General > Discussion

Suspension of belief

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homunculus:
you mean, producing things in non-specialized workshops in a secret underground base is somehow so cheap that it can compete with ordinary (above ground) specialized factories?
i would find that unbelievable.
so why don't people build such underground factories all over the world right now if they are so competitive?

the 'research complete' state is also unbelievable, in real life the research will go on for ever and never be complete, and when the research is complete then the scientist dies.
or something like that, this wording was sarcastic but i hope you get the point.
you get, say, a live alien and in a week you know everything about it, while after a hundred years research we don't even know everything about the most simple earthly bacteria.
research should not have an upper limit.

on the other hand, kerrblade should be obvious and straightforward enough so that a soldier should be able to use it right away without research (at the same time the kerrblade research would not have an upper limit, of course).

Triaxx2:
By which I mean isn't it cheaper to manufacture ammo where it's being loaded and given to the soldiers than produce it, and then fly it half-way around the globe?

Not necessarily. Consider that it's been that entire hundred years, but we hadn't actually discovered them until then. We first had to stop and develop Microscopes that could see them, and the development didn't stop, we just didn't have to keep researching them to do something with them. Usually you can only get so far before you need another breakthrough to move to the next step.

Of course, the Kerrblade is essentially useless, but that's beside the point. It should be fairly obvious.

homunculus:
ok, we don't even know what exactly triggers dna replication in bacteria, we don't know exactly how linear growth (of mass of bacteria) differs from exponential growth and why, etc, we don't know how much we don't know.
and microscopes (and many more things) have been around for more than a week.

Triaxx2:
What I'm driving at is that yes, research is endless, but once you hit a certain point, it's not really being developed for the military application any more.

Anarch Cassius:
I think the deal with PHALANX funding is politics. Despite relative peace you can imagine the wariness the alliances may feel about turning over their defense to a 3rd party. Where you put you base is a big deal and that country gets good protection. It's hard not to imagine this having political ramifications.

So they all start willing to play ball but they aren't going to stop funding their own individual defense and this is all very expensive. PHALANX may be Earth's best hope to some people but others may argue that they'd be better off fighting on their own instead of subsidizing other nations' defenses. If one or two alien incidents go unresponded to you can see how their attitude could quickly go from helping PHALANX to suspecting it's a power play by the other nations to weaken them. Their citizens are being mutilated in the street while an organization they've put tons of money in to is attending to the needs of other regions.

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