Avatar review thread

[Zixinus]

Personally, I came to the conclusion that the mindless charge was done for the usual artistic reason: it looked good (and conveyed the Na'Vi's way of war).

A charge is always dramatic. So why not just charge mindlessly?

The impression would be wrong. Blacks are not a separate species. They are human like you and I. Not alien. Why does no one understand the difference here? I'm not forbidding sex between humans from different cultures. I'm saying it's deviant behavior to fuck another species be that species sentient or non-sentient.

A look in the WordWeb dictionary clarifies my confusion:

A person whose behaviour deviates from what is acceptable especially in sexual behaviour

Brings that up for both "pervert" and "deviant".

What you fail to understand, which is pretty big lack of observation being that it was one of the glaring points of the film, was that Jake was effectively a Na'Vi.

He may have lived a human life (in trailer with three other people) next to his Na'vi life. However, when he was a Na'Vi, he was an Na'Vi: he felt the same things that of a Na'Vi, he had their eyes and aside small details (an extra finger and slightly smaller eyes) he was identical to any other Na'Vi.

Jake didn't fuck Neyriti as a human. He fucked her as a Na'Vi. A Na'Vi fucking another Na'Vi is hardly deviant. Jake fucking Neyriti as a human (particularly as a human cripple) would be deviant.

Do you know exactly the details what being a Na'Vi is like? No? Then your definition cannot logically work because you do not know what is the norm is for the situation.

For all we know, the rest of the avatar group could be furiously humping any other Na'Vi (including other Avatars) in reach offscreen. Or would be, if given a chance. The issue is, we don't have a norm to compare to, to say what is deviant and what is not. The norm is an arbitrary majority opinion.

Furthermore, I am not sure I would call him a pervert. A perversion I can think of is necrophilia or acrotomophilia (sexual attraction about amputees). I do not recall one point in the film where it was shown that Jake was particularly aroused by the presence of a Na'Vi female.

[aieeegrunt]

arun2110, I want to address the point you made that Quaritch is incompetent because he went after Jake Sully after his command ship was shot down, instead of trying to re-establish command.

Personally I think going after Jake was a sign he's an excellent commander.

In war you want to hit the centre of gravity of the enemy force, you want to hit something that will make them come apart and stop fighting. Sure you can do this by simply killing enough of them that the rest give up, but this is the crudest, shallowest, simplest and most resource intensive way of doing it. There is a reason that pure attrition is disdained in warfare unless it's the only option.

Sully was the nominal commander, but did he really exercise command of all the Na'vi? Could he exercise command without communication, runners, etc? And since the Na'vi were not fighting in a line, how would the others learn that their commander has fallen?

Him and his ability to ride the big monster was the symbol around which the Na'vi army coalesces. Absent that the plains Na'vi and the coastal Na'vi would have simply ignored the Tree Na'vi's plight as being Not Their Problem. Jake dieing would have been a very clear sign that Ewa did not favor this action. That plus the heavy losses the Na'vi took fighting the RDA would have caused everybody to go home.

Communication within the Na'vi seemed to be messengers plus a few radio links. This would have been sufficient to spread news of his death by nightfall at the latest. Certainly when the Na'vi paused to regroup and then attack the base the news would have spread then.

What are the Na'vi? They are a tribal people who's culture and way of life is largely driven by their religious beliefs and legends. Look at how Sully managed to assemble his army. It wasn't by a rational appeal to their own self interest; he did it by inspiring faith in being anointed by the God(s) in his task by taming the giant flying monster creature.

Quaritch took aim at that. His first attempt was by trying to destroy the soul tree. Destruction of the living manifestation of Ewa most likely would have resulted in the Na'vi army disbanding as Quaritch would have demonstrated to them that their God was either non-existent or that he and the Sky People were simply more powerful.

None of which answers my concerns. The battle that Quaritch was engaged in was going to go its own way with/without Sully. Why not finish the battle, save his soldiers and bomb the trailer. He could always call in an airstrike later and that'd effectively put Sully and co out of business.

By the time he found the trailer he was alone and out of commo. His air force had been chewed up by swarms of flying monsters and his ground troops routed by swarms of charging monsters. He retreats to the base, the Na'vi regroup, follow, overrun the base and he's fucked. He kills Sully, the Na'vi army falls apart as the the news starts to spread, this buys him time to regroup.

When that didn't work due largely to Act of Plot, look at Quaritch's action. His command shuttle is destroyed and with it his ability to communicate with what is left of his forces. The shuttle is down and with it his ability to destroy the soul tree. Re-establishing command means a lengthy hike through the suddenly incredibly dangerous jungle and linking up with remnants of his forces, which really only have the option of retreating to the base and subsequently being overrun by Na'vi forces.

Then he should have waited until he located sully's trailer and bombed the trailer before he engaged the Na'vi. They should have seen his death and lost their rallying point.

He has no way of finding it. What is he going to do, do a meter by meter search of the jungle? The trailer is small and easily concealed. Electronics are useless in that area so it would be literally a visual search for it. He doesn't have time for that. He's got to disperse the Na'vi before they concentrate and Isandlwana his ass. So he's got to deal then a decisive center of gravity blow in that very limited time window.

But what lies before him? Why it's Shake Soooooooooly! Jake Sully is another key centre of gravity he can strike. His personal anointment as War Leader is what holds the army together, him and his flying monster. He is also the only leader in the enemy command that understands modern warfare and Quaritch, he's the only enemy commander who can realisticly formulate plans to beat the RDA. His death has a high probability of causing the Na'vi army to disband, as he is the personal manifestation of Ewa's will.

So despite the extreme personal danger he goes after Jake because he knows he can still win this thing if he kills him. I'd also make the observation that Quaritch is smart enough to know that killing Jake's unconscious human body is far easier than Jake's Na'vi avatar, and that is what he goes after. And he would have won, again, except for Act Of Plot, again.

For the reasons I'd stated above, I disagree with your conclusions.

Your reasons as stated have been addressed.

I'd like to address your other point about Quaritch; that not building a bigger fortification zone around the human base was a sign of incompetence, and that he should have turled inside this base instead of going out and blowing up the soul tree.

Lets step back and look at the overall situation. The humans are on Pandora not as an exercise in imperialism but to mine. They are'nt there to colonize, nor are they there to conquer and rule over the Na'vi. Their primary objective is obtaining unobtanium. Unless the Na'vi improbably unite into a giant army and zerg rush the base they are'nt a problem. Individual Na'vi tribes that get the way can and have been handled in the past. The humans have a very, very real personel and equipment bottleneck in the form of the distance between Earth and Pandora. Every man hour and piece of equipment is critical. Every man hour and equipment hour Quaritch spends building Space Dien Bien Phu is an hour not spent digging up unobtanium, which is the entire reason the humans are there.

Absent a massive Na'vi army there is no reason to divert very limited resources from mining to fort building. Once the massive Na'vi army has assembled there is no time to do so; and recall that the assembly of that army resulted from a ridiculously improbable concatenation of events: Jake Sully arriving on Pandora, Jake Sully getting lost in the forest, Jake Sully being adopted by the tribe instead of being killed, the cat girl falling in love with him etc etc etc. Essentially Quaritch failed to forsee this chain of events happening, which I think can be excused.

