Headscratchers / Red Faction

• The Hydra. Massively armed, can kill with precision or kill entire continents. Has zero point defense. Is destroyed by a single missile. Who designed this thing?
  • Volition. And the missile was pretty much a super-superweapon.
  • A super-superweapon in it's damage potential, but not in it's accuracy or speed or defenses or anything that would make it less likely to be effected by point-defense systems. It was a perfectly regular missile with a perfectly regular chance of hitting, carrying a one-hit-kill warhead.
  • Fridge Brilliance? The Hydra was, according to EDF news broadcasts, designed by the same guy who captains it. Given that most of the EDF leaders in the game appear more concerned with appearances and terrorizing colonists than actually combating the Red Faction, maybe he actually didn't consider defenses.
  • It's not a missile. It's a shot from the nano forge.
    • It was an RM-8 Missile stuffed with nanites.
  • Most of the weapon systems were not online. They did not expected any meaningful resistance once Hydra is on orbit as the Red Faction had been lacking weaponry since the start and certainly didn't have anything capable of leaving atmosphere. Them suddenly have a surface-to-orbit missile and the means to launch might not have been their first thought.
• There's a mission in Dust sector where the EDF has organized a supposedly peaceful demonstration with the intent of luring malcontents in and then killing them. The miners were smart enough to come armed, though, and when you get there an enormous firefight is in progress. Your objective is to save the miners by...destroying the loudspeakers broadcasting claims of a peaceful protest, which are supposedly luring more innocent people into the fray. You know, despite the fact that all the loudspeakers are inside the crater where the battle is taking place. Indeed, the only way to hear them at all is to be actively involved in said firefight, and anyone outside the immediate area would just hear the gunfire and explosions. With that in mind...what's the point of destroying the loudspeakers? For that matter, why do the miners even need saving? Virtually all of the protesters came armed, and when you arrive they're set up in a fairly fortified area with ample cover, holding their own pretty damn well.
  • Hell, how do we know the EDF even planned on opening fire? How do we know they even fired the first shot? Any competent police officer who saw dozens of 'peaceful protesters' openly carrying assault rifles and taking defensive positions would be liable to shoot first and sort it out later.
  • To clear things up the EDF did not organize the protest, merely attended and when it seemed like the protestors might get public support started killing people. Your goal is to keep them from luring more innocent people into their killzone, where they'd be slaughtered for daring the agree with the rebels, with the loudspeakers while other members of the Red Faction dispersed in the crowds help the miners fight their way back out.
• Does anyone know why they took out the ability to destroy terrain in all the games after the first Red Faction, seriously it was the funniest part of the game.
  • Because that would mean there would be need to create a limit on how much you can destroy it. It's more simple to make buildings destroy than desing entire world to work on physics.
• So, the Marauders. In Guerrilla, they live in giant heaps of scrap that look about a strong wind away from collapsing in a heap. In Armageddon, they live in... futuristic underground cities shinier and more advanced than anything the EDF ever had. The "centuries-old" Marauder temple Darius visits is in better condition than most of the EDF colonies. Where did they get this sort of tech in under a century?
  • I'm pretty sure the whole "primitive marauders in dinky metal houses" thing was a masquerade of some kind. They're actually scientists.
  • It's a masquarade. They've got the magnetic accelerator canon as well as an entire underground conclave hidden beneath the shacks proving they haven't lost any technical knowhow. They just pretend to be savages so nobody would have any real interest in them given they are Ultor survivors and the descendants their of who might still be wanted for all their illegal human experimentation. All they did in Armageddon is apply their knowledge openly instead of hiding themselves through the appearance of savagery.
• So, the Terraformer, essentially the key to everything that occurs in the entire game, gets taken out in the beginning of the game and then repaired by Darius at the end. It took Darius all of five minutes to do this—by himself. Why didn't anyone else do this before now?
  • For that matter, the Nano-Forge has impossible ramifications for industry and economy. It can completely repair anything that the user points it at, to the point of apparently creating matter out of thin air to fill in annihilated portions. It can rebuild large structures in mere seconds (even if the user would have no clue what it used to look like, the Nano-Forge essentially reverses time on the structure) and the power source is either unlimited or extremely efficient. It's effectively made standard reconstruction work obsolete as the user can simply wave his arm and bring destroyed objects back to life. Its ability to repair an object as complex as a sci-fi power generator indicates an unfathomable ability to create matter, which could theoretically allow the user to create resources or valuables for no effort. Aaaaand it's being used by some random scavenger?
