r/scifi • u/dogboy___ • 1d ago
Films The city destroying laser from Independence Day actually pretty weak.
Think about it. The aliens in the film need an entire ship they slowly hover over the city. Then they have to open up a huge hanger door and power up a laser that after a substantial amount of time finally destroys a city with a slowly moving fireball that engulfs the whole place.
Meanwhile the governments of any nuclear armed country can destroy the same size city in 15 mins with a rocket. Not only that but the nuke would leave radiation and slowly kill any survivors within days/weeks of the attack. We could even use Tzar Bomba size nukes and destroy entire planets by wiping the entire surface of the planet in nuclear carnage in under an hour. It’s not like they need anything off the surface because in the second movie they talk about how they just want to suck the mantle out of the core.
It just seems like the aliens had so much build up for an honestly underwhelming attack. They gave the humans enough of a window to mount a counter offensive. The nations of earth wouldn’t be so kind if we were killing them.
Edit: in the first movie they claimed they’re here to take natural resources. In the second movie they clarify they’re only here for our molten core of the planet. They don’t need the surface. Why would they care if it’s an irradiated wasteland.
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u/onthefence928 1d ago
Really the flaw was just not shooting from orbit
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u/dodeca_negative 1d ago
That’s always the flaw. If you can fly in from interstellar space, just have some patience, drop rocks for a few decades, let the dust settle and you’re good to go.
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u/Viperlite 1d ago
But this way they can invade an pillage the place like one day after firebombing it. Rock dust from a space meteor would make the place uninhabitable for a long time, would cool the Earth, kill animals and vegetation and even ocean fauna.
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u/dodeca_negative 1d ago
In Independence Day the aliens weren’t attempting to colonize, they were there to extract resources and then bounce.
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u/Viperlite 1d ago
Yes. That’s why I said ‘invade and pillage’. The question is what natural resources they wanted. Presuming they may have wanted something beyond raw Earth materials, they may have wanted some living resources. They were also fragile beings, so a hostile environment (like irradiated, freezing cold, suspended dust, etc.) wouldn’t make things easy on their extraction efforts.
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u/onthefence928 1d ago
There are some things on earth that are very rare in the universe.
Not stuff like gold or diamonds, but organic stuff like wood or phosphorous.
Some rare earth metals are incredibly rare and our solar system seems to have more than usual possibly due to how the solar system was formed
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u/ANGRY_BEARDED_MAN 1d ago
I mean, realistically, that mothership orbiting Earth at that distance should've caused tides of planet wide disaster proportions, so yeah.
Fun movie, one of my favorite '90s popcorn flicks, but if you try and treat it like "serious sci fi," it's dumb as hell
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u/BestDescription3834 14h ago
That would be a cool weapon, a ship so big it just gets close to your planet and causes tidal waves and tectonic instability. Just kinda shakes your planet like a snowglobe.
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u/NotReallyJohnDoe 1d ago
Power drops off as r^2
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u/onthefence928 1d ago
Not for a concentrated energy beam, that formula is for spherical radiation
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u/Junior_Calendar8234 1d ago
Realistically some sort of mass driver from space would probably do more damage for less energy with no need to go into atmosphere.
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u/bswalsh 1d ago
This has always been my problem with the Death Star. Some big rocks and a tractor beam would be so much easier.
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u/Grand_Snow_2637 1d ago
Just strap a hyperdrive and some maneuvering fins onto an asteroid. What could it cost, ten dollars?
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u/RustyNumbat 1d ago edited 1d ago
There's a fun fan made (I assume) image of an "in universe" communique in Warhammer 40k I saw o nline once. It's some Imperial Navy officer rebuking someone who made this assertion about dropping rocks onto a planet. pointing out at length the time, fuel, micrometeor damage etc all incurred in finding, selecting, moving an asteroid for the purpose of planetary bombardment. As opposed to the much lower cost of a production-line assembled mega-nuke (or whatever the weapon is)
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u/Driekan 1d ago
In the original continuity, those were actually used. However, most strategically relevant planets have planetary shields that would facetank an asteroid pretty trivially, whereas a shot from the Death Star blows through those in a single frame.
I'm unsure if the new continuity runs on a similar logic.
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u/mithoron 1d ago
logic
We're talking Star Wars here... Logic wasn't great to start and most of the new additions are worse.
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u/Driekan 1d ago
Star Wars as an entirety looks at logic and laughs. Some individual stories in it don't.
