One note on the viability of firearms in the Buffy-verse. Allow me to provide a number of points from canon:
1) Spike was in a wheelchair for much of season 2 because it took a long time for the damage to his central nervous system to heal, despite mystical recovery. This strongly suggests the CNS injuries can be seriously debilitating to vampires for a period of time beyond a single combat engagement.
2) While decapitation is effective, in the vast majority of situations, vampires are dispatched either via a sharpened stick or through an arrow or crossbow bolt (which is basically a sharpened stick moving fast). The slayers do this on a nightly basis.
3) Arrows and stakes MUST penetrate at least a portion of the vampire's heart. When the native American spirits were attacking during the Thanksgiving episode, Spike was repeatedly penetrated with arrows to the point that he was starting to look like a pincushion. I point this out (no pun intended) to state that slayers regularly were able to hit a small target on vampires with both melee and projectile weapons -- a target that was unlikely (though not impossible) to hit by chance.
4) Buffy and other slayers are regularly stated as having a supernatural ability to learn any weapon. Given that she was able to effectively use a rocket launcher with less than an afternoon's familiarization, we can say it is extremely likely that this ability extends to modern weapons.
5) There are plenty of enemies apart from vampires that find guns rather deadly, as both Wesley and Wolfram and Hart proved repeatedly in Angel.
Conclusion: Slayers could easily take down a vampire with even regular jacketed 9mm bullets by hitting their CNS, and there were plenty of demons that were not immune to bullets (and those that were either had a mystical vulnerability -- fyarls and werewolves need silver -- or had really thick armor, which suggests AP rounds may be a solution). Buffy hated guns, probably because her first watcher killed himself with one. Even without that, she would have had some severe restrictions on being able to carry a gun given that she was an American high school student in California (which has very strict open and concealed carry laws). Failing to train slayers in firearms still seems like a massive oversight on the part of the Council. It is unclear as to whether that oversight is deliberate.
I didn't say they were 100% useless. But to get those CNS hits, well, realworld trained soldiers get that less than 1% of the time in anything but sniping or CAREFULLY aimed shots.
The kind of shots you do not get at something that moves much faster than a human.
Oh yes, slayers could easily do it. Others, not so much.
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A lot (if not all) of his comment was just... nonsense science. I wouldn't spend too much time trying to argue with him.
Just because you prefer to be smugly ignorant and incompetent doesn't mean everyone else has to be. Why don't you prove me wrong? Please try. I mean, instead of kneejerking to a useless personal attack and insult because you're unable to understand the science.
It was a FUSION reactor. The only way failure equals big explosion like it did in the movie would be if it was designed to double as a colonial self-destruct device.
Sustained fusion requires either stellar mass level gravity or a sustained energy input. Cut out the energy input, then at worst the electromagnetic containment fails, and the magnets themselves, along with the walls of the vacuum chamber the reaction is happening in, will be exposed to rapidly cooling plasma. By the time the chamber melts down, the temperature will drop enough to resemble conventional flames and the pressure will be fairly low. The reactor itself, and the surrounding rooms would be destroyed, but most of the colony would be untouched.
So, the reactor going up would destroy the hive, but not kill the marines in a different building.
That's roughly correct for the majority of theoretically possible fusion reactors yes. Not for all. And if the increased power generation efficiency is great enough, the people building it will pick the more dangerous reactor type because hey, more energy for less cash, obviously the better choice. Compare to realworld, where today it is 100% possible to build fission reactors that are simply unable to have a meltdown, but because their efficiency is lower, it's not the model being built.
Agreed. I didn't know where to begin with his armor assumptions (if something that good was available, it would be used unless there's something VERY wrong with it.
Pricetag is on the, let's say "high" side of things. And manufacturing is so far done in tiny little squares a few mm thick. Without making it easier to apply in practice, it's going to be a repeat of the F-35s "stealth-coat" that makes it require several times the groundcrew of otherwise comparable modern fighters, and STILL require >triple the groundservice time per mission.
