Yeah, the Avengers helicarrier is so far outside the realm of possibility it makes physics weep.
The heaviest aircraft ever built is way, way, way, way lighter than even the tiniest aircraft carrier ever built. We’re talking many orders of magnitude difference. And that heaviest aircraft ever built was a big ol’ fixed-wing cargo craft – helicopters don’t get even remotely close to that class of weight.
Aircraft carriers are only possible because the water below them supports insane amounts of weight. Trying to lift ships of that size into the air and sustain flight is utterly impossible with anything remotely close to extant technology.
But they’re not built with anything close to extant technology, they’re built with Tony Stark Superscience. More to the point, they’re built in the Marvel Universe, where the laws of physics are more like polite suggestions, just like the Narbonverse.
It does bother me just a *wee* tad that, when the captain wants this craft back in covert mode, he or she probably yells “SINK! SINK!” rather than “DIVE! DIVE!” On the other hand, it probably bothers the crew one frikken’ hell of a lot more…
Daedalus, the submarine aircraft carrier from Macross! …which never got to show its capabilities as it wound up in deep space as the “arm” of a starship.
Also, at the end of WWll, the Japanese did have a submarine equipped with 2 full-sized seaplanes. Didn’t really see action but it was the biggest submarine of the war. I guess it was maybe not QUITE the size of this one.
This would seem to support that Shelby actually *is* Mr. Green. I wouldn’t have thought so, but who else would know where all the secret aircraft carriers are?
I think the author’s comments from last Sunday strongly implied that Shelby is a spy for AG-I, which isn’t consistent with Shelby being Mr.Green; the head of the Illuminati wouldn’t need to spy on Skin Horse to look for his own spies [spies like Sweetheart’s admin chief].
I think the author’s comments from last Sunday didn’t just imply that Shelby is a spy for AG-I. They confirmed it.
However, if he really is Mr. Green and head of A-Sig as well, how better to hide his true identity than by acting as a spy for another agency.
Remember your Art of War. “When we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away” and “O divine art of subtlety and secrecy! Through you we learn to be invisible, through you inaudible; and hence we can hold the enemy’s fate in our hands.”
(But fwiw, I don’t think he’s Mr. Green either. I already voiced my theory the other day, and I still maintain it.)
Remember, not so long ago, the most advanced cloaking device was brightly colored paint in crazy patterns, and that could fool even the most complex sensors… and then somebody went ahead and invented radar.
If one of your co-workers is a violent zombie with cannibalistic tendencies, a perpetual supply of meats isn’t a waste of money, it’s a core part of office safety procedures.
Sweetheart is saying that Skin Horse may be wasting money on charcuterie, but they clearly aren’t wasting nearly as much money as AG-I did on building a submarine aircraft carrier.
She is not, as I first thought, suggesting that the existence of a submarine aircraft carrier somehow justifies Skin Horse’s expenditure on cured meats.
Thanks, that does make sense now. I think you’ve got it. I was trying and failing to draw some kind of linear connection between a charcuterie plate and the aircraft carrier.
Supplies and expenditures are tricky. At the post office, we needed a variety of supplies constantly, pens and pencils, blank labels, label holders, gloves…but of the couple hundred people in the plant, I was the only one who would go and get them. (Wonder how they’re doing now that I’m retired?)
You can only stretch things so far before suspension of disbelief collapses.
Narboniverse mad science gives you wiggle room, for sure. You want to have laser rifles? Sure, that’s easy. How about a giant robotic foot that jumps everywhere? Weird, but sure.
But how about if one of those laser rifles didn’t just punch holes in a brick wall, but somehow could vaporize an entire mountain? That… doesn’t work quite as well, does it?
Or what if the giant robotic foot didn’t just jump over cars and people, but could actually leap all the way out into space and land on the moon? Mad science be damned, that’s just too absurd to be taken seriously.
That’s the sort of difference in scope we’re talking about.
If you made an aircraft carrier out of magical super high tech alloys and materials, and somehow managed to make it 100x as light (which is pretty insane even for mad science), well… even then, it still wouldn’t fly. In fact, it wouldn’t come anywhere even close. Especially not powered by rotors!
It’s one thing to imagine someone being so hungry they could eat an entire cow. It’s another thing entirely to imagine they could eat the sun.
Did you also dis Star Wars, for building moon-sized space stations that could vaporize a planet?
