NoirWolf

Alien race has advanced weaponry and FTL... gets defeated by stairs? That's like Signs level stupid .

Neah, Droopy was clumsy, Cain is more of a Robert Downey Jr.-era Sherlock Holmes ( Droopy no tap hot Inquisitorial assh after all and you can tell from most of Vail's interjections that she holds a personal connection to Cain even though Inquisitors as a rule trust no one enough to build a personal connection to the degree of actually protecting a person who wasn't what you would call the most honest or upright of His Majesty's servants and after his death it would serve her no purpose to place his memoirs under inquisitorial seal).

Yet still the US pushed the Japanese to war (there were sets of documents declassified in the 1960s or 1980s that showed this), there's a difference between being oblivious to the point of retardation and bitchslapping a country until they fight back. The US with its economic stranglehold on the Japanese were gradually reducing the Japanese to silence thus the US were not morons and knew they were likely to get a war (the warrior code in Japan pretty much said that you either redeem your honour through actions or you die and everyone in their military followed this code). Also fully autonomous drones would likely mean drones capable independent actions, if your job is to eliminate all sentient life on a planet you program said drones to seek out and kill anything that looks self-aware aside from its masters and self-destruct when reasonably sure nothing is left. They wouldn't be AIs, just automated robots following a set of commands, an AI requires self-awareness and the capacity to evolve, any sufficiently evolved race capable of AI creation would know how to not make one.

Man I should really make lore hints more obvious ... Cypher has a bolter and a plasma pistol and is one of the Fallen who are proactively hunted by the Dark Angels (I said Raven Guard before, mae culpa there, sorry).

Hmm... rewards...Skitso has a good idea with soldiers but it'd also need something more interesting... how about the aliens are targeting former Xenonaut operatives with these abductions and as a reward you unlock a piece of fluff about the organization's past ( I personally would love to read about stuff like that ) and maybe even a soldier, possibly either a reckless son/daughter of the former operative or the operative him/her-self or a old piece of kit which is just a item with a custom skin, something along those lines. This would give the missions a more personal touch in my view (you get lore, you get a trinket and you have a reason to do it, defending your own).

Actually if memory serves the M1 has crew safety as a priority, the Israeli Merkava has crew protection as a high priority ( you can see the distinctions between the two quite readily ). Also I was in no way making reference to the Boston bombings, in truth I'd forgotten it even involved a pressure cooker, what I was trying to point out that even new ones sometimes explode (flaws, accidental damage in the vein of heat-cold stress fractures, etc) and in combat if a tank takes a direct hit to the ammo storage area it's gonna pop its lid, if it takes a hit that breaches into the ammo storage area it's gonna pop its lid, the only times I know that the newer storage racks help with preventing explosions and crew death directly is when it's a hit that doesn't breach the ammo storage area. Otherwise... yeah M1s still go up due to their racks just under more specific circumstances than the M48s and M60s before them.

Probably gonna be tweaked before launch or someone's gonna make a mod for it post launch (the AI I mean).

Ask them for me if they plan on keepin space MacGyver (Caiphas Cain) on the rosters for the foreseeable future I love those books, one of only two series of books I am up to date with thus far ^^ (both with commissar protagonists, must've been one in a past life or something ).

You are aware the I was referring to drones as in remotely piloted vehicles and, maybe, semi-autonomous units controlled in groups by a human being (semi-autonomous in this instance being able to receive orders and act them out without human assistance, that's a far cry from even bug level awareness) , right? Also Pearl Harbour was about as much of a surprise attack to the US as the German blitz to the Polish ( the US had been openly belligerent and hostile towards Japan leaving it absolutely no recourse but war and the US knew that the other option they offered, taking it up the behind like champs and not raising a fuss about it, would never go for a society which back then still practised ritual suicide for unforgivable mistakes).

Also known as the "Awww cute the bugs could fly... before they met my sword." .

-TrashMan pursued the one called NoirWolf to a desolate planet only to be confronted by a Raven Guard ship, what followed is not known as TrashMan was never seen of again-

Androns are only part of the force and clones are the stupidest thing you could use to replace standard soldiers (mostly because unlike drones clones cannot be easily replaced and lose the experiences they had up until that point, memory imprinting would give knowledge but not experience) to say nothing of genetic template degradation in time or gradual genetic manipulations which inevitably leads to unusable stock ( borking something with genetics is fairly easy to do, you could end up with troops who aren't interested in fighting as much as in the other f word ). In comparison drones could be all controlled by individual pilots or multiple drones controlled by one commander as it were, that way the drones can be kept non-sentient but also be as dangerous as the real thing without the risk of losing knowledge and experience by loses incurred in the field. The civilization depicted in-game isn't at its prime, it's stagnating possibly even decaying thus the notion of it getting bested by a technologically inferior enemy isn't as absurd as it sounds, unlikely yes but not absurd ( for example the romans got their asses handed to them at the end of the Roman Empire by peoples with inferior technology but completely alien ways of waging war and another example is the british getting their asses handed to them by the zulus in quite a few fights even though the brits had superior technology by comparison).

