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Thus posts regarding it should not be allowed in this hallowed forum. Discuss.
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May 17, 2020 17:57
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We should discuss it in qcs
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May 17, 2020 18:02
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pseudanonymous posted:Discuss. A New Hope is science fiction, the Death Star is a new technology that threatens to upset the balance of power and we explore how people react to that. Obi-Wan's little "that's no moon" moment is a pretty elegant bit of futureshock acting, I always thought. Same with Leia getting shown her home planet being destroyed just as a proof of concept. The Death Star is a cultural force too. The rest of it, yeah, technology never grows or changes ever again, even when we go back in time for the prequels which is bizarre. The actual day-to-day implications of mass Droid slavery are left remarkably unexplored, same with clones, same with everything except planet-buster-laser, that's the "new thing" and again, only for one movie. Even when we see people designing that laser in Ep II it's just a throw-away, it's not like anybody talks about the grasshopper aliens breaking a treaty to do it or something. So yeah I agree on every film except Ep IV, that one actually does have a glimmer of real classic speculative fiction in it, mostly because of Alec Guinness.
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May 17, 2020 19:20
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 There's science-fiction and then there's sci-fi, the latter of which is essentially "action with futuristic stuff on top of it", so actually it's the likes of Star Trek and Babylon 5 and Asimov and everything else that might really be considered science-fiction that need to be evicted from this otherwise perfectly fine subforum.
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May 17, 2020 20:45
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What, do you think it's real?
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May 17, 2020 21:51
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"Oh god not this poo poo again" -- everyone's reaction to this thread title. Regardless of ontological arguments Star Wars has been considered science fiction in practical terms since its very conception 43 goddamn years ago, therefore it's unrealistic and even delusional to think that people are going to change gears because of some  poo poo.
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May 17, 2020 22:04
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It's not my job to know what it is and what it isn't. These forums shall be what we build them to be.
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May 17, 2020 22:07
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Genre isn’t real. It’s just marketing.
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May 18, 2020 00:42
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May 18, 2020 00:58
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The vast bulk of science fiction runs on fictional science anyways. I don't see what's so different about Star Wars.
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May 18, 2020 01:45
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op if you're earnestly arguing that a franchise based on aliens, robots, space ships, ray guns and laser swords isn't sci-fi enough for a forum that has ~20 people viewing it at any one time then maybe Reddit is more your speed
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May 18, 2020 01:48
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SlothfulCobra posted:The vast bulk of science fiction runs on fictional science anyways. I don't see what's so different about Star Wars. Please allow me to explain the difference between the childish nonsense of Star War's "The force did it" and the nuanced sophistication of Star Treks "We need to overbuffer the fluctuating Glorbotronetic phase matrix plasma flax elucidator!" *poot*
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May 18, 2020 02:03
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Buddy they don't even let ME wear it (the glove of Darth Vader) because of how fictional it is in this based science
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May 18, 2020 04:26
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r2d2 would be my friend, scientifically speaking
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May 18, 2020 04:32
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I am going to step off my hover board now. What did you just say?
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May 18, 2020 04:46
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Thats because Star Wars is a documentary, and the events happen in real-time
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May 18, 2020 06:50
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Squizzle posted:r2d2 would be my friend, scientifically speaking nah, R2D2 hated stormtroopers
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May 18, 2020 07:02
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Filthy Hans posted:nah, R2D2 hated stormtroopers lol
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May 18, 2020 07:04
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Filthy Hans posted:nah, R2D2 hated stormtroopers 
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May 18, 2020 07:27
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scifi is a fake genre, all fiction is fantasy 
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May 18, 2020 09:32
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Science Fantasy! Look it up.
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May 18, 2020 09:33
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It's sci-fi OP, it's in space. That's what sci-fi is.
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May 18, 2020 11:05
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Agreed but only for the opposite reason, the forum name being just "Star Wars" was funnier and it should be changed back to that
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May 18, 2020 14:04
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Fantasy is just social-science fiction, if we're doing all the classics here
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May 18, 2020 14:57
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BoldFrankensteinMir posted:The rest of it, yeah, technology never grows or changes ever again, even when we go back in time for the prequels which is bizarre. One subtle touch I like is that prequel-era one-man starfighters can’t fit a hyperdrive, so they attach to external booster rings that they leave in orbit
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May 18, 2020 15:04
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If anything, a lot of the shiny tech of the prequels looks like poo poo in the originals
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May 18, 2020 15:06
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Zoran posted:One subtle touch I like is that prequel-era one-man starfighters can’t fit a hyperdrive, so they attach to external booster rings that they leave in orbit My understanding is that some one man starfighters can fit a hyperdrive and some can't. So this isn't really a technology question, it's a question of which model. Like all the tie fighters the Empire uses can't fit hyperdrive, that's why they have to emerge from the ships, whereas the rebellion uses starfighters with hyperdrives. I think I read this in a star wars RPG book about 25 years ago, so it might not be canon.
