a spineless idiot incapable of standing up for anyone.

Yet that does not mean a perfect one will suddenly materialise.

We WERE talking about finding a perfect superconductor.
You said that knowing something's properties means its structure can be determined even without a sample of the material (which is wrong).
I said that you still need to have it to analyse a structure.
You said that knowing it exists is enough, when we are discussing a situation where its existence is still not known until AFTER reaching Pandora. Your point was that people shouldn't go because knowing it exists is enough to synthesise it (which is wrong).

It doesn't need to be arbitrarily sized. Again, compare 50MW to 1.3GW and counting.

Exactly. If you read back, you're proving my point here - that it may not be as optimal as something engineered for the same purpose, but it's possible to exist.

Yep. That's why the mountains remain within the atmosphere.

Again, everything seen is possible, even if advanced compared to Earth.
The majority of your arguments are about why you wanted to see spess mehren robots killing everything with lasers and didn't see your personal favourite things you wanted it to have - e.g. your 'hurr durr use nanotechnology lol' argument has since been abandoned as crap after I pointed out the failings.

Yes, and indeed, Jake was seen to be able to afford electricity, and a huge TV. There was lighting everywhere, and various technology on Earth. Having lots of energy available does not mean replicators will be available to solve problems such as scarcity.

Earth itself makes a non-appearance, other than a couple of on-surface scenes, so you can't say that as if it's a failing.

Isn't that a huge problem for your argument? :P

You still need to find alleles for every single basic part you need, and solve any interdependence and biological compatibility issues. You need to find examples of what you are looking to use before they can be added. As it is, engineering of whatever plant species may allow the use of the beneficial traits likely IS how it is implemented.
AGAIN, that makes it possible, not instantly happening (especially since any large-scale contracting is as much political as anything else, not to mention introducing alien flora to Earth - I'm sure even you can see how there may be some opposition or things to consider there, despite the potential).

You want one that is easily available, and not overkill for the job you are supposed to be doing, as that would allow abuses to be easily committed.

He's dead.

The ISV is returning to Earth, which will take ~6 years - the RDA have likely lost their contract based on what happened, so Selfridge will presumably be fired for allowing quaritch to cause that to happen.

I would think that the minutiae of who/what can come to Pandora weren't important for most people to know in the first film.

People do that at this very moment. They're paid to do a job, not fight a completely safe invasion with ridiculous spess mehren lazors.

Eliminating risk is impossible. Indeed, if they even did their actual job as they were meant to, it isn't particularly dangerous other than simple hazards (don't take your exopack off). People work in more dangerous jobs than the environmental hazards.

Only if it predated fusion in its existence. As it is, fusion would seem to be capable of providing energy anyway (as you mentioned, you were lying about the fraction required as it is actually 'small country').

Why? I mean, skyscraper farms aren't that expensive compared to the amount of power Earth really needs to have sloshing around. You can, I believe, grow vegetables indoors today, it's just not economical.

PFM? :P JC himself disagrees that "it does work."

Well, the human genome is only 4 gigabits. (And I don't remember implying it happens there, only possibly that it should. "Theorectically." ) That's not that hard to transmit reliably, especially when you have a fairly large amount of carrying capacity.

The Na'vi, AFAIK, don't even have the "the stars are other suns" meme that differentiates astronomy from mythology. You kind of need that to recognise people as aliens.

Arriving at heliocentrism is actually a leap of mathematics, not just pure observation. To logically arrive at the Sun being the centre of rotation, rather than Earth/Pandora, you need to actually plot out the orbits of everything and see they all follow elipses if centered on the Sun. The Na'vi don't seem interested enough in astronomy to pull any of that off. They don't even share Newton's view of science as an investigation of God's creation. (If they do, I want to know about it! That'd be cool, and interesting, and completely unstereotypical!)

Actually, there's a major problem as far as astronomy on Pandora is concerned: light pollution. :P

If they're thus inclined, why wouldn't they see a being that they know nothing about as worth learning about?

True enough. The point is that pure computation is useful.

You can still do things with pure computation. (i.e. use it to manipulate the market and make yourself rich)

I know it's Watsonian, but the context of the scene implies that $20m is a very large amount of money. It is, after all, funding a very difficult interstellar mission.

The Austrailian Aborigines apparently mistook the white settlers for the souls of the dead for much the same reason. (sans horses, obviously) Also, I don't really know where you got the idea I'm calling the Na'vi stupid; I'm saying they do not have the ability to recognise extraterrestials as such. They do not have the astronomy knowledge, nor the "extelligence" that is required to conceive of aliens from other planets. Not to mention the theology issues that Newton, Copernicus, et. al ran into when they proposed that Earth wasn't special. Maybe the Na'vi believe something similar?

IMO, that's a stupendously bad idea. If you're there for devious purposes, (or even just not-so-devious purposes, and sufficiently paranoid) you want to give the impression that you are powerful, and vanilla humans aren't powerful at all on Pandora. You should be doing your discovery by unmanned drone, etc, not as inefficiently as in-person.

Though the original point is that humans go there, rather than robots, because humans can survive there. ...Except they can't, which removes most of the benefits for being there.

Yet EMP weapons, which rely on the same technology, appear perfectly usable? (And to relatiely poor terrorists, AFAIK.)

