What could a scientist in my Star Wars fan fic be working on?

[Maximum77]

Im trying to write a story about a scientist who is working on something in the era of the New Republic. He does not believe in the Force. I just need something for him to be researching. It really isn’t that important to the story; it just has to sound cool and scientific. Also it can’t have already been done in Legends or Canon. I want a fresh idea.

It cannot be

A time machine
A teleporter
A matter replicator
A singularity Weapon
Any type of droid
Anything to do with holograms
A food synthesizer
Anything to do with the Force or Midi-chlorians
A shrink ray
A freeze ray
pico and femtotechnology
A Dyson sphere or any type of megastructure.
Liquid metal armor or a nano morph
Any improvements on the hyperdrive
Limb regeneration
Hyperspace nullifier
Holodeck
Knowledge Transfer (Instant learning like in the Matrix)
Philosophers Stone
Kinetic weapons
Solar sail
Anything to do with kyber crystals
Gene editing
Mech suit
Exosuit
Gender change
In canon, during the Empire, scientists were researching methods to control droids, lasers that can punch through deflector shields and ship scale disintigrators. These ideas are therefore taken.

Yes I know I create too many of these but I haven’t found the right idea yet.

[Excession]

Im trying to write a story about a scientist who is working on something in the era of the New Republic. He does not believe in the Force. I just need something for him to be researching. It really isn’t that important to the story; it just has to sound cool and scientific. Also it can’t have already been done in Legends or Canon. I want a fresh idea.

At least half of these strike me as engineering, or magic, not really pure science. Even in space opera, there is a lot of science beyond super-weapons, robots, and medicine. Is he working alone or with a group? Where is the funding coming from? All of these could be important to the story, and would affect the type of research he might be doing. Make it affect the story in some way, and it'll be more fun.

What area of science would you prefer: chemistry, physics, astronomy, cosmology, biology, medicine, computer science, sociology, archaeology, or something else?

For a bunch of random ideas:

The mating habits of the lesser spotted womp rat.
The affect of the collapse of the Galactic Empire on Wookie cultural practices.
Pharmacological applications of sarlacc gut bacteria.
Investigating the interaction of gravitational waves and hyperspace chirality.
The collapse of the bronze-age Gungan empires.

This could be fun, but the space is almost too big. Can you narrow this down some?

[Peelee]

Im trying to write a story about a scientist who is working on something in the era of the New Republic. He does not believe in the Force. I just need something for him to be researching. It really isn’t that important to the story; it just has to sound cool and scientific. Also it can’t have already been done in Legends or Canon. I want a fresh idea.

It cannot be

Any type of droid
Anything to do with holograms
Any improvements on the hyperdrive

Why? All of those are pretty ubiquitous in the SW universe.

In any event, just try to think of something you'd like to make your life easier, and if it doesn't fall in any of those categories, have the dude work on that. Or hell, have him try to work on something we later know can be done (like a capacitor that can take actively massive amounts of energy from the sun) and just fail at it. Easy-peasy.

ETA:
Wookie
Wookiee. 2 E's.

[Maximum77]

At least half of these strike me as engineering, or magic, not really pure science. Even in space opera, there is a lot of science beyond super-weapons, robots, and medicine. Is he working alone or with a group? Where is the funding coming from? All of these could be important to the story, and would affect the type of research he might be doing. Make it affect the story in some way, and it'll be more fun.

What area of science would you prefer: chemistry, physics, astronomy, cosmology, biology, medicine, computer science, sociology, archaeology, or something else?

For a bunch of random ideas:

The mating habits of the lesser spotted womp rat.
The affect of the collapse of the Galactic Empire on Wookie cultural practices.
Pharmacological applications of sarlacc gut bacteria.
Investigating the interaction of gravitational waves and hyperspace chirality.
The collapse of the bronze-age Gungan empires.

This could be fun, but the space is almost too big. Can you narrow this down some?


I’m looking for something in any field of science that can be just a novelty but still cool. I try to avoid anything groundbreaking.

[gomipile]

I imagine there's a lot of evolution research that can be done in the SW universe.

For one, lots of animal species have been spread to many planets by interstellar travelers. Investigating how some of those populations have adapted to their new homes over the last few thousand years would be interesting.

Also, there are probably planets that have isolated communities of species with common ancestors. Think about Darwin's observations in the Galapagos but more widespread and diverse, on planets with the right conditions.

Microbiologists would have plenty of disease causing microbes to study all over the galaxy, too.

[LibraryOgre]

Warp drive (a la Star Trek). An abandoned technology, but which the scientist thinks has some applications.

FTL communications, separate from subspace or the holonet.

A new foodstuff. Not food replicator or anything, but more akin to a concentrated, healthy, foodstuff... "It's like bacta for your nutritional needs!"

Mycology.

[Excession]

I’m looking for something in any field of science that can be just a novelty but still cool. I try to avoid anything groundbreaking.

Are there any esoteric skills the character he could have picked up during his studies? The extend on one of my previous examples, studying womp rats for example you'd just tend to pick up skills like desert survival, remote camera and drone operation, and possibly running really quickly from aggressively hormone filled 2m long predators. As a bonus, it's a nice callback to the original movie. For me, that is cooler than "oh yeah, I was studying <insert meaningless technobabble>."

Maybe leave the field of study undecided until the end, then find something that can explain any specific skills the character needed.

[Mutant Donkey]

Did you ever see or read Dune?
You remember the battle training simulation with this cylindrical robot that had all kinds of cool weapons?
Since he doesn't believe in the force then an advanced training simulation could fit.
With real consequences for the lazy recruit. No holograms.
Statistics for each soldier gets recorded in the mainframe and performance analysis can be streamlined.

[The Glyphstone]

The tastiest possible fruit smoothie. Culinary science is still a type of science. There are, canonically, at least 50 million inhabited systems. That's a lot of fruit combinations for him to experiment with.

[Blackhawk748]

He's researching the effects of cold rain on Silurian Grain. It's imported to the planet in question and their temperature is a few degrees colder.

[Eldan]

I think the thing you should take away from this thread is this: most scientists don't work on "inventing new technology". The overwhelming majority of scientists don't do that, or anything close to it. They work on understanding something, anything, that is known already slightly better. Perhaps making a mathematical model of it.

So, a scientist wouldn't work on a "shrink ray" anyway. They would work on measuring how matter interacts when hit with a certain wavelength of radiation. Then they'd see that it would sometimes look as if the matter is shrinking. They'd get very excited and publish then. Then the next ten scientists would come along and see if they can replicate that effect. Then, if more radiation changes the amount of shrinkage, and by how many percent. Someone would write their 3-year PhD on "The Effect of Johnson radiation at 300 nanometer wavelength on orthogonal crystal lattices of Yodanite". Eventually, they have a pretty good mathematical idea of how Johnson radiation affects matter, so they hand it over to an engineer. Who then tries to build a giant prototype of a repeatable Johnson ray. Five engineers later, someone has made a hand-held shrink ray.

"The mating habits of the womp rat" describes most science a lot better than "building a dyson sphere" or "discovering the philosopher's stone". And the big discovery in most scientist's life is not "I invented hyper drive" but "I looked at this type of rat that everyone knows, but I saw that 5% of their males stand on their hind legs to impress females and then wrote a mathematical model to try and explain why it is 5% and not 10%".

[Red Fel]

If I were a scientist in the Star Wars universe? I would be researching the ever-loving crap out of Mon Cala.

Hear me out. First off, it's cool from an environmental science perspective - it's an oceanic planet. As in, basically all underwater. There's a lot of scientific research you can do in an environment like that - uniquely in an environment like that - especially given the fact that the planet hosts not one, but two intelligent races, and their civilizations, so it's not like you're doing research on a barren rock without resources.

Which leads me to my second point - the Mon Calamari and the Quarren. What. The. Force.

The planet is Mon Cala. It is named for the Mon Calamari. (Or they're named for it. Whichever.) The planetary ruler is Mon Calamari. But it plays host to two distinct races... With no explanation given. Why are there two distinct intelligent races on this planet? Don't get me wrong, a lot of planets host multiple races, but these two are indigenous to Mon Cala. Yet throughout their history, they apparently never annihilated one another over resources.

There are so many fascinating areas of study there. From a genetic and evolutionary perspective, do they arise from a common ancestor, or were they distinct races even before developing intelligence? Do they occupy separate evolutionary niches? From a social science and anthropological perspective, why did the two races never destroy each other? Is the planet so big or so abundant that conflict over resources was never an issue? The Quarren are traditionally depicted as aggressive, and the Mon Calamari as peaceful - why aren't the Quarren a dominant race with the Mon Calamari held in oppression? Are these tendencies biological or social? Why do the Mon Calamari rule (and name) everything? How did Quarren achieve representation? Did they even? For a planet with two distinct peoples on it, it's pretty one-sided in favor of the Mon Calamari - how does that even work?

Just saying. Lot of stuff to study there. Even if it's just something bland like "oceanic botany in planetary deep-sea gardening."

[LibraryOgre]

I believe the line is "Most mad scientists are really just mad engineers."

[Cicciograna]

He's studying the psychological implications of a role play game set in a fictional universe of your choice. I suggest the universe of a Space Opera named Stellar Struggles in which, in a galaxy dominated by a cruel Monarchy, a cosmic essence named "the Power" can be manipulated by a cadre of strange priests-sorcerers dubbed "Deji".

[Mith]

He's studying the psychological implications of a role play game set in a fictional universe of your choice. I suggest the universe of a Space Opera named Stellar Struggles in which, in a galaxy dominated by a cruel Monarchy, a cosmic essence named "the Power" can be manipulated by a cadre of strange priests-sorcerers dubbed "Deji".

Stealing "Deji" as an in world name for Psionicists. Or at least the largest faction of it's practitioners.

[BeerMug Paladin]

Attempting to replicate the Mitchelson-Morsey experiment. No I don't know what that is, every time I try to listen to the explanation I enter a laymen's trance and wake up in dazed condition.

[Mith]

Attempting to replicate the Mitchelson-Morsey experiment. No I don't know what that is, every time I try to listen to the explanation I enter a laymen's trance and wake up in dazed condition.

It would be amazing if it proves the existence of the Force using it. Maybe using high energy UV waves over a long distance.

[NichG]

He's studying rare, naturally occurring obstacles in hyperspace. Specifically, when two neutron stars occur in the same system, the place where their axes of rotation intersect forms a natural hyperdrive for charged particles ejected along the axis. These particles form a sort of bell-shaped navigational hazard that jumps around, which can damage engines or even destroy smaller craft. The character wanted to develop a model predicting the dynamics of such fluctuations (specifically, explaining a detail of the pattern called 'warp scatter' where a dynamical instability can cause secondary echoes after the initial bell to jump around chaotically). The model would have particular implications for pirate groups that hide their bases in regions where they have mapped the historical pulse patterns, and so the scientist is a bit nervous after having received threats to discontinue their research.

Eventually, his results would play a minor role in the development of artificial mass shadows and hyperspace interdiction - not fully enabling the technology, but in establishing stability bounds for the maximum directional specificity that an interdiction field can have before dynamical instability sets in (the so-called "No corridors" theorem)

[razorback]

How to turn Bantha milk into a solid, easily transportable and tasty foodstuff. blue Bantha cheese

[LordEntrails]

- Higgs-Boson Particle interactions with light?
- Graviton waves as interstitial strings?
- Near light speed time dilation?
- Low-energy electron behavior?
- Neutron particle vibration at absolute zero?

[iTreeby]

Attempting to replicate the Mitchelson-Morsey experiment. No I don't know what that is, every time I try to listen to the explanation I enter a laymen's trance and wake up in dazed condition.

It's like playing with some polarized lenses. You get crazy results for wierd reasons.

[Bavarian itP]

How to turn Bantha milk into a solid, easily transportable and tasty foodstuff. blue Bantha cheese

And how to turn it white.

[Maximum77]

At least half of these strike me as engineering, or magic, not really pure science. Even in space opera, there is a lot of science beyond super-weapons, robots, and medicine. Is he working alone or with a group? Where is the funding coming from? All of these could be important to the story, and would affect the type of research he might be doing. Make it affect the story in some way, and it'll be more fun.

What area of science would you prefer: chemistry, physics, astronomy, cosmology, biology, medicine, computer science, sociology, archaeology, or something else?

For a bunch of random ideas:

The mating habits of the lesser spotted womp rat.
The affect of the collapse of the Galactic Empire on Wookie cultural practices.
Pharmacological applications of sarlacc gut bacteria.
Investigating the interaction of gravitational waves and hyperspace chirality.
The collapse of the bronze-age Gungan empires.

This could be fun, but the space is almost too big. Can you narrow this down some?

To be honest, I love chemistry. I’d like something in chemistry.

[LibraryOgre]

To be honest, I love chemistry. I’d like something in chemistry.

Spectral properties of crystals grown in various natural and lab environments. He took over the project from his mentor; it was actually commissioned by the Jedi in 300 YBY, and has never QUIIIIITE run out of funding.

[Peelee]

Spectral properties of crystals grown in various natural and lab environments. He took over the project from his mentor; it was actually commissioned by the Jedi in 300 YBY, and has never QUIIIIITE run out of funding.

Years Before Yavin? I'm familiar with BBY, but not YBY.

Anyway. Scientist could be attempting to synthesize spice, maybe for one of the Hutt Cartels?

[LibraryOgre]

Years Before Yavin? I'm familiar with BBY, but not YBY.

Anyway. Scientist could be attempting to synthesize spice, maybe for one of the Hutt Cartels?

Yeah, BBY is what I shoulda written. Forgot the nomenclature.

Trying to synthesize spice would be a good one.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

Honestly, from a story perspective, I think this whole tread is the wrong aproach. You want a main character to be an absolute expert in some field of study, but you don't care which field? Then don't fill it in yet. Write the story until you do know what this character would study. This is a character defining trait, it should absolutely come up further on in your story. Otherwise, why is this character even a scientist at all?

That may be harsh, but I think this is a great opportunity to work on your storytelling, and stories generally benefit a lot from synergizing with their characters.

[Aeson]

I'm mostly in agreement with Lvl 2 Expert - outlining the story you want to tell, figuring out where this scientist fits into it, and then choosing a suitable field is probably better than choosing a field for the character and then trying to work him, her, or it into the story. Especially if the scientist is not a main character - and I presume that he, she, or it is not, since you've indicated that the guy's field of study is not particularly relevant to the story - the character will probably fit into the story much more naturally if you create him, her, or it to fit the story you want to tell rather than creating the character and then figuring out how to fit the story around the character. If you want your characters to meet the guy while exploring Mandalorian Wars/Jedi Civil War-era (~4000 BBY) ruins on Dantooine or Telos, for example, you might be able to get away with an archaeological chemist looking for traces of chemical markers of orbital bombardment to show something about the kind of weaponry used to bombard the planet or to prove/disprove the "myth" that the place was subjected to an orbital bombardment by a rebellious Old Republic fleet or something like that - maybe Mandalorian turbolasers and Republic turbolasers of the period would cause different reactions in a certain kind of stone or something like that. It'd be harder to make an astrochemist specializing in the study of exotic materials from the new!canon Maw cloud seen in Solo fit under the same circumstances - why is he, she, or it visiting ancient ruins rather than working in a lab at the Maw Institute or a research university somewhere?

[Peelee]

Honestly, from a story perspective, I think this whole tread is the wrong aproach. You want a main character to be an absolute expert in some field of study, but you don't care which field? Then don't fill it in yet. Write the story until you do know what this character would study. This is a character defining trait, it should absolutely come up further on in your story. Otherwise, why is this character even a scientist at all?

That may be harsh, but I think this is a great opportunity to work on your storytelling, and stories generally benefit a lot from synergizing with their characters.

I apparently discarded a lot of the context from OP, because I thought this was for a side character. I completely agree with you.

[wumpus]

I believe the line is "Most mad scientists are really just mad engineers."

Not grumpy engineers? How about deranged engineers? Once I pondered forming a company (just myself) to release software under the name "Mad Science and Engineering" with my job title as "Chief [insane] Engineer" (gotta have three letters for those C-level jobs).

[Peelee]

Not grumpy engineers? How about deranged engineers? Once I pondered forming a company (just myself) to release software under the name "Mad Science and Engineering" with my job title as "Chief [insane] Engineer" (gotta have three letters for those C-level jobs).

Chief Unruly Engineer? Then when you make an inspection you could say "CUE THE BOSS!"

[Magic_Hat]

Im trying to write a story about a scientist who is working on something in the era of the New Republic. He does not believe in the Force. I just need something for him to be researching. It really isn’t that important to the story; it just has to sound cool and scientific. Also it can’t have already been done in Legends or Canon. I want a fresh idea.

It cannot be

A time machine
A teleporter
A matter replicator
A singularity Weapon
Any type of droid
Anything to do with holograms
A food synthesizer
Anything to do with the Force or Midi-chlorians
A shrink ray
A freeze ray
pico and femtotechnology
A Dyson sphere or any type of megastructure.
Liquid metal armor or a nano morph
Any improvements on the hyperdrive
Limb regeneration
Hyperspace nullifier
Holodeck
Knowledge Transfer (Instant learning like in the Matrix)
Philosophers Stone
Kinetic weapons
Solar sail
Anything to do with kyber crystals
Gene editing
Mech suit
Exosuit
Gender change
In canon, during the Empire, scientists were researching methods to control droids, lasers that can punch through deflector shields and ship scale disintigrators. These ideas are therefore taken.

Yes I know I create too many of these but I haven’t found the right idea yet.

Cosmetic surgery, cosmetics, weight loss, muscle growth, hair growth...

What? You darn near eliminated everything that's cool or interesting so why not something superficial?

[Jarawara]

Limb regeneration.

Yes, I know, it's on your "cannot be this" list. But seriously, with the amount of limbs flying off left and right, being replaced with mechanical ones, with all the resulting profits going to the manufacturers of mechanical limbs... there would be a massive profit potential for a scientist to perfect the process of limb regeneration.

Especially if he can patent the process!

You might consider it, even if you decide that his research leads him to something else (that presumably drives the story).

