One of the things that I loved about the Necromongers was that they COULD be defeated. As your video shows, their fighters and even some of the larger command vessels were shot down. They're GOOD but they're not invincible.
@@SacredCowShipyards Also, sheer numbers. Still, I think their business model has a pretty limited shelf life. If your group is just a bunch of murder hobo atrocity machines, sooner or later, everyone around you is going to gang up on you and take you down (see: Daesh, Axis Powers). To succeed in the Evil Empire business, it helps to open a trade route from time to time and build some roads and aqueducts. You can get away with some really hardcore nastiness, like torturing thousands of people to death on a major thoroughfare, if you can answer the question, "What have the Romans ever done for us?!" They win on aesthetics though, with that amazing Gothic look. It would be cool to see a reboot or a sequel with a bigger budget.
@@kevincrady2831 honestly, tho, from what I understand, they're less "evil empire" and more "murder hobo Entropy Cult with a mobile Vatican as their flagship, except with a safer (or at least _faster)_ daycare"
and if I also remember during the middle of that when they thought they were actually going to lose one of the idols automatically fired early and then dropped almost that many troops near by
@@ariesdarkmage2987 They had little mini-portable icons that particularly nutty ones of them carried that they were tasked to deploy if the unit they were accompanying went down.
From the novelization they do not use plasma weapons but gravity weapons. The Conquest Icons actually create a gravity field that Builds up then shoots straight down and compressing everything in its area of effect to a couple MM in thickness. Plants, animals, buildings people all flattened in a nice smooth sterilized circle. The novelization also has a nice history of the Necormongers.
Someone in the Necromonger ranks said to the Lord Marshal: My Lord, let us put your face on top of our Planet destroying super weapon. The lord Marshal: How about four.
@@SacredCowShipyards I think the Lord Marshall we see in the film is the 5th one, the masks are to represent his predecessors. Thing I don't get, is that the NM fleet has to have some sort of FTL drive or equivalent, or inhabitable systems need to be astronomically speaking very close together for them to hit say, Furia and then go murder hobo on Helios Prime within 40 years, unless Riddick has spent a massive amount of time in cryosleep.
@@shanehudson3995 i mean if you fiddle with gravity to enough of a degree you can get time to go FUCK RIGHT OFF and can quitly slide into star systems so 40 years time is quite fast really, and as another commenter pointed movies change things
Things falling from space gets you Dinosaur extinction level artillery. That this not weaponized more often in SciFi baffles me. I played TTRPG game a decade or more back where where each player could develop different spaceships types and we were trying to break up a large Empire the other players didn't get why a made what amounted to a VERY big, somewhat stealthy, VERY fast ... push based tug boat. It was weirdly cheap in the point buy system we were given...it was bizarre and I think half homebrewed. Then they saw what happened when I started to push things from the Oort Cloud or Kuiper Belt type regions at more central planets. . . just basic calculations of the energy imparted to the planet was insane. "Rocks Fall Everyone Dies" was written on the side of ship.
I can only think of three groups/villains in fiction who were smart enough to use this: the radical Belters from the Expanse, the Bugs from Starship Troopers, and Sephiroth from Final Fantasy 7 (though that one had a lot more weird anime magic going on). I guess Ultron from MCU did too; does it still count as an asteroid if you are just launching a Russian city on a suborbital trajectory? Either way, it was same principle at least.
@@zobblewobble1770 The Gamilas from Space Battleship Yamato used this stratagey too on a regular basis. If they decide that conquering you isn't worth it, they'll just set up a couple of bases with patrol ships in your system (to wreck your navy) and then throw rocks at every planet in range until none of them are fit for *human* habitation
@@zobblewobble1770admiral Thrawn as well. And he cloaked them to make them impossible to track and to make it difficult to ascertain when there was no longer a threat
Your introduction reminded me of a happy little piece of advice from Lt. Aldo Rayne, US Army. "You know, fighting in a basement offers a lot of difficulties. Number one being, you're fighting in a basement."
Pitch Black and Chronicles are both cool movies, but are so different in feel that they don't even seem to be related. From the more grounded Pitch Black I never would have guessed the wider universe had hoards of undead Mongol analogs and mystical elemental Fae.
My understanding is that Pitch Black is how Vin Diesel got his universe's foot in Hollywood's door, and then he went on to do what he actually wanted to do with it, since it's all based on an RPG campaign of his.
@@ranekeisenkralle8265 Looks like he may have factored in his RPGing into the later movies: gizmodo.com/vin-diesel-tells-us-why-riddick-is-one-big-game-of-dung-514236515 I do know that The Last Witch Hunter was lifted straight from one of his D&D games.
@@SacredCowShipyards wait a sec wasnt the start of the expanse also based on a roleplaying session... honestly i do like the idea of using role playing campaigns as basis for stories since they are not subservient to the whims of a single individual writer and have deeper relationships
I have to subtract points for Genocidal SOciopathic behavior, But damn, do the Necromongers get bonus points for style, efficiency, and utter ruthlessness. As a Tropish Movie Big Bad, they certainly raise the bar a notch or two. I'd rather go fight those guys in the white armor than can't hit the broad side of a Bantha.
@@SacredCowShipyards the "Evil Invading army" market is really crowded. So ya have to put that extra effort in. No one wants to end up as "That movie with John Travolta with a knobby forehead and stilts.
Ngl, I saw the thumbnail and thought this was going to be about the Sardukar. But Riddick stuff jives my Jimmies too. Also, I'm stealing "auto-fornicate elsewhere."
Tbh I always found the Necromongers fascinating from an ideological perspective, such that they make a perfect villain faction imo... a perfectly circular argument, backed up by an arsenal of weapons that are as beautiful as they are lethal, they're not just "evil", they have their own agenda and woe betide anyone else who gets in their way.
After all, mass drivers have been outlawed by every civilized planet.
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Sometimes I wish I have never seen Babylon 5, so that I could just see it again for the first time, it's so good. Guess It's time for the annual viewing of it again.
@ While nothing can truly recapture the experience of watching it for the first time there is a youtuber who is doing reaction videos of her blind watching it and her enthusiasm is contagious and lets you live vicariously through her first viewing. ua-cam.com/users/medusacascade She is still on season 2 just before the excrement made contact with the air circulation device. It has me eagerly awaiting her reaction to what is about to go down.
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@@nobodyimportant2470 Thanks, I actually saw her viewing of The Gatthering and of S1 EP1, and I liked it!
I loved the worldbuilding of 'Chronicles of Riddick' (and wonder how much input Vin Diesel had in it, since this is the first movie in the trilogy where he owns all the rights, I believe). I wanted to learn more about the Furyan race, the 'Elementals', how the Necromonger King got his powers, and thought future films would fill in these details. Too bad it didn't do well at the theaters, forcing them to go back to the 'Pitch Black' formula, but at least they acknowledged the events of Chronicles.
I am so glad to see some love for the Riddick-verse! I fell in love with it when i was in middle school, it played well into my love for all things involving blades. Knife fights in space?? Yes please!
Tungsten telephone poles are high end rocks. On a tangent I'm pretty sure some of the defense satellites have hidden in them designs to be dropped on targets as a last resort and have some kind of core for extra mass. Think tungsten sphere. Accurate no, but minute of city is close enough for them.
Well, the EarthForce defense satellites for Terra did have a scorched earth program built into them in B5, but I think that was put there for a different reason.
If you're talking about real life, Project Thor, aka, the "Rods from God," was considered, but never got off the drawing board. Probably due either to the Outer Space Treaty, or the prohibitive cost of shipping tungsten telephone poles into orbit. The physics behind it is very real though, just an expression of F=ma. I mean, a lot of sci-fi has railguns, mass drivers, and The Last Jedi even had a kinetic kill against a 60km boomerang, but sci-fi tends to UNDERESTIMATE the physics of just how powerful these kinetic kill vehicles/projectiles are (while utterly overestimating the force of their laser guns). The Last Jedi had the right idea, but the effects would have actually been quite a bit more devastating than that at near-light speed, as in, the induced cosmic rays from the collision would have stripped the atmosphere right off of Crait, never mind what it would have done to the Resistance transports. Transformers 2 had the "railgun," which fired a metal projectile at mach 7, punching through Devastator as if he weren't even there. That's probably the most accurate that I've got off the top of my head, even though no Navy destroyer has the power plant to actually POWER a railgun.
@@BlackEpyon The main issue with 'rods from god' was that aiming them is impossible, the plasma sheath around them as they re-enter would make them both blind and unable to be remotely guided so getting them near the target would be improbable. Added to that they would not be dramatically more damaging than their weight in conventional bombs and the cost of getting them into orbit means that they would be much less effective than using conventional missiles or bombers to deliver guided munitions.
