Avatar review thread

[Serafina]

Well, it is a room-temperatur superconductor.

According to a spuriously canon website that features Dr Lovecraft the human experimentor who made avatars by developing psychic machineries.

I say it's space crack until I see some official statement canonising that as more than a promotional tool.

Um...it IS an explanation for all those floating rocks etc., so there is at least some evidence for it.

But if you prefer space-crack...

[NecronLord]

I am really amused that people still love justifying genocide still. Way to go guys.

Relocation isn't Genocide. I don't see anybody saying we should exterminate them.

I think you'll find that there are people who say that.

As for relocation being genocide, depends if you believe the UN (you know, the supreme political authority on our planet, no matter how inept it is) or not. They tend to say ethnic cleansing is a form of genocide. At the very best, it's still a serious warcrime.

[NecronLord]

Well, it is a room-temperatur superconductor.

According to a spuriously canon website that features Dr Lovecraft the human experimentor who made avatars by developing psychic machineries.

I say it's space crack until I see some official statement canonising that as more than a promotional tool.

Um...it IS an explanation for all those floating rocks etc., so there is at least some evidence for it.

But if you prefer space-crack...

It's an explanation, though one that leaves many unanswered questions; how the fuck do those things stay up without being eroded, how the hell do they have constant waterfalls coming off them, etc, etc.

[Shroom Man 777]

Assuming Earth pulls a miracle out of its ass in this hypothetical dependency situation and everybody instantly agrees to stop using Unobtanium in future products, it's still going to take years to wean off it, to recover from companies going out of business because of it, economic fallout etc. People don't work that way of course.

The other thing we've got to consider is whether Pandora, specifically, was vital to the continuation of Earth's socio-cultural wellbeing. Is it just a situation where they were getting more, better, faster from Pandora, or was it like the only place they were getting reasonable quantities of it?

To answer your question more directly, going Cold-Turkey on a super-commodity like this isn't feasible, and if they suddenly stop getting shipments from their most lucrative mine there will be serious repercussions. Whether it's justifiable or not can be determined by evaluating how many Na'Vi lives would be lost by a forced relocation, and compare this with the number of lives lost, ruined etc on Earth by the fallout of this. We can only estimate obviously, but if there's a clear advantage to doing it, it should become apparently. There are added complications too, like "is one Na'Vi life equal in value to one Human life?"

Judging by the fact that it takes these ships six years to transit from Earth to Pandora, and that there's only one TINY mining outpost there, do you honestly see the RDA's operations on Pandora as being vital to providing for the entire planet Earth's all-pervasive super-addiction to some stupid rock that gets transported only in TINY amounts?

It's a determining the lesser evil situation. Economic collapses aren't cushy.

If an "economic collapse" is like the economic "crisis" today where America's expereincing "hardships" but its standards of living are still lightyears ahead of the Third World and it's populace is still capable of living in relative comfort compared to other people, then this greater-evil lesser-evil bullshit is just that - bullshit.

No one's even expounded on the extent of the socioeconomic sideffects on Earth, yet even without that people are jumping at the notion of doing harm to helpless little people just for the "greater good". My ass. People bitch about computating turbolaser yields and contrasting them to the phaser or particle ray shield dissipation rate and calculate thermal values by screencapping ESB asteroids. But talk about displacing some natives in acts of ethnic cleansing or genocide or orbital bombardment, and people will just go for it without even detailing exactly WHY it's necessary at all aside from vague "oooh economic recession the fundamentals of our economy are strong/weak" - because that's what it all is, a bullshit rationalization to justify these shit-eating actions.

I've seen other justifications too. Oooh Avatar was shit because it didn't use XYZ lame piece of shit military hardware like the Su-24 Flaccid. Oooh Avatar was shit because the Na'vi are violent barbarians (despite the fact that the HUMANS were the ones who committed all the violent shit in the movie). Oooh blah blah this. Oooh blah blah that. Even before the movie was release, people were already talking about orbital bombardment in this thread. There was even that shit-eater who felt like a Big Man because he told his women friends about how he would've massacred the Na'vi and justified it, and he felt sooooo PROUD because his friends were shocked that he was a war whoring weiner. He probably felt proud because he thought that by saying that kind of atrocious shit, people will think his dick was big - like, his dick was actually not a dick but one of those giant machineguns those Avatar mecha used, and that his sperm-bullets could kill Avatar space dinosaurs.

