The RDA can't do physics

[Clarke]

Originally Posted by Human No More

For about the 15th time, the fact that is isn't realistic with current-day technology does not make it impossible. If there is enough power, it is possible.

Engines hundreds of times more powerful than VASIMIR have fuel ratios to get up to 0.5c around about 10^26 or so. That's not possible to construct.

By that logic, you should hate dr who, because it doesn't explain anything. You're just another hipster who can't admit that it was a good film simply because people liked it, it dis well, and it may potentially gain scifi the real credibility it had been lacking for decades.

(I admitted it was a good film right there in the previous post. )

As I have explained before, they can - you talk about 20m dollars, but we have no idea how much that is is any historical currency context.

Unobtanium has to be worth non-neglible fractions of Earth for that to be true.

...and that's bad. I originally said this about SW, but it applies to Dr Who too, in that I called it "scifi for people who would be insulted if you said they liked scifi".

Not all sci-fi has to be hard sci-fi.

Your 'theoretical standpoint' is 100% WRONG.
Again, go watch the actual film, and stop watching that crappy flash on Newgrounds.

It's a network cable, with or without any spiritual signifigance.

EXACTLY. You're digging yourself deeper into a hole here.

And it won't make a difference whether or not the things the Na'vi meet are human or humanoid robots. It's not as though they can tell the difference.

Moore's law has a physical limit. Silicon has a physical limit. There is a size, even if you use a non-silicon material, at which the voltage will leak across the transistor when it is closed. You can NOT work around that limit with transistor-based circuits.

Then use non-transistor cirucits. I know that's not technically Moore's Law, but it's still the same march of technology. If the RDA have access to computronium, there are far more useful things they could be doing than mining unobtanium.

You're developing new things expressly for a single use, and yet you're the one complaining about cost.

R&D is cheaper in this case. Or didn't you notice the astronomical energy involved?

You're abandoning all pretence of trying to handle this peacefully and without causing damage.

Robot = war machine since when?

You're adding huge complexity, and ignoring the fact that a single human without a base and support can NOT survive on Pandora.

I mentioned this already.

they have their own problems, not least being their lack of controllability, lack of accountability, lack of proper autonomy, requirement for control, and only having the ability to react to known and exactly programmed situations.

Are the mining robots remote-controlled or not? (Ideally, they wouldn't be, they'd be directed by AI.) Because that entire list can't be true at the same time.

A chemical laser, which needs an entire passenger airliner for support and fuel, and needs large amounts of hazmat fuel, producing even more with each firing.

Solid-state lasers? Or is that what you mean?

I do not understand why you are mentally incapable of understanding this, but they can not have or use advanced military hardware. They are not a military, it is not an invasion. the marines are using standard off the shelf equipment because all they are meant to be doing is providing basic security, not fighting a war.

Dual-rotor gunships armed with what appear to be either incinderiary or anti-tank missiles are "basic security?"

The ionisation still takes a LOT of energy, and a short time, higher energy discharge is MUCH harder to engineer a battery to provide.

And yet we have petawatt lasers in the lab.

They are entirely different.

"...for the relavent property of being affected by EMPs."

It says that EMP based weapons are common enough to be available to terrorists, eliminating the dependence on UAVs. It says that projectile weapons are used on Earth, but the type include gauss gun -type weapons as well as standard bullets. There is no mention of your precious lasers.

There are various problems here:
1) EMPs are easy to defend agianst if you know they're coming. Not only are Faraday cages cheap, the actual circuits can be shielded against the blast.
2) Non-nuclear EMP generators would require the very supercapacitors laser weaponry would also require. Building the latter would almost be a case of plug-and-play. [/slight exaggeation]
3) Handheld gauss weapons are impractical. Recoil much?

Yes, that IS the point. Aeroplanes have been around for ~100 years, and that does not mean that the most highly advanced ones are available to everyone, even if a moderately skilled person could build one that outperforms the earliest ones.

Who said anything about highly advanced? I was expecting them to be practically invented in 2050 or so and improved from there. Building a given device with 100 years manufactured start over the original designers is probably not difficult.

The same goes for lasers. They will not be available to everyone as some kind of ridiculous spess mehren weapon just because they have been around for a certain period of time.

But they're being around for a long time suggests that constructin them would be quite easy.

The rights to mine unobtainium are dependent on conditions, including not using excessive weapons - they can only use what they actually need for basic security.

There's... 10, 12 gunships hovering around when Hometree is destroyed, all but one of which is firing some high explosive rocket? That's "basic security?"

You can not enclose an aeroplane in a faraday cage, because it requires external connections.

Not in-flight it doesn't. A faraday cage isn't necessarily one static piece.

That's quite a change of position... to the exact opposite, in fact.

Earth has woefully inadequete energy for what they're trying to do; Pandora has functionally infinite energy for what they're trying to do. What's the problem?

Yet Hell's Gate already has sufficient weaponry.

A few thousand iron-age tech warriors managed to overrun it! That's not "sufficient."

To protect humans by making them more survivable when outside, as well as heavy moving/lifting as required.
You know, what they were designed for on Earth.

Yet there's enough of them to constitute a ground attack force. That shouldn't be necessary.

Avatars need humans to be there.
Oh, and yes. Humans are biological organisms, who they can communicate with and learn from.

I mean, why do the Na'vi ever contact humans and not Avatars? It's the Avatars' job to do that. (The most efficient way of interacting with the Na'vi is another topic entirely, though.)

Again, watch the actual film. Quaritch works for Selfridge, Selfridge is just a spineless idiot.

On paper, yes, I'd agree.

Also, he does mention others that are not on Pandora, but I understand that that wasn't in wikipedia's plot summary so you probably never heard of that.

"We don't see any of Selfridge's bosses..."

The problem is knowing nothing about its structure, you would essentially be guessing as to composition and physical structure.

Current research is basically doing that anyway, and we're getting somewhere. Albiet slowly.

I was pointing out that you believe that knowing something's characteristics will magically make it synthesisable - I asked that, in that case, why has not an ideal nuclear fuel, an ideal structural metal, or an ideal plastic been synthesised?

Knowing something's characteristics means that you cna build a model of its actual structure. Once you've got that, and it works, then it's snythesisable.

Well, the upper limit known is stars. Based on that, there is essentially no hard limit.

The limit of fusion is that size yes, but the limit of magnetic confinement is quite a lot lower. Probably 1-10 million times lower.

Originally Posted by Human No More

You're right, it's an engineering problem, which clearly either proved impractical, or a lower priority.

That must be for a reason other than expense, considering the energies involved.

Depending on the course, also decades to centuries

Maybe two decades, if you make a delibrately bad decision.

...then why bring it up?

Because you mentioned that all of Pandora's fauna/flora were physically possible, and I'd argue that Hometree is not unelss it's made out of some magic carbonfibre clone.

Again, a column of a given thickness and structural strength. Hometree is a LOT smaller than human structures, which use much smaller structural cross sections.

And Hometree is not built out of stainless steel. Also, Hometree is leaning sideways. Sheer force is not your friend.