@@patrickheslip7420 Getting signal through the plasma sheath was cracked more than a decade ago. And if you're dropping huge formations of them guidance beyond inertial doesn't matter. Just flatten killbox one and move on to killbox two.
@@patrickheslip7420 You do know that ICBM warheads also have to get around the same reentry issue? I'd assume they'd have a guidance package of some sort, like conventional smart bombs and ICBMs, so that it can be guided to the intended target. You don't need a rocket motor or anything, just deployable fins and a sensor. Of course, what they describe as "telephone poles" are only 20ft long (about 24,000 lbs), and at the proposed mach 10 speed, you're only delivering about 15 tons worth of TNT equivalent explosive force, which is more than a GBU-43/B MOAB at only 11 tons, but about 3/4 that of a Davy Crocket at 22 tons. But your average utility pole in America is at least 40 feet long, with 6 feet in the ground, which at about 1200 lbs/cubic foot, and assuming it's a tapered telephone pole (say about 18 inches diameter at the base, 8-9 inches at the top), would bring the yield to around 140 tons of TNT. Not exactly what one would call "nuclear grade," but far more than conventional weapons, and much more than a Davy Crocket. Now, that mach 10 figure assumes that you just toss it out of the launcher and let gravity do the work. What if you accelerate it to orbital reentry speeds, say around mach 25? You get around 856 tons of TNT equivalent for a 46 ft tungsten utility pole, or about 94 tons for the original 20 footer. Both of those are between a Davy Crocket and an AIR-2 Genie, which puts it into the nuclear yield range, if only in the little leagues. Now, if you wanna go crazy and launch those tungsten telephone poles out of a magnetic accelerator cannon at say, about 1% the speed of light, then you have to switch from your normal kinetic energy calculator to a relativistic energy calculator (if you're following along). You get 11 Megatons and 106 Megatons, respectively. That puts it well into the nuclear yield range, with the 20 footer being a bit more than a B53 high-yield bunker-buster (9 Mt), and the 46-footer being about twice that of the Tsar Bomba (50-58 Mt), the largest nuclear device ever deployed. And at relativistic speeds, you don't even need a guidance package. It will go through the atmosphere like it's not even there.
One of my own sci-fi settings had something similar. Coming from a faction rather reversed to Necromongers aesthetically, but not so different in capability. A ship capable of creating a gateway would first enter orbit, through which it would drop a colossal column formed primarily of hyper dense stone. The columns were themselves conduits through which further dramatic abilities could be triggered, or through which forces could be projected, such as thousands of fighter drones and war machines. Fortunately, the people who possessed these things were the ethical opposite of the Necromongers, having instead inherited them from the fallen empire of their ancestors, unable to build more than the 10 they already possessed, and never actually using them. At most there were some tense discussions where the suggestion came up during desperate times. They were basically a faction of isolationist idealist pacifists, with all the deadly toys but a strong cultural conviction against using them.
@@ranekeisenkralle8265 Thanks. I tend to have to skim over a bunch of details regarding this civilisation when mentioning them, due to quirks of the setting/civilisation that take more time to describe than most would care for in something like a UA-cam comment. It's an old setting of mine. The civ in question I named "Etheria". Regarding them possessing tech/military power that seems to conflict with their pacifist nature, if that's the part you found peculiar, it stems from how they are the last remnants of what was once a supremacist interstellar empire of immense power and technological capability. As the sole survivors of the galactic catastrophe that abruptly ended said empire, it took them millennia to recover, and the civilisation that eventually emerged was a very different one to their ancestors. Through study of their history and the atrocities that characterised their ancient heritage, they vowed to never repeat that path and effectively formed an inward facing repentant society. When other forms of sapient life also eventually returned to the galaxy (that mentioned catastrophe having ended all other civilisations also), and then finally advanced enough to be capable of detecting and stumbling across Etheria (still isolating themselves mostly inside a single hidden location), it marked a turning point in Etherian history. How with the galaxy "heating up" in terms of other races ambitions and conflicts, it became gradually harder and harder both to avoid attention and encounters, as well as harder to justify remaining neutral and not intervening in the galactic community. Since even as a minuscule fragment of their old ascendant empire, they still possess easily enough power to be a deciding factor in galactic affairs.
in aldnoah.zero, the mecha anime, the martians use a similar weapon called a "landing castle", and it functionally does exactly the same thing, all while providing a military beachhead and forward operating base
For as much as I think these guys are badass, I am a big believer that there is always a bigger fish. You can't go around the galaxy thinking that you will always win.
Most people hearing about the rods from god project and taking the time to look it up, i see why it was abandoned. People who like learning about physics and are military nerds who don't even have to look it up, I am glad it was abandoned.
YES LOVE THAT BOOK BRILLIANT. It's a perfect blend if science fact and fiction writing and that's saying something considering the authors other books.
G.I. Joe: Retaliation also shows the potential (pun intended) very well. Makes you think whether some rods are already orbiting us. This also leads to another interesting problem that arises with space travel. Someone could just grab an asteroid from the astroid belt and throw it at earth/moon base/mars/etc.. To avoid this, I guess it would be harder to get your hands on a spaceship, than to buy a nuclear sub. The latter is not impossible though, as history shows, the S.A. drug cartels tried to buy an old soviet one
The electromagnetic field planets have is usually enough to protect a planet. Bit harder to do that with purpose bombardments, space flack canons maybe? You can't really stop something like it if its fast enough though.
@@SacredCowShipyards True, one might have better luck deflecting shots than destroying ordinance in that case. Artificial moons or asteroids field could take the hits in the planets place. Temporary solution at best, it's the classic issue with such huge targets in wars.
They tried this on one of my planets. It worked about as well as you would think. Unfortunately for them, they tried it on another one. Mysteriously, their drives and weapons were disabled and they were nudged into a stable orbit, where we immediately used a modification of their stupid plasma thing to wipe their ships clean of life and then promptly set about stealing their tech and developing our own version.
@@SacredCowShipyards Fun! I made this comment yesterday, and woke up, and realized, that seeing you tear into the Spirit of Fire from Halo might be fun. Might as well see if you want to add it to the back pocket, lol. Thanks for the awesome videos!
They have this interesting philosophy. "You keep what you kill."? Or was it "You are what you kill."? It was about the situation when if you kill a Necromancer of higher stations you inherit the position and all possession of the one you killed.
Starblazers, also called Yamato in Japana, also had a comet empire and fleet inside a comet that invades a planet, in the early 1980s cartoon series. The Comet Empire was season two.
For all of Hollywood's love for BIG BOOMS, and the fact that the impact of a massy object dropped from even orbit would be on the order of "nuclear", they really understated the damage these things would cause. Could be that they were decelerating on approach to save the squishies.
@@SacredCowShipyards yeah, that’s the only thing that makes sense but... Necromongers... the underverse... I’m not expecting a lot of physics to make sense in the Riddick films and I still haven’t seen the third one
@@parandiac I have to give them credit in that their tech is clearly magic, but they just mostly use it as a setting, and don't try to get all technobabbly about it. The tech exists, they use it, and they don't try to explain it. That works. As for the movies, they're glorious popcorn flicks, and even more fun given the history that they're really a byproduct of an RPG game Diesel used to play with his friends (and may still).
@@SacredCowShipyardsThat would depend on just how big a projectile you are throwing. Something like a 40-ton rod would result in a blast of roughly half a kiloton Given how big and massive that thing is, however, it is fair to assume its mass to be significantly higher. At, say 40.000 tons you are in the ballpark of 580 kilotons. Still not a whole lot in comparison to a nuke, but considering how highly focused the kinetic impact is, it can be comparatively surgical for an orbital attack.
If you want a better depiction of CI style landing ship it it would be the Vers knight's orbital landing castles from Aldnoah Zero. In EP 1 of the show you see what actual effect something like that would have on the landing zone and its a pretty elegant solution to how to secure and LZ given the Vers's numerical inferiority to humans of earth, hell it even does a really fucking well job showing what dropping rocks from the moon onto earth would do given that universes backstory. Hell that whole show is written by the great Urobuchi Gen of madoka magica fame and it should be a must watch for most people that like tight well crafted stories and universes.
1. The idea that the defenders of a planet have a huge disadvantage isn't realy true if both sides as advanced as each other. I recommend Isaac Arthur's video about Planetary Invasions although it is quite long and siency. 2. If the Necromongers travel between star systems then the Conquest Icons have to be going way faster than terminal velocity more like close to the speed of light so these "ships" wouldn't really need any fighters they would destroy whole countries on impact. But still a great video about an awesome ship
I feel like we're understating the effect such an impulse (a huge mass times near-light-speed squared) might have on a planet. I'm sure there's some simulation software out there that could adequately appreciate it, but I'm guessing that it'd be extinction-level stuff. I also don't understand how any ship is supposed to survive that. Perhaps I missed the part where it slams the brakes before going in, but even then ..... whatever's stuck in the ground afterwards would most assuredly no longer be a ship, let alone launch fighters and stuff.