Finally even if Quaritch had an impregnable fort built and turtled in it, then the Na'vi win without a shot being fired. The humans are on Pandora not to exist, but to mine unobtanium. If they sit inside their base instead it's still defeat for them.

[Junghalli]

I get the feeling you're reaching out there. How would this work?

If plants are competing for pollinators I can see how lots of them would glow, since you'd have an evolutionary race between different plants to be most attractive to pollinators.

Anyway, does it really matter? Sure, it's probably there because the writers/special effects people thought it would look cool and didn't think too much about the evolutionary implications. Is that a big deal? It just seems like whiny nitpicking by somebody who disliked the movie (BTW I'm no big fan of it either) and wants to find as many things wrong with it to complain about as possible.

If Eywa did such a thing with the kind of connection that Eywa seemed to have with everything, well, I'll complain. Everything lives to support the great Eywa and everything should die to protect the great Eywa. Kind of how Germany is Hitler and if Hitler's going to die, then hell with Germany as well. Now, this analogy is limited as analogies always are, but I think it fits rather well.

Do you have similar problems with the way millions of cattle and chickens live and die to support human civilization (indeed arguably simply for human pleasure, since most of us could survive just fine on a vegetarian diet)? If not, you don't really have much of a leg to stand on here.

I was thinking of the Hitler and Germany thing when I wrote that. Not at the Eywa in the movie, but at the Eywa they suggested would send live MREs to the Na'vi.

Our society doesn't treat cows and chickens any better. Actually commercial cows and chickens arguably mostly have it worse than wild animals on Pandora (I'm remembering Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dillemma and what the corn diet that's fed to most commercial cattle does to their health...). I can't really find it in me to feel vast moral anguish over some space buffallo getting killed when I eat meat on a regular basis.

Hindsight is 20/20. Waiting until the Na'vi get out of the area where there's a shitload of interference and bombing them would have worked better because the humans would have had the full benefit of their command and communication lines as well as their tech advantage.

Oh, you're not going to get any arguments from me about how the battle could have been done better. I got into a big argument on another forum about how contrived the whole thing felt to me...

Yes, the assumption was, Sully did a stupid thing and told a planetary intelligence that did not understand human capabilities as well as he did that the humans were out to ruin the planet and they should be kept off it.

Which would make him a moron if unobtanium was actually so important humans would commit genocide over it.

Are you kidding me? Sudan and Darfur are modern society. There are places in Sweden where they're having jews be persecuted again.

Mainstream modern Western society.

Or if you meant modern as in western, that itself could be called racist. Not exactly the best argument there is that.

No, it's not racist at all, it's an acknowledgement of the fact that different cultures have different values, which is something that's self-evident if you think about it for five seconds. Indeed, the idea that criticism of other cultures is racism could in itself be argued to be racist, and I personally have a good deal of contempt for squeamishness in criticizing the Other.

[eyl]

Yes. A properly shaped rod would be better, but any large object massive enough to survive reentry would do as well as the jetpacks to move said object.

And you think the Earth governments won't come down on the RDA like a ton of bricks for creating a WMD - which they are explicitly forbidden to do? Bear in mind that Earth has seen escalating violence, including nuclear terrorism - governments are going to be very wary of anyone using WMDs.

Not to mention that non-purpose-built orbital weapons probably don't really have much accuracy - miss by too much and you might well hit the base.

Incidently - just in case anyone brings up this argument - I remember seeing a proposal on SB.com to make the kinetic orbital an "accident". I suspect if anyone tries this Earth's governments will take the RDA apart with extreme prejudice - bad enough if they built WMDs, but no-one wants people having these sorts of accidents in control of relativistic spacecraft anywhere near the solar system.

Mines require very little explosives. A few hundred pounds would have very effectively denied the approaches to the colony.

So why not use those few hundred pounds in a bomb (like they did in the movie) instead of sacrificing a very expensive and hard-to-replace shuttle?

BTW, I think you're underestimating the difficulty of making such a minefield - the RDA probably doesn't have too many experts in this application on site, and onlike your typical IED you can't place it right next to the road where you expect the target to go - you're talking about a lot of explosives and probably quite a few accidents.

And aieeegrunt's comments about the problems with fortifications in this scenario are well said.

[arun2110]

Zook,
1. Interstellar travel with reaction drives.
We're talking millions upon millions of tons of reaction mass. Theoretically possible does not mean practically. I believe, scientists who examined the drive proposal in question estimated they'd need 400 million tons of reaction mass. ^_^ Where you going to get it?

2, Shuttle managing heavy g world and relativistic c travel:
How are these two related? One's about powerful engines which may or may not have endurance for a day and the other's about slow and steady acceleration for possibly years.

3. KEW:
Tell your objections to the Tunguska event, the Shiva crater, the Yucatan crater and the comet Shoemaker-Levy. I think they all disagree with you on how much extreme engineering is needed for a KEW. A massive enough object spun about its axis like a bullet and mounted with a jetpack is all that's needed. Weapon will not be terribly accurate, but hey, close counts with nukes and KEWs, unless the KEW in question is an anti-personnel or anti-armor weapon system.

4. WMDs.
Read the KEW thing. I laugh at banning WMDs. Also remember, earth cannot enforce those rules on Pandora. Kind of like how even though US and the west ban WMDs, they cannot do anything about India, S. Africa, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Israel, Pakistan, N. Korea, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Libya, etc. I laugh again at the idea of earth banning WMDs.

5. Economy without Unobtanium:
Think of it as a chain effect. The market capitalization of RDA - which was in the trillions of dollars - vaporizes overnight. Spaceships are now harder to build without superconductor (how the fuck do you manage all this heat? We're burning up here in this new ship.) Faster, more powerful processors are out (less heat produced, better operations.) And a host of other things. It's not going to be one industry. Starting with financial markets, everything's going to take a hit if only indirectly. So, depression and economy collapse.

6. Mass of unobtanium shipped:
Think of the antimatter fuel for your drive. To produce 1 kg of antimatter you need to expend more than 1 kg worth of energy (using the E= mc2 equation.) Where's that energy going to grow? Certainly not on trees. Even if they use solar farms, how may trillions were invested for these collectors in space? What about the cost of the spaceship? The cost of operations? The cost of the colony. The cost of the manpower. These are all big expenses. If you expect me to think they got away with shipping a ton, I laugh in the face of that.

7. Selfridge doesn't say Unobtanium isn't important.
Yes, room temperature superconductor isn't the holy grail and wet dream of scientists and engineers everywhere and is practically useless junk. I laugh even more.

8. Treaty of versailles:
I was expecting you to pounce on this. Thanks for taking the bait. Let me pontificate:

People keep harping about the unjust nature of treaty of versailles. Tell me, how much of the treaty was enforced in the spirit it was written in? Reparations? The Germans printed so much money the got hyperinflation and then pleaded they could not pay the reparations and got away with it. The reduced army? Every man in the army was trained to a level two above his rank so that the army could expand like crazy (one of the reasons why germany was able to expand it's army so far under hitler.) They ignored terms about never building subs. Just a few ways in which the Germans violated the terms of the treaty.

