Red Faction/Headscratchers

• The Hydra. Massively armed, can kill with precision or kill entire continents. Has zero point defense. Is destroyed by a single missile. Who designed this thing?
  • Volition. And the missile was pretty much a super-superweapon.
  • A super-superweapon in it's damage potential, but not in it's accuracy or speed or defenses or anything that would make it less likely to be effected by point-defense systems. It was a perfectly regular missile with a perfectly regular chance of hitting, carrying a one-hit-kill warhead.
  • Fridge Brilliance? The Hydra was, according to EDF news broadcasts, designed by the same guy who captains it. Given that most of the EDF leaders in the game appear more concerned with appearances and terrorizing colonists than actually combating the Red Faction, maybe he actually didn't consider defenses.
  • It's not a missile. It's a shot from the nano forge.
    • It was an RM-8 Missile stuffed with nanites.
• There's a mission in Dust sector where the EDF has organized a supposedly peaceful demonstration with the intent of luring malcontents in and then killing them. The miners were smart enough to come armed, though, and when you get there an enormous firefight is in progress. Your objective is to save the miners by...destroying the loudspeakers broadcasting claims of a peaceful protest, which are supposedly luring more innocent people into the fray. You know, despite the fact that all the loudspeakers are inside the crater where the battle is taking place. Indeed, the only way to hear them at all is to be actively involved in said firefight, and anyone outside the immediate area would just hear the gunfire and explosions. With that in mind...what's the point of destroying the loudspeakers? For that matter, why do the miners even need saving? Virtually all of the protesters came armed, and when you arrive they're set up in a fairly fortified area with ample cover, holding their own pretty damn well.
  • Hell, how do we know the EDF even planned on opening fire? How do we know they even fired the first shot? Any competent police officer who saw dozens of 'peaceful protesters' openly carrying assault rifles and taking defensive positions would be liable to shoot first and sort it out later.
• Does anyone know why they took out the ability to destroy terrain in all the games after the first Red Faction, seriously it was the funniest part of the game.
  • Because that would mean there would be need to create a limit on how much you can destroy it. It's more simple to make buildings destroy than desing entire world to work on physics.
• So, the Marauders. In Guerrilla, they live in giant heaps of scrap that look about a strong wind away from collapsing in a heap. In Armageddon, they live in... futuristic underground cities shinier and more advanced than anything the EDF ever had. The "centuries-old" Marauder temple Darius visits is in better condition than most of the EDF colonies. Where did they get this sort of tech in under a century?
  • I'm pretty sure the whole "primitive marauders in dinky metal houses" thing was a masquerade of some kind. They're actually scientists.
  • It's a masquarade. I mean, they got the accelerator, which you don't keep in working order with shaky houses. They pretend to be savages so nobody would have any real interest in them, although some people already suspect(listen to news in Guerrilla) that they are Ultor survivors.
• So, the Terraformer, essentially the key to everything that occurs in the entire game, gets taken out in the beginning of the game and then repaired by Darius at the end. It took Darius all of five minutes to do this--by himself. Why didn't anyone else do this before now?
  • For that matter, the Nano-Forge has impossible ramifications for industry and economy. It can completely repair anything that the user points it at, to the point of apparently creating matter out of thin air to fill in annihilated portions. It can rebuild large structures in mere seconds (even if the user would have no clue what it used to look like, the Nano-Forge essentially reverses time on the structure) and the power source is either unlimited or extremely efficient. It's effectively made standard reconstruction work obsolete as the user can simply wave his arm and bring destroyed objects back to life. Its ability to repair an object as complex as a sci-fi power generator indicates an unfathomable ability to create matter, which could theoretically allow the user to create resources or valuables for no effort. Aaaaand it's being used by some random scavenger?
    • It's possible that the Nano Forge just reconstructs things using only nearby rubble (thus not violating the law of conservation of mass) and based on installed schematics. While theoretically you could turn anything into anything it knows of, assuming you have the right raw materials, all you can manage with a simple handwave is "recognise what's probably supposed to be there, build something like it and make sure it probably works". For all we know the Forge could have accidentally hooked up a garbage compactor to where one of the water purifiers was supposed to be in that one mission. But for the sake of game simplicity, it just restores what was originally there.
    • On top of this, it's possible that Darius is keeping the Nano Forge hush-hush to keep it from falling into the wrong hands. There sure are a lot of loonies running around on Mars, and you certainly don't want someone like Adam Hale at the command of a veritable technological singularity.