There's a guy here on UA-cam who does simulations along the line of, "I made this dime weigh 10,000,000,000,000 times more than the sun and threw it at the Earth at 0.9c just to see what would happen." I suppose we could ask him? As for the actual landing, given how most of the necron propulsion seems to be entirely gravitic, I'm sure they have inertial dampeners and structural integrity fields and all that other hand-waving.
It was stylish, but it utterly shifted the Riddick universe from Sci-Fi deep into Fantasy, even past Space opera. So it is more bad than good, we have loads of fantasy already. And all the stuff going on is too unbelievable to be invested in
The only thing wrong with most of the science fiction wars I've seen/read is the scale. I think Battelstar Galactica had the best "conquest" of planets. Nuke everything, move on. And they stressed the idea that they were scaling back their Battlestars and armies. The Expanse probably did it the worst. Only because Earth has far more resources to throw at Mars and Space ISIS.
In the anime "Space Battleship Yamato", this is exactly what the alien empire does to the earth. They send asteroids on it to kill the human population.
In terms of scifi evil races this is one of my favorite. The necromongers don't need to worry about ftl anyway because the process they go through makes them immortal. Necromongers only die through either battle in the case of the warrior fodder or through intrigue in the case of the nobles. Using real kinetic rods as a reference point a single necromonger rod would most likely take out a normal sized continent when it landed. They wouldn't need to use the necro nuke or even attack planets because just landing one Conquest Icon on each continent would kill all life on the planet. Also each Icon carries THOUSANDS of fighters,
Aldnoah.Zero’s Martian Landing Castles are a similar concept I believe. One of them hitting the ground from orbit caused an explosion equivalent to a Hydrogen Bomb
Just found this video. I love The Moon is a Harsh Mistress reference. I listened to the audiobook and when Mike cheerful says "We can throw rocks at them." I went "Oh, Shit." I knew *Exactly* what he meant the first time.
riddick trilogy is great sure its a little disjointed... but each movie is a good enough watch; even if 3, is a remake/retelling of 1. space doggo good boy rip :(
Wonderful video as always. Babylon 5 did a good job when they showed the Centari using mass drivers to hurl rocks at Narn Prime. Just out of curiosity, how much is a hyperdrive overhaul on a Corellian YT-1300f light freighter? I need mine fixed with minimum question or 'entaglements'. Thanks
Not knowing the setting I have to knock off points for killing everything, then converting everything that survives, then killing them anyway in the Exterminatus? Unless they take the converts with them. They’re like the tyrannids and the inquisitor black ships built into one. The rod of god Icon of Conquest tactic also reminds me of a minor anime I watched and appreciated for its use of generally clever tactics in the first season. Less so in the second season but anyway, the Knights of Mars have these basically magic powered ships called Landing castles which do the same thing, it’s effect can be seen when it lands in the first episode, the effect is similar to what you’d expect from a nuclear device, except the impact area seems larger, and they’re also carriers of a crap ton of missiles and mech delivery craft. Because ofc it has mecha. A simultaneous landing of 20 of these basically managed to neuter the United Nations defenses in something like an hour. The UN was basically on the back foot for the rest of the series.
@@SacredCowShipyards so there is also always a demand for fresh bodies. Also explains the ruthless efficiency. Any attrition can’t exactly be replaced easily. Doesn’t that mean they’re one doomed invasion from a demographic crisis? Not that that seems likely but still.
20 hours. I'm gone only 20 flippin hours and you cubed my ship? Are your parking meters buggy or something? Now how in the hell am I supposed to get these illegal weapo... er, um, Medicine, yeah life saving medicines to those poor sick orphans? My insurance lady is gonna freak out over this one. You have any idea what this'll do to my credit score???
i kinda like the troop transport/missile platforms the aliens fight with in final fantasy movie more in reach of our tech if we could pack ourselves like eggs and not die landing
Well, sure, but it's heavily implied / outright stated that its impact point is made of some pretty durable stuff, while most of what it hits is dirt or buildings.
At least they are nice enough to slow it down from their interstellar travel speeds before it impacts, though that might just be to make sure there are some people left to convert on the planet
Something to take into account is that any centuries old, space faring civilization at the bottom of a gravity well will have massive clouds of orbital infrastructure. There will definitely be a lot of gun batteries with the best sensors pointing every which way looking for, and shooting at, any and all enemies. I wish this was shown more in Sci-Fi. Riddick is a fun series, even if the plot is barely coherent. Necromungers had a great look.
With advanced warning, and their vessels traveling at sub light speed, it's pretty easy to defend against them. Shotgun blast flak towards them. Solid slugs preferably, bigger the better. Their evade response will be slow due to inertia and red shifting/time dilation. The combined velocity and inertia of an impact would shred their ships. And their evasion would be slow enough that the next volley is already on intercept. If the prows are too heavily reinforced for that (doubtful), use cluster munitions which intercept then detonate alongside rather than in front of. How a more advanced species would be afraid of them kinda tells me they're not that advanced.
On the other hand you have infinite armour , infinite ammo and its really F^&#$ing hard to vent your atmosphere . Planets are kinda hard to sink too . The other guys literally have to carry Everything to you . Makes attacking a planet that has had time to prepare a loosing proposition I thought ( except in High fantasy Sci Fi )
I agree that it would be a logistical nightmare to take a planet. It is however far easier to just destroy it. That is the reason defending a planet would be downright awful if the enemy decides that if they can't have it then you can't either. You may be able to stop some of the asteroids but can you stop the entire kuiper belt hurtling towards you.
I'm guessing they go around picking on small colonies and pre-space-flight civilisations? Once their MO is known to an equivalent technology civilisation, the defences are blindingly obvious.
Or they dial up the impact velocity of their spikes, and be a little more deliberate about their targets. Hard to say. They are, however, feared almost universally throughout the galaxy, but most of the Riddick galaxy isn't a whole lot more advanced than the planet featured in this movie.
I heavily dislike the trope that defending a planet is hard. It depends on what tech they have available, and many sci-fi would make the gravity well of a planet trivial. Halo for example lets a cargoship the size of a c-130 aircraft reach space without any boosters or thrusters. With that technology, the attacker has a kinetic advantage, but not an overwhelming one. So your enemy has thrown a giant rock at your planet. Most if not all sci-fi will then go "you detect it 10 minutes out and it causes massive destruction!". Back in reality such an attack would be detected, and a space-fight would ensue over the rock you've thrown. Even if you use a rock from within the system the defenders only need to give it a miniscule nudge to prevent it from hitting its target. This means the attackers now also become the defenders, as they have to guide and defend the rock all the way to its terminal vector. Even then the planet carries a permanent shield: the atmosphere. Hitting the rock might not make it miss its target planet, but it can burn up most of its matter. That is, if the defenders are the passive kind. Most starships in sci-fi like this carry ridiculous amounts of power generation they need for their FTL and weapons. In the meantime a generator on a planet the size of one powerplant like we have today would dwarf the energy output of entire battlegroups and would not require the space and power of an FTL drive, or need to worry about specific materials to keep the ship maneuverable and still use its gadgets like FTL and shields. The weapons that can be powered would easily deal with something as simple as a rock thrown at them. Ofcourse most of these sci-fi have more aces up their sleeve that make such attacks trivial. Shields, gravity/antigravity and tractorbeams powered by planetary power generation would easily compensate for the gravity well they are in. Then there is layered defenses. Most if not all sci-fi has this weird idea that you can first destroy the defenses in space and orbit, then the planet is at your mercy since for some mystical reason the planets defenses can only fire into orbit at best, and then only after the orbital defenses have been cleared. While any realistic scenario with such technologies would see a layered defense. Planetary based guns and sensor stations would support orbital platforms and defenses which has its own local defense fleet. A fleet that would not require space for lodging, entertainment or other long-term living conditions in space compared to an interstellar fleet. If we get even more realistic then we have to add a supply chain, which most sci-fi glosses over. You have a ship capable of interstellar distances, but that has to cost something right? Fuel, food, space onboard for those longer duration flights to not make the occupants go mad. This means that your fleet will enter a system and immediately look to restock. It will have to bring an industrial ship/group of ships to mine the asteroid fields at the edge of a system to replenish what they lost and also to start creating the ammo they need to persecute a war. You might have some ammo, but bringing a full complement across stellar distances that lasts the length of a campaign against an entire star system? That is going to take months if not years of conquest. Even if you assume the supply line comes from another system it still means that the attacking fleet has a relatively microscopic amount of armaments available compared to a single reasonably developed planet, let alone a star system. This also means that the defending planet has time to try and deal with you. Using high-powered weapons, preferably FTL capable munitions, to try and take out this supply line would be key. If I had to defend a planet in Star Wars, Halo, 40K or Star Trek without any changes to their mechanics I would be able to make moderately developed planets a high-powered bastion against any attacker without having a terribly over-the-top budget. The biggest problem is that people seem to forget the massive scale of a planet, the resources it has available and what you can build on it. Take this necromonger ship. 900 fighters? That would perhaps deal with a single continent on the planet, but the planet itself? Nah. Not with how available spaceship technology is in that universe.
