Watch this essay's Nebula-exclusive companion video to find out what on earth "CHECMATE" stood for and how it did not, in fact, end war as we know it (as well as lots of other stories): nebula.tv/videos/jacob-geller-the-failed-space-weapons-of-the-us-military
It's funny how they tried to come up with these "cool" names that ended up sounding like edgy illuminati names from Deus Ex (the game, not the plot device). And then there's CHECMATE. They HAD to know it was all ridiculous.
I'd love to get nebula but last 2 times I checked it only accepted credit card and that is not really a normaly thing where I am from like a credit card isnt something you run a netflix subscription on.
One of my favorite takes on the Orbital Laser is the ARCHIMEDES II from Fallout: New Vegas. Elijah, in his time as an Elder of the Brotherhood of Steel, discovered it and spent vast resources on trying to make it operational. Not only did he fail, but his intense interest in the power plant that served as part of the satellite's weapons array attracted the NCR, who were rightfully convinced that the Brotherhood would only be interested in this place if there was a powerful weapon there. You can succeed where he failed, if you locate the gun which acts as the targetting system, but only if you intentionally choose to divert the potential power of the solar array away from everyone else who needs it. And yeah, it feels pretty good to have the option, recharged daily, to call down the wrath of the heavens on your enemies, but every time it's fired you're reminded of the fact that you chose this one cool but impractical weapon over delivering a vital resource to hundreds, if not thousands, of people.
Agreed! ARCHIMEDES cost the Brotherhood more than they could've gotten. In Veronica's quest she states to the Elder that Elijah basically got the Brotherhood killed over "glorified artillery"; since it can only fire once a day and is only effective outdoors. And yet, Elijah was convinced it would turn everything in their favor.
I think the best thing about ARCHIMEDES II thematically is that it is, as a weapon of *war*, utterly useless. It is almost solely useful as a personal weapon, but with the resource investment of a small army. It was a boondoggle, essentially. Both for the Americans who built it, and for the Brotherhood later. If you get it, it's somewhat better than a grenade, but grenades are cheap and this thing is one-of-a-kind and takes a day to recharge, and merely turning it on has a real human cost in prolonging the suffering of thousands.
Was looking for this comment because I wanted to write exactly this. It's really an underlining of the whole 'you could give enourmous funds to the military for something outragous, or you could help thousands of citizens, and you chose the military'
@@killerbee.13 Well, the _portable targeter_ for the ARCHIMEDES II is useless after deteriorating for centuries. And even after all that time, the defensive subsystem could absolutely shred infantry forces.
I'm so glad Jacob is talking about orbital lasers, my father was killed by an orbital laser when I was four years old. Apparently, it was by some mailman with a weird space gun.
Close. It's holding the population hostage, a reminder that if they step out of line at best they have nothing to hope for. Convince people that they've already lost and it's easier to dominate them.
My favorite orbital laser is the one in Robocop. It's literally just a news aside, but it vaporizes like half of the west coast and kills two former presidents because of a misfire during testing. It's so hilariously cynical.
@@Chazinthius So like, does it balance out or does one cancel out the other? Does it smell like bacon with a hint of burnt plastic or the other way around?
I'm actually really surprised you didn't bring up the Gatling gun. It was America's first weapon to end all wars, and the world's first useful machine gun. It was drafted and patented by a pacifist, and was instrumental for the US during the Civil War and westward expansion. Nowadays they're not handcranked, but instead mounted in planes like the A-10 or F-35, firing several thousand rounds of high-explosive or armor piercing rounds per minute. One weapon made to end all weapons always leads into another.
The same occurred with the creation of dynamite. A mining tool so powerful that no man would be foolhardy enough to cross someone who had it. Except.. that it became a predecessor to modern grenades within the decade.
I don't understand or know most of the cultures and history of our own real world, why should I know the history of an entire fictional universe? Just gimme fast cars and cool stuff to look at, yea.
The fact that multiple planetary governments seem to be participating in this "illegal race", feels like the entire Redline race itself is a excuse to secretly smack down on Roboworld's, or any other planet, that violated some treaty or another. Fucking amazing
Not enough people know about this movie, seeing it get some real representation in this video made me actually giddy lol. My friends and I have been watching this movie at least once yearly for the past 8 or so years.
I feel like there should be an honorable mention for the EDF games. Specifically because the operator, upon firing, cackles like a madwoman, compliments your taste with a sadistic tone to her voice or demands that someone fix those circuits or reroute power… when she doesn’t just shout “Beam!”. Which sort of implies that the long wait between each use isn’t because the thing needs to cool or recharge but because it literally breaks every time you fire it.
EDF is great for a lot of B-movie sci-fi tropes, due to the game's campiness around how it portrays all of these superweapons. My favorite is the giant Kaiju-fighting mech... that is stupidly expensive and completely worthless against anything that isn't a giant Kaiju (read: 99% of the game's enemies)
There should also be an honorable mention for the Stargate franchise. One orbital laser in SG-1 and two in Atlantis. The SG-1 one worked, destroyed the BC-303 Prometheus, and we never hear of it again, which was a shame, because once the Tau'ri got the Asgard's plasma weapons on the BC-304's they should've gone back for a rematch. Both orbital lasers in Atlantis largely failed, the Alteran one because the fools didn't install engines on it so versus moving targets it was simply a matter of closing the range, and the Asuran one partially worked, but in both cases the trope still plays out as the Alterans got wiped out despite theirs and the Asurans used theirs for all of one episode and then still got wiped out.
What you concluded with Akira kind of reminds me of Metal Gear Rising: Revevengeance. Throughout the entire Metal Gear series, the peak of war is the focal point of each game, the Metal Gears, the large mechs that can fire nuclear missiles from any location and can move anywhere in the world. They were always the final boss of each game excluding MGS3, but it's in MGRR that it's special. It's the last in the timeline, and it's in the opening that everything changes. The game opens WITH a Metal Gear, the entity that is supposed to be the final boss. The final boss is now the first boss, and the song that goes with it as well the difficulty and visual of the boss fight all highlight one concept, Metal Gears have been outclassed. The peak of warfare is no longer the peak.
@@The-Singularity-X01 people say it doesn't have nuclear weapons. Are the lasers it fires nuclear? I mean they seem nuclear, and it would make sense if that were the case, and it would also make sense if that were the same for the modified RAY
@@tri-sapien6487 I said a PSEUDO Metal Gear, it didn't have nukes. But I don't doubt Excelsis could have been equipped with nukes as an alternate configuration, it's actually bigger than Rex after all.
@mrbuttocks6772 no I don't mean nukes, but nuclear weapons like fission beams, which are still nuclear but aren't bombs. I'm arguing that it's still a full Metal Gear because its beams seem like fission or fusion beams.
In college I actually had an older engineering professor that worked on the “star wars” nuclear defense system back when it was active. He gave a lecture one day on those experiences and it was fascinating, he talked about the Apollo space program was used as a talking point in favor of the development star wars systems. He said something along the lines of “many people were highly skeptical of wether it would work or not, but that didn’t matter, all that counted was that the Soviets believed, and they had just watched the Americans land on the moon, so it would be difficult for them to deny what may have seemed impossible to us”. Even if it that wasn’t strictly what the Soviets thought, it was really interesting the propaganda on the American side for it.
Yeah, there we go. We started working on it which meant the Soviet’s had to follow in suit, otherwise what would have happened if our efforts had worked. It was an enormous waste of money on both sides… but the USSR couldn’t out-spend the US, so the SDI I would say helped drive the collapse of the USSR through sheer pointlessness
"Star Wars" thing was pulling out resources and intelligence from soivet union to develop tools and things that were impossible at the time. I don't understand how it was possible to make a huge video about this with the message "REAGAN IS A FOOL, HE HAS STAR WARS IN HIS HEAD"
There's a very good video by Polymatter on America's missile defense problem that touches on SDI. The follow-up video about America's pursuit of invincibility is also compelling.
@@ЛошараМоисеев Oh come on; this video had me in conniptions with how... uncharitably it cherrypicked facts/reports and how it disregarded the strategic theory behind it, to make it seem as ridiculous as possible, but the message of the video wasn't just "REAGAN BAD". While he obviously had a bone to pick with Reagan (and I don't know nearly enough about the man and his policies to judge whether that is justified or not, nor do I care enough to learn) the primary theme/thesis of the video is how the advancement of military tech/capabilities leads to equivalent escalation by their opposition. To be honest my biggest problem was how he took issue with the proposal to use the defences to protect European allies, when I suspect he would've found it equally problematic had they refused to protect their allies.
@@TrinSpin Well, I'm sorry, in my culture, all I know about Reagan is that he is a monstrous evil and wanted to destroy the Union of Socialist Republics with his own hand XD The author devoted most of the video to these events, and it was quite uncomfortable to watch how he ignored some VERY important things
The more I learn about Reagan the more horrifying it gets. The fact SDI's preliminary tests were faked though reminded me of Sophocles' Philoctetes, one of the Greek plays that ended in a genuine Deus Ex Machina. The play is about Achilles' son Neoptolemus and Odysseus going to an island and trying to convince the disabled Philoctetes, an archer with Heracles' bow, to join the Trojan War. The problem is that Philoctetes hates Odysseus, because the latter actually abandoned him on the island for having a diseased foot, and refuses to help him in any way. For much of the play, Odysseus tries and fails to trick Philoctetes into getting on his boat so he could kidnap him, and eventually Philoctetes ends up convincing Neoptolemus to take him back home to Greece. Heracles then is craned from the top and tells him to join the war, ending the play. The thing is, in the initial showing of the play, the same actor that plays Odysseus also plays Heracles, possibly implying this is another of his tricks. Even within the story, the god is still from a machine, manipulating Philoctetes' emotions to get him to sack Troy. It's interesting to see SDI sort of parallel this ending. It couldn't actually shoot down missiles, but it could fake it convincingly enough to get its funding and bring the US closer to war.
Something to note about the Ion Cannon in Command & Conquer is that it doesn't even do its job in the story. The first strike against the Temple of Nod in Sarajevo fails to kill Kane, and the second attempt only fails harder because Kane deliberately put a fuckton of Tiberium under the new temple _specifically so that GDI would shoot it again with the giant space laser._ It made the environmental disaster caused by Tiberium to go past the point of no return, _and_ it drew the attention of extraterrestrial forces.
The Nod campaign in the original C&C ended with you hijacking the ion cannon yourself on Kane's behalf and picking a GDI landmark to destroy, though that part probably wasn't canon to the sequels. Its imitator in the Generals spin-off does the same thing, though - the GLA campaign has the player-controlled terrorists hijack an American particle cannon to destroy its flagship carrier in the Mediterranean, which in hindsight looked a lot like the Akira scene considering the limitations of the game engine. There is the problem, though, that while the campaign may have used it symbolically that way, as far as the player is concerned it's just a cool, aspirational game-winning superweapon.
Now that I think about it, the entire C&C franchise, specially Red Alert(my beloved) are built upon the same idea of We built a superweapon to end all wars and now the war is worse oh shit oh fuck
@@nidhogg8446 In Command and Conquer: Generals, China is pulverized in central Asia by the GLA (a generic Arab terrorist faction) and the US (who have their own, slightly more realistic particle beam) have to go clean house, global war on terror style. Then in the expansion, you (as the GLA) steal all their particle cannons, sink the navy, and use the chaos to dump biological weapons all over California. Canonically in that plotline, America eventually stops being a military superpower BECAUSE of their space laser.
The ion cannon fails to kill Kane, because Kane is immortal as far as games have shown. And basically every major progression of the narrative is basically caused by his plans, in spite of GDI's efforts at thwarting them. The Scrin come to earth prematurely because he planned to trick GDI into using their weapon the same way they did years before and thus inadvertently detonating a hidden Tiberuim bomb and lure the Scrin. Thus advancing the plot. The Ion Cannon isn't the Deus Ex Machina in the story, Kane is.
Potentially apocryphal story: during the Cold War there were several exercises/what if scenarios conducted by the US that pretty much shown that politicians have a tendency to disproportionately escalate any conflict they are put in charge of. The military usually tried to go slowly, test the opponent and see what can be done to de-escalate, while the first question of a politician was 'can we nuke them?'
From what I know of the US's behavior during the Cuban Revolution and Korean War, the opposite would be more true. The politicians absolutely has an aggressive stance, to be clear -- but the military side was *extremely* aggressive. Like, we're talking MacArthur wanting to drop 30 to 50 'tactical' atomic bombs all across the borders between North Korea and China/The USSR.
Reminds me of a news clip called 'No fly zone would require war with Syria and Russia'. The senators wanted to control Syrian airspace, but for that they needed either: 1) declare war and take it by force, 2) illegally take the airspace and provoke war with Syria and Russia. The general straight-up stated this would spark war. The politicians took a moment to reword their discussion and make it seem like they wanted to control the airspace through non-violent methods to minimalise casualties. They were covering their own asses by accusing the general of misinterpreting their discussion, and he backed down due to his willingness to abide by the chain of command.
Reminds me of the Covenant practice of glassing in the Halo franchise. For those who don't know, glassing is the act of bombarding a planetary surface with plasma until everything on the surface was turned to glass and ash. Most Covenant capital ships are capable of glassing operations, and to glass a planet requires the concerted effort of a fleet of dozens. The first use of it chronologically is to squash the grunt rebellion by televising the glassing of their home planet. It's a massive act, one the Covenant leadership hadn't considered but the Arbiter they had assigned to deal with the rebellion did. The repercussions were significant for the Covenant, but the destruction of the world? It was considered a minor loss for the organization, even as for the grunts it was overwhelming. The next time we see it used, it's against humans, the UNSC. The Covenant saw humans as unforgivable heretics, vile primitives that desecrated Forerunner artifacts. Because of this, every human world, once secured, was glassed in an act of complete genocide. Interestingly enough though, the glassing ofthen left survivors, and in some cases enough survivors to continue a guerilla war. Often, glassing was also done in a local, tactical sense, like trying to make sure an enemy was dead (they try this in Halo 2 against the Master Chief and fail). The framework changed a bit at the end of the war: the Covenant fractured and one side joined the humans. Also, a parasitic lifeform called the Flood had entered the war by taking over the Covenant capital, so its no surprise that the next time we see Glassing, it's in the context of eradicating a local flood infestation in Africa to save the rest of Earth. The final time we see glassing I think is Halo Wars 2. Humans are fighting a Covenant offshoot for control of a vital installation, and decide to activate the glassing beam on an enemy ship by infiltrating it. They don't do it to stop the conflict, but instead to force the station's defense systems to destroy the enemy ship before it can destroy the human ship. After the mission suceeds, the war rages on as both sides are stranded on the installation and very much still in fighting shape. Interestingly, it also found that the glass left over from a bombardment is a useful material, so humans start mining the glassed worlds, showing little reverence for the fact that the glass used to be metropolitan areas with millions of people in it, and showing more concern over how dangerous mining glass can be because of sharp edges
I think the Death Star counts, because the idea never to actually use it, just... prove it works and then whenever someone throws a can of baked beans at a stormtrooper, bring it through hyperspace and just park it neatly in orbit, so everyone knows what will happen if they keep causing trouble. It's using the fear of it's capablities more than the capabilities themselves. If they actually use it, then yes it's no longer in orbit, but that's not supposed to happen.
