Darths & Droids IV: Not in Numerical Order

[Squire Doodad]

Spoiler: ROS

Show

The are a lot of ways to not have to deal with it in your movie. One is to not jump through hoops to tell the same tired old plot from Episodes IV, VI, and VII that requires a bunch of fighters to go shoot one weak point to win the battle. Maybe Abrams could have done that if <words to the effect of: he lacks the creativity to do so>

Spoiler: Random Gibberish

Show

Let's see what I come up with in 5 seconds: "Hyperspace generators give off a small amount of [type] radiation that travels through space. Normally, this doesn't do anything, but because the [thing you need to destroy] power source is sensitive to it, we can get a ring of fighters and have them fly by repeatedly in quick succession with their drives running but not activated. It's exceptionally risky due to the dangers of running a hyperdrive right next to a large mass, but if we can keep the ring going long enough, it'll cause the power source to wear out, letting us take down the superweapon with conventional weaponry."
That's still along the lines of "shoot a weak point", but that's somewhat different. The better answer, of course, is to have a movie that is not reliant on a superweapon that needs to be destroyed.

[Rockphed]

Spoiler: Random Gibberish

Show

Let's see what I come up with in 5 seconds: "Hyperspace generators give off a small amount of [type] radiation that travels through space. Normally, this doesn't do anything, but because the [thing you need to destroy] power source is sensitive to it, we can get a ring of fighters and have them fly by repeatedly in quick succession with their drives running but not activated. It's exceptionally risky due to the dangers of running a hyperdrive right next to a large mass, but if we can keep the ring going long enough, it'll cause the power source to wear out, letting us take down the superweapon with conventional weaponry."
That's still along the lines of "shoot a weak point", but that's somewhat different. The better answer, of course, is to have a movie that is not reliant on a superweapon that needs to be destroyed.

Spoiler

Show

You mean like in Empire Strikes back where the main battles are a defensive, delaying action and a variety of chase scenes?

[Xihirli]

Spoiler: I don't really think this needs a spoiler but it's replying to one so...

Show

Empire Strikes Back is a lot of people's favorite Star Wars movie for a reason. It's not mine, but it does contain the best line in all of Star Wars.
"War does not make one great."

[The Glyphstone]

Spoiler: Sequels

Show

I reiterate my comment from the Media Discussions threads of yore.

Holdo's Law: As the length of any Star Wars discussion increases, the probability of someone bringing up the hyperspace ramming scene approaches unity and ends productive discourse.

[keybounce]

Can I request a separate spoiler thread, so that I can easily read everything after the end of the 9th movie? :-)

[memnarch]

Can I request a separate spoiler thread, so that I can easily read everything after the end of the 9th movie? :-)

I'm figuring I'll just go back through the threads on a rereading binge once the movies are done.

[theangelJean]

I'm normally of the "don't split the threads" mentality, but this part of the discussion is really more "Star Wars sequel trilogy plot" than actual Darths and Droids. Is there still a SW thread?

[SirKazum]

I'm normally of the "don't split the threads" mentality, but this part of the discussion is really more "Star Wars sequel trilogy plot" than actual Darths and Droids. Is there still a SW thread?

More than that, a lot of it (at least the recent discussion) is pretty much a retread of a discussion (or a couple related points) that repeatedly pops up whenever people discuss the sequel trilogy, so... just look anywhere that's discussed and you'll see it, I guess

Edit: to illustrate, here's a spoiler-free redaction of The Glyphstone's last post here:

I reiterate my comment from the Media Discussions threads of yore.

(REDACTED)'s Law: As the length of any Star Wars discussion increases, the probability of someone bringing up (REDACTED) approaches unity and ends productive discourse.

[Rogar Demonblud]

Can I request a separate spoiler thread, so that I can easily read everything after the end of the 9th movie? :-)

No real need to go back. You'll see it all thrashed out again when we get to those scenes. And again. And again. Ad infinitum, ad nauseum.

