New efforts!

[Sinistar]

Well in that case, I agree with Victoria.  The hell with autonomous cars.  I want my robot body.  I could drive myself there by transforming into a car.  We'd solve a lot more problems too like advanced aging and disabilities.

Now to figure out what I'd want my transformed form to be.  How about a McClain F1

The problem with a robotic body, or being part human, part machine a.k.a a Cyborg is aside from the initial construction costs and installation of the components, the maintenance, upgrade and repair costs would be rather.....staggering.

The Bionic Man: back in the day it cost 6 million to assemble Colonel Austin after he was chewed up in that plane crash.  Then throughout the series there were episodes where his arm would be damaged, or sometimes his legs, once even his eye was damaged.  Imagine the repair costs to fix or even replace the damaged limbs and parts?

Robocop in the 80's was roughly 90 million as I recall from the sequel.  Robocop 2014 it was mentioned it cost 2 billion to turn Alex into Robocop.

Tony Stark however apparently has more money then anyone on the planet, so for him to have the IM armor damaged or trashed isn't that big a deal since he tends to have spare suits sitting around.  Even still, the costs of building even one suit of IM armor I would think would run close to a billion per suit.  Yikes!

Now becoming a werewolf or a vampire.....

[Codewalker]

Even still, the costs of building even one suit of IM armor I would think would run close to a billion per suit.  Yikes!

Tony Stark is a bit of an exception, since he's shown to be master of inventing new technology, including fully automated fabrication and assembly lines. While he would still need to buy the raw materials involved which involves some expense, his costs wouldn't be nearly as high as if he were buying the tech from someone else, or paying people to assemble the suits for him.

Hell, he even creates new elements to use for a power source rather than just buying rare isotopes; though his prototype particle accelerator did seem to be made of off the shelf components that I'm sure weren't cheap. I bet the Mk. II wasn't.

I think his costs are still probably not extravagantly more than say, a Batman type character, just because he is so self-sufficient. He likely spends a lot more on the Avengers facilities than he does on his own stuff.

[Arcana]

The problem with a robotic body, or being part human, part machine a.k.a a Cyborg is aside from the initial construction costs and installation of the components, the maintenance, upgrade and repair costs would be rather.....staggering.

The Bionic Man: back in the day it cost 6 million to assemble Colonel Austin after he was chewed up in that plane crash.  Then throughout the series there were episodes where his arm would be damaged, or sometimes his legs, once even his eye was damaged.  Imagine the repair costs to fix or even replace the damaged limbs and parts?

Robocop in the 80's was roughly 90 million as I recall from the sequel.  Robocop 2014 it was mentioned it cost 2 billion to turn Alex into Robocop.

Tony Stark however apparently has more money then anyone on the planet, so for him to have the IM armor damaged or trashed isn't that big a deal since he tends to have spare suits sitting around.  Even still, the costs of building even one suit of IM armor I would think would run close to a billion per suit.  Yikes!

Now becoming a werewolf or a vampire.....

If we're talking about the MCU Iron Man, Tony Stark's armor suits might actually be incredibly cheap to make, relatively speaking.  There's no question they *contain* billions of dollars of technology, but it seems that he almost literally fabricates the suits himself in his own personal fabrication labs.  That means while there is enormously expensive genius in those suits, the actual costs to Tony Stark himself are just electrical power and raw materials.  It might actually cost Tony "only" a few million dollars of materials to make an Iron Man suit.  Tony is depicted as being extremely good at leveraging technology.  He synthesized the element for his new arc reactor with technological components I recognized as being similar to what a college lab might set up as an advanced graduate experiment.  That set up might have set him back about a couple hundred grand, to do something you'd expect to take a research lab several billion dollars to accomplish.  If you had to pay for the individual components in an Iron Man suit you might be paying millions of dollars a kilogram or more.  But he just has Jarvis basically print them out with the equivalent of a Stark Makerbot version 9999.9.