Warning though: The scientist turning into a Lizard Man has already been done. Still, there's other directions this technology could lead, even without the base science ever succeeding. Consider that donor grafts to begin the regeneration process end up creating the correct limb, but with cellular memory of the donor, creating a mind-to-body control that creates an army of slaves to the original force-attuned donor? Plus, consider the horror element - the patient's minds are still very much under their own control, they simply do not control their own limbs anymore.

There's simply so many side effects branching off from limb regeneration, so many things that can go wrong, the story just writes itself!
Good luck with your fan fic.

[veti]

Womp rat fur, it turns out, can be used to make a revolutionary new form of velcro that (gasp) *doesn't* start to ball up with continuous use.

This was of course a huge boon to the clothing industry and explains a lot about SW fashions. However, the animal rights lobby didn't like it a bit, and eventually brought the rat farming industry to its knees with a galaxy wide boycott.

The fur itself has been studied for decades, there's nothing much more to be learned there. What nobody can quite figure out is how to grow it using only vegetable sources.

[Maximum77]

Huh. I never would’ve thought of that. Womp rat fur. Somehow I think though that it would be done many millennia before my scientist hit the scene.

[Peelee]

Huh. I never would’ve thought of that. Womp rat fur. Somehow I think though that it would be done many millennia before my scientist hit the scene.

Why? Womp rats are native to Tatooine, a notoriously hostile world, at the edge of galactic space, and wasn't known as a hub of scientific activity. I think it's more than a bit silly that you've nixed a lot of very Star Wars-centric areas for seemingly no reason whatsoever, but you're the author, you can easily just say "welp nobody ever thought of this before" and nothing in canon contradicts that as well as nothing in Canon would be notably affected by that, so you're covered.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

Star Wars is notorious for having roughly the same tech level over the tens of thousands of years of it's history after all. If inventions are being done, society at large is forgetting about them at roughly the same rate. Humans might have hit their tolerance limit for complexity, and there are few good computer systems to help, while super smart droids are for some reason used for tasks like pulling hoversleds around.

[AdmiralCheez]

Huh. I never would’ve thought of that. Womp rat fur. Somehow I think though that it would be done many millennia before my scientist hit the scene.

I mean, if you think about the real world for a second, it took us how long before we thought to put wheels on luggage? Sometimes the simple solutions get overlooked for ages before someone figures it out.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

Star Wars is notorious for having roughly the same tech level over the tens of thousands of years of it's history after all. If inventions are being done, society at large is forgetting about them at roughly the same rate. Humans might have hit their tolerance limit for complexity, and there are few good computer systems to help, while super smart droids are for some reason used for tasks like pulling hoversleds around.

It's not really an issue of "forgetting" inventions or things being too complex, I think.

*puts on nerd glasses*

There's two running themes to Star Wars technology throughout the EU (which, yes, de-canonized by Disney, blah blah blah, but still):

1) Key impossible-in-real-life technologies like hyperspace travel, blasters, cloaking, and the like were all originally developed by Force-sensitive civilizations and/or incorporated the Force into the technology, and modern versions of those technologies are either crippled due to lack of Force integration or imperfectly reverse-engineered to get around the issue.

Supporting the former, the Rakatan Infinite Empire created the first hyperdrives, which were powered by the Dark Side and started to fail when the Rakatans lost their Force sensitivity; at least two ancient civilizations developed hypergates (basically hyperspace portals), and for one of them, the Gree, only their "Gatemasters" could use the hypergates, implying an exclusive caste of possible Force-sensitives; Centerpoint Station, with its repulsor cannon that fired through hyperspace, was built by the Krilliks, a highly-Force-Sensitive hivemind species; and all of those versions of hyperspace travel/attacks could start or end within gravity wells, unlike modern hyperdrives. Also note that Interdictor cruisers and other ships that generate interdiction fields don't pull ships out of hyperspace by actually doing something involving hyperspace itself, they just generate gravity wells with massive repulsor generators to exploit a weakness in modern hyperdrives rather than exhibiting mastery of hyperspace physics.

Similarly, blasters use Tibanna gas, a substance that, when exposed to cohesive light and radiation, outputs four times the energy that was put into it, violating conservation of energy in some way; Tibanna gas can also be used as a hyperdrive coolant, further relating to impossible technologies. And Tibanna gas is a natural byproduct of creatures called "beldons" which live in Bespin and other gas giants and could survive in space (and most examples of large sentient space-dwelling creatures in Star Wars have some natural hyperjump capabiliites, like the Purgills, which are still canon in Disney!Canon), another possible Force connection due to its necessary origin in living Force-sensitive creatures. And pre-Empire-era cloaking devices (which didn't have the "double blind" problem of modern ones, where the user can't see out of the cloaking field) used Stygium crystals, which, like Kyber crystals, are rare crystals from a specific handful of planets with unique physical properties that are suitable for use in lightsabers.

2) Leaving a droid un-memory-wiped for long enough causes it to spontaneously develop independence and a distinct personality.

Droid memory wipes are routine in the Empire and among those who treat droids as property, while droids who avoid memory wipes are capable of doing things like slicing space station information networks and co-opting ship systems (most notably R2-D2, but plenty of other astromechs, assassin droids, and similar droids who started out with high intelligence exhibit similar traits). Heck, IG-88 gained sapience essentially as soon as he was turned on and was able to duplicated his sapience into similar droid bodies, and even remote-controlled battle droids with barely any independent sapience to speak of developed catchphrases and personality quirks.

So, why don't droid designers just make droids that don't spontaneously turn into people? Well, maybe they can't. For all that C-3P0 says it's "perverse" for the factory on Geonosis to be full of "machines making machines," every example of droid construction we see involves droids being made by factories or other droids--sure, Humans and other biologicals can physically assemble droids from existing parts, but none of them have ever built a droid brain; the closest that they've come is taking an existing brain, adding memory and such, and swapping out personalities, not designing or even understanding the underlying hardware.

Droids are made by automated factories, which are made by construction droids, which are made by automated factories, and so on, all on droid manufacturing planets like Mechis III that have been pumping out droids since the early Old Republic...planets, by the way, that are barely staffed by organics and are basically treated as unknowable black boxes by their staff. So it's entirely possible that droid brains also originated as Force-based technology that modern engineers can't fully reproduce, though that's just a supposition, not made explicit in canon like the rest of it.


Put all that together, and it looks like the entire galaxy is stuck making only incremental improvements to existing technology, and fairly slow, tiny, and/or trivial ones at that because the underlying principles are largely unknown and to make truly new technology you have to be Force-sensitive. The most front-and-center example of impossible technology in Star Wars is the lightsaber, and we watch characters go through the lightsaber construction process several times in various media where they explicitly put together a bunch of physical parts and then just "do Force stuff at it" to achieve otherwise-physically-impossible results:


With my finger poised on the transformer button that would start the energy flowing, I drew in a deep breath and lowered myself into a trance. I knew that manipulating matter sufficiently to meld the part and forge the weapon would have been all but impossible for anyone but a Jedi Master like Yoda, but doing just that as part of the construction of a lightsaber had been studied and ritualized so even a student could manage it. It was very much a lost art, a link to a past that had been all but wiped out, and by performing it I completed my inheritance of my Jedi legacy.

I hit the button, allowing the slow trickle of energy to fill the battery. I opened myself to the Force and with the hand I had touching the lightsaber’s hilt, I bathed the lightsaber with the Force. As I did so subtle transformations took place in the weapon. Elemental bonds shifted allowing more and more energy to flow into the cell and throughout the weapon. I was not certain how the changes were being made, but I knew that at the same time as they were being made in the lightsaber, they were being made in me as well.

What if making a new kind of hyperdrive, a new kind of droid brain, and so forth requires the same Force connection? It's kind of like how no one person today can understand all of how a computer works at every layer, but then also make it so that key figures like Alan Turing, Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, Tim Berners-Lee, Noam Chomsky, and so forth all had to be strongly Force-sensitive to make their important contributions to computer hardware and software and everyone else between and since them was forced to flail around blindly, only able to make the slightest improvement to Turing's computer through lots of tinkering, trial and error, and luck. If that were the case, rather than the rapid advancement of computing in merely decades, we'd be lucky to be using antique vacuum tube technology hundreds of years from now.

That's my theory, at least.

*takes off nerd glasses*

So to come back to the original topic, the scientist could be researching something seemingly trivial like "figuring out how to give droids a built-in sense of humor" or "figuring out how to change the color of blaster bolts of a given energy level" and it could still be important and ground-breaking research because plenty of others have tried to do that sort of thing before and no one else has managed it because they couldn't without Force sensitivity.

[jayem]

Lots of things scale quite badly. Sorting a list very naively takes roughly the length of the list squared to do (you have to go through the list to find the first item, then...)
If it takes 100 seconds to do it for 10 items. Then for 1000 it takes 1,000,000. And for a galaxy of people, it's not going to happen.
In practice this is already unworkable, and there are better methods, for this and we put the effort in, and a general case goes 10->1, 1000->3000, 1 Billion->9 Billion, and if we can set things up better we can even get things linear.

However even that isn't ideal as it basically means the hardware still needs to be proportionally faster to cope (or take longer). And there will be problems where we can currently (nearly) brute force, and that will be unworkable.

So things like communication systems probably will need new math and engineering for each scale up.

[Xyril]

I don't know if this idea should be subsumed under droid-brains/artificial intelligence, but how about some sort of creativity generator?

You feed it some vague parameters--i.e., "I want some cool technology that doesn't exist today, but it can't be lame"--and it just starts spitting out random suggestions. You start giving it feedback--what results are unacceptable, what's on the right track, etc. You don't even have to give it a good reason why something is unacceptable: Through the magic of machine learning, it eventually comes to understand your preferences, even though it--and you--can't really articulate them. Eventually, it will start putting out the right sort of ideas with minimal failures.

As a technological development, it makes a lot of sense for the setting. You already have computers that can specialize in storing, recalling, organizing, and analyzing information--even taking action in immediate response to new information. You have droids that are arguably sentient, and are capable of creativity as part of that sentience, but nobody really knows how that sentience arises or how to separate out the component functions. To isolate the mechanisms for machine creativity would be precisely the sort of interesting scientific challenge people would pursue regardless of whether there would be obvious applications--or to put it more accurately, regardless of whether it could be applied to a task in a way that is superior to existing solutions to the same problem.

[Maximum77]

A creativity generator is definitely different but not something I would be looking for.

[LibraryOgre]

A device to generate small, controlled, bursts of probability.

[Peelee]

A device to generate small, controlled, bursts of probability.

A device to generate small, controlled bursts of profitability?

[LibraryOgre]

A device to generate small, controlled bursts of profitability?

Or make women's undergarments jump three feet to the left, to the delight of partygoers.

EDIT: Another thought: He's working on making counterfeit credits... creating money within the banking system, without getting caught.

[Peelee]

Or make women's undergarments jump three feet to the left, to the delight of partygoers.

EDIT: Another thought: He's working on making counterfeit credits... creating money within the banking system, without getting caught.

Aww, I was all excited about a string of small, controlled bursts of things like portability or potability or pot belly.

[LibraryOgre]

Aww, I was all excited about a string of small, controlled bursts of things like portability or potability or pot belly.

Apologies. I was excited by the possibilities of the Heart of Gold visiting Nar Shadda

[Peelee]

Apologies. I was excited by the possibilities of the Heart of Gold visiting Nar Shadda

Yeah, but that's, like, almost infinitely improbable.

[LibraryOgre]

Yeah, but that's, like, almost infinitely improbable.

But not infinitely unprofitable.

[Peelee]

But not infinitely unprofitable.

Is it infinitely unprovable?

[LibraryOgre]

Is it infinitely unprovable?

It is certainly significantly imponderable.

[Peelee]

It is certainly significantly imponderable.

Even if the ship is continually impoundable?

[Prehysterical]

Call this idea more of a cheeky jab than an honest suggestion, but: why are almost all of the Star Wars planets single-biome planets?

Perhaps he visits Naboo and, seeing how the atmosphere and ocean currents interact with the geology, starts to wonder why most planets don't display variation in climate at differing attitudes.

Another alternative is studying planets with hollow cores, again like Naboo. Most planets have a solid or liquid core, including gas giants, so how does that affect planets that lack such a feature? Do they lack a magnetic field? How do they support life if there is no radiation from the inside of the planet itself, which is responsible for most tectonic activity and the cycling of materials? What are the differences in mineral composition (geochemistry)?

[PairO'Dice Lost]

Call this idea more of a cheeky jab than an honest suggestion, but: why are almost all of the Star Wars planets single-biome planets?

I mean, that's not all that implausible. Our own solar system basically consists of Tatooine (hot desert planet), Cato Nemoidia (acidic cloudy planet) [or, going by 80s era sci-fi theories, Felucia (fantastic jungle planet)], proto-Coruscant (city planet that used to have varied biomes), Geonosis (sandy red planet near an asteroid belt), Endor (gas giant with lots of moons), Bothawui (planet with a big ring), Yavin (another gas giant with lots of moons), Dac/Mon Cala (watery/icy world), and Hoth (small frozen world), and most large moons and exoplanets we've found are similar.

[Prehysterical]

Most species in the Star Wars universe are carbon-based organic lifeforms that need liquid water to sustain themselves and typically breathe oxygen. In our own solar system, there is only one planet that fits those requirements. Yes, life could be sustained by other conditions, but the results of such conditions would not produce life that is so similar to us. I am aware that there are species that defy these generalizations, such as the Gand, but most life forms that we encounter in this fictional universe are Earthlings cut from a different cloth.

When you have these requirements for life, you expect to see certain patterns because water is a weird substance. Only planets within a relatively narrow temperature range and atmospheric pressure can support liquid water, which throw a lot of hot and cold worlds out. I can accept ocean worlds completely covered in water, especially since our own is mostly covered in water, but then things get nitty-gritty trying to figure distance from the sun, orbital patterns, what type of star it orbits, and the atmospheric content. On top of that, you have to have a minimum of around 22% oxygen make-up in the atmosphere. Again, this is operating under the idea that atmospheric chemistry is consistent across most of the Star Wars species.

Tatooine is only a desert planet because the ancestors of the Tusken Raiders (Sand People) nuked themselves into the Stone Age rather than suffer under alien rule. I imagine it was very different, originally.

If you're going to use gas giants, Bespin would be a better argument than Yavin or Endor, since the planet itself has lifeforms that are native to it. I don't see how being a moon instead of a planet changes the argument. For all we know, Titan has life on it, but that is nothing more than speculation with no hard evidence to back it up.

Only Star Wars's thousands of years of technology would allow Coruscant to be livable. Otherwise, with a planet covered in synthetic materials and a ridiculously low amount of photosynthesizing plant life, how are the people living there not getting baked or choking on the lack of oxygen?

Hoth just... breaks everything about environmental models. For how little biodiversity there seems to be, the fact that multicellular life managed to evolve beyond lichens is astounding to me. Maybe the planet was an ocean at one point and our vision of that planet is after a huge mass extinction brought about by an Ice Age to end all Ice Ages?

Now, I know that this all ultimately falls to it being a long-standing trope of science fiction to have these exotic worlds that are nothing like Earth, but it just baffles me to see Star Wars continuing to write worlds in this style without throwing in at least a few worlds that display more than two colors. In the old canon, we had Panspermia to fall back upon, but who knows if that's still true?

[NichG]

Earth didn't have oxygen until life put it there. In a universe where the Force is an underlying concept (e.g. life to some extent has extra special primacy over matter) I could see the degree to which life terraforms its world to be vastly exaggerated compared to our universe, which might contribute to the single-biome thing.

[Prehysterical]

I am aware about the life-creates-atmospheric-oxygen thing, but we're talking about worlds that are presently inhabitable, not potentially.

I'll admit, I never thought about whether the Force itself has an effect on how life originates on worlds in such a setting. It's an intriguing idea. Of course, that all depends on whether someone accepts the existence of midichlorians...

[The Glyphstone]

If the scientist doesn't believe in the Force, that could explain why all his studies keep coming up Millhouse. He's got a giant variable he's not even accounting for in his formulae.

[Prehysterical]

If the scientist doesn't believe in the Force, that could explain why all his studies keep coming up Millhouse. He's got a giant variable he's not even accounting for in his formulae.
I like this idea! :smallbiggrin:

[PairO'Dice Lost]

Most species in the Star Wars universe are carbon-based organic lifeforms that need liquid water to sustain themselves and typically breathe oxygen. In our own solar system, there is only one planet that fits those requirements. Yes, life could be sustained by other conditions, but the results of such conditions would not produce life that is so similar to us. I am aware that there are species that defy these generalizations, such as the Gand, but most life forms that we encounter in this fictional universe are Earthlings cut from a different cloth.

This is true. My point was mostly that everyone always complains "OMG Star Wars is full of single-biome planets, that's totally unrealistic, everything should be super-diverse like Earth!" when the single-biome setup is fairly realistic. It's the "70+% of alien species are Humanoid and are perfectly comfortable in Earth-like temperature/oxygen/moisture/etc. ranges" part that people should complain about, and if they're willing to handwave that in the name of "Eh, it's science fantasy" the biome thing shouldn't even register.


If you're going to use gas giants, Bespin would be a better argument than Yavin or Endor, since the planet itself has lifeforms that are native to it.

Actually, I picked the other two purely because Jupiter and Uranus are known for their high number of moons, and Endor and Yavin have bunches of moons while Bespin only has 2. There are plenty of other well-known(-ish) gas giants that fit, though--and like Bespin many of them are noted to have a "tibanasphere," an atmospheric layer of lifeform-generated Tibanna gas, so gas giants with native lifeforms are apparently fairly common.


Earth didn't have oxygen until life put it there. In a universe where the Force is an underlying concept (e.g. life to some extent has extra special primacy over matter) I could see the degree to which life terraforms its world to be vastly exaggerated compared to our universe, which might contribute to the single-biome thing.

If the scientist doesn't believe in the Force, that could explain why all his studies keep coming up Millhouse. He's got a giant variable he's not even accounting for in his formulae.

