BAD GUY Forces analysis (Avengers Spoilers)

[Zor]

A basic rundown of how effective the Chitauri forces are from the Avengers Movie actually are. Starting with some basics...

Chitauri Trooper: Armed with energy rifles as well as time bombs, superhuman strength (being able to climb up walls easily) and probably resistant to chemical weapons (they survived being in space easily enough). Cybernetic creatures by the look of it.
Chitauri Heavy Weapons trooper: Carries a heavier weapon which can inflict some damage on. I think that the heavy weapon replaces
Sky Chariot: VTOL Capable Ariel platform that carries three Chitauri troops, unarmed but quick and VTOL capable.
Leviathan: Heavily armored flying critter that i think is about 50 meters long and carriers a large number of Chitauri soldiers. Can fly and take quite a beating, though its exposed flesh is vulnerable.

Zor

[Manus Celer Dei]

Sky Chariot: VTOL Capable Ariel platform that carries three Chitauri troops, unarmed but quick and VTOL capable.

There was at least four or so variants. Of the top of my head I recall seeing the type that carry three troops, a type that had the driver and a forward facing gunner (the type Widow hijacked), one with the mounted gun pointing backwards, and one that seemed to have the gun platform elevated higher than the pilot's station rather than slightly below like the other types, the weapon also seemed to be larger although I don't recall it's effects being any different from the others.

[Jim Raynor]

Nice thread, I was hoping that people would start cataloging and analyzing the movie in this manner. Anybody catch the different types of starships that were briefly shown when Iron Man took the nuke through the portal?

[madd0ct0r]

Leviathan's armour is significant in strength and hardness since hulk and Thor have to get through it to do some damage, and end up using a piece of armour as the spike...

likewise the leviathan seems to steer like a real animal - ie hulk hanging off one side of it's face caused it to circle.

no real signs of intelligence beyond herd instinct (except the people herded up in the theater?)

[Ahriman238]

Nice thread, I was hoping that people would start cataloging and analyzing the movie in this manner. Anybody catch the different types of starships that were briefly shown when Iron Man took the nuke through the portal?

Just saw the mothership and more dragon-things. I guess Leviathan is the name we're going with here?

Thor killed one of the Leviathans with a lightning attack. Earlier he used a similar attack on Tony, who luckily had already built in the comic book suits' ability to absorb electricity. That attack charged Tony up to 450%. Tony's first arc reactor (built IN A CAVE!! WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS!!!) and thus his weakest, able to power the Mk III suit for only a few minutes of battle and flight, had an output of 3 gigajoules a second (IM novelization.) Which puts a lower limit on the lightning attack needed to bring a Leviathan down, though the actual figure is probably much, much higher.

[Simon_Jester]

Thor killed one of the Leviathans with a lightning attack. Earlier he used a similar attack on Tony, who luckily had already built in the comic book suits' ability to absorb electricity. That attack charged Tony up to 450%. Tony's first arc reactor (built IN A CAVE!! WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS!!!) and thus his weakest, able to power the Mk III suit for only a few minutes of battle and flight, had an output of 3 gigajoules a second (IM novelization.) Which puts a lower limit on the lightning attack needed to bring a Leviathan down, though the actual figure is probably much, much higher.

I wouldn't stick with that three gigawatts figure. Given what we see the suit do and an upper bound on its probable weight, if it's putting out three gigawatts, the reactor's energy is being used extremely inefficiently. Which is possible of course, but if so, where's it going?

Also, if the reactor is really capable of three gigawatts, he wouldn't need to do any more development work to make arc reactors into a viable industrial power source. Although I've never really understood that either, since there's really nothing stopping him from just building thousands of the things and running them in parallel.

[Sarevok]

Thor's lightning is magical. I don't think you can "calc" it.

[Lord Revan]

Thor's lightning is magical. I don't think you can "calc" it.

if it has limits you can quantify it.

[Sarevok]

Thor's lightning is magical. I don't think you can "calc" it.

if it has limits you can quantify it.

I guess you are right. We can quantify the hammers effects if not the bolts themselves.

[lord Martiya]

For some reason, nuking the Chitauri flagship insta-killed the troops. It either served as a control ship or was powering them somehow, I think.

[Sarevok]

Probably a safe guard against troop rebellion.

[Majin Gojira]

Given that the troopers were cyborgs, its likely that the ship was an external power source and taking it down robbed them of power.

Anyone have a guess towards the possible yield of the nuke?

The Rifle-like weapons appeared to have a bayonet attachment which could channel some of the energy inherent in the weapon (IE: it glowed blue). And the arm socket heavy weapon appeared to have a very difficult firing mechanism for humans to use or had a user ID denial system installed (if only to explain why one wasn't picked up and used).

[MKSheppard]

You know Zor, I'm sure fucking glad I managed to, after ten days of waiting for an open captioned showing of Avengers, that I managed to line it up before I checked up on Science Fiction today --- because you put a semi major spoiler in your FUCKING THREAD TITLE.

I was pleasantly surprised that the Chitariu from Ultimates in a modified form showed up -- but it wouldn't have been a surprise to me if I had checked SF this morning.

You fucking dumbass.

[Ahriman238]

Thor's lightning is magical. I don't think you can "calc" it.

In particular, many fantasy geekboys come here and say that magic cannot be quantified. Perhaps they do not understand what quantification is, or how numbers apply. Allow me to provide an example:

Quote:
A fantasy wizard has a magic spell which is said to make him invincible. Let us further suppose that we see him use it against a foe who can throw lightning, and it seems to work.

