Why not just nuke the ships? I agree that would have long term detrimental effects on our environment but they had already nuked Houston and at that point they were going to nuke the rest of the ships so why throw that plan out? At the time it definitely had a higher probability of success than what they went with (just send more fighter jets with inferior firepower up)
shareI haven't seen the film in awhile, but iirc, the general said that they had installed a nuclear warhead on the craft that Jeff Goldblum was in. I think they set it off as they were re-entering the atmosphere.
sharebecause, they didn't "need" nukes, with the shields down, conventional arms worked fine, after all, single missile explosion took down a 15 mile wide Destroyer
shareActually they didn’t, the plan only worked because Quaid kamikazed himself, they didn’t know that would work. The plan to take down the ship with conventional missiles was failing miserably
sharenope, the very first missile to enter the ship completely destroyed it
shareUh no they were completely out of missiles, the alien ship was about to blow Area 51 but then quaid decided to sacrifice himself and that’s what blew the ship up. However they had no idea at the time that was going to work. Did you even pay attention?
shareQuaid went kamikaze because his last missile wouldn't fire. Had he been able to fire it, it may have been successful. So yes, one missile in the proper spot at the proper time could take down an entire destroyer.
shareRight but they didn’t know that would work. They had to have known that their entire firepower still would not have taken down the ship.
shareForky, you fail to understand that wasting hundreds of missiles on a city destroyer was not enough. The city destroyer over Area 51 was preparing to fire their primary weapon, and so the general ordered it disabled. None of the humans expected the entire city destroyer to erupt into flames when the crop duster guy managed to fly into the firing pin AT JUST THE RIGHT MOMENT WHEN IT WAS FIRING.
It was a SHEER FLUKE.
But this particular plan would require each of the city destroyers to fire their primary weapon and have a hotshot pilot launch a missile into the firing pin at EXACTLY THE RIGHT MOMENT.
That's how I see it, anyway.
i disagree, but thank you for explaining your view
sharealso, that's why General Grey said "tell em how to bring the sonsobitches down" a single conventional missile inside the firing door
shareHe was referring to Quaid flying his jet into the ship when they were firing their primary weapon. If this is a troll job by you then please stop
shareI stopped trying to justify the details after it was shown the Aliens were using the TCP/IP protocol which allowed Golblum to inject a computer virus into their alien network.
shareExplosions don't work how you think they do... but movie explosions are an exception.
Setting a nuke off on the surface of a giant flying ship is like setting a firecracker off on your palm. It stings, but it doesn't do much damage. Now close your hand and set that same firecracker off and you'll blow your hand apart. An explosion is just rapidly expanding air, we actually detonate nukes several meters above the ground in order to maximize the destruction to surrounding buildings.
Of course in movies explosions act differently. Movie Nukes could probably take out a flying saucer and have no radiological damage... but I think the director wanted a Death Star tail pipe moment.
No need, the mothership was providing power and shielding to all destroyers and fighters below. David spotted this, scrambled their signal, which helped our people actually damage and take down the destroyer over area 51. All the other destroyers all over the world were disabled when the mothership was destroyed. They just dropped out of the sky.
shareThey didn’t know destroying the mothership would destroy all the other ships. Also a nuke would have done far more damage than the standard missiles they were using and I’ll say again: they were willing to use nukes earlier so what changed?
shareThey used the nuke as a last resort because the aliens were revealed to have shields impervious to any other type of attack. If that nuke proved to be strong enough to be the only thing that could shoot down the aliens, they would've nuked all those ships. The nuke was seen to have zero effect on the craft, so that idea was instantly abandoned, as the price was too high and there was no point.
And at the last attack, they couldn't nuke areas 51 obviously, and they hoped fighter jets were enough to shoot the destroyer down once it is without its shields. The jets were not enough, but they were out of time for any other type of attack. Once Russel Casse obliterated it by blocking it's main gun while it was shooting, they spread the word on how to kill them for good. Which was, of course, not needed because they fell down from the sky like bricks.
