Why are their guns so bad?

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Those Morita rifles have grenade launchers on them too.
However, did you notice how it took 6-12 MI soldiers utterly emptying their magaizines to take down one bug... but just one military scientist can kill it outright with a single burst to the nerve stem?

The weapons are fine. The soldiers are pants!

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It depends on the troop, regular infantry like the ones in the Klendathu battle take 20 of them together to kill 1 bug whereas elite infantry like Watkins killed like 50 bugs by himself before he blew up. Carl, aka NPH, proved if you fire a burst at the bug's nerve stem its dead right away. Its just harder to hit when the bug is coming at you, and for regular infantry its even harder since their aim sucks.

Also I'm not sure if you caught on, but almost all aspects of the infantry vs Bugs are supposed to be a satire of the efficiency of military tactics. Standing in a line while you fire at the enemy, ground invasion without any air support, wearing 100 lbs of armor that seems to do jack to help minimize injury, etc.


If Ari Gold saw Chappie he would say:
"Chappie makes Elysium look like Citizen ƒvcking Kane"

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Why are their guns so bad?

This movie is a huge metaphor. Sadly, it's about people like you, who are prisoners of the profane plane, too traumatized to process the bigger picture, the sacred plane.

The human army in Starship Troopers is - for the lack of a better word, retarded! As inept the Marines on the ground are at killing bugs - even though Doogie Houser explains in a video how easy it is to kill a bug by aiming at his nervous system, just as mindless is the Fleet up in the sky - huge spaceships crashing into each other, incapable of avoiding slow balls of fire farted by the bugs miles below them. You'd think they'd be smart enough to detect those huge balls of fart moving towards them, and maneuver away from them. But no, they clash and crash the battle cruisers into each other, like headless chickens...

The metaphor that is created here, is that the Army is a bunch of immatures, being sent to die, by the system. Those marines unloading their weapons into the bugs, are no smarter than the kids on Tv, crushing bugs on the street, and wielding the guns given to them by the army.
The soldiers are traumatized kids! That's the metaphor of the story. Rico's parents' death is trauma.

The system is designed to traumatize the people, through war. Look at Rasczak and the other officer at the airport. They are both missing parts of their bodies! Rico , Dizzy, Carmen, Doogie Houser, they all lose a part of them, even before going to war: their families, crushed by that slow moving asteroid that inched its way through our solar system.
You'd think that a civilization that's capable of traveling across the galaxy, would be able to detect and destroy an asteroid that's a bit larger than a battle cruiser.

The fact that that asteroid managed to hit Earth, should allow you to realize that the Sky Marshals allowed it to hit Earth, to traumatize the population.
When two dogs fighting among them, encounter a wolf, they become allies, to fight off the wolf. This is a well known mechanism of the human societies: to eliminate internal enemies, you need an external enemy. This way, people will not question you exploiting them, because they're busy fighting what they perceive to be a bigger threat.

The Arachnids are located at the other end of the galaxy, it is obvious for anyone with a mature intellect that they have no interest in attacking Earth.

The marines unloading their guns into the bugs, is a metaphor for castration. Their guns are their impotent penises, engaged in a gang rape-like ritual, against a scapegoat, an illusion, an avatar. The real enemy is the Sky Marshal hidden in a closet in some office on Earth, sending them to die, so that they can never get power.
Access to power is given after you serve in the army. But the war kills you, and your friends, and your teacher, and everybody you loved, and leaves you traumatized, dead inside, shocked, and alone, and with parts of your body missing, if you miraculously survive the slaughter.
Rico is mindlessly repeating the mantra of the citizen making the security of the system his highest priority, as Dizzy's coffin is discarded into the abyss.

The purpose of the army is to destroy you, so that you never get to exercise political power! That's why their guns are so bad. They are designed to get them killed as fast as possible.

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i'll answer you with what i think...

we see the humans have a huge fleet, with fighters capable of carpet-bombing bug swarms and guns capable of blowing apart a huge asteroid in just one shot... the mobile infantry also has weapons like a nuke launcher and that gun at the end of the film that blows up a mountain. so why do most troopers use the assault rifle?

well, because if the federation was interested in ending the war quickly, then they'd be able to develop a better one pretty quickly. but they aren't. the federation is a fascist government and one of the ideal end goals of a fascist state is that of perpetual conflict - one that isn't any threat to the existence of the state. this is because a perpetual conflict encourages a militaristic atmosphere and also emphasizes that a man's (and in this film, a woman's) most important role is to be a soldier. the arachnids, being literal insects, represent the ideal enemy for a constant war. they can't build a fleet and really menace earth, they can only hurl rocks into space, and that gets under control within a couple weeks (at most) after buenos aires. the federation needed an enemy for its big war machine, and the bugs were a perfect fit.

baby can you dig your man?
he's a righteous man.

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But, in real life, we do have massive aircraft carriers, intercontinental missiles and atomic bombs, yet guess what the army gaves to privates when they go to war?

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Klendatheu was a massacre, 300,000 casualties. Nightbattle, with large numbers of untested marines shooting willy nilly.
It seemed the Marines got better engaging the bugs and killing them with better efficiency.

The instructional video with Doogie Howser seemed to indicate this.

Although their defense of the outpost was a loss, they still had a much better kill ratio by then.

It was frustrating to watch their starships battle formations in orbit. They bunched their ships together. Got attacked by the spores... and in the following battles it seemed their ships were packed just as tightly together. Leading to more massacre.

Perhaps Doogie had his limitation with intelligence.






I couldn't believe when I read his filmography that he played a toilet (no joke) in According to Jim

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They can kill them with those guns, but only by shooting a nerve stem so small that you virtually require hand to hand combat with those things. It is almost as though the mobile infantry are part of some Malthusian project to reduce the surplus human population. Rico with his low math score and civilian though apparently wealthy parents might be an ideal candidate for removal through social engineering.
You would think questions would be asked about their poor weaponry, but this does not seem to be a society in which awkward questions are seriously posed.

"Chicken soup - with a *beep* straw."

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