Captain America: Brave New World - Official Trailer (2025)

[chuckdee]

I think the main thing is that Sam is extremely experienced in using the flight harness, but he was also part of an entire USAF PJ unit using them at least a decade before this film. Assuming he’s not the only survivor, and they weren’t the only unit, there must have been at least dozens of such operators and dozens of such harnesses, which have only got more advanced in the last decade.

How expensive are they? Who knows, but Torres got one*, no questions asked, just because he’s a promising young USAF officer who’s Cap’s best pal. He’s not a superhero, we have no reason to think he’s unique or even exceptional, he’s just a great pilot and hacker.

*Torres says “I make your old suit look good” but since Sam’s last suit got wrecked in FatWS and it didn’t look much like the one Torres has, I’m going to assume it’s a similar model and not the same one.

I think it is his old suit, and Torres got it back into service and modified it as he fixed it. And Sam was the last one of his unit - I took it to mean that the unit was seen as not viable and discontinued. That's the angle I saw it as from Winter Soldier.

 

[jian]

I think it is his old suit, and Torres got it back into service and modified it as he fixed it. And Sam was the last one of his unit - I took it to mean that the unit was seen as not viable and discontinued. That's the angle I saw it as from Winter Soldier.

That’s a possible interpretation, but I thought it very unlikely that Torres is using Sam’s old suit. It’d be like my dropping a F-35 with its wings torn off on to my friend’s lawn and expecting him to have fixed it up and made it fully operational as a hobby project. Heck, at least F-35s are in regular service and so you can get spare parts - if the falcon suit is no longer in service then how the heck is Torres supposed to have fixed it?

 

[chuckdee]

That’s a possible interpretation, but I thought it very unlikely that Torres is using Sam’s old suit. It’d be like my dropping a F-35 with its wings torn off on to my friend’s lawn and expecting him to have fixed it up and made it fully operational as a hobby project. Heck, at least F-35s are in regular service and so you can get spare parts - if the falcon suit is no longer in service then how the heck is Torres supposed to have fixed it?

At the end of FATWS when Torres talked about it- he asked Sam if he could have it. That's where I got that from. And Torres was his go to man for technical stuff with the wings in that series.

 

[jian]

A bit frustrated it wasn't better (the seams were pretty obvious around the reshoot scenes, for example). But I did appreciate

Spoiler

Sterns' ultimate revenge on Ross being to turn him into what he hated most: a Hulk.

There’s actually a lot of parallels with a certain DC character.

Spoiler

I of course mean General Eiling AKA the Shaggy Man AKA the Very Shaved Man. It’s a pity we won’t see Ross in the Thunderbolts, they could use the muscle.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I would think it would be. And more difficult to train with more casualties in training. It has been said that Falcon has borderline superhuman reflexes, the adjustments and reactions he has to make when flying at speed. They make it look easy, but the comics have made sure to emphasize the fact that it is very difficult.

Even if not prohibitively expensive up front, its always possible designs not produce by supergeniuses are godawful hanger queens (which is already a problem with fighters, so if these are even worse...)

 

[Thomas Shey]

I think the main thing is that Sam is extremely experienced in using the flight harness, but he was also part of an entire USAF PJ unit using them at least a decade before this film. Assuming he’s not the only survivor, and they weren’t the only unit, there must have been at least dozens of such operators and dozens of such harnesses, which have only got more advanced in the last decade.

We were outright told there was only one surviving suit in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. That doesn't suggest to me there were many of them.

Fact is, all sign is that outside of Stark and Wakanda, people have serious problems getting power suits to work out in the MCU. Except for Ironheart, all examples of such we've seen originates from one or the other, either directly or indirectly (you can make an argument about Vanko's suit, but Vanko was pretty much a dark Tony Stark, and those don't seem thick on the ground in the MCU).

How expensive are they? Who knows, but Torres got one*, no questions asked, just because he’s a promising young USAF officer who’s Cap’s best pal. He’s not a superhero, we have no reason to think he’s unique or even exceptional, he’s just a great pilot and hacker.

