Things you're tired of seeing in movies

[Riceball]

It bugs me to see how SAMs, MANPADS, and air to air missiles always turn planes into giant flaming fireballs that rain debris everywhere when they're hit. I've seen enough footage of missile hits on target drones and have read enough accounts of how pilots either fly their planes home or keep it in the air long enough to bail out to know that planes don't instantly explode when hit by a missile. Anti-aircraft missiles, of all sorts, kill primarily by shrapnel and are usually armed with proximity fuses which means they seldomly actually physically hit the planes they're targeting and they don't try to kill their targets by creating a ginormous explosion and blowing them into tiny little bits like they're some sort of flying bomb. Of course there's always the chance of hitting a fuel tank but outside of a solid fuel tank hit a plane is just not going to completely blow up when hit by a missile.

 

[glunark]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airliner_shootdown_incidents



Sometimes they do.

 

[Cephus]

Stormtroopers are basically bad shots to begin with. Those helmets can't be easy to see out of let alone aim a weapon with, and why are they even wearing armor anyway if one shot anywhere they get hit kills them. If it were me, I would ditch the armor and walk around buck nekkid and not have to worry about getting killed from an accidental stray shot from an angry bar attendent. I think the armor actually attracts the laser blasts. I think they are thinking like the ant mentality. Lets just fire a bunch of times in that general direction and surely we'll hit something at some point. But, it's just like the red shirts. If you pit a Stormtrooper against a Red Shirt, the Stormtrooper would fire 100 rounds and miss everytime, but the Red Shirt would die anyway.

I don't really buy that though, the movie made it a point to say that Stormtroopers were excellent shots in the scene where they encountered the burned out landcrawler.

 

[sithman66]

No one could have predicted that the rebels would blast a hole in the wall and end up in the trash compacter so that scene was unaccounted for in Tarkins' plan.
I think they even point out (the Imperials) that they lost them as well.
After all while they were tracking them on their own space station they would not be able to go anywhere without notice.

 

[LrdSatyr8]

I don't really buy that though, the movie made it a point to say that Stormtroopers were excellent shots in the scene where they encountered the burned out landcrawler.

I think that's just a selling point, a brainwashing of sorts, so they could get more clones. You never hear a used car salesman say, this car has bad gas mileage, it leaks, and the tires need to be changed changed because they are bald. Of course not, you'd never buy that car. But just to give you a good example of how bad of shots they are, look at first shootout at the Hanger Bay in Mos Eisley. You had what 10 stormtroopers, against 1 guy (and an automatic belly gun) and not one of them hit their target. Looks like the cloning process had pretty much gotten thinned out and the talent of the original was carbon copied out! I still think it's more of the ant or zombie mentality. You have a couple of well trained hunters that's all well and good, but you put those hunters up against 10,000 bad shooting stormtroopers, it wouldn't matter. The troopers would win simply because of the shear numbers of them would over whelm them no matter how good they are.

 

[Riceball]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airliner_shootdown_incidents



Sometimes they do.

I didn't say that missiles don't shoot down planes, they just don't blow them up in a giant fireball, like they did the Bus in last week's Agents of SHIELD, unless they hit a gas tank. Even hitting a fuel tank is no guarantee of an instant fireball since a lot of military planes, fighters in particular, have self sealing tanks and av-gas isn't that flammable, not when compared to gasoline. Now if the plane was running on fumes and got hit in a tank that might cause a fireball but I want to say, but don't know for certain, that modern planes (commercial, civilian, & military) have measures to prevent or dissipate highly flammable fuel vapors.

 

[Riceball]

I think that's just a selling point, a brainwashing of sorts, so they could get more clones. You never hear a used car salesman say, this car has bad gas mileage, it leaks, and the tires need to be changed changed because they are bald. Of course not, you'd never buy that car. But just to give you a good example of how bad of shots they are, look at first shootout at the Hanger Bay in Mos Eisley. You had what 10 stormtroopers, against 1 guy (and an automatic belly gun) and not one of them hit their target. Looks like the cloning process had pretty much gotten thinned out and the talent of the original was carbon copied out! I still think it's more of the ant or zombie mentality. You have a couple of well trained hunters that's all well and good, but you put those hunters up against 10,000 bad shooting stormtroopers, it wouldn't matter. The troopers would win simply because of the shear numbers of them would over whelm them no matter how good they are.

Stormtroopers were also pretty bad in Empire when shooting at Luke on Bespin, their Snowtrooper brethren weren't all that much better at Echo Base, and what about the legion of the Emperor's "best troops" on Endor? In each one of those situations they weren't allowing anybody to escape and yet they weren't hitting much of anything.

On the subject of Stormtrooper armor, not only does it not do anything to protect from blaster hits it is also completely ineffective against stone age weapons. While a kevlar vest might not stop a stone tipped arrow or spear it does stop bullets (which it's designed and meant to do) and a kevlar helmet would probably stop stone tipped weapons. But a Stormtrooper's armor doesn't even offer any protection against 3' teddy bears hitting them with rocks, granted they were fairly large rocks in some cases but they weren't exactly boulders.

