Are there any good examples of a species or race of creatures hindering themselves without realising it?
I realise I'm not wording this very well, so I have an example.
Suppose there's a species of alien that has a culture founded on combat. On their homeworld they practice some pretty serious guerilla warfare on one another.
However, every single member of this species is colourblind, and because they are ALL colourblind, they simply assume that everything exists in shades of grey.
At one point, these aliens get invaded by a hostile force and summarily slaughtered.
turns out, the invading force can see most of the visible spectrum, similar to what we can see. These aliens, unbeknownst to them, have been using garishly bright colours for their armour and weapons, and the invading force has no issue spotting them and countering their guerilla tactics.
Pic unrelated, just an alien in bright armour.
Sorry if this threads kinda incoherent, it's 2am and I was just struck with this idea while browsing Halo Lore videos on youtube
Are there any good examples of a species or race of creatures hindering themselves without realising it?
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Surely if they have even basic science they are familiar with the electragnetic spectrum?
As such, they would be aware of the ranges outside of their visible range and could build vision systems able to see those ranges.
Just like we issue uniforms and select equipment components (e.g. Plastic buckles - note that you don't see black buckles used on quality modern gear) based on reduced IR emissivity even though we can't see infra red.
>As such, they would be aware of the ranges outside of their visible range and could build vision systems able to see those ranges.
thast doesn't really mean much, if they see shades of grey they see the visible light, they just don't see the difference, eventhough they know it's there. Yes they could build a system that tells them it's yellow they have in front of them, but that's a useless information for them, since every colour is a shade of grey. This is nto the same as infrared and beign able to see it, they are able to see the colours, they are just unable to discern them and don't know that another speices might be able to discern them. They could discover it and adapt to it, but that would take some time.
Don't see why not. Humans hold themselves back and cripple themselves all the time.
This falls into a trap when thinking about alien species.
Of course something that let them see more of the visible spectrum would be different than IR equipment. The basic concept of "make a invisible light visible through science" would occur. The advantages are massive and if they are a warlike species they would not be overlooked. Especially if it made otherwise effective camouflage patterns blazing bright.
I'm pretty sure having armour in the colour of a rainbow and/or amazing optical camouflage stops mattering when the tech of optical systems (for spectrums) and computers designed to visually identify targets regardless of their attempts to break up their appearance is practically comonplace.
I think the camo in Halo works on light-bending tech, which would make those optical systems less effective.
Really, the biggest offense is swinging around plasma sword while under the effects of camo instead of keeping that fucker turned off.
This. If they're advanced enough and their primary tactics rely on stealth, there's no way they wouldn't seek tech that can spot enemies easily and hide them better. If they're too primitive then being colorblind and wearing garish costumes is trivial against a spacefaring species.
Predator.
Arnold jungle cammo is nothing for the IR view of the Predator, but at the same time the reliance on it allowed Arnold to use mud against it.
The Elites themselves are a wonderful example. They don't need to even land on planets, they can just win the space battle and glass the place(and they do that most of the time anyways). In fact, they tend to kinda get their shit kicked in on the ground. But they do it because they're egotistical and cocky.
And even before they fought humanity, way back when they first fought the San'Shyuum (the Prophets from Halo 2/3), they refused to reverse-engineer the Forerunner tech that they had because they revered it too much. They thought their faith would carry them through.
A species highly sensitive to some form of disturbance might outlaw any real technological progress into those areas. Others might have environmental concerns and such.
>Islam
This reminds me of a pilot in the X-wing books. He was an alien who could only see in the infrared part of the spectrum, and was really proud of his rad custom paintjob, which just looked dull grey to human vision.
Seriously though, I don't really see how a spacefaring species would win or lose a war on the basis of its infantry camouflage.
I think the issue goes further beyond just the camo thing. There's a lot of applications they could use color-viewing technology for. Imagine the ability to fire up colored flares/smokes to signal certain things. The enemy side just sees a regular signal going up, but if your guys know what to look for then the designated colorscope trooper can identify what color the signal is and relay what it means.
There's also more subtle things like using colored ink to send encrypted messages. If you use some really obscure shade of a color as the "encryption key," you could in theory leave messages in plain sight and only someone who knows exactly what color spectrum to be searching for would be able to see and read the message (with the proper equipment of course).
There's plenty of silly ideas you could come up with to exploit this sort of thing.
>2020, the year we made Contact
>they are hostile and the higher tech decrypts everything we got
>Jamal have an idea
>warnings and battle plans are laid out in walls as graffiti markings
Elites were pushing shit deep into humans anus in every front they fighted hand to hand.
Thats why humans started the Spartan program. So they could actually face an Elite.
Seriously did you just think anything you wrote down?
It was technically a pretty even fight as far as raw skill is concerned. The only reason the Elites had such a huge advantage all the time was superior technology and superior physical performance. They even respected the humans and wanted to recruit them into the Covenant for being such great warriors, but of course the prophets didn't like that idea. This is why the spartans are able to put up such a good fight against them, because the enhancements and power armor eliminate the tech and strength limitations normal humans have versus elites.
Spartans existed before the discovery of the covenant my dude.
Humans did tend to stalemate covenant forces on land hence why they did all the glassing
Pretty sure they do it to reach because they are having a hard time
OH BOY DO I HAVE THE GREATEST FLUFF FOR YOU
From Infinity the tabletop game.
One of the factions is the Combined Army, a militant race. Their greatest fear is the inevitable heat death of the universe, and so they are trying to find a way to transcend to a energy less state of existence. They realised that they are not smart enough to figure it out, so they built an AI computer that didn't think like them to find the answer.
The AI found the answer, deemed them unworthy of the answer, and promptly transcended, leaving the Combined Army behind.
They were pretty mad at this, so they built a second AI, this one was programmed to think like them, so it would share the answer when it found out. However, the problem is that it still thinks like them, and will never find the answer due to this fact. The Combined Army is unaware of this fact, and is traipsing around the galaxy in search of Computonium, because they believe the AI simply needs more power to compute and solve the problem.
Classic fools errand.
That is so sad.
makes no fucking sense.
Not really dude, the SPARTAN program was started like a decade or two before the Covenant was even discovered. Hell, the SPARTANs didn't even really make that big of a difference in most battles because they weren't even deployed to large scale campaigns.
Humanity routinely kicked the Covenant's teeth in on the ground because the Covenant's troops were so woefully inexperienced at ground warfare due to the long periods of relative peace between its member species. However, that doesn't really mean much when the Covenant's naval capabilities were so much more advanced and powerful than Humanity's that they would just glass the planet from orbit after they annihilated the defending fleet.
>making an AI that is fundamentally superior to its creator species.
classic
I really enjoy Halo lore.
Has anyone done a writeup for tabletop for it?
Full summary? Not that I know of. There's wikis for it though.
>They even respected the humans and wanted to recruit them into the Covenant for being such great warriors
This is cool and makes me like the elites more
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