As noted, Torres repaired Sam's old wings.

*Torres says “I make your old suit look good” but since Sam’s last suit got wrecked in FatWS and it didn’t look much like the one Torres has, I’m going to assume it’s a similar model and not the same one.

I'm pretty sure you're wrong. Torres is extremely competent so it seems entirely possible, especially with willingness from the military to assist him that he would have been able to repair the extent suit. It has the advantage that whatever technomagic Tony Stark did with the original didn't need to be recreated--just fixed.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I think it is his old suit, and Torres got it back into service and modified it as he fixed it. And Sam was the last one of his unit - I took it to mean that the unit was seen as not viable and discontinued. That's the angle I saw it as from Winter Soldier.

It probably required too much maintenance by too highly a skilled technicians at best.

(Note: we're missing some data here, as the Armor Wars movie/series never happened and may never happen now).

 

[jian]

I think there’s a whole interesting side thread here about why superhero tech doesn’t work outside superheroes in the MCU. Obviously the main explanation is Doylist (only superheroes get super suits and that’s final) but I’d love to get a decent Watsonian explanation.

The most likely Watsonian explanation, as people have said, is that the technology is too expensive, unreliable, or unsuitable for most roles. Basically, if you’ve got F-35s you don’t really need a man-sized version to duplicate that role. Presumably the PJ wing suits were an experiment that didn’t pan out and were discontinued. But it does definitely allow for the possibility of the US military or other militaries developing and using them.

(Honestly it’s unlikely that the suits are too expensive. F-35s cost 100m each but the whole program cost will be about 1.5tn for development and operation, which is a godawful amount of money. It’s fairly unlikely that even the Iron Man program cost that much in total - there’s no way Tony had that sort of money or could borrow it. But there’s the question of cost-effectiveness; if the USAF doesn’t want Iron Man suits it’s not going to buy them, however good they are.)

 

[chuckdee]

The most likely Watsonian explanation, as people have said, is that the technology is too expensive, unreliable, or unsuitable for most roles. Basically, if you’ve got F-35s you don’t really need a man-sized version to duplicate that role. Presumably the PJ wing suits were an experiment that didn’t pan out and were discontinued. But it does definitely allow for the possibility of the US military or other militaries developing and using them.

I also think it would run afoul of the same thing that our fighter jet technology is just starting to run into - the cost of the human element. There's a level of skill to operate those wings- just look at the final training statement that Sam gives Torres and he hadn't even thought of what Sam said about disabling the fighter.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I think there’s a whole interesting side thread here about why superhero tech doesn’t work outside superheroes in the MCU. Obviously the main explanation is Doylist (only superheroes get super suits and that’s final) but I’d love to get a decent Watsonian explanation.

The most likely Watsonian explanation, as people have said, is that the technology is too expensive, unreliable, or unsuitable for most roles. Basically, if you’ve got F-35s you don’t really need a man-sized version to duplicate that role. Presumably the PJ wing suits were an experiment that didn’t pan out and were discontinued. But it does definitely allow for the possibility of the US military or other militaries developing and using them.

(Honestly it’s unlikely that the suits are too expensive. F-35s cost 100m each but the whole program cost will be about 1.5tn for development and operation, which is a godawful amount of money. It’s fairly unlikely that even the Iron Man program cost that much in total - there’s no way Tony had that sort of money or could borrow it. But there’s the question of cost-effectiveness; if the USAF doesn’t want Iron Man suits it’s not going to buy them, however good they are.)

The classic explanation is that supertech is extremely hard to make work without a supergenius in charge; which doesn't mean that if the supergenius is willing to just hand you the blueprints and manufacturing data it can't be duplicated, but there are any number of reasons (some defensible) they aren't usually doing that, and without that there are subtle (or not so subtle) nuances lesser minds will miss when trying to reverse engineer them.

You can very much argue that's not realistic, but so are any number of things in superhero settings.