[Kantaki]

No real need to go back. You'll see it all thrashed out again when we get to those scenes. And again. And again. Ad infinitum, ad nauseum.

I mean if we can avoid this discussion until the comic reaches the point in question that would be progress.
We wouldn't need to put it in boxes for one.
Also, it would be relevant.
And yes, I added to it too. Mea Culpa.

[Douglas]

So...

Spoiler: TLJ and the Original Trilogy

Show

None of those are actually complaints about the movie it's in. The main question is "why didn't anyone do this before?" with a side of "I assumed light speed worked this way but either it doesn't or that's also dangerous if you hit someone with it."
And in TLJ, we do have an alright understanding of why nobody's done this before. It was never a good idea until then.
When Holdo turned her ship around, she came into range of their cannons in the process. This is directly addressed when Hux orders them not to switch targets. So none of the other rebel ships while they were fleeing could have done it firstly, and secondly they were being pursued by a lot of ships. In fact, after Holdo heavily damage their fleet, the First Order pursuit of the Rebels continued after brief confusion and a coup. So hitting them with a rebel cruiser would have done nothing. Now, using a light fighter may have been something to try, but the first thing the First Order did after arriving was blowing up all of the Resistance's light fighters before they could get out of the hanger.
For the other movies, it doesn't require too much thought there either. The Death Star is heavily armored and they need to get a specific spot in said Death Star to do much. Sure, you might do damage, but it's highly unlikely that it will stop the cannon from firing unless you get the exhaust port, and at the point where you have a shot lined up why aren't you just bombing it like they did? In the Empire Strikes Back, there's never really a good moment for it. There's usually more than one target to worry about, and during the bulk of the movie everyone we're following is in one ship. Can't really sacrifice one ship to save the rest when the one ship you're in has the princess and the guy who doesn't really do self-sacrifice piloting it.
For Return of the Jedi, the thought might be "well, that Death Star was still being built. So couldn't you just aim for the middle and go to town?" And maybe. Lando had to weave around a lot of things to get to the core though, so it seems unlikely. Then there's the fact that for the first half of that battle, the Rebellion thought that the Death Star II wasn't able to fire yet, so there wasn't really any urgency that would warrant hitting it (and also it had a force field). By the time they learned they were up against a "fully armed and operational battle station" they were scattered, scared, and once again I don't think there was any guarantee they'd hit anything that would keep the laser from firing. I mean, apparently they can manage the laser with only half a death star. Who knows how many redundancies that thing had?
I feel no reason to go through the prequels or JJ Abrams's work since... I mean, you all know why. Off the top of my head, there are a few times in the Prequels that it would have been an alright idea, but for some of the others there was a rescue mission involved, which is hard to synchronize with a kamikaze attack, and the bulk of the time the Good Guys are fighting in the first two movies they are the entirety of the non-evil military in the entire Galaxy, which makes me think that there wasn't a dedicated force or enough discipline for that level of self-sacrifice (and/or aiming) in the ranks. But the sequel trilogy basically ignores the prequels anyway except when it doesn't (where'd the midichlorions go?), and figuring out the demarcation line doesn't sound like fun.

For JJ Abrams, I'd like to point out that they do kill something by accelerating to light speed while it's in the process of eating them. And Finn is panicked at approaching a planet at light speed, so hitting something while going that fast is definitely a possibility. Therefore any failure to capitalize on this idea in his movies is on Abrams's head.
He is my enemy, after all. I can't throw him a bone every time.

Spoiler

Show

A lot of this doesn't actually address the issue, because it's not about why no one light-speed rammed a ship into the enemy before. The real issue is why big rocks with hyperdrives mounted on them and droid or remote control pilots aren't standard missile weapons in every military that ever fights capital ships. Sure, hyperdrives are expensive, but trading one hyperdrive for an enemy Star Destroyer is an extremely good military bargain, and that's the level of effectiveness Holdo's ramming demonstrated.