"Create a device of mass destruction, use it to demonstrate how powerful and disastrous it is, never actually plan to use it again and just cause fear by making everyone aware of its existence" where have I heard this before
And, vitally, it never does its job. Not even once. In every iteration it (at most) kills a bunch of people and then gets blown up, doing more damage to its creators than its enemies in process.
My favorite orbital laser is in the first Bayonetta game. The penultimate boss fires the laser at her, which of course fails. So rather than Fire it again, he snaps his fingers and the cannon starts FALLING FROM ORBIT toward the battle. It’s amazing.
"Superweapons, in reality, in fiction, offer only the illusion of invincibility. A false claim, that utopia can be ushered in with a tool that deals in death." Great quote. Thanks for the video.
the point of a weapon that creates utopia, is that once you have used it to obliterate your enemy, you can create your utopia using their bones as the foundation.
@@KossolaxtheForesworn That would explain why Darth Vader never thought of attaching a hyperspace drive to a guided missile and using that to blow up a planet.
I have not played a single Gears of War game but from the moment the phrase "Hammer of Dawn" entered my mind. It has not left. And it always felt "so evocative" precisely as Jacob puts it when describing the literal translation of deus ex machina. The image of a celestial hammer possessed of the essence of the Sun literally coming down to smite the foes of man just had something pure in it. Now, finally, Jacob comes with that same itch to help us along and see why the hell have I been keeping those words around for ages in my head.
Gears of War is one of my favourite game franchises. The first three games being some of my favourites of all time. If you're on Xbox I would happily play through the games with you, it's heavily cooperative based. I usually jump at the smallest chance to introduce people to my favourite games. 😄
I think what's really interesting is that this same idea of new weapons facilitate new wars can even apply to other weapons such as the Metal Gears from the Metal Gear franchise. Every time a new massive Mecha or robot is made, war consistently changes in that franchise to warp around the new changes, to the point where the Metal Gears are merely backdrops for a whole new type of informational warfare by the year of 2014
@@GibbousTTI love to imagine a world where these super high tech nuclear missile wielding mechs are able to be thwarted by one guy who can roll to the side
This is honestly what sucked me in to The Phantom Pain, the incredibly detailed, politically realistic alternate history demonstrating the ways that new weaponry is used to perpetuate conflict and exploit people. It was really eye-opening
4:50 Goldeneye is a orbital nuclear bomb, which detonated high above the earth creates a EMP effect. This is very much a real life weapon, as shown by Operation Fishbowl/Starfish Prime Test in the US and Project K in the Soviet Union.
"Superweapons, in reality, in fiction, offer only the illusion of invincibility. A false claim that utopia can be ushered in by a tool that deals in death." Is such a cool quote!
i also love fancy sounding quotes that don't mean anything. nuclear weapons are superweapons, and they can be used to become invincible against those who do not have them. the second quote is just self absorbed bullshit too. almost anything you want to happen could if you could choose who lives and dies. this is the shittiest type of intellectualism, poetic naval gazing with no real substance.
My favorite orbital laser is MPU from Cowboy Bebop, which, decades after being decommissioned, used its death machine to instead restore the previously destroyed Nazca Lines, just because it thought it looked nicer that way. That's a cool space laser!!!
Once upon a time, it had been the ultimate damocles' sword, quietly hanging over the collective heads of all humanity. Today it draws doodles in the dead landscape because it has become sentient and bored. The news cycle just treats it as a curiosity and invites a tinfoil hat wearer to explain how it's actually aliens in vain attempt to squeeze at least a drop of audience retention out of the story. Because the actual truth, shocking as it may be, is completely banal in the face of the society-ending corporate mishap that was the hypergate accident which put an end to human civilization on Earth. Of course, nobody knows the true of nature of that either, and most can't bring themselves to care in the first place. Shit happens, right. So that's how "the ultimate conclusion of the arms race" goes down in history. Literal lines in the sand accompanied by nonsensical ramblings remembered by none a day later. Almost reminds me of something...
I like when Jacob takes the time to go off about how cool something was, which I think a lot of video essayists think they are above while clearly still feeling that way. The cool factor is an important part of this! and Jacob's recognizing of it only helps his analysis while grounding him. Because the fact we simply enjoy this media at all is the reason we feel so compelled to look at it so closely.
I think one mistake that many people make when they design a weapon which is supposed to "end all wars" is that they don't think about human nature. They think "this weapon is so big, powerful, deadly, and gruesome, that surely all enemies will immediately give up when facing it." However, this often does not happen. Why? Because, those "enemies" are also not just fighting for the sake of it. They too fight for a specific cause that they deem worthy, moral, and, in the most extremistic form, superior to any other option. They will not easily give up just because they are faced with some new and powerful weapon. Instead, they will think about what they can do to get back to an equal playing field. Either copy the weapon or devise a way to make it ineffective. Think about it this way: You are the good guy (of course you are, everyone is always the good guy in their own mind). Now your enemy, who is obviously the bad guy, has come up with some enormous and extremely powerful weapon, that you have absolutely no way of fighting against. Would you rather just give up, lay down, and accept whatever they wish to do to you and the people you care about? Or would you become very busy, laboring for many days and nights, for a way to either defend yourself against such a weapon or at least copy it so that, if your enemy uses it on you, you can at least also use it on your enemy? Or alternatively, you could also try to start fighting in a way that prevents your enemy from ever actually using this weapon. That is why I think weapons which "bring an end to all wars" will inevitably always fail at their intended purpose. At best, they change how wars are fought, just like we have seen with the nukes. Since the end of WW2, there was, at least to my knowledge, no formal declaration of war from any officially recognized country against a country that posesses nuclear weapons. However, there have still been terrorist attacks, economy-wars meant to remove a country's ability to function economically, manipulation of public opinion, in order to sway their votes towards someone who the "attacker" deems favorable, and all such things. More recently, countries have also started trying to attack vital infrastructure via hacking of computer systems. Wars still happen, they just no longer happen with organized armies marching forward to meet on the frontlines or moving behind enemy lines to destroy military infrastructure and civilian targets with conventional weapons. That, and they're no longer called wars. This is the only thing that nuclear weapons have accomplished. It will be similar for any possible future weapons "to end all wars".
@@luiginotcool they were forced into it so it does not invalidate the ops claim. If Ukraine had nukes Russia wouldn't be attacking. This actually proves the ops point. Just cuz Russia has nukes it didn't stop Ukraine from fighting back. Simply because they have to. Nukes didn't stop that war from happening. Neither will it ever.
> Wars still happen, they just no longer happen with organized armies marching forward to meet on the frontlines. How is that not a massive win for humanity? I could dispute the point -- since proxy wars still feature armies, marching, and frontlines -- but I assume you're talking about the battles that weren't fought between the USA and USSR so let's just go with that. The Cold War expressed itself in global espionage, outside forces meddling in the internal political processes of just about every country on the planet, and an unknowable menagerie of disinformation/propaganda campaigns. (And proxy wars, but again we're setting that aside.) That's some pretty not-good shit. Would it be better if both sides kept to their own alliances' borders? Sure. Would it have been better if the Allied forces turned on the Red Army immediately after the fall of Berlin? Of course not. Technology can make warfare more brutal, more destructive, more traumatizing for everyone involved. If nothing else, economic growth will always make wars more destructive, since civilization has further to fall. But at the same time, would you rather be on the frontline in the days of Napole on or the days of Gengis Khan? More lethal weaponry kills faster. Dying is bad, but dying slowly is worse. WWI was probably the most hellish war in history; trench warfare is a truly exceptional misery-machine after all. But it's gotten marginally less hellish since then. And I think it'd be pig-headed in the extreme not to attribute that to MAD. Chemical and Biological warfare, the real nightmare timelines, have thankfully seen little to no use since the introduction of MAD. Why not, except the ever-present risk that every escalation poses in a post-nuclear world?
"Polls of the time often showed that Americans believed the US already had a system that would defend them from foreign missile strikes. Fitzgerald attributes this to the fact that the alternative- that they were, truly, vulnerable to nuclear apocalypse- was almost too existentially terrifying to accept." got such crazy goosebumps from this line i had to play it again just to process it my god. having not known about SDI in any capacity before now makes it hard to believe this is all real history and not some spectacular piece of fiction, so, fitting i guess
WRONG! WRONG! WRONG! Whoever was writing about that didn’t know that anti-ballistic-missile systems have been widely deployed since the 1960’s by over a dozen countries. It would be nice if fucking idiots didn’t loudly inform others in an endless feedback loop of misinformation.
Yes, we did. It was called Nike and it wasn’t enough to defeat more than a small percentage of a Soviet strike. It saddens me to hear this bright young man so confidently straw man Reagan as stupid. I lived through that time and he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. In the 1970s the USA had just lost Nixon to watergate, the arab oil embargo had devastated the economy and made gas 5x more expensive, inflation was out of control, the top tax rate was 70% down from 90%. Unemployment was high which led to stagflation. Our problems were not isolated. We were in an existential struggle with the USSR who had produced 50,000 nukes to our 30,000. They saw us as weak and decided to invade Afghanistan. We had a “national malaise” and our leaders told us we were in decline. We had dozens of hostages in Iran for over a year. We felt helpless. Everyone expected the USSR to “win”. Reagan called bullshite on all that and his vision of rebuilding America snapped us out of it. He reminded us why we were the good guys. He became president and that day the Iranians released the hostages. If you read the gulag archipelago you will begin to understand how evil totalitarian governments are. Reagan called them out. Bro, you’re evil. What we didn’t know is Stanislov Petrov had saved the world from Soviet Ineptitude. That MAD keeping us safe was an illusion. The Soviets nearly launched because they had crap failsafes and they detected a launch of 5 missiles. So Reagan met with Gorbachev and said let’s get rid of all nuclear weapons. Gorby said ok but Star Wars goes too. Reagan walked but that led eventually to a 90% reduction in nukes. The Soviets spent 25% of GDP on military and we kept the pressure on them spending 3%. The Soviets ran their economy into the ground and in 1992 the USSR collapsed. 1.6 million people celebrated freedom with a Metallica concert in Moscow. We all thanked God we escaped nuclear war and Socialism. Nobody would be dumb enough to ever try that shite again. Well I was so wrong, people are always ready to repeat past mistakes
@@Greg-yu4ij Nike was a complete waste of resources, and Reagan very much was completely full of shit. Unironically for the same reason Nike was a failure, it wasn't going to do anything to prevent huge amounts of civilian casualties because the Soviets weren't idiots if they launched they could easily choose less defended targets or rely on falling short of target and count on fallout to do the job. The DOD already knew that in the 50s. If you want to defend Reagan, head down to your local American Legion meeting place, you'll face a kinder reception there for your alternative history.
@@cericati guess, technically? It would have not mitigated a full scale soviet nuclear strike. I guess it did have some value in the data that could be have been generated by the program. A full defence against a large scale nuclear attack is impossible. But there are good reasons in trying to invest in orbital defence. It massively helps deter smaller, weaker nations that might still have nukes, and make them unable to effectively threathen the united states.
This is probably apocryphal but I've heard that Otomo drew the solid black epicenter of the explosion at the beginning of Akira by crosshatching it, which is an insanely painstaking way to do it and also completely unnecessary (you could use a screentone or...idk just USE A BIGGER PEN to get the same effect), but he felt that the immense amount of work was necessary to understand the immense amount of life lost that single image represented, even though it would not be visible in the final result. On an unrelated note, I think my favorite "orbital laser" is Final Fantasy 6's Light of Judgement, which isn't really orbital but fired from the top of a tower so tall that it can reach anywhere in the world. It's kind of the ultimate apotheosis of the pointlessness of all that destructive power -- the name suggests divine intervention but it's really just a big gun that a deranged clown uses to incinerate anyone who crosses him. The tower it's on is even literally constructed out of trash, the shattered remains of the now-obliterated evil empire's capital city. There's a section with toilets embedded in the walls. The main villain would be impossible to take seriously, except for the fact that he controls so much power. Actually, kinda wonder now if Kefka was partially inspired by Ronald Reagan.
Just like Kefka, Reagan was... Actually competent. Unlike Kefka, he wasn't actually evil and did not, in fact, start the war on drugs. The SDI was always a bluff, most of the money in the proposal went to other projects.
@@vyor8837 the worst part about Kefka is the same trait he shares with Ryuk from Death Note. They're so goofy and aloof in their attitude towards life, but sooner or later they show what they truly represent, the horrific concept of nihilistic death and destruction
As a kid I always hated how Kefka only uses the Light of Judgment once. Partially because wow cool 16bit explosion but also "Why bother with literally anything else, bro? You have a death laser. You've already won." Growing up is realizing that "You've already won" is *exactly* the point of having superweapons like that. He didn't have to nuke everywhere in the world for people to be so terrified of crossing him that they just do what he says. Because he *can*. You can still argue that Kefka as a villain doesn't actually do a whole lot in the second half of the game but I counter that with 1) Being massively arrogant and dismissive of people he deems weaker than himself is a trait that's been well established since his very first scene, and 2) He's got a fuckin Death Laser dude what could literally anybody other than the heroes he already soundly defeated once do about it?
Wouldn't even an infinitely tall tower only have line of sight on half the earth at most? Maybe with a projectile weapon you could factor in gravity, mass and acceleration, but with light one of those variables is negligible within the scope of Earth, and two are constants.
"Now let's talk about Ronald Reagan" is unironically one of the most terrifying sentences you've said in a video. Whenever a subject like this pivots back to real life it gets worrying, and Reagan only ever makes things worse when it comes to that. Fantastic work.
Ok, I need a bit of context here. I'm somewhat unfamiliar with Reagen, and somewhat recall him really, really wanting to have a go at the Soviets for a while. What all about him is so terrifying? Y'know, save his administration fuelling the crack epidemic in the 80s.
@@bean108 basically if you are not a rich straight white man with no disabilities, Reagan screwed people like you over. Ignored the aids crisis, fucked over the financial system, and about a billion other things.
Gears is genuinely a lot more in-depth and creatively interesting than a lot of people give it credit for, always glad to the series get some recognition!
I expected a video about why it's implausible to hit a target on Earth from a satellite, but was really pleasantly surprised by all of the history, politics, and philosophy discussed. Really enjoyable video essay!
I realised 10 minutes in he didn't have the knowledge to scientifically debunk orbital satallites and just wanted to talk about real-world culture and politics. I don't feel I got click-baited but at the same time this feels irrelevant to the topic.
@@sgtNACHOi mean its about „bigger weapon =\= peace“ thats the TLDR. But i was disappointed i wanted an explanation why it wouldn’t work. But i mean there is no reason it shouldn’t work just not like in the movies.
There's a vampire story book called "Bento" by André Vianco, where the ultimate weapon used to eradicate the vampires is called "Tupã". It's a a big satelite equipped with mirrors formely used for agriculture, reflecting the sun at targeted spots on earth to improve crops. And after the vampiric apocalypse, the main characters embark on a quest to find its control center so humans can incinerate the vampires out in the open. Not quite an orbital laser, but it works just like one.
There is one orbital laser that barely counts but considering what you counted I think works, and that one is my favorite of them all. Halo's glassing beam. In Halo there are two orbital type lasers, the UNSC built ones and the Covenant built ones, and the difference between them is one is for gameplay and the other is for theme. The UNSC orbital laser represents the missile platforms of SDI given reality, striking down missiles onto a single target, but it was only ever for gameplay. It's the glassing beams that are special. Unlike other fictions the glassing beam is consistently used power of the opposing alien side, each time signifying the victory of the Covenant. The glassing beams are treated as horrific end games, and they aren't used in the traditional way of simply removing a threat, but instead for religious reasons, seeing the humans as abominations and wanting to erase everything they touch, and the glassing beams are what do that. They aren't what wins, they're what signifies victory and what makes that victory permanent, insuring the humans can never regain it. The glassing beams are a symbol of horror used to show that the enemy is winning, and that their victories cannot be taken away, even when they are defeated.
