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.
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.
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.