But was the treaty unjust? Let's see. They started the war. They borrowed a hell of a lot of money expecting they'd get the losers to pay the bill after they won the war. And they were expansionist assholes. And they wanted to get away without paying reparations when it became clear they were going to lose. WTF! The Germans got exactly what they deserved on paper. They managed to finagle their way out of paying their debts and cried foul about the unjust terms.

So, treaty of versailles was not the crucial part of the equation. It's a fairly minor part of the equation. The major part of the equation is what I stated earlier. There were new big dogs in the neighborhood and they had to settle who was the alpha, thus the two wars.

FYI, the treaty also doesn't explain Italy and Japan. What did the treaty have to do with those two nations, btw? Pray enlighten us.

9. Treaty of versailles = rise of hitler to power.

You did not say that. Sorry, my bad. What you said was ww1 created the situation that led to hitler's rise to power.

This still does not change my statement about people who make sweeping statements.

Nonsense. The Germans were expansionist assholes. Hitler was an expansionist asshole. The Germans got out of honoring the treaty of versailles, but that also undermined the weimar republic, paving the way for a match made in hell.

10. It's unjust for Na'vi to pay the price for humanity's shortcomings.
Did I say anywhere my story was a just one? Please cite where I said this.

11. Interstellar fleet during a recession.
They use the fleet they already had. Or built one. Kinda like how Japan sent its ships to pearl harbor while american blockade was strangling its economic lifeline.

12. Na'vi right to defend their land.
I don't refuse that. If you'd read closely, my argument was essentially "so what? the humans were stronger and were going to take it unless the Na'vi did what the Japs did and not what everyone else on the planet did against the europeans."

13. Burning the home tree.
The goal was to burn the home tree. Not burn the home tree and spare the Na'vi there. So, don't bring this here.

Go look up what a war crime is. The Na'vi fired while surrounded by civilians. That puts the burden on their head. Quaritch retaliated like an asshole with overwhelming force, but since his enemy were hiding among civilians and shooting at him, he was not committing a war crime. He was being an asshole, though, as I'd stated repeatedly.

14. The concept of total war.
The concept of total war would have had Quaritch bring down their home, burn their forest ( so that they can't hunt), bomb them to smithrens and then force an unconditional surrender.

15. One could argue... and Quaritch's noble goals
I said, "similarly, one could argue..." I did not say "I argue."

16. Hauling shuttles back.
Just thought they would. No need for a big fleet of shuttles on the colony. Doesn't matter none to me if they leave the shuttles behind.

17. Shuttles and refueling.
Heh. Come up with a better argument. I'm not arguing that they should have used to shuttle as KEW. I'm saying it's expendable and not as mission crucial as you keep insisting it is.

As for the Americans and B-52 in Iraq, funny because that's what the Americans usually do. Call in Artillery or air support while they hold you and bomb the fuck out of you.

18. Morality.
Why would I want to concede something I wasn't arguing at all? You were arguing morality. Not I. I was arguing it's deviancy. Being on either end of the bell curve doesn't make you morally right or wrong. WTF are you basing your logic on?

19. Nekkid girl pics.
Your question sucked. I gave you a valid and proper answer. If my answer showed your question's stupidity, not my fault, is it?

20. Morality again.
Again, WTF?

21. Exotic shit.
Not sure if you're being sarcastic or not.


22. Sully starting a war.
RDA started a war between the mine and the Omaticaya. Sully started a war between Pandora and humanity. History, if written would go something like, "there was an incident at the mine between the RDA and the neighboring tribe and Sully started an interstellar war over it." kind of like how the blackhand killed francis fredinand, but did not start wwI. Austria-hungary and Germany did when they declared war on Serbia for the assassination.

And yes, they fight humanity in my story for reasons that I'd explained over and over again. Just because you say they don't fight humanity doesn't mean I shouldn't say they fight humanity. Or are you questioning my right to thought and speech? If so, I laugh at your face and continue to do what I've always done.

23. Raging on sully.
Like you're raging on me? Grow up.

[Zixinus]

RDA started a war between the mine and the Omaticaya. Sully started a war between Pandora and humanity. History, if written would go something like, "there was an incident at the mine between the RDA and the neighboring tribe and Sully started an interstellar war over it." kind of like how the blackhand killed francis fredinand, but did not start wwI. Austria-hungary and Germany did when they declared war on Serbia for the assassination.

How are they fighting entire humanity? How the hell are they fighting an interstellar war?

What movie did you actually watch? The Na'Vi have no spaceships, no orbital capacity, no high-altitude crafts or even fucking steelworks. Please tell me, how the loving hell could they be fighting an interstellar war, when they can't leave their own planet?

The movie made it clear as day that Jake was fighting off the RDA. In the end of the movie, some humans were allowed to stay: Jake doesn't have a grudge against humanity, just the way that the RDA torched his newly-adopted tribe's home.

At best, you may make an argument that the Na'Vi has sabotaged humanity's expansionist effort by denying them perfect superconductors. That will hurt, but the Na'Vi are incapable of doing any more damage than that. Considering that Humanity had to get to Pandora without the perfect superconducter, I would wager that it will not altogether stop Humanity's expansion into the stars. Slow it down at best.

However, the Na'Vi are incapable of doing any more than that. They just can't. Their highest-level weapon is a bow and arrow for fuck's sake. Any technology left there, and even with the optimistic assumption of a self-sustained colony with fabricators, it will take at least several decades, if not centuries for the Na'Vi to gain any sort of high-tech.

[Questor]

I know I wasn't supposed to answer for other people, but I couldn't resist:

When sully ascertained negotiations weren't possible, RDA went to limited war.

Total war, or war to the knife was what happened between the nazis and the russians on the eastern front. Between carthage and rome. Just two examples. ^_^

Would you describe what Sherman did as total war?

Also, I'd be hard pressed to figure out how a war of extermination - remember they had already destroyed their objective - home tree - is limited.

[Anguirus]

^ Let's be fair, even Quaritch didn't fight a war of extermination. He wanted to utterly destroy the Na'Vi's fighting spirit. However, he convinced himself that the Tree of Souls was a simple shrine, rather than an actual physical refuge for umpteen thousand (million?) personalities. From that perspective, destroying a shrine to break the will of your enemy to fight is perfectly reasonable, and neither a war crime nor a use of excessive forceper se.

It's his actions earlier in destroying Hometree that were really beyond the pale, even from his own presumed metaphysics. Those actions really show how he considered the Na'Vi to be un-people, rather than the attack on the Tree. "Some arrows are bouncing off my hull, NOW THE CHILDREN SHALL DIE."

[loomer]

Wait, it's deviant to bang something very similar to humans? It's deviant to want to do an Elf? (And apparently anyone who's ever wanted to be with 'close' twins should be put to death?) Christ, Arun, if that's deviance then I'm the fucking Marquis De Sade over here.

Further - what exactly is wrong with deviation from the norm if it causes no harm or troubles?

[arun2110]

Total war, or war to the knife was what happened between the nazis and the russians on the eastern front. Between carthage and rome. Just two examples. ^_^

Would you describe what Sherman did as total war?

Also, I'd be hard pressed to figure out how a war of extermination - remember they had already destroyed their objective - home tree - is limited.

Was it Quaritch's military objective to exterminate the Omaticaya (I honestly don't remember and am curious) or he simply going for the preemptive strike? If the former, I'd be wrong and he was practicing total war. If not, I'd day he wasn't.

