IDEA! Avatar 2: Ava-Tarrer

[Ultonius]

The Avatar Wiki claims that the Bucket-Wheel Excavators were brought by starship in pieces, assembled in orbit, then parachuted to the surface. This might be because the excavators have components that are too high-tolerance/big/time-consuming for Hell's Gate's stereolithography plants.

[PeZook]

The Avatar Wiki claims that the Bucket-Wheel Excavators were brought by starship in pieces, assembled in orbit, then parachuted to the surface. This might be because the excavators have components that are too high-tolerance/big/time-consuming for Hell's Gate's stereolithography plants.

This, of course, sounds incredibly stupid. Parachuting something so huge, heavy and complex from orbit is asking for disaster.

[Simon_Jester]

Ugh, you're right. Bucket-wheel excavators are the ideal candidate for on-site manufacture, because they're big dumb pieces of metal with no small fiddly components at all.

The important thing to remember is which cup the poison is in.

Also, to never get involved a land war on Pandora...

[Steve]

Also, to never get involved a land war on Pandora...

QFT.

Which is why you bomb it from orbit, just to be sure.

*sits back with tub of popcorn to watch orbital bombardment*

And before the inevitable cries of "FASCIST" and "IMPERIALIST" start raining down, allow me to explain why I'm bombing Pandora into a radioactive rock.





(Note: If you took this post seriously.... you are taking this subject way, way too personally. And I'll remind you we're in a thread that started with Shroom proposing a hypothetical creator race of Pandora forcefully reprogramming all of Humanity in retaliation to RDA wiping out the Na'vi. A silly little pic-containing post fits right in.)

[Stark]

This, of course, sounds incredibly stupid. Parachuting something so huge, heavy and complex from orbit is asking for disaster.

Is it stupid because you think they didn't use enough to brake the descent and it hits the ground hard, or because they didn't use the right chutes to guide its descent?

If they used a BALLUTE SYSTEM, it seems they may have a fairly good control of their descent.

[Darth Wong]

What the fuck is all this talk of an energy crisis? Does Douchebaggio not read the fucking news? Earth is in an "energy crisis" right now, and it's probably going to be in an "energy crisis" forever, because we're always trying to use more than we can cheaply acquire. We are always in a state of not having a guaranteed limitless comfortable supply of cheap energy, and worrying about where we'll get it from in future.

[Ford Prefect]

This, of course, sounds incredibly stupid. Parachuting something so huge, heavy and complex from orbit is asking for disaster.

They've mastered interstellar travel, I think they can handle it.

However I don't really buy the idea that the excavators are being brought piece by piece from Earth. I mean there's at least four of them and they are so big it's ridiculous. If they were only the size of the Bagger 288 it would take the entire ISV fleet working together three round trips to transport one, devoting all their cargo mass to just that. The HEM-OA is freakishly bigger.

I guess we can just take it as one of those oversights of something minor.

[Simon_Jester]

This, of course, sounds incredibly stupid. Parachuting something so huge, heavy and complex from orbit is asking for disaster.

Is it stupid because you think they didn't use enough to brake the descent and it hits the ground hard, or because they didn't use the right chutes to guide its descent?

If they used a BALLUTE SYSTEM, it seems they may have a fairly good control of their descent.

The obvious problem isn't that they can't control their paradrops. It's that if anything goes wrong with dropping such huge, heavy cargoes, you've wasted enormous resources.

Imagine you've got a 500-ton bucket excavator, and you drop it from orbit in twenty 25-ton loads. If one of those loads gets caught in a freak wind and crashes out in the middle of nowhere (or, heaven forbid, the ocean), you have a big problem. If you can't recover and refurbish the excavator component, the other 475 tons of cargo you just moved from Earth to Pandora by antimatter rocketship at almost immeasurable expense is totally wasted. And you won't be getting spare parts for the excavator for about ten years, because of how long it takes to order a new part and get it shipped out.

Trying to figure out some way to ship a system for making mining equipment on Pandora out of native materials (possibly mined in orbit and not on the surface) is much more appealing. You might still airdrop the cargo through the atmosphere, that part of the plan works fine, Stark... but you'd want to avoid shippping it out on the starships if you can.

[Ford Prefect]

If the choice is between 'maybe lose the machine in a freak accident' and 'not having the machine and thus never doing any mining', what do you think the smart choice is? The risk of losing the machine could be as high as one in ten (it won't be anywhere near that risky), but you would still have to do it.

Imagine you've got a 500-ton bucket excavator

That would be embarrassing.

[Darth Tedious]

Actually, parachuting the things down whole isn't as crazy as it sounds.

