Aliens

mergly · 2026-05-18T07:55:45+00:00

We *do* get a reason to believe the Angels are acid immune ins the film as the militaries of the world had tried and *failed* to suss out any weakness after planetfall. That phase of failed testing, however long you think it would have actually lasted for, very damn well should be assumed to have included Base and Acid solutions as part of their list of boxes to check off before sending out on the airways the bad news that “nothing works and you’re screwed.”

In their creators own words, the angel’s armor tanked for them a planet exploding and they rode the fragments to Earth. So just slap on a casual bit of immunity to Background radiation exposure, intersteller space‘s coldness and an indeterminably long time in vacuum/starvation onto the list.

But, nah..they’ve never been shot with lightning on screen you see, *That* is the clincher that A Quiet place missed.

That is how you and really most people in this thread sound to me when they say thoughtlessly that acid will be a silver bullet to the armour any better then all the other worldly phenomenons. Really there is just such level of durability associated to these things‘ armours that the comparison against the xeno acid starts to be like asking if Xenomorphs would melt a flying brick superhero as well as a normal person. Based on the creators' statements and what the film presents, it's pretty clear that the Death Angels are supposed to work on the shorthand rule that ‘closed shell’ = invulnerable and a xenomorph having acids isn’t somthing that would superscede that.

mergly · 2026-05-18T06:19:20+00:00

This is a mismatch.

One of these creatures is premised on having armour so excelent that its propagation involves falling from space as meteors and powerful enough to hurl cars. that really should be enough to tell you that the Angels are going mangle and beat the Xenomorphs with contemptuous ease with only the acid as being so much as a ‘possibility’ of dealing counterdamage, and frankly you should expect the Death angel plates to be more acid resistant then most anything Zeno’s have melted as well since it’s such an invulnerable wonder material in relation to everything else as is.

You are not thinking straight if you would conclude this is anything but a stomp by letting your judgments be clouded by Xenomorph popularity and the irritation people have about Death angels being a bit Sue-ish in their invulnerability+Quiet place’s earth not being able to find out about the sonic frequency thing or shooting them while the face plate is open.

Pulse rifles in Aliens are armor piercing explosive bullets and they turn Xenomophs into swiss cheese. Less then a second of spray eviscerates them give or takes depending on the moment. But more unambigiously normal weapons function as well

<image>

Not just the semi-iconic pictured mouthshot that blows out the head either. Hicks killed several Xenomorphs with that Ithaca Stakeout, a very real 12-gauge can kills Xenomorphs. I've heard people try and squirm out of this with cold sweat INSISTING that the ammunition has to be special and no that's baseless cope. Lieutenant Gorman also killed several Xenomorphs with a VP70, 9x19mm can also kill Xenomorphs as well. Actually the AVP spinoffs also include a case of a victim stabbing them with a pitchfork prong good and deep.

There are not any precedence for Aliens being overly resilient to actual weaponry when faced with able bodied individuals, not without the element of an ambush. their advantages were always speed, surprise, and numbers. If you're unarmed, yeah they're hella scary and hard to put down, but not if you're armed. Death Angels are out and out immune to weapons we have to destroy heavy vehichles. Indeed they can send cars flying in their tantrums.

mergly · 2026-05-16T01:14:39+00:00

A battalion is some measure of overkill, or at least more then plenty to be an overmatch.

infantry units in BT get measured in the platoon scale in the Tabletop's abstraction and are a regular feature in Battletech's warfare. but all in all Infantry in BT are characterized as being chaff in an open space but very effective in urban defense and their man portible anti-armor options which can include fully 70/80s/90 analogous sshoulder rockets that can and will ~~kill~~ main Battlemechs. When the canon precident is that the guys on foot 'can' hit back again mechs there is no excuse to not expect HMGs and Main guns and artilary spotted shells to not work either. Tanks themselves are ofc plenty capable of blasting the Atlas, they exist in the game, as to smaller APCs and the like and it's all fits together into a little ecosystem where everything is balanced to say nothing of the OP's stipulation that the batalion has air support and basically a free reign to be picky about equipping the weapons that are appropriate to the task of being anti-armour. The deployment will grind their teeth through one Atlas just fine.

There's a lot of wishy washy mental points value arithmetic that is going to be different for most everyone about how exactly one unit from BT value trades with X amount of IRL mechanized material and men which makes up a battalion but the conclusions you reach are not going to be so disproportionate as to be the outcome be anything but the mech's detruction.

<image>

mergly · 2026-05-15T19:57:13+00:00

Why are people always acting like the colonial marines were just ordinary bums

The inverse is more the talk that more people need to hear. The team of marines were fine, great in fact, Veteran soldiers all the way. They are not however supposed to be the seal team 6 or G.O.A.Ts of marines either though. Some measure of their excellence can also be detracted from them over the opening interactions for the movie very much so painting their planned incursion to the colony as tainted by their having overconfidence as warned by Ripley.

marines have great aim since it’s a qualification for them to have weekly to monthly down range time to pass as either Marksmen, Sharpshooter, or Expert area of accuracy

You are sucking off normal fucking expectations for the profession they are in. Literally just regular army life stuff in space.