A private individual can own an airplane with a planetkiller drive jet engine. If you use maths, a planetkiller drive jet engine probably has more raw energy than a mecha/helicopter/Quarritch machine gun. I mean, geeze, you could fly a jet airplane into the Home Tree Trade Center and killfuck three thousands of Na'vi or something. But today, people CAN own and operate jet aircraft but are NOT allowed access to assault rifles.

Are you implying that private companies don't have access to assault rifles?

You're familiar with PMC's aren't you? Various private security firms probably do, as well.

I am implying that just because an individual (or a corporation) can own a theoretically very destructive mode of transportation DOESN'T mean they will also be granted access to strategic weaponry or other forms of armaments.

You said:

It'd be like letting private citizens own knives, rocket launchers and nuclear weapons but forbidding them from owning handguns.

Sarevokerritch said:

In avatar earth private companies are allowed to own planetkiller star drives. But god forbid they bring a 20th tech level weapon with them. Unleashing the energy of a minitature death star is safe and kosher but SU 25 Frogfoots are extremely dangerous in private hands and too expensive compared to stablized walkers and orbital shuttles

Just because RDA has access to awesome space ship that can theoretically do terrible damage to a planet =/= RDA can have access to other weapons systems

Just because private citizen has access to awesome jet plane that can theoretically do terrible damage to American skyscrapers =/= private citizen has access to other weapons systems

They probably have Space-Obama in power, too, and his space-healthcare reforms were destroyed by additions and compromises made by space-special interest groups and space-Republicans. You can tell because the government clearly isn't footing the bill for Jake's space-surgery to repair his spine.

Also, the obvious reason why you wouldn't throw an improvised RKV at them (aside the ethical ones) would be that it would totally ruin your mining site and kill all your crew on the ground.

Maybe it was after the clusterfuck on Pandora that saw the RDA-friendly Space Republicans and the Space Shrub voted out of office - and with an election that used Diebold machines that transformed into heroic robots in disguise that're more than meets the eye, Space Obama ended up getting elected for a third term.

Aha. AFTER the movie, unlike what Blayne and whoever presupposed, instead of becoming murdering fucks Space America ends up becoming Space Liberal with the friendly new administration of Space Obama! When the incident on Pandora shows what kind of true fuckers the RDA and the Space Republicans are, they end up getting voted out of the space airlocks and a new era where humanity is NOT a bunch of swollen dicks (the kind with rubber bands wrapped around them so that the blood stays in the cock and keeps it engorged and erect even after it turns blue) ensues.

Well they brought a whole bunch of military equipment with them that they shouldn't have if somebody sane was planning a mining operation (armed gunships, mechs with massive machine guns, etc), and it's not implausible for them to have some kind of blue-print database on hand. I ain't sayin' that they necessarily did, but if they'd wanted to build them they could have requested the schematics, or brought them with them when they came. As I said before, the most likely reason is that they never fathomed that they would ever need such a thing. By all rights, helicopter gunships and mechs should have been enough to slaughter the Na'Vi, human turncoats or no. I can't fault them for not realizing that they were the villains in a dances with wolves remake.

Yeah, pretty much. But I think the armed gunships and mechs with massive machine guns count as pretty much "light" military equipment, like the MRAPs and whatnot modern day PMCs are equipped with, and that other heavier stuff (like Sukhoi Frogfaces) would've been contraindicated as being too much. Massive machine guns work since, well, they're dealing with bigass space dinosaurs. It's like an elephant gun!

[Xon]

As for relocation being genocide, depends if you believe the UN (you know, the supreme political authority on our planet, no matter how inept it is) or not. They tend to say ethnic cleansing is a form of genocide. At the very best, it's still a serious warcrime.

The UN is a somewhat effective political forum. Not a political authority by any strech of the imagination.

Also, by the UN's version of genocide is little more than large scale killing of some very narrowly definied criteria which isn't even internally consistant.

