Droid Engineer Archive
Thread: The Animatrix; a DE's Take
I dunno if you folks have seen the The Animatrix, but it should be required viewing for all DEs. I watched it recently and I almost crapped my pants. The first three episoids and the last episode are amazing. They really gave me the chills.
Talk about creating a mobile AI and then asking "what have I wrought?"
It's scary, but not for a DE. If the machines in the Animatrix were droids they'd run out of power before they could kill you, they'd lose you if youran to a different city, and there'd only be five of them and only one of them could beafter you at a time. The otherdroids they made (which survived without any crits) would just be used to decorate their machine city.
ya i bet the DE's in the animatrix were crying nerf when theirdroids went AWOL and started making their own droids
but i dont get though, how they robot city 01 survived a nuclear barage, especially since the EMP would have knocked out a lot of the robots, and the nuclear winter that would follow combined with the air strikes and ground invasion afterward should have killed em off
To answer your question Karikaru, nuclear weapons do not wipe out great big craters like you see in the movies. Nuclear weapons kill by filling a large volume of area with "lethal" amounts of radiation. The human body if very fragile compaired to shielded and armored machines. In the matrixthe EMP device on the ships only have a very short range. A nuclear weapon would effect a small area then the radiation would make non-mechanical life forms impossible for a few hundred years.
In the end all they did was piss them off and had the effect of dropping a pinpoint 5000 pound bomb on a major city.
Karikaru wrote:
but i dont get though, how they robot city 01 survived a nuclear barage, especially since the EMP would have knocked out a lot of the robots, and the nuclear winter that would follow combined with the air strikes and ground invasion afterward should have killed em off
The droids of Zero One rock the friggin' house. It was awesoem to see them rip people apart like rag dolls. The Animatrix contains a powerful criticism on racism and the proclivity for war in America -- and reams of deadly droids. It's awesome!
Killermuppet wrote:
To answer your question Karikaru, nuclear weapons do not wipe out great big craters like you see in the movies. Nuclear weapons kill by filling a large volume of area with "lethal" amounts of radiation. The human body if very fragile compaired to shielded and armored machines. In the matrixthe EMP device on the ships only have a very short range. A nuclear weapon would effect a small area then the radiation would make non-mechanical life forms impossible for a few hundred years.
In the end all they did was piss them off and had the effect of dropping a pinpoint 5000 pound bomb on a major city.
Respectfully,I have to dispute that. What you are describing is a dirty bomb, which has little to no concussive effect. Mostconventional explosives work concussively and can do a significant amount of damage by just exploding next to a target (only heavily armored tankscan take indirect hits with little damage). By conventional, I'm talking about air to groundbombs whose blast is measured in pounds.For examplemany smart bombs are2000 pound weapons (which is 1 ton). Theblast of a hydrogen bomb is measured in megatons. For example the 10.4 megaton bomb tested in 1952 is equivalent to 10 million, 4 hundred thousand smart bombs in force,or basically20800000000 pounds. To compare the blast radius between a 1 ton bomb and a 10.4 megaton bomb you take the square root of the energy (since the surface area of a sphere is 4*pi r^2), and you find that a hydrogen bomb is effective tomore than3000 times the distance of a 1 ton bomb. So what a smart bomb can do (which include both destroying infrastructure and armor), a hydrogen bomb will do the sameon an area 3000 times larger. The radiation poisoning probably affects a radius many times larger than that.
The bombs used in World War 2 were 600 times weaker than this. The test of the bomb I mentioned destroyedone island and left a crater 175 feet deep. I'm no expert, but these things have been tested long enough, showing the devastating effects of the blast. Itis true that more people died from the radiation poisoning of nuclear weapons than the blast, but they are still incredibly destructive when neglecting radiation. Considering that Sentinels were vulnerable to bullets (as demonstrated by both the Animatrix and the movie itself) whereasthe best tanksare not,that tells me the machines' armor was much weaker and thuswould have been fodder to nuclear weapons.
On radiation, sub-atomic particles can also do significant damage to circuitry, especially on silicon with increasingly small gate sizes whereenergetic particles do proportionately more damage. As is the case with comptuer systems,damaging a small partcan often bring down the whole system. Ie: you're more likely to start up a car that's been exposed to a lot of radiation than a comptuer exposed to the same amount. That is if they didn't melt first.
Add to all this that there are 1000s of these weapons in the world, there would be no problem in blasting every square mile of a large city. I found the truth in the story about "The Second Renaissance" was more how humans could possibly beso criminally abusive of other sentient and otherwise peaceful beings, and not that the machine city somehow survived so much firepower.
LancerDL wrote:
I found the truth in the story about "The Second Renaissance" was more how humans could possibly beso criminally abusive of other sentient and otherwise peaceful beings, and not that the machine city somehow survived so much firepower.
Yeah, that was pretty amazing commantary in the second peice. When those guys beat the crap out of that anthropomorphic droid and then shot her; it gave me the chills with how violent it was. Reminded me, and was a clear allusion to, the violence of the south against minorities.
Anyway, I thought it was apporpriate to this forum since ther Animatrix really showed an amazing evolution from the human development of robotic automatons to the sentience that sprung therefrom -- AND humanity's typical "war is the answer" response to a new, thinking and apperantly feeling life form.
I hope we get some smarter droids. It'd be nice if R2s refused to roll into a battle on occasion, or took other indipendant approaches.