+1 on Lucky’s statement - its not just US Army which has us carrying crazy crap with no useful application to theatre…
<did start spouting examples but it was getting a bit too military anoraky even for me>
I stand corrected then on the unneeded gear. So when you carried these items, was it then because your mission called for the possibility of using them or was it just an oversight of whoever issued you your kit?
THIS IS MY FLASHLIGHT
THERE ARE MANY LIKE IT
BUT THIS ONE IS MINE
Not really so much as issued or assigned, but more of paranoia and being prepared for any situation—no matter how unlikely. In any event, the equipments always there, but it’s up to whoever is planning and leading the mission to decide if it gets taken along. You get some green LT and he’s jumping at shadows and wants everything brought. You get an experienced LT and he wants to be prepared for everything. Next thing you know, you are packed into a vehicle like a sardine, staring nose to mine at a large stack of claymores. It never bothered me too much, so long as I wasn’t the one carrying the stuff.
So with the BSG world you would think the heavier caliber weapons and ammo would be close at hand; even if it wasn’t needed. Anyhoo, it’s just a small detail that has really bugged me for a while.
On a slight tangent…
I’m thinking that possibly the cylon(s) put the software contract for the current generation Centurions out to tender like the government does…
… which would explain why they’re such craaapppy shots
I guess it sounds like you must be either ARMY or Marines, and Galactica seems to be more likened to the NAVY. There is a marine presence on Galactica but it seems to be limited. That might explain why your military experience on this issue is so different than what is portrayed on BSG. But I’d probably just say its mainly because neither Battlestar was battle read or equipt for battle at the time of attack.
I’ve wondered a few times on the makeup of the military in Galactica -
Was rewatching the episodes with Crashdown, Chief etc on Cobol, and its pretty clear from that, the expectation is more what you’d expect (and I’m not not cussing Navy here) for people who are trained as naval personnel in a situation they really aren’t trained for.
What strikes me as particularly odd though, back to my original line of thought… there IS a Marine presence on board Galactica, but in the times they are referenced to, there’s plenty of mention of NCOs but never of Marine Officers.
Is it just pretty darn lucky that the flight officers happen to be cross trained (in some cases) to set them up to command Marine forces? (my experience was that after a while some people in the military collect other ‘speciality’ training just for the variety)
If that’s the case then Crashdown’s performance is fair enough.
On the other hand, if the Marine troops are more ‘organically integrated’ with the Naval chain of command, then you really would hope for the flight officers to have been crossed trained a bit more than is evident on average.
That being said, I’d probably be ok under Helo or Starbuck as a Marine
Well, it was 40 years since the war, no one had seen cylons since the armistance, and no one expected them to show anytime soon. Can you say “peace dividend”? They simply didn’t spend the capital on improvments because they could not rationalize the costs associated with it.
We’re going to soon have a similar problem in the states, in that all of our nukes are getting old, are soon going to need to be dismantled, and we have no plans for new models.
The only problem I can see there is that there’s going to be a lot of nuclear (nucular?:)) waste to be disposed of.
What would you use “new models” of nuclear missiles for? Bombing a backwater village in a developing country that consists of three straw huts and a cattle ranch?
That makes a lot of sense, other than the fact both Tigh and Adama state that in CW 1, they both had seen the centurions board the colonial ships.
But the Galactica and Pegasus were being decommissioned or in maintenance during the time of CW 2, so I think that is probably the best reason for the lack of superior small arms. So yeah, I think I am sold on that. Originally, my theory was that after CW 1, the colonials had major problems within their own worlds, so their fellow humans were seen as the bigger threat.
It’s reassuring to know other militaries have their WTF moments too.
Are you kidding!!?? We need them for when the Cylons arrive in April!
They’re already walking among us… and I think one of them asked me for directions to the nearest Starbuck’s yesterday… they’re coming for our COFFEE! Can you feel the smell in the air, Helo?