And yes, Sherman was doing total war. It was his intention to destroy Confederate infrastructure, destroy their supplies, damage their morale and reduce their already declining ability to wage war and thus, end it faster.

[arun2110]

Wait, it's deviant to bang something very similar to humans? It's deviant to want to do an Elf? (And apparently anyone who's ever wanted to be with 'close' twins should be put to death?) Christ, Arun, if that's deviance then I'm the fucking Marquis De Sade over here.

Further - what exactly is wrong with deviation from the norm if it causes no harm or troubles?

It's simply deviance. Deviance is not good or bad. It simply means you're different from the average.

And yes, I'd be another fucking De Sade myself. ^_^

[arun2110]

Personally, I came to the conclusion that the mindless charge was done for the usual artistic reason: it looked good (and conveyed the Na'Vi's way of war).

A charge is always dramatic. So why not just charge mindlessly?

Sully couldn't order his folks to form lines, and attack/withdraw on a signal. They were not trained and being warriors, were not disciplined as soldiers, and he did not have a responsive enough communication system to separate his troops into units and use them as we do in a battle.

The impression would be wrong. Blacks are not a separate species. They are human like you and I. Not alien. Why does no one understand the difference here? I'm not forbidding sex between humans from different cultures. I'm saying it's deviant behavior to fuck another species be that species sentient or non-sentient.

A look in the WordWeb dictionary clarifies my confusion:

A person whose behaviour deviates from what is acceptable especially in sexual behaviour

Brings that up for both "pervert" and "deviant".

What you fail to understand, which is pretty big lack of observation being that it was one of the glaring points of the film, was that Jake was effectively a Na'Vi.

I noted it and I'm unconvinced. I fail to understand how remote piloting a Na'vi body made Sully a Na'vi.

He may have lived a human life (in trailer with three other people) next to his Na'vi life. However, when he was a Na'Vi, he was an Na'Vi: he felt the same things that of a Na'Vi, he had their eyes and aside small details (an extra finger and slightly smaller eyes) he was identical to any other Na'Vi.

Jake didn't fuck Neyriti as a human. He fucked her as a Na'Vi. A Na'Vi fucking another Na'Vi is hardly deviant. Jake fucking Neyriti as a human (particularly as a human cripple) would be deviant.

Do you know exactly the details what being a Na'Vi is like? No? Then your definition cannot logically work because you do not know what is the norm is for the situation.

So, people who pilot UAVs belong UAVs? All the total immersion and such, I simply think of the pinnacle of interface technology. That's how I see this. Obviously, we have different perspectives on this one.

For all we know, the rest of the avatar group could be furiously humping any other Na'Vi (including other Avatars) in reach offscreen. Or would be, if given a chance. The issue is, we don't have a norm to compare to, to say what is deviant and what is not. The norm is an arbitrary majority opinion.

Furthermore, I am not sure I would call him a pervert. A perversion I can think of is necrophilia or acrotomophilia (sexual attraction about amputees). I do not recall one point in the film where it was shown that Jake was particularly aroused by the presence of a Na'Vi female.

We have the rest of humanity for calculating the norm. Was Sully a deviant among the pilots? I don't know. As you say, the others may have been boffing the Na'vi as well and we simply did not see it. Was Sully a deviant and a pervert with respect to the rest of humanity? Yes.

[Questor]

Was it Quaritch's military objective to exterminate the Omaticaya (I honestly don't remember and am curious) or he simply going for the preemptive strike? If the former, I'd be wrong and he was practicing total war. If not, I'd day he wasn't.

I'm pretty sure there was no "pre-emptive strike" discussions. And the fact that he was pressing the war into a place where his technology would not work, and he would not be in complete situational awareness is not a rational military decision outside of the context of "kill every one of them."

At some point you have to look whether the "limited" objectives actually result in "limited" war.

Have you read The Big One by Stuart Slade? Would you consider what was done to Germany in that scenario "limited war" simply because the targets were "preemptive strikes" against the Germans ability to wage war by cutting off everything Germany could use to continue the war?

[arun2110]

Sully was the nominal commander, but did he really exercise command of all the Na'vi? Could he exercise command without communication, runners, etc? And since the Na'vi were not fighting in a line, how would the others learn that their commander has fallen?

Him and his ability to ride the big monster was the symbol around which the Na'vi army coalesces. Absent that the plains Na'vi and the coastal Na'vi would have simply ignored the Tree Na'vi's plight as being Not Their Problem. Jake dieing would have been a very clear sign that Ewa did not favor this action. That plus the heavy losses the Na'vi took fighting the RDA would have caused everybody to go home.

Communication within the Na'vi seemed to be messengers plus a few radio links. This would have been sufficient to spread news of his death by nightfall at the latest. Certainly when the Na'vi paused to regroup and then attack the base the news would have spread then.

That brings up an interesting plot hole. Was there no triangulating equipment around? If Sully and crew were using radio and I'd assume they'd have to because they were remote piloting the Na'vi bodies, then why wasn't this triangulated. Not all that hard. Go to a point, check the relevant frequency. Get the strength and direction. Go two other points and repeat the same procedure. Finally, triangulate his position. Not all that hard. But this wasn't done by Quaritch at all. Was he being an idiot? Maybe. Did he not care about going after the head at all? Maybe there too. For that matter, was Quaritch aware that Sully was the commander of the Na'vi force and not someone else? If he did not know, what does that make Quaritch going after Sully?

Moving on to your contention that going after Sully would kill the war by evening, you agree then it wouldn't stop the battle. So, when Sully's trailer wasn't going anywhere - who would move it? - why did Quartich go after the trailer instead of trying to find his men and reestablishing command?

None of which answers my concerns. The battle that Quaritch was engaged in was going to go its own way with/without Sully. Why not finish the battle, save his soldiers and bomb the trailer. He could always call in an airstrike later and that'd effectively put Sully and co out of business.

By the time he found the trailer he was alone and out of commo. His air force had been chewed up by swarms of flying monsters and his ground troops routed by swarms of charging monsters. He retreats to the base, the Na'vi regroup, follow, overrun the base and he's fucked. He kills Sully, the Na'vi army falls apart as the the news starts to spread, this buys him time to regroup.

If, as you say Quaritch's forces had been beaten by then (my memory of the film is a little ambiguous on this.), then would Sully's death have dispersed the Na'vi? They'd just won a victory against a vastly superior enemy. At this point, the loss of a leader would be mourned, but not make them lose heart and hope. It wouldn't even buy all that time. Sully's death would have easily enraged the Na'vi even further.

Then he should have waited until he located sully's trailer and bombed the trailer before he engaged the Na'vi. They should have seen his death and lost their rallying point.

He has no way of finding it. What is he going to do, do a meter by meter search of the jungle? The trailer is small and easily concealed. Electronics are useless in that area so it would be literally a visual search for it. He doesn't have time for that. He's got to disperse the Na'vi before they concentrate and Isandlwana his ass. So he's got to deal then a decisive center of gravity blow in that very limited time window.

If electronics is useless, how was Sully transmitting to his Na'vi body? How were he and his friends communicating with each other through radio? What can be transmitted can be sensed and what can be sensed can be localized and bombed the shit out of.

For the reasons I'd stated above, I disagree with your conclusions.

