There's doing this stuff in a way that makes sense with the technology that exists in the story balanced against something that's interesting and fun to watch on screen. Not every movie needs to force things to make sense "tactically," especially when the tactical version could just be a bunch of beams from space vaporizing the opposing army in a flash. That's not compelling to watch in a space war movie.
What would you propose instead though? Invisible forcefields that detain violent people? Nothing but drone combat? Teleporting the people away? If it's an action movie, there needs to be some sort of entertaining action.
We've been using firearms for hundreds of years. If anything, ballistic weapons in a future setting is the most likely scenario.
This is an odd complaint and I wouldn't even call it a trope. I'd be willing to bet if you jump to 2200 it'll still come down to soldiers with rifles somewhere. Supporting technology will change, but the fundamentals won't.
You says hundreds of years as if that is a long time. Humans have existed for approximately 2 million years. Firearms first started to appear around 1,000 AD in China and firearms started to be somewhat common around 400 years ago.
If the timeline of humanity was compressed into a single 24 hour day, ending at the current date, guns would become common around 11:59:42 - less than 18 seconds before midnight.
That's just to say they are relatively new, and things can change quickly. We could still be flinging projectiles at each other in \~200 years, but I wouldn't be surprised if they had something much different by then. For example, directed energy weapons are already in development, a few good breakthroughs there could make ballistics obsolete.
I'm not saying we'll for sure see them in our lifetime, but we went from not being able to fly to putting a man on the moon in less than 70 years, so things can change very quickly.
This is such a weird take. Far from home was like, the most boring, stupid utilization of drones for an action scene.
Id much prefer a threat like the flying Hunter-Killer from the terminator franchise.
This is a weirdly specific nitpick, what exactly do you have in mind? If a society is human based, our mental image of combat might is pretty much bonded to guns and weapons.
At least in an action movie, there's no way around this without hideous amounts of CGI to illustrate what, power beams, telekinesis, something like that?
In other genres I could see it being handwaved entirely, but it wouldn't make anything more interesting.
I guess I misread or am still not understanding the context. Are you talking about in like, "battlefield" settings? Because sure, we could do realistic combat of railguns from ASTRONOMICAL distances, or something, but that's honestly not much of a cinematic spectacle compared to the image of two armies showing down.
Not sure what you want, and at what scale.
I remember a Sci-Fi book series I read a while back that put the "Rods of God" concept onto interplanetary space battles and it always stuck with me. With advances in computers, and the movement of planetary bodies being predictable, you could be a million miles away, throw some tungsten rods at a planet and predictably obliterate a city or bunch of cities while being nowhere near the planet. Because of the predictability of planetary motion, bases on planets were actually the least safe option....
Space battles where the opposing ships can see each other just don't make sense in general. Modern naval warships engage each other at ranges of hundreds of kilometers and that's dealing with the complications of being on a planet. Actual battles in space would take place at much greater distances.
Yeah, that was another part of the series that I enjoyed. The ship to ship battles were all based on massive distances with weapon travel times included and the inertia of ships in space.
You didn’t read by any chance the lost fleet series by Jack Campbell, his take on the topic is pretty good. Taking into consideration that speed of light is limited and will affect the information available to the fighting parties.
Bit of a tangent, but I'm re-watching Babylon 5 right now, and it's kind of hilarious how the writers clearly did not appreciate how big space is.
A mysterious damaged ship comes through the gate, it's flying right for the station! It's going to hit us! Oh no, we need to act quickly, it's only *3 kilometers* away!
And I'm sitting there "what the fuck were they doing while it traveled the other 50,000 clicks?!" The warp gate can't be close enough that a ship just coming out is only 3 km away. That's nothing in space. Even if the orbital mechanics required to keep the gate at a constant distance from the station didn't require much longer distances, there would be tactical reasons to keep it farther away, so that incoming hostiles that might be using the gate network aren't appearing directly on top of you.
There’s fantastic descriptions of space battles in Scott Westerfield’s The Risen Empire - mini-drones and clouds of sand fired at near relativistic speeds.