Agreed, and that fits pretty well with my "Star Wars technology progression is based on using (or, in modern times, failing to use) the Force" hypothesis above. Supporting that, common Humanoid species that lie farther from the Human baseline tend to have higher levels of Force sensitivity, a special talent with key technologies, or both: Givin have an exoskeleton, and also superhuman mathematical talent that makes them natural hyperspace astrogators; Verpine have superhuman senses, and are expert technicians who build top-quality hyperdrives and ion weaponry; Gand and Kel Dor don't breathe oxygen, and have a high incidence of Force-sensitivity leading to their Findsman and Baran-Do Sage traditions; Miraluka are blind, and use the Force to see; and so on.

To mangle a quote, "Not only does the Force play dice with the galaxy, but it sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen." :smallamused:

[Maximum77]

So I’ve figured out what my scientist is researching. He’s discovered a frog on an Outer Rim planet that secretes a substance that the scientist wants to extract because it has special properties that give the users a beneficial enhancement. I just need to figure out what this secretion can do. It cannot

-Heal a disease or wound or injury

-Get you high like on marijuana

-Put you to sleep, wake you up or eliminate sleep, induce lucid dreams or semi-hemispheric sleep

-Help you lose weight.

-Increase one of your five senses or give you a sixth sense.

-Anything to do with Midi-chlorians or the Force.

-Subsitute for Food or nourishment.

-Give you superpowers (e.g. Super strength, Super speed, Super intelligence)

What can this secretion do? Hard science ideas are highly welcomed and recommended.

[Peelee]

Surely there must be a more efficient way to crowdsource a fanfic.

[Khedrac]

If what the scientist is working on is integral to your story, then your story plan will cover what he/she/it is working on and you don't need to ask us (unless you are trying to get us to generate the plot of your story). I will do you the courtesy of assuming that this is not the case.

In the other case you have a story in which the scientist is a character - either background or significant. In this case going in to too much detail on what the scientist is working is a mistake.
Actually, this being space opera helps, in that people will be more willing to overlook science that doesn't work, however you still run the risk that anything that goes against established canon will draw a negative reaction.
For example, a reference to a scientist working "on genetics" gets accepted and ignored, except as relevant to the story; a reference to a scientist working on "genetic compatability of different alien races" will get debate about how the races can have compatible genetics; and a refence to a scientist working on "blending the DNA from humans with a DNA from a known species of living rocks" will get complaints that rocks are silicon based life forms and cannot have DNA.
In short, the more specific you get, the more likely people are to find holes in what you write (even if you are actually correct) and complain about it. People who like science fiction are likely to pick up a reasonable amount of knowledge about sicience (admitedly a lot of it may be wrong) and they will notice and react to things that don't fit their existing knowledge.
The same phenomenon occurs in crime fiction where the readers "learn" a lot about legal proceedings from the stories they follow and then notice when the writers of another work get it "wrong" (again, the writers may or may not be correct, but people go with what they think they know).

There are always niche cases where the true experts complain (the friend I was watching the first Jurasic Park film with in the cinema turned to me and complained that "there's a lot more too it than that" when they talked about extracting the dinosaur DNA from the mosquito gut blood - but then she was doing her PhD on that sort of thing at the time - thinking about it I could see most of what they had skipped past, but not being an expert it hadn't bothered me) but those are rare and only really matter to said experts.

Edit: so what the frog does is "something" - don't go into specifics.

[The Glyphstone]

Great Modthulu: This doesnt need a separate thread since it's still the same topic.

@OP: Why not give us a list of potential options to comment on, instead of listing negatives and asking us to guess between the blanks? Your ban list has basically ruled out every possible beneficial result a biological substance can have.

[Bastian Weaver]

If you want to figure out what the frog's secretion do for the user, think how it might benefit the frog.

[LibraryOgre]

So I’ve figured out what my scientist is researching. He’s discovered a frog on an Outer Rim planet that secretes a substance that the scientist wants to extract because it has special properties that give the users a beneficial enhancement. I just need to figure out what this secretion can do. It cannot

-Heal a disease or wound or injury

-Get you high like on marijuana

-Put you to sleep, wake you up or eliminate sleep, induce lucid dreams or semi-hemispheric sleep

-Help you lose weight.

-Increase one of your five senses or give you a sixth sense.

-Anything to do with Midi-chlorians or the Force.

-Subsitute for Food or nourishment.

-Give you superpowers (e.g. Super strength, Super speed, Super intelligence)

What can this secretion do? Hard science ideas are highly welcomed and recommended.

Well, an obvious option is that it's a highly efficient poison.

Another option is that the frog consumes something with a lot of a certain element. The excretion is a concentration of this. The element is very useful in the creation of something relatively mundane, but important... maybe its a useful catalyst in droid brains or hyperdrives. This frog isn't NECESSARY for these things, but it would provide a new source or avenue of gathering it.

[DavidSh]

It is a source for a perfume, along the lines of musk or ambergris.

If that does not seem scientific enough, how about a perfume that makes Hutts smell pleasing to Humans, an otherwise difficult task.

[Excession]

So I’ve figured out what my scientist is researching. He’s discovered a frog on an Outer Rim planet that secretes a substance that the scientist wants to extract because it has special properties that give the users a beneficial enhancement. I just need to figure out what this secretion can do.

Can he not just be researching the pseudo-frog* because it's unique and interesting? Science isn't always about putting frogs in blenders and turning them into a marketable product. Chances are, what with differences in biology from planet to planet, the substance doesn't do anything to humans, and might only be interesting due to how it relates to other lifeforms in that biosphere. Perhaps it works on the creature's primary predator as an appetite suppressor, so only one will get eaten at a time; that would certainly be a novel type of poison.

(*) If it's not from Earth, it's not a frog, even it if fills roughly the same niche and looks similar due to convergent evolution. I dislike the way sci-fi authors throw around words like "reptile" or "bird" when those don't make any sense for alien life.

[Xyril]

On top of that, you have to have a minimum of around 22% oxygen make-up in the atmosphere. Again, this is operating under the idea that atmospheric chemistry is consistent across most of the Star Wars species.


Just curious, where did you get that threshold? IIRC, somewhere around the Jurassic period we had substantially higher oxygen concentrations, meaning that larger creatures with comparatively inefficient vascular systems (i.e., giant arthropods) thrived that could not survive under current conditions. In terms of biology, I don't see why species couldn't evolve that could survive in lower oxygen conditions, particularly since we have (admittedly, not very complex) extremophiles that do precisely that.

Is there something about having <22% oxygen that has some unavoidable and catastrophic effect on atmospheric chemistry?


Now, I know that this all ultimately falls to it being a long-standing trope of science fiction to have these exotic worlds that are nothing like Earth, but it just baffles me to see Star Wars continuing to write worlds in this style without throwing in at least a few worlds that display more than two colors. In the old canon, we had Panspermia to fall back upon, but who knows if that's still true?

In their defense, the non-movie media (both Legends and currently canon stuff) is a bit better about that sort of thing. As for the movies, with limited budgets it's probably not worth the extra cost to toss in Zhang Yimou style scenery porn showing that Hoth actually has a brief rainy season in regions closer to the equator.

Edit: Then again, I suppose they could have done it at the end of RotJ when they were showing all that other scenery porn.

[Xyril]

Great Modthulu: This doesnt need a separate thread since it's still the same topic.

@OP: Why not give us a list of potential options to comment on, instead of listing negatives and asking us to guess between the blanks? Your ban list has basically ruled out every possible beneficial result a biological substance can have.

I second this, though as OP has stated he's well aware that this is a valid criticism of all of his threads ever.

These threads are pretty much always OP listing a bunch of stuff he doesn't want, then noting all of the suggestions that aren't what he's looking for, without ever really putting any effort into trying to articulate why something doesn't work or what kind of thing he's looking for.

Maximum, what is it that you're trying to avoid? Sci-fi cliches and tired tropes? Technologies that are too powerful? (i.e., if your main character is working on cloaking technology, it's not plausible that he'd be a relative unknown because everyone in the Empire and the Rebellion would be going after any scientist making a potential breakthrough in cloaking.) Technologies that are so irrelevant that it doesn't make sense that your protagonist would have enough steady work to feel secure taking time of to go gallivanting around the galaxy? Do you want something that would reflect on his personality but otherwise have zero impact on the plot? Alternatively, do you need something for the plot?

Is the premise of this plot all a lie, and you're actually just trying to crowd source ideas for your new startup?

[Maximum77]

I second this, though as OP has stated he's well aware that this is a valid criticism of all of his threads ever.

These threads are pretty much always OP listing a bunch of stuff he doesn't want, then noting all of the suggestions that aren't what he's looking for, without ever really putting any effort into trying to articulate why something doesn't work or what kind of thing he's looking for.

Maximum, what is it that you're trying to avoid? Sci-fi cliches and tired tropes? Technologies that are too powerful? (i.e., if your main character is working on cloaking technology, it's not plausible that he'd be a relative unknown because everyone in the Empire and the Rebellion would be going after any scientist making a potential breakthrough in cloaking.) Technologies that are so irrelevant that it doesn't make sense that your protagonist would have enough steady work to feel secure taking time of to go gallivanting around the galaxy? Do you want something that would reflect on his personality but otherwise have zero impact on the plot? Alternatively, do you need something for the plot?

Is the premise of this plot all a lie, and you're actually just trying to crowd source ideas for your new startup?

Never fear. I’m far too dumb to make a startup with a science idea. I don’t even know how to drive.

Definitely avoiding cliches and tropes and definitely avoiding anything too powerful. Just something for him to be working on that is cool but possibly in a niche. It can reflect his personality if need be and can be irrelevant to the wider galaxy
Basically just science

[Xyril]

Never fear. I’m far too dumb to make a startup with a science idea. I don’t even know how to drive.

Definitely avoiding cliches and tropes and definitely avoiding anything too powerful. Just something for him to be working on that is cool but possibly in a niche. It can reflect his personality if need be and can be irrelevant to the wider galaxy
Basically just science

Cool, thanks for the clarification.

Any clue as to what that personality might be? Just as an example, the EU gave (young) Jacen Solo an affinity for animals that was supposed to underscore a more intuitive, emotive personality, while his sister's aptitude for machines reflected her more analytical thinking and direct personality.

For example, do you think your character will be a big picture guy, or very detail oriented? A traditionalist, or an iconoclast? Cautious and risk-averse, or reckless and impulsive? For example, how did he discover the frog? Was he just some recent graduate with a zoology background, backpacking around the galaxy trying to find himself when he stumbled upon something cool, or was he already working, trying to study some particular trait, when he heard rumors about some primitive tribe of humanoids in the Outer Rim who displayed crazy amounts of that trait?

For example, for the free-spirited wanderer, I think something in the vein of introspection or spiritual development would fit the theme well. Keeping in mind your restrictions on the Force, affecting sleep, or "getting high," maybe something that temporarily altered your mental state in a beneficial way. For example, there's the argument that experience can put a limit on creativity. As you get older, you learn to think a certain way: You learn what works, so you often unconsciously use that as a starting point for new solutions, and you learn what doesn't work, so you might be quick to dismiss stupid ideas that are too similar to stuff that previously failed. Maybe the secretions help suppress those blocks, helping the local tribe to become some of the most creative artists and innovators in the known galaxy.

Or maybe it suppresses that part of our mind that tries to protect us from hard truths about ourselves. Using the frogs, people are able to take an honest look at themselves, learn to either accept or correct their flaws, and grow as people, but maybe there are some major drawbacks. Perhaps there are negative side-effects, or perhaps the secretions work too well, and users often end up emotionally paralyzed by the hard truths about themselves. Our scientist could be trying to figure out how the substance work in order to help people without pushing them too hard.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

The frog's slimy secretion makes you invisible, but only as long as you aren't observed. It's a quantum effect.

Its actual value is in its use as a coating for premyzaline. Premyzaline is a medicine for cats, life saving. It combats a type of worm that unchecked can eat the cat whole from the inside out. But the medicine is incredibly bitter, not to mention nasty and foul to boot. Cat's won't eat it. But you can trick them into eating it by coating the stuff in the frog's secretion and administering it to them while they're inside a box that also contains a vial of poison kept closed by a single molecule of a radioactive isotope. That way they can't see how bad it tastes.

At least, that's the theory. The medicine doesn't seem to work very well on worms that are both alive and dead. But we might be able to fix that by making them exactly the right amount of alive and dead, so the quantum resonance can cancel out the quantum interference.

[Prehysterical]

Just curious, where did you get that threshold? IIRC, somewhere around the Jurassic period we had substantially higher oxygen concentrations, meaning that larger creatures with comparatively inefficient vascular systems (i.e., giant arthropods) thrived that could not survive under current conditions. In terms of biology, I don't see why species couldn't evolve that could survive in lower oxygen conditions, particularly since we have (admittedly, not very complex) extremophiles that do precisely that.

Is there something about having <22% oxygen that has some unavoidable and catastrophic effect on atmospheric chemistry?
I was just talking about our own atmospheric composition, which is roughly 78% nitrogen and 22% oxygen with other gases thrown in. We're operating under the assumption that since most species in the Star Wars universe can intermingle in the same room without needing any sort of breathing apparatus, most of these life forms are used to the same atmospheric chemistry.

You're perfectly right that life could evolve in much lower oxygen conditions, but we never see any evidence of life forms with higher oxygen requirements (like us) needing supplemental oxygen whenever we visit those planets. We could also experience planets with a much higher oxygen content, but the inhabitants of those worlds would need their own atmospheric devices when visiting worlds that would fit comfortably within human atmospheric requirements.

The 22% oxygen is not a hard and fast atmospheric threshold for life in general, but terrestrial life only became possible on Earth after the atmosphere was pumped with oxygen as a byproduct of the rampant development of photosynthesis as a means of acquiring energy. A lower oxygen content in the atmosphere would severely inhibit life above sea level, since getting oxygen is so much harder out of water. If the oxygen make-up in our own atmosphere ever dropped below 19.5%, human respiratory systems would begin to fail. There would still be oxygen, but not enough to support our needs and doubtless the needs of a great many terrestrial animals.

As PairO'Dice Lost pointed out, these problems arise from world-building a galaxy full of beings that have very similar requirements for existence despite coming from very different planets and ecosystems.

[Xyril]

I was just talking about our own atmospheric composition, which is roughly 78% nitrogen and 22% oxygen with other gases thrown in. We're operating under the assumption that since most species in the Star Wars universe can intermingle in the same room without needing any sort of breathing apparatus, most of these life forms are used to the same atmospheric chemistry.


That's a big and not entirely justified assumption. Sticking to the movie continuity, half of our major examples of settings are military ships and installations run by a human-centric, xenophobic authoritarian regime that has conformity so intrinsic to its DNA that its military began with literal clones. In the scenes where the movies did go out of their way to show a diverse array of species, many individuals did in fact have their faces (and presumed breathing holes) covered.

In other media, where depicting this sort of thing isn't as costly, you see this sort of thing a bit more often.



You're perfectly right that life could evolve in much lower oxygen conditions, but we never see any evidence of life forms with higher oxygen requirements (like us) needing supplemental oxygen whenever we visit those planets. We could also experience planets with a much higher oxygen content, but the inhabitants of those worlds would need their own atmospheric devices when visiting worlds that would fit comfortably within human atmospheric requirements.

T

We do in fact see plenty of folks (of unknown species) wearing what look like respirators or pressure suits, and let's keep in mind that in the movies, we've only really visited a handful of sorta lazily designed planets. In both the currently canon and old Legends expanded materials, you actually do see humans using supplemental oxygen or other breathing apparatuses sometimes.

Also, a population with lower oxygen requirements than typical humans won't necessarily get in trouble in "normal" oxygen atmosphere. Just as a real life example, the average human on Earth will noticeably struggle at high altitudes, while the indigenous peoples (Tibetans, Andean natives for example) who have acclimated for generations do just fine. The converse isn't true--when these folks descend to sea level, where the air pressure and oxygen concentrations are higher, they don't generally suffer from any ill effects in our overly thick air. (At least, on the short term with respect to immediate and obvious deficits: I have no idea whether anyone's done studies to see if Tibetans moving to the coast suffer higher risks of anything due to the chronic exposure.)

[veti]

Frog juice:
- permanently makes your eyes turn an iridescent purple colour
- is a powerful aphrodisiac
- makes you temporarily immune to all narcotics
- causes your scalp to secrete an effective and pleasant smelling hair gel
- is a powerful laxative
- reconfigures your fingerprints and/or retinal and/or iris patterns
- all of the above

Come on, it's not that hard to come up with these.

[Maximum77]

Frog juice:
- permanently makes your eyes turn an iridescent purple colour
- is a powerful aphrodisiac
- makes you temporarily immune to all narcotics
- causes your scalp to secrete an effective and pleasant smelling hair gel
- is a powerful laxative
- reconfigures your fingerprints and/or retinal and/or iris patterns
- all of the above

Come on, it's not that hard to come up with these.

The laxative idea is really good. Thanks!!!

[Leewei]

He's developing a precursor to Bacta (https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Bacta).

[Peelee]

He's developing a precursor to Bacta (https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Bacta).

So it's a frog from Manaan (https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Kolto)?:smallwink:

[Maximum77]

I’m shifting gears. I’m trying to look for something that was never researched until the era of the New Republic like kyber crystals weren’t until the Empire used them for a superlaser and even then, they had been used in weapons formation in the past. I’m looking for something that presumably hasn’t been thought of in the 25,000 years of time where almost everything has already been done.

[Xyril]

I’m shifting gears. I’m trying to look for something that was never researched until the era of the New Republic like kyber crystals weren’t until the Empire used them for a superlaser and even then, they had been used in weapons formation in the past. I’m looking for something that presumably hasn’t been thought of in the 25,000 years of time where almost everything has already been done.


IIRC, scientific kyber crystal research wasn't something that "hadn't been thought of," it was something that had been actively discouraged by the extremely influential Jedi Order. If you're looking for something else like kyber crystals, then you need to figure out something else that has been tangentially mentioned already and subject to a similar taboo, or alternatively, look to all the stuff mentioned during or before the KotOR era and see what hasn't really been mentioned since--in practice, it probably means it was something that the KotOR authors thought of after most of the modern era EU stuff was published and nobody could figure out how to reconcile the two, but you can take advantage of that and just call it "lost science."

