Ah my monthly Sci-Fi Sunday episode and a side of First Rule of Warfare. 22:29 "Afterall a simple stone arrowhead teleported into your supreme leaders head works wonders for changing his mind." 😂😂😂 Informative as always Isaac.
Since we're talking advanced technology, what's to say the Supreme Leader isn't some posthuman entity made of nano machines that'd simply expell the arrowhead and repair its head in seconds like a T1000?
@@DogFoxHybrid That may be why it's stone. This was essentially a warning shot. 'That time it was a simple piece of flint. Next time it might be a disassembly virus, or an EMP generator that affects an area roughly the size of a basketball, or the arrowhead is made of anti-matter. So do please return to the negociation table. We dislike being this dramatic about making our point.'
Stellaris has a doomsday device that causes every star in the galaxy to simultaneously go supernova. Activating it instantly wins the game for you. Everyone else will try very hard to stop you.
Way before stellaris, Spaceward Ho! Has an armageddon feature that the player can choose to set off that destroys half the stars in the galaxy. No one can stop you from using it. If you don’t like the results or even survive you can use it again and again until you are no more.
I had a kinda horrifying idea for a dark energy bomb, which would suddenly accelerate Hubble expansion in a volume by many orders of magnitude, disintegrating all matter within its radius.
A scaled back version might be able to isolate dangerous entities without killing them. It's nice to have a range of options rather than just kill everyone. It's not very useful as an actual weapon of war if everyone knows u can't use it without committing suicide(works fine as a deterrent). cool concept though as far as stupendously overkill superweapons go
Oh wow! I’ve always wondered about earth size/mass moons and what sort of conditions would be required for them to be habitable for modern earth life. And Isaac is releasing an episode on just that very subject *on my birthday*! Greatest birthday gift ever! I can’t wait!
@@davidroddini1512 Happy Birthday to my fellow brother from the Taurean Reconnaissance Force. Commander Arthur will grant us both a 3 day birthday leave but due to anomalies inherent in FTL travel, we've already enjoyed the party in a parallel timeline even though after we jumped out of warp we realized it hasn't happened yet.
I think you mean, unprovoked attack from Alderaan. It never happened, Alderaan was an inside job, the empire did nothing wrong, the Alderaanians deserved it.
Unprovoked? Someone didn't see Rogue One. The Princess of the planet was actively engaged in an assault against the Empire, got caught like 5 minutes later and used the classic Shaggy defense of "Wasn't me" to the man who literally watcher her fly off. The Royal Representative of the planet was literally engaged in spying and terrorism.
@@NaatClark There's a difference between 'this government official did something' and 'this planet's population did something.' _And_ Alderaan is ruled by an aristocracy, and Leia isn't even the head of her own House.
The Empire was right. They offered order and the common man was allowed to order his affairs and defend himself with personal weapons as he saw fit. The rebellion was a hobby of the incompetent wealthy.
Some of those superweapons are absolutely M.A.D., but I think my favorite is the Berserker Swarm. Why fight the enemy when you can just take them apart and build them into more useful stuff?
Samantha Carter once blew up a star (and the fleet surrounding it) by dropping an active Stargate in it, causing the sun to go supernova. For a brief moment she as an individual person achieved Kardeshev II, harnessing the entire output of a star as a weapon against her enemies.
I've found it a little ironic how one of the very earliest depictions of an O'Neil cylinder in science fiction ALSO also includes -- like 30 seconds later -- the very first depiction of a Colony Drop. Never forget: any spaceship, no matter how large, is just a badly designed missile with air conditioning.
The one that always sticks in my mind is at the end of E. E. Smith's "Skylark DuQuesne" where the "heroes" caused millions of suns, each being orbited by a planet where the "bad species" has evolved, to go nova because they were "irredeemable". Oh, and of course the end of Greg Bear's "Anvil of Stars" still haunts me to this day.
It's funny that you have mentioned gundam before on your space habitat videos....but you didn't mention the fact that one of the biggest atrocities in the series was one side of the war dropping an O'Neil cylinder on earth and craving a very big crater where Sydney Australia was along with a lot of other damage. In UC gundam they stayed dropping colonies with varied effects
It's one of the series trademarks. Just about every iteration has a special, unique Gundam for the pilot protagonist, a rival with a mask (initially) and a red robot, and some ungodly large space structure thrown at the planet.
Turning off EM forces holding matter together, is what Davros tried to do with his reality bomb. As a super weapon it reallly illustrates a lot of your points, because they had to get a 'planet engine' using several specific worlds plucked form time and space, so their gravity fields create an energy source to power the whole damn thing. There's an idea, out of the box sources of energy.
One fact of superweapons that was missed imo but has likely been covered is the fear factor being just so much more then a "normal" weapon. Sure yeeting a few asteroids at a planet or a handful of RKMs will do the job for pennys on the dollar. But a sphere of anti-uranium the size of a moon that is set off nuke style and absolutely vaporizes not just the planet but the entire solar system while you televise it to your enemys survivors or your other enemys is one HELL of a message. And sometimes a message is far more valuable then a million cheaper weapons. I mean see the U.S nukeing japan as a perfect case in point. If we had stormed the island the casualtys could have been many thousands of times worse then the bombs caused. At least from our PoV. Im sure japan would argue otherwise, but the then "super weapon" had the intended result and more or less ended the war on that front by scareing the piss out of them in essence. Crimson worlds series had that as a weapon in it. And while wasteful i know i as a human would be scared shitless of the tentacle monsters of grixnax broadcasted that thing going off to us just before the super nova lit off in our skys and said you belong to us now. It would take the fight out of us before a shot was fired at least short term. Long term its going to have an extremely high chance to ensure everyone and their little dogs too look for the first chance to burry a knife in your back and off your race asap out of fear they are next.