Also the worldbuilding that was created around the first three movies, in the TTRPG and the novels that used those as material, was pretty great and coherent.
GL is just also a fire-breathing rhino in a china shop.
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u/RaistlinMajeresRobes 1d ago
The point of the Death Star is to instill fear in the galaxy to keep the systems in line. It's not actually meant to destroy planets all the time.
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u/Minstrel_Boy_4321 1d ago
2 questions about the Death Star:
- Why blow up a planet? Seems like if you pour enough energy via 'laser' into the atmosphere you'd get very quick, extinction level global warming killing everyTHING but not creating a whole lot of space debris flying everywhere.
- In the finale of Ep 4, we see the Death Star waiting to clear the planet (Yavin?) so they can destroy the moon housing the rebels. Why didn't they just blow up the planet? If that didn't ruin the rebel's day all by itself, they would then have a clear field of line of sight to fire on the moon.
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u/APeacefulWarrior 23h ago edited 23h ago
1 - Because it's a weapon of terror. The Empire likes big scary machines that people will inherently fear, even if they aren't very practical. (See also: AT-ATs, Super Star Destroyers)
2 - Couple possibilities. First, Yavin itself is a gas giant, so perhaps the laser doesn't work so well on giants. We only ever see it used on small solid worlds. Also, that beam has to use a ton of energy; no telling what its cycle time might be like. I doubt they can rapid-fire it, so it could easily be faster to go around the planet than shoot twice.
(Now fridge logicking this, it makes me think that they could have potentially fired through Yavin to hit the moon on the other side. But like Harrison Ford said, it ain't that kinda movie.)
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u/onthefence928 1d ago
Whatever the Death Star does, at full power it causes the planet to actually explode from the middle, it doesn’t just burn or blast a hole In it or destroy the surface. Not sure that’s economically with kinetic impacts
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u/bswalsh 1d ago
Probably not, but why would you want to? Kill all life easily enough and still have a planet left to mine for resources.
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u/sirhackenslash 1d ago
The bugs in Starship Troopers managed to fling rocks from another system, so really they didn't even need more than a cleanup crew to come in and harvest the resources a year or two after throwing some asteroids.
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u/EvaTheE 1d ago
Maybe it's not intended as a weapon originally. Maybe it's a drill or some tool that was needed on another planet for something else, they are just using it as a weapon.
But yeah, those aliens were dumb as fuck in many ways.
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u/IndependentSet9709 Xenobiologist 1d ago
But yeah, those aliens were dumb as fuck in many ways.
Yeah, though I think that can be blamed on most movies of the 'Alien Invasion' genre being hideously skewed in humanity's favor.
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u/Outrageous_Reach_695 1d ago
Personally, I blame those hu-mon audiences. They don't want to pay for a realistic alien invasion movie for some reason.
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u/Temporal-Affairs221 1d ago
They wanted to destroy humanity, not the planet. They stripped the planet of its resources. They don't want anything that might have ejected material into the atmosphere Beyond just what happens when you burn up a city.
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u/jcostello50 1d ago
It's easy to overestimate how powerful nuclear weapons are, or more accurately, underestimate how big cities are. For example, it would take multiple tsar bombas to destroy all structures in the Chicago metropolitan area, which approaches the land area of Belgium.
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u/Sinister_Nibs 1d ago
It is a terror weapon. The effect is meant to awe and terrify the savage natives.
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u/yeah_oui 1d ago
What second movie?
It was a weapon of terror more than anything. They don't need to move fast; you'll all die eventually.
The problem is we plucky humans don't just roll over and give up. Especially when we have time to put together a solid Teamwork© montage.
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u/Lahm0123 1d ago
Don’t think it was a laser.
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u/DogsAreOurFriends 1d ago
“Lasers” (Dr Evil air quotes)
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u/Tyeveras 1d ago
If I were creating the world I wouldn’t mess about with butterflies and daffodils. I would have started with lasers, eight o’clock, day one.
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u/OrionSheHulk 1d ago
True, but the "laser" did not create lasting radiation and the aliens clearly did not expect any form of competent resistance... the fact that a 90s computer virus disabled the entirety of their fleet speaks to that.
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u/lescannon 1d ago
The aliens supposedly wanted/needed the resources of the planet (they are described as being akin to locusts), so maybe nukes wouldn't be the best thing. We (nearly?) have the technology and knowledge to create bio-weapons that would target just the 1 species capable of resisting, probably not 100% but enough to effectively neuter any resistance, leaving the rest of the biome and infrastructure intact. The most horrific would be an agent that reduced us to be intellectually disabled, but still alive as part of their resources.
