Where do Machine Calibers fit into the realtype power rankings?

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>>14903035
given their intellect and pinpoint laser spam, extremely high up, the anime power level chart proves this

>>14903043
>Logos > Full Possession Shirouga > Demonbane
Um, no?

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>>14903043
>Tetsuo below Kenshiro
>guy who can instantaneously explode anyone into a gory pulp simply by willing it versus guy who has to touch people to do the same

Designing a mass production unit that doesn't suck takes Macross-level technology.

>>14903069
>it takes macross level technology to not be a fucking retard, or at the least not succumb to anime cliche

>>14903077
Yes.

>>14903119
You're an idiot.

>>14903046
They're both just memes.
Shitty, forced memes.

>>14903124
Not that anon but was still pretty nice to see them take a design that is overpowered as fuck and mass produce it

>>14903035

Pretty high. Chamber is extremely powerful and hard to kill. A single machine caliber would run roughshod over most Gundam settings, requiring something uniquely powerful like some of the newtype weapons or outright magic mechs to take down.

Not counting Gunbuster, because Gunbuster sort of crosses out of the 'real' spectrum, I think Macross is the only setting that has grunts that could take a Machien Caliber in space. And even then, I don't think it would be a clear victory for either side. Macross has speed and fold weapons, but the Machien Calibers have beamspam and more important aimbot tier accuracy. Superior speed doesn't help you dodge if the AI is good enough to hit you with a speed of light weapon anyway.

It would be a hell of a fight to see, though.

>>14903378
The funny thing is I would actually put Muv Luv's TSFs starting at around 2nd gen onward at not entirely onesided odds versus Machine Calibers.

Assuming it's just 1 Caliber vs many TSFs.

And that's mostly to do with the fact that Muv Luv as a setting has thrown laser lightshows at humanity enough times that they've had to figure out ways to deal with it on the battlefield. The technological divide between both settings is immense and consequently I would still expect a Caliber to clown any TSF due to the raw tech gap, but by design and combat theory TSFs are in their element against a laser spamming threat.

Just saying.

>>14903411
It's not really spam if every beam is targeted.

>>14903419
Spam is strictly a function of volume.

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>>14903046
>>14903311
it's true though

>>14903056
>Tetsuo and Akira being that low in general.
I mean, no Akira ain't lower than Card Captor Sakura sorry.

>>14903411

I'm not super familiar with Muvluv, but how specific are those defenses? Because I know the BETA have a laser-class that shoots lasers, but what Chamber spams is actual a sort of electromagnetic Ion Cannon, as opposed to a true laser.

I'm not sure how much difference that makes.

At the same time, what do TSFs have to get through Chamber's armor? He can apparently tank conventional explosive shells without cosmetic damage, and even ion cannons from Striker largely bounced off of his armor. He's not invulnverable, but he is pretty damn tough.

In terms of a grunt, it's one of the most powerful grunts out there.

>>14903466

To the point of being more powerful than a large number of Hero units, event. I could even see a Chamber unit taking out some supers. An army of them would be overkill for almost any problem... which makes it all the more terrifying that the space squids are still a problem for them.

>>14903411
> Assuming it's just 1 Caliber vs many TSFs.

Now I am imaging Kugel landing on Muvluv Earth, taking one look around the place, and deciding that he is the hero that Earth deserves.

How well would a Machine Caliber deal with the BETA?

>>14903479

Weren't they about to win the war when Chamber got knocked to earth? Or were they about to lose, I forget.

>>14903483

They said that this battle was vital to the winning of the war, and the fight was fubar so they had to retreat.

At the same time... we don't really know that much about the war. I'm honestly not sure, for example, how the hell the Hideauze can strike at Avalon themselves. The alliance are the ones with wormhole tech, the Hideauze had to piggyback off of the wormhole generator to escape Earth in the first place. I think its a war of extermination where Avalon itself is largely safe simply due to distance, but the Hideauze can live anywhere and its a war of containment to keep them from spreading throughout the galaxy and claiming it before the Alliance can.