[Lvl 2 Expert]

I’m shifting gears. I’m trying to look for something that was never researched until the era of the New Republic like kyber crystals weren’t until the Empire used them for a superlaser and even then, they had been used in weapons formation in the past. I’m looking for something that presumably hasn’t been thought of in the 25,000 years of time where almost everything has already been done.

This is a detail, right? It's such a tiny detail of the setting that it's not relevant to the actual story in any way, which is why it can be anything. Honest advice: stop looking for the perfect detail, just write the friggin story.

There are two kinds of writers: those who finish their books and those who never get that perfect first sentence down.

[Maximum77]

This is a detail, right? It's such a tiny detail of the setting that it's not relevant to the actual story in any way, which is why it can be anything. Honest advice: stop looking for the perfect detail, just write the friggin story.

There are two kinds of writers: those who finish their books and those who never get that perfect first sentence down.

I’m definitely the latter. However the way my dumb brain works is that I need a prompt before I can start writing.

[tyckspoon]

I’m shifting gears. I’m trying to look for something that was never researched until the era of the New Republic like kyber crystals weren’t until the Empire used them for a superlaser and even then, they had been used in weapons formation in the past. I’m looking for something that presumably hasn’t been thought of in the 25,000 years of time where almost everything has already been done.

The lost art of making paper, with an eventual eye toward recreating the exotic data-storage medium known as 'books'.

[Peelee]

The lost art of making paper, with an eventual eye toward recreating the exotic data-storage medium known as 'books'.

Flimsiplast, or flimsi for short, was more widespread than paper, but paper was still used. Both were uncommon to rare, though.

[Mister Tom]

How about this: may frogs (ok, many 4 limbed amphibians) secrete a whole apothecary of toxic substances for self defence , but this one has a symbiotic relation with a microorganism that has a similar effects to those of the terran Toxoplasma gondii (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasma_gondii). This organism has evolved to alter brain chemistries of its planet's macrobiota, specifically those which trigger predatory or aggressive behaviour towards other infected organisms. (Its effects are a bit like futurama's brain slug.) The empire wish to weaponise this by creating compliance as plague.

It's hardly a new idea, but it could work.. and probably has room for a twist or three. (The scientist herself is certainly already infected, and subconsciously working to spread the pure strain.)

[Xyril]

I’m definitely the latter. However the way my dumb brain works is that I need a prompt before I can start writing.

Wait, you don't have some sort of story idea in mind already? So your last few threads have basically been crowdsourcing other folks' creativity until you find an idea that you want to build an entire story around?

That's impressive. Reminds me of improv on a massive scale.

[Peelee]

Wait, you don't have some sort of story idea in mind already? So your last few threads have basically been crowdsourcing other folks' creativity until you find an idea that you want to build an entire story around?

That's impressive. Reminds me of improv on a massive scale.
Dang, I'm prescient.:smalltongue:

Surely there must be a more efficient way to crowdsource a fanfic.

[Maximum77]

I was down to 3 ideas. A Guided recirprocating deflector shield from someone on abovetopsecret forums, Synthetic coaxium from FFG forums and The Dynamics of an Asteroid Field on Sjgames. I decided against the shield because it was too wordy and could be a game changer. The coaxium I felt ruined the rarity of hyperfuel and the asteroid belt analyzation was good but their are likely billions of asteroid fields in the galaxy. Who

[Peelee]

What's the plot of the story?

[PairO'Dice Lost]

The coaxium I felt ruined the rarity of hyperfuel

Point of order: "hyperfuel" (more correctly "hypermatter") has never been rare in canon, either EU or Disney, until Solo decided to retcon it into being an issue. Hypermatter is standard technology; it's created/harvested from hyperspace in refineries all over the galaxy, used as fuel in hypermatter annihilation reactors to power ships both large and small, and consumed in large quantities on the order of kilograms for starfighters and thousands of metric tons for capital ships.

If hypermatter were anything approaching rare or valuable, sustaining a galactic-scale society would be basically impossible. Not only that, but deciding to replace hypermatter (a substance that intrinsically interacts with hyperspace because it comes from there and naturally "sublimates" back there) with coaxium (some random naturally-occurring mineral found in a handful of places that explodes if you leave it out of the fridge too long) makes no sense in- or out-of-universe except as an arbitrary one-off plot device. The Wookieepedia page tries to claim that coaxium is a "form" of hypermatter, but (A) there's no citation and (B) that conflicts with all the actual observed properties of both hypermatter and coaxium.

Of the many, many sins of NuCanon, introducing fuel scarcity as the major plot point in not one but two movies is definitely up there. :smallannoyed:

So, personally, I'd say go ahead with the scientist researching some way to improve hypermatter performance (longer shelf life, denser storage, faster production time, etc.), it's exactly the level of "interesting flavor detail but not setting-altering technology" that you're looking for.

[The Jack]

My belief for star wars

If you're going to be a scientist you're going to be looking at nature; Alien ecology or biology, geography or geology, space anomalies... If not, you're in soft science or psuedoscience where everyone's a shrink or a mystic.


Tech does not advance in star wars.
Oh man I hate that TLJ for insinuating that it does.

People make ships and new toys with planned obsolescence in mind; It's going to work excellently for fifteen years, be a piece of crap for ten, and it might as well be illegal to fly a ship after 25. Sure, how much you fly a ship, where you fly it and how much you repair it is going to effect it, but ships are designed to fail so you must buy more or get some expensive servicing that always seems to increase in costs as the ship gets rarer. When people get excited for new technology, it's because their technology has gotten old.


As for new technologies; everything has been invented and is in a library somewhere. People forget techs when they're not really relevant any more, but bring them back when there's a market for niche ideas like hyperspace jammers or doomsday weapons.
If you don't have access to it, it means you've got the wrong library. I reckon archeologists are better for technology than scientists are, because uncovering old libraries is likely easier than working up a new solution.

[Peelee]

Tech does not advance in star wars.
Oh man I hate that TLJ for insinuating that it does.

Luke Skywalker: Ever since the XP-38 came out, they just aren't in demand!

Obi-Wan Kenobi: That's no moon. It's a space station.
Han Solo: It's too big to be a space station!

Oh look insinuations that civilian and military tech is advancing in literally the first Star Wars movie. Damn that movie for wrecking the canon!

[Cicciograna]

Luke Skywalker: Ever since the XP-38 came out, they just aren't in demand!

Obi-Wan Kenobi: That's no moon. It's a space station.
Han Solo: It's too big to be a space station!

Oh look insinuations that civilian and military tech is advancing in literally the first Star Wars movie. Damn that movie for wrecking the canon!

Also, I think that one of the small details that I liked from the otherwise horrible third prequel is the slow but steady transition of the Old Republic capital ships' shape to the traditional diamond shape associated to the Empire: as Palpatine grows in power, so his hand shows even in the technology itself.

[The Jack]

Luke Skywalker: Ever since the XP-38 came out, they just aren't in demand!

Obi-Wan Kenobi: That's no moon. It's a space station.
Han Solo: It's too big to be a space station!



First quote is really pro-my argument. Planned Obsolescence dude, Planned obsolescence. It's all about sales, not tech. The Star Wars Galaxy is heavily commercial.

Second quote...
They're just building bigger. They're not advancing per se. Sure, others don't build things that big, but is that an engineering issue or an economic one? Because Sweet Christmas is that death star an economic concern.

[Peelee]

First quote is really pro-my argument. Planned Obsolescence dude, Planned obsolescence. It's all about sales, not tech. The Star Wars Galaxy is heavily commercial.

Second quote...
They're just building bigger. They're not advancing per se. Sure, others don't build things that big, but is that an engineering issue or an economic one? Because Sweet Christmas is that death star an economic concern.

Admiral Motti: This station is now the ultimate power in the galaxy. I suggest we use it.

Darth Vader: Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've created.

Sure sounds like it's a marked increase in tech.

[The Glyphstone]

Admiral Motti: This station is now the ultimate power in the galaxy. I suggest we use it.

Darth Vader: Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've created.

Sure sounds like it's a marked increase in tech.

Compared to the assorted superweapons of the KOTOR era, or even the various nonsense invented in the post-RotJ Legends timeline, the Death Star really doesn't stand out all that much though. It might look like there is technological progress from the lifespan of a person within the universe, but the overall degree of tech has indeed been static for an excessive amount of time.

[maruahm]

Compared to the assorted superweapons of the KOTOR era, or even the various nonsense invented in the post-RotJ Legends timeline, the Death Star really doesn't stand out all that much though. It might look like there is technological progress from the lifespan of a person within the universe, but the overall degree of tech has indeed been static for an excessive amount of time.

KOTOR superweapons were the results of ancient Sith powers combined with the technological prowess of the long-extinct Infinite Empire. It doesn't seem all too unusual that the core Star Wars races, being goody-goody Jedi-embracing governments, wouldn't utilize Sith knowledge. Nor is it unusual that they wouldn't have access to very rare rakatan technology.

Not much of a Star Wars fan, and in particular I've no idea what the Legends timeline is, so you may still be correct. What I'm saying that KOTOR itself isn't strong evidence of technological stagnation.

[Peelee]

Compared to the assorted superweapons of the KOTOR era, or even the various nonsense invented in the post-RotJ Legends timeline, the Death Star really doesn't stand out all that much though. It might look like there is technological progress from the lifespan of a person within the universe, but the overall degree of tech has indeed been static for an excessive amount of time.

KOTOR superweapons were the results of ancient Sith powers combined with the technological prowess of the long-extinct Infinite Empire. It doesn't seem all too unusual that the core Star Wars races, being goody-goody Jedi-embracing governments, wouldn't utilize Sith knowledge. Nor is it unusual that they wouldn't have access to very rare rakatan technology.

Not much of a Star Wars fan, and in particular I've no idea what the Legends timeline is, so you may still be correct. What I'm saying that KOTOR itself isn't strong evidence of technological stagnation.

It wasn't Sith powers, though; the Star Forge was fed by the Dark Side of the Force, not anything related to the Sith themselves. You're spot on on ancient, unknown, rare Rakatan tech, though. This is basically equivalent to us finding an actual factual Atlantis advanced dome city under the sea, and then saying "well we haven't really advanced technologically." The fact that an ancient secret society was able to do that doesn't invalidate that most of their knowledge was lost and the hill was climbed again by others.

[maruahm]

It wasn't Sith powers, though; the Star Forge was fed by the Dark Side of the Force, not anything related to the Sith themselves.

Right, whoops. I keep forgetting Sith refers to either 1) a specific subset of Dark Side practitioners or 2) the race, and that the rakatan were just Dark Side practitioners and not Sith. But just replace 'Sith' in what I said with 'the Dark Side,' and my point that the Jedi-influenced polities of the core civilizations wouldn't utilize Dark Sided powers seems to hold.

"The Dark Side of the Force is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIHF8Xe-O6Y)

[Peelee]

Right, whoops. I keep forgetting Sith refers to either 1) a specific subset of Dark Side practitioners or 2) the race, and that the rakatan were just Dark Side practitioners and not Sith. But just replace 'Sith' in what I said with 'the Dark Side,' and my point that the Jedi-influenced polities of the core civilizations wouldn't utilize Dark Sided powers seems to hold.

Oh, certainly true, but not terribly relevant. If the aforementioned Atlanteans got their technology through gratuitous human sacrifice, then while the Principality of Peelee would certainly never have utilized such methods, we also never even knew about it to begin with.

[The Jack]

The death star isn't an advancement, it's at best a statement.

I'm not even thinking of the expanded universe. There's no 'ha the Rakatans built a better one' or anything like that with me.
The Deathstar is a monument of labour and costs, and it's an engineering marvel in that it's so goddamn big.... but It's not advanced relative to the rest of the galaxy. There's no special technology there, it just uses already existing technology on a larger scale (oh, it moves without visible propulsion unlike almost every other ship). The big bits are power and cooling... but we don't have context for that. Structurally, the advanced materials of the star wars universe mean they can build as big as they like.

It's an engineering achievement, it's a financial achievement, but it's not an advancement. They just built a whole lot bigger than sensible people were willing to build.

[Peelee]

The death star isn't an advancement, it's at best a statement.

I'm not even thinking of the expanded universe. There's no 'ha the Rakatans built a better one' or anything like that with me.
The Deathstar is a monument of labour and costs, and it's an engineering marvel in that it's so goddamn big.... but It's not advanced relative to the rest of the galaxy. There's no special technology there, it just uses already existing technology on a larger scale (oh, it moves without visible propulsion unlike almost every other ship). The big bits are power and cooling... but we don't have context for that. Structurally, the advanced materials of the star wars universe mean they can build as big as they like.

It's an engineering achievement, it's a financial achievement, but it's not an advancement. They just built a whole lot bigger than sensible people were willing to build.

Star Wars Opening Crawl: During the battle, Rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire's ultimate weapon, the DEATH STAR, an armored space station with enough power to destroy an entire planet.

There are no other planet-destroying lasers. They don't exist. Even if you want to call that just "making it bigger," miniaturization is still a big technological advancement IRL, and there's no reason to believe embiggening lasers into planet-destroyers is different. There is no existing technology to destroy a planet, and "eh just make it bigger" doesn't work like you think it does. It's not just economic, it's a whole 'nother level. Do any other lasers have smaller beams coalescing at a focal point into a larger, single, unified beam that then shoots towards the target? No, because nothing like that exists. The Death Star is unique tech.

[LibraryOgre]

And their need for Galen Erzo during Rogue One argues that they certainly had some issues scaling the weapon up.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

The Death Star is unique tech.

Unless you go by old canon = legends, which had similar super weapons being made both long before and after the Death Star. In that timeline The Jack's statement holds a pretty good amount of water. Tech gets temporarily forgotten, but overall there really isn't that much of a difference between the available technologies 10,000 years before the movies and a few hundred years after them. During the short period in which the movies take place the Empire's war machines do grow bigger with each non-prequel movie, but that's the nature of sequels...

[The Jack]

Making the death star is like making a supercarier or a mile long highway bridge or the world's largest canon.

You can do it,
You need expenses
but you've got to look at a lot of problems to fix due to scale, because it's a unique project,


Let's look at the droid army in the prequels.
They're getting better, but they're not getting better because technology is advancing, they're getting better because the first model was a bargain model security droid that didn't have open warfare in mind. The successor is the same thing wired for war, and more advanced models are the result of realising that the bargain model isn't ideal for many purposes... but there isn't some kind of moving forward progression here, it's 'oh we need X for Y because regular battle droids aren't good for this (cue salespitches for different factions of the seperatist army trying to sell the new X)
But the new battle droids aren't an advancement in technology, they're just 'more armour, pricier servos, bigger guns, bigger AI brain... More expense'. The most advanced model was the Droideka and everything else is just between.


Further note; Ships and fighters.
Fighters in the prequel era are better, or at the very least definitely not worse.
Not looking at expanded universe stuff, the republic ships of the prequels could just be pointy because that's a good design for warships.
More to the point; The imperial ships are different not because they're more advanced, but because the new doctrine is wanton for big, intimidating ships with terrifying compliments of fighters that make stuka noises. Plus those old republic ships have a short service life because that's good economic practice, they needed to be replaced anyway.


(also, the galactic civil war was relatively centrist republic VS Libertarian seperatists and a good deal of seperatist leaders were corperate guild types; The Trade federation, The Techno union, I think banking clan at some stages of the war... Point being the star wars galaxy is incredibly business oriented. Coruscant is just walls of adverts)

Look, everyone treats the Millenium falcon like it's a hunk of junk. Even though it's been serviced and modified, It's an old model, so they think it's junk. They're conditioned to think the old stuff is junk, because they're always buying new stuff, but the MF performs as good or better as new ships of comparable price range. Maintaining ships is apparently gross and you should always get new ones... Such a consumer mindset is great for big business.


Star wars is a setting where things are designed to get old so people can buy new stuff.
It's a setting where people'll sell you the cheapest, crappiest droids so they can make better droids look better and more justifiably expensive.


In the context of all this, the deathstar is an impressive engineering feat, but it's not a step forward.

[hamishspence]

In TCW at least (season 7 - the Utapau arc) it's strongly implied that kyber crystal superweapons are an ancient idea from the old wars between the Jedi and the Sith.

So in that respect, Galen Erso may be redeveloping "lost technology".

[The Jack]

And their need for Galen Erzo during Rogue One argues that they certainly had some issues scaling the weapon up.

Actually, I'm certain that he's got some line about how he needed to be the one to do it because anyone could do it, that they don't need him and could replace him easily, they just didn't realise it yet. He needed to do it because he wanted to put the flaw in.

They wanted him cause maybe he was the best and could do the thing a little faster than some other shmuck engineer, but there were certainly other shmuck engineers that could've done it. Krennic was notably barely competent.

[Peelee]

Unless you go by old canon = legends, which had similar super weapons being made both long before and after the Death Star. In that timeline The Jack's statement holds a pretty good amount of water.
I dunno, there wasn't really anything like the Death Star. Even Malack with the Star Forge needed several ships to destroy a planet, and that was simply just razing it to the point of near-lifelessness. The Mass Gravity Generator similarly didn't demolish planets. Centerpoint Station could HAVE, IIRC, but nowhere near the same way the Death Star could. Plus, then you have things like the Sun Crusher, which is again a tech advancement.

lots
Dude, no. A biplane and a 747 have inherently different technology, and that's peanuts as opposed to what you're tryi g to compare here. You want to plug your ears and say, "but they could just make it bigger!" that's your own problem. The characters in the movie disagree with you.

Han Solo: The entire starfleet couldn't destroy the whole planet. It'd take a thousand ships with more fire power than I've...

[The Jack]

Dude, no. A biplane and a 747 have inherently different technology, and that's peanuts as opposed to what you're tryi g to compare here. You want to plug your ears and say, "but they could just make it bigger!" that's your own problem. The characters in the movie disagree with you.