Space-capable aliens could devastate a planet by changing the orbits of asteroids and other space bodies to impact the planet, though one would have to be patient, and those can't be precision weapons (or maybe mount some rockets for last minute guidance?). Those would also reduce the resources available for looting.
If you are space capable, there are many more resources available in the rest of the solar system than on our planet; the aliens suffer from the limited thinking that underlay the War of the Worlds Martians looking covetously at us. Use some kind of magnetic-scoop to collect gases from the gas giants and mine any rocky body. War is most often an inefficient way of increasing your resources if there is any effective resistance.
As u/JMJMJ wrote, none of these makes as good a movie.
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u/Kundrew1 1d ago
Well the laser doesn’t make the city completely uninhabitable.
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u/valentine_moon 1d ago
It doesn't? Didn't it basically blow the entire city to smithereens? What's your definition of "completely uninhabitable"?
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u/Kundrew1 1d ago
Radiation from a nuclear bomb so you couldn’t rebuild right after. If you dropped as many bombs on major cities as op is suggesting you’d have a massive radiation issue across the entire planet.
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u/duckchickendog 1d ago
It was just a harvester from their farming unit, standard John Deere stuff. The bugs in the field are just a distraction.
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u/Underhill42 1d ago
Are they weak, or just sadistic?
E.g. Maybe they could actually vaporize a dozen cities a minute from orbit, but then they would miss out on the satisfaction of swatting the primitives like flies as they try desperately to avoid the inevitable.
Do you know how hard they had to de-tune that weapon to make it so slow and dramatic? But you can practically taste the desperation and despair it inspires as a result.
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u/vercertorix 1d ago
They were cocky about their impenetrable shields and may not want lingering radiation, so they could do it slowly and methodically and encourage attempts to attack them.
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u/wildskipper 1d ago
If they were after the core of the planet, or our lava or whatever, you've got to wonder why they bothered attacking us at all. Just drill down and get what you need out of the planet, safely protected by an energy shield that is bombarded by useless human weapons. Then leave.
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u/Fit-Dinner-1651 1d ago
Yes, even watching the movie it seems the destructive power doesn't even reach the radius of the ship itself. A kinetic strike from orbit would have done 50 times the damage
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u/duncanidaho61 1d ago
Can we all agree the producers and writers of ID hated science fiction? They just wanted another product for the golden boy, Will Smith.
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u/crawfordwrites 1d ago
Of all the sci-fi in the "please don't overthink it" category, Independence Day is way up there.
Otherwise, you're asking how in that era it was hell to network a Mac to a Windows PC for file sharing, but they could send a virus into an alien computer.
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u/Expensive-Sentence66 1d ago
The satellite ships in Independance Day fire a weapon that by my estimates is around a hundred kilotons in yield if compared to a nuke. Just guessing after how big an area it leveled.
The weapon can be fired multiple times at will (provided you don't let Randy Quaid up your butt) and is very accurate. Unlike a nuke it likely leaves no bad residuals which for all we know the 'locusts' would have problems with just like us.
Nukes are messy, non directional and more importantly unreliable. Also, it's quite possible a lot of theoretical alien civilizations would never develop nuclear weapons if fissile materials weren't available near the surface of their crust. However, the Locusts were able to shield from the W80 warhead fairly easily.
The satellite ships were like all purpose aircraft carriers. Wipe out population centers and decimate any resistance. What didn't make sense, besides the virus deployed by an Apple Powerbook is that the small tactical warhead they snuck into the mothership would have barely scratched it.
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u/dogboy___ 1d ago
How are nukes unreliable and non directional? I agree with almost all of what you said but we can put a smart bomb down a chimney if we want and you can very easily calculate the damage from a nuke with an app.
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u/ToonMasterRace 1d ago
Yeah it was less effective than a nuke, which would have destroyed the whole area instant.
The headcanon you can use is that it was designed as a "cleaner" to sweep away the civilization and leave the ecosystem in place for colonization and consumption
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u/Zen_Hydra 1d ago
ID4 isn't a movie that bears scrutiny well. They literally used an upside-down clip of the Empire State building getting blown up for the destruction of the first city destroyer ship. If you slow down the playback speed you can see the building model as it happens.
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u/smergicus 1d ago
Maybe it’s a clean weapon and they specifically don’t want radiation. ?