Not only does Pandora have only 0.8G, but the xenon content of the atmosphere makes it ~20% thicker than Earth's. Which all means terminal velocity is decreased, and airdropped stuff is less likely to be damaged.

Though, this doesn't help with the issue of things being blown off course (the thicker air actually makes it worse)...

[Stark]

They might have used a ballute->retro->chutes system, so they might be reasonably predictable. When dropping from orbit, which stage of the descent leads to the most diversion?

[Cesario]

I am sure the people in Cesarioworld have not mastered complicated engineering principles like "plug hundreds of smaller emitters into the same power source", but it shouldn't be much of a problem elsewhere.

Except for the fact that it wasn't solved in the Avatarverse.

What possible reason could there be for this being impossible? Seriously. They can fire a huge-ass laser and keep it powered and pointing at a tiny object for five and a half months, but you declare that using hundreds of smaller emitters and keeping them pointed at power satellites in Earth orbit (a technology we could build TODAY) is too difficult for them?

Illogical as it may be, the fact that the energy crisis was actually being resolved by unobtainium pretty much makes this the case.

Yes, they concentrated on building c-fractional starships four kilometres long to go to the next star system over in search of magic rocks that would have the ability to solve their energy woes.

That's waaaaaaaaaay easier

Apparently it was.

Based on what, exactly? They built three orbiting antimatter reactors with no unobtainium whatsoever. Each one of these was four kilometres long. They then built a starship around each.

What about installing them on the moon and using them to power massive amounts of habitats is more difficult than hurling them four light years out for exploration's sake? What about this situation points towards an energy crisis on Earth?

The EU material talking about an energy crisis on Earth. The stuff we've been discussing for some time now.

It's even sadder that the entire film was set on the planet where the magic space rocks that enable their space fleet to be constructed happen to be being mined.

Okay, I will use pictures.



They had these. They need no unobtainium.

Well, that's useful information.

They can carry hundreds of passengers and have enough delta-v to collect gas from the gas giant's upper atmosphere and return it to Pandora.

So even with no vehicles other than those we saw in the movie, they had more than enough capability to move their population, or at least their industry, off-planet to be powered by the massive antimatter reactors there.

No unobtainium needed to solve the energy crisis, if there even is one. If there's none, the moral right of the RDA to rape loot and pillage other people's land is gone.

What good is moving their industry off-planet when their biosphere is already dead? The whole point of moving industry off-planet in such a case would be to minimize it's impact on the biosphere, right?

Isn't capitalism supposedly a means of streamlining things and improving efficiencies? I guess you think that state bread lines forming immediately is not only a more efficient use of resources, but must happen before any attempt to secure new energy resources can ever be made.

No, capitalism has nothing to do with "efficient use of resources". It results is massive duplication in production by definition because producers compete to sell their products to consumers, with many producers fighting for the same market.

This actually wastes resources and energy. It works well when you have an excess of both, breaks down if shortages occur. And in an existential crisis, it's the first thing to go: if your food supply is threatened by energy shortages, fuck yes you switch to a planned economy and ration everything that's not needed for survival.

Shouldn't you be rationing the things that are needed for survival, not the other way around?

Capitalism is a rationing system. Problems it may have, certainly, but that is its function. This is like talking to someone who's afraid of Obamacare because that would mean rationing healthcare, when the current system is already rationing healthcare. All human economic systems are an attempt to maximize the use of limited resources. One can argue that government planned economies are superior for some functions and free market systems are superior for other functions, but to claim that either is inherently not a rationing system is to misunderstand economics so completely that I really can't see this being resolved to anyone's satisfaction no matter how many posts this proceeds through.

Duck season. Rabbit season. Weren't you the one arguing that the humans were wicked and evil, and I was the one arguing that the existence of rules the RDA had to operate within puts the lie to that? I guess that there were rules the RDA had to operate within and that the humans weren't mostache twirling supervillains. I conceed the point to you, my good sir.

I never said humanity as a whole was evil. I said the RDA was for murdering hundreds of people in the name of profit. Sometimes I said "the humans" in the clear context of the human mining operation on Pandora.

That may be where our problem lies. The film makes no distinction between the two, so I haven't been either.

Still an annoying line from the film. And I can't think of a better way of addressing it than having Pandora's biosphere burned off and to watch them try to mine in the resulting conditions.

Yet you were saying the RDA is somehow moral for not using this option, and then proceeded to argue vehemently that it would actually make sense for them to wipe out the entire Pandoran ecology from the profit standpoit.

But now you backpedal furiously and say it was just facetious and a joke. Right. Sure it was. Good joke. Everybody laugh.

Out of universe, it's rediculus and worth joking about. In-universe it makes sense based on everything the characters said.

