Avatar, asymmetric warfare, and US contribution to WW2

Two news videos show how the two rotorcrafts, Samson and Scorpion, were designed:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHIa7C9gCnc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0Oh0bTP1Mk
 
Or every firearm sounding like a piece of field artillery, rather than just a loud "pop" or "crack." Every sword rings. Every aircraft in any sort of dive sounds like a Stuka.

Oh, and my favorite: you see an explosion (airplane, bomb, volcano, whatever) that's miles away. And you hear it instantly. Gaaahhhhrrr.
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Michael Mann doesn't do that. I wish he'd direct a sci fi movie...it'd be sick.
 
Maybe this isn't helpful, but all I heard from those videos was "toyletic." And a trip to my local Wal-Mart prior to Christmas really confirmed that for me.
 
EDITED VERSION:

Okay guys, I never visited this topic before because I was waiting to see the movie Avatar beforehand.
Now allow me to say I'm EXTREMELY disappointed by the way some have turned this topic (which is supposed to be about "Vehicle design" and therefore as little polemic as possible) into a springboard for some of the members' personal opinions. I'm glad I didn't visit this thread before because it really would have spoiled the fun of discovering it and marveling at it.

I do not care that Avatar was not quite accurate from a technological point of view. Except for the vortex thing, it all seemed extremely plausible, extremely well designed, impeccably done and well thought out. It is a kick-ass movie that got me breathless and in wonder for 2 hours and 41 minutes. How many movies do that? This doesn't happen so often. You come out of the theater a bit hazy, not wanting to get back into the real world (just like Sully in his capsule, in fact).

I don't think it is fair to say that the hero always has to be a civilized guy who comes to rescue the savages, as someone said it earlier. Sully succeeds in uniting this people and saving this planet simply because he has learned the codes and the ways of both worlds. Only with this dual knowledge was he able to win. And to all the rationals here who say "Bah! Humbug! A few savages with arrows cannot defeat an armored, heavily-armed armada", I would like to underline that the message is more important than the likelihood of the plot: with determination one can accomplish things that most would deem impossible. It's also about a people's determination to rather die than submit. A courage that is most admirable.

As to the "cowboy vs. Indian" thing, so what? It's a mere consequence of the film being "American". The Japanese keep doing movies about man vs. machine or post-atomic worlds because that's THEIR history. The Germans seem to be obsessed with war guilt in their movies and TV. The French have stories about collaboration with the Nazis. This is all a natural desire to come to terms with one's difficult history. Hollywood often goes on an Indian guilt trip or a Vietnam guilt trip, and other similar scenarios time and time again, but then that's only normal. It's the USA's past, and its has trouble coming to terms with it as a nation.

This being said, limitating Avatar to a US point of view would be extremely reductive. What the earthlings do to the Na'vi in the movie echoes what just about any major world power did to the Amazon, Africa, India and the rest: considering that taking their riches was more important than respecting them as human beings, because they considered themselves as inherently superior to them or more deserving of their riches.
 
I haven't seen the movie, going today, and was avoiding the topic. I will add my comments later.
 
Having seen the movie now:

Its a good, fun movie. Nothing very interesting in the plot-by-numbers storyline but entertaining and the 3D was excellent.

The vehicles seemed if anything too low tech, assuming we've developed interstellar travel you'd think we'd have something a bit less Apache-meets-Osprey for planetary use. They certainly looked good, however.

I agree with Scott that the fauna seemed on the surface scientifically implausible with little consistency between species in terms of basic anatomy. However, perhaps the similarity of body layouts seen on Earth is atypical by universal standards. It may be that the diversity seen in the Pre-Cambrian Edicarian fauna is normal with Earth artificially impoverished by mass extinction events.
 
overscan said:
Having seen the movie now:

Its a good, fun movie. Nothing very interesting in the plot-by-numbers storyline but entertaining and the 3D was excellent.

The vehicles seemed if anything too low tech, assuming we've developed interstellar travel you'd think we'd have something a bit less Apache-meets-Osprey for planetary use. They certainly looked good, however.