[Keltest]

Spoiler

Show

A lot of this doesn't actually address the issue, because it's not about why no one light-speed rammed a ship into the enemy before. The real issue is why big rocks with hyperdrives mounted on them and droid or remote control pilots aren't standard missile weapons in every military that ever fights capital ships. Sure, hyperdrives are expensive, but trading one hyperdrive for an enemy Star Destroyer is an extremely good military bargain, and that's the level of effectiveness Holdo's ramming demonstrated.

Spoiler

Show

I mean, we see an A-wing smash into a big honking ship in RotJ, and while the ship does explode, thats because it crashes into the Death Star II, not because the damage from the A-win caused any particular cataclysmic structural failure. Given that a hyperdrive missile would have a fairly narrow range of approach anyway, there just isnt that much of an advantage over using regular explosives, or just mass drivers.

[Douglas]

Spoiler

Show

I mean, we see an A-wing smash into a big honking ship in RotJ, and while the ship does explode, thats because it crashes into the Death Star II, not because the damage from the A-win caused any particular cataclysmic structural failure. Given that a hyperdrive missile would have a fairly narrow range of approach anyway, there just isnt that much of an advantage over using regular explosives, or just mass drivers.

Spoiler

Show

Holdo shows hyperdrive ramming literally breaking a First Order dreadnought in half. That's several orders of magnitude more powerful than any weapon ever shown in any of the movies that isn't on the scale of a Death Star superlaser.

[Keltest]

Spoiler

Show

Holdo shows hyperdrive ramming literally breaking a First Order dreadnought in half. That's several orders of magnitude more powerful than any weapon ever shown in any of the movies that isn't on the scale of a Death Star superlaser.

Spoiler

Show

Its also using a missile the size of the biggest capital ship ever used by the protagonists in a movie (i think. Home One may have been bigger) Building missiles that size to act as capital ship killers is such an ungodly waste of resources it hurts just to think about.

[The Glyphstone]

I won't encourage this.
I won't encourage this.
I won't encourage this.

Spoiler: Darnit

Show

What really makes or breaks the whole thing is if conventional physics apply to hyperspace transitions - specifically E=MC^2. If the projectile is physically propelled to the edge of lightspeed before entering hyperspace, then small hypermissiles would function.

Looking at Wookiieepeediiaa, the Canon, non-Legends article for Hyperspace says:

Hyperdrives manipulated hypermatter particles in order to thrust a starship into hyperspace[3] whilst preserving the ship's mass/energy profile.[3-TFA: Incredible Cross-Sections]

If we take ICS at its word as canon, the 'jump to lightspeed' bypasses Einsteinian physics entirely as it 'preserves the ship's mass/energy profile'. Without the element of C-fractional speed adding to effective impact energy, we're left with simple mass as the primary contributing factor to how much damage a 'Holdo Maneuver' can do, meaning asteroids or fightercraft would indeed be far less effective weapons.

This will do nothing to actually end the debate, but it's my take on it from 5 minutes of research.

[Keltest]

I won't encourage this.
I won't encourage this.
I won't encourage this.

Spoiler: Darnit

Show

What really makes or breaks the whole thing is if conventional physics apply to hyperspace transitions - specifically E=MC^2. If the projectile is physically propelled to the edge of lightspeed before entering hyperspace, then small hypermissiles would function.

Looking at Wookiieepeediiaa, the Canon, non-Legends article for Hyperspace says:


If we take ICS at its word as canon, the 'jump to lightspeed' bypasses Einsteinian physics entirely as it 'preserves the ship's mass/energy profile'. Without the element of C-fractional speed adding to effective impact energy, we're left with simple mass as the primary contributing factor to how much damage a 'Holdo Maneuver' can do, meaning asteroids or fightercraft would indeed be far less effective weapons.

This will do nothing to actually end the debate, but it's my take on it from 5 minutes of research.

Spoiler

Show

Assuming that Randall Munroe can be trusted, it PROBABLY isnt actually striking at 9/10s of lightspeed, given the absence of nuclear explosions and general chain reactions as physics starts to get upset.

