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Re: Some Explanations
Posted By: paoloDate: 4/1/02 1:28 p.m.

In Response To: Some Explanations (William Spencer)

Wow! Hey, that's what I call a message!
I am honestly speechless in front of such a choice of possibilities.
Personally, I tend to buy the first option.

: 1) Battle damage. The electromagnetic pulse burnt out most of the dataports
: on Marathon, because the UESC was too cheap to use optical. Or maybe the
: Iomega dataport extension file was corrupted, and there was no time to use
: the backup disks to reinstall it.

: 2) "Never forget your weapon was made by the lowest bidder." The
: suit was designed that way: If computer memory is cheap, less memory is
: cheaper. Maybe the computer simply doesn't support data uploads. Maybe the
: maps are hard-encoded on a chip, and the Marine didn't have the Marathon
: map chip installed, and didn't have time to find and install one. Terrain
: maps of the colony outskirts wouldn't be much help.

: 3) Need to know. The Marine wasn't cleared to have a complete map of
: Marathon, and Leela couldn't bend the rules and give him a copy because of
: her programming. (And Durandal? Keeping you in the dark kept you under his
: thumb...) And maybe this is operational doctrine for handling battleroids
: - if they don't know where they are, they can't kill as many people if
: they go berserk. (This happens in Masamune Shirow's comic _Black Magic_ -
: the humans have the plans to the building while the battleroid doesn't,
: giving them a greater advantage.)

: 4) Hardware incompatibility, intentional. The suit is only designed to accept
: data from secure UEMC military-grade dataports, and does not function with
: unsecure civilian public access terminals. Maybe it uses a completely
: different plug head, and would require an adapter that was unavailable.
: Not as dumb as it sounds - the military has done this before, I believe.

: 5) Hardware incompatibility, unintentional. I think of the Mars Lander, where
: Lockheed thought "inches" and NASA thought
: "centimeters". I think of Apollo 13, where the astronauts
: discovered the hard way that the power and air packs in the lunar module
: were incompatible with those in the command module. Maybe there was a
: screw-up, and the suits are just incompatible. Maybe Marathon's crew did
: an upgrade of the dataports mid-voyage, and didn't adapt the battle armor
: as well (it's not like anyone was using it during the voyage...). Maybe
: the battle armor was assigned at the last minute, with no time to check
: compatibility. Maybe archaic equipment was assigned to the ship (like
: those Gulf War Colt .45's), and the suits are too old to work with the
: modern hardware. Maybe the suit's dataport broke, and couldn't be
: repaired.

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Pre-2004 Posts

Replies:

AGAIN: WHY YOU/HE DIDN'T KNOW?paolo 4/1/02 7:52 a.m.
     Re: AGAIN: WHY YOU/HE DIDN'T KNOW?Cpt. Sqweky 4/1/02 10:09 a.m.
           Re: AGAIN: WHY YOU/HE DIDN'T KNOW?D-M.A. 4/1/02 10:20 a.m.
                 Re: AGAIN: WHY YOU/HE DIDN'T KNOW?Boomer 4/1/02 10:28 a.m.
                       Re: AGAIN: WHY YOU/HE DIDN'T KNOW?paolo 4/1/02 10:43 a.m.
                             Re: AGAIN: WHY YOU/HE DIDN'T KNOW?Boomer 4/1/02 11:27 a.m.
                             Re: AGAIN: WHY YOU/HE DIDN'T KNOW?zudo 4/2/02 3:46 a.m.
     Why should he?Dan Aris 4/1/02 11:47 a.m.
           Re: Why should he?Boomer 4/1/02 11:57 a.m.
                 Re: Why should he?paolo 4/1/02 12:31 p.m.
                 Some ExplanationsWilliam Spencer 4/1/02 1:12 p.m.
                       Re: Some Explanationspaolo 4/1/02 1:28 p.m.
           Re: Why should he?Tru7h 4/1/02 12:36 p.m.
                 Re: Why should he?Boomer 4/1/02 12:57 p.m.
                       Re: Why should he?paolo 4/1/02 1:02 p.m.
     Re: AGAIN: WHY YOU/HE DIDN'T KNOW?Steve Levinson 4/3/02 8:30 a.m.
           Re: AGAIN: WHY YOU/HE DIDN'T KNOW?[zudo] 4/3/02 11:01 a.m.
     One last idea....Flatman 4/3/02 6:10 p.m.



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