I agree with Scott that the fauna seemed on the surface scientifically implausible with little consistency between species in terms of basic anatomy. However, perhaps the similarity of body layouts seen on Earth is atypical by universal standards. It may be that the diversity seen in the Pre-Cambrian Edicarian fauna is normal with Earth artificially impoverished by mass extinction events.
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several SF groups are currently discussion the Pandora biosphere ..

the remarkable anatomical differences between the Nav'i and the rest of the biosphere have led many participants to the theory that the Nav'i are NOT indigenous to Pandora, but are the product of an earlier attempt of a different spacefaring civilisation to get at Pandoras resources ..

some people even think that entire Pandora is artificial ..
 
overscan said:
Perhaps if "toyletic" were a real word I might understand your point better....
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Perhaps you’ve revealed that ‘Ray’ is actually a marketing bot for Mattel ;-)

Stargazer don’t confuse criticism of the hackneyed story in Avatar with colonialism denial. Nor is it a manifestation of some kind of American guilt complex but rather a dumbed down, post modern, fantasy viewpoint of the so-called ‘conflict’ between nature and technology.

The technology dimorphism, resource extraction scenario as presented in Avatar is actually something that has not happened that much in this world outside of the past 50 years andin a few places like the PNG and the Amazon. And in those cases the real bastards doing the dirty work on the natives were not all English speaking white folk. The inspiration for the corporate marines is more often than not Javanese, French, Rwandians, Lebanese etc.
 
overscan said:
the 3D was excellent.
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Actually, I thought the 3D was *invisible.* I didn;t really notice it... except for the movie company logos and such at the beginning of the movie. Maybe that's good, maybe it was a waste, I dunno.

The vehicles seemed if anything too low tech...
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There is an "Avatar for activists guidebook" or some such In Bookstores Now that describes most of the stuff in the movie (without, sadly, good, proper orthogonals). It is specifically mentioned that the flying vehicles are many decades out of date, because:
1: everthing is built on-site using rapid prototypers, and thus need to be made simple designs using simple materials
2: the wacky magnetic fields caused early UAV versions of the gunships to go buggo.
 
I think Cameron does a yeoman's job of making stuff look "reasonable" with regard to the technological element of his movies. He is definitely a step above the other folks out their (like Michel Bay...ugh) and he actually can draw unlike almost every other director out their short of Neill Blomkamp and Shane Acker. I'm quite fond of the aesthetic of Cameron films and I let the anomalous stuff slide. Also I wouldn't dig too deep into why he made Pandora the way he did since the real reason had more to do with creating vast real estate for some extreme Parallax on the stereographic elements. All those floating mountains and flying fauna made for some compelling "look it's 3D" shots - especially the jungle - more than they had to do with believable science. Everything in their is either a plot device, where compromises are always made in favor of a good story, or it serves as a depth cue. Every 3D project I worked on had busy floating BG elements or some dense forestry (like King Kong 3D which no one will ever get to see).
 
prolific1 said:
(like King Kong 3D which no one will ever get to see).
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:eek: Uh... Why's that? Did the studio change their mind about it? Was it almost completed?
 
overscan said:
Just call me Ray said:
overscan said:
Repeating your statement again won't force us to discuss it, "Just call me Ray".
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Then I guess it's not.
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Perhaps if "toyletic" were a real word I might understand your point better....
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Well it would've probably helped if I had learned to spell it right :p

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyetic


Anyway, I guess it's a bit too late for this, but I don't know if this topic really qualifies so much as "theoretical projects" as it should go to the Bar.
 
Shocked Uh... Why's that? Did the studio change their mind about it? Was it almost completed?
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Funny story actually. Peter Jackson, who was impressed by the stereographic conversion process my former employers used, set up a deal to do Kong. Three quarters the way into the movie he pulled the plug. It came out pretty damn good and let me tell you that stuff is tedious. Everything had to be roto-ed using key-frame interpolation, and all the in-painting of occluded areas was done on a per frame basis. Apparently Mr. Jackson was peeved about royalties on the Lord of the Rings franchise so he beefed with Newline over that until they budged...or whatever. Damn shame really...it looked real good.
 
Now that this has been moved here I feel I can step in with my comment.

First I should say this. I have not seen it yet and when I do, I'm not going to try it in 3-D. That would be a waste as I've tested out as having a minimum level of depth perception.