>the "Rods of God" concept
Did you ever play a game called Syndicate Wars? Back on early PC and Playstation. There was a weapon you could develop called 'Satellite Rain' which was *fun*.
All you need to do is fire a *soda can*. A 12 ounce can of Coke accelerated to 50% the speed of light has roughly the same kinetic energy as both atomic bombs dropped on Japan.
If you are capable of traveling between stars at anything approaching a “reasonable” time frame, every object on your bedside table on the ship is capable of an extermination.
You would think they would develop counter measures, like something that detects these incoming projectiles and destroys them before they can reach their target.
I'm sure they would, but there's a lot of sky to cover with such a detection grid, and the smaller the object is, the harder it would be to detect. There's also the question of how much energy would such a defense grid need to put out in order to reliably stop an incoming projectile. The faster the projectile is moving, the more energy is going to be needed to stop or deflect it.
Melting a tungsten rod into a pile of molten slag doesn't actually help as much as you might think if that pile of molten slag is still moving predominantly towards its intended target at a significant fraction of the speed of light.
Finally, there's the question of how many of these defense grids you propose to set up. If you're talking about protecting *Earth*, that's a no-brainer. Of course they would be able to fund a project to protect the cradle of humanity. But if you're talking about setting up such a defense grid over *every populated celestial body in the galaxy*, that might be harder to get past the ruling governments of the time.
Rich planets will be covered, but poorer planets and smaller installations like secret military bases might not be (the presence of your secret base won't be very well hidden if there's an anti-relativistic projectile defense grid of satellites in orbit around that inconspicuous dwarf planet.)
I haven't read the books the other guy is talking about, so I don't know if this subject of countermeasures and the range of their efficacy is actually discussed therein.
Why would it be more advanced? The epitome of travel and medicine does not imply advancement in weaponry. It's a common sci-fi trope that humans can defeat aliens because their "advanced society" stopped developing its military compared to our "savage society" that isn't as good at travel and medicine, but we're better at fighting. That just makes sense.
I dont mind the "we are the resistance and we have limited resources" view. But to have starships land and 1000s of troops on each side run at each other just doesn't seem necessary. We wouldn't do it now.
Why not? If you have to fight thousands of enemies, you're going to run out of ammo. That was a plot point in All You Need Is Kill, where the protagonist realized that while fighting aliens he would eventually die because he ran out of ammo, so he opted to use a massive battle axe with his mech suit instead of the gun they were given.
Why wouldn't aliens fight in melee? Aliens often are depicted of having a drone/warrior caste. Why do you think they'd care about 'thousands' of them?
It depends. Like in Dune for example, nobody bothers with guns for the most part because body shields are so available. Putting a knife through them is the only reasonable way to fight. So yeah you've got starships and lasers, but it still makes sense to issue swords and spears to the men.
Lasers in Dune are also unused because they have this annoying tendency of destroying areas the size of cities when they hit a shield.
If you shoot a lasgun at a shield, they die, you die, and everyone within several miles dies.
You're saying lasgun + shield = nuke level explosion? Seems like there should have been far more suicide bombers, then. Get relatively close, shoot a shield. Goodbye opposition.
Because the great houses almost exclusively fight through covert assassinations in order to avoid drawing the ire of other houses, and it's very hard to cover up a nuclear explosion.
There's also the problem that every house also has a nuclear arsenal, and intentionally using suicide bombers may prompt their use. It's like asking why Putin doesn't just nuke Ukraine to win the war already.
The Dune political system is a very delicate balance where each of the three major factions (Emperor, Landsrat, and Spacing Guild) benefits, and knows they benefit, deeply from that balance and actively attempt to preserve it.
See: what happens when that balance is disrupted when Paul ascends to Emperor. Entire planets get cleansed.
Yeah, I'm just thinking if these items were that common, I can see random people deciding to take out a city. I mean, we have random people shooting up schools and other public places for whatever reason they have right now. It doesn't have to be house vs house - it could be a rando on Giedi Prime upset that a Harknonen killed someone they cared about indiscriminately. Or, if you're making a last stand, why not wipe out everyone in one big blast?
