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visionaryprime · 7 years

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Regarding The Last Knight

It’s pretty obvious from what we saw in Transformers: The Last Knight that their Earth is well and truly fucked. You don’t even really need to see this scene featuring Hong Kong, a city of seven million permanent residents, being scraped away by Cybertron’s anchors, to know it. Watching the anchors make a mess out of southern England hammers home the point pretty well on its own. However, what the Hong Kong scene does is indicate just how widespread the damage is━━at a bare minimum, we now have a swathe of destruction running from Southeast Asia to Western Europe, where the sky has been replaced by a million-dollar view of an alien planet and if you’re really unlucky your corpse may hitch a ride hundreds of kilometres from your home on one of those titanic scrapey bits.

I wanted to know exactly how fucked we all are... so I put together a loose projection of the contact zone, assuming that Hong Kong and Stonehenge are the two farthest-flung locations affected by the anchors.

Due to the distances involved it is most likely that the path would fall across the Asian continent; to go the other way Cybertron would have had to sort of wrap around two thirds or more of Earth’s circumference. Besides which, this is the more costly version in terms of human loss anyway.

What’s under that red smear are some of the most extensive and closely-linked population centers in the world, nine of the top twenty largest urban agglomerations, and about four, four and a half billion people. It’s three of the top five manufacturing countries (China, Germany, India), the top two agricultural producers (China and India again), and six of the top ten oil-producing nations in the world. It’s London and Hong Kong, two of the top four financial world centers. It’s the European Union, which in 2016 accounted for nearly a quarter of the global gross domestic product, and the headquarters of all but two of the specialized agencies of the United Nations.

Thankfully, most of the contact zone is continental crust, meaning that Earth might not suffer apocalyptic tectonic reactions. Continental crust is much thicker than oceanic crust: here’s a map showing relative thicknesses. The vast majority of the land in the contact zone is 30km thick or more, with the Himalayas and Tibetan Plateau being an average of 70km thick. The anchors are unlikely to breach the Earth’s crust even on oceanic crust━━ I found this forum thread estimating the size of body you might need to penetrate through to the mantle, but that requires a very large mass (km in diameter) traveling at typical meteorite impact speeds (which Cybertron clearly was not). We also clearly cannot use the Giant Impact Hypothesis as a base, because then the movie would have ended in a giant ball of molten rock and everyone we know and love would be dead. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Living under the anchors is not an immediate death sentence━━the events of TLK establish that the anchors were stopped after an initial period of activity of maybe a couple of hours. If we make an arbitrary estimate based on the scene just before the Ignition Chamber assault where the Autobots outrun the anchors dropped around Stonehenge and say they’re traveling at approximately 40km per hour (based on the anchors being shown to outpace the humans on the ground, but not by much), this gives us paths of about 80km in length. Looking at the anchors, the width could vary from 500m to ten kilometres━━enough to wipe out not just Hong Kong but a lot of Shenzhen and Guangzhou as well. And, as we know, the anchors fall in clumps. Earth is undergoing terraforming on a massive scale. Dust fills the atmosphere. If you’re still alive under the anchors, you’re breathing through dust masks and shirt sleeves and squinting into the darkness.

Even after the anchors stop moving, the ground is alive with tremors. The main tectonic region in Asia is the collision boundary between the Eurasian and Indo-Australian plates, which drives orogeny from China to Iran. Seismically active zones further west exist in the Anatolian, Arabian, Aegean and African plate boundaries, comprising fault zones which have produced destructive earthquakes in the last decade as well as throughout human history. Earthquakes occur as a release of pressure built up over time within the Earth’s crust. We know because of fracking and underground nuclear tests that they can be triggered by outward stimuli. The majority of earthquakes are small, occurring deep in the crust and over short, local fault zones. Shallow earthquakes━━the sort that would undoubtedly be triggered by the scraping anchors━━ can be highly destructive even on short faults. The danger, given the widespread pounding the Asian continent is receiving on this model, is that faults all along the plate boundaries may rupture in one go. The Karakoram Fault System is one of the largest in Asia, at around 800km long, debate pending; a single fault rupture that long could produce a single earthquake of magnitude 9.

