I was under the impression that the asteroid was sent after the invasion fleet had launched. Remember that Denise Richards’ ship got hit by it.
Is that true? If you blow the asteroid into small pieces and every piece still hits the earth, still, many of them might dissipate in Earth’s atmosphere. I don’t know what the effects of that would be, but I suspect they’d be better than the effects of a collision with the surface. The total amount of energy would be the same as you say, but the total amount of damage might differ.
FWIW in the commentary (or somewhere) it’s explained that there’s part of the backstory that never made it to the film that involves the notion that that football field sized cube is supercompressed and actually contains the mass of a large city, or something like that. I don’t know the math, so I don’t know if that works out concerning gravity etc, but at least someone involved in writing the thing was concerned about the issue you brought up.
In a scene which seemed to indicate that FTL speeds are “slower than walking”.
IIRC, the X-Wing manual had manoevering thrusters on the edge of its S-Foils, so it should have “flown” like the Star Furies.
Tau Delta Blern lost a lot of good pledges that day… 
Starship Troopers, the novel: Citizenship, military service, and fascism.
Starship Troopers, the movie: Propaganda, blowin’ shit up, and naked co-ed shower scenes.
You say that like it’s a BAD thing. 
The sad part is, even by the metric of “blow shit up real good”, which Hollywood normally excels at, the book was still better than the movie. Where were the nuclear hand grenades, or the twenty-second bomb? Where was the friggin’ powered armor?
treis said:
IIRC, asteroid attacks were repeated and ongoing. That was not the same asteroid as the one that hit Rio.
No, it was pretty clearly intended to be the same meteor – that was the point of it coming so close that it broke off their communications antenna – they couldn’t warn Earth it was coming.
Of course, this makes not an iota of sense, no matter how you fanwank it. Verhoeven clearly neither knew nor cared about accuracy and consistency of his universe’s science plus imaginary science. He wanted non-tech bugs using natural weapons who nevertheless could inflict damage on a planet at the other end of the galaxy, apparently acting as if Earth and Klendathu were closer than Earth and Mars. The number of errors – technical, scientific, and logical in that scenario are overwhelming. Best not to think about it too much.
Which is particularly odd, considering the T-Rex causes a loud thud that makes the ground shake with each step.
Many species actually live in salt water.
Except for the facism part.
Debatable. On the one hand, militarism != fascism; fascism is a form of totalitarianism, and the Federation actually seems to be a rather libertarian, minarchist society. OTOH, one of the central doctrines of “History and Moral Philosophy” – doctrine the officers of the Federation military are expected to learn and internalize (and who do you think is going to go on to hold high public office post-service, in that society?) – is that life in the Universe is an unending, zero-sum struggle between different sentient species for cosmic Lebensraum; peaceful coexistence is not a realistic option, save on an interim breathing-space basis. If you substitute “nations” or “races” for “species,” that’s pretty central to the historical worldview of all forms of fascism.
And that’s one thing that did survive in the film adaptation.
I seem to recall an interview with the director where he said that basically the budget would cover either the bugs or the powered armor, but not both. If that’s true, I guess I can forgive him that. The movie (bad enough already) would have been truly and totally unwatchable with mini-Gundams running around fighting against Power Ranger bugs…
But where were the earrings?
-val
No, actually it didn’t and it’s not facism. A LOT of things are necessary for a worldview to be facist. Having one tenet that is shared with some forms of facism isn’t enough. That’s the equivalent of saying that someone who supports universal health care is a Communist. No, they are not most likely and definitely not necessarily. Yes, most Communist countries have universal health care, but wanting universal health care doesn’t make you a Communist. It’s the same thing here. Believing that there is going to be a struggle for resources between different species/nations doesn’t make you a facist just because facists believe that.
To which the proper solution was to wait about two years before making the movie for special effects to come down in price.
Of course, the solution also involves not letting Verhoeven anywhere within a hundred klicks of the project, so it was probably a lost cause from the beginning.
Not defending the Van Allen belt thing, but the largest squids have been reported to range down to depths of well over a mile. And there are living things all the way down–when the Trieste went down into the Challenger Deep (once, 20 minutes, 1960, etc.) they reported a number of critters down there.
Regardless of whether or not Heinlein was depicting a fascist society, intentionally or not, the fact that we can debate it at all means, to me, that at some level the novel can be said to be about fascism.
Independence Day, why didn’t the aliens (if they really were just after Earth for the minerals) just slam one of the smaller ships, or a number of them, into the planet’s surface at high speed? I guess you wouldn’t have such a splendid knock off of all those 50s/60s flying saucer films, but on the other hand I think we the audience should demand more!