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Apollo was a real Greek god.
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Who?
The Tooth said:
Because those legs were huge, so capable of traversing very large terrain roughness.
Bosstone said:
Consider that biology has invented legs and not wheels. Consider that legs can go over obstacles that defies wheels with the same size constraints.
Actually, I’m wondering why the Snowtroopers didn’t open up a hatch and shoot the cables with their blasters. The energy should have been weak enough not to damage the leg armor but strong enough to cut the cables. But hey, hindsight (from 30 years later).
Alessan said:
The infantry were there so that when the snowtroopers disembarked from the AT-ATs, they would engage. But they should have kept their heads down until then.
Unauthorized Cinnamon said:
They took care of their own naughty bits (while we weren’t looking). :dubious:
Maybe the elastic waistbands give underwear a spore-proof barrier. :dubious:
carnivorousplant said:
And spacecraft maneuver with control surfaces in space.
Shot From Guns said:
Didn’t they show that in Episode III, in the battle with General Grievous? Where the gremlins are knocked off the space ship because of the wind?
How about Armageddon? That whole movie is dumbassery. Shooting shotguns on oil platforms. MIR spinning to make gravity. Mounting guns on the asteroid hovercraft.
Once mechanical control approaches the sort of control we have over our own appendages, it’ll start to make more sense. I know the BigDog is pretty impressive for current technology. But the AT-ATs were extremely inflexible, and would have been incapacitated by a ditch its operators didn’t see pretty easily.
Also, let’s see you take down an M1 Abrams with a cable.
. . . more than once.
Not to mention the basic premise, of Armageddon and Deep Impact. If there is an asteroid on a collision course with Earth,and you blow it up with a nuclear bomb, now you have millions of fragments, with the same aggregate mass and kinetic energy as the original object, heading for Earth on roughly the same trajectory and at roughly the same velocity; plus, now they’re radioactive. This does not improve the situation.
I think your logic is a little flawed there. Surely by blowing it apart you have altered the trajectory of at least some of the particles to one that does not intersect with Earth’s orbit. Beyond that, millions of particles have a much higher surface area exposed to re-entry temps, which make them more likely to burn up. You have also scattered that radiation over a much larger portoin of our atmosphere, so it is less likely to cause problems.
In short, I think you just failed physics again.
That much mass “burns up” in Earth’s atmosphere, you’re gonna have enough gunk in the air to block a significant fraction of the sunlight for a significantly long time. Extinction-level event.
TIEs can function in atmosphere, they just can’t maneuver very well: up and down, forward and back, fine. Strafing side to side? You’ll probably rip your solar panels the hell off.
It’s possible. I was just thinking of the original trilogy. The prequels were so horrible I’ve forgotten most of the details.
Was the idea to blow up the asteroid, or to use an explosion to alter its trajectory? (I honestly have no idea–one of the movies I didn’t see, and one I saw and promptly forgot.)
Is that called a Trope Trek or did I make up a new term this morning?
That’s like refusing to wear a seat belt, so that you’ll be thrown clear in the event of an accident. The entire asteroid burning up in the atmosphere is precisely what you’re trying to avoid.
Still, blowing it all to smithereens, if you do it early enough, would probably guarantee that many or most of the smithereens would miss Earth.
It makes little difference if they “burn up” or not; the energy still gets delivered; rather like expecting a shotgun blast to the face at point blank range to be less lethal than a rifle bullet. To use an analogy; suppose a mountain is dropping on you. Something breaks it into gravel just before it lands on you. Are you any less dead?
Like Chronos says, breaking it up will only do any good if it’s far enough away that most of it misses. And with enough force that the fragments don’t just arrive in formation.
I figured they got knocked off the space ship because some asshole had just slammed into them with another space ship, knocking them loose.
As to why they fell away from the ship after getting knocked off, I presume these space fighters are accelerating while this is going on. Alternately, I presume it looked cool, which is the primary reason anything works in the Star Wars universe.
Failing those two, there’s two Jedi within 10 feet of the droids. They were pushing them off with the Force. Personally, I find your lack of faith… disturbing.
My problem with that scene was that if an enemy is going to get close enough to your mine so you can release a bunch of little robots who will disassemble his ship, why not skip the robots and just pack the mine with explosives, which will also disassemble his ship, only much more quickly and finally.
They loop and roll and generally act as thought they were manuvering in air and gravity rather than using thrusters, as for example the fighters in Babylon 5.
Gawd, it hurts saying something nice about Babylon 5…
Them’s fightin’ words.
What about Londo’s haircut? Can’t you say something nice about that?
It wasn’t as bad as Sisko’s.
Ow!
For that, may you be nibbled to death by cats. 