Han Solo: The entire starfleet couldn't destroy the whole planet. It'd take a thousand ships with more fire power than I've...


Making it bigger is an engineering achievement... I don't really get why you're ignoring that I'm acknowledging that. Han Solo isn't the most reliable source, so grain of salt there.

They're using very advanced materials to build it in space. Lots of it's hollow too.
-Making the Hull is completely within what people can make in star wars. It's not an advancement. May I remind you coruscant is a planet city.

As for the power... we don't actually know how they power things, so we can't comment here.

As for the laser... I believe they build a smaller version on a seperatist ship during the clone wars cartoon. But, y'know, maybe they go with that particular laser design because a more conventional laser wouldn't be capable of handling so much power running through it. I think, but I'm not sure, that I've seen -several lasers converging for one laser- elsewhere in starwars movies. Perhaps in Attack of the clones, a Large war droid or a clone vehicle perhaps?.

That's not necessarily a new development. It could be, but maybe it's common knowledge. It's like, if you build a bridge large enough, you best be making support structure above the bridge, not just below it; If you build a really big laser, you best use lots of little lasers... Maybe that's just common sense to the engineers of the star wars galaxy.


It's a huge project, but not necessarily a leap forward. the 'Death star Tech' of TLJ is just someone not getting it.
(Or First Order Propaganda. Rose is a Spy after all)

[Peelee]

Making it bigger is an engineering achievement... I don't really get why you're ignoring that I'm acknowledging that. Han Solo isn't the most reliable source, so grain of salt there.

Apparently neither are Admiral Motti, Darth Vader, or Luke Skywalker. :smallsigh:

Also, conversely, I don't really get why you're ignoring that there's a lot more involved in the Death Star than just "making it bigger." That's the most childish view I've ever heard about Star Wars, which is kind of impressive, I have to say.

[Flumphburger]

He's studying the comparative evolutionary paths of flatworm-analogues on planets with otherwise similar climates that orbit yellow and red suns.

[Bohandas]

He should be doing archaeology. Because: One, there's massive gaps in the Star Wars Universe's tech that surely must have been filled at some point and still have a place where they could be useful, and Two, it ties in with the other big Lucasfilm series, Indiana Jones


Unless you go by old canon = legends, which had similar super weapons being made both long before and after the Death Star. In that timeline The Jack's statement holds a pretty good amount of water. Tech gets temporarily forgotten, but overall there really isn't that much of a difference between the available technologies 10,000 years before the movies and a few hundred years after them. During the short period in which the movies take place the Empire's war machines do grow bigger with each non-prequel movie, but that's the nature of sequels...

Or if you go by the new canon, which has smaller weapons tech that's derived from superlaser technology, like the battering ram cannon. Or if you go by the original trilogy, which had the second death star

[Peelee]

Or if you go by the new canon, which has smaller weapons tech that's derived from superlaser technology, like the battering ram cannon. Or if you go by the original trilogy, which had the second death star

Neither of those in any way imply that the Death Star superlaser wasn't new technology?

Also, Maximum 77, in case it got lost in the fold, I'll ask again: what is the plot of your story?

[Maximum77]

Neither of those in any way imply that the Death Star superlaser wasn't new technology?

Also, Maximum 77, in case it got lost in the fold, I'll ask again: what is the plot of your story?

It’s about a scientist employed by the New Republic who is hired to investigate why ships and planets seem to be gravitating towards the Unknown Regions. He then discovers a big threat and must find a way to stop it. The science I’m asking for is what he’s originally doing before he is tasked with this enormous project. I need it to sound cool because I want to show he’s a top scientist.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

Do it's page 4 of this thread, and you're just now telling us you're specifically looking for some kind of wormhole cosmologist?

That's kind of a far cry from frog secretian research.

In that case he's working on optimizing pilot assist systems for use on gravity assisted trade routes like the Kessel Run. 11 parsecs should be doable for light freighters.

[Peelee]

It’s about a scientist employed by the New Republic who is hired to investigate why ships and planets seem to be gravitating towards the Unknown Regions. He then discovers a big threat and must find a way to stop it. The science I’m asking for is what he’s originally doing before he is tasked with this enormous project. I need it to sound cool because I want to show he’s a top scientist.

This sounds like a grossly inordinate concern given how little time will likely be spent on it, honestly. Consider: in The Force Awakens, Rey is a scavenger. She take a piece of a Star Destroyer to sell. We don't know what that piece is, because it's wholly unimportant to the story. All we need to know is that it's something she can take to sell. That's it.

It seems like instead of trying to figure out what specific thing the scientist has to be researching, you could just have a character say "they're researching gravitachs or something. I don't know, only a few dozen people in the galaxy understand enough to even be able to explain what they research." A couple lines of dialogue, ideally better written than that, and you're golden. Because here's the deal: if I'm reading that story and what the scientist is researching doesnt matter and never comes up again, I probably won't ever remember it.

Youre spending a huge amount of time on an unimportant detail that could easily be delegated to the editor or TBD'd instead of actually writing the story. I can tell you right now, just say the scientist is working on X and start writing, or you'll never get the story down.

[Maximum77]

Do it's page 4 of this thread, and you're just now telling us you're specifically looking for some kind of wormhole cosmologist?

That's kind of a far cry from frog secretian research.

In that case he's working on optimizing pilot assist systems for use on gravity assisted trade routes like the Kessel Run. 11 parsecs should be doable for light freighters.

Well the frog was just an idea for what he was working on before he starts working on figuring out what’s going on in the Core. I’m a perfectionist and like every detail to have color.

[Peelee]

Well the frog was just an idea for what he was working on before he starts working on figuring out what’s going on in the Core. I’m a perfectionist and like every detail to have color.

Perfect is the enemy of good. There are countless details. If you insist on having each one nailed down before you put pen to paper, you're going to die with nothing written.

[Maximum77]

Perfect is the enemy of good. There are countless details. If you insist on having each one nailed down before you put pen to paper, you're going to die with nothing written.

Yes you are correct but this particular detail is important to me. It’s a me thing. The other details don’t matter so much.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

Well the frog was just an idea for what he was working on before he starts working on figuring out what’s going on in the Core. I’m a perfectionist and like every detail to have color.

My point is you're purposely leading everyone to the wrong color. We're helping you pick a shade of purple while you actually want green.

Even in Star Wars the primary specialist in gravitational anomalies is not spending his life researching frogs. He'll be studying gravitational anomalies. You had the answer in your hand the entire time and made a game of letting us guess what you were thinking of.

And you wonder why you're not getting the perfect answer.

I'm officially done here. I'll go check some advice threads where people actually want advice.

[Xyril]

Actually, I'm certain that he's got some line about how he needed to be the one to do it because anyone could do it, that they don't need him and could replace him easily, they just didn't realise it yet. He needed to do it because he wanted to put the flaw in.

Given the source, you should take this with a grain of salt. In my experience, many of the best engineers and scientists don't think what they do is all that special. Certainly not "easy" in the sense that any idiot could do it, but they do believe that they're not the only individuals in the world who could reach a particular insight given enough effort and time. In fact, one of the reasons they're so good at what they do is that they look at every problem as one that's potentially solvable, rather than something that might be intrinsically inscrutable to all but a select few individuals.



They wanted him cause maybe he was the best and could do the thing a little faster than some other shmuck engineer, but there were certainly other shmuck engineers that could've done it.

There were other schmuck engineers who could have been put to the job--this doesn't mean they could have made the necessary breakthroughs at all, let alone quickly enough to serve the Emperor's timetable for consolidating power. In a galaxy of probably hundreds of trillions of sentient beings, the existence of people capable of eventually reaching the same insights as Galen is a near certainty--however, the Empire being able to pick them out of the aforementioned trillions and put them to work is far from certain.


First quote is really pro-my argument. Planned Obsolescence dude, Planned obsolescence. It's all about sales, not tech. The Star Wars Galaxy is heavily commercial.

That doesn't really apply here. In general, planned obsolescence presupposes that there's technological advancement--you're just deliberately holding back some of the advancements so that you can make multiple, incremental better sales rather than selling one massive upgrade and calling it a day. There are exceptions--some systems lend themselves to artificially forcing obsolescence, for example any server interfacing or peer-to-peer system where you can hard code incompatibility with older versions. However, given how shockingly trivial it seems for astromechs and computer systems to interface with each other and with various ships and vehicles, many being decades old with a patchwork of upgrades, I think it would be very difficult to introduce some sort of systemic, universal compatibility issue that would torpedo an otherwise perfectly workable landspeeder.

Without technological advancement, there are very few ways to effectively implement your idea. One would be to deliberately introduce a model that is inferior to the available state of the art so that you can introduce and "improved" version later--however, it would be difficult to get folks to buy that model in the first place. Similarly, you could use clever marketing to convince folks that a new model has advancements where none exist. While this might work in the more affluent Core worlds, in other parts of the galaxy--namely, the parts that the source of that quote was most familiar with--folks are much more resource constrained. I don't see most folks on Tatooine ignoring the fire sale on excess XP-38 inventory because they fell for the clever marketing.

[Peelee]

My point is you're purposely leading everyone to the wrong color. We're helping you pick a shade of purple while you actually want green.

Even in Star Wars the primary specialist in gravitational anomalies is not spending his life researching frogs. He'll be studying gravitational anomalies. You had the answer in your hand the entire time and made a game of letting us guess what you were thinking of.

And you wonder why you're not getting the perfect answer.

I'm officially done here. I'll go check some advice threads where people actually want advice.

I gotta completely agree on this. Dude's going to be called for a specific type of problem, he's not going to be researching some random whatever, he's going to be well-versed in that field. You don't start out Raiders of the Lost Ark by having Indy be researching atomic energy, ya know?

[Maximum77]

I gotta completely agree on this. Dude's going to be called for a specific type of problem, he's not going to be researching some random whatever, he's going to be well-versed in that field. You don't start out Raider of the Lost Ark by having Indy be researching atomic energy, ya know?

My scientist is a Reinassance man. He can do it all.

[Peelee]

My scientist is a Reinassance man. He can do it all.

There's another term (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Sue) for that.

[Maximum77]

There's another term (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Sue) for that.

No. I just mean he’s a brilliant genius with training in all fields of science. He isn’t a Mary Sue. He will run into many problems (well I don’t know yet). He’s far from perfect.

[Peelee]

No. I just mean he’s a brilliant genius with training in all fields of science. He isn’t a Mary Sue.

Yeah, he will be. Brilliant genius with training in all fields of science is ridiculous, and your story will suffer greatly for it. I can't make you change it, but that's my advice.

[The Jack]

I feel there's merit to the renaissance man in the modern or future day... it'd be like if school science kept going for a few more years. You cant really contribute to hard science but you could have a good crack at sociology, history, politics.... being good with languages, sociology and religion is good for an archeologist...

But as partner to someone doing a phd in physics, I'm telling you a dabbler can't do ****.

[Peelee]

I feel there's merit to the renaissance man in the modern or future day... it'd be like if school science kept going for a few more years. You cant really contribute to hard science but you could have a good crack at sociology, history, politics.... being good with languages, sociology and religion is good for an archeologist...

But as partner to someone doing a phd in physics, I'm telling you a dabbler can't do ****.

Exactly. A Renaissance man is impressive, and they do exist (eg Bruce Dickinson is lead singer of one of the biggest heavy metal bands, commercial airline pilot, and Olympic-level fencer, among other things), but a genius who excels at all fields of science is not a Renaissance man, that's just a poorly-written character.

[Anymage]

I mean, if you want to have this character be a multidisciplinary genius because it fits your story, I've known enough players who would shrug it off and say "okay, cool, science guy" and let that be that.

Still, if it's just "okay, cool, science guy", you don't need to explain what sort of frog science he's doing. And if your players are the sort to look in for details, it might seem strange to ask why this multidisciplinary scientific genius is off in some backwater instead of attached to some major university.

[Xyril]

Exactly. A Renaissance man is impressive, and they do exist (eg Bruce Dickinson is lead singer of one of the biggest heavy metal bands, commercial airline pilot, and Olympic-level fencer, among other things), but a genius who excels at all fields of science is not a Renaissance man, that's just a poorly-written character.

Not to imply he's not impressive, but getting your commercial pilot's certification takes fewer flight hours than a lot of people put into Skyrim.

I'd say that Renaissance men/women are a lot more common than you'd think--I couldn't begin to count the number of folks I've met who were very high achieving in academics or research, who also had one or two other things that they were nationally or internationally recognized. Even though da Vinci is often cited as the quintessential Renaissance man, the sheer breadth and depth of his abilities put him in a very tiny minority. Also, he had the benefit of a lot of low hanging fruit--and possibly some hints from sources from antiquity or from beyond Europe. Since there wasn't a huge body of work for him to study before he could usefully "dabble," he actually had time to understand numerous fields and to make meaningful contributions.

Today, there are certainly scientific discoveries and inventions that are like that--the sort of simple but brilliant insights that seem obvious in hindsight but remained elusive for thousands of years. The problem is that there are very few of these left, while most of the things left to be discovered require a lot more knowledge to even approach. The sort of people with the innate talent to excel in any field of science do exist--the problem is that it takes studying well into adulthood to learn all the work that came before just to find your footing in one or two areas of specialization, and that problem would likely be even more of a hurdle if your science is thousands of years more advanced than ours.


Now, the real question for @OP: If your whole plan was for your character be an omnispecialist Mary Sue, PhD, why in the heck did you troll us into doing all of this work trying to figure out the perfect research for him?

[Xyril]

I gotta completely agree on this. Dude's going to be called for a specific type of problem, he's not going to be researching some random whatever, he's going to be well-versed in that field. You don't start out Raiders of the Lost Ark by having Indy be researching atomic energy, ya know?

But how else would he know, years later, that the fridge would protect him?

It's called a Chekhov's gun, I believe.

[Peelee]

Not to imply he's not impressive, but getting your commercial pilot's certification takes fewer flight hours than a lot of people put into Skyrim.

Imean, that's not a really good comparison; I'd wager that it takes fewer hours (not credit hours - any hours worked, period) to get a Ph.D than a lot of people have put into Wow, for instance. Or the amount of time I've spent on these forums. :smalltongue: I, and the Skyrim players, don't have any functional skills to show for that time investment, while Dickinson has a secondary career.

Also, IIRC, he was also Marketing Director for the airline he flew for, and when the company went under, he used his considerable wealth to form his own airline and hired out everyone that was just laid off. He had also gotten permission to deck the plane out in Iron Maiden livery and have the callsign Flight 666 when he pulled duty transporting UK soldiers home from Afghanistan. Nothing to do with his Renaissance man status, just little stories about how he's just an incredibly cool guy.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

But how else would he know, years later, that the fridge would protect him?

It's called a Chekhov's gun, I believe.

This explains so much. It's my new headcanon.

[Eldan]

No. I just mean he’s a brilliant genius with training in all fields of science. He isn’t a Mary Sue. He will run into many problems (well I don’t know yet). He’s far from perfect.

That's not how that works. Every field of science is bigger than one person can learn in a life time. Literally. New research articles are written in every scientific discipline faster than you can read them. Time you spend reading an entirely different discipline is time you spend not working on yours. Keeping up in fields as different as cutting-edge biology and cutting-edge gravitational physics means you will not be an expert. And keeping up with "all" fields of science makes you a dabbler. A science teacher, perhaps, or a journalist. Not a researcher.

[The Jack]

Now, the real question for @OP: If your whole plan was for your character be an omnispecialist Mary Sue, PhD, why in the heck did you troll us into doing all of this work trying to figure out the perfect research for him?

I dunno, I still want to bring everyone around to the idea that Technology in star wars doesn't advance, people just make new things because of capitalism.

I'll concede that the deathstar was the height of technology and engineering, as there isn't anything on that macro scale in the present star wars universe (SK base)
(Though, given how quickly they build Deathstar II, along with how big ships like the trade federation capital ship, the imperial star destroyer, vaders ship... I don't think macro is so much of an issue in the star wars galaxy. I feel the reason people didn't build death stars in the past is because it's terribly impractical, not because they didn't have the technology)


However, for ships, Im pretty certain they're designed to break down after a certain amount of years without good (expensive) maintenance. Like washing machines or cars. You're encouraged to scrap the old and buy the newer, more fashionable ship; everything in the prequels is so shiney and smooth whilst everything in the OT is rugged and greebled... that's probably a generational style thing.
But also they've got so many exotic shapes. I think it's a marketing tool. (I mean, in real life it's to sell toys, but in universe here). You can always convince people you've got the latest and greatest if you put it in a new, completely different design (and they're used to such changes)

Furthermore, as the galactic economy has it's ups and downs, it can mask how stale the technology growth actually is:

1- Economy is great. Sell High octane ships.
2-Economy crashes. Focus on budget models.
3-Economy comes back- Go back to high octane ships and act like they're a technological advancement because they're so much faster than the ships in step 2 and most of the ships in stage 1 are out of commission by now so there's nothing to compare them to.
4- Economy crashes again... and guess who needs new budget model ships because the last ones are scrap by now?

They could also just surf trends. five years of good cargo space, a five years of above average interiors, five years of good mileage... You've always got something 'improved' if you just follow the cycles, so you've always got something to sell and it seems to consumers that they're always getting something better. In reality, they aren't.

[Peelee]

I dunno, I still want to bring everyone around to the idea that Technology in star wars doesn't advance.

Not gonna happen. I offer the Darksaber (the Legends one, not the new canon one. Which is somehow even worse) problem: why not just build the superlaser? Most of the Death Star is a military base. Cut that out, and you cut out the expense, material, time, etc. completely. It's also more efficient, with less energy demand. The galaxy is a big place, and the Hutts, Black Sun, the Hapes Consortium, et al are rich enough to do it. If the only issue was "make it bigger" then surely we would see some others trying it. The Hutts in the book had to steal the knowledge on how to make it, heavily implying it wasn't just "make a really big laser."