The government had to ultimately pay for the Bionic Man's technology even if they did a lot of the work themselves, and the two Robocops were built essentially with the resources of a mega corporation behind them.  But MCU Tony is a do it yourself fabrication wizard, and he might be using just hundreds of millions of dollars of pre-existing fabrication technology and tens of millions of dollars of power and supplies to crank out Iron Man armor versions.



Edit: scooped by Codewalker.

[MM3squints]

If we're talking about the MCU Iron Man, Tony Stark's armor suits might actually be incredibly cheap to make, relatively speaking.  There's no question they *contain* billions of dollars of technology

Sound like the case that the F-35 Joint Fighter made xD we all know how much billions of dollar of technology that was (still counting )

[LadyVamp]

The problem with a robotic body, or being part human, part machine a.k.a a Cyborg is aside from the initial construction costs and installation of the components, the maintenance, upgrade and repair costs would be rather.....staggering.

The Bionic Man: back in the day it cost 6 million to assemble Colonel Austin after he was chewed up in that plane crash.  Then throughout the series there were episodes where his arm would be damaged, or sometimes his legs, once even his eye was damaged.  Imagine the repair costs to fix or even replace the damaged limbs and parts?

Robocop in the 80's was roughly 90 million as I recall from the sequel.  Robocop 2014 it was mentioned it cost 2 billion to turn Alex into Robocop.

Tony Stark however apparently has more money then anyone on the planet, so for him to have the IM armor damaged or trashed isn't that big a deal since he tends to have spare suits sitting around.  Even still, the costs of building even one suit of IM armor I would think would run close to a billion per suit.  Yikes!

Now becoming a werewolf or a vampire.....

For a one off, the cost would be out of this world but the economy of scale states that as we build more copies the cost of development, maintenance, upgrades and even repairs goes down as the costs of development and tooling are spread out over many buyers.  Same idea with practically everything today.  If Intel built a one off CPU just for you, you'd need millions of dollars.  But take that development and tooling costs and spread it over hundreds of thousands of units and the development costs per cpu drop significantly.

Same law of economics applies to automobiles too.  Google building a self driver for you, better be prepared to fork over a few million.  Make 400,000 of those cars annually for 5 years and the development and tooling costs drop to almost nothing for each customer.  Now before you tell me no one sells that many cars every year, consider that Toyota is only about 10,000 units short for just the camry.  Honda's accord is also in that neighborhood.  Just those two companies sell three quarters of a million units between those two lines every single year.  Cars get a redesign every five to ten years with minor cosmetic changes yearly and a refresh usually after year two or three.  The refresh itself isn't major either.

It's doable.  Yes you'd need a bank loan for your new body, and you'd be stuck with it for the term of your loan.  I'm sure someone would decide to lease a body and the market for used bodies would be sizeable too.  Insuring your body would be the norm too.  Maintenance contracts would also be common.

Frankly, I'd rather be able to transform into the car instead of having a self driver.  I'd could go for a helicopter or airplane form too.  A triple changer would be ideal.  Autobot Springer or Sandstorm would work well. 

[Arcana]

For a one off, the cost would be out of this world but the economy of scale states that as we build more copies the cost of development, maintenance, upgrades and even repairs goes down as the costs of development and tooling are spread out over many buyers.

So what you're saying is if VV wants to become Deathlok, we're going to need a bigger Kickstarter.

[LadyVamp]

So what you're saying is if VV wants to become Deathlok, we're going to need a bigger Kickstarter.

More like we need a few million people to want to become Deathlok.  Or, VV needs to build one hell of a cash producing machine like a major advertising firm or a major service business or a major manufacturer.  Of course, she could build it herself and save money.

[Arcana]

Sound like the case that the F-35 Joint Fighter made xD we all know how much billions of dollar of technology that was (still counting )

I remember when the joint strike program was in its early days and thinking the Boeing design was goofy but the Lockheed design was completely ridiculous.  So of course the Pentagon went with ridiculous, because they literally thought ridiculous was less risky than goofy.  I honestly believe that the Pentagon awarded to Lockheed less on their appraisal of the design and more because some felt Lockheed needed the business to stay healthy.