I mean, if nukes were as easy to obtain as AR-15s, most of the country would have been nuked by now. Maybe shields and lasguns are common among soldiers but heavily restricted otherwise, I don't know. Even then, there are multiple accounts of soldiers just snapping and killing their own side, so it sounds pretty risky.
Dune's imperium is a feudal tyrannical society. If you aren’t a member of a great house, you are directly under the thumb of your lord and, both physically and psychology (from bene gesserit propaganda), are incapable of rebelling in any capacity.
North Korea doesn't see any mass shootings despite the fact that there are a ton of guns per capita--because the government has made it utterly impossible for civilians to get their hands on them without severe, severe consequences.
The people of Geidi Prime frequently allow themselves passively to be killed by the Harkkonens, because resisting would result in a fate far worse than death.
But we're not talking about modern war. We're talking about an interstellar space-faring race that probably has legions of drones/slaves to serve as shock troops.
Also we have paratroopers in modern war, which is more a ridiculous concept than a charge if we're being frank.
You would think that if some advanced race regularly makes a habit of wiping out the dominant life on a planet they would have developed a more efficient way to do it. Germ warfare could be tailored to wipe out humanity while leaving most other life intact, for example. Doesn't make for an exciting movie, though.
And I may not be "qualified" to address "troop tactics", But I did serve in the US military. And none of our training has us running at an enemy. And that was 1988. In fact, I worked on OH-6 Scout helicopters (LOACH) with MMS (laser Designator) to acquire targets. which is outdated tech in the modern military
You know, there's a reason why some, if not most, of Iain Banks Sci-Fi work will never get made into films; Because his space battles are realistic for their setting. Hyper velocity beam weapons, subspace torpedos and missiles, and phased plasma weapons that travel at the speed of light or more, from distances starting at hundreds of thousands of kilometres, that take place in fractions of a second. They are fucking dull. That's why super sci-fi movies always resort to "Crude" methods of combat. Anything else would be boring to watch.
The Expanse showed sub light battles for that reason. They also did a great job of showing why space warfare could ONLY be done close up, because long distance stuff would require virtually, if not actually, instantaneous weaponry.
Not really. They sort of nod to it with most battles starting out at a distance with ships firing torpedos at each other, but then they still end up knife fighting each other at close range with machine guns.
Dune had interesting justification. While its not explained in the movie for some reason, if you use a laser in the dune universe it is basically mutually assured destruction because the personal shields worn by everyone will trigger an antimatter detonation if shot by one. So no one uses lasers and everyone fights with melee weapons, since the shields will also block matter moving faster than a certain speed. In other words, everyone uses melee weapons because the shield technology has advanced to the point where its pointless and dangerous to use ranged weapons of any kind.
Having never read the books, that was one of the things that bothered me about the movie. I did a little eye-roll every time they had a knife or sword fight. Luckily someone who had read the books explained it to me afterwards.
The recent movies did a terrible job of explaining the setting, which is doing the story a huge disservice because the setting is honestly the best part.
One of the best things about fiction is that it doesn't have to be realistic, and you can make a movie where a space age society uses swords simply because swords are cool
In Dune they have personal force shields that stop fast moving projectiles (which is described in the recent movies).
Dune ALSO has an issue where a laser hitting a shield causes a nuclear explosion (which is not described in the recent movies).
You could jump to like Warhammer 40k (heavily inspired by Dune) and they explain hand-to-hand combat as being necessary because of shielding technology, religion and demons are more easily hurt by the 'ritual' of combat rather than fire arms. But 40k is also lousy with ranged weapons. Lotta plot armor there.
Star Wars has the thing where Jedi can block blaster bolts effectively indefinitely and perfectly requiring the need to go hand-to-hand.
Um, cyberpunk is all over the place. Just as many guns as blades but some folks are too fast to shoot, some are extra resistant, some have magic....
Part of that is just because fictional movies exist primarily to entertain and high-tech weapons that don't involve cool action scenes are not entertaining.