Just look at the size of that ship, any idiot can see that a standard missile isn’t going to be able to take it down. And they didn’t know Quaids maneuver would even work
shareThey didn't know about Casse's maneuver at all.
As i said, they can't nuke Area 51, and the first time since the beginning of alien invasion, they could actually damage the alien forces. All out attack on the destroyer was their only chance. They may not even have access to nuclear arsenal at this point, but that wouldn't have done them any good anyway.
Once again, you are complaining for the sake of complaining. I haven't seen a more useless person in these boards than you. And to think you have thousands and thousands of such useless comments posted here, you must have no life. You do one thing and still manage to fail at it. So sad.
They had access to nuclear arsenals just a few hours earlier so that point is BS
I said before they didn’t know Quaids maneuver would work, that was just pure luck that it did
They should have realized that a ship that big regular missiles wouldn’t make much of a dent, they were better off taking their chances with the nuke then just staying down in Area 51 until the radiation leveled off.
Now you are resorting to personal insults because you know that you’re wrong and you are cornered. You need to grow up and get over it, kid.
"As i said, they can't nuke Area 51"
"They had access to nuclear arsenals just a few hours earlier so that point is BS"
MCU497, I think mrbnk means that they couldn't risk using a nuke on an important military site, especially one that also became one of the last pockets of human resistance against the invaders, because they'd be destroying themselves as well.
"They should have realized that a ship that big regular missiles wouldn’t make much of a dent, they were better off taking their chances with the nuke then just staying down in Area 51 until the radiation leveled off."
Considering what happened to the invaders' mothership when that one single nuke went off inside it, you'd be lucky to have ANY Area 51 left at all, irradiated or not.
Actually that doesn’t add up because the aliens didn’t start sending the ship to Area 51 until they realized that the humans were organizing an attack, so if they hadn’t organized the attack then the ship wouldn’t have been on the way over therefore nukes would have been an option.
So the question still remains: why use nukes before but not after? They find out the nukes won’t penetrate the shields but now the shields are down. I realize it’s a risk but they already nuked Houston so they were pretty much already committed
That does not add up? Lol. Child, you're basically a chatbot. They didn't use nukes because they would also be destroyed. No point in arguing with you because it won't "add up" or "register" in your files.
shareThe aliens weren’t even coming to Area 51 until they realized they were about to launch an attack. Had they not tried to launch the attack the aliens wouldn’t have come to Area 51 and it would have worked. Again I’m not saying I’m in favor of nuking, I’m saying the film never provided a logical explanation as to why shooting the ship with very tiny missiles was the right option, nor have you
shareWe already did.
shareDid what?
shareExplain, but it obviously doesn't get through your badly coded algorithms.
shareNo you didn't, but it's OK, I don't expect someone with such a low IQ as yourself to be able to construct a coherent argument.
shareWe have explained these to you countless times, but your primitive programming can not comprehend. Sad, actually.
shareYou haven’t explained anything, all you’ve given me is a bunch of incoherent nonsense.
shareNo I have explained in a clear and simple fashion, but your AI is just lacking in terms of fundamental comprehension capabilities.
shareThe only thing that is lacking is your ability to form a coherent thought.
shareCoherent-incoherent lol. It’s been over two years, yet your programmers haven’t even been able to add another adjective!
You are not smart, nor you are capable. Someone has to burst the bubble, sorry.