In the context of an externally triggered seismic event crossing the Eurasian continent, this would likely be just a small part of the destruction. The shaking would be recorded and potentially felt worldwide. Tsunami production would depend on two factors: whether the seismic activity extended to large offshore faults such as the Sunda Trench, and what happens when the anchors make landfall in the ocean. The former would produce regular tsunamis, up to 30m high; the latter, depending on how the anchors act, could produce tsunamis with extremely high initial wave heights. Here’s a case study in the Chicxulub meteorite impact: our anchors are (mostly) smaller and approaching at much slower speeds, but the water in the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea is much deeper, and megatsunami formation is primarily dependent on water displacement. These things considered, I wouldn’t say it’s out of the question to expect one or two initial wave heights of maybe a half kilometre or more.

Within a week or so, the dirt and dust particles kicked up by the moving anchors will begin dissipating into the atmosphere. A dark cloud spreads out from Cybertron, bringing severe electrical storms in its wake. When Mt Tambora erupted in 1815, the following year was known as the Year Without A Summer due to the atmospheric cooling precipitated by volcanic ash. Again, the Chicxulub impact caused similar atmospheric cooling for ten years or more. Here, we could be looking at decades of low temperatures. I don’t understand climatology enough to say how this affects weather patterns worldwide; I just know that it will.

Small chunks of the moon periodically rain down on Earth for the next few decades; the rest became either asteroids or exoplanet food.

On the bright side, places like the Americas are relatively unharmed. The USA, Canada, Mexico, Australia, Brazil and Argentina are well-placed to benefit from the recovery effort━━because there will be one; humans don’t tend to give up easily. Japan, Korea, the Philippines and Indonesia are far enough removed from the devastation to survive, though parts of the latter two may be affected by teletsunamis given their places in Southeast Asia. As long as Cybertron doesn’t knock us out of our orbit too badly, things will eventually stabilise. We’ll have faced the worst extinction event in our planet’s history, but like all others before, life finds a way.

Politically, the world will be in shock. NATO and the EU are dead in the water. The Arab League and Russia are floundering. The rest of the world experiences the economic depression of a lifetime. There are food shortages worldwide; transport systems crash as oil becomes a much rarer commodity. Globally dominant companies disintegrate en masse. New ones replace them. There might be a wave of popular revolutions taking advantage of the chaos; there might be military coups and dictatorships established. The possibilities are really endless.

TL;DR━━ we’re fucked, but not as badly as we could have been.

#maccadam #tf5 #transformers the last knight #maccadams #「FILE //: out of faith」༗ ╍ ❛ MANU DOES THINGS. ❜#「FILE //: verse」♔ ╍ ❛ TYRAN. ❜#「FILE //: data reference」♔ ╍ ❛ WORLDBUILDING. ❜#spoilers

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entergamingxp · 4 years

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Hunt: Showdown review – a sweaty, stinking, cat-and-mouse masterpiece • Eurogamer.net

A rough beast indeed, Hunt: Showdown, slouching toward the daylight after a couple of years in Early Access. A peculiar chimera of genres – survival horror, battle royale, boss rush shooter, insect, demon, human being. It resembles Far Cry 2 at a glance, all flammable shades of brown, but it moves more like PUBG, shunning the clear ground, ears pricked for proximity chat. It has the vivid markings of a Monster Hunter, but those patterns are really just for show, like the eye-whites of a killer whale – masking the gunsights protruding from its abdomen. You certainly wouldn’t call it handsome, but you can’t seem to drag your gaze away. How did something so… multiple ever survive the evolutionary process? But alas, you’ve looked for too long. It knows you’re there now. No, don’t try to run! The creature’s girth is deceptive. We’ll have to see if we can bring it down.

If Hunt: Showdown’s unusual – and, as it turns out, fantastically exhilarating and engrossing – mixture of inspirations has a single guiding principle, it’s that predators become prey. It’s a game in which stepping on a twig while backstabbing a zombie can get you shot from a hundred yards off, and the ceremony of a bossfight offers zero defence against the player lobbing dynamite through a window.

