RANDOM THOUGHTS #49
Steve Cole muses: Just thinking to himself about the television series Falling Skies.
1. I think the aliens will have a tougher time in Texas, because a much higher percentage of our houses have guns, multiple guns.
2. The whole "fighters vs. civilians" thing is nonsense. First off, soldiers are taught to protect civilians, not treat them as unwanted baggage. Secondly, unless you're proven to be incompetent in combat or have some key skill (like being a doctor or someone able to build a radio), every able-bodied adult needs to be carrying a gun as "fighter." (Those unable to fight can keep the kids under control.)
3. Some yahoo shows up and says "the big boss wants you to send all of your kids with me." Was I the only one who said "this smells like a guy who is working for the skitters?" The simple solution here is to tell him that their parents are going with them. He won't like that.
4. We had a kid who was telepathically linked to an alien and did not even try to carry on any kind of dialogue?
5. We rescued five more kids and nobody tried to debrief them about what they saw? One lazy kid can now do 102 push-ups. One kid with some disease is now cured. Did anyone else undergo some kind of miraculous cure? Did any of them see anything we might want to know?
6. Why have we seen no alien vehicles? (Steven Petrick noted that the aliens move their slaves around on foot, which makes little sense. Why waste the time? Put them into a truck!)
7. The key to the current tactical situation is to find a reliable way to kill a mech. Killing a skitter isn't that hard (just keep shooting it) but those mechs are armored, heavily armed, and just plain dangerous. The only reliable mech-killer we seem to have is dynamite (which requires the mech to wander on top of a buried bundle wired to a detonator). Of all the weapons we have found, have we never found something heavier? Maybe a big-game rifle? A Barrett-50? Heck, I have some Israeli-made .556 ammo that I bought back when I was in the State Guard and thought that (guarding the gate of an oil refinery) I might have to stop a speeding truck by shooting into the engine block. I'm gonna bet that stuff will take out a mech, and I'm going to bet that there is more such ammo available. (A quick check found several types of armor-piecing rifle ammo on sale at a local gun store.) How about a shotgun with a sabot-slug? AT4 rocket launchers? (The Army had a LOT of those things and there has to be a lot of Army stuff left laying round.)
8. Ok, so the clever aliens began the war by attacking the military and wiping it out. Well, wiping out a 15,000-man division is not that easy. You can kill most of them and scatter the rest, but I've got to believe that there are a LOT of small groups of armed soldiers still keeping out of the way of any skitter detachment that is too big to fight.
9. It seems that the Hollywood writers have so much contempt for the military that they never even asked a real soldier any questions. They also never think anything all the way through, and just miss a whole lot of stuff. (Do the mechs not have night vision and precision targeting?)
10. Alas, network science fiction is rarely well written and is always badly treated by executives who are out of touch with what the viewers want.
1. I think the aliens will have a tougher time in Texas, because a much higher percentage of our houses have guns, multiple guns.
2. The whole "fighters vs. civilians" thing is nonsense. First off, soldiers are taught to protect civilians, not treat them as unwanted baggage. Secondly, unless you're proven to be incompetent in combat or have some key skill (like being a doctor or someone able to build a radio), every able-bodied adult needs to be carrying a gun as "fighter." (Those unable to fight can keep the kids under control.)
3. Some yahoo shows up and says "the big boss wants you to send all of your kids with me." Was I the only one who said "this smells like a guy who is working for the skitters?" The simple solution here is to tell him that their parents are going with them. He won't like that.
4. We had a kid who was telepathically linked to an alien and did not even try to carry on any kind of dialogue?
5. We rescued five more kids and nobody tried to debrief them about what they saw? One lazy kid can now do 102 push-ups. One kid with some disease is now cured. Did anyone else undergo some kind of miraculous cure? Did any of them see anything we might want to know?
6. Why have we seen no alien vehicles? (Steven Petrick noted that the aliens move their slaves around on foot, which makes little sense. Why waste the time? Put them into a truck!)
7. The key to the current tactical situation is to find a reliable way to kill a mech. Killing a skitter isn't that hard (just keep shooting it) but those mechs are armored, heavily armed, and just plain dangerous. The only reliable mech-killer we seem to have is dynamite (which requires the mech to wander on top of a buried bundle wired to a detonator). Of all the weapons we have found, have we never found something heavier? Maybe a big-game rifle? A Barrett-50? Heck, I have some Israeli-made .556 ammo that I bought back when I was in the State Guard and thought that (guarding the gate of an oil refinery) I might have to stop a speeding truck by shooting into the engine block. I'm gonna bet that stuff will take out a mech, and I'm going to bet that there is more such ammo available. (A quick check found several types of armor-piecing rifle ammo on sale at a local gun store.) How about a shotgun with a sabot-slug? AT4 rocket launchers? (The Army had a LOT of those things and there has to be a lot of Army stuff left laying round.)
8. Ok, so the clever aliens began the war by attacking the military and wiping it out. Well, wiping out a 15,000-man division is not that easy. You can kill most of them and scatter the rest, but I've got to believe that there are a LOT of small groups of armed soldiers still keeping out of the way of any skitter detachment that is too big to fight.
9. It seems that the Hollywood writers have so much contempt for the military that they never even asked a real soldier any questions. They also never think anything all the way through, and just miss a whole lot of stuff. (Do the mechs not have night vision and precision targeting?)
10. Alas, network science fiction is rarely well written and is always badly treated by executives who are out of touch with what the viewers want.
posted by Federation Commander at 6:13 AM
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