I love this movie,i think it was one of connerys best.That said what is up with these movies set in the distant future,and there still using shotguns.they have achieved intergalactic space travel but they haven't developed any energy weapons both leathal and non leathal.Ghost of mars is another example.Don't you think at least the hitmen would have used something different then what the marshall used. thats my 2 cents
shareNope. Consider the fact that firearms have remained relatively unchanged for over 500 years. They're cheap, easy to produce, and reliable. Look at all the advances in science and culture that have been made in that time. The gun has certainly been improved upon, but it's essentially the same today as it was back in the 1500's.
If you look on the web, you can find hand-held energy weapons for sale today. They're cumbersome, expensive and perform far below what can be achieved with a regular firearm. The advantage of an energy weapon is distance and targeting accuracy, neither of which is necessary (or necessarily attainable) with a handgun or spread-weapon like a shotgun. Will energy weapons continue to improve? Sure. But we're still a long way off from Han Solo's blaster pistol. I believe that traditional weapons will still be around in the next couple of centuries.
That being said, I actually prefer to see traditional weapons in sci-fi "near-future" movies. Especially around the time this film was made, with all the hype from Star Wars. Just watch the final battle in Moonraker (which bought into the SW craze hook, line and sinker) and tell me which you prefer. Personally, I like the shotgun, and I think in terms of accuracy, this is the way to go.
"you can find hand-held energy weapons for sale today. They're cumbersome, expensive and perform far below what can be achieved with a regular firearm."
Really, would you care to provide us a link. And I don't mean to any of those ultrasonic anti-rape alarms either. They don't count as an energy weapon.
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http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/lights/5a47/
It won't slice off your hand, but could surely do permanent retina damage.
I think that there are actually international laws (or at least pending laws) making the use of blinding laser weapons on the battlefield a war crime.
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Yeah.
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Yea thats dumb. Its considered better to blow some ones head off rather then get a soldier sick or blinded off the battle field.
I guess it's kind of like folks still smoking cigarettes. At almost $5 a pack now, I wonder how much they would cost on Io. I'm always comforted by the fact that even in far distant future, people still enjoy smoking!
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The french fries would probably cost more, by virtue of weight and space. It's comforting to think that in the future, man's greatest enemy will still be... tobacco.
Getting back to the shotguns: simple, easy to make, reliable. Yep.
Essentially the same? Flintlock weapons and modern automatics?? The materials and mechanisms are way different and so is the ammo. The only thing they have in common is that they are portable and shoot projectiles using explosives. It's like saying that a 70's pocket calculator is essentially the same as a modern computer and fireworks the same as an intercontinental missile :p.
Also, you forget that technological advancement occurs with an increasing pace (law of accelerating returns). Not only does technology advance exponentially, but the exponential advance itself, increases exponentially as well.
About current laser weapons being cumbersome: take a look at computers from the 50's. They were darn cumbersome too - and slooow. Now I ask you, how long did it take to make them into the fast and portable machines of today? Centuries? Nope, mere decades.
Another advantage of energy weapons could be the possibility of continuous beams. That could definitely come in handy. And why not a diverging beam? That would be comparable to a shotgun. Also, bullets take more time to travel through air and would be harder to fire accurately on high gravity planets. I'd say energy weapons could constitute a technological paradigm shift in firearms still within this century, unless something better is invented.
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All that we see or seem. Is it but a dream within a dream?
Can i get a plasma rifle in the 40 watt range? Asking for a friend
shareIntergalatic? Jupiter is even pur own solar system, so it's pretty far from "intergalactic".
sharethe movie takes place on jupiter's moon.space travel in the movie could go well beyond our galaxy.we could only guess.
sharethe movie takes place on jupiter's moon. space travel in the movie could go well beyond our galaxy.we could only guess.
Our own Milky Way galaxy is 100,000 light-years across and contains billions of stars. Even traveling at warp factor 6, as in Star Trek, it would take almost a week to travel from Earth to the nearest star, Proxima (Alpha) Centauri, which is only 4 light-years from our solar system.
Forget intergalactic travel. Our own galaxy is plenty big enough.
