Attack on Titan: Chainshot?!

[dyre]

Chain shot is sexy, but imo the real question is why haven't they surrounded the castle walls with a damn No Man's (or Titan's) Land. Dig ditches, fill them with spikes, put up wooden stakes, etc. Since they apparently developed explosives, the survey corps should cover certain areas of the forest with booby traps (rope tied between trees that triggers a shaped shrapnel charge when pulled). Considering how long it must have taken to build a damn castle, they must have had time to build some basic defenses outside the walls.

One of the things that got me was how it take three years(?) to train roughly a platoon worth of soldiers(and considering how fast they lose people that only makes it worse). Seriously? Hell, it only takes about two years to train a US Navy Seal and those guys are among the military Elite.

It was three years yeah. It's probably safe to say that it takes more time to prepare people to fight the scariest motherfuckers in the world that will brutally one touch kill you, the psychological training should be extensive.

I don't know much about military practice but we as a species understand how humans work so it's easier to train for it. Titans are a scientific blank where the game could change at a moments notice (that flying fish Titan tho...)

Speaking of the flying fish, have you played the Unity browser game? The fish Titans will fucking wipe the server singlehandedly, Survey Corp characters included. A few regular players develop a phobia of the things even.

At the end of the day, three years is the most dramatic because four years would feel like way too long but honestly two years sounds a little bit too short. We all know that AOT strives to make the most dramatic experience possible.

Judging by how every other soldier seemed to have a nervous breakdown in the first major battle in the series, I think it's safe to say that they don't receive the same level of psychological conditioning as Navy Seals.

Also, given the long training time, and considering the extremely low number of trainees per class who sign up for the survey corps, and the survey corps' apparent casualty rate of 95%, I wonder how they still have soldiers left in that group...

 

[Erttheking]

Here's the thing though. In order to pull that off you have to be a complete and utter dead eye with the cannon, and cannons just aren't that accurate. Just about the only time the cannons in AoT where of any use is towards the end of the battle of trost when all the Titans were lined up against the inner wall and the Garrison was just shelling them non-stop with explosive rounds. It doesn't help that you have to very specifically get the nape of the neck, miss it and the titan WILL get back up. In the battle of Trost we see that a titan gets its entire head ripped off and it started to get back up before its nape was crushed. I doubt chainshot would be that precise.

Plus the main problem with cannons being the only defense against Titans is that cannons are a fixed weapon that take awhile to reload and, well, the Titans don't stay still for very long.

 

[Erttheking]

Judging by how every other soldier seemed to have a nervous breakdown in the first major battle in the series, I think it's safe to say that they don't receive the same level of psychological conditioning as Navy Seals.

Also, given the long training time, and considering the extremely low number of trainees per class who sign up for the survey corps, and the survey corps' apparent casualty rate of 95%, I wonder how they still have soldiers left in that group...

Well see here's the thing. The main thing that the military does in basic training is break you down and make it so that your body responds automatically in the heat of battle. This is just with things like rifles and grenades, mainly to make sure that in the heat of battle you don't choke and, say, drop your magazine while reloading or miss the slot. Needless to say, getting the reactions of soldiers who have to grapple through the air, avoiding being crushed and slicing open the back of a Titan's neck with surgical precision would take a lot longer to get down.

Actually it seems right. The causality rate of the Survey Corps is only around 33% per mission, with the survivors usually becoming very skilled. The main characters are part of the 104th trainee corpse, meaning that a new class of recruits is probably put together and starts training every year considering that the walls have been standing for 105 years. Also, considering that their mission outside the wall during the series was called the 57th expedition, that means they probably only go out once every two years. So they go out, lose 33% of the men who goes out, gain experience, go back in, get two graduating classes of recruits to make up for the lost numbers, then go back out again. Rinse and repeat.

Of course, in more recent events the Survey Corps takes quite a thrashing, and if you're up to date on the manga, you'd see evidence that they're only hanging on by a thread.

 

[shintakie10]

I've only finished as far as the anime has gone, so they probably explain more in the manga, but isn't one of the prevailing things they talk about complacency and corruption? The one girl specifically brings up the point about how the better you are at fighting titans, the farther away from any actual titans you get.

 

[The Wykydtron]

I've only finished as far as the anime has gone, so they probably explain more in the manga, but isn't one of the prevailing things they talk about complacency and corruption? The one girl specifically brings up the point about how the better you are at fighting titans, the farther away from any actual titans you get.

That's pretty much the entire current arc yeah. I've not been keeping 100% up to date with it because I like to stack issues and read 10 at once but it's definitely gone for a whole internal politics scrap over Titan killing (maybe a good thing because they kill off a random character every bloody time they fight them) but I assume the Survey Corp will sort it out and go off to finally find that plot device in the basement. They'll probably get totally shreked by random new Titan attack #100 again though because nothing can go according to plan in this universe.

 

[dyre]

Judging by how every other soldier seemed to have a nervous breakdown in the first major battle in the series, I think it's safe to say that they don't receive the same level of psychological conditioning as Navy Seals.

Also, given the long training time, and considering the extremely low number of trainees per class who sign up for the survey corps, and the survey corps' apparent casualty rate of 95%, I wonder how they still have soldiers left in that group...

Well see here's the thing. The main thing that the military does in basic training is break you down and make it so that your body responds automatically in the heat of battle. This is just with things like rifles and grenades, mainly to make sure that in the heat of battle you don't choke and, say, drop your magazine while reloading or miss the slot. Needless to say, getting the reactions of soldiers who have to grapple through the air, avoiding being crushed and slicing open the back of a Titan's neck with surgical precision would take a lot longer to get down.

Actually it seems right. The causality rate of the Survey Corps is only around 33% per mission, with the survivors usually becoming very skilled. The main characters are part of the 104th trainee corpse, meaning that a new class of recruits is probably put together and starts training every year considering that the walls have been standing for 105 years. Also, considering that their mission outside the wall during the series was called the 57th expedition, that means they probably only go out once every two years. So they go out, lose 33% of the men who goes out, gain experience, go back in, get two graduating classes of recruits to make up for the lost numbers, then go back out again. Rinse and repeat.

Of course, in more recent events the Survey Corps takes quite a thrashing, and if you're up to date on the manga, you'd see evidence that they're only hanging on by a thread.

Military basic training last 10 weeks though, not 3 years. These guys supposedly have more training than US Navy Seals, yet all freak out at the first sign of combat.

Also, wasn't the Survey Corps casualty rate 80% per mission?

 

[Rowan93]

Plus the main problem with cannons being the only defense against Titans is that cannons are a fixed weapon that take awhile to reload and, well, the Titans don't stay still for very long.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse_artillery