[Anonymouswizard]

Spoiler: Maybe I'll copy and paste this when it's relevant to the comic

Show

Honestly, considering that ships in Start Wars either use reactionless drives or have massive reserves of energy and literally synthesise reaction mead as required, hyperspace missiles aren't shown to be any more destructive than the weapons they could be making.

As drives don't take in remass and propel ships quickly (we're down takeoffs they would likely require multiple Gs for their shown time scales), then you could just strap a droid brain, a thruster, and a battery/generator to an asteroid and ram them into planets at 0.9c+. A ship is almost certainly harder to hit, although you could possibly get a SSD or the like with a smaller asteroid at 0.5c+. But using this logic makes the Death Star both more and less impressive (it's faster than a relativistic asteroid at destroying the planet, but definitely costs much more just to build, and probably to maintain*, which makes building something so pointless am even bigger symbol of the Empire's power), so we tend not to bring it up

A hyperspace missile could probably destroyba planet, a relativistic asteroid definitely could. Both, with a smart enough guidance system, could take out a capital ship. The problem with both isn't the potential, because as long as it's not done on screen we can assume there's some unstated reason. The problem comes from when it is shown on screen and we can then use in-setting technology to come up with a better version (such as sticking a droid brain to a hyperdrive and adding a bit of dead weight).

It's relatively easy to come up with a reason why they don't do it. 'Hyperdrives don't work in a gravity field of significant strength, therefore capital ships can generate a gravity field of 0.2G half a light-second in diameter, pulling such missiles out of hyperspace to be destroyed by point defence weapons.' There, apart from the new canon removing the key element (although you just change from 'gravity field' to whatever they do use these days) it's a perfectly reasonable explanation for why you don't stick a hyperdrive to a protocol droid and hit 'go'.

* And really, are you blowing up enough planets to justify the cost of having a planet killer floating around all the time? Odds are you aren't.

[Xihirli]

Spoiler: Sure, let's add to the trash heap

Show

I'll remind everyone that the Republic had no military until the third act of Attack of the Clones. The galaxy has only had a military for about 60 years. I totally believe that a lot of military tactics just aren't known to them because this is a galaxy that is new to war. Napoleon and Alexander the Pretty Alright had access to the same materials and weapons as everyone else they were conquering. The way that they won was in thinking of things that no one else had thought of, some of it very basic.

Spoiler: French Uniform at the Beginning of World War One

Show

Historically speaking, our technology improves a lot faster than our tactics do. It's why a whole new kind of warfare was created during both World Wars. From the beginning, there were machine guns, mortars and submarines. But army vs army tactics in Europe hadn't changed from the days of armies in bright colors lining up and shooting at each other in an empty field. Until they were forced to. This seems unrealistic to us from the outside, but this is how warfare works. We don't understand the way that a new piece of technology changes warfare until it does.

[Anonymouswizard]

Spoiler: The one line RoS needed to sort this all out

Show

'It's been years, [they've probably/they have] learnt to counter it by now.'

For all we know the Resistance did make some raids after TLJ that involved strapping a droid brain to a hyperdrive and using an X-Wing to launch it at a First Order shipyard or the like. Which would have resulted in the First Order developing a countermeasure (which, in a galaxy with anti-FTL technology, isn't exactly difficult) and the Resistance stopped using it. Even if you can't equip everything important with the countermeasure you can probably deploy it widely enough to stop the Resistance from using it.

The problem stands from the fact that we can easily come up with ways to mitigate the problem we're actually given, not that is hard to justify not using it. Here's another one:

'A hyperdrive is half the cost of an X-Wing, which is only reusable if it comes back from a mission.'

Like, my problem isn't the scene, it's a cool scene, my problem is I think the explanation for why it's not used more later is half-hearted when it's not exactly hard to say 'there's a countermeasure now' or 'so you tell us where we can get 20,000 AI willing to commit suicide.'