[NecronLord]

I think you'll find its treaties are considered binding international law. It's a weak authority that's flouted, but it is still authority. If you were in this country you'd be treated to news dominated by an inquest partly about whether or not Blair, head of government of a sovereign nation, was acting illegally by defying the United Nations. The prevailing opinion among the legal experts is yes.

[Broomstick]

I am really amused that people still love justifying genocide still. Way to go guys.

Relocation isn't Genocide. I don't see anybody saying we should exterminate them.

It can be, especially if you relocate non-technological people to a location where they have little or no resources and no idea how to cope with the local environment.

Even if, technically, it's not genocide fatality rates during relocations can be significant. In the US, the Trail of Tears relocations had fatality rates of around 25%. That's just from the relocaton itself, more deaths occured afterward at the new site due to weakened people and lack of shelter. It's still reprehensible.

You mean room-temperature superconductors right? I could have sworn that superconductive materials already existed, but only at near-absolute-zero temperatures.

It's a two part statement, the first part explaining that they are highly desirable. The second part explaining what can be done with them if you have above room temperature, non-toxic superconductors which are trivial to handle.

Understanding superconductors is hard. RL superconductors breakdown horribly if too much current is pumped through them, they aren't even ductile and are highly brittle, they are in general highly toxic and require extremely volatile cooling to even work. RL superconductors are little more than than research toys, and other very very expensive ventures.

Oh really? You've never heard of medical Magnetic Resonance Imaging or MRI? Most of them use helium-cooled superconducting materials for magnets. Sure they're expensive in a sense, but much cheaper than, say, exploratory surgery which they have largely made obsolete.

[PeZook]

Something like unobtainium would literially be used in almost every roll you can think of using copper in if they had enough of the stuff.

It takes 26,5 years for the entire RDA fleet to run one supply cycle per ship, delivering 4200 tonnes of unobtainium to Earth. Even if they started running, at full capacity, in 2010 and were kept running at full capacit and with no maintenance downtime since then, they'd be able to conduct 5,5 full cycles, or deliver a mere 22,8 thousand tonnes of unobtainium.

How are you going to make humanity dependent on this resource with such meagre quantities available? Even if unobtainium is only half the density of copper, you'd only have enough after 140 years to rewire...the Polish 400kV power transfer magistral

Even if the magical maglev trains stop working the minute you lose unobtainium supplies, the power transfer networks (which means normal trains, too) will keep working just fine, because there is simply no way they can get enough unobtainium to rewire the entire electrical grid. The only thing that will happen is that workers won't be able to commute thousands of miles to work - hardly the massive Malthusian collapse people keep mentioning for no reason whatsoever.

[Shroom Man 777]

It can be, especially if you relocate non-technological people to a location where they have little or no resources and no idea how to cope with the local environment.

Even if, technically, it's not genocide fatality rates during relocations can be significant. In the US, the Trail of Tears relocations had fatality rates of around 25%. That's just from the relocaton itself, more deaths occured afterward at the new site due to weakened people and lack of shelter. It's still reprehensible

I mean, shit, the RDA already DID relocate the Na'vi when they exploderized the fuck out of the Home Tree. And when they moved into the Tree of Souls, shit, the Tree of Souls isn't the Home Tree. Home Tree's probably got their food stores, it's got their beds, it's got their shelter, it's got their toilets and supplies and everything. Now, that's gone. When the RDA helicopters came and strafed the Home Tree, the Na'vi didn't even have a chance to properly evacuate with their supplies. Hell no, all the RDA did was blow the fuck out of it, and the Na'vi didn't even have any chance to get food or clothing or medicine to take with them when they went on the run.

Christ, and after that they had to walk through the fucking jungle that's full of xenopanthers and shit, without food, without clothing, nothing but the shit they had on their backs - with probably a whole bunch of them suffering from shrapnel injury (like that that killed their fucking chieftain) - into the inhospitable fucking jungle. How many shitloads of them fucking died there? Jesus.

Of course, the bullshit assholes will just go "LESSER EVIL PRECIOUS COMMODITIES LOL SU-24 FROGFUCKERRRRS!!! FTW REALISTIC!!11"

I swear. Give the RDA fucking stahlhelms and swastikas, and give the Na'vi yid lids and kippahs and torahs (and have them teach Jake the Torah instead of the Eywa) and these people would probably shut their fucking yaps.

