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@@r.gletscher5162 my beef is the "five classes" thing. There's either only three, Destroyers, Cruisers and BattleShips. Or two: Aircraft Carriers and Submarines.
I can imagine the meeting where the RDA decided to land ISV's "Could we save money by landing an ISV so we don't have to use Valkyries?" "It would annihilate the landing zone." "That would save us even _more_ money!"
Another large reason is simply: we can't make a base slowly like last time because the Na'vi and Pandora would destroy it too quickly. So creating a huge burned/radioactive wasteland to keep out the pandoran life is another bonus
@@viken3368 you'll be getting a bonus in your RDA monthly salary, keep the good ideas coming! 😂😂 Seriously, was there _any_ downside to this plan from a management perspective?
@@juimymary9951 dammit, who invited engineers to our corporate meeting? 😂 It's probably a good point, which some other comments have addressed with suggestions of burning an excessively hydrogen rich fuel mix during landing (I'm not an engineer, so I'm not sure that this would work, but it sounds great) Leave those minor technical details to the boffins downstairs
No gushing over the radiators? When I saw this in the theater, the first thing that came to my mind, was feelings of absolute disgust, because you know it just showed that no matter what the RDA does not care about the planet itself. But at the same time, I also felt that it was a great way of doing visual storytelling. In the first movie, we saw the giant open pit mines that were being created and then of course, there is the famous or infamous, depending on your way of thinking event, where they literally blew down home tree. And then, of course, the small little vineyard, where one of those robotic bulldozers trampled over a fairly Sacred Location. And it just goes to show that the forces of the RDA literally have no regard for the planet. It’s self. But then again, if I remember correctly, Mr. Cameron essentially has modeled them after basically corporate greed.
@@ultrajdCameron basically wants you to hate the RDA, he doesn’t want an honest discussion or complex narrative with deep moral conundrums about taking the resources of a healthy fledgling species and using them to keep your own old and suffering species alive. And if he doesn’t want that then I‘ll have to just disagree with him and side with the RDA regardless.
It's possible that the first modules are deliberately flying too low in order to save on munitions shipments- they have to clear the forest anyway, and an engines thrust output is proportional to it's effectiveness as a weapon. So drop the first one in hot, then crane down the second as they pull back up into orbit.
That makes sense. No reason an engine that powerful can't hold the craft in an extremely low orbit for a short period. The payload is craned down to the surface. The payload module itself is equipped with small thrusters to keep it stable as it descends.
There's an Isaac Asimov story about a peaceful civilization that gets invaded by militant types only to fairly quickly win by pointing their powerful space engine technology at the enemy and turning it on. The point of the story was that in space, the difference between "propulsion" and "weapon" is mostly in the labeling.
@@michaelramon2411not really quites. It's not JUST a difference in labeling, it's also a difference in optimization of the hardware. You optimize a weapon for accuracy and muzzle velocity, maybe rate of fire. You optimize a drive system exclusively for maximum recoil at minimum payload.
I audibly gasped in the theater during this scene, and my dad gave me a funny look. I'm a nerd okay, and a semi-realistic space landing gets me excited.
The "Manifest Destiny" lol. I see Avatar 2 is continuing the first film's proud tradition of having a script that about as subtle as being smacked over the head while being yelled at.
Pilot 1 : where do we drop , everything is crawling General XYZ: Can’t you just Orbital bombardment it or launch Rocks or something from orbit or send in Valkyrie’s on bombing runs Admiral : ISV 1 to ISV 5 delay braking burn till stratosphere and manoeuver to hover at 20 km altitude for about a 10 mins and detach the Landing forces Modules slings on my mark General : what do ya mea… Holy Fuc, Sht sht sht . My eyes Aaaghh
So regarding the laser sail I don't think its been forgotten. I think RDA has just built even more lasers around Earth to push more (or bigger) ISVs out to alpha centauri. Part of the reason RDA needs the space elevator (good spot by the way) is to build another set of lasers in orbit of Pandora to break a new wave of massive engineless ISVs (no need for heavy antimatter engines, more mass for cryobeds and cargo). Also the fact its called a sling load rather than a sky crane might be because the ISVs can also come down and pick stuff up using the same system.
I love the technology shown off in Avatar and Avatar 2, but the concepts involved are just impossible to scale up to much so fast. The RDA would need to build an additional nine laser batteries capable of outputting power comparable to the sun.
@@RobertDeVriesII Anti-matter containment opens a lot of doors, like cheap energy via antimatter catalyzed fusion. Human space infrastructure is likely nearly directly proportional to the amount of unobtanium they get off of Pandora.
The story would have been better if they had made both sides sympathetic (human colonists desperate for a new home vs Na'vi natives trying to hold onto it for themselves. More depth vs cartoon villains.
@@randlebrowne2048 Not every film has to have grey morality. Also, he made cartoon villains and people still genuinely argue that they were totally in the right.
Seeing that in IMAX 3D was totally worth it. The devastation was exactly what the sky people return represented and the landing and technology were suprisingly realistic for a mainstream movie. I need detailed breakdowns of every vehicle, structure and weapon in Avatar 2, there were dozens of amazing designs!
Hope you got the "Visual Dictionary" for the movie then! It has a bunch of in-depth descriptions and close ups of machinery, including the landing module.
Since you mentioned that the engines have a hydrogen afterburner I think they just turned down the power and started dumping as much hydrogen as possible into the engines to keep enough thrust while making the exhaust juuust cool enough not to weld the landing modules to the ground. That would of course make the engines very inefficient but thats ok since each ISV only has to do one landing/takeoff before getting refueled.
And even if it is10x less efficient compared to normal, if we say the landing takes 1 day of continous thrust that would add 10 days of "normal" runtime. when it already has fuel for ~180 days it's not too much weight to reduce to reach the required fuel savings
fr tho 🤣 I actually got the feeling that the makers realized after the first movie that the RDA was far too cool, so they made them extra evil in the second movie. I had a discussion with one of my friends before watching Avatar 2 on how rootable the humans are. In the first movie, they kinda were in a moral grey zone, exploiting resources and killing natives, but retaliating only because provokated and mining those resources only because they are direly needed at home, with families, friends and humankind back at home they need to worry about. Meanwhile in the second movie I feel they became a bit too "generically" evil if you know what I mean. Just killing because they are greedy and want to live forever and stuff. I hope they don't make them any more evil just for the sake of it in the following movies though, I want to go back to being pro-RDA again.
@@scifidino5022 To be fair, if humans found some way to atain imortallity I can guarantee they would wipe out how many sentient creatures as needed. (just look at the amount of people dead from oil conflicts)
@@scifidino5022Earth became uninhabitable in the background which is why the RDA invested so much into the 2nd wave of colonization. It’s not an invasion, it’s refugees.
I'd like to point out that a LOT of science fiction franchises have explicit rules about using space based propulsion in a planetary atmosphere. Some universes out right state that using space based propulsion in atmosphere is war crime. I think this counts.
I may be on the other end of the spectrum, but I was honestly horrified when that scene took place. Granted that’s how it would work, but understanding the whole process, they essentially glassed hectares of land in the process and left it irradiated for some time after from those exhaust plumes. They knew what they where doing, and turned a spindly cargo transport vessel in to a horrifyingly effective beachhead vessel.
thing of it is, I have my doubts RDA considered the consequences to the crew in the less shielded segments. If Cameron is planning well, the radiation injuries to this first wave of outright colonials is going to cause loyalty issues within RDAs rank and file.
This is the equivalent of when Amos friend light up the epstein drive during atmospheric launch and the whole place got completely wipe by the sheer might of the drive plume
when i watched the movie I was under the impression that theres an unshown time delay between the ISV arrivals and then the development of the new base/city. I figured it was probably months and months which could maybe give time for a cleanup crew to sterilise any residual health issues before the robots began construction. Consider that the ground isnt blasted perfectly flat yet the city itself sits on an utterly flat featureless circle so alot of work went into the ground prep between arrival and city
Well, the point of those is to deny your enemy resources, and if the RDA isn't using the forests for resources and the Na'vi are, then I think it still makes sense. (You were probably joking though)
@@nahuelleandroarroyo I remember a history class talking about how a young George Washington messed up by making a hasty fort without cutting down enough of the surrounding forests, so clearing the area around a fortress/castle/base to provide better visibility/eliminate cover has definitely been standard protocol for centuries if not millenia.