In Hunt, you play patron to a “Bloodline” of bounty hunters, all seeking their fortune amid the rot of a 19th century Louisiana that has been overrun by demons. Your task, in the main bounty-hunting mode, is to find the lair of a legendary monster within one of two festering open world maps, using your sorcerous Dark Vision to chase swirling blue sparks to clues that narrow down the search area. Having slain and exorcised the abomination, you must collect a bounty and head to a map exit to complete the match. Along the way you’ll fight or avoid myriad lesser horrors – from vanilla zombies who can be treated as speed bumps, providing you don’t overlook the ones waving cleavers or torches, to chunkier threats such as the Meathead, a one-armed juggernaut that sees by way of a slithering entourage of leeches.

Hunt: Showdown

Developers: Crytek

Publisher: Crytek

Platform: PC, Xbox One, PS4 (reviewed on Xbox One)

Availability: 18th February 2020

You’ll earn both character XP and coin for slaying these minor foes, but every bullet or firebomb wasted on a demon dog (and every bandage applied to your shredded flesh after discovering that the dog has friends) is one less to pit against the boss itself. There are three of them, right now – you never know which you’re up against before starting a match, so it’s wise not to specialise too much when equipping guns and consumables. The Butcher is the soft option, for all its bulk: a porcine bully armed with a flaming hook, easily slaughtered providing you keep your distance. The knife-wielding Assassin is wilier, dissolving itself into a cloud of flies in order to course through the crevices of barns and windmills; it can even clone itself to distract you, like a lizard discarding its tail. Worst of all, though, is the Spider, a viciously nimble wall-crawler that always seems to be behind or above you, its rattling feet setting your hairs on end. Many hours after first killing one, I still feel the urge to stand on a chair while fighting it.

Thankfully, bosses never leave their lairs, so you can always hurry outside to patch yourself up, scrounge some ammo or take potshots at your quarry through a gap in the boards. Except that you can’t, actually, because the sting in Hunt’s tail is that it’s a competitive affair. There may be other players in the vicinity – as many as a dozen per match, questing in groups of up to three. Enemy players aren’t marked on the HUD or map screen to begin with, but it’s easy to give yourself away while thinning the NPC herd, and as in Turtle Rock’s sadly forgotten Evolve, each map is awash with nefarious ambient warning systems such as patches of broken glass, clattering chains and flocks of tetchy crows. The bossfights, naturally, tend to involve a lot of telltale screaming and explosions, and once you’ve killed the boss, you must banish it to obtain the bounty – a two-minute exorcism ritual that flags your position on the map, giving rivals all the time they need to close in and set up a perimeter. Bounties themselves are visible on the HUD along with their carriers, which often makes exfiltration the most arduous part of the match.

It’s a recipe, all told, for two kinds of dread. On the one hand, there’s the revulsion you feel toward creatures who used to be regular folks and animals: the women whose chests have split to reveal mosquito hives, grimacing at you sideways; the men who resemble giant, groaning lumps of decaying coral. This is a fear that abates as you play match after match, memorising AI aggro ranges and unlocking new gear and skills such as blunt impact resistance or faster crossbow reloads. Beyond the first 10 Bloodline levels, hunters and their gear are lost forever when slain but, as in they are just as swiftly replaced, with one free greenhorn recruit available on the roster screen between matches (you can also buy “Legendary” hunters with real money, but the perks are strictly cosmetic). You learn not to grow too attached, though you can always extract from a round early if you feel totally outgunned.

Which means that it’s all about the second kind of dread, the all-pervading, remorseless awareness that at any given moment, somebody could be aiming a gun at you, somewhere out there in the sweaty blur of undergrowth, reading your position and direction in birdsign, the splashing of your feet (why on earth did you take that shortcut through the swamp?) and the hungry twitching of nearby zombies. It’s a horror I can only liken to horror of an omniscient god – and it’s alleviated only by the sheer malice you feel when you hear a cough, turn slowly and spy another player galloping through a cornfield with their microphone on.