Even if the magical maglev trains stop working the minute you lose unobtainium supplies, the power transfer networks (which means normal trains, too) will keep working just fine, because there is simply no way they can get enough unobtainium to rewire the entire electrical grid. The only thing that will happen is that workers won't be able to commute thousands of miles to work - hardly the massive Malthusian collapse people keep mentioning for no reason whatsoever.

It's because it's a big fat load of fuck used to justify the atrocities these people jerk off to. If people are forced to rely on copper instead of unobtanium, if people are forced to use horse-drawn carts or fucking steam powered trains, people can still fucking survive and live relatively well WITHOUT resorting to atrocities.

How the HELL does fancy maglevs and fancy spaceships translate to vital society bullshit? Those are fucking non-essential commodities! Humanity, civilization, doesn't need bullshit fast trains or bullshit space ships to survive and even without unobtanium they already BUILT spaceships WITHOUT unobtanium - unless the original humans who went to Pandora used a fucking Stargate or something.

[PeZook]

It can be, especially if you relocate non-technological people to a location where they have little or no resources and no idea how to cope with the local environment.

Or when the natives don't take your abuse sitting down and decide to go and fight you, and most of their adults are warriors, meaning that the moment you try to move them, you will have to kill most of their adults in the fighting sooner or later.

[Shroom Man 777]

Oh no, PeZook. It is all their fault. This is the lesser evil and the RDA were stupid because they didn't have Shroom-24 Frogfaces armed with Nikeheraculezeus and used simple space helicopters instead. Let us cheer the onset of ruthless genocidal warmongers and their annihilation of weak defenseless racial minorities. I always rooted for the Nazis in all those WW2 movies and I think it was a lesser evil when the Native Americans ended up getting carted off to their reservations or get mailed smallpox blankets that afflicted them with horrific diseases and killed scores of men, women and children. Didn't you hear that napalm sticks to kids? They should've used Agent Orange on the Eywa flora too, because all those furries will probably not be so hot on the Na'vi once their children started looking like those chemically deformed Vietnamese babies who were gassed for the lesser evil also.

Oh no don't call me a Nazi. My advocacy of atrocities is totally NOT equivalent to other historical acts of immorality and depravity stop invoking Godwin's Law you Zionists! I am just being realistic.

[Xon]

Oh really? You've never heard of medical Magnetic Resonance Imaging or MRI? Most of them use helium-cooled superconducting materials for magnets. Sure they're expensive in a sense, but much cheaper than, say, exploratory surgery which they have largely made obsolete.

Those are very expensive machines, both in the initial construction and the required safety procedures to keep them running properly. It is because they provide such accurate information that the expense is worth it. One important aspect which has pushed the per patient cost down is the volume of people you can image through it is largely constrainted by personal avaliable to interprete the data and cooling requirements and the nuclear material.

An MRI built using room-temperature super-conductors would have vastly higher efficiencies because it can generate strong magnetic fields without boiling it's cooling off, as well as being able to run more often due to not requiring changing of the expensive dangerous cooling.

[Shroom Man 777]

Oh, I forgot. The Tree of Souls that Quarritch wanted to bomb so that he could carve a hole in their racial memory was also the place where the Na'vi refugees - including the women and children - were taking shelter in. But that's also part of the lesser evil, right?

[Xon]

How the HELL does fancy maglevs and fancy spaceships translate to vital society bullshit? Those are fucking non-essential commodities!

I don't think you grasp how many people a properly designed maglev system can move per day(but with the loonies in charge in Avatar-verse, it probably isn't well designed).

There was an awesome discusion on arstechnica which using some highly conservative figures calced a maglev system capable of moving 1-2 million people per day in continental North America. Most of the discusion was on the utter lack of political will, the right-of-way issues and that the whole thing would cost into the tens of trillions to actually build.

Never mind using such a system for light cargo.

For a society able to build interstellar ships with pay-offs in the decades, that shouldn't be much of an issue politics wide.

