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No armor at the beginning i don t get it.


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I understand ballistic armor arent fit to dispel heat generated by the Alien plasma weaponry.. only partially.

There are many ballistic vest core.

Some are kevlar/steel plates, and i dont understand why the steel wouldn t provide some protection even minor,

Others are Kevlar/ceramic plates.

And there s were the game theory goes to hell, Ceramic are extremely resilient to heat, thats whe they are used on space shuttle (ok its a special ceramic) but ballistic ceramic would provide cover.

Now i understand that maybe, this is the case for the first armor.

The ballistic ceramic could be less resistent, the steel even less.

But even then, i don t understand why we haven t a starter armor, it doesn t make sense.

Could be heavy Bulky provide little armor but it would be player choice to use it or not.

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I'd suggest reading the xenopedia entry for Jackal armour. The rationale for "no armour" is there.

What he's saying is that it still doesn't make much sense. There's not a great deal of variance in the ceramic used for heat resistance and the ceramic used for stopping a round, and the ceramic that would stop rounds is considerably resistant anyway.

Further, they make mention of the data gained from the Iceland engagement, and knew the characteristics of the aliens' weaponsand go on to make mention that they'd figured it out enough to sufficiently armor a fighter (which raises its own questions anyway as to the point, but I'll buy it for the sake of the argument), so they'd already turned the key.

Kevlar of course would be useless as mentioned (it would cause worse injuries), but they'd already nailed down the causative factor in the injuries their weapons caused, and learned how to mitigate it.

Edited by EchoFourDelta
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So, do you want a better rationale for no armour, or a rationale for armour?

EDIT, Echo, I just refeshed myself with the description to Jackal armour. Are you referring to the phrase: "intelligence from the 1958 Iceland Incident suggested extraterrestrial weapons would punch right through it" as "making mention of the Iceland Engagement"? Okay, so, they know that extraterrestrial weapons would punch right through normal armour. That doesn't suggest they understand the mechanism of how extraterrestrial weapons did it, just that it did it.

I then thought, hang on a second, they must do, what about the documented evidence of the Iceland Incident itself? Surely there's something there, right? So I took a look at that. There's a reference to the Iceland incident in the description of the Condor, with specific reference to the damaged Phantoms of the group that were scrambled at the start of the engagement. There's a description of a flash of light, then aircraft burnt to cinders. I looked up the properties of a titanium/magnesium alloy, and it's described as a desirable substance for applications in fields such as aerospace due to it's high strength/weight. The Xenopedia article goes on to express a hope that this reinforced bodyframe will be useful against alien weapons.

I also looked in the Iceland Incident desciption itself. It describes "energy bolts" "charring the flesh from the bones" of soliders and a "thrumming red ray of light" "carve a Patton in two". Then all useful evidence of the battle is annihilated when the UFO detonates. From what I can see, there's no evidence to go on prior to the invasion. The Jackal entry talks about "laboratory tests of captured alien plasma weapons", so I don't see how the Xenonauts are getting this information prior to capturing samples during the invasion, because there doesn't seem to be anything concrete to go on prior to the invasion.

Edited by Max_Caine
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They apparently know exactly how to protect the interceptors, and the troops on the ground were engaged in direct combat; it's listed as one of the improvements to the Condor. That doesn't come from nothing. That, or it was the best random armor material selection ever made. It's also not hard to take away someone saying "It charred them, and melted stuff," and think, "Damn, heat."

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Erm, I don't believe they "exactly know" how to protect the interceptors.

"we believe may prove more resistant to alien weapons than conventional aircraft materials"

and

"hopefully allowing it to soak up more damage"

and

"it is impossible to know how it will measure up against extraterrestrial craft unless they return"

Does not express "we know exactly how to protect our interceptors". It expresses "maybe this will work, but we aren't certain. At all."

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"We believe" ? Based on what ? Water screening, Tarot, runes.

This doesn t speak military mind at all.

And anyway if "we believe" for planes, "we believe" for our soldier also.

And soldiers are awfully cheaper Lab rat than planes.

No matter how you turn it, its one of those things that doesn t make sense in the settings.

Like heavy platting the planes to reduce ammo. Is the cost of greater speed and range would be ammo i would understand, but plating ? Without even testing unplatted ?