I've already answered this one, pay attention.
I am talking about what they are allowed to use, not the numbers they built (clearly excessive), the way the marines used them, or what ammunition they built for it.

It does weird things if you can deliver it over 1as, though.

"Though you will never need 1PW except for silly physics experiments. 1GW will do fine as a weapon."
Presumably you mean a connection from outside the cage into it? Because, as I said, you can mitigate that, if it's important.
1) How would aerodynamics be affected at all? 2) Windows can be meshed. The wavelengths of an EMP blast are on the order of centimres long, as opposed to the wavelength of visible light, which are billions of times smaller. 3) Movable parts work fine, because the cage does not have to be a static piece. It just needs to be electrically connected to itself.
I did not realise this, thanks for pointing that out. However, equally, neither of us are engineers, so it might be unfounded to assume that converting a V-22-like to a Scorpian would be only a minor change.

Aren't all three of those subject to the design/tolerence of the weapon?

Well, there is the fact that your magnets have a tendency to rip themselves into itty bitty pieces. Lorentz force, FTL. :P

So Quaritch's whole speech about fighting terror about terror isn't actually allowed by the contract, regardless if anyone actually gets hurt? They're not only not allowed to hurt the Na'vi, but not allowed to intimidate them either?

But why would we need industrial processing? We only need a couple of dozen of them... :)

Not sure why flight surfaces are precluded by a faraday cage.

Then cut out some of the flying sequences, or re-work the training montage that constitutes Act 2.

Inception managed to tell a story without leaving out any particularly large detail, and IMO, why the RDA are there, and what they're capable of doing there are pretty important details.

River is a Sue! :party:
Dr. Who is actually a really bad example of what you're talking about, because the show runs on continuity errors, retcons, and similar devices. It is about time travel, after all.
Also, I don't believe there are any fans who treat Who as such serious business as some people here treat Avatar. If you point out a flaw in it, they'll either jokingly provide a pseudo-explanation ("Space-wacey/timey-wimey ball" is a popular one) or just politely discuss it with you.

Because I did remember the impression that there was a lot of them?

...which, functionally, is Quaritch being superior. I'm not interested in what technically happens; practically, Selfridge would never contradict Quaritch.

Well, yeah; we'd need a theory of how high-temperature superconductivity actually works for that. Any reason to think they won't have one 140 years from now?

The point is that you know it exists (since you found it on Pandora) and you know what it does. Then there's a couple of decades of quantum chemistry research to find out how it does what it does, and then you know enough to build it. This research will be cheaper than actually flying an ISV there.

I'm not sure what you mean. Sure, most of Pandoran biology can exist, but there's no reason to steal it wholesale; building your own out of the bits will work out better.

I mentioned that the cutoff for the Meisner effect becoming neglible is probably measured in double-digit metres, didn't I? :P

Actually, it's probably for the best that that nanotech doesn't exist; I don't trust JC to write post-singularity fiction. :P (Do you know how much fun a plot device the technology underlying the T1000 is? :awesome: )

Anyway, nanotech was abadoned because you kept focusing on how you'd arrive at the structure of unobtanium. If worst comes to the worst, you retrieve one sample of unobtanium, analysize and then cross your fingers, pray to $_diety, and hope like hell that the synthesis patent will recoup the cost. :P (Though if you avoid the monpoly lawsuits, then recouping the cost won't be such a problem.)

Scarcity becomes a lot less of a problem when energy is everywhere. See what happened after the Industrial Revolution, and less so, the printing press. Before the printing press, books were valuable, rare and expensive. After, we get "airport novels."

More importantly, solar collectors would be more efficient to use over fusion reactors.

*pulls the factor of 20 back out of his sleeve*
Not really. :P

Pretty unlikely, considering how powerful genetic engineering apparently is. You're not going to get iterative construction of Avatars past ethics testing, for instance.

It wasn't my idea to introduce Pandoran flora to Earth?

Anti-tank rockets look pretty overkill to me. Also, abuse is easy regardless. You really need to get someone there you ostensibly trust. :P

Personally, I'd be expecting the RDA to go bust at that point, since they spent at least one fuel load with nothing to show for it, possibly more if the conveyor belt of ISVs is canon. It's arguable whether or not unbotanium is so expensive as to be worth it, but I don't think you could argue that a corporation could be large enough to survive the loss. If we go back to the 50-ton ISV again, the total yield from that is $900bn. How on earth are the Directors going to save the company from having to cough up $900bn they unexpectedly don't have?

...except when unmanned robots become involved.

What did Grace call it, "the most dangerous environment known to man?" (Or something along those lines.)

20 small countries, over 6 years. For one vehicle. Why would it need to pre-date fusion? Solar collection from orbit would be massively more powerful. (at least, can be made massively more powerful)

On the other hand, it still needs everything from growth media to a non-extinct edible plant species.

...then why even make the point? Theoretically, any number of things could have happened biologically if selection had gone a different way.

Which part of this do you not understand?
THERE. ARE. OTHER. MOONS. WITHIN. VISUAL. RANGE. DURING THE DAYTIME.

Not to mention a gas giant, which will semi-regularly eclipse the sun - that it itself would be enough to be capable of understanding their relative motion - on Earth, nearly nothing eclipses the sun, only ever the moon, and only in very specific spots due to their relative sizes.

