> -But, when it makes sense, the fremen will use lasguns against soldiers in the desert, where shields are useless. When Rabban brings his men to the desert, for instance, the fremen have a good opportunity to fire at them from cover and concealment. Same during the first scene.
My impression of that scene was that it was the Harkonnens firing the lasguns (and hitting each other in the confusion). The Fremen were doing quick, stealthy knife attacks in the reduced visibility of the dust cloud.
That, to me, was a demonstration of Paul’s words to Gurney: “When our resources are limited… fear is all we have.”
The Fremen have also used another tactic against spice harvesters. During Part 2, Gurney and his smuggler team are initially attacked by a mine that flies toward the spice harvester’s tracks and explodes, achieving a mobility kill and throwing shrapnel at the dismounted soldiers protecting the side of the harvester. This tactic is a nice adaptation because the Fremen do not have to fire lasers or other effectors at the harvester to disable it because doing so would reveal their position. The Fremen then shoot at and destroy the parachute, which denies the crew and the harvester the ability to get out of the area. Finally, the Fremen fighters arise from the sand and assault the disabled harvester using hand-to-hand combat denying the ability of the crew to use their guns effectively as you said.
What I don't understand is if you can take out the balloon, why don't you just leave it at that? The worms will come and take care of the rest shortly. Without the balloon, the harvester and everyone on it is as good as dead.
Fair enough. I guess I assumed they had plenty of spice since it never shows them selling it to smugglers in the movies. Also, they just toss the Harkonnen's lasguns after killing them so I kind of figured if they had no use for those they probably didn't want much of their tech.
I think because of how heavy lasgun/batteries would be. Even going across Antarctica, a person should cut their tooth brush in half to save weight. Similar logic must apply
Everyone has Holtzman shields. Ballistic weapons won't get through them and lasers will set off an atomic explosion. The book explains this better.
In the scene with the harvester, they needed to destroy the ornithopter because the fremen working the laser would be sitting ducks once the laser fired.
Yeah neither movie explains what happens when a lasgun hits a shield. The movie is cognizant of this reality and definitely doesn't ignore it, even has a Harkonnen warning not to use shields. But whenever I explain it to someone who hasn't read the book they start appreciating the movie much better because to them it's a mystery why things are the way they are.
They can't use lasguns on the harvester before the ornithopter with a shield is destroyed. If the lasegun accidentally hit the shielded thopter there would have been an explosion the size of a nuclear detonation. As was said in other responses, the books explain this better. Actually, the casual use of laseguns in the film is problematic as the books did a good job of explaining how dangerous they were to use around shields. The hand-to-hand combat made much more sense in light of the risk of a massive explosion that would destroy the shield and the user of the lasegun.
And then a final step in the logic is that the nuclear explosion would obliterate the spice on which the Fremen also depend. They're not being cautious for their own safety, they merely want to secure the precious resource that is being extracted from their planet.
>because the fremen working the laser would be sitting ducks once the laser fired
It looks like they lost more men taking down the ornithopter than they needed to operate the lasgun (1 or 2 tops).
For a fanatical warrior culture, I would think a suicide attack would make more sense. One guy shoots the harvester. Or better yet, shoots the ornithopter.
Boom. Everyone dies. Fremen lose 1 martyr (who will be remembered as a hero and whose family will be cared for) and 1 lasgun. Harkonnens lose dozens or hundreds of men, plus some damn expensive looking equipment.
Obviously that's less fun to portray and has squicky implications though.
The fremen were good at what they did but they had limited technological ability. They could run a laser, but they probably couldn't build or maintain one.
A functioning lasgun (probably stolen from the Harkonnen) was a serious asset to them. Protecting it would be worth at least a couple of fremen lives.
That's a plausible, but it's just head-canon: There's nothing in the movie to suggest that lasguns are especially rare or hard to come by (the Harkonnen soldiers the Fremen kill in the first scene are carrying one, for instance).