This is science fiction, or more to the point, mad science fiction. It’s not limited by the possible. Right from the start, it’s been so far beyond the possible, you have to simply accept it, because you know that it can’t possibly be real, and so therefore it must be. You can’t rationalize it in any way using the feeble laws of physics. But if that’s too much for you, we’ll be sorry to see you leave, and we’ll wish you well, but you seem to be rather alone in your complaints.
Star Wars does a hell of a lot more to distance itself from our extant technology, and by extension the intrinsic limits of our technology do not apply.
The Death Star is plausible because we have no idea what it’s made of or how it’s powered. It’s easy to imagine is uses some form of materials and energy production entirely unknown to us. It doesn’t even LOOK like anything we’re used to – not even the architecture is familiar to us.
But the Avengers helicarrier doesn’t have that benefit. It’s not an object from long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away – It’s an object built in the modern day, on earth. It is inherently limited by the setting it exists in.
And worse, even if you wanted to argue that it might be made out of exotic super materials and powered by phlebotinum, it doesn’t LOOK like it. It is quite visibly constructed out of familiar materials, in a familiar shape and form, performing a familiar function to things that already exist.
It’s hard to argue that you’re using special super science alloys and fusion power when it LOOKS like you built it out of run of the mill steel and aluminum, and your primary propulsion source is giant ducted rotor fans that clearly are powered by some form of fossil fuel combustion.
In contrast, the Death Star looks like nothing we know, and therefor we know nothing about its inherent limits. How does it work? We don’t know, and that makes it easier to believe that it should be able to do the things it does. Or more accurately, to believe that there’s nothing which should STOP it from doing them.
But if they led us to believe certain things about the Death Star that would suggest certain physical limitation, and then it defied those expectations, we’d be pissed off about it. For example, if they tried to tell us that the Death Star ran on one big diesel engine, we’d immediately cry foul and call them out for utter bullshit, because we know that nothing which runs on diesel could ever do the things the Death Star is shown doing.
Which is why I can’t accept the Avengers helicarrier. It does absolutely nothing to establish it as being anything other than what it looks like – an aircraft carrier with rotors, made out of modern materials and technology.
And an aircraft carrier with rotors simply CANNOT fly. And even an aircraft carrier with rotors made out of secret mad science materials that were 100x better than what we currently have STILL couldn’t fly.
Basically, you have limited your own range of what is acceptable and what is not, for the purposes of your own personal suspension of disbelief. You can accept the Death Star because it’s far enough away from reality, but you refuse to accept the helicarrier because it’s closer to your notion of “realistic”. I have no trouble accepting that a helicarrier in the Marvel Universe can fly, despite my knowledge that in my world, it is not physically possible. It’s not in my world — despite the similarity of the Marvel “Earth” to my own — so it doesn’t have to obey the physical laws of my world.
You have determined in your mind that if something is close to falling within our laws of physics, then for you to accept it, it must obey those laws. But that’s an irrational mindset. There is so much more in the Marvel Universe that is not physically possible according to our laws of science. The very existence of Captain America, the Hulk, Spiderman, Nick Fury… All of those go well beyond rational science, and have to be accepted as they are. You simply have to believe that those things can exist, because they do.
If you still can’t accept it, that’s fine. You have the choice to not read, not watch, whatever. But you don’t get to demand of the authors that they make things fit your limited view of what is believable, and you don’t get to tell others what they should or shouldn’t believe.
You claim I have invented these limits, but this is flatly untrue.
The fundamental difference between science fiction and fantasy is the that everything in science fiction must be grounded at least somewhat in reality, and it must not only be theoretically possible, be also – even if just remotely – PLAUSIBLE.
And the key facet of my argument is that plausibility is DIRECTLY linked to the givens you work from. What is plausible in one circumstance is not so in another.
We can believe a story about modern day humans having a fighting off an alien invasion from space – like the movie, Independence Day. We can accept that story because it is remotely plausible to imagine humans with jet fighters and 90s era computers having a chance of finding a way to defeat space ships, even if it’s a bit of a stretch.
But if the movie had instead been about cowboys in the Old West fighting off the same alien invaders… suddenly it’s a lot harder to take seriously. Suspension of disbelief gets severely stretched, and for many people it may even break. It’s leaving the realm of plausibility to imagine people taking out an alien mothership with only lever action rifles, horses, and maybe some cannons.
Now take it even further. Imagine a bunch of Neanderthals beating the aliens by chucking rocks and crude spears at them. No matter how theoretically possible your explanation for how that could work might be, it’s still completely implausible. You cannot take a story like that seriously. And it can’t be called science fiction at that point – it has moved into the realm of total fantasy.