I never said they wouldn't, but people are drawn to something that is alike. Why are 99.9% of portrayals of aliens by humans humanoid? Because humans can recognise them easily as a sentient being, most likely with many human-like traits.

I never implied it wasn't large - I said that we don't know how large - e.g. rich person's savings, value of medium sized company, or the GDP of a third world country.

Persecution of Copernicus was down entirely to superstition. The Na'vi lack that attitude.

People on Earth who have had no contact have a far more 'flat Earth' understanding - there are not multiple moons observable, and certainly no planets visible with the naked eye (well, distinguishable from stars).
The Na'vi are present all over Pandora (although there is likely no settlement at the polar regions, ikran mean they will certainly have at least seen them). Their ease and availability of travel, particularly flight, means they will understand that Pandora is spherical far earlier and more easily than humans did (who kept inventing reasons to believe Earth was flat even when faced with objects disappearing over the horizon), so the assumption that Pandora is another one of those moons that they can see orbiting around the larger blue sphere is a natural step from there.

PS. As for your previous point, centaurs are from western mythology anyway :P

But nobody WAS 'there for devious purposes'. Nobody WANTED to 'give the impression that you are powerful' in the first place!
Also, discovery of the Na'vi != first contact, as you should well know if you weren't being intentionally obtuse in order to argue.

Humans can survive there in terms of actual survival. If you manage to piss off the ecosystem itself, obviously you're not going to last long - but general environmental conditions on Pandora are similar to some areas of Earth (exopacks on Earth are just thanks to pollution (and possibly disease, I'd guess) rather than H2S/CO2), while the large farm-type area near the avatars' building implies more availability of good quality food than Earth's algae farms.
Remember, humans were never supposed to be causing wanton damage in the first place.

Such a weapon is by nature single shot.

1GW that's usable in a human-movable battery for more than a single shot? Isn't going to happen.

1. You're adding extra metal to the structure.
2. You're ignoring the fact that they're still a weak point.
3. ...and NOT electrically connected to anything internal. Good luck with that.
Oh, also, you're forgetting the cost of implementing this, something that is explicitly mentioned in background that scorpions do not have any kind of protection due to their small size.

If you modified the design from that principle, it wouldn't be a gauss gun.

That's a railgun.

...the one he made after going completely off the deep end and turning into a raging psychopath?
WATCH THE FILM FIRST, DO NOT RELY ON WIKIPEDIA.

That precludes production for any reasonable cost.

I've already explained this.
They need power, and some kind of control. That necessitates an internal connection, which, if it's fly by wire, is also directly connected to the computer systems.

So in other words, remove some of the best parts of the film.
[b]This is not the film you wanted to make/see. It never will be. Stop poiting out stupid things like this that YOU think would 'improve' it.
This describes you perfectly:
If I haven't said this enough yet, I'll say it again. Avatar is not the film you wanted to have - that does not mean you can come on here, start trolling and talking about what you WANTED to see.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6036637/clarke.jpg

Inception is a rehash of a TNG episode (some might say a blatant ripoff of it), and also lacks an ending. It's also fantasy rather than scifi, and the vast majority of fantasy works on 'MAGIC!!'.
Unlike you, I can admit when I haven't watched a film and have only read the wiki page on it, but AFAIK,there's no explanation of how any of its magic works.

You can't use a criticism of the people involved as a criticism of how things are intended to work.

It works the same as any superconductor, just with a higher critical temperature. If your logic was true, it would be known today.

It doesn't explain how you got it in the first place.
As I said before, they're making tonnes of money in the meantime going there, not to mention developing a large enough presence in space to effectively allow them to shut out other competitors from any out of system resource.

It will also be many orders of magnitude harder to do so when the entire original purpose was interaction with the Na'vi anyway. Also, it needs to be mostly-humanoid in order for a human to comfortably control it without months of learning.

I've already explained why it can't - if they had your bull**** nanoassembler fantasy, they could just recycle rubbish into anything they wanted, and there would be no problems on Earth as everyone would have clean water and cheap, non-artificial food. It's the same as a replicator, except with 'nanotechnology lol' as a substitute for 'transporters lol'.

Yet they still need the materials to make them. Unless you can make something useful out of hydrogen, energy itself is no use for material items past using more energy-intensive manufacturing processes.

Did you even read my post?
If extant, they don't necessarily predate fusion, and indeed, maybe have been built afterwards, being enabled by the on-Earth fusion reactors' existence. The power source is never specified, ONLY that fusion has been perfected.

Doing so is completely counterproductive when the real ones can be easily made form simple engineering without constructing them afresh.

They're ammunition.
There are no ICBMs, for example.

I'm not arguing that again, I've already proven why they aren't. It's like groundhog day in this thread.

...if you're an idiot, it will kill you. If you take the time to understand, you're fine. Remember how disparaging she was to Jake at that point?

I said it DOESN'T predate fusion - that is, that it could be built afterwards to ensure there are no energy supply problems.

Why would these be a problem? (Also, I'd be amazed if anyone let food crops go extinct.)

So? Just being able to see the thing doesn't mean you have any better idea what it is. Also, just understanding the motion still leaves you horribly confused if you think in terms of motion relative to Earth/Pandora. (because obviously the motion is irregular and roundabout) Thinking of orbits in relation to the Sun/Polyphemus is an intuitive leap that it took a very long time to make, and the Na'vi don't seem to have made at all.