I find it interesting that this movie has stirred such a wide range of arguments. For example. One writer posted (on TOR.com) a critique in which he argues that the movie is an allegory of the conflict between Science Fiction and Fantasy. The chain of comments to that posting made an amusing read. Therefore, it doesn't surprise me that this group could not keep this thread focused on the vehicle designs. And, I have found this thread to be an amusing read.

Mike
 
prolific1 said:
I think Cameron does a yeoman's job of making stuff look "reasonable" with regard to the technological element of his movies.
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FWIW, my wife is a biology major and says that the skull of the huge pterosaur seen in one of the scene was remarkably accurate, embodying features such as scleraes (?) which are bones found exclusively in the eyes of birds. The muscle attachment locations were also realistic. So I'm guessing consultants were used in the design of the creatures as well. The question of whether those creatures make sense from an evolutionary point of view remains open, but just like the flying vehicles seen throughout the movie, they are probably very functional.
 
First I should say this. I have not seen it yet and when I do, I'm not going to try it in 3-D. That would be a waste as I've tested out as having a minimum level of depth perception.
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I felt the movie did fine in 2D and was compelling enough to be seen with out 3D. One of the arguments I often made about 3D not being the future of film was: how many people can actually perceive stereo depth in cinema? As a steroegraphic artist I couldn't actually see stereo depth unless it had high parallax. In fact I relied on the diorama feature of our software package to create scenes and only after being diagnosed with gross stereo vision - and having it subsequently corrected with contacts - was I able to see what I made as it was intended to be seen (and amazingly I was one of the better artists in the company). I haven't read any statistics yet on the subject but I bet as much as 20-30% of people have questionable stereo vision and perhaps 10% none at all.
 
AeroFranz said:
prolific1 said:
I think Cameron does a yeoman's job of making stuff look "reasonable" with regard to the technological element of his movies.
Click to expand...

FWIW, my wife is a biology major and says that the skull of the huge pterosaur seen in one of the scene was remarkably accurate, embodying features such as scleraes (?) which are bones found exclusively in the eyes of birds. The muscle attachment locations were also realistic. So I'm guessing consultants were used in the design of the creatures as well. The question of whether those creatures make sense from an evolutionary point of view remains open, but just like the flying vehicles seen throughout the movie, they are probably very functional.
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I just saw the movie for a second time, mostly because my daughter had not seen the movie yet. Regardless of plot, etc., I enjoyed the attention to detail. I reall enjoy the little things like the skin of the "horse" shaking off bugs or my favorite the fellow taking the inlet covers off the engines before cranking the engines on the get away chopper. I also enjoyed the air effects on the wings of the flying beasties and the downwash and vortex effects of the choppers moving through the clouds. I also noted that the helicopters had a rotor sound much more expected of two three bladed counter-rotating systems behind the classic "Huey" sound. So I guess they decided they had to make Joe and Jane Doe comfortable with sounds. Conversly I was appaulled at the horrid tactics of the rotorcraft; bunching up like that. Even against arrow wielding locals. It would not have worked a second time as the locals had modified their tactics, techniques and procedures so that their arrows were able to succesfully penetrate the the aircraft and ground vehicles. Probably switched to unobtainium tipped arrows...
 
Sorry for the thread necro here guys, but I saw Avatar on Blu Ray for the first time.

Back when it was in theaters in December, when I decided that yes, I wanted to see it -- it had moved out of the theaters which had rear-windowed captioning (I'm Deaf/Hard of Hearing); and So I had to wait for it to come out on home video.

Rear Windowed or Open Captioned theaters generally show a movie for only a few days or at best a week, and then they move to a different movie for that theater.

So my review of the biggest brainbugs:

Excellent first 30 minutes.

Great Spaceship design, a realistic looking SSTO orbital drop shuttle, with huge intakes for scramjets; even the ground vehicles or the various ornthicopters looked pretty good.

Small details like "everyone, put on your masks!", the digital pattern the Marines wore, the fact that aircraft have FOD covers put on them when not in use, etc.

But the first act was the best.

The Second and Third acts just kept getting worse, as all sides in the movie started to take increasingly larger stupid pills.

For example:

1.) We have a aircraft capable of lifting a pretty big load to orbit and it's shape suggests scramjets (the huge doors in the front).

