Avatar.

...tow the mountain? They have pretty big shuttles, and even if they don't tow the mountain, it will only fall on the less-sacredish trees.

Whatcha gonna do, little buckaroo? | i be pimpin' madoka fics

It says in the manual that they tried mining the mountains and it led to a nasty accident, so who knows?

(And the Sphere of Destruction link was because a magnet powerful enough to suspend itself 100m+ in the air is powerful enough to warp and destroy anything around it.)

Da Rules excuse all the inaccuracy in the world. Listen to them, not me.

Mining it out "slowly" is a relative term, considering you're talking about an entire mountain. Without specialized equipment, research teams taking careful note of how the Unobtainium is dispersed through the mountain and precision removal, it's really quite likely that you'd make the mountain unstable and prone to dangerous shifts, which could easily damage personnel/machinery stationed there.

Sure, they could mine it if they wanted, but it would be a lot more dangerous than just getting it from the ground. Plus, you wouldn't have to use aerial transport to move the ore; iirc, all the Unobtianium in the area scrambles radar and makes flying dangerous.

What I want to know is how there's a waterfall on one of the mountains. I mean, I suppose its possible if it rained recently, but...

I'm still not sure how super conductors-> antigravity. But again, tow the buggers over to your quarry and blow the mother fucker up. Now you've got rubble you can throw into the grinders.

Fight smart, not fair.

Superconductors -> antigravity because of an esoteric piece of physics.

(And you really don't want to blow up current-carrying superconductors)

edited 30th Aug '10 10:23:01 AM by Yej

Da Rules excuse all the inaccuracy in the world. Listen to them, not me.

It would depend on how much voltage they're running and how much resistance the non superconductor material now creates.

Fight smart, not fair.

Well, the force of a magnetic dipole is inversely proportional to the distance to the sixth. Since keeping the thing up seems to require impossible amounts of power, I wouldn't want to be around if you suddenly add heat to the equation.

edited 30th Aug '10 1:13:54 PM by Yej

Da Rules excuse all the inaccuracy in the world. Listen to them, not me.

Eywa did it.

Formerly known as Crow T. Robot.

I'm considering watching again and going a bit more in depth on the issues I spot. It would probably be much thinner and skippier on certain sections than previous. Any approval?

Fight smart, not fair.

Yes.

Skimming over the Wiki article on Unobtainium, apparently its discovery caused scientists to revise electromagnetic theory. I suppose science being proven wrong is a bit more believable than pretty much any other handwave.

I'm pretty sure they don't have the power to tow an entire mountain. For one, space ships aren't built that way. Secondly, the magnetic fields would destroy their radar, and going into a field filled with floating rocks with a massive ship without a decent radar is several shades of stupid. And finally, even if they could tow the thing, the amount of explosives required would be enormous; unless they knew they were going to be blowing up whole mountains from the get go, I doubt they'd carry that much firepower.

I find it hard to believe I'm defending James Cameron's world building, but there you go. Then again, I won't defend anything that has to do with the biology of Pandora.

edited 2nd Sep '10 5:21:10 PM by Blazinghydra

New thread or just keep going? I'll probably start tomorrow or something. I'll be using the later style with large paragraph style posts. I'm also thinking of taking screen shots and actually discussing the designs and how I would do it differently.

Fight smart, not fair.

I say just keep going Deboss.

Rejoice for I have RETURNED! Thank DQZ for spurring me to come back and do this. Now, since I already did it as a "thought stream" version, I'm likely going to switch to the paragraph style. I'm also going to posting screen shots and links to The Other Wiki for the things I'm going to be discussing. As soon as I'm done with my pass through the forums.

Fight smart, not fair.

Okay, now, I've just started it and I've heard an issue I missed the first time. I've heard this is supposed to be a "no FTL 'verse" but it took six years to go to the system. These are the closest star systems rated by distance. Light year is not a time period, it's a distance. It's how far a photon to travels at three hundred thousand kilometers a second in one year. If you would like to calculate it, 3E8 (m/s) times 365.25*24*3600 (s/year) will get you the number of meters traveled.

Now there are a few ways this could work. One is the tried and true "no Hyper Drive inside a system" so most of the travel time is eaten up just getting to the place you can jump with. This is used by quite a few people including such giants as Larry Niven (The Mote In Gods Eye). It's also possible that FTL or near FTL is in effect but slow enough that it still takes years to get anywhere interesting. In which case I applaud Camerons subversion of Casual Interstellar Travel.