Your reasons as stated have been addressed.

And you have my refutal. ^_^

I'd like to address your other point about Quaritch; that not building a bigger fortification zone around the human base was a sign of incompetence, and that he should have turled inside this base instead of going out and blowing up the soul tree.

Lets step back and look at the overall situation. The humans are on Pandora not as an exercise in imperialism but to mine. They are'nt there to colonize, nor are they there to conquer and rule over the Na'vi. Their primary objective is obtaining unobtanium. Unless the Na'vi improbably unite into a giant army and zerg rush the base they are'nt a problem. Individual Na'vi tribes that get the way can and have been handled in the past. The humans have a very, very real personel and equipment bottleneck in the form of the distance between Earth and Pandora. Every man hour and piece of equipment is critical. Every man hour and equipment hour Quaritch spends building Space Dien Bien Phu is an hour not spent digging up unobtanium, which is the entire reason the humans are there.

So, you have a mineral worth 20 million dollars a kilogram back on earth and have been having trouble with natives for quite a while now. You don't fortify to protect the mines and your colony?

Absent a massive Na'vi army there is no reason to divert very limited resources from mining to fort building. Once the massive Na'vi army has assembled there is no time to do so; and recall that the assembly of that army resulted from a ridiculously improbable concatenation of events: Jake Sully arriving on Pandora, Jake Sully getting lost in the forest, Jake Sully being adopted by the tribe instead of being killed, the cat girl falling in love with him etc etc etc. Essentially Quaritch failed to forsee this chain of events happening, which I think can be excused.

Finally even if Quaritch had an impregnable fort built and turtled in it, then the Na'vi win without a shot being fired. The humans are on Pandora not to exist, but to mine unobtanium. If they sit inside their base instead it's still defeat for them.

You assume the Na'vi army has staying power. They don't have the log infrastructure and they don't have the centuries of experience conducting war that we do. Ergo, they can't. In a siege, the Na'vi can't win unless they can take the colony in a single mass attack, which wouldn't have worked against a fort.

[arun2110]

Was it Quaritch's military objective to exterminate the Omaticaya (I honestly don't remember and am curious) or he simply going for the preemptive strike? If the former, I'd be wrong and he was practicing total war. If not, I'd day he wasn't.

I'm pretty sure there was no "pre-emptive strike" discussions. And the fact that he was pressing the war into a place where his technology would not work, and he would not be in complete situational awareness is not a rational military decision outside of the context of "kill every one of them."

At some point you have to look whether the "limited" objectives actually result in "limited" war.

Have you read The Big One by Stuart Slade? Would you consider what was done to Germany in that scenario "limited war" simply because the targets were "preemptive strikes" against the Germans ability to wage war by cutting off everything Germany could use to continue the war?

No, I haven't read it. I'll put it on my to read list. Was the book any good? Because I live in India and will probably have to buy the book from Amazon, which'll cost a pretty penny.

[arun2110]

I get the feeling you're reaching out there. How would this work?

If plants are competing for pollinators I can see how lots of them would glow, since you'd have an evolutionary race between different plants to be most attractive to pollinators.

Anyway, does it really matter? Sure, it's probably there because the writers/special effects people thought it would look cool and didn't think too much about the evolutionary implications. Is that a big deal? It just seems like whiny nitpicking by somebody who disliked the movie (BTW I'm no big fan of it either) and wants to find as many things wrong with it to complain about as possible.

Lots may glow. Not everything. What we were seeing on Pandora was that everything glowed, which is what my observation was about. There was no need for everything to glow except as eye-candy.

It's not a big deal, but like I'd said earlier to others, it's a good topic for discussion. ^_^

If Eywa did such a thing with the kind of connection that Eywa seemed to have with everything, well, I'll complain. Everything lives to support the great Eywa and everything should die to protect the great Eywa. Kind of how Germany is Hitler and if Hitler's going to die, then hell with Germany as well. Now, this analogy is limited as analogies always are, but I think it fits rather well.

Do you have similar problems with the way millions of cattle and chickens live and die to support human civilization (indeed arguably simply for human pleasure, since most of us could survive just fine on a vegetarian diet)? If not, you don't really have much of a leg to stand on here.

You see it as sentients killing non-sentients for food. I see it as Hitler and his Germany must die if I do. We don't share such an intimate connection with our animals as Eywa does and it's the thought of Eywa doing something like this with that connection that makes revolts me. It'd be kind of like asking my kid to die for my cause because that's my take on the connection. Eywa is supposed to be neutral in all things because it is connected to all things. It can't order it's animals to sacrifice their lives to protect itself. It strikes me as unethical and immoral. The animals did not sign up for that shit, after all.

I was thinking of the Hitler and Germany thing when I wrote that. Not at the Eywa in the movie, but at the Eywa they suggested would send live MREs to the Na'vi.

Our society doesn't treat cows and chickens any better. Actually commercial cows and chickens arguably mostly have it worse than wild animals on Pandora (I'm remembering Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dillemma and what the corn diet that's fed to most commercial cattle does to their health...). I can't really find it in me to feel vast moral anguish over some space buffallo getting killed when I eat meat on a regular basis.

See my argument's above.

Hindsight is 20/20. Waiting until the Na'vi get out of the area where there's a shitload of interference and bombing them would have worked better because the humans would have had the full benefit of their command and communication lines as well as their tech advantage.

Oh, you're not going to get any arguments from me about how the battle could have been done better. I got into a big argument on another forum about how contrived the whole thing felt to me...

It is. ^_^

Yes, the assumption was, Sully did a stupid thing and told a planetary intelligence that did not understand human capabilities as well as he did that the humans were out to ruin the planet and they should be kept off it.

Which would make him a moron if unobtanium was actually so important humans would commit genocide over it.

Which is what I'd said in Consequences.

Are you kidding me? Sudan and Darfur are modern society. There are places in Sweden where they're having jews be persecuted again.

Mainstream modern Western society.

France supported the Hutus and supplied the machetes as well as gave the training for the massacre of several hundred thousand Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda. Mainstream modern Western society does not like to get their hands dirty. They simply prefer to use others to do their dirty job. Also, Germany and France supplied and supported Saddam by building him bunkers, giving him dual purpose systems when he was busy trying to exterminate the Kurds in Northern Iraq. Mainstream modern Western society is also mostly pro-palestinian when it's their avowed goal to eradicate the nation of Israel from the face of the earth.

Or if you meant modern as in western, that itself could be called racist. Not exactly the best argument there is that.

No, it's not racist at all, it's an acknowledgement of the fact that different cultures have different values, which is something that's self-evident if you think about it for five seconds. Indeed, the idea that criticism of other cultures is racism could in itself be argued to be racist, and I personally have a good deal of contempt for squeamishness in criticizing the Other.

Ah! I'm sorry. I was subtly baiting you there and fringing on politics. ^_^

As for being contemptuous of squeamish behavior towards the fault in other cultures, good to know we're on the same page.

[arun2110]

Yes. A properly shaped rod would be better, but any large object massive enough to survive reentry would do as well as the jetpacks to move said object.

And you think the Earth governments won't come down on the RDA like a ton of bricks for creating a WMD - which they are explicitly forbidden to do? Bear in mind that Earth has seen escalating violence, including nuclear terrorism - governments are going to be very wary of anyone using WMDs.

