I'd lean towards joke, because even if one built a modern version of one of Nelson's warships, it would be a floating target for any warship built in the last century alone. But that is largely due to Ships of the Line being designed for a far different form of naval warfare.

Retrotech is, in many, much like rebuilding the Titanic with modern technology and construction rules. It can be done, there's been various proposals to do so, but the finished product would bear at best a superficial resemblance to its historical namesake. And that's what you go for with Retrotech, namely taking proven designs and wrapping them around "modern" technology.

>
>But this one...The Avro Arrow is largely a myth, even today. In 400
>years, what would they have to go on to reconstruct it besides a few
>photos? Why burn effort and time working on a centuries old design
>that you aren't even sure will match something a lot cheaper? Unless
>you could build a modern starfighter to look like literally anything,
>in which case the DIE-WING should be a much more successful design,
>and there ought to be something made out of force-fields, guns and
>engines strapped to a lawn chair out there that out-performs the TIE
>series.

Why burn effort and time? Because it's a proven airframe, which is what one would aim for during such a clandestine program. Starting from scratch means months, if not years, of simulation and prototyping. Part of success is not trying to reinvent the wheel.

>
>And then there is the designated punching bag status of the villains,
>who can't notice the building of the factories, the shipments of
>ultra-rare alloy, or the building of the airbases when they are
>ostensibly in control of the area. That sticks in my craw as well.
>How can I take them seriously when they're idiots? And if I can't
>take them seriously, how am I supposed to care about what they do, or
>why the protagonists are fighting them?

Bureaucracies, as almost a rule, are anything but absolute masters of all they command. The EA would have bigger fish to try, especially when Canada's idea of resistance to annexation is refusing to show up to work. Devoting manpower to continuous surveillance of Northern Canada would be wasteful, while automated systems could not adapt as humans could to active subterfuge.

And if you argue that somebody might catch a glimpse of something, what's more likely: A mid-level official looking at the unclear readings and deducing that Canada's secretly building an aerospace force composed of modernized versions of an ancient aircraft that never made it past prototype stage and devoting the resources to put a stop to it or deciding that the readings are in error and stamping the report "low priority" before moving onto more pressing matters like armed resistance in the larger countries?

--------------------------
CdrMike, Overwatch Reject