And the glassing beams are basically nuclear weapons (explained as a plasma streams from the ship's fusion reactor), glassing is a reference to trinitite (a glass-like substance found at the Trinity test site). Why the game designers chose glassing beam instead of nuclear carpet bombing, I don't know, I guess the aesthetics of a blue light beam from the sky is too entrenched in the genre and that it's more theatrical. HALO is a cyberpunk game, basically, I guess they did not want to skip that genre element.
@@duncanmc797 I guess you are right, storywise it has nothing "punk" in it, but I was mostly focused on the world setting, if you can get what I mean, the dark dystopian very low-tech future
@@aleksandarrudic3694If I recall, the energy projectors are sometimes not weapons. Excavation tools that can be used as weapons. That's how powerful the Covenant technology is.
@@Mobius__ I'd argue it's quite primitive for an interstellar civilization that's many millennia old, it's just applied on a massive scale (like a Great Wall of China - it's totally unimpressive technologically - just a simple brick and mud wall, it's only impressive because it's massive in scale). But perhaps I'm too blinded by the last few centuries of our real-time technological progress (which, if we were able to continue with the same pace for a few centuries more, would make most sci-fi interstellar civilizations comparably as backward technologically as the first cavemen). Other than slipspace manipulation, and some Forerunner tech, everything in Halo is very low-tech but very massive. Hell, even the Flood - the creation of Precursors, supposedly infinitely advanced civilization, is inferior in many aspects to our 20th century theoretical concept of the Von-Neumann probe.
I wholeheartedly agree. I always thought Gears was very PRO-War, rather than the opposite, so seeing a very plausible case made for the series being Anti-War is...very cool, tbh. I love third-person shooters too, so I may have to actually pick these games up again. I still have the OG trilogy for my dusty 360 so I might just actually get around to playing them this time.
@@youtubeuniversity3638 yes. I believe Jacob Geller refers to Noah Caldwell-Gervais' video, Gears Through The Years: ua-cam.com/video/2-gQCZL8VA8/v-deo.html
One of my favorite depictions of an orbital weapon and its unreliability is actually the Hyper Disintegrator Cannon from Redline that you covered. Much like the others, it shows off with flashes and drama, but still fails spectacularly. The night before the race, two racers snuck up to the cannon to sabotage it, giving us a slight glimpse of the inside. It breathes and stares ominously, building up expectations of its capabilities. During the race, the cannon had its target set to the rampant Funky Boy who just broke out. The energy accumulated, charged and... dissipated. Nothing. No fanfare, no unleashed potential, just disentchantment. "Why is it not firing?" "We have a malfunction..." "WHAT?! This is unacceptable!" Just a few minutes later, it was ready to fire again. Minutes. It took the repair crew *minutes* to find and fix the seemingly miniscule internal damage which rendered this cannon larger than the city it's meant to protect completely inoperable. The shot seen in 6:24 onward then hits the creature dead-on, burying nearby soldiers and racers in bus sized chunks of rock. All the racers survived, but almost none of the soldiers. Even worse, a chunk of Funky Boy remained, and it grows back to full size within seconds. Ultimately, the cannon only hurt its own faction without being of any help, knocked out and recharging from that point on.
It may be fanon, but there's a theory about this I rather like, that essentially says that Redline was essentially used to bait the Machine World into showing irrefutable evidence of bioweapons, plural, Funky Boy and whatever-you-call-what-Volton-turned-into. And that the Secretary of Defense Titan was a traitor, hence his general just-barely-incompetence, with weapons that were powerful but also had Achilles heels and suffered from friendly fire.
I have to admit, I'm surprised by no mention of the solar system from gundam! Not only was it likely the inspiration for the appearance of Sol and Floyd in Akira but its probably one of the most devastating versions of an orbital laser I've ever seen because rather than orbiting a plant and devastating it from the sky, its a set of mirrors that orbit a sun and then direct the sun's energy in a path that cannot be truly controlled. fleets have to be organized for lightyears to avoid random casualties and even then its incredibly easy to clip random people who will utterly disintegrate from its usage. it was also made after the banning of nuclear weaponry! though i imagine it wouldn't fit in the context of the video, all things considered. just felt it'd be neat to share.
I've been watching the entire UC timeline from the beginning and I thought of this as well. It's even played off as an accident when Ghiren kills his own father, saying he must have been too close. Or rather, his defense of the act. Then going from 0079 to Zeta, the Gundam which represented the Pinnacle of mobile suit warfare is immediately brought to use by the villians to escalate their plans.
It could fit in the video because of the simple fact, that even though the orbital laser helped end a war, it was just a temporary reprieve, because there were still more and more conflicts, which made the laser pointless, even more so in unicorn gundam, where the god in the machine ironically enough manifests not as a system to inflict more pain, but as a symbol of what one should strive for, mutual understanding and deterrence from creating more unneeded weapons of mass destructions, with the titular unicorn gundam being the first, and a laser the latter
the message is more blatant in "Final Fantasy: Spirit Within", an orbital laser caused a friendly fire and allows bad guys to win while simultaneously the laser self-destruct due to being overused.
As far as I have watched in Gundam they’ve never really actually fired an orbital laser on the earth, just at other space colonies of space battleships They just prefer dropping really big physical things on earth (space colonies, Axis) Don’t spoil me I’ve only seen the UC through CCA, Wing, G-Witch, and like 4 episodes of 00
@@phoenixfritzinger9185 in Iron Blooded Orphans they've taken to dropping Tungsten Rods onto people from orbit. This is to get around various treaties that nobody understands why they were written The launchers for the Tungsten Rods are often listed as being against various treaties... but somebody generally speaks up, "that is only when you put nuclear weapons into then... a Tungsten Rod at terminal velocity is completely okay"... you know... because this show is a bit too good at being an accurate depiction of human interactions
@@tinyetoile5503it's kinda both. Lucas has, I believe, explicitly stated that it's a Vietnam war allegory but the death star hatch sequence is pretty reminiscent of dam busters
To be honest if there was a laser that fired from space, that did anything at all to do damage to the surface. That shit would have to blind everybody in the city if they were looking at it. That'd be terrifying, looking at something and being blinded by the destruction.
When the Halifax Harbour explosion happened more than 1000 people (about 2% of the population) were blinded all at once by glass shrapnel- It started with a boat on fire in the Harbour, and people were watching out their windows when the shockwave from the explosion blasted them in the face with shattered glass
In an attempt to not spoil: Dune Messiah involves this in a pretty important event in the latter story, if you’re interested in reading a handling of it
Aren’t most real laser weapons not visible? I mean, they would destroy your eyes if you looked directly into them, but viewing from the outside you don’t even notice anything.
@@AceRasputin yeah but there's no real laser "weapon" there's an engineer UA-camr that did a video on this actually when he made a laser that was so strong he needed a welding mask to use it, it illuminated his entire garage on it's own and it melted through thin metal sheets in over a minute. The impracticality of a laser is that realistically they're just heating things quickly not exactly vaporization, so something that does vaporize needs to heat something so quick it goes beyond spontaneous combustion. Whether it's visible to the naked eye depends on the kind of laser.
"being blinded by the destruction" brings to mind another quasi-religious parallel: the destruction of Sodom. Mr. Lot was warned not to look at the destruction, but his wife looked back at the exploding city and was struck dead
I'm reminded of the invention of the Gatling Gun in 1861. It popularized the concept of a rotary barrel system. Richard Jordan Gatling thought that such a high RPM weapon would end wars due to the horror of both using such a weapon and being attacked by it. It was used in the Civil War, the Boshin War, the Anglo-Zulu War, and even the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. It spread across the world, from the U.S. to Tokugawa Japan to France to the British Empire to Peru to Qing Dynasty China to the Ottoman Empire. It was mounted on turrets, on ships, on wheels, on tripods. It was manufactured in the thousands all through the 19th century and its descendants are still in use today in too many contexts to name. The Gatling Gun did not end war. The Gatling Gun was a tool of death. People built it, people bought it, and it was _used._
I find the concept of orbital laser (lance) strikes in Dawn of War and Warhammer 40k to be interesting because it depicts a fleet needing to gain naval supremacy before being deployed. The oneupmanship involved also helps tell how horrifying your enemies are. When there are threats that even an orbital laser strike can’t kill, you know something is horribly wrong and that the situation is serious.
40k is kind of a special case though. Its weapons are so destructive for the sake of it that an orbital laser is something that makes a lot of sense when you consider things like cyclonic torpedoes, most Eldar ship weapons, or whatever the Necrons used on a daily basis during the War in Heaven. 40k has so incredibly powerful weapons that an orbital laser isn't any sort of ultimate weapon, it's an artillery strike in a different format.
@@staringgasmask 40k weapons are destructive because of the scale of the setting. A few terratons of firepower isnt gonna cut it when you have 1 million planets to defend.
I used to watch Jacob because he made videos about things I cared about. Now I care about things based on Jacob's videos. When I grow up, I'm gonna be a orbital laser and make Jacob proud!
Oh my gosh I fricking love Jacob Geller his writing is phenomenal. Right now I'm doing a project in school on Ronald Reagan and his approach. to American politics and foreign policy. This video was super informative and really helped me gain insight into Reagan's SDI, and see it for being more than just a badass space laser, but a terrifying looming symbol of destruction, death, and fear. Please keep this up man you are incredible.
A small side note I think worth adding with the Gears of War section, the 'baddies' or creepy crawlies as you so beautifully described them, are actually yet deus ex Machina, heavily genetically modified humans originally coming from a super soldier meant to end the human war, that it itself only comes from the fighting over one of the only remaining energy sources on the planet, imulsion. Which it itself is what causes a disease that in the process of curing, causes the super soldier program to begin. In short, Gears of War is a game of Deus Ex Machinas, which never end, and only continues to grow.
you really know how to pick a good topic. always specific enough to be concise, yet not too specific as to allow you to go on some excellent tangents. an excellent watch as always :)
As an RTS game enthusiast, it made me smile to see CnC's Ion Cannon mentioned. I now go back to my trillion year slumber until the next big RTS release.
Give Combat Mission a try, definitely not traditional RTS, but lots of fun and extremely well made(but with a terrible UI and old ass graphics) but its a series a lot of RTS players sleep on when they absolutely shouldn't.
Every video you make is a landmark. When art museums and film institutes host exhibitions of video essays someday, your work will be on the schedule. Thank you for this. Also, for anyone else reading this, the Nebula-exclusive companion video on actual military and private attempts at space weaponry is a can't-miss with a brilliant punchline.
I think the Hammer of Dawn might be my favorite orbital laser in any media. I just appreciate how the point was "this thing is actually really fucked up and shouldn't exist."
From the technical side, the wild thing is that ground-based defensive lasers are feasible, relatively inexpensive, and nearly impossible to turn into tools of death. I guess it's not a surprise that they haven't seen as much fanfare as offensive space lasers.
Gears is one of my favorite series, in no small part because of how realistic it manages to be about the grey morality of war while also... y'know, having a mega space laser & chainsaw rifles lol, thanks for bringing it in on this, Jacob. another absolute banger video
Orbital to surface attacks in general are just a terrifyingly interesting concept for me. The fear that orbital weapons can create just by existing can justify its existence alone no matter how effective. The idea that at any instant something could hit you from orbit with pretty much nothing capable of stopping it alone very demoralizing, it’s basically the new flamethrower or missile strike.
Isn’t that the real power of the US military’s drone program. The implied threat and paranoia of knowing at any moment a drone could swoop down and rain death on your entire village or town and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.
I'm surprised there was no mention of the classic orbital laser I know of, being the Halo glassing beams used by the covenant as excavation tools for forerunner artefacts. It's pretty iconic and is visualized a ton in the Halo video games. Especially in Halo 3 during the Covenants attack on Earth, or the glassing of half of Africa to exterminate the flood. And (because I love Warhammer 40k) the classic exterminatus button that every fleet has capable of obliterating a planet like the Death Star. But more convenient and more people own in 40k.
Seriously, the glassing beams are so horrifying that they're really the trope definition for me. Jacob talks about them being "nukes without the baggage" at one point and I think part of what makes glassing so terrifying is it has the baggage still. They're the laser equivalent of salted earth, they leave a layer of glass and radioactive fallout so thick that the targeted area is unliveable for a long period after. It's overkill to the n-th degree, it's obliteration of anything counter to the zealotry of the covenant and to me, that's just thematic gold unmatched
Although the exterminatus button isn't necessarily a big laser. Other notable form include virus bombs, or flesh eating mega nukes. Edit: the covenant space lasers are not orbital ones, they are fully mobile space ships with bug lasers attached. Not even sure if they actually start orbiting the planet they are going to laser before they laser it.
The ship-based energy projectors and even nukes in the Halo franchise don't play to the same narrative as the examples used here. In universe, neither are treated like deus ex machina that promise to fix the problems that the characters otherwise could not achieve. In the interstellar genocide of the Human-Covenant War, their use is no different than any other kind of gun, bomb, or energy weapon. Rather than weapons of mass destruction, ONI's SPARTAN II and SPARTAN III programs and their ethical ramifications as well as AI are more significant across media.
@@Santisima_Trinidadanything that hovers over the earth to fire down upon it would indeed be orbiting the earth. It would not be able to stay in the air above the earth otherwise.
its so nice to watch someone on a video at full speed because your speech cadence is actually how people talk... not trying to run 90 words a minute to cram every little bite of information into a 9min video
The fact that for decades now, every single day dozens of people all over the world were (plus minus a couple safety hurdles) just a button-press away from THE disaster to end all disasters, and we are still here, gives me some faith in humantiy.
It's both harrowing and heartening to know that in a few cases things happened that, by all protocols and procedures, *should* have caused nuclear armageddon except that the people faced with the prospect of annihilation and being charged with the duty to fire back, said "No, we (our side) might all die, but that doesn't mean everyone else has to."
The end statement is literally just Vader's quote, "Don’t be too proud of this technological terror you’ve constructed. The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force." Basically the collective belief of people will always be stronger than the weapons we build.
“You see, the war, the true war, has never been one waged by droids, or warships, or soldiers. The true war is waged in the hearts of all living things, against our own natures, light or dark. That is what shapes and binds this galaxy, not these creations of man. You are the Battle Ground.” - Kreia
I don't have Nebula so I'm not sure if you mentioned it also but this ironically reminded me of Call Of Duty Ghosts, in which most of the struggle in the game is about gaining control of a orbital satellite that can drop tungsten rods, kinda like a lower tech version of orbital lasers. The Soviets also planned to develop a similar orbital platform that can drop nukes everywhere, but US decided to negotiate with them to stop doing that.
It's funny, since actual Rods from God, or solid tungsten telephone poles dropped from orbit, would be exponentially more resource intensive than actual orbital laser platforms. In other words, if you can figure out how to haul so much mass into LEO, you could probably build the actual tech to make orbital lasers realistic.