What bothered me about the ISV skycrane landing scene is that it would definitely melt the engines. Realistic high-ISP engine concepts like the antimatter engines of the ISV rely on a vacuum gap between the exhaust and the components of the engine, usually maintained with powerful magnetic fields holding the exhaust plasma in place. A plume that hot would turn every material known to man to plasma instantaneously, but radiation is slow enough at transferring heat between the plume and the engine components that a cooling loop can handle the heat that does make it across the gap. Maintaining that vacuum gap is pretty simple in space since space is conveniently a vacuum. Not so on a planet like Pandora, that gap will fill with air and that air will conduct heat from the plume to the engine and it will explode. I've thought a lot about how this can be avoided. The obvious possibility is that the ISV engines work at a lower temperature in atmosphere, but that would also reduce the specific impulse to be optimistically a few times better than a chemical rocket and I doubt the ISVs have the fuel for that. But the propellent need not be internally stored, maybe these next-gen ISV engines have air intakes and they just use the antimatter to heat the air before shooting it out as exhaust. That could be very efficient. Though neither of these options would cause the destruction seen in the movie, the ground destruction would be more comparable to that caused by the first Starship launch at worst. A far more on-brand solution would be if they found some quasi-magical material on Pandora that can withstand comically absurd temperatures without melting, and they built the ISV combustion chambers and nozzles out of that. And to obtain it they had to genocide some cute intelligent creature that lives in a volcano, or something.
Even during normal operation, the ISV will consume all of it, leaving behind the return antihydrogen in order to reduce its mass as much as possible. Hydrogen that can be procured locally will be collected by descending to Polyphemus with the Valkyrie Shuttle, so there is no problem even if the hydrogen in the tank is used up.
They do have such a « magical material », and that is unobtainium. It is said that it could solve the energy crisis on earth but since no specific explaination is given, we can reasonably think it has several « amazing » properties.
@@andreameertAlthough unobtanium is a room-temperature superconducting material, it loses its magnetism when exposed to high temperatures, so it is actively cooled with liquid helium. The gist of this story is to lower the plume temperature by increasing the mixture ratio of hydrogen reacting with antihydrogen in order to protect the ship from the heat transfer of the insane plume temperature during atmospheric descent. If that happens, the fuel efficiency will be as bad as that of a chemical rocket, so he is concerned about the amount of hydrogen remaining.
Yeah James Cameron is many things, but subtle isn't one of them. Regarding the landing though: I've seen it mentioned that if the ISVs can adjust the ratio for the afterburners, which seems reasonable, then for those few moments in the actual atmosphere (and since they're going straight down and up they'll be in the atmosphere for the shortest possible time) they can push the thrust mass to as hydrogen-rich as it'll go and minimize both the radiation and the heat at the momentary cost of engine efficiency. Still more than enough to glass the landing zone.
Still have a gripe with the fact that they used a space-exclusive vehicle that is held together by sheer tensile strength dangle in the dense Pandoran atmosphere whose flex (even ignoring the shockwaves produced by the engines) would literally mangle it.
Besides the obvious fact that the landing zone looked to 'solid' (should be melted like you said and not with still visible tree stumps), I found it incredibly ridiculous that amongst the mechs, there were guys on foot!
When I first saw them decelerating I internally burst in joy, because it was the first time we’ve seen somewhat realistic depiction of near lightspeed travel. In order to go fast you need to accelerate a lot and then brake a lot - and you do the braking by reversing acceleration - something we don’t really see in most blockbuster sci-fis. Then the landing part kinda felt kinda off, because as mentioned, the destruction of the planets surface would be incomprehensible.
I can see how this makes sense, since the pandoran jungle is so thick with huge (way bigger) trees than here on Earth, it's only natural that they use the engine plume as an incineration device, since they would have to clear out the forests anyway, why not using the massive matter-antimatter engine? It saves other resources that can be used for base building and construction, also ammunition and weapons, i also like how they depicted the firestorm as an equivalent to a nuclear bomb.
Cameron may be rumored to be a difficult person to work with, and there was room for Jack on the door, but one thing his movies always nail is little details like this that look awesome.
Jack tried to get on, and the door nearly sank, so he decided not to try again. Mythbusters and Cameron tested it, and it would've worked if they had stuck her life vest underneath. If, y'know, either of them had been capable of thinking of that while soaked in icewater and freezing to death. Much less executing the plan.
One thing I will always stand by was that both Jack and Rose could not have survived on the board. While there was room on the board, if both of them had gotten on the board would have been partially submerged into water and killed both of them with Hypothermia.
@@EGRJ I will never understand the "Jack would have fit" crowd. *The film establishes that the door will not support both people* ! What other film history do we want to revise for no reason? How about "Rick could have gotten on the plane, because Laszlo was polyamorous", or "The Man with No Name was actually named Clarence"?
I love the detail that Cameron put in explaining why the humans can’t use fixed wing aircraft. Because a single bomber would be capable of forcing the Navi to surrender in less than a week.
Regarding the waves bit. I imagine the first landings are the impressive ISV drops, which also clear (by way of glassing, effectively) where Bridgehead will be, and the follow-on construction stuff is brought down more conventionally.
On them arriving at the same time, they were repelled once, so they want to bring in a larger force. So they just have the ones further ahead burn early on the trip, so they all arrive at almost the same time, ensuring that they have the number that they need
@@AnonD38 and the only way to ensure our survival is to invade another planet with hostile biology and wipe out the indigenous sentient population? The only reason we’re here is for the plot. That or the RDA is incompetent and greedy.
4:40 if pandora is tidally locked (which is most likely is) then it is possible to construct a space elevator to a lagrange point rather than geostationairy orbit. this is also how we can make a space elevator on earth's moon
I would suggest that the ISVs arriving simultaneously can probably be explained by accounting for the likelyhood that RDA A) has more than one laser to propel them with, B) they could have used their antimatter engines to boost them along, and C) it’s highly likely that they weren’t launched from Earth. Probably they were launched from the Moon or Mars, enabling them to use gravity assists to accelerate onto the proper trajectory before the lasers (probably positioned in the outer solar system) had to be used.
The "Visual Dictionary" on Way of Water has a large, detailed view of that landing module. It mentions "radiation shielding to protect the crew during travel as well as the engines radiation on entry"! You are not the first having thought of that potential problem :) And they even mention and show heat radiators to regulate temperature.
The scene looks nice, but the destruction is nowhere near of what it should be, i think book INVINCIBLE by Stanisław Lem encapsulates such orbital landing sequence of a gigantic ship perfectly, where he describes the complete obliteration of considerable portion of the land around the ship and complete glassing and turning it to magma. The book in general i think would be an amazing topic for one of your vids regarding space tech, there is an amazing visual novel for it too which creates a really nice setting appropriate designs for the lead ship and overall tech portrayed.
It seems hard to judge what destruction engines actually cause. I remember that the moon lander engineers had concerns like that as well, but eventually it was determined that it would not be problematic.
They are making that into a game. Invincible, that is. My favorite book, where everybody is profesional, responsible adult, like the crew of such a Behemot should be. It was such a fresh air, after usual Hollywood nonsense.
@@deejay554 they are making it into a game that doesn’t seem to have much in common with the book aside the setting, it won’t be a book adaptation and I’m not entirely convinced it will stand up to amazing scrutiny of Lem’s visions.
@@deejay554 space magic still has its own charm, but Yeah, realistic sci-fi is so much better, when it is grounded, but properly grounded, not just pretending to be.
In the finale, I hope Cameron provides budget for more action from the RDA’s new toys. A land, air AND sea battle against Bridgehead would be a spectacle of the ages!
Yeah with a treeline pushed that far away the Navi would have to commandeer large crafts like Dragon gunships themselves to make that happen. Which would be ultra sick.
Sully must regret not hiding a bomb on the shuttle that he allowed to leave at the end of the first movie. Give it a timer to go off while the ISV is leaving the system or even approaching relativistic velocities to ensure a kill. Or just when it's first docked with the ISV to hopefully prevent a message getting back to Earth. Without any warning the ship will be assumed lost and the next ship arriving will be off guard and land it's shuttle as usual, as long as the charade can be maintained by the mining site.