Though thinking that over, I suppose that means I ought to be more careful about assuming they've overcome the engineering hurtles required for dropping heavy rocks into a gravity well, since that's another capability they haven't really demonstrated.

Did you even read my Home Tree argument?

Which one? You keep switching between three versions: "RDA urgently needed to mine unobtainium or Earth is kaputt and they bombed the hometree to prevent deaths to miners, too", "RDA wasn't in any particular hurry to mine the unobtainium from Home Tree but still needed it at some time in the future and they bombed the hometree to prevent deaths to miners" and "RDA didn't actually need unobtainium from that particular deposit and they bombed the hometree just to prevent deaths to miners"

The last one would be the argument I actually put forward.

Yep, collapsing their entire economy and gutting their global communication infrastructure is sure to both add efficiencies to the system and ensure that the people continue to be fed. It's a bold plan, but we definately hired the right man for the job.

THEIR FOOD SUPPLY IS IN DANGER.

That's your claim. You claim THEIR FOOD SUPPLY, the thing they need to live, is in danger due to energy shortages, but banning bars from using massive wallscreen TVs and shutting down holographic ads is somehow excessive and impossible (due to wah wah economy will collapse!). Because using small TVs, the Internet, radio or PA systems is not an option: the only possible global communications network they can have are massive 100 inch TVs. And of course the ads, these are a crticial part of the food distribution infrastructure

Yep, a bold plan. I'm sure that limiting the communication infrastructure and decreasing the prevalence of social engineering that advertising represents is sure to keep people doing things like religeously using birth control.

If you read back a bit, you'll find that someone complained early on in the thread about me not using this quoting style.

That was me, and nothing about using quote tags means you have to split a post up into single sentences.

No, but poorly constructed paragraphs might make that more desirable.

Oh, and here's a nice quote from pandorapedia about the Na'Vi not wanting to talk to the humans, the bastards:

And a lot of the sorties we’re out talkin’ to the Na’vi, especially the Omaticaya clan. I fly Grace, I mean Avatar Grace, out to her school a lot, also. So I know a lot of the locals. They’re pretty cool. Everybody around base thinks they’re these vicious savages, but they’re really not. They’re very spiritual, and they know how to party. They love music.

By Trudy Chacon.

Man, they totally never talked to humans and thought all humans were evil scum. Coming to the human school and doing dancing and singing and learning English and astronomy and chatting up helicopter pilots is totally evidence for that.

Oh yeah but they weren't interested in negotiation for their ancestral home, THE RACISTS

Astronomy? There's nothing about that mentioned in your quote.

Anyway, I question where the people around base got the idea that the Na'vi were vicious. Made up from whole cloth? Trudy obviously has no idea of anything that would make them look that way from that quote.

But it's really beside the point. There's nothing in Trudy's quote to indicate that negotiation was going on at any point. Socializing maybe, but even that's obviously being limited to the point that fairly major elements of their society were still hidden enough to be discovered by Jake, and not one thing they could possibly want was ever determined until Jake became Torak Makto and ordered them to start using radios for tactical communications.

You don't seem to grasp that there are no inherent advantages to English specifically when you already have a language. The only use it has for the Na'vi is communicating with the humans, something they aren't interested in doing anyway.

Stop shifting the goal posts you dishonest turd. The problem with you is, you sprout bullshit to defend your retarded position, and when that bullshit is taken apart, you make more bullshit to defend the earlier bullshit. To wit
1. You said the Na'vi weren't interested in anything about human culture - then why the hell did they learn English?
2. Your next level of bullshit is to say language is NOT part of culture. I am still ROFL over that one.
3. To follow that bullshit up, you make the further bullshit claim English is not useful in and of itself, (because apparently learning useless cultural things don't count). At the same time you say this, you use English to communicate this point demonstrating a) its usefulness and b) how stupid you are.
4. To defend that bullshit, you come up with ah when I said not useful in and of itself, I really really really meant not useful in and of itself to communicate among yourselves when you already have a language. Can you see the goal posts being moved further? Even you recognise this is bullshit, because another language can be used to communicate with people who speak this other language, ie humans. So quickly try to cover this weakness with a lie, that the Na'vi were not interested in communicating with humans. Sorry, they weren't interested in moving from their homes. The no communication clearly isn't true because they went to fucking school. Geez, you don't suppose you have to communicate to learn do you?

Is there any level of dishonesty you won't stoop too?

You do recall what spawned this particular tangent, right? The film presenting things of value about one culture and not the other. English was not presented as a thing of value about the human culture by the film. Try something else.

That would be "not useful in itself". If you're going to throw stuff back in my face trying to prove you understood what I said, get the details right.