Humanity, civilization, doesn't need bullshit fast trains or bullshit space ships to survive and even without unobtanium they already BUILT spaceships WITHOUT unobtanium - unless the original humans who went to Pandora used a fucking Stargate or something.

We have no idea how fast thier spaceships not using unobtanium actually went or how much they had to sacrifice in cargo capacity to even work.

[Xon]

Oh, I forgot. The Tree of Souls that Quarritch wanted to bomb so that he could carve a hole in their racial memory was also the place where the Na'vi refugees - including the women and children - were taking shelter in. But that's also part of the lesser evil, right?

Quarritch had obviously accumulated brain damage from exposure to Pandora's atmosphere. Apparently Pandora has hydrogen sulfide in it's atmosphere which does causes accumulative brain damage!

[PeZook]

There was an awesome discusion on arstechnica which using some highly conservative figures calced a maglev system capable of moving 1-2 million people per day in continental North America. Most of the discusion was on the utter lack of political will, the right-of-way issues and that the whole thing would cost into the tens of trillions to actually build.

Polish state railways were able to move 360 million passengers in the year 2000, and they're running dilapidated rolling stock on rusting infrastructure.

Color me unimpressed.

[Xon]

Color me unimpressed.

Apparently you didn't read the link as I failed when copying the numbers out.

the transport capacity is roughly 600 people per second, 2.1 million people per hour.

Even at 1 million per hour, that comes out to 8765 million per year. Or more than the entire world population today.

[Broomstick]

Oh really? You've never heard of medical Magnetic Resonance Imaging or MRI? Most of them use helium-cooled superconducting materials for magnets. Sure they're expensive in a sense, but much cheaper than, say, exploratory surgery which they have largely made obsolete.

Those are very expensive machines, both in the initial construction and the required safety procedures to keep them running properly.

Bullshit. Have you looked up the list price for a new passenger jet?

It's about 5 million to purchase, set up, and build a housing for an MRI.

Cost of a new B-737: $51-87, depending on choice of options.

An MRI is an expensive machine. A passenger jet is a very expensive machine. There are even more expensive machines than that. Stop pretending that a device that utilizes super-conducting is some highly exotic, uber-expensive thing. It's not.

It is because they provide such accurate information that the expense is worth it.

An abdominal scan in an MRI is around $3,000-5,000

Exploratory surgery for same (almost unheard of these days) starts at around $30,000

Sorry, there really is a cost savings there in pure dollars, nevermind pain, risk, surgical complications, and recovery time.

That in no way argues against a room temperature super-conductor having advantages, it's just that while an MRI isn't something the average person can afford to purchase it's really not that horrifically expensive. Businesses routinely pay far more than the costs of an MRI for all sorts of things, from assembly lines to buildings.

We actually do have MRI's that don't require super-cooling, in fact, they utilize permanent room-temperature magnets which are surprisingly dangerous because you can't turn them off. Why would you want to turn off an MRI machine's magnet? Look here. It's a lot easier to fix an accident if you can turn off the machine.

[adam_grif]

Judging by the fact that it takes these ships six years to transit from Earth to Pandora, and that there's only one TINY mining outpost there, do you honestly see the RDA's operations on Pandora as being vital to providing for the entire planet Earth's all-pervasive super-addiction to some stupid rock that gets transported only in TINY amounts?

Before I go on, please note that I wasn't trying to argue that it was going to be some humanitarian disaster if we didn't get it. Rather, my arguments were made in the context of the "what if?" scenario, where we were assuming it was as bad as if oil suddenly vanished. This was in turn based on earlier comments made by various people. So don't read into my comments as "well obviously it would be that bad because in the movie we saw _____", but rather "if this were at stake, then these actions should be seriously considered".

But since something interesting might appear out of it, I may as well crunch some numbers and see what comes out. Maybe we can settle this finally, one way or another.