In that case, the Alliance can always take another couple years to build up their forces and fight the hive again, but in that time the Hideauze will slowly have infested even more space and possibly built new hives. My headcanon is that they can't build a new Blossom Sail, which is effectively their Avalon, because they don't have the civilization the original generation had anymore which means no more sophisticated tool use. So the Hideauze can spread, and those hives can be destroyed, but as long as the Blossom Sail still exists the thread of the Hideauze will never be over.

>>14903483

Kugel said that if the Alliance's attack on the nest failed, the war may as well be over for them.

>>14903463
While most of the defensive technologies may not line up due to the technical difference between

>alien deathbeam colloquially referred to as a laser but may not actually be one
and
>laserlike particle stream of ions that may or may not interact with targets similarly to a laser weapon

one key context-independent design quirk of TSFs has been that, as I recall, they are designed to reflexively and autonomously break line of sight the moment they sense a laser-class BETA is tracking them, since other than an ablative coating that buys about 3 seconds of survival time at most a BETA laser will punch through just about anything.

Against BETA that normally means sensing the low power tracking beam that laser BETA emit in the buildup to a killing discharge, but presumably that could be configured to react to any sort of targeting system with an active track component, if not implementing an ability to infer firing trajectories of a target given knowledge of its physical placement relative to oneself.

Simply put, they instinctually evade without the pilot's input, a design feature to compensate for the lethality of the laser BETA given the reaction times of a human being.

You only care about Garangita because it was written by Urobuchi you fucking director whore OP.

Kill yourself or get some taste. A topic like this doesn't need a thread for anyone who actually enjoys mecha

>>14903508

Literally the only people who care that Gargantia was directed by Urobuchi are the Urobuchi haters. No one else ever brings it up.

I don't like Gargantia because Urobuchi is associated with it. I like Gargantia because I think it has really well written AI that avoid the usual machine intelligence tropes of the AI going skynet or seeking to become human. I like the designs and the characters and I think the plot is simple but well executed.

>>14903529
>avoid the usual machine intelligence tropes of the AI going skynet or seeking to become human.

read more books.

>>14903533

Mecha anime wold be in better hands if more of its writers did that.

>>14903536
It wouldn't stop people from calling the writers hacks.

Hell it'd probably just result in them being written off as pretentious hacks namedropping stuff they saw on a library shelf.

>>14903533

Always. Got anything in specific to recommend?

>>14903546
Have you read Yukikaze yet?

>>14903550

Huh. The last time I looked for it (I admit, this was years ago) I couldn't find any english translations for it. But apparently its on Kindle now.

Thanks for reminding me, anon.

>>14903541

No I mean maybe they'd learn how to write, since most writers take a thing called writing classes and peer review.

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>>14903546
>Got anything in specific to recommend?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture

>>14903575
How do you get that from reading a book?

Reading a book and writing a book are two different things.

And writing a book isn't exactly the same as writing a tv script.

>>14903576

Ugh, no. I knew someone was going to recommend this.

Consider Phlebas was trash. Trash sprinkled with interesting ideas, but I never once gave a fuck about the characters because they were too goddamn stupid to live.
It would be fine if only a couple of them had died to dumb mistakes, that might add a sense of realism to an otherwise fantastical setting. But the majority of the characters in the story die as a result of dumb luck or lack of communication, and the supposed plot of the book doesn't actually kick off until two thirds of the way in for seemingly no reason at all. Everything on the Clear Air Turbulence could have been chopped down to a handful of chapters, cutting out the ringworld arc entirely, and the book would have been better for it. If your main plot isn't enough to sustain a book, don't just pad the shit out with nihilistic filler.
The title of the book doesn't even mean anything, its just the name of the last chapter that ALSO doesn't mean anything. Every other chapter is named after the place where the events take place, and then you get 'Consider Phlebas' which means nothing even in context.
And the events of the book don't even contribute to anything. The lost Mind doesn't matter, it doesn't go on to do anything important or impact the war in any noticeable way. In fact, we don't even get a resolution to the main conflict until the APPENDICES AT THE BACK OF THE BOOK.
Unengaging characters, horrible pacing, an intentional disregard for the promises implicitly made to the reader, but a sorta neat setting and some clever details.