Budget. :P Look at H.G. Wells' Martians, for instance. (Literature gets away with non-human aliens all the time. It can even get away with non-material entities, such as in Diaspora.)

Since I suspect JC is after telling a good story over good worldbuilding, I think it's safe to assume he means the value of a medium sized company.

I'm not talking about persecution; people would probably reject the idea of "stars as other suns" because it contradicts the idea of Earth being a special place Adam and Eve were given by God.

The other moons are visible as flat disks. It's also unlikely that Polyphemus can be made out as a sphere, rather than a disk.

Meh, it was an example of what can happen. :P


Having checked my dictionary, (always a good idea) I want to contradict what you said earlier: this is [url=http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/invasionan an invasion.[/url] The RDA are there specifically to take something it turns out the Na'vi "own," and it would be amazingly stupid to say that they're going to get away with it scott-free.

Done by robot or Avatar? There shouldn't be a need for them to meet a human.

Humans can survive there in terms of actual survival. If you manage to piss off the ecosystem itself, obviously you're not going to last long - but general environmental conditions on Pandora are similar to some areas of Earth (exopacks on Earth are just thanks to pollution (and possibly disease, I'd guess) rather than H2S/CO2), while the large farm-type area near the avatars' building implies more availability of good quality food than Earth's algae farms.


...which means that it has to be even cheaper for it to be worth terrorists using.


It's not the energy density that's important, as I've said before.


1. ...No I'm not. (AFAIK) The airframe itself would work.
2. To what? Because if the mesh has holes, say, 5mm across, no radio signal is getting through it.
4. It's not much of a cost if you consider it when you first design the thing.

No, I mean the recoil as compared to a chemical firearm. A chemical weapon can divert the recoil wherever it likes.

High power magnets tend to wrench themselves apart. That's just how magnets work.


Are they allowed to intimidate the Na'vi or not? If not, how are they supposed to maintain security?

Production cost is a drop in the bucket compared to the ISV's fuel.

Er.., yes. Internal connections. Unless you're having wires connected to the actual airframe, there's no problem there. (Motors involve airgaps, and probably wouldn't be a problem.)

Or something else. Those were just the two longest scenes that came to mind.

*is surprised such a point came up*

The explanation is, AFAIK, PFM. And you have some very odd defintions of the terms if Inception is fantasy.

...This conversation started because you critized me naming Quaritch as one of Selfridge's bosses. :P

We don't know how high-temperature condutivity works. (In this case, "high-temperature" is >-170C or something) If we did know how room-temperature superconductivity could work, we could probably build Unobtanium today.

Their prescence has nothing to do with it, since they have a government-granted monopoly on exosystem resources. (...How on Earth did they get such a thing?)

"It spoils the plot" is not a valid in-universe reason.

(I have a fusion reactor, don't I? :awesome:)
And yes, the energy-intensive manufacturing is the key: if energy is so abundant I can just throw it away, I can make things with whatever process I want, no matter how inefficient.

Yes, and any power source significantly more powerful than fusion will supersede fusion power on Earth.

Attaching the driver's DNA into a completely alien genome is "simple engineering?"

There's nothing that needs blowing up on Pandora, so why have anti-tank rockets?

Quaritch also says, "I will not succeed." We are generally bashed over the head with the idea that Pandora is dangerous in the first 20 minutes or so of the film.

I herped when I should've derped there, sorry.

[QUOTE=Clarke;159450]Why would these be a problem? (Also, I'd be amazed if anyone let food crops go extinct.)[/quoe]
It isn't necessarily - just that it's still out of the price range of most people, who eat synthetic food and algae.

They do not seem NOT to have. That's the difference - they are far older than humanity.

Originally, but not any longer. Nonhumanoids are still usually only one episode characters, or find some other way to interact (e.g. Galaxy quest) because humans need to relate to them. Even in books, humanoids are overwhelmingly prevalent.

Exactly. That's persecution rooted in superstition.

Actually, no, they would be visible as spherical, especially with rotation. The same goes for Polyphemus. Earth's moon is tidally locked, but not all moons are.

Wrong context of the word.

If you really want to be pedantic, they are not there as a hostile invasion force.

I. HAVE. EXPLAINED. THIS. BEFORE.
First contact predates the Avatar program. First contact is between HUMANS and aliens.

Because it has to be extremely common to be a threat, right? :P
Oh, wait.
(Also, modern weapons such as missiles cost hundreds of thousands per shot and are common enough that they can be considered obtainable, especially older generation ones)

Again, a single shot weapon is not going to be a particular problem for energy, since there's no requirement for reuse.

As I've said before, a single joule over a short time still isn't going to be dangerous.

1. It's still larger, slower and bulker. Impractical.
2. Depends on your frequency.
4. I HAVE ALREADY EXPLAINED they are older generation aircraft - newer ones are more dependent on electronics but also said to have protection.

Not consistently, hence the point.

Permanent ones, yes. The point of an electromagnet is that it isn't (and if it was, the projectile would never move past it). You're thinking of railguns again.