And a good example of a unconventional super weapon *(SPOILERS)* since their attacks consisted of turning off/disrupting consciousness for a localized space, not blowing anything up
Don't forget the "Bring down the sky" DLC for Mass Effect 1, your favorite! As for ZPMs, (gonna steal the stargate term), I like to think of the Markers in Deadspace as ZPMs from hell. But one of the more confounding superweapon uses in gaming is in resident evil. The continued tolerance of the rest of the world to Umbrella's making bioweapons. Even if the general public doesn't know, governments have GOT to know what Umbrella Corps was doing under Racoon City. I don't get why Resident Evil didn't devolve into a war of the whole world versus Umbrella. I also don't get why the writers of Resident Evil never went into the non weapon related things Umbrella made, even the non weapon related things involved in war. Supposedly they're a Pharmacutical company that's highly regarded, so why don't they have the retail and commercial presence on the ground in Racoon City to show it. Moving back to the real world, I love using the following string of reasoning to disprove Marjorie Taylor Greene's Jewish space laser conspiracy theory; 1. Something of that size is not the sort of thing you can build quietly. It would be visible to EVERYONE in the sky while it was being built. Anyone with a backyard amateur telescope or a pair of binoculars could potentially spot it. 2. The Rothschilds are bankers, if bankers destroy large swaths of wilderness, they're not really gaining anything by doing so. You could imagine doing that to a small town or a neighborhood if you were really evil, and then blaming it on wildfires so that you can sell loans and insurance to the people there later. But there's no direct gain by doing so. You would have to work to recoup that loss and its not gueranteed. 3. If you really want to make money with a space laser, its in pushing spacecraft, not in setting virgin wilderness on fire. If you were the Rothschilds and you had a space laser, you'd be working with Elon Musk to sell tickets to the outer solar system to prospect for precious metals and set up colonies, then having people, governments and businesses pay for the privelage. But that's not what we see. We see massive wildfires, the kind that are easier to start with a careless use of pyrotechnics during a gender reveal party than with a space laser.
I mean, taking the whole 'MIRV'd nukes' idea to a logical maximum, let's look at antimatter. Let's assume you want to uniformly blanket an entire planet in nuclear fire, say, 1.7kt per square kilometer. About 40mg of antimatter would do that. You can probably fit a containment system, guidance, and reentry package into a 100-gram dart, each containing that 40mg. That totals up to about 20 tons of antimatter to uniformly toast an Earthlike world, and about 51,000 tons of delivery systems. Divide that across a fleet, and it's entirely conceivable that a fleet of, say, 500 small warships is more than capable of delivering Exterminatus to any world they choose, without even making too big a dent in their mass budget.
Happy G-Type Main-Sequence Star Day! If you have your finger over the button of a Super Weapon, I hope you can hold off long enough to grab a snack, sit down, and enjoy this video!
Every time you say, “Send in the murder bots“ I hear it in my head to the tune of song Send in the Clowns. Which means I picture the sad ironic twist at the end of the song, “Send in the murder bots… They’re already here“ sung by one lonely remaining murder bot from the last invasion.
Some (many) years ago, I read an article about the concept of "novaing". Basically, if you enriched the deep atmosphere of a gas giant with deuterium and detonated one (or many) nuclear warheads, you would cause a chain reaction that would sterilize everything up to the Kuiper belt.
Love that you referenced "The Gods Themselves" the moment I thought of it applying to what you were saying about harnessing other universes for energy.
Some crazy ideas: 1. piece of 'neutronium' extracted from neutron star and close to 'c' - to slow down it's natural detonation in relation to target 2. again small blackhole of precisely calculated mass and speed so it does 'airburst' of hawking radiation above hostile planet 3. fling brown dwarf to destabilize orbits and catapult target planet as rouge 4. aim quasar jet onto something 5. I loved Starcarrier ur-Shaddar approach: fling star huge star through Black Rosette - spacetime gateway created from collapsed 6 blue supergiants 6. 18:40 - nah, it was also used in Stargate ( improvised ), Andromeda ( Nova bombs - using dark energy to temporarily negate gravity within star ) and to extend Galactic Corps ( small starship called Trigger though the star under warp drive ) 7. anything that messes with Higgs field - dictates mass, mass dictates chemistry -> express option to turn everything to green goo; or strong nuclear force
I would like to type on behalf of Ambassador Alexei de Sadeski (played by Peter Bull) from the movie, Dr. Strangelove. He responded to the question with "It was to be announced at the Party Congress on Monday. As you know, the Premier loves surprises."
In the Wing Commander series, the Kilrathi (the baddies) developed a super weapon ship that would increase the gravity constant on a target planet for a partial second.
I came home from work frustrated today . Sitting in traffic didn’t help either- but I finally got home - showered n made dinner n played call of duty. Once bedtime was approaching I turn on my utube channel and click on Issac Arthur. So many episodes I miss🤦🏾♂️damn but I be busy. But this 1 I watched and really enjoyed!! Thanks Issac !! I luv SciFi !!
Regarding super-nukes, Teller (of the Teller-Ulam hydrogen bomb design) had noted any sufficiently large bomb wouldn't need to be on target to achieve desired effect of annihilating the enemy. Of course, in his case he was conceiving of 10,000 megaton doomsday bombs which could level New England, Germany or the Korean peninsula in one blast and blanketing the planet in apocalyptic-levels of fallout.The sort you use to either deter the enemy from using their doomsday devices or take them with you if you are about to lose.
A fission bomb big enough to strip a planet of life, even if it's mostly fusion boosted, would surely be quite noticeable for vast distances across the universe
hard disagree, thats an insignificant of power at interstellar scales, noticeable for thousands of lightyears sure, but... well .. the universe is billions of lightyears wide, and our galaxy is at least 120 thousand lightyears, we routine observe some binary star systems which output way more power than that when one is a white dwarf or neutron star and siphons off enough mass to have say a kilonova, so whilst detectable compared to background, it's not particularly a standout feature.
@@SpecialEDy it really wouldn't, that power out put is nothing compared to what gets routinely dumped out even relatively far from the galactic core, nevermind that the galactic core dumps orders of magnitude more power out than that on a second by second basis, the emission spectrum of such a nuclear detonation should predominate in gamma rays and x rays because most of it will not be absorbed and just spread out in a sphere as such, and this is not really distinguishable from what leaves the core, except to be orders of magnitude weaker, now sure, its it a noticable pulse, yes ive already said that, but in terms of energetic cosmic event, it really doesnt rank high.
interesting how you mentioned the concept of colony dropping but you didnt mention moble suit gundam, one of the first (and probably the most well known) cases of colony drops in popular media.
I've been watching since 2015. I'm a creationist but some of the concepts you cover I agree with and even enjoy the ones I don't. Either way you're a great person and it's so encouraging to see someone do what they love
After listening to science based content, do you ever question the literal narrative of creationism? Good for you that you consume media outside of your chosen dogma!!
You are thus not a creationist but share their scizophrenia religiosa. Massdelusion is the base of the grift. It’s only a grift. Good luck on your path to enlightment and education is your ticket.
