2008-12-24, 02:32 | Link #1801 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Senior Member
Join Date: Jun 2007
|
I'll work backwards on this one. Deal with more recent points, then work on leftovers from previous posts.
Quote:
Quote:
Besides, if Arf does tap more of Fate's mana pool than Fate herself, what happens when Fate needs that energy after her limiter release? Quote:
Quote:
The only deployment I utterly disagreee with was making Erio and Caro stand the midnight shift. They're what, 10? They were at HQ at just past 7pm on Sept 11 and were scheduled to be there until the conference ended at 6 or 7pm on Sept 12, that's 24 hours on duty! They're in the millitary and all, but they're still just 10! At the least, they should have let them sleep and called them in just before the conference starts. I've already said I don't mind seperating the captains from their devices, there's some rationale for it (however paperthin and farfetched it may seem to you) but this was nuts! Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
In no. 2, you can't guarantee any (HQ) unit that gets Arf will be willing to let her go. Especially if no one in RF6 has any say in her deployment. I think that pretty much precludes 3 and 4 from happening. Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
1. Shamal and Zafira smack the drones that get too close to the building. They are successful for a while. 2. Otto shows up and starts bombarding them. 3. Shamal shifts her priority to blocking her attacks. Zafira shifts to covering her from drones. 4. Drones take the opportunity to get around them into the base. But Shamal and Zafira have no choice but to hope that Vice can intercept those that get to close to the personnel. Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
2008-12-24, 06:04 | Link #1802 | |
物語は、もう、おしまい……?
Join Date: Jan 2007
Location: In the Horizon
Age: 43
|
Quote:
Come to think of it, if the Jail faction did consider the training field as a potential refuge for the RF6 personale, what they can do is:
Both situations are bad. The first is a desperate defense that could swiftly deteriorate into a "sit, wait and die" situation, but the latter is worse in the sense that the prey will have no cover and will fall like wheat before a sharp scythe (metaphorically speaking, of course).
__________________
|
|
2008-12-24, 10:29 | Link #1803 | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Senior Member
Join Date: Jul 2007
|
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
If familiars are rare (as you postulated previously, and is probably true based on evidence so far) then the base layout of the limiter will assume no familiar-like demands. Given this, they are going to have to make some re-engineering choices anyway for Fate's limiter. In fact, in a parallel pipeline configuration, they won't have to modify to just clamp Fate (one pipe), while to clamp Fate and Arf requires modification! Even in a serial pipeline configuration, it is not at all clear why clamping Fate and Arf would be the easier clamp. Quote:
Difference number 2. Your familiar can execute magics independently. This is not true of most spells. Quote:
In any case, the very premise of a familiar is that any capability loss the mage suffers through making and feeding one is compensated by the gain of an additional maneuver and fire element. In short, Fate should have a net advantage with Arf at her side. If she blows that advantage (say by sending Arf with the Forwards, thus getting into deeper crap in Ep21), that's a use that's probably not anticipated by the creator of the familiar process (or maybe they will say the use shows her priorities and in that sense is correct). Quote:
To be fair though, we don't see them through a lot of the guard process. Maybe they took naps in turns and we didn't see them. Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
1) The correlation of forces improves in the HQ, which will at least be something. OR 2) The option now exists to send someone ELSE back (or even two) and maintain the same approximate combat potential at GF. Quote:
Preparation of a position means to arrange for things that will improve your survivability or your ability to kill enemies. Such as barricades, trenches, barbed wire, mines (OK, I guess the last one won't be TSAB but you get the point) ... etc. A guy who gets shot 10 seconds in from a stray shot while fighting from a well-fortified position still had a prepared position - he was just unlucky. A person who fights for 2 hours but has to use shields constantly because there is nothing else to protect her from fire is still fighting from an unprepared position. If that person had a prepared position, she might have lasted 4 hours because she can save a lot of effort from not having to make shields. Quote:
Quote:
Can you honestly say that glass-heavy roof of RF6 (and we can SEE how thin the roof's 'crete was from the wreckage) is "the strongest material possible?" In general, soldiers would prefer a roof on their heads - if it is actually cover-grade strong, like a bunker. That's why I'm forking them off to a position that can be turned into a defensive position 500m (according to you) away. Hiding under a roof that does not have strength is actually a potential hazard since the durn thing might collapse on the first blow and squash you. It is kind of like hiding behind concealment - it gives a false sense of security and if it is the only (or one of a few) concealment it basically tells the enemy exactly where to shoot up. Imagine this. You lead an infantry squad. Your choices are reduced now to lying on the grass dispersed or trying to hide out in a (the only) small but very visible hut. The enemy has RPOs and RPGs that will turn the hut into cinders with a few hits, and they probably won't have compunctions doing so to be safe. Sure you won't consider trying to lie in the grass and hoping the enemy doesn't spot you until you can get the jump on them? Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Besides, since you argue that they don't have pseudomatter but they can generate holograms and forcefields that match it, arguably the same argument goes for your idea. Furniture made of your system would have most of the same advantages. Quote:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
2008-12-31, 09:55 | Link #1804 | |||||||||||||||
Senior Member
Join Date: Jun 2007
|
I wanted to reply earlier, but I just never found the time to properly compose it until now.
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
It'd be easier to wrap the base in pseudomatter armor once they come under attack. That they didn't is either because such a system doesn't exist, they couldn't afford it, or it got disabled already. Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
|
|||||||||||||||
2009-01-19, 22:45 | Link #1805 |
Once and Current Subber
Join Date: Dec 2005
|
So I had a thought while perusing a volume of Japanese history.
We've all talked before about how the whole "let's get all of our brass into one place and disarm them" meeting is, from a military perspective, really really stupid. It had occurred to me before that there might be an explanation of "oh, it's traditional, and that's why we keep on doing it," but that explanation was a little unsatisfying. WHY would there have been such a tradition? Why would that have ever seemed like a good idea? What, at the end of the day, is the bloody point? But if you think of it, not as a military strategy meeting, but a kind of "sankin-kotai" procession, it makes a lot of sense. Recap on Japanese history... the sankin-kotai was the system that the Tokugawa shogunate used to keep the various daimyo (lords of each domain) in line. Each daimyo was required to travel to Edo in alternate years and live there, as well as to keep most of their families there full-time. Hugely expensive, as each domain had to fund their capital estate and retainers as well as a long procession to get the lord there and back safely and in style. It didn't make a whole lot of sense to the daimyo, exactly, but the system wasn't to benefit them at all. The entire point of the exercise was to demonstrate their submission to the rule of the shogun, create a very real vulnerability in the daimyo (it's a lot harder to rebel when you're in the capital and surrounded by Shogunate troops, heh), and expose potentially-rebellious nobles ("What, you're not coming to Edo? Obviously you're plotting something! We'll crush you at once.") I could see how Midchilda could have a use for such a custom. Powerful mages could certainly turn less-developed alternate realities into their own private fiefs, build armies, and declare independence or make war on the center, as it were. Making everyone above a certain level of power and importance head home and get together under conditions of mutual vulnerability would definitely help things stay united - it's a good opportunity to snap up actual rebels who show up, and those who don't show up are obviously up to something, right? (Or, at any rate, they're insufficiently committed to the idea of the central rule that they're not willing to follow a direct order that places them in a vulnerable position, which is not quite the same thing but pretty similar...) So I ask myself, why didn't someone just make the parallel so that it was obvious? Or maybe it's just sufficiently obvious to Japanese viewers, the vast majority of whom are familiar with that system, that it didn't even bear repeating? In other words, maybe the reason we think the TSAB was being so dumb is just one big culture gap? Comments, please. I might just be smokin' the good stuff here. |
2009-01-20, 01:10 | Link #1807 |
Once and Current Subber
Join Date: Dec 2005
|
Doesn't kill the metaphor. Obviously travel times are faster when you can warp rather than having to ride in a palanquin. ;p And disarmament in the Shogun's presence was also very much SOP.