So what do we use it for?

Why, we send it crawling towards the alien cultural site at 10 m/sec and a few thousand feet over ground level, letting aliens on lizard birds attack it!

If they had even gone in subsonic at 25,000 feet; then the Navi wouldn't even be able to attack it, because hypoxia would have set in and they'd have gone unconscious before reaching that altitude.

Also, general tactics and technology for the ground force was not that bright -- they should have spent the money shipping some light armored vehicles to Pandora instead of those mechs, along with some indirect fire artillery like mortars or howitzers.

2.) We know that this unobtanium is valuable enough to ship giant haulbots five years away from earth. And from the ground scans, we know that Pandora is full of the stuff. So why is that deposit under the tree so valuable? I know it's the biggest deposit within 200 klicks....but why do we have to specifically mine for that?

Even if we do have to mine for it; can't you dig a pit down several hundred feet, and then proceed to horizontally drill a mine shaft towards the deposit under the tree?

3.) They could have enlisted the help of the Navi themselves in their mining operations really simply.

Not EVERYONE in the tribes is going to be all "lets commute with the earth and nature"; there will be outcasts who instead of studying the intricate byplay of nature, actually instead look to the skies and study the orbital mechanics of their gas giant, it's moons, and the other stars in their constellation.

So why not identify those Navi and give them a ride to orbit?

4.) Why does everything glow in the dark? Even the Navi themselves glow in the dark (those spots)

On Earth, you only see bioluminescence in things which operate in the dark or at night -- and Pandora isn't THAT dark.

I can understand there being a valley that is shoruded in darkness 95% of the time, which is isolated from the rest of Pandora and is only reachable via flying lizard. There, you can have everything being bioluminescent...but not 100% of all life forms there.

5.) I find the entire concept of the Avatar very morally, ethically, and religiously dubious.

Creating something like that would have a fairly high failure rate.

What do you do with all the failed Avatars?

Do you flush them down the toilet or pureee them in a blender for more organic material for Avatar #221?

What do you do with the Avatars once you're done with them?

We know the Avatars have brains...we know that there is some sort of brain to brain linkage that works between the human brain and the avatar brain -- as shown on screen....

So why isn't there an imprinting of the person's neural network onto the avatar after the person has been using it heavily?

Jake had been using the Avatar continuously with only interruptions during the body's sleep cycle for months by the end of the movie. So why didn't his brain patterns get imprinted on the Avatar?

Why didn't the Avatar just wake up on it's own and walk around thinking that yes, it is Jake Sully?

Unless of course, the delinking procedure, both Emergency and Normal, wipe the brain after each use....in which essence, you kill yourself each time you jump into the avatar body.
 
All in all I think some of you guys forget that this is primarily entertainment, and as such you can only go so far in trying to find coherence there. I personally try to not allow this kind of reasoning spoil the fun of what I'm watching... Later on I go back over it and pinpoint a few anomalies, but you can't go watch a movie that is complete fantasy and expect everything to be 100% believable!!!

I'm surprised though that the greatest inconsistency of the movie has not been highlighted in this thread: as soon as Jake dissembles from his avatar, the avatar's body lays dormant somewhere in Na'avi territory. Apparently the times when Jakes get "woken up" do not necessarily match the Na'avi sleeping hours...How come then no-one there wonders why it has gone inert, and presumably in the middle of nowhere?
 
RyanCrierie said:
So why isn't there an imprinting of the person's neural network onto the avatar after the person has been using it heavily?

Jake had been using the Avatar continuously with only interruptions during the body's sleep cycle for months by the end of the movie. So why didn't his brain patterns get imprinted on the Avatar?

Why didn't the Avatar just wake up on it's own and walk around thinking that yes, it is Jake Sully?
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Because if they'd done that, any fan of Poul Anderson in the theater would have freakin' rioted.

As for the holy site that gets attacked at the end, the obvious approach to have been to take off and nuke the site from orbit... it's the only way to be sure. Cameron got around that easy answer via the simple expedient, not mentioned in the movie but described in some of the licensed books,of having the corporation being disallowed by law from having nukes. Fine.