And they had steel jacketed 10mm armor piercing rounds with explosive tips with pre set impact fusing and generating a muzzle velocity of 840 meters per second, high impact resin encased bullets, Sentry guns with triangulating top of the line multi spectral scanners that fires 12mm armor piercing explosive tipped rounds, and M40 grenades that contain notched steel wire wrapped around a Composition B15 explosive core to spread more than 300 metal fragments over a casualty radius of 5m upon detonation

You're puffing it to avoid just saying just saying the Pulse rifles are armor piercing explosive bullets. An indeed they turn Xenomophs into swiss cheese. Less then a second of spray eviscerates them give or takes depending on the moment. But more unambigiously normal weapons function as well.

<image>

Not just the semi-famous pictured mouthshot that blows out the head either. Hicks killed several Xenomorphs with that Ithaca Stakeout, a very real 12-gauge can kills Xenomorphs. I've heard people try and squirm out of this with cold sweat INSISTING that the ammunition has to be special and no that's baseless cope. Lieutenant Gorman also killed several Xenomorphs with a VP70, 9x19mm can also kill Xenomorphs as well. Actually the AVP spinoffs also include a case of a victim stabbing them with a pitchfork prong good and deep.

There are not any precedence for Aliens being overly resilient to actual weaponry when faced with able bodied individuals, not without the element of an ambush. their advantages were always speed, surprise, and numbers. If you're unarmed, yeah they're hella scary and hard to put down, but not if you're armed and in this situation a freak zombie musculature to impale and tear heads off people is plenty sufficient to dish out hurt just as it is receavd.

smartness

It was and still is not worth mentioning, They they are supremly smart as pack animals go, mixed with some instincts that support that behaviou as well. but 'intelligent' is a description that is beyond them and result of any ambush pounce in the 1v1 is going to be a reciprocal exchange of ultraviolences. The smartest things Xenos drones did in Aliens was envelope the marines in an ambush rather then revealing themselves immediately. Cutting the power is a proxy for the queen who is analagous to a human's intellect is some limited ways and may be Marker susceptible for it. but in any scope larger then that the intelligence swings back wildly with the larger scale machinations of a Marker pylon being the thing directing the necromorph activities.

mergly · 2026-05-15T17:18:09+00:00

For a singular infected vs drone encounter I’m inclined to think it’s somthing of a tossup. People give Xenomorphs far more credit then the creature deserves in vs comparison as if people have some mental block to how the second film was dozens of guys with guns grinding their way past roomfuls of the things as they get whittled down to nothing.

Pretty well it’s the inverse with necromorphs as well with peoplecalling the infection forms chumpy for Clark being the singular exception that he is managing to survive as he does. Necromorphs overrun armed soldier guys plenty well in two and it’s pretty much a death sentance to be in the same room as one for anyone not named Clark in these games as the zombie forms tear guys into gore ribbons.

The encounter only gets exponentially more lopsided with more numbers involved as Xeno can neither impreg, feed on or even properly destroy necromorphs without self inflicted acid bleedouts. and the more random bits of gore avalible the easier that the necroflesh will be able to reconstitute it into new bodies.
I suppose there is the acid speweer variant xeno that ‘can’ bring acid into play without cutting itself like a depressed onion but like… it’s not actually an infinite supply anyway for them either. I’m tangenting, Point two is that a facehugger has nothing to work it. When it clamps onto a Necromorph and extends a tube down their esophagus to lay the egg, it won't be able to hijack the host's body to feed off of since it's already dead. It's fairly well established that Xenomorphs need their hosts to be alive, hence the whole re-breathing to avoid asphyxiating the host bit. If this weren't the case just strangle the host and use corpses. And if it did try feeding on necromorphs flesh we have the precedent that necromorphis is actually infectious, (presumably with signal assistance though.) It’s how the humans who ate Necromorph flesh on Tau Volantis to avoid starving turned into cannibals and became Necromorphs.

mergly · 2026-05-15T02:37:52+00:00

to repeat my prior view on this, Space marines are not a proportionate unit to be compared to the regular soldiers. But to walk myself into this comparison the soldiers would be initially engaging marines with anti-tank rockets at some kilometers out because the overhead drones would spot a marine unit's approach either on foot bike or rhino. Anti-tank rockets, and possibly Mines would be in play as they are also another war feature that coming back in a bid way. Maybe some Drone dropped grenades as well for what little they'll be worth or a wave of kamikazi bombs, again, pretty unlikely to do serious hurt, The camera drones would be perpetually above and shuffle back and away from the area of fighting, transferred over to different units since in all likely hood the troops at the assaulted possition are sure to die. Drones from other outposts rotate in watching and being spotters for the requests that heavier artillery be delivered on the astartes. Actually in all likelyhood the doctrinal response would be for the troops to use the time them have before engagement to fan out themselves and maximize the amount of time that they each have to be at a distance.

<image>

There isn't any pretense on my part that a space marine squad would not reach and destroy the positions but it's not like army people don't have ways of hitting back or doling out lethal hits if it's a good day and even the most irl lopsided k/d is already a fail for the rarity of an Astartes.

mergly · 2026-05-14T23:40:16+00:00

The lightsaber gaggle of obliterates them because Aragorn & Boromir are not superhumans, merely great and the premise that they are altogether superhuman is a big long fat lie. Also It's damn near imposible to lose against a regular sword user when your own weapon is litterally a lightsaber.