This quite laughable when I quoted you with links to your posts.

You do realize that what I was correcting was a symantic problem in your posts that was reversing the meaning, right? That I corrected while telling you that you needed to read more carefully? And you think that's an example of me being dishonest with you?

Still not getting the whole "the Na'vi already had a language" thing.

Still not getting the whole "shifting the goal posts is intellectually dishonest thing". Of course shifting the goal posts might actually work if your second set of criteria wasn't as retarded as the first one.

Exactly the same criteria, even.

You read things? That's unexpected.

Yeah, I guess you expect people to not go over what you say so its easier for you to lie. How dare I use your quotes against you.

Or rather you attempt to do so without reading what's in those quotes.

But yes, killing humans is something they were clearly interested enough in doing that they were willing to lower themselves to use the tools of the evil ones in order to do it. I conceed.

I love how in one breath you conceed then fire off a but....

The but came first.

But for all its worth concession accepted dipshit.

I'm glad you're happy.

You clearly didn't read even the parts you quoted, since they don't support your conclusion.

Aside the fact I showed several posts earlier my conclusion where you shifted the goalposts, and considering you eventually conceded in one of those points, I would say, yeah it does support my position.

Wait, you thought "we'll use the demons' tools to destroy them" was an endorcement of an element of value in human culture? That's... I don't even...

This might work if you were demonstrably reading my arguments instead of showing how straw men broke down.

You mean how you accuse me of not reading, and then I quote you saying exactly what I accuse you of saying with links to boot.

More like when you don't read the quotes and just pretend they say what you wanted them to say. It's honestly strange that you aren't just writing the quotes yourself if you're going to lie about their contents while presenting them.

But I am apparently creating a strawman. Thanks for playing retard. Tell me, did you want to machine gun down your fellow students because they weren't as stupid as you are?

Another example of you not reading my posts. I provided numeric designations and everything, and you still don't undersand.

I certainly can. One is far more ammusing than the other. Cataloguing your ignorance is not really coming out ahead.

But arguing with someone who you consider ignorant is?

Actually, yeah. Have you ever tried it?

Seriously retard, who are you fooling with this bullshit? Oh wait, you are the guy who says English is not useful in and of itself while using English to communicate the point.

Language in general has value. English in particular is just the arbitrary one we happen to be using. If we spoke Na'vi, we wouldn't need English to do this stuff, now would we?

Idiot, my dislike of the Na'vi covers many levels, not all of them moral ones relevent to the discussion.

Idiot, my demolishing your arguments were not confine only to your moral ones.

Speaking of repeating the same line:

Idiot, my dislike of the Na'vi covers many levels, not all of them moral ones relevent to the discussion.

Speaking of repeating the same line : Idiot, my demolishing your arguments were not confine only to your moral ones.

I had arguments about the non-moral reasons to dislike the Na'vi? And here I thought I had matters of opinion stated soely to inform others of my position. Apparently I've been assembling arguments about them without even knowing it.

The RDA weren't given the option to negotiate.

Correction, they weren't interested in negotiating in good faith. If they did that they would be prepared for the option if talks fall through. They weren't. They planned to attack home tree anyway, which is why they only gave Jake a time limit.

They gave Jake three months to bring them something. Jake brought them nothing except the assessment that negotiation was impossible. What was he going to do with infinite time that wasn't already accomplished in those three months?

And now you aren't even reading your own posts. You said nothing about the Na'vi voting not to give up their homes. You blathered on about the Na'vi voting not to adopt a technological lifestyle.

Since in the movie RDA were only offering technology in exchange for giving up their home, both options would pretty much go hand in hand.

No they don't. The RDA were offering anything. Education isn't technology. Those astronomy lessons that PeZook seemed to see in a quote they were never mentioned in is an example of something that was being offered to the Na'vi that wasn't technology.

You also said nothing about the Na'vi negotiating at any point during this decisionmaking process.

Oh my god. Seriously are you brain damaged or something? Once people have negotiated something with another country / countries, it still needs to be ratified by a vote in parliament. I trust you can join the dots.

So you're calling me stupid for not making shit up to fill in your inadequite scenario? Yeah, that sounds about right for you.

While that is usually true in practice, it is really more a manefestation of me being on the right side while my oponents are on the wrong one.

Then why is everyone is using you as their chew toy, but you are just too stupid to see it?

To quote George Orwell, "Sanity is not statistical."

If you are right, why is it that you had to conceed something in this very post?

That the Na'vi used radios when their chosen one told them to for the sole and express purpose of facilitating battlefield communications in the effort to kill all humans? Yeah, that was a real blow to my argument alright.