@@SacredCowShipyards yes a few hundred tungsten rods would be powerful and wasteful. Tungsten is rare in the universe, and from where are you going to fire them? You are already deep inside the enemies defenses or else they'll just intercept the rods and thank you for the rare materials. Shields and tractorbeams make this even less of an issue. Rods from God attacks would be a specialist attack type. You would need to create a hole in the enemy defenses, get a ship into low orbit and hope no one is monitoring the ship as it does so to intercept the rods. Again, this is heavily dependant on the setting. Many settings dont have the high-powered technology to defend against this type of attack and in those cases you are absolutely right. But in other universes like WH40K or Star Trek a rod from god would be almost weaker than conventional weapons aboard their ships, and far easier to intercept with ground/orbital/space based equipment.
@@TheDemigans ... I'm not talking Rods from God. I'm telling you that the Necromongers literally drop literally hundreds of those Conquest Icons on their target planets. Conquest Icons complete with nigh a thousand fighters bolted on to each. Hundreds of those. Possibly thousands. They might recover some of those, but most remain behind to cauterize the globe. I don't think you understand the scope of the horror they bring with them.
@@SacredCowShipyards its been a while since I last saw the movies, I thought they dropped just the one. But dropping hundreds would definitely work and it does fit in the laissez faire attitude to resources of the Necromongers.
@@TheDemigans Oh no. Their target worlds turn into those... what are they called? Cloved oranges? that you humies love during your holidays. In fact, they leave behind enough of the Conquest Icons to stand as testament to the horrors they wrought on the planet in question. It's a thing.
The Necromongers are not an empire, they are more like a traveling horde, like the chaos in Warhammer fantasy, they arrive hit hard, kill a lot of people destroy a lot of things, take whatever may be useful for them and go away as soon as they can (so they don't suffer retaliation from close by allied forces and as they don't use faster than light methods for their main fleet, which are traceable in the Ridick Universe, they go around relatively stealthy), well any planet with a decent array of telescopes and space observation devices like we have here on earth has a good chances of see them coming but as they dissappear and appear for large periods of time (due to their sub light methods of transportation) I guess that even if people know about them they don't know when and where they are going so no one is fully prepared to repel them at any time, maybe if in Ridick exists a trully militaristic empire with 24/7 ready to fight and to invade standing army with a more warrior like or at least castrense like culture, then they would be able to stop the Necromonger, however taking in consideration the Warmonger and kind of masochistic culture of the Necromongers they would be more than happy to engage said empire in constant battles of mutual extermination and genocide for all eternity if possible.
@@SacredCowShipyards I am not blaming you or accusing you of anything, I just wrote my comment as it occurred to me at the moment. But Japan still has an emperor but that makes them an empire?
A stake with style? I think the basic concept has a huge design flaw. So leaving a stake after the weapon goes off kind of makes sense to deter, but what squishy would build lets say an atom bomb with an aircraft carrier around it. Would it not make more sense to release the 800-900 fighters from another ship in orbit before the stakes crashes into the planet? How high is the average necromonger IQ? ...
I am an old idiot and not familiar with materials and technologies in that universe so apologies in advance but... wouldn't something big enough to hold ~1000 fighters impacting a planet at those velocities basically wipe out the dinosaurs? Why do you need the fighters?
Wouldn't something hitting a planet at terminal velocity be akin to the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs? What would be left alive after that, especially where the craft hit?
@@entropy11 That would be funny but i dont think he would be able to find the original show where Sanada's bullshitacular inventions saved the day, 2199 was cool but missed some aspects that made the original fun to watch.
Earth: DON'T DO IT LUNA! YOU UNDERESTIMATE OUR NUKES!
Luna: IT'S OVER EARTH, WE HAVE THE HIGH GROUND!
Purple Alicorn Princess doesn't care about your Nukez, she has the power of Friendship and Hasbro's Legal Team!! Muwaha Ha Ha Ha!!
@@grayeaglej who and the what?
@@grayeaglej i understood that reference
@@hokutoulrik7345 Huzzah!! :D
@@grayeaglej the fun has been DOUBLED!
That level of style gets you extra points on your genocide award.
They pin those awards on with a hammer and stake
Oh dear god. "Auto fornicate elsewhere." You have an amazing turn of phrase.
One of the things that I loved about the Necromongers was that they COULD be defeated. As your video shows, their fighters and even some of the larger command vessels were shot down. They're GOOD but they're not invincible.
Yup, they mostly got by on the mystique.
And by picking and choosing targets carefully.
@@SacredCowShipyards Also, sheer numbers. Still, I think their business model has a pretty limited shelf life. If your group is just a bunch of murder hobo atrocity machines, sooner or later, everyone around you is going to gang up on you and take you down (see: Daesh, Axis Powers). To succeed in the Evil Empire business, it helps to open a trade route from time to time and build some roads and aqueducts. You can get away with some really hardcore nastiness, like torturing thousands of people to death on a major thoroughfare, if you can answer the question, "What have the Romans ever done for us?!"
They win on aesthetics though, with that amazing Gothic look. It would be cool to see a reboot or a sequel with a bigger budget.
@@kevincrady2831 honestly, tho, from what I understand, they're less "evil empire" and more "murder hobo Entropy Cult with a mobile Vatican as their flagship, except with a safer (or at least _faster)_ daycare"
and if I also remember during the middle of that when they thought they were actually going to lose one of the idols automatically fired early and then dropped almost that many troops near by
@@ariesdarkmage2987 They had little mini-portable icons that particularly nutty ones of them carried that they were tasked to deploy if the unit they were accompanying went down.
From the novelization they do not use plasma weapons but gravity weapons. The Conquest Icons actually create a gravity field that Builds up then shoots straight down and compressing everything in its area of effect to a couple MM in thickness. Plants, animals, buildings people all flattened in a nice smooth sterilized circle.
The novelization also has a nice history of the Necormongers.
Someone in the Necromonger ranks said to the Lord Marshal:
My Lord, let us put your face on top of our Planet destroying super weapon.
The lord Marshal: How about four.
Which completely fits with the ego of the people who ascended to that status.
@@SacredCowShipyards I think the Lord Marshall we see in the film is the 5th one, the masks are to represent his predecessors.
Thing I don't get, is that the NM fleet has to have some sort of FTL drive or equivalent, or inhabitable systems need to be astronomically speaking very close together for them to hit say, Furia and then go murder hobo on Helios Prime within 40 years, unless Riddick has spent a massive amount of time in cryosleep.
@@shanehudson3995 i mean if you fiddle with gravity to enough of a degree you can get time to go FUCK RIGHT OFF and can quitly slide into star systems so 40 years time is quite fast really, and as another commenter pointed movies change things
@@lechking941 to my understanding, messing with gravity to that extent actually turns time into matter
At least by our current best models
@@angrydragonslayer ya and still makes things go FUCK ALL to the sideways.
Riddick is basically Conan in space. He seems to follow the same trajectory.
And it's GLORIOUS.
@@SacredCowShipyards it could be nothing less.
Trajectory? Ballistic? Thats just Falling with Style. O.o
Things falling from space gets you Dinosaur extinction level artillery.
That this not weaponized more often in SciFi baffles me.
I played TTRPG game a decade or more back where where each player could develop different spaceships types and we were trying to break up a large Empire the other players didn't get why a made what amounted to a VERY big, somewhat stealthy, VERY fast ... push based tug boat. It was weirdly cheap in the point buy system we were given...it was bizarre and I think half homebrewed. Then they saw what happened when I started to push things from the Oort Cloud or Kuiper Belt type regions at more central planets. . . just basic calculations of the energy imparted to the planet was insane.
"Rocks Fall Everyone Dies" was written on the side of ship.
I can only think of three groups/villains in fiction who were smart enough to use this: the radical Belters from the Expanse, the Bugs from Starship Troopers, and Sephiroth from Final Fantasy 7 (though that one had a lot more weird anime magic going on). I guess Ultron from MCU did too; does it still count as an asteroid if you are just launching a Russian city on a suborbital trajectory? Either way, it was same principle at least.