Wanna know what's truly scary? While rods from god remain science fiction and arguably harder to pull off than a laser satellite considering the prospect of lifting that much weight into orbit, how much simpler would it be to use an unmanned space vehicle to move an asteroid onto a collision course with earth? The technology already exists or is very feasible to create on short notice, and all it would really take is figuring out the math to choose the right sized asteroid to put onto a collision course with the target designated for destruction that will destroy that target completely without endangering the rest of the world. You f up that math though and you might miss the target or get wiped out as well. There are currently ten countries in the world that can launch space rockets into orbit, and developing the vehicle necessary and the tech it would deliver to move the asteroids onto their collision courses is probably within all of their grasps, especially America's and China's.
Wish you mentioned it's usage in Justice League Unlimited. The laser at the JL's watchtower was an important plot point, since it's existence was a strong point in favor of the existance of Cadmus, who saw the Justice League as a threat to humanity due to not only the orbital laser but also the fact that, in an alternative reality, Superman killed President Lex Luthor and the League became dictators, called the Justice Lords.
It's been ages since I watched JLU, but I recall a scene where either Superman or Batman is trying to convince Amanda Waller that the league is not the enemy, to which she responds: "then why is your laser pointed downwards?"
Another thing is that they have (or seemingly have) a perfectly reasonable reason for wanting the laser. In the Justice League finale, in order to destroy an alien base set up on earth and save the world Batman had to kamikaze the old watchtower into the base. With the laser that is no longer an issue and it proves it works when they first show it off. The only problem is that no-one stoped to think what kind of message they were sending with that laser and also DIDN'T TELL ANY GOVERNMENT ABOUT IT
Jacob dropping the video essay cadence to talk about Tetsuo bringing down the laser was great. I get so used to the normal cadence and intonation that whenever he just talks about something normally I always get a little caught off guard
I KNEW AKIRA WAS GOING TO SHOW UP AND I'M HERE FOR IT! My favorite theme about Akira isn't how it's the "Nuke" (IE superweapon) is bad, it's how the idea of the "Nuke" (be it a space laser or engineered human evolution and psychic powers) is inherently and nigh impossibly seductive to possess. It doesn't matter if you've been hit by it. You want it.
I've has a really difficult week at work. Coming home on a Friday to a new Jacob Geller video is probably the best thing I could've asked for. Thank you Jacob, please take my money now
After first watching "the search for the last great secret" I quickly became enamored by Jacob's writing style. He even inspired me to become obsessed with games like bloodborne and shadow of the colossus. But I am always looking for a new entry to the "Fear Of - __" series. That being said, I love massive space lasers!!
That was the same one that got me into Jacob. The Last Great Secret was just so well done and written I was hooked immediately. Ended up finding my favorite UA-camr.
Finally playing Gears and finding out that the writing was excellent was one of my favourite surprises in recent years. Genuinely one of my favourite takes on militarism in modern fiction.
@@AmanojakuX The Gears universe is ridiculously interesting and the war between humanity and the Locust that the games cover is only a fraction of the commentary the series as a whole has to offer. I love my dumb chainsaw gun books so much.
Glad this was recommended to me, it's a great exploration of the topic. I totally thought it'd be about the technological limitations too, but seeing the ideological limitations that lead to their uselessness was way more interesting and arguably applicable.
one of my favorite scenes/ levels of any game is when gears of war 3 has you walking through a city that is covered in ash and people turned into burnt husks and has the characters talking about how the hammer of dawn was used on that area and it's honestly pretty impressive how well gears of war goes from chainsawing people in half to genuinely serious emotional moments.
Neon Genesis Evangelion's Arael while not technically being an orbital laser, is still my favourite version of this concept. A large ethereal bird/angel that looms in orbit with an defined exterior shape. But undefined features apart from its body. Came in, fired a beam of divine light, destroyed the mind of a kid, then promptly got stabbed and died. Awesome.
This essay in particular lives so rent free in my mind that every time one of my team mates dies to my orbital laser in helldivers 2 Jacob Geller appears in my mind and says "I told you so!" This does not stop me from bringing it to every mission, using it very liberally, and not warning my teammates of its arrival.
My first core memory of an orbital strike was a fighting game called “Evil Zone” where one of the characters if he hit you with his command grab he will call in a satellite laser to reign down on you. It was like drugs to my kid brain. Took about 8 or 10 of them to actually defeat the enemy with it so it fit pretty well with the theme of this video.
I love it when your titles are exactly the opposite of clickbait: it hints in a direction, but you never see the conclusion coming that is way more interesting and meaningful than you thought it could be.
"and the laser is still functional, and it FUCKIN RULES." A lot of essayists try to project a seriousness that is unassailable, and I get why they do it, but I have a genuine appreciation for how Geller chooses to call out something badass with such palpable enthusiasm when it's called for. Like, say, when a psychic teenager, surfing a space laser, starts firing it wildly at a boat.
I've been slightly obsessed with Redline lately and seeing it mentioned almost right away in this video fires a laser hotter than the sun straight to my heart, warming me thoroughly
I swear you could make an essay about Spoons or Bananas and it would be equally interesting. I always thought of Orbital Lasers as just a gimmick tool for sci-fi games or movies, as you said "I get it" but never thought about how they were devastatingly useless for what they were supposedly built to do, not to mention I knew nothing about Reagans space lasers either lmao, I'm not from the US but still can't believe I've never heard anything about it, is kind of scary and hilarious at the same time
I remember being taught (unironically and at a prestige school in NY) that SDI caused the collapse of the Soviet Union due to increases in military spending. In hindsight, it was likely because many of the teachers grew up in the 80s and 90s when it was a major talking point on national news, so they internalized it and taught it to their students in a strange cycle of perpetuating propaganda)
If you want a good banana video, I think Jacob would cover a lot of the same territory as Sam O’nella’s “Banana Republics” video, or Knowing Better’s “A Veteran’s Warning” Banana lore goes deep and is actually really dark lol
I havent read the Akira comic, just watched the movie, but i wanted to add that there is a time (i'm talking about the movie) that the SOL satelite accomplishes its purpose, and hurts Tetsuo, and evaporates his arm. But then the arm starts to grow and all, gross and meety, and out of control. And makes all things worst My point is that even when it succeeds, it fails What to expect of something that only destroys Excellent video, Jacob
I wish you’d mentioned Code Geass in this video, since I think it fits with much of the themes you’re discussing, and is another anime. At the end of the story, the final war is over control of basically a satellite that can shoot nukes anywhere. The villain of the show hopes that this weapon will bring world peace, will unite the world. But his ideology is explicitly refuted in the text: all it does is bring more war, more fear, and more suffering in the populace. And the main character knows this. That’s why at the end of the show, when world peace is explicitly achieved, or at the very least a better world is created, that satellite is destroyed. Humanity has moved past the need for weapons like that, the only way to bring a real peace is to not be armed in the first place. When people trust each other and learn to work together (in the shows case against a common foe), then things will improve. Not when we’re all dancing at the knifes edge of apocalypse.
Looking back on the Arkbird from the game "The Unsung War", it fits the orbital laser theme in the perfect way. Originally being a spacecraft for exploration and scientific discovery, the Arkbird goes through every type of orbital laser trope. The player helps arm the spacecraft with the laser system early on in the story, giving their country a leg up in future battles. A few missions later the player is saved by the Arkbird's laser decending from above to smite a seemingly invincible foe. Of course next time the player faces a similar foe, they are alone. The Arkbird is not in the correct position to help them. After many more missions the Arkbird is "hijacked" and the player's squadron must destroy it, along with any hope of it being brought back to its former glory. The game may be overly cheesy and anime-esque, but I did love the Arkbird's story arc.
One of my favorite versions of an orbital laser has got to be Archimedes II from Fallout: New Vegas. I mean, just the fact that some random kid happened to have the literal pointer for the laser and it only just didn't work because the station was offline is freaking hilarious and disturbing.
I was about to be like "No hammer of dawn reference?" It's the first thing that comes to my mind when I think of space lasers. Also EXCELLENT choice of music while talking about the hammer of dawn. Really shows that you know GoW.
The music choice in this video was top tier, almost every track fit perfectly with each theme, with some of them making me think of the subjects before you even got to them, immaculate
Except the SDI actually had viable tech lol, it wasn't an orbital laser but a post-atmospheric missile defense system; things are shot down in space, not at some fictional ground-target. Also universal health-care will cost more than "literal billions", and most government tax money will just go right back into funding weapons programs like the one you just made fun of lol
Fun fact- My great uncle was tasked to develop the lasers for STAR wars. I don’t know much about it, but it’s been a part of our family’s lore. He did invent some kind of insane laser, which was my inspiration for wanting to learn science as a kid.
Drones are often destroyed en masse if the enemy has anti-air defence. Ukraine admitted to losing most of their Baryaktars in the first week of the conflict. If the enemy has AA, you can use anything that flies to a similar effect. Drones are just cheaper and more economical for some situations.
Watch this essay's Nebula-exclusive companion video to find out what on earth "CHECMATE" stood for and how it did not, in fact, end war as we know it (as well as lots of other stories): nebula.tv/videos/jacob-geller-the-failed-space-weapons-of-the-us-military
It's funny how they tried to come up with these "cool" names that ended up sounding like edgy illuminati names from Deus Ex (the game, not the plot device). And then there's CHECMATE. They HAD to know it was all ridiculous.
Already did 😎
Where did you get that Willamette Valley hat? It's awesome
I'd love to get nebula but last 2 times I checked it only accepted credit card and that is not really a normaly thing where I am from like a credit card isnt something you run a netflix subscription on.
There's to much communists on Nebula sorry 😔
One of my favorite takes on the Orbital Laser is the ARCHIMEDES II from Fallout: New Vegas. Elijah, in his time as an Elder of the Brotherhood of Steel, discovered it and spent vast resources on trying to make it operational. Not only did he fail, but his intense interest in the power plant that served as part of the satellite's weapons array attracted the NCR, who were rightfully convinced that the Brotherhood would only be interested in this place if there was a powerful weapon there.
You can succeed where he failed, if you locate the gun which acts as the targetting system, but only if you intentionally choose to divert the potential power of the solar array away from everyone else who needs it. And yeah, it feels pretty good to have the option, recharged daily, to call down the wrath of the heavens on your enemies, but every time it's fired you're reminded of the fact that you chose this one cool but impractical weapon over delivering a vital resource to hundreds, if not thousands, of people.
Agreed! ARCHIMEDES cost the Brotherhood more than they could've gotten. In Veronica's quest she states to the Elder that Elijah basically got the Brotherhood killed over "glorified artillery"; since it can only fire once a day and is only effective outdoors. And yet, Elijah was convinced it would turn everything in their favor.
I think the best thing about ARCHIMEDES II thematically is that it is, as a weapon of *war*, utterly useless. It is almost solely useful as a personal weapon, but with the resource investment of a small army. It was a boondoggle, essentially. Both for the Americans who built it, and for the Brotherhood later.
If you get it, it's somewhat better than a grenade, but grenades are cheap and this thing is one-of-a-kind and takes a day to recharge, and merely turning it on has a real human cost in prolonging the suffering of thousands.
@@killerbee.13 It's funny how an orbital laser is less effective than spiked knuckles lol
Was looking for this comment because I wanted to write exactly this. It's really an underlining of the whole 'you could give enourmous funds to the military for something outragous, or you could help thousands of citizens, and you chose the military'
@@killerbee.13 Well, the _portable targeter_ for the ARCHIMEDES II is useless after deteriorating for centuries. And even after all that time, the defensive subsystem could absolutely shred infantry forces.
Even without any context, "maybe that's why I can't stop thinking about orbital lasers," would clearly be a Jacob Geller quote.
Perhaps "Maybe that's why I can't stop thinking about X," where X is any idea from the last sixty centuries...
@@eshafto he just can't stop thinking
@@Gloomdrake god we all wish we could stop thinking but we just can’t! Its never ending!
“I’m thinking of ending things (via orbital laser)”
@@paleposter (“things” being very specific political figures in developing countries)
I'm so glad Jacob is talking about orbital lasers, my father was killed by an orbital laser when I was four years old. Apparently, it was by some mailman with a weird space gun.
I'm sorry to hear that he became the C in pythagora's theorem
Did he have spurs that jingled jangled jingled?
New Vegas truly is a wild place
YOU ACTIVATED ARCHIMEDES?!
DOOOFENSCHMIRTZ!!!
I’m disappointed that Eggmans piss didn’t get an honorary mention as an orbital laser. He used it to blow up the moon after all.
I thought eggman was the walrus
"im gonna piss on the moon!"
@@gerneric454l08 Thanks R Kelly
How do you like that, Obama?!
I'VE COME TO MAKE AN ANNOUNCEMENT SHADOW THE HEDGEHOG IS A BI-
The thing I love about Akira's orbital laser is it really feels like Neo-Tokyo is holding a gun to it's own head on a planetary scale.
that’s such a cool way to put it honestly
To be fair, that is how we live with nuclear weapons every day
@@JinKee We're in a protracted one sided murder-suicide pact with civilization.
Close. It's holding the population hostage, a reminder that if they step out of line at best they have nothing to hope for. Convince people that they've already lost and it's easier to dominate them.
A true "Sword of Damocles"
“Fire the cannon at Funky Boy!” Somebody had to give that voice line with a straight face. Pure gold.
UNITED STATES OF SMAAAAAAAASH
Anime is pretty rad 😁
Goated anime
The fact that the Big Red Button to fire the laser looks like a record turntable is just amazing.
I’m so happy to see a Redline reference
My favorite orbital laser is the one in Robocop. It's literally just a news aside, but it vaporizes like half of the west coast and kills two former presidents because of a misfire during testing. It's so hilariously cynical.
I asked remake or original but found it in the first video I tried, it’s from the 1987 original.
Oh that's incredibly Verhoeven.
theres also the implication that it was fired by the current president, who was visiting it at the time.
That’s a pretty good orbital lasers
I’d buy that for a dollar!
If there was a fragrance called "Essence of Orbital Laser" I would buy it instantly.
It would smell like bacon and burnt plastic
@@Chazinthius So like, does it balance out or does one cancel out the other? Does it smell like bacon with a hint of burnt plastic or the other way around?
@@Chazinthiusaluminum, ozone and a hint of sulphur
It would make me feel Like a Dragon if i had one
@@resyntaxit'd definetly be some heat, a move for sure
I'm actually really surprised you didn't bring up the Gatling gun. It was America's first weapon to end all wars, and the world's first useful machine gun. It was drafted and patented by a pacifist, and was instrumental for the US during the Civil War and westward expansion.
Nowadays they're not handcranked, but instead mounted in planes like the A-10 or F-35, firing several thousand rounds of high-explosive or armor piercing rounds per minute. One weapon made to end all weapons always leads into another.
The same occurred with the creation of dynamite. A mining tool so powerful that no man would be foolhardy enough to cross someone who had it.
Except.. that it became a predecessor to modern grenades within the decade.
not to mention they're nearly obsolete compared to missiles
"westward expansion"= slaughter of native peoples
@@rdablock love your pfp so much
Ww1 has entered the chat
Shoutout to Redline for not only not explaining the giant laser, but not explaining ANYTHING in the movie! I love it!
masterpiece
That's the beauty of show don't tell.
I don't understand or know most of the cultures and history of our own real world, why should I know the history of an entire fictional universe?
Just gimme fast cars and cool stuff to look at, yea.
The fact that multiple planetary governments seem to be participating in this "illegal race", feels like the entire Redline race itself is a excuse to secretly smack down on Roboworld's, or any other planet, that violated some treaty or another.