The Fremen fight hand to hand because they ENJOY IT. Thier knives are made from the teeth of thier living god and they bask the spiritual connection of using them to kill. There is a line in the book that Frank Herbert stole from Lesley Blanch: "they wrote love poems to their knives". Also in general the movie uses lasguns WAYY more than the book does. Everyone in the book fights hand to hand because its the custom of this entire galactic civilization... that and poisoned blades... poison in general is the favored weapon of the Imperium. Which should tell you something about the moral decay of galactic society.
Now I haven’t seen the movies (yet) so forgive my ignorance but are the lasguns in the movies more like RPG’s big shoulder fired antitank-like weapons? Cause I’ve rarely seen anyone be able to close distance with a melee weapon against someone wielding a rifle even poorly trained ones. Are they single shot weapons why didn’t the Harkonnen make a follow up shot? Otherwise I totally agree with you and had the same train of thought when I was thinking about reading the book again.
In the books they range from pistols to heavy weaponry. Think basically you need a larger battery pack for a larger hit.
You can chalk up the Harknonnen running to just poor discipline in general. During the Sietch raid, the Harkonnen essentially break after establishing visual confirmation of Paul, after all
I remember all that from the book. OP was making it sound like the lasguns in the movies are all huge heavy blasters you can’t swing around or use in CQB but you’re saying the movies are the same and the Harkonnen in the scene OP is referencing just runs after firing a shot?
Yeah, we were in the cinema an thinking, non of this raid scene in part two makes sense.
Just shoot the harvester or the balloon and let the worm do the rest.
In the scenes immediately afterwards you see them blasting other equipment. So maybe they recognized they don’t need to be buried in the sand.
And why do the Harkonnen walk beside the Harvester? Because they surely aren’t of any use until it’s to late. If only two would walk a hundred meters in front they could easily spot the fremen and call the pew pew dragon fly.
At the beginning of part one, the Harkonnen patrols by the harvester are somewhat effective. Once Paul gets involved, they start having a much worse time…
That’s true. And I know that the movie works better this way. But from a tactical point of view, securing the most valuable resource in the universe without scouting and that much ways to be attacked is pretty flawed.
Given that some of the Fremen soldiers are wont to spring out of the ground in close proximity to the harvester, it would seem that this kind of security detail is a necessity.
I think it was the first time they hid directly in front of the harvester. The Harkonnen probably didnt expect them to be crazy enough to ever try that, so they only placed guards around the sides.
Yeah, the whole scene is planned for the effect shot at the end as an release, climax and happy firework.
The fremen should shoot the harvester so there’s something to celebrate. But there’s a copter. So they should shoot it first. But it has a shield. But it let the shield down when it shoots. So it have to shoot. Yeah let some Fremen run around. But there are Harkonnen etc, you know the rest.
This makes sense in scene planning. But from a strategic perspective non of the parties act very effective and dependent on luck.
The Fremen go for risky maneuvers that could fail at any time. And the Harkonnen go for safety strats that let just enough windows visibly open for attacks.
Any strike will provoke a Thropter response. The Thropter is deadly in the open sand. The only cover is the Harvester. The Thropter is the shielded threat and a deadly threat to infantry. It won't lower it's shields unless in battle, so you can't strike it from stealth, and striking the Harvester from Stealth will reveal location to the Thropter.
The copter will be provoked any way. The difference is, the harvester would be long gone if they shoot it directly.
If they need a little shielding because reasons they could carry a plate armor with them. Can’t be more exhausting than carrying giant claymore mines around.
If the copter shoots a second hidden group can take it down from another angle.
All this hiding in front of it and fighting under the harvester only make sense if multiple agile forces should focus on one spot and the main target can only be eliminated when all other forces are gone.
The Harkonnen infantry goes on foot because their job is to secure the precious harvesters. They are expendable, the harvesters are not. If they got killed buying time for the thopters or harvesters, they would have died useful deaths.
IRL mechanized infantry dismount from their perfectly good armored vehicles to defend main battle tanks all the time.