I understand what went wrong with the F-22.  It was an air superiority fighter designed to gain air superiority over enemies that currently don't exist on Earth except in the Independence Day sequel.  The F-35's cost to utility ratio is so high it is possible its most effective use would be to sell them to Russia and bankrupt the entire country.

[Vee]

So what you're saying is if VV wants to become Deathlok, we're going to need a bigger Kickstarter.

I'd imagine she'd probably be willing to hang around for even more funding if it meant we could skip the whole death and reanimation part of the Deathlok process.

[MM3squints]

I remember when the joint strike program was in its early days and thinking the Boeing design was goofy but the Lockheed design was completely ridiculous.  So of course the Pentagon went with ridiculous, because they literally thought ridiculous was less risky than goofy.  I honestly believe that the Pentagon awarded to Lockheed less on their appraisal of the design and more because some felt Lockheed needed the business to stay healthy.

I understand what went wrong with the F-22.  It was an air superiority fighter designed to gain air superiority over enemies that currently don't exist on Earth except in the Independence Day sequel.  The F-35's cost to utility ratio is so high it is possible its most effective use would be to sell them to Russia and bankrupt the entire country.

To be fair the flying hippo was what the Joint Fighter was supposed to be in its very inception. A fighter that will requires little modification to operate in CTOL,STOVL, and CV. However, what ultimately doomed Boeing was not the looks of the aircraft, but they couldn't fill the Marine Corps' checkbox by preforming a STOVL take off properly. Still makes me wonder who was actually designing it. It's not Boeing's first rodeo to make a military aircraft. They went from a Super Hornet Design:



To this O.o



Of course aesthetic do not what wins wars, the A-10 proves that.

Note: The bottom mouth I know is for the air intake, but still, if your going to go that route, Sukhoi made the SU-33 and it actually looks like a fighter jet

[Arcana]

Of course aesthetic do not what wins wars, the A-10 proves that.

If there exists a fighter or attack aircraft that resembles my design aesthetic, it is the A-10.  I don't care what it looks like, I don't care what it sounds like, I don't care if it can do anything else besides what it is intended to do.  All I care about is that it does the job, it does so with simplicity, all the important components are over-designed by 100%, and if I can get away with it there's two of them.

Actually, if I designed the A-10 it would probably look like the actual A-10 but be much larger, and if it was damaged the pilot would eject out of the aircraft inside a smaller A-10 and just keep going.  Then again Moore's Law provides me with advantages that Bernoulli's Law wouldn't.


I also find it hilarious, except insofar as I'm a US taxpayer, that the idea behind the Joint Strike Fighter project was to make one design do four different things for three different services to save money.  Economy of scale is nice in theory, but not when it comes to complicated projects with the complexity of a medium sized space program.  I mean, flat screen television costs have plummeted impressively due to manufacturing economies of scale, but that doesn't mean if you were to design a TV that was also a microwave oven that that would then make the combined costs of televisions and microwaves drop because everyone would only have to buy one.  It would probably be one single $65,000 micro-TV.


When people tell me how absurd they think it is that humanity defeats the technologically superior aliens in ID4, I sometimes tell them that if you extrapolate from the F-35 and the V-22 as emblematic of how advanced militaries attempt to incorporate technological progress, you have to wonder if the humans in ID4 were actually the underdogs.  I'm imagining a conversation on some alien world where an alien engineer asks why they shouldn't just use the hardware-based quantum encrypted communications system they've been using for over a century in their new invasion super-carrier, and an alien defense contractor in a biomechanical suit and tie tells him that they have a much better system they are going to spend fifty trillion quatloos on that automatically hijacks the enemies communications satellite system, decrypts and decodes its messaging system on the fly, and then sends their own tactical communications in the enemy's own binary signalling language and its going to be so cool just wait and see.

[Arcana]

PS: Since I'm on the subject, does anyone else think that on the alien homeworld, the movie Independence Day is actually their version of Jurassic Park?

No?  Only me?