All the universe . . . or nothingness. Which shall it be, Passworthy? Which shall it be?
What about Warp Factor 7? Could they do it in 5 1/2 days?
shareI don't know about the tech of the future, but I do know that the post production costs of adding a single laser blast effect in those days were astronomical.
For example in V, which was made several years later, the laser blast effects were said to cost about $1000 per shot in post production. Which was the 'real' reason that most of the resistance characters continued using M-16s instead of just stealing the aliens guns.
Still, lots of futuristic films still have conventional guns in the. All 4 Aliens films used conventional weapons, rigt down to pump action shotguns, as with the new British series of Dr. Who. They show them using bull-pup rifles with caseless bullet 1000s of years in the future when they have matter transporters etc.
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This is a Steampunk film. It's supposed to combine aspects of the past, and future. Hence the shotguns.
shareNo, this is not Steampunk. Steampunk centers around the Victorian era, where steam driven machines are the basis of technology. This is standard science fiction: a near-future setting, with extrapolated technology, based on current developments and societal structures. Steampunk is a look to the past, with the introduction of current technology into the steam era.
If you want Steampunk, look at the works of Jules Verne (and the movie and tv adaptations), as well as The Wild Wild West, Steamboy, and the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (comic, not crappy movie). Granted, Verne wrote in the Victorian era, so his work is technically specultive fiction, but it provides the template that Steampunk authors attept to emulate.
Here, we have basic space travel, industrial mining centers, computer analysis, and designer drugs; which are window dressing to what is essentially a remake of High Noon.
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Take a look at the landing pad battle between Han Solo and the Storm Troopers at the spaceport in A New Hope. That scene was almost textbook for a man shooting with a sawn-off.
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A shotgun is actually a very clever weapon for an enclosed space. Depending on the gunpowder charge, and the size and type of shot used, it could be discharged in a close, presurized space without risking blowing a hole in the structure that keeps the air and pressure inside.
there are in my view more obvious misses:
The SF of the time suffers from the "black screen, green DOS characters" computers effect that went away in the late 80's. also, computers, like Telex machines ot teletypes, whirr and make noise as they display characters. (Alien!) Imagine what real computers will be in, say, 2050, where this movie is apparently done.
also, the biggest problem they face: Graviti. Io is much smaller than even our Moon, yet gravity is earth-like.
..oh well
I agree pretty much with carter627. And actually, I don't know if it's even true that this movie is about the DISTANT future. That's the great thing about Outland, that it really depicts realistically (within some limits) what life in outer space would be like for the foreseeable future: dangerous, claustrophobic, and monotonous. It's a great corrective to the rather magical image of space travel that you see in Star Wars or Star Trek. As his son says to O'Niel before he and his mother are to leave for earth, it takes a year to get from the space station to earth. That is a pretty realistic estimate of what the travel time is likely to be for the next few centuries, whenever we do actually start to travel to other planets in this solar system.
"Intergalactic" travel is probably extremely far in the future. Who knows when we'll ever be able to do it. Even in Contact, Carl Sagan did not suggest that the benevolent extraterrestrials actually travelled to earth. Rather, they sent messages of some kind to us, allowed a sort of interstellar "telepathy." He realized that there wasn't any realistic way to conceive travel to other solar systems.
Outland is a great "environmental" film. It really makes you appreciate the earth. We're meant to live here, not out in space.
"Extremism in the pursuit of moderation is no vice."
I'll take either shotguns or laser weapons any day. Both are just as effective.
shareOutland is a great "environmental" film. It really makes you appreciate the earth. We're meant to live here, not out in space.
Humans are meant to live wherever our tools and technology enable us to live. That's why we have a reasoning brain, an endless curiosity about the universe around us, and a set of thumbs. Earth is the cradle of humanity, but all infants must eventually outgrow the cradle.
All the universe . . . or nothingness. Which shall it be, Passworthy? Which shall it be?
They mention the gravity in the opening text, and all the exterior shots show them bouncing around in moon-like conditions. In the scene early on when the drug dealer Sean Connery caught was in the floating prison cell, it says on it "No Artificial Gravity", indicating that the base had some sort of artificial gravity working.