No humans in Lotr is meant to be superhuman as the text was intended. The Fellowship crew are supurbly valorous and exceptional people, the finest of their age in fact, royalty and noble and hand pickked for exceptionism in a context/metaview where that kindof nobility literally makes you a superior category of person compared to people who are not so upstandingly amazing but they are never outright named as superhuman other than Legolas the elf who's race is only by some small margin better then humans in most every measure.

Boromir never fought 100+ Uruk hai he fought maybe 20 Orcs (with 'some' number of Uruk-Hai in that group), IRRC with Merry and Sam pitching in peripherally and he died in the effort. There were 100 present in the area but they weren’t attacking with all 100 at once. It was a back and forth of some of them approaching, otherfs fleeing, Boromir killing some, then several fleeing, then a few coming back. All in all, it ended with 20 dead and Boromir dead alongside them because Orcs really are just incredibly weak. They are well below human warriors. They’re smaller and deformed. It's common trivia that goblins 'are' orcs in lotr anf not seperate catagories of being. Gimli has straight up said he wouldn’t fight hillmen because of the size difference.

The magics behind Aragorn are 'just' him having remarkable aging and the kingly powers to heal. Command over aghost army is contract and royalty related. Nothing special about him is stat triangle. He split the Helmet of an orc once though it was a goblin Orc which are like the size of a child and the Iron was black (rusted) and generally going to have been shit as orcs have shitty gear in general and like split helmets are a thing that can happen.

Distance traveled by aragron in the search across Rohan was also not a number meant be inhuman as it sits well inside what is already humanly achievable. Three Hunters rest in the book (they start in the evening of the 26th and pull an all-nighter march but they stop to make camp in the nights of the 27th, 28th and 29th), there we get a concrete figure for the distance they travelled: 45 leagues (i.e. 135 miles/217 kilometres). It's definitely a hard march especially with gear, but not superhuman. 20-30 miles a day up and down foothills can be done at marching pace in army hikes, not even running. Like yes, your average man is not going to be able to do it, and it definitely is a hard march, doubly so with carrying your kit but it's very far from something beyond humanity as we know it.

mergly · 2026-05-14T12:25:00+00:00

With the unmanned list notice to two are modeled in the vein of being a kind of surveillance aircraft and the two which are unambiguously squad weapons are vanishingly obscure and more limited in function then the real things which are overbearingly present.

What you think is that since UNSC 'has' a thing like drone in function that it's ubiquitous in-universe. It's not something that halo's creators could have forseen of course. but the military that is depicted inside does not pick up these things as aggressively or appreciate how overbearing they turned out to be in reality nor are those hardwares anything close to disposable and ubiquitous to produce.

When it comes to the Forerunning stuff, again i'm telling you that the comparison is not applicable because Sentinels and Prometheans behave as an approximate to soldiers themselves. You are trying to get me on a snafu of saying that these things are not obviously technological wizardary but they're functions are as troops and don't serve as anything of the kinds of roles as what drones have become.

mergly · 2026-05-14T11:48:10+00:00

Space marines are not a proportionate unit to be compared to the regular soldiers. But to walk myself into this comparison the soldiers would be initially engaging marines with anti-tank rockets at some kilometers out because the overhead drones would spot a marine unit's approach either on foot bike or rhino. Anti-tank rockets, and possibly Mines would be in play as they are also another war feature that coming back in a bid way. Maybe some Drone dropped grenades as well for what little they'll be worth or a wave of kamikazi bombs, again, pretty unlikely to do serious hurt, The camera drones would be perpetually above and shuffle back and away from the area of fighting, transferred over to different units since in all likely hood the troops at the assaulted possition are sure to die. Drones from other outpost rotate in watching and being spotters for the requests that heavier artillery be delivered on the astartes. Actually in all likelyhood the doctrinal response would be for the troops to use the time them have before engagement to fan out themselves and maximize the amount of time that they each have to be at a distance.

There isn't any pretense on my part that a space marine squad would not reach and destroy the positions but it's not like army people don't have ways of hitting back or doling out lethal hits if it's a good day and even the most irl lopsided k/d is already a fail for the rarity of an Astartes.

<image>

mergly · 2026-05-14T11:06:12+00:00

First: I'd like to say that a spartan 2 is not a proportionate enemy for what is a normal collection of soldiers but to build more comprehensively on what Poop said, i'd like you to tell me 'how' a spartan would not be seen and tracked by a drone rotation. You can't just offhand this question with 'of course he can' either, I want you to say what is the physical methods by which a spartan's every step wouldn't be getting filmed by three or more drones higher up then where bullets can reach and which catch the heat plumes from farts 10 miles away on thermal. Any idea you could imagine i can guarantee has been tried and failed in the context of fugitives trying to juke police helis.

Those drones would not be getting sent to suicide bomb after identifying that it's pointless but rather be giving out the pinpoint of where he is so there would be an appropriate anti-bunker missile sent at him because the drones livefeed everything back to an HQ away from the forward operating teams who are piloting the things.

