Movie Asgardians (Marvel) not so impressive!

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Mr. Oragahn
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Movie Asgardians (Marvel) not so impressive!

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Sat Mar 08, 2014 11:22 am

Finally watched Thor 2, and really, all I can say is that they don't have much to protect themselves from any decent modern military, even less from your random science fiction or fantasy army.

Their ground defenses are terribly lame, their aircrafts equally bad (aside from some form of very short range missile weapons), their mightest shield only protects the palace, not even the city, not even the whole area around it, and takes a damn while to raise entirely. Local force fields as seen in the prison can actually be smashed through by sheer brute force. The Asgardians' concept of a good infantry involves a mix of swords, shields, gratuitously encumbering armour and Jaffa staves fired from the hip for a very few of them. In fact for only one of them, the King.

The quantity of troops doesn't seem particularly impressive either. They'd be hard pressed to even convince me they had a thousand of them.

Now let's return for a moment to those city defenses. We've only seen those heavy guns, slow rate of fire, firing sluggish and dumb projectiles, all that wrapped in a very limited range.

They have nothing remotely approaching a battery of dedicated heavy beam cannons to engage larger targets at longer range. So much that they can't even threaten a whalish building sized target, they can't even spam it with missiles and don't possess the tech to scan a super heavy spaceship hovering right above their heads. Even Odin's birds can't spot it, even Afrodall can't see it.

Let's not even pretend that they'd have any decent form of spaceship since they can't even come with anything remotely good on ground or air, and their sole concept of interstellar trip involves being catapulted by one single superdevice which can double as a considerably long range bombardment cannon, so I don't see why they'd even bother with anything like a spaceship.

Oh and they seem to be easily stabbed by pretty much any kind of weapon. Ok, for the sake of it, let's say all of their enemies have access to adamantium and all edges are monomolecular. Sigh.

Their only saving grace is Mjölnir and it appears that if you maim the wielder, even that advantage is gone.

I say it's rape time.

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Re: Movie Asgardians (Marvel) not so impressive!

Post by Lucky » Mon Mar 10, 2014 6:13 am

Mr. Oragahn wrote: Finally watched Thor 2, and really, all I can say is that they don't have much to protect themselves from any decent modern military, even less from your random science fiction or fantasy army.
I think you are under estimating what weak Earth 199999 Asgardians are capable of, and what they were fighting.

Elliot Randolph is able to fight a group of people who could throw cars, and in with some minor first aid was able to recover from being stabbed in the heart with an Asgardian war staff in a few minutes. Heck, Elliot fully expected to be able to just break himself out of The Bus until he found out the room he was in was made with/of Vibranium.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Their ground defenses are terribly lame,
a few thousand years of peace, and an advanced warning system that is seemingly all seeing will get you caught flat footed when someone does something that is suppose to be impossible.

Asgard is a magic floating island for crying out loud.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: their aircrafts equally bad (aside from some form of very short range missile weapons),
I don't recall the flying boats being used in war. They seem to use the Rainbow Bridge for travel.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: their mightest shield only protects the palace, not even the city, not even the whole area around it, and takes a damn while to raise entirely.
And yet the shield was enough to hold off the dark elves for a seemingly indefinite amount of time.

Asgard is an island in its own pocket universe it seems remember.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Local force fields as seen in the prison can actually be smashed through by sheer brute force.
And yet out of all the superhuman beings held there, only one could do it? Don't you think it has more to do with Algrim being a Kursed?
Mr. Oragahn wrote: The Asgardians' concept of a good infantry involves a mix of swords, shields, gratuitously encumbering armour and Jaffa staves fired from the hip for a very few of them. In fact for only one of them, the King.
You must have missed the fact the sheilds and armour are "enchanted". You must have seen the weapons and armour glow from time to time.

A person superhuman armed with cut anything blades, block pretty anything sheilds and armour is rather hard to defeat.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: The quantity of troops doesn't seem particularly impressive either. They'd be hard pressed to even convince me they had a thousand of them.
A thousand years or so of near peace gives little reason to have a large military.

Agents of S.H.E.I.L.D. also covers this in Season 1 Episode 8 "The Well'. If Asgard goes to war the Asgardian military have Asgardian civilians enlist in the military. The civilians are given some training, and handed magic weapon that turns them into berserkers.

One thing to keep in mind is that we don't know how many Asgardians there are.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Now let's return for a moment to those city defenses. We've only seen those heavy guns, slow rate of fire, firing sluggish and dumb projectiles, all that wrapped in a very limited range.
The AA guns seem to fire energy blasts.

The flaw seems to be the gunners are out of practice or poorly trained. The thousand or so years of peace again.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: They have nothing remotely approaching a battery of dedicated heavy beam cannons to engage larger targets at longer range.
True
Mr. Oragahn wrote: So much that they can't even threaten a whalish building sized target, they can't even spam it with missiles and don't possess the tech to scan a super heavy spaceship hovering right above their heads. Even Odin's birds can't spot it, even Afrodall can't see it.
So because the Romulans and Klingons have cloaking devices that let them hide from Federation sensor, the Federation has poor sensor technology in your eye?

In order to hide from the sight of Heimdal you need to either use powerful magic/high end technology, or be in a rare secret place that almost no one knows about. The guy could see trillions of souls from his post, and was supprised when he lost sight of Jain Foster.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Let's not even pretend that they'd have any decent form of spaceship since they can't even come with anything remotely good on ground or air, and their sole concept of interstellar trip involves being catapulted by one single superdevice which can double as a considerably long range bombardment cannon, so I don't see why they'd even bother with anything like a spaceship.
Given they live on a magic floating island in an otherwise seemingly empty pocket dimension, I'm not sure why they would have ships to go places the ships can't get to without the use of the bifrost.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Oh and they seem to be easily stabbed by pretty much any kind of weapon. Ok, for the sake of it, let's say all of their enemies have access to adamantium and all edges are monomolecular. Sigh.
When do we see Asgardians get stabbed or cut by anything other then "magical" Asgardian weapons?

+++++

You do realize that Wolverine was created as a Hulk antagonist, correct?
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Their only saving grace is Mjölnir and it appears that if you maim the wielder, even that advantage is gone.
Could you please provide evidence of this please? Mjolnir does not need to be touched by Thor.

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Re: Movie Asgardians (Marvel) not so impressive!

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Fri Mar 14, 2014 2:04 pm

Lucky wrote:
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Finally watched Thor 2, and really, all I can say is that they don't have much to protect themselves from any decent modern military, even less from your random science fiction or fantasy army.
I think you are under estimating what weak Earth 199999 Asgardians are capable of, and what they were fighting.

Elliot Randolph is able to fight a group of people who could throw cars, and in with some minor first aid was able to recover from being stabbed in the heart with an Asgardian war staff in a few minutes. Heck, Elliot fully expected to be able to just break himself out of The Bus until he found out the room he was in was made with/of Vibranium.
Yet in the movies, upper tier Asgardians die by being stabbed. Example with Thor's mother, Frigga. It doesn't even seem she was backstabbed in the heart by a sword, but both Thor and Odin considered her dead and didn't even try to carry her away.
Upper tier Asgardians seem to better handle concussion, but not penetration.

All troops were seen to go down to impacts which didn't even dramatically damage their armours or their clothes. This means a moderate amount of damage, even if the initial amount of energy was much higher, would take them down, since we consider what actually goes through, and we get a good idea of that considering what the Dark Elves' energy weapons don't do to the Asgardian troops.
Plus those bolts don't even go through the bodies. Clearly the damage done to the bodies is nothing impressive.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Their ground defenses are terribly lame,
a few thousand years of peace,
First of all, they still train.
Secondly, by Odin's words, you always have to be prepared for war.
Thirdly, going by the wikia, I see that they have waged some wars only a few centuries ago (Berserkers sent to Earth in the 12th century), and by the Asgardians' lifespans, they're ought to remember that for most of them.
Fourthly, who says they were better back then?
Fifthly, whatever reason that might explain why they're bad doesn't change the fact that bad, they are.
and an advanced warning system that is seemingly all seeing will get you caught flat footed when someone does something that is suppose to be impossible.
Clearly Afrodall doesn't see all. He didn't see the anti-diplomatic exchanges going on on Jötunheimr as part of the plot to invade Asgard, he didn't spot Loki moving around either.
He didn't spot the cloaked ships depite the fact that they're not exactly that discrete since we can even discern their silhouettes even when cloaked, and they leave small trails in the air.
In atmosphere.
Asgard is a magic floating island for crying out loud.
And?
Magic or technology, how is that relevant, how is that changing anything regarding the lack of good military assets?
And most importantly, how does that compare to a good number of space faring forces which have assembled large fleets of "flaoting" ships or cities?
Mr. Oragahn wrote: their aircrafts equally bad (aside from some form of very short range missile weapons),
I don't recall the flying boats being used in war. They seem to use the Rainbow Bridge for travel.
They're the closest thing they have to weaponized fast transport system. Nothing else was used or scrambled.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: their mightest shield only protects the palace, not even the city, not even the whole area around it, and takes a damn while to raise entirely.
And yet the shield was enough to hold off the dark elves for a seemingly indefinite amount of time.
Meaning that at best, they were besieged. We've seen that the palace has no decent counter weapon, it only sports emplacements occupied with some of those same weak sauce guns.
This defense system is totally incapable of protecting the vast majority of the populated areas, and they can't even retaliate once hunkered.
Worst, said shield is activated from a control center located from many kilometers outside the palace, and to top it all, as hinted at in the former paragraph, they don't even have the capability to deploy an entire net of crafts to patrol their own little very small bubble-land.
Oh wait, I also forgot that their conception of a good security system to the shield generator is putting about hald a dozen guards in front of a door that has no seal whatsoever, magical or technological.
How bad is that?
Asgard is an island in its own pocket universe it seems remember.
Which the Dark Elves didn't have a problem to intrude with their big ass ship, remember.
Not to say that many civilisations in science fiction have done dimensionnal voyages in various forms.
Star Trek, Stargate, even Star Wars in some ways in the EU or simply by using hyperdrives.

As a sidenote, it took the Dark Elves around five hours or so to get from that asteroid belt they were sleeping in, to the Asgard realm.
And they move around pretty damn fast considering how they got back to their homewold and then moved to Earth in a relatively short time span.
But that's not relevant to our discussion.

Mr. Oragahn wrote: Local force fields as seen in the prison can actually be smashed through by sheer brute force.
And yet out of all the superhuman beings held there, only one could do it? Don't you think it has more to do with Algrim being a Kursed?
Let's not blow this out of proportions. Those superhuman beings, for most of them, were just grunts with ugly faces, slightly stronger than the average Joe.
Above all, the movie makes it clear that strength does it. The Cursed does it by doing all that is necessary to put the highest momentum into his blows, and his sheer strength allows him to literally crush the face of one of the convicts into one of those force fields and bulge it!
That said, strength he has, since he can punch a heavy Thor more than hundred meters away.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: The Asgardians' concept of a good infantry involves a mix of swords, shields, gratuitously encumbering armour and Jaffa staves fired from the hip for a very few of them. In fact for only one of them, the King.
You must have missed the fact the sheilds and armour are "enchanted". You must have seen the weapons and armour glow from time to time.
Indeed I have, and how is that going to help? Their shields offer a very limited coverage and troopers are easily shot in the legs or the opposite side of their flanks by a foe standing in front of them, not even flanking them.
A person superhuman armed with cut anything blades, block pretty anything sheilds and armour is rather hard to defeat.
Their face are utterly exposed to anything like particles, bullets, heat, acids and poisons.
Plus they just can't ignore the momentum of a bullet hitting them squarely and throwing them off feet.
Let's not begin to talk about things a bit more advanced than powder guns.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: The quantity of troops doesn't seem particularly impressive either. They'd be hard pressed to even convince me they had a thousand of them.
A thousand years or so of near peace gives little reason to have a large military.
Perhaps, but again excuses as to why they're weak aren't going to matter a lot when they'll get crushed.
Agents of S.H.E.I.L.D. also covers this in Season 1 Episode 8 "The Well'. If Asgard goes to war the Asgardian military have Asgardian civilians enlist in the military. The civilians are given some training, and handed magic weapon that turns them into berserkers.
That show is in total disconnection with the movies. Asgard has already been invaded once, the King threatened and the Weapons Vault nearly pillaged.
That didn't even have them considerably reorganize their internal security system.
Then they get attacked a second time, right on their home turf once more, and can't do a thing. Later on they know the enemy is out there and they don't deploy anything more spectacular than the bog standard troop in cape and encumbering armour.
As for enlisting, that's subpar. There's not even any proof that they'd have enough armour to hand them all.
Plus modern militaries don't really have qualms to level places of packed men if it needs to be done.
One thing to keep in mind is that we don't know how many Asgardians there are.
The first movie has shown a lot of territory and people, and the second one added to that.
But considering how they enjoy living in spacious places, there's a lot of wasted room.
I'd peg that population at a very few millions tops.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Now let's return for a moment to those city defenses. We've only seen those heavy guns, slow rate of fire, firing sluggish and dumb projectiles, all that wrapped in a very limited range.
The AA guns seem to fire energy blasts.
Yes, they do. Doesn't help though.
The flaw seems to be the gunners are out of practice or poorly trained. The thousand or so years of peace again.
The weapons suck, that's the problem. And there's no sign that the gunners are badly trained either. They clearly have a HUD system in place, if you look closely.
If Asgardians enjoy a steady flow of constant training for ground combat, I'd expect them to also be smart enough to train on those turrets and the aircrafts as well.
And these guns hardly pack that much firepower either (just having a look at the kind of damage the missed shots do on the environment is enough to get that).
So no, they quite fail.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: So much that they can't even threaten a whalish building sized target, they can't even spam it with missiles and don't possess the tech to scan a super heavy spaceship hovering right above their heads. Even Odin's birds can't spot it, even Afrodall can't see it.
So because the Romulans and Klingons have cloaking devices that let them hide from Federation sensor, the Federation has poor sensor technology in your eye?
The point is that they can't protect themselves from anything that has a light-cloaking system.
The ships were still there, so there's no reason the Asgardians couldn't use some weapons to shoot randomly or use some particle system or god forbid some tempest spell whatever, if they had anything like that.
Like a storm, from the thunder god. Y'know?
The ships are in atmosphere. And big. That's hardly helpful, even if you're visually cloaked. You literally have to remain still to make no discernable disturbance beyond what your mere presence will already cause.
In order to hide from the sight of Heimdal you need to either use powerful magic/high end technology, or be in a rare secret place that almost no one knows about. The guy could see trillions of souls from his post, and was supprised when he lost sight of Jain Foster.
Not only we know he has limits, but he only looks in one direction at a time. You just have to be in a position where he has no reason to look at and you're fine.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Let's not even pretend that they'd have any decent form of spaceship since they can't even come with anything remotely good on ground or air, and their sole concept of interstellar trip involves being catapulted by one single superdevice which can double as a considerably long range bombardment cannon, so I don't see why they'd even bother with anything like a spaceship.
Given they live on a magic floating island in an otherwise seemingly empty pocket dimension, I'm not sure why they would have ships to go places the ships can't get to without the use of the bifrost.
The Bifrost is just a fast transport system for small packets of matter.
A ship is obviously going to be useful in many other occasions.
Now I'd bet that they might pull some mighty Space Viking Barge at some point future Thor movies, but they'll be hard pressed to explain any of that then.
But for the moment, it's pretty poor. Fact is, if they had anything like that, they didn't even use it to go get the Dark Elves' craft and spot them.