Fucking amazing
Not enough people know about this movie, seeing it get some real representation in this video made me actually giddy lol. My friends and I have been watching this movie at least once yearly for the past 8 or so years.
I feel like there should be an honorable mention for the EDF games.
Specifically because the operator, upon firing, cackles like a madwoman, compliments your taste with a sadistic tone to her voice or demands that someone fix those circuits or reroute power… when she doesn’t just shout “Beam!”.
Which sort of implies that the long wait between each use isn’t because the thing needs to cool or recharge but because it literally breaks every time you fire it.
EDF is great for a lot of B-movie sci-fi tropes, due to the game's campiness around how it portrays all of these superweapons. My favorite is the giant Kaiju-fighting mech... that is stupidly expensive and completely worthless against anything that isn't a giant Kaiju (read: 99% of the game's enemies)
There should also be an honorable mention for the Stargate franchise. One orbital laser in SG-1 and two in Atlantis. The SG-1 one worked, destroyed the BC-303 Prometheus, and we never hear of it again, which was a shame, because once the Tau'ri got the Asgard's plasma weapons on the BC-304's they should've gone back for a rematch. Both orbital lasers in Atlantis largely failed, the Alteran one because the fools didn't install engines on it so versus moving targets it was simply a matter of closing the range, and the Asuran one partially worked, but in both cases the trope still plays out as the Alterans got wiped out despite theirs and the Asurans used theirs for all of one episode and then still got wiped out.
EDF 5 alone has the orbital laser (letter) weapon capable of devastating close range or long range targets
I like the idea of charge times that are actually caused by the powerful weapon breaking itself each time it fires and having to repair the damage
I see a fellow air raider... nothing beats the sound of your friends screaming "ReD cIrCle!" After they run into one of your targeting beams...
What you concluded with Akira kind of reminds me of Metal Gear Rising: Revevengeance. Throughout the entire Metal Gear series, the peak of war is the focal point of each game, the Metal Gears, the large mechs that can fire nuclear missiles from any location and can move anywhere in the world. They were always the final boss of each game excluding MGS3, but it's in MGRR that it's special. It's the last in the timeline, and it's in the opening that everything changes. The game opens WITH a Metal Gear, the entity that is supposed to be the final boss. The final boss is now the first boss, and the song that goes with it as well the difficulty and visual of the boss fight all highlight one concept, Metal Gears have been outclassed. The peak of warfare is no longer the peak.
Technically you fight a pseudo-Metal Gear as the first phase of the final boss too... and its a 3 phase boss at that.
@@The-Singularity-X01 people say it doesn't have nuclear weapons. Are the lasers it fires nuclear? I mean they seem nuclear, and it would make sense if that were the case, and it would also make sense if that were the same for the modified RAY
@@tri-sapien6487 I said a PSEUDO Metal Gear, it didn't have nukes. But I don't doubt Excelsis could have been equipped with nukes as an alternate configuration, it's actually bigger than Rex after all.
@mrbuttocks6772 no I don't mean nukes, but nuclear weapons like fission beams, which are still nuclear but aren't bombs. I'm arguing that it's still a full Metal Gear because its beams seem like fission or fusion beams.
@@tri-sapien6487 ...No they are just lasers. Sure they might be nuclear powered, but the beams themselves are IN NO WAY 'nuclear'.
In college I actually had an older engineering professor that worked on the “star wars” nuclear defense system back when it was active. He gave a lecture one day on those experiences and it was fascinating, he talked about the Apollo space program was used as a talking point in favor of the development star wars systems. He said something along the lines of “many people were highly skeptical of wether it would work or not, but that didn’t matter, all that counted was that the Soviets believed, and they had just watched the Americans land on the moon, so it would be difficult for them to deny what may have seemed impossible to us”. Even if it that wasn’t strictly what the Soviets thought, it was really interesting the propaganda on the American side for it.
Yeah, there we go. We started working on it which meant the Soviet’s had to follow in suit, otherwise what would have happened if our efforts had worked. It was an enormous waste of money on both sides… but the USSR couldn’t out-spend the US, so the SDI I would say helped drive the collapse of the USSR through sheer pointlessness
"Star Wars" thing was pulling out resources and intelligence from soivet union to develop tools and things that were impossible at the time. I don't understand how it was possible to make a huge video about this with the message "REAGAN IS A FOOL, HE HAS STAR WARS IN HIS HEAD"
There's a very good video by Polymatter on America's missile defense problem that touches on SDI.
The follow-up video about America's pursuit of invincibility is also compelling.
@@ЛошараМоисеев Oh come on; this video had me in conniptions with how... uncharitably it cherrypicked facts/reports and how it disregarded the strategic theory behind it, to make it seem as ridiculous as possible, but the message of the video wasn't just "REAGAN BAD".
While he obviously had a bone to pick with Reagan (and I don't know nearly enough about the man and his policies to judge whether that is justified or not, nor do I care enough to learn) the primary theme/thesis of the video is how the advancement of military tech/capabilities leads to equivalent escalation by their opposition.
To be honest my biggest problem was how he took issue with the proposal to use the defences to protect European allies, when I suspect he would've found it equally problematic had they refused to protect their allies.
@@TrinSpin Well, I'm sorry, in my culture, all I know about Reagan is that he is a monstrous evil and wanted to destroy the Union of Socialist Republics with his own hand XD
The author devoted most of the video to these events, and it was quite uncomfortable to watch how he ignored some VERY important things
The more I learn about Reagan the more horrifying it gets. The fact SDI's preliminary tests were faked though reminded me of Sophocles' Philoctetes, one of the Greek plays that ended in a genuine Deus Ex Machina. The play is about Achilles' son Neoptolemus and Odysseus going to an island and trying to convince the disabled Philoctetes, an archer with Heracles' bow, to join the Trojan War. The problem is that Philoctetes hates Odysseus, because the latter actually abandoned him on the island for having a diseased foot, and refuses to help him in any way. For much of the play, Odysseus tries and fails to trick Philoctetes into getting on his boat so he could kidnap him, and eventually Philoctetes ends up convincing Neoptolemus to take him back home to Greece. Heracles then is craned from the top and tells him to join the war, ending the play. The thing is, in the initial showing of the play, the same actor that plays Odysseus also plays Heracles, possibly implying this is another of his tricks. Even within the story, the god is still from a machine, manipulating Philoctetes' emotions to get him to sack Troy. It's interesting to see SDI sort of parallel this ending. It couldn't actually shoot down missiles, but it could fake it convincingly enough to get its funding and bring the US closer to war.
18 HOURS?! how the hell
@@tristanyou yeah it's kinda confusing ! maybe it was released early for, like, members of channel or smth?
"I'm glad Reagan dead"
Not reading allat, shit's wild though.
@@glockroach5731you’re watching a Jacob Geller video, you’re contractedly obligated to read every essay here.
Something to note about the Ion Cannon in Command & Conquer is that it doesn't even do its job in the story. The first strike against the Temple of Nod in Sarajevo fails to kill Kane, and the second attempt only fails harder because Kane deliberately put a fuckton of Tiberium under the new temple _specifically so that GDI would shoot it again with the giant space laser._
It made the environmental disaster caused by Tiberium to go past the point of no return, _and_ it drew the attention of extraterrestrial forces.
The Nod campaign in the original C&C ended with you hijacking the ion cannon yourself on Kane's behalf and picking a GDI landmark to destroy, though that part probably wasn't canon to the sequels. Its imitator in the Generals spin-off does the same thing, though - the GLA campaign has the player-controlled terrorists hijack an American particle cannon to destroy its flagship carrier in the Mediterranean, which in hindsight looked a lot like the Akira scene considering the limitations of the game engine.
There is the problem, though, that while the campaign may have used it symbolically that way, as far as the player is concerned it's just a cool, aspirational game-winning superweapon.
I was actually surprised when the aliens came, but it figures
Now that I think about it, the entire C&C franchise, specially Red Alert(my beloved) are built upon the same idea of We built a superweapon to end all wars and now the war is worse oh shit oh fuck
@@nidhogg8446 In Command and Conquer: Generals, China is pulverized in central Asia by the GLA (a generic Arab terrorist faction) and the US (who have their own, slightly more realistic particle beam) have to go clean house, global war on terror style. Then in the expansion, you (as the GLA) steal all their particle cannons, sink the navy, and use the chaos to dump biological weapons all over California. Canonically in that plotline, America eventually stops being a military superpower BECAUSE of their space laser.
The ion cannon fails to kill Kane, because Kane is immortal as far as games have shown. And basically every major progression of the narrative is basically caused by his plans, in spite of GDI's efforts at thwarting them. The Scrin come to earth prematurely because he planned to trick GDI into using their weapon the same way they did years before and thus inadvertently detonating a hidden Tiberuim bomb and lure the Scrin. Thus advancing the plot.
The Ion Cannon isn't the Deus Ex Machina in the story, Kane is.
Potentially apocryphal story: during the Cold War there were several exercises/what if scenarios conducted by the US that pretty much shown that politicians have a tendency to disproportionately escalate any conflict they are put in charge of. The military usually tried to go slowly, test the opponent and see what can be done to de-escalate, while the first question of a politician was 'can we nuke them?'
It’s like Thrawn vs your average imperial officer, maybe that’s where the writers got their inspiration from lol
From what I know of the US's behavior during the Cuban Revolution and Korean War, the opposite would be more true. The politicians absolutely has an aggressive stance, to be clear -- but the military side was *extremely* aggressive. Like, we're talking MacArthur wanting to drop 30 to 50 'tactical' atomic bombs all across the borders between North Korea and China/The USSR.
Reminds me of a news clip called 'No fly zone would require war with Syria and Russia'. The senators wanted to control Syrian airspace, but for that they needed either:
1) declare war and take it by force,
2) illegally take the airspace and provoke war with Syria and Russia.
The general straight-up stated this would spark war. The politicians took a moment to reword their discussion and make it seem like they wanted to control the airspace through non-violent methods to minimalise casualties. They were covering their own asses by accusing the general of misinterpreting their discussion, and he backed down due to his willingness to abide by the chain of command.
In 2023, AI was put through similar exercise. With similar results. I can't possibly imagine why.
Reminds me of the Covenant practice of glassing in the Halo franchise. For those who don't know, glassing is the act of bombarding a planetary surface with plasma until everything on the surface was turned to glass and ash. Most Covenant capital ships are capable of glassing operations, and to glass a planet requires the concerted effort of a fleet of dozens.
The first use of it chronologically is to squash the grunt rebellion by televising the glassing of their home planet. It's a massive act, one the Covenant leadership hadn't considered but the Arbiter they had assigned to deal with the rebellion did. The repercussions were significant for the Covenant, but the destruction of the world? It was considered a minor loss for the organization, even as for the grunts it was overwhelming.
The next time we see it used, it's against humans, the UNSC. The Covenant saw humans as unforgivable heretics, vile primitives that desecrated Forerunner artifacts. Because of this, every human world, once secured, was glassed in an act of complete genocide. Interestingly enough though, the glassing ofthen left survivors, and in some cases enough survivors to continue a guerilla war. Often, glassing was also done in a local, tactical sense, like trying to make sure an enemy was dead (they try this in Halo 2 against the Master Chief and fail).
The framework changed a bit at the end of the war: the Covenant fractured and one side joined the humans. Also, a parasitic lifeform called the Flood had entered the war by taking over the Covenant capital, so its no surprise that the next time we see Glassing, it's in the context of eradicating a local flood infestation in Africa to save the rest of Earth.
The final time we see glassing I think is Halo Wars 2. Humans are fighting a Covenant offshoot for control of a vital installation, and decide to activate the glassing beam on an enemy ship by infiltrating it. They don't do it to stop the conflict, but instead to force the station's defense systems to destroy the enemy ship before it can destroy the human ship. After the mission suceeds, the war rages on as both sides are stranded on the installation and very much still in fighting shape.
Interestingly, it also found that the glass left over from a bombardment is a useful material, so humans start mining the glassed worlds, showing little reverence for the fact that the glass used to be metropolitan areas with millions of people in it, and showing more concern over how dangerous mining glass can be because of sharp edges
Actually, the first time glassing was used (to my knowledge, anyway) was during the Taming of the Hunters, albeit in a limited scope
honestly the arcane sentinel beam from infinite should be classified as its own portable glassing beam cannon because dear lord
Pretty sure Balaho (the Grunt homeworld) was only partially glassed.
@@thechunkmaster8794 it was after the grunts revolted
I think the Death Star counts, because the idea never to actually use it, just... prove it works and then whenever someone throws a can of baked beans at a stormtrooper, bring it through hyperspace and just park it neatly in orbit, so everyone knows what will happen if they keep causing trouble. It's using the fear of it's capablities more than the capabilities themselves. If they actually use it, then yes it's no longer in orbit, but that's not supposed to happen.
Something something Tarkin Doctrine
@@SenyiKimmo Yep, Tarkin Doctrine.
"Create a device of mass destruction, use it to demonstrate how powerful and disastrous it is, never actually plan to use it again and just cause fear by making everyone aware of its existence" where have I heard this before
And, vitally, it never does its job. Not even once. In every iteration it (at most) kills a bunch of people and then gets blown up, doing more damage to its creators than its enemies in process.
nuclear deterrent (space edition)
My favorite orbital laser is in the first Bayonetta game. The penultimate boss fires the laser at her, which of course fails. So rather than Fire it again, he snaps his fingers and the cannon starts FALLING FROM ORBIT toward the battle. It’s amazing.
You should mention that Bayonetta then catches it, and throws it back at said boss. Because Bayonetta is absolutely bonkers.
@@Demonstormlord girlboss
Kinda the same thing in Lost Planet 2
And in true Bayonetta fashion, she flips one in 2 as well by pole dancing(?), either way, she vogued it back towards God the Rainbow Brite twice
You know Helldivers 2 is satire because it has an orbital laser that actually works
You!
For Super Earth!
Yes, but its also not a superweapon.
Or technically orbital for that matter
@Birb_of_Judge Yeah, but in HD2, its corresponding strategem is literally called "Orbital Laser Strike."
REQUEST APPROVED, ENGAGING ORBITAL LASER
"Superweapons, in reality, in fiction, offer only the illusion of invincibility. A false claim, that utopia can be ushered in with a tool that deals in death."
Great quote. Thanks for the video.
"The Mako Cannon will work this time I swear."
the point of a weapon that creates utopia, is that once you have used it to obliterate your enemy, you can create your utopia using their bones as the foundation.
@@KossolaxtheForesworn That would explain why Darth Vader never thought of attaching a hyperspace drive to a guided missile and using that to blow up a planet.
Me: You haven't seen the stuff i use
I have not played a single Gears of War game but from the moment the phrase "Hammer of Dawn" entered my mind. It has not left. And it always felt "so evocative" precisely as Jacob puts it when describing the literal translation of deus ex machina. The image of a celestial hammer possessed of the essence of the Sun literally coming down to smite the foes of man just had something pure in it.
Now, finally, Jacob comes with that same itch to help us along and see why the hell have I been keeping those words around for ages in my head.
Oh man, if you enjoy language like that, I've got a book recommendation. It's a little on the lengthy side.
@@piterpraker3399 I'd like to hear it! (I hope you don't mean the bible)
@@Fallkhar It's...pfft...it's a...
a *HOLY* different book.
King James Approved.
Gears of War is one of my favourite game franchises. The first three games being some of my favourites of all time.