I'm just throwing this out there. It's probably not reflective of anything at all. But it's at least mildly plausible and more palatable than "writers were idiots, full stop"... |
2009-01-20, 01:53 | Link #1808 |
Sword Wielding Penguin
|
The writer's aren't idiots. They just have no idea how military tactics and strategy operate. Some of the mistakes they've made are things you could learn not to make playing against BOTS in an RTS game. Their strategy shows how n00b they'd be in a game of starcraft. ZERG RUSH with mook units or toss in some elites... Or both if you've built up for it... and try to cover for your superweapon.
Hell, realisticly, if we applied Jail's drones to the real world... say the Pentagon... Even if the president was secretly ordering the Secretary of Defense to let Jail do his thing, his drones would NEVER be allowed to get within five hundred miles of DC. EVER. Intercepts would occure at the six-hundred mile range... Not: Just outside the city limits. The first line of defense in a defense is having some kind of network that can track the enemy approach from way beyond their ability to actually strike so you can either evacuate, or launch a counter attack in advance. (Or both.) The fact that the drones could get right up to the bay in Cranagan on a regular basis is borderline criminal negligence. I could understand not being able to pin them down once the intelligence network was knocked out. But there should have been some kind of long range perimiter around Cranagan that would detect the drones until that intel was knocked out, so that even if you don't know where they are, you know they're X-hundred miles out and have to still clear the distance. Enough to get your aces rearmed and back topside to kick ass well before arrival. Instead, the enemy, their drones, and their elites are allowed to get well within twenty miles of Cranagan, a hugely populated city, before anyone things "Maybe we should go destroy them now..." Ya'know... if they approached from the ocean, they'd stick out like a sore thumb. If they approached from land directions... someone would notice and call in about hundreds of flying drones if they were low enough to terrain mask. Which leaves only Quattro's obnoxious IS to explain things, but then she's not there every single time. Such things could have been more dramatic if the writer's had done that kind of research. Instead of the TSAB's gaping holes. You could actually depict them as capable and tough, but Jail's Cyborgs were JUST THAT GOOD to get drones inside a 500 mile radius perimiter and into striking range quickly AND manage to not only survive doing so, but achieve the mission objective with trivial losses. |
2009-01-20, 02:01 | Link #1809 |
Senior Member
Join Date: Jun 2007
|
The existence of teleportation renders engagement at a distance obsolete. What they do need are sensors that can zero in on teleportation signatures. The thing is, they do have this tech onboard TSAB ships. The question remains, why don't they have protocols for rapid engagement of teleported advesaries?
|
2009-01-20, 02:52 | Link #1811 | |
Sleep beneath the flowers
Join Date: May 2007
Location: Lording above all of humanity >;3
Age: 34
|
Quote:
Midchilda's dependency on magic for, well, everything is probably what makes an AMF such a deadly thing.
