Need to know the similarites and differences between the armor in starship troopers and Forever War?

Question

I've read starship troopers, i'm suppose to read Forever War as well but my order hasn't come in yet. For homework we're suppose to tell the descriptions of both books armor descriptions and the similarities and differences.. Are there any hardcore scifi fands out there can give me a hand? i need to do this homework quite soon! thanks for any help, it is greatly appreciated :D

Answer 1

I suspect that Forever War hardware was based on the Starship Troopers equipment. Heinlein wrote his book well before Haldeman and it was the definitive hard-SF "army grunt" story. Haldeman just wrote -at the time of the Vietnam war protests - that the military life was not one of glory. More likely, it was about despair and disconnection from real life.

Heinlein's gung-ho "only veterans should vote" attitude in the book was not popular by then. Mind you, it was likely a "constructed world" rather than a political point of view; but he took a lot of heat for it over the years.

I don't remember the details - it's been 30 years since I read either of them. (Actually, IIRC, Forever War was written as a series of novellas. Possibly re-written to fit the traditional novel format, or you may find it disjointed and episodic.)

The main thing I recall was the fog or feild around the battles in Forever War. If you drop a bunch of troopers into a war zone, today's ammo, so presumably the future's, is quite capable of knocking them out on the way down; or laying waste to large areas so as to not miss them. The old "Why don't they just carpet bomb?"

Heinlein ignored this. Haldeman came up with some damping field so that nothing worked except hand-to-hand combat. (Did they use bow and arrow or something?)

With today's smart-bombs and precsion munitions, you have ot wonder what the defences for single combatants would be.

I'm a bit hazy, it's been a while since I read these.