Oh, btw, since they deploy their troops from the Bifrost marker, the enemy just has to spawn camp and lob grenades.
Until the beam is shot at another place and the enemy just has to turn cannons.
I mean, why even bother with infantry when you can shoot with tanks and other armoured anti-infantry vehicles?

Or even manage to have something tossed inside the beam the moment it sucks things up back to Asgard. BAM!
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Oh and they seem to be easily stabbed by pretty much any kind of weapon. Ok, for the sake of it, let's say all of their enemies have access to adamantium and all edges are monomolecular. Sigh.
When do we see Asgardians get stabbed or cut by anything other then "magical" Asgardian weapons?
Well, several times in Thor 2 for instance.
Dark Elves use a mix of blades and guns.
You do realize that Wolverine was created as a Hulk antagonist, correct?
And?
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Their only saving grace is Mjölnir and it appears that if you maim the wielder, even that advantage is gone.
Could you please provide evidence of this please? Mjolnir does not need to be touched by Thor.
It seems more than heavily implied in Thor 2 I'd say.
But it could be part of the whole theatrical ploy, so I'd give you that.


I also just realized that they suck so much at geography that they can't even remember where Northern Europe is on a map. So much that when Thor is cast out, they drop him on the wrong continent.

Lucky
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Re: Movie Asgardians (Marvel) not so impressive!

Post by Lucky » Thu Mar 20, 2014 12:02 pm

Mr. Oragahn wrote: Yet in the movies, upper tier Asgardians die by being stabbed.
Yes, stabbed by weapons that carve up space ships that are undamaged by crashing into stone. Asgardian weapons and armor are very similar to repulsor technology used by Tony Stark and Whiplash.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Example with Thor's mother, Frigga. It doesn't even seem she was backstabbed in the heart by a sword, but both Thor and Odin considered her dead and didn't even try to carry her away.
Upper tier Asgardians seem to better handle concussion, but not penetration.
Frigga isn't a high end Asgardian.

In the comics Frigga isn't Thor's "biological" mother as well.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: All troops were seen to go down to impacts which didn't even dramatically damage their armours or their clothes. This means a moderate amount of damage, even if the initial amount of energy was much higher, would take them down, since we consider what actually goes through, and we get a good idea of that considering what the Dark Elves' energy weapons don't do to the Asgardian troops.
Plus those bolts don't even go through the bodies. Clearly the damage done to the bodies is nothing impressive.
Or the weapons being used do damage in less obvious ways. When dealing with things like Asgardian technology, it is a rather bad idea to assume that everything is happening on the "material plain". Sif is shown ignoring shotgun blasts to the gut.

I will admit the Asgardian A.A. was underpowered.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: First of all, they still train.
Secondly, by Odin's words, you always have to be prepared for war.
Thirdly, going by the wikia, I see that they have waged some wars only a few centuries ago (Berserkers sent to Earth in the 12th century), and by the Asgardians' lifespans, they're ought to remember that for most of them.
Fourthly, who says they were better back then?
Fifthly, whatever reason that might explain why they're bad doesn't change the fact that bad, they are.
I confused the guy making a statue of Odien's father with serving under Odien's father. Didn't Bor fight the Dark Elves before Odien had Thor?

Being out of practice do to no real enemies leading to complacency leading to lax training makes perfect sense. There is a difference between no teaining, and being lax.

They weren't using weapons like Berserker staffs. For all we know the guards we see were never battle tested while facing elite veteran dark elf warriors.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Clearly Afrodall doesn't see all. He didn't see the anti-diplomatic exchanges going on on Jötunheimr as part of the plot to invade Asgard, he didn't spot Loki moving around either.
He didn't spot the cloaked ships depite the fact that they're not exactly that discrete since we can even discern their silhouettes even when cloaked, and they leave small trails in the air.
In atmosphere.
Not seeing something that is cloaked, and not seeing places that are not known to exist all the while being able to see something like 99% of what exists, what a horrible sensory system.

The missiles fired from the "boats" were very effective

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItQPxsEhuAI

Mr. Oragahn wrote: And?
Magic or technology, how is that relevant, how is that changing anything regarding the lack of good military assets?
And most importantly, how does that compare to a good number of space faring forces which have assembled large fleets of "flaoting" ships or cities?
You seemingly have to send in a small force, or invade from the bridge.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: They're the closest thing they have to weaponized fast transport system. Nothing else was used or scrambled.
I was mistaken.

The weapons on the flying boats seemed rather effective even if they could not take a hit, but the boats seem to be targeting the exhaust ports of the Dark Elf ships often
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Meaning that at best, they were besieged. We've seen that the palace has no decent counter weapon, it only sports emplacements occupied with some of those same weak sauce guns.
This defense system is totally incapable of protecting the vast majority of the populated areas, and they can't even retaliate once hunkered.
Worst, said shield is activated from a control center located from many kilometers outside the palace, and to top it all, as hinted at in the former paragraph, they don't even have the capability to deploy an entire net of crafts to patrol their own little very small bubble-land.
Oh wait, I also forgot that their conception of a good security system to the shield generator is putting about hald a dozen guards in front of a door that has no seal whatsoever, magical or technological.
How bad is that?
I'd think that this suggests how hard it is to get to Asgard?

Why didn't the Dark Elves attack the method of turning the shield on and off? That would suggest the defenses are not all that they appear.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Which the Dark Elves didn't have a problem to intrude with their big ass ship, remember.
Not to say that many civilisations in science fiction have done dimensionnal voyages in various forms.
Star Trek, Stargate, even Star Wars in some ways in the EU or simply by using hyperdrives.
Those examples aren't very good as those groups barely understand it. The only group who might is the R.O.B. in Star Trek.

Mr. Oragahn wrote: As a sidenote, it took the Dark Elves around five hours or so to get from that asteroid belt they were sleeping in, to the Asgard realm.
And they move around pretty damn fast considering how they got back to their homewold and then moved to Earth in a relatively short time span.
But that's not relevant to our discussion.
The Dark Elf home world seems to be one of the Nine Realms rather then a planet. It as fast as traveling through a wormhole.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Let's not blow this out of proportions. Those superhuman beings, for most of them, were just grunts with ugly faces, slightly stronger than the average Joe.
Above all, the movie makes it clear that strength does it. The Cursed does it by doing all that is necessary to put the highest momentum into his blows, and his sheer strength allows him to literally crush the face of one of the convicts into one of those force fields and bulge it!
That said, strength he has, since he can punch a heavy Thor more than hundred meters away.
They are on par if not stronger then Sif. Asgardians just don't look impressive when fighting equals.
Lady Sif in action on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quUjNQ1QO-E

Thor is at least in the comics, half elder god. Anything that can throw Thor around is insanely strong.

Anything that can take a blow from Thor's hammer is insanely tough.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Indeed I have, and how is that going to help? Their shields offer a very limited coverage and troopers are easily shot in the legs or the opposite side of their flanks by a foe standing in front of them, not even flanking them.
Check the fight Tony Stark had with Ivan Vanko in Monaco. Ivan, Tony, and Asgardians use similar technology.

If you can, I suggest you catch this episode for Asgardians VS humans
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGlmRuoxPQk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quUjNQ1QO-E
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Their face are utterly exposed to anything like particles, bullets, heat, acids and poisons.
Plus they just can't ignore the momentum of a bullet hitting them squarely and throwing them off feet.
Let's not begin to talk about things a bit more advanced than powder guns.
And yet Sif ignores shotgun blasts into her kidneys in Yes men.

Ivan Vanko ignores being hit by a car in Monaco.

Tony Stark ignores flying into a concrete wall in his lab while testing his boots and gloves.

Tony's armor shrugs off a tank round and a nose dive into the ground.

There are a lot of invisible "shields" generated by battle armor.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Perhaps, but again excuses as to why they're weak aren't going to matter a lot when they'll get crushed.
There is nothing stopping Asgard from raising a larger army if it chooses.

Few groups have the capability to stop Asgardians from teleporting into their bases, and killing them.

Few have the capability to hide from Asgardians.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: That show is in total disconnection with the movies.
The reason Lorali was on the run was because of the jail break in the movie.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Asgard has already been invaded once, the King threatened and the Weapons Vault nearly pillaged.
That didn't even have them considerably reorganize their internal security system.
Then they get attacked a second time, right on their home turf once more, and can't do a thing. Later on they know the enemy is out there and they don't deploy anything more spectacular than the bog standard troop in cape and encumbering armour.
As for enlisting, that's subpar. There's not even any proof that they'd have enough armour to hand them all.
Plus modern militaries don't really have qualms to level places of packed men if it needs to be done.
Since when is a commando team(to put the best spin on things for the Frost Giants) an invasion force, and they needed inside help.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: The first movie has shown a lot of territory and people, and the second one added to that.
But considering how they enjoy living in spacious places, there's a lot of wasted room.
I'd peg that population at a very few millions tops.
You're confusing The Realm of Asgard with the other NINE REALMS. Asgard does not need the Bifrost to travel to places in Asgard.

What we see at the start of "Thor: The Dark World" is Asgard acting as cosmic police officers in the other eight realms.

Asgard is a magical floating island in its own realm, and conversely Midgar is more then Earth.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Yes, they do. Doesn't help though.
It was kind of odd that the flying boats seemed to have better weapons.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: The weapons suck, that's the problem. And there's no sign that the gunners are badly trained either. They clearly have a HUD system in place, if you look closely.
If Asgardians enjoy a steady flow of constant training for ground combat, I'd expect them to also be smart enough to train on those turrets and the aircrafts as well.
And these guns hardly pack that much firepower either (just having a look at the kind of damage the missed shots do on the environment is enough to get that).
So no, they quite fail.
And? Having a good targeting system is useless if you don't know how to use it.

I agree the A.A. guns seemed underpowered for some reason. Asgardian daggers should not be better A.A. weapons then huge bleep off cannons, but then again the Dark Elf ships weren't damaged by crashing through large amounts of palace made of stone.

What do the A.A. guns hit besides the Dark Elf ships that is remotely quantifiable? Seems like the Dark Elf ships tend to be taken out by things flying down the exhaust pipe.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: The point is that they can't protect themselves from anything that has a light-cloaking system.
The ships were still there, so there's no reason the Asgardians couldn't use some weapons to shoot randomly or use some particle system or god forbid some tempest spell whatever, if they had anything like that.
Like a storm, from the thunder god. Y'know?
The ships are in atmosphere. And big. That's hardly helpful, even if you're visually cloaked. You literally have to remain still to make no discernable disturbance beyond what your mere presence will already cause.
Light cloaking system? You call a cloak that literally hides souls a light cloaking system?

Even visible spectrum aspects made the ships almost impossible to see when you could touch them.

What are Dark Elf ships made from? You keep harping on how weak the weapons were, and yet you ignore the targets flying through stone repeatedly.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Not only we know he has limits, but he only looks in one direction at a time. You just have to be in a position where he has no reason to look at and you're fine.
You missed the part where Heimdall does the all seeing thing with his eye closed.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: The Bifrost is just a fast transport system for small packets of matter.
A ship is obviously going to be useful in many other occasions.
No, you can not simply walk from one realm to another. It like Earth Realm and Outworld in Mortal Kombat.

The Bifrost can easily transport armies.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Now I'd bet that they might pull some mighty Space Viking Barge at some point future Thor movies, but they'll be hard pressed to explain any of that then.
More like some goats and a chariot. I almost find it amusing that you are criticizing the parts that were truest to myth.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: But for the moment, it's pretty poor. Fact is, if they had anything like that, they didn't even use it to go get the Dark Elves' craft and spot them.
You seem to be working on the faulty assumption that Asgard and the other Realms are in Midgard which houses things like the Kree Epire.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Oh, btw, since they deploy their troops from the Bifrost marker, the enemy just has to spawn camp and lob grenades.
Until the beam is shot at another place and the enemy just has to turn cannons.
I mean, why even bother with infantry when you can shoot with tanks and other armoured anti-infantry vehicles?

