Cracked.com's 8 most incompetent sci-fi robots

[NecronLord]

Yeah. Number eight and four of those are pretty stupid. I've just, to see what the hell was going on there, hunted down the demonstration the robot company gives the US military. Two of these things are able to total an MBT with their lasers. They're pricey, yes, but that's emergent technologies for you. They're also likely to be far, far more effective than any real human soldiers in many roles. Even armoured vehicles.

IIRC, they had no difficulty getting up stairs and such, either. Assuming they're even vaguely bulletproof, they'd definately be worth buying.

[Stark]

Yeah, even in SC2 5 is primarily fucked due to battery damage; in field military roles they'd probably be up-armoured and by the 90s would have way better battery technology. In the first movie I believe he takes hits from small arms without a problem, but one hit to an eye, an actuator or the battery would be serious.

[White Haven]

Eh, to be fair the 'lol battery asploded' point in the Terminator entry is perfectly valid. The rest is somewhat bunk, but the un-use of the chest-nuke suicide charge is pretty inconsistent.

[Stark]

Eh, to be fair the 'lol battery asploded' point in the Terminator entry is perfectly valid. The rest is somewhat bunk, but the un-use of the chest-nuke suicide charge is pretty inconsistent.

I'm sorry, Terminator 3 never happened.

[PeZook]

Even if it did, it was a T-850 there, not a T-800. The original terminator didn't 'splode when its fuel cell was crushed in a hydraulic press, so it's safe to assue he couldn't just blow up on purpose.

Also, using a mini-nuke may have made it kinda hard for people to develop Skynet, with the processor totally annihilated and all.

[Gandalf]

Maybe his inability to self terminate meant that he couldn't use his power cell to kill Sarah Connor when he might be killed himself?

[Vendetta]

#8 is just stupid. I mean really, did they ever watch the first movie?

Where Reese says that Skynet had lost, it's defense grid had been smashed, and that the time travel was a last ditch attempt to win?

And also that all the records of this time had been lost, so all Skynet had was the name and city that she lived in -- so methodically working your way through the phone book made a lot of logical sense.

Yes, but presumably it lost because it's robots were all so shit.

[PeZook]

Yes, but presumably it lost because it's robots were all so shit.

It lost because it pointlessly deployed laser and plasma weapons rather than using good old firearms which can kill people just as good, but won't hurt a termie.

[RedImperator]

Maybe his inability to self terminate meant that he couldn't use his power cell to kill Sarah Connor when he might be killed himself?

That wouldn't make a whole lot of sense. Terminators are expendable foot-soldiers, and Skynet has sent them on suicide missions before. If they had the ability to suicide bomb a valuable enemy target, it would be foolish to disallow it. Skynet and Terminators have sophisticated enough AIs to know the difference between ordinary suicide and a suicide attack.

The most obvious explanation (if you insist on including T3 in the continunity at all) is that T-850s have unstable, explosive power cells, but T-800s do not. It's pretty clear T-800s do not have exploding batteries, since in both T1 and T2, a T-800 took catastrophic damage to its main power cell without exploding (in T1, the Terminator was crushed in a hydraulic press, and in T2, the T-1000 speared Uncle Bob right through the battery; Uncle Bob not only didn't explode, he switched to auxillary power and got back into the fight).

The T-850 does raise questions, though. Why didn't Skynet build infiltrators with suicide bombs? In T1 we see (in flashbacks) an infiltrator attack on a Resistance base; a cyborg walks into the base and starts shooting it up. He presumably could have killed everyone inside with a powerful enough bomb. Of course, we also don't know why Skynet didn't use chemical or biological weapons, to which its forces would have been completely immune; really, it doesn't pay to think too hard about Skynet's tactics versus the Resistance. Unless you assume Reese is mistaken or lying about Skynet's plans to exterminate humanity, Skynet really made some piss-poor decisions.

[PeZook]

The T-850 does raise questions, though. Why didn't Skynet build infiltrators with suicide bombs? In T1 we see (in flashbacks) an infiltrator attack on a Resistance base; a cyborg walks into the base and starts shooting it up. He presumably could have killed everyone inside with a powerful enough bomb. Of course, we also don't know why Skynet didn't use chemical or biological weapons, to which its forces would have been completely immune; really, it doesn't pay to think too hard about Skynet's tactics versus the Resistance. Unless you assume Reese is mistaken or lying about Skynet's plans to exterminate humanity, Skynet really made some piss-poor decisions.

I like the explanation that the Resistance simply didn't know what Skynet's plan wa, so all we got was speculation passed on by Reese. Another possible ones are:

1) SkyNet was just plain too dumb to use chemical and biological weapons. It was built as a system to manage defence of the United States. This is undermined by that fact it did create a new weapon in the form of the infiltrators, which used a completely different tactic than most system Skynet was originally designed to manage.

2) It lacked the infrastructure to create chemical or biological weapons, and could barely support its fully mechanized forces as it was with what installations he could get running after the bombs fell. After all, running a chemical plants requires a lot of infrastructure, which is designed to be operated by humans, so he'd need to start from scratch with them (either building robots to take over and fire up the old human infrastructure, or building entirely new fully automated chemical plants).

It's possible he felt the need to put together and support an army with a devastated industrial base was more important at the moment than producing WMDs, and simply was defeated before he could start making things like gas, nukes or bioweapons.

[Stark]

Frankly, Skynet is only 'bad' when you realise most of it's capability was invented by novels or fans. Reese describes Skynet using nuclear weapons to win then rounding humans up into extermination camps; this is really, really inefficient. Those ragged LA survivors then ACTUALLY WON! They pushed over a chain link fence and later they were blowing up giant tanks with thermos bombs. Skynet was ALWAYS retarded, the only reason humans were in danger was the results of the initial nuclear bombardment (fucked up infrastructure, chaos, massive deaths, etc).

I mean, some people figure Skynet controls all of the US, or even all of the world... based on nothing. That just makes Skynet look WORSE.

[Starglider]

It lost because it pointlessly deployed laser and plasma weapons rather than using good old firearms which can kill people just as good, but won't hurt a termie.

I doubt it was pointless; the use of laser and plasma weapons was likely because that greatly extends the time units can operate without resupply (Skynet's robots are highly reliable and use nuclear power sources, so ammo might be the only significant consumable). Still a bad choice in the long run, but not an irrational one.

[PeZook]

I doubt it was pointless; the use of laser and plasma weapons was likely because that greatly extends the time units can operate without resupply (Skynet's robots are highly reliable and use nuclear power sources, so ammo might be the only significant consumable). Still a bad choice in the long run, but not an irrational one.

Well, I suppose he would have to face humans looting all the easily available ammo and firearms right at the start of the war, while he was trying to get his army numbers up, so he may as well have been forced into doing that. Of course, this is all complete speculation.

[Vendetta]

It's probably worth noting that Skynet was programmed by idiots who apparently gave it no operational safety constraints, and hooked up without any kind of live environment testing to see what it would do when they did. The fact that it is an idiot itself should, in those circumstances, not be a surprise.

[Vympel]

Oh come on these are people who think you should knock over a tracked (car-speed) robot armed with a fucking laser gun and carrying a nuclear bomb.

Dude, the plan in Short Circuit for using the SAINT robots was pretty stupid, and intentionally so - the generals are discussing it over refreshments, and is going on how they're gonna send each of these, carrying a bomb, up "main street Moscow", and it's called "Operation Gotcha Last".