The Venture star was the 9th ship in it's class, all owned by RDA, all dedicated to shipping Unobtanium back from from Pandora. A one way trip takes 14.5 "real years" according to Earth time, but with at least nine ships (possibly more, 9 is the minimum that must exist), that's a ~300 tonne shipment (350 tonne is capacity, it's mentioned that sometimes returning crew members are told to wait till next time so they can cram more of the stuff on. This figure is a guesstimate.) every 2 years or so. Since it's already completed one round trip, that's means that there has been at least 18 shipments (more in reality since the original ships in the class have been hauling since long before Venture Star was completed), yielding ~5400 tonnes of the stuff.

At the 20 mil per kilo value, that puts it at 108 trillion dollars of product over 14.5 years, or ~7.44 trillion / year of product.

2009 GDP for the whole world was ~57 trillion. If someone could adjust for inflation over the ~150 years between now and Avatar that'd be grand. At a guess, I'd say it's a significant portion, but I'm doubtful it would be in striking range of oil in '09 dollars.

If an "economic collapse" is like the economic "crisis" today where America's expereincing "hardships" but its standards of living are still lightyears ahead of the Third World and it's populace is still capable of living in relative comfort compared to other people, then this greater-evil lesser-evil bullshit is just that - bullshit.

Again, these comments are made under the assumption it would be like oil magically vanishing in terms of economic significance, because this line of reasoning from me originated from before it was brought forward that, in fact, we have no evidence to suggest it would be approaching that bad. So, no, far worse than the current economic situation.

No one's even expounded on the extent of the socioeconomic sideffects on Earth, yet even without that people are jumping at the notion of doing harm to helpless little people just for the "greater good". My ass.

Err, if we suddenly went into economic and social lockdown because a cornerstone of society suddenly collapsed, it's a bit worse than you're trying to make it out, and killing a few hundred Na'Vi in the process of moving them somewhere else to prevent that from happening may well end up being the lesser evil there.

As it happens, I've made a preliminary analysis attempt above.

Just because RDA has access to awesome space ship that can theoretically do terrible damage to a planet =/= RDA can have access to other weapons systems

Just because private citizen has access to awesome jet plane that can theoretically do terrible damage to American skyscrapers =/= private citizen has access to other weapons systems

No, I understand perfectly that having access to an antimatter-catalyzed fusion torch doesn't mean that you're allowed to have a bomber or what have you, except that it's more complex than that. First of all, we have no reason to believe they had the weapons banned - it never came up at all in the film or any supplementary materials that the gear the RDA had was restricted in any way by laws. In legal terms, if harm-minimization is the goal, then it's not as plainly- comparable to your analogy as you'd have us believe. Although proportionally it might be roughly correct, in absolute terms a makeshift RKV is completely and totally devastating. Granting someone an air-plane doesn't confer the same level of trust that granting them them a rocket that goes at 0.7 C does.

Likewise, they've already been granted access to helicopter gunships that aren't really all that far behind a strike fighter in terms of firepower. Once again, I know this isn't irrefutable proof that they would be allowed to have them, but it would be mighty strange if they were explicitly forbidden from building them in-situ. We don't have evidence to suggest that they were banned, especially since a far simpler and more probable explanation exists - they didn't think to build them because they didn't think they would need them.

It can be, especially if you relocate non-technological people to a location where they have little or no resources and no idea how to cope with the local environment.

Well I'd hope that the RDA are a bit more humane than that

The majority of the Na'Vi did not live on that big vein of delicious gold. Or whatever it was that the space-imperialists were after. I imagine it's not the only spot on the whole planet that the Na'Vi can live at, and we know there are tribes scattered all over.

Oh, I forgot. The Tree of Souls that Quarritch wanted to bomb so that he could carve a hole in their racial memory was also the place where the Na'vi refugees - including the women and children - were taking shelter in. But that's also part of the lesser evil, right?

We all know that colonel cardboard was an unreasonable, irrational warmonger. His defining character trait was "being evil". Relocating the Na'Vi doesn't have involve bombing the shit out of the Soul Tree. It's not an all-or-nothing deal where we either side with the Na'Vi in the movie or the douchbag military in the movie. Alternate solutions are preferred.

[Broomstick]

It can be, especially if you relocate non-technological people to a location where they have little or no resources and no idea how to cope with the local environment.

Well I'd hope that the RDA are a bit more humane than that

The majority of the Na'Vi did not live on that big vein of delicious gold. Or whatever it was that the space-imperialists were after. I imagine it's not the only spot on the whole planet that the Na'Vi can live at, and we know there are tribes scattered all over.