You may have felt similar emotions while playing venerable MMO shooter DayZ – Hunt’s achievement, perhaps, is to take that game’s ethos of treachery and paranoia and pack it into rounds of 30-40 minutes apiece, with a clear, overarching rhythm of exploration, battle and escape. That’s 30-40 minutes at the outside: if there are 12 players in the field, it’s not uncommon to bump into rivals within the first few minutes. If you’re luckier, you might be the one player who doesn’t bumble into that gunfight and wind up all on your lonesome, farming the map’s denizens at your leisure. But of course, you can never guarantee that you’re the last person standing. If you plan on going loud it’s safest to pair up, as hunters can revive one another at the cost of the permanent loss of a health bar segment.

That fear of being watched teaches you to savour the devious intricacy of Hunt’s environment design. Every feature of this benighted landscape is the basis for some kind of tactical dilemma. Buildings harbour ammo or health refills, but that also means you’re more likely to encounter other players there. Randomly applied misty or night time conditions lessen the anxiety when breaking cover, but dial it up again when defending a lair during the banishment – it’s wise to douse the lanterns before risking a peek out the window. There are times when you might want to create a noise, perhaps tripping a generator to drown out any sounds you make while sneaking up on a camper.

Boss lairs, especially, assume a twofold existence in your mind. There’s the trepidation of invading them, particularly when battling the Spider, whose form – like the Xenomorph – is hard to make out against thickets of rusting farm tools and the entangled shadows of beams. And then there’s the process of defending them during or after a banishment, whereupon you become the lurking terror, reading the minds of invaders. A woman’s yell downstairs indicates that one nearby player has roused a zombie’s wrath. A creak above suggests that another – allied to the first? – is tip-toeing across the tiles. A distant burst of cawing reveals that a third is approaching from the north. If the dice fall your way, they might take out the one on the roof while you pounce on the first player below. But you’re not really worrying about players 1, 2 and 3. The player you’re worried about is player 4, the one you haven’t detected yet, the one you must always assume is there.

I’m not sure I’ve played a multiplayer game that breeds such tension since Rainbow Six: Siege. Hunt’s drawback, if you can call it that, is that it doesn’t offer much alternative to that tension. You can’t solo the game’s maps, and while there’s a boss-less Quickplay option, this isn’t quite the emergency release valve for pent-up jitters it sounds like. Rather, it’s a very nifty extension of the character levelling system.

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In Quickplay, you’re handed a random, cursed hunter and must track down three energy sources in order to activate a mystic wellspring and escape the map. Where in bounty hunt, new guns can only be looted from dead hunters, in Quickplay you’ll find exotic weapons dotted all over. You’ll also acquire a random skill for every energy source you tap. The result is a custom-created hero, endowed with choice gear and abilities that might be beyond your current Bloodline rank. Survive the ordeal, and you can recruit that character to your roster. The catch is that only one hunter can activate the wellspring and escape – and there’s nothing like the rage when you’ve cobbled together your very own Van Helsing and somebody yanks the rug away with an exploding crossbow bolt.

Long in the brewing – it began life at Crytek USA as a kind of Grimm fairytales spin on Left 4 Dead – Hunt: Showdown cuts a strange, skulking figure alongside the multiplayer shooters that dominate discussion today. It’s resolutely one-note, though each bounty hunt throws up a variety of deadly surprises, and profoundly unforgiving. Beyond that 10 level grace period it has no real interest in making you feel at home. That sheer impassivity, however, stokes emotions you simply won’t find in most multiplayer games. The way your pulse jumps when you catch the echo of gunfire. The bile in your throat as you read the Spider’s motions through the woodwork of a barn. And above all, the horrible triumph when a flock of birds take off nearby, and you aim your shotgun just as somebody peers around a wall.

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/02/hunt-showdown-review-a-sweaty-stinking-cat-and-mouse-masterpiece-%e2%80%a2-eurogamer-net/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=hunt-showdown-review-a-sweaty-stinking-cat-and-mouse-masterpiece-%25e2%2580%25a2-eurogamer-net

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