Next I'll note the use of Human Popsicle. ◊ (I made it clickable for you) Now, although Human Popsicle is a good idea in this instance, the chamber has a lot of wasted space. It's at least three people wide and is mostly hollow space. That's a lot of air and metal wasted on aesthetics.

The next post will likely be about the space ship itself. And my 's' key seems unusually sensitive, so if you see a trail of ssssssssssssss, you'll know what it is.

edited 17th Sep '10 3:38:36 PM by Deboss

Fight smart, not fair.

Now, to the space shit ship.

Okay, now you may be asking "Why'd you flip it vertical?" the answer is so that you don't have to click it. I labeled the important parts. Now, the design wasn't as bad as I thought it was originally.

The biggest issue, as I pointed out before, that the spinny thing is in front of the solar panel array and the array is going to be blocked by both the array, and the engines at the back. Proper positioning would have a solar array right around the engines. Or possibly mounted directly on the spinny thing.

Next, there's the spinny thing itself. Now, those of you have been consuming harder scifi without Artificial Gravity already know what that thing is for. For those of you who don't, it's there to use Centripetal force to create some weak gravity, as extended stays in very low gravity tends to wreck your shit. However, Cameron decided to be unique and use a pole  ^*

. The reason poles aren't used, is that wheel shapes give much more area at the appropriate level of gravity so you can do more than just sit there.

One other thing I'd like to point out is that it came into the system ass end first. That's actually accurate as you tend to want to point the engines in the direction you want to slow down in.

And before I forget:

The cargo is PEOPLE! PEOPLE I TELL YOU!

edited 20th Sep '10 10:55:54 PM by Deboss

Fight smart, not fair.

What's currently happening is that the shuttles are taking a nose dive through the atmosphere and leaving cool contrails for everyone to see and be impressed with (I'll see if that's good enough later). After coming in over the big mine where they're digging up Unobtainium. For those of you who don't know, the giant saw of doom operating is based on a real machine. We can see the giant dump trucks trundling by with loads of ore to be smelted and people walking next to them. The giant dumptrucks also currently exist, but google has failed to produce a link.

As the shuttle comes in over the base we can see it switch to VTOL engines. That honestly seems like a waste of energy. VTOL tends to be a huge gas guzzler for something the shape of a shuttle. Since it just has those turbines pointed straight down and not those big honkin' engines hanging off the end. Since I don't see a launch pad like what we currently use, I must assume that those big engines are how it gets into space on it's own.

From the way it's mentioned, it seems like the air has a significantly lower oxygen partial pressure. This is what causes the humans besides General Badass to start gasping for breath and slowly asphyxiate, General Badass doesn't need air as that is beneath his dignity as a Commissar, which is what I'm going to call him for the rest of this.

The internal bay of the shuttle appears to be based on that of the C130◊. I approve.

As Sully wheels himself out of the shuttle, I notice that the wheelchair isn't much different than current ones. It doesn't look super collapsible (realistic for a space transport) or hover (Rule of Cool). Then again, that's likely just how Sully rolls. YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

A giant dump truck trundles by, likely filled with ore to be processed. What sticks out are the half dozen or so arrows sticking out of the wheels. The truck doesn't seem to be slowed down, the tire doesn't seem to be deflating, so the locals can't even do any significant damage and these things can be remote controlled. Why do they need to be guarded on the way back again?

That's enough for today, I'll be back tomorrow.

edited 17th Sep '10 4:53:24 PM by Deboss

Fight smart, not fair.

I will once again lower myself to being Cameron's bitch, despite how much I dislike the movie anyway.

First off, solar panels. Do we ever see if the engines cast a shadow on them? It doesn't seem like it'd be terribly difficult to orient it in orbit so it faces their star; though, one has to keep in mind that Pandora is actually a moon, and thus the Jupiter-like planet would likely blot out their sun for a fair amount of time each day, making it difficult to collect solar energy effectively anyway.

The travel being FAL or barely FTL seems like a reasonable explanation. I'll keep that as my personal canon unless Cameron's mentioned anything directly against that.

The space in the human-pop chambers seems to me like it's intended to accommodate the crowd once everyone exits their pods, if I had to guess at the purpose of it being so wide and open.

Considering we've seen Pandoran arrows at some point penetrate the windshield of military vehicles, one can assume they can do significant damage if they get a lucky shot. I suppose a giant truck intended to move through hostile alien terrain would have rather reinforced tires, so...

My goodness. This discussion is far more entertaining than the movie itself was.