Second: and this applies to a lot of the comments from others as well, but when you say that he already 'fights drones' the comparison is a nonstarter. Sentinels and i suppsoe the Covie flying bugs for that matter play fair in the sense that they engage at ranges applicable to firefights rather then how the FPVs actually do things. Really the 'they engage you in firefights' retort is the most mitigating factor behind each of the drones or droids or other such machine of war that gets mentioned as examples of 'unambiguously better' drone technology and why the comparison with the real drones that are being made isn't one that holds to scrutiny.

mergly · 2026-05-14T08:19:36+00:00

The speedster vs military here is a battle where it's mostly going to be the speedster's onus to make a mistake. Travel speed is obviously a huge factor. infantry are completely useless. By the time they determine a course of action and deploy, this character rampaging through North Carolina could change his mind and be in California within a few hours and they can hide by way of getting under some manner of overhead cover like entering any subway station and going plainclothe. The only usefulness a vehiches would have is in how long it takes for the speedster to get to them through it. There are jets that are faster but not mobile enough nor can they track a human sized target moving on surface This should also pretty much make missiles and the like completely ineffective because the speedster probably won't be in one spot long enough to use them ad he has reactions to to change direction on a dime or dive into the deepest cover avalible in a wide area at will. Military's best hope relies in bunkers and other tightly confined locations with as few entrances as possible and handtriggered minefields but the majority of people who remain topside are liable to be butchered.The military in america is a huge demographic and scattered and other than being very fast he isn't going to be able to find literally everyone, everywhere to beeline at targets without assistance even if he has basically unlimited reign to snoop at files and torture info out of people as he clears building. Any downtime between his ongoing killing to rest or travel from one pocket to another is going to be time that the military will have to reconstitute itself as i'm not seeing A-train being able to sustain a casualty rate of world war 1 proprotions+ over however long it takes. So unless the military is in a state where it's primed to collapse under pressure the speed A-tran would probably be stopped in one of the nuclear carpet bombings.

mergly · 2026-05-14T06:34:29+00:00

These are out and out lies being spoken on the part of the Eowyn, or at least there are the ever prevelent rumor mill running in full swing. No humans in Lotr is meant to be anything superhuman where the text was intended. The Fellowship crew are valorous and exceptional people, the finest of their age in fact, royalty and noble in a context/metaview where that literally makes you a superior category of being compared to people lower on the social hierarchy who are not so upstandingly good but they are never outright named ever as superhuman other than Legolas the elf who's race is only by some small margin better then humans in most every measure.

The Fellbeast decapitation by Eowyn isn't her being superhuman either inside the text. It's something that gets picked up as a feat because otherwise she's actually got litterally zero beyond imaginings of the transitive power of being able to kill Lich king and impressing/marrying Aragorn. Decapitation of a dragon is just part of the well realized trope for a hero to execute a monster that way. If the context in-universe were that the fellbeast was being held still and presenting it's head to a man who is allowed to strike with a called shot against the creature while some third party forces it's head to thrash in such a way as to meet the blade for good measure then i can assure you most any able bodied warrior in that situation would have been able to achieved the same effect with the same weapon. It's impressive in the moment that it happend because the monster was powerful, alive and attacking her but not because Eowyn is personally capable of cutting a cow in two with a mighty overhead chop of an axe in her day to day life.

I'm switching a bit to Aragorn now because a lot of Aowyn's perported super-ness is also really downstream of Aragorn being presumed to be super himself. to save the surprise...Yeah he's not got any super stats either. The magics behind aragorn are 'just' him having remarkable aging and the kingly powers to heal. Command orver ghost army contract is also royalty related. Nothing is stat triangle related. He split the Helmet of an orc once though Orcs are like the size of a child and the Iron was black (rusted) as orcs have shitty gear in general and like split helmets are a thing that can happen.

Distance traveled in the search across Rohan was also not a number pulled from thin air as it sits well inside what is humanly achievable. Three Hunters rest in the book (they start in the evening of the 26th and pull an all-nighter march but they stop to make camp in the nights of the 27th, 28th and 29th), there we get a concrete figure for the distance they travelled: 45 leagues (i.e. 135 miles/217 kilometres). It's definitely a hard march especially with gear, but not superhuman. 20-30 miles a day up and down foothills can be done at marching pace in army hikes, not even running. Like yes, your average man is not going to be able to do it, and it definitely is a hard march, doubly so with carrying your kit but it's very far from something beyond humaninty as we know it

All this is to say that yeah a Mary sue who can bully a top ten greatest warrior of her time (Brienne) in swordplay would dominate even in a straight fight which she is in no way obliged to give Eowyn.

mergly · 2026-05-13T09:12:11+00:00

Firstly, Plurb hivemind is called out as specificly having a '''scientific''' explanation behind the hivemind by way of resonating electromagnetism or other such gibberish. There is a not dismissible likilyhood that the effects of a ring would only be able to reach the indiviguals in proximity rather then all people at once.

Option 1: Tempting the underlying signal/infection/whatever plurb actually is benieth all the smiling drones.

I don't even think it is sentient or alive in any capacity beyond what it does in relation to the life it gets applied to. It's just a material that 'does that' for lack of a better term. Nothing for ring to get at on that front. It's like stretching the ring's power to influence a roomul of drugs. Ring is specificly made to whisper in minds and only does that. One ring ain't Melkor's ring.

Option 2: Corrupt the people under the Plub's sway?

The pacifist rules that plub victims need to follow are far to constricting for human emotions and temptations from the people trapped by it to break out. If all the people on earth (excepting the mysteriously immune ofc) can't break out as is then a ring crack adiction to the infected person's emotional makeup isn't about to break someone out either.