If you are right, why is it that you cannot back up some claims from several pages back, like you know the Earth energy crisis bullshit? Your level of delusion is quite amusing.

We covered the energy crisis several pages ago.

You seem to have missed the whole scene where Selfridge was explaining the point of Jake's mission. Both in your original viewing of the film and in this thread where I quoted his dialogue.

You seem to have missed the part where you have to justify HOW Jake is at fault? You know, how it ties up to what right RDA had to force the Na'vi from their home in the first place. Because if they had the right, then one might be able to blame Jake for not convincing the Na'vi to leave. But if they did not, then the blames falls squarely onto them.

You don't see the distinction between two separate moral actors?

You don't want to get into the subject of consent with me.

Why? Are you going to embarrass yourself further?

You don't want to get into the subject. Last warning. After this, I'm just going to ignore further inquiries along this line.

I simply have no expectation that any modern government would put up with this shit given the importance of the mining operation.

An importance which you have not demonstrated despite repeated calls to back up your earth energy crisis hypothesis bullshit.

Yeah, you've clearly been reading anything I've written in this thread.

This, of course, sounds incredibly stupid. Parachuting something so huge, heavy and complex from orbit is asking for disaster.

They've mastered interstellar travel, I think they can handle it.

However I don't really buy the idea that the excavators are being brought piece by piece from Earth. I mean there's at least four of them and they are so big it's ridiculous. If they were only the size of the Bagger 288 it would take the entire ISV fleet working together three round trips to transport one, devoting all their cargo mass to just that. The HEM-OA is freakishly bigger.

I guess we can just take it as one of those oversights of something minor.

Why not do what you did with all my evidence thus far and just declare that it's made up bullshit? After all, that link was to the same wiki I've been referencing.

[Ford Prefect]

Why not do what you did with all my evidence thus far and just declare that it's made up bullshit? After all, that link was to the same wiki I've been referencing.

Because I know your interpretation of the material is through a lens of frothing at the mouth insanity. You keep trying to sell this idea of human civilisation in peril and the Na'vi as totally in the wrong, but I saw the film. You can't tell me how it was. I was there.

We were all there. We saw what happened. We saw what motivates the RDA and it's pure profit. Like all the hardcore pro-RDA people, you stretch and twist material to get a highly tortured result which somehow supports your position, but that position doesn't really exist. It's not that the material is bullshit, it's just that you're full of it.

[Darth Tedious]

Why not do what you did with all my evidence thus far and just declare that it's made up bullshit? After all, that link was to the same wiki I've been referencing.

The wiki entry he linked to was referenced to a source. :V

[Cesario]

Why not do what you did with all my evidence thus far and just declare that it's made up bullshit? After all, that link was to the same wiki I've been referencing.

Because I know your interpretation of the material is through a lens of frothing at the mouth insanity. You keep trying to sell this idea of human civilisation in peril and the Na'vi as totally in the wrong, but I saw the film. You can't tell me how it was. I was there.

We were all there. We saw what happened. We saw what motivates the RDA and it's pure profit. Like all the hardcore pro-RDA people, you stretch and twist material to get a highly tortured result which somehow supports your position, but that position doesn't really exist. It's not that the material is bullshit, it's just that you're full of it.

That's what I thought. There's nothing wrong with the source, just something wrong with me presenting it.

[mr friendly guy]

Dipshit boy is in his own little dreamworld. You quote him directly saying something and he will say you are misquoting him even though you linked it directly.

You do recall what spawned this particular tangent, right? The film presenting things of value about one culture and not the other. English was not presented as a thing of value about the human culture by the film. Try something else

Sorry can we use more objective rather than bullshit criteria. You can set any criteria about what is "presented as a thing of value," I could point out that knowledge of English allowed Tseutsey to translate Jake's orders and speech to inspire them, ultimately leading to victory, but you would still say its not "presented" that way.

But that rebuttal no way addressed my points. You made a bullshit statement, and then used further bullshit to justify it. Just saying nah nah nah doesn't count.

You do realize that what I was correcting was a symantic problem in your posts that was reversing the meaning, right? That I corrected while telling you that you needed to read more carefully? And you think that's an example of me being dishonest with you?

Yep, the guy who says English has no value in and of itself and still tries to weasel his way out of that one.

Wait, you thought "we'll use the demons' tools to destroy them" was an endorcement of an element of value in human culture? That's... I don't even...

More like two way radios have useful military applications. But thanks for the strawman. But I am sure you will find the film the Na'vi going, hey lets these demon tools to destroy the demons right. Just like how in the film you found a mythical energy crisis of such severity.

More like when you don't read the quotes and just pretend they say what you wanted them to say. It's honestly strange that you aren't just writing the quotes yourself if you're going to lie about their contents while presenting them.