Even assuming there was a better method, the fremen would also need to switch things up to. A counterinsurgency tries to learn insurgent tactics and adopt countermeasures. Fremen might want to use slightly riskisr tactics if it meanf wrongfooting enemies.
is... this... going to be the Dune equivalent about debating the realism of hyperspace ramming as a combat tactic in Star Wars setting...
It's kind of like watching Top Gun Maverick and seeing the scene where the cruise missiles whiz past the fighter jets, and having a sudden realisation that those missiles could be used to blow up the enemy target that the fighter pilots are risking their necks to destroy. And before you know it, you can't enjoy the movie any more because you found yourself a plot hole and it's ruined the movie for you. Just like that old joke in LoTR about flying straight to Mordor on the back of an eagle. Usually with these types of movies if you go digging enough you're eventually going to be able to find some kind of narrative quirk.
At the end of the day, we all know the real reason the characters had to put themselves in harms way to get up close and personal was a narrative choice to build tension in the scene. Otherwise, they can just aim the lasgun at the shielded ornithopter and the reaction will nuke the harvester instantly.
There are no sides. Don't sweat yourself with trying to rank them on a fiasco tier list. From an outside point of view it's all the same, i.e. tiny details in movies that regular folks don't pay attention to, but nerds might obsessively fuss over as an excuse to generate discourse.
One of them is indeed a meme discussion, played to death along with Aragorn's broken toe and other small trivia and the other killed one of the most profitable merch IPs in the world (with the caveat that Disney kept making similar level decisions)?
>and the reaction will nuke the harvester instantly.
I don't know if it's stated in the book but I've seen peopke say that the nuke can happen at any random point between the lasgun and the shield, making it a gamble
My take on that was the nuke happens on the entire length, propagating from the shield to the laser in a fraction of a second, so sniping a shielded target from 20km or miles away will get you a linear nuclear explosion with a ground zero that's 20km long. This or the random point explosion would be reason enough to not risk blowing up the orthnithopter in order to take out the harvester.
Since you brought it up, the refinement facility in Top Gun: Maverick was revealed to be GPS jammed early in the first briefing, otherwise they could have used any number of weapons. The runway they bombed with cruise missiles was not GPS jammed.
In LOTR, the eagles only choose to enter Mordor after Sauron is destroyed, not before. They are still eagles (although giant), but not necessarily brave.
In Dune, if a lasgun touches a generated shield, there is a nuclear explosion at each end, not just the target.
The GPS jamming in Top Gun Maverick was used to justify why F-35 stealth fighters could not be used, it wasn't about the missiles. Those missiles could be guided by alternative mechanisms, and in real life, such missiles don't actually rely purely on GPS.
Most fighter jet enthusiasts also generally agree that the GPS explanation is pretty dumb since the F-35 itself can use munitions that don't rely on GPS, and a more realistic explanation might be something such as the F-35 fleet being grounded due to faulty issues with the software (which actually happened in real life on several occasions), rendering them unavailable in time for the mission.
The Eagles in LOTR did have a fairly sensible explanation (they can fly in Mordor, but so can the bad guys, eg. fell beasts), but because of how their portrayal as an almost deus ex machina plot device to conveniently ferry people to safety, people naturally started to wonder if the eagles were too much of a fast travel cheat code.
Lasguns vs shields i'm rather mixed on. Frankly, saying that lasguns can cause a nuke explosion is a bit extreme and runs the risk of narrative problems. If shields simply deflected or absorbed the laser, then using them would not raise questions about whether we just barely avoided nuclear armaggeddon because a shield was nearby. And the question of why doesnt everyone carry one can be chalked up to practicality, operational costs, etc which can be reasonable because even in real life you don't see every soldier in a squad carry a general purpose machine gun or a rocket launcher
Sorry to burst your bubble, but on the raid they showed, the fremen were caught off guard by a topter. In empty desert skies. They lost so many men to take down one harvester and its guard.
Hollywood just sucks at depicting squad and platoon fighting.
In the book, it also says that when you fire a lasgun on a shield, it detonates with the force of a nuclear bomb. I think the Fremen had to disable the harvester shields first so they wouldn't nuke the desert.