The magic geekboy would look at this and conclude "yes, this spell makes him invincible. We know because he used it and it worked. Therefore, God himself could not overwhelm this spell."

An empirically-minded (read: scientifically minded) person looks at this same evidence and says "if we had not seen the spell in action, we would not know whether it works at all. Now that we have seen it in action, we know that it works well enough to block or at least redirect a lightning strike. We can use data from normal lightning strikes as a rough estimate for the energy and power levels involved, and this would represent a lower limit for its capabilities."

Any further extrapolation of its abilities is unreasonable unless you assume literal semantic inerrancy on the part of the source. And bear in mind that even if one does assume literal semantic inerrancy on the part of the source, all you have to do is find a single flaw in the literal semantic inerrancy of the entire book (or comic series, or entire series of books, etc) and that house of cards comes crashing down.

Of course, much of the information we have is fuzzy. The 3 GW figure is from two models ago, there's no guarentee that Thor's strike at the Leviathan wasn't vastly more powerful than his strike against Tony, and I'm not sure that's outside the capabilities of regular lightning anyway.

[DarkArk]

Thor's lightning is magical. I don't think you can "calc" it.

You should be, because the Asgardians are just sufficiently advanced aliens. Thor goes into that in his own movie.

Though I think using the power output of the original arc reactor is rather hopeless for calculations since I'm sure Iron Man's later models are significantly improved.

As for the deactivation, I thought that might have been a fail save against Loki betraying his erstwhile allies. It's been a week since I saw it, but did the troops deactivate when the base blew up or when the portal collapsed?

Also am I the only one who found it a little hard to believe that a nuke totally destroyed their base? Given that it was launched off a fighter it couldn't have been much more than 300 kt. Given what we've seen of the Asgardians and other alien forces nuclear weapons seem surprisingly effective.

[evilsoup]

Well they have super-science, so it could be some kind of super-nuke.

[Crossroads Inc.]

Well they have super-science, so it could be some kind of super-nuke.

My personal head-cannon was that it was a "Phase-2" nuke, enhanced with cube energy.
It would be nice since a "normal" nuke being so effective against super advanced aliens seems so, bland.

[Ryan Thunder]

Or they just aren't all that super-advanced in the "surviving enormous power input" capacity. It's not like we're talking about an entire army of Loki and Thor.

[Elheru Aran]

Didn't Black Widow manage to pick a Chitauri rifle and shoot a few with it? Perhaps they have some battery-pack units that don't jack into their cybernetics to draw power?

[Grandmaster Jogurt]

I think it was just an off-the-cuff remark, but I remember someone saying that the nuke would destroy midtown Manhattan, implying it wasn't some super gigaton bomb that would level the entire metropolitan area.

[rematog]

Best Alien response to nuclear attack:

Mars Attacks.... Suck it in and Smoke it........

[Ahriman238]

Though I think using the power output of the original arc reactor is rather hopeless for calculations since I'm sure Iron Man's later models are significantly improved.

Good enough for a lower limit, since the new arc reactors presumably aren't lesser. Of course, if we do multiply 3 gigs by 4.5 we get... only about 60% the power of an "average" lightning bolt. Damn.

Since it's one of the only numbers actually given in the movie, I'd sort of hoped to get some use from it. Perhaps we could reverse, use the lightning bolt to determine the power of Tony's new reactor? But no, we'd have to assume average lightning bolt and Mjolnir's enchantments in no way enhanced the lightning.

I wouldn't stick with that three gigawatts figure. Given what we see the suit do and an upper bound on its probable weight, if it's putting out three gigawatts, the reactor's energy is being used extremely inefficiently. Which is possible of course, but if so, where's it going?

And then there's that. I'd be more worried that the 3 gigawatt one wasn't enough to run any suit but the very first.

[Lord Revan]

Didn't Black Widow manage to pick a Chitauri rifle and shoot a few with it? Perhaps they have some battery-pack units that don't jack into their cybernetics to draw power?

She did, though it could like the geonosian beamweapon in the republic commando game that you a small "on-board" power source that gets refueled/recharged from an outside source (aka from the cybernetics) at least I don't remember any of the troops running out of ammo or having to reload.

[Darkevilme]

Also am I the only one who found it a little hard to believe that a nuke totally destroyed their base? Given that it was launched off a fighter it couldn't have been much more than 300 kt. Given what we've seen of the Asgardians and other alien forces nuclear weapons seem surprisingly effective.

I figured the Chitauri command ship simply wasn't expecting to be attacked by the primitive and feeble monkey creatures. So they didn't have their mundo mundo mega shields activated, possibly also cause such things might adversely effect any cyborgs on flying jetskis that were trying to travel through the shield.

This is all conjecture of course, but i believe it quite possible that they have defences and simply didnt use them in this situation due to the circumstances.

[Dass.Kapital]

I didnt think it was just 'any' Nuke.

I thought it was the thing that Stark found out about rummaging through the Shield files.

It was a 'Phase 2' weapon prototype. It kind of looked like the missile image that Tony briefly had on one of the screens when he was dressing down Fury (Under the influence of Loki's staff).

Nuking the bad guys with their revers engineered Cube power would be a whole different level than 'Just a nuke'...

EDIT Also, on the point of the shield?

Wasn't it in effect sort of preventing anything from getting back into the rift? Not just a protective bubble around the cube and the generator? I seem to remember the 'Jet-skis' and the first big lizard-borg having a 'shimmer' type thing happen as they came through and then 'peeled' off in their attacks? Only once the cube was turned off as a portal power source would there maybe have been any chance of anything going back up through the portal. Everything else was coming out. Only Stark and the missile went in.

Much cheers to you and yours.