The fact they haven't progressed farther than plasma technology in terms of handheld weaponry or that they do not have completely automated combat drones and require scouting of potential target planets tells me that the alien civilization itself might be in a state of decay brought on by stagnation, possibly even technological regression (think about it: why wouldn't they just glass major threats from orbit and then send in mop up crews? it's either extreme hubris, considering they've already lost one of their main ships scouting the planet decades before, or something else, either the inability to or even desperation).

The universe is roughly 13 billion years old and the fact that the gold in your computer even exists to begin with proves that the area where the Sol system currently exists was inhabited in the past by now defunct stars (probably quite massive ones due to the fact that anything heavier than iron is a endothermic fusion reaction thus making it impossible for a stable star to produce, gold, silver, platinum and a host of other heavier elements are thus the products of supernovae). The existence of stars prior to our own suggests the possibility of planets existing prior to our own, now granted you're not gonna be seeing civilizations 11-12 billion years old but half that is probable considering the fact that the first generation stars were massive and burned through their fusion fuels in a matter of a few million years. Knowing that tell us again how is this game unrealistic in its portrayal of a possible alien invasion in the 1970s-1980s?

Even pressure cookers explode sometimes.

I am still saddened by the mention of a flamethrower in the FAQ on this thread it and the mech are two things I would've liked to have seen in-game..

I still miss the Sisters of Silence .

So no mobile armours in the vanilla game?

Well if there's a Rodney Mckay, a Sheldon Cooper and that little asian kid from Big Bang theory the research speed might be faster, or you might see a homicidal rampage by one of the geniuses involved.

But it would be magic for us in terms of explaining how it works today, 33+ years ago it would've been even more magical as back then they were barely wrapping their heads around how to contain fusion grade plasma. We'd know it's a gun, how to use it (basic principals of aim, shoot, pray) and could guess or coerce some knowledge about maintenance but explaining how it works is gonna be tricky for years especially considering we today don't have a clue how to obtain a self-containing plasma bolt with long distance capabilities, we can fire a really pissed off chunk of lead at something but that's about it. We could reverse engineer it in a few years maybe with allot of waterboarding and a few geniuses onboard but 33 years ago plasma physics was still a immature science so you'd be looking at people who don't even yet fully understand less dense plasmas let alone the denser ones you'd need for a bolt. Suspension of disbelief works for the lasers not for the hail mary level of genius required to take alien technology and understand it in months or a year ( you'd need an entire team of Sheldon Coopers all working in sync and not being extraordinarily wrong, which is very possible considering how current knowledge of plasma physics is, 33 years ago it would've been quite a bit worse, to get it that fast through the unknown -> theory -> prototype -> weapon cycle, for reference lasers start at being prototypes).

-pulls out a bolter and a plasma pistol- He is no god, but a man to be admired -singes your commissar cap before vanishing in what looks to be a flash of baleful light-

Dear god... do you even realize how optimistic you are? Industrial espionage, copying tech you already know the fundamentals (the physics, the theories behind them) are not even remotely comparable to the depth and difficulty of reverse engineering utterly alien technology (the physics theories it uses, the alloys it is made out of, it's operational parameters, language decryption, the possibility or impossibility of reproduction using current knowledge both technical and theoretical), you'd be giving a AK-47 to a Bronze age human and expect them to know how to use it without training, how to maintain it without knowing anything about it, its construction or its constituent elements and how to reproduce it. Threat of extinction or not humans aren't good at reverse engineering things, they are however good at adapting things using new knowledge, again laser technology could be significantly improved within a few weeks using alien artefacts, within months you could get lasers powerful enough to punch through the hide of a alien space craft without requiring a multi-ton medium or a nuclear reactor power source. Plasma weapons would be too much to use as anything else than secondary weapons when captured or primary ones when expecting a heavy fight but not mainstay weapons as they're extremely limited, you only get what you captured, nothing else. Also just as a fun fact regardless of what tricks you use there's not enough chemical fuel in the universe to power a space craft (regardless how small) that close to the speed of light in the conventional sense. It was a trick question to prove a point.

Still no mech love? I want my Gunda...breaching suits .

I've been skimming the xenonauts wiki and it seems certain things in it are either currently disabled in-game or have been outright dropped (flamethrower and I hear hypervelocity weapons) so my question is: What weapons and armour are currently in the game and what will be put in or back in in the future (certainty or reasonably certain)?