By not causing confrontations in the first place. By stopping a random angtsik from knocking down the gates and smashing through the buildings inside. By stopping a human who has gone made from doing damage.

You're right - there IS a reason they used them, after all :P
I was just pointing out the fallacy in your logic when they still need ones that are producible, meaning the designs, knowledge and equipment is still extant.

Isn't that what I just said?
Current can jump gaps - after all, an EMP itself doesn't need contact.
Oh, and yes, I did mean internal connections to the airframe - you do want propulsion, sensors, refuelling capability, movable structural components and weapons, didn't you? :P

See the Mad Editor point.
Stop being such an idiot hipster than you think 'I can do better than James Cameron lol'.

You're the one who brought Inception up.

Yes, because you were WRONG.

Does it follow a different principle from low temperature? That's like saying 'high temperature freezing' somehow works differently - IT DOESN'T.

Yep. If they aren't actually doing anything, someone else will bid to take over it.

It's also several centuries too advanced, minimum, not to mention, as I JUST SAID, the fact that if it was present, there are hundreds of applications that actually would make life on Earth perfect.

So you think the amount of energy used to produce a single hydrogen in the same process as antimatter is somehow cheaper than electrolysis from water?
lol wut.

Not when you reach something like iron - the worst nuclear fuel possible in either direction.

Coal/oil haven't been superseded yet, have they? :P

Simpler than your bull**** fantasy of creating new organisms. In your previous post, you were talking about 'iterative construction' of them, not production via manipulation of existing sequences.

DID YOU EVEN READ MY POST?
That's ammunition, which is inappropriate in itself, but not the basic system - anyone can think up clever abuses of something. As I just said, there are no ICBMs, because there is no actual use for them.
...oh, and anti-tank missiles are not simple explosives, they haven't been since WW1.

Yes, because he's an idiot.
Anyway, who's to say that 'being all intimidating with scar and scary speech to scare the newbs' should be taken as literal '1 more more people WILL die'?

...But it'd be cheap. That's a result of there being so much energy avaliable. (Completly ignoring "synthetic meat," since AFAIK they didn't exist when Cameron was writing the script.)

And have no scientific inquiry whatsoever, as far as we're shown. If they did, they'd probably have passed the Singularity by now.

So this would be a good reason to do first contact with Avatars, rather than humans?

So Na'vi vision has sub-arcsecond resolution? Polyphemus is probably going to be further away from Pandora than Earth is from the Moon, and it's very hard to show that the Moon is spherical without a telescope.

(Of course, ideally this would spawn an intricate mythology about the roles of the various moons in the context of life, but that would be good worldbuilding. :P)

"3. entrance as if to take possession or overrun."
The RDA are there to take posession. Looks like an invasion to me.

IMO, that's being stupid. Why not completely falling into the Uncanney Valley when you first meet the Na'vi?

Unless you're in a warzone like Afghanistan, the terrorists aren't going to be well-funded enough for £100,000 missiles to be affordable, hence my inference that if a terrorist group were using one-shot weapons, they must be relatively easy and cheap to manufacture.

You know how an EMP is generated, right?

Depends entirely how you deliver it, as I said. If you deliver it fast enough over a small enough area, it will do incredible damage.

1. So internal insulation that can be as little as a thin layer of some insulator is going to be larger...
2. 1mm gaps, then. That stops even the highest energy microwaves.
4. So, I presume, EMP weapons are the latest and greatest thing... except I get the impression that they're actually a relatively old thing and weapons technology has moved on from them. The Scorpians aren't that old, are they?

Isn't consistency just a matter of engineering? I even saw one weapon that redirected the recoil to reload the chamber.

Do you know why it is so hard to build more powerful magnets? Because they explode! Passing current through a circular coil will, per the physics involved, attempt to expand the coil. At high intensity, as required in a coilgun, this can be a very large force indeed.

This contradicts the mission's purpose. Oops.

They can presumably construct anything they like at Hell's Gate, with a 3D printer or something similar, so I'm not sure how specialised equipment becomes involved.

Forgot to mention: not all electronics are vulnerable to EMPs. Only transistors and other such things are destroyed, and you can use relays to protect those. (In fact, that's probably what you're doing anyway because of the current differences involved)

Ah, so JC is the God of Editing, then? :P

Yes, as an example of good exposition. Then you attack it for being ripped off of a TNG episode, when it's actually ripped off of a Donald Duck strip... ;) The fact that it ripped off something else isn't a sign of quality, especially since most of the internet knows this particular film as Dances with Smurf!Pocahontas IN SPACE.

Yes, actually, it does.

Why's it a monopoly in the first place?

Yeah, which is an argument from consequences, and basically boils down to "It spoils the plot." That's a valid argument outside the context of the film, otherwise it runs into a problem, since there's no idea of "plot" inside it. You also have no idea what is realistic for 2154. (The only thing we have to go on is what is believable, and that varies widely.)

I have the hydrogen already. The reason the fusion reactor is useful is because I can build everything lighter than iron using it, and even get energy out at the same time. But anyway that was a joke comment; there are more efficient ways of building most things than doing it molecule by molecule.

I was tlaking about mechanical, not nuclear engineering.