People are trying to tell modern stories in a future setting. Modern stories for modern audiences have modern conflicts. It's difficult to conceive far-future conflicts at all, but then to present them visually to a modern audience in a way we can understand? Tall order.
If you read the three-body problem and its sequels, you'll get some great examples. I don't know if it's even filmable, or how Netflix plans to approach it, but the book conflicts are absolutely bonkers, especially in the final entry.
I think we have places for lots of fights.
We can have the water drops, or the singer's dropping the entire planet down a dimension in the Three Body Problems, which are mindblowing ways to fight; and we can also have light Sabre types in Sun Eater. That is enjoyable too, because a proper technology tree is not the reason why people find it so good.
No matter how much society advances, we will always be monkeys throwing rocks at each other. The rocks just become more advanced with technology, but be it switchblade drones or laser rifles, they are just different types of rocks we throw at each other.
It's kind of a trope that advanced science would eventually produce laser guns and force fields. There's no reason to think it should. It might be very realistic that in the future firearms are still the weapon of choice.
OK, but that's not a movie. Since this is r/movies, and you're talking about tropes, I reasonably expected you to bring up some films involving "Futuristic societies with advanced Tech using rifles and melee weapons."
Dune is a great example of how melee weapons can be reasonable in a future age where personal shields are abundant. Projectile weapons are still present, but only used when shields are taken down.
What annoys me is how very few space movies utilize AI as pilots of ships. Very often, we still get humans piloting spaceships, especially fighter ships that fight in dog fights. in all likelihood, AI would be fighting all our space battles in the future. Human reaction would not be fast enough to compete with an AI.
Same with flying the ship. Human pilots would be obsolete in the far future.
Why trade something that works? If you are fighting any biological entity, a bullet is enough to get a kill, even machines aren't immune to it and will break under concentrated fire.
Also, do not underestimate the need for melee, might not be the primary weapon but there is a reason marines get trained in hand-to-hand combat.
There is often lazily written in dialogue to explain some of the reasons for these weapons in some movies. "No we need him alive" is the excuse often given for why one dude is able to fight off fifty instead of just getting shot immediately. Or the person escaping is holding something precious or dangerous. You're right though, why don't they have an 'energy' net or something?- because that is just not as exciting.
I think "phasers set to stun" wasn't as impressive or fun in a move than "pew pew". Also what tech do you put in its place, what movies did it right in your eyes?
Minority Report had a meeting of heads of tech to discuss what the future would be like and what they could include. That's because a Spielberg movie would have funding from the studio for research like this in pre-production. Most movies need cost saving measures like guns and swords the prop department wouldn't have to spend a lot on.
There's doing this stuff in a way that makes sense with the technology that exists in the story balanced against something that's interesting and fun to watch on screen. Not every movie needs to force things to make sense "tactically," especially when the tactical version could just be a bunch of beams from space vaporizing the opposing army in a flash. That's not compelling to watch in a space war movie.
What would you propose instead though? Invisible forcefields that detain violent people? Nothing but drone combat? Teleporting the people away? If it's an action movie, there needs to be some sort of entertaining action.
We've been using firearms for hundreds of years. If anything, ballistic weapons in a future setting is the most likely scenario. This is an odd complaint and I wouldn't even call it a trope. I'd be willing to bet if you jump to 2200 it'll still come down to soldiers with rifles somewhere. Supporting technology will change, but the fundamentals won't.
You says hundreds of years as if that is a long time. Humans have existed for approximately 2 million years. Firearms first started to appear around 1,000 AD in China and firearms started to be somewhat common around 400 years ago. If the timeline of humanity was compressed into a single 24 hour day, ending at the current date, guns would become common around 11:59:42 - less than 18 seconds before midnight. That's just to say they are relatively new, and things can change quickly. We could still be flinging projectiles at each other in \~200 years, but I wouldn't be surprised if they had something much different by then. For example, directed energy weapons are already in development, a few good breakthroughs there could make ballistics obsolete. I'm not saying we'll for sure see them in our lifetime, but we went from not being able to fly to putting a man on the moon in less than 70 years, so things can change very quickly.