Wouldn't recommend as a book. Killed any desire I had to read anything else in the Culture cycle. Probably best experienced via wikipedia article.

>>14903575
Most well regarded Sci Fi books have pretty tedious actual stories because they're too busy giving seminars on speculative technology/sociology to tell one. And while reading a glorified textbook might be alright if you're into the subject matter, translating that into a visual format is not a recipe for success.

>>14903628
I feel seminar writing is pretty up there on the "things you never want to do in a speculative fiction story," unless you're invoking something incredibly esoteric.

Like, understanding the technology should be an organic part of the narrative, if that makes any sense. Frontloading it all and potentially losing the reader in cool shit they don't care about is half of why people perceive scifi as a genre to be meritless garbage.


The other half being the assumption that all scifi is stupid pulpy escapist nonsense.

>>14903628

Foundation is the definitive science fiction series (well, the older books anyway) and it's not what you described. It's stories about people, and characters using their wits to overcome problems.

>>14903666
Hail Satan.

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>>14903607
>Reading Phlebas first

Start with Player of Games or Excession.

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>>14903654
What I meant was less that works were just tracts about stuff (though those do exist), and more that in most acclaimed sci fi the story is just an excuse to get to the speculative stuff, and the story itself suffers as a result.

Example, The Fountains Of Paradise is a famous sci fi novel by the very well regarded sci fi author Arthur C Clark that introduced the concept of the space elevator to the world. And that's all well and good, but despite it being a fair size book, for the life of me I can't remember anything happened in the actual story. The protagonist was called Morgan, he had monofilament wire and something about terrorists. That's all I can recall. It just failed utterly to engage me as a piece of storytelling. It was good speculation, but it wasn't very good fiction. And this is the issue I personally have with much 'hard' sci fi. Wank about the author's self invented utopia or tech porn derived from real research just cannot hold my interest, and in my opinion, cannot carry a narrative when the author leaves every other element to wither on the vine.

>>14903628
>>14903767

You're talking about hard scifi, which is always about the technology and stuff. Most scifi is soft, it's about how people live in this kind of world.

Alfred Bester wrote one of the greatest science fiction novels of his time, The Demolished Man, and it's soft. It poses a simple question, in a world where everyone is capable of reading the mind of everyone else (after being given permission), how would a person get away with murder? And it explores every facet of what kind of society that would create.

>>14903870
>You're talking about hard scifi, which is always about the technology and stuff
>it's about how people live in this kind of world
Not at all, I did mention sociology for a reason after all. My experience has been that social speculation and technological speculation both are things for which narrative usually takes a back seat. Whether the means are described in meticulous detail or hand waved, if the work is too self absorbed with these concepts it's just not engaging unless that alone is enough to carry it for you.

> it explores every facet of what kind of society that would create.
I haven't read this novel, but from what you've said it still seems to me to be the sort of thing I was talking about, since your description didn't mention anything about the narrative, only described the speculative concept of the setting.From how you're describing it sounds like the book is entirely about the speculative world and that the narrative just exists to facilitate that. Not to say that this would make the work objectively bad by some dumb arbitrary standard, but it's not engaging for me personally. Like I said, good speculation, bad fiction. How can I get invested in a cast of characters or a plot if they're just a model made to sell an idea? I feel like at that point I might as well cut out the middle man and read an essay on the subject.

>>14903607
It's a reference to a line from The Wasteland.

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.

A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.

Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

The war isn't resolved in the main story because the whole point is the valuelessness of a human life in the face of intergalactic war.

>>14903479
>How well would a Machine Caliber deal with the BETA?
Considering it flies and lasers bounces of it, then nothing can harm it in its element. And with those advantages it can just get rid of a hive by firing straight down the whole that's over a reactor.

>>14904115
wow way to culuteally appropriate Japan, the coonskin hat is Amerci'a and America's alone

>>14903932
>The war isn't resolved in the main story because the whole point is the valuelessness of a human life in the face of intergalactic war.

If the point of the story is 'none of this matters', why is it worth my time to read it? Out of all of the stories they could have told me about this war, why promise me a story about an important mission that could change the fate of the war, and then decide "eh, I guess that was an exaggeration" halfway into it?

> Start with Player of Games or Excession.

Consider Phlebas already burned the fuck out of me, no taking that back without a time machine. Ironically, I already have Excession. It ended up in my possession as a result of my parents offloading some books that accumulated in their house over the years, and I figured I should start this Culture shit at the beginning.

Unless you can convince me that Excession is MUCH better than Consider Phlebas, I'm tossing it. I'd rather read a Terry Goodkind book than another Culture book at this point, and I promise you thats not a point in Terry Goodkind's favor.

Chamber has child-bearing hips.

>>14903901

Well for one, the main character is the murderer and you know it. The detective who is the antagonist KNOWS he's the murderer, but he needs a way to prove it, and this is a society where you have to ask permission to read minds because of protection of one's sense of self. It's a whole "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to be afraid of" mentality.

It's actually a really cool story in trying to find a way to catch him through conventional means.

>>14904721
The Culture series jumps around a lot in theme. One book will be about a random guy, another will be about a quantum super ai ship made of physics and deep thoughts. Consider Phlebas isn't unrepresentative but it doesn't get much into the supertechnology, and I found it pretty dry too. So YMMV but you should try one of the books about ships before you drop the series - I believe Excession is one of them.

>>14904721
It matters a great deal; Horza's sacrifice is important enough that he gets the space equivalent of having an aircraft carrier named in his honor. It just happens to be a drop in the ocean compared to the scale of intergalactic war and it's difficult for a human to be comforted by a computer calculating exactly how many thousands/millions of lives it saved.

It does suffer from being too long for its own good, but at the same time the ending doesn't hit without having gone through all of Horza's adventures.

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Phlebas is probably the weakest of the Culture novels in my opinion. I think some of this stems from it 1) being the very first novel, and Banks not being entirely sure what he was wanting to do and 2) it being really unnecessarily long (the whole section on the giant cruise ship just goes on forever),

However, it's interesting as it's from the perspective of an enemy of the Culture, and his mission is one against the Culture.

You shouldn't let Phlebas taint your experience of it.

>>14904941
> Horza's sacrifice is important enough that he gets the space equivalent of having an aircraft carrier named in his honor

But that's wrong. Horza doesn't sacrifice, he fails. At no point did he willingly do anything to help the Culture. His grand contribution to the war is fucking up his own mission so hard that he managed to sabotage a separate mission by his own allies as well and leave the captured culture agent as the only survivor to take home the prize.

The Culture doesn't even honor Horza, the mind, who doesn't have a name yet, picks his name because reasons. Those two characters never even meet, just see each other briefly during a firefight at which point both of them are quickly incapacitated and then Horza dies.

>>14904434

Well, and the Dutch.

We got that hat from the Dutch, you know.

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>>14905572
>At no point did he willingly do anything to help the Culture. His grand contribution to the war is fucking up his own mission so hard that he managed to sabotage a separate mission by his own allies as well and leave the captured culture agent as the only survivor to take home the prize.
>The Culture doesn't even honor Horza, the mind, who doesn't have a name yet, picks his name because reasons

yfw you read a few more Culture books and realise that this is all just as planned by the Culture and that that is the reason the mind takes his name.

