Stealth, pressing the Law of excessive explosions to the limit

Cafe Society
21

I noticed the “chafe” gaff as well. Someone should have caught that. That is, caught it while there was still time to fix it.

The movie was just full of stupidity. A friend of mine is a navy pilot and I could just imagine him having conniptions seeing it.

I’d say the AI in this film is, if nothing else, the most dynamic character. No one else really has a character arc.

I was pretty amused by the refueling dirigible. How exactly is that moving fast enough to let fighter jets refuel? Dirigibles don’t tend to be that fast, and if the planes getting refueled go too slow they’ll drop out of the sky.

As for the heat signature, Incubus, what they say in the movie is that each individual plane has a specific heat signature. So I guess subsequent EDIs would have a different heat signature and thus that information wouldn’t be important once that particular plane is gone. But it still makes no sense; a heat signature will help you differentiate one plane from another, but it isn’t going to help you find the plane in the first place.

I thought it was amusing when they said that EDI had downloaded all available music from the internet. That’s just goofy; why does he have that much extra memory devoted to nothing useful? Also, isn’t it pretty much insane to allow a learning AI access to the Internet? Sure, if he’s reading the Dope everything’s fine, but what if he finds the Jack Chick website or something? Yikes!

Oh, at one point Jamie Foxx’s character says that 1 is a prime number. It’s not. Of course, this isn’t necessarily bad moviemaking; his character could just be ignorant.

Also: If you wanted to find a huge deployment of landmines, where would you go? In this movie, where is it that we find a complete and total lack of land mines? Yep, same place.

I found it a bit odd that EDI was piloting a unique aircraft. It seemed to me that the sensible way to do it would be to have him fly a known aircraft, rather than introducing new variables by putting him in something untested. I suppose the filmmakers did it to make sure EDI was visually distinct in the combat scenes.

I was giggling throughout this film. It was colossally stupid. Still, I was entertained, so I suppose it did its job.

22

It’s amazing how much emotion they could put into a scene with an unmanned aircraft trying to refuel from another unmanned aircraft. Why can’t they do that with the human actors, now? :smiley:

Oh, and from what it looked like, the Talon (at least) was able to refuel from the dirigible by kicking in a centerline lift jet, like a Yak-41 or an F-35. (So, yeah, that’s a few tons of weight and some internal space you need to find on a swing-wing hypersonic stealth fighter-bomber that carries all it’s weapons internally, and has to be sturdy enough for carrier ops. AND it’s the design built by the lowest bidder.)

Aaand…these are supposed to be stealth aircraft going on secret missions, right? Then I was just wondering, y’know, how they kept the massive amount of two-way video, audio, and data transmissions from giving away the plane’s position. Broadcasting through subspace, maybe?

23

Oh, er, and for the record, I did like the movie, as a fun summer flick—robots and jet fighters, blowing the crap out of each other. Throw in Godzilla, a few nukes, and some zombies, and it’d be perfect. :cool:

24

Overall, I enjoyed it. I didn’t expect it to be any more than a “planes blowing stuff up” movie, so I wasn’t disappointed. One thing I was confused by was the demilitarized zone. Unless I got turned around, wasn’t Biel’s character getting shot at from a location south of her, and then all of a sudden that was the place she and the other guy were trying to get to? I think the filmmakers either didn’t understand what the Korean DMZ is like, or they just fudged it for drama’s sake. But it’s a big fudge. But in their defense, there was no chain link fence blowing up, it was clearly something next to the fence exploding, and throwing flame through the fence.

But all was redeemed by seeing Jessica Biel in that bikini. Holy smokes.

25

Are we talking Dr. Strangelove type refueling emotion and HAL pleading for his life emotion? Both would be great in these actors.

26

Ok. I suppose I’ll see it, then.

27

It would have also been sensible for a new one-of-a-kind artificially intelligent supercomputer to have been thoroughly tested without hooking it up to something with guns and missiles first.

But then it wouldn’t have been as creepy when his voice sounded like HAL.

28

Yeah, it’s a bit like giving your two year old an assault rifle and telling him to be good.

And, now that I think of it…their first mission was “Fly around a bunch to show EDI some moves.” While they were flying around, they were diverted to attack a target…so why, why oh why, was EDI even armed? I wouldn’t think they’d load him up with explosive ordnance unless they had an actual mission planned, because the ordnance load would be a mission-specific configuration. Did they just say “Here’s a random bunch of missiles, go fly around now!”

I also liked how it was shown that an attack force of one plane and two persons is enough to breach the Korean border. Let’s hope North Korea never decides to attack with, say, two planes and five guys or they’ll overrun all of South Korea.

29

And, on the same subject, why were the other three planes all armed with the necessary ordnance to accomplish a mission that didn’t exist until after they were airborne?

30

I think that was supposed to be the idea behind the whole “Talon” squadron—you’d have them loaded up with futurific all-purpose munitions, and they could hypersonically deploy almost anywhere in the world in a very short amount of time—you saw how fast they got across most of Eurasia—with the pilots themselves planning their own attack on the fly.

(Hey, I didn’t say it was a GOOD or FEASIBLE plan. Hell, how many MAJOR terrorist actions did the Talons almost let happen because they were fretting about collateral damage?)