In the TV SF series Dark Angel, the secret government agency Manticore genetically designs super-soldiers called “X5’s.” Half are male, half female. Why any females? The X5’s were designed for combat and nothing else, males make better fighters (the differential would hold even with the genetic enhancements, wouldn’t it?), and since they were all test-tube babies in the first place, there would be no need to breed more by ordinary sexual reproduction – just order up a new batch from the lab.
How, then, would Jessica Alba be able to star in the series?
Seriously, this is the answer.
In this episode, Lydecker mentioned that they tried to get X-5’s and ‘normal’ humans to produce offspring but failed. When he learns that one X-5 is the mother of a healthy child, he remarks “We can make a hundred more like him”. So it looks like Project Manticore wanted to create generations of humans with X-5 traits.
Figures. How did Alan Shepard describe humans? “The only self-programming unit that can be mass-produced by unskilled labor?”
Personally, I was always hoping for a scene when an X-5 jumps in, kung-fus a bunch of guys and then gets blown away by someone with an M-16.
Enhanced biology’s fine, but steel and lead beat all.
Maybe that did happen - I didn’t watch the show often enough.
Well, there was the time that someone tried to shoot at Max… and she was too fast for him to target her.
Steel and lead can beat all… if it hits.
Of course, now I’m curious if anyone’s ever done studies involving paintball guns or MILES lasers to see how difficult it really is to shoot highly agile people. Start with some Olympic gymnasts and martial artists and see if a reasonably well-trained individual with a semi-automatic weapon can get them and what conditions most favour the target. I’d guess that any distance over twenty feet invariably favours the shooter.
What’s a MILES laser?
Dude, I’m so sending this to Mythbusters.
Me too. 'Course, it won’t prove anything about a fantasy universe, since Max and most other characters who dodge bullets are supposed to have superhuman speed and/or reflexes.
ISTR hearing about some Russian general of some sort who was arrested and ordered executed in one of the Communist purges. When he saw the guy walk up to his cell with the pistol, he started dodging back and forth and it apparantly took two magazines for them to shoot him dead. Apparantly he was some sort of martial artist, but I’m not sure if that helped him as much as the adrenaline and the “OH GOD THEY’RE GONNA SHOOT ME!” fight-or-flight mode he would have been in.
Of course, I have no idea of the veracity of this story, I saw it on the History Channel.
I distinctly remember Max kicking serious man-mutant ass, so no, I guess the differential doesn’t hold.
But the real answer is much simpler - covert ops. There are places a pretty lady can get in a lot easier than a guy.
That’s what shotguns are for… you don’t have to be quite so accurate!
Personally, I always wondered why they made the X-5s super-intelligent. Not a necessary trait for a soldier, nor a desirable one for obvious reasons – they have this pesky tendency to question authority, rebel, etc.
Actually, the perfect soldier (as opposed to ninja assassin or Special Ops types) wouldn’t be super-strong or fast; they’d be super-enduring. Able to go a week without sleep; able to keep marching and fighting after an ordinary solider would have laid down and died; able to go for extended periods with little or no food; able to endure extremes of heat and cold; able to take massive injury and not only survive but be able to keep fighting; psychologically resistant to “battle fatigue”, panic, depresssion, etc. In other words, something like a WW2 Red Army soldier only x10- a super-grunt.
It is both desirable and necessary for something like a special forces unit. In the real world, SpecOps personnel are the elite. They’re smarter, more determined, more disciplined, more trained, and more capable than regular soldiers. Anybody who makes it into any of those units is usually in the top percentile mentally and physically of all the people in his branch of service. They are required to make it through training courses that are the equivalent of a specialized courses of study in college, they all have to complete instruction in a foreign language, and they all undergo mental and physical strains during training and testing that would be beyond most people. If they fail any part of the training, they’re usually out of the whole program, which provides a HUGE amount of motivation.
The way they operate requires a high degree of autonomy and good decision making abilities. There is often no way to communicate with HQ on a regular basis and they may be out of contact for days at a time. They may have to adapt tactics to fit the changing conditions of the situation, or in catastrophic cases even scrap the whole plan and figure out something on the fly. If you don’t want to lose your people, and all the investment of money, time, and expertise you put into training them, you probably want them to be as adept at planning as they are at carrying out those plans.
That means that they need to be smart. Ideally, really smart, as in as smart or smarter than the guys back at the command center who have the benefits of lots of information gathering equipment and communications gear, the input of people with special training who help interpret that information, and a big-picture view of the battlefield working for them.
I think the problem with the X-5s was that the Powers that Be didn’t do a very good job of making their loyalty to command as strong as their loyalty to their teammates. There’s probably no way to do that without fundamentally changing the way human brains form social attachments. The next generation had a “hive mind” and of course didn’t behave like humans.
Lumpy, the other strains of experimental soldiers had many of those traits, including some that were optimized for specific environments.
I remember, and that strained my suspension-of-disbelief a lot more than the show’s original premise. I mean, the guy (another X5) was still bigger than Max was, with more muscle mass, longer reach, etc. Which is the reason why women don’t compete against men in boxing, or contact sports generally.
That’s what you would want in an infantry grunt, but I get the impression X5’s were intended as special-ops soldiers like Army Rangers and Navy Seals – used for challenging but short-duration missions where you sneak into enemy territory by submarine or parachute to attack a specific target, then get out fast. For that, endurance is less important than the ability to defeat any enemy or obstacle you might encounter.
Actually, I’d be willing to bet that some folks would debate back and forth on even the infantry part. I’ve heard at lesat one historian describe the Battle of Normandy as “The Boy Scouts Vs. The Nazi Youth”, since on one side you had soldiers from nations that had Scouting (The UK, Canada, the US) with their emphasis on resourcefullness, personal initiative, etc., and on the other side Germany which had soldiers who would have been in the Hitler Youth, with it’s emphasis on obeying authority. When things went to crap on both sides, the Allies improvised, and the Germans waited for orders. By the time the Germans had the orders to do what they needed to stop the landings, the Allies were already moving inland.