It's not about orbit, it's going to be spending most of it's time moving toward the planet from out of the system, so it's going to be oriented in one direction with a near continuous burn on the engines. Or bursting the engines if there's cooling restrictions or something. You want to wait until the end to thrust so you can minimize travel time.

I'm going to be mentioning the glass cockpits later since I remember them a bit. I'm going to wait for screen shots though.

edited 17th Sep '10 8:33:48 PM by Deboss

Fight smart, not fair.

Ah,I knew I'd seen it somewhere - breakdown of the ship's components.

Looks like the solar panels are actually a Whipple shield - once it's brought up to speed by the lightsail,they rotate the whole ship so it's pointing shield-first.

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

Fair enough. There was apparently a shit ton of design put into it that wasn't presented in the movie. I claim I'm not talking out of my ass for reasons of All There in the Manual, all I had were the visuals in the movie. Honestly, discussing the design choices on the ship would have been more thought provoking than anything else. Though, lulz were had, so it's all good.

Okay, back to the show. The Commissar is giving his "do not befriend the foul xenos speech" And the vacation in hell part as well. I know I've seen that elsewhere in a movie, but the actor who's playing the commissar is clearly enjoying himself, reminds me of the Star Ship Troopers movie. I'm gonna keep going for a while.

I'd like to take a minute to discus the science chick who's name I didn't catch. She's in charge of the Avatar project and wrote a book on Pandoran botany. So right off the bat we know she's an Omni Disciplinary Scientist. Given the cost it takes to send people out there, this makes sense because the company will likely have it's pick of individuals to send out for reasons of "we can send you to an alien planet" incentive. What I don't get it is why they put a botanist (which is clearly her primary) in charge of a genetic engineering project. Or why she's in charge of the "interacting with the locals" component. The company clearly has the pull to get whoever they want. Given a choice, I'd put someone whose primary area of study was cultural analysis (I think that's called anthropology, I stay away from the humanities section of colleges because the deathray density is too low) instead of an anti social botanist. The companies HR department really sucks.

She can't stand marines, apparently her idea of "safety" entails going out into the "most hostile environment known to man" (pretty tame for a Death World in all honesty), with no weapons or guards while wondering around stabbing things with her sensor needle dealies.

Off to the control center to bitch at the boss. She's really not getting the whole "you're just on the pay role for PR purposes" memo is she? Bitch bitch bitch, okay, As You Know the reason they're on the planet is for the Unobtainium that floats. The price quoted seems a little low for interstellar shipping standards, but that's just me. According to some of the fluff I read over on the trope page, it's supposed to be a high temperature super conductor used in mag lev trains. Don't get me wrong, purging xenos for cheap high temp super conductors is quite reasonable, I just don't think "mag lev trains" is the best use for it. I'm guessing that's supposed to be some of that Science Is Bad aesop I keep hearing about, but never managed to wrap my mind around. Onward.

The avatars themselves seem like a weird idea. Cameron is invoking LEGO Genetics again. How exactly are these things supposed to be communicating with the MRI giant spinning mind transfer thingy is strange. They're transmitting the PC thoughts to the brain of the smurf body, but there's no antennae or any kind of visible transmission system. My guess is that they carved the memory component out of the brain and put all the transceiver equipment in there. That's what I'd do anyway.

We're getting to meet helicopter pilot for the first time, I'd say more but I need to take a nap cause my little brother needs a chauffeur tomorrow. I suspect that the HR department was behind this choice in personnel again.

• ->pilot: *sitting in room in a tight tank top*
• ->HR guy: "...so the... uh... next question, if ordered...uh... to commit unspeakable evil... upon the indigenous population... for cash, would you do it?"
• ->pilot: "of course not!"
• ->HR guy: [dammit, was there a "not" at the end of that? She's distracting me with titties, my one weakness.] "well, that's what we needed to hear, welcome aboard"

I'll see you tomorrow, if possible, I'll post pics of the stuff too.

edited 20th Sep '10 10:54:56 PM by Deboss

Fight smart, not fair.

Right, so I don't think I'm going to be continuing this. My drive crashed and I lost the original copy I had, combined with the lack of interest on my part, I think I'm done. I did want to post a gag I was planning to do. I was going to take a screenshot and then post design influences I could see, and (for the weapons at least) images of what it should look like and why. Since I'm not continuing, I'll post the set up I had for one.

The bird thing◊ is a composite of this◊ and this◊. Probably much funnier in my head.

Fight smart, not fair.