But they have *spaceships.*

There are multiple moons with other human colonies on 'em, so presumably there's a system of interplanetary spacecraft. Just perfect for grabbing a five meter chunk of rock, metal or ice and chucking it at that damned glowy tree. Additionally, if there happens to be a starship in orbit, a one-second burst from on of its engines should do a fantastic job of frying the area. The ship is described as having fusion/antimatter engines capable of boosting the ship at 1.5 G's. However, I haven't found any data on the ships mass, or the Isp of the engines. The ship has a cargo capacity of 350 tons, and is a giant structure, so let's assume a mass of (handwave) 600 metric tons. And lets assume an exhaust velocity of 1/10 lightspeed. So to generate 1.5 g's, each of the two engines needs to generate 450 metric tons of thrust, or about 4.4 million Newtons. The exhaust velocity is 0.1 C, or 29,805 meters per second. This means that the power of the jet is 65.5 gigawatts.

Fire one of these engines at the target for one second, and you've dumped 65.5 gigajoules onto it (not counting atmospheric losses, which will probably be substantial). Since the energy equivalency of one ton of TNT is 4.184 gigajoules, one second of engine blast is the equivalent of 15.6 tons of TNT. This will do a dandy job of turning that tree and its space hippie worshippers into charcoal briquettes.
 
They are pitching new HDTVs with "3D" capability now. Does the BluRay version actually work with such a setup? I don't know much of the technology behind this "new" 3D craze.

Sooner or later I need to replace my massive "first generation" 720P set with something fancier that doesn't weigh a metric ton.
 
RyanCrierie, have you read the Heechee novels by Frederick Pohl, starting with "Gateway"? In one of the latter in the series, The Annals of the Heechee, digital "avatars" (for use in virtual reality) are created, both for living people and for deceased. The use by the former create dilemmas such as those you've mentioned (avatars get their own consciousness, while keeping the memories of their users) which has to be solved by either letting them live, with the security risks involved, or deleting - killing - them.

Orionblamblam, I'm not sure if it's written by Poul Anderson but I have read a short story in which a crippled guy is in radio contact with an artificial Jovian, in order to explore Jupiter and the other (IIRC natural) Jovians. His fellow shipmates are worried that this guy is getting too attached with his Jovian. In the end, the crippled guy creates a short circuit or some such so that his own body dies and his consciousness gets downloaded into "his" Jovian, so he can live happily ever after with his Jovian mate.
 
Aha!

Thanks, I was thinking of Simak's "Desertion" which is somewhat similar.
 
Hammer Birchgrove said:
RyanCrierie, have you read the Heechee novels by Frederick Pohl, starting with "Gateway"?
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Yes I have. Though I must state that the first novel "Gateway" is the best of the series.

The rest of them slowly degenerated into unreadability with each successive book.

And yes, in the later books, the entire "digital copy of you" aspect is explored. But at that point the books were very much boring, and I had to slog through them. Sigh.
 
So um... anyone seen anything like three views of the Avatar rotorcraft?
 
If I may add my five cents, I guess I'll be a real malcontent here. When I watch a movie, I use the SBS, or sore-butt syndrome criterion: the sooner I get a sore butt, the worse the movie. In Avatar it got sore after the first five minutes. The entire film is a hodge-podge of worn themes and ideas, the garish, bioluminescent esthetics seem to be aimed at ten-year old collectors of Barbie figures and the design of the flying machines only reveals how limited is the filmmakers' imagination: four centuries into the future and, as many here have observed, the artists come up with mutated versions of existing aircraft( did you notice the AH-64D-like LCD displays in the Scorpion, or what's it called?). This is just as ridiculous as a prediction made in Paris in the 19th century that, because of the rapidly growing numbers of horse-drawn vehicles in Paris, they would run out of fodder and place for both the horses and the carriages in the 20th century. Similarly, the nazis predicted, e.g. pneumatic trains, mail-delivery u-boats, wood-burning buses, etc-absurd enough by todays standards? Well, that was only like seventy years ago.
Somebody here said he'd come out of the theatre dizzy-so did I, plus a headache due to overdrawn exposure to the flicker of the 3D glasses, to me a clear sign the 3D technology is far from perfect, and the possible health hazards not properly researched into.
I'd really looked forward to this flick, but, alas, 'tis a terrible flop to me, and I guess it's not only my opinion, as the Oscar tally shows. The one thing I liked though, was the mocking of Bush's war-on-terror rhetoric in the marine colonel's pep talk. Too bad this between-the-lines criticism of US colonial wars couldn't be heard earlier though, at least in a movie of this scale. Over and out.
 