Nah, they‘d know something was off. It takes days to weeks for the ISV to get from the edge of the solar system to Pandora. They‘d be close enough for delayed radio communication or even delayed laser communication. If they got 0 signs of life from RDA HQ on Pandora they‘d find that incredibly suspicious.
Well if you ask me the only logical premise for a sequal to the original movie was one where the Pandorans are desperatly reverse enginering Human technology and trying to negotiate control of the mining on Pandora and an export agreement with Humans in exhcange for yet more technology. You know the thing that any sensible civilization would do to try to preserve itself in the face of a rapacious and technologically advanced power and what Native Tribes actually did because they weren't ignorant Blue monekys that dance in trees and refuse to so much as touch the superior technology being weilded against them as they sit just wishing that the enemy will never come back after he's been given a mere bloody nose by throwing wave after wave of your best warriors at them in victory so bloody that it should be called Phyric. I don't know what Avatar insults more, native peoples or the audiances inteligence.
@@kennethferland5579 exactly, if RDA wanted to ensure they could get the material unopposed they could've dropped a few asteroids onto the major navi settlements which they would have had no way to defend against with their bows and animals.
I completely missed that the things holding the cables up were the actual ISVs when watching the movie (twice), thought it was just some sub-craft. I guess it didn't enter my mind precisely because of the reasons mentioned in the video - the landings were brutal, but not quite brutal enough for what interstellar drives should do to the planet.
I really love it when media doesn't shy away from how absolutely bonkers the energy levels of space flight, and combat are, especially when they have established lore (or on screen presentation) describing said energy. It was always such a let down when Star Trek ships blast away at each other with apocalyptic level weapons, only to fly away without a scratch. Sure shields can hand wave away damage, but I lost count of the number of times that torpedoes with antimatter warheads, more powerful than the most powerful nukes of today impacted unshielded ships and did not completely obliterate them. Star Wars too, a star destroyer's turbo lasers are shown instantly vaporizing asteroids of various sizes, but the beat up hunk of rust and dreams that is the Millennium Falcon eats at least half a dozen shots directly to the hull before being mildly inconvenienced and forced to try something else. The Expanse does a pretty good job of depicting their weapons realistically, at least in terms of the damage that could be done to a space vehicle, if not the exact physics of high velocity impacts and nuclear detonations, but outside of that it is super rare for weapons to be displayed actually doing the damage that they are purportedly able to do, let alone drives systems being given any thought at all. I do love the chase scene between the Roci and the Azure Dragon where the Dragon crew tries to use their drive plume as a weapon though.
Definitely the scene that got my ears to prick up the most. Seening the ships causing down towards the planet I straight sat up and yelled "are they landing!?"
I saw these small tubes protruding from the Valkyrie boarding shafts. Those are probably the cockpits since there's no rotating axle and no corridor connecting the Valkyries to the landing module, just the winch. The shuttles were probably mainly cargo, with the pilots being waking crew since the cryosleep bunks are probably in the landing module as well. It also explains how the ship goes back to orbit after detaching the landing module.
I would imagine that the ISV's dropped their pods at different spots but the ones that didn't land at bridgehead were loaded with shuttles/transports and they just moved to bridgehead after the landing.
Having those vessels enter the atmosphere and bombard the surface with their antimatter catalyzed fusion exhaust is a pure evil act that I 100% believe humans would do to an inhabited world.
Even though they aren't space vehicles, I would love a breakdown of the AT-101 Seawasp, the SA-9 Kestrel Gunship and the S-76 SeaDragon. They're such cool-ass RDA vehicles.
I was wondering how this worked with the engines, and now I know it just... can't? Like, wouldn't the radiation on the ground be pretty bad for a while, making construction really delayed?
I was confused by the radiation bit. What radiation? Yeah, the antimatter engines generate a lot of radiation. Radiation is a very spicy invincible light beam. When the engines are off, the radiation beam is off. Literally zero radiation from the engines then. Do the engines create some radioactive isotopes that get thrown around?
@@TealJosh The ground absorbs the rads and becomes new isotopes which need to be scraped off and moved elsewhere. Gamma splits the atomic shells and creates cascades of other particle types which settle back into the rock layers still left over from exhaust wash and turns them radioactive.
@@TealJosh I was under the impression that the matter-antimatter annihilation was then used as heat exhaust thrust, so the fire emitted from the engines is what's radioactive. The radiation is then washed over the ground as the heat exhaust from the annihilation keeps the whole engine assembly aloft.
The only thought i had is "you could end the movie right here - the entire moon now has terminal stage cancer"; It is actually funny how everyone remembers the engines are annihilation drives (no pun intended), and then just sends them into the atmosphere, as if the gamma-ray emissions equivalent to those of a star, two per ship each, would not harm the habitability of Pandora in any way, whilst in reality even one ISV just moving into orbit with plumes pointed at the moon would turn it into an irradiated desert
I kinda Imagine that is the way they set up a new city on Pandora, That big cargo module probably contains everything needed to setup a new city and the powerful engines of the ships make sure that the area around it is clear. City gets build by robots in the landed modules and recoirces of pandora. Later supplies from earth to the city will be done by shuttles
i always thought the plums sterilized the area for the building to instantly be started after the ship leaves the atmosphere. This also gives a deadzone perimeter much like you see in Bridgehead city. looks like was built directly where a landing was.
Despite the 16km diameter of the laser sail, that’s a really small solid angle if the laser is inside Earth orbit out of the ecliptic. Like I’ve commented before, doing photon wavelength shifting and concentration to make a solar collector powered laser is more energy efficient than going through electricity to then get photons again in the laser. I think they could have launched them in a stagger and converged but probably because berthing and provisioning them fully simultaneously sounds like logistics overload for the RDA who’s been operating on a cycle for so long and Earth being plot point resource poor. Proton-Antiproton annihilation energy is in the GeV range which renders most matter transparent and while any interaction is full of a pooptonne of particles spraying out, they likewise have very low interaction probabilities. I’d say it’d be nasty off of shear scale of reactions in the drives but the dose might be comparable to the interstellar one, though it would be acute vs. chronic. Side note, if you haven’t read “Mote in God’s Eye” they also have a laser sail powered interstellar ship but it uses solar wind braking (perhaps because it’s dramatically lower mass).
What little information, all theoretical since we don’t have one, is that the radiation being lost in mater anti mater reaction are Neutrinos and the rest are photos. Since the photos are being absorbed in the hydrogen after burners then the radiation these things are giving off is primarily leftover photos(which gamma will not last longer then 10^-12 seconds),hydrogen, and what ever atoms get kicked up from the exhaust plume. So it’s probably not actually that radioactive, but as hot as fresh cooled lava.
2:00 Well, it would kinda make sense to have them all arrive at the same time, even though they had to depart at quite different times, waiting for their place in the queue. You don't want to have one ship hit the other one with the relativistic engine jet, which is what would probably happen if one were to lag behind the other one
I mean... couldnt they just slow down at different rates? One start their break burn at lets say 50% early, next craft 60% etc. And end up in a nice group? Would ofcourse mean the crew would not be at 1g but... its a thought
@@AnonD38 no not the crew. The ISVs had, as i recall, 3 crew rotations that would stay awake during flight. They live in the habs with artificial gravity and would take care of maintenence and waking up the passenger once the tour is over.
@@AnonD38 yeah i think its one shift awake at the time.. but one would be awake. Its been a while since i read the lorebook. I can go dig it up if you want?
I mean if you want to ensure the locals won't be messing with your landing troopers that is definitely one way to handle them. And giving them a larger area to work with.
They probably wouldn’t care? The survival of humanity is on the line, they got way more important things to worry about rather than "hmmm does this name offend me?"
I would think they would quietly not allow Native Americans to join. Come up with some convenient reasons to turn then down. The moment a Native American hears we are strip mining an indigenous culture's sacred locations for minerals and causing horrific environmental devastation in the process... "This is sounding waaaay tooo familiar!" Or in the case of the second movie, killing a very sentient life form to steal their brain juice so rich people can live forever. I imagine RDA has a total news black out on anything that happens on Pandora. I do think having humans try and colonize a planet where they can't even breathe the air for a few seconds is really stupid though. If we have the means to terraform Pandora (which would likely destroy the ecosystem in the process) versus earth. I think terraforming earth to a more livable condition would be easier. About the only thing that would make any real sense is have humans just transfer their consciousness to vat grown na'avi and colonize the planet that way. But then would we be human any longer?