The Avengers helicarrier is pure fantasy, because it isn’t remotely plausible based on the given facts of the setting. It might work in a “near-future” setting where the physics are explained away with some exotic brand-new power source. It would definitely work in a “distant-future” setting with totally alien and hyperadvanced technology being the status quo.
But in the setting of the Avengers? In a present day world where our comparative lack of technological development versus the rest of the universe is a major plot point? It doesn’t make sense.
And that’s not MY opinion. That’s just science fiction. If you’re willing to overlook insane logical discrepancies, then you aren’t treating a work as science fiction – you’re treating it as fantasy.
What you can and cannot accept are limits that you have imposed upon yourself. And the book you just wrote here merely explains why those are your own limitations. I have never heard anyone else once who so vehemently refused to accept something in the Marvel Universe, or in any other work of fiction, for that matter.
You keep saying “we can believe” and “we can’t believe”, but the only person whose belief or disbelief you can truly speak for is yourself. And from your comments, you seem to be basing your belief solely on what you’ve seen in the movies, which means you only have a minute fraction of the whole picture. The Marvel Comics have been around for decades, so there is a LOT that is not in the movies, simply because it is not possible to put 60 years of information in there. You don’t want to accept that they HAVE laid out the logic behind all their technology just because you haven’t read about it or seen it on the screen. So you call it fantasy simply because you don’t know the science that they have defined. It follows their prescribed laws of science, ergo it IS science fiction. You don’t believe it? That’s fine. It’s very narrow minded of you, but that’s your choice, and I don’t expect you to change. But you do NOT get to define what ANYONE else can and cannot believe. Each person’s level and ability to believe something is their own.
Indeed. But I’ve always assumed it works though some kind of antigravity assist and the rotors are there mainly for maneuvering. They clearly have a thrust role in keeping it flying, but if the A/G itself just reduces the gravitational vector or changes bouyancy and can’t by itself lift the thing, that makes sense, especially if it’s an antigravity material that can’t be turned on or off. If that’s the case, you’d need an extra source of thrust to control vertical movement; thus rotors.
Same idea as an airship with a gas chamber that can only lift a potion of its payload, but which uses rotors to assist.
An anti-gravity system would be a great help in making the helicarrier easier to believe in. Unfortunately, there is ZERO mention of such a thing in the films. It’s not even hinted at.
All it would have taken to would be a single throwaway exchange of dialogue.
Bruce Banner: “How is it possible for a craft this big to get off the ground? The amount of energy required would be…”
Nick Fury: “…astronomical?”
Tony Stark: “You’re telling me this sucker is fueled by some… alien power source?”
Nick Fury: “Not exactly. We had a little help with the underlying principles, but the anti-gravity generator itself is our own take on the concept.”
I think that part of the problem is that so few people have read the comics, as opposed to seeing the films. In the Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD comics, it was pretty clear that the systems in the helicarrier and flying cars were based on anti-gravity technology holding them up, and that the rotors were for propulsion.
I don’t know why they left that out of the movies, but D. Walker is correct, a short exposition would have made that both more clear and indicated the level of the science more correctly.
On the other fictional points, though, I wish to point out that both Frank Herbert and Poul Anderson wrote novels demonstrating that sometimes low-tech weapons can defeat high-tech defenses. If you’re only prepared for a laser beam, a sword or a Winchester round might come as an unpleasant surprise.
It’s like the flying aircraft carrier from The Avengers, but a submarine!
Which, frankly, makes more sense.
Yeah, the Avengers helicarrier is so far outside the realm of possibility it makes physics weep.
The heaviest aircraft ever built is way, way, way, way lighter than even the tiniest aircraft carrier ever built. We’re talking many orders of magnitude difference. And that heaviest aircraft ever built was a big ol’ fixed-wing cargo craft – helicopters don’t get even remotely close to that class of weight.
Aircraft carriers are only possible because the water below them supports insane amounts of weight. Trying to lift ships of that size into the air and sustain flight is utterly impossible with anything remotely close to extant technology.
But they’re not built with anything close to extant technology, they’re built with Tony Stark Superscience. More to the point, they’re built in the Marvel Universe, where the laws of physics are more like polite suggestions, just like the Narbonverse.
It does bother me just a *wee* tad that, when the captain wants this craft back in covert mode, he or she probably yells “SINK! SINK!” rather than “DIVE! DIVE!” On the other hand, it probably bothers the crew one frikken’ hell of a lot more…
It looks like it’s built into an iceberg, which reminds me of Project Habakkuk.
