Well, I'll warn you straight off that this thread contains spoilers for Silent Storm and Sentinels, but they shouldn't spoil the overall enjoyment of the game, just some minor story points.

Okay, so the thread's called "Wouldn't it be nice if", and appropriately so as the full title I'm going to suggest is "Wouldn't it be nice if Silent Storm was a backstory to the X-COM games",

In Silent Storm, mysterious bad guys (Thor's Hammer) turn up, and in later missions seem to be sporting the latest in one-shot laser weaponery. They have armoured suits that also carry advanced weaponery. Heck, they're trying to build and launch a fully armed laser-satellite to take over the world.

The link to X-COM comes not from the minor point that laser weaponery is practically impossible in today's world, but more to a clue from the missions reports in Silent Storm.

When I first completed the game, a mission report flashed across the screen mentioneing a 2000 year old scroll with blueprints for building laser weapons or something similar - I forget the actual wording. Now, I highly doubt the Romans had laser guns, and aside from time travel, the only other possibility is aliens.

On to Silent Storm: Sentinels now - there's apparently a random encounter in Switzerland where a lod of Thor's Hammer goons in Pazerkleins have surrounded *gasp* a crashed UFO of all things! Now if you take them out, you can have a prototype laser weapon for the rest of the game. Neat stuff eh?

Now my leap of logic isn't quite so far-fetched - what if the first encounter with aliens mentioned in the X-COM universe wasn't the crashed Roswell UFO from the 50's, but this one? In fact, since everything about your outfit in the Sentinels addon screams secrecy, what if this was the same encounter and a few facts like the Thor's Hammer PK's didn't make it as far as the tabloid papers?

From this minor leap, we can deduce that perhaps the Extraterrestrial Combat Unit (X-COM) maybe wasn't first put together by the world's leaders at the time, but maybe this was a public act as the Sentinels could not very well come clean about their past missions so the first we hear from them is when they re-form under the X-COM banner.

So we go from war stories to Sentinels to X-COM in fifty short years

Anyone else like this idea?

Hah, that'd be awesome. Sounds pretty possible, really. Should make for some interesting fanfic ideas, at least.

Very neat idea! Troll, start writing!

Only problem is that the prototype laser rifle and crashed UFO was in the original Silent Storm, not the Sentinels.

So... it's a government coverup then Simple as that

There is an inconcistancy. The aliens would've given them plasma weaponry. The only lasers in X-Com had to be developed by the humans, remember? And if they really were the same organization, surely we wouldn't have had to research lasers again? Those man-portable beam cannons are quite nice, just reproduce the dozens that you captured in WWII.

Those man-portable beam cannons also guzzled ammo like no tommorow. Suitable for use on Panzerkleins and other large targets, but rather wasteful for use on normal infantry.

Which would you rather have, a laser rifle with infinite ammo, or a beam cannon that has more power, but only five shots?

Meh, good point. Still the matter with the plasma.

Easily solved - this all takes place 40-50 years previous. What if the aliens hadn't developed plasma weapons by then but had managed laser weapons some time earlier?

There's also the fact of the plans for the weapon being 2000 years old - it could have been sent back by an X-COM scientist who wanted to give an advantage as he knew aliens were attempting time travel to destroy earth at an earlier point in time (ala Star Trek First Contact on that last bit) and sent them back only what they needed.

Quite what may have happened to the time-travelling aliens is anyone's guess, but hey?!

My bet is that they saw the PKs and it reminded them too much of the power armor and the genocide X-Com caused their species, so they hid in the ship.

Maybe the plans came from T'leth itself?

Nope... scrap that, we're starting to get a bit far-fetched now