We don't have microwave death beams from space yet. :awesome:

Standard software design (which is what genetic engineering becomes when you crack how genes behave) involves wriitng one bit of code, testing it to make sure it works, and then writing another bit. You can't do that when you're constructing sentient organisms, for obvious reasons, and you seem to be suggesting than an Avatar would be a thing that you get right on the very first try, with zero mistakes.

Sorry, I didn't realise what you meant by ammunition in that context. In that case, the question is why Quaritch is there in the first place.

What was that about holes and Confucius you told me in IRC? :D

Ah, so that's why the mission went so horribly wrong. :P It seems the RDA directors are idiots too, then.

Nobody suggests that Quaritch is exaggerating or trying to intimidate anyone.

Depends on how many billion people you have.

They understand enough. Again, you're being an idiot who calls them stupid simply because you don't like them and like spess mehrens.

Ah, no. The point was about how humans react within expected ways to other humanoids.

AGAIN (see earlier), it isn't tidally locked.

That's because you're a bull****ter who has clearly never seen Avatar and wants it to be some 40k-esque story.

Try reading what something actually is before using it in your argument.

...hence my point about previous generation stuff being available more widely.

You know rhetorical questions contribute nothing to an argument, right?
(Yes, and that has no bearing on this argument)

Great, if you want sub-metre range.

1. Stop moving the goalposts AGAIN. This WAS about a faraday cage, which is in the realm of pure fantasy in this application.
2. Fine, but that still doesn't mitigate the problem in your reasoning that I pointed out earlier that all it would need was charged objects to come into contact.
4. The 'Scorpians' (sic) are late 21st century. EMP weapons may have existed at that time or not - but providing some kind of shielding was not practical at that point, especially if only the side deploying them had it at that time.

Interesting, but if I understand it properly, it doesn't make them impossible to use.

No, it doesn't, because the purpose is not your 40k-esque fantasy, no matter how much you like to pretend otherwise.

Electronics, as I've pointed out before, Not only do they need to come from Earth, but they need to be able to be made there.
Oh, and yes, the stereolithography still needs the design - I thought even someone as dense as yourself could figure that one out :P

Which current difference?
The ENTIRE POINT is that the scorpions are not vulnerable to EMP in such a manner because of their older design, as I have explained multiple times.

Yes. You, on the other hand, are some random hipster.

Again, never having read/watched either. That's like calling Star Wars LOTR in space - it only has the most basic ideas in common.

"Cuprate superconductors (and other unconventional superconductors) differ in many important ways from conventional superconductors, such as elemental mercury or lead, which are adequately explained by the BCS theory."
That's not high temperature specific, it's specific to a subtype.

On what? If you mean space, because it managed to get that contract.
If you mean anywhere else, it isn't.

It's also a less complicated consequence than ones you were implying through 'NANOTECHNOLOGY!!' anti-Avatar arguments.

You've based this ENTIRE THREAD on what you personally believe is.

Then hydrogen is useless for your purposes.

We have both cheaper and more available sources available, more than enough to completely phase out any one of choice.

No. Doing so would take time and trials, but by constructing an entirely new organism as you believe would take many orders of magnitude more time and resources.

For hiring him? I'd agree - testing anyone who will be around weapons for being a complete psychopath or not seems like a reasonable step.

He doesn't pull out statistics either.

The quantities of energy involved are massive. Literally. :P

...How? I mean, they're older than humanity, but nobody, anywhere, has advanced beyond the Iron Age in terms of technology? (Woo for Singularity-level tech sharing!) The Internet is a powerful tool when its only been around for a couple of decades; I don't even want to try to guess what it does after millenia. :P

...Also, you appear to have conflated "unscientific" and "stupid."

Yeah, and the Na'vi appear to behave similarly.

And? It's almost physically impossible to see any sort of depth at that distance. It's not an unexpected inference to suppose Polyphemus was the surface of some body of water.

I'm not sure what you mean. You don't want to meet a new species and have them immediatly reject you because you look alien. That's common sense.

Questioning whether you know what you're talking about has everything to do with the argument. Namely, energy is a concern for an EMP weapon because an EMP is generated by, surprise surprise, discharging a high energy capacitor very quickly!

IR, longer wavelengths, etc, etc. Air is not necessarily an obstacle.

1. It still is about the farady cage: namely, the airframe itself. All bar one aircraft I can think of are built out of metal, and the only reason they aren't automatically completely invulnerable to EMPs is because they might have electrical connections on the outer airframe. Once you make sure those aren't connected to anything electrically fragile, like a transistor, you're done.
2. Um, no? Even directly contacting a cage won't do anything to anything inside it. You have to breach the cage to do that, and that's either 1) impossible or 2) useless in the case of an aircraft.
4 ...It's practical at any point because the shielding is not a physical addition to the vehicle.

Depends how much power you put through them. It just so happens that railgun research is not progressing very fast because the weapon needs replacing every 2 or 3 shots...

The purpose is to take something from Pandora. The Na'vi are in the way, and, as Jake quite clearly says, will not move. (And at that point, he's merely confirming what they theorised anyway.) At that point, you either abandon the mission, (and get shot by your shareholders :P) or forcefully take what you came for, i.e. invade.

Von Nuemann machines FTW... (Aslo, it';d make more sense to bring an electronics synthesizor with them. Fuel costs and whatnot. :P)

The current difference beteween what goes through a transistor and what comes out of a diesel engine or a lead-acid battery. There's a significant difference in the circuits used to actually power things and the circuits used to transmit signals, and the two are kept quite seperate.