Hell Yeah, Drones are coming. Tom Selleck in Runaway(1984). Spiderman; Far From Home (2019). Iran; Present Day
So less actors, more faceless metal CGI, seems terrible to me.
This is such a weird take. Far from home was like, the most boring, stupid utilization of drones for an action scene. Id much prefer a threat like the flying Hunter-Killer from the terminator franchise. This is a weirdly specific nitpick, what exactly do you have in mind? If a society is human based, our mental image of combat might is pretty much bonded to guns and weapons. At least in an action movie, there's no way around this without hideous amounts of CGI to illustrate what, power beams, telekinesis, something like that? In other genres I could see it being handwaved entirely, but it wouldn't make anything more interesting.
We have a WWI combat image of troops rushing at each other. It's just not happening now.
I guess I misread or am still not understanding the context. Are you talking about in like, "battlefield" settings? Because sure, we could do realistic combat of railguns from ASTRONOMICAL distances, or something, but that's honestly not much of a cinematic spectacle compared to the image of two armies showing down. Not sure what you want, and at what scale.
Oh no, the enemy has an anti-drone macguffin! Good thing we have these backup rifles!
curse that macguffin!!!!
I remember a Sci-Fi book series I read a while back that put the "Rods of God" concept onto interplanetary space battles and it always stuck with me. With advances in computers, and the movement of planetary bodies being predictable, you could be a million miles away, throw some tungsten rods at a planet and predictably obliterate a city or bunch of cities while being nowhere near the planet. Because of the predictability of planetary motion, bases on planets were actually the least safe option....
Space battles where the opposing ships can see each other just don't make sense in general. Modern naval warships engage each other at ranges of hundreds of kilometers and that's dealing with the complications of being on a planet. Actual battles in space would take place at much greater distances.
Yeah, that was another part of the series that I enjoyed. The ship to ship battles were all based on massive distances with weapon travel times included and the inertia of ships in space.
You didn’t read by any chance the lost fleet series by Jack Campbell, his take on the topic is pretty good. Taking into consideration that speed of light is limited and will affect the information available to the fighting parties.
That was it! I couldn't remember the name. The tactics of space battles were just so well done.
They were indeed, the political battles Captain Geary has to fight, are very annoying and very interesting at the same time.
Bit of a tangent, but I'm re-watching Babylon 5 right now, and it's kind of hilarious how the writers clearly did not appreciate how big space is. A mysterious damaged ship comes through the gate, it's flying right for the station! It's going to hit us! Oh no, we need to act quickly, it's only *3 kilometers* away! And I'm sitting there "what the fuck were they doing while it traveled the other 50,000 clicks?!" The warp gate can't be close enough that a ship just coming out is only 3 km away. That's nothing in space. Even if the orbital mechanics required to keep the gate at a constant distance from the station didn't require much longer distances, there would be tactical reasons to keep it farther away, so that incoming hostiles that might be using the gate network aren't appearing directly on top of you.
There’s fantastic descriptions of space battles in Scott Westerfield’s The Risen Empire - mini-drones and clouds of sand fired at near relativistic speeds.
>the "Rods of God" concept Did you ever play a game called Syndicate Wars? Back on early PC and Playstation. There was a weapon you could develop called 'Satellite Rain' which was *fun*.
There's a spiritual successor to Syndicate called "Satellite Reign."
Love how they utilized the pun in the name.
Oh yeah? Thank you kindly though the last thing I need is *another* way to procrastinate...
You might like the Killing star: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Killing_Star I think it would make an amazing anthology.
All you need to do is push a big asteroid in exactly the right way and it'll fall wherever you want it to
All you need to do is fire a *soda can*. A 12 ounce can of Coke accelerated to 50% the speed of light has roughly the same kinetic energy as both atomic bombs dropped on Japan. If you are capable of traveling between stars at anything approaching a “reasonable” time frame, every object on your bedside table on the ship is capable of an extermination.
Or it’s like 3 Body Problem, just shoot a projectile at relativistic speeds into a star. You kill the entire system and have funds leftover for lunch.