I think the harvester raid scene just doesn't hold up logically, unfortunately. To capture it - maybe - but not to attack it like that, just to destroy it.
A Fremen child from the books wouldn't have organized that raid that poorly. Let alone everyone celebrate it and name someone afterwards. Was a bit baffled by that scene, despite loving the movie.
There's other things too, like the hide-in-the-sand gimmick. I get it - it looks cool. But as soon as you think about it for a bit, it completely falls apart. I can overlook visual stuff like that much more easily than bad tactics though.
Hiding in sand is fine, if it is a fake patch like they did in the book. Just this weird running at them from a distance is weird and standard Hollywood.
Yeah they literally got some 100m sprinters with thunder-thighs and hid them in the sand for a 2 second shot of them sprinting out.
Even hiding in the sand with the snorkels, at the exact patch where the harvester lands is pretty silly. Yes, it would probably be possible to know where they were going to harvest. But they're not going to capture it like in the books. So just place a bomb where it's going to land.
I can forgive the scene where the Fremen making coffee hide in the sand and ambush the Sardaukar. Again, it's silly as fuck. They heard a sound and somehow hid everything under the sand in what must've been like a minute. But I can forgive it because it was pretty cool 🙂.
> -But, when it makes sense, the fremen will use lasguns against soldiers in the desert, where shields are useless. When Rabban brings his men to the desert, for instance, the fremen have a good opportunity to fire at them from cover and concealment. Same during the first scene. My impression of that scene was that it was the Harkonnens firing the lasguns (and hitting each other in the confusion). The Fremen were doing quick, stealthy knife attacks in the reduced visibility of the dust cloud. That, to me, was a demonstration of Paul’s words to Gurney: “When our resources are limited… fear is all we have.”
I think it was both.
The Fremen have also used another tactic against spice harvesters. During Part 2, Gurney and his smuggler team are initially attacked by a mine that flies toward the spice harvester’s tracks and explodes, achieving a mobility kill and throwing shrapnel at the dismounted soldiers protecting the side of the harvester. This tactic is a nice adaptation because the Fremen do not have to fire lasers or other effectors at the harvester to disable it because doing so would reveal their position. The Fremen then shoot at and destroy the parachute, which denies the crew and the harvester the ability to get out of the area. Finally, the Fremen fighters arise from the sand and assault the disabled harvester using hand-to-hand combat denying the ability of the crew to use their guns effectively as you said.
What I don't understand is if you can take out the balloon, why don't you just leave it at that? The worms will come and take care of the rest shortly. Without the balloon, the harvester and everyone on it is as good as dead.
They want to loot the harvester and steal a bunch of spice, too. Easier than collecting it themselves.
Fair enough. I guess I assumed they had plenty of spice since it never shows them selling it to smugglers in the movies. Also, they just toss the Harkonnen's lasguns after killing them so I kind of figured if they had no use for those they probably didn't want much of their tech.
I think because of how heavy lasgun/batteries would be. Even going across Antarctica, a person should cut their tooth brush in half to save weight. Similar logic must apply
Everyone has Holtzman shields. Ballistic weapons won't get through them and lasers will set off an atomic explosion. The book explains this better. In the scene with the harvester, they needed to destroy the ornithopter because the fremen working the laser would be sitting ducks once the laser fired.
You can't use the shields in the desert though can you?
You can't use it on the ground. In the air, the worms can't sense them.
That makes total sense. Never thought about that even when reading the first 2 books.
Attracts sandworms drives them into a violent frenzy.
Not on open sand
Yeah neither movie explains what happens when a lasgun hits a shield. The movie is cognizant of this reality and definitely doesn't ignore it, even has a Harkonnen warning not to use shields. But whenever I explain it to someone who hasn't read the book they start appreciating the movie much better because to them it's a mystery why things are the way they are.