And the suicidal run mission, no way to flee ? Why ? I hope they are looking into this.

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Here's one suggestion of a rationale:

The official lore for the Xenonauts states that in the years between the Iceland Incident and the game's invasion the world's anti-alien combat status steadily dropped downwards, until the only force training for fighting aliens was "a few dedicated scientists and technicians and less than a dozen soldiers." It's quite possible that in the financial drawdowns of Xenonaut forces, research was lost or archived, and the first few researches in the game actually represent unarchiving and refamiliarizing with stuff that had been learned over a decade earlier at the Iceland Incident.

Among the things forgotten was the EXACT temperatures and such that alien weaponry burns at. Obviously your scientists pretty quickly figure out that fire hot and hot bad, but whether it's burning at 200 C or 5000 C is kind of an important detail. :P Moreover I think it's mentioned that Jackal is specially treated ceramic armor, using technomagic methods to make it leagues better than normal ceramics which would provide EFFECTIVELY nil protection against alien attacks. The idea would be that you could issue your troops 50 kilos of armor in order to provide them with almost three percent protection, but no-one in their right mind would ever do that so the option is removed from the game.

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It's odd they remembered the formula for the plane and not the troops, though. I mean, the average infantry soldier is wearing thicker armor than you find on an aircraft's fuselage.

Most of it comes down to some fairly subpar justifications in-universe; not saying. I'm just saying. The story for XCOM stuff is about as weak as wet toilet paper. The stuff put together for this isn't much different. It's sometimes easy to ignore; it's just that when you do run into some of the more glaring stuff, it's really glaring.

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You don't stick so much armor on an "interceptor" that it can barely move while carrying 50 cannon rounds and a pair of piddly missiles if you don't have any idea if it'll work. Their primary defense is speed and maneuverability. At that point, you're better stripping the thing down and hoping it can dodge and outrun whatever they sling at it anyway. That's all predicated on the idea you could actually armor a fighter and have it matter anyway; it's not a truck that you just slap a bunch of armor on. The engines are still open, the intakes are still open, there's the little matter of the cockpit, and a host of other stuff.

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It's a good job that armour isn't being put on it, then.

From the first paragraph:

"it has broadly similar performance to its parent aircraft but uses a modified airframe that incorporates significantly larger fuel tanks and greater durability (paid for via a reduced payload)"

Okay, straight away, the tradeoff is not simply protection. It's range. A short-range interceptor has been given extended range. But whatevs.

The third paragraph

"This has been used to give each Condor a reinforced airframe, hopefully allowing it to soak up more damage."

The materials used to make the airframe is a human handwavium alloy which majjickally grants it extra durability (lol amirite?). There's no mention of armour throughout the entire article.

Echo and Mordobb, I'm fairly certain you have a very clear idea of what you want Xenonauts to be. By all mean re-write the article. I look forward to the mod. But the articles as written don't support your arguments. It's clear from the Jackal article and the Condor article that the best the science team can come up with to begin with is "fuck if I know". That's the rationale - "we don't know what we're facing. When we get samples, we can formulate a defence. Until then, you're on your own". However you want to cut it, however you want to say "no, that's wrong", that's it. That's how it is. Tee ess.

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You used to get Jackal armour as starting gear. It made a lot more sense going in than wearing coveralls, and I picked it up from these forums as very much a step forward.

For me, the rest is more game balance, with the back story following than the other way round.

Personally, I'd have kept a basic Jackal to save new players losing too many troops in the first few missions. That does mean that the aliens have a fair level of lethality.

It nicely differentiates between the soldiers with the Heavy Weapons and the assault troops. You can have big weapons, says the game, but the aliens are much more likely to kill those soldiers if given a chance.

It also stopped me carrying around umpteen grenades for every situation, as the armour weight meant that it was that, a weapon, some ammo and a few grenades. Which is probably what it should be.

Once the aliens have appeared with heavier plasma weapons, research could go into an advance Jackal armour. It's a bit more resistant ( the basic model could even be lowered to give better balance between the two types), and fits in with the weapons that can now be brought back and tested a la backstory. It would fit into the same place as the Jackal research now. The realistic armour mod provides us with some nice graphics, and no sprites really have to be updated.

The basic model would be free, and the advanced version would have to be paid for.