Or even manage to have something tossed inside the beam the moment it sucks things up back to Asgard. BAM!
A beam that melts and craters blacktop, and is center in the middle of your forces? Right that'll work great.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Well, several times in Thor 2 for instance.
Dark Elves use a mix of blades and guns.
I realize I misphrased the question, but you had to realize what the spirit of the question was?

Your answer is that Asgardians are hurt by magical dark elf weapons? That hardly defeats my point given Sif can ignore shotgun that are fired from a few feet away.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: And?
My point is that Wolverine was designed from the start to have weapons that could threaten Thor let alone your average Asgardian. Heck, Taskmaster was killing Asgardians in the comics.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: It seems more than heavily implied in Thor 2 I'd say.
But it could be part of the whole theatrical ploy, so I'd give you that.
That is the thing, in Thor: The Dark World the hammer is almost a character in itself.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: I also just realized that they suck so much at geography that they can't even remember where Northern Europe is on a map. So much that when Thor is cast out, they drop him on the wrong continent.
You think Odin cared where Thor ended up on Earth? If Odin cared where Thor had ended up in the first movie then there is a good chance Odin planned everything in the movies.

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Mr. Oragahn
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Re: Movie Asgardians (Marvel) not so impressive!

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Wed Mar 26, 2014 8:03 pm

Lucky wrote:
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Yet in the movies, upper tier Asgardians die by being stabbed.
Yes, stabbed by weapons that carve up space ships that are undamaged by crashing into stone. Asgardian weapons and armor are very similar to repulsor technology used by Tony Stark and Whiplash.
You're conflating different facts.
The weapons that carved a ship were Afrodall's. None of his swords were used to hurt an Asgardian.
You haven't demonstrated that his weapons are the standard. Otherwise, Thor's Mjolnir's is a standard as well.
Which it is not.
In fact, I'm pretty sure that the Einherjar in the dungeons would have loved to have access to those blades that cut through ship hulls in order to help the Kursed lose an arm.
At least Loki managed to impale the guy with a spear of some kind, possibly picked from the Dark Elves although it just seems to have poped out of nowhere.
So yes, standard Asgardian blades might be good, but they're not all bells and whistles as much as you'd like them be.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Example with Thor's mother, Frigga. It doesn't even seem she was backstabbed in the heart by a sword, but both Thor and Odin considered her dead and didn't even try to carry her away.
Upper tier Asgardians seem to better handle concussion, but not penetration.
Frigga isn't a high end Asgardian.
She casts illusions just as much as Loki, who isn't exactly a wimp. He actually also gets impaled. Or at least if it was an illusion (we don't know when he really faked his death precisely), it did look convincing.
And contrary to other moves that clearly show that something important is happening, it didn't look like the Kursed made much effort to get the blade through.
Frigga is good enough to fight back Malekith as well. And yet, one stab where it hurts and goodbye.
In the comics Frigga isn't Thor's "biological" mother as well.
What comics?
Those from the same story arc? Earth 1999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 or another?
Mr. Oragahn wrote: All troops were seen to go down to impacts which didn't even dramatically damage their armours or their clothes. This means a moderate amount of damage, even if the initial amount of energy was much higher, would take them down, since we consider what actually goes through, and we get a good idea of that considering what the Dark Elves' energy weapons don't do to the Asgardian troops.
Plus those bolts don't even go through the bodies. Clearly the damage done to the bodies is nothing impressive.
Or the weapons being used do damage in less obvious ways. When dealing with things like Asgardian technology, it is a rather bad idea to assume that everything is happening on the "material plain".
Speculation much.
Eventually all I could accept is that the energy blast spread across the body and nerve-kill the target without dealing too much kinetic damage proper.
That said those weapons were very powerful for infantry guns. Powerful enough to blast stone pillars.
Modern military would have to think about using heavy rifles, slugs and grenade launchers to hope get close to that. But they can.
It is still impressive that those weapons managed to do so little damage to Asgardian armours.
That's a good point in favour of Asgardians. But it also shows that the little that actually got through still owns guards.
Plus if that kind of firepower is impressive for current times, in science fiction or science fantasy settings, it is simply not. Such is also the point I'm making here.
This is not always about the National Guard you know. ;)
Sif is shown ignoring shotgun blasts to the gut.
I'll come back to that later on if you don't mind.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: First of all, they still train.
Secondly, by Odin's words, you always have to be prepared for war.
Thirdly, going by the wikia, I see that they have waged some wars only a few centuries ago (Berserkers sent to Earth in the 12th century), and by the Asgardians' lifespans, they're ought to remember that for most of them.
Fourthly, who says they were better back then?
Fifthly, whatever reason that might explain why they're bad doesn't change the fact that bad, they are.
Being out of practice do to no real enemies leading to complacency leading to lax training makes perfect sense. There is a difference between no teaining, and being lax.

They weren't using weapons like Berserker staffs. For all we know the guards we see were never battle tested while facing elite veteran dark elf warriors.
What? Those same arguments apply to the Dark Elves, yet they were doing quite well (did you see any stray shot during the landing inside the palace?).
Even more in fact, since they haven't seen a fight in millennia for all we know. In comparison, the Asgardians have already fought in the meantime.
And what about berserker staves? Clearly, even when the city is threatened from within as well as under a constant threat of invasion, no one breaks out the fancy toys.
They merely count on the vanilla guardsmen in encumbering armour and exposed faces.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Clearly Afrodall doesn't see all. He didn't see the anti-diplomatic exchanges going on on Jötunheimr as part of the plot to invade Asgard, he didn't spot Loki moving around either.
He didn't spot the cloaked ships depite the fact that they're not exactly that discrete since we can even discern their silhouettes even when cloaked, and they leave small trails in the air.
In atmosphere.
Not seeing something that is cloaked, and not seeing places that are not known to exist all the while being able to see something like 99% of what exists, what a horrible sensory system.
As I said, we still can discern some silhouette and the ships still move in atmosphere, so obviously Afrodall's scanning leaves a lot to be desired since he can't even scan odd movements in atmosphere despite knowing the shit is right under his nose.
Not to say that the other excuse, being that he can't see what he doesn't know about, is quite disturbing, if not downright pathetic, really.
How can one discover anything if the prerequisite to seeing anything is knowing about them before hand?
Can we claim laughter here?

Now I have a theory. His vision is great on things that have been tagged for his vision to work on. Those nine realms, for example, and some trillions of souls stuck on whatever worlds within those realms.
Probably largely helped because the Yggdrasil connects them all.
The missiles fired from the "boats" were very effective
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItQPxsEhuAI
I didn't say they sucked. However, they only were fired at a very close range and used once.
Even when Malekith's ship was floating before the palace in plain day, nothing was ever fired at it. Not even the AA guns, as a matter of fact. I can only conclude that their range sucks big hairy donkey balls.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: And?
Magic or technology, how is that relevant, how is that changing anything regarding the lack of good military assets?
And most importantly, how does that compare to a good number of space faring forces which have assembled large fleets of "flaoting" ships or cities?
You seemingly have to send in a small force, or invade from the bridge.
Or since Asgard is still in this universe, drop a new gate on the edge of said bubble island, like the Ori or the Wraith from Stargate can do, as much as the Strogg from Quake.
Just throwing some examples here.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Meaning that at best, they were besieged. We've seen that the palace has no decent counter weapon, it only sports emplacements occupied with some of those same weak sauce guns.
This defense system is totally incapable of protecting the vast majority of the populated areas, and they can't even retaliate once hunkered.
Worst, said shield is activated from a control center located from many kilometers outside the palace, and to top it all, as hinted at in the former paragraph, they don't even have the capability to deploy an entire net of crafts to patrol their own little very small bubble-land.
Oh wait, I also forgot that their conception of a good security system to the shield generator is putting about hald a dozen guards in front of a door that has no seal whatsoever, magical or technological.
How bad is that?
I'd think that this suggests how hard it is to get to Asgard?
Looks mighty stupid, yes. If you build a shield, it means you know your lair isn't invasion-proof. Why place the on/off button outside of the shield?
Even if only one bloke can activate or deactivate it, what happens if he's... occupied? Or gets his arse freezed?
Not, that's just stupid, and one point in favour of the invader.
Why didn't the Dark Elves attack the method of turning the shield on and off? That would suggest the defenses are not all that they appear.
They already had a dude who was inside the palace and blew the shield engine with his fists. Who knows what they'd have done if the last of the Kursed had failed?
We have no proof that damaging the spherical structure at the end of the Bifrost bridge does anything (aside from obviously destroying the command system), but it's a design failure to have the activation system outside, no matter how you look at it.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Which the Dark Elves didn't have a problem to intrude with their big ass ship, remember.
Not to say that many civilisations in science fiction have done dimensionnal voyages in various forms.
Star Trek, Stargate, even Star Wars in some ways in the EU or simply by using hyperdrives.
Those examples aren't very good as those groups barely understand it. The only group who might is the R.O.B. in Star Trek.
Let's go back to reviewing some cases here, then.
In Star Wars, hyperspace travel is totally mundane and spread across an entire galaxy.
For Stargate, even the humans at some point were able to target altverses and even have a bridge built between two universes. I'll leave the Ancients out because it would take too long to list everything that approaches more or less dimensional flux. The Wraith have shown that one simple soldier, once stuck on Earth, built from the remnants of his Dart a transdimensionnal radio.
Star Trek? When they get into fluidic space, for example? Looks like a perfectly legit example of jumping between two realms. Although I don't know Trek much, considering the setting it is, I'd expect a good number of episodes involving dimensionnal traveling, potentially some of these cases not leaving the UFP that baffled. But perhaps they never understand it (aside from the jump to fluidic space, which is very well mastered, at least by the Borg ... oh boy, the Borg in movie Asgard, LOL).
That's just an example. Heck, perhaps we could pick Babylon 5, since their FTL seems to precisely involve jumping into an entirely different realm.
Oh, let's not talk about Warhammer 40000 then, now that I think of it.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Let's not blow this out of proportions. Those superhuman beings, for most of them, were just grunts with ugly faces, slightly stronger than the average Joe.
Above all, the movie makes it clear that strength does it. The Cursed does it by doing all that is necessary to put the highest momentum into his blows, and his sheer strength allows him to literally crush the face of one of the convicts into one of those force fields and bulge it!
That said, strength he has, since he can punch a heavy Thor more than hundred meters away.
They are on par if not stronger then Sif. Asgardians just don't look impressive when fighting equals.
Lady Sif in action on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quUjNQ1QO-E
Impressive, but that's literally at odds with what we were seeing seconds earlier when she was desperately shielding herself from the bullets.
Looks like plot hax. But I give you that. Some kind of shield, indeed. Like what seems to be provided by the arc reactor tech, which is derivated from research on the Tesseract (otherwise, there's no way the first suit Stark built would have not killed him when he crashed into the ground).
Still, shotguns are not the most powerful weapon a human can carry. And that's just contemporary humans we're talking about here.
Plus there are varieties of ammunitions. Some a less powerful than others.
Thor is at least in the comics, half elder god. Anything that can throw Thor around is insanely strong.
Anything that can take a blow from Thor's hammer is insanely tough.
Yep, but still not talking about the comics here. Sorry.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Indeed I have, and how is that going to help? Their shields offer a very limited coverage and troopers are easily shot in the legs or the opposite side of their flanks by a foe standing in front of them, not even flanking them.
Check the fight Tony Stark had with Ivan Vanko in Monaco. Ivan, Tony, and Asgardians use similar technology.
Wrong. Stark uses a reactor that gives him a huge advantage and is only matched by the exceptionally powerful Thor.
Your average Asgardian isn't anywhere close to that. Guards get down with much, much less. Like punches in the face from fists that, even if slightly more dense that human fists, don't move at super speeds (see the escape from Asgard).

So again excuse me but I'm not impressed.
Not to say that if Thor is away, all these Asgardians look pretty much screwed.
If you can, I suggest you catch this episode for Asgardians VS humans
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGlmRuoxPQk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quUjNQ1QO-E
Lorelei isn't human.
As for the rest, it would be much more interesting if we were to see humans deploy greater firepower.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Their face are utterly exposed to anything like particles, bullets, heat, acids and poisons.
Plus they just can't ignore the momentum of a bullet hitting them squarely and throwing them off feet.
Let's not begin to talk about things a bit more advanced than powder guns.
And yet Sif ignores shotgun blasts into her kidneys in Yes men.
Because of the armour. And she still was hiding her face with the shield seconds before that. But as you may have not noticed, I was talking about the exposed flesh.
I forgot to add mere punches to the list.
Ivan Vanko ignores being hit by a car in Monaco.
Yes, arc reactor derivatives allow for that. We've seen it even protects Stark from Loki's possession trick as well.
But again not all Asgardians have access to that.
Tony Stark ignores flying into a concrete wall in his lab while testing his boots and gloves.

Tony's armor shrugs off a tank round and a nose dive into the ground.
Not exactly a tank round but a smaller round from the smaller gun.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Perhaps, but again excuses as to why they're weak aren't going to matter a lot when they'll get crushed.
There is nothing stopping Asgard from raising a larger army if it chooses.
Considering how far their standards for the Einherjar (elite warriors) go, I'm not too worried.