[SirKazum]

Spoiler: Sure, let's add to the trash heap

Show

I'll remind everyone that the Republic had no military until the third act of Attack of the Clones. The galaxy has only had a military for about 60 years. I totally believe that a lot of military tactics just aren't known to them because this is a galaxy that is new to war. Napoleon and Alexander the Pretty Alright had access to the same materials and weapons as everyone else they were conquering. The way that they won was in thinking of things that no one else had thought of, some of it very basic.

Spoiler: French Uniform at the Beginning of World War One

Show

Historically speaking, our technology improves a lot faster than our tactics do. It's why a whole new kind of warfare was created during both World Wars. From the beginning, there were machine guns, mortars and submarines. But army vs army tactics in Europe hadn't changed from the days of armies in bright colors lining up and shooting at each other in an empty field. Until they were forced to. This seems unrealistic to us from the outside, but this is how warfare works. We don't understand the way that a new piece of technology changes warfare until it does.

Oh man, I've GOT to give Keybounce a spoiler-free preview of this. Here it is, spoilered for image size:

Spoiler

Show

[Rodin]

On memnarch's commentary: I had never noticed before that there's a reason the GM is doing an NPC conversation sequence with no PC present. It's because there WAS a PC present, in the form of Annie secretly playing Vader.

On keybounce's commentary: I knew I had heard of Ultraviolet security clearance before, so I Googled it. "Ultraviolet security" got me pens that write in invisible ink that can only be seen with UV light. That is far more ridiculous than the fictional thing I was searching for, which turned out to be Paranoia.

I have a mental tic that auto-completes a repeated "What is it?" with "I've never seen one before, no one has..."

Also applies to the spoilered discussion.

[hamishspence]

On keybounce's commentary: I knew I had heard of Ultraviolet security clearance before, so I Googled it. "Ultraviolet security" got me pens that write in invisible ink that can only be seen with UV light. That is far more ridiculous than the fictional thing I was searching for, which turned out to be Paranoia.

40K's Dan Abnett novels had clearance levels like "Magenta" and "Vermilion" - which sound pretty similar.

[SirKazum]

40K's Dan Abnett novels had clearance levels like "Magenta" and "Vermilion" - which sound pretty similar.

I can't speak for Keybounce of course but it sounded very definitely like a Paranoia thing to me. The joke is that Ultraviolet is the lowest possible security clearance, and violet is the second-lowest, if I remember my Paranoia lore right (I've never played it).

[Anonymouswizard]

I can't speak for Keybounce of course but it sounded very definitely like a Paranoia thing to me. The joke is that Ultraviolet is the lowest possible security clearance, and violet is the second-lowest, if I remember my Paranoia lore right (I've never played it).

Other way round, infrared is the lowest, ultraviolet is the highest.

[keybounce]

Infrared is unimportant NPC. Red is beginning players. Violet is the highest possible player rank, and Ultra violet is the GM's rank.

[SirKazum]

Oh okay, I got that backward. I was thinking that the lowest rank was not in the visible spectrum so the clothes were black, but was at the wrong end of the non-visible spectrum.

[Rockphed]

Oh okay, I got that backward. I was thinking that the lowest rank was not in the visible spectrum so the clothes were black, but was at the wrong end of the non-visible spectrum.

Ultraviolet light tends to be perceived as white if it actually makes it to your eyes. It also damages your cornea and retina something fierce, so don't spend too much time testing it.

[Xihirli]

Heh. Sometimes I forget that Pete started out as Jim's friend.

[137beth]

Wow, Jira is not someone I expected to see again.

[keybounce]

Ultraviolet light tends to be perceived as white if it actually makes it to your eyes. It also damages your cornea and retina something fierce, so don't spend too much time testing it.

Which is why the UV-clearance corridors are white.

Fun times in Paranoia: Send your troopers out to an area that is not under computer control, where you have white corridors instead of color-approved corridors.