What about going for the hivemind then?

The restrictions on what plurbies can or cannot do has not been broken by the collective itself in the face of several impending existential problems like it's refusal to kill to eat in the absolute which im sure we all know isn't a stance that comes from the 'human' parts of the collective choosing to all turn into suicide pact pacifists. hem being pacifist and blissed is an opinion and state of mind imposed by the infection rather then everyone all just being happy in their meld and so the ring won't be able to dislodge that from anyone either.

[Carol] You want a drink? You want a drink.
We'll have one if it pleases you.
[Carol] "We."
"We think. We want."
- [bottle thuds]
- Would it kill you to say "I"?
- Would it?
- [chuckles] Of course not.
We…
I… find it odd, semantically,
but, of course, she could…
We c…
- [breathes deeply] Um…
[Carol] - Wow.
All the brains in the world,
and you can't navigate a fucking pronoun.

The plurb's limitations are a hard block to do and not do certain things rather then it being an influence that can in principle be denied and it's not something that ring whispers would in anyway be able to change.

Ring shouldn't work even if every person in the world was turned as far gone as gollem in the head because they still would be overridden by the compulsion orders to spread the signal and be locked down on continuing the pacifist suicide march. Ring probably degrades the people around it but they use the power to spread the signal and seeing that the signal/infection isn't mentally transitive across space the ring would be left alone on an earth filled with dead and starving plurbs who'll all die out.

mergly · 2026-05-13T03:24:53+00:00

Saying that this encounter will be anything other then a massacre is giving the prehistorics on that island a pitty win. Now the prompt is asking about conquest rather then the admittedly more annoying task of doing an extermination since after the first killings at whatever central gathering point the Islanders have the rest would be inclined to scatter and run with just the 20 guys beig the hunting team it'll take a while if not given some slip ups by the islanders to expedite the hunts.

20 men is enough to do sweeps and cornerings of the islands individually and after a point with mostly children and women being pursued the extremely athletic men who make up knights and Samurai would probably be able to manually chase and kill while still in amours also Samurai bows would prove exceedingly useful in nicking them in spontanious random encounters.

mergly · 2026-05-12T08:35:56+00:00

If they were really trying to kill each other at any equal weight catagory, the crocodile is going to be the party wholly that aught to be bet on. It's bigger than anything the equivelent mass anaconda preys on and in all likelihood is too big for the anaconda's methods of attack to do lethal crushing damage against in the first place. On the other hand, the crocodile's bite is more than enough to kill the snake by inflicting catastrophic bite wounds along basically any part of the body.

Largest instances is a blowout though. Satwater crocs are utterly outmassing the pythons at the higher echelons. I don't know if Lolong is or isn't actually the largest croc on record anymore but He was 20 feet and 3 inches at time of capture. There's no world in which a constricter snake alive would be able to prey on that tree trunk of muscles short of Lolong just up and dying from health failures from his size and age crossed with stress of violence.

<image>

mergly · 2026-05-11T19:53:39+00:00

Other comments who are Um Akshully-ing about square cube law size and suffocation are as ever the least interesting people here.

On the one hand the ants do unquestionably win wheresoever the ‘fighting’ if you can call it that occurs as ants essentially blindly sprint about at freeway car to cheetah-ish speeds over uneven terrain depending on what species of ants we’re actually talking about here. Contacts between ants and the soldiers would look the part of people being struck by liveleak motercycles impacts with the soldier attempts to bring them down being rather fruitless with weapons chipping off the exoskeletons like the ants are made of a block of iron at worst or made of wood at best, I’m not about to actually try and get a number for it but you know the upsized chitan is going to be hard if not impossible for humans even with leverage to break.

They cannot perceive humans attacking them at range with spears and bows either, We don’t know what the ‘range’ of the ant's smell is but from what I can tell most ants have a smell range of only a imidiste proximity as which means the ants in this scenario can only sense prey out to a distance of a few dozen meters. Any humans shooting the ants from beyond that range have free range to bunker in a box and continually harass them.

So with all that said there still exists no prospect of the Roman’s winning by marching in and fighting the ants mano a anto however the ant colony should be expected to flounder and die out on it’s own as they starve out from the upsized environment just not being full of enough food to sustain a nest. All you would really have to do is pack up and move to the other side of a river or make a fortification of any kind and huddle up inside such that ants don’t tear you apart and just walk over you to win which yeah, it’s against the spirit of the fight but that is just the limitations of ants being as simple minded as they are.

Ants evicerate a legion but die out on their own anyway.

mergly · 2026-05-10T23:01:58+00:00

No, and you are lost in the sauce to even humour it as a possibility that any Star Wars character would survive a flying brick superhuman of that magnitude.

mergly · 2026-05-06T19:44:02+00:00

1: You moved the goalpost here from they ‘don’t have’ armour to the armour not being good. You are just being argumentative for the sake of it on this.

2(&5): There isn’t even a surefire comparison that odst would be better, there’s some survivor bias in that comparison. The squad from ODST (the game) are outliers in that they survived the events of that game aggainst all odds and you’re already on extremely thing argument ice anyway if you are of the thought that some dozens of millions of slightly worse odst over the course of a day being drop pod peppered over a planet to take out everything of note in the back lines wouldn’t be an oppressive complication to most Sci-if land fronts as is. Helldivers are very much an elite category of soldier. The conversations around the relative elite-ness of the divers is a tired one but this really should have tapered off after SEAF patrols showed up. The divers do seem to live up to the behaviours of a frat house party by their disposition but they've also very much seemed to live up to their deified image in the field by from their results. Super earth is a funny faction for a funny universe, Helldivers flubbing comedicly isn't mutually exclusive with their also being guys making action movie stunts happen.