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May 18, 2020 15:09
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Tie fighters are one of the smallest starships we see throughout the movies, so there's not much room to work with, but more importantly, they were just designed without hyperdrives to cut costs. It's not like the Empire had any intention of sending strike forces without heavier ships to back them up. This also had the handy side effect of reinforcing individual pilot reliance on the command structure and left potentially disloyal pilots without a way to easily defect. Some of the EU books like the Essential Guides go and write little stories about the corporate development of individual ships, and the tie fighter's super barebones design is directly derived from jedi starfighters which relied on expert pilots to make up for deficiencies in shields and such, despite the Imperial reforms that were made to emphasize uniformity and interchangeability of pilots over training up aces. They were still put into production because all the cut costs made them cheap as hell, and the only people who were directly inconvenienced by their deficiencies were way down in the command chain.
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May 18, 2020 15:42
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The idea was to essentially swarm enemies with numbers. Kinda funny that in the various strategy and sim games that the Empire is the one that relies on overwhelming cheap units while Rebels have powerful, expensive ones. Usually ot's the inverse.
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May 18, 2020 15:47
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Zoran posted:One subtle touch I like is that prequel-era one-man starfighters can’t fit a hyperdrive, so they attach to external booster rings that they leave in orbit Okay yeah I guess that's fair. It's never a plot point, like Amidala says "the new ships are always so dirty, chrome will never go out of style!" but yeah that ring-thing young Obi Wan uses, that fits into the larger discussion of: SlothfulCobra posted:Tie fighters are one of the smallest starships we see throughout the movies, so there's not much room to work with, but more importantly, they were just designed without hyperdrives to cut costs. It's not like the Empire had any intention of sending strike forces without heavier ships to back them up. This also had the handy side effect of reinforcing individual pilot reliance on the command structure and left potentially disloyal pilots without a way to easily defect. Tie fighters don't even have life support, you have to wear a crappy black space suit while you pilot one. I always thought that was a nice dehumanizing aspect of the empire, and although it didn't end up this way, as a kid in the pre-prequels years I always thought that was how Darth Vader ended up a cyborg, he just spent so many hours piloting his fancy interceptor he eventually just never took off the gear. The first time a forcefield on a cargo bay failed and everybody not in a mask died it would have paid off, and it's not like the Empire would take an incident like that as impetus to fix anything.
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May 18, 2020 17:25
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BoldFrankensteinMir posted:Okay yeah I guess that's fair. It's never a plot point, like Amidala says "the new ships are always so dirty, chrome will never go out of style!" but yeah that ring-thing young Obi Wan uses, that fits into the larger discussion of: Pretty sure you just put more thought into this post than Lucas put into the prequels.
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May 18, 2020 17:29
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Now I can't stop imagining A New Hope but the Empire have fancy X-wings with life support and the rebels have lovely tie fighters they have to pilot with space suits on. And it's maddening because I just keep thinking the only reason it's not that way is because you have to see the good guys' faces in a movie.
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May 18, 2020 18:05
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BoldFrankensteinMir posted:Now I can't stop imagining A New Hope but the Empire have fancy X-wings with life support and the rebels have lovely tie fighters they have to pilot with space suits on. And it's maddening because I just keep thinking the only reason it's not that way is because you have to see the good guys' faces in a movie. It could've been that the empire provided space suits for people so that if they had a hull breach they survived but the rebels were plucky and poor and couldn't afford advanced systems like that.
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May 18, 2020 18:16
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I mean you could be generous and say that authoritarian fascist regimes that go properly uncontested will grow inefficient and cheap, but that's giving everyone involved in ANH's production the wrong kind-of credit.
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May 18, 2020 18:21
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pseudanonymous posted:It could've been that the empire provided space suits for people so that if they had a hull breach they survived but the rebels were plucky and poor and couldn't afford advanced systems like that. Oh god this headcanon requires very specifically ignoring EU stuff that isn't real canon anymore, so I actually don't know if Tie Fighters don't have life support anymore and you might already be right? Star Wars actively makes it hard to be the kind of fan it's famous for, wtf.
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May 18, 2020 18:27
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It's also worth noting that they use all the money they save on those cheap garbage fighters to buy more big fancy star destroyers, or even bigger and fancier mega-ships, because important officers get to play with those, and the quality of your equipment is directly related to your clout. Great for assaulting a full-size enemy fleet, not really for dealing with hit and run tactics from small targets across a front too wide to cover with ISDs. Kind of a typical mistake for a huge formalized state used to fighting more formal wars to overlook smaller forces.
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May 19, 2020 04:38
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TIEs are fast and fragile and come in swarms because Star Wars' dog fights are based on movies about WW2 in the Pacific. So the TIEs are like Zeros and the letter wings are like Wildcats, Corsairs, Dauntlesses, etc.
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May 19, 2020 05:06
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They don't even have landing gear, do they? I thought TIE ships had to be loaded into those little docks with a robot arm, and they just rest on the bottoms of the hexagons. They're twin ion engines and a cockpit, like the cheapiest little ship possible.
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May 19, 2020 05:28
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BoldFrankensteinMir posted:Okay yeah I guess that's fair. It's never a plot point, like Amidala says "the new ships are always so dirty, chrome will never go out of style!" but yeah that ring-thing young Obi Wan uses, that fits into the larger discussion of: 
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May 19, 2020 05:50
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So I guess what I'm taking away from this discussion so far is, there are sci-fi concepts being explored in Star Wars, it's just hard to pinpoint them because the continuity is such a giant mess that any possible meaning you glean from the imagery has been contradicted or confused by now. So it is sci-fi, OP, it's just not very good sci-fi.
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May 19, 2020 17:15
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