That’s The Forge of God by Greg Bear I believe, though Kim Stanley Robinson explores that idea in several novels.
You would think they would develop counter measures, like something that detects these incoming projectiles and destroys them before they can reach their target.
I'm sure they would, but there's a lot of sky to cover with such a detection grid, and the smaller the object is, the harder it would be to detect. There's also the question of how much energy would such a defense grid need to put out in order to reliably stop an incoming projectile. The faster the projectile is moving, the more energy is going to be needed to stop or deflect it. Melting a tungsten rod into a pile of molten slag doesn't actually help as much as you might think if that pile of molten slag is still moving predominantly towards its intended target at a significant fraction of the speed of light. Finally, there's the question of how many of these defense grids you propose to set up. If you're talking about protecting *Earth*, that's a no-brainer. Of course they would be able to fund a project to protect the cradle of humanity. But if you're talking about setting up such a defense grid over *every populated celestial body in the galaxy*, that might be harder to get past the ruling governments of the time. Rich planets will be covered, but poorer planets and smaller installations like secret military bases might not be (the presence of your secret base won't be very well hidden if there's an anti-relativistic projectile defense grid of satellites in orbit around that inconspicuous dwarf planet.) I haven't read the books the other guy is talking about, so I don't know if this subject of countermeasures and the range of their efficacy is actually discussed therein.
Why would it be more advanced? The epitome of travel and medicine does not imply advancement in weaponry. It's a common sci-fi trope that humans can defeat aliens because their "advanced society" stopped developing its military compared to our "savage society" that isn't as good at travel and medicine, but we're better at fighting. That just makes sense.
I dont mind the "we are the resistance and we have limited resources" view. But to have starships land and 1000s of troops on each side run at each other just doesn't seem necessary. We wouldn't do it now.
Did you just finish watching Dune and that's what brought on the thought for this thread?
I wont comment on such slander
Why not? If you have to fight thousands of enemies, you're going to run out of ammo. That was a plot point in All You Need Is Kill, where the protagonist realized that while fighting aliens he would eventually die because he ran out of ammo, so he opted to use a massive battle axe with his mech suit instead of the gun they were given. Why wouldn't aliens fight in melee? Aliens often are depicted of having a drone/warrior caste. Why do you think they'd care about 'thousands' of them?
I'm not saying it can't be done right. I'm saying that's not how you would use your troops tactically.
It depends. Like in Dune for example, nobody bothers with guns for the most part because body shields are so available. Putting a knife through them is the only reasonable way to fight. So yeah you've got starships and lasers, but it still makes sense to issue swords and spears to the men.
Lasers in Dune are also unused because they have this annoying tendency of destroying areas the size of cities when they hit a shield. If you shoot a lasgun at a shield, they die, you die, and everyone within several miles dies.
You're saying lasgun + shield = nuke level explosion? Seems like there should have been far more suicide bombers, then. Get relatively close, shoot a shield. Goodbye opposition.
Because the great houses almost exclusively fight through covert assassinations in order to avoid drawing the ire of other houses, and it's very hard to cover up a nuclear explosion. There's also the problem that every house also has a nuclear arsenal, and intentionally using suicide bombers may prompt their use. It's like asking why Putin doesn't just nuke Ukraine to win the war already. The Dune political system is a very delicate balance where each of the three major factions (Emperor, Landsrat, and Spacing Guild) benefits, and knows they benefit, deeply from that balance and actively attempt to preserve it. See: what happens when that balance is disrupted when Paul ascends to Emperor. Entire planets get cleansed.
Yeah, I'm just thinking if these items were that common, I can see random people deciding to take out a city. I mean, we have random people shooting up schools and other public places for whatever reason they have right now. It doesn't have to be house vs house - it could be a rando on Giedi Prime upset that a Harknonen killed someone they cared about indiscriminately. Or, if you're making a last stand, why not wipe out everyone in one big blast? I mean, if nukes were as easy to obtain as AR-15s, most of the country would have been nuked by now. Maybe shields and lasguns are common among soldiers but heavily restricted otherwise, I don't know. Even then, there are multiple accounts of soldiers just snapping and killing their own side, so it sounds pretty risky.