[Zombie Hustler]

IMO, the biggest problem with self-driving cars is not the self-driving car, but the fact that not every car on the road is a self-driving car. Like with most things, real live people are the ones that will screw things up, and no amount of AI can compensate for that.

Unless those AIs decide to go the Ultron route, in which case we're all screwed anyway. 

[Remaugen]

On the subject of the A-10, when I was stationed in Korea (US Army Military Police, 2d MP Co) in the late 80's, I was part of the "Global Shield" war games. While riding in the MG Turret of a hardtop HMMWV during a river crossing, we were under smoke from generators set up on both sides of the river. We could hear an A-10 somewhere overhead. A light breeze came up when we were in mid-river and the smoke parted just in time for me to look up, right into the muzzle of the A-10 just a few hundred feet above us as it opened up (It was firing blanks of course and they blow huge smoke rings that it flies into!). Our Miles alarms went off and we were declared dead. But it remains one of the absolute coolest sights/moments of my life. That big GAU gun sounds a lot like a chainsaw when it goes off, at least when it is firing blanks in a war game, even over the very loud whine of it's engines. It was so close that the noise rattled my chest. . .

[Kassandros]

PS: Since I'm on the subject, does anyone else think that on the alien homeworld, the movie Independence Day is actually their version of Jurassic Park?

No?  Only me?

Not quite identical, but similarly I think Steven Universe is the gems' version of Avatar with Rose Quartz as their Jake Sully. (Steven Universe is much, much better than Avatar, but the gems are more advanced so that only makes sense.)

[Arcana]

On the subject of the A-10, when I was stationed in Korea (US Army Military Police, 2d MP Co) in the late 80's, I was part of the "Global Shield" war games. While riding in the MG Turret of a hardtop HMMWV during a river crossing, we were under smoke from generators set up on both sides of the river. We could hear an A-10 somewhere overhead. A light breeze came up when we were in mid-river and the smoke parted just in time for me to look up, right into the muzzle of the A-10 just a few hundred feet above us as it opened up (It was firing blanks of course and they blow huge smoke rings that it flies into!). Our Miles alarms went off and we were declared dead. But it remains one of the absolute coolest sights/moments of my life. That big GAU gun sounds a lot like a chainsaw when it goes off, at least when it is firing blanks in a war game, even over the very loud whine of it's engines. It was so close that the noise rattled my chest. . .

I was on vacation in England in 2005 and riding a bus in the countryside when I saw two British Tornados apparently doing drills.

The interesting part was that I saw them looking out of my window.

The really interesting part was that I was looking *down* at them.

I've heard stories that Tornado drivers love to flirt with the deck.  But when you can see the insignia painted on the *top* of the wings from a tour bus, that's just bananas.  Granted we were driving on a hillside road and there was a gentle valley to our right, but that's still bananas.  I'm pretty sure someone "accidentally" forgot to carry a two that day when executing the flight parameters.

[LaughingAlex]

The aliens in Independence day(and from what I hear they aren't much smarter in the sequal) are actually not that intelligent, nore advanced.  Firstly, sure they can build the big super structure ship that I imagine a hyper advanced civilization could, but they have failings in advanced targetting computers and proper seige weaponry for pounding a planet from the stars.  They had to, in the first movie, come up with an over-elaborate plan of coordinating massive space ships down to earth in the hopes the humans would be stupid enough to not recognize that as an invasion force and they target CIVILIAN centers, rather than military complexes.  If they were to wipe out humanity, there are easier ways to do so:

For those interested only in resources to mine:
Death Star could blow planets apart from a few orbits away.
Episode VII takes it to an extreme with....I won't say.

In master of orion 2 you have monstrocities such as this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6e5HtWdh_rw

Basically, the ship has "Achilles targeting system" combined with a few other modifications to enable it to wipe out whole swaths of similarly massive death stars.  This combination works on ships of any size, although the phase cloaking device and time warp facilitator was nerfed to no longer work together to allow such a near flawless victory.(In fact, the player used armor piercing, he didn't even need that with the Achilles system, it makes ALL beam weapons bypass armor flawlessly).  And of course, planet destroying beams.

