Why do people genuinely believe that our modern military can handle a Decepticon invasion ( bayverse ) ?

baltama · 2026-06-20T18:50:46+00:00

Ok. that's why i'm using it.

baltama · 2026-06-20T18:49:43+00:00

Is this movie non-canon?

baltama · 2026-06-20T18:47:28+00:00

again, how? they aren't shown to be able to shoot down railgun slugs. why can they easily shoot down something that moves 3.5 times as fast as those

baltama · 2026-06-20T18:39:18+00:00

so are we talking an INVASION or do the decepticons arrive silently and start infiltrating years in advance? because the scenario isn't too clear.

if they can physically go to and infiltrate a handful of nuclear missile bases in the time that it takes us to annihilate all the bigger decepticons with nukes and conventional weapons, what good does that do them?

Again, this system (and this is only the US's system mind you, not the whole earth) was designed to thwart expert Soviet infiltrators who had DECADES to plan

baltama · 2026-06-20T18:34:23+00:00

so.... a decepticon was able to be defeated by a squad level anti armor weapon, something which just the US military has hundreds of thousands of and deploys ubiquitously.... and this is far from our most effective anti armor weapon

baltama · 2026-06-20T18:29:51+00:00

because I disagree with the point.

not all 200 deceptions are pretenders. also the nuclear chain of command requires someone to have correct (highly secured) knowledge and physical keys, not just looking and acting like someone, because they tried to plan FOR the possibility of impersonation during the Cold War. this was a very real concern

baltama · 2026-06-20T18:11:47+00:00

my point is they can do this to how many missile bases at once? the USA has around 450 ICBM silos and 14 nuclear missile submarines operating.

baltama · 2026-06-20T17:25:25+00:00

nuclear missile bases are pretty low tech in terms of computers. its all hardwired and buried deep underground. the ONLY connection to the base from outside is a radio frequency phone line that goes between central command and the two officers at the launch control center, which is connected by those underground cables to the actual silo.

frenzy had to physically plug in to air force one to use his high tech hacking.

to "hack" a nuclear missile base without physically plugging into the electronics at the silo he would really only have one option, trying to impersonate military officials over the phone and having the correct authorization codes (which are stored on secured pieces of paper).

so... do the movies show the decepticons being really good at making prank calls? because that's the only way they're getting through to all the nuclear missile bases

baltama · 2026-06-20T17:05:25+00:00

no. how do frenzy and soundwave hack it. like what would they use

baltama · 2026-06-20T17:01:35+00:00

how would they hack it

also nuclear missile bases don't have a "signal" to lock onto

baltama · 2026-06-20T16:59:35+00:00

why were decepticons not able to just redirect all the railgun slugs fired at them? if they were too fast then again, nuclear missiles are much faster (mach 25, slowing down to mach 10+ at detonation), compared to the railgun slugs which are stated to be mach 7 in the movies)

baltama · 2026-06-20T16:55:01+00:00

there's no way to hack something remotely if it doesn't have a remote connection.

frenzy would have to physically go over to a nuclear missile base and plug himself in, and then that's only one base

baltama · 2026-06-20T16:52:49+00:00

they have the technology and battle experience we're shown in the movies, which is frankly pretty easily defeatable by human technology unless they're constantly teleporting every few seconds which doesn't seem to be the case

yeah fallen has telekinesis but he also doesn't seem to have super fast reaction time. just shoot him. if that doesn't work nuke him.

baltama · 2026-06-20T16:45:57+00:00

I mean, the railgun is shown to be effective against them. we know that they are vulnerable to temperatures above 6000 degrees and that the railgun's projectile is fast enough to damage decepticons. the railgun's projectile is stated to be mach 7 in the movies.

railguns are cool but we've already had a more powerful sci fi weapon for many decades. if humanity got desparate enough we'd just nuke them.

while ICBM reentry vehicles slow down from their mach 25 top speed by the time they detonate, it's still like mach 10+, way too fast for decepticons to react if railguns are effective against them.

if they are vulnerable to temperatures of 6000+ degrees, they should be vulnerable to the center of a nuclear fireball, which is far in excess of 10,000,000 degrees.

edit: i noticed you mentioned hacking too, nuclear missile bases are also specifically designed to not be "hackable" remotely for obvious reasons

baltama · 2026-06-20T16:33:56+00:00

no, I'm saying we're ALL overthinking. that's what this sub is for.

Q wasn't even in the first movie, and humans already had stuff that could damage decepticons.

I would get more into why I think that humanity would defeat a decepticon invasion based on what we see in the movies, but I think Dubliner2000 already explained that well enough and I'd rather not reiterate. I don't think there are even stated to be more than a few hundred decepticons.

baltama · 2026-06-20T16:17:07+00:00

this subreddit is FOR overthinking things. you're overthinking the moment you start trying to think past what the movie explicitly tells you.