@@zobblewobble1770 The Gamilas from Space Battleship Yamato used this stratagey too on a regular basis. If they decide that conquering you isn't worth it, they'll just set up a couple of bases with patrol ships in your system (to wreck your navy) and then throw rocks at every planet in range until none of them are fit for *human* habitation
"Footfall" by Niven and Pournelle
@@zobblewobble1770 not Russian, skovian
@@zobblewobble1770admiral Thrawn as well. And he cloaked them to make them impossible to track and to make it difficult to ascertain when there was no longer a threat
Your introduction reminded me of a happy little piece of advice from Lt. Aldo Rayne, US Army.
"You know, fighting in a basement offers a lot of difficulties. Number one being, you're fighting in a basement."
Pitch Black and Chronicles are both cool movies, but are so different in feel that they don't even seem to be related.
From the more grounded Pitch Black I never would have guessed the wider universe had hoards of undead Mongol analogs and mystical elemental Fae.
My understanding is that Pitch Black is how Vin Diesel got his universe's foot in Hollywood's door, and then he went on to do what he actually wanted to do with it, since it's all based on an RPG campaign of his.
@@SacredCowShipyards Wait... WHUT? if accurate, that is one hell of a cool setting for a campaign. Got any details on that?
@@ranekeisenkralle8265 Looks like he may have factored in his RPGing into the later movies: gizmodo.com/vin-diesel-tells-us-why-riddick-is-one-big-game-of-dung-514236515
I do know that The Last Witch Hunter was lifted straight from one of his D&D games.
@@SacredCowShipyards I love that he's an ascended nerd.
@@SacredCowShipyards wait a sec wasnt the start of the expanse also based on a roleplaying session... honestly i do like the idea of using role playing campaigns as basis for stories since they are not subservient to the whims of a single individual writer and have deeper relationships
I have to subtract points for Genocidal SOciopathic behavior, But damn, do the Necromongers get bonus points for style, efficiency, and utter ruthlessness. As a Tropish Movie Big Bad, they certainly raise the bar a notch or two. I'd rather go fight those guys in the white armor than can't hit the broad side of a Bantha.
One always has to appreciate it when someone has /style/, almost especially when they're bad guys.
@@SacredCowShipyards the "Evil Invading army" market is really crowded. So ya have to put that extra effort in. No one wants to end up as "That movie with John Travolta with a knobby forehead and stilts.
The Necromongers are basically an Imperial Inquisition Exterminatus fleet, minus the Imperium.
Also minus a lot of structure.
Heresy 👍
I guess the Necromongers would like the "Rod of God" Nickname.
Ngl, I saw the thumbnail and thought this was going to be about the Sardukar. But Riddick stuff jives my Jimmies too.
Also, I'm stealing "auto-fornicate elsewhere."
Tbh I always found the Necromongers fascinating from an ideological perspective, such that they make a perfect villain faction imo... a perfectly circular argument, backed up by an arsenal of weapons that are as beautiful as they are lethal, they're not just "evil", they have their own agenda and woe betide anyone else who gets in their way.
Now you have a better understanding of why Londo looked so stoically upset at the use of Mass drivers on the Narn Homeworld.
After all, mass drivers have been outlawed by every civilized planet.
Sometimes I wish I have never seen Babylon 5, so that I could just see it again for the first time, it's so good. Guess It's time for the annual viewing of it again.
@ While nothing can truly recapture the experience of watching it for the first time there is a youtuber who is doing reaction videos of her blind watching it and her enthusiasm is contagious and lets you live vicariously through her first viewing. ua-cam.com/users/medusacascade
She is still on season 2 just before the excrement made contact with the air circulation device. It has me eagerly awaiting her reaction to what is about to go down.
@@nobodyimportant2470 Thanks, I actually saw her viewing of The Gatthering and of S1 EP1, and I liked it!
@@nobodyimportant2470 She IS infectiously enthusiastic. :)
"You keep what you kill"
Oh gods, thank you for mentioning The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, the Rods from God and Riddick! WOW, all my favorites!
I loved the worldbuilding of 'Chronicles of Riddick' (and wonder how much input Vin Diesel had in it, since this is the first movie in the trilogy where he owns all the rights, I believe).
I wanted to learn more about the Furyan race, the 'Elementals', how the Necromonger King got his powers, and thought future films would fill in these details.
Too bad it didn't do well at the theaters, forcing them to go back to the 'Pitch Black' formula, but at least they acknowledged the events of Chronicles.
Oh, don't worry, the Furya movie is coming, if Vin has anything to say about it, which, given his income at this point, he does.
Vin diesel is basically responsible for the movies entirely even before having all the rights he came up with riddick and everything
The necromongers do it in style. And from what megamind said, The difference between a Villian and a super villian is STYLE!
They had no shortage of that.
"A genocidal weapon that has THAT level of style..." yes. :)
I am so glad to see some love for the Riddick-verse!
I fell in love with it when i was in middle school, it played well into my love for all things involving blades. Knife fights in space?? Yes please!
One of the live action GI Joes movies does a good job of destroying london with a titaniam rod
"your cordially invited to autofornicate elswere".... damn got to take a note of that one. quite backhanded dear sir ^^
"Rods from God" better known as Kinetic Energy Weapons... no point putting a nuke on it, as it wouldn't really add any more damage.
Hot take, the Riddick series is awesome. Weird, but awesome. The Riddick pc games were fucking sweet too
Like Vlad the Impaler leaving a message that no words are needed to understand.
Tungsten telephone poles are high end rocks.
On a tangent I'm pretty sure some of the defense satellites have hidden in them designs to be dropped on targets as a last resort and have some kind of core for extra mass. Think tungsten sphere. Accurate no, but minute of city is close enough for them.
Well, the EarthForce defense satellites for Terra did have a scorched earth program built into them in B5, but I think that was put there for a different reason.
If you're talking about real life, Project Thor, aka, the "Rods from God," was considered, but never got off the drawing board. Probably due either to the Outer Space Treaty, or the prohibitive cost of shipping tungsten telephone poles into orbit. The physics behind it is very real though, just an expression of F=ma. I mean, a lot of sci-fi has railguns, mass drivers, and The Last Jedi even had a kinetic kill against a 60km boomerang, but sci-fi tends to UNDERESTIMATE the physics of just how powerful these kinetic kill vehicles/projectiles are (while utterly overestimating the force of their laser guns). The Last Jedi had the right idea, but the effects would have actually been quite a bit more devastating than that at near-light speed, as in, the induced cosmic rays from the collision would have stripped the atmosphere right off of Crait, never mind what it would have done to the Resistance transports. Transformers 2 had the "railgun," which fired a metal projectile at mach 7, punching through Devastator as if he weren't even there. That's probably the most accurate that I've got off the top of my head, even though no Navy destroyer has the power plant to actually POWER a railgun.
@@BlackEpyon The main issue with 'rods from god' was that aiming them is impossible, the plasma sheath around them as they re-enter would make them both blind and unable to be remotely guided so getting them near the target would be improbable. Added to that they would not be dramatically more damaging than their weight in conventional bombs and the cost of getting them into orbit means that they would be much less effective than using conventional missiles or bombers to deliver guided munitions.
@@patrickheslip7420 Getting signal through the plasma sheath was cracked more than a decade ago. And if you're dropping huge formations of them guidance beyond inertial doesn't matter. Just flatten killbox one and move on to killbox two.
@@patrickheslip7420 You do know that ICBM warheads also have to get around the same reentry issue? I'd assume they'd have a guidance package of some sort, like conventional smart bombs and ICBMs, so that it can be guided to the intended target. You don't need a rocket motor or anything, just deployable fins and a sensor.
Of course, what they describe as "telephone poles" are only 20ft long (about 24,000 lbs), and at the proposed mach 10 speed, you're only delivering about 15 tons worth of TNT equivalent explosive force, which is more than a GBU-43/B MOAB at only 11 tons, but about 3/4 that of a Davy Crocket at 22 tons. But your average utility pole in America is at least 40 feet long, with 6 feet in the ground, which at about 1200 lbs/cubic foot, and assuming it's a tapered telephone pole (say about 18 inches diameter at the base, 8-9 inches at the top), would bring the yield to around 140 tons of TNT. Not exactly what one would call "nuclear grade," but far more than conventional weapons, and much more than a Davy Crocket.
Now, that mach 10 figure assumes that you just toss it out of the launcher and let gravity do the work. What if you accelerate it to orbital reentry speeds, say around mach 25? You get around 856 tons of TNT equivalent for a 46 ft tungsten utility pole, or about 94 tons for the original 20 footer. Both of those are between a Davy Crocket and an AIR-2 Genie, which puts it into the nuclear yield range, if only in the little leagues.