In Master of Orion 3(not the best one, in fact everyone knows it's terrible), ship targeting and range can get well across half or more of a full star system.

Both games allow for construction of such super ships in very little time, to.  Whole armadas of death-star sized space craft are nothing unusual.

Now now, the planet is blown up, we cannot use- oh wait the resources are just in pure form easy to mine and harvest.  Unless the aliens needed a livable breathable atmosphere for resources, and if that is the case, they also failed to develop important ecological technologies(which I guess was there only reason to not use such powerful weapons).  Even then though, they could simply fire a large projectile, or a few, into the planets oceans to wipe out most city life through flooding, and subsequent bombardments wouldn't permanently damage a livable atmosphere as severely as you'd think if you do not use weapons which leave any kind of radioactive residues or simply use orbital bombs with advanced precision targeting.  Dropped or launched from such high orbit humans wouldn't be able to retaliate or even see whats destroying them.

Scanning technology likewise exists in the hands of humans to detect deep deposits of oils ect.  So why couldn't the aliens have such technologies combined with advanced precision targeting for bunker busting missiles/bombs?

I'd say, from what I hear of the second movie, the aliens were the underdogs.  Because they aren't smart enough to truly come up with truly war winning technologies.  They could only make over-stupid elaborate machines of terror, not war .  Nor even use that engineering skill to make some seriously effective ecological advancements to not have to invade other cultures in the first place.

[MM3squints]

On the subject of the A-10, when I was stationed in Korea (US Army Military Police, 2d MP Co) in the late 80's, I was part of the "Global Shield" war games. While riding in the MG Turret of a hardtop HMMWV during a river crossing, we were under smoke from generators set up on both sides of the river. We could hear an A-10 somewhere overhead. A light breeze came up when we were in mid-river and the smoke parted just in time for me to look up, right into the muzzle of the A-10 just a few hundred feet above us as it opened up (It was firing blanks of course and they blow huge smoke rings that it flies into!). Our Miles alarms went off and we were declared dead. But it remains one of the absolute coolest sights/moments of my life. That big GAU gun sounds a lot like a chainsaw when it goes off, at least when it is firing blanks in a war game, even over the very loud whine of it's engines. It was so close that the noise rattled my chest. . .

Biggest GAU I seen so far is a CIWS. Interesting enough the A-10 fires a larger caliber than the CIWS, but then again the CIWS is a defense weapon. Too bad they are slowly being replaced with the RAM.

[Nyx Nought Nothing]

Self driving cars......autonomous cars.........AUTOBOTS?

They are bots that go, Gobots.

[Arcana]

The aliens in Independence day(and from what I hear they aren't much smarter in the sequal) are actually not that intelligent, nore advanced.

After I saw the first movie, I came up with a theory that others independently came up with as well that the aliens in ID4 were actually a relatively primitive race, perhaps only slightly more advanced than humanity was intrinsically, that happened upon the technology they were using in ID4.  Because their own technology was so radically different (think the bioengineered body suits) they appropriated the technology rather than integrated it into their industrial-technological systems.  As a result, they were far more vulnerable to the kinds of strategies that the humans employed on them than the true masters of the technology would likely have been.  There are pockets of evidence that the aliens were extremely trusting and reliant on their technology without fully understanding its limitations.  Why would they deliberately chase Will Smith into the hull of their own mothership at the end when their shields were down, as if the pilots of those craft simply were not fully appreciating the fact that their primary life-saving defense wasn't operative.  Why deploy their vulnerable primary weapon under those same circumstances, whereas if they had just hovered around for a couple of hours alien IT would have restored their shields and they could have proceeded to destroy the Earth?

And perhaps most important, why is their technology relatively unchanged in decades?  The crashed craft from Roswell appears to be fundamentally identical to the fighter craft the aliens invade with forty years later.  That difference can't just be cosmetic either, because they seem to have the same speed, roughly the same maneuverability, exactly the same broadcast power systems, and exactly precisely the same network communications systems.  That seems odd, unless you assume the aliens are just maintaining the technology but aren't really developing it.