@@gavinrush4995 concepts like black holes dark matter larger starts help me understand the sheer power of the creator of the universe. It puts into context the level of power and energy needed to even make just a sun let alone a galaxy.
@@gavinrush4995 no not question but solidify it. So while the literal says "God said let there be light" and I consider what I learned about light and the sun. It just makes me ponder about the scientific profess after he spoke.
Creationist in the sense that you just believe God created the universe, or Creationist in the sense that you think the world is 6000 years old? Because one is faith, and the other contradicts everything we've discovered about the universe.
"It's a reminder that subtle and clever use of force can be better than raw might." Yes, and on the other hand we have the "Disassemble a gas giant and several planets to create a gravity manipulator megastructure and then use it to destabilize the local star in such a way that it turns into the stellar equivalent of a flamethrower"...
18:34 Also, 'Look to Windward' by the late Iain M. Banks, in which the events of the plotline lead up to a memorial of the Culture supernova-ing an Idiran star
why would you give them a preset kill limit. That's dumb and also it's very difficult to confirm kills on a battlefield. Even more difficult on a battlefield with transhumans. Anyways u dont put a kill limit. u tell them to keep firing until the enemy is well & truly dead. Also robots are gunna be cheaper & faster to replace than humans whhile having a far higher K/D ratio
I thought you would've mentioned that episode of SG-1 where Sam supernova;d a star with the gate sent to an adress with the blackhole. Also the dimensional weapons in the Liu Cixin's Remembrance of Earth's Past
I would think that if you are powering a volley of missiles using a laser, and you want them to all hit at slightly different times, the most efficient way to do that would be to stack them all together in a bundle, then accelerate that bundle all to the minimum speed you want one of them to be, and then that one would detach from the front of the pack and move itself just slightly out of the way, while the beam pushes the rest a bit faster, and then the second one splits off, and so on, until only one is left accelerating.
USSC (United Spacefaring Species Council) member: "There are many ways to measure how advanced a species is: their architecture, art, philosophy, technology, weapons..." Somebody in the audience: "Weapons? Surely, nobody would concentrate all their efforts on advancing those..." Human just behind him: "And that's where you're wrong, buddy."
"I'm voting against activation of both _Project Streetlights_ and _Project Neighborhood_ . Planet crackers and nova weapons, fine; but weaponizing Sesame Street _and_ Mr Rogers is just beyond the pale!" -- from the _Behold Humanity_ series
It's been many years since I read the Dresden Files but wasn't it an isolated mega mansion full of vampires that he pulled the satellite down on? And yes, that was done by a single spellcaster, again showcasing that the "killing curse" style spells are woefully unimaginative. The guy in question was powerful enough to do a satellite drop with just their universe's version of Accio.
Really depends on how fast you want to throw the thing, but keeping "plausibility" in mind accelerating a 1.4 solar mass netron star to 10% of light speed would require no less, & probably a whole lot more, than 1.262×10^45 J. That is 104.4 BILLION YEARS OF TOTAL SOLAR OUTPUT. There are stars with over a million times the sun's luminosity & one of those could do it in in a little under 104k years(not actually since there's no way ur getting 100% conversion to kinetic energy which is what i calculated).
@@virutech32 Such high speeds won't be needed if a sturdy enough wormhole (or as I'd like to call it, a space-time continuum gun barrel) could be opened and propped up.
In the books (a MUCH better version of the attack) he used Tungsten Rods in, exactly, the way Isaac described at about 15/16 minutes in. It also killed billions not just a few million like the show 🙄
@@bitharne Where the rods coated with stealth composites? I haven't read the book, but how did Marco get the rods? You need to machine them, especially since they were made of tungsten. Besides, how did Earth defend itself from such an attack to even remotely survive?
One other point in favour of having many smaller bombs over one big one is simply the flexibility, with smaller bombs you can scale the number and dispersion pattern of the devices to the size and resistance of the target. With a huge bomb you can only efficiently deploy it against an extremely large or insanely well hardened target, there is no point firing a 1 Teraton device at a colony on a small asteroid, even if the colony is inside you could excavate your way in to the settlement and blow it with probably just a handful of 1 Megaton devices, and certainly with far less than a million of them. With just a fraction of that firepower you could turn the entire asteroid into a bunch of gas although even that would be overkill blasting every fragment larger than a pebble until no such fragments remain would well and truly do the job too. Only exception perhaps would be if you are afraid of even bacteria surviving the assault but it surely wouldn't be that hard to sterilise fragments that small, basking the whole area around the fragments in gamma rays from nuclear devices or something like a graser should do the trick.
22:29 "a simple stone arrowhead teleported into your supreme leader’s head works wonders for changing his mind." Isaac, your dark dad humor was definitely at form here!
With an RKM, at that speed would it not be possible even for the devices to slightly adjust their arrival time and target using ablative fins that could be deployed for course corrections? If you want to slow down slightly mechanically exposing some ablative plates to the diffuse gas of interstellar space should do the trick over time, similarly to deviate the tiny angle necessary over that distance to fine tune the target you could do the same asymmetrically. Utilise the slight drag from the diffuse gas along with the outgassing from the ablative plate to make fine adjustments over the long flight. Hell you could probably even abort this way until being fairly close to the target, planets are small and space is big so it wouldn't take much of a nudge to divert the device to miss a whole planet if desired or even a star for that matter they are also tiny on interstellar scales.
"how many and how big is their cannons may be not the best one" yep, never in the history of ever someone said, look at my rock, spear, sword, cannon, tank, plane, nuke, stealth bomber, i am this advanced compared to you.
I like the Interex weapon in Voyager: they could rewind time with it and "erase" their enemies. If we ever encounter hostile aliens, perhaps we won't even notice them...we'll just cease to exist at their whim.
In the anime Series Gundam X it takes place AFTER an O'Neil Cylinder was dropped on the planet, and in Gundam SEED Destiny a chunk of Space Colony' well wreckage crashed into Earth, it was destroyed on the way down but there was still massive destruction. While the Sci-Fi elements are a tad leaning towards the fantastic (Given giant combat human piloted Robots) it still is within the subject, Gundam Wing has the space colony (technically a warship but called a colony to hide its purpose) with a giant super weapon, and in Gundam Seed it has a laser weapon that converts all the energy in a super nuke into a gamma ray beam. Nukes are actually a common weapon in many of the Gundam series do bigger weapons are often the replacement for MAD weapons instead Gundam SEED Nukes overuse is a major plot point. In Gundam SEED they actually consider genetic viruses to kill genetically engineered people.