I guess thats why I PUT A LINK to your quote so anyone who disbelieves me can click on it and see where you wrote it. But then you believe RDA are the good guys, humans will run out of food so seriously, whats one more delusion.

Actually, yeah. Have you ever tried it?

Its entertaining demolishing your arguments if thats what you mean. Your statement about English is not useful in and of itself provided me with a good laugh. Haven't seen something that funny since a Fundie almost discovered the sun.

Language in general has value. English in particular is just the arbitrary one we happen to be using. If we spoke Na'vi, we wouldn't need English to do this stuff, now would we?

Now I know you are being dishonest. This point was addressed several times by different posters. You would need English if you need to communicate with someone who speaks it but doesn't speak Na'vi very well. Thats why say China wants to educate its students to speak English as a second language. Thats why even under your own critieria (ie English is only useful when communicating with humans) you still fail, because the Na'vi used English to communicate with humans. Numerous examples where given before and I give another one here. To translate Jake's orders.

But we know you are going to shift the goalposts again. You are going to say when you said x, you really meant y, and people are really misquoting you. Oh, poor baby.

I had arguments about the non-moral reasons to dislike the Na'vi? And here I thought I had matters of opinion stated soely to inform others of my position. Apparently I've been assembling arguments about them without even knowing it.

According to your own posts, you do

Idiot, my dislike of the Na'vi covers many levels, not all of them moral ones relevent to the discussion.

Your poisoning the well tactics aren't fooling anyone. The fact that you are too stupid to see the rhetorical trick is not my problem, because lots of people say stupid things without realising it.

But hey, I guess I still misquote you even with the link. Yep, keep the delusion going.

They gave Jake three months to bring them something. Jake brought them nothing except the assessment that negotiation was impossible. What was he going to do with infinite time that wasn't already accomplished in those three months?

Hmm, let me think about this. If RDA were interested in negotiating in good faith, they could have forked out the cash and gotten someone else to do it. Oh, and put someone else who isn't an idiot like Selfridge in charge.

So you're calling me stupid for not making shit up to fill in your inadequite scenario? Yeah, that sounds about right for you.

No I am calling you stupid because you didn't realise that when people vote on a treaty negotiations have aleady been done. But lets play along.

Even if the Na'vi adopted aspects of human culture which you say are useful and they negotiate for one year with RDA, but no one will accept the other sides best offer. You will still say RDA is right to attack home tree. You will most probably use some bullshit like the Na'vi didn't compromise (because only they had to do so, and RDA didn't have to). You will take some swipe at the Na'vi culture in a poisoning the well tactic at the same time saying its really irrelevant to the moral part of the equation, but you just had to say it. At the end of the day you will still say RDA is in the right. Ergo all these talk about luddism, not negotiating, not taking aspects of human culture, English being not useful in and of itself is just a cover, a red herring. Your whole point is might makes right but your inner chicken little prevents you outright saying it, so you will try finding some other bullshit excuse.

Of course you will try to nitpick the scenario to death first. But no matter how much you nitpick, I can simply alter the scenario to "clarify" it to an obfuscating retard like yourself, because the crux of the argument is still intact. A point everyone else but you would understand.

That the Na'vi used radios when their chosen one told them to for the sole and express purpose of facilitating battlefield communications in the effort to kill all humans? Yeah, that was a real blow to my argument alright.

Then why did you concede if it wasn't a "real blow." Just not very bright are we? Oh I forgot, you have the magical ability to change the goalposts. When the own criteria you state falls, you just change it again.

We covered the energy crisis several pages ago.

Yep, and it is still bullshit now as it is then.

You don't see the distinction between two separate moral actors?

Since you see the distinction, why are you blaming Jake ONLY and not RDA? More flip flopping by yourself I see.

You don't want to get into the subject. Last warning. After this, I'm just going to ignore further inquiries along this line.

Oh, poor baby. Did I hurt your feelings? Oh noessss, you warned me. Scary stuff there. I would be shivering in my boots but I just can't stop ROFL to start.

You know when I did that "when a woman says no, she really means yes" jibe, I was referring to how you can't tell what is there even if its stated right in front of your eyes. I never imagined that you really do have problems ahem, of that nature. What, you mean you can't really tell the difference between the terms yes and no. Imagine that.

Yeah, you've clearly been reading anything I've written in this thread

Cesario's method of debating an opponent.

Opponent : Cesario says this, how stupid.

Cesario : No I didn't.

Opponent : Yeah you did. See I will put a link showing where you said it, so anyone can check and see I am lying.

Cesario : I still didn't say it. You are misquoting me.