__________________
|
|
2009-01-20, 03:00 | Link #1812 | |
Sword Wielding Penguin
|
Quote:
Part of such a defensive measure, is if the enemy can teleport in, have teleport barriers ready. If the enemy tries to come in, you pick up the signature and snap up a barrier. Barring the way. The wide area barrier seems to be a decent backbone of mages at least early on in the series before we got to strikers... And then it was forgotten. I mean, what better way to contain the enemies than to slap up a barrier of this form and trap them in a pocket dimension? That effectively keeps a person, no matter how close, at 'arms length' from criticals. Given how barriers seemed to work to keep things out AND in equally well if you don't have brute magical power or the key or an effective decryption method... Slapping one up around the facility you're protecting, and another one at the destination of a detected teleport, you'd effectively have the enemy bogged down just as if you had them at 600 miles. They'd have to find a way to breach both barriers, which burns time and ruins the ambush. Then there's another problem with the teleporting. If it worked so well putting people in place, you could just as easily yank people out. Quite frankly, would I be one to modify TSAB protocalls to make sense. Overland and air traveling targets would be intercepted WAY outside of range as it should be. And teleporters would get double barrier treatment while anything sensitive in range of teleporters would get another double barrier treatment. You telelport, or try. But find your teleport interrupted because you can't jump into a barrier that easily. Or if the barrier reaction was slow, you're "Caught in a box." And have to break out, and once you've done that, there's another box you have to break INTO to get to the objective. Area denial pretty much the core of the strategy. "I see you, and you can't even get NEAR here without some kind of big fight..." EDIT: Now, for magical 'radar'... No. See, this is another one of those writers didn't think it through, and thus the TSAB as a fictional entity have criminal negligence levels of stupidity. Because if the enemy is wandering around evaiding your super high end Magic Sensors because they have AMF clouding them, you more than have the tech that can pick up thermal signatures, regular radar detection... Hell, if your sensors that use magic are capable of taking background readings of areas... big bubbles of -NO READINGS- stick out just as much as -LARGE METALIC OBJECTS-. Any of which, if properly written, would come to the mind of someone who was an expert in the field of detection. "We've got enemies who can't be detected because they use AMF which magic can't detect through." "Well, that makes it easy then. Just put some routines on to alert us to any anomalies that look like holes in the sensor sweeps." There's more to stealth than not reflecting radar signals back to source. |
|
2009-01-20, 06:11 | Link #1813 |
Adeptus Animus
Author
Join Date: Jan 2007
Age: 36
|
On the subject of radar, the TSAB could very much detect the AMF generating drones, so that isn't the reason they managed to sneak up on the HQ.
However, ATC, you seem to forget that the TSAB did have a Barrier in place to prevent teleporting in. Unfortunately for the TSAB, Jail had Cinque in place to sabotage it. From that point on, preventing enemies from teleporting in becomes impossible, as its obvious that Barriers that prevent entry need big generators to keep going -as evidenced by A's, in which Fate, Yuuno and Arf easilly managed to get into the Barrier created by Vita- Teleporting enemies out has its own complications. As far as we have seen, it works by placing a circle underneath whats being teleported and porting it. Any target aware of that would simply move out of the way. Then there is also the fact that the drone AMF would interfere with the teleporting proces, rendering it inacurate, if not impossible. From my point of view, the strategical error you are maiking is that you seem to be aproaching Jail as an enemy army, I.E. the chances of seeing them coming are high. GDI, if you will. Instead, you should try to treat Jail as a terrorist group. Like Stealth GLA. You have no idea where they are, no idea where they are coming from, and no idea where or when they will strike until they are there. Jail's drones and cyborgs made use of sewers and other undeground entrances in adition to attacking from the sky and teleporting in. In fact, one could say that the moment Cinque destroyed the generator powering the bases main defences, the TSAB was doomed to fall. From that point, the drones were teleported in, disrupted the defensive lines, and allowing further entry by air or ground. Last edited by Keroko; 2009-01-20 at 06:31. |
2009-01-20, 07:46 | Link #1814 | ||
Senior Member
Join Date: Jun 2007
|
Quote:
Quote:
|
||
2009-01-20, 09:11 | Link #1815 | ||||
Senior Member
Join Date: Jul 2007
|
Quote:
Quote:
Strictly speaking, we are not even sure whether the thing has an anti-teleport ability at all. Our enemies didn't exactly seem awfully interested in teleporting inside the building. The shield apparently wasn't even raised at the beginning (Dieci's shot hit the building direct), yet no one tried any teleports that we can see. Quote:
