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[Space Wars] The Next Generation
Posts
Ballistic missiles, man. Send up twice as many for half the price. Let's see them intercept all of them.
Really, if Star Wars had caught up to the 21st century, or even before that, you certainly wouldn't have fighters engaging eachother, than ships. You'd have the ships firing salvos of long-range missiles that could obliterate an enemy ship in a few quick hits, and could be deployed in a hundredth the time needed to scramble pilots and launch them.
It wouldn't be very exciting.
I'm surprised Lucasarts doesn't pretend this doesn't exist.
Well, they do hit all of their projectile attacks in the movie. Except for that one idiot Ewok who bolas himself in the face.
I assume it would be easier to get to the black parts once the Stormtrooper was down. The hands are pretty unprotected by ST armor, since they need to retain finger flexibility, only the back of the hand is covered. And since the natural defensive posture of the hands is with the palms out, you have 2 nice black targets covered only by cloth, waiting to be poisoned.
The most realistic space battle I've read was from a parody sci-fi book, ironically enough.
When two ships engaged in battle, their computers linked, determined which ship had the advantage (better weapons and armour, more manoeuvrability, superior tactical computer), and when the balance of probability was for one side the other just surrendered without firing a shot.
That would never allow for The Picard Maneuver.
Drones would work
... until some 8 year old blows up the command ship that's coordinating all those drones, then does a barrel roll because it's a neat trick.
They have anti-missile defenses in Star Wars. They lower the power of the laser cannons, allowing them to shoot faster, since you don't need a full-strength laser to detonate the warhead. Then they fill up the sky with red and green light.
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Point-defense_laser_cannon_%28anti-missile%29
Both concussion missiles and proton torpedoes are listed as being nuclear/thermonuclear warheads, and it takes a number of those just to whittle down a SD's shields, let alone take out the DS with a broadside.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCoHT_cHPzY
Or don't, just let them hit the DS. You're basically talking about throwing bowling balls at the moon. Look at our moon, it's been hit a bunch of times and hasn't gone anywhere.
Besides, those teamsters down in Imperial Repair & Maintenance could stand to actually do some work once in a while.
That's why you need something you can fly by wire into the belly of the beast without sacrificing valuable mans.
That's why I said it wouldn't be very exciting.
I think you mis-heard the video. The 20-kg slug is being thrown/shot at 1.3% of light speed, not 1.3x light speed.
If ME had 1.3xLS guns, they sure wouldn't need Shepard to kill the "Reapers".
I would also guess Star Destroyers and the like must have some sort of ballistic projectile countermeasure. Something the size of the Death Star is going to be in danger of get hit by a meteoroid relativistically going many km/s at some point. Never mind space rail guns aiming things at it.
But then the only visual science fiction I've seen that acknowledges that tiny debris is flying around is Stargate Atlantis when someone gets hit in the leg with one when the shield goes out while they're flying through space.
MOSTLY BLACK!
Of course, by the same logic, you wouldn't need the Death Star. A large enough ship going multiple times the speed of light directly into a planet could obliterate a terrestrial world. You could just have it take off from the other planet like a normal ship.
Then you have the problem that anyone in the galaxy with a moderately large freighter could damage or destroy any planet they wished. When you're a tyrannical dictator ruling by force and already fighting a fairly large well armed and well organized rebellion, that's not the way you want them to start thinking.
Besides which, the Death Star served as much as a symbol of terror as an actual weapon. Anyone who saw the thing show up in orbit knows that they've screwed up, and everyone else in the galaxy knows they screwed up and knows it would be wise to endeavor not to screw up in the same way. Not so much when a relativistic planet killer might have been some freighter captain who hit the bottle a bit too hard and miscalculated his course by a fraction of a degree.
Hyperspace and normal space are linked somewhat in existence. By trying to hyperspace into something you would only be hitting it's hyperspace equivalent to its mass and gravity well, aka gravity shadow. This is why you don't want to just hyperspace all willy nily because you could run into a star and get destroyed.
At least that's what I'm guessing it is.
I'm okay with this
Uh, I mean, jumping to hyperspace ain't like dusting crops, boy!
Wait...is there a wookiepedia article with a full history of crop dusting in Star Wars now?
It really wouldn't surprise me.
Probably have a list of links to popular crop-dusting star fighters too.
While they may have existed beforehand, the Thrawn series introduced me to a class of ship the Empire uses called an Interdictor, which essentially generates a massive gravity well (... don't ask) that convinces nearby ships that they're too close to a planet to jump to hyperspace, or to prevent reinforcements from joining the fray too quickly, among other uses.
Now that I think about it, it also provides loitering/incoming/outgoing traffic a relatively safe zone. If you could just jump/warp/hyperspace into any place you liked, going to Coruscant would have to involve stopping at the outer boundries of the system, lest you inadvertantly land in someone else's lap, literally or figuratively. As long as you're within the gravity well/shadow, you're fairly safe from incoming traffic.
I guess you kind of have to take that approach, if you want your movie to be visually interesting. Even modern air combat would be pretty boring to show on film. Realistic space battles would involve both sides firing large numbers of smart munitions and drones, then watching the results on a screen. Not terribly interesting to watch.
Rigorous Scholarship
I've been fine with that my entire life.
The technology aspect of it is best glossed over. Laser swords? Really? What warrior would use something like that in a highly advanced space-faring civilization?
Rigorous Scholarship
Just wait until the Forever War movie finally gets made. They'll have to either go completely 2001 on it, or just change everything to make the space battles actually interesting to watch.
An awesome one, that's who.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFCBwob65Nw
It's not really serious, just a bit of fun nerd-baiting.
In complete honesty, I always found the naval architecture the most interesting part of Star Wars. The political "Aesop's Fable", quite frankly, sucks out loud. The Jedi come off as some sort of creepy warrior cult who train child soldiers and control the inner workings of government, who are pretty much the whole point of everything everywhere. And everyone's too stupid too see through obvious schemes.
Ship designs, while highly impractical, are still interesting and curious. The engineering and logistical sides interest me.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5blbv4WFriM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgspzYMdqdc
Star Trek does get bonus points for having the legendary Quad Facepalm:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzLo-q_CK2w
Newton doesn't exist in Star Wars anyways. In TIE Fighter or any of the other Larry Holland games, when you turn off your engines in space, you come to a complete stop.
Well, yeah. He wasn't born yet.
Purely non-Newtonian physics inevitably feel wrong to me. Then again, I got into TIE Fighter because I loved flight sims. Really, any similar game would really benefit from some sense of momentum and application of other forces, rather than "Your fighter can turn in any direction without any sort of problems, only limited by turn speed".
I think it'd make for more interesting dogfighting. Force people to do something other than try and out-turn each other for ten minutes. But, that's only me. I'm sure that would piss people off as well.
And it still had tri-cording. Unless you want a universe where everyone moves like a bishop.
90s game physics > real world physics.