From the Sun Beam and high dimensioned anti matter planets in the Lensman series, to mini blackholes, gravity negation on a planet by mental power in Galactic Milieu to the dimension strike in the Three Body Problem. Lots of methods
The biggest risk of a superweapon is the saying, "what doesnt kill me only serves to make me stronger." Long as enough people survive with the right skills, and want either to protect against that, or get revenge with multiplied or exponential force is a very real threat.
Weapons of mass destruction that permanently change the laws of physics is a running theme in the "Earth's Remebrance" trilogy (AKA The Three Body Problem).
Everytime I think about Nanobots used for a weapon I imagine entire solar system turned into paper clips. Some paper clips as big as the width of Earth. Others the size of cars.
Wait, did you just describe how the nexus space works in "The Expanse" Series, The protomolecule builders found a way to break into another universe filled with energy and put a bubble in there for their nexus space and then sent "seedpods" as gate builders to other systems to connect to the same nexus space. It just so happened that the inhabitants of the universe they put their bubble in were not too happy and started tampering with space time on the other side of the bubble connecting to our universe, the nexus space quarantined itself to try and stop the other universe entities who settled down after the death of the builders till humans came along and started dumping stuff into the other universe whenever the gates exceed mass/energy flow rate.
Tsar Bomba actually detonated with a measured yield of 57MT. Prototype for a 100MT model, the Soviets decided in the end not to proceed with it, even though a powerful enough rocket, the UR-500 (which eventually became the Proton satellite launcher) was being developed for it, because it was far more wasteful of nuclear material that could be better employed in fueling lots of 5MT or smaller devices, and also because there was no tactical value in a bomb powerful enough to make the rubble bounce 40 miles instead of only 10.
I wonder how effective bioweapons would be (ranging from edited viruses/microorganisms to super predators like the White Spikes from The Tomarrow War)?
Well, if the alien life is cellular in nature then some kind of bio weapon could most likely be found, but if it’s not cellular biology then what? Like what if the creature is pure energy that manipulates other energy? Or even sentient stars or black holes? What if it’s a void entity that only effects sentient creatures through their dreams?
Or a quantum AI that takes over the internet and controls people through subliminal, subluminal or other psy-op mind control in real world applications, as well as manipulating world economies, all hidden as an anonymous group of hackers?
@@AFMR0420 a lot of what you’re describing is going into hard sci-fi as opposed to grounded science though I imagine the latter super weapons Isaac described would work on those things.
👍👍Fun video-thanks. For relativistic missiles, I recommend "The Killing Star' by Charles Pellegrino (1995). An oldie but a goodie. Of course, destruction of your planet by relativistic missiles never really gets old. Just started reading it for the 2nd time. As you implied, Isaac, we never saw them coming.
![[#2024MAMA] ROSÉ (로제), Bruno Mars - APT. | Mnet 241122 방송](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/dgGqD28J6aQ/mqdefault.jpg)
The first rule of warfare: make sure quality control double checks your super weapon for pesky little exhaust ports leading straight to the reactor.
At least make the exhaust port smaller than a Womp Rat.
It was never a bug, it was a feature. Just in case you lost control of your super weapon, make it easily disarmable.
Underrated comment
you all underestimate how little this exhausting vent is but a few grids along the way would have been a cheap method
😂😂😂😂 Bloody good one mate 😂😂😂
"There's no such thing as overkill."
"If brute force isn't working, you're not using enough of it."
Words to live by, Mr. Arthur. 😊
This channel is like an old friend you love. It doesn’t matter if you don’t check in for awhile, when you see them, they’ll make your day
Make your day. Or try to utterly destroy your entire multiverse timeline with a temporal doomsday weapon!
Ah my monthly Sci-Fi Sunday episode and a side of First Rule of Warfare.
22:29 "Afterall a simple stone arrowhead teleported into your supreme leaders head works wonders for changing his mind." 😂😂😂
Informative as always Isaac.
Thank you for the time stamp! Once again, he drops some serious gems.
Since we're talking advanced technology, what's to say the Supreme Leader isn't some posthuman entity made of nano machines that'd simply expell the arrowhead and repair its head in seconds like a T1000?
@@DogFoxHybrid That may be why it's stone. This was essentially a warning shot. 'That time it was a simple piece of flint. Next time it might be a disassembly virus, or an EMP generator that affects an area roughly the size of a basketball, or the arrowhead is made of anti-matter. So do please return to the negociation table. We dislike being this dramatic about making our point.'
Ah, another reminder of the power of teleportation.
@@DogFoxHybrid Or a being who doesn't even care that one of his 10 quintillion bodies was killed.
Stellaris has a doomsday device that causes every star in the galaxy to simultaneously go supernova. Activating it instantly wins the game for you. Everyone else will try very hard to stop you.
Way before stellaris, Spaceward Ho! Has an armageddon feature that the player can choose to set off that destroys half the stars in the galaxy. No one can stop you from using it. If you don’t like the results or even survive you can use it again and again until you are no more.
Isn't this featured in one of the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy sequels?
Stellaris sounds like it has a very broad definition of winning. 😀
@@barryon8706 That's just one of the ways you can win in Stellaris. In this case, it's the ending if you become the crisis.
ah the Kriket device
How come no one talks about mega-maid from spaceballs?
The ability to remove the atmosphere from a planet would be a devastating weapon.
Cool weapkn
I had a kinda horrifying idea for a dark energy bomb, which would suddenly accelerate Hubble expansion in a volume by many orders of magnitude, disintegrating all matter within its radius.
A scaled back version might be able to isolate dangerous entities without killing them. It's nice to have a range of options rather than just kill everyone. It's not very useful as an actual weapon of war if everyone knows u can't use it without committing suicide(works fine as a deterrent).
cool concept though as far as stupendously overkill superweapons go
Basically a Shatterbomb from Orion's Arm.
Oh wow! I’ve always wondered about earth size/mass moons and what sort of conditions would be required for them to be habitable for modern earth life. And Isaac is releasing an episode on just that very subject *on my birthday*!
Greatest birthday gift ever! I can’t wait!
Happy early birthday David :)
Happy birthday
Cheers!
Thanks to everyone for the early birthday wishes.