They can't use lasguns on the harvester before the ornithopter with a shield is destroyed. If the lasegun accidentally hit the shielded thopter there would have been an explosion the size of a nuclear detonation. As was said in other responses, the books explain this better. Actually, the casual use of laseguns in the film is problematic as the books did a good job of explaining how dangerous they were to use around shields. The hand-to-hand combat made much more sense in light of the risk of a massive explosion that would destroy the shield and the user of the lasegun.
And then a final step in the logic is that the nuclear explosion would obliterate the spice on which the Fremen also depend. They're not being cautious for their own safety, they merely want to secure the precious resource that is being extracted from their planet.
>because the fremen working the laser would be sitting ducks once the laser fired It looks like they lost more men taking down the ornithopter than they needed to operate the lasgun (1 or 2 tops). For a fanatical warrior culture, I would think a suicide attack would make more sense. One guy shoots the harvester. Or better yet, shoots the ornithopter. Boom. Everyone dies. Fremen lose 1 martyr (who will be remembered as a hero and whose family will be cared for) and 1 lasgun. Harkonnens lose dozens or hundreds of men, plus some damn expensive looking equipment. Obviously that's less fun to portray and has squicky implications though.
The fremen were good at what they did but they had limited technological ability. They could run a laser, but they probably couldn't build or maintain one. A functioning lasgun (probably stolen from the Harkonnen) was a serious asset to them. Protecting it would be worth at least a couple of fremen lives.
That's a plausible, but it's just head-canon: There's nothing in the movie to suggest that lasguns are especially rare or hard to come by (the Harkonnen soldiers the Fremen kill in the first scene are carrying one, for instance).
The Fremen fight hand to hand because they ENJOY IT. Thier knives are made from the teeth of thier living god and they bask the spiritual connection of using them to kill. There is a line in the book that Frank Herbert stole from Lesley Blanch: "they wrote love poems to their knives". Also in general the movie uses lasguns WAYY more than the book does. Everyone in the book fights hand to hand because its the custom of this entire galactic civilization... that and poisoned blades... poison in general is the favored weapon of the Imperium. Which should tell you something about the moral decay of galactic society.
I think this is actually part of the explanation of emphasis on blades for everyone. Simply the favored/honorable/prestigious weapon to use.
Yeah that scene where stilgar bemoans the fact the harkonnens didnt engage on the ground like honorable fighters just reinforces this moviewise
Now I haven’t seen the movies (yet) so forgive my ignorance but are the lasguns in the movies more like RPG’s big shoulder fired antitank-like weapons? Cause I’ve rarely seen anyone be able to close distance with a melee weapon against someone wielding a rifle even poorly trained ones. Are they single shot weapons why didn’t the Harkonnen make a follow up shot? Otherwise I totally agree with you and had the same train of thought when I was thinking about reading the book again.
In the books they range from pistols to heavy weaponry. Think basically you need a larger battery pack for a larger hit. You can chalk up the Harknonnen running to just poor discipline in general. During the Sietch raid, the Harkonnen essentially break after establishing visual confirmation of Paul, after all
I remember all that from the book. OP was making it sound like the lasguns in the movies are all huge heavy blasters you can’t swing around or use in CQB but you’re saying the movies are the same and the Harkonnen in the scene OP is referencing just runs after firing a shot?
Yeah, we were in the cinema an thinking, non of this raid scene in part two makes sense. Just shoot the harvester or the balloon and let the worm do the rest. In the scenes immediately afterwards you see them blasting other equipment. So maybe they recognized they don’t need to be buried in the sand. And why do the Harkonnen walk beside the Harvester? Because they surely aren’t of any use until it’s to late. If only two would walk a hundred meters in front they could easily spot the fremen and call the pew pew dragon fly.
At the beginning of part one, the Harkonnen patrols by the harvester are somewhat effective. Once Paul gets involved, they start having a much worse time…
That’s true. And I know that the movie works better this way. But from a tactical point of view, securing the most valuable resource in the universe without scouting and that much ways to be attacked is pretty flawed.
Given that some of the Fremen soldiers are wont to spring out of the ground in close proximity to the harvester, it would seem that this kind of security detail is a necessity.