Right - where are you going to re-locate the tribe of Na'vi you're moving? Most good spots will already be taken by other Na'vi, who probably won't react real happily to having refugees forced upon them. If you find an uninhabited spot it's probably uninhabited for reason.

Face it - forcible relocation will, at best, become a fucking mess.

[Ugolino]

PeZook: RDA was wrong, and they're the obvious villains. I'm not questioning that. The preachy blue skins just annoyed me to the point where I cheered them on because it got the aliens to shut up. They're obviously in the right, so much so that it started to be irritating. As for Ultramar being a better place to live, of course. Problem is, from the perspective of a reader, it got on my nerves.

Samuel: Of course they're good at it, they're the spess marines and all that. It's the way they're repeatedly said to be better than all the other chapters, and the way GW focuses on them that's the problem. That, and their armour is just ugly. :p

starfury: I like Necrons. I like their fluff. I like reading about them. And it's 40k, everyone's trying to rid themselves of everyone else. As for wiping out humanity; won't happen while GW can sell a single Ultramarine.

[Shroom Man 777]

I don't think you grasp how many people a properly designed maglev system can move per day(but with the loonies in charge in Avatar-verse, it probably isn't well designed).

There was an awesome discusion on arstechnica which using some highly conservative figures calced a maglev system capable of moving 1-2 million people per day in continental North America. Most of the discusion was on the utter lack of political will, the right-of-way issues and that the whole thing would cost into the tens of trillions to actually build.

Never mind using such a system for light cargo.

For a society able to build interstellar ships with pay-offs in the decades, that shouldn't be much of an issue politics wide.

We have no idea how fast thier spaceships not using unobtanium actually went or how much they had to sacrifice in cargo capacity to even work.

So we want to commit ethnic cleansing reminiscent of the American-Indian relocations, at best, and genocide at worst... so we can have shit that can make our choo-choo trains move faster? Jesus Christ. So I guess we can all comfortably justify the atrocities done on Native-Americans, or on the Hebrews, or on the various minorities in Serbia/Yugoslavia if the European settlers, the Natzies, or Milosovic justified it by building a dumb monorail like in that episode of The Simpsons? Holy shit. Well, at least we can use such a system for light cargo to send alien minorities to the death camps by train.

Quarritch had obviously accumulated brain damage from exposure to Pandora's atmosphere. Apparently Pandora has hydrogen sulfide in it's atmosphere which does causes accumulative brain damage!

No, I understand perfectly that having access to an antimatter-catalyzed fusion torch doesn't mean that you're allowed to have a bomber or what have you, except that it's more complex than that. First of all, we have no reason to believe they had the weapons banned - it never came up at all in the film or any supplementary materials that the gear the RDA had was restricted in any way by laws. In legal terms, if harm-minimization is the goal, then it's not as plainly- comparable to your analogy as you'd have us believe. Although proportionally it might be roughly correct, in absolute terms a makeshift RKV is completely and totally devastating. Granting someone an air-plane doesn't confer the same level of trust that granting them them a rocket that goes at 0.7 C does.

I'm just saying that it does not necessarily follow that just because someone has access to an airplane/space ship that can do devastating damage when used rightly/wrongly, then they'll also naturally have access to weapons that can do similar levels of damage.

And it's not REALLY that far fetched that there were government rules and regulations as to what the RDA could or couldn't bring into Pandora. That place IS supposed to be seen as some kind of wonderland back on Earth, an awesome extraterrestrial moon with wonderful unique wildlife. I mean, here on Earth there are already shitloads of anal retentive regulations when you're visiting exotic locales to prevent, say, introducing foreign species of animals to the local biosphere, etc.

Yeah, the RDA has assault helicopters and security personnel. But I still think that a lot of questions would've been raised if they went on to buy a crapload more military hardware.

Unlike the hippotheticel importance of unobtanium, Selfridge DID stay out loud that conflict with the natives would've made them "look bad".