How long does it take to raise that army? The more of them, the longer it takes to prepare and deploy them. We get back to spawn camping at the point of arrival of the Bifrost's beam.
Few groups have the capability to stop Asgardians from teleporting into their bases, and killing them.
Few have the capability to hide from Asgardians.
Aside from those careful enough to not have their base out in the open, of course.
Or those who aren't on planets known by Afrodall (since he needs to know things exist to even have a chance to see them apparently).
Let's not even think about simple outer space, since the Dark Elves didn't have a problem to hide in some random asteroid field above a planet.
Or worlds simply outside of Yggdrasil. Because there are some.
And, the best of all, the cloaked base.
Let's also add the shielded world or base, which has no reason to be violated by the Bifrost elevator thing.

All in all, it also appears that realms are nothing more than planetary systems at best, aside from Asgard being a mere small dimension with a view on a section of the universe.
Which is funny when you think of it because it means light can get through. However controls the light might easily get a foot into the door.

Only one case suggests that a realm might be an entire galaxy, and that's not totally sure. Thor's drawing shows planets, eventually small groups of them at best.
In fact
"Your world is one of the nine realms of the cosmos linked to each other by the branches of Yggdrasil, the world's tree."
In the defense of the multi-galactic supervision, unless one of those realms is mega populated, you can't cram ten trillion souls on just eight planets.
In fact the movies seem to go back and forth between both possibilities, but clearly putting the emphasis on the realm = world interpretation.

In the first movie, Earth is a world and directly equalled to a realm by Thor himself. Jötunheimr is a planet (although initial sketches also had it as some kind of floating mass), nothing else, and even a comics that is partially a prelude to the second movie, presents Vanaheim as a world of its own, in a planetary system of the same name.

Not to say that the windows to the other realms over Greenwich literally show the surface of worlds, not entire planetary systems or what else. Plus the connection to those realms during the Convergence clearly transports things to worlds, not outer space.

Aside from Asgard being a special "realm", there doesn't seem to be nothing special about those other realms.
At the outmost, and that's absolutely stretching it, in order to fit with the vague and poetic ending of the first Thor movie, each of these planets might be the "ambassy" of different galaxies which Yggdrasil would connect to.
Still, in the end, it's a limited number of locations. We know there are worlds outside of Yggdrasil's reach.

When the Dark Elves' ship floats above a planet which might be Svartálfar, surrounded by a couple of rocks, and they're supervising the Convergence of the nine realms; their tactical screen shows a planet (likely Svartálfar), and the subtitles have Algrim say that the worlds are aligned.
Thor again says that the nine realms orbit Asgard and during the Convergence, the worlds are aligned.

Not to say that if a mere handful humans can actually crack a system that stabilizes something as odd as the Convergence, and can literally play with the Convergence effects as to open portals here and there, I don't think it would be very hard for much more advanced groups to crack the thing that opens such portals, at least in theory.

And, again, the Dark Elves got to Asgard without the help of anyone from Asgard.




By the way, it seems you're automatically thinking that Asgardians would be fighting contemporary militaries or medieval forces only.

Mr. Oragahn wrote: Asgard has already been invaded once, the King threatened and the Weapons Vault nearly pillaged.
That didn't even have them considerably reorganize their internal security system.
Then they get attacked a second time, right on their home turf once more, and can't do a thing. Later on they know the enemy is out there and they don't deploy anything more spectacular than the bog standard troop in cape and encumbering armour.
As for enlisting, that's subpar. There's not even any proof that they'd have enough armour to hand them all.
Plus modern militaries don't really have qualms to level places of packed men if it needs to be done.
Since when is a commando team(to put the best spin on things for the Frost Giants) an invasion force, and they needed inside help.
Fine, call that an incursion right into Asgard. The thing being that these few Frost Giants still got inside into one of the most important rooms of all.
Even with help from inside which actually baffled Afrodall, that would have been enough to crank the danger'o'meter off the carts. Because when you think of it, even enemies know better ways to get inside Asgard than both Odin and Afrodall combined.
And they can't even know how much any potential enemy outside would know about those passages.

As for the events of the second movie, I reiterate: despite all the urgency, the danger, the deaths and destruction, you never see any super duper force ever deployed. Not super toy, nothing.
Asgardians are dramatically unprepared for an invasion of their land.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: The first movie has shown a lot of territory and people, and the second one added to that.
But considering how they enjoy living in spacious places, there's a lot of wasted room.
I'd peg that population at a very few millions tops.
You're confusing The Realm of Asgard with the other NINE REALMS. Asgard does not need the Bifrost to travel to places in Asgard.

What we see at the start of "Thor: The Dark World" is Asgard acting as cosmic police officers in the other eight realms.

Asgard is a magical floating island in its own realm, and conversely Midgar is more then Earth.
Excuse me? Did we lose the connection somewhere down there? I'm responding to a part that strictly focuses on the potential size of the population of a place called Asgard which, for all clues we have, is actually a very small place.
Thus with the capita count, we can muse about the army that might be raised, and yet you offer me a total non sequitur in return?

Plus aside from all of what you said being totally irrelevant, it begs to be dicussed, as seen above.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Yes, they do. Doesn't help though.
It was kind of odd that the flying boats seemed to have better weapons.
Aside from the missiles, they're just as bad.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: The weapons suck, that's the problem. And there's no sign that the gunners are badly trained either. They clearly have a HUD system in place, if you look closely.
If Asgardians enjoy a steady flow of constant training for ground combat, I'd expect them to also be smart enough to train on those turrets and the aircrafts as well.
And these guns hardly pack that much firepower either (just having a look at the kind of damage the missed shots do on the environment is enough to get that).
So no, they quite fail.
And? Having a good targeting system is useless if you don't know how to use it.
Good, you've just proved that the gunners in Asgard are total inepts.
This is not what I'd call a defense in their favour.

It also goes without saying that the Dark Elves weren't exactly providing hard to hit targets. Any aiming assisted by computer should have at least hit one of those ships. Yet I can't recall even a single one of them being remotely scorched. It's just that bad.
I agree the A.A. guns seemed underpowered for some reason. Asgardian daggers should not be better A.A. weapons then huge bleep off cannons, but then again the Dark Elf ships weren't damaged by crashing through large amounts of palace made of stone.
Crashing through stone is something that many crafts in science fiction do without much problem, while surviving.
What do the A.A. guns hit besides the Dark Elf ships that is remotely quantifiable?
During the escape, bolts from one of these cannons is seen hitting a rocky formation on the edge of a large water area. Damage is subpar. Even a modern Apache's missiles do more damage in Afghanistan than that.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: The point is that they can't protect themselves from anything that has a light-cloaking system.
The ships were still there, so there's no reason the Asgardians couldn't use some weapons to shoot randomly or use some particle system or god forbid some tempest spell whatever, if they had anything like that.
Like a storm, from the thunder god. Y'know?
The ships are in atmosphere. And big. That's hardly helpful, even if you're visually cloaked. You literally have to remain still to make no discernable disturbance beyond what your mere presence will already cause.
Light cloaking system? You call a cloak that literally hides souls a light cloaking system?
Even visible spectrum aspects made the ships almost impossible to see when you could touch them.
Aside from other fictional universes having cloaking systems that mask people's presence, that's hardly explaining the lack of sighting of the ship itself.
Even more in atmosphere. A ship takes volume in a fluid.
I already made that point clear enough and you haven't provided a proper counter to that.
What are Dark Elf ships made from? You keep harping on how weak the weapons were, and yet you ignore the targets flying through stone repeatedly.
Well, since the cannons couldn't even decently threaten natural stone formations, it's quite a logical conclusion that they wouldn't even scratch the Dark Elves' ships.
Whatever they're made of isn't much important at this point since there's nothing the Asgardians possess in terms of defense that would have sufficed.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Not only we know he has limits, but he only looks in one direction at a time. You just have to be in a position where he has no reason to look at and you're fine.
You missed the part where Heimdall does the all seeing thing with his eye closed.
It's an image.
The principle remains. Jane Foster landed where the Aether was hidden, which must be on one of the nine realms since portals only happen between those realms, which were worlds.
Afrodall lost track of her.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: The Bifrost is just a fast transport system for small packets of matter.
A ship is obviously going to be useful in many other occasions.
No, you can not simply walk from one realm to another. It like Earth Realm and Outworld in Mortal Kombat.
The Bifrost can easily transport armies.
I'm talking about logistics here. A ship allows better travel than a tunnel system that can only allow x persons to be funneled through at a time, while standing shoulder to shoulder after walking down a laboriously long bridge.

A ship is also far more mobile so it makes transport easier, both on the fact that you don't necessarily have to be at a given point to move out, and that you also are able to move to other places with more ease than a system which, thus far, has only been seen to be capable to displace people only on worlds.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Now I'd bet that they might pull some mighty Space Viking Barge at some point future Thor movies, but they'll be hard pressed to explain any of that then.
More like some goats and a chariot. I almost find it amusing that you are criticizing the parts that were truest to myth.
Pardon? You're confused. I'm criticizing the lack of real military assets, although I consider it possible that, fitting with the overal gods are advanced aliens shtick, we might see some kind of large space-capable battle ship that might somehwat look like a viking sailing boat. Just for coolness.
But if you want to insist that the ship will be tracted by goats, be my guest. :D

My point was that the introduction of such a vessel, however cool and awesome it might be, would be totally at odds with the second Thor movie as it would fail to explain why it wasn't used in some of the direst times for Asgard.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: But for the moment, it's pretty poor. Fact is, if they had anything like that, they didn't even use it to go get the Dark Elves' craft and spot them.
You seem to be working on the faulty assumption that Asgard and the other Realms are in Midgard which houses things like the Kree Epire.
Proof that the Kree Empire is inside Midgard?

And, might you also explain how this is relevant to the topic of the Asgardians pulling a huge ship out of some random warehouse and using it to hunt down Malekith's craft?
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Oh, btw, since they deploy their troops from the Bifrost marker, the enemy just has to spawn camp and lob grenades.
Until the beam is shot at another place and the enemy just has to turn cannons.
I mean, why even bother with infantry when you can shoot with tanks and other armoured anti-infantry vehicles?

Or even manage to have something tossed inside the beam the moment it sucks things up back to Asgard. BAM!
A beam that melts and craters blacktop, and is center in the middle of your forces? Right that'll work great.
All depends on how mobile the bridge is, really.
Although it would work well against modern forces, it would be harder against advanced ones and shielded units.
There can only be one bridge at a time.

Plus imagine you bait them. Since the bridge beam can suck things up, you can infiltrate the city that way by sticking to people being beamed up, or smuggle anything inside an artifact the Asgardians would try to snatch from their enemy's grasp. It would have been very unfortunate if, say, a 50 MT bomb had been sitting right inside the Aether's pillar.

Then I guess someone's going to have to use massive loads of dark energy to allow even one guy to move out of Asgard.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Well, several times in Thor 2 for instance.
Dark Elves use a mix of blades and guns.
I realize I misphrased the question, but you had to realize what the spirit of the question was?

Your answer is that Asgardians are hurt by magical dark elf weapons? That hardly defeats my point given Sif can ignore shotgun that are fired from a few feet away.
LOL. Malekith himself was hurt... strike that. Impaled by nothing more than metal sticks of the most mundane origin, produced on Earth.
Glorified criucket sticks hammered down in the soft grassy ground of the Greenwich's palace garden.
And before you claim that Thor threw them so this and that, we can actually see how "fast" those pickets were thrown. Nothing too formidable here. Far from it, actually.

Oh, plus Malekith still had his dark face thing on, meaning that he most likely still benefited from the extra oomph of the Aether.

Frankly, it seems quite clear that although those guys can deal with huge concussion, they really hate anything that cuts.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: And?
My point is that Wolverine was designed from the start to have weapons that could threaten Thor let alone your average Asgardian. Heck, Taskmaster was killing Asgardians in the comics.
Is this in any way related to the cinematic continuity by chance? Because otherwise, you're wasting both of our times I'm afraid.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: I also just realized that they suck so much at geography that they can't even remember where Northern Europe is on a map. So much that when Thor is cast out, they drop him on the wrong continent.
You think Odin cared where Thor ended up on Earth?
You mean he could have tossed him right into the ocean?
If Odin cared where Thor had ended up in the first movie then there is a good chance Odin planned everything in the movies.
Or not?



Also, it just dawned upon me that the Asgardians don't even have any radio system at all.
Their concept of communication is all about meeting someone in person to deliver a message or any piece of information.
On the battlefield, you see nothing remotely close to a system to deliver info beyond the range of voice shouting, down to any unit section.
Even less anything that would remotely evoke a networked communication system.

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Re: Movie Asgardians (Marvel) not so impressive!

Post by Lucky » Mon Mar 31, 2014 3:58 am

Mr. Oragahn wrote: You're conflating different facts.
The weapons that carved a ship were Afrodall's. None of his swords were used to hurt an Asgardian.
You haven't demonstrated that his weapons are the standard. Otherwise, Thor's Mjolnir's is a standard as well.
Which it is not.
In fact, I'm pretty sure that the Einherjar in the dungeons would have loved to have access to those blades that cut through ship hulls in order to help the Kursed lose an arm.
At least Loki managed to impale the guy with a spear of some kind, possibly picked from the Dark Elves although it just seems to have poped out of nowhere.
So yes, standard Asgardian blades might be good, but they're not all bells and whistles as much as you'd like them be.
1) Why assume that some hold out weapons Hemdall had on him are anything special?

2) Why assume the Kursed is as easily damaged as the ship?

3) Loki's spear is Loki's spear, and the guy is a mast of illusion and "magic".

