I dunno…seems true to life to me. I can fly clear across the country in a few hours and then spend a few more taxiing to the gate. 
And you DO NOT want to know how the Imperial Transportation Security Agency manages the pre-boarding security checks. 
“Are you carrying any Samsung Note 7 phones?”
“No, these aren’t the droids you’re looking for.”
The point of this thread may be to point and laugh, but in fairness to the MCU…
(1) The original helicarrier did have stealth technology. It didn’t work again Hawkeye, who probably knew all about it. We don’t know the exact nature or limits of it in general.
(2) The original helicarrier was unarmed, apart from its planes and security personnel. It seemed to be more of a base than a warship, though, so that may have been the point: why put battleship guns on the HQ, when you can just send out planes? It makes the same sense as with regular naval carriers; increase the range of your firepower without giving away your location.
(3) Project Insight gave Hydra a method of removing every possible enemy leader or resistance cell. It wouldn’t matter if everyone on Earth privately swore vengeance - they would never be able to organize, or for that matter, even know who was really doing the attacking. And the moment anyone tried to start a movement, Hydra would be able to immediately eliminate them, either by bombardment or simply arranging an “accident”. It might not have battered if someone did take down the new, evil-brand helicarriers, as long as Hydra was able to consolidate power first.
How about the Tholian Web? A confinement field that requires the target to be relatively immobile for several hours?
That way you can move them from ship to ship instead of having to build one per. Which is germane to the Rebel’s problem of limited ressources : when the Imperial Navy is around, you send a bunch of starfighters raiding, then they come back and you put their droids back on fleet hopping duty. Maybe ?
There’s also the whole “perform repairs in zero atmosphere” aspect - or into a fire, that sort of thing. You actually see an example of it in the prequel trilogy, where a bunch of R2s are sent out to do in-combat emergency repairs on a capital ship. Plus, say you’ve got a big meteorite-shaped hole in a bulkhead and you have to seal half of the ship away before the entire thing goes through decompression, it’s kinda nifty to have a little guy you can send in to patch it up, or run the components that are in the no-air half of the ship.
Now, why the little guy doesn’t have, yanno, arms…
[QUOTE=Robot Arms]
For something with so many functions, how are people supposed to interact with it? R2 is shown understanding human speech, but its ability to reply seems pretty limited. There’s not much point in having something process information if it can’t communicate the results.
[/QUOTE]
Well that’s why you have to buy a translation droid for it. That’s Big Droid for you. You thought Microsoft was solely confined to our galaxy ?
Seriously though, IIRC one of the RPG’s book explained that R2’s beeps and boops are sort of like your PC’s motherboard’s beeps and blinkenlights : sure they’re useless to the average user, but a droid specialist knows exactly what they mean and over time even non-specialist can sort of guess around the more common boops. I mean, even just watching the trilogy you can tell when R2’s going “oh hell no” or sarcasming at C3PO.
Dune’s shields. Stop fast projectiles, don’t stop slow melee weapons.
So you can’t kill me with a machine gun, but you could smack my brains out with a frying pan. Rightio.
Love it.
[QUOTE=**DrDeth]
**Yes helicarriers are massively stupid.
[/QUOTE]
Well, that explains it, then.
How much damage could a frying pan moving at six to nine centimetres per second do?
Might give you a nasty burn if it’s fresh of the stove.
Speaking of Dune, do you recall the first (godawful) film? The “weirding modules”. Not a bad weapon per se, I suppose (although absolutely a wretched interpretation of Herbert’s vision). I was a bit silly how it worked- just as when I was a kid pretending to do karate, if you yell “Hah” at just the right time, your blow is waaaay more effective.
Strategically, probably locking them away in a vault where they would be unavailable to Atreides soldiers if attacked was probably not their mentat’s finest moment.
This is not completely insane. Some non-Newtonian fluids exhibit properties that are vaguely similar–they resist fast-moving objects more than slow moving ones. Granted, it might be a bit messy to surround one’s self with a non-Newtonian fluid.
The same idea was used in Haldeman’s “The Forever War.” Within the confines of the force-field, there was a maximum speed objects could move. Guns didn’t work, but axes and pitchforks were just fine!
I don’t remember where, but I read some SF story where the force-field suppressed the differential, not of speed, but of acceleration. You could go as fast as you wanted, and accelerate as much as you wanted, but the acceleration itself could only increase slowly. Sort of an anti-concussion field. (I’m thinking Larry Niven, 'cause it’s right up his alley.)
I’ve heard the differential of acceleration termed “jerk”.
That would definitely mess up guns. Not lasers or ray-guns. Maybe a gyrojet gun could work, depending on amounts of jerk allowed. Same for swords & such, although lower jerk.
Niven had a field that could hold you immobile, used in his “crash field” and “police web”. I don’t think it was based on acceleration or jerk.
You’ve obviously never had my girlfriend’s cooking.
rimshot
The bigger problems with the M41A Pulse Rifle being the fact it has incredibly simplistic gutter/trench iron sights as well as a digital round counter that can’t be seen without removing your eyesight from the sight picture. These looked better on-screen than they would in real combat which is why they did it.
The first person video games based on the Alien franchise managed to fix this in two separate but simple ways. They either always have the player character fire the weapon from the hip (much like in the actual movie) thus there’s no need for the iron sights as well as you can still see the round counter while firing. Or they add a simple optic to the top that also has a build-in round counter there as well below the red dot sight.
And now for a completely different kind of stupid weapon
I don’t understand why people thought Darth Maul was cool when he had the dumbest light saber in the SW Universe. How do you point that thing at anybody without hurting yourself?
Starkiller Base in SW:TFA, a weapon so dumb even I noticed how idiotic it was.