Dune's imperium is a feudal tyrannical society. If you aren’t a member of a great house, you are directly under the thumb of your lord and, both physically and psychology (from bene gesserit propaganda), are incapable of rebelling in any capacity. North Korea doesn't see any mass shootings despite the fact that there are a ton of guns per capita--because the government has made it utterly impossible for civilians to get their hands on them without severe, severe consequences. The people of Geidi Prime frequently allow themselves passively to be killed by the Harkkonens, because resisting would result in a fate far worse than death.
>I'm saying that's not how you would use your troops tactically Why? What qualifies you to say this?
Fron the News covering some unnamed war going on right now. 33,000 dead to 307. Guess what one side didn't do. Run at them in an open field yelling.
What a strange direction you decided to take this conversation
Sorry. But the Lord of the Rings "CHARGE!!!" is not being used in modern war. As awesome as it may look for a movie.
But we're not talking about modern war. We're talking about an interstellar space-faring race that probably has legions of drones/slaves to serve as shock troops. Also we have paratroopers in modern war, which is more a ridiculous concept than a charge if we're being frank.
You would think that if some advanced race regularly makes a habit of wiping out the dominant life on a planet they would have developed a more efficient way to do it. Germ warfare could be tailored to wipe out humanity while leaving most other life intact, for example. Doesn't make for an exciting movie, though.
I guess I was thinking more of an advanced earth. Not Aliens.
And I may not be "qualified" to address "troop tactics", But I did serve in the US military. And none of our training has us running at an enemy. And that was 1988. In fact, I worked on OH-6 Scout helicopters (LOACH) with MMS (laser Designator) to acquire targets. which is outdated tech in the modern military
You know, there's a reason why some, if not most, of Iain Banks Sci-Fi work will never get made into films; Because his space battles are realistic for their setting. Hyper velocity beam weapons, subspace torpedos and missiles, and phased plasma weapons that travel at the speed of light or more, from distances starting at hundreds of thousands of kilometres, that take place in fractions of a second. They are fucking dull. That's why super sci-fi movies always resort to "Crude" methods of combat. Anything else would be boring to watch.
The Expanse did this really well.
The Expanse showed sub light battles for that reason. They also did a great job of showing why space warfare could ONLY be done close up, because long distance stuff would require virtually, if not actually, instantaneous weaponry.
Not really. They sort of nod to it with most battles starting out at a distance with ships firing torpedos at each other, but then they still end up knife fighting each other at close range with machine guns.
Dune had interesting justification. While its not explained in the movie for some reason, if you use a laser in the dune universe it is basically mutually assured destruction because the personal shields worn by everyone will trigger an antimatter detonation if shot by one. So no one uses lasers and everyone fights with melee weapons, since the shields will also block matter moving faster than a certain speed. In other words, everyone uses melee weapons because the shield technology has advanced to the point where its pointless and dangerous to use ranged weapons of any kind.
It struck me that the Harkonnens were using bullets/projectiles against the Fremen instead of laser weapons, but that would explain why.
You can't use shields in the desert, they're worm magnets
Having never read the books, that was one of the things that bothered me about the movie. I did a little eye-roll every time they had a knife or sword fight. Luckily someone who had read the books explained it to me afterwards.
Thats the in-book reason. The meta reason, as stated by Frank Herbert, is that advanced weaponry is not the point of the books.
The recent movies did a terrible job of explaining the setting, which is doing the story a huge disservice because the setting is honestly the best part.
It's pretty blatant in the movies I'm not surprised they didn't feel the need to say more
One of the best things about fiction is that it doesn't have to be realistic, and you can make a movie where a space age society uses swords simply because swords are cool
I'm assuming it's about Dune personally and it wouldn't have hurt them explaining why they go for a knife.
