Why weren’t terminators sent to kill John Conor and his mom etc sent at an early time, lets say to kill Conor’s grandparents? It would make it a lot easier.
Because it would make the movie a lot less interesting?
What makes you think they weren’t? After all, there are still a lot of sequels that haven’t been made yet. 
Well, note that the only information Skynet had about Sarah Connor was her name and city of residence in 1984. The first T-800 had to look her up in the phone book and then killed the other two Sarah Connors that happened to be listed first, so it didn’t have information about her appearance either, as the second T-800 did about John Connor.
When the information is this sketchy, what information could Skynet possibly have about Sarah’s parents or grandparents? It didn’t kill and impersonate her mother until it found her address in Sarah’s phone book. So the answer is probably that Skynet didn’t know who Sarah’s parents were, let alone her grandparents.
Furthermore, Skynet didn’t expect resistance, since it didn’t know the human rebels were about to capture the time machine. It probably figured that a 1984 untrained human would be easy pickings for a T-800.
Finally, it’s not inconceivable that there is a limit as to how far back the time machine can put you. We never get an explanation how it works.
Yep, I’m a Terminator geek… Ask me about predestination some time.
Terminator 5 – The Librarian
Skynet sends a new Teriminator – the T-Dewey Decimal – back in time to the time of the printing of Sarah Connors’ phone book so he can find out who her parents were, so he can kill them. The Human Resistance sends Conan the Librarian back in time to stop him.
Pedant: if you check out the novelisations, you’ll find that Skynet sent the Terminators back through time when it was about to be captured and destroyed; it couldn’t calculate the ramifications of altering history in sufficient detail to risk it as anything but a last resort.
I generally prefer to leave out novelisations in matters such as this. I have yet to know of a single novelisation where no detail is different from the movie (although 1989’s Batman was awfully close and close to awful), so information from there cannot be construed as canonical.
But you’re broadly right; we don’t know in what stage Skynet sent the Terminators back or how much it knew about its own fate. I retract that statement.
And the first movie, IIRC, gave the impression that the T-800 did end up killing Sara Connor’s mom, anyway.
Yeah, but there’s no point in doing it after Sarah’s been born.
I do remember Reese ranting in the police station that Skynet’s defenses were smashed at the time it sent the first, mysteriously younger-looking T-800 back in time (Terminator V will involve a T-800 using a cybernetic walker). So I’d say it’s a safe bet that it knew full well the barbarians were at the gates and it was hail-mary time.
Well, Terminators have been sent back repeatedly to kill one of Sarah’s ancestors, Connor Macleod, but he has proven surprisingly difficult to eliminate.
Sarah could have saved the world if she only had an unlisted phone number. Proof once again AT&T is evil! lets burn their headquarters to the ground, just to screw over those blasted robots!!!
Why not just send back a big H-bomb, covered in vat grown human flesh?
LA is reduced to a puddle of glass and the rest of us are saved.
I don’t think the resistance had an H-bomb. And Skynet had the technology to attach human flesh to machines, but the humans didn’t, did they?
The bad guys send the bomb back. Works as long as the Skynet HQ isn’t in LA.
Terminator 2 dialog:
John: “Why can’t they just send a bomb and get me?”
Ahnold: “It cannot send machine with complex moving parts. It doesn’t work that way”
John: “Then what does it use?”
Ahnold: “Knives. And stabbing weapons.”
[sub]I’m paraphrasing from memory here - no need to link to the screenplay and correct my mistakes. :)[/sub]
Terminator one said the feild produced by a living organism is what caused time travel, which is why termies had to go, and go in the buff. (anything inside the flesh was good as gold, so they should have just sent back a terminator with a nuke in his chest (and had a black lightsaber plus be named Grando Calrissian) to take out Conner
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That’s a good question.
Was it?
Tripler
And what are the titles of those novelizations? (I wanna read 'em)
Sure I don’t NEED to…
John actually asked why didn’t T-1000 turn into a bomb, and Arnie said it couldn’t imitate complex machinery, only pointy shiny things.
And yeah, sending back a bomb to blow up LA would destroy any chances of there being an arm and cpu hanging around waiting to be discovered by Cyberdyne so they could create Skynet who’d send back the arm/cpu etc…
:smack:
Yes, that’s an important thing for me to forget while making that point, isn’t it? So much for using my memory, which I have a feeling resembles that picture of Homer’s brain…