If you're on Xbox I would happily play through the games with you, it's heavily cooperative based. I usually jump at the smallest chance to introduce people to my favourite games. 😄
@Atash Gallagher I wouldn’t call HFY very wholesome, most of it is very sympathetic to fascist ideology tbh
I think what's really interesting is that this same idea of new weapons facilitate new wars can even apply to other weapons such as the Metal Gears from the Metal Gear franchise. Every time a new massive Mecha or robot is made, war consistently changes in that franchise to warp around the new changes, to the point where the Metal Gears are merely backdrops for a whole new type of informational warfare by the year of 2014
MEMES! THE POWERHOUSE OF THE SOUL!!
That's cringe Jack, and your setup is weak.
And MGS2 where Raiden destroys 30 Rays with a missile launcher and some chaff grenades
@@GibbousTTI love to imagine a world where these super high tech nuclear missile wielding mechs are able to be thwarted by one guy who can roll to the side
This is honestly what sucked me in to The Phantom Pain, the incredibly detailed, politically realistic alternate history demonstrating the ways that new weaponry is used to perpetuate conflict and exploit people. It was really eye-opening
4:50 Goldeneye is a orbital nuclear bomb, which detonated high above the earth creates a EMP effect. This is very much a real life weapon, as shown by Operation Fishbowl/Starfish Prime Test in the US and Project K in the Soviet Union.
"Superweapons, in reality, in fiction, offer only the illusion of invincibility. A false claim that utopia can be ushered in by a tool that deals in death." Is such a cool quote!
i also love fancy sounding quotes that don't mean anything. nuclear weapons are superweapons, and they can be used to become invincible against those who do not have them. the second quote is just self absorbed bullshit too. almost anything you want to happen could if you could choose who lives and dies. this is the shittiest type of intellectualism, poetic naval gazing with no real substance.
I'll give you mine : superweapon is only superweapon until everyone has it. Then it became just another weapon.
That quote reminds me a lot of Gungnir from Baldr Sky. A lot of the implications, both politically and philosophically, are brought up and dicussed.
::TARGETING::
I mean we already have nukes
My favorite orbital laser is MPU from Cowboy Bebop, which, decades after being decommissioned, used its death machine to instead restore the previously destroyed Nazca Lines, just because it thought it looked nicer that way. That's a cool space laser!!!
Once upon a time, it had been the ultimate damocles' sword, quietly hanging over the collective heads of all humanity. Today it draws doodles in the dead landscape because it has become sentient and bored. The news cycle just treats it as a curiosity and invites a tinfoil hat wearer to explain how it's actually aliens in vain attempt to squeeze at least a drop of audience retention out of the story. Because the actual truth, shocking as it may be, is completely banal in the face of the society-ending corporate mishap that was the hypergate accident which put an end to human civilization on Earth. Of course, nobody knows the true of nature of that either, and most can't bring themselves to care in the first place. Shit happens, right.
So that's how "the ultimate conclusion of the arms race" goes down in history. Literal lines in the sand accompanied by nonsensical ramblings remembered by none a day later.
Almost reminds me of something...
He was a good robot. Wish he'd been a recurring character after that.
The one acceptable use of orbital lasers let them do big art!!!!!!
And, in the most irresponsible use of orbital lasers ever, Ed drew his face on the Earth with it.
Yes!
I like when Jacob takes the time to go off about how cool something was, which I think a lot of video essayists think they are above while clearly still feeling that way. The cool factor is an important part of this! and Jacob's recognizing of it only helps his analysis while grounding him. Because the fact we simply enjoy this media at all is the reason we feel so compelled to look at it so closely.
Its a theoretical weapon with the ability to smite people from space. The concept alone is oppressive and awesome.
Just like when Noah Caldwell-Gervais talked about the action set pieces in Gears of War 4.
I think one mistake that many people make when they design a weapon which is supposed to "end all wars" is that they don't think about human nature. They think "this weapon is so big, powerful, deadly, and gruesome, that surely all enemies will immediately give up when facing it." However, this often does not happen.
Why? Because, those "enemies" are also not just fighting for the sake of it. They too fight for a specific cause that they deem worthy, moral, and, in the most extremistic form, superior to any other option. They will not easily give up just because they are faced with some new and powerful weapon. Instead, they will think about what they can do to get back to an equal playing field. Either copy the weapon or devise a way to make it ineffective. Think about it this way: You are the good guy (of course you are, everyone is always the good guy in their own mind). Now your enemy, who is obviously the bad guy, has come up with some enormous and extremely powerful weapon, that you have absolutely no way of fighting against. Would you rather just give up, lay down, and accept whatever they wish to do to you and the people you care about? Or would you become very busy, laboring for many days and nights, for a way to either defend yourself against such a weapon or at least copy it so that, if your enemy uses it on you, you can at least also use it on your enemy? Or alternatively, you could also try to start fighting in a way that prevents your enemy from ever actually using this weapon.
That is why I think weapons which "bring an end to all wars" will inevitably always fail at their intended purpose. At best, they change how wars are fought, just like we have seen with the nukes. Since the end of WW2, there was, at least to my knowledge, no formal declaration of war from any officially recognized country against a country that posesses nuclear weapons. However, there have still been terrorist attacks, economy-wars meant to remove a country's ability to function economically, manipulation of public opinion, in order to sway their votes towards someone who the "attacker" deems favorable, and all such things. More recently, countries have also started trying to attack vital infrastructure via hacking of computer systems. Wars still happen, they just no longer happen with organized armies marching forward to meet on the frontlines or moving behind enemy lines to destroy military infrastructure and civilian targets with conventional weapons. That, and they're no longer called wars. This is the only thing that nuclear weapons have accomplished. It will be similar for any possible future weapons "to end all wars".
Ukraine declared war on Russia which has nuclear weapons
@@luiginotcoolafter Russia invaded it in a "special military action"
@@DatBrasss still goes against ops claim that nobody has declared war on a nation with nuclear weapons. Of course Ukraine is in the right here
@@luiginotcool they were forced into it so it does not invalidate the ops claim. If Ukraine had nukes Russia wouldn't be attacking. This actually proves the ops point. Just cuz Russia has nukes it didn't stop Ukraine from fighting back. Simply because they have to. Nukes didn't stop that war from happening. Neither will it ever.
> Wars still happen, they just no longer happen with organized armies marching forward to meet on the frontlines.
How is that not a massive win for humanity? I could dispute the point -- since proxy wars still feature armies, marching, and frontlines -- but I assume you're talking about the battles that weren't fought between the USA and USSR so let's just go with that. The Cold War expressed itself in global espionage, outside forces meddling in the internal political processes of just about every country on the planet, and an unknowable menagerie of disinformation/propaganda campaigns. (And proxy wars, but again we're setting that aside.) That's some pretty not-good shit. Would it be better if both sides kept to their own alliances' borders? Sure. Would it have been better if the Allied forces turned on the Red Army immediately after the fall of Berlin? Of course not.
Technology can make warfare more brutal, more destructive, more traumatizing for everyone involved. If nothing else, economic growth will always make wars more destructive, since civilization has further to fall. But at the same time, would you rather be on the frontline in the days of Napole on or the days of Gengis Khan? More lethal weaponry kills faster. Dying is bad, but dying slowly is worse. WWI was probably the most hellish war in history; trench warfare is a truly exceptional misery-machine after all. But it's gotten marginally less hellish since then. And I think it'd be pig-headed in the extreme not to attribute that to MAD. Chemical and Biological warfare, the real nightmare timelines, have thankfully seen little to no use since the introduction of MAD. Why not, except the ever-present risk that every escalation poses in a post-nuclear world?
"Polls of the time often showed that Americans believed the US already had a system that would defend them from foreign missile strikes. Fitzgerald attributes this to the fact that the alternative- that they were, truly, vulnerable to nuclear apocalypse- was almost too existentially terrifying to accept." got such crazy goosebumps from this line i had to play it again just to process it my god. having not known about SDI in any capacity before now makes it hard to believe this is all real history and not some spectacular piece of fiction, so, fitting i guess
WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!
Whoever was writing about that didn’t know that anti-ballistic-missile systems have been widely deployed since the 1960’s by over a dozen countries.
It would be nice if fucking idiots didn’t loudly inform others in an endless feedback loop of misinformation.
Yes, we did. It was called Nike and it wasn’t enough to defeat more than a small percentage of a Soviet strike.
It saddens me to hear this bright young man so confidently straw man Reagan as stupid. I lived through that time and he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. In the 1970s the USA had just lost Nixon to watergate, the arab oil embargo had devastated the economy and made gas 5x more expensive, inflation was out of control, the top tax rate was 70% down from 90%. Unemployment was high which led to stagflation. Our problems were not isolated. We were in an existential struggle with the USSR who had produced 50,000 nukes to our 30,000. They saw us as weak and decided to invade Afghanistan. We had a “national malaise” and our leaders told us we were in decline. We had dozens of hostages in Iran for over a year. We felt helpless. Everyone expected the USSR to “win”.
Reagan called bullshite on all that and his vision of rebuilding America snapped us out of it. He reminded us why we were the good guys. He became president and that day the Iranians released the hostages.
If you read the gulag archipelago you will begin to understand how evil totalitarian governments are. Reagan called them out. Bro, you’re evil. What we didn’t know is Stanislov Petrov had saved the world from Soviet Ineptitude. That MAD keeping us safe was an illusion. The Soviets nearly launched because they had crap failsafes and they detected a launch of 5 missiles. So Reagan met with Gorbachev and said let’s get rid of all nuclear weapons. Gorby said ok but Star Wars goes too. Reagan walked but that led eventually to a 90% reduction in nukes. The Soviets spent 25% of GDP on military and we kept the pressure on them spending 3%. The Soviets ran their economy into the ground and in 1992 the USSR collapsed. 1.6 million people celebrated freedom with a Metallica concert in Moscow. We all thanked God we escaped nuclear war and Socialism. Nobody would be dumb enough to ever try that shite again.
Well I was so wrong, people are always ready to repeat past mistakes
@@Greg-yu4ij Nike was a complete waste of resources, and Reagan very much was completely full of shit. Unironically for the same reason Nike was a failure, it wasn't going to do anything to prevent huge amounts of civilian casualties because the Soviets weren't idiots if they launched they could easily choose less defended targets or rely on falling short of target and count on fallout to do the job. The DOD already knew that in the 50s.
If you want to defend Reagan, head down to your local American Legion meeting place, you'll face a kinder reception there for your alternative history.
@@cericati guess, technically? It would have not mitigated a full scale soviet nuclear strike.
I guess it did have some value in the data that could be have been generated by the program.
A full defence against a large scale nuclear attack is impossible. But there are good reasons in trying to invest in orbital defence. It massively helps deter smaller, weaker nations that might still have nukes, and make them unable to effectively threathen the united states.
@@Greg-yu4ijwilling to bet that you voted for Trump and that you think that Biden is a communist
This is probably apocryphal but I've heard that Otomo drew the solid black epicenter of the explosion at the beginning of Akira by crosshatching it, which is an insanely painstaking way to do it and also completely unnecessary (you could use a screentone or...idk just USE A BIGGER PEN to get the same effect), but he felt that the immense amount of work was necessary to understand the immense amount of life lost that single image represented, even though it would not be visible in the final result.
On an unrelated note, I think my favorite "orbital laser" is Final Fantasy 6's Light of Judgement, which isn't really orbital but fired from the top of a tower so tall that it can reach anywhere in the world. It's kind of the ultimate apotheosis of the pointlessness of all that destructive power -- the name suggests divine intervention but it's really just a big gun that a deranged clown uses to incinerate anyone who crosses him. The tower it's on is even literally constructed out of trash, the shattered remains of the now-obliterated evil empire's capital city. There's a section with toilets embedded in the walls. The main villain would be impossible to take seriously, except for the fact that he controls so much power.
Actually, kinda wonder now if Kefka was partially inspired by Ronald Reagan.
Just like Kefka, Reagan was... Actually competent.
Unlike Kefka, he wasn't actually evil and did not, in fact, start the war on drugs.
The SDI was always a bluff, most of the money in the proposal went to other projects.
@@vyor8837 the worst part about Kefka is the same trait he shares with Ryuk from Death Note. They're so goofy and aloof in their attitude towards life, but sooner or later they show what they truly represent, the horrific concept of nihilistic death and destruction
As a kid I always hated how Kefka only uses the Light of Judgment once. Partially because wow cool 16bit explosion but also "Why bother with literally anything else, bro? You have a death laser. You've already won."
Growing up is realizing that "You've already won" is *exactly* the point of having superweapons like that. He didn't have to nuke everywhere in the world for people to be so terrified of crossing him that they just do what he says. Because he *can*.
You can still argue that Kefka as a villain doesn't actually do a whole lot in the second half of the game but I counter that with 1) Being massively arrogant and dismissive of people he deems weaker than himself is a trait that's been well established since his very first scene, and 2) He's got a fuckin Death Laser dude what could literally anybody other than the heroes he already soundly defeated once do about it?
Wouldn't even an infinitely tall tower only have line of sight on half the earth at most? Maybe with a projectile weapon you could factor in gravity, mass and acceleration, but with light one of those variables is negligible within the scope of Earth, and two are constants.
@@yoyobeerman1289 you can just... Move the satellite?
"Now let's talk about Ronald Reagan" is unironically one of the most terrifying sentences you've said in a video. Whenever a subject like this pivots back to real life it gets worrying, and Reagan only ever makes things worse when it comes to that. Fantastic work.
The Star Wars project was pulluing people's resources and money out of the Soviet Union, they tried to steal and do something that wasn't there.
Ok, I need a bit of context here. I'm somewhat unfamiliar with Reagen, and somewhat recall him really, really wanting to have a go at the Soviets for a while. What all about him is so terrifying? Y'know, save his administration fuelling the crack epidemic in the 80s.
@@bean108 he’s like the modern-day patron saint of conservativism
@@bean108 basically if you are not a rich straight white man with no disabilities, Reagan screwed people like you over. Ignored the aids crisis, fucked over the financial system, and about a billion other things.
Eh, something like that is almost predictable, in a way. Similar to "let's talk about capitalism..." or "In 1940s Germany..."
at 10:38 i feel this ties into the quote "A machine built to end war is always a machine built to continue war"
Gears is genuinely a lot more in-depth and creatively interesting than a lot of people give it credit for, always glad to the series get some recognition!
I was suprised by that too, i though gears was just a generic shooter lol
Yes yes, I too enjoy Metal Gear Solid's Tactical Espionage Action.
I expected a video about why it's implausible to hit a target on Earth from a satellite, but was really pleasantly surprised by all of the history, politics, and philosophy discussed. Really enjoyable video essay!
I guess it's because the "why it's implausible" has a two-word explanation: Orbital mechanics.
I realised 10 minutes in he didn't have the knowledge to scientifically debunk orbital satallites and just wanted to talk about real-world culture and politics. I don't feel I got click-baited but at the same time this feels irrelevant to the topic.
@@scrittleexactly. Just a video about how Orbital Lasers in fiction are always shown and that he thinks Reagan was a dum dum.
If the nuclear weapon was more of a political weapon, why would an orbital laser be any different?
@@sgtNACHOi mean its about „bigger weapon =\= peace“ thats the TLDR.
But i was disappointed i wanted an explanation why it wouldn’t work. But i mean there is no reason it shouldn’t work just not like in the movies.