Earth has to prove it was a WMD strike and not a asteroid impact. How is Earth going to prove it?

Not to mention that non-purpose-built orbital weapons probably don't really have much accuracy - miss by too much and you might well hit the base.

Axial spin will reduce the error. Also, it's not going to be all that bad to begin with. The rock is going to be traveling many miles per second and it won't be within Earth's atmosphere long enough to be deflected away from its target.

Incidently - just in case anyone brings up this argument - I remember seeing a proposal on SB.com to make the kinetic orbital an "accident". I suspect if anyone tries this Earth's governments will take the RDA apart with extreme prejudice - bad enough if they built WMDs, but no-one wants people having these sorts of accidents in control of relativistic spacecraft anywhere near the solar system.

How is earth going to prove this? How would earth investigate this? Why would earth suspect this in the first case?

Mines require very little explosives. A few hundred pounds would have very effectively denied the approaches to the colony.

So why not use those few hundred pounds in a bomb (like they did in the movie) instead of sacrificing a very expensive and hard-to-replace shuttle?

They weren't loading a few hundred pounds. And a few hundred pounds of explosive going off in one place does not have the same effect as several square miles of mined area that denies territory or serves as an obstacle for attacking forces.

BTW, I think you're underestimating the difficulty of making such a minefield - the RDA probably doesn't have too many experts in this application on site, and onlike your typical IED you can't place it right next to the road where you expect the target to go - you're talking about a lot of explosives and probably quite a few accidents.

And aieeegrunt's comments about the problems with fortifications in this scenario are well said.

All those explosive experts they use in the mines are expert enough to create IEDs. Ball bearings and mining explosive with sensor, remote control and detonator equals mine. The miners would be using at least four of these while using explosives in the mine. The mines also don't have to touch detonated. They could be remote detonated.

As for fortifications, see my very brief response to his comments.

[arun2110]

How does one edit a reply? I added one too many quotes to my reply to Zixinus... ^_^;;

[Questor]

Was it Quaritch's military objective to exterminate the Omaticaya (I honestly don't remember and am curious) or he simply going for the preemptive strike? If the former, I'd be wrong and he was practicing total war. If not, I'd day he wasn't.

I'm pretty sure there was no "pre-emptive strike" discussions. And the fact that he was pressing the war into a place where his technology would not work, and he would not be in complete situational awareness is not a rational military decision outside of the context of "kill every one of them."

At some point you have to look whether the "limited" objectives actually result in "limited" war.

Have you read The Big One by Stuart Slade? Would you consider what was done to Germany in that scenario "limited war" simply because the targets were "preemptive strikes" against the Germans ability to wage war by cutting off everything Germany could use to continue the war?

No, I haven't read it. I'll put it on my to read list. Was the book any good? Because I live in India and will probably have to buy the book from Amazon, which'll cost a pretty penny.

I enjoyed it, but probably not enough to get it shipped to India. (I know what shipping to the ME costs, and I doubt India is that much cheaper. I don't know if any book is good enough to pay that much for.)

Long story short. The US drops nuclear weapons on every town in Germany, removing it from the war.

[Junghalli]

Lots may glow. Not everything. What we were seeing on Pandora was that everything glowed, which is what my observation was about.

Do we know that everything glowed? After all, the plants that didn't glow would be largely invisible at night, unless they were large.

You see it as sentients killing non-sentients for food. I see it as Hitler and his Germany must die if I do. We don't share such an intimate connection with our animals as Eywa does and it's the thought of Eywa doing something like this with that connection that makes revolts me. It'd be kind of like asking my kid to die for my cause because that's my take on the connection.

I think you're anthropomorphisizing Eywa. I think the easiest explanation of how it came to be is that it evolved as a plant that could manipulate the behavior of animals to benefit itself (spread its seeds, protect it from things that would eat it etc.). If that's true then it arranging for animals to die to help insure its own survival against invaders would be perfectly natural.

Eywa is supposed to be neutral in all things because it is connected to all things. It can't order it's animals to sacrifice their lives to protect itself. It strikes me as unethical and immoral. The animals did not sign up for that shit, after all.

The cattle that went into our hamburgers didn't sign up to be meat animals. And if you take the Na'Vi's statement that it intervenes to preserve the balance and look at it from an evolutionary theory point of view it's pretty easy to read that as "it intervenes to maintain an environment favorable to itself" viewed through the rose colored glasses of people who worship it as a god.

Which is what I'd said in Consequences.

And my point was I don't think the movie ever made him out to be that stupid (granted I think his characterization could have been handled better in some ways).

France supported the Hutus and supplied the machetes as well as gave the training for the massacre of several hundred thousand Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda. Mainstream modern Western society does not like to get their hands dirty. They simply prefer to use others to do their dirty job. Also, Germany and France supplied and supported Saddam by building him bunkers, giving him dual purpose systems when he was busy trying to exterminate the Kurds in Northern Iraq.

So let's say the moon was a bit bigger, big enough to have a thick atmosphere and liquid water, and there was an intelligent species living there. Let's also say there was a useful resource there. Do you think we'd casually wipe them all out to get it?

We might if the situation was desperate enough, but we'd try other things first.

[PeZook]

Zook,
1. Interstellar travel with reaction drives.
We're talking millions upon millions of tons of reaction mass. Theoretically possible does not mean practically. I believe, scientists who examined the drive proposal in question estimated they'd need 400 million tons of reaction mass. ^_^ Where you going to get it?

Prove it. A link to a proper study or article would suffice.

2, Shuttle managing heavy g world and relativistic c travel:
How are these two related? One's about powerful engines which may or may not have endurance for a day and the other's about slow and steady acceleration for possibly years.

They show us they possess the general level of technology we would consider complete science fiction (heh) regarding aerospace vehicles. Their shuttles can do repeated trips between orbit and Pandora's surface without maintenance for their airframes, for example, which indicates the state their materials tech is at.

3. KEW:
Tell your objections to the Tunguska event, the Shiva crater, the Yucatan crater and the comet Shoemaker-Levy. I think they all disagree with you on how much extreme engineering is needed for a KEW. A massive enough object spun about its axis like a bullet and mounted with a jetpack is all that's needed. Weapon will not be terribly accurate, but hey, close counts with nukes and KEWs, unless the KEW in question is an anti-personnel or anti-armor weapon system.

*sigh*

And you wonder why I keep calling you an idiot?

Let me spell this out for you: a Kinetic Energy WEAPON is a WEAPON because it can, in general, hit its target. Comparing random asteroid strikes to a KEW is like saying your rifle doesn't need a precisely machined barrel because falling rocks have killed people before.

Let's examine your wonder-weapon in more detail:

Energy content:

If we assume Pandora is identical to Earth (it's not: its surface gravity is significantly lower, and it's probably smaller, thus its orbital velocity is significantly lower) A 500kg metal rod will thus posess a kinetic energy of 11,560 GJ. Because I'm being generous here, we'll ignore the fact the KEW will have to go through the atmosphere and thus shed a lot of energy on the way down.

So the (rather large) KEW will be the explosive equivalent similar to a three-ton bomb (one ton of TNT is 4.3 gigajoules) - somewhat more than the improvised bombs the RDA wanted to use originally, bu not by an order of magnitude. Certainly nowhere near a nuclear yield as you try to claim.