What the frack are you talking about? The Cylon is not the issue here, Dude. I’m talking about drawing a line in the sand, Dude. Across this line, you DO NOT… Also, Dude, Cylon is not the preferred nomenclature. Artificial-cybernetic-humanoid, please. (Sorry, Big Lebowski moment)
Speaking about realism, if the Cylons ever did invade Earth, they would probably have their ships fly into an asteroid or the moon due to their network systems being spammed with porn and Viagra ads.
LOL !
And we have our secret weapons ready…Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum…
Oh my, does anyone know this short story by Harlan Ellison where all of a sudden this HUGE fleet of alien spaceships turns up in Earth’s orbit, all neatly lined up and they just sit there, not doing anything for weeks and then this trigger-happy general decides to shoot a nuclear missile at one of them and then one of the alien ships starts shooting back and it turns out that Earth had actually been turned into a parking lot for spaceships and the attendant now wants to rid the planet from the vermin that messed up one of the parked ships…?
Along the same lines of this thread…It has always bothered me that Galactica can survive direct nuclear hits. You can say they’re only low yield weapons but even so they would vaporize where they hit regardless of plating.
Besides, the Cylons weren’t known to “hold back” on the nukes and would surely hit Galactica with a good one.
And while Galactica has an excuse to conserve its nukes (where will they get more?) the Cylons don’t. They can mine anywhere and have a large supply of slave labor, so why isn’t almost every missile they fire at Galactica a nuke?
Nukes are like Twinkies. They may last a long time, but eventually they go bad. Not to be political on either side, but there’s a decision to be made in the future as to whether or not to have nuclear weapons. BSG seems to show some situations where there will always be a need for tactical nukes, but not neccesarily the huge city killers. I see western powers moving to this model, as long as countries like China and Russia do likewise. Otherwise, a new cold war may loom.
As a related topic, so skinjobs aren’t as succeptable to radiation as humans, it seems? They seem to have no problem using them, or living on a world that has been irradiated(Caprica).
Concerning BSG and surviving a nuke hit. Have we established that no one in this universe has energy shields? Perhaps all battlestars have armor similar to a tank’s reactive armor. A section of it will explode when hit, pushing against the incoming shell with an opposite force, so that the explosion is pushed back into space, rather than inwards into the hull.
I agree with the first part, disagree with the second part.
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Yes, nuclear weapons are going to be around for a while, mankind lacking bigger killing devices (nuclear fusion bombs?). But I don’t think one could rationalize to use them in an all-out war between nations states - I’m not implying that one ever could. What we might see is smaller nukes being used by terrorist groups/states for guerilla/terrorist attacks, but no industrialized nation could justify retaliating such an attack with strategic nuclear weapons.
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There’s not going to be a new Cold War. I’ve written a history book about US-Soviet relations between '45 and '62 and believe me, the geo-political playing field is very different from what it was in the 1940s, when the Cold War started. The Cold War was first and foremost a bipolar, ideological antagonism and one side of that polarity vanished in the early 90s. Nobody actually believes in communism and the teachings of Marx and Lenin any longer. Sure, China may call itself a “People’s Republic,” but what it really is is just another authoritarian state and authoritarianism’s ideology has always been quite simple: power. China’s ruling elite is quite adaptable, actually: they’re implementing capitalism to stay in power. Can you hear Marx turning in his grave?
What we might see, instead, will be wars for resources - and I think those are going to be hot instead of cold.
I’m a bit hazy, but don’t we already have fusion bombs? (using we loosely here) - thought the thing with the big city killers was that they were devices that used a fission reaction to generate the conditions necessary to initiate fusion reaction, thus upping the yield.
Finally nasty layer was when something then realised they could implement fission-fusion-fission devices, which added on some cheap (and IIRC dirty) fission to further increase the overall yield, at the cost of extreme fallout
all pretty shitty really
timmers
p.s. and in case the conspiracy theorists are correct, hello to our good friends at the NSA, who just became interested in our thread. In your time off, please watch BSG because its great viewing.
Don’t worry - those guys probably already read the scripts for the second half of season four… lucky bastards…
Nah not the scripts… they got rips of the video already.
If only they were as bad as the UK govt for losing sensitive material… s4 on youtube before you can say ‘knife’