Opponent : How can I? I put a link. Here it is again. It says exactly what I accuse you of.

Cesario : Have you been reading anything I wrote?

[PeZook]

Is it stupid because you think they didn't use enough to brake the descent and it hits the ground hard, or because they didn't use the right chutes to guide its descent?

If they used a BALLUTE SYSTEM, it seems they may have a fairly good control of their descent.

It's more the part about assembing it in orbit and dropping it whole.

I mean, that freakin' thing might very well weight 10 000 tons or more, and its center of balance is...really awkwardly placed. It can easily come apart, tumble or do a thousand other things during re-entry, will need a gigantic parachute and furthermore...the mining site is less than two kilometres from the base, so you better be reaaaaaaaaaly precise during your drop or you damage/wipe out your base of operations

And even if you can do all that no problem, you will still have to move it in place and deploy it anyways (it's not like it will ride down down with that huge excavator arm extended...).

So if they brought it from Earth, it makes more sense to drop it in pieces if at all. Though the do have shuttles, and can make huge building-sized dozers on-site just fine, so I don't see why they'd need to bring the major parts of the excavators, of all things, on their ships.

Plus of course the fact that in order to ship four 10 000 tonne excavators they'd need to occupy their entire ISV fleet for decades (their entire fleet can just about ship half of a single such load in one round trip).

And those RDA excavators...are probably way, way bigger than 10 000 tonnes

EDIT:

Oh, and

When dropping from orbit, which stage of the descent leads to the most diversion?

Actually the errors can easily accumulate, especially when you lack a tracking network to continually correct the trajectory.

The most errors, though, acrrue when going through the atmosphere, and more precisely in the lower parts. In the halcyon days of the space program, recovery ships often had the capsule land outside visual range due random stuff like wind blowing the parachutes off-course.

When you navigate by dead reckoning (without ground-side tracking radars to tell you what your position is in real time), you can add positioning errors in orbit to that. The Eagle was off target by three miles because of residual air pressure in the connecting tunnel between it and the CSM screwing up positioning calculations of the onboard computer

Of course the RDA did have some air traffic control capability, so it wouldn't be as bad, but the atmosphere is denser, so...

[Stark]

Maybe their lack of planetside infrastructure makes assembly difficult? I wouldn't want to assemble 10,000t of something in a jungle under attack by mutants and then realise some mud got in somewhere and it doesn't work.

If they're prepared to wait a few weeks while it trundles to where it is supposed to go, it might keep all their assembly in space where it's considered safer. But y'know, wiki based on EU = maybe not so good.

[Simon_Jester]

Yeah, the wiki doesn't make a lot of sense in this case- you'd think they'd constructing gigantic mine excavators before setting up the groundside infrastructure to make, say, the vehicles to carry the ore? Or the buildings to house the workforce, or the fortifications (huge walls and such) to keep out Pandoran wildlife?

I would think that the giant mine excavators would be one of the last things to get built, and that if there's supposed to be groundside industry on Pandora, the RDA would move Heaven and Earth to get it up and running first, because that saves them thousands of tons of starship cargo capacity.

Actually the errors can easily accumulate, especially when you lack a tracking network to continually correct the trajectory.

If I were coming to a strange planet from another star, the first thing I'd do would be to set up TDRS and GPS networks so my landers didn't get lost.

[PeZook]

Maybe their lack of planetside infrastructure makes assembly difficult? I wouldn't want to assemble 10,000t of something in a jungle under attack by mutants and then realise some mud got in somewhere and it doesn't work.

Well, you'd have to do some major assembly on-site anyways, and the mining site is less than two kilometres away from the base (if we go by what shuttle pilots say in the beginning), so it's not going to be that bad - just put it together (more or less) inside the perimeter fence, have the building-sized dozers plow a road and send the beastie on its way. It will get there in a week or so

Now, moving those things to the second site that the movie was all about, that's gonna be something

If they're prepared to wait a few weeks while it trundles to where it is supposed to go, it might keep all their assembly in space where it's considered safer. But y'know, wiki based on EU = maybe not so good.

Yeah, but the biggest obstacle to moving it from Earth is the massive weight vs. smallish cargo capacity of the ships. I suppose you could build it on-site, loft the pieces into orbit using shuttles, assemble it there and then dump it back down. It makes little sense but would make for truly awesome visuals

If I were coming to a strange planet from another star, the first thing I'd do would be to set up TDRS and GPS networks so my landers didn't get lost.

That much is true

Though you can get away with surprisingly little guidance if you can do powered descents/ascents (like the Valkyries do: it's no big deal if they come ten miles short, they'll just fly the rest of the way using radio beacons/air control radar/visual cues). The problem with dumping the excavator from orbit is that the descent isn't going to have a lot of options in terms of adjustments it could make on the way down.