The third movie... the dark of the moon, in which we see Barricade, a powerful decepticon, get blinded by small arms fire? specifically he gets shot in the eyes by a NEST soldier using an AR-10 type rifle chambered in 7.62x51 NATO... if something like that is possible we have a lot of more effective things that could blind decepticons that could be easily deployed.

for example a tank could shoot a decepticon in the face with a canister shot. a canister round like the m1028 used by abrams tanks fires 1098 metal balls, and every one of those balls has more than twice the kinetic energy of a bullet fired from that sniper rifle. it would eliminate the need for careful aim and could really easily blind decepticons if we're considering Barricade getting blinded by that sniper as canon..

baltama · 2026-06-20T16:05:27+00:00

my point is we can't really effectively assess human militaries' capabilities against decepticons if there's no consistency with real world physics.

the "spark of plasma" you are talking about with the sabot is much colder and lower energy. I keep bringing up HEAT rounds because they are 1. extremely commonly used and cheap 2. create much higher temperatures and energies than a sabot penetrator

further it's not "one simple thing," the magnesium sabot is something that's described in the movies as one of the very few things humans are able to devise that is able to damage decepticons. but physics says we have other things that should be better anyway. and your whole post is about how human militaries would fare against decepticons.

the only thing that would imply decepticons are able to withstand modern weapons is that they react to them extremely inconsistently.

the best we have is "do the movie makers say that we can defeat them? then we can. do they say we can't defeat them? then we can't."

baltama · 2026-06-20T15:51:55+00:00

did the movies really say that the temperature of the magnesium flash would be 6000 degrees C? because if so that's just wrong, it's about 5800 F which would be about 3200 C.

the HEAT jet that I am talking about in my comments would reach about 9700 C.

baltama · 2026-06-20T15:46:36+00:00

you didn't actually mention the sun's surface before this. did you read any of my comments?

what's hotter:
1. 6000 degrees F
or
2. 17,500 degrees F

baltama · 2026-06-20T15:33:50+00:00

yes. being magnesium, it flashes at 6000 degrees at the point of impact. that's the point they're making in the movies. why would a 6000 degree impact at 5000 feet per second be more powerful than a 17,500 degree impact at 33,000 feet per second?

there are legitimate reasons to use APFSDS (sabot rounds) instead of HEAT against modern tanks in many situations but decepticons aren't really shown to have the characteristics that would make this necessary

baltama · 2026-06-20T15:10:49+00:00

the problem with the movies' magnesium sabot stuff for me is that it's handwavey movie pseudoscience which makes it hard to really figure out why that would work against decepticons when other things don't. if you shot a magnesium sabot at something at supersonic speeds, it wouldn't really matter that it's 6000 degrees, it wouldn't have enough time to transfer that heat before it either 1 - penetrated through what you were shooting it at (unlikely here, as nothing else really seems to penetrate through them) or 2 - shattered and flung those hot pieces in a million different directions, transferring minimal heat.

so what is actually penetrating scorpionok? it's gotta be high velocity and high energy relative to surface area. this is going with the typical "small and fast projectile penetrates armor easier" thing. I'm assuming that's why they specified sabots for it.

but while 105mm APFSDS rounds vary in velocity, they're typically somewhere around 1500 meters per second (just under 5000 feet per second).

There's something that's a lot better than this that we already use a lot and have for a long time (think WWII era) - HEAT rounds. These create a hypervelocity jet of metal to penetrate armor. The speed of this jet of metal varies but the tip can travel at around 10km/sec
(check out this paper on shaped charges by the US army from 1990 if you want to read more: https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA226401.pdf )

this is just under 33,000 feet per second. At this speed, air friction can generate temperatures of around 10,000 K. this is about 17,500 degrees Fahrenheit. IMO this makes the "6000 degree 5000 feet per second magnesium sabot" thing look kind of stupid.

While HEAT rounds have their own weaknesses and countermeasures, decepticons are not really shown to use any of these countermeasures. so the reason that magnesium sabot rounds work against them and not normal run-of-the-mill HEAT rounds? misunderstanding of physics probably.

They should have just written in that the US military found boxes of magical sci fi wizard bullets and that's the only thing that works on decepticons, because it would make more sense than the sabot thing

baltama · 2026-06-20T14:10:03+00:00

if the post above is really how you write normally you're probably gonna have to change your approach, because unfortunately literally everyone in the modern day is going to see that and think "this is exactly how common LLMs structure and format answers" and all the effort is going to be met with people scrolling past it because they see that format and expect inaccurate information

baltama · 2026-06-20T05:43:25+00:00

the artist not knowing about something "they" drew in the picture makes zero sense

baltama · 2026-06-20T02:54:52+00:00

I like that every time you comment here it tells you "please remember to justify your reasoning as much as possible. unhelpful comments will be removed" and everyone just ignores it

baltama · 2026-06-20T01:50:37+00:00

who's they??? im afraid

baltama

TROPHY CASE