4) Even if standard Asgardian blades are only half as good as Heldall's that still means they can carve up most armors.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: She casts illusions just as much as Loki, who isn't exactly a wimp. He actually also gets impaled. Or at least if it was an illusion (we don't know when he really faked his death precisely), it did look convincing.
And contrary to other moves that clearly show that something important is happening, it didn't look like the Kursed made much effort to get the blade through.
Frigga is good enough to fight back Malekith as well. And yet, one stab where it hurts and goodbye.
Odin>Thor>Loki>>>Sif and the Warriors Three>>>>Everyone else more or less
Mr. Oragahn wrote: What comics?
Those from the same story arc? Earth 1999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 or another?
Earth 616, it is used to explain why Thor is abnormally powerful..

Comic book Thor is kind of a broken character when the author remembers who they are writing. He is a B class super scientist, a B class magic user, and an A class warrior who can casually pop planets, and there are wars to make him even more powerful...
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Speculation much.
Eventually all I could accept is that the energy blast spread across the body and nerve-kill the target without dealing too much kinetic damage proper.
That said those weapons were very powerful for infantry guns. Powerful enough to blast stone pillars.
Modern military would have to think about using heavy rifles, slugs and grenade launchers to hope get close to that. But they can.
It is still impressive that those weapons managed to do so little damage to Asgardian armours.
That's a good point in favour of Asgardians. But it also shows that the little that actually got through still owns guards.
Plus if that kind of firepower is impressive for current times, in science fiction or science fantasy settings, it is simply not. Such is also the point I'm making here.
This is not always about the National Guard you know. ;)
We are talking about two groups using Infinity Stone powered "magical" weapons. The stuff is weird shit by default.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: What? Those same arguments apply to the Dark Elves, yet they were doing quite well (did you see any stray shot during the landing inside the palace?).
Even more in fact, since they haven't seen a fight in millennia for all we know. In comparison, the Asgardians have already fought in the meantime.
And what about berserker staves? Clearly, even when the city is threatened from within as well as under a constant threat of invasion, no one breaks out the fancy toys.
They merely count on the vanilla guardsmen in encumbering armour and exposed faces.
1) The Dark Elves had been in a form of suspended animation. Effectively there was no time passing between wars for them, and they were the elite to begin with.

2) Why would you have dangerous toys like berserker staves laying around? Those things are dangerous, and the Asgardians didn't know what they were facing at first.

3) I think you are makes a big deal about exposed faces without doing any research.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Range ... ercise.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._ ... q_2009.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Flick ... ng_(1).jpg

U.S. A. Soldiers with exposed faces, and many without eye protection...
Mr. Oragahn wrote: As I said, we still can discern some silhouette and the ships still move in atmosphere, so obviously Afrodall's scanning leaves a lot to be desired since he can't even scan odd movements in atmosphere despite knowing the shit is right under his nose.
The Dark Elf ships were hidden in what appears to be the vacuum of space, and surrounded by cover.

Even in Asgard you needed to be very near them to even notice them.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Not to say that the other excuse, being that he can't see what he doesn't know about, is quite disturbing, if not downright pathetic, really.
How can one discover anything if the prerequisite to seeing anything is knowing about them before hand?
Can we claim laughter here?
Who's saying that? Marvel is filled with uber tiny pocket dimensions that maybe an insanely tiny number of beings if any know about. There's even a team called "The Lords of the Splinter Realms".
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Now I have a theory. His vision is great on things that have been tagged for his vision to work on. Those nine realms, for example, and some trillions of souls stuck on whatever worlds within those realms.
Probably largely helped because the Yggdrasil connects them all.
Or there are ways to hide from his sight, but it is difficult?
Mr. Oragahn wrote: I didn't say they sucked. However, they only were fired at a very close range and used once.
Even when Malekith's ship was floating before the palace in plain day, nothing was ever fired at it. Not even the AA guns, as a matter of fact. I can only conclude that their range sucks big hairy donkey balls.
Or the Dark Elf ships have really good frontal armor?
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Or since Asgard is still in this universe, drop a new gate on the edge of said bubble island, like the Ori or the Wraith from Stargate can do, as much as the Strogg from Quake.
Just throwing some examples here.
Asgard isn't a planet in Mdgard. None of the Nine Realms are planets in Midgard.

You're entering Doctor Strange territory when you start talking about traveling to Asgard and the other realms.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Looks mighty stupid, yes. If you build a shield, it means you know your lair isn't invasion-proof. Why place the on/off button outside of the shield?
Even if only one bloke can activate or deactivate it, what happens if he's... occupied? Or gets his arse freezed?
Not, that's just stupid, and one point in favour of the invader.
Clearly we are missing a large bit of information about Asgard.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: They already had a dude who was inside the palace and blew the shield engine with his fists. Who knows what they'd have done if the last of the Kursed had failed?
We have no proof that damaging the spherical structure at the end of the Bifrost bridge does anything (aside from obviously destroying the command system), but it's a design failure to have the activation system outside, no matter how you look at it.
Tried some else subtle and sneaky.

You may want to look into what that control center might be made of.
http://marvel.wikia.com/Adamantine_(metal)
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Let's go back to reviewing some cases here, then.
In Star Wars, hyperspace travel is totally mundane and spread across an entire galaxy.
For Stargate, even the humans at some point were able to target altverses and even have a bridge built between two universes. I'll leave the Ancients out because it would take too long to list everything that approaches more or less dimensional flux. The Wraith have shown that one simple soldier, once stuck on Earth, built from the remnants of his Dart a transdimensionnal radio.
Star Trek? When they get into fluidic space, for example? Looks like a perfectly legit example of jumping between two realms. Although I don't know Trek much, considering the setting it is, I'd expect a good number of episodes involving dimensionnal traveling, potentially some of these cases not leaving the UFP that baffled. But perhaps they never understand it (aside from the jump to fluidic space, which is very well mastered, at least by the Borg ... oh boy, the Borg in movie Asgard, LOL).
That's just an example. Heck, perhaps we could pick Babylon 5, since their FTL seems to precisely involve jumping into an entirely different realm.
Oh, let's not talk about Warhammer 40000 then, now that I think of it.
As much as I want to say your Star Trek example might be valid, most groups such as the Kree, Skrull, Shi'ar and a large number os species are on the level of the bleeping Alteran, and yet are still basically confined to Midgard. marvel had a Stargate network before Stargate
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Impressive, but that's literally at odds with what we were seeing seconds earlier when she was desperately shielding herself from the bullets.
Looks like plot hax. But I give you that. Some kind of shield, indeed. Like what seems to be provided by the arc reactor tech, which is derivated from research on the Tesseract (otherwise, there's no way the first suit Stark built would have not killed him when he crashed into the ground).
Still, shotguns are not the most powerful weapon a human can carry. And that's just contemporary humans we're talking about here.
Plus there are varieties of ammunitions. Some a less powerful than others.
An odd staple of Thor and Wonder Woman is that they block bullets as if the things are dangerous to them.

I'd wager they shot Sif with some at least as large as buckshot if not a Saboted which are from what I read on wiki, roughly on par with hunting rifle rounds.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Yep, but still not talking about the comics here. Sorry.
We are talking about Earth-199999, and anything that can take a hit from Thor is insanely tough. It's a "magical" hammer.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Wrong. Stark uses a reactor that gives him a huge advantage and is only matched by the exceptionally powerful Thor.
Your average Asgardian isn't anywhere close to that. Guards get down with much, much less. Like punches in the face from fists that, even if slightly more dense that human fists, don't move at super speeds (see the escape from Asgard).

So again excuse me but I'm not impressed.
Not to say that if Thor is away, all these Asgardians look pretty much screwed.
An Arc Reactor in 199999 is a "cheap" copy of the Tesseract, and the Tesseract is an Infinity Stone. Basically Iron Man and Whiplash use the same technology as Asgardians.

I'd also be willing to make the claim that Extremis is the same or at least similar stuff to the Kursed stones used by the Dark Elves.

Steve Rogers is likely a pseudo Asgardian do to the S.S., or possibly part Asgardian to begin with.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Lorelei isn't human.
As for the rest, it would be much more interesting if we were to see humans deploy greater firepower.
Good, then my point seems to be made. Asgardians do not look impressive when facing physical equals
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Because of the armour. And she still was hiding her face with the shield seconds before that. But as you may have not noticed, I was talking about the exposed flesh.
I forgot to add mere punches to the list.
And real world soldiers rarely have their faces covered in any form of armor.

The fact of the matter is we don't know if Sif was actually in danger from the bullets at all, but Asgardian body armor is better then what you'd find in use, and an armored Asgardian can pretty mush ignore side arms and possibly side arms. given they were likely packing for deer.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Yes, arc reactor derivatives allow for that. We've seen it even protects Stark from Loki's possession trick as well.
But again not all Asgardians have access to that.
I haven't seen an Asgardian weapon of shield that did not shine with a similar light to that of an Arc Reactor. Asgardians had a long time to study the Tesseract.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Not exactly a tank round but a smaller round from the smaller gun.
No, the Tank shot him out of the sky with a direct hit.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Considering how far their standards for the Einherjar (elite warriors) go, I'm not too worried.
The elite are the guys who went with Thor to kick Frost Giant ass in the first movie. Loki, Sif, The Warriors Three
Mr. Oragahn wrote: How long does it take to raise that army? The more of them, the longer it takes to prepare and deploy them. We get back to spawn camping at the point of arrival of the Bifrost's beam.
How long does it take to spread the word, and then put civilians through basic? Bor didn't seem to have trouble.

The Bifrost seems to be rather flexible as to where it opens, and being beneath it would likely be lethal to a human assuming they don't do something similar to what Loki tried on a smaller scale..
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Aside from those careful enough to not have their base out in the open, of course.
Or those who aren't on planets known by Afrodall (since he needs to know things exist to even have a chance to see them apparently).
Let's not even think about simple outer space, since the Dark Elves didn't have a problem to hide in some random asteroid field above a planet.
Or worlds simply outside of Yggdrasil. Because there are some.
And, the best of all, the cloaked base.
Let's also add the shielded world or base, which has no reason to be violated by the Bifrost elevator thing.

All in all, it also appears that realms are nothing more than planetary systems at best, aside from Asgard being a mere small dimension with a view on a section of the universe.
Which is funny when you think of it because it means light can get through. However controls the light might easily get a foot into the door.

Only one case suggests that a realm might be an entire galaxy, and that's not totally sure. Thor's drawing shows planets, eventually small groups of them at best.
In fact
"Your world is one of the nine realms of the cosmos linked to each other by the branches of Yggdrasil, the world's tree."
In the defense of the multi-galactic supervision, unless one of those realms is mega populated, you can't cram ten trillion souls on just eight planets.
In fact the movies seem to go back and forth between both possibilities, but clearly putting the emphasis on the realm = world interpretation.

In the first movie, Earth is a world and directly equalled to a realm by Thor himself. Jötunheimr is a planet (although initial sketches also had it as some kind of floating mass), nothing else, and even a comics that is partially a prelude to the second movie, presents Vanaheim as a world of its own, in a planetary system of the same name.

Not to say that the windows to the other realms over Greenwich literally show the surface of worlds, not entire planetary systems or what else. Plus the connection to those realms during the Convergence clearly transports things to worlds, not outer space.

Aside from Asgard being a special "realm", there doesn't seem to be nothing special about those other realms.
At the outmost, and that's absolutely stretching it, in order to fit with the vague and poetic ending of the first Thor movie, each of these planets might be the "ambassy" of different galaxies which Yggdrasil would connect to.
Still, in the end, it's a limited number of locations. We know there are worlds outside of Yggdrasil's reach.

When the Dark Elves' ship floats above a planet which might be Svartálfar, surrounded by a couple of rocks, and they're supervising the Convergence of the nine realms; their tactical screen shows a planet (likely Svartálfar), and the subtitles have Algrim say that the worlds are aligned.
Thor again says that the nine realms orbit Asgard and during the Convergence, the worlds are aligned.

Not to say that if a mere handful humans can actually crack a system that stabilizes something as odd as the Convergence, and can literally play with the Convergence effects as to open portals here and there, I don't think it would be very hard for much more advanced groups to crack the thing that opens such portals, at least in theory.

And, again, the Dark Elves got to Asgard without the help of anyone from Asgard.
You really don't understand what the Nine Realms are. Midgar is not the Eart or even the Sol System, but the entire plane Earth is in, and Hemdall sees it all unless you have some super-duper cloak. The guy thought it impossible for someone to disappear from his view.

You keep inexplicably assuming limitation that are never implied in the movie.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: By the way, it seems you're automatically thinking that Asgardians would be fighting contemporary militaries or medieval forces only.
You really hate Storm Trooper that much? ^_^

I'm working under the assumption that in order to fight the Asgardians you need to be able to keep them from being able to open a wormhole wherever they please. They don't need to engage your military so long as they can wipe out any form of production including food when ever they choose.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Fine, call that an incursion right into Asgard. The thing being that these few Frost Giants still got inside into one of the most important rooms of all.
Even with help from inside which actually baffled Afrodall, that would have been enough to crank the danger'o'meter off the carts. Because when you think of it, even enemies know better ways to get inside Asgard than both Odin and Afrodall combined.
And they can't even know how much any potential enemy outside would know about those passages.
And the Frost Giants were easily detected and wiped out by the security system.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: As for the events of the second movie, I reiterate: despite all the urgency, the danger, the deaths and destruction, you never see any super duper force ever deployed. Not super toy, nothing.
Asgardians are dramatically unprepared for an invasion of their land.
Then perhaps there was the threat you seem to imply? Odin seemed perfectly willing to wait out the Dark Elves.

The threat seems to have been Jain's life.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Excuse me? Did we lose the connection somewhere down there? I'm responding to a part that strictly focuses on the potential size of the population of a place called Asgard which, for all clues we have, is actually a very small place.
Thus with the capita count, we can muse about the army that might be raised, and yet you offer me a total non sequitur in return?