There's a vampire story book called "Bento" by André Vianco, where the ultimate weapon used to eradicate the vampires is called "Tupã". It's a a big satelite equipped with mirrors formely used for agriculture, reflecting the sun at targeted spots on earth to improve crops. And after the vampiric apocalypse, the main characters embark on a quest to find its control center so humans can incinerate the vampires out in the open. Not quite an orbital laser, but it works just like one.
Can you link the book…?
Just got a notification, I don’t think you can post links… :(
Can you give me the title…? Or what website you found it at…?
It's a Brazilian book, I don't think it's been translated to any other language
@@caiomaida3630 too bad
@@plaguedfrost1753 he edited the comment to put the book name in it
There is one orbital laser that barely counts but considering what you counted I think works, and that one is my favorite of them all. Halo's glassing beam. In Halo there are two orbital type lasers, the UNSC built ones and the Covenant built ones, and the difference between them is one is for gameplay and the other is for theme. The UNSC orbital laser represents the missile platforms of SDI given reality, striking down missiles onto a single target, but it was only ever for gameplay. It's the glassing beams that are special. Unlike other fictions the glassing beam is consistently used power of the opposing alien side, each time signifying the victory of the Covenant. The glassing beams are treated as horrific end games, and they aren't used in the traditional way of simply removing a threat, but instead for religious reasons, seeing the humans as abominations and wanting to erase everything they touch, and the glassing beams are what do that. They aren't what wins, they're what signifies victory and what makes that victory permanent, insuring the humans can never regain it. The glassing beams are a symbol of horror used to show that the enemy is winning, and that their victories cannot be taken away, even when they are defeated.
And the glassing beams are basically nuclear weapons (explained as a plasma streams from the ship's fusion reactor), glassing is a reference to trinitite (a glass-like substance found at the Trinity test site). Why the game designers chose glassing beam instead of nuclear carpet bombing, I don't know, I guess the aesthetics of a blue light beam from the sky is too entrenched in the genre and that it's more theatrical. HALO is a cyberpunk game, basically, I guess they did not want to skip that genre element.
@@aleksandarrudic3694Halo isn't cyberpunk lmao, it has zero "punk" to it at all, it's literally a military game.
@@duncanmc797 I guess you are right, storywise it has nothing "punk" in it, but I was mostly focused on the world setting, if you can get what I mean, the dark dystopian very low-tech future
@@aleksandarrudic3694If I recall, the energy projectors are sometimes not weapons. Excavation tools that can be used as weapons. That's how powerful the Covenant technology is.
@@Mobius__ I'd argue it's quite primitive for an interstellar civilization that's many millennia old, it's just applied on a massive scale (like a Great Wall of China - it's totally unimpressive technologically - just a simple brick and mud wall, it's only impressive because it's massive in scale).
But perhaps I'm too blinded by the last few centuries of our real-time technological progress (which, if we were able to continue with the same pace for a few centuries more, would make most sci-fi interstellar civilizations comparably as backward technologically as the first cavemen).
Other than slipspace manipulation, and some Forerunner tech, everything in Halo is very low-tech but very massive. Hell, even the Flood - the creation of Precursors, supposedly infinitely advanced civilization, is inferior in many aspects to our 20th century theoretical concept of the Von-Neumann probe.
Wow. Gears of War is way deeper than I ever gave it credit for. No one was ever able to explain it this concisely.
I wholeheartedly agree. I always thought Gears was very PRO-War, rather than the opposite, so seeing a very plausible case made for the series being Anti-War is...very cool, tbh. I love third-person shooters too, so I may have to actually pick these games up again. I still have the OG trilogy for my dusty 360 so I might just actually get around to playing them this time.
I highly recommend Noah Caldwell Gervais' video on the series!
@@JacobGeller UA-cam video, i assume?
@@youtubeuniversity3638 yes. I believe Jacob Geller refers to Noah Caldwell-Gervais' video, Gears Through The Years: ua-cam.com/video/2-gQCZL8VA8/v-deo.html
@@youtubeuniversity3638 you could’ve jus searched “gears of war Noah” it’s the first result. Would’ve taken you 5 seconds
One of my favorite depictions of an orbital weapon and its unreliability is actually the Hyper Disintegrator Cannon from Redline that you covered. Much like the others, it shows off with flashes and drama, but still fails spectacularly.
The night before the race, two racers snuck up to the cannon to sabotage it, giving us a slight glimpse of the inside. It breathes and stares ominously, building up expectations of its capabilities.
During the race, the cannon had its target set to the rampant Funky Boy who just broke out. The energy accumulated, charged and... dissipated. Nothing. No fanfare, no unleashed potential, just disentchantment. "Why is it not firing?" "We have a malfunction..." "WHAT?! This is unacceptable!"
Just a few minutes later, it was ready to fire again. Minutes. It took the repair crew *minutes* to find and fix the seemingly miniscule internal damage which rendered this cannon larger than the city it's meant to protect completely inoperable. The shot seen in 6:24 onward then hits the creature dead-on, burying nearby soldiers and racers in bus sized chunks of rock. All the racers survived, but almost none of the soldiers. Even worse, a chunk of Funky Boy remained, and it grows back to full size within seconds. Ultimately, the cannon only hurt its own faction without being of any help, knocked out and recharging from that point on.
It may be fanon, but there's a theory about this I rather like, that essentially says that Redline was essentially used to bait the Machine World into showing irrefutable evidence of bioweapons, plural, Funky Boy and whatever-you-call-what-Volton-turned-into. And that the Secretary of Defense Titan was a traitor, hence his general just-barely-incompetence, with weapons that were powerful but also had Achilles heels and suffered from friendly fire.
@@TheLoneWolfling That's an intriguing perspective :o
Haven't thought of it like that yet, but it seems to add up, thanks for sharing ^^
Holy shit another human being who knows what Redline is. Kudos
@@zombiesalmon4997i love finding fellow redline enjoyers, it’s such a beautifully insane film
@@undercookedtoast1479 Fellow Redline enjoyer here! Happy to see y'all. I very much enjoy this comment chain.
I have to admit, I'm surprised by no mention of the solar system from gundam! Not only was it likely the inspiration for the appearance of Sol and Floyd in Akira but its probably one of the most devastating versions of an orbital laser I've ever seen because rather than orbiting a plant and devastating it from the sky, its a set of mirrors that orbit a sun and then direct the sun's energy in a path that cannot be truly controlled. fleets have to be organized for lightyears to avoid random casualties and even then its incredibly easy to clip random people who will utterly disintegrate from its usage. it was also made after the banning of nuclear weaponry! though i imagine it wouldn't fit in the context of the video, all things considered. just felt it'd be neat to share.
I've been watching the entire UC timeline from the beginning and I thought of this as well.
It's even played off as an accident when Ghiren kills his own father, saying he must have been too close. Or rather, his defense of the act.
Then going from 0079 to Zeta, the Gundam which represented the Pinnacle of mobile suit warfare is immediately brought to use by the villians to escalate their plans.
It could fit in the video because of the simple fact, that even though the orbital laser helped end a war, it was just a temporary reprieve, because there were still more and more conflicts, which made the laser pointless, even more so in unicorn gundam, where the god in the machine ironically enough manifests not as a system to inflict more pain, but as a symbol of what one should strive for, mutual understanding and deterrence from creating more unneeded weapons of mass destructions, with the titular unicorn gundam being the first, and a laser the latter
the message is more blatant in "Final Fantasy: Spirit Within", an orbital laser caused a friendly fire and allows bad guys to win while simultaneously the laser self-destruct due to being overused.
As far as I have watched in Gundam they’ve never really actually fired an orbital laser on the earth, just at other space colonies of space battleships
They just prefer dropping really big physical things on earth (space colonies, Axis)
Don’t spoil me I’ve only seen the UC through CCA, Wing, G-Witch, and like 4 episodes of 00
@@phoenixfritzinger9185 in Iron Blooded Orphans they've taken to dropping Tungsten Rods onto people from orbit. This is to get around various treaties that nobody understands why they were written
The launchers for the Tungsten Rods are often listed as being against various treaties... but somebody generally speaks up, "that is only when you put nuclear weapons into then... a Tungsten Rod at terminal velocity is completely okay"... you know... because this show is a bit too good at being an accurate depiction of human interactions
Our enemies are like The Empire that's why we're building a Death Star...
Wait what?
Well, I believe StarWars to actually be an allegory to the Vienam War, so....
@@Sett86 actually, it's a sci-fi remake of dambusters
@@tinyetoile5503it's kinda both. Lucas has, I believe, explicitly stated that it's a Vietnam war allegory but the death star hatch sequence is pretty reminiscent of dam busters
To be honest if there was a laser that fired from space, that did anything at all to do damage to the surface. That shit would have to blind everybody in the city if they were looking at it. That'd be terrifying, looking at something and being blinded by the destruction.
When the Halifax Harbour explosion happened more than 1000 people (about 2% of the population) were blinded all at once by glass shrapnel-
It started with a boat on fire in the Harbour, and people were watching out their windows when the shockwave from the explosion blasted them in the face with shattered glass
In an attempt to not spoil: Dune Messiah involves this in a pretty important event in the latter story, if you’re interested in reading a handling of it
Aren’t most real laser weapons not visible? I mean, they would destroy your eyes if you looked directly into them, but viewing from the outside you don’t even notice anything.
@@AceRasputin yeah but there's no real laser "weapon" there's an engineer UA-camr that did a video on this actually when he made a laser that was so strong he needed a welding mask to use it, it illuminated his entire garage on it's own and it melted through thin metal sheets in over a minute. The impracticality of a laser is that realistically they're just heating things quickly not exactly vaporization, so something that does vaporize needs to heat something so quick it goes beyond spontaneous combustion. Whether it's visible to the naked eye depends on the kind of laser.
"being blinded by the destruction" brings to mind another quasi-religious parallel: the destruction of Sodom. Mr. Lot was warned not to look at the destruction, but his wife looked back at the exploding city and was struck dead
I'm reminded of the invention of the Gatling Gun in 1861. It popularized the concept of a rotary barrel system. Richard Jordan Gatling thought that such a high RPM weapon would end wars due to the horror of both using such a weapon and being attacked by it. It was used in the Civil War, the Boshin War, the Anglo-Zulu War, and even the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. It spread across the world, from the U.S. to Tokugawa Japan to France to the British Empire to Peru to Qing Dynasty China to the Ottoman Empire.
It was mounted on turrets, on ships, on wheels, on tripods. It was manufactured in the thousands all through the 19th century and its descendants are still in use today in too many contexts to name. The Gatling Gun did not end war. The Gatling Gun was a tool of death. People built it, people bought it, and it was _used._
I find the concept of orbital laser (lance) strikes in Dawn of War and Warhammer 40k to be interesting because it depicts a fleet needing to gain naval supremacy before being deployed.
The oneupmanship involved also helps tell how horrifying your enemies are. When there are threats that even an orbital laser strike can’t kill, you know something is horribly wrong and that the situation is serious.
40k is kind of a special case though. Its weapons are so destructive for the sake of it that an orbital laser is something that makes a lot of sense when you consider things like cyclonic torpedoes, most Eldar ship weapons, or whatever the Necrons used on a daily basis during the War in Heaven.
40k has so incredibly powerful weapons that an orbital laser isn't any sort of ultimate weapon, it's an artillery strike in a different format.
That's basically how bombers work, you can only deploy them if you destroyed all of their Anti Air defenses and gained Aerial Supremecy
@@staringgasmask 40k weapons are destructive because of the scale of the setting. A few terratons of firepower isnt gonna cut it when you have 1 million planets to defend.
@@hang_kentang6709 that's basically a rephrase of what I said
@@staringgasmask Ah sorry, i had misunderstood the part "Its weapons are so destructive for the sake of it".
Old comments: relevant to the video
New comments: FOR MANAGED DEMOCRACY!
Without an atmosphere, the sun is effectively an orbital laser. A deadly one, even.
~The Sun is a deadly laser~
the sun is basically the optical opposite of a laser
@@FishySpiderGuy oh nevermind, there's a blanket
We could make a religion out of this......
It doesn't orbit Earth.
I absolutely love any time anyone tries to describe any plot element of Redline. It's just so representative of just how BONKERS this movie is.
I used to watch Jacob because he made videos about things I cared about. Now I care about things based on Jacob's videos.
When I grow up, I'm gonna be a orbital laser and make Jacob proud!
I am already proud pf your commitment.
@@nomeayano7757 Thank you Nome that means a lot
Oh my gosh I fricking love Jacob Geller his writing is phenomenal.
Right now I'm doing a project in school on Ronald Reagan and his approach. to American politics and foreign policy. This video was super informative and really helped me gain insight into Reagan's SDI, and see it for being more than just a badass space laser, but a terrifying looming symbol of destruction, death, and fear. Please keep this up man you are incredible.
A small side note I think worth adding with the Gears of War section, the 'baddies' or creepy crawlies as you so beautifully described them, are actually yet deus ex Machina, heavily genetically modified humans originally coming from a super soldier meant to end the human war, that it itself only comes from the fighting over one of the only remaining energy sources on the planet, imulsion. Which it itself is what causes a disease that in the process of curing, causes the super soldier program to begin.
In short, Gears of War is a game of Deus Ex Machinas, which never end, and only continues to grow.
you really know how to pick a good topic. always specific enough to be concise, yet not too specific as to allow you to go on some excellent tangents. an excellent watch as always :)
As an RTS game enthusiast, it made me smile to see CnC's Ion Cannon mentioned.
I now go back to my trillion year slumber until the next big RTS release.
Homeworld 3 coming soon :)
If you like C&C then you might want to keep an eye on Tempest Rising
@@Taisto-Perkele thanks man, been awhile since i last saw classic RTS games.
Stormgate is coming soon, might be the next big title!
Give Combat Mission a try, definitely not traditional RTS, but lots of fun and extremely well made(but with a terrible UI and old ass graphics) but its a series a lot of RTS players sleep on when they absolutely shouldn't.
Every video you make is a landmark. When art museums and film institutes host exhibitions of video essays someday, your work will be on the schedule. Thank you for this. Also, for anyone else reading this, the Nebula-exclusive companion video on actual military and private attempts at space weaponry is a can't-miss with a brilliant punchline.
I think the Hammer of Dawn might be my favorite orbital laser in any media. I just appreciate how the point was "this thing is actually really fucked up and shouldn't exist."
sometimes i’m certain that jacob geller uploads for my mental health and mine alone, this guy’s got good timing
From the technical side, the wild thing is that ground-based defensive lasers are feasible, relatively inexpensive, and nearly impossible to turn into tools of death. I guess it's not a surprise that they haven't seen as much fanfare as offensive space lasers.
Props on your Reagan intro! From FDR to Reagan, so much was gained and then lost. Subscribed.
Gears is one of my favorite series, in no small part because of how realistic it manages to be about the grey morality of war while also... y'know, having a mega space laser & chainsaw rifles lol, thanks for bringing it in on this, Jacob. another absolute banger video
Orbital to surface attacks in general are just a terrifyingly interesting concept for me. The fear that orbital weapons can create just by existing can justify its existence alone no matter how effective. The idea that at any instant something could hit you from orbit with pretty much nothing capable of stopping it alone very demoralizing, it’s basically the new flamethrower or missile strike.
They’re a high tech sword of Damocles, instead of getting stabbed, you get vaporized!
Getting struck by a meteor is very unlikely but not impossible.
That's pretty much any ICBM, a missile launched into orbit then descends to its target. Pretty much why there was a space race
Isn’t that the real power of the US military’s drone program. The implied threat and paranoia of knowing at any moment a drone could swoop down and rain death on your entire village or town and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.