Wait? What is wrong with LCD multi-function-displays? I don't know, but I would imagine trying to hit some holographic thing while flying an aircraft would be a bit more disorienting than hitting something that is actually "there."
 
RyanCrierie said:
Hammer Birchgrove said:
RyanCrierie, have you read the Heechee novels by Frederick Pohl, starting with "Gateway"?
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Yes I have. Though I must state that the first novel "Gateway" is the best of the series.

The rest of them slowly degenerated into unreadability with each successive book.

And yes, in the later books, the entire "digital copy of you" aspect is explored. But at that point the books were very much boring, and I had to slog through them. Sigh.
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I liked all the novels (that I've read; I haven't gotten the ones Pohl wrote after he supposedly was finished during the 80's), but had issues with the idea that somehow humans and Heechee alike would like becoming pure energy creatures. Ah well.

I wonder if the Heechee novels at least partially become inspiration for the Stargate films and TV-series.
 
Colonial-Marine said:
Wait? What is wrong with LCD multi-function-displays?
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In principle nothing, but Avatar used the common sci-fi trope of see-through displays. Bleah. To see why this is a bad idea, take a page of text - any text - and print out one copy on a standard sheet of paper, and print out another on a transparency (amazingly, they still sell that stuff). Then hold said sheets of text up to a TV screen thats showing people walking around and doing stuff (or, better yet, scenes of flying through valleys at high speed), and then try to read them.
 
yasotay said:
So um... anyone seen anything like three views of the Avatar rotorcraft?
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http://myhobbycraft.blogspot.com/2010/01/at-99-scorpion-gunship-avatar-172.html
 
Yeah, I thought the LCD displays were silly. It would be different if they were Hud displays that were placed virtually in front of their faces for targeting etc, maybe through a halo worn on the head. But to show all of the vehicle info on them with the background interfering, not to mention the changing BG light levels was silly. If I had done it, granted I didn't, I would have had made the cockpits entire virtual displays without windows. That would open all kind of display tech possibility.

I really liked the ducted fan vehicles and the battle suits. The tech didn't look very advanced and I don't think it was meant to. The only thing that actually "bothered" me about the vehicle designs was the two separate cockpit modules on the front of the big four engined ducted fan vehicle. I mean, I understand it's just a movie, but that was one of those points that were just sort of like, "How can we intentionally design something to make the least amount of sense possible?"

Overall, I got the sense that the purpose of the vehicle design wasn't to make me feel like I was in the future. It was to make me say, "I want one of those!" ;) And it did. I do want some of those ducted fan vehicles.
 
flateric said:
yasotay said:
So um... anyone seen anything like three views of the Avatar rotorcraft?
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http://myhobbycraft.blogspot.com/2010/01/at-99-scorpion-gunship-avatar-172.html
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A-ha. So *that's* where it's from. Just tonight I stumbled across this ebay listing:
http://cgi.ebay.com/AT-99-Scorpion-Gunship-AT99-Avatar-Wood-Model-FrShp-New-/350324753134?cmd=ViewItem&pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item5190fb82ee

Note that the illustration of the "magnificent and Museum-Quality crafted Avatar AT-99 Scorpion Gunship AT99 WOOD MODEL," supposedly "finely handmade from kiln-dried Wood Mahogany and skillfully hand-painted by gifted artists," is the same computer-generated illustration from your link.
 
Sci-fi has become less futuristic than it used to be... I got pretty disappointed by Terminator: Salvation that none of the robots used lasers, very much unlike the future visions in Terminator 1 and 2. I also find it silly that in the new Battlestar Galactica (no, I haven't seen the old one), there are no ray weapons, while there are these self-aware "Cylons" and faster-than-light travel. ::)
 
Yeah. And in Stargate SG-1, basic earthian machine guns scare the heck out of all the Jaa'fa who are supposed to posses much more lethal Go'auld technology... Silly!
 

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