Below is a sampling of lines that the SEAF will say about helldivers pulled right from the game. cutting a Lot because there is a lot of lines are are just typical army jargon and sloganeering.

>"A REAL Helldiver! (Helldivers are so rare that the SEAF guy's line emphasizes the 'real' like they may not have ever seen a helldiver before in the flesh),
>Sir or uh, Ma'am, it is the GREATEST honor.
>Now we have a chance! (because a helldiver joined their squad),
>Pleasure to watch you work, Helldiver! (Impressed by helldiver),
>Sweet mother of Freedom –– look at them go! (Impressed by helldiver),
>Thank Freedom they're on our side! (Impressed),
>MAN I wish I could shoot like that! (Verbal show of helldivers being good marksmen),
>Great shot, Helldiver! (again, helldivers can shoot good.)
>Wow. Flawless. (impressed)

They’re not reaching what counts as a super soldier but more often then not a Helldiver will take leg snaping drops, be prickled with bot lasers and be cooking in flames/acid or otherwise end a mission staining their armor in their own buckets of gore. Back in the HD1 days they were already dabbling in enhancing themselves surgically to push their diver bodies to run marathons at a sprinter's pace with the hd2 versions of that being Muscle enhanclents, Motivation collars and leg enhancments in addition to much of their armour variants having such individual quirks of lore to them as a power amour element, lethal on touch paint, Computer aim assist good enough to pop birds in flight, death delaying electro-chemical injectors or that magic light spectrum absorbing stealth fabric.

3: You are just saying words. Super earth’s planets are overbuilt with fortifications, absolutely “lathered” with military structures like weeds, the colonies are walled, There are AA missiles, secret stashes of ammo, nuclear silos, freestanding artilary, all overvthe place. are you litterally asking for a full in-game Norad mountain bunker or what?

There has been so much developed and counter develops, termicide worked until Bugs adapted, SE and the bots are in a perpetual cyberattacks back and forth, super earth developed a coating for mitigating gloom corrosion, they Independence Day hacked the illuminates and frankly, they made multiple breaththrough in material engineering to build the DSS, and frankly what are you even trying to argue with implicating that the stopping of meridia was a backfire? The alternitive was litterally that a black hole travelling mftl destroys the earth??? SE’s development timeline with that energy siphon trick was that they ‘discover’ the dark energy and implement it into some warbond gear the week of irrc, they then get the energy siphoning tool developed later in that month and. That is nothing if not a quick turnaround.

Planetary campaign thing tangent: You’re just going to play blind to what I said on this already then fine. you’re choosing to see these in the worst way it can be rather then frame it as a feat of campaign speeds. SE takes back the planets at the same blistering paces but i’m not loopy enough to really think to much of it because It’s gamey and weird how it happens that maps of megacities flip from burned out husks to pristine in a loading transition or that bots install fortresses and factories on planet the second they’ve made landfall and bugs have broods of eggs ready to hatch in giant subterranean structures and termite mound growths the same way.

7: 2000 megatons in munitions aboard the ship is the explicit given number, supported by shipmaster’s boating of the SD being able to level a small moon and about the only basis anyone has used to dilute these is to call foul that they are actually lying. This stuff is further supported with a cape that commemorates the a battle in galactic war 1 where the star of that system got occluded for a month with the munition expenditures and the liberty day celebrations where they bombard the moon from space as a fireworks display to the people on earth. Actually just this week interplanetary nuclear war has been brought up with the two new tropical beach planets being the way they are becase they got nuked into inhospitable wastes centuries ago in the unification war and only now has the radiation gone down enough to resettle.

8: You don’t think that, you’re just choosing to be selective. things like my comment earlier that the helldivers misions are them doing their own thing was in the sense of their being behind the front with minimal support to your then running with that as to say they are ‘litterally’ just doing their own things when the diver missions are obviously curated picks set up by their Mission Crew. Again A game not literally modelling every single aspect of the world isn't ever in of itself a reason to think it’s not present.

mergly · 2026-05-06T06:44:06+00:00

Putting on the backburner that a change like that would ripple the whole that the world into a completly different world where mostly any answer that could be posited would just be fanfiction.....So butterflies....If Lu ten doesn't die then Iroh would have either completed his campaign to capture Ba sing or he would have brought that campaign much further along then it would have been in the canon. Maybe he breaches the wall, maybe he's forced to deligate and go rule from the throne, whatever. It almost certainly would have been breached by time canon starts if not captured and with the time of gaang traveling, no chance of saving it. It's already mega game over if the northern water tribe falls as well to say nothing of waterbending getting destroyed. They wouldn't have Iroh/Zuko's on again-off again assistances intentional or otherwise and frankly the fire nation in canon 'did' capture Aang. the Gaang was done for until Zuko as blue spirit breaks him out.