    • It's possible that the Nano Forge just reconstructs things using only nearby rubble (thus not violating the law of conservation of mass) and based on installed schematics. While theoretically you could turn anything into anything it knows of, assuming you have the right raw materials, all you can manage with a simple handwave is "recognise what's probably supposed to be there, build something like it and make sure it probably works". For all we know the Forge could have accidentally hooked up a garbage compactor to where one of the water purifiers was supposed to be in that one mission. But for the sake of game simplicity, it just restores what was originally there.
    • While this would ordinarily be a plausible suggestion, it doesn't match what we see the Nano Forge do: even if a power generator has been bashed to pieces and scattered across a room, the device instantaneously creates one in its place (not reassembling the broken pieces, but actually causing a generator to appear from thin air) that is already turned on and in perfect working condition. If a machine is only partially broken, in less than a second the Nano Forge puts it in perfect working order. It can't be taking nearby rubble, because otherwise we'd see enough mass to make this power generator disappear (and even then, rebuilding complex devices isn't as simple as grabbing random rocks nearby even if you could break them down into their component atoms). If the device's power was explained in any other fashion, an alternate explanation could be possible. But we can clearly see what it's doing and that it not only violates Conservation of Mass, but actually creates a technological device that is already turned on and functioning flawlessly within seconds. There is absolutely zero evidence that contradicts this as far as I know, and we cannot extrapolate something contradictory to try and justify bad writing decisions.
    • On top of this, it's possible that Darius is keeping the Nano Forge hush-hush to keep it from falling into the wrong hands. There sure are a lot of loonies running around on Mars, and you certainly don't want someone like Adam Hale at the command of a veritable technological singularity.
    • He's doing a pretty poor job of keeping it hush-hush, seeing as how he keeps it strapped to his arm 24/7 and has no problem using it any time it's necessary. There's even an early mission based around escorting an APC and its contingent of soldiers, none of whom react at all to Darius having the single most advanced piece of technology anybody had seen and casually using it to rebuild staircases and computers.
    • Not to mention, since Nanoforge can fix the terraformer... why didn't he do it right away? I mean, he knows Nanoforge can do it and it would have been much easier when there wasn't an alien army occupying it...
    • Because the Terraformer was buried in lightning storm after dust devil after Cultist occupation. Would you, a lone individual, throw yourself against an entire army, most of which can see you and have a clear line-of-sight to your skull, to turn on the AC? On top of having to dodge lightning strikes and not choke to death on sand? Darius thought it would be better to wait it out and go back another day.
    • Except they had already taken control of the terraformer when the bombs were detonated, they could have easily walked right back in and repaired it.
• In the final mission of Guerrilla Alec Mason has to use a tough but far from invincible tank to fight through the EDF lines, facing multiple barricades of powerful vehicles and troops to reach the missile launch site to open it up. From a mechanical perspective a decent enough finale, even if the constantly respawning reinforcements coming from the rear are kinda bull. But from an in-universe perspective Alec was just using satellite targeting to stop an attack on the control building by using the captured EDF artillery. At no point is either the targeting or the artillery in any way disturbed. My question is why doesn't he just continue to do so, obliterate the entire enemy force with them having no ability to fight back, then make a brisk walk through the rubble, wreckage and smoke to open the launch bay unopposed?
  • An excellent question! There seem to be four likely reasons that the artillery wasn't an option:
    • Engineering wise the artillery base requires a lot of power. A whole set of independence very unstable reactors that Alec blew up when initially taking the base. Odds are good it took most of the power generated by the liberated sectors to bring the base back online if only briefly, power that is now going to the older and less efficient but much longer range mass driver at Mt. Vogal to allow for a shot at the Hydra.
    • Technologically speaking the artillery targeting system is specifically tied to EDF satellites. It's not clear if the artillery can even function without them and the Red Faction only got access by stealing codes from an EDF officer. Presumably once they realized what happened the EDF issued new access codes to everyone able to access the artillery or took those satellites offline entirely.
    • Tactically speaking a major part of why they even had a shot at the Hydra itself is that the EDF navy wasn't taking the situation on Mars all that seriously. Their predominant concern was the Nanoforge rather then normal insurgents and seemed to be dismissing much of what the Mars garrison had to say. The infighting spawned by politics and career advancement concerns meant the Hydra showed up with most of its weapons not prepped for combat including point defense. Having the artillery base actively shelling every EDF position in range would likely sway the Hydras commander to come on guns blazing nullifying their chance to take down the Hydra.
    • The element of surprise is also a matter to consider. Prior to this the EDF had been in retreat and so far as the Red Faction was aware didn't know about the mass driver. The EDF surprised them by launching a raid that killed the Marauders left to guard the mass driver before forcing the launch tube closed. There likely wasn't time to bring the artillery base back online even if the Red Faction still had access to the satellites used for aiming and could still restore power. The situation changed to suddenly for all that forcing a more immediate confrontation.