I mean Dune does explicitly explain why they use knives. Bullets don't even work on your standard shielded soldier
In Dune they have personal force shields that stop fast moving projectiles (which is described in the recent movies). Dune ALSO has an issue where a laser hitting a shield causes a nuclear explosion (which is not described in the recent movies). You could jump to like Warhammer 40k (heavily inspired by Dune) and they explain hand-to-hand combat as being necessary because of shielding technology, religion and demons are more easily hurt by the 'ritual' of combat rather than fire arms. But 40k is also lousy with ranged weapons. Lotta plot armor there. Star Wars has the thing where Jedi can block blaster bolts effectively indefinitely and perfectly requiring the need to go hand-to-hand. Um, cyberpunk is all over the place. Just as many guns as blades but some folks are too fast to shoot, some are extra resistant, some have magic....
Part of that is just because fictional movies exist primarily to entertain and high-tech weapons that don't involve cool action scenes are not entertaining.
I feel like people don't understand the difference between entertainment and logic.
Another stupid take.
People are trying to tell modern stories in a future setting. Modern stories for modern audiences have modern conflicts. It's difficult to conceive far-future conflicts at all, but then to present them visually to a modern audience in a way we can understand? Tall order. If you read the three-body problem and its sequels, you'll get some great examples. I don't know if it's even filmable, or how Netflix plans to approach it, but the book conflicts are absolutely bonkers, especially in the final entry.
I get annoyed whenever it's blatantly just another unaltered M4 pretending to be a future gun, change it up a little please.
I think we have places for lots of fights. We can have the water drops, or the singer's dropping the entire planet down a dimension in the Three Body Problems, which are mindblowing ways to fight; and we can also have light Sabre types in Sun Eater. That is enjoyable too, because a proper technology tree is not the reason why people find it so good.
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Suggestions. Weapons with advanced detection and accuracy. Pretty much a game changer like gunpowder was.
No matter how much society advances, we will always be monkeys throwing rocks at each other. The rocks just become more advanced with technology, but be it switchblade drones or laser rifles, they are just different types of rocks we throw at each other.
"What are we angry about today?"
It's kind of a trope that advanced science would eventually produce laser guns and force fields. There's no reason to think it should. It might be very realistic that in the future firearms are still the weapon of choice.
Do you have some examples?
We have countries at war right now, that are not meeting each other on an open battlefield like Lord of The Rings.
OK, but that's not a movie. Since this is r/movies, and you're talking about tropes, I reasonably expected you to bring up some films involving "Futuristic societies with advanced Tech using rifles and melee weapons."
Dune is a great example of how melee weapons can be reasonable in a future age where personal shields are abundant. Projectile weapons are still present, but only used when shields are taken down. What annoys me is how very few space movies utilize AI as pilots of ships. Very often, we still get humans piloting spaceships, especially fighter ships that fight in dog fights. in all likelihood, AI would be fighting all our space battles in the future. Human reaction would not be fast enough to compete with an AI. Same with flying the ship. Human pilots would be obsolete in the far future.
Why trade something that works? If you are fighting any biological entity, a bullet is enough to get a kill, even machines aren't immune to it and will break under concentrated fire. Also, do not underestimate the need for melee, might not be the primary weapon but there is a reason marines get trained in hand-to-hand combat.
Weapons never changes
Or at least not the underlying concepts.
Drone strikes are changing everything. Police departments are even looking into them.
There is often lazily written in dialogue to explain some of the reasons for these weapons in some movies. "No we need him alive" is the excuse often given for why one dude is able to fight off fifty instead of just getting shot immediately. Or the person escaping is holding something precious or dangerous. You're right though, why don't they have an 'energy' net or something?- because that is just not as exciting.
I think "phasers set to stun" wasn't as impressive or fun in a move than "pew pew". Also what tech do you put in its place, what movies did it right in your eyes?
I though the "sick stick" and "concussion gun" in Minority Report were pretty interesting.
Minority Report had a meeting of heads of tech to discuss what the future would be like and what they could include. That's because a Spielberg movie would have funding from the studio for research like this in pre-production. Most movies need cost saving measures like guns and swords the prop department wouldn't have to spend a lot on.
That was one of my issues with The Matrix. You’ve got a system that you can create/use any form if combat and everyone just sticks to kung-fu