Nuclear Weapons and Arachnos

Yeah but that technically applies to every single piece of technology in the superhero universe. heck in the case of Batman it only required a handgun.

Dunno, lemme get back to you when Positron gets off his butt and puts his brains into providing cheap, nigh limitless power for the planet.

okay, in all seriousness, I suppose that is a good point. A super hero story I've been drafting is set in an alternate 1960's in a world where "Super powers are everyday but heroes are rare" and super powers have been around since the dawn of time (Epic of Gilgamesh? Legend of Heracles? The Ulster Cycle? They're some of the best historical documentation on early metahumans!) and part of the point of it is that while super powers are not bad, it's just the question of "is it really wise for everyone to have them?"
The answer being "not without significant enlightment" since what ends up happening is that while you have wonderful things like cybernetic limbs, virtually free health care, and gene therapy to help people survive diseases that would kill us in our world, there's naturally a significant number of people who abuse the advances in science and the existence of magic to their own ends.

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow City of Heroes is a game about freedom of expression and variety of experiences far more so than it is about representing any one theme, topic or genre.

In his defense, there's more than one city on this planet.

Anti-matter can cheat and claim his reactor is all that because they've genocided away the 99% of their planet, but his power plant isn't really that much more of an accomplishment.

Oh, I know, but if one reactor, built with the resources of a half-dead world can power the eastern seaboard of North America, just imagine what Positron could do with the resources of multiple dimensions at his disposal. Hell, some of our base power sources seem like they'd easily help power entire cities. (and RPers are sure to make up fluff saying that their heroes do help contribute to society by letting some civvie neighbors mooch some free energy.)

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow City of Heroes is a game about freedom of expression and variety of experiences far more so than it is about representing any one theme, topic or genre.

just because you can do something doesn't mean you should....sure Positron could provide limitless power for the planet but then what?
How many people would be out of work because we no longer need to 'make' energy?
How many businesses would fail because of this miracle power source?
Who decides who gets this power source? Do enemy countries and states get this power?
Who regulates its use?

The odds of someone gaining superpowers in any one instance of mortal danger are pretty low. The problem is when you start killing thousands or millions of people at once those million-to-one odds start adding up fast. If the Joker squirts one guy with his smiley juice the overwhelming likelihood is the guy won't get superpowers from it. If he dumps it in the water supply he may be in for a surprise.

Sure, when your looking for a time proven and cost effective apporach to annilhilating large amounts of your enemies acreage. I'm sure even Lord Recluse can appreciate K.I.S.S

I give Lord Recluse credit for style. No self respecting supervillain dictator at the top of his game is going to stoop to a mere nuclear bomb. No, at his level of play were talking pulling the moon out of orbit, weather machines, invasions of mutant fish men, mind controlling the entire midwest, creating giant monsters to ravage Tokyo week after week...

Sure, nukes are effective, but they are just so 50 years ago...

Recluse wants to conquer and enlighten humanity. Extinguishing them with nuclear fire and fallout is not his best bet.

Pure disintegration? Perhaps.

Well, only those who are a little slow on the socio-political uptake. Everyone else should be just fine.

Then what? retire
Out of work? Lower cost of operation = new tech jobs
Business fail? More would thrive then fail becasue again lowered operational costs
Who gets? Anyone who can either A. copy the tech or B. we don't have trade embargoes with.
Regulation? each government can't do its own regulations...that's what they exist for

Well I'd say most tech base characters tend to function on a fairly reliable source at least.

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow City of Heroes is a game about freedom of expression and variety of experiences far more so than it is about representing any one theme, topic or genre.

They ALL float down here. When you're down here with us, you'll float too!

@Starflier

Let's also not forget that Hamidon seems to HAET Nuclear weapons. We saw in Praetoria what happens when you try to nuke Hami. It ends with something like the First Ward. I think even Recluse isn't up to dealing with that.

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow City of Heroes is a game about freedom of expression and variety of experiences far more so than it is about representing any one theme, topic or genre.

This is such a horrible argument I have a hard time accepting you're making it seriously. It's a bad argument because you can apply it to absolutely everything. "Hey, I have the secret of eternal life!" "Boo! Do you know how many undertakers will lose their jobs?" Human society will adapt. In fact, the ultimate utopia is a word where NO-ONE has to work for a living.

---

On nukes, I believe I ranted about this recently. I fail to see how Warburg is such a threat to Paragon City (or why Blitz is at war with Paragon City in particular and not the US in general), and why more can't be done.

Warburg shouldn't be this hard to deal with. Like I said before - nuke it, bomb it, invade it, send commandos in to disable the nukes. We can't? Um... Yeah we can. When Alexis gets captured, our next task is to go disable the missiles. Which we do. So why did we have to wait until a famous retired heroine was captured before we disable the WMDs of a rogue state? Where's George Bush Junour when you need him?