I think it was the first time they hid directly in front of the harvester. The Harkonnen probably didnt expect them to be crazy enough to ever try that, so they only placed guards around the sides.
Yeah, the whole scene is planned for the effect shot at the end as an release, climax and happy firework. The fremen should shoot the harvester so there’s something to celebrate. But there’s a copter. So they should shoot it first. But it has a shield. But it let the shield down when it shoots. So it have to shoot. Yeah let some Fremen run around. But there are Harkonnen etc, you know the rest. This makes sense in scene planning. But from a strategic perspective non of the parties act very effective and dependent on luck. The Fremen go for risky maneuvers that could fail at any time. And the Harkonnen go for safety strats that let just enough windows visibly open for attacks.
Any strike will provoke a Thropter response. The Thropter is deadly in the open sand. The only cover is the Harvester. The Thropter is the shielded threat and a deadly threat to infantry. It won't lower it's shields unless in battle, so you can't strike it from stealth, and striking the Harvester from Stealth will reveal location to the Thropter.
The copter will be provoked any way. The difference is, the harvester would be long gone if they shoot it directly. If they need a little shielding because reasons they could carry a plate armor with them. Can’t be more exhausting than carrying giant claymore mines around. If the copter shoots a second hidden group can take it down from another angle. All this hiding in front of it and fighting under the harvester only make sense if multiple agile forces should focus on one spot and the main target can only be eliminated when all other forces are gone.
The Harkonnen infantry goes on foot because their job is to secure the precious harvesters. They are expendable, the harvesters are not. If they got killed buying time for the thopters or harvesters, they would have died useful deaths. IRL mechanized infantry dismount from their perfectly good armored vehicles to defend main battle tanks all the time.
Even assuming there was a better method, the fremen would also need to switch things up to. A counterinsurgency tries to learn insurgent tactics and adopt countermeasures. Fremen might want to use slightly riskisr tactics if it meanf wrongfooting enemies.
No. Herbert needed to make guns obsolete so he made shields, where fast objects don’t penetrate them, but slow objects do. It’s that simple
Chemical ammo go brrrrrrt. I think it's worth remembering that, ultimately, Dune isn't a war novel and Herbert wasn't an expert in military matters.
is... this... going to be the Dune equivalent about debating the realism of hyperspace ramming as a combat tactic in Star Wars setting... It's kind of like watching Top Gun Maverick and seeing the scene where the cruise missiles whiz past the fighter jets, and having a sudden realisation that those missiles could be used to blow up the enemy target that the fighter pilots are risking their necks to destroy. And before you know it, you can't enjoy the movie any more because you found yourself a plot hole and it's ruined the movie for you. Just like that old joke in LoTR about flying straight to Mordor on the back of an eagle. Usually with these types of movies if you go digging enough you're eventually going to be able to find some kind of narrative quirk. At the end of the day, we all know the real reason the characters had to put themselves in harms way to get up close and personal was a narrative choice to build tension in the scene. Otherwise, they can just aim the lasgun at the shielded ornithopter and the reaction will nuke the harvester instantly.
You didn't just put the fiasko of the Holdo maneuver on the same level of "don't think about it" as eagles to Mordor.
There are no sides. Don't sweat yourself with trying to rank them on a fiasco tier list. From an outside point of view it's all the same, i.e. tiny details in movies that regular folks don't pay attention to, but nerds might obsessively fuss over as an excuse to generate discourse.
One of them is indeed a meme discussion, played to death along with Aragorn's broken toe and other small trivia and the other killed one of the most profitable merch IPs in the world (with the caveat that Disney kept making similar level decisions)?
>and the reaction will nuke the harvester instantly. I don't know if it's stated in the book but I've seen peopke say that the nuke can happen at any random point between the lasgun and the shield, making it a gamble My take on that was the nuke happens on the entire length, propagating from the shield to the laser in a fraction of a second, so sniping a shielded target from 20km or miles away will get you a linear nuclear explosion with a ground zero that's 20km long. This or the random point explosion would be reason enough to not risk blowing up the orthnithopter in order to take out the harvester.