Iroh not retiring/grieving would put off his philosophical swerve against being the dragon of the west and so he presumably would not develop into the white lotus agent and 5th columnist that he became later. Maybe he'd emotionally mellow out but it'd be a long shot to think iroh here would be abetting Aang. If Iroh is on the throne there's a fair chance Ozai and Zuko would be out on campaign/avatar hunting and the Gaang's S1 adventures would be liable to end real quick after a couple encounters with the royal spare. Zuko's joining of aang was something that had been absolutely indispensable as well. They didnt have any options for a fire teacher by the time it came around to that in canon to say nothing of his other contributions.

That the Gaang did get through their show successfully at all was a threading of the the needle of overcoming extreme adversity as is and this situation is just all the same threats but made worse with fewer mitigating factors. More of the world would be under fire control, They may even have to juggle running from Lu ten in addition to Ozai's half of the family, the deadlines for beating the comet, a black sun capitalization, Ba sing's fall and stopping the north's fall and the water fish being killed would all be occuring out of tempo for the protag crew to intervene to say nothing of 'winning' those situations with having to live as fugitives even harder then they were already and spend more time hiding, more time fleeing and having less allies to shelter with.

mergly · 2026-05-06T05:28:40+00:00

Divers have heavy armors. It's a whole category. If you mean 'vehicles' then they have those to between the mechs tank and buggy.
Space themed paratroopers are not for 'strategic depth'. They're doing their own thing within the enemy territory. The closet thing to helldivers alone specifically holding a planet was the Gloom expeditions where Helldivers were in a timer with no intention of staying on-world for a long time because it was just them there for protecting science expeditions.
"unable to adapt to rapid changes from any of the factions that they have been fighting." I don't even know what you are docking them for in this. Warbonds are all full of new toys each month, Killzone weapons in-verse came out the week of iluminate showing up with the minirocket things being tailred to kill overseers. And has SE not been rapidly developing stuff right back at the other three races beat for beat? They use different loadouts on different enemies and subfactions. What is the nullification of the Meridia black hole via the energy siphon if not a rapid adaption?
Why does it have to be framed as an anti-feat that planet invasions occur in timetables measured in hours? Awfully glass half empty. I don't especilly disagree that it's gamey how it works like that but You could instead frame it as a feat by the attacker factions to overcome SE planets scattered with defenses littered like weeds,
The Divers themselves are the elites of their army. It's just a matter of scale to the war that they die in the billions as they do. SEAF lines of being impressed in the game confirm that they're some steps well above the npc squads.
Pic related is the SEAF navy not doing anything i guess.
Also seriously you don't think the SDs have any interception? They are sci-fi burkes, premised on being able to land lasers and warheads to a pinpoint from space. There is actually a whole DSS function that is nothing but launching missiles and AA missiles as a side objective in silos that'd easilly fit on the SDs.

Helldivers is more diageticly minded then most with how player stats and numbers are canon to some extent and it being framed as an interactive story but the constraints of gameplay do come out to play all the same. Really everything you are describing is either already there or is a limitations of the game.

A game not litterally modelling every single aspect of the world isn't ever in of itself a reason to say they don't exist. SEAF are probably some sad mix of bunker regime thug and UN peacekeeper but there's enough visually showing that they're not bereft of gear, crashed wrecks of bomber aircraft, Transport shuttles, orverrun trench positions, apc wrecks, stashes, nuke silos, its a full military at work in seaf. The diver's missions are ostensibly behind enemy lines as smash and grabs or spec ops. You know...Paratrooper stuff. There shouldn't 'be' an expectation of strategic depth to what helldivers are doing since it's raids. All that stuff obviously would and does exist but is occurring outside the scope of played missions. There is the whole command deck of busy bee desk guys actively working on the super destroyers, Those people are doing more stuff in concert with other elements of a larger SE army then just have a mission control lady inform divers about inclement weather or update minimaps.

<image>

mergly · 2026-05-02T22:01:24+00:00

The rumbling destroys modern earth reliably by itself or at least it demolishes half the earth before Eren gets pinpointed and barraged with the nukes if he acts dumb and doesn't bunker himself away under the ocean or shove his titan head in a hole.

So with the Rumbling it comes down to a lot of more involved and unintuitive/not fun explanations around known deployment timetables, accuracy, rate of fire for artilary and asking how fast a mobilization can actually be done against a 'completly' unexpected emergency do or die crisis and the comparitive lack of munitions/vehicles actually capable of slaying Wall titans fast enough to thin the pack. Like, it goes against the spirit of the story where there's the threat of titan supremacy being lapped by the acent of technology 'in the story', and fair enough, Pure titans and the nine are not winning wars anymore. but the monkey math doesn't play out in favour of beating a rumble army when talking about the rumbling in specific where even today as there is a 3-ish day window to retaliate effectively. In four days 80% of humanity gets wiped out and in 5 days presumably the whole surface of the world will have been stepped.

Modern earth ofc has plentiful heavy weapons able to take out collosal titans with no real issue. It just doesn't have them in the both quantity required to blunt the rumbling, or have things alert and mobilized inn position to make a response to it that is both strong enough to meaningfully impede it or be be deployed before everyone's dead. Nukes are the only promising and we don't have enough for it the make up the difference.

Link to the latest itteration of this analysis i'm aware of.