Now, if you wanna go crazy and launch those tungsten telephone poles out of a magnetic accelerator cannon at say, about 1% the speed of light, then you have to switch from your normal kinetic energy calculator to a relativistic energy calculator (if you're following along). You get 11 Megatons and 106 Megatons, respectively. That puts it well into the nuclear yield range, with the 20 footer being a bit more than a B53 high-yield bunker-buster (9 Mt), and the 46-footer being about twice that of the Tsar Bomba (50-58 Mt), the largest nuclear device ever deployed. And at relativistic speeds, you don't even need a guidance package. It will go through the atmosphere like it's not even there.
in call of duty ghosts they have a rod of god weapon wel represented
Extra-extra style points on the NEXT world conquest, since that hacked up poseur's face should be replaced with the new Lord Marshall Riddick's .....
You don't have to waste mass on armor, engines, or even guns if you don't bother to slow down.
"Keep what you kill"
Ah yes, kinetic bombardment... Wonderful
It might not have worked, but I respect Vin Diesel for having a vision and just GOING FOR IT.
Eh, he's working on the Furya movie presently, so it seems to be working.
@@SacredCowShipyards Oh, well that's cool.
One of my own sci-fi settings had something similar. Coming from a faction rather reversed to Necromongers aesthetically, but not so different in capability. A ship capable of creating a gateway would first enter orbit, through which it would drop a colossal column formed primarily of hyper dense stone. The columns were themselves conduits through which further dramatic abilities could be triggered, or through which forces could be projected, such as thousands of fighter drones and war machines.
Fortunately, the people who possessed these things were the ethical opposite of the Necromongers, having instead inherited them from the fallen empire of their ancestors, unable to build more than the 10 they already possessed, and never actually using them. At most there were some tense discussions where the suggestion came up during desperate times. They were basically a faction of isolationist idealist pacifists, with all the deadly toys but a strong cultural conviction against using them.
an ..interesting premise. Peculiar, but interesting nonetheless
@@ranekeisenkralle8265 Thanks. I tend to have to skim over a bunch of details regarding this civilisation when mentioning them, due to quirks of the setting/civilisation that take more time to describe than most would care for in something like a UA-cam comment. It's an old setting of mine. The civ in question I named "Etheria".
Regarding them possessing tech/military power that seems to conflict with their pacifist nature, if that's the part you found peculiar, it stems from how they are the last remnants of what was once a supremacist interstellar empire of immense power and technological capability. As the sole survivors of the galactic catastrophe that abruptly ended said empire, it took them millennia to recover, and the civilisation that eventually emerged was a very different one to their ancestors. Through study of their history and the atrocities that characterised their ancient heritage, they vowed to never repeat that path and effectively formed an inward facing repentant society.
When other forms of sapient life also eventually returned to the galaxy (that mentioned catastrophe having ended all other civilisations also), and then finally advanced enough to be capable of detecting and stumbling across Etheria (still isolating themselves mostly inside a single hidden location), it marked a turning point in Etherian history. How with the galaxy "heating up" in terms of other races ambitions and conflicts, it became gradually harder and harder both to avoid attention and encounters, as well as harder to justify remaining neutral and not intervening in the galactic community. Since even as a minuscule fragment of their old ascendant empire, they still possess easily enough power to be a deciding factor in galactic affairs.
@@UnknownSquid If you haven't seen Space Battleship Yamato the anime you need to, their is a similar civilization
so like the ancients of rimworld.
in aldnoah.zero, the mecha anime, the martians use a similar weapon called a "landing castle", and it functionally does exactly the same thing, all while providing a military beachhead and forward operating base
Gundam series. Operation meteor. Creating the TV trope known as colony drop. Enough Said.
@@cdcastro2503 never read War of the Worlds huh?
Takes the phrase "shafted" to a whole new level.
Once these things come down you planet is well and truly f....
For as much as I think these guys are badass, I am a big believer that there is always a bigger fish. You can't go around the galaxy thinking that you will always win.
Well, they had plans on leaving the galaxy, so maybe even they knew that.
There IS a bigger fish. Riddick.
Most people hearing about the rods from god project and taking the time to look it up, i see why it was abandoned. People who like learning about physics and are military nerds who don't even have to look it up, I am glad it was abandoned.
YES LOVE THAT BOOK BRILLIANT.
It's a perfect blend if science fact and fiction writing and that's saying something considering the authors other books.
G.I. Joe: Retaliation also shows the potential (pun intended) very well. Makes you think whether some rods are already orbiting us. This also leads to another interesting problem that arises with space travel. Someone could just grab an asteroid from the astroid belt and throw it at earth/moon base/mars/etc.. To avoid this, I guess it would be harder to get your hands on a spaceship, than to buy a nuclear sub. The latter is not impossible though, as history shows, the S.A. drug cartels tried to buy an old soviet one
The electromagnetic field planets have is usually enough to protect a planet. Bit harder to do that with purpose bombardments, space flack canons maybe?
You can't really stop something like it if its fast enough though.
EM fields generally work for solar radiation, not massive Rods from Gods.
@@SacredCowShipyards True, one might have better luck deflecting shots than destroying ordinance in that case.
Artificial moons or asteroids field could take the hits in the planets place. Temporary solution at best, it's the classic issue with such huge targets in wars.
Nice, a the moon is a harsh mistress reference
Such a good book.
@@SacredCowShipyards My favorite, in fact. Ironically, I got it for free, from a friend who recommended it during lunch.
They tried this on one of my planets. It worked about as well as you would think. Unfortunately for them, they tried it on another one. Mysteriously, their drives and weapons were disabled and they were nudged into a stable orbit, where we immediately used a modification of their stupid plasma thing to wipe their ships clean of life and then promptly set about stealing their tech and developing our own version.
Pretty sure the 40K Orks did this strat too when they invaded Armageddon
They do like their Roks.
*Sacred Cow Shipyards starts talking about telephone death poles from space*
Me: *COD Ghosts flashbacks*
Hey, SCS, ODIN video when?
I suppose I could do that and the B5 earth defense sats together.
@@SacredCowShipyards Fun! I made this comment yesterday, and woke up, and realized, that seeing you tear into the Spirit of Fire from Halo might be fun. Might as well see if you want to add it to the back pocket, lol. Thanks for the awesome videos!
They have this interesting philosophy. "You keep what you kill."? Or was it "You are what you kill."?
It was about the situation when if you kill a Necromancer of higher stations you inherit the position and all possession of the one you killed.
It was, "You keep what you kill," and it's basically how Riddick ended up in charge.
They also clear a landing zone. Neat.
Starblazers, also called Yamato in Japana, also had a comet empire and fleet inside a comet that invades a planet, in the early 1980s cartoon series. The Comet Empire was season two.
After all, the Moon is a Harsh Mistress . . .
Pretty sure all their drives and weapons aside from melee are gravitation based.
So glad you mentioned the moon is a harsh mistress. It's one of my favorite books
It is one of the best books.
Functioning like Rods from God, I’m surprised the filmmakers didn’t have them cause more catastrophic damage.
For all of Hollywood's love for BIG BOOMS, and the fact that the impact of a massy object dropped from even orbit would be on the order of "nuclear", they really understated the damage these things would cause. Could be that they were decelerating on approach to save the squishies.
@@SacredCowShipyards yeah, that’s the only thing that makes sense but... Necromongers... the underverse... I’m not expecting a lot of physics to make sense in the Riddick films and I still haven’t seen the third one
@@parandiac I have to give them credit in that their tech is clearly magic, but they just mostly use it as a setting, and don't try to get all technobabbly about it. The tech exists, they use it, and they don't try to explain it. That works.
As for the movies, they're glorious popcorn flicks, and even more fun given the history that they're really a byproduct of an RPG game Diesel used to play with his friends (and may still).
They fell pretty slow all things considered. So they fell right in the way you need to scare a planet so shitless they surrender to your will.
@@SacredCowShipyardsThat would depend on just how big a projectile you are throwing. Something like a 40-ton rod would result in a blast of roughly half a kiloton
Given how big and massive that thing is, however, it is fair to assume its mass to be significantly higher. At, say 40.000 tons you are in the ballpark of 580 kilotons. Still not a whole lot in comparison to a nuke, but considering how highly focused the kinetic impact is, it can be comparatively surgical for an orbital attack.
Threshold! Threshold! Take us to the Threshold
If you want a better depiction of CI style landing ship it it would be the Vers knight's orbital landing castles from Aldnoah Zero. In EP 1 of the show you see what actual effect something like that would have on the landing zone and its a pretty elegant solution to how to secure and LZ given the Vers's numerical inferiority to humans of earth, hell it even does a really fucking well job showing what dropping rocks from the moon onto earth would do given that universes backstory. Hell that whole show is written by the great Urobuchi Gen of madoka magica fame and it should be a must watch for most people that like tight well crafted stories and universes.