That's not how that works. Every field of science is bigger than one person can learn in a life time. Literally. New research articles are written in every scientific discipline faster than you can read them. Time you spend reading an entirely different discipline is time you spend not working on yours. Keeping up in fields as different as cutting-edge biology and cutting-edge gravitational physics means you will not be an expert. And keeping up with "all" fields of science makes you a dabbler. A science teacher, perhaps, or a journalist. Not a researcher.
I had a couple SMBCs I wanted to post, but they turned out to not be forum-friendly.

[Bohandas]

My point is you're purposely leading everyone to the wrong color. We're helping you pick a shade of purple while you actually want green.

Even in Star Wars the primary specialist in gravitational anomalies is not spending his life researching frogs. He'll be studying gravitational anomalies. You had the answer in your hand the entire time and made a game of letting us guess what you were thinking of.

Unless there's some kind of frog that lives in the galactic core or something and has some kind of thing it does that somehow relates to all the black holes

[Peelee]

Unless there's some kind of frog that lives in the galactic core or something and has some kind of thing it does that somehow relates to all the black holes
5 Republic dataries says that's not gonna be the case:

My scientist is a Reinassance man. He can do it all.

[Xyril]

Imean, that's not a really good comparison; I'd wager that it takes fewer hours (not credit hours - any hours worked, period) to get a Ph.D than a lot of people have put into Wow, for instance. Or the amount of time I've spent on these forums. :smalltongue: I, and the Skyrim players, don't have any functional skills to show for that time investment, while Dickinson has a secondary career.

That's a fair point. I used the Skyrim example because I've probably spent more time in that game than any other since high school, and that's just under a couple hundred hours, which is not much less than the flight hours required for the commercial certification. I spend a decent amount gaming, but I'd much rather to dabble in a wide variety than to obsessively focus on one.

The point I was trying to make is that there are a shocking number of folks who are likely in the top 5-10% of the population when it comes to talent and achievement in two or three very disparate areas. It's not at all impossible, nor is it particularly implausible that you'd personally meet several of them. The main thing is that you don't really notice them unless one of their talents gives them a bit of celebrity--for example, competing in the Olympics in one of the more popular events in your country, or being a commercially successful musician.

If Iron Maiden had never grown beyond a local fanbase because Bruce was a bit distracted by his doctoral research, most people wouldn't know who he was--and I imagine a lot of folks who did wouldn't call him a Renaissance man, they'd call him that airline pilot with the pointless graduate degree who likes his sports and plays in a band on weekends. The same applies more narrowly to advanced scientific knowledge. There are folks with more than one doctorate who are specialists in two or more very different fields. True, their knowledge of any particular field might be deeper if they focused on a single one, but they are certainly capable of making meaningful contributions to the field--sometimes specifically because they spent time learning to approach problems differently.

[Xyril]

I dunno, I still want to bring everyone around to the idea that Technology in star wars doesn't advance, people just make new things because of capitalism.


Your argument strikes me as somewhat haphazard.

For one thing, the capitalism thing really isn't relevant to your assertion. Even in a world where technology doesn't advance, people would still make new things, particularly if old things wear out or the population grows, or if situational needs change. (Though I would argue that adapting to changing needs, even if done by recycling old ideas, is a form of lateral progression, if not advancement precisely.)

Capitalism can--and has--existed in some form during times of negligible technological advancement. However, it that doesn't really prove your argument--beyond maybe establishing that your argument isn't immediately wrong on its face. What you're trying to do is to prove that technological advancement doesn't exist in a setting where technological advancements have often been implicit in the plots, and characters talk about technological advancements as if its existence is beyond dispute.

So what you need to do is two-fold. First, you need to demonstrate that all of these in-universe sources are unreliable for one reason or another. You made a few attempts to do so, but you never really follow through on that. Next, once you've made a convincing argument that we shouldn't accept technological advancement as an implicit part of the setting, you need to argue specific evidence that it doesn't exist. You've tried to do that a little bit, but not particularly well. For example, you misspent a lot of time on the Galen Erso hill, trying to cite his assertion that he's not the only one who could build the kyber superlaser as proof that the laser isn't actually a technological advancement. However, that logic really doesn't follow. There's an entire body of U.S. patent jurisprudence that exists only because multiple inventors can--and do--achieve the same novel, non-obvious, and useful advancements completely independently of one another. And if you're going to argue that the fact that multiple folks inventing the same thing in fact does mean it's not a meaningful invention, then I really can't get behind that reasoning either, because it basically means that the difference between a meaningful advancement and trash any schmuck engineer could do is basically whether other inventors heard about your invention soon enough to give up and stop duplicating your efforts.


(Though, given how quickly they build Deathstar II, along with how big ships like the trade federation capital ship, the imperial star destroyer, vaders ship... I don't think macro is so much of an issue in the star wars galaxy. I feel the reason people didn't build death stars in the past is because it's terribly impractical, not because they didn't have the technology)


These aren't unrelated reasons. Technology doesn't only relate to what's possible, it also relates to what's practical and what is useful. Just as an example, let's look at contemporary navies. For a long time, we had the technology to build massive ships--certainly larger than the largest ships of the line in the age of sail--but it wasn't really practical to do so. Then, with the industrial age, we started building massive battleships--not only did technology make is slightly easier to implement a massive shipbuilding program for massive ships, advances in military technology meant that we had a reason to have such big ships--so they could carry bigger guns.

Then WWII comes along, bringing massive technological advancements, and battleships become impractical. This wasn't because of some regression or stagnation in massive-battleship-based technologies: We still have the ability to build battleships, and the big cruise ships are basically super-Bismarcks without the guns. What changed is that there isn't the same return on investment. While a destroyer or frigate equipped with smaller guns and less armor was completely outclassed by battleship with heavy guns, a fight between a guided missile destroyer and some hypothetical guided-missile battleship would be more of a contest, and I would imagine that multiple DDGs would be more powerful (and certainly more useful) than spending the same amount of resources to make a single battleship.

Aircraft carriers are basically the only massive naval vessel we still use, and that's probably because flight decks, hangars, and runways don't scale down as easily--yet. If planes suddenly stopped working, or if we had some breakthrough in engineering that made it more cost effective to cram 70 aircraft into 3 or 4 destroyer-sized light carriers, we'd never see another big ship. We don't know for sure whether the Old Republic, the Sith Empire, or any other older power had the technology to build a Death Star-sized ship. What we can infer, however, is that they didn't have a specific reason to do so--for example, by developing a planet-killing laser that wouldn't even fit on a Super Star Destroyer.

[Peelee]

That's a fair point. I used the Skyrim example because I've probably spent more time in that game than any other since high school, and that's just under a couple hundred hours, which is not much less than the flight hours required for the commercial certification.

Private pilot certification, you mean. Commercial is 1500, IIRC.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

I dunno, I still want to bring everyone around to the idea that Technology in star wars doesn't advance, people just make new things because of capitalism.

Star Wars tech definitely does advance, it just does so very slowly because (A) the major technologies have all plateaud so progress is mostly incremental over thousands of years and (B) the underlying fundamentals of the technologies are not well-understood. For example, the modern species have had hyperdrive tech and interdictor tech for tens of thousands of years, but interdictor tech cycles in and out of popularity over centuries as hyperdrives are slightly improved to counter them, so current interdiction fields are inefficient against them, so gravity well generators are slightly improved, so interdiction work well again, to hyperdrives are slightly improved again to counter them, and so forth.

And possibly, going by my "all Star Wars technologies rely on the Force" theory, because most new technologies are invented by single mildly-Force-sensitive/-inspired individuals rather than large teams of researchers. All of the superlaser-related superweapons ever created were designed by one man, for instance (though of course other scientists and engineers helped); though plenty of factions might have wanted their own superlaser for various reasons, the Hutts needed to hire him to build the Darksaber and no one else has managed to duplicate the effort since.


(Though, given how quickly they build Deathstar II, along with how big ships like the trade federation capital ship, the imperial star destroyer, vaders ship... I don't think macro is so much of an issue in the star wars galaxy. I feel the reason people didn't build death stars in the past is because it's terribly impractical, not because they didn't have the technology)

While the major preceding technologies (composite-beam technology, such as LAAT/i anti-infantry cannons, the "much smaller version" you referenced in your other post, and hypermatter-powered beam weapons, such as the ancient Sith superweapon the Desolator) had existed for some time, the superlaser actually was an entirely new development based on those technologies.


As for the power... we don't actually know how they power things, so we can't comment here.

We do, actually: hypermatter reactors, which produce massive amounts of power through complete conversion of their fuel into energy, similar to antimatter generators except in this case it's energy given off as the hypermatter sublimates back into hyperspace rather than antimatter mutually annihilating with normal matter.


You're encouraged to scrap the old and buy the newer, more fashionable ship; everything in the prequels is so shiney and smooth whilst everything in the OT is rugged and greebled... that's probably a generational style thing. But also they've got so many exotic shapes. I think it's a marketing tool.

No, the former is due to the fact that "shiny and smooth" ships were created and owned by wealthy planets and corporations at the height of the Republic, while the "rugged and greebled" ships were owned by Outer Rim planets, smugglers, rebels, and other people who didn't want the attention and/or couldn't afford to waste money on fancy starships.--there are plenty of rugged bounty hunter ships in the PT era and luxury yachts in the OT era--while the latter is due to the fact that every species, government, and corporation has its own signature designs, strengths, and idiosyncratic technology, the same way real-world companies that build cars, planes, sailboats, and similar do.


the 'Death star Tech' of TLJ is just someone not getting it.

Now this part I wholeheartedly agree with. :smallamused: Claiming a superficially-similar-looking cannon that has nothing else in common with a superlaser is "Death Star tech" is like saying a toy slingshot uses "trebuchet tech"--sure, both chuck rocks at things, but they're otherwise totally unrelated.

[Xyril]

Private pilot certification, you mean. Commercial is 1500, IIRC.

I'm afraid recall incorrectly. You're thinking of airline transport pilot's certificate, which is 1500 hours. I was speaking of the commercial pilot certificate, which only requires 250 hours. This is not something where I would be that grossly imprecise about the terminology. The private pilot certificate requires even fewer logged hours.

In your defense, it does sound like Dickinson would have to have the ATP. I had heard about the pilot thing, but I always thought he was a small scale pilot for higher, and not someone flying multi-engine for a big carrier.

[Xyril]

No, the former is due to the fact that "shiny and smooth" ships were created and owned by wealthy planets and corporations at the height of the Republic, while the "rugged and greebled" ships were owned by Outer Rim planets, smugglers, rebels, and other people who didn't want the attention and/or couldn't afford to waste money on fancy starships.--there are plenty of rugged bounty hunter ships in the PT era and luxury yachts in the OT era--while the latter is due to the fact that every species, government, and corporation has its own signature designs, strengths, and idiosyncratic technology, the same way real-world companies that build cars, planes, sailboats, and similar do.


This also reflected a great choice from a storytelling perspective. The OT really wanted to push the aesthetic of a society that was ground down and broken by decades of Imperial oppression, so it created a beautiful contrast between the Imperial ships and soldiers--which were all polished, immaculate, and impressive, but cold and devoid of individuality and humanity--and the Rebellion and than random oppressed citizens just trying to survive, whose clothing, ships, and equipment are all old, makeshift, broken-down and patched-together, but also express a striking amount of personality and individuality.

In contrast, the prequel trilogy was portraying--like you said--the most privileged privileged parts of Old Republic society. The Jedi enjoyed a position that was basically a weird hybrid of a hereditary aristocracy and an elite civil- or military-service corps like the mandarins of ancient China or the Ottoman Janissaries. Two major characters were literal royalty, and just by the nature of the plot, many minor characters were, if not part of the government in some form, at the very least were among the middle class of one of the more affluent worlds. For the prequels, the plot demanded a different contrast, one between a Republic at its peak that was pretty much everything a society might aspire to, with clothing, ships, and buildings that conveyed a sense of affluence, beauty, refinement, and individuality that remained apathetic (or willfully blind) to a barely concealed underclass that struggled to survive. The Jedi--and the Republic in general--grew complacent because they were surrounded by people who enjoyed freedom and material comfort, all while beneath that superficial veneer there was a decaying core that Palpatine was able to exploit.

[Peelee]

I'm afraid recall incorrectly. You're thinking of airline transport pilot's certificate, which is 1500 hours. I was speaking of the commercial pilot certificate, which only requires 250 hours. This is not something where I would be that grossly imprecise about the terminology. The private pilot certificate requires even fewer logged hours.

In your defense, it does sound like Dickinson would have to have the ATP. I had heard about the pilot thing, but I always thought he was a small scale pilot for higher, and not someone flying multi-engine for a big carrier.

Mucho appreciado! I even tried to look it up yesterday before I wrote WoW post, but it was quick and dirty and that bit me in the ass. Cool to know!

Also, yeah, dude flies the band plane for world tours, which is usually a 747 (that the airline Dickinson used to work for would charter out to him for touring). From his wiki:
His role as a pilot has led to some high-profile flights, which include returning a group of British RAF pilots from Afghanistan in 2008, 200 UK citizens from Lebanon during the Israel/Hezbollah conflict in 2006, and 180 stranded holiday makers from Egypt following the collapse of XL Airways UK in September 2008. In addition, he flew Rangers F.C. and Liverpool F.C. to away matches in Israel and Italy in 2007 and 2010 respectively.

The Afghanistan one is the only one I know of where he got the band livery and the Flight 666 callsign, but it's also one of the only ones where that seemed appropriate to begin with of those listed to begin with.

He was also eventually the Marketing Director for Astraes, the airline he used to fly for, which also seemed like a good idea to me; if you have the frontman for a hugely famous band on the payroll, may as well make as much use of him as you can.

[Xyril]

Mucho appreciado! I even tried to look it up yesterday before I wrote WoW post, but it was quick and dirty and that bit me in the ass. Cool to know!


It's one of those things that stuck with me because I was shocked by how minimal the time requirements are--it was something they were trying to push when I went out to train for the LSA certification. I was worried enough to ask and that's when they told me about the more stringent and specific requirements for airline transport, which was pretty reassuring. Beyond the logged flight hours requirements--which includes a ton of cross country flight time and time on the specific model you want to fly--that the U.S. government requires, I think most of the big carriers require a lot of hours in the third seat of one of their own planes before they'll let someone be pilot in command or even the copilot.

I'm not sure how the rules work in Great Britain, but in the U.S. I think he could technically fly the band's 747 without the more stringent certification. In the U.S. there's some regulation that defines what an "airline" is, and you need the ATP to fly for one of them, but I think you don't even need the commercial pilot license to fly your buddies around in a 747, as long as you qualify for multi-engine and have enough time logged on that plane. I suppose for most people, that sort of training would be prohibitively expensive if you're not specifically planning to fly for an airline, but the lead singer of a wildly successful band isn't most people.

[zimmerwald1915]

Wait wait wait wait. Wait.

There are scientists in Star Wars? I thought the whole setting had been stagnant for millennia and that engineering consisted of managing to hold things together with spit and prayers.

[Peelee]

Wait wait wait wait. Wait.

There are scientists in Star Wars? I thought the whole setting had been stagnant for millennia and that engineering consisted of managing to hold things together with spit and prayers.

Ya know, I decided to look it up and the sheer ridiculous of it made me laugh. So, I present to you, according to Wookieepedia...

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/d/dc/Young-Galen-Erso-SWCT.png/revision/latest?cb=20170429033305

[zimmerwald1915]

Ya know, I decided to look it up and the sheer ridiculous of it made me laugh. So, I present to you, according to Wookieepedia...

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/d/dc/Young-Galen-Erso-SWCT.png/revision/latest?cb=20170429033305
I could quibble over the differences between scientist, engineer, and administrator, but I'm far more fascinated by what appears to be a sonic screwdriver in his breast pocket.

[Peelee]

I could quibble over the differences between scientist, engineer, and administrator, but I'm far more fascinated by what appears to be a sonic screwdriver in his breast pocket.

Oh, no, that's a code cylinder. Pretty much all officers carry them, usually two to a pocket.

[zimmerwald1915]

Oh, no, that's a code cylinder.
What kind of codes? Say, door passcodes? :smallamused:

[Peelee]

What kind of codes? Say, door passcodes? :smallamused:

Coded information about the wearer, and access to various areas and terminals. So basically, yeah. It's not normal Star Wars thing where they're almost never used but have entire pages written about them.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

Ya know, I decided to look it up and the sheer ridiculous of it made me laugh. So, I present to you, according to Wookieepedia...

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/d/dc/Young-Galen-Erso-SWCT.png/revision/latest?cb=20170429033305

To be fair, the Legends version of the page (https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Scientist/Legends) is much less ridiculous, as with pretty much every topic.

[The Glyphstone]

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/7/72/NuvoVindi2-SWE.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20111021041330

That guy looks like he stepped out of someone's knockoff Incredibles fan-film. And the canon page at least gives benign/beneficial examples of 'science', the only named example in the Legends page is a bio-terrorist.

[Brother Oni]

I could quibble over the differences between scientist, engineer, and administrator, but I'm far more fascinated by what appears to be a sonic screwdriver in his breast pocket.

Given that the actor is Mads Mikkelsen, also known for playing Hannibal Lecter in the eponymous TV show and torturing James Bond with a length of knotted rope (don't even ask about his viking role in Valhalla Rising), you're probably better off not knowing if you want to sleep at night.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/7/72/NuvoVindi2-SWE.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20111021041330

That guy looks like he stepped out of someone's knockoff Incredibles fan-film. And the canon page at least gives benign/beneficial examples of 'science', the only named example in the Legends page is a bio-terrorist.

I assumed Peelee found the page ridiculous because it was just a list of three Imperial superweapons developers (plus two agricultural researchers who had a change of heart, admittedly) followed by a quote about how all those scientists "mean well" and are "entirely forgivable" when their work is used to, for instance, blow up planets. The Legends page at least notes that weapons developers were a minority and mentions the scientific community and a few universities. And yes, the picture is pretty exaggerated, but that's the Clone Wars animation style for you.

[The Glyphstone]

It's more the weird domino mask that makes him look like an aspiring supervillain, than the animation style as a whole.