I’m pretty sure that’s supposed to be water running off the deck and down the sides of the ship as it emerges.
Daedalus, the submarine aircraft carrier from Macross! …which never got to show its capabilities as it wound up in deep space as the “arm” of a starship.
And that sounds like “Starblazers” to me.
Also, at the end of WWll, the Japanese did have a submarine equipped with 2 full-sized seaplanes. Didn’t really see action but it was the biggest submarine of the war. I guess it was maybe not QUITE the size of this one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-400-class_submarine
spuers have all the nice stuff
Habukkuk!
I was going to ask what this had to do with a minor prophet, then I looked it up.
Gesundheit
Pykrete ships sank the Titanic
This would seem to support that Shelby actually *is* Mr. Green. I wouldn’t have thought so, but who else would know where all the secret aircraft carriers are?
Unless, of course, the secret aircraft carrier is operated by AG-I.
The two things are not mutually exclusive.
I think the author’s comments from last Sunday strongly implied that Shelby is a spy for AG-I, which isn’t consistent with Shelby being Mr.Green; the head of the Illuminati wouldn’t need to spy on Skin Horse to look for his own spies [spies like Sweetheart’s admin chief].
I think the author’s comments from last Sunday didn’t just imply that Shelby is a spy for AG-I. They confirmed it.
However, if he really is Mr. Green and head of A-Sig as well, how better to hide his true identity than by acting as a spy for another agency.
Remember your Art of War. “When we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away” and “O divine art of subtlety and secrecy! Through you we learn to be invisible, through you inaudible; and hence we can hold the enemy’s fate in our hands.”
(But fwiw, I don’t think he’s Mr. Green either. I already voiced my theory the other day, and I still maintain it.)
I notice that putt-putting Nick in the first panel rather closely resembles his Wimsyworld avatar.
Someone will demand Instrument and sensor upgrades after this.
Wouldn’t do him any good. Just like in Star Trek, a sufficiently effective cloaking device can deceive even the most complex sensors.
And sufficiently effective sensors can ignore even the most complex cloaking devices. It’s an arms race as old as warefare itself.
Remember, not so long ago, the most advanced cloaking device was brightly colored paint in crazy patterns, and that could fool even the most complex sensors… and then somebody went ahead and invented radar.
Considering Nick’s a top-secret military research project, he may already have the best sensors available.
Unless this is what the military’s been working on since he left…
If one of your co-workers is a violent zombie with cannibalistic tendencies, a perpetual supply of meats isn’t a waste of money, it’s a core part of office safety procedures.
Okay, I didn’t think of it, but when you put it like that, it just makes sense. As much as anything makes sense in this universe.
Shelby you forgot to list maintenance among your superpowers 00
“F. P. 1 Doesn’t Answer,” an old [German] movie from the 1930s.
It’s pretty obvious that this was constructed with some of the debris from the combined Narbon/Madblood flying island/arctic shield fortress incident.
Completely confused by the charcuterie comment.
Sweetheart is saying that Skin Horse may be wasting money on charcuterie, but they clearly aren’t wasting nearly as much money as AG-I did on building a submarine aircraft carrier.
She is not, as I first thought, suggesting that the existence of a submarine aircraft carrier somehow justifies Skin Horse’s expenditure on cured meats.
Thanks, that does make sense now. I think you’ve got it. I was trying and failing to draw some kind of linear connection between a charcuterie plate and the aircraft carrier.
I had to look it up, but if it keeps Unity happy, it is worth it.
Supplies and expenditures are tricky. At the post office, we needed a variety of supplies constantly, pens and pencils, blank labels, label holders, gloves…but of the couple hundred people in the plant, I was the only one who would go and get them. (Wonder how they’re doing now that I’m retired?)
By the way, you guys weren’t in my GoComics email this morning.
You can only stretch things so far before suspension of disbelief collapses.
Narboniverse mad science gives you wiggle room, for sure. You want to have laser rifles? Sure, that’s easy. How about a giant robotic foot that jumps everywhere? Weird, but sure.
But how about if one of those laser rifles didn’t just punch holes in a brick wall, but somehow could vaporize an entire mountain? That… doesn’t work quite as well, does it?
Or what if the giant robotic foot didn’t just jump over cars and people, but could actually leap all the way out into space and land on the moon? Mad science be damned, that’s just too absurd to be taken seriously.
That’s the sort of difference in scope we’re talking about.