Well I'm pretty sure a majority of modern Native Americans are at least partially white, soooo... "I'm just following half my ancestors' time-honored traditions, YEE HAW!"
This is the planet where they mine unobtainium, which floats mountains in the air. Any reason they couldn't refine enough of the stuff to make an anti-weight for a _short_ space elevator to a station in low Pandora orbit?
James Cameron isn't the only one working on this movie, if 100 other experts working on the movie decided to make it this way, it's probably intended to be this way. And that was only the initial landing, burning everything to assert dominance to establish a ground for base, surely they dont use ISVs after that to burn everything just to deliver some building materials, staff members, supplies.
I feel like thrust from craft that are landing/taking off is one of those things that Sci fi is particularly prone to ignore. Other than direct anti-gravity technology I'm not really clear on how you ever have landing craft bouncing up and down to planets so easily. Although I suppose mass effect gets a bit of a pass because if you can reduce something's mass then presumably you need only very small engines.
@@BigFormula93 They're underused because they're extremely vulnerable. Space elevator can't move out of the way of an orbital debree, or imagine its land part being hit by a hurricane?
@@BigFormula93 1. Maybe you could enlighten me then how, say, a space elevator will move out of the way of a hurricane? Or how it would be immune to it, if even ordinary tiny skyscrappers need to account for the wind pressure in the arrea? 2. They aren't used in fiction because it's easier to throw in magic technology that allows you to get up in your small sleek spaceship and dart for the stars from the landing pad in one continous cinematic shot. There's no mystery here. 3. yeah, and those other structures are either even less possible than a space elevator, or, like the Lofstrom's loop, aren't immune to extreme weather either.
"burning up" is a function of aerobraking to go from orbital velocity to a slower one where you stop "missing" the planet as you fall. normally used because of that dang rocket equation and the fact that we don't have infinitely powerful thrust with infinitely light fuel. IF YOU DO tho, you could be coming down at a leisurely 15mph or whatever other feather like velocity you want... friction burning from air need not apply.
When I see those ISVs land and the construction crew come out of the loading docks, I keep thinking of that Metal Gear Rising song "Red Sun". Does anyone else think this???
Landings still makes no sense. Structurally, those ships would literally disintegrate inside a gravity well during that maneuver. The ISV is a powerful, but also very fragile craft optimized for you know, zero gravity. They could have come up with a far more plausible, and still dramatic looking landing sequence, but what we see there, is just ridiculous and over the top. The environmental destruction shown would cause so many problems for the landing force as well, but go with it anyhow..... The other thing I have to ask, is, where did the RDA even test these landings. On earth? I doubt that. Venus. Noooo. Mars? Atmosphere too thin and gravity too low to accurately simulate Pandora.
While I did have some reservations that these engines while in vacuum would work without issues. Having them dip into an atmosphere even at the 1/8th G of pandora it still would just get obliterated by the atomic bomb like thrust it constantly emits let alone just cook anyone in the landers unless these things had some impressive shielding and well didn’t sink in the radioactive lava. I mean quite honestly this would be an absolutely devastating weapon if all you did is have several of these ships just slowly hovering and moving across the planet surface it would just destroy everything and literally nothing could stop them.
The script for this film baffles me. It begins with this sequence where they show the destructive capabilities of this landing and then later on the general talks about how they can't destroy the tree where Jake is hiding. Just land an ISV there, duh..
When i saw this i was just wondering how could these ships have the structural integrity to complete such a maneuver. The mass on those ships must be insane and with gravity that would create a huge downward force at thr bottom of the ship, and these massive engines creating a huge upward force at the top of the ship. Unobtanium, surely.
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If World of Warships is sponsoring you guys they must be working on some new Soviet tech tree.
No gushing over the radiators?
2 minutes of ads on 5 min videos are starting to be a bit much. Everyone gets that you need sponsors, but this is becoming umwatchable rapidly.
it is possible to skip past an ad...@@r.gletscher5162
@@r.gletscher5162 my beef is the "five classes" thing. There's either only three, Destroyers, Cruisers and BattleShips. Or two: Aircraft Carriers and Submarines.
I can imagine the meeting where the RDA decided to land ISV's
"Could we save money by landing an ISV so we don't have to use Valkyries?"
"It would annihilate the landing zone."
"That would save us even _more_ money!"
Another large reason is simply: we can't make a base slowly like last time because the Na'vi and Pandora would destroy it too quickly.
So creating a huge burned/radioactive wasteland to keep out the pandoran life is another bonus
@@viken3368 you'll be getting a bonus in your RDA monthly salary, keep the good ideas coming! 😂😂
Seriously, was there _any_ downside to this plan from a management perspective?
Make sense if you think about it
@@viken3368Engineer: "But that would make the area inhospitable for us as well!"
@@juimymary9951 dammit, who invited engineers to our corporate meeting? 😂
It's probably a good point, which some other comments have addressed with suggestions of burning an excessively hydrogen rich fuel mix during landing (I'm not an engineer, so I'm not sure that this would work, but it sounds great)
Leave those minor technical details to the boffins downstairs
any sense of morality leaving my body the moment the humans have cool spaceships
It's OK, the series never intended to have an honest and thought-provoking discussion anyway.
Humanity first!
Humanity first!
No gushing over the radiators?
When I saw this in the theater, the first thing that came to my mind, was feelings of absolute disgust, because you know it just showed that no matter what the RDA does not care about the planet itself.
But at the same time, I also felt that it was a great way of doing visual storytelling. In the first movie, we saw the giant open pit mines that were being created and then of course, there is the famous or infamous, depending on your way of thinking event, where they literally blew down home tree. And then, of course, the small little vineyard, where one of those robotic bulldozers trampled over a fairly Sacred Location.
And it just goes to show that the forces of the RDA literally have no regard for the planet. It’s self. But then again, if I remember correctly, Mr. Cameron essentially has modeled them after basically corporate greed.
@@ultrajdCameron basically wants you to hate the RDA, he doesn’t want an honest discussion or complex narrative with deep moral conundrums about taking the resources of a healthy fledgling species and using them to keep your own old and suffering species alive.
And if he doesn’t want that then I‘ll have to just disagree with him and side with the RDA regardless.
It's possible that the first modules are deliberately flying too low in order to save on munitions shipments- they have to clear the forest anyway, and an engines thrust output is proportional to it's effectiveness as a weapon. So drop the first one in hot, then crane down the second as they pull back up into orbit.
i thought they were clearing the forest on purpose when i first saw it ngl
That makes sense. No reason an engine that powerful can't hold the craft in an extremely low orbit for a short period. The payload is craned down to the surface. The payload module itself is equipped with small thrusters to keep it stable as it descends.
There's an Isaac Asimov story about a peaceful civilization that gets invaded by militant types only to fairly quickly win by pointing their powerful space engine technology at the enemy and turning it on. The point of the story was that in space, the difference between "propulsion" and "weapon" is mostly in the labeling.
@@michaelramon2411not really quites. It's not JUST a difference in labeling, it's also a difference in optimization of the hardware. You optimize a weapon for accuracy and muzzle velocity, maybe rate of fire. You optimize a drive system exclusively for maximum recoil at minimum payload.
@@michaelramon2411 I think you mean Larry Niven.
I audibly gasped in the theater during this scene, and my dad gave me a funny look. I'm a nerd okay, and a semi-realistic space landing gets me excited.
Same
I've waited so long for this scene to get uploaded here on RUclips yo I can watch it a 100times more.
I started shouting the second they looked up and saw the engines so yeah I know how you feel lol
Seconded, this was just jaw dropping in its execution.
Don't lose your nerd card when you get older. Believe me, whatever it is it's not worth losing your nerd card over.
“Anti-Matter’em from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure.”
Navi
Species Rights : Undesirables.
This species will be *purged*
The "Manifest Destiny" lol. I see Avatar 2 is continuing the first film's proud tradition of having a script that about as subtle as being smacked over the head while being yelled at.
Nothin' wrong with a little Manifest Destiny. SOMEBODY has to put the blue furries in their place.
@@alaskamark4562if they are too dumb to take the carrot we will hit 'em with the stick
Manifest Based
James Cameron likes it subtle
"I know writers who use subtext and they're all cowards!" - Garth Marenghi
This takes _clearing the L Z_ to a whole 'nother level.
