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Before landing on Char, General Warfield says that Char has "an atmosphere that will burn a man alive;" however, during the cinematics, the marines are shown without their helmets and there doesn't appear to be any sort of shielding on their platform. How is this possible?

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  • Cause if your a Blizzard character looking bada** is more important than realistically breathable atmospheres.
    – Ender
    Commented Jun 28, 2015 at 1:18

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While there is no reason given in the story we can make guesses.

Just because the "atmosphere will burn a man alive" doesn't mean it's crazy hot. It could just mean ~100-200 degrees Celsius.

While that sort of temperature is lethal the marines haven't taken their suits off nor their helmets, they've only opened the visor. Now we assume that there is cooling incorporated into the suit. While the efficiency will certainly go down with the visor open it doesn't necessarily mean that the person would burn especially since we don't know how hot that planet actually is.

So the atmosphere is hot, but their suits are working hard to compensate and will also probably be blowing nice cool air into their faces, which if I recall my physics lessons correctly would cause a pressure difference which prevents the hotter outside air from getting in.

It's also likely that the suits would be able to gather power from the heat around them so it may not even drain the suits power reserves.

I don't think that in this scenario it is very unrealistic to have their visors up, I doubt that it would cause discomfort let alone burn them alive. Those suits have far superior technology in them to anything we have currently so it's impossible to guess what it has to keep them alive and comfortable in extreme conditions.

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  • Actually, as a Russian and fan of saunas of all sorts, I kinda agree :-)
    – Orc JMR
    Commented Jun 30, 2015 at 4:24
  • To pedantic, it's not heat that generates power, but heat differentials. So the suit can't be keeping the inside cool at the same time it's harvesting power from the difference in heat, unless it's a perpetual motion machine.
    – congusbongus
    Commented Jun 30, 2015 at 4:55
  • @congusbongus well the surface is basically made of lava, and the exhausts are near the top of the back, so I'd imagine there's quite a lot of difference. I can't say I know much about this particular branch of phsyics though.
    – Aequitas
    Commented Jun 30, 2015 at 5:25
  • Something else to consider is that the Terrans make liberal use of nuclear technology. Raynor or Swain (I forget who) says that Vultures have them, and Medics used to have something called a "caduceus reactor", so it isn't at all far fetched for Marines to have nuclear reactors in their suits for temperature control.
    – aebabis
    Commented Jun 30, 2015 at 22:31
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Ender is right - there is no in-game reason for this. This is just the rule of cool. Extremely hostile environments are cool - only real heroes may prevail there. Speaking to each other from behind closed helmets is uncool - the player can't see character's dramatic expressions.
Conflict? No, why? :-)

See also: how a normal human (not the ripped Tychus) can fit into a CNC, why does Raynor have two revolvers - a human-sized and a CNC-sized one, etc. etc.

It's just that the story of SC2 is not exactly thoroughly written, we all have to deal with it.

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