its not a matter of deception, its a matter of how the law works and how laws are created. you have to define practically everything when writing a law because its going to be torn apart over and over by people either attempting to exploit or circumvent it. that, combined with politics, is how you end up with really convoluted laws that have to define things so specifically that they practically become recursive, self referencing, and 'technically' wrong. I am not saying that your wrong about the science, I'm saying that, by and large, all the law cares about is creating a logical argument/statment, using logic not necessarily facts, to create a rule with certain conditions and applications. if it has to redefine words to do that, then law makers will.
edit: i do think that if they do this they need to make those changes transparent and clear to everyone involved. its not the definitions that are the problem. its concealing that you defined things in that way that is.
This being said i totally agree with you that this was primarily written this way to ban as much weapons as possible, weather this was a political move or an attempt to future proof the law against possible future technologies, probably both? either way i am sure the governments involved knew about it when signing, as this is the kind of stuff they actively look for when making treaties and such. move-over its pretty strongly implied that enforcing this law is a lot harder than its looks like at first glance as the politics involved are so crazy and the TSAB stretched so thin i dont see a way for them to do so with any real effectiveness out side of blantent offenses.
Of course this avoiding the elephant in the room that the term was picked by a manga/anime writer, not a scientist or a politician.
Except, like you said, they can use whatever set of words they wanted if they laid out that definition. Why use "mass-based weapons" to refer to anything non-magical, if not to incline someone, be it some nation they just encountered or their own people, to think first of kinetic weaponry, and not of more precise weapons like lasers, when they hear the term? It's a manipulation tactic, plain and simple. They could have used "non-magical". They didn't.
As for it being invented by a manga author, I suspect it was originally referring to kinetic bombardment, and got extended to other types of weapons in later installments. Or that's my best guess, anyway. Either that, or poor translation.
My read on the Mass Weapons issue is that the TSAB probably dusted off an old archiac law, written back when the choice of weapons were Magic or Metal. In which one depends upon F=MA for damage and the other does not.
It'd be easier to pass such a law(or possibly a constitutional item, given that mass weapons were associated with past disasters, it could very well be written into the TSAB founding charter), with its attached set of precedents and simply add an amendment to update the defintions to include all non-magical weaponry.
Usually, one would just tack on other terms, rather than stretching an older one out to cover all the new things. Still, I could see that happening, especially in common parlance.
An impending operation to rescue a legendary tactician who led the Resistance during the initial alien invasion, yet is never referenced by name? One who is slated to take over leadership of XCOM, despite being absent for decades?
My video game protagonist sense is tingling. This is how the story of XCOM 2 opens, isn't it?
Yep. I'm a touch worried that this is a trap for XCOM in this, though, either an ambush, or that the Commander has been compromised somehow. Maybe I'm just paranoid, though. It seems like the win conditions have changed, and maybe even the Great Commandy One will need our help to win. Otherwise, the Commander being around kinda reduces our need to intervene.
Stage a bombing during a speech of what sounds like ADVENT's chief PR rep? I like the way this Reaper guy thinks. That does sound like a job for an Agni.
Guerrilla warfare is a Reaper's bread-and-butter. They're masters of stealth, explosives, and sabotage. Oh, the fun you can have with them. They can shoot with a chance not to break stealth, especially if they kill the last guy who could possibly see them (100% chance, vs 50% or less). Pair that with a nice sniper spot and Squadsight (ability that means a sniper can hit anyone your units can see), and you have a headshot party. The claymores that go off when someone shoots them and the ability to explode explosive objects without breaking stealth is just icing on the cake. They're OP, is the TL;DR.
Are you kidding? Just look at the smug fucker.
He's also a lizard-person. Not even a joke, he's one of the last "Thin Men", infiltration units from the first game. They're usually called Vipers in XCOM 2, since they're now in their natural form: snake with arms (and boobs, for some reason).