Necessary CEP:

A six-tonne Tallboy bomb was expected to make a crater 30 meters in diameter. Let's assume the crater to be similar, since much of the Tallboy's mass was the casing. So in order to guarantee the destruction of the Soul Tree, you'd need to drop your KEW within 30 meters of it. From orbit.

Plausibility:

So, the RDA needs to machine an impactor and equip with it with a guidance package capable of placing it within 30 meters of the target. They have no personnel with any sort of experience in making re-entry vehicles, and regulations prohibit them from hauling the plans for such to Pandora, so they have to design them from scratch. In a couple of days.

The guidance system is another matter: what do you use to correct the impactor's course? Satellite? Inertial? Radio-command? How do you avoid smacking into one of the flying mountains?

Do you know what CEP the first American ballistic missile had? 1400 meters. And it was designed by huge teams of highly qualified experts, whereas the impactor would be jury-rigged by people who spent their time designing mining equipment and firearms.

4. WMDs.
Read the KEW thing. I laugh at banning WMDs. Also remember, earth cannot enforce those rules on Pandora. Kind of like how even though US and the west ban WMDs, they cannot do anything about India, S. Africa, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Israel, Pakistan, N. Korea, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Libya, etc. I laugh again at the idea of earth banning WMDs.

Earth can enforce these rules back on Earth, by, say, shutting the RDA down.

5. Economy without Unobtanium:
Think of it as a chain effect. The market capitalization of RDA - which was in the trillions of dollars - vaporizes overnight. Spaceships are now harder to build without superconductor (how the fuck do you manage all this heat? We're burning up here in this new ship.) Faster, more powerful processors are out (less heat produced, better operations.) And a host of other things. It's not going to be one industry. Starting with financial markets, everything's going to take a hit if only indirectly. So, depression and economy collapse.

Depression does not equal collapse, for fuck's sake! I do not deny there could possibly be a depression if only due to RDA's failure, but we're in the middle of a depression right now and there's no rioting on the streets and starving people. Certainly if Obama suggested the US go an kill off some African tribesmen for their unobtainium to help us get out of depression, people woul dbe mortified: because unlike morally corrupt assholes like you, they don't think economic woes trump lives.

6. Mass of unobtanium shipped:
Think of the antimatter fuel for your drive. To produce 1 kg of antimatter you need to expend more than 1 kg worth of energy (using the E= mc2 equation.) Where's that energy going to grow? Certainly not on trees. Even if they use solar farms, how may trillions were invested for these collectors in space? What about the cost of the spaceship? The cost of operations? The cost of the colony. The cost of the manpower. These are all big expenses. If you expect me to think they got away with shipping a ton, I laugh in the face of that.

And once again you show you can't fucking read.

How is this rant supposed to show they can in fact ship enough unobtainium to make Earth's economy depend on it?

7. Selfridge doesn't say Unobtanium isn't important.
Yes, room temperature superconductor isn't the holy grail and wet dream of scientists and engineers everywhere and is practically useless junk. I laugh even more.

Again, you're a fucking retard with zero reading comprehension. Unobtainium is without a doubt useful and important, it's just not important enough to cause economic collapse if taken away!

How many times will I have to repeat this point?

8. Treaty of versailles:
I was expecting you to pounce on this. Thanks for taking the bait. Let me pontificate:

People keep harping about the unjust nature of treaty of versailles. Tell me, how much of the treaty was enforced in the spirit it was written in? Reparations? The Germans printed so much money the got hyperinflation and then pleaded they could not pay the reparations and got away with it. The reduced army? Every man in the army was trained to a level two above his rank so that the army could expand like crazy (one of the reasons why germany was able to expand it's army so far under hitler.) They ignored terms about never building subs. Just a few ways in which the Germans violated the terms of the treaty.

Jesus christ...they had to bend out of shape to circumvent the terms of the treaty in order to have an army and functioning economy again, and you say it was a "pretty minor part of the equation"?

Your logic is astonishing.

But was the treaty unjust? Let's see. They started the war. They borrowed a hell of a lot of money expecting they'd get the losers to pay the bill after they won the war. And they were expansionist assholes. And they wanted to get away without paying reparations when it became clear they were going to lose. WTF! The Germans got exactly what they deserved on paper. They managed to finagle their way out of paying their debts and cried foul about the unjust terms.

This is a debate for another time: what matters is that the german public perceived the treaty as unjust.

So, treaty of versailles was not the crucial part of the equation. It's a fairly minor part of the equation. The major part of the equation is what I stated earlier. There were new big dogs in the neighborhood and they had to settle who was the alpha, thus the two wars.

Germany was a new big dog? Are you serious?

FYI, the treaty also doesn't explain Italy and Japan. What did the treaty have to do with those two nations, btw? Pray enlighten us.

I don't to explain Italy and Japan, since you claimed economic woes would inevitably lead to new world wars and Hitlers and mass murder. Italy was a fascist state, but not one led by a mass murdering psychopath, and the rise of fascism in italy and nazism in Germany are, in fact, quite different phenomena.

This still does not change my statement about people who make sweeping statements.

Nonsense. The Germans were expansionist assholes. Hitler was an expansionist asshole. The Germans got out of honoring the treaty of versailles, but that also undermined the weimar republic, paving the way for a match made in hell.

Did you forget the context of the discussion? You claimed economic woes lead to war and deth and destruction and used Hitler as justification, I responded by saying WWII had other reasons besides the Great Depression, mainly the treaty of versailles. You then reply the Treay Of Versailles wasn't the only reason for the war, which is pretty much true. We now disagree on the treaty's importance.

In other words, you shot down your own argument. Congratulations!

10. It's unjust for Na'vi to pay the price for humanity's shortcomings.
Did I say anywhere my story was a just one? Please cite where I said this.

You're defending humanity's actions and trying to justify them by saying Earth's economic collapse would lead to more lives lost than wiping out an entire ecosystem.

11. Interstellar fleet during a recession.
They use the fleet they already had. Or built one. Kinda like how Japan sent its ships to pearl harbor while american blockade was strangling its economic lifeline.

They didn't have a fleet. The RDA operated 12 starships in total.

12. Na'vi right to defend their land.
I don't refuse that. If you'd read closely, my argument was essentially "so what? the humans were stronger and were going to take it unless the Na'vi did what the Japs did and not what everyone else on the planet did against the europeans."

And yet you try to justify it by claiming Earth would go into economic collapse and war.

13. Burning the home tree.
The goal was to burn the home tree. Not burn the home tree and spare the Na'vi there. So, don't bring this here.

Then why did Quaritch even bother with tear gas and assurances to Selfridge that he'd try to minimize the casulaties, if the goal wasn't to spare as many Na'Vi as possible?

Go look up what a war crime is. The Na'vi fired while surrounded by civilians. That puts the burden on their head. Quaritch retaliated like an asshole with overwhelming force, but since his enemy were hiding among civilians and shooting at him, he was not committing a war crime. He was being an asshole, though, as I'd stated repeatedly.

They weren't hiding amongst cvilians, the archers were standing there in plain sight.

14. The concept of total war.
The concept of total war would have had Quaritch bring down their home, burn their forest ( so that they can't hunt), bomb them to smithrens and then force an unconditional surrender.