But, OK, we need a traitorous scientist to disable the missiles. OK, I'll roll with that. So steamroll the island. We can't because the defences are too strong? Apparently, they're not. According to the contact in SSA3, "we can bust through all that." Hell, the very line "he has an island, we have a whole army" comes from that very same agent. And at the end of SSA3... We do exactly that. So why did we have to wait until AFTER Alexis was captured?

Failing that, didn't the US spend many years and many billions of dollars on the "Star Wars" defence system specifically designed to shoot down ICBMs? What happened to those laser-equipped Jumbo Jets that already exist today even without super heroes in the world? You know, the ones that can shoot down ICBMs from a long distance away? What about the Phalanx missile launchers? None of this is science fiction, it's right out of the Discovery Channel.

Even if the US of 2010 can't shoot down ICBMs from 1960, what about all them heroes who have the right powers to shoot down missiles out of the sky? In one episode of the X-Men, the Blackbird hovered over the sea while Russian nuclear sub Omega Red had taken over fired a salvo of Nuclear Missiles, and the Blackbird shot them all down. Hell, the Statesman once took a nuclear missile to the back of the head, and he came out fine.

The thing with using conventional weapons as your big threat is conventional countermeasures exist to combat them. The benefit of using fantastical weapons is that you can make up the reasons for why they can't just be shot down and still sound plausible.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

See, just reading this made me figure out a simple fix.

Blitz has managed to hack our MediCom system (which, it seems, is quite frail when it comes to signal jacking) aaaaaand, boom! Those 1960's ICBMs can port in and kill a lot of people. The only reason Blitz doesn't do it is because:

A) He knows Paragon is Recluse's goal. To destroy it would mean the full offensive capabilities of Arachnos are brought to bare.

B) Even worse, the destruction of an area of Paragon would call down the entirety of the UN and world superhumans. That... would hurt.

I'll buy that. I mean, it'd be kind of a plot railroad, but at least it'd make sense. It uses established in-game concepts to provide a reasonable explanation for why counter-measures to this threat can't be applied.

Even better, let's work off precedent. The Rikti had made "mass teleportation assaults" in populated city areas multiple times throughout the game's history, so the technology to do this clearly exist. And it's not just alien technology, because so very many Paragon City technologies are reverse-engineered from theirs.

Recluse routinely deals with the Rikti. Blitz has spies within Arachnos proper. Who's to say one couldn't have procured the technology to mass-teleport nuclear weapons into large metropolitan areas with virtually no warning and no chance to react? That I would buy, and it would make sense for why he's a threat.

So why hasn't he done this? Because he's not an idiot. As the Longbow agent says, at best he can nuke one city, but he'll get his own Warburg nuked back to the stone age in return. He dies, his dreams die, the end. The only reason this hasn't happened yet is because Arachnos seems to be keeping the situation under wraps, and they're "dealing" with it. If Blitz launches a nuclear assault on an independent nation, he becomes an enemy of the entire world, and even he's not dumb enough to do that. But he CAN use it as a threat.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I suggest you read Squadron Supreme...the supers did this sort of thing. The more they helped the more the populace grew to rely on them...until one day they woke up and found themselves in a world run by super powered beings

Posts like this make me miss the 5-star system.

That's why you don't set super heroes down to turn hamster wheels or lead law enforcement. You set super scientist down to think up the tech that moves the world forward and then TEACH people how to use their tech to make their own lives better. Give a man a fish and he's fed for a day. Teach a man to fish and he's fed for life.

Besides, stories that specifically set down to examine super heroes trying to reshape the world intentionally go out of their way to make that the wrong choice, otherwise there's no story. It's like Yahtzee's interpretation of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. "Would you" asks the game "enhance your body with machines?" What do you mean "Would I?" I already wear a wrist watch. And spectacles. And own an iPhone that I'm in the process of duct-taping to the side of my head.

A story where super heroes came together, produced a better tomorrow and everyone lived happily ever after, the end... Is a story that has nothing to offer above a theoretical science dissertation. It is not, in and of themselves, a human story. It is a story of technology. So you colour it. You add controversy, you add trite philosophy, you add "the human condition" and you invent reasons for why no good deed goes unpunished. Because no-one would read a book about how a bunch of people tried to do something good and it pretty much succeeded. You could always inject villains that try to mess things up, but then that's not a book about super heroes trying to improve the world any more than any other regular super hero book.

The Powerfpuff Girls have an episode like that, too. Suddenly, it turns out everyone relies on them for everything. Cops wait for them to arrest criminals, firemen wait on them to put out fires, people make stupid demands, like walk my dog, fix my car, open my jar of pickes and so forth. So the girls stop helping and people learn to do things for themselves. I know the Powerpuff Girls is not exactly high literature, but they are - believe it or not - the kind of super heroes I grew up with.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Every major scientist talks about what you just said. While technological conflicts make good reading, they are most likely never going to happen like that.