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greater durability (paid for via a reduced payload)"

This has been used to give each Condor a reinforced airframe, hopefully allowing it to soak up more damage

There's not much you can do to actually protect aircraft from gunfire than armoring it up. The concoction of excuses given make no sense in a realistic context, and the stuff in the Xenopedia is just bad writing, considering the final intent. No big there, we get it in video games all the time. But basing circumstances in-game on horrible logic and the writer's poor understanding of how fightercraft work doesn't lend itself much to someone who's looking for some degree of plausibility. I've mentioned before that it's a science fiction game: fantastical is to be expected. The out-of-the-ordinary in this story, though, is the aliens, not an amazing reversal of how airplanes, armor, and physics work for basic human technology.

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One of the major factors to consider in this thread is that materials technology has progressed a whole lot between now and 1979. We're using materials now that no one even dreamed of 30 years ago.

Kevlar wasn't even being used much until the 1980s. And the high strength ceramic plating wasn't available until later. Handwavium aside, the materials science just wasn't there. Only after capturing the alien weaponry were they able to nail down exactly how to make something resistant enough to help stop it.

What stops the alien plasma bolts (high heat dissipation without destruction) wouldn't normally be incorporated in human armor, because it wouldn't stop bullets. While you could definitely make educated guesses, getting it exactly right would have been difficult. In that case, you have to weigh mobility against the hope that it might work.

In the case of aircraft, the enlarged fuel tanks would actually make the aircraft much much more vulnerable to alien plasma weaponry. They should have spent the time and money on better sensors. Or remembered that they had radar guided weapons and E-2 Hawkeyes. But hey. :)

Edited by Ishantil
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Except that we can detect and track them from hundreds of miles away. With, you know... radar. And that every mention made of tracking them 21 years earlier during the Pulitzer prize-winning writeup of the Iceland Incident (with absolutely caveman-type equipment, comparatively) mentions, again... radar.

That said, it's even easier to detect something that's an active radiation emitter than it is to tell it's there by bouncing radar waves at it, and we've had anti-radiation missiles that track specific wavelengths for decades; it's all electromagnetism; even a few earlier types were designed to home in on jamming signals, specifically to short-circuit evasion attempts, or on specific communications frequencies.

This all being moot, though, because of the radar stations we build to detect them.

Edited by EchoFourDelta
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Our radar stations have what, 1% chance to detect a UFO per minute? While I agree on long-distance missiles being viable against larger UFO targets without much mobility, they'd be pretty much worthless against anything that can dodge unless you nuked every UFO, Iceland Incident-style.

As for the primary topic:

While the wreckage from the Iceland Incident was pretty much all gone, there were inspectable wreckages of military fighter planes once the UFOs returned. An analysis of such could give justification for an experimental plane to be reinforced in a particular way (Likely with heat sinks) and the term "hopefully" being used. Without immediate access to plasma tech, any assertion beyond "hopefully" would be silly, as it couldn't possibly be tested.

However, you can't conclude from a plane being reinforced that a personal body armor version is immediately viable. We get access to a 20 kg Combat Shield from the start, which indeed would be possible to make, but there's no reason to think a full-body version would be light enough to be effective. The shield has the benefit that you can drop it once it starts melting.

Besides, from a gameplay perspective, if we started with Jackal armor none of the starting soldiers would have been strong enough to carry a shield.

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Tanks were using ceramic armor plating for many years before it was implemented in personal armor. Your logic doesn't follow. Besides, realism is one of the worst arguments you can use--all your arguments can be handwaved away by saying that xenonaut troopers wear the best armor available and that's one reason they are so successful. It's equipped on everyone by default.

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Except that we can detect and track them from hundreds of miles away. With, you know... radar. And that every mention made of tracking them 21 years earlier during the Pulitzer prize-winning writeup of the Iceland Incident (with absolutely caveman-type equipment, comparatively) mentions, again... radar.

That said, it's even easier to detect something that's an active radiation emitter than it is to tell it's there by bouncing radar waves at it, and we've had anti-radiation missiles that track specific wavelengths for decades; it's all electromagnetism; even a few earlier types were designed to home in on jamming signals, specifically to short-circuit evasion attempts, or on specific communications frequencies.

This all being moot, though, because of the radar stations we build to detect them.

It's funny how my brain shuts down sometimes; I knew all of that. :P

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