Ford Prefect wrote:Did you seriously have to break my post down almost sentence by sentence? It's totally unnecessary. I'm going to collate all your related comments, because you only have a couple of points.
Okay, that was a little overboard. Sorry.
Don't try to act all incredulous because I think you're full of shit. Jet Alone is not a robot with a nuclear reactor strapped to it, it's a robot built from the ground up to house a nuclear reactor. There's a significant difference, and you can see how much of its mass is taken up by the nuclear reactor, and it's a lot. It's practically a fifth of an Evangelion's volume.
Hence why I was proposing nuclear batteries earlier. But since I'm not quite sure of how much juce you can get out of one of those either, I'll concede that point.
Christ, you are retarded. Yes, they have satillites, and yes, they have the ability to launch N2 weapons into space. This is not quite the same thing as trivially constructing a nuclear power station in orbit which can beam the power down to Tokyo 3 all the time.
Its no less trivial than constructing something like the Geo Front, so why the fuck not? Because you say so?
You're just totally dismissing the difficulty involved in such a project, given that it would at least be as difficult as constructing the International Space Station and would definitely be much more difficult. Think about this for a moment: the ISS has cost over a hundred billion dollars (and this hypothetical space power station is going to cost as least as much), while a supercarrier costs only eight billion. You could more or less build twelve nuclear power plants capable of running an Evangelion for the price of one orbital power station. Which do you think is a better option for an emplaced defensive position? This is a rhetorical question, because the answer is obviously the ones built on earth: not only will it be cheaper, it will simply be easier to do. You can't just handwave all the difficulties associated with a large scale construction project in space, or with maintenence of such an orbital power plant. What if it does break down? You can't just fix that overnight, nor can just switch on your other orbital power plant have it take up the slack, because you won't have another one. You can't fix a terrestrial power plant overnight either, but it's going to be a whole lot easier regardless.
We're also using a sub optimal system of transporting material into space to build the ISS, the Space Shuttle. There have been multiple threads in SLAM about how we could do better even using the technology we have. I brought up the N^2 missiles because the US is currently looking into launching satellites using ballistic missiles, just one example of how we can improve our space capabilities with relative ease. As for maintenance and repair: think about the sheer level of automation Tokyo 3 demonstrates regularly. Now tell me, what else can you do with that kind of automation? You act as if NERV would necessarily go about this exactly like we would in reality without considering the differences in our technological capabilities.
Yes, there's no denying that a great deal of money went into constructing Tokyo 3, but Tokyo 3 isn't just umbilical cables you stupid fuck. It's an entire defensive position, replete with a huge number of emplaced weapons and support equipment for Evangelion operations, such as the deployable armour partitions which have been vital to Eva operations (most notably the Isfrael battle). Building this orbital power station isn't going to make Tokyo 3 magically a fraction of the cost, because the power plants beneath the city are only a fraction of everything Tokyo 3 is. As Misato says, it's a city designed to recieve then Angels and then kill them.
Most of those weapons were completely useless against the AT field toting Angels, something which Gendo was completely not surprised at. Do you think Tokyo 3 was really the best way to go about defending the Earth? I don't. It was an expensive clusterfuck all around. It would have made far more sense to just move Adam someplace
already fortified such as Cheyenne mountain, away from the coast, and force the angels to slog through North America, which I presume is still far less densely populated in this setting than Japan. I'm sure you can see how orbital bombardment and increased mobility would become much more of an advantage for an Eva in this kind of setup. But of course, the plot demanded that the story take place in Tokyo because they were deconstructing this that and the other giant robot cliche`s.
Also, just because some group wants to have a solar power plant in orbit by 2020 (which, hilariously, is six years after the events of NGE and is in the real world where the apocalypse hasn't wiped out a third of the world's population) doesn't mean that there will actually be an orbital solar power plant by 2020.
There is a reason for that, and its the same reason I think most space projects haven't gotten off the ground: There's No Demand for it in Real Life.
Of course I think that. How could she, the director of the project with security clearence second only to that of Gendou and Fuyutski, not? That's a ridiculous proposition, because it suggests that Ritsuko has literally no idea of the combined cost of her own project. Citing the fact that Misato doesn't give a shit is alsosilly, because it's completely meaningless. Of course Misato doesn't care, it's Misato. Comparitively, Ritsuko does care, and she gets extremely defensive about it; if the Jet Alone guy was bullshitting, why didn't she just say 'that's bullshit, dude'? I'm pretty sure she even tries to justify the cost.
You realise that the term 'umbilical cable' wasn't invented by Neon Genesis Evangelion, right? I've heard the term used for both space suits and diving gear.
Fair enough.
P.S. I just wanted to say, since it seems to have struck a nerve with you, when I insulted the pointless symbolism that's present in NGE, I didn't do that just to be a common hater or to insult Anno. I wouldn't know as much about this show as I do if I didn't really enjoy it, but that doesn't mean I'm about to overlook its flaws or keep my mouth shut about things that I don't think make sense about it.