Though I would agree that the reason the base had artificial gravity was it would have been far too costly and cumbersome to have everybody floating around on wires.
One of the practical aspects of shotguns in a vaccum-based mining colony is that shotguns, while having a very powerful and lethal payload, will not penetrate as nearly as much as a pistol or a rifle. You wouldn't want a stray bullet from a hi-powered rifle to go through a wall and decompress an entire section of the space station. (As in the climactic gun battle--which basically took place in a greenhouse/glass atrium.)
"She thinks she's a mystery to all/ but I know what's behind those eyes."
I've only seen parts of this movie ages ago. IIRC there is one scene in which a shotgun is used during EVA. This would not be possible as shotguns require oxygen to function.
shareI don't believe guns don't work in vacuum. But if this is the case, then it would be very easy to modify a bullet to fire in the vacuum of space. With a bit of remixing solid rocket propellant could be used. Or peroxide could be added provide oxygen to the burn/detonation process.
shareThe Soviet had a space-based anti-satellite gun, so, yeah. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almaz
shareIt wasn't an anti-satellite gun, it was a point defense gun designed to protect the installation in the event of war from attempts to shoot it down with missiles or to board/ram it some how.
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yeah it's possible. They aren't firing 17th century muskets they are firing modern shotguns which use smokeless powder which has all the gases it needs to explode and propel the pellets out of the gun.
"I've only seen parts of this movie ages ago. IIRC there is one scene in which a shotgun is used during EVA. This would not be possible as shotguns require oxygen to function."
They WOULD function.
But in reality, the knockback would be overwhelming for the user.
Yeah, shotguns do work in a vaccum alright. However, in zero grav there'd be a pretty pokey recoil, I should think.
I also think there'll be some sort of basic ballistic weapon around for a very long time. They already have been. Let's face it, we still sometimes use pointy bits of metal and they've been a very effective anti-personnel weapon since we first found metal; before that it was stone and before that, wood. So we know pointy works; and we sure know that firearms work even better.
In fact, to pick up on someone else's post, the relatively short range from a shotgun or rifle might be a great asset in a confined space; a concentrated beam-effect weapon would theoretically fire forever if the target was missed. That could be a problem, especially if something important happened to get in the way- you could fire at someone, miss, and the beam would go sailing on and hit some life-support equipment.
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All the gases needed to make a gun go boom are in the smokeless powder.
shareGunpowder is a monopropellant, which just means it's all self-contained and doesn't need anything beyond itself to burn. It isn't actually oxygenated as such, it relies on potassium nitrate to oxidize.
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Beam weapons wouldn't fire forever unless they had a infinite power source, the energy would eventually dissipate. Even in space.
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Okay, let me clarify: a beam weapon would fire forever until it encountered something sufficient to interact with which would absorb its energy.
Given that certain energy sources in the universe have been travelling for many, many millions of years without dissipating to any appreciable degree, I think we can assume that a beam weapon's output could be rattling around in the cosmos for a long enough time for it to be largely irrelevant to whatever it was we were originally aiming for and why we did so.
Scientifically, that's not quite "forever", true, but that's a bit of a nitpick in this context, surely? ;)
You're thinking of radiated energy. A beam would loose focus with distance and would eventually disperse to the point of nothingness. You would have a 10nm laser at the focusing lens, but by the time that it had traveled any appreciable distance it would be much wider and much weaker.
Shine a flashlight at a near wall and a far wall and you will see that the image on the far wall will be larger and darker. It's the same principle even with lasers.
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I'll bow to your knowledge on this one; I'm afraid I'm something of an amateur scientist and have to admit I don't know about the subtleties between the different forms of energy. I wasn't aware that lasers can lose focus too.
That said, lasers can and do work effectively over- at least to us- rather large distances, surely? I know that laser weapons with enough power to take out any threats militarily aren't practical yet, but let's imagine a high-tech, compact yet powerful hypothetical future one capable of blasting a hole in a person. Even if such a weapon were to exist, wouldn't it still be more dangerous to fire one of these in the relatively closed surroundings of the colony than a shotgun which loses its effective range much more quickly?