Plus aside from all of what you said being totally irrelevant, it begs to be dicussed, as seen above.
We have no idea as to how large Asgard is, or how the laws of physics operate there. It seems to be an island floating in space and surrounded by water then falls off an edge, and yet they never run out of water.

During the funeral it seemed implied the stars in Asgard were the souls of the dead.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Good, you've just proved that the gunners in Asgard are total inepts.
This is not what I'd call a defense in their favour.

It also goes without saying that the Dark Elves weren't exactly providing hard to hit targets. Any aiming assisted by computer should have at least hit one of those ships. Yet I can't recall even a single one of them being remotely scorched. It's just that bad.
They did hit the Dark Elf ships though, but the Dark Elf ships were just too heavily armored for the number of hits to matter.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Crashing through stone is something that many crafts in science fiction do without much problem, while surviving.
The dark elf ships seemed completely undamaged by the crash. Most ships in most setting can't do that.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: During the escape, bolts from one of these cannons is seen hitting a rocky formation on the edge of a large water area. Damage is subpar. Even a modern Apache's missiles do more damage in Afghanistan than that.
The problem is that energy weapons tend to have variable yields, and do they really want to kill Jain, and Thor?
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Aside from other fictional universes having cloaking systems that mask people's presence, that's hardly explaining the lack of sighting of the ship itself.
Even more in atmosphere. A ship takes volume in a fluid.
I already made that point clear enough and you haven't provided a proper counter to that.
Except visual cloaks are dirt cheap in Marvel, and Heimdall is stated to see souls. He is looking through dimensional barriers and seemingly seeing metaphysical things.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Well, since the cannons couldn't even decently threaten natural stone formations, it's quite a logical conclusion that they wouldn't even scratch the Dark Elves' ships.
Whatever they're made of isn't much important at this point since there's nothing the Asgardians possess in terms of defense that would have sufficed.
You're assuming they wanted to kill Jain or Thor. Killing Jain would complicate things
Mr. Oragahn wrote: It's an image.
The principle remains. Jane Foster landed where the Aether was hidden, which must be on one of the nine realms since portals only happen between those realms, which were worlds.
Afrodall lost track of her.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse_(Marvel_Comics)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ma ... dimensions
Mr. Oragahn wrote: I'm talking about logistics here. A ship allows better travel than a tunnel system that can only allow x persons to be funneled through at a time, while standing shoulder to shoulder after walking down a laboriously long bridge.

A ship is also far more mobile so it makes transport easier, both on the fact that you don't necessarily have to be at a given point to move out, and that you also are able to move to other places with more ease than a system which, thus far, has only been seen to be capable to displace people only on worlds.
Except the ship needs the Bifrost anyway.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Pardon? You're confused. I'm criticizing the lack of real military assets, although I consider it possible that, fitting with the overal gods are advanced aliens shtick, we might see some kind of large space-capable battle ship that might somehwat look like a viking sailing boat. Just for coolness.
But if you want to insist that the ship will be tracted by goats, be my guest. :D

My point was that the introduction of such a vessel, however cool and awesome it might be, would be totally at odds with the second Thor movie as it would fail to explain why it wasn't used in some of the direst times for Asgard.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sk%C3%ADðblaðnir

http://marvel.wikia.com/Thor's_Chariot
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Proof that the Kree Empire is inside Midgard?

And, might you also explain how this is relevant to the topic of the Asgardians pulling a huge ship out of some random warehouse and using it to hunt down Malekith's craft?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse_(Marvel_Comics)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ma ... dimensions

The Kree empire exist in the same realm as Earth.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: All depends on how mobile the bridge is, really.
Although it would work well against modern forces, it would be harder against advanced ones and shielded units.
There can only be one bridge at a time.
Given the Bifrost is a wormhole, I doubt you can stop it unless you can stop the formation of wormholes
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Plus imagine you bait them. Since the bridge beam can suck things up, you can infiltrate the city that way by sticking to people being beamed up, or smuggle anything inside an artifact the Asgardians would try to snatch from their enemy's grasp. It would have been very unfortunate if, say, a 50 MT bomb had been sitting right inside the Aether's pillar.

Then I guess someone's going to have to use massive loads of dark energy to allow even one guy to move out of Asgard.
Good thing the Asgardians look before they leap.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: LOL. Malekith himself was hurt... strike that. Impaled by nothing more than metal sticks of the most mundane origin, produced on Earth.
Glorified criucket sticks hammered down in the soft grassy ground of the Greenwich's palace garden.
And before you claim that Thor threw them so this and that, we can actually see how "fast" those pickets were thrown. Nothing too formidable here. Far from it, actually.

Oh, plus Malekith still had his dark face thing on, meaning that he most likely still benefited from the extra oomph of the Aether.

Frankly, it seems quite clear that although those guys can deal with huge concussion, they really hate anything that cuts.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqDA3c1K38U
So you consider magic realm stabilizing staves to be mundane objects? Sounds like cherry picking.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Is this in any way related to the cinematic continuity by chance? Because otherwise, you're wasting both of our times I'm afraid.
Nice to know you don't understand what the movie continuity is based on. If X happens in the comics then X will likely happen in the movies based on the comics. Impossibly sharp weapons harming otherwise highly damage resent beings is not a low showing.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: You mean he could have tossed him right into the ocean?
You know what i meant.

Odin might not have cared where Thor ended up so long as Thor could survive there.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Or not?
Odin gave one of his eyes for wisdom and knowledge of the future did he not?
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Also, it just dawned upon me that the Asgardians don't even have any radio system at all.
Their concept of communication is all about meeting someone in person to deliver a message or any piece of information.
On the battlefield, you see nothing remotely close to a system to deliver info beyond the range of voice shouting, down to any unit section.
Even less anything that would remotely evoke a networked communication system.
odin has his ravens, and Loki was able to talk to Thor while Thor was on Earth and Loki was in Asgard.

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Re: Movie Asgardians (Marvel) not so impressive!

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Sat May 24, 2014 3:19 pm

Lucky wrote:
Mr. Oragahn wrote: You're conflating different facts.
The weapons that carved a ship were Afrodall's. None of his swords were used to hurt an Asgardian.
You haven't demonstrated that his weapons are the standard. Otherwise, Thor's Mjolnir's is a standard as well.
Which it is not.
In fact, I'm pretty sure that the Einherjar in the dungeons would have loved to have access to those blades that cut through ship hulls in order to help the Kursed lose an arm.
At least Loki managed to impale the guy with a spear of some kind, possibly picked from the Dark Elves although it just seems to have poped out of nowhere.
So yes, standard Asgardian blades might be good, but they're not all bells and whistles as much as you'd like them be.
1) Why assume that some hold out weapons Hemdall had on him are anything special?

2) Why assume the Kursed is as easily damaged as the ship?

3) Loki's spear is Loki's spear, and the guy is a mast of illusion and "magic".

4) Even if standard Asgardian blades are only half as good as Heldall's that still means they can carve up most armors.
1, 2 & 3. Considering that the staff used by Loki wasn't his, since he barely managed to hide a dagger, your entire rebuttal is invalid.
We're back to the last Kursed (Algrim) being impaled, Frigga being impaled, and none of the weapons in question having shown to employ any magical advantage. At best they're good enough to withstand Asgardian bog standard weapons. Those weapons haven't changed since the last time a Kursed fought against Asgardians, and the Einherjar used spears which did get through the former Kursed, although they didn't totally impale the creature the way a hot knife slices through butter. Unless there is any reason to believe the Kursed's skin/armour is as tough as a Dark Elf ship's hull, clearly the Asgardian weapons are inferior to Afrodall's blades.

4. Why even assume that standard Asgardian blades are half as good as Afrodall's blades and not even inferior to that ratio?
Mr. Oragahn wrote: She casts illusions just as much as Loki, who isn't exactly a wimp. He actually also gets impaled. Or at least if it was an illusion (we don't know when he really faked his death precisely), it did look convincing.
And contrary to other moves that clearly show that something important is happening, it didn't look like the Kursed made much effort to get the blade through.
Frigga is good enough to fight back Malekith as well. And yet, one stab where it hurts and goodbye.
Odin>Thor>Loki>>>Sif and the Warriors Three>>>>Everyone else more or less
The hierarchy isn't the point. The point is what actually killed an important Asgardian who's been shown to achieve illusions, which indicates certain abilities which, for all intents and purposes, are limited to a few people, even on Asgard.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: What comics?
Those from the same story arc? Earth 1999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 or another?
Earth 616, it is used to explain why Thor is abnormally powerful..

Comic book Thor is kind of a broken character when the author remembers who they are writing. He is a B class super scientist, a B class magic user, and an A class warrior who can casually pop planets, and there are wars to make him even more powerful...
Then it is irrelevant unless the comics belong to the cinematic universe.
Clearly different Thors.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Speculation much.
Eventually all I could accept is that the energy blast spread across the body and nerve-kill the target without dealing too much kinetic damage proper.
That said those weapons were very powerful for infantry guns. Powerful enough to blast stone pillars.
Modern military would have to think about using heavy rifles, slugs and grenade launchers to hope get close to that. But they can.
It is still impressive that those weapons managed to do so little damage to Asgardian armours.
That's a good point in favour of Asgardians. But it also shows that the little that actually got through still owns guards.
Plus if that kind of firepower is impressive for current times, in science fiction or science fantasy settings, it is simply not. Such is also the point I'm making here.
This is not always about the National Guard you know. ;)
We are talking about two groups using Infinity Stone powered "magical" weapons. The stuff is weird shit by default.
You don't really object to anything I've said.
Plus we've seen weapons directly tapping the Tesseract in Captain America, for example. Good, but not that good.
It really takes special weapons to see very impressive effects.
Advanced civilizations have very good weapons, and they can standardize them.
For example beam weapons which can blast portions of stone pillars are available to a great many factions in other SF verses.
And blasting stone pillars is already available to human infantry today by using more powerful weapons which can be produced on an industrial scale. This kind of firepower totally pwns the forces of Asgard.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: What? Those same arguments apply to the Dark Elves, yet they were doing quite well (did you see any stray shot during the landing inside the palace?).
Even more in fact, since they haven't seen a fight in millennia for all we know. In comparison, the Asgardians have already fought in the meantime.
And what about berserker staves? Clearly, even when the city is threatened from within as well as under a constant threat of invasion, no one breaks out the fancy toys.
They merely count on the vanilla guardsmen in encumbering armour and exposed faces.
1) The Dark Elves had been in a form of suspended animation. Effectively there was no time passing between wars for them, and they were the elite to begin with.

2) Why would you have dangerous toys like berserker staves laying around? Those things are dangerous, and the Asgardians didn't know what they were facing at first.

3) I think you are makes a big deal about exposed faces without doing any research.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Range ... ercise.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._ ... q_2009.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Flick ... ng_(1).jpg

U.S. A. Soldiers with exposed faces, and many without eye protection...
1. Any proof that the suspended animation was really a full stop? By default, that's a claim that assumes perfect technology and a complete freeze in time. Many centuries not flexing muscles and training them, if only for muscle memory, is bound to degrade the quality of warriors until they recover.

2. Did I say they'd be found anywhere, everywhere? I simply pointed out, no matter how it displeases you, that at NO TIME in the movie they begin to use those weapons or equip the guardsmen with something better, even when they do know what they're up against.

3. You know, these soldiers happen to use something called ranged weapons. It's no arbitrary factor that back when humans fought with swords, they tried to cover as much of their faces as possible. When modern US troops are threatened by fire, they take cover and they're literally pinned down. At least with ranged weapons they can return fire. Not so much with swords. And you still have the problem of there being no protection against gas.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: As I said, we still can discern some silhouette and the ships still move in atmosphere, so obviously Afrodall's scanning leaves a lot to be desired since he can't even scan odd movements in atmosphere despite knowing the shit is right under his nose.
The Dark Elf ships were hidden in what appears to be the vacuum of space, and surrounded by cover.
Space? Let's say ok, perhaps, but they were right ontop the palace, so they were not outside of that bubble.