You mentioned earlier that the scorpions have no shielding against EMPs. This implies that the RDA found a design that is naturally immune to them with no extra cost...

Oh right, just making sure we're on the same page.

I'm absolutely confident that some people using that joke have seen both. Not everyone who disagrees with you is an idiot.

"Until Fe-based superconductors were discovered in 2008,[2][3] the term high-temperature superconductor was used interchangeably with cuprate superconductor..."
The theory only goes up to 30K. Iron-based superconductors go up to 50K.

Yes, I mean space, but I'm asking why space would be monopolised in the first place. It's not a one-of-a-kind thing.

The nanotechnology originally came up because it was suggestged that unobtanium could be synthesized under any circumstances. That can't physically be true, because nanotech is possible to build.

And on the proof-by-contradicton of "If you actually do have this much energy around, you get non-appearing side effect X." If we know P leads to Q, and Q is false, we can actually conclude that P is also false.

...We can phase out nuclear?

...And? Every single time you construct the thing without getting it absolutely right, you have to murder something. That's going to get you into a legal storm.

Maybe I should change the thread title to "The RDA can't do human resources"? :P

Basic rule of worldbuilding: we trust characters, especially expositional speeches, unless we have a good reason not to.

Yep :P

Yet there has been change over time, but just at a slower pace, which you would know if you had read any background at all.

Exactly. You just defeated your own argument there :P

THEY ARE NOT STUPID.
If you think it looks like water, that's another clear proof you haven't seen the film ("it's blue!", perhaps?).There will even be observable features at different points in the orbit.

I mean that it's the discredited theory that the more detailed a CG/drawn human is, the less realistic they will look. It has nothing to do with this argument.
My point was that first contact pre dated the avatars, and you just threw that out there in absence of anything relevant.

AS I SAID MULTIPLE POSTS AGO, for a single shot. That is the issue with your ridiculous 'NEEDS LAZORS GRIMDARK KILL EVERYTHING LOL'.

Great, if you have the entire operational environment with a controlled atmosphere and consistent air temperature :P
...oh, and can get useful heating out of a single joule.
Also, AGAIN, discharging a massive current over a short time is not an unlimited capability in any battery. That's a reason ones designed for high current draw are much bulkier, heavier and higher voltage.

1. That isn't going to happen for any production aircraft. For a one off no expense spared, perhaps, but otherwise no.
2. Actually, it's 1. easy and 2. useful, assuming non-mechanical flight control (the reason the Scorpion DOES NOT NEED shielding, because it's not electronically operated)
4. Yes, it is.

Railgun != coilgun, AGAIN.
Yes, there will be wear issues on a coilgun, but nowhere near as much as a railgun. Also, they exist in universe. GET OVER IT. The mechanics of them have nothing to do with your anti-Avatar rant.

AND THEY ARE NOT ALLOWED TO DO SO. They were not supposed to ever put the Na'vi in that position.
Do you understand this? If not, then please say so so I can spell it out in a manner suitable for someone with an IQ of less than 80 to understand.

They do not exist yet. I have already explained that.

Oh, and if you knew anything at all about chip fabrication, you'd know that bringing one with an ISV's cargo space would potentially take decades.

Ah, I see what you mean there now.
The problem with that is that info that was true and any barrier would automagically prevent all EMP damage, then they would never be viable at all, which is not the case.

No, it implies that they won't lose flight control if their systems are disabled (navigation, communication, whatever, is another story).

Fair enough - but on the other hand, having unobtainium (which then would not be Fe-based, presumably) implies they would determine the new base. That does not mean they can automagically synthesise it just from knowing what metal base produces higher temperature superconductivity than Fe.

It can be if governments determined that they didn't have the ability to bring in out of system resources while the RDA did.
Even today, there are all sorts of treaties on space that are past the national level.

Possible, yes.
A ****ing dyson sphere is POSSIBLE to build, but humans can not yet if they ever will be able to at all.

WRONG.
All of your 'non-appearing side effects' are ones that will not necessarily suddenly appear just because it's theoretically feasible to do. That's an appeal to probability.

Yes, if use of coal and oil was ramped up to compensate.

Potentially so, so that's ANOTHER reason it's crap. You just shot your own point down there again :P

We have one.

So feeding a few billion people shouldn't be that hard. You have tons of energy, after all.

Pretty unlikely, IMO, but this is not a sociology thread.

But they're also not (apparently) scientific or rational thinkers. Nobody with no astronomy knowledge would look at the moon and suppose it's an object largely similar to Earth; they'd look at the moon and think "god," or "spirit" or whatever other notion fits into their beliefs, which are most likely mystical. At that distance, a Jupiter-like object looks like a flat disc with a fluid moving across it.

IMO, it's simply a bad idea for Uncanny Valley reasons. It doesn't really matter if the Valley actually applies to the Na'vi; you don't really want to take the risk.

EMPs are more energy-hungry than short range lasers, especially if they're omnidirectional. (You'd have to actually do the math if you wanted to tell if they're more energy-hungry than long-range lasers.)

Not sure why you're fixated on the arbitarary number I picked out of the air to demonstrate the difference between energy and power.