Creating the LZ lmao
Pilot 1 : where do we drop , everything is crawling
General XYZ: Can’t you just Orbital bombardment it or launch Rocks or something from orbit or send in Valkyrie’s on bombing runs
Admiral : ISV 1 to ISV 5 delay braking burn till stratosphere and manoeuver to hover at 20 km altitude for about a 10 mins and detach the Landing forces Modules slings on my mark
General : what do ya mea… Holy Fuc, Sht sht sht . My eyes Aaaghh
Takes hot LZ to another level
So regarding the laser sail I don't think its been forgotten. I think RDA has just built even more lasers around Earth to push more (or bigger) ISVs out to alpha centauri. Part of the reason RDA needs the space elevator (good spot by the way) is to build another set of lasers in orbit of Pandora to break a new wave of massive engineless ISVs (no need for heavy antimatter engines, more mass for cryobeds and cargo). Also the fact its called a sling load rather than a sky crane might be because the ISVs can also come down and pick stuff up using the same system.
Sky crane would be fine in both cases too.
"Engineless ISVs". That gives me the heebie-jeebies on behalf of the Panodorans. The RDA would have constant arrivals of pure cargo and colonists.
So they basically don't need unobtanium anymore?
I love the technology shown off in Avatar and Avatar 2, but the concepts involved are just impossible to scale up to much so fast. The RDA would need to build an additional nine laser batteries capable of outputting power comparable to the sun.
@@RobertDeVriesII Anti-matter containment opens a lot of doors, like cheap energy via antimatter catalyzed fusion. Human space infrastructure is likely nearly directly proportional to the amount of unobtanium they get off of Pandora.
"Hey guys the humans are back!!"
"What makes you say tha-" *Gets vaporised*
Those ISVs and their Valkyrie Shuttles are the true stars of the franchise... gosh I love them....
I'm more a fan of the atmospheric craft myself, the Scorpions, Samsons, and Kestrels, but the Valkyrie is a sweet shuttle design too.
@@VegetaLF7 I agree, got to love me a VTOL SSTO
My heart has been stolen by the Sea Dragon. Doesn't matter if your maximum altitude is fifty meters if you look that good.
@@mattrobson3603 I agree
I love the Scorpions too
They’re so cool
"Oh Yeah! Did I mention that the lead ISV for the invasion was called the Manifest Destiny?"
James Cameron thinks that subtlety is for cowards.
Just waiting now for the S.S. Trail of Tears, the Last Ghost Dance, and the Yes We Know We Are The Bad Guys to touch down for Avatar 3.
The story would have been better if they had made both sides sympathetic (human colonists desperate for a new home vs Na'vi natives trying to hold onto it for themselves. More depth vs cartoon villains.
@@randlebrowne2048 Not every film has to have grey morality.
Also, he made cartoon villains and people still genuinely argue that they were totally in the right.
@@somdudewillson Because they are. Humanity first, forever and always
@@somdudewillson humanity first my guy, if it aint from Shit Outa Luck III it's game
Seeing that in IMAX 3D was totally worth it. The devastation was exactly what the sky people return represented and the landing and technology were suprisingly realistic for a mainstream movie.
I need detailed breakdowns of every vehicle, structure and weapon in Avatar 2, there were dozens of amazing designs!
Yes, need more info on the S-76 WIGE
Hope you got the "Visual Dictionary" for the movie then! It has a bunch of in-depth descriptions and close ups of machinery, including the landing module.
Since you mentioned that the engines have a hydrogen afterburner I think they just turned down the power and started dumping as much hydrogen as possible into the engines to keep enough thrust while making the exhaust juuust cool enough not to weld the landing modules to the ground. That would of course make the engines very inefficient but thats ok since each ISV only has to do one landing/takeoff before getting refueled.
And even if it is10x less efficient compared to normal, if we say the landing takes 1 day of continous thrust that would add 10 days of "normal" runtime. when it already has fuel for ~180 days it's not too much weight to reduce to reach the required fuel savings
Aha, not bad
I know the message of the movies, but the ISVs make it hard to root for anyone else but RDA and it's shiny toys
fr tho 🤣
I actually got the feeling that the makers realized after the first movie that the RDA was far too cool, so they made them extra evil in the second movie. I had a discussion with one of my friends before watching Avatar 2 on how rootable the humans are. In the first movie, they kinda were in a moral grey zone, exploiting resources and killing natives, but retaliating only because provokated and mining those resources only because they are direly needed at home, with families, friends and humankind back at home they need to worry about.
Meanwhile in the second movie I feel they became a bit too "generically" evil if you know what I mean. Just killing because they are greedy and want to live forever and stuff. I hope they don't make them any more evil just for the sake of it in the following movies though, I want to go back to being pro-RDA again.
@@scifidino5022Just be evil.
The evil guys get cookies.
@@scifidino5022 To be fair, if humans found some way to atain imortallity I can guarantee they would wipe out how many sentient creatures as needed. (just look at the amount of people dead from oil conflicts)
@@scifidino5022Earth became uninhabitable in the background which is why the RDA invested so much into the 2nd wave of colonization. It’s not an invasion, it’s refugees.
@@jack727dave5it is an invasion.
Those ginormous engines had the entire cinema shaking from the bass it was absolute insanity
I'd like to point out that a LOT of science fiction franchises have explicit rules about using space based propulsion in a planetary atmosphere. Some universes out right state that using space based propulsion in atmosphere is war crime. I think this counts.
O yeah, Im certain this is illegal but looking at circumstances I dont know
Navi arent people so war crimes dont apply to them and frankly getting charged is only a concern if you lose
@@AlphaKnight-hg2jq even if they arent, you cant just burn up a planets atmosphere, climate, and environment just to land on the surface really cool.
@@ashleysmith9755 Yeah well uh who's gonna stop us lol?
get rekt ayys
"It's not a war crime the first time"
"Manifest Destiny"
Trying to hit the audience with force of reentry there.
I may be on the other end of the spectrum, but I was honestly horrified when that scene took place.
Granted that’s how it would work, but understanding the whole process, they essentially glassed hectares of land in the process and left it irradiated for some time after from those exhaust plumes.
They knew what they where doing, and turned a spindly cargo transport vessel in to a horrifyingly effective beachhead vessel.
Horror + Time + Shiny toys = Coolness, it's just how it works.
If the blue monkeys didn't want their planet glassed they should have given us the rock we wanted!!! /s
@@josem.unzueta1452The monkeys should blame Jake for being a Simp and not telling them why they are chopping down trees.
thing of it is, I have my doubts RDA considered the consequences to the crew in the less shielded segments. If Cameron is planning well, the radiation injuries to this first wave of outright colonials is going to cause loyalty issues within RDAs rank and file.
Adapt and overcome.
This is the equivalent of when Amos friend light up the epstein drive during atmospheric launch and the whole place got completely wipe by the sheer might of the drive plume
# Starship B7 S24 Start in this Year, with the Crater under the Startpad 😉
when i watched the movie I was under the impression that theres an unshown time delay between the ISV arrivals and then the development of the new base/city. I figured it was probably months and months which could maybe give time for a cleanup crew to sterilise any residual health issues before the robots began construction. Consider that the ground isnt blasted perfectly flat yet the city itself sits on an utterly flat featureless circle so alot of work went into the ground prep between arrival and city
The time delay is about a year in universe time
You can actually see the RDA bulldozers going to work basically right after landing
I've heard of scorched land tactics, but ain't that supposed to be done on retreat and not arrival?
Well, the point of those is to deny your enemy resources, and if the RDA isn't using the forests for resources and the Na'vi are, then I think it still makes sense. (You were probably joking though)
When you gotta set a _tone._ 😉
You can see something similsr for some Vietnam era US FOBs
@@nahuelleandroarroyo Daisy Cutters FTW. 😁
@@nahuelleandroarroyo I remember a history class talking about how a young George Washington messed up by making a hasty fort without cutting down enough of the surrounding forests, so clearing the area around a fortress/castle/base to provide better visibility/eliminate cover has definitely been standard protocol for centuries if not millenia.