So limited war = any war ever fought?

16. Hauling shuttles back.
Just thought they would. No need for a big fleet of shuttles on the colony. Doesn't matter none to me if they leave the shuttles behind.

You said yourself that the shuttles would burden the ship, and they want to cram every gram of unobtainium they can aboard. It would be like the Apollo spacecraft hauling back the LEM cabin.

17. Shuttles and refueling.
Heh. Come up with a better argument. I'm not arguing that they should have used to shuttle as KEW. I'm saying it's expendable and not as mission crucial as you keep insisting it is.

Jesus christ, you really think that a ridiculously advanced SSTO spacecraft is expendable?

And yes, you have argued they should've used it as a KEW.

As for the Americans and B-52 in Iraq, funny because that's what the Americans usually do. Call in Artillery or air support while they hold you and bomb the fuck out of you.

Woosh! The point of the analogy flies right over your head, idiot.

18. Morality.
Why would I want to concede something I wasn't arguing at all? You were arguing morality. Not I. I was arguing it's deviancy. Being on either end of the bell curve doesn't make you morally right or wrong. WTF are you basing your logic on?

If you don't think it's morally wrong, you should have no problem saying it.

19. Nekkid girl pics.
Your question sucked. I gave you a valid and proper answer. If my answer showed your question's stupidity, not my fault, is it?

Except it didn't, because you argued in this very thread that appearances don't matter, what matter is the mechanics behind the creature.

Therefore, even if something appears human, but is not, in fact, a human, then it's deviant to be aroused by it. Your own words, your own logic.

21. Exotic shit.
Not sure if you're being sarcastic or not.

I kind of am.

22. Sully starting a war.
RDA started a war between the mine and the Omaticaya. Sully started a war between Pandora and humanity. History, if written would go something like, "there was an incident at the mine between the RDA and the neighboring tribe and Sully started an interstellar war over it." kind of like how the blackhand killed francis fredinand, but did not start wwI. Austria-hungary and Germany did when they declared war on Serbia for the assassination.

I don't think I have the energy to try and repeat, again, that the RDA attacked and destroyed the centre of the Omaticaya's way of life. They should've expected a counterattack, and it's not a sign of idiocy nor an unreasonable escalation that the Omaticaya sought allies in their war against the RDA. Is it unreasonable escalation or idiocy when, after a man breaks into your home and forcibly evicts you, you bring in the authorities to arrest him?

Not to mention that RDA doesn't equal humanity. The Na'Vi even let the civilians leave!

And yes, they fight humanity in my story for reasons that I'd explained over and over again. Just because you say they don't fight humanity doesn't mean I shouldn't say they fight humanity. Or are you questioning my right to thought and speech? If so, I laugh at your face and continue to do what I've always done.

They fight humanity RAR TO THE DEATH OF THEIR SPECIES because you say they would. That makes you a shitty writer, but yeah, I guess you can write anything you want.

23. Raging on sully.
Like you're raging on me? Grow up.

Then what was the point of even mentioning it? You didn't say "Sully had a damaged spine!", after all. That would've also been completely true and totally neutral.

[eyl]

Yes. A properly shaped rod would be better, but any large object massive enough to survive reentry would do as well as the jetpacks to move said object.

Issues with orbital KEW have been pointed out above

And you think the Earth governments won't come down on the RDA like a ton of bricks for creating a WMD - which they are explicitly forbidden to do? Bear in mind that Earth has seen escalating violence, including nuclear terrorism - governments are going to be very wary of anyone using WMDs.

Earth has to prove it was a WMD strike and not a asteroid impact. How is Earth going to prove it?

Incidently - just in case anyone brings up this argument - I remember seeing a proposal on SB.com to make the kinetic orbital an "accident". I suspect if anyone tries this Earth's governments will take the RDA apart with extreme prejudice - bad enough if they built WMDs, but no-one wants people having these sorts of accidents in control of relativistic spacecraft anywhere near the solar system.

How is earth going to prove this? How would earth investigate this? Why would earth suspect this in the first case?

"There are always witnesses to a massacre, even if they're all behind the guns"*. We;ve seen that not everyone agrees with the lengths Quaritch went to (hell, even Selridge was uncomfortable with them). Do you honestly think that no-one is ever going to talk about it? And unless Earth's governments are total morons, there are going to be ways to either prevent or at least record any attempts to use the spaceships to do this (black boxes would be the simlest, but I can think of all sorts of other). Again, it's inevitable that Earth will be very nervous about handing potential WMDs to anyone, given the political situation.

*Don't remember the quote originator - it might have been Bujold

Mines require very little explosives. A few hundred pounds would have very effectively denied the approaches to the colony.

So why not use those few hundred pounds in a bomb (like they did in the movie) instead of sacrificing a very expensive and hard-to-replace shuttle?

They weren't loading a few hundred pounds. And a few hundred pounds of explosive going off in one place does not have the same effect as several square miles of mined area that denies territory or serves as an obstacle for attacking forces.[/quote]

And it does nothing to solve the problem - the Na'vi might not be able to sustain an army capable of assaulting the base for long, but they likely can keep enough patrols out to pin the humans to the base - which is just as well from their POV. And you're ingoring that they can effectively airdrop troops into the base.

[Shroom Man 777]

So if Earth can't ban particular weapons from being developed in certain nations, then it automatically stands to reason that Earth can't ever never ever ban particular weapons from private organizations like corporations because corporations are exactly the same as rogue nations that can flick their noses at the UN and withstand sanctions and starvations of their populaces, because... corporations can flick their noses at the UN and withstand sanctions and starvations of their populaces... because corporations can... oh wait. They can't.

[Sarevok]

Well RDA never needed to fight anyone if they had shown any intelligence at all. They could have just ignored the Navi because there is jack shit they can do. RDA has no need to go into the jungle. They are here for shinies like unobtainium. All they need to do is erect some big walls around their base and put gun turrets on them. If the Navi try to approach they die. If they dont who thrn cares about what goes on in the jungle ? The movies premise needed the RDA act like captain planet villains and go on the offensive. But frankly there was no need for RDA to ever venture out beyond base perimeters. To the Navi the sky people could have remained giant monoliths that stay at once place and zap anyone going too close.

[PeZook]

Well RDA never needed to fight anyone if they had shown any intelligence at all. They could have just ignored the Navi because there is jack shit they can do. RDA has no need to go into the jungle. They are here for shinies like unobtainium. All they need to do is erect some big walls around their base and put gun turrets on them. If the Navi try to approach they die. If they dont who thrn cares about what goes on in the jungle ? The movies premise needed the RDA act like captain planet villains and go on the offensive. But frankly there was no need for RDA to ever venture out beyond base perimeters. To the Navi the sky people could have remained giant monoliths that stay at once place and zap anyone going too close.

Uh...they need to venture out of their base to actually mine the unobtainium. You can see in the beginning that the mine is some way out from the base, and it appeared that they needed to start developing another deposit. And, since they're greedy assholes, they decided to chose the biggest one around - the one under the Home Tree.

I actually agree they didn't need to fight the Na'Vi if they just settled for a smaller or less convenient deposit without indingenous people living on it, but for the RDA, profit trumps lives.