@@davidroddini1512 Happy Birthday to my fellow brother from the Taurean Reconnaissance Force. Commander Arthur will grant us both a 3 day birthday leave but due to anomalies inherent in FTL travel, we've already enjoyed the party in a parallel timeline even though after we jumped out of warp we realized it hasn't happened yet.
Never forget the unprovoked attack on Alderaan
I think you mean, unprovoked attack from Alderaan. It never happened, Alderaan was an inside job, the empire did nothing wrong, the Alderaanians deserved it.
The Empire was provoked by the naked expansionism of the Rebel Alliance and had to act to defend itself from impending aggression.
Unprovoked? Someone didn't see Rogue One. The Princess of the planet was actively engaged in an assault against the Empire, got caught like 5 minutes later and used the classic Shaggy defense of "Wasn't me" to the man who literally watcher her fly off. The Royal Representative of the planet was literally engaged in spying and terrorism.
@@NaatClark There's a difference between 'this government official did something' and 'this planet's population did something.' _And_ Alderaan is ruled by an aristocracy, and Leia isn't even the head of her own House.
The Empire was right. They offered order and the common man was allowed to order his affairs and defend himself with personal weapons as he saw fit. The rebellion was a hobby of the incompetent wealthy.
Finally, a video explaining how Ican purge the unclean.
BURN THE HERETIC, KILL THE MUTANT, PURGE THE UNCLEAN!!- some new astartes getting pumped for training exercises
"Listen I'm not a genocidal maniac, I just need to eliminate a few pops to cut down on lag"
Every late game Stellaris player
Even my beefy CPU can only allow so much coexistence, and still absolutely no xenophilia
-Thanos, basically
*machine god plays in background*
[aetherophasic engine intensifies]
*Revs up the stellar systemcraft*
Some of those superweapons are absolutely M.A.D., but I think my favorite is the Berserker Swarm. Why fight the enemy when you can just take them apart and build them into more useful stuff?
A new ironic series Sunday Super Weapons.
Please pardon my pressing but in what way would such be "ironic"?
Can we get an episode about 1000 decibel sound destroying reality?
Domingo armas de superior
Ironic or not, I think I may need that in my life. Sounds fkn great I'm in!
@@nyrdybyrd1702 everything
Samantha Carter once blew up a star (and the fleet surrounding it) by dropping an active Stargate in it, causing the sun to go supernova. For a brief moment she as an individual person achieved Kardeshev II, harnessing the entire output of a star as a weapon against her enemies.
I've found it a little ironic how one of the very earliest depictions of an O'Neil cylinder in science fiction ALSO also includes -- like 30 seconds later -- the very first depiction of a Colony Drop.
Never forget: any spaceship, no matter how large, is just a badly designed missile with air conditioning.
The one that always sticks in my mind is at the end of E. E. Smith's "Skylark DuQuesne" where the "heroes" caused millions of suns, each being orbited by a planet where the "bad species" has evolved, to go nova because they were "irredeemable". Oh, and of course the end of Greg Bear's "Anvil of Stars" still haunts me to this day.
16:37 _". . . Skinny Black Metal Mega-Bullet"_
good name for a band! \m/
It's funny that you have mentioned gundam before on your space habitat videos....but you didn't mention the fact that one of the biggest atrocities in the series was one side of the war dropping an O'Neil cylinder on earth and craving a very big crater where Sydney Australia was along with a lot of other damage. In UC gundam they stayed dropping colonies with varied effects
It's one of the series trademarks. Just about every iteration has a special, unique Gundam for the pilot protagonist, a rival with a mask (initially) and a red robot, and some ungodly large space structure thrown at the planet.
And then there's Gundam X, where the *series backstory* features hundreds of colonies getting dropped, to the point that society basically collapsed.
It's the archetypal Colony Drop example
Colony drops are a big trope in Mobile Suit Gundam as well. Probably the most famous franchise to use it, surprised to not see it here.
Turning off EM forces holding matter together, is what Davros tried to do with his reality bomb. As a super weapon it reallly illustrates a lot of your points, because they had to get a 'planet engine' using several specific worlds plucked form time and space, so their gravity fields create an energy source to power the whole damn thing.
There's an idea, out of the box sources of energy.
One fact of superweapons that was missed imo but has likely been covered is the fear factor being just so much more then a "normal" weapon.
Sure yeeting a few asteroids at a planet or a handful of RKMs will do the job for pennys on the dollar. But a sphere of anti-uranium the size of a moon that is set off nuke style and absolutely vaporizes not just the planet but the entire solar system while you televise it to your enemys survivors or your other enemys is one HELL of a message.
And sometimes a message is far more valuable then a million cheaper weapons. I mean see the U.S nukeing japan as a perfect case in point. If we had stormed the island the casualtys could have been many thousands of times worse then the bombs caused. At least from our PoV. Im sure japan would argue otherwise, but the then "super weapon" had the intended result and more or less ended the war on that front by scareing the piss out of them in essence.
Crimson worlds series had that as a weapon in it. And while wasteful i know i as a human would be scared shitless of the tentacle monsters of grixnax broadcasted that thing going off to us just before the super nova lit off in our skys and said you belong to us now. It would take the fight out of us before a shot was fired at least short term.
Long term its going to have an extremely high chance to ensure everyone and their little dogs too look for the first chance to burry a knife in your back and off your race asap out of fear they are next.
The Goths from The Expanse are a good example of what can happen when a civilization taps another universe for power. Good episode!
And a good example of a unconventional super weapon *(SPOILERS)* since their attacks consisted of turning off/disrupting consciousness for a localized space, not blowing anything up
Don't forget the "Bring down the sky" DLC for Mass Effect 1, your favorite! As for ZPMs, (gonna steal the stargate term), I like to think of the Markers in Deadspace as ZPMs from hell. But one of the more confounding superweapon uses in gaming is in resident evil. The continued tolerance of the rest of the world to Umbrella's making bioweapons. Even if the general public doesn't know, governments have GOT to know what Umbrella Corps was doing under Racoon City. I don't get why Resident Evil didn't devolve into a war of the whole world versus Umbrella. I also don't get why the writers of Resident Evil never went into the non weapon related things Umbrella made, even the non weapon related things involved in war. Supposedly they're a Pharmacutical company that's highly regarded, so why don't they have the retail and commercial presence on the ground in Racoon City to show it.
