Solauren wrote: ↑2017-11-06 01:05pm
Beam weapons, as shown in most Sci-fi, are also horribly ineffective next to most modern firearms.
I mean, we've seen normal humans dodge a phaser beam.
You can see a phaser beam (or most other sci-fi energy weapons) coming, and dodge them.
You can't see a bullet going and dodge it.
This is based on a certain approach to evaluating Star Trek technology, which is to comb through about 720 40-minute episodes looking for examples, then picking the most embarrassing ones ("can be stopped by packing crates, slow enough to dodge").
I don't know about you, but if I had the option of finding 'evidence' for the performance of modern firearms by looking through a random sample of 500 hours of action movies, and I got to selectively pick the worst examples of firearm performance, modern slugthrowers would come out looking pretty stupid.
"Hey, remember that episode of
The A-Team where everyone was firing fully automatic machine guns for like five minutes and nobody got hurt? Man, guns must
suck. They'd have been more effective fighting each other with bows and arrows or something! I mean, Barracus did more damage by just walking up to guys and throwing them than he did by shooting at them! How pathetic is a weapon that gets outperformed by
not using a weapon?"
...
Basically, the problem with this kind of argument is that it proves too much. You can use it to prove
any technology sucks, because if you let a series run long enough, sooner or later the scriptwriters will soft-pedal the technology's capabilities for the sake of plot.