[LibraryOgre]

So, a completely unrelated thing... I have two suggested plots for Star Wars that deal with science

1) An Ithorian eco-terrorist uses tractor beams to hurl comets at planets (https://rpgcrank.blogspot.com/2017/09/welmo-rogue-ithorian-geoformer.html), with the intention of using them to revitalize the hydrospheres of dry worlds.

2) The Empire and the nobles of Anoat decide to use the ice of Hoth to construct massive spheres of ice in low orbit, siphon the poisoned atmosphere of Anoat away, and replace it with the clean air of Hoth. (https://rpgcrank.blogspot.com/2018/04/star-wars-orbastras-planetary-peril.html)

Maybe your scientist is working on the gravitational underpinnings of tractor beams, seeking to improve their efficiency? Or improved detection systems, to locate dangerous planetoids before they impact inhabited worlds? Or maybe he's working on terraforming toxic atmospheres

[The Jack]

Most of those sound like engineers.

[Maximum77]

My idea was perfect. I got it from Mythic Scribes. Intermetallic energy alloy plating. Then I found something like that existed on Wookieepedia. I’m so pissed!!!! Why can’t I find an idea that works and hasn’t been done already?

[The Glyphstone]

My idea was perfect. I got it from Mythic Scribes. Intermetallic energy alloy plating. Then I found something like that existed on Wookieepedia. I’m so pissed!!!! Why can’t I find an idea that works and hasn’t been done already?

1) because you have a gigantic long list of banned options, eliminating almost all of the things that haven't been done already.

2) You do realize how freaking big the Star Wars universe is, right? Scientists could go their entire lives without ever meeting, or even knowing the other exists. It's extremely plausible that two scientists could be working on or developing or studying the exact same thing, independently. Heck, if it happened in our RL universe (Newton and Leibniz), don't say it can't happen in SW.

[Peelee]

I assumed Peelee found the page ridiculous because it was just a list of three Imperial superweapons developers (plus two agricultural researchers who had a change of heart, admittedly) followed by a quote about how all those scientists "mean well" and are "entirely forgivable" when their work is used to, for instance, blow up planets. The Legends page at least notes that weapons developers were a minority and mentions the scientific community and a few universities. And yes, the picture is pretty exaggerated, but that's the Clone Wars animation style for you.

Actually, what I found ridiculous was the image of a generic Imperial officer as "scientist." At least the Legends image was unique.

[DataNinja]

My idea was perfect. I got it from Mythic Scribes. Intermetallic energy alloy plating. Then I found something like that existed on Wookieepedia. I’m so pissed!!!! Why can’t I find an idea that works and hasn’t been done already?

Look, this is fanfiction. It doesn't have to be fully consistent with the entire world, especially on something terribly minor. Yes, it may be great to stick as close as possible to the source as possible, but, if you write a compelling story, people won't care. Especially if it's just some minor background detail - both in the main canon and in your story.

As an aside, basically trying to crowdsource different ideas (for both this and other ventures of yours in the past) feels to me a little intellectually dishonest. Write about your ideas, not those of somebody else.

[Peelee]

As an aside, basically trying to crowdsource different ideas (for both this and other ventures of yours in the past) feels to me a little intellectually dishonest. Write about your ideas, not those of somebody else.

I can't agree enough with this. I have trouble grasping the combination of "i don't want to write what stuff other people thought of already" and "I want other people to tell me what to write about."

[Maximum77]

I can't agree enough with this. I have trouble grasping the combination of "i don't want to write what stuff other people thought of already" and "I want other people to tell me what to write about."

I want some help coming up with a science idea for my scientist to be studying. I can’t think of anything but yes if someone already put pen to paper or finger to button with it, it feels stale. It’s hard to explain and I apologize for dragging this out.

[Peelee]

I want some help coming up with a science idea for my scientist to be studying. I can’t think of anything but yes if someone already put pen to paper or finger to button with it, it feels stale. It’s hard to explain and I apologize for dragging this out.

I mean no insult by this, it's an honest question and I'm asking it just as much to seek an answer as to prompt self-reflection.

If you cannot explain your own preferences and you cannot figure out what your main character will be doing, do you honestly believe you will be able to write the story at all?

[Maximum77]

I mean no insult by this, it's an honest question and I'm asking it just as much to seek an answer as to prompt self-reflection.

If you cannot explain your own preferences and you cannot figure out what your main character will be doing, do you honestly believe you will be able to write the story at all?

I have a basic idea of how to write the story. I just needed a boost.

[Khedrac]

I want some help coming up with a science idea for my scientist to be studying. I can’t think of anything but yes if someone already put pen to paper or finger to button with it, it feels stale. It’s hard to explain and I apologize for dragging this out.
At which point I have to refer you back to what multiple people have said - DON'T specify what he/she/it is working on.
As you have found, virtually everything anyone suggests has issues that people knowledgable about science and/or the Star Wars universe can spot and complain about (even if they are not really justified). About the only way to make a scientist background work, especially if it isn't particularly relevant to the plot (and you say you know what the plot will be) is to not specify it.

Also, if when writing the story you find it is relevant to the plot, you can always go back and fill in the details needed. It is much easier to change story background to match plot that plot to match story background...

[Maximum77]

Okay someone on Reddit informed me that a supermassive black hole could never do what I want it to do. I’ve decided to scrap the whole story.

[Peelee]

Okay someone on Reddit informed me that a supermassive black hole could never do what I want it to do. I’ve decided to scrap the whole story.

And airships could never work like they do in Order of the Stick, but note how Rich Burlew is still writing the story.

[InvisibleBison]

Okay someone on Reddit informed me that a supermassive black hole could never do what I want it to do. I’ve decided to scrap the whole story.

Don't be discouraged! "Star Wars" and "scientifically accurate" are basically antonyms. Your idea being impossible actually makes it more suited for a Star Wars fanfic.

[The Glyphstone]

For that matter, the core concept of a scientist who's a prodigy in every field of study was already an impossibility, and you didn't let that stop you.

[The Jack]

I think you could justify 'genius know-it-all' in star wars with cybernetic brain implants.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

I think you could justify 'genius know-it-all' in star wars with cybernetic brain implants.

Designed and secretly implanted by meddling aliens from the next galaxy over (more of a Star Trek trope, but it works) who are also behind the impossible behavior of the black hole. It's all part of their plot to prevent the collision of their galaxies by destroying this one. They have been infiltrating the republic/empire and redirecting its production for centuries now as part of their plan. But they didn't count on the human side of this scientist's brain being strong enough to oppose them.

But the scientist still needs to have build a name for themselves in gravitational physics to be asked to tackle a big gravitational physics problem. I have my limits.

[The Jack]

https://liftingfog.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/lobot.jpg

I was more thinking this.

[Maximum77]

Okay I’m going to give the story a second shot.

[Maximum77]

I decided to go with a quark star. It’s better than a black hole because we don’t even know if they exist. Perfect for expansion However, I still need something for him to be working on before he deals with the quark star. I’m looking not for a gadget or piece of tech. I’ve decided everything technological that we can think of, can be done. Speeders with deflector shields? Sure. We haven’t seen them but they can easily be done. I’m looking for something that would still be an emerging field of science. Something a Type II/III civilization would do next. Any ideas?

[DataNinja]

Just... come up with anything that sounds plausible. Look around for something in line-of-sight, and make something out of that. Looking left, I see a houseplant. You could have research into if plants can be force sensitive. Trying to do something along the lines of the living technology of Zonama Sekot, whatever. If it's important to the story, then the story will tell you. If it's not important, either don't bother, or make something up.

[Peelee]

Max, I have to make two observations.

1.) Literally everyone in this thread has participated to help you write the story.
2.) You have yet to actually write any part of the story.

You can keep asking and fishing all day long, but that's never going to get you to write the story.

[Maximum77]

Max, I have to make two observations.

1.) Literally everyone in this thread has participated to help you write the story.
2.) You have yet to actually write any part of the story.

You can keep asking and fishing all day long, but that's never going to get you to write the story.

Yeah I’ve been getting a little out of hand. I’m just so interested in science and technology that I want my story to be great. I don’t need help writing the story. I have ideas for a plot.

[Peelee]

Yeah I’ve been getting a little out of hand. I’m just so interested in science and technology that I want my story to be great. I don’t need help writing the story. I have ideas for a plot.

That's the thing, though, you really do need help writing the story. Not the plot, you have that. Not the details like what your scientist is writing on, that's either unimportant and you can figure it out later or is important and you be informed by the story as it comes out. What you need help with is putting the words down. Inking the paper. Typing on your word processor. That’s what you need help with.

Michael Crichton famously did little research, yet had a good deal of his stories turn into movies because his stories were interesting. The science in his science-based books were god-awful but damn fun to read. Hell, take some advice from the most famous and prolific author in American history:


Do the research, but don't overdo it for the reader. You may be entranced with what you're learning about flesh-eating bacteria, the sewer system of New York, or the IQ potential of Collie pups, but your readers are probably going to care a lot more about your characters and your story.

You? You're overdoing it. This is a tiny, unimportant detail. From what I can tell, you could remove it from the story and it didn't affect the story. It doesn't matter. When you're holding up writing your story for something that doesn't matter to the story, you have a very serious problem.

[Maximum77]

I agree with you Peelee but this detail may become more important as the story goes on. I’m still developing it.

I’m going about this all wrong when it comes to asking what idea I want. I’m looking for a science thing that my scientist could study. On Steven Jackson games forum, someone suggested the migration patterns of Purgills. It would have been perfect except for the fact that it might lead someone to Ezra and Thrawn. That story will be told in the future. I want something unique but also a science that my scientist can study as his main work. Not an invention.

[BeerMug Paladin]

I agree with you Peelee but this detail may become more important as the story goes on. I’m still developing it.

I’m going about this all wrong when it comes to asking what idea I want. I’m looking for a science thing that my scientist could study. On Steven Jackson games forum, someone suggested the migration patterns of Purgills. It would have been perfect except for the fact that it might lead someone to Ezra and Thrawn. That story will be told in the future. I want something unique but also a science that my scientist can study as his main work. Not an invention.
It doesn't sound like it's important for the story if you don't already have a clear idea about what it is.

When I was in a similar situation, I thought about what field my scientist-character worked in. The field itself didn't really matter, so I chose it and did very little research about the subject matter. I put a passage here and there about their field when it would naturally come up, but for the most part their background doesn't matter nearly as much as their role as a scientist in the events of the story.

If I tried to change that character's field of focus, it would be relatively trivial to do so. That really ought to be how you approach incidental character details. You know, details that don't play a large role in the story, itself. Just pick something. Anything, and run with it, bring it up only when it would naturally arise and give those details room to breathe.

If the detail isn't incidental to the character's role in the story, then it should really be a lot clearer to begin with.

[Xyril]

My idea was perfect. I got it from Mythic Scribes. Intermetallic energy alloy plating. Then I found something like that existed on Wookieepedia.
1) It sounds like it wasn't your idea to begin with... it was one from some helpful stranger.

2) If it was really a perfect idea (that is, one that meshed perfectly with your idea for the story), it's still perfect despite having been done before--particularly if it's so obscure that nobody in that first brainstorming session immediately thought "Hey, that sounds familiar!"



Why can’t I find an idea that works and hasn’t been done already?

There are nearly eight billion people on Earth, over a billion of them English speakers. This means that most of the more "obvious" ideas--stuff that's maybe one or two intuitive leaps or creative twists away from existing ideas that have been shared--have problem been thought of by somebody or another. Very few people come up with something that is completely new and unrelated to existing ideas; this number is even smaller (probably effectively zero) if you're expecting them to come up with one of these truly original ideas prompted only by "Come up with original, creative ideas for my story... GO!"

Making a great story doesn't mean having the most original idea as a starting point--in fact, it doesn't mean having an original idea at all. Alternative history as a style of fiction has existed since at least Asimov--it's probably older than that if you look deeper. However, the most well-regarded authors in that genre--probably Turtledove or Phillip K. ****--weren't the guys who invented the genre, just the ones who managed to do it really well, in their own way. In fact, their most well-known works are superficially even less original, since The Man in the High Castle, Days of Infamy, and The War that Came Early can all be dumped in the even more narrowly defined (and rather oversaturated) bucket of "WWII alternative history where the Axis was much more successful."



I have ideas for a plot.



If the detail isn't incidental to the character's role in the story, then it should really be a lot clearer to begin with.

I don't think you and the rest of us have the same level of detail in mind when you say "I have an idea for a plot" and everyone else says "If you're still brainstorming a detail that you say is integral to the plot, you do not in fact have an idea for a plot."

Basically, you seem to have an idea for a plot the way an inventor has an idea for an invention when he says "I'm going to build a weapon for the military. It'll use some sort of science to kill a target from a great distance," and then starts asking people to brainstorm "details" such as whether it'll be a projectile, or a beam, or some biological agent, etc. I think what people are expecting is something a little more fully baked, such as "I'm going to use magnetic fields to launch some sort of projectile" or "I'm going to use a high energy collimated beam of radiation--probably way above the visible frequency range--to damage a target."

There's nothing wrong with what you're doing (other than, perhaps, failing to disclose that fact clearly before we all became invested in this thread)--like I said before, it sounds a bit like improv, but in a written medium with a longer format. The major pitfall--as others have alluded to--is that when the whole structure of your story is so entirely dependent on that starting seed of an idea, that seed might never be good enough. Nobody wants to put effort into a venture when you think there might be a built-in limit on its potential, so it feels self-defeating to start your story with any idea that is less than "perfect." In improv comedy at least, when the audience idea turns out to be horrible and your bit falls flat, you're moving on to the next joke in a couple of minutes. With this story, if it turns out the core idea of your story isn't workable, that's a lot more time invested. That's scary. I understand that.

The thing you should remember is that between "terrible idea that couldn't possibly work" and "perfect idea that couldn't possibly fail," there's a lot of stuff that can form the kernel of a great story, with the right person writing it. You just have to believe that you're that right person writing that story, find an idea that works in whatever vague framework of a plot you have in mind, and run with it. Even if it turns out that you don't get the story you want out of it, that won't be wasted time. Maybe you end up with a more concrete, well-thought out framework for your original story idea, one where it's easier to narrow down the right science to fill in that plot detail-hole. At the very least, you learn a little more about how your own writing process works so that you have a better idea of what kind of help you might need to get started the next time.

[Maximum77]

I agree but I have this urge to find new stuff. I’m thinking about doing something related to Hyperspace. What science can my scientist study about Hyperspace before he’s called away to deal with the supermassive black hole?

[Peelee]

I agree but I have this urge to find new stuff. I’m thinking about doing something related to Hyperspace. What science can my scientist study about Hyperspace before he’s called away to deal with the supermassive black hole?

....hypospace?

[BeerMug Paladin]

....hypospace?

That would certainly be a different sort of thing to research in a sci-fi setting.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

....hypospace?

Which you can use to keep Swiss cheese good indefinitely, as long as you don't need it to go anywhere. :smallbiggrin:

[The Glyphstone]

What does hyperspace taste like when it is distilled into an ice cream flavor?

[hamishspence]

What does hyperspace taste like when it is distilled into an ice cream flavor?

It probably Tastes Like Purple (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TastesLikePurple). :smallamused:

[Lvl 2 Expert]

It probably Tastes Like Purple (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TastesLikePurple). :smallamused:

Or like that quamtum-frog-excretion stuff.

[Maximum77]

....hypospace?

What is hypospace? Is it just you joking around or is it a serious thing?

[The Glyphstone]

What is hypospace? Is it just you joking around or is it a serious thing?

It's a joke.

Hyper- is a prefix meaning over or beyond. Hyperthermia is having excessively high temperature. Hyperspace is a dimension that exists above/beyond the regular three dimensions.

Hypo- is a prefix meaning under or less than. Hypothermia is having a dangerously low body temperature. Thus, 'hypospace' would be a dimension that exists below/inside normal space. Like the Quantum Realm in Ant-Man, I guess.

[Peelee]

Ayep. However, you could totally make it a real thing and possibly be a cause or solution to the supermassive black hole problem. Imean, hyperspace isn't a real thing until someone said "uh, it's a way to go past light speed why not." It's a joke (and a fantastic one), but you could totally run with it.

[The Glyphstone]

Or even just a theory. Sciencey McScienceton believes that if hyperspace exists, thus 'hypospace' must also exist. He's never found proof for it, but all his equations insist it must be there even if it can't be accessed - theoretical physics in the Star Wars universe. Black holes compress space and time. They might be the way he proves the existence of hypospace, so he's also a black hole/gravity specialist. Now he's the logical in-universe expert on black hole-related phenomena to consult when one is needed.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

While subspace (https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Subspace) exists as a counterpart to hyperspace, and is sufficiently well-understood to be used for FTL communications (https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Subspace_transceiver), it's basically "hyperspace, but slower" so perhaps this scientist believes that subspace is misnamed and isn't "below" realspace at all. Perhaps subspace is a "layer" of sorts between realspace and hyperspace, and "hypospace" is a realm with completely different properties from both of them.

On the subject of supermassive black holes, objects in realspace have very tiny proportions of their mass in hyperspace (such that you don't need to worry about smacking into the "mass shadow" of realspace objects when traveling through hyperspace until those objects are moon-sized or larger), so perhaps hypospace is the opposite: instead of having practically no matter in it and have very weak gravitational effects, hypospace might be full of tons of matter and very strong gravity. Dark matter, in fact, might be a proportionally tiny projection of hypospace matter into realspace the same way mass shadows are a proportionally tiny projection of realspace matter into hyperspace..and a black hole that somehow interacted with hypospace would suddenly have much more mass and a much stronger pull than should be possible for a black hole of that its size.

So it might not be possible in realspace for a supermassive black hole to do , and it's precisely [I]because of the physical inconsistency that the other scientists shrug and say "I dunno, that's impossible, something something hyperspace, maybe?" and your scientist goes "Aha! Hypospace! I knew it!" and plot ensues.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

Calling it now: '77 is not even going to go into this fully fleshed out good idea for a science fiction story and will instead ask if we know of any research that can be done using a violin.