But, the material exists, and i only used it as an example because i've actually once read up on it, there are others with similar levels of advantage, BUT ALSO similar levels of issues.
If you have to apply the Exote layer purely by hand to a tank, at exacting levels of precision, including figuring out how to get allover coverage without compromising optics, electronics etc, the pricetag for doing that goes instantly into the range of "ridiculous" even before looking at the high cost of the layer itself.
On the personal armour side, the replacement for a ballistic plate that was tested, full pricetag was something like a >hundred times the ballistic plate it replaced, and modern armies are already straining to maintain troops with just regular bodyarmour that is a tiny fraction of the cost.
As to the M2; my point stands. If the US DOD can get something as good or better for less, they will. Of course, produced locally is a factor in such decisions, so something slightly better produced in another country will not count....
No they wont. The US DoD is literally infamous for being irrational. Again, i can use the F-35 as an excellent example as it is on the edge of "glorified crap". The fun about it comes when you look at some of the decisions made relating to it. Like how the machinetools for making the Harrier II were specifically destroyed as part of the F-35 deal, just to make sure that noone could back out from the F-35s replacing it.
Or how it has a datalink system that produces sensor ghosts on a regular but unpredictable basis. While the datalink my own nation built, most noticeably used in the Gripen(but also fully integrates with land and sea forces), was designed and done BEFORE that on the F-35, and does NOT produce any sensor ghosts like that. USA could have purchased our system, freely available BEFORE they started their own development.
Seriously, the USSR pioneered this kind of datalink with the MiG-31 back in the late 80s, and even the current Russian incarnation of that ALSO works better than what the F-35 uses, despite costing a fraction of it.
Or how about we talk about STRIX, another one from my own country. It was developed from mid 80s and put into production in the early 90s. Years later, USA decided it wanted the same capability. Oh, but just the study made to take that decision cost more than it cost Sweden developing it and running one production line with the 1st generation. STRIX was freely and openly available for purchase long before USA even STARTED its own R&D program. And fully compatible to US systems.
Instead, the US XM395 PROTOTYPE ammo gets live fire testing for the first time in 2011 Afghanistan. STRIX went into active, NONprototype service in 1994. And the XM395 isn't even better than the 2nd generation or later STRIX, which went into production in the late 90s.
And the STK .50 isn't just "slightly better" than the M2. But yes, "not built here" is an extremely strong force within the US DoD, it's a heavily ingrained part of the severe corruption there. And as shown above, "not built here" and "not invented here" goes to the point of stupidity and then keeps going far beyond that point, STRIX being an absurdly good example, with USA spending something like 30 times MINIMUM of what Sweden did(a lot of the R&D costs have been hidden through corruption shenanigans, the full cost could easily be double or even triple what is known), and more than twice the time to get something that is just barely vaguely equal in capability.
And they didn't even start their own until STRIX was in active service.
Perhaps i should have been blatant about including corruption and greed dressed up as patriotism in that inertia, but lets be very clear about that rationality does NOT have anything to do with it.
The M2 is extremely overdue to be replaced no matter how decent a gun it was when it was designed. Like i already said, even just the DShk from less than 20 years later than the M2 can be argued as better enough that it could be considered a valid replacement. With the DShk you COULD argue "just slightly better", but this is also a gun from 1938, something which is also effectively obsolete.
Something not designed to take advantage of modern massproduction, materials engineering or precision.
As i also already noted, unless the Germans screw up the RMG .50 badly, it's going to push the M2 into the territory of "putting lipstick on a pig" level of obsolete. And the US DoD is almost certainly not going to replace it anyway. Instead there will be more pie in the sky projects that will be more or less utter fails.
Even just a straight redesign update of the M2 to make full use of industrial improvements would make it better in almost every way, but even this isn't being done. Because this couldn't excuse wasting money like "experimental supergun projects" can, and thus it isn't important enough.