 

[glunark]

Thanks for the spoiler, we are a few weeks behind on agents of shield in the uk.

 

[LrdSatyr8]

Thanks for the spoiler, we are a few weeks behind on agents of shield in the uk.

You could always go on Hulu and see all the latest episodes a day after they air on TV here.

 

[glunark]

Hulu is a US only service, so no I can't.

I have stayed out of the agents of shield thread to avoid spoilers, but I didn't think I needed to avoid the entire board.

 

[Riceball]

Thanks for the spoiler, we are a few weeks behind on agents of shield in the uk.

Sorry about that, I didn't even think about the UK when I posted. Does it help to tell you that everybody dies and Cap & Iron Man come in to save the day and reform SHIELD with Wolvie as the head?

 

[CB2001]

Stormtroopers are basically bad shots to begin with. Those helmets can't be easy to see out of let alone aim a weapon with, and why are they even wearing armor anyway if one shot anywhere they get hit kills them. If it were me, I would ditch the armor and walk around buck nekkid and not have to worry about getting killed from an accidental stray shot from an angry bar attendent. I think the armor actually attracts the laser blasts. I think they are thinking like the ant mentality. Lets just fire a bunch of times in that general direction and surely we'll hit something at some point. But, it's just like the red shirts. If you pit a Stormtrooper against a Red Shirt, the Stormtrooper would fire 100 rounds and miss everytime, but the Red Shirt would die anyway.

On your first point:

On your last point:

 

[binkleywalker]

Hulu is a US only service, so no I can't.

I have stayed out of the agents of shield thread to avoid spoilers, but I didn't think I needed to avoid the entire board.

America! Yeah! We win again!

 

[Riceball]

America! Yeah! We win again!

No, no, no. You got it all wrong, you're supposed to say it like this, "'Muhrica!".

Sent from my KFTT using Tapatalk 2

 

[blewis17]

The big, über strong bad guy grabs the hero, and rather than snapping his/her neck and finishing it right there, baddie tosses the hero 20 feet across the room into a cement wall.

Hero loses his/ her breath, but manages to get up and hobble out of the way before big baddie walks the 20 feet across the room to finish the job.

Indestructable "regular" mortals, who get pummeled and then limp off (Die Hard films)
Recent example would be Terminator: Salvation, where Connor fight the Arnie T-800, gets tossed or falls onto multiple hard surfaces, then his heart is impaled by a metal bar. He limps out with the help of Marcus, lives long enough to get a FREAKIN HEART TRANSPLANT and we assume he recovers.
John Conner is not a mutant, and he doesn't have adamantium bones.

 

[binkleywalker]

I apologize. I was trying to keep it classy. But of course, you are correct. Thanks for not letting me get away with that.

 

[p51]

On the subject of Stormtrooper armor, not only does it not do anything to protect from blaster hits it is also completely ineffective against stone age weapons. While a kevlar vest might not stop a stone tipped arrow or spear it does stop bullets (which it's designed and meant to do) and a kevlar helmet would probably stop stone tipped weapons. But a Stormtrooper's armor doesn't even offer any protection against 3' teddy bears hitting them with rocks, granted they were fairly large rocks in some cases but they weren't exactly boulders.

I think most SW fans just shrugged that off. But having served in the Army, yeah, the concept of a suit of armor that doesn't protect against, well, anything is very silly indeed.

 

[Solo4114]

I've always looked at the Stormtrooper Armor thing as being more about providing protection from:

- environmental elements.
- Lower powered blaster fire.
- Glancing shots.

Think about it this way. Would a modern helmet stop a head-on impact from a modern assault rifle round fired from under less than 200m? I don't know for certain, but I'd guess it probably wouldn't. That's not to say it wouldn't protect in the event of a glancing blow, or that a lower-powered pistol round wouldn't bounce off.

So, the stormtrooper armor is probably great at stopping civilian-grade weaponry, and can handle glancing shots from military-grade weaponry. It might even be capable of stopping earlier military grade weaponry, but the Rebels developed better munitions to fight them, and blackmarketeers can get that kind of weapon out to other figures like Han.

 

[Victor3]

Going way bak to the old West End RPG, trooper armor offered better protection against physical attacks too. Granted, we don't see many physical attacks at all in the OT. And most of them were Ewoks successfully using them against Stormtroopers. So...

 

[NotAMoon]

We don't know the Storm Trooper armor doesn't protect them from blaster fire (Sticking just with ANH, this might get contradicted in later films). We see them getting hit and falling down, but we don't know they stay down. It could very well be like taking a 9mm round to a kevlar vest. You'll get knocked down, have your breath knocked out of you, and you may have a few bruised or cracked ribs, but you'll survive. Could be the same with Storm Trooper armor. They could be getting back up as soon as the camera moves off the action for all we know or at least being hauled off to the infirmary rather than the morgue.

As for Ewoks.... Maybe they're like Chimps, small, but several times stronger than a much larger human. Yeah, that's the ticket.