Sea Skimmer wrote:Eternal_Freedom wrote:Yeah that's something that really always bugged me. Couldn't they find anything heavier? Also, why did Area 51 have all those spare F/A-18's lying about?
It was just dumb movie nonsense to ensure smoke trails, though a real AMRAAM makes almost no smoke after the motor fire fires by deliberate design.
Someone said here once years ago that the NOVEL include Harpoon missiles but that makes no damn sense either as the missile would be unable to function correctly against a giant stationary airborne target, and still only has a 500lb warhead. Anything less then a 2000lb GP bomb would be an utter joke, and its not like you could miss, 1941 night bombers wouldn't miss completely, and even that sort of bomb would be comically ineffective without massed heavy bomber attacks. In real life we surely would have used nukes out of hand, the Aliens had already inflicted a nuclear level of attack anyway.
One assumes the Area 51 F/A-18s flew in from other bases that got destroyed while they were airborne. Also the real Area 51 keeps part of an F-16 squadron around as chase planes as it is, could have been Hornets in another universe. The refueling gear and O2 refilling gear are NATO standard, and the Hornet doesn't need a starter cart so as long as nothing critical physically broken on the plane they'd be able to rearm and fly again from any major USAF base.
Hm. Given what the Air Force actually has lying around, what conventional munitions would you arm the planes with? Obviously you're going to have to hope that the aliens expose some critical component of the ship that you can actually damage, since a thing that big could easily have a few dozen meters of hardened armor plate covering critical areas.
Gravity bombs would be problematic because the target might actually be
under the saucer- if it has recognizable engines they probably point down while it's hovering, and we know its main weapon points down. Hard to hit something dangling from the belly of a giant flying saucer with a bomb
dropped from a plane...
Hitting it from above with nuclear gravity bombs would be the obvious trick, yeah. Bet that's what some of the other people did.
Batman wrote:They 'did' try to use nukes earlier in the movie. The shields nixed them.
Well rather they tried one single nuke, and against the SIDE of the ship where it would transmit the smallest fraction of its blast energy to the target ! Considering these are ~15 mile spacecraft even an unshielded ship made of plain steel would actually have colossal resistance to such an attack. Simply, unless the nuke induced the power supply or ammo on the alien ship to destroy it, you'd actually expect it to survive a single blast. Certainly at least of a 200kt warhead. Some mass gravity arch bridges in Europe were expected to have 50% chances of withstanding nuclear Tomahawk attacks under realistic accuracy conditions. Biniki atoll test data suggested battleship crews below the armor deck would survive a low yield nuclear blast at the edge of the fireball.
9 megatons burst underneath the enemy ship is more on par with what it would actually take to destroy a craft that big. And a real attack plan would most probably involve first a mass cruise missile attack from multiple directions, those bombers can haul a lot more then one weapon, and if that failed someone would fly a suicide mission under the enemy ship to drop a gravity bomb in a laydown profile. Or plausibly both missions would execute at the same time with the cruise missiles impacting 1-2 minutesafter the laydown. Because the damn earth just had utterly huge numbers of people wiped out and doing anything else is absurd! The anti nuclear tripe in the film was the only part that ever bothered me. It was just such utter nonsense to stop at one single nuclear warhead when giant alien spaceships are already going full genocide on the entire human race![/quote]
so why not go all in 