>>14903479
>How well would a Machine Caliber deal with the BETA?
Senmetsu.
Chamber is a fucking mass produced, gravity controlling, laser packed aimbot that can pretty much wipe out armies of not space squids on its own.

>>14906081

Considering that the Beta Superior, through troll logic, refuses to believe that humans are intelligent because they are carbon based as opposed to silicon based...

Would the Beta Superior treat a Machine Caliber as 'intelligent life'?

Granted, if its Striker, I'm not sure it would get the chance. She seemed more trigger happy than Chamber.

Is Gargantia a good series on the whole? I rarely hear anything about it.

>>14906275

I think so, yes.

It gets a lot of shit because a guy who wrote a bunch of other popular things that casuals have heard of wrote Gargantia as well, and somehow that's enough to draw down internet hellfire.

Its going to start with a spacewar, but it doesn't stay there. The Spacewar is, essentially, nothing but backstory and context for a lot of the character development and events to follow.

The meat of the show is a space marine and his brotastic AI controlled mech trapped away from the spacewar and figuring out what to do with their lives now that they have been removed from the militaristic command structure that dictated their every waking moment for their entire life previously. Fights will happen, but this isn't Gundam where any episode where a fight doesn't happen is somehow a failure to come up with an excuse to deploy the mech. The mech gets plenty of screen time just participating in conversations and being generally awesome.

It comes up with a good way to bring these character arcs to a close without having to go for SUPAR HEUG STAKES at the end, and even the mandatory beach episode contributes no fewer than two important details that come up again in the finale, so there isn't a lot of wasted screentime.

Comfy show with solid writing that avoids a lot of the plotholes you come to expect in anime-tier scripts, written more like a western scifi tale than a japanese one. Cool robots, laserific battles, only 13 episodes and some OVAs.

One of those shows that I am genuinely sad that it probably won't get a sequel, because while the first season wraps up the character arcs nicely, the OVAs introduce a new plot that I actually would have liked to see taken further.

>>14906275
Nah, there are better shows.
Just watch Fafner, it does everything Gargantia does better and less stupid except animation, and even then it's animation gets better in the OVA, movie and second season.

>>14906326

You might as well have compared Gargantia to Raxephon, they have exactly as much in common. Fafner is in no way the same mecha genre as Gargantia is.

>>14906309
Holy shit. Someone that actually understands what is going on. That's a rarity these days amongst the constant shit posting.

>>14906206
I doubt it. Even if somehow they are recognized as being "alive" they would most likely be disregarded as intelligent due to the troll logic as they are a creation of humans. It would be like if a robot stiched together a bunch of fleshy bits and animated it into some sort of primitive abomination.

What the fuck is even real robot about Gargantia
or any mecha for that matter

>>14906390

Real Robot refers to a genre of mecha fiction where the mecha are treated as mass produced tools of war maintained by militaries instead of singular and unique mecha that are one of a kind and someone keeps in their garage until monsters attack.

Its called so on the presumption that this militaristic, mass produced bent is more 'realistic' than super robots are.

By this commonly accepted definition, Chamber is a 'real robot'.

>>14906410
>>14906390
"Real Robot" is a term companies came up with in the 80s to market their mecha shows in order to differentiate them and make them stand out from previous series. The claim being that series like gundam, votoms, ideon, etc were more "realistic" because they treated the mecha as tools/weapons and covered more serious topics and often used war as a background.

Its a marketing gimmick that stuck with the franchise and everyone has their own variation on the definition and there is a lot of grey area and overlap.

>>14906410
I see. So we're on the topic of powerful grunts, then I'd say Getter Robo has the most powerful grunt machines.

>>14906206
>Considering that the Beta Superior, through troll logic, refuses to believe that humans are intelligent

It never refused anything, merely questioned it. All it said was that the only recorded intelligent life IT knew of were its creators who were silicon based and wanted takeru to prove humans were in fact sapient. being a hs student he was just too retarded to do so

>>14906326
>Just watch Fafner, it does everything Gargantia does better and less stupid except animation
Literally what.