Also Maaya Sakamoto sings the intro song. It really is a nice space opera and I love the Prussian influences in the military and noble ranks.
1. The idea that the defenders of a planet have a huge disadvantage isn't realy true if both sides as advanced as each other. I recommend Isaac Arthur's video about Planetary Invasions although it is quite long and siency.
2. If the Necromongers travel between star systems then the Conquest Icons have to be going way faster than terminal velocity more like close to the speed of light so these "ships" wouldn't really need any fighters they would destroy whole countries on impact.
But still a great video about an awesome ship
Their propulsion systems are largely gravitic, so I have no doubt they limit the impact speeds to have enough survivors to convert.
Thor’s Hammer; correction, project Thor kinetic bombardment. Shame the US didn’t follow through on it.
Expanse and obvs Anakin vs Obiwan Planets never have the high ground im so happy you covered this
Brilliant Pebbles on a massive scale. Thank you Dr. Jerry Pournelle.
I feel like we're understating the effect such an impulse (a huge mass times near-light-speed squared) might have on a planet. I'm sure there's some simulation software out there that could adequately appreciate it, but I'm guessing that it'd be extinction-level stuff. I also don't understand how any ship is supposed to survive that. Perhaps I missed the part where it slams the brakes before going in, but even then ..... whatever's stuck in the ground afterwards would most assuredly no longer be a ship, let alone launch fighters and stuff.
There's a guy here on UA-cam who does simulations along the line of, "I made this dime weigh 10,000,000,000,000 times more than the sun and threw it at the Earth at 0.9c just to see what would happen." I suppose we could ask him?
As for the actual landing, given how most of the necron propulsion seems to be entirely gravitic, I'm sure they have inertial dampeners and structural integrity fields and all that other hand-waving.
It was stylish, but it utterly shifted the Riddick universe from Sci-Fi deep into Fantasy, even past Space opera. So it is more bad than good, we have loads of fantasy already. And all the stuff going on is too unbelievable to be invested in
*ahem* Dune, anyone?
You should do more ships from the Mechwarrior universe
In the Tom Clancy verse Endwar game and books the USA ‘s super weapon is a tungsten rod dropped from orbit
I have to wonder if the landing castles in Aldoah Zero drew inspiration from these, or if they were both inspired by common sources.
The notion of, "We will throw rocks," has been around for a very long time.
@@SacredCowShipyards "We'll drop a giant pillar that deploys an invasion force and anchors our invasion!" is a touch more advanced and specific.
The only thing wrong with most of the science fiction wars I've seen/read is the scale. I think Battelstar Galactica had the best "conquest" of planets. Nuke everything, move on.
And they stressed the idea that they were scaling back their Battlestars and armies.
The Expanse probably did it the worst. Only because Earth has far more resources to throw at Mars and Space ISIS.
So an oversized drop pod with style? Could link to your latest video.
That'd take effort.
Wow, you've gained a lot of subs in the past few days!
It's been straight WILD>
shame nobody had a planetary shield to prevent such a thing or a spacward facing ion cannon or something...
In the anime "Space Battleship Yamato", this is exactly what the alien empire does to the earth. They send asteroids on it to kill the human population.
In terms of scifi evil races this is one of my favorite.
The necromongers don't need to worry about ftl anyway because the process they go through makes them immortal. Necromongers only die through either battle in the case of the warrior fodder or through intrigue in the case of the nobles.
Using real kinetic rods as a reference point a single necromonger rod would most likely take out a normal sized continent when it landed. They wouldn't need to use the necro nuke or even attack planets because just landing one Conquest Icon on each continent would kill all life on the planet.
Also each Icon carries THOUSANDS of fighters,
Aldnoah.Zero’s Martian Landing Castles are a similar concept I believe. One of them hitting the ground from orbit caused an explosion equivalent to a Hydrogen Bomb
Just found this video. I love The Moon is a Harsh Mistress reference. I listened to the audiobook and when Mike cheerful says "We can throw rocks at them." I went "Oh, Shit." I knew *Exactly* what he meant the first time.
"It's all downhill from here."
The moon is a hard mistress was a great book.
It is one of the best books.
Suggestions:
Super-X(Godzilla)
Buck Rogers(80s show) Starfighter
Gunstar(The Last Starfighter)
Evangelion
Heli-Carrier(Marvel)
riddick trilogy is great
sure its a little disjointed...
but each movie is a good enough watch; even if 3, is a remake/retelling of 1. space doggo good boy rip :(
F
There is 4. The animated movie is there.
@@barrybend7189 the game is awesome as well
Necromongers are pretty cool.
Their nihilistic cult is pretty dumb, but it's so stylish and well written that it's insanely cool.
Wonderful video as always. Babylon 5 did a good job when they showed the Centari using mass drivers to hurl rocks at Narn Prime. Just out of curiosity, how much is a hyperdrive overhaul on a Corellian YT-1300f light freighter? I need mine fixed with minimum question or 'entaglements'. Thanks
Those get cubed right off the bat.
@@SacredCowShipyards But, but, how will I do the Kessel run in under 12 Parsecs?
@@bubbaray998 Row faster and use a slide rule.
Not knowing the setting I have to knock off points for killing everything, then converting everything that survives, then killing them anyway in the Exterminatus? Unless they take the converts with them.
They’re like the tyrannids and the inquisitor black ships built into one.
The rod of god Icon of Conquest tactic also reminds me of a minor anime I watched and appreciated for its use of generally clever tactics in the first season. Less so in the second season but anyway, the Knights of Mars have these basically magic powered ships called Landing castles which do the same thing, it’s effect can be seen when it lands in the first episode, the effect is similar to what you’d expect from a nuclear device, except the impact area seems larger, and they’re also carriers of a crap ton of missiles and mech delivery craft. Because ofc it has mecha. A simultaneous landing of 20 of these basically managed to neuter the United Nations defenses in something like an hour. The UN was basically on the back foot for the rest of the series.
Once you're converted you're part of them. Part of their culture is they don't breed.
@@SacredCowShipyards so there is also always a demand for fresh bodies. Also explains the ruthless efficiency. Any attrition can’t exactly be replaced easily. Doesn’t that mean they’re one doomed invasion from a demographic crisis? Not that that seems likely but still.
Yeah that is ultimate evil convert or die, scary group and I would not want them to rule my world 8)
20 hours. I'm gone only 20 flippin hours and you cubed my ship? Are your parking meters buggy or something?
Now how in the hell am I supposed to get these illegal weapo... er, um, Medicine, yeah life saving medicines to those poor sick orphans?
My insurance lady is gonna freak out over this one. You have any idea what this'll do to my credit score???
It's in local hours.
i kinda like the troop transport/missile platforms the aliens fight with in final fantasy movie
more in reach of our tech if we could pack ourselves like eggs and not die landing
terminal velocity from orbit is 11km/s... the thing would take the same damage as what it struck. This is what is termed ' a Bad Afternoon' .
Well, sure, but it's heavily implied / outright stated that its impact point is made of some pretty durable stuff, while most of what it hits is dirt or buildings.
At least they are nice enough to slow it down from their interstellar travel speeds before it impacts, though that might just be to make sure there are some people left to convert on the planet
@@FrankPWNZu That and to keep alive the onboard squishies
Something to take into account is that any centuries old, space faring civilization at the bottom of a gravity well will have massive clouds of orbital infrastructure. There will definitely be a lot of gun batteries with the best sensors pointing every which way looking for, and shooting at, any and all enemies. I wish this was shown more in Sci-Fi. Riddick is a fun series, even if the plot is barely coherent. Necromungers had a great look.
Necromongers are awesome.
In both senses of the word.
The fighter pilots are technically dead already. The living dead when they converted
With advanced warning, and their vessels traveling at sub light speed, it's pretty easy to defend against them. Shotgun blast flak towards them. Solid slugs preferably, bigger the better. Their evade response will be slow due to inertia and red shifting/time dilation. The combined velocity and inertia of an impact would shred their ships. And their evasion would be slow enough that the next volley is already on intercept. If the prows are too heavily reinforced for that (doubtful), use cluster munitions which intercept then detonate alongside rather than in front of.
How a more advanced species would be afraid of them kinda tells me they're not that advanced.
The advanced species in question are basically one step away from ascension, so...
@@SacredCowShipyards so you're saying they're just stupid, gotcha.
0:47 Counterpoint: ua-cam.com/video/lwzATXm9Oso/v-deo.html
On the other hand you have infinite armour , infinite ammo and its really F^&#$ing hard to vent your atmosphere . Planets are kinda hard to sink too . The other guys literally have to carry Everything to you . Makes attacking a planet that has had time to prepare a loosing proposition I thought ( except in High fantasy Sci Fi )
I agree that it would be a logistical nightmare to take a planet. It is however far easier to just destroy it. That is the reason defending a planet would be downright awful if the enemy decides that if they can't have it then you can't either. You may be able to stop some of the asteroids but can you stop the entire kuiper belt hurtling towards you.