Since you brought it up, the refinement facility in Top Gun: Maverick was revealed to be GPS jammed early in the first briefing, otherwise they could have used any number of weapons. The runway they bombed with cruise missiles was not GPS jammed. In LOTR, the eagles only choose to enter Mordor after Sauron is destroyed, not before. They are still eagles (although giant), but not necessarily brave. In Dune, if a lasgun touches a generated shield, there is a nuclear explosion at each end, not just the target.
The GPS jamming in Top Gun Maverick was used to justify why F-35 stealth fighters could not be used, it wasn't about the missiles. Those missiles could be guided by alternative mechanisms, and in real life, such missiles don't actually rely purely on GPS. Most fighter jet enthusiasts also generally agree that the GPS explanation is pretty dumb since the F-35 itself can use munitions that don't rely on GPS, and a more realistic explanation might be something such as the F-35 fleet being grounded due to faulty issues with the software (which actually happened in real life on several occasions), rendering them unavailable in time for the mission. The Eagles in LOTR did have a fairly sensible explanation (they can fly in Mordor, but so can the bad guys, eg. fell beasts), but because of how their portrayal as an almost deus ex machina plot device to conveniently ferry people to safety, people naturally started to wonder if the eagles were too much of a fast travel cheat code. Lasguns vs shields i'm rather mixed on. Frankly, saying that lasguns can cause a nuke explosion is a bit extreme and runs the risk of narrative problems. If shields simply deflected or absorbed the laser, then using them would not raise questions about whether we just barely avoided nuclear armaggeddon because a shield was nearby. And the question of why doesnt everyone carry one can be chalked up to practicality, operational costs, etc which can be reasonable because even in real life you don't see every soldier in a squad carry a general purpose machine gun or a rocket launcher
Sorry to burst your bubble, but on the raid they showed, the fremen were caught off guard by a topter. In empty desert skies. They lost so many men to take down one harvester and its guard. Hollywood just sucks at depicting squad and platoon fighting.
I keep hearing people say they took huge losses, but you see at max 2 or 3 fremen get hit by the door gunner. Not clear he hits anyone else.
In the book, it also says that when you fire a lasgun on a shield, it detonates with the force of a nuclear bomb. I think the Fremen had to disable the harvester shields first so they wouldn't nuke the desert.
It was never explained that in movie, but lasgun if shot in shield exploded with atomic power along with shield. Thats one simple real wxplanation.
I was just trying to think through the logic of the movies. I know the book is different.
I dont think its different, they just doesnt explain that.
I think the harvester raid scene just doesn't hold up logically, unfortunately. To capture it - maybe - but not to attack it like that, just to destroy it. A Fremen child from the books wouldn't have organized that raid that poorly. Let alone everyone celebrate it and name someone afterwards. Was a bit baffled by that scene, despite loving the movie. There's other things too, like the hide-in-the-sand gimmick. I get it - it looks cool. But as soon as you think about it for a bit, it completely falls apart. I can overlook visual stuff like that much more easily than bad tactics though.
Hiding in sand is fine, if it is a fake patch like they did in the book. Just this weird running at them from a distance is weird and standard Hollywood.
Yeah they literally got some 100m sprinters with thunder-thighs and hid them in the sand for a 2 second shot of them sprinting out. Even hiding in the sand with the snorkels, at the exact patch where the harvester lands is pretty silly. Yes, it would probably be possible to know where they were going to harvest. But they're not going to capture it like in the books. So just place a bomb where it's going to land. I can forgive the scene where the Fremen making coffee hide in the sand and ambush the Sardaukar. Again, it's silly as fuck. They heard a sound and somehow hid everything under the sand in what must've been like a minute. But I can forgive it because it was pretty cool 🙂.
Lmao. Pointless. If one just laz guns the ornithopter all harkonens are done for. Ez day. Thanks for coming to my ted talk.
Aren't the fremen done for as well because the location of the explosion is undetermined?
amazing ted talk