"Manifest destiny" subtle james, subtle
What bothered me about the ISV skycrane landing scene is that it would definitely melt the engines. Realistic high-ISP engine concepts like the antimatter engines of the ISV rely on a vacuum gap between the exhaust and the components of the engine, usually maintained with powerful magnetic fields holding the exhaust plasma in place. A plume that hot would turn every material known to man to plasma instantaneously, but radiation is slow enough at transferring heat between the plume and the engine components that a cooling loop can handle the heat that does make it across the gap. Maintaining that vacuum gap is pretty simple in space since space is conveniently a vacuum. Not so on a planet like Pandora, that gap will fill with air and that air will conduct heat from the plume to the engine and it will explode.
I've thought a lot about how this can be avoided. The obvious possibility is that the ISV engines work at a lower temperature in atmosphere, but that would also reduce the specific impulse to be optimistically a few times better than a chemical rocket and I doubt the ISVs have the fuel for that. But the propellent need not be internally stored, maybe these next-gen ISV engines have air intakes and they just use the antimatter to heat the air before shooting it out as exhaust. That could be very efficient. Though neither of these options would cause the destruction seen in the movie, the ground destruction would be more comparable to that caused by the first Starship launch at worst.
A far more on-brand solution would be if they found some quasi-magical material on Pandora that can withstand comically absurd temperatures without melting, and they built the ISV combustion chambers and nozzles out of that. And to obtain it they had to genocide some cute intelligent creature that lives in a volcano, or something.
Even during normal operation, the ISV will consume all of it, leaving behind the return antihydrogen in order to reduce its mass as much as possible. Hydrogen that can be procured locally will be collected by descending to Polyphemus with the Valkyrie Shuttle, so there is no problem even if the hydrogen in the tank is used up.
They do have such a « magical material », and that is unobtainium. It is said that it could solve the energy crisis on earth but since no specific explaination is given, we can reasonably think it has several « amazing » properties.
@@andreameertAlthough unobtanium is a room-temperature superconducting material, it loses its magnetism when exposed to high temperatures, so it is actively cooled with liquid helium. The gist of this story is to lower the plume temperature by increasing the mixture ratio of hydrogen reacting with antihydrogen in order to protect the ship from the heat transfer of the insane plume temperature during atmospheric descent. If that happens, the fuel efficiency will be as bad as that of a chemical rocket, so he is concerned about the amount of hydrogen remaining.
Morality and realism aside the RDA’s machinery and equipment and architecture is some of the most badass I’ve seen in fiction
Yeah James Cameron is many things, but subtle isn't one of them.
Regarding the landing though: I've seen it mentioned that if the ISVs can adjust the ratio for the afterburners, which seems reasonable, then for those few moments in the actual atmosphere (and since they're going straight down and up they'll be in the atmosphere for the shortest possible time) they can push the thrust mass to as hydrogen-rich as it'll go and minimize both the radiation and the heat at the momentary cost of engine efficiency. Still more than enough to glass the landing zone.
Still have a gripe with the fact that they used a space-exclusive vehicle that is held together by sheer tensile strength dangle in the dense Pandoran atmosphere whose flex (even ignoring the shockwaves produced by the engines) would literally mangle it.
Besides the obvious fact that the landing zone looked to 'solid' (should be melted like you said and not with still visible tree stumps), I found it incredibly ridiculous that amongst the mechs, there were guys on foot!
When I first saw them decelerating I internally burst in joy, because it was the first time we’ve seen somewhat realistic depiction of near lightspeed travel. In order to go fast you need to accelerate a lot and then brake a lot - and you do the braking by reversing acceleration - something we don’t really see in most blockbuster sci-fis.
Then the landing part kinda felt kinda off, because as mentioned, the destruction of the planets surface would be incomprehensible.
I can see how this makes sense, since the pandoran jungle is so thick with huge (way bigger) trees than here on Earth, it's only natural that they use the engine plume as an incineration device, since they would have to clear out the forests anyway, why not using the massive matter-antimatter engine? It saves other resources that can be used for base building and construction, also ammunition and weapons, i also like how they depicted the firestorm as an equivalent to a nuclear bomb.
Cameron may be rumored to be a difficult person to work with, and there was room for Jack on the door, but one thing his movies always nail is little details like this that look awesome.
Jack tried to get on, and the door nearly sank, so he decided not to try again. Mythbusters and Cameron tested it, and it would've worked if they had stuck her life vest underneath.
If, y'know, either of them had been capable of thinking of that while soaked in icewater and freezing to death. Much less executing the plan.
They nail the little details like phones to a wall
One thing I will always stand by was that both Jack and Rose could not have survived on the board.
While there was room on the board, if both of them had gotten on the board would have been partially submerged into water and killed both of them with Hypothermia.
@@EGRJ I will never understand the "Jack would have fit" crowd. *The film establishes that the door will not support both people* ! What other film history do we want to revise for no reason? How about "Rick could have gotten on the plane, because Laszlo was polyamorous", or "The Man with No Name was actually named Clarence"?
I love the detail that Cameron put in explaining why the humans can’t use fixed wing aircraft. Because a single bomber would be capable of forcing the Navi to surrender in less than a week.
Regarding the waves bit. I imagine the first landings are the impressive ISV drops, which also clear (by way of glassing, effectively) where Bridgehead will be, and the follow-on construction stuff is brought down more conventionally.
On them arriving at the same time, they were repelled once, so they want to bring in a larger force. So they just have the ones further ahead burn early on the trip, so they all arrive at almost the same time, ensuring that they have the number that they need
Somewhere in some when the God Emperor smiled on this day.
This video is great as usual. But with most things in Avatar it just makes me think the human's are even cooler.
No, we’re just the ones with high technology for once. We just use it for comparative evil
Still cool though
@@BrowncoatGofAZIf ensuring the survival of humanity is evil, then why be good?
@@AnonD38 and the only way to ensure our survival is to invade another planet with hostile biology and wipe out the indigenous sentient population?
The only reason we’re here is for the plot. That or the RDA is incompetent and greedy.
@@AnonD38 Is it really ensuring survival and not endless growth?
4:40 if pandora is tidally locked (which is most likely is) then it is possible to construct a space elevator to a lagrange point rather than geostationairy orbit. this is also how we can make a space elevator on earth's moon
I would suggest that the ISVs arriving simultaneously can probably be explained by accounting for the likelyhood that RDA A) has more than one laser to propel them with, B) they could have used their antimatter engines to boost them along, and C) it’s highly likely that they weren’t launched from Earth. Probably they were launched from the Moon or Mars, enabling them to use gravity assists to accelerate onto the proper trajectory before the lasers (probably positioned in the outer solar system) had to be used.
The "Visual Dictionary" on Way of Water has a large, detailed view of that landing module. It mentions "radiation shielding to protect the crew during travel as well as the engines radiation on entry"! You are not the first having thought of that potential problem :) And they even mention and show heat radiators to regulate temperature.
The scene looks nice, but the destruction is nowhere near of what it should be, i think book INVINCIBLE by Stanisław Lem encapsulates such orbital landing sequence of a gigantic ship perfectly, where he describes the complete obliteration of considerable portion of the land around the ship and complete glassing and turning it to magma. The book in general i think would be an amazing topic for one of your vids regarding space tech, there is an amazing visual novel for it too which creates a really nice setting appropriate designs for the lead ship and overall tech portrayed.
It seems hard to judge what destruction engines actually cause. I remember that the moon lander engineers had concerns like that as well, but eventually it was determined that it would not be problematic.
They are making that into a game. Invincible, that is. My favorite book, where everybody is profesional, responsible adult, like the crew of such a Behemot should be. It was such a fresh air, after usual Hollywood nonsense.
@@deejay554 they are making it into a game that doesn’t seem to have much in common with the book aside the setting, it won’t be a book adaptation and I’m not entirely convinced it will stand up to amazing scrutiny of Lem’s visions.
@@Volke_ invincible and Expanse books ruined sf for me :) cant stand space magic Hollywood stupidity anymore :)
@@deejay554 space magic still has its own charm, but Yeah, realistic sci-fi is so much better, when it is grounded, but properly grounded, not just pretending to be.
In the finale, I hope Cameron provides budget for more action from the RDA’s new toys. A land, air AND sea battle against Bridgehead would be a spectacle of the ages!
Yeah with a treeline pushed that far away the Navi would have to commandeer large crafts like Dragon gunships themselves to make that happen.