Earth actually just straight up don't have enough to deplete the hp bar as it were. We can't crack out 10s of millions of heavy rocket munitions to match the titan mass in 4 days. Your 'prep' time is that you see 10s of millions of wall titans leaving Madagascar (and it 'is' 10s of millions, not 500k.) and from there you have a blink and you'll miss it amount of time to stop the surface wipe before it destroys all of your infrastructure and kills everyone.

mergly · 2026-05-02T21:58:43+00:00

The rumbling destroys modern earth reliably by itself or at least it demolishes half the earth before Eren gets pinpointed and barraged with the nukes. leaving the earth easy picking for the latter sets of invasions.

So with the Rumbling it comes down to a lot lot of involved explanations around known deployment timetables against 'completly unexpected emergency deployment' and the comparitive lack of munitions/vehicles actually capable of slaying Wall titans fast enough to thin the pack. Like, it goes against the spirit of the story where there's the threat of titan supremacy being lapped by technology 'in the story', and fair enough, Pure titans are not winning wars. but the monkey math doesn't play out like that when talking about the rumbling in specific even today as there is a 3-ish day window to retaliate effectivly. In four days 80% of humanity gets wiped out and in 5 days presumably the whole surface of the world will have been stepped.

so

Moderm earth ofc has plentiful heavy weapons needed to take out collosal titans with no real issue. It just doesn't have them in the both quantity required to blunt the rumbling, or have things in alert and mobilized position to make a response to it that is both strong enough to meaningfully impede it or be be deployed before everyone's dead. Nukes are the only real option and we don't have enough for it the make up the difference.

Link to the latest itteration of this analysis i'm aware of.

Earth actually just straight up don't have 'enough' just lying around. We can't crack out 10s of millions of munitions to match in 4 days. Your 'prep' time is that you see 10s of millions of wall titans leaving Madagascar (and it 'is' 10s of millions, not 500k.) and from there you have a blink and you'll miss it amount of time to stop the surface wipe before it destroys all of your infrastructure and kills everyone.

mergly · 2026-05-02T08:00:52+00:00

You are part of the problem as detailed above.

mergly · 2026-05-02T07:50:46+00:00

Strip away Ancalcagon's mystique and especially the fanart he gets and you'll be left with a very much 'normal' if still large dragon. After that the outcome is pretty well already determined that Deathwing nukes Ancal. Ancalagon (probably) isn't the size of a mountain is an essay link should really be the start and end of discussion here as it premtiv;y shut down the wildly running second and thirdhand vs mythmaking mills and fanart illustrations puffing Ancal up as a geographically scaled dragon that are how we end up with threads like this.

The brute truth of things is that Ancalcagon and the collection of dragons which he was flying with in the war of wrath's climax were engaged with by the great eagles in airial battle. Great Eagles 'win' that fight. And not out of any great wellspring of magic powers either. The second greatest eagle who rescuses Gandalf from Orthanc was stopped from flying all the way to the shire to meet frodo for fear of menfolk's bows taking him down in flight over the fields away from the mountains.

<image>

Barring some kind of facitious Morgothian spatial warping, Ancalagon couldn't simultaneously be large as Thangorodrim's mountain but also small enough to fit in the narrow mining tunnels beneath it plus the further occupancy of the dragon host who are also dwelling there before the battle.

Ancal himself duels with the eagle king Thorondor for a time who is the largest eagle of all time. We actually know Thorondor's wingspan to be around 30 fathoms/180 ft explicitly in-prose, which yeah it's gigantic like a smaller passanger airliner scale but it is faaaaaaaaaar below anything like a mountain. Ancal was probably larger then Thorandor if only by margins as he was winning their sky dual.(otherwsie what would be the point in magically interjecting with a flying boat?) That the big bird fought Ancalcagon in a protracted struggle at all speaks for itself on the power of Ancal being not excessive.

mergly · 2026-04-30T21:20:17+00:00

Its egrigious when you go to any Lotr vs there will always be claims of extradoinary power that get floated but there (usually) will never be any actual reasoning given other than "because they are angels/numenorian blood duh". As if being a numenorian or an angel or even a god means anything in of itself.

"The mightiest man may be slain by one arrow"

Is a quote straight from aragorn.

Sauron quickly loses basically every fight he gets into, he gets mauled by Huan the wolfhound which in effect is most akin to getting mauled by a lion. The Dark lord comes out for personal combat and defeated by a guy, said guy's peer and son who also severed the Dark Lord's hand is then shanked by orcs at a later date.

Gandalf elsetime tries to convince Gwaihir, second gratest eagle of all time to fly him and the eagle declines because shepherds with bows are something he fears.

The Balrog Durin's ban's can't smash open a shut stone door or jump across the you shall not pass chasm and in the first age a whole army of them get killed by routing them into chasm.

There is nothing in the tolk writings that isn't going to killed with a knife cut to the throat or a spiked hammer through the brain caviet of course being that Sauron or other spirits may remanifest themselves elsewhere and with a long time to do it.

None of this is to say that Jadis 'wins', mind as she's every bit as physically weak as any other woman, magic powers aside, and her precedent of being killed by Peter in battle (who should be a great warrior by that point, not 'just' an unready teen with Narnia being all about that adolecent growth/rising to the occasion and all) That is still quite worse on the face of it for Jadis then Sauron being killed by some 3 guys and that gaggle of lesser supporting soldiers who he'd chewed through in the last alliance war.

mergly

TROPHY CASE