If you made an aircraft carrier out of magical super high tech alloys and materials, and somehow managed to make it 100x as light (which is pretty insane even for mad science), well… even then, it still wouldn’t fly. In fact, it wouldn’t come anywhere even close. Especially not powered by rotors!
It’s one thing to imagine someone being so hungry they could eat an entire cow. It’s another thing entirely to imagine they could eat the sun.
You have to have disbelief in the first place to be able to suspend it.
Did you also dis Star Wars, for building moon-sized space stations that could vaporize a planet?
This is science fiction, or more to the point, mad science fiction. It’s not limited by the possible. Right from the start, it’s been so far beyond the possible, you have to simply accept it, because you know that it can’t possibly be real, and so therefore it must be. You can’t rationalize it in any way using the feeble laws of physics. But if that’s too much for you, we’ll be sorry to see you leave, and we’ll wish you well, but you seem to be rather alone in your complaints.
Star Wars does a hell of a lot more to distance itself from our extant technology, and by extension the intrinsic limits of our technology do not apply.
The Death Star is plausible because we have no idea what it’s made of or how it’s powered. It’s easy to imagine is uses some form of materials and energy production entirely unknown to us. It doesn’t even LOOK like anything we’re used to – not even the architecture is familiar to us.
But the Avengers helicarrier doesn’t have that benefit. It’s not an object from long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away – It’s an object built in the modern day, on earth. It is inherently limited by the setting it exists in.
And worse, even if you wanted to argue that it might be made out of exotic super materials and powered by phlebotinum, it doesn’t LOOK like it. It is quite visibly constructed out of familiar materials, in a familiar shape and form, performing a familiar function to things that already exist.
It’s hard to argue that you’re using special super science alloys and fusion power when it LOOKS like you built it out of run of the mill steel and aluminum, and your primary propulsion source is giant ducted rotor fans that clearly are powered by some form of fossil fuel combustion.
In contrast, the Death Star looks like nothing we know, and therefor we know nothing about its inherent limits. How does it work? We don’t know, and that makes it easier to believe that it should be able to do the things it does. Or more accurately, to believe that there’s nothing which should STOP it from doing them.
But if they led us to believe certain things about the Death Star that would suggest certain physical limitation, and then it defied those expectations, we’d be pissed off about it. For example, if they tried to tell us that the Death Star ran on one big diesel engine, we’d immediately cry foul and call them out for utter bullshit, because we know that nothing which runs on diesel could ever do the things the Death Star is shown doing.
Which is why I can’t accept the Avengers helicarrier. It does absolutely nothing to establish it as being anything other than what it looks like – an aircraft carrier with rotors, made out of modern materials and technology.
And an aircraft carrier with rotors simply CANNOT fly. And even an aircraft carrier with rotors made out of secret mad science materials that were 100x better than what we currently have STILL couldn’t fly.
Basically, you have limited your own range of what is acceptable and what is not, for the purposes of your own personal suspension of disbelief. You can accept the Death Star because it’s far enough away from reality, but you refuse to accept the helicarrier because it’s closer to your notion of “realistic”. I have no trouble accepting that a helicarrier in the Marvel Universe can fly, despite my knowledge that in my world, it is not physically possible. It’s not in my world — despite the similarity of the Marvel “Earth” to my own — so it doesn’t have to obey the physical laws of my world.
You have determined in your mind that if something is close to falling within our laws of physics, then for you to accept it, it must obey those laws. But that’s an irrational mindset. There is so much more in the Marvel Universe that is not physically possible according to our laws of science. The very existence of Captain America, the Hulk, Spiderman, Nick Fury… All of those go well beyond rational science, and have to be accepted as they are. You simply have to believe that those things can exist, because they do.
If you still can’t accept it, that’s fine. You have the choice to not read, not watch, whatever. But you don’t get to demand of the authors that they make things fit your limited view of what is believable, and you don’t get to tell others what they should or shouldn’t believe.
You claim I have invented these limits, but this is flatly untrue.
The fundamental difference between science fiction and fantasy is the that everything in science fiction must be grounded at least somewhat in reality, and it must not only be theoretically possible, be also – even if just remotely – PLAUSIBLE.
And the key facet of my argument is that plausibility is DIRECTLY linked to the givens you work from. What is plausible in one circumstance is not so in another.
We can believe a story about modern day humans having a fighting off an alien invasion from space – like the movie, Independence Day. We can accept that story because it is remotely plausible to imagine humans with jet fighters and 90s era computers having a chance of finding a way to defeat space ships, even if it’s a bit of a stretch.