Which would be ultra sick.
Sully must regret not hiding a bomb on the shuttle that he allowed to leave at the end of the first movie.
Give it a timer to go off while the ISV is leaving the system or even approaching relativistic velocities to ensure a kill. Or just when it's first docked with the ISV to hopefully prevent a message getting back to Earth.
Without any warning the ship will be assumed lost and the next ship arriving will be off guard and land it's shuttle as usual, as long as the charade can be maintained by the mining site.
Nah, they‘d know something was off.
It takes days to weeks for the ISV to get from the edge of the solar system to Pandora.
They‘d be close enough for delayed radio communication or even delayed laser communication.
If they got 0 signs of life from RDA HQ on Pandora they‘d find that incredibly suspicious.
Well if you ask me the only logical premise for a sequal to the original movie was one where the Pandorans are desperatly reverse enginering Human technology and trying to negotiate control of the mining on Pandora and an export agreement with Humans in exhcange for yet more technology. You know the thing that any sensible civilization would do to try to preserve itself in the face of a rapacious and technologically advanced power and what Native Tribes actually did because they weren't ignorant Blue monekys that dance in trees and refuse to so much as touch the superior technology being weilded against them as they sit just wishing that the enemy will never come back after he's been given a mere bloody nose by throwing wave after wave of your best warriors at them in victory so bloody that it should be called Phyric. I don't know what Avatar insults more, native peoples or the audiances inteligence.
@@kennethferland5579 exactly, if RDA wanted to ensure they could get the material unopposed they could've dropped a few asteroids onto the major navi settlements which they would have had no way to defend against with their bows and animals.
I completely missed that the things holding the cables up were the actual ISVs when watching the movie (twice), thought it was just some sub-craft. I guess it didn't enter my mind precisely because of the reasons mentioned in the video - the landings were brutal, but not quite brutal enough for what interstellar drives should do to the planet.
I can’t wait to see the RDA in Avatar 3. They are my favourite faction
Your favorites are the borderline fascist, colonizing imperialists? What are you, american?
Yea, the humans are just way cooler and are definitely the heroes in my imagination.
RDA all the way!
Wait until Sigourney Weaver's character uses one of the Crab Mechs
fuck the natives. RDA all the way!
In the ad read I thought you said World Of Warship had "clown battles" which is now something I want.
I really love it when media doesn't shy away from how absolutely bonkers the energy levels of space flight, and combat are, especially when they have established lore (or on screen presentation) describing said energy.
It was always such a let down when Star Trek ships blast away at each other with apocalyptic level weapons, only to fly away without a scratch. Sure shields can hand wave away damage, but I lost count of the number of times that torpedoes with antimatter warheads, more powerful than the most powerful nukes of today impacted unshielded ships and did not completely obliterate them. Star Wars too, a star destroyer's turbo lasers are shown instantly vaporizing asteroids of various sizes, but the beat up hunk of rust and dreams that is the Millennium Falcon eats at least half a dozen shots directly to the hull before being mildly inconvenienced and forced to try something else.
The Expanse does a pretty good job of depicting their weapons realistically, at least in terms of the damage that could be done to a space vehicle, if not the exact physics of high velocity impacts and nuclear detonations, but outside of that it is super rare for weapons to be displayed actually doing the damage that they are purportedly able to do, let alone drives systems being given any thought at all. I do love the chase scene between the Roci and the Azure Dragon where the Dragon crew tries to use their drive plume as a weapon though.
Makes the whole premise that Earth is uninhabitable a bit ridiculous.
Definitely the scene that got my ears to prick up the most. Seening the ships causing down towards the planet I straight sat up and yelled "are they landing!?"
The "Manifest Destiny"? Was it's sistership "White man's burden"?
"Kill de Boer"
Might as well have named one of them the Jebediah Springfield at this point.
Don't be ridiculous... the company is speciesist not racist.
Nah, its "Art of the Deal"
@@adambielen8996 You're absolutely right. It would have to be "Humanity's Burden" or something like that.
I saw these small tubes protruding from the Valkyrie boarding shafts. Those are probably the cockpits since there's no rotating axle and no corridor connecting the Valkyries to the landing module, just the winch. The shuttles were probably mainly cargo, with the pilots being waking crew since the cryosleep bunks are probably in the landing module as well. It also explains how the ship goes back to orbit after detaching the landing module.
Say what you will about the movies and their plots, I absolutely love the worldbuilding and props from the rifles to the spaceships.
Maybe those ISV's were designed specifically for planetary entry.
I would imagine that the ISV's dropped their pods at different spots but the ones that didn't land at bridgehead were loaded with shuttles/transports and they just moved to bridgehead after the landing.
Man. I was hoping you'd do more topics on Avatar 2! Especially the ISVs!
Can't wait for more videos around the tech of Avatar 2!
Having those vessels enter the atmosphere and bombard the surface with their antimatter catalyzed fusion exhaust is a pure evil act that I 100% believe humans would do to an inhabited world.
This is not evil, this is just efficient. Why fight on the ground when you can just use your tech advantage and clear the LZ right away?
Even though they aren't space vehicles, I would love a breakdown of the AT-101 Seawasp, the SA-9 Kestrel Gunship and the S-76 SeaDragon. They're such cool-ass RDA vehicles.
I was wondering how this worked with the engines, and now I know it just... can't? Like, wouldn't the radiation on the ground be pretty bad for a while, making construction really delayed?
They would probably move and start construction elsewhere at first.
@@ewanlee6337 That'd make the most sense, yeah. Those suits and vehicles would need some serious radiation protection for the trek, though.
I was confused by the radiation bit. What radiation? Yeah, the antimatter engines generate a lot of radiation. Radiation is a very spicy invincible light beam. When the engines are off, the radiation beam is off. Literally zero radiation from the engines then. Do the engines create some radioactive isotopes that get thrown around?
@@TealJosh The ground absorbs the rads and becomes new isotopes which need to be scraped off and moved elsewhere. Gamma splits the atomic shells and creates cascades of other particle types which settle back into the rock layers still left over from exhaust wash and turns them radioactive.
@@TealJosh I was under the impression that the matter-antimatter annihilation was then used as heat exhaust thrust, so the fire emitted from the engines is what's radioactive. The radiation is then washed over the ground as the heat exhaust from the annihilation keeps the whole engine assembly aloft.
Its always heart warming when the good guys land
My favourite cinema moment of all time. Shock and awe describes it perfectly.
The only thought i had is "you could end the movie right here - the entire moon now has terminal stage cancer"; It is actually funny how everyone remembers the engines are annihilation drives (no pun intended), and then just sends them into the atmosphere, as if the gamma-ray emissions equivalent to those of a star, two per ship each, would not harm the habitability of Pandora in any way, whilst in reality even one ISV just moving into orbit with plumes pointed at the moon would turn it into an irradiated desert
I kinda Imagine that is the way they set up a new city on Pandora, That big cargo module probably contains everything needed to setup a new city and the powerful engines of the ships make sure that the area around it is clear. City gets build by robots in the landed modules and recoirces of pandora. Later supplies from earth to the city will be done by shuttles
i always thought the plums sterilized the area for the building to instantly be started after the ship leaves the atmosphere. This also gives a deadzone perimeter much like you see in Bridgehead city. looks like was built directly where a landing was.
Yes, they did it this way, because now they know that Eywa can attack with fauna.
Yeah, plot armour was really strong in that movie.
Great video by the way. I thoroughly enjoyed it. 👍💪
Despite the 16km diameter of the laser sail, that’s a really small solid angle if the laser is inside Earth orbit out of the ecliptic. Like I’ve commented before, doing photon wavelength shifting and concentration to make a solar collector powered laser is more energy efficient than going through electricity to then get photons again in the laser. I think they could have launched them in a stagger and converged but probably because berthing and provisioning them fully simultaneously sounds like logistics overload for the RDA who’s been operating on a cycle for so long and Earth being plot point resource poor.
Proton-Antiproton annihilation energy is in the GeV range which renders most matter transparent and while any interaction is full of a pooptonne of particles spraying out, they likewise have very low interaction probabilities. I’d say it’d be nasty off of shear scale of reactions in the drives but the dose might be comparable to the interstellar one, though it would be acute vs. chronic.
