Back from LA with Honorverse move news

clancy688 wrote:

61Cygni wrote:
I love the movie Starship Troopers too.

One can say whatever he wants about Verhoeven's Starship Troopers, but there's one thing which simply has to be acknowledged:

The Klendathu drop scene was awesome to the max.

Awesome indeed - but the tactics are way beyond incompetent.

Mind you, as I recall the film started out as an entirely unrelated space war film, but somebody noticed similarities to the book and decided hey, rather than getting sued for ripping off the book, why don't we buy the rights and call it an adaptation?

Yeah...I think they'd have been better off leaving it unrelated.

Werrf wrote:Awesome indeed - but the tactics are way beyond incompetent.

Tactics? Which tactics?

That's "Drop, Charge, Shoot", but not something as sophisticated as tactics.

Yes, it's awesome, but only as long as you DON'T use your brain to think about what they're actually doing there.

clancy688 wrote:

Werrf wrote:Awesome indeed - but the tactics are way beyond incompetent.

Tactics? Which tactics?

That's "Drop, Charge, Shoot", but not something as sophisticated as tactics.

Yes, it's awesome, but only as long as you DON'T use your brain to think about what they're actually doing there.

Well, there is the... But don't forget how... Of course, you have to remember that...

Yeah, okay, fair point

By the by, the space scenes in Starship Troopers are pretty much the first thing that comes to mind when I think of all the things the Honorverse does right. There is absolutely no reason for those ships to be so close together that they keep ramming each other (except, of course, to have those awesome-looking scenes).

61Cygni wrote:

NeverendingWar wrote:They should do the Movie in full CGI. Finding a Honor actress is too though and all the prolong society awkwardness... I just don´t know :/

Considering that Evergreen Films' current production is the CGI Walking With Dinosaurs 3D, this really may not be a bad idea. Does this studio have any experience at making live-action films? And what's the projected budget going to be? Doesn't need to be extravagant, look what the current movie Elysium did with $90 million; from reviews the visual effects (from Weta) are execellent.

I have this feeling that the movie is going to be some real low-budget no-name cheapie that gets dumped into the January-Feburary period, the traditional "garbage dumpster" for Hollywood.

Or it could be a "Europa Report," done on a low budget but with a quality script and good direction and acting, and very clever photography, and getting quite nice reviews.

I'll take live actors over cartoon characters any day.

Orangesky wrote:<snip>
Lasers, Grasers etc. are invisible in vacuum. A firing sequence can be shown as a glowing point on the hull. The beam itself would be invisible. Then the enemy ship is shown.<snip> it should be kept at a certain realistic level.

sigh

This is what happens when you come in late to a 25+ page long discussion - having to reply to comments made 20 pages back!

Laser and grazer beams may be invisible in a vacuum, but vacuums (where we are currently used to seeing them) don't exist outside of laboratories!

There is all kinds of crud floating out there amongst the stars - alpha radiation from stars (which is/are effectively helium atoms), free hydrogen (created from beta radiation from the same stars), stellar debris (resulting from multiple millennia of Novae and Supernovae, & etc). The whole purpose of Bussard ramjets is to collect this stuff and use it for fuel. I imagine shining a 20cm wide laser beam rated in gigajoules through a suspension of this glop will be fairly visible.

We could exercise a little artistic license and substitute plasma projectors for grasers. They would be just as powerful, but much more visible when used!

Oh this invisible beam stuff, simplest solution is have viewed from a holo tank projection where the AI has been instructed to represent the beam weapons in the visual spectrum. Since the beams can be detected they can be represented in the holo projector.

In the movie have the battle shots played out within the holo projection and when it over have it pan out to show that the battle was being witnessed using a holo projection. Since all sides have this tech can be used for all sides in representing battles.

You get the movie flash, without breaking science.

PS. could use this approach to address identifying different sides if ships designes are the same.

rdt wrote:Or it could be a "Europa Report," done on a low budget but with a quality script and good direction and acting, and very clever photography, and getting quite nice reviews.

I'll take live actors over cartoon characters any day.

Europa Report, along with Moon are more smaller-scale intimate sci-fi/thriller films, and can be done well on low budgets. The Honorverse is space opera/military scifi, and unless you want the space battles and action scenes greatly pared down or done in a minimalist style (like people watching the holo plot most of the time), it's going to need a much larger budget. It's why I use Serenity ($40 million budget) as an example. Another one would be Danny Boyle's Sunshine, though again it's a sci-fi thriller and doesn't have battles, it does have a lot of space scenes/exterior views.

Of course, one of the prime ways to save money is to cast mostly unknown actors, as well as to cut down on the number of speaking roles (i.e. eliminating and combining characters), and I expect both will be done with HoTQ.

ColonialBoy wrote:

Orangesky wrote:<snip>
Lasers, Grasers etc. are invisible in vacuum. A firing sequence can be shown as a glowing point on the hull. The beam itself would be invisible. Then the enemy ship is shown.<snip> it should be kept at a certain realistic level.

sigh

This is what happens when you come in late to a 25+ page long discussion - having to reply to comments made 20 pages back!

Laser and grazer beams may be invisible in a vacuum, but vacuums (where we are currently used to seeing them) don't exist outside of laboratories!

There is all kinds of crud floating out there amongst the stars - alpha radiation from stars (which is/are effectively helium atoms), free hydrogen (created from beta radiation from the same stars), stellar debris (resulting from multiple millennia of Novae and Supernovae, & etc). The whole purpose of Bussard ramjets is to collect this stuff and use it for fuel. I imagine shining a 20cm wide laser beam rated in gigajoules through a suspension of this glop will be fairly visible.

We could exercise a little artistic license and substitute plasma projectors for grasers. They would be just as powerful, but much more visible when used!

If you're going to be that picky, then space is a far better vacuum than exists in the laboratory. Sure, there are a few molecules per cubic meter, but not enough to make even a terawatt graser beam visible. Sorry, your "glop" is invisible. A graser beam would not be visible except where it goes through the debris field of an exploding ship, or impinges on a sidewall or ship hull.

Whether it would be aesthetically acceptable to have visible beams in a movie is a different question.

SWM wrote: If you're going to be that picky, then space is a far better vacuum than exists in the laboratory. Sure, there are a few molecules per cubic meter, but not enough to make even a terawatt graser beam visible. Sorry, your "glop" is invisible. A graser beam would not be visible except where it goes through the debris field of an exploding ship, or impinges on a sidewall or ship hull.

Whether it would be aesthetically acceptable to have visible beams in a movie is a different question.

I think the general consensus on visible versus non-visible beam weapons here is that it's okay to let it slide for the movie. I could be wrong, but that was the impression I got from the comments much earlier in the thread.

An aside: Everything people have been saying in defense of Starship Troopers are exactly the reasons for which I hate, hate, HATE, that so-called movie. Nothing anyone says is going to convince me that it has any redeeming value whatsoever. Even topless chicks in the shower couldn't save that monstrosity in my eyes.

It was the only movie I've ever seen where I actually got up to leave - only reason I didn't is because I had to give the guy who went with me a ride home, and he *liked* the movie.

Almost made him walk...

On the point of invisible lasers and grasers, in my minds eye I see them whenever the written word says they're fired when I'm reading it. So I'm all for some artistic license on this.

But I agree that when they show a ship being destroyed, from the outside, it should be silent. A scene of repair crews and other spacers being swallowed from within the vessel can have roaring flame effects but when it cuts outside it should be a silent expanding ball of light.