Likewise, they've already been granted access to helicopter gunships that aren't really all that far behind a strike fighter in terms of firepower. Once again, I know this isn't irrefutable proof that they would be allowed to have them, but it would be mighty strange if they were explicitly forbidden from building them in-situ. We don't have evidence to suggest that they were banned, especially since a far simpler and more probable explanation exists - they didn't think to build them because they didn't think they would need them.

Yes, I agree with you that the RDA and the mercenaries probably didn't think that they needed more crap - they already had more than enough to defend themselves, and to lord over the planet with already way superior firepower.

I still think that it's not too far fetch, and that it's within the realm of possibility, that the RDA would've gotten unwarranted and unwanted attention if they started hauling more military hardware.

Not only would the government be scrutinizing their operations, but the RDA is also a corporation.

Like:

Sarevokeridge: Today, I propose that we allocate XYZ Space Dollars in budget to procure Su-24 Frogfaces and XB-70 Valkyrinikeheraculezeus weapons systems for our operations in Pandora!"

CEO Shroom Gates: Just why are we spending more shit on this crap? We are a mining corporation not a military. We have profit margins and it's already expensive as fuck to supply shit to Pandora! I'm a bigass penny-pinching executive! I want profit for minimal expenditure! Space EPA and Space California's already bitching to me about the Venture Star's antimatter carbon emissions! Fucking Space Denmark Kyoto Konference!"

Sarevokeridge: Uh... moving on... there's also the matter of the corporate pensions and employee benefits...

CEO Shroom Gates: Employee benefits? Pensions? This ain't no union shop! You'll get what I give and like it! If you don't like it, I'll just employ a bunch of illegal interdimensional immigrants from Space Mexico to do your job for you for less money!

Sarevokeridge:

[Shroom Man 777]

PeZook: RDA was wrong, and they're the obvious villains. I'm not questioning that. The preachy blue skins just annoyed me to the point where I cheered them on because it got the aliens to shut up.

The prevalence of "might makes right" assholes who can justify their evil actions because of profit or because of non-vital comfort commodities, and the fact that these assholes are everywhere from the government to the corporations to internet message boards, means that the world needs more preachy blue skins who'll harpoon these Space Hitlers in their dumb-moustache'd faces with fucking twenty-foot long space arrows.

[starfury]

PeZook: RDA was wrong, and they're the obvious villains. I'm not questioning that. The preachy blue skins just annoyed me to the point where I cheered them on because it got the aliens to shut up. They're obviously in the right, so much so that it started to be irritating. As for Ultramar being a better place to live, of course. Problem is, from the perspective of a reader, it got on my nerves.

Samuel: Of course they're good at it, they're the spess marines and all that. It's the way they're repeatedly said to be better than all the other chapters, and the way GW focuses on them that's the problem. That, and their armour is just ugly. :p

starfury: I like Necrons. I like their fluff. I like reading about them. And it's 40k, everyone's trying to rid themselves of everyone else. As for wiping out humanity; won't happen while GW can sell a single Ultramarine.

That can of Said of Space marines/Chaos Space marines Period, Since they pushed all other armies to the sidelines, I mean WH40k was joked as WarMarine 40k at Times, since Everybody plays space marines. I actually Felt the lack of Malice of evil of Nercons and Tyranids meant their cruelty toward everyone else was easier to swallow, since both of incapable of Personalized old fashioned human hatred, one saw humans as food, the other sees everything as food.

The Dark Crusade Tau and Imperium often grated on me as both powers seems to use the war as excuse to justify later assholish behavior after the war, the Tau sterilizing Humans after the war seemed to confirm what they always likely suspect humans would do give half the chance and simply moved up the schedule of removing humans from the planet and the Imperium with their bomblast of killing all aliens.

This Despite the fact that they had at least some sort of uneasy coexistence before the war seems to meant nothing once either got the chance to lord over the other.

[PeZook]

PeZook: RDA was wrong, and they're the obvious villains. I'm not questioning that. The preachy blue skins just annoyed me to the point where I cheered them on because it got the aliens to shut up.

I didn't say you condoned their actions, I said it was ironic because that's exactly what happened in the movie, except the RDA went the extra step between "being annoyed" and "being violent towards those who annoyed them".

I just found it amusing