Well, yes, but 1) I never said it was unlimited, just large compared to the current being drawn, 2) the current involved is very small, because it doesn't need to be large.

1. Isn't it? It involves less major adjustment than removing fly-by-wire, as is mentioned elsewhere.
2. If you breach the cage, you might as well be using an ordnance warhead, not an EMP. The explosive is more reliable at actually destroying the craft.
4. What do you add to the craft then? Because, if you look up how a faraday cage works, you'll see that any conductor will suffice. The airframe itself is conductive, ergo the airframe will work as a faraday cage for anything that is inside it but not electrically connected to it. You can re-arrange the internal wiring so that only heavy-duty things are eletrically connected to the airframe surface; voila, one EMP-proof vehicle.

It's an example of the physics involved.

Well, they'll still be significant if you want a decent muzzle velocity for the bullet. It's almost precisly the same force responsible for both, after all.

I don't remember questioning this.

Go directly to Earth, do not pass Go, do not collect $200bn. The RDA potentially go bust, game over? Once the Na'vi have established they are not moving, it is no longer possible to complete the stated mission under the stated constraints.

(Meant Von Neumann architecture machines, which are completely different)

Then use something less complex? You can offload the main processing to Hell's Gate, mostly.

I hope you don't mean "not the case" in the world of Avatar. That'd be circular.

I actually looked this up. I do that, despite your insistence to the contrary. I found this:
The Scorpion Gunship was built for use on Earth as terrorists and insurgents gained access to EMP (Electromagnetic pulse) weaponry to counter drones and other combat machines used by militaries and the like, whose combat hulls and external electronics were hardened against EMP weaponry. However, the "soft" CPU remained vulnerable, short-circuiting and leaving the drone both harmless and helpless.

JC is not treating EMPs realistically, so I think we're done with this?

My original point is that by 2154, we will probably have a theory of how superconductivity actually works. With that, studying and understanding unobtanium will be much easier.


Why would it be a monopoly, though? What possible advantage does that bring anyone except the company involved?

Imagine you have a planet-building business. Without a Dyson sphere, you can't hope to gather enough energy fast enough to be able to build a planet in the lifetime of your clients, and so you can't run your business. You simply do not have the resources to build a planet economically, despite the existence of a more expensive method that is possible to use; the more expensive method is too expensive.

Same applies with Unobtanium. Mining it is so expensive, that it can't possibly be worth it. In this case, the major reason you want it in the first place is the energy you save from electrical resistive loss. This is, perhaps, as high as 1% or so of the power you pass through the cable. You need an awful, awful lot of energy to go through the cable before the resistive loss you've saved matches the energy value of the unobtanium. (Measured in 1000kgc^2, keep in mind.) Hence, it is uneconomic to gather it without a synthesis process.

<HumanNoMore> if P then Q.
<Clarke> Equivalently, if not-Q, not-P.
<HumanNoMore> WRONG.
<Clarke> Contraposition - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
<Clarke> I assume you don't need something more than a direct proof?
<HumanNoMore> then where the **** did I make a mistake?hang on

Automatically assuming that I am wrong without your own research won't let this discussion get anywhere, unfortunately.

Well, if unimaginably vast quantities of energy are avaliable, I'd have thought it pretty certain people would use it, and there's an awful lot you can do with that amount of energy, especially when coupled with the advanced technology we see. Letting everyone eat steak every night is not out of the question, for instance. Wealth is not conserved, and so on, so forth.

I suppose, but then you run into economics issues.

So you get a genetic re-build (since it's apparently merging the driver and Na'vi DNA together, not just fiddling with the Na'vi to resemble humans) right, perfectly, the first time you try it? That seems to be what you're suggesting happens.

At the time? We aren't given any indication at the time that Quaritch is not to be trusted. Nobody comments about him exaggerating, and this is his first appearance.

This is no longer a physics discussion, but a discussion about everything, and it's very hard to follow :S

Well, it's all interconnected. (which makes it all the more annoying when we run into JC saying, "It works that way here! Shush!")

I fail to see how those two statements are connected. Whatever, I'm not saying it bothers me, just that at the beginning I found it highly entertaining and now it is not :P

It's not entertaining now, because it's all mixed up. At the start, you could clearly see them throwing points at each other (and a few insults, I believe) and the thread had character. ;)

Why is this thread still allowed to be open if it's just 2 people arguing with each other?

It's not hurting anyone, so I don't see why it's necessary that it be closed.

When JC says, either implicitly or explicitly, "this element is a plot device and thus works regardless of real science," it becomes difficult to analyse anything that depends on it. This discusssion is only interesting, IMO, as long as there's the facade of the film working on some set of self-consistent rules, and not simply on JC's fiat.

I notice that all your contributions thus far have been rather negative. :P Since the only person being insulted here is me, and I don't mind, why should it be closed?

Well anyway, regardless of what you think, I don't see how any of JC's motives are related to how this thread has degraded (and by degraded I mean split into several independent discussions).

So wait: those posts are negative? :rolleyes: How so? I just pointed out what I saw and made no negative comments about anyone's post or the topic...
I'm actually insulted now..

To be honest, I'm surprised because I had a thread which was similar to this about GM crops with Tsyal and Isard posting as well and HNM closed it for no reason.