Moving back to the real world, I love using the following string of reasoning to disprove Marjorie Taylor Greene's Jewish space laser conspiracy theory;
1. Something of that size is not the sort of thing you can build quietly. It would be visible to EVERYONE in the sky while it was being built. Anyone with a backyard amateur telescope or a pair of binoculars could potentially spot it.
2. The Rothschilds are bankers, if bankers destroy large swaths of wilderness, they're not really gaining anything by doing so. You could imagine doing that to a small town or a neighborhood if you were really evil, and then blaming it on wildfires so that you can sell loans and insurance to the people there later. But there's no direct gain by doing so. You would have to work to recoup that loss and its not gueranteed.
3. If you really want to make money with a space laser, its in pushing spacecraft, not in setting virgin wilderness on fire. If you were the Rothschilds and you had a space laser, you'd be working with Elon Musk to sell tickets to the outer solar system to prospect for precious metals and set up colonies, then having people, governments and businesses pay for the privelage. But that's not what we see. We see massive wildfires, the kind that are easier to start with a careless use of pyrotechnics during a gender reveal party than with a space laser.
Strange Matter bombs and False/True vacuum bombs are terrifying.
I mean, taking the whole 'MIRV'd nukes' idea to a logical maximum, let's look at antimatter. Let's assume you want to uniformly blanket an entire planet in nuclear fire, say, 1.7kt per square kilometer. About 40mg of antimatter would do that. You can probably fit a containment system, guidance, and reentry package into a 100-gram dart, each containing that 40mg. That totals up to about 20 tons of antimatter to uniformly toast an Earthlike world, and about 51,000 tons of delivery systems. Divide that across a fleet, and it's entirely conceivable that a fleet of, say, 500 small warships is more than capable of delivering Exterminatus to any world they choose, without even making too big a dent in their mass budget.
There are super weapons and then there are super content creators. Issac is the later.
Or is he both? The public deserves to know! Lol
Happy G-Type Main-Sequence Star Day! If you have your finger over the button of a Super Weapon, I hope you can hold off long enough to grab a snack, sit down, and enjoy this video!
Every time you say, “Send in the murder bots“ I hear it in my head to the tune of song Send in the Clowns. Which means I picture the sad ironic twist at the end of the song, “Send in the murder bots… They’re already here“ sung by one lonely remaining murder bot from the last invasion.
Some (many) years ago, I read an article about the concept of "novaing". Basically, if you enriched the deep atmosphere of a gas giant with deuterium and detonated one (or many) nuclear warheads, you would cause a chain reaction that would sterilize everything up to the Kuiper belt.
Love that you referenced "The Gods Themselves" the moment I thought of it applying to what you were saying about harnessing other universes for energy.
Some crazy ideas:
1. piece of 'neutronium' extracted from neutron star and close to 'c' - to slow down it's natural detonation in relation to target
2. again small blackhole of precisely calculated mass and speed so it does 'airburst' of hawking radiation above hostile planet
3. fling brown dwarf to destabilize orbits and catapult target planet as rouge
4. aim quasar jet onto something
5. I loved Starcarrier ur-Shaddar approach: fling star huge star through Black Rosette - spacetime gateway created from collapsed 6 blue supergiants
6. 18:40 - nah, it was also used in Stargate ( improvised ), Andromeda ( Nova bombs - using dark energy to temporarily negate gravity within star ) and to extend Galactic Corps ( small starship called Trigger though the star under warp drive )
7. anything that messes with Higgs field - dictates mass, mass dictates chemistry -> express option to turn everything to green goo; or strong nuclear force
2. They had "black hole bullet" in Andromeda series
I would like to type on behalf of Ambassador Alexei de Sadeski (played by Peter Bull) from the movie, Dr. Strangelove. He responded to the question with "It was to be announced at the Party Congress on Monday. As you know, the Premier loves surprises."
The secret doomsday weapon, is best line in Dr.Strange Love.
In the Wing Commander series, the Kilrathi (the baddies) developed a super weapon ship that would increase the gravity constant on a target planet for a partial second.
I came home from work frustrated today . Sitting in traffic didn’t help either- but I finally got home - showered n made dinner n played call of duty. Once bedtime was approaching I turn on my utube channel and click on Issac Arthur. So many episodes I miss🤦🏾♂️damn but I be busy. But this 1 I watched and really enjoyed!! Thanks Issac !!
I luv SciFi !!
Regarding super-nukes, Teller (of the Teller-Ulam hydrogen bomb design) had noted any sufficiently large bomb wouldn't need to be on target to achieve desired effect of annihilating the enemy. Of course, in his case he was conceiving of 10,000 megaton doomsday bombs which could level New England, Germany or the Korean peninsula in one blast and blanketing the planet in apocalyptic-levels of fallout.The sort you use to either deter the enemy from using their doomsday devices or take them with you if you are about to lose.
A fission bomb big enough to strip a planet of life, even if it's mostly fusion boosted, would surely be quite noticeable for vast distances across the universe
hard disagree, thats an insignificant of power at interstellar scales, noticeable for thousands of lightyears sure, but... well .. the universe is billions of lightyears wide, and our galaxy is at least 120 thousand lightyears, we routine observe some binary star systems which output way more power than that when one is a white dwarf or neutron star and siphons off enough mass to have say a kilonova, so whilst detectable compared to background, it's not particularly a standout feature.
@T S Well yes, the light won't be bright relatively speaking. But the gamma rays and plutonium/uranium emission spectrum would outshine the galaxy?
@@SpecialEDy it really wouldn't, that power out put is nothing compared to what gets routinely dumped out even relatively far from the galactic core, nevermind that the galactic core dumps orders of magnitude more power out than that on a second by second basis, the emission spectrum of such a nuclear detonation should predominate in gamma rays and x rays because most of it will not be absorbed and just spread out in a sphere as such, and this is not really distinguishable from what leaves the core, except to be orders of magnitude weaker,
now sure, its it a noticable pulse, yes ive already said that, but in terms of energetic cosmic event, it really doesnt rank high.
interesting how you mentioned the concept of colony dropping but you didnt mention moble suit gundam, one of the first (and probably the most well known) cases of colony drops in popular media.
Captain, we killed all our enemies.
Not enough. Go back in time and kill them again.
I've been watching since 2015. I'm a creationist but some of the concepts you cover I agree with and even enjoy the ones I don't. Either way you're a great person and it's so encouraging to see someone do what they love
After listening to science based content, do you ever question the literal narrative of creationism? Good for you that you consume media outside of your chosen dogma!!
