Headscratchers / Supreme Commander

• Is it really true that all the units except the ACUs in Supreme Commander are piloted by AI? When I look at a lot of close-ups of units and buildings—especially on the UEF side—I see cockpits, windows, and bridges with bridge lights (in the case of naval units). Is it explicitly stated somewhere that all the non-Commander units are just drones?
  • Well, I can't really provide a quote from the manual or anything like that, but the events in each game would make much less sense if the armies were actually manned. Why would an entire Commander's army defect with him when he does, and how are they bringing personnel into combat to man constructed units when quantum teleportation gates only drop in one ACU at a time? Where's the chain of command? Also, at the level of detail we get with the closeup, your "cockpits, windows and bridges with bridge lights" could just be sensor pods, radios and normal lights.

• How stupid are the UEF to leave an island maybe what 10 miles away from their war ending super weapon completely unguarded?
  • Black Sun base has been under constant attack. That's why the other two sides can bring armies against a base located on the UEF homeworld.
  • Even if they did guard it, it's pretty easy to let 1 unit slip by, and considering that this one unit will most probably be an ACU, which is in no way weak (and is capable of taking the island either on its own, or by constructing a small army), I can see how it's possible.
    • If you play the UEF campaign you can see ruins of a base on the island to the south of the island on which Black Sun resides, so they were probably overrun.
• Why did the UEF build Black Sun on Earth? Why not say deep space on a space station with the location heavily classified?
  • Then the Fridge Brilliance kicks in they built Black Sun on Earth because it has to fire into the gate network to function, which means that by building it on Earth, Earth can not be destroyed by the weapon.
    • Additionally, Cybran hackers were quite good so it was safer to build it on Earth where UEF's forces would be gathered instead of risking Cybrans getting hold of it because it wasn't guarded well enough in a "heavily classified" location.
    • It's on the UEF homeworld and it still came under attack, and all of the secret off-site development stations were overrun. The logistics of SC warfare mean that remoteness is fairly moot, and all it takes is one leak for your classified site to come under attack.

• If an Armored Command Unit is a personal mech for each commander, then how come every time you start a new campaign mission, your ACU got reversed into its basic starting setup, with all the previous upgrades that you might have done in the previous mission removed? Granted, in-game mechanic-wise means it'll stop players from getting an easy start with a high-tier ACU, but story-wise, why would anyone do that?
  • Possibly a result of the how the Quantum Gates work. Details are never given, but we can surmise that travel requires an incredible ammount of energy (what with a gate assisted entry into battle for a subCommander requiring mass and energy from the receiving end), so it's quite possible that for a gate-to-point transport the energy requirements are so high far mass transportation that it's more practical to gate in with only a default command unit and build it up instead of transporting it with upgrades. All upgrades increase the mass of the ACU, and with how constant battles it's likely that on the grand scale it's just more practical to have each ACU be as small as possible before transport.
  • This isn't canon, but a possible explanation is labelled in the fanon Infinite War Series: it creates an energy signal so powerful that you'll be instantly spotted, giving you no time to build any defense for you to leave or retaliate.

• In Mission 2, it's shown that Celene and QAI both had multiple nuke silos ready, only to use them to bomb each other. Why didn't they just nuke the Loyalisy base and the player from the start?