Also, considering that Asgard's sky is always filled with a given amount of clouds, the very fact that we saw none of them between the city and the ship rather tells us that said ship might very well have been inside the atmospheric bubble.
The size of the city seen from above, the scale of the shot, are typical of an altitude that's well within the atmosphere of Earth for example.
Even in Asgard you needed to be very near them to even notice them.
Cloaking in Star Trek and Stargate (for example) don't show up just because you stand next to the cloaked object.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Not to say that the other excuse, being that he can't see what he doesn't know about, is quite disturbing, if not downright pathetic, really.
How can one discover anything if the prerequisite to seeing anything is knowing about them before hand?
Can we claim laughter here?
Who's saying that?
You, in a way, although it's pretty much implied by the movies as well, considering how Afrodall couldn't even spot a passage in a cave and not even sense a figment of Bifrost-like energy being activated a couple kilometers away from his observatory.
His sight seems to be very good to observe people and tag "souls", that he put his gaze upon mostly (implying a will and some expected natural and normal conditions), and even that has clear limits.
Marvel is filled with uber tiny pocket dimensions that maybe an insanely tiny number of beings if any know about. There's even a team called "The Lords of the Splinter Realms".
Cinematic universe or not?
And knowing about a secret place is not something super impressive. It's just knowing a secret. It's fine and all when it is isolated from your own land.
But it gets funny when the mystery is right under your nose, so to speak, as is the case with Afrodall.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Now I have a theory. His vision is great on things that have been tagged for his vision to work on. Those nine realms, for example, and some trillions of souls stuck on whatever worlds within those realms.
Probably largely helped because the Yggdrasil connects them all.
Or there are ways to hide from his sight, but it is difficult?
Well clearly a visual cloak does the trick, amongst other things. He doesn't even see dimensional portals otherwise he'd have known where Jane Foster went. For one he'd have noticed the Aether's monolith since it's been clearly placed there by Asgardians. You even have a typical Bifrost ground tag right on the stone platform where lies the artifact.
If anything, that artifact would be something Afrodall would be asked to check out regularly, considering the danger it is to the universe. So the dude clearly is far from being infallible. Even convicts can smuggle crap right under his nose.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: I didn't say they sucked. However, they only were fired at a very close range and used once.
Even when Malekith's ship was floating before the palace in plain day, nothing was ever fired at it. Not even the AA guns, as a matter of fact. I can only conclude that their range sucks big hairy donkey balls.
Or the Dark Elf ships have really good frontal armor?
Purely made up (stone is just stone), and doesn't preclude them from even trying; the point is that their weapons suck and that's all. They don't have good defences.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Or since Asgard is still in this universe, drop a new gate on the edge of said bubble island, like the Ori or the Wraith from Stargate can do, as much as the Strogg from Quake.
Just throwing some examples here.
Asgard isn't a planet in Mdgard. None of the Nine Realms are planets in Midgard.
In the cinematic universe, there's enough evidence to think that realm = world = planet, as I explained in details in my former post.
We'll get to that later on.
You're entering Doctor Strange territory when you start talking about traveling to Asgard and the other realms.
What is that supposed to mean?
I suggest doing a simple trick, in fact: Let Afrodall suck a bait with a powerful beacon in it.
Voila, Asgard pin pointed.
Because, contrary to what you think, there's nothing that proves Asgard in the movie is particularly well isolated at all. It is clearly odd in nature, but it stops there.
You should work from a clean slate and stop using knowledge you have from other continuities. They don't interest me in the slightest and are totally irrelevant here.
Since scientists can build mechanical ways to build dimensional gateways (meaning it's not limited to "magic"), then it's clearly within the grasp of an ungodly amount of scientists from other fictional universes.
Afrodall doesn't even scan any bad guy coming in. Remember the scene in the second movie, which shows Malekith's masked lieutenant be captured. He's brought back by some of the Warriors Three and they just walk in front of Afrodall and that's all. That's literally insane. One could smuggle a multi gigaton nuke right into their faces or any doomsday device and they'd be toasted. Afrodall didn't spot the odd device planted inside the soon to be Kursed Dark Elf. Any cyborg can be brought in and he won't even object to it either. Don't even say oh but the kurse stone is stealthed or something, since there's no proof of that and if Afrodall scanned each individual inside out, he'd have noticed the odd cavity inside the Dark Elf and that strange element he couldn't see. Then, right there, this should have been a direct trigger.
This opens so many insane possibilities to intrusion or destruction!
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Looks mighty stupid, yes. If you build a shield, it means you know your lair isn't invasion-proof. Why place the on/off button outside of the shield?
Even if only one bloke can activate or deactivate it, what happens if he's... occupied? Or gets his arse freezed?
Not, that's just stupid, and one point in favour of the invader.
Clearly we are missing a large bit of information about Asgard.
What a lame cop out. We've seen all there is to know, so we do know enough and anything beyond that is extreme extrapolation.
So disabling the activator for the shield is a piece of cake.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: They already had a dude who was inside the palace and blew the shield engine with his fists. Who knows what they'd have done if the last of the Kursed had failed?
We have no proof that damaging the spherical structure at the end of the Bifrost bridge does anything (aside from obviously destroying the command system), but it's a design failure to have the activation system outside, no matter how you look at it.
Tried some else subtle and sneaky.

You may want to look into what that control center might be made of.
http://marvel.wikia.com/Adamantine_(metal)
In the movie, the first control center (that doubles as the Bifrost ramp) broke apart without much effort.
You'll say that there was energy, explosion and all that, but we've seen what the blast did to rock and water: not that devastating.
You want to peg that? Between the blast on water, the rock somewhat shattered in some sections and the damage down to Jötunheimr's ground, let's say soft kilotons (because of a very low power in fact, so little blast effect compared to a nuke, but more low chemical in nature).
Huh, even punching through it was achievable with Mjölnir. And before you say it's the hammer alone, there was something called Loki between it and the wall.
Not to say that with The Avengers, we've seen that a man-made prison can still give Mjölnir some tough time to break through material that's quite below adamantium, going by the description about this material.
Frankly, a low kiloton nuke shall be more than enough in order to tear that Bifrost ramp apart in no time flat. Probably much less. Gigajoules, easily.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Let's go back to reviewing some cases here, then.
In Star Wars, hyperspace travel is totally mundane and spread across an entire galaxy.
For Stargate, even the humans at some point were able to target altverses and even have a bridge built between two universes. I'll leave the Ancients out because it would take too long to list everything that approaches more or less dimensional flux. The Wraith have shown that one simple soldier, once stuck on Earth, built from the remnants of his Dart a transdimensionnal radio.
Star Trek? When they get into fluidic space, for example? Looks like a perfectly legit example of jumping between two realms. Although I don't know Trek much, considering the setting it is, I'd expect a good number of episodes involving dimensionnal traveling, potentially some of these cases not leaving the UFP that baffled. But perhaps they never understand it (aside from the jump to fluidic space, which is very well mastered, at least by the Borg ... oh boy, the Borg in movie Asgard, LOL).
That's just an example. Heck, perhaps we could pick Babylon 5, since their FTL seems to precisely involve jumping into an entirely different realm.
Oh, let's not talk about Warhammer 40000 then, now that I think of it.
As much as I want to say your Star Trek example might be valid, most groups such as the Kree, Skrull, Shi'ar and a large number os species are on the level of the bleeping Alteran, and yet are still basically confined to Midgard. marvel had a Stargate network before Stargate
Those groups barely record on the radar in the cinematic universe.
As it stands, movie Asgard is in great danger.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Impressive, but that's literally at odds with what we were seeing seconds earlier when she was desperately shielding herself from the bullets.
Looks like plot hax. But I give you that. Some kind of shield, indeed. Like what seems to be provided by the arc reactor tech, which is derivated from research on the Tesseract (otherwise, there's no way the first suit Stark built would have not killed him when he crashed into the ground).
Still, shotguns are not the most powerful weapon a human can carry. And that's just contemporary humans we're talking about here.
Plus there are varieties of ammunitions. Some a less powerful than others.
An odd staple of Thor and Wonder Woman is that they block bullets as if the things are dangerous to them.

I'd wager they shot Sif with some at least as large as buckshot if not a Saboted which are from what I read on wiki, roughly on par with hunting rifle rounds.
That would be the high end. You simply have no proof of that. What about the recoil, eh? Should give a good idea of the power of that shot that literally made a puff of smoke.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Yep, but still not talking about the comics here. Sorry.
We are talking about Earth-199999, and anything that can take a hit from Thor is insanely tough. It's a "magical" hammer.
It has limits. Like maximum speed, the amount of damage its lightning can do, the kind of materials it can break (like, the glass of that prison for starters, which much like the rest of the prison, gets utterly shattered on impact from a free fall - oh be sure it's an impressive fall, but then it does put a limit to the hammer).
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Wrong. Stark uses a reactor that gives him a huge advantage and is only matched by the exceptionally powerful Thor.
Your average Asgardian isn't anywhere close to that. Guards get down with much, much less. Like punches in the face from fists that, even if slightly more dense that human fists, don't move at super speeds (see the escape from Asgard).

So again excuse me but I'm not impressed.
Not to say that if Thor is away, all these Asgardians look pretty much screwed.
An Arc Reactor in 199999 is a "cheap" copy of the Tesseract, and the Tesseract is an Infinity Stone. Basically Iron Man and Whiplash use the same technology as Asgardians.
I'd also be willing to make the claim that Extremis is the same or at least similar stuff to the Kursed stones used by the Dark Elves.
Steve Rogers is likely a pseudo Asgardian do to the S.S., or possibly part Asgardian to begin with.
Yeah fine but super characters are just not what I was talking about here. Nice dodging the facts about the Einherjar.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Lorelei isn't human.
As for the rest, it would be much more interesting if we were to see humans deploy greater firepower.
Good, then my point seems to be made. Asgardians do not look impressive when facing physical equals
I just said Lorelei wasn't human. I didn't say the skirmish wasn't impressive.
Still, notice that their members don't move that fast. What makes the difference is the density of their bodies (which isn't massively superior either, as we can see when Thor gets into Foster's crappy red car). Again, another very solid upper limit on their abilities.
If anything, they sometimes deliver super punches by doing akin to suddenly summoning a force field at the tip of their fists. Still very rare in the end.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Because of the armour. And she still was hiding her face with the shield seconds before that. But as you may have not noticed, I was talking about the exposed flesh.
I forgot to add mere punches to the list.
And real world soldiers rarely have their faces covered in any form of armor.
And they're not meant to engage at very close range. When there's enemy fire, they also do something known as taking cover while trying to return fire. I'm repeating myself, see earlier on.
The fact of the matter is we don't know if Sif was actually in danger from the bullets at all, but Asgardian body armor is better then what you'd find in use, and an armored Asgardian can pretty mush ignore side arms and possibly side arms. given they were likely packing for deer.
I'll trust that she considered it a danger. Since normal Asgardians can be punched out by Asgardians by blows that are nowhere impressive (see the escape ouf ot Asgard), it stands to reason that bullets to the face are not something to be taken lightly.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Yes, arc reactor derivatives allow for that. We've seen it even protects Stark from Loki's possession trick as well.
But again not all Asgardians have access to that.
I haven't seen an Asgardian weapon of shield that did not shine with a similar light to that of an Arc Reactor. Asgardians had a long time to study the Tesseract.
It is not because it shines that it is automatically on par.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Not exactly a tank round but a smaller round from the smaller gun.
No, the Tank shot him out of the sky with a direct hit.
It wasn't from the main cannon I mean. I'd like very solid evidence that it was a direct hit btw.
Not to say a vulcan's 20 mm caliber bullets clearly worry Iron Man to some great extent (Iron Man). Aboard the supercarrier, Hulk is annoyed by them, Thor dives to dodge them (The Avengers).
That, like all the high caliber guns which were mounted on the robots built by the Russian Botox Man.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Considering how far their standards for the Einherjar (elite warriors) go, I'm not too worried.
The elite are the guys who went with Thor to kick Frost Giant ass in the first movie. Loki, Sif, The Warriors Three
Yes and? I haven't denied their abilities. I'm relativizing them, based on what is seen.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: How long does it take to raise that army? The more of them, the longer it takes to prepare and deploy them. We get back to spawn camping at the point of arrival of the Bifrost's beam.
How long does it take to spread the word, and then put civilians through basic? Bor didn't seem to have trouble.
Unless humans can teleport to the weapon caches and then teleport to the Bifrost ramp thing, you already need time. More than what would suffice to assemble troops in case of an invasion. And we know how things went during said invasion.
It was so odd in fact that as soon as the battle ended after the intrusion inside the palace, you'd already see normal people, not guards, walking on terraces while Thor was piloting the Dark Elf craft to flee Asgard.
As for Bor, he assembled an army in an unknown amount of time, and what we saw at the beginning of Thor 2 was the last battle against the DE.
At that point, yes, they were really going to spam troops as much as possible. But that's too late.
The Bifrost seems to be rather flexible as to where it opens, and being beneath it would likely be lethal to a human assuming they don't do something similar to what Loki tried on a smaller scale..
Considering how it worked in Thor (people had to rally to the arrival tag on the ground), there are good reasons to consider that the flexibility comes at a cost.
A boost of dark energy, perhaps?
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Aside from those careful enough to not have their base out in the open, of course.
Or those who aren't on planets known by Afrodall (since he needs to know things exist to even have a chance to see them apparently).
Let's not even think about simple outer space, since the Dark Elves didn't have a problem to hide in some random asteroid field above a planet.
Or worlds simply outside of Yggdrasil. Because there are some.
And, the best of all, the cloaked base.
Let's also add the shielded world or base, which has no reason to be violated by the Bifrost elevator thing.

All in all, it also appears that realms are nothing more than planetary systems at best, aside from Asgard being a mere small dimension with a view on a section of the universe.
Which is funny when you think of it because it means light can get through. However controls the light might easily get a foot into the door.

Only one case suggests that a realm might be an entire galaxy, and that's not totally sure. Thor's drawing shows planets, eventually small groups of them at best.
In fact
"Your world is one of the nine realms of the cosmos linked to each other by the branches of Yggdrasil, the world's tree."
In the defense of the multi-galactic supervision, unless one of those realms is mega populated, you can't cram ten trillion souls on just eight planets.
In fact the movies seem to go back and forth between both possibilities, but clearly putting the emphasis on the realm = world interpretation.

In the first movie, Earth is a world and directly equalled to a realm by Thor himself. Jötunheimr is a planet (although initial sketches also had it as some kind of floating mass), nothing else, and even a comics that is partially a prelude to the second movie, presents Vanaheim as a world of its own, in a planetary system of the same name.

Not to say that the windows to the other realms over Greenwich literally show the surface of worlds, not entire planetary systems or what else. Plus the connection to those realms during the Convergence clearly transports things to worlds, not outer space.

Aside from Asgard being a special "realm", there doesn't seem to be nothing special about those other realms.
At the outmost, and that's absolutely stretching it, in order to fit with the vague and poetic ending of the first Thor movie, each of these planets might be the "ambassy" of different galaxies which Yggdrasil would connect to.
Still, in the end, it's a limited number of locations. We know there are worlds outside of Yggdrasil's reach.

