Independence Day/Headscratchers: Difference between revisions

*** Even with the blackbody radiation, it's very hard to see unless you're specifically looking for it. It peaks in the infrared spectrum, so it's invisible to the naked eye and radio-telescopes can't detect it. It emits about 10^15 W, which isn't much when you're trying to detect something millions of miles away, so the intensity doesn't seem unusual, and unless its engine is operating exposed to space, it's not emitting a gamma-ray signature, either.

** Consider this, the A-10 was introduced to USAF in 1977, it is planned to keep it in service until 2028, maybe later. That's 51 years right there.

* That does bring up another JBM, though: don't the aliens have, like, serial numbers? The Area 51 vessel had been gone or missing (from the aliens' perspective) for ''fifty years'' or so. All of a sudden it shows up again in the middle of the assault on Earth, and attracts no real interest until it tries to move on its own? I mean, it does look like the alien equivalent of Homer Simpson is running the parking garage, but even so, that's like Amelia Earheart's plane suddenly showing up on an air traffic controller's boards tomorrow. It didn't cause a ''little'' interest at all?

** What if the missing fighter had been an advanced reconnaissance scout sent out ahead of the mothership, while the mothership had been decelerating from relativistic speed on entry into the solar system? In that case the time lapse between release of the scout and arrival of the mothership at earth could be much less than 50 years from the aliens' point of reference.

*** Had it worked, they would only need a few dozen nukes to get rid of the city destroyers and a few more detonated in space for the mother ship. Doesn't sound like something to bring about the death of billions of humans. And while nukes are icky, it's not like they make large swathes of land uninhabitable. Just ask the denizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki living there today.

*** "A few dozen nukes" of large enough yield to kill the city destroyers? Yes, that ''would'' do massive damage to the ecosystem and cause nuclear winter; it really doesn't take that many.

*** Nuclear winter is also more likely to be caused by detonating nuclear weaponry over cities. The city destroyers appear to linger over cities when not immediately in motion. Destroying Houston alone should have some severe ecological consequences (on top of the damage the city destroyers' weapons have already done; leveling dozens of cities is also going to be releasing a lot of soot into the air too) Conclusions have already been reached that a small-scale, regional nuclear exchange (of only 750 kilotons - 50 individual initiations of 15 kiloton weapons) could cause devastating global consequences, let alone detonating dozens of megaton-level nuclear weapons over cities and potentially destroying the city destroyers, which would cause further damage. The weapon deployed by the B-2 bomber outside Houston looks like a B61 (don't quote me on that - it might be an AGM-86) which is a multi-megaton-yield weapon. That one initiation over Houston has probably done more ecological damage to Earth than a regional nuclear war. Conclusion: ''nukes are serious business, don't disregard how powerful they are.''

*** The weapon they deployed on Houston was 50-70 kilotons at most, more that enough to slag the down town area. Now with modern technology you could easy build and deploy a 100 megaton warhead that is small enough(<5 tons) to be carried on one ICBM. Each one of these devices would be more than three orders of magnitude more powerful than the weapon displayed in the film. It's the difference between shooting a man with a bb gun and a 20mm anti material rifle. Since there is no way that even 20% of that 1.5 gigatons of total yield was used to propel clay sized dust into the upper atmosphere it would not cause cooling more significant than that caused by a eruption of a large felsic/intermediate volcano.

* No, really, what was that African ship targeting? Out of all ships shown in the conclusion, it's the one that makes the less sense. So we see one crashed in what seems to be Mesopotamia (presumably on its way to Baghdad or Basra). There's another one in Egypt (on its way to or from Cairo). Then there's the Australian one (on its way to Sydney). Then there's that one ship, crashed against the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro in the middle of the Tanzanian wilderness, nowhere close to any major African power or population centers...

** The probably hit it while it was moving somewhere.

**** It was headed to Antananarivo next. Just to kill you. And the [[Pandemic|President of Madagascar]].