You are thus not a creationist but share their scizophrenia religiosa. Massdelusion is the base of the grift. It’s only a grift. Good luck on your path to enlightment and education is your ticket.
@@gavinrush4995 concepts like black holes dark matter larger starts help me understand the sheer power of the creator of the universe. It puts into context the level of power and energy needed to even make just a sun let alone a galaxy.
@@gavinrush4995 no not question but solidify it. So while the literal says "God said let there be light" and I consider what I learned about light and the sun. It just makes me ponder about the scientific profess after he spoke.
Creationist in the sense that you just believe God created the universe, or Creationist in the sense that you think the world is 6000 years old? Because one is faith, and the other contradicts everything we've discovered about the universe.
Dresden Files was not a reference I was expecting here, but it was appropriate.
Rifts RPG games breaks this stereotype. The weakest pistols are on par with damage of an RPG 7 to anti-Tank weapon. Without the explosion, of course.
Rifts was my first tabletop rpg experience, I still have a bunch of old 90s era manuals and rule books :)
I just started the episode but can already tell it's going to be a.. banger.
Man what a plethora of ways to destroy everything. 😮😮
I first heard about dropping a colony on a planet in Mobile Suit Gundam (1979).
"It's a reminder that subtle and clever use of force can be better than raw might."
Yes, and on the other hand we have the "Disassemble a gas giant and several planets to create a gravity manipulator megastructure and then use it to destabilize the local star in such a way that it turns into the stellar equivalent of a flamethrower"...
Can you give a full count of the number of first rules of warfare?
No tech yet can beat a real human mind. Nothing more devious or deceptive.
NOTIFICATION GANG!!!
cant get enough of this mas videos
Thank you for your hard work issac ❤
18:34 Also, 'Look to Windward' by the late Iain M. Banks, in which the events of the plotline lead up to a memorial of the Culture supernova-ing an Idiran star
Death bots are easy. Just keep sending soldiers at them until they hit their preset kill limit.
why would you give them a preset kill limit. That's dumb and also it's very difficult to confirm kills on a battlefield. Even more difficult on a battlefield with transhumans.
Anyways u dont put a kill limit. u tell them to keep firing until the enemy is well & truly dead. Also robots are gunna be cheaper & faster to replace than humans whhile having a far higher K/D ratio
I thought you would've mentioned that episode of SG-1 where Sam supernova;d a star with the gate sent to an adress with the blackhole.
Also the dimensional weapons in the Liu Cixin's Remembrance of Earth's Past
The Spitting Cobra in House of Suns was a good way of having an ftl like technology without violating causality
Everyone forgets Stargate. A solar system here and there, doomed a few planets to slow death by black hole...
I would think that if you are powering a volley of missiles using a laser, and you want them to all hit at slightly different times, the most efficient way to do that would be to stack them all together in a bundle, then accelerate that bundle all to the minimum speed you want one of them to be, and then that one would detach from the front of the pack and move itself just slightly out of the way, while the beam pushes the rest a bit faster, and then the second one splits off, and so on, until only one is left accelerating.
USSC (United Spacefaring Species Council) member: "There are many ways to measure how advanced a species is: their architecture, art, philosophy, technology, weapons..."
Somebody in the audience: "Weapons? Surely, nobody would concentrate all their efforts on advancing those..."
Human just behind him: "And that's where you're wrong, buddy."
"I'm voting against activation of both _Project Streetlights_ and _Project Neighborhood_ . Planet crackers and nova weapons, fine; but weaponizing Sesame Street _and_ Mr Rogers is just beyond the pale!" -- from the _Behold Humanity_ series
Pulling the power cord on the computer running our simulation
1:30 that armored dude is strokin that gun like the sun's about to go supernova.
Honor Harrington and Harry Dresden name drops, I knew I liked you for a reason.
I enjoyed this video. Great and good.
It's been many years since I read the Dresden Files but wasn't it an isolated mega mansion full of vampires that he pulled the satellite down on?
And yes, that was done by a single spellcaster, again showcasing that the "killing curse" style spells are woefully unimaginative. The guy in question was powerful enough to do a satellite drop with just their universe's version of Accio.
It was a mansion or fortress or such, but there were humans killed, with in-series blowback due to the rules about killing humans with magic.
Another epic video, perfect addition to a good Sunday afternoon
Stargate has some nice uses supernovae to blow up stuff. Also crushing planets into black holes. Great video!
What would it take to be able to lob a full-sized neutron star at an enemy planet or star system?
Really depends on how fast you want to throw the thing, but keeping "plausibility" in mind accelerating a 1.4 solar mass netron star to 10% of light speed would require no less, & probably a whole lot more, than 1.262×10^45 J. That is 104.4 BILLION YEARS OF TOTAL SOLAR OUTPUT. There are stars with over a million times the sun's luminosity & one of those could do it in in a little under 104k years(not actually since there's no way ur getting 100% conversion to kinetic energy which is what i calculated).
@@virutech32 Such high speeds won't be needed if a sturdy enough wormhole (or as I'd like to call it, a space-time continuum gun barrel) could be opened and propped up.
For the asteroid attack, in the Expanse Macro used stealth composites and complex orbital paths to attack Earth.
In the books (a MUCH better version of the attack) he used Tungsten Rods in, exactly, the way Isaac described at about 15/16 minutes in. It also killed billions not just a few million like the show 🙄
@@bitharne Where the rods coated with stealth composites? I haven't read the book, but how did Marco get the rods? You need to machine them, especially since they were made of tungsten. Besides, how did Earth defend itself from such an attack to even remotely survive?
"Relativistic Kill Cloud" is a great name for a metal band.
One other point in favour of having many smaller bombs over one big one is simply the flexibility, with smaller bombs you can scale the number and dispersion pattern of the devices to the size and resistance of the target. With a huge bomb you can only efficiently deploy it against an extremely large or insanely well hardened target, there is no point firing a 1 Teraton device at a colony on a small asteroid, even if the colony is inside you could excavate your way in to the settlement and blow it with probably just a handful of 1 Megaton devices, and certainly with far less than a million of them. With just a fraction of that firepower you could turn the entire asteroid into a bunch of gas although even that would be overkill blasting every fragment larger than a pebble until no such fragments remain would well and truly do the job too. Only exception perhaps would be if you are afraid of even bacteria surviving the assault but it surely wouldn't be that hard to sterilise fragments that small, basking the whole area around the fragments in gamma rays from nuclear devices or something like a graser should do the trick.