But if the movie had instead been about cowboys in the Old West fighting off the same alien invaders… suddenly it’s a lot harder to take seriously. Suspension of disbelief gets severely stretched, and for many people it may even break. It’s leaving the realm of plausibility to imagine people taking out an alien mothership with only lever action rifles, horses, and maybe some cannons.
Now take it even further. Imagine a bunch of Neanderthals beating the aliens by chucking rocks and crude spears at them. No matter how theoretically possible your explanation for how that could work might be, it’s still completely implausible. You cannot take a story like that seriously. And it can’t be called science fiction at that point – it has moved into the realm of total fantasy.
The Avengers helicarrier is pure fantasy, because it isn’t remotely plausible based on the given facts of the setting. It might work in a “near-future” setting where the physics are explained away with some exotic brand-new power source. It would definitely work in a “distant-future” setting with totally alien and hyperadvanced technology being the status quo.
But in the setting of the Avengers? In a present day world where our comparative lack of technological development versus the rest of the universe is a major plot point? It doesn’t make sense.
And that’s not MY opinion. That’s just science fiction. If you’re willing to overlook insane logical discrepancies, then you aren’t treating a work as science fiction – you’re treating it as fantasy.
What you can and cannot accept are limits that you have imposed upon yourself. And the book you just wrote here merely explains why those are your own limitations. I have never heard anyone else once who so vehemently refused to accept something in the Marvel Universe, or in any other work of fiction, for that matter.
You keep saying “we can believe” and “we can’t believe”, but the only person whose belief or disbelief you can truly speak for is yourself. And from your comments, you seem to be basing your belief solely on what you’ve seen in the movies, which means you only have a minute fraction of the whole picture. The Marvel Comics have been around for decades, so there is a LOT that is not in the movies, simply because it is not possible to put 60 years of information in there. You don’t want to accept that they HAVE laid out the logic behind all their technology just because you haven’t read about it or seen it on the screen. So you call it fantasy simply because you don’t know the science that they have defined. It follows their prescribed laws of science, ergo it IS science fiction. You don’t believe it? That’s fine. It’s very narrow minded of you, but that’s your choice, and I don’t expect you to change. But you do NOT get to define what ANYONE else can and cannot believe. Each person’s level and ability to believe something is their own.
Indeed. But I’ve always assumed it works though some kind of antigravity assist and the rotors are there mainly for maneuvering. They clearly have a thrust role in keeping it flying, but if the A/G itself just reduces the gravitational vector or changes bouyancy and can’t by itself lift the thing, that makes sense, especially if it’s an antigravity material that can’t be turned on or off. If that’s the case, you’d need an extra source of thrust to control vertical movement; thus rotors.
Same idea as an airship with a gas chamber that can only lift a potion of its payload, but which uses rotors to assist.
Oh, and looky here:
https://marvel.com/universe/S.H.I.E.L.D._Helicarrier
One of the points of interest is indeed the Anti-Gravity Generator Room.
Sort of like the ballast tanks in a submarine, only it affects gravity rather than buoyancy.
An anti-gravity system would be a great help in making the helicarrier easier to believe in. Unfortunately, there is ZERO mention of such a thing in the films. It’s not even hinted at.
All it would have taken to would be a single throwaway exchange of dialogue.
Bruce Banner: “How is it possible for a craft this big to get off the ground? The amount of energy required would be…”
Nick Fury: “…astronomical?”
Tony Stark: “You’re telling me this sucker is fueled by some… alien power source?”
Nick Fury: “Not exactly. We had a little help with the underlying principles, but the anti-gravity generator itself is our own take on the concept.”
“Plus, it’s made in the USA.”
I think that part of the problem is that so few people have read the comics, as opposed to seeing the films. In the Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD comics, it was pretty clear that the systems in the helicarrier and flying cars were based on anti-gravity technology holding them up, and that the rotors were for propulsion.
I don’t know why they left that out of the movies, but D. Walker is correct, a short exposition would have made that both more clear and indicated the level of the science more correctly.
On the other fictional points, though, I wish to point out that both Frank Herbert and Poul Anderson wrote novels demonstrating that sometimes low-tech weapons can defeat high-tech defenses. If you’re only prepared for a laser beam, a sword or a Winchester round might come as an unpleasant surprise.
After concrete ships, almost anything is believable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Atlantus
Why are concrete ships any less believable than ships made of steel? Steel is a hell of a lot denser than concrete.