Shotguns worked perfectly. I like the fact that they weren't running around with phasers or crap like that.
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Wouldn't be too surprising. It seems to me that the sound effects guys (Foley artists, I think, in filmspeak) use a pretty standard library of sound effects over many films and many years.
I'm a bit of an Aliens-geek, and I've noticed the sounds of the colony doors opening and the Sulaco's dropship doors opening have been used again and again in many films over the years.
great thread, genuine discussion and i don't think anyone has been called a retard once.
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dl on AVP:R I could watch my own rape on film and enjoy it more than this.
must make a comment on this thread... actually, some sort of energy beam, used as a weapon would be an incredible waste of energy... especially in the atmosphere... and besides... shotguns make people bleed... LASER might cauterize the wound ;)
shareInteresting idea- that a laser might cauterize the wound. To my knowledge, no living thing has been hit yet by a laser capable of drilling a hole through them since most lasers in use today are pretty weak. If I'm wrong and that has indeed happened, can somebody shed some light on what happens? Genuine curiosity-led question, BTW.
I am led to understand that CO2 lasers are the current badasses of the optical cutting world, being capable of slicing and dicing thick metal plate with ease. Whilst I assume that being involved in an unplanned human/CO2 laser interface situation might result in lost body parts and a whole world of excruciating pain, I am genuinely interested in the question of whether having something like a hand sliced off by laser causes less physical damage than, say, a circular saw?
I mean, I'm led to believe that the cleaner a cut is, the better- a cut from a scalpel or razor blade may be deep, but apparently it's better for the body to cope with than a cut from a jagged-edged thing, because it doesn't tear up the tissues quite so badly. Also, so I hear, it's much less painful too, 'cause it isn't mauling nerves quite so much- it's so subtle that, in some cases, people who are stabbed by very sharp knives don't even know it until some time later; sometimes only when they start to lose too much blood and feel woozy.
So I would think that a laser- especially one which can trace cut-lines on a piece of steel that are intensely focussed within a tiny fraction of a millimetre- would make a very, very clean cut on body tissue.
But is much heat radiated out from a laser and if it were hot enough to sever tissue could it also be hot enough to cauterize it?
Just a thought, like.
I'm willing to be that somebody has tried these things on animals and that at there has been one or two human related accidents.
Lasers are used all the time in medicine. Though mostly not for slicing. The use them to trim very small amount of people's retina to correct certain eye problems and they use them to burst the dark masses that cause birth marks. There are loads of applications.
I don't think that they use them for cutting due to the nerve damage that they could cause. If it's hot enough to cauterize then it's hot enough to damage the surrounding tissue and the blistering that it causes might also be an infection risk. Of course I'm not a doctor and I might be completely wrong on this.
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I think we need either a laser expert or a medical expert on this. Or preferably, a medic who uses lasers.
Then again, maybe megabuck-earning plastic surgeons don't regurlarly trawl the Outland pages of the IMDB, having better, possibly Nip/Tuck like shenanigans to be involved with. Still, surely there are some physicists or at least laser-hobbyists (those that actually make their own lasers from scratch, not the kit-buyers- I know they exist; I've seen the websites) who can shed some light on this?
Enquiring minds want to know...
How about this, traditional methods are more cost effective when it comes to straight forward cutting. Lasers only come into their own for specialist roles such as eye surgery where incredibly fine movements and burns are needed or where you want to go through one material and into another based on things such as heat absorbency..
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I recall an SF writer - might have been Harry Harrison - speculating that high-powered laser rifles would have to be used in a sweeping way, rather than a single shot way. If used against a single target, you'd want to really incapacitate him, not just punch a clean, tiny hole through him, so the beam would have to be swept side to side or up /down to maximise tissue damage and the onset of death.
shareA better method would be a pulse laser, rather than one concentrated burst in a tiny area, you'd have multiple bursts each slightly off center in a different direction. So you'd get a concentrated burst of hits over an area maybe an inch across in a split second. It would be the equivalent of using a high caliber low speed bullet rather than low caliber high speed bullet (Like an AK-47 compared to an M-16)
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