>>14906428
For me id say gundam00 trail blazer grunt units.
Technological leap was fucking ridiculous during the inbetween of s2 and the movie.
Grunts had giant space lasers, features that gundams had in 2 and their own limiter release.
God forbid they actually massproduced the braves

>>14906440
>being a hs student he was just too retarded to do so
Being distracted by the brutally dismembered corpse of his friend and comrade being dangled in front of him might also have had something to do with it.

>>14903504
There is the simply fact that the lasers used by the machine calibers can also have their flight path altered by the AI when the enemy moves, its not a whole lot like in E7 but its still pretty hard to dodge something that adjusts itself

>>14903628
It can be done though, take gundam 00, the writer said he based himself primarily on western scifi stories and somehow he managed to translate it pretty well to gundam of all things.

It can indeed happen its a pretty rare chance of the writer doing it right and the producers and higher ups allowing to happens instead of trying to cut corners

>>14906326
Nigger what, I like Fafner a whole lot but how the fuck can you even compare the two stories? They are completely different things altogether

>>14907072

doesn't he basically say 'lol this isn't worth the effort, better kill it'

>>14906505
>Technological leap was fucking ridiculous during the inbetween of s2 and the movie
It sure helps having access to a quantum computer and the mother ship/HQ with a bunch of secret tech stashed in it

>>14907129
Nah, he gets so stunned by her body that he's struck dumb for a few seconds, then before he can get his faculties back Meiya Cool Aid Mans her way through the wall and kind of forces the issue by engaging the superior.

>>14903458
Sakura (from CCS) is the most powerful being in the entire "CLAMP universe" which is filled with overpowered beasts. She's stronger than them.

>>14907169

Clow Cards are pretty hax, yeah. Can't she erase people from the timeline if she wants? So they never existed, and only she remembers they ever were?

Thats a tier of power all on its own.

>>14907102
Well ok I'll give toothpaste lasers the upper hand in that case, bendy beams can be all kinds of obnoxious.

>>14907231
>Can't she erase people from the timeline if she wants? So they never existed, and only she remembers they ever were?

Yes, she does. Even more than that, the story stops before she can reach her full power.

>>14907242
I think the ability to bend beams would be a given for any robot that can manipulate gravity

>>14907242
>bendy beams can be all kinds of obnoxious.
Amen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiJRCFVmMHc

>>14907133
That too.
Not to mention they have a fucking mobile quantum computer backing them now.

>>14907245
If Sakura gets the chance to grow into power...how much of an Archwizard can she be in her 30's? In her 40's?
I'm now thinking of an ara-ara Reality Warper Sakura.

>>14907280

Depends. All of her power comes from the cards, which while absurdly powerful are something she lucked into and isn't responsible for.

So while she is incredibly powerful compared to nonmagical folks, it isn't hard to imagine that there are other magical artifacts out there (like the cards) that can operate on her level.

>>14907263
>posting anything but an example of the classic Raiden toothpaste laser

I mean seriously anon, that shit is classic nonsense.

>>14903499
Hideauze will constantly attack the Alliance because the Alliance has wormhole tech. This why they have been attacking Human settlements. It is the only means for them to spread.

>>14903529
Urobuchi only wrote a couple of episodes. The production used his name to draw an audience.

>>14906428
How about Sizzlers, they were designed to be more powerful than Gunbuster.

>>14908312
Still weaker than a far future Getter.

>>14907438
No. She has powers that have nothing to do with the cards, and her magical capacity is stupidly high. The first power she got was precognition and she gets stronger every time she uses it.

As I said before, she's the strongest in the CLAMP-verse, and that "universe" is filled with overpowered beasts.

>>14908733
What do those do?

(I have no idea what future getters can do)