I'm surprised there was no mention of the classic orbital laser I know of, being the Halo glassing beams used by the covenant as excavation tools for forerunner artefacts. It's pretty iconic and is visualized a ton in the Halo video games. Especially in Halo 3 during the Covenants attack on Earth, or the glassing of half of Africa to exterminate the flood. And (because I love Warhammer 40k) the classic exterminatus button that every fleet has capable of obliterating a planet like the Death Star. But more convenient and more people own in 40k.
Seriously, the glassing beams are so horrifying that they're really the trope definition for me. Jacob talks about them being "nukes without the baggage" at one point and I think part of what makes glassing so terrifying is it has the baggage still. They're the laser equivalent of salted earth, they leave a layer of glass and radioactive fallout so thick that the targeted area is unliveable for a long period after. It's overkill to the n-th degree, it's obliteration of anything counter to the zealotry of the covenant and to me, that's just thematic gold unmatched
Although the exterminatus button isn't necessarily a big laser. Other notable form include virus bombs, or flesh eating mega nukes.
Edit: the covenant space lasers are not orbital ones, they are fully mobile space ships with bug lasers attached. Not even sure if they actually start orbiting the planet they are going to laser before they laser it.
But the energy projector the covenant uses is not a laser...
The ship-based energy projectors and even nukes in the Halo franchise don't play to the same narrative as the examples used here. In universe, neither are treated like deus ex machina that promise to fix the problems that the characters otherwise could not achieve. In the interstellar genocide of the Human-Covenant War, their use is no different than any other kind of gun, bomb, or energy weapon. Rather than weapons of mass destruction, ONI's SPARTAN II and SPARTAN III programs and their ethical ramifications as well as AI are more significant across media.
@@Santisima_Trinidadanything that hovers over the earth to fire down upon it would indeed be orbiting the earth. It would not be able to stay in the air above the earth otherwise.
its so nice to watch someone on a video at full speed because your speech cadence is actually how people talk...
not trying to run 90 words a minute to cram every little bite of information into a 9min video
The fact that for decades now, every single day dozens of people all over the world were (plus minus a couple safety hurdles) just a button-press away from THE disaster to end all disasters, and we are still here, gives me some faith in humantiy.
It's both harrowing and heartening to know that in a few cases things happened that, by all protocols and procedures, *should* have caused nuclear armageddon except that the people faced with the prospect of annihilation and being charged with the duty to fire back, said "No, we (our side) might all die, but that doesn't mean everyone else has to."
Don't jinx it
@@fanboy50 kinda brings back your faith in mankind doesn't?
have you ever heard about the cold war?
That the percentage of possible people who could push that button has been so rapidly been decreasing, and turning hereditary, is unnverving.
The end statement is literally just Vader's quote, "Don’t be too proud of this technological terror you’ve constructed. The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force." Basically the collective belief of people will always be stronger than the weapons we build.
No. Space magic is potentially stronger than the weapons we build.
Collective belief does precisely bugger all.
Lol and they went off to build another one
“You see, the war, the true war, has never been one waged by droids, or warships, or soldiers. The true war is waged in the hearts of all living things, against our own natures, light or dark. That is what shapes and binds this galaxy, not these creations of man. You are the Battle Ground.” - Kreia
Wait is that where the name for that one super monkey upgrade comes from?
@@maltesers1239 monk monks?
I don't have Nebula so I'm not sure if you mentioned it also but this ironically reminded me of Call Of Duty Ghosts, in which most of the struggle in the game is about gaining control of a orbital satellite that can drop tungsten rods, kinda like a lower tech version of orbital lasers. The Soviets also planned to develop a similar orbital platform that can drop nukes everywhere, but US decided to negotiate with them to stop doing that.
It's funny, since actual Rods from God, or solid tungsten telephone poles dropped from orbit, would be exponentially more resource intensive than actual orbital laser platforms. In other words, if you can figure out how to haul so much mass into LEO, you could probably build the actual tech to make orbital lasers realistic.
and reagan also considered god rod as a part of the SDI program
Wanna know what's truly scary? While rods from god remain science fiction and arguably harder to pull off than a laser satellite considering the prospect of lifting that much weight into orbit, how much simpler would it be to use an unmanned space vehicle to move an asteroid onto a collision course with earth? The technology already exists or is very feasible to create on short notice, and all it would really take is figuring out the math to choose the right sized asteroid to put onto a collision course with the target designated for destruction that will destroy that target completely without endangering the rest of the world. You f up that math though and you might miss the target or get wiped out as well. There are currently ten countries in the world that can launch space rockets into orbit, and developing the vehicle necessary and the tech it would deliver to move the asteroids onto their collision courses is probably within all of their grasps, especially America's and China's.
I did not expect to hear the phrase "A top-5 contender for Most Dementia While Allowed to Launch a Nuclear Strike" today. lol.
Good video!
Wish you mentioned it's usage in Justice League Unlimited. The laser at the JL's watchtower was an important plot point, since it's existence was a strong point in favor of the existance of Cadmus, who saw the Justice League as a threat to humanity due to not only the orbital laser but also the fact that, in an alternative reality, Superman killed President Lex Luthor and the League became dictators, called the Justice Lords.
It's been ages since I watched JLU, but I recall a scene where either Superman or Batman is trying to convince Amanda Waller that the league is not the enemy, to which she responds: "then why is your laser pointed downwards?"
Another thing is that they have (or seemingly have) a perfectly reasonable reason for wanting the laser. In the Justice League finale, in order to destroy an alien base set up on earth and save the world Batman had to kamikaze the old watchtower into the base. With the laser that is no longer an issue and it proves it works when they first show it off. The only problem is that no-one stoped to think what kind of message they were sending with that laser and also DIDN'T TELL ANY GOVERNMENT ABOUT IT
I can't believe there exists such a good channel like this. Jacob does not miss
Everything he claimed about SDI was wrong.
@@vyor8837 Sure thing, Ron.
Everything he said about Reagan was wrong.
@@bodugok how so?
@@Phriedah nixon was the one that actually started the war on drugs for one.
First the fear of depths, then the cold, now it's the most primal fear of them all, Orbital Lazers
Jacob dropping the video essay cadence to talk about Tetsuo bringing down the laser was great. I get so used to the normal cadence and intonation that whenever he just talks about something normally I always get a little caught off guard
I KNEW AKIRA WAS GOING TO SHOW UP AND I'M HERE FOR IT!
My favorite theme about Akira isn't how it's the "Nuke" (IE superweapon) is bad, it's how the idea of the "Nuke" (be it a space laser or engineered human evolution and psychic powers) is inherently and nigh impossibly seductive to possess. It doesn't matter if you've been hit by it. You want it.
I've has a really difficult week at work. Coming home on a Friday to a new Jacob Geller video is probably the best thing I could've asked for. Thank you Jacob, please take my money now
Hey man, I hope next week is better for you
i hope things get better for you too :)
you’re so good at incorporating music into your videos and that extra layer really just puts it all together. 10/10
Every time he said SDI my Smash Melee brain got tickled.
After first watching "the search for the last great secret" I quickly became enamored by Jacob's writing style. He even inspired me to become obsessed with games like bloodborne and shadow of the colossus. But I am always looking for a new entry to the "Fear Of - __" series. That being said, I love massive space lasers!!
That was the same one that got me into Jacob. The Last Great Secret was just so well done and written I was hooked immediately. Ended up finding my favorite UA-camr.
Finally playing Gears and finding out that the writing was excellent was one of my favourite surprises in recent years. Genuinely one of my favourite takes on militarism in modern fiction.
Oh I know, especially during the fight with the Boss.
I like the woman one by the starship troopers guy, made my Brain hurt so it must be good
You should read the books. No, I'm not kidding.
@@AmanojakuX The Gears universe is ridiculously interesting and the war between humanity and the Locust that the games cover is only a fraction of the commentary the series as a whole has to offer. I love my dumb chainsaw gun books so much.
A GIANT WORM. THEY’RE SINKING CITIES WITH A GIANT WORM.
The concept of superweapons is a theme in the Ace Combat series. Each one depicted, whether created for good or not, just leads to greater wars.
Weapons cannot end wars, only fight them.
Glad this was recommended to me, it's a great exploration of the topic. I totally thought it'd be about the technological limitations too, but seeing the ideological limitations that lead to their uselessness was way more interesting and arguably applicable.
one of my favorite scenes/ levels of any game is when gears of war 3 has you walking through a city that is covered in ash and people turned into burnt husks and has the characters talking about how the hammer of dawn was used on that area and it's honestly pretty impressive how well gears of war goes from chainsawing people in half to genuinely serious emotional moments.
Char is so fucking cool. Everything about the cannon event, aftermath, and politics of the survivors is just great.
jeclber galoer
jake gillz
Jacbe goolor
Jeceb Gallor
jakeeb galear
Javobg Heller
Neon Genesis Evangelion's Arael while not technically being an orbital laser, is still my favourite version of this concept. A large ethereal bird/angel that looms in orbit with an defined exterior shape. But undefined features apart from its body.
Came in, fired a beam of divine light, destroyed the mind of a kid, then promptly got stabbed and died. Awesome.
true chad arael
Man of culture as well
This essay in particular lives so rent free in my mind that every time one of my team mates dies to my orbital laser in helldivers 2 Jacob Geller appears in my mind and says "I told you so!"
This does not stop me from bringing it to every mission, using it very liberally, and not warning my teammates of its arrival.
My first core memory of an orbital strike was a fighting game called “Evil Zone” where one of the characters if he hit you with his command grab he will call in a satellite laser to reign down on you. It was like drugs to my kid brain. Took about 8 or 10 of them to actually defeat the enemy with it so it fit pretty well with the theme of this video.
I love it when your titles are exactly the opposite of clickbait: it hints in a direction, but you never see the conclusion coming that is way more interesting and meaningful than you thought it could be.
"and the laser is still functional, and it FUCKIN RULES."
A lot of essayists try to project a seriousness that is unassailable, and I get why they do it, but I have a genuine appreciation for how Geller chooses to call out something badass with such palpable enthusiasm when it's called for. Like, say, when a psychic teenager, surfing a space laser, starts firing it wildly at a boat.
"His God from the machine" that hits so hard
I've been slightly obsessed with Redline lately and seeing it mentioned almost right away in this video fires a laser hotter than the sun straight to my heart, warming me thoroughly
Glad you mentioned the hammer of dawn. It's probably one of the most plot important orbital lasers in video games.
I swear you could make an essay about Spoons or Bananas and it would be equally interesting. I always thought of Orbital Lasers as just a gimmick tool for sci-fi games or movies, as you said "I get it" but never thought about how they were devastatingly useless for what they were supposedly built to do, not to mention I knew nothing about Reagans space lasers either lmao, I'm not from the US but still can't believe I've never heard anything about it, is kind of scary and hilarious at the same time
I remember being taught (unironically and at a prestige school in NY) that SDI caused the collapse of the Soviet Union due to increases in military spending. In hindsight, it was likely because many of the teachers grew up in the 80s and 90s when it was a major talking point on national news, so they internalized it and taught it to their students in a strange cycle of perpetuating propaganda)
If you want a good banana video, I think Jacob would cover a lot of the same territory as Sam O’nella’s “Banana Republics” video, or Knowing Better’s “A Veteran’s Warning”
Banana lore goes deep and is actually really dark lol
I havent read the Akira comic, just watched the movie, but i wanted to add that there is a time (i'm talking about the movie) that the SOL satelite accomplishes its purpose, and hurts Tetsuo, and evaporates his arm.
But then the arm starts to grow and all, gross and meety, and out of control. And makes all things worst
My point is that even when it succeeds, it fails
What to expect of something that only destroys
Excellent video, Jacob
I wish you’d mentioned Code Geass in this video, since I think it fits with much of the themes you’re discussing, and is another anime.
At the end of the story, the final war is over control of basically a satellite that can shoot nukes anywhere. The villain of the show hopes that this weapon will bring world peace, will unite the world. But his ideology is explicitly refuted in the text: all it does is bring more war, more fear, and more suffering in the populace. And the main character knows this. That’s why at the end of the show, when world peace is explicitly achieved, or at the very least a better world is created, that satellite is destroyed. Humanity has moved past the need for weapons like that, the only way to bring a real peace is to not be armed in the first place. When people trust each other and learn to work together (in the shows case against a common foe), then things will improve. Not when we’re all dancing at the knifes edge of apocalypse.
Looking back on the Arkbird from the game "The Unsung War", it fits the orbital laser theme in the perfect way. Originally being a spacecraft for exploration and scientific discovery, the Arkbird goes through every type of orbital laser trope.
The player helps arm the spacecraft with the laser system early on in the story, giving their country a leg up in future battles.
A few missions later the player is saved by the Arkbird's laser decending from above to smite a seemingly invincible foe.
Of course next time the player faces a similar foe, they are alone. The Arkbird is not in the correct position to help them.
After many more missions the Arkbird is "hijacked" and the player's squadron must destroy it, along with any hope of it being brought back to its former glory.
The game may be overly cheesy and anime-esque, but I did love the Arkbird's story arc.
I think it was *_Ace Combat 5:_* The Unsung War
Don't mind me, I'm just a random passerby
One of my favorite versions of an orbital laser has got to be Archimedes II from Fallout: New Vegas. I mean, just the fact that some random kid happened to have the literal pointer for the laser and it only just didn't work because the station was offline is freaking hilarious and disturbing.
Veronica also tells that safety was engaged on designator
I was about to be like "No hammer of dawn reference?" It's the first thing that comes to my mind when I think of space lasers. Also EXCELLENT choice of music while talking about the hammer of dawn. Really shows that you know GoW.
jacob geller could really talk about literally anything and i would just sit down here and listen to all of it
The music choice in this video was top tier, almost every track fit perfectly with each theme, with some of them making me think of the subjects before you even got to them, immaculate
When people tell me he can’t afford universal health care, I’ll tell them we spent literal billions on an imaginary space laser.
"One of these things is not like the other."
@@libertyprime7911 yea, one increases the life expectancy of the citizens, and the other is an imaginary concept.
@@raydgreenwald7788 one increases the life expectancy of the citizens, the other very quickly decreases the life expectancy of the citizens
Except the SDI actually had viable tech lol, it wasn't an orbital laser but a post-atmospheric missile defense system; things are shot down in space, not at some fictional ground-target. Also universal health-care will cost more than "literal billions", and most government tax money will just go right back into funding weapons programs like the one you just made fun of lol
@@chrisgaming9567 either way, you’re increasing your citizenry life expectancy relative to the rest of the world.
Fun fact-
My great uncle was tasked to develop the lasers for STAR wars. I don’t know much about it, but it’s been a part of our family’s lore. He did invent some kind of insane laser, which was my inspiration for wanting to learn science as a kid.
Thank you for mentioning Redline Jacob!! My favourite movie that not many people talk about, would recommend to everyone and anyone
Love the Goncharov hat! Great to see people enjoying that classic more and more :)
I'm surprised he never brought up predator drones. They inspire the very same fear of instant, undefendable death from the clear blue sky.
I was going to say the same. Most of the on demand destruction utility of space lasers is already achievable with drones.
Drones are often destroyed en masse if the enemy has anti-air defence. Ukraine admitted to losing most of their Baryaktars in the first week of the conflict. If the enemy has AA, you can use anything that flies to a similar effect. Drones are just cheaper and more economical for some situations.