Side note, if you haven’t read “Mote in God’s Eye” they also have a laser sail powered interstellar ship but it uses solar wind braking (perhaps because it’s dramatically lower mass).
Everyone in the Cinema was cheering during this scene.
Reminds me of a meme I saw recently.
Devil: "you must consider collateral damage and plan accordingly"
Douglas MacArthur: "Sea of irradiated cobalt"
This scene was probably one of the best moment I had in a cinema, the 3D was actually very good and the sound surround was so powerful
please make some avatar 2 vehicle breakdowns
What little information, all theoretical since we don’t have one, is that the radiation being lost in mater anti mater reaction are Neutrinos and the rest are photos. Since the photos are being absorbed in the hydrogen after burners then the radiation these things are giving off is primarily leftover photos(which gamma will not last longer then 10^-12 seconds),hydrogen, and what ever atoms get kicked up from the exhaust plume.
So it’s probably not actually that radioactive, but as hot as fresh cooled lava.
2:00
Well, it would kinda make sense to have them all arrive at the same time, even though they had to depart at quite different times, waiting for their place in the queue.
You don't want to have one ship hit the other one with the relativistic engine jet, which is what would probably happen if one were to lag behind the other one
I mean... couldnt they just slow down at different rates? One start their break burn at lets say 50% early, next craft 60% etc. And end up in a nice group? Would ofcourse mean the crew would not be at 1g but... its a thought
The crew would be in cryosleep.
So, doesn’t really matter too much.
@@AnonD38 no not the crew. The ISVs had, as i recall, 3 crew rotations that would stay awake during flight. They live in the habs with artificial gravity and would take care of maintenence and waking up the passenger once the tour is over.
@@Ph33NIXx Would they go in and out of cryo-sleep?
@@AnonD38 yeah i think its one shift awake at the time.. but one would be awake. Its been a while since i read the lorebook. I can go dig it up if you want?
@@Ph33NIXx I‘d imagine it works
like:
shift 1 - shift 2 - shift 3
work - sleep - sleep
sleep - work - sleep
sleep - sleep - work
Is this the most prominent media example of space engines just getting raw deliberate weaponized use?
I mean if you want to ensure the locals won't be messing with your landing troopers that is definitely one way to handle them. And giving them a larger area to work with.
This scene in the theater was really cool, although I did think the ISV landing was a bit stupid, which you described the reasons for pretty well.
This sequence was the wet dream of every sci/fi nerd
5:02 I wonder if any of the RDA invasion fleet's personnel were native americans. I'd be curious to see what they thought of that name.
They probably wouldn’t care?
The survival of humanity is on the line, they got way more important things to worry about rather than "hmmm does this name offend me?"
I would think they would quietly not allow Native Americans to join. Come up with some convenient reasons to turn then down. The moment a Native American hears we are strip mining an indigenous culture's sacred locations for minerals and causing horrific environmental devastation in the process... "This is sounding waaaay tooo familiar!" Or in the case of the second movie, killing a very sentient life form to steal their brain juice so rich people can live forever.
I imagine RDA has a total news black out on anything that happens on Pandora.
I do think having humans try and colonize a planet where they can't even breathe the air for a few seconds is really stupid though. If we have the means to terraform Pandora (which would likely destroy the ecosystem in the process) versus earth. I think terraforming earth to a more livable condition would be easier. About the only thing that would make any real sense is have humans just transfer their consciousness to vat grown na'avi and colonize the planet that way. But then would we be human any longer?
Well I'm pretty sure a majority of modern Native Americans are at least partially white, soooo...
"I'm just following half my ancestors' time-honored traditions, YEE HAW!"
In Nivens books the fusion exhaust is used as a weapons along with gravity control .
Really Great cgi 😊
This is the planet where they mine unobtainium, which floats mountains in the air. Any reason they couldn't refine enough of the stuff to make an anti-weight for a _short_ space elevator to a station in low Pandora orbit?
Stop asking logical questions!
James Cameron isn't the only one working on this movie, if 100 other experts working on the movie decided to make it this way, it's probably intended to be this way.
And that was only the initial landing, burning everything to assert dominance to establish a ground for base, surely they dont use ISVs after that to burn everything just to deliver some building materials, staff members, supplies.
@@revolverswitch It wasn't a critique, just an idea for a feature in the _next_ movie.
I feel like thrust from craft that are landing/taking off is one of those things that Sci fi is particularly prone to ignore.
Other than direct anti-gravity technology I'm not really clear on how you ever have landing craft bouncing up and down to planets so easily.
Although I suppose mass effect gets a bit of a pass because if you can reduce something's mass then presumably you need only very small engines.
@@BigFormula93 *Isaac Arthur has entered the chat*
@@BigFormula93
They're underused because they're extremely vulnerable. Space elevator can't move out of the way of an orbital debree, or imagine its land part being hit by a hurricane?
@@BigFormula93
1. Maybe you could enlighten me then how, say, a space elevator will move out of the way of a hurricane? Or how it would be immune to it, if even ordinary tiny skyscrappers need to account for the wind pressure in the arrea?
2. They aren't used in fiction because it's easier to throw in magic technology that allows you to get up in your small sleek spaceship and dart for the stars from the landing pad in one continous cinematic shot. There's no mystery here.
3. yeah, and those other structures are either even less possible than a space elevator, or, like the Lofstrom's loop, aren't immune to extreme weather either.
I love it when the good guys show up
"burning up" is a function of aerobraking to go from orbital velocity to a slower one where you stop "missing" the planet as you fall. normally used because of that dang rocket equation and the fact that we don't have infinitely powerful thrust with infinitely light fuel. IF YOU DO tho, you could be coming down at a leisurely 15mph or whatever other feather like velocity you want... friction burning from air need not apply.
When I see those ISVs land and the construction crew come out of the loading docks, I keep thinking of that Metal Gear Rising song "Red Sun". Does anyone else think this???
I love it when the heroes make an epic entrance.
As a humanity fan I absolutely love this scene. It was cool asf
Who needs Agent Orange when you have anti-protons!
Those engines look so cool and the plumes like the flame of an oxy-acetylene torch
The dozers coming out gets me every time
Landings still makes no sense. Structurally, those ships would literally disintegrate inside a gravity well during that maneuver. The ISV is a powerful, but also very fragile craft optimized for you know, zero gravity. They could have come up with a far more plausible, and still dramatic looking landing sequence, but what we see there, is just ridiculous and over the top. The environmental destruction shown would cause so many problems for the landing force as well, but go with it anyhow.....
The other thing I have to ask, is, where did the RDA even test these landings. On earth? I doubt that. Venus. Noooo. Mars? Atmosphere too thin and gravity too low to accurately simulate Pandora.
The RDA out there teaching the planetary ecosystem the Kinzi lesson from Ringworld XD
Bro naming the lead "Manifest Destiny" is fucking savage
The nice thing about being in atmosphere is that the engines radiators would have extra efficiency.
take that nature
While I did have some reservations that these engines while in vacuum would work without issues. Having them dip into an atmosphere even at the 1/8th G of pandora it still would just get obliterated by the atomic bomb like thrust it constantly emits let alone just cook anyone in the landers unless these things had some impressive shielding and well didn’t sink in the radioactive lava.
I mean quite honestly this would be an absolutely devastating weapon if all you did is have several of these ships just slowly hovering and moving across the planet surface it would just destroy everything and literally nothing could stop them.
The humans almost went full 40K EXTERMINATUS - for a LANDING OP!!!
THE EMPEROR PROTECTS!!!! 😆
The script for this film baffles me. It begins with this sequence where they show the destructive capabilities of this landing and then later on the general talks about how they can't destroy the tree where Jake is hiding. Just land an ISV there, duh..
If I could get the movie but it's just all cool tech and visuals without the snoozer of a story I'd be all in.
A space elevator in Avatar 3 would be INSANE, the fact it's 2 more years before the movie is released is soul crushing
When i saw this i was just wondering how could these ships have the structural integrity to complete such a maneuver. The mass on those ships must be insane and with gravity that would create a huge downward force at thr bottom of the ship, and these massive engines creating a huge upward force at the top of the ship.
Unobtanium, surely.
Landing, AND THE BIGGEST FU to any enemy near. 10/10 style points.
The stupidity of this scene is insane. The ship would have completly destroyed themselves trying to do this.
Yeah this was the highlight of the film for me, got chills watching it both times