Comical irony alert: Your own post is riddled with grammatical errors. Get fucked you loser.
shareThat’s as much effort as I’d exert for you, you incompetent robot.
shareYou just don't know proper English you brainless fucktard.
shareI do not need grammatical advice from incomplete chatbots.
shareBecause that would be stupid. It's one thing to use a nuclear weapon as a last resort, but once you've disabled the shields and can bring the ships down with conventional weapons, you'd be a fool to start detonating nukes all over the globe.
shareExcept standard missiles wouldn’t work as the movie clearly shows us
shareI gotta say... How do you know "they" did not? I mean, all attempts to attack the ships failed until one brave lunatic hit one in the big ray-gun. But... What happened after that is not detailed in the film. We see crashed alien ships in Egypt and Sydney and apparently all of the rest were dealt with. We do not know if some of the alien ships were brought down with small nukes, and I would not find it surprising. Air forces had been depleted. I guess stocks of missiles had probably been depleted as well. So even without shields, the alien ships would have been terribly difficult to destroy. Why wouldn't somebody decide to use a tactical nuke or two to knock the things down fast, before they turn out to have a backup command and control system and wipe us off the face of the Earth. Anyway, I always figured more of them would turn up in a couple of days anyway, cuz surely they had ships out harvesting materials off the outer moons or the Oort cloud.
Clearly these aliens had a terribly fragile "glass jaw" in their centralization and lack of imagination. I suppose they just never encountered a species that was capable of more than token resistance.
The other ships were disabled when the mother ship blew up, also if they hiked those ships the entire area would have been wiped out yet we see people witness the destruction of those ships
shareI always assumed the aliens just couldn't be so utterly pathetic that all of their ships just failed completely when the central control went down. Some additional attacks must have been required. If this is not true, the movie just takes on one more layer of stupidity, so I will assume this to be true in order to preserve my impression that, while silly, it was at least halfway decent.
Also, are you arguing that nukes ought to have been employed in the brief period between the time the alien shields failed and the time the ships dropped out of the sky? Nobody had time to re-arm. All the planes we saw were armed to fight through alien defenders. For all we know there were other non-fighters standing off with nukes, but there was not a lot of interval to use them unless the aliens did remain at least partially effective after the mother ship was blown up.
This movie was stupid to begin with so it’s not an issue given the universe that this film establishes.
And there were several stealth planes that were called back from Houston just hours ago, it certainly would have taken less time to get them up and running than it did to organize that entire attack which required people to come halfway across the world for (which is another layer of stupidity in this movie)
Y'know what my favorite thing about Independence Day is? It's the BBC audio drama ID-UK, which set the story up in imitation of The War of the Worlds broadcast and then continued with the action occurring in the UK--using the music and sound effects from the film.
Overall the film could have been Mars Attacks, as it should have been done, with all the graphic mayhem of the original card series. But it wasn't. And it Wasn't The War of the Worlds updated to the '90s either. It was just stupid but entertaining...enough.
Speaking as someone from engineering background and knows something about weapon systems. Not that they did not want to, but they couldn't. No missile for aerial targets has nuclear warheads. It takes few years of development and testing to do just that.
You might say:"Hey, why not fly above the thing and drop a nuclear bomb".
Well, that might not work as expected either, because nuclear bombs use a delayed fuse, so the launching platform could escape, the bomb might just bounce and roll off and destroy whatever underneath the target, but does nothing to the target in this case.
The literally used a nuclear missile in a previous scene.
shareThat one is for space, should be a ballistic missile.
shareThe missile wasn’t in space, it was over Houston.
shareYou are right, I forgot about that.
That looks like a cruise missile, but they are for ground targets, not so sure it would work for aerial targets.
"They didn’t know destroying the mothership would destroy all the other ships. Also a nuke would have done far more damage than the standard missiles they were using and I’ll say again: they were willing to use nukes earlier so what changed?"
I haven't seen this movie in years, but I never realized that when the mothership blew up in outer space that the other ships on earth blew up automatically. I always thought the military in other countries were told to shoot inside the center of the ship with a missile or something. The general did mention towards the end after the pilot sacrificed himself to notify to other countries how to take them down. Didn't he mention that? Or am I thinking of a different movie?
I remember the same. It would be a strange tactic by the aliens to destroy all ships at the same time when just one is hit lethally...
share