How the MOON NAZIS did it in Season 1 of IRON SKY.
I'm guessing they go around picking on small colonies and pre-space-flight civilisations? Once their MO is known to an equivalent technology civilisation, the defences are blindingly obvious.
Or they dial up the impact velocity of their spikes, and be a little more deliberate about their targets. Hard to say. They are, however, feared almost universally throughout the galaxy, but most of the Riddick galaxy isn't a whole lot more advanced than the planet featured in this movie.
"...and you really have to appreciate a genocidal weapon with that type of STYLE..." HAHAHA, good stuff!
I heavily dislike the trope that defending a planet is hard. It depends on what tech they have available, and many sci-fi would make the gravity well of a planet trivial. Halo for example lets a cargoship the size of a c-130 aircraft reach space without any boosters or thrusters. With that technology, the attacker has a kinetic advantage, but not an overwhelming one.
So your enemy has thrown a giant rock at your planet. Most if not all sci-fi will then go "you detect it 10 minutes out and it causes massive destruction!". Back in reality such an attack would be detected, and a space-fight would ensue over the rock you've thrown. Even if you use a rock from within the system the defenders only need to give it a miniscule nudge to prevent it from hitting its target. This means the attackers now also become the defenders, as they have to guide and defend the rock all the way to its terminal vector. Even then the planet carries a permanent shield: the atmosphere. Hitting the rock might not make it miss its target planet, but it can burn up most of its matter.
That is, if the defenders are the passive kind.
Most starships in sci-fi like this carry ridiculous amounts of power generation they need for their FTL and weapons. In the meantime a generator on a planet the size of one powerplant like we have today would dwarf the energy output of entire battlegroups and would not require the space and power of an FTL drive, or need to worry about specific materials to keep the ship maneuverable and still use its gadgets like FTL and shields. The weapons that can be powered would easily deal with something as simple as a rock thrown at them.
Ofcourse most of these sci-fi have more aces up their sleeve that make such attacks trivial. Shields, gravity/antigravity and tractorbeams powered by planetary power generation would easily compensate for the gravity well they are in.
Then there is layered defenses. Most if not all sci-fi has this weird idea that you can first destroy the defenses in space and orbit, then the planet is at your mercy since for some mystical reason the planets defenses can only fire into orbit at best, and then only after the orbital defenses have been cleared. While any realistic scenario with such technologies would see a layered defense. Planetary based guns and sensor stations would support orbital platforms and defenses which has its own local defense fleet. A fleet that would not require space for lodging, entertainment or other long-term living conditions in space compared to an interstellar fleet.
If we get even more realistic then we have to add a supply chain, which most sci-fi glosses over. You have a ship capable of interstellar distances, but that has to cost something right? Fuel, food, space onboard for those longer duration flights to not make the occupants go mad. This means that your fleet will enter a system and immediately look to restock. It will have to bring an industrial ship/group of ships to mine the asteroid fields at the edge of a system to replenish what they lost and also to start creating the ammo they need to persecute a war. You might have some ammo, but bringing a full complement across stellar distances that lasts the length of a campaign against an entire star system? That is going to take months if not years of conquest. Even if you assume the supply line comes from another system it still means that the attacking fleet has a relatively microscopic amount of armaments available compared to a single reasonably developed planet, let alone a star system. This also means that the defending planet has time to try and deal with you. Using high-powered weapons, preferably FTL capable munitions, to try and take out this supply line would be key.
If I had to defend a planet in Star Wars, Halo, 40K or Star Trek without any changes to their mechanics I would be able to make moderately developed planets a high-powered bastion against any attacker without having a terribly over-the-top budget. The biggest problem is that people seem to forget the massive scale of a planet, the resources it has available and what you can build on it.
Take this necromonger ship. 900 fighters? That would perhaps deal with a single continent on the planet, but the planet itself? Nah. Not with how available spaceship technology is in that universe.
They drop literally hundreds of those spikes on the target planets.
@@SacredCowShipyards yes a few hundred tungsten rods would be powerful and wasteful. Tungsten is rare in the universe, and from where are you going to fire them? You are already deep inside the enemies defenses or else they'll just intercept the rods and thank you for the rare materials. Shields and tractorbeams make this even less of an issue.
Rods from God attacks would be a specialist attack type. You would need to create a hole in the enemy defenses, get a ship into low orbit and hope no one is monitoring the ship as it does so to intercept the rods.
Again, this is heavily dependant on the setting. Many settings dont have the high-powered technology to defend against this type of attack and in those cases you are absolutely right. But in other universes like WH40K or Star Trek a rod from god would be almost weaker than conventional weapons aboard their ships, and far easier to intercept with ground/orbital/space based equipment.
@@TheDemigans ... I'm not talking Rods from God.
I'm telling you that the Necromongers literally drop literally hundreds of those Conquest Icons on their target planets. Conquest Icons complete with nigh a thousand fighters bolted on to each.
Hundreds of those. Possibly thousands.
They might recover some of those, but most remain behind to cauterize the globe.
I don't think you understand the scope of the horror they bring with them.
@@SacredCowShipyards its been a while since I last saw the movies, I thought they dropped just the one. But dropping hundreds would definitely work and it does fit in the laissez faire attitude to resources of the Necromongers.
@@TheDemigans Oh no. Their target worlds turn into those... what are they called? Cloved oranges? that you humies love during your holidays.
In fact, they leave behind enough of the Conquest Icons to stand as testament to the horrors they wrought on the planet in question.
It's a thing.
The Necromongers are not an empire, they are more like a traveling horde, like the chaos in Warhammer fantasy, they arrive hit hard, kill a lot of people destroy a lot of things, take whatever may be useful for them and go away as soon as they can (so they don't suffer retaliation from close by allied forces and as they don't use faster than light methods for their main fleet, which are traceable in the Ridick Universe, they go around relatively stealthy), well any planet with a decent array of telescopes and space observation devices like we have here on earth has a good chances of see them coming but as they dissappear and appear for large periods of time (due to their sub light methods of transportation) I guess that even if people know about them they don't know when and where they are going so no one is fully prepared to repel them at any time, maybe if in Ridick exists a trully militaristic empire with 24/7 ready to fight and to invade standing army with a more warrior like or at least castrense like culture, then they would be able to stop the Necromonger, however taking in consideration the Warmonger and kind of masochistic culture of the Necromongers they would be more than happy to engage said empire in constant battles of mutual extermination and genocide for all eternity if possible.
They literally call themselves an empire: riddick.fandom.com/wiki/Necromonger_Empire
@@SacredCowShipyards I am not blaming you or accusing you of anything, I just wrote my comment as it occurred to me at the moment.
But Japan still has an emperor but that makes them an empire?
3:53 more like "really COMET trope" amirite? ;)
media1.tenor.com/images/677cb7e5d87ca9c15fc30e63c78f441f/tenor.gif?itemid=11812354
A stake with style? I think the basic concept has a huge design flaw. So leaving a stake after the weapon goes off kind of makes sense to deter, but what squishy would build lets say an atom bomb with an aircraft carrier around it. Would it not make more sense to release the 800-900 fighters from another ship in orbit before the stakes crashes into the planet? How high is the average necromonger IQ? ...
A squishy trying to make a point.
I am an old idiot and not familiar with materials and technologies in that universe so apologies in advance but... wouldn't something big enough to hold ~1000 fighters impacting a planet at those velocities basically wipe out the dinosaurs? Why do you need the fighters?
I assume they can modulate the speed at which they hit, given their drives are largely gravitic in nature.
@@SacredCowShipyards Roger, rough landing, not catastrophic.
Wiping everything out in a single stroke makes for a short movie
They didn´t built up a comet around their fleet, it just looks like a comet when it enters the atmosphere. Because medieval-futurism.
Except the comet broke apart before they hit atmo, and they saw the comet from the planet long before they actually arrived.
Wouldn't something hitting a planet at terminal velocity be akin to the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs? What would be left alive after that, especially where the craft hit?
Their propulsion systems and weapons are largely gravitic in nature, so I have full faith and confidence they can modulate their impact velocity.
So those guys are the comet empire from Yamato.
Wait till we get SCS to do some Yamato.
@@entropy11 That would be funny but i dont think he would be able to find the original show where Sanada's bullshitacular inventions saved the day, 2199 was cool but missed some aspects that made the original fun to watch.
biggest drop-pod around
multi-function as well.
Just a shame the controlling faction is derp as hell.
What they lacked in tactics they made up for with style.
@@SacredCowShipyards Death Korps of Krieg would agree.
Ork roks would dispute the biggest part.