How come the GTVA doesn't have the banshee in FS2. After all it was the most powerful weapon in FS. Why would they scrap their best weapon. It just doesn't make any sense to me. Any thoughts?
[DerisiveSarcasm]And why didn't they just build Hercs? They're the best fighter around, so they should have just built them and nothing else![/DerisiveSarcasm]
The in-universe explanation is that it probably costs a bundle to make the Banshee. Moreover, you can argue that with the resources and industrial base in Sol gone, the remnant GTA and subsequent Terran Blocs simply couldn't afford to spare the resources [if they even had it, see: Prometheus R] to produce the weapon.
Moreover, did you notice how only a few ships can even mount the Banshee? Couple that with the fact that it's a major power-drain, and was built specifically for anti-Shivan work, there really isn't a need for such a powerful weapon in the Rebuilding era when Avengers and Prometheus-Cannons do the job for a lot cheaper [both in terms of ship-energy and likely dollar-cost].
Finally, it's implied that weapons and armour have grown stronger in the yeares between FS1 and FS2, meaning the Banshee design might just not be as useful any more as it once was.
For the real-world explanation, the game is a sequel, meaning you should only really reuse things from the previous game when you have to, such as Capital ships. Weapons and soforth would logically change over time, meaning :V: could safely replace all the weapons with shiny new ones to show that technology has advanced, giving the game a more sequel-y feel. For a comparison, imagine Metroid Prime 2, where your arm-cannon weapons were the same from Metroid Prime 1. Definintely loses some of the sequel-y feel, don't it?
Yeah, I always used the Banshee, and when I saw they had kept the Prometheus and called it the weapon that won the Great War, I was like, wha??????????????????????????? I mean, the Great War, for anybody who knows how to select weapons by anything other than what they look like ("Ooh, this one has more barrels in the picture, and they've got those little holes in them, which makes it look über-cool, it must be better!") and selected their weapons based on this, the Great War was won by the Banshee (and the Harbinger). What is this nonsense!?!?
Just because the weapons was the most powerful doesn't mean it 'won the war'. I mean, we don't know about deployment, kill ratio, production, and usage across the fleet. For all we know, the Banshee could have been kept to only the more elite squadrons, not unlike the Kayser. The Prometheus Cannon was available early on, it was obviously widespread in use, and it provided excellent firepower on just about every craft that could mount it, not to mention that it made killing Shivans
vastly more efficient. Frankly, those facts alone make it one of the premier weapons of the Great War, rather than a big cannon introduced in the closing days and just made it
easier to kill Shivans.
Yes, it's a good gun, but just because it can kill Shivans the quickest doesn't mean it won the war.