[Ford Prefect]

I mean, that freakin' thing might very well weight 10 000 tons or more

Ten thousand? More like one hundred thousand. The very real Bagger 288 is 13,000, and the HEM-OA could crush the Bagger 288 with its huge spinning bucket thing.

[Shroom Man 777]

Maybe they used different, and much larger, shuttle craft and/or mother spaceships during the initial resource and cargo-intensive phases of setting up the Pandora bases, and when the high-complexity megamachineries that can't be replicated on-site were already set up along with the on-site fabrication machines, the following space journeys involved much smaller shuttle crafts and mother spaceships.

Like how a giant facility might require initial shipments of craps by a SPRUCE MOOSE antonovski giant aeroplane, but after all the essentials are there, the successive and less-huge shipments are done by C-130s or something.

[PeZook]

If they had spaceships that are humongously heuger in cargo capacity than the Venture Star, they'd keep using them for the dineros to ship the maximum amount of unobtainium home.

[Simon_Jester]

Maybe they used different, and much larger, shuttle craft and/or mother spaceships during the initial resource and cargo-intensive phases of setting up the Pandora bases, and when the high-complexity megamachineries that can't be replicated on-site were already set up along with the on-site fabrication machines, the following space journeys involved much smaller shuttle crafts and mother spaceships.

Like how a giant facility might require initial shipments of craps by a SPRUCE MOOSE antonovski giant aeroplane, but after all the essentials are there, the successive and less-huge shipments are done by C-130s or something.

The problem here is expense. If flying out fuel to a giant facility in a SPRUCE MOOSE is too expensive because air freight costs a bazillion dollars a kilo, it may actually be cheaper to ship out a nuclear reactor once and then never refuel it again.

Likewise, flying out a fifty thousand ton STARMOOSE is ten times more expensive than flying out a five thousand ton Venture Starantelope, and if you build the ships once and never use them again, you waste a big investment. So if there is any way for RDA to get their heavy equipment running by manufacturing it around Alpha Centauri, they'd be fools not to do it that way. And we know they got plenty of other heavy equipment running by making it there, so it surprises me if they did not do the same thing with the giant mine crawlers.

[MKSheppard]

What the fuck is all this talk of an energy crisis? Does Douchebaggio not read the fucking news? Earth is in an "energy crisis" right now, and it's probably going to be in an "energy crisis" forever, because we're always trying to use more than we can cheaply acquire. We are always in a state of not having a guaranteed limitless comfortable supply of cheap energy, and worrying about where we'll get it from in future.

Not really.

Consider.

In Ava-Terrier; apparently the USA, Brazil etc still exist (if the Avaterrier wiki is accurate about the extended opening scene on earth).

Yet apparently we have an advanced enough space infrastructure to build not just one, but ten ISV Venture Star type ships (If the wiki is believed to be accurate) for a nebulously defined private corporation.

Not just only that; but to generate enough antimatter to fuel them; which is very very energy intensive to produce.

If Humanity has that level of space infrastructure, then...

Well....



The original 1978 NASA study had it around 90,000~ metric tons to generate 5 GWe, but by the 2000s, NASA had gotten it down to 3,000 metric tons to generate between 1 and 10 GWe.

Let's not get into resource extraction.

If the economics work out somehow to send antimatter ships on ten year roundtrips to SHROOMDORA; which is 276,380~ AU from earth; then the economics work out even better to send antimatter ships on much much shorter trips to the Asteroid belt, which is 3 AU from earth.

Not incidentally, all that advanced technology developed to support multi-year voyages, like hydroponic farms and suchlike can be easily spiraled into industrial food production.

Not to mention that earth's population will stabilize out at around 9.2~ billion and start dropping by 2080, according to the UN Medium projection, which is borne out by dropping fertility rates around the world, like in Brazil -- there's been a Washington Post series on this, the changes happening in Brazil when they go from 'welp grandmother had nine kids to her granddaughter Jenny having just 2 kids (or less)'.

The universe of Ava-tarrier looks sexy when you first see it, but doesn't make sense when you step back and think about it.

It would have made more sense if Pandora was selected to be the site of humanity's first extrasolar colony -- to provide a backup for the human race in case of an unforeseen catastrophe like a gamma ray burst sterilizing Sol, rather than a resource colony extracting space beaver pelts.

As part of the whole "Second Chance" thing, we do like the docu-drama ALIENS and construct giant fusion based atmosphere processors to terraform Pandora's atmosphere....and we discover the Na'vi exist only after we've brought five of them online and changed the atmo composition 0.05% or some random number.

Whoops.