17:30 _"...Brutal Relativistic Kill Rain"_
another great band name!! \m/
22:29 "a simple stone arrowhead teleported into your supreme leader’s head works wonders for changing his mind."
Isaac, your dark dad humor was definitely at form here!
Dual vector foil from Three Body is the most terrifying for me
The Thom Brady probem is far more terrifying Amanda. Maybe if you weren't out there chugging dong all night you'd know that Amanda.
@@jennyanydots2389 Who's this Thom fella? Were you too busy chugging dong all night to use the correct spelling Jenny?
Palpatine has entered in the chat.
Nice! Dropped just in time for my Sunday afternoon project
This is going to be fun!
Yet another amazing video. Pure quality
"Teleporting an arrow to your supreme leader's brain works wonders to change their mind."
- Isaac Arthur, 2023
Simply beautiful
With an RKM, at that speed would it not be possible even for the devices to slightly adjust their arrival time and target using ablative fins that could be deployed for course corrections? If you want to slow down slightly mechanically exposing some ablative plates to the diffuse gas of interstellar space should do the trick over time, similarly to deviate the tiny angle necessary over that distance to fine tune the target you could do the same asymmetrically. Utilise the slight drag from the diffuse gas along with the outgassing from the ablative plate to make fine adjustments over the long flight. Hell you could probably even abort this way until being fairly close to the target, planets are small and space is big so it wouldn't take much of a nudge to divert the device to miss a whole planet if desired or even a star for that matter they are also tiny on interstellar scales.
"how many and how big is their cannons may be not the best one"
yep, never in the history of ever someone said, look at my rock, spear, sword, cannon, tank, plane, nuke, stealth bomber, i am this advanced compared to you.
Yess, there is no such thing as overkill. Love that.
Ryk Brown in his frontiers saga loves using "kinetic kill vehicles" to strike large capital ships in surprise attacks.
First Rule of Warfare:
Never die first.
James Bond title confirmed.
I like the Interex weapon in Voyager: they could rewind time with it and "erase" their enemies. If we ever encounter hostile aliens, perhaps we won't even notice them...we'll just cease to exist at their whim.
Red Foreman is oure evil.
I hope you haven't convinced anyone that we shouldn't build O'Neil Cylinders because some fool might drop one on us.
well it's not like we need to build them in LEO or anything
In the anime Series Gundam X it takes place AFTER an O'Neil Cylinder was dropped on the planet, and in Gundam SEED Destiny a chunk of Space Colony' well wreckage crashed into Earth, it was destroyed on the way down but there was still massive destruction. While the Sci-Fi elements are a tad leaning towards the fantastic (Given giant combat human piloted Robots) it still is within the subject, Gundam Wing has the space colony (technically a warship but called a colony to hide its purpose) with a giant super weapon, and in Gundam Seed it has a laser weapon that converts all the energy in a super nuke into a gamma ray beam. Nukes are actually a common weapon in many of the Gundam series do bigger weapons are often the replacement for MAD weapons instead Gundam SEED Nukes overuse is a major plot point. In Gundam SEED they actually consider genetic viruses to kill genetically engineered people.
The super weapon that uses a nuke to fire a gamma beam is basically an upgraded version of the bomb-pumped X-ray laser concept.
How big and sophisticated their weapons are for how small they can make those weapons and still be useful
"We have arrived, and it is now that we preform our charge"
From the Sun Beam and high dimensioned anti matter planets in the Lensman series, to mini blackholes, gravity negation on a planet by mental power in Galactic Milieu to the dimension strike in the Three Body Problem. Lots of methods
The biggest risk of a superweapon is the saying, "what doesnt kill me only serves to make me stronger." Long as enough people survive with the right skills, and want either to protect against that, or get revenge with multiplied or exponential force is a very real threat.
the first rule of war : nothing is overkill
Weapons of mass destruction that permanently change the laws of physics is a running theme in the "Earth's Remebrance" trilogy (AKA The Three Body Problem).
Maybe the real super weapon is the friends we made along the way.
Everytime I think about Nanobots used for a weapon I imagine entire solar system turned into paper clips. Some paper clips as big as the width of Earth. Others the size of cars.
Thank you for all your incredible content.
Wait, did you just describe how the nexus space works in "The Expanse" Series, The protomolecule builders found a way to break into another universe filled with energy and put a bubble in there for their nexus space and then sent "seedpods" as gate builders to other systems to connect to the same nexus space. It just so happened that the inhabitants of the universe they put their bubble in were not too happy and started tampering with space time on the other side of the bubble connecting to our universe, the nexus space quarantined itself to try and stop the other universe entities who settled down after the death of the builders till humans came along and started dumping stuff into the other universe whenever the gates exceed mass/energy flow rate.
Tsar Bomba actually detonated with a measured yield of 57MT. Prototype for a 100MT model, the Soviets decided in the end not to proceed with it, even though a powerful enough rocket, the UR-500 (which eventually became the Proton satellite launcher) was being developed for it, because it was far more wasteful of nuclear material that could be better employed in fueling lots of 5MT or smaller devices, and also because there was no tactical value in a bomb powerful enough to make the rubble bounce 40 miles instead of only 10.
Thank you Isaac.
I wonder how effective bioweapons would be (ranging from edited viruses/microorganisms to super predators like the White Spikes from The Tomarrow War)?
Well, if the alien life is cellular in nature then some kind of bio weapon could most likely be found, but if it’s not cellular biology then what? Like what if the creature is pure energy that manipulates other energy? Or even sentient stars or black holes? What if it’s a void entity that only effects sentient creatures through their dreams?
Or a quantum AI that takes over the internet and controls people through subliminal, subluminal or other psy-op mind control in real world applications, as well as manipulating world economies, all hidden as an anonymous group of hackers?
@@AFMR0420 a lot of what you’re describing is going into hard sci-fi as opposed to grounded science though I imagine the latter super weapons Isaac described would work on those things.
Very effective
I love that every rule of warfare is the "1st rule of warfare."
amazing episode! Loved it
👍👍Fun video-thanks. For relativistic missiles, I recommend "The Killing Star' by Charles Pellegrino (1995). An oldie but a goodie. Of course, destruction of your planet by relativistic missiles never really gets old. Just started reading it for the 2nd time. As you implied, Isaac, we never saw them coming.