Areku wrote: ↑Thu Feb 23, 2017 4:41 am
Hi, guys. I've got something I want to get off my chest that you may or may not find interesting.
I first watched OVA 7 when it was new, was several kinds of ticked off most of the way through for narrative reasons, most prominently the parts where Riddhe didn't die when he really should've. Or rather, when I wanted him to. A lot.
Finally got around to rewatching it a few days ago, and while the passionate distaste I felt has long dissipated, I feel like I was more attentive to the other plot/narrative flaws. I've seen many of them discussed at length, but I'll share one of the ones I haven't seen brought up.
So, you guys remember how ~1/3rd of OVA 7 is spent on the firing of Gryps 2, be it the actual event or the various discussions in the Cheyenne base or the "something's targeting us" Newtype necromancy? Well I do, and aside from ~30 seconds of genuinely impressive spectacle, it was all a complete waste of time. And I'm not talking about how Bright/Londo Bell should've been able and willing to prevent the firing (or how Bright waits 4 whole minutes before deciding he wants to call the Nahel Argama and warn them), or how Alberto waited until
after Ronan initiated the sequence to mention Riddhe, or any of the other things that should've happened to prevent Ronan from sending the order to Gryps 2 (and with personal experience operating Really High Output Military Equipment (TM), I can assure you that
no one in their right mind would attempt the systems dismantling needed to bypass fire control authentication of a colony destroyer at "95% operation critical output", in case Gryps 2 got word that Ronan had been compromised ^^).
Finally, to my main point. The distance between Gryps 2 and Industrial 7 was ~666,840km, so distant that the beam is visibly curved by the Earth's influence. I'm going to be extremely liberal and say that Gryps 2 would destroy anything within 80km of its beam. This makes the shot the equivalent of hitting a mock human target at about 0.53miles/0.85km, approaching the range considered "long-range sniping". By the T-60 mark, Ronan has clearly decided he wants to abort, but is told it's too late and that aborting would kill 1,000+ personnel. So here's a novel idea: if you can't stop the laser from firing,
how about you just miss? In that final minute, if you could rotate/pivot/turn Gryps 2 just 0.00043 degrees, you'd completely miss your original target.
That's a rotational speed of 1 degree in 1 day 15 hours!! That's nothing! And it gets better: in the background, you can hear operators reporting on Gryps 2's attitude adjustment, automatic tracking and final target adjustment; any one of these could be terminated or adjusted to achieve the desired miss.
This is just one of the things I find extremely off-putting in OVA 7, albeit the most technical. As a whole, OVA 7 had tons of great spectacle and music, but ZOINKS was it stuffed full of meaningless babble, nonsensical events and narrative flaws.
Of course, maybe I'm being way too critical and the show deliberately filled the command center with duplicitous Titan sympathizers and poor Bright just had a bad case of main character-itis that day.