I don't understand why a utilitarian race like the umiak would have a seemingly cosmetic wrist-blade of all things.
Is it like a terror-weapon? The whole arm being used as a sort of scythe?
I suppose this is a dream of a suppression force rather than an extermination team, or they would all be getting fried at the moment anyway.
As mentioned above, the wrist blade is a normal part of the Umiak biological weaponry, and so it is a traditional weapon. A more common version would be more like the biological weapon, which can either slash against soft targets or crush hard targets. I think in warfare involved swift and heavily armored cyborgs, close combat may be more common than in our modern warfare. But in the theater in which this individual is operating, its targets are all soft. Genocide is a messy business, and you run out of ammunition quickly when slaughtering unarmed civilians.
Of course, it's true that occasionally one of the unarmed civilians makes your head explode, but that's an exceedingly rare occurrence. Acceptable losses, in the Umiak frame of mind.
The more I look at those things, the less clear it is to me of how much umiak is actually left in those suits.
Very little. Essentially the brain and organs, the core of the nervous, circulatory and endocrine systems, and just enough meat to keep it contained and running. Since the Umiak are exoskeletal anyway, it's a lot easier to take the guts out and put them in an artificial shell than it would be for a vertebrate with all that pesky bone in the middle of everything.
These hardtroops are the extreme end of the spectrum of enhanced infantry. Some are genetically modified to improve G-tolerance, and others have an armored exoskeleton grafted onto their existing bodies.
The scariest thing about Umiak is if they are willing to do that to themselves, imagine how far will they go with their enemies ....or even allies.
Jardin was completely right.
The scariest thing about Umiak is if they are willing to do that to themselves, imagine how far will they go with their enemies ....or even allies.
Jardin was completely right.
We are assuming that there's any will involved. Presumably no-one is signing up for it willingly, as umiak are essentially growing their own people, but their decision making progress might be more in line with bee-hive / ant-hill thinking rather than a sort of self-destructive human process where your decision making is constantly undercut by human type second-guessing that is inherently opposed to what it means to be an ant hive or an umiak.
Ie, thinking of umiak decisions in terms of what they are willing to do to their own soldier caste could be a bit like analyzing ants by what they're willing to do to themselves. There's no real decision involved. Your hive is in danger, there are enemies, you require hard-shelled frontline soldiers. Therefore you produce hard-shelled frontline soldiers. The queen doesn't decide to birth soldier ants, she's operating on instincts and chemical signals from what I recall.
If you're just slaughtering unarmed civilians, or you don't want to waste ammo tearing apart the walls of every home you walk through, having a blade like that would probably be pretty functional.
Is it replaying Fireblade's memories of events with Alex as a drop-in - meaning he'll experience everything that happened to her, or is Fireblade's subconscious just setting the stage and placing him inside it?
In the latter case, events could (and most likely would) play out completely different than Fireblade would remember. And THAT would be a big tell for her that something or someone intruded upon her mind, if she didn't notice his presence itself.
Diplomatic status or not, she would definitely demand answers on threat of dismemberment.
In addition, let's assume that Fireblade didn't notice anything. This would be an even more dangerous secret for Alex to keep than a tablet with a Historian construct installed on it.
Re: The knife thing. I think Arioch's explanation makes sense. You've got a very mobile and very damage resistant combat unit being deployed for urban warfare. It can close distances in ways a regular soldier can't, and will be much harder to reliably put down when exposed. Hand to hand will be a *bit* more common for a trooper like that, and a little chopper isn't terribly expensive. Especially since there's always some utility use for a knife in the field.
Am curious though. How well would Barsam Marines hold up to Umiak Hard troops like this? It's unlikely to come up outside of some niche skirmish given the current state of the war, but it's an interesting thought
I think you guys are overestimating the cost of ammunition for a high-tech industrial society and underestimating the increased effort of manual slaughter, even for a mechanized force. Especially against populations with substantial amounts of esp'ers.
I think you guys are overestimating the cost of ammunition for a high-tech industrial society and underestimating the increased effort of manual slaughter, even for a mechanized force. Especially against populations with substantial amounts of esp'ers.
It's not so much the cost of ammunition, and more how much your troops can have on hand? It was a well known phenomena on the Western front in WW2 for roomimg SS death squads to simply run out ammunition when trying to liquidate local populations of "undesirables"*. It wasn't all that efficient, and part of the reason they went for the extermination camp model.
*Admittidly the bigger issue with the death squads was psychological endurance. Guys would eventually either get sick of the killing and just freeze up, or get so enthusiastic about it that even SS officers recognized it a bad idea to keep them on the firing line. Though given the species barrier and just how utterly engineered for war Umiak hard troops are, human morale issues probably aren't relevant. They might actually be perfectly capable of stoically hunting down and mechanically chopping alien civies in half for days with nary a care, in order to save ammo in case they run into insurgents who can actually fight.
I'm not aware of how often anti-partisan troops ran out of ammunition, most stories from anti-partisan fighting is mainly about how continuously it stresses the soldiers who have to do it, eventual firefights are usually quickly finished, not drawn out affairs. From what I recall that has been constant from the eastern front to vietnam to iraq.
With the kind of augmented soldiers the umiak field, morale is probably not a problem, I agree, but running out of ammunition is even less of a concern when you're a mechanized hard-trooper engaging in eradication tactics, since controlling the area is moot anyway, you don't really need to hold positions, and can just retreat to re-arm without worrying about a desperate and under-equipped insurgency force capturing positions, since them holding a position just makes locating and destroying them that much easier.