[The Glyphstone]

The bow is a tiny lightsaber, and the strings are even smaller lightsabers. Each one has a different type of crystal/color, so when the bow touches the the clashing crackling noise is slightly different. It has been this scientist's life's work to compose a Symphony in Kyber Flat.

[Peelee]

The bow is a tiny lightsaber, and the strings are even smaller lightsabers. Each one has a different type of crystal/color, so when the bow touches the the clashing crackling noise is slightly different. It has been this scientist's life's work to compose a Symphony in Kyber Flat.

Sucks for Maxey if they liked that idea because now I'm gonna write about it. The Kyber Cacophony will sell millions, I tells ya!

[Maximum77]

Calling it now: '77 is not even going to go into this fully fleshed out good idea for a science fiction story and will instead ask if we know of any research that can be done using a violin.

I prefer guitars

Both of those ideas are incredibly dumb and I don’t want to use them for my story.

[Peelee]

Both of those ideas are incredibly dumb

You, uh, you're not terribly familiar with Star Wars, are you? :smallamused:

[Maximum77]

You, uh, you're not terribly familiar with Star Wars, are you? :smallamused:

Don’t even go down that alley. I am the biggest Star Wars fan ever. I just finished watching the end of Star Wars Resistance.

Lightsaber violins and hypospace are silly ideas.

[Peelee]

Don’t even go down that alley. I am the biggest Star Wars fan ever. I just finished watching the end of Star Wars Resistance.

Lightsaber violins and hypospace are silly ideas.

Great! Then you know all about how the galaxy burned at the hands of grossly incompetent droid armies. Or how someone who got cut in half and fell down a gaping chasm survived. Or how there's a character named Savage Oppress. Star Wars is a universe of silly ideas incarnate. It's a ridiculous universe. It abounds in stupidity.

Search your feelings, you know it to be true. Give in to your feelings, embrace the silliness. It is your destiny!

[Maximum77]

Great! Then you know all about how the galaxy burned at the hands of grossly incompetent droid armies. Or how someone who got cut in half and fell down a gaping chasm survived. Or how there's a character named Savage Oppress. Star Wars is a universe of silly ideas incarnate. It's a ridiculous universe. It abounds in stupidity.

Search your feelings, you know it to be true. Give in to your feelings, embrace the silliness. It is your destiny!

I find your lack of faith disturbing.

[The Glyphstone]

i find your lack of faith disturbing.

Nooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!

[PairO'Dice Lost]

Don’t even go down that alley. I am the biggest Star Wars fan ever. I just finished watching the end of Star Wars Resistance.

That doesn't necessarily make you the biggest fan ever, it just makes you a masochist. :smallamused:


hypospace [is a] silly idea

Counterpoint: The idea of there being two different FTL-enabling alternate dimensions, one "above" normal space and one "below" it, is very common in sci-fi. They may have different properties (in fact, Star Wars is unusual for having its subspace have basically the same properties as hyperspace, as opposed to one being communication-only and one being transportation-only, or having two different sets of physics, or whatever) or different names (The Culture series has Ultraspace and Infraspace, for instance, as in that setting hyperspaces are the boundaries between concentric expanding universes), but it's a long and proud tradition. "Hypospace" may not be the coolest name for it, but it's a logical technical term for a physicist to choose to describe a hypothetical dimension opposite to hyperspace, and exploring the concept in a story is just as logical.


Great! Then you know all about how the galaxy burned at the hands of grossly incompetent droid armies.

Be fair, though: the droid armies may have started off grossly incompetent during the invasion of Naboo, but after that they started to be produced in staggeringly ridiculous numbers (funded by the galaxy's richest corporations and constructed on multiple planets dedicated entirely to droid manufacturing), they grew in sapience in personality as the war went on (as droids are wont to do), and they were being fed critical intelligence on Republic military resources and activities to keep the war dragging on for as long as Palpatine needed.

In StarCraft terms, a bunch of Zerglings can't stand up to even a much smaller number of Carriers, but if the Zerg player starts the game with triple the normal amount of minerals while the Protoss player is still teching up and can see the Protoss player's every move while the Protoss player is subject to the normal fog of war rules, the Zerg player can either overwhelm the Protoss player with sheer numbers or keep the game going as long as he wants.

[Peelee]

Be fair, though: the droid armies may have started off grossly incompetent during the invasion of Naboo, but after that they started to be produced in staggeringly ridiculous numbers (funded by the galaxy's richest corporations and constructed on multiple planets dedicated entirely to droid manufacturing), they grew in sapience in personality as the war went on (as droids are wont to do), and they were being fed critical intelligence on Republic military resources and activities to keep the war dragging on for as long as Palpatine needed.

No, the battle droids maintained their ludicrous ineptitude throughout. Super battle droids were better.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

No, the battle droids maintained their ludicrous ineptitude throughout. Super battle droids were better.

Basic battle droids were generally morons from start to finish, yes, but they went from being mindless drones (except for the officer droids, of course) to self-awareness and marginal levels of competence as the war progressed, and the droid armies as a whole got better firepower, more varied capabilities, better commanders, and so forth. "A bunch of B-1 battle droids" and "the combined armies of the CIS" are very different things.

[Peelee]

Basic battle droids were generally morons from start to finish, yes, but they went from being mindless drones (except for the officer droids, of course) to self-awareness and marginal levels of competence as the war progressed, and the droid armies as a whole got better firepower, more varied capabilities, better commanders, and so forth. "A bunch of B-1 battle droids" and "the combined armies of the CIS" are very different things.

True. Everyone acts as if a bunch of B-1s are a grave threat throughout, however.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

The bow is a tiny lightsaber, and the strings are even smaller lightsabers. Each one has a different type of crystal/color, so when the bow touches the the clashing crackling noise is slightly different. It has been this scientist's life's work to compose a Symphony in Kyber Flat.

That would honestly be awesome.

Not as super-relevant and mega-plotdevicy als hypospace, but cool to imagine.

[The Jack]

The battle droids were programmed with incomptence to force buyers to purchase more advanced models that have bigger premiums attached. It's kinda like how computer manufacturers still make pentiums, celerons and whatever AMD's budget model is. They merely exist so that super-battle droids look better and more valuable. The seperatist army is after all, largely corporate and they're waging war for business reasons.


As for the war.
Space navies and ground vehicles make up more of the fighting than infantry. Of course narratively it's good to focus on infantry because it's more personal, which is why most people think of America's involvement in WW2's pacific war as an island-hopping campaign rather than a naval war, but really warships, planes, tanks and big guns are more important in a total war than infantry.


I do really think the basic battle droids are wasted though. The design is intimidating, the way they act isn't. If they were a mass of silent killers who stoically endured all loses as they marched forward in line formation, they would've been terrifying and the prequels would've improved dramatically.

[Peelee]

The battle droids were programmed with incomptence to force buyers to purchase more advanced models that have bigger premiums attached.

Which is no less ridiculous than them being incompetent for any other reason to begin with.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

Which is no less ridiculous than them being incompetent for any other reason to begin with.

It is a bit like saying car manufacturer A makes their low end cars extra crappy so people will buy the high end cars...

In practice people looking for a cheap car will just opt for manufacturer B.

[The Jack]

Nah, really, with computers they totally do it because there's about two companies for every piece of hardware that can be manufactured.

And for cars, well, here's the rabbit hole for ya:
Different brands are often owned by one company. That company will own both high-end and low-end brands for high and low end products.


It makes total sense for droids to be the same.


(I mean, really, the incompetence of battle droids is atrocious. The poor accuracy is a fine little thing to purposely put into a budget model, but the slapstick personalities aren't good business.)

[Peelee]

Nah, really, with computers they totally do it because there's about two companies for every piece of hardware that can be manufactured.

Low-end computers aren't made with the goal of getting people to pay for the higher-end ones, they're made for people who want to spend less money and either don't want, don't need, or can't afford the specs that the higher-end ones offer.

It's not like a low-end computer, it's like shipping out cheaper computers deliberately infested with malware (not bloatware) to get the customers to buy the higher-priced ones.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

The poor accuracy is a fine little thing to purposely put into a budget model, but the slapstick personalities aren't good business.)

Remember, whatever process Star Wars droid manufacturers use to create/grow/whatever their AI templates leads to droids developing personalities and quirks over time if not memory-wiped regularly. So it's less a Baktoid sales rep saying "Let's give our battle droids a sense of humor, that'll definitely drive sales!" and more a Trade Federation mechanic saying "Well I'm not going to be the one to reimage a few hundred thousand droids every week. Screw it, I can get used to that annoying 'Roger roger!' thing."

[The Jack]

Low-end computers aren't made with the goal of getting people to pay for the higher-end ones, they're made for people who want to spend less money and either don't want, don't need, or can't afford the specs that the higher-end ones offer.
.

Nope.

When you've got the infastructure for it, a celeron/pentium cpu is produced at a similar price to a higher end cpu, but their market value is drastically different and higher end CPU's are thus more of a 'luxury' item do to the presence of low end stuff. Furthermore, GPU's... Oh boi. Computer parts rapidly decline in value with age, but every year there's a slightly better low/med/high end GPU release. Roughly speaking Last year's high end GPU'll be better than this years middle quality GPU, but it'll also be cheaper. A store will scrap the better and cheaper goods so it can maintain set prices. The industry's broke.
Also, both my dad and brother have worked computer retail. They refer to it as 'a scam', like their entire job, working in the nation's largest hardware chain store.


People legitimately make crap to sell more, they deliberately insert flaws into designs. Look up 'planned obsolescence'. The computer industry is horrifying, and I doubt Star Wars's robots are any better.

[Peelee]

When you've got the infastructure for it, a celeron/pentium cpu is produced at a similar price to a higher end cpu, but their market value is drastically different and higher end CPU's are thus more of a 'luxury' item do to the presence of low end stuff.
Manufacturers artificially inflate the prices of different-performing items that cost the same to produce? Hold on, I'll need to get my clutching pearls.

Still not analogous to incompetent battle droids.
Also, both my dad and brother have worked computer retail. They refer to it as 'a scam', like their entire job, working in the nation's largest hardware chain store. [/QUOTE]
Forget the clutching pearls, I'll need my fainting couch!

[BeerMug Paladin]

The battle droids were programmed with incomptence to force buyers to purchase more advanced models that have bigger premiums attached.
So there could be a hacker in Star Wars who just jailbreaks droids and resells them as deluxe models?

Oh boy, I know next to nothing about Star Wars, but I totally have a character/story in mind now. Jailbreaking droids and earning a decent living with private purchasers until their exploits are discovered. Trying to put a stop to the practice, the company lobbies to get lawmen from the Empire and enforcers from the rebellion against them in an effort to quell the intellectual property rights infringement.

One by one, they become a fugitive among all sufficiently sized political factions. Eventually the character has no choice but to break the monopoly/duopoly/whateveropoly these people are operating who supply all sides with arms in every conflict in the galaxy.

Eventually, those who sell arms to all sides go bust from overextending themselves (as a result of the attempted crackdown on the jailbreaking tech the character spreads to everywhere they can) and the market crashes big. With nobody to supply the droids in the quantities needed for further conflict, peace is uneasily achieved.

With outright wars throughout the galaxy quelled and in its place only a few sparks of conflict remaining, the hero must figure out a completely new career ahead of them with not much to show for all their efforts.

Oh, and I guess someone somewhere has some force powers or something. Pew pew pew. I recognize that Star Wars is silly, but I didn't realize it was this silly.

[The Jack]

So there could be a hacker in Star Wars who just jailbreaks droids and resells them as deluxe models?


There's a gap between hardware and software. Most of the battlefroids are likely victim of poor targeting computers, limb movement motors that might not line up with sensors, and the stupidity could be from a logic processor that's designed to break down.

Fixing this stuff is likely more expensive than just buying the working version.

[Brother Oni]

Jailbreaking droids and earning a decent living with private purchasers until their exploits are discovered.

Sounds like something a computer scientist would do. :smalltongue:

[Maximum77]

Computers huh? Interesting angle!

What could the scientist be working on in order to make navicomputers better or more efficient?

[Peelee]

Hyperchips. Holoprocessors. Lightmemory.

....hypochips?

[BeerMug Paladin]

Hyperchips. Holoprocessors. Lightmemory.

....hypochips?

Hyposcience and hypoengineering is going to be a thing with you now, isn't it?

[Peelee]

Hyposcience and hypoengineering is going to be a thing with you now, isn't it?

They're the fastest growing fields currently!

[The Glyphstone]

They're the fastest growing fields currently!

Wouldnt they be a shrinking field, not a growing field?

[Lvl 2 Expert]

They're the fastest growing fields currently!

It's getting a lot of hype!

[Peelee]

Wouldnt they be a shrinking field, not a growing field?
No, it's just a smaller infinity.

It's getting a lot of hype!
Ooohh, that's clever. Very sad I couldn't find a screengrab of Nixon's Head saying that.

[Maximum77]

One of the first possible ideas given to me in this thread was by Excession. It was the "Pharmacological applications of sarlacc gut bacteria". I asked him to elaborate, but he admitted he didn't know what it could be. This intrigues me because Sarlaccs are generally very rare and its not the wisest thing to stick your hand in one....until circa 24 ABY, when my scientist is nutty enough to try. Sarlaccs take 1000 years to digest their food. That much I know. What could be used from that? What could the pharmacological applications of sarlacc gut bacteria be?

[Peelee]

One of the first possible ideas given to me in this thread was by Excession. It was the "Pharmacological applications of sarlacc gut bacteria". I asked him to elaborate, but he admitted he didn't know what it could be. This intrigues me because Sarlaccs are generally very rare and its not the wisest thing to stick your hand in one....until circa 24 ABY, when my scientist is nutty enough to try. Sarlaccs take 1000 years to digest their food. That much I know. What could be used from that? What could the pharmacological applications of sarlacc gut bacteria be?

Hyperchips. Holoprocessors. Lightmemory.

....hypochips?

[Brother Oni]

What could the pharmacological applications of sarlacc gut bacteria be?

We don't know. That's why it's called research. :smalltongue:

[Peelee]

We don't know. That's why it's called research. :smalltongue:

https://media.giphy.com/media/QIiqoufLNmWo8/giphy.gif

[Lvl 2 Expert]

Hyperchips. Holoprocessors. Lightmemory.

....hypochips?

Hypochondriasis?

[PairO'Dice Lost]

Microorganisms with unknown, possibly physics-breaking properties, hmm...

...hypochlorians? :smallamused:

[Brother Oni]

...hypochlorians? :smallamused:

So hypochlorians are processed in the sarlaac's gut to become midichlorians?

I'm just imagining the Jedi Order's primary source of funding being its line of pro-biotic yogurts now...

"Hmmm, new Jedi Order Yogurt drink, gain power of the Force you will!" /Yoda

[Lvl 2 Expert]

Microorganisms with unknown, possibly physics-breaking properties, hmm...

...hypochlorians? :smallamused:

That's the hypothesis...

[AdmiralCheez]

Sarlaccs take 1000 years to digest their food. That much I know. What could be used from that? What could the pharmacological applications of sarlacc gut bacteria be?

I seem to recall that the sarlacc is also supposed to keep their victims alive the entire time they're being digested, so research could be into some kind of food preservative, or an emergency medical kit to keep critically wounded soldiers alive long enough to get them to a full hospital.

[Peelee]

So hypochlorians are processed in the sarlaac's gut to become midichlorians?

I'm just imagining the Jedi Order's primary source of funding being its line of pro-biotic yogurts now...

"Hmmm, new Jedi Order Yogurt drink, gain power of the Force you will!" /Yoda

It helps keep the Jedi regular.

[Maximum77]

Yes. I know everyone is going to get mad but this is my last ditch effort. I decided that I’m going to have my scientist study an astrological body BUT it’s something that we haven’t identified in the real world. I’m no good at physics so I don’t know what kind of new astrological body I can make up. Does anybody have ideas for a fictional celestial body? Like something in the class of a quasar or a pulsar or a black hole

[The Glyphstone]

A hypocube.

[Peelee]

A hypocube.

What would the scientists hyperthosis be?

[PairO'Dice Lost]

Yes. I know everyone is going to get mad but this is my last ditch effort. I decided that I’m going to have my scientist study an astrological body BUT it’s something that we haven’t identified in the real world. I’m no good at physics so I don’t know what kind of new astrological body I can make up. Does anybody have ideas for a fictional celestial body? Like something in the class of a quasar or a pulsar or a black hole

A white hole, perhaps? It's the opposite of a black hole (a region that can't be entered and that constantly spews out matter and energy) and is allowed under general relativity, but is purely theoretical in real-world physics.


What would the scientists hyperthosis be?

Well, a hypercube is a 4D cube, so a hypocube would be a 2D cube, that is to say, a square. Perhaps he could be doing research involving novel uses of right triangles to calculate quadrilateral areas, in which case when he publishes his paper it would be really big hypote-news. :smallcool:

Thank you, thank you, I'm here all week, try the bantha steaks.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

He's updating the hypocritic oath.

[Peelee]

A white hole, perhaps? It's the opposite of a black hole (a region that can't be entered and that constantly spews out matter and energy) and is allowed under general relativity, but is purely theoretical in real-world physics.

I kind of want to say that's a star, but I like the term "white hole" so much better.

[The Glyphstone]

I kind of want to say that's a star, but I like the term "white hole" so much better.

Technically speaking they are different. A star doesnt create matter, its just a very efficient conversion engine for turning matter into energy.

[Peelee]

Technically speaking they are different. A star doesnt create matter, its just a very efficient conversion engine for turning matter into energy.

The white hole in question spews our matter, not creates it. As far as light being matter goes, better physicists than I (well, that field is a bit too big. I'll narrow that down to "people who actually know physics") can argue that it is under certain interpretations.

Or, for a better argument, hyposun?

[LibraryOgre]

Chronicling the mechanical life that has arisen on a giant robotic moon found adrift in space.

[Peelee]

giant robotic moon

That's no moon. It's a space station!

[The Glyphstone]

Studying artifacts left behind by a species that turned naturally occurring planetoids into orbital habitats.

That's no space station, that's a moon!