Quote:
On the broader issue of Middie sensors, they definitely don't have a lot of variety, and their general hopelessness in detecting anything without a large energy signature is legend (the one time we saw it, detection vs two non-mage girls is 300 yards - maybe a dedicated search would squeeze out a bit more range...). On the other hand, what they have are reasonably suited to TSAB's purpose, which is mostly against large energy (mostly magical) events. When a large event happens, the sensors do seem to cue in very quickly and automatically, with apparently excellent resolution and even finds a way to present a visual a lot of the time. Also, it apparently works through walls and mud, at least for the target types of interest, which makes it more useful as a general purpose TSAB sensor than line of sight limited methods like radar, thermal and visual sighting. The lack of long range air surveillance is curious to us, but not so much considering their dominance. They don't have conventional enemies and even air travel of all kinds seems strictly limited. Under such circumstances, they may have decided to forego the expense of dedicated active emitting radar-type surveillance. It is probably assumed that if a really dangerous flying threat actually appears, it'll have a high energy signature, and will be detected adequately on the regular surveillance system (if it is a "pop-up" threat, probably the radar system would have trouble picking it up until it powers up as well), and a less dangerous flying threat would have a low energy signature, so it is less important if it was detected at a closer range. And of course there's the whole teleport thing too. But they won't really appear because their primary targets are criminals which probably won't be so conspicious as to fly. |
||||
2009-01-20, 09:43 | Link #1817 | |
~ Your Smile ~
Author
Join Date: Dec 2008
Location: 346Pro
Age: 38
|
Quote:
__________________
|
|
2009-01-20, 11:17 | Link #1819 |
Once and Current Subber
Join Date: Dec 2005
|
The US has a vast array of powerful radars searching for incoming Russian missiles. Why can't these radars be re-tasked to search for Arabs with suicide vests?
'cause it doesn't work that way, duh. ;p Personally, I think the whole "barriers? We're not gonna bother with a barrier" thing is mostly related to the terrain they end up fighting in. For the most part, it's "ruined city" (boy, they have a lot of that), so protection of the civilian populace is not an issue. But there's another aspect to it. Say you see a team of drones and you erect a barrier such that the drones and your defenders are inside the barrier. Then... team of drones 2 arrives and merrily wrecks their objective. Or substitute "Numbers cyborg" or "hostile mage" or "flying spaghetti monster" or whatever. When you're defending something, removing yourself from the same reality as the thing you're defending is not necessarily a good idea! We don't ever see anyone thrown into a barrier without the person casting the barrier being in with them as well, do we? |
2009-01-20, 15:26 | Link #1820 |
Sword Wielding Penguin
|
See, now what you're doing is rationalizing the writer's inabilities to apply correct military logic procedures to their writing by trying to link things that aren't really spoken about.
It's the point I'm trying to make here. The TSAB come across as foolish in military perspective to military junkies because the writers didn't do their research. If they HAD done their research, they'd have written the scenarios a lot better. Getting anywhere NEAR cranagan would have been a feat, and an assault with a successful objective in there would have actually been... awesome. Because if real soldiers and actual military understanding were involved in the writing. The drones wouldn't be allowed NEAR the City without Jail showing TRUE cunning and jumping through all the hoops. The detection network would be tuned in to dealing with them as well as power spikes. (You can't seriously tell me that after ten plus years of Jail doing his thing, someone's not going to have set up sensor detection suites tuned specificly to picking up the signatures of drones, AMF, or their side effects.) Again, if Cranagan were DC and the Pentagon was HQ, its security would be considered paramount over just about everything. There would be five times redundant sets of multiple security patterns to deal with, and a policy of No Nonsense to suspected threats. If it LOOKS like a hostile, it's a hostile until proven otherwise, you'd have interception scrambled if someone SNEEZED wrong. Jail would be forced to operate more covertly than overtly, because any sizable force he were to mount would be met with a sledgehammer BEFORE he could move into position. But, as the writing stands, the TSAB lacks any kind of real doctrine or procedure for keeping opponents at arms length from their most IMPORTANT city. Magical teleportation or not, they allowed Jail to get sizable forces within striking distance of the city on a regular basis. At the least, they should have forced Jail to constantly come up with new methods of approach. |
|
|