As amusing as putting giant weed-whackers on tanks and sending them into the jungle to clear out the vietcong may seem, it's ultimately easier and looks more humane to the cameras to napalm it instead.
Umiak melee troopers make more sense to me as a traditionalist aspect that is only enabled by advanced armor/mechsuit technology, insofar as umiak have any use for such conceptions.
I think it's not so much an issue of cost as it is of supply. And what we're seeing is not really anti-partisan fighting... that Loroi female and child are not "partisans."
In the early days of the Final Solution, the Einsatzgruppen would shoot their victims and bury them in mass graves. This quickly became impractical due to the sheer numbers of victims, and they had to find alternate "solutions." Perhaps more pragmatic right from the start of the war, the Japanese would bayonet the thousands of civilians and wounded that they captured rather than waste ammunition on them.
Are there any Stray like ground pounders in the umaki forces. I imagine the leading one with mean looking left hook is a leader class while the back one is a heavy gunner since his arms are gone and replaced with guns?
I think it's not so much an issue of cost as it is of supply. And what we're seeing is not really anti-partisan fighting... that Loroi female and child are not "partisans."
When you're not fighting partisans, running out of ammunition is even less of a concern.
In the early days of the Final Solution, the Einsatzgruppen would shoot their victims and bury them in mass graves. This quickly became impractical due to the sheer numbers of victims, and they had to find alternate "solutions."
Mass graves have been the most consistently practical solution for genocide. The Einsatzgruppen certainly never found a more practical one. The only method of mass execution that they found more practical than shooting was mass gassings where you have to pack about a thousand people into a gas chamber at a time, and it's not really clear that extermination efforts were improved in efficiency by that, whether in terms of saving on ammunition or supply lines. They used less ammunition but diverted zyklon b away from pest control and ended up creating multiple pandemics instead, and by concentrating victims into camps in polish production centers they further clogged down vital supply lines to the eastern front.
Perhaps more pragmatic right from the start of the war, the Japanese would bayonet the thousands of civilians and wounded that they captured rather than waste ammunition on them.
This seems to be based on american atrocity propaganda and anti-japanese dehumanization efforts, not on hard evidence. There were similar tales of the germans in ww1 throwing babies into the air and impaling them on bayonets, and about whoever the enemy was in most other conflicts.
I think it's not so much an issue of cost as it is of supply. And what we're seeing is not really anti-partisan fighting... that Loroi female and child are not "partisans."
When you're not fighting partisans, running out of ammunition is even less of a concern.
In the early days of the Final Solution, the Einsatzgruppen would shoot their victims and bury them in mass graves. This quickly became impractical due to the sheer numbers of victims, and they had to find alternate "solutions."
Mass graves have been the most consistently practical solution for genocide. The Einsatzgruppen certainly never found a more practical one. The only method of mass execution that they found more practical than shooting was mass gassings where you have to pack about a thousand people into a gas chamber at a time, and it's not really clear that extermination efforts were improved in efficiency by that, whether in terms of saving on ammunition or supply lines. They used less ammunition but diverted zyklon b away from pest control and ended up creating multiple pandemics instead, and by concentrating victims into camps in polish production centers they further clogged down vital supply lines to the eastern front.
Perhaps more pragmatic right from the start of the war, the Japanese would bayonet the thousands of civilians and wounded that they captured rather than waste ammunition on them.
This seems to be based on american atrocity propaganda and anti-japanese dehumanization efforts, not on hard evidence. There were similar tales of the germans in ww1 throwing babies into the air and impaling them on bayonets, and about whoever the enemy was in most other conflicts.
Not so much propaganda as proof from survivors from Nanking and other cities overtaken by the IJA. There's well documented cases in Germany and Japan during world war two of officers either tossing them in the air for machine gun teams or slicing them in half with swords. That's the route the Umiak are taking here with the Loroi, so the parallel is obvious.
Ammunition is a factor once you consider they have to move it across not only multiple light-years (and parsecs), but also also through space that can be raided by the enemy. It would be many jumps back to any manufacturing facility.
Even if they are using plasma-based weapons.
However, it this unit appears to have both melee and ranged components, since they are dealing with the threat of potential esp'ers even in the civilians, much less any surviving military or resistance fighters.
Not so much propaganda as proof from survivors from Nanking and other cities overtaken by the IJA. There's well documented cases in Germany and Japan during world war two of officers either tossing them in the air for machine gun teams or slicing them in half with swords.
I have found no proof of it that is not second-hand atrocity propaganda pushed either by chinese partisan propagandists or western journalists. Neither group is known for being objective, especially in wartime.
That's the route the Umiak are taking here with the Loroi, so the parallel is obvious.
The umiak appear to be taking a much more likely route, which is to treat an "infestation" of an alien species like you'd treat an infestation of ants.
Not so much propaganda as proof from survivors from Nanking and other cities overtaken by the IJA. There's well documented cases in Germany and Japan during world war two of officers either tossing them in the air for machine gun teams or slicing them in half with swords.
I have found no proof of it that is not second-hand atrocity propaganda pushed either by chinese partisan propagandists or western journalists. Neither group is known for being objective, especially in wartime.
That's the route the Umiak are taking here with the Loroi, so the parallel is obvious.
The umiak appear to be taking a much more likely route, which is to treat an "infestation" of an alien species like you'd treat an infestation of ants.
So the bugger like things are now the exterminators
