Saturday, 5 February 2011

Foliation

Another thoughtful post by Just_Me at Bell of Lost Souls, this time for ponderers of future warfare, high technology and transhumanism, here in the form of space marines.

Compare the Kuto Sebree of Riskail, even the T1000. How else does fiction do this?

5 comments:

The Angry Lurker said...

I have loved space marines from the first ones until now with them getting and better especially terminators but modern man is not designed for this, modern weapons and modern body armour cancel each other out to a point but not enough once you up in calibre, size and rate of fire.

I have seen on a future weapons show about battlefield armour for the modern soldier and it's cost versus safety versus practicality. I think Iron Man came the closest to what modern soldiers want maybe but I do not think space marines are the future I believe it will be the robots of Skynet first.

Sean Robson said...

Here's an interesting tid-bit that might also change the way you think of space marines: Astarte is the Phoenician goddess of love and fertility, so Adeptus Astartes can be literally translated as "proficient in love."

So, does their moniker derive from their philosophy of peace, love, and compassion or is it a nickname earned by their behaviour on shore-leave? :)

Paul´s Bods said...

I suppose the best armour would be the "not to get hit in the first place" or "not to be seen to be shot at" type, so mobility and colour design would overweigh bulletstopping capability..a bit like Predator´s armour..he doesn´t have much at all and does pretty well, Predators are a bit like spacemarines, except not a uniformed group..thier lack of a consistent uniform IS their uniform. Like the space marines in Alien II they go "bug Hunting", just that sometimes the bugs turn out to be...US!
Cheers
paul

Porky said...

@ The Angry Lurker - Interesting thoughts. Cost and practicality are perhaps more easily pushed down the ranking when the subject gets considered, in that efficacy seems key, but they are issues that need to be considered with limited and even shrinking budgets and changing cicumstances. I think I'd tend more towards the robots too, though not necessarily humanoid of course.

@ Sean Robson - Another eye-opener! She was also connected with war, but given the comic tone of 40K in the Rogue Trader days, weaving in the peace theme might have been conscious on the part of the designers. The idea of marines being peaceniks could well mess with a few heads. Re shore leave, the monastic aspect is played up strongly, a small mercy, so it can't be that at least. Maybe it's those enhanced organs?

@ Paul's Bods - In 40K that's how the Eldar do it, with speed and agility supposedly, and devices like holo fields blurring outlines. Your thinking is a natural approach. At someone's blog today I read a passage, quoted from a forum I think, in which a gamer who'd played in Greyhawk in the early days described a stealth operation, or rather the desperate attempts of his starting character to survive by being ultra-cautious and legging it wherever possible! (Whoever's blog that was, apologies for the failure of memory and lack of credit. I plead information overload!) As we well know, there is research into bending of light so invisibility may be a possibility, and strikes me as the right way to go. This would seem best suited to minimising loss of life and destruction all round - tight, stealthy operations resolving conflicts with minimal impact on lives and livelihoods. Naive?

netherwerks said...

Interesting. The Kuto Sebree aren't really warlike, so it's kind of fun comparing these two approaches. We're not all that familiar with 40K, but this has piqued our interest, certainly. We'll have to get the Audraseenians and the more war-drone-like Volg posted in the coming week.

@Sean: Perhaps these Astarte adepts have more than just the military enhancements?

@Paul's Bods: Right on the money--best defense: No Be Where They Hitting. Mas Oyama-sensei said that in an old filmed interview and he ought to know.