When the Dark Elves' ship floats above a planet which might be Svartálfar, surrounded by a couple of rocks, and they're supervising the Convergence of the nine realms; their tactical screen shows a planet (likely Svartálfar), and the subtitles have Algrim say that the worlds are aligned.
Thor again says that the nine realms orbit Asgard and during the Convergence, the worlds are aligned.

Not to say that if a mere handful humans can actually crack a system that stabilizes something as odd as the Convergence, and can literally play with the Convergence effects as to open portals here and there, I don't think it would be very hard for much more advanced groups to crack the thing that opens such portals, at least in theory.

And, again, the Dark Elves got to Asgard without the help of anyone from Asgard.
You really don't understand what the Nine Realms are. Midgar is not the Eart or even the Sol System, but the entire plane Earth is in, and Hemdall sees it all unless you have some super-duper cloak. The guy thought it impossible for someone to disappear from his view.
Look, try to do better than brush all that evidence aside. This is picked straight from the movies, ok?
>>> right from the movies <<<

If you have nothing to raise against that much evidence, then I accept your concession.

As to Afrodall, looks like he seldom dealt proper cloaking technology, that is all. It's a technology that's found in several fictions though.
Hence bad news for Asgardians.
You keep inexplicably assuming limitation that are never implied in the movie.
Like what?
Unless you have proof that I assume more than I can observe, you don't have any point here.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: By the way, it seems you're automatically thinking that Asgardians would be fighting contemporary militaries or medieval forces only.
You really hate Storm Trooper that much? ^_^

I'm working under the assumption that in order to fight the Asgardians you need to be able to keep them from being able to open a wormhole wherever they please. They don't need to engage your military so long as they can wipe out any form of production including food when ever they choose.
Let me remind you that "wherever they please" is limited by knowledge of territory and line of sight for the beam.
Anything hidden or well defended, either by matter or some forcefield, doesn't have to fear much (unless you possess proof of the contrary, naturally).
And of course any mobile force that lives on ships or mobile space stations, or even advanced submarines, won't have much to fear from that beam either. Same for subterranean forts.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Fine, call that an incursion right into Asgard. The thing being that these few Frost Giants still got inside into one of the most important rooms of all.
Even with help from inside which actually baffled Afrodall, that would have been enough to crank the danger'o'meter off the carts. Because when you think of it, even enemies know better ways to get inside Asgard than both Odin and Afrodall combined.
And they can't even know how much any potential enemy outside would know about those passages.
And the Frost Giants were easily detected and wiped out by the security system.
Easily detected? You mean only when they lifted the Ice Casket thing from its base? Mmm wait. Actually it took an intermediary step, as Odin first had to sense the intruders, then hit the ground with his staff to launch the Destroyer.
Looks like a terrible defense system.
It is also much interesting that they had one Destroyer, but not two of them. Guess what would have been useful to help against the Dark Elves?
Besides, the Destroyer itself wasn't that much impressive. It cannot survive exposure to its own firepower, which is like a condensed flame gun with effects in the e2~4 KW range I'd say, based on the highest cases of damage done to cars, ground and buildings.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: As for the events of the second movie, I reiterate: despite all the urgency, the danger, the deaths and destruction, you never see any super duper force ever deployed. Not super toy, nothing.
Asgardians are dramatically unprepared for an invasion of their land.
Then perhaps there was the threat you seem to imply? Odin seemed perfectly willing to wait out the Dark Elves.
Yes, with -oh nice- 10,000 Einherjar, as he himself puts it.
You'd expect all of Asgard to be on high alert and have superior tech, weapons and troops be deployed left and right.
I mean, if they're not going to do it while they've been literally raped on their home turf, when will they do it?
Oh, I guess never.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Excuse me? Did we lose the connection somewhere down there? I'm responding to a part that strictly focuses on the potential size of the population of a place called Asgard which, for all clues we have, is actually a very small place.
Thus with the capita count, we can muse about the army that might be raised, and yet you offer me a total non sequitur in return?

Plus aside from all of what you said being totally irrelevant, it begs to be dicussed, as seen above.
We have no idea as to how large Asgard is
We seem to get a very nice view of the island's urban area in both movies.
We see it's somehow a too sided disc and that the atmospheric area extends well beyond the radius of island itself.

... or how the laws of physics operate there. It seems to be an island floating in space and surrounded by water then falls off an edge, and yet they never run out of water.
Antigravity to maintain a large floating thing... in fact we don't know that, since it's space... OK, that's honed down to artificial gravity on the surface. Easy done by many forces. nBSG does it on its ships.
Forcefield that maintains atmosphere? We are already musing about it.
Water that probably gets sucked one place and moved to another place... well, not anything out of range of a many popular science fiction factions, and I'm not talking about the upper tier ones here.

For the rest, looks like usual monday morning.
During the funeral it seemed implied the stars in Asgard were the souls of the dead.
Yeah well then get ready to count a lot more stars.
(although I don't remember where it's implied aside from the floating glow balls and fancy Tinkerbell powder that goes up in the wind)
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Good, you've just proved that the gunners in Asgard are total inepts.
This is not what I'd call a defense in their favour.

It also goes without saying that the Dark Elves weren't exactly providing hard to hit targets. Any aiming assisted by computer should have at least hit one of those ships. Yet I can't recall even a single one of them being remotely scorched. It's just that bad.
They did hit the Dark Elf ships though, but the Dark Elf ships were just too heavily armored for the number of hits to matter.
"Hits" seemed to be nothing more than proxy-fuses.
I wish we could see more details of those engagements.
Still, in the end, that's nothing more than ships with armour well tougher than stone that trample all over Asgard's defenses.
Guess what, that's easy stuff in several fictional universes as well.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Crashing through stone is something that many crafts in science fiction do without much problem, while surviving.
The dark elf ships seemed completely undamaged by the crash. Most ships in most setting can't do that.
It only takes a material tougher than stone and sufficient amounts of it.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: During the escape, bolts from one of these cannons is seen hitting a rocky formation on the edge of a large water area. Damage is subpar. Even a modern Apache's missiles do more damage in Afghanistan than that.
The problem is that energy weapons tend to have variable yields, and do they really want to kill Jain, and Thor?
OK, once and for all, it is not Jain but Jane.
Secondly, yes, the orders were clear: "Stop Thor, by any means necessary."
And why would they even lower their firepower if they couldn't even stop their enemies with normal firepower anyway?
Finally, there is zero evidence of any variable yield regarding those cannons.
All about them is shitty. Range, rate of fire, bolt speed, firepower and accuracy. You cannot suck more than that.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Aside from other fictional universes having cloaking systems that mask people's presence, that's hardly explaining the lack of sighting of the ship itself.
Even more in atmosphere. A ship takes volume in a fluid.
I already made that point clear enough and you haven't provided a proper counter to that.
Except visual cloaks are dirt cheap in Marvel, and Heimdall is stated to see souls. He is looking through dimensional barriers and seemingly seeing metaphysical things.
In the cinematic universe he's just keeping an eye on biosigns, plus a few other details, and that as long as they're not light-cloaked.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Well, since the cannons couldn't even decently threaten natural stone formations, it's quite a logical conclusion that they wouldn't even scratch the Dark Elves' ships.
Whatever they're made of isn't much important at this point since there's nothing the Asgardians possess in terms of defense that would have sufficed.
You're assuming they wanted to kill Jain or Thor. Killing Jain would complicate things
Such were the worded orders.
You're assuming that Thor and the Aether-imbued Jane could not survive the ship crash. Again, stopping at any cost. Any cost because Odin wanted the Aether inside Asgard, to bait Malekith into a battle.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: It's an image.
The principle remains. Jane Foster landed where the Aether was hidden, which must be on one of the nine realms since portals only happen between those realms, which were worlds.
Afrodall lost track of her.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse_(Marvel_Comics)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ma ... dimensions
You're not proving that those dimensions, if they are truly that, are outside of the cinematic universe.
Unless you have evidence from this continuity, perhaps we shall consider this course of debate entirely fruitless and move onto things we know for sure?
Mr. Oragahn wrote: I'm talking about logistics here. A ship allows better travel than a tunnel system that can only allow x persons to be funneled through at a time, while standing shoulder to shoulder after walking down a laboriously long bridge.

A ship is also far more mobile so it makes transport easier, both on the fact that you don't necessarily have to be at a given point to move out, and that you also are able to move to other places with more ease than a system which, thus far, has only been seen to be capable to displace people only on worlds.
Except the ship needs the Bifrost anyway.
Except not?
Did the Dark Elves use it? Didn't seem to.
Was the Bifrost necessary for the convergence to happen? Mmm... nope.
Sorry, point still stands very well.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Pardon? You're confused. I'm criticizing the lack of real military assets, although I consider it possible that, fitting with the overal gods are advanced aliens shtick, we might see some kind of large space-capable battle ship that might somehwat look like a viking sailing boat. Just for coolness.
But if you want to insist that the ship will be tracted by goats, be my guest. :D

My point was that the introduction of such a vessel, however cool and awesome it might be, would be totally at odds with the second Thor movie as it would fail to explain why it wasn't used in some of the direst times for Asgard.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sk%C3%ADðblaðnir

http://marvel.wikia.com/Thor's_Chariot
1. Useless link.
2. Useless link.

Good job. I believe my point was fairly easy to understand.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Proof that the Kree Empire is inside Midgard?

And, might you also explain how this is relevant to the topic of the Asgardians pulling a huge ship out of some random warehouse and using it to hunt down Malekith's craft?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse_(Marvel_Comics)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ma ... dimensions

The Kree empire exist in the same realm as Earth.
Find me a citation relevant to Earth-1999999toomany, not some vaguely general idea.
What applies to a universe doesn't even need to apply to any other.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: All depends on how mobile the bridge is, really.
Although it would work well against modern forces, it would be harder against advanced ones and shielded units.
There can only be one bridge at a time.
Given the Bifrost is a wormhole, I doubt you can stop it unless you can stop the formation of wormholes
It's beam shot through a wormhole, not the same.
Mmm... what's interesting with wormholes is that they work bothways...
Besides, the opening through which the beam is shot manifests a far distance from the targeted planet. Which means there's a limit there, and many things can be placed inbetween to stop the beam.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Plus imagine you bait them. Since the bridge beam can suck things up, you can infiltrate the city that way by sticking to people being beamed up, or smuggle anything inside an artifact the Asgardians would try to snatch from their enemy's grasp. It would have been very unfortunate if, say, a 50 MT bomb had been sitting right inside the Aether's pillar.

Then I guess someone's going to have to use massive loads of dark energy to allow even one guy to move out of Asgard.
Good thing the Asgardians look before they leap.
Good thing that they couldn't spot that kind of gift. Nor could they spot a cloaked device or guy.
I'm not going to come up with an insulting list of universes wherein personal cloaks exist.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: LOL. Malekith himself was hurt... strike that. Impaled by nothing more than metal sticks of the most mundane origin, produced on Earth.
Glorified cricket sticks hammered down in the soft grassy ground of the Greenwich's palace garden.
And before you claim that Thor threw them so this and that, we can actually see how "fast" those pickets were thrown. Nothing too formidable here. Far from it, actually.

Oh, plus Malekith still had his dark face thing on, meaning that he most likely still benefited from the extra oomph of the Aether.

Frankly, it seems quite clear that although those guys can deal with huge concussion, they really hate anything that cuts.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqDA3c1K38U
So you consider magic realm stabilizing staves to be mundane objects? Sounds like cherry picking.
Boy, way to mix things up in some giant some screen.

The devices' ability to open short lived portals (I don't think they stabilized anything) is irrelevant to their constitution.
They're gadgets mounted on basic metal pikes. That's the point. The supports are nothing advanced at all.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Is this in any way related to the cinematic continuity by chance? Because otherwise, you're wasting both of our times I'm afraid.
Nice to know you don't understand what the movie continuity is based on. If X happens in the comics then X will likely happen in the movies based on the comics. Impossibly sharp weapons harming otherwise highly damage resent beings is not a low showing.
The movies are another continuity.
Please make a solid argument that what happens in continuity X ist most likely to happen in ANY continuity Y.
This would require that all continuities always be very similar.
Is this the case?
Mr. Oragahn wrote: You mean he could have tossed him right into the ocean?
You know what i meant.

Odin might not have cared where Thor ended up so long as Thor could survive there.
Still an odd choice considering their past.
Anyway, this reality is an odd one, wherein Loki remains a nice fella until the movie. Totally contrary to mythology that's several centuries old, from the latest recordings (which themselves were condensed writings from older folklore).
Well, the reason why Odin did lose an eye is also different. It was a price to pay to obtain wisdom and knowledge. It didn't happen because some nasty giant freezosmurf threw a spiked magic iceball at his face. :D
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Or not?
Odin gave one of his eyes for wisdom and knowledge of the future did he not?
In the movies? Doesn't seem to be the case. The old man doesn't seem to see shit either. At the very best, we seem to be served with a slight implication that he guessed, a bit in advance, that considering the attack on the temple, Frigga might be in danger.
Other than that, movie Odin isn't much impressive in terms of sight or wisdom. His behaviour in Thor 2 clearly reduces him to some blinded old enraged grumpy man who couldn't see a thing or display any sign of wisdom in the direst moments.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Also, it just dawned upon me that the Asgardians don't even have any radio system at all.
Their concept of communication is all about meeting someone in person to deliver a message or any piece of information.
On the battlefield, you see nothing remotely close to a system to deliver info beyond the range of voice shouting, down to any unit section.
Even less anything that would remotely evoke a networked communication system.
odin has his ravens, and Loki was able to talk to Thor while Thor was on Earth and Loki was in Asgard.
Ravens? One, you mean. What's one bird good to do? Are you joking?
And Loki heard Thor through the Destroyer, which had a direct connection with the throne.
There's no matter to be impressed with here.

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