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I was gonna say that the only thing in there I probably agreed with was the fact that trying to do too many ultra-massive superweapons one after the other sounds like bad pacing. I haven't really read Dark Empire though, so I don't know. I suspect it has a lot of the issues that were pervasive throughout 90s comics.
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Mar 18, 2021 00:50
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Corran Horn and Kyle Katarn are both in the X-Wing Miniatures game, but neither have force abilities.
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Apr 14, 2021 18:18
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I don't think much of the other material about Imperial pilots agrees with the idea that they're the result of some super elite training. There's a few fantastic pilots that pop out of the system, but they're more of a mistake than the expected result. Of course, the aspects that would make you succeed in the academy of a fascist empire probably wouldn't have much to do with actual flying ability and more to do with who you know, whether you're the desired demographic, raw obedience to superiors, and bribery.
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Apr 16, 2021 03:41
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I only ever started worrying about the implications of nobody apparently ever thinking about that before weeks after seeing it, and while I was watching the movie, I was more concerned with those other ships that were in the nuRebel fleet back when it was still a fleet who had scenes where they died horribly where you just knew their sacrifice would be unremembered and unmourned and left mostly meaningless by the plot. If ramming was on the table, you'd think they could have their own big cool moments, but no.Defiance Industries posted:Jedis have been Super Saiyans since at least RotJ, just make your peace with it. They really weren't. Lucas was actually pretty restrained with the supernatural abilities of jedi, much like how Tolkien was pretty restrained with how much magic Gandalf does. In RotJ Luke's got a couple super jumps and a little ESP, and that's it. Even in the prequels, the jedi didn't actually sling around very much magic by the standards of like superhero media. There absolutely wasn't the thing that happened with DBZ where powers just get inflated indefinitely until nothing really means anything because everything is so powerful that it's too abstract to meaningfully depict. The sequels give off a real feeling of writers taking all the toys of the franchise and trying to push them to the limits of what could possibly be done with them. Instead of trying to find a groove of their own, everything is constantly framed in the perspective of the franchise, even if you're actively trying to be charitable and not do your own direct comparisons.
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Apr 18, 2021 02:52
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I'm reading a lot of speculation and not enough facts. I will correct this. So these guys  and these guys  are basically the same species. Mostly. There's a little in-universe controversy over that.The first guys are Duros from the planet Duro. They have an extremely old society that lays claim to being one of the first to develop hyperspace. As a result of that, the planet Duro has been left heavily polluted by eons of heavy industry, and most of the planet's population has to live in orbital cities instead of on the planet's surface. Duros throughout the galaxy have a reputation as excellent pilots and explorers, but that also leads to a sort of tragedy for their society in that so many of them spread throughout the galaxy instead of sticking around to improve things. The second guys are Neimoidians, who are apparently the result of some colonization project by the Duros long ago. Their main world is Neimoidia, but there are a number of other colony worlds (called "purse worlds") under the same political umbrella, the richest and most powerful being Cato Neimoidia. There's some genetic drift between them and the Duros, but the biggest difference is a cultural one, and most of that seems to spring from one particular practice: While Duros prefer to form more traditional family units, Neimoidians are raised in communal hives and grub hatcheries where they are neglected by caretakers and must learn to be greedy to get enough food to survive. That is credited as the reason Neimoidians are as ruthless as they are in the corporate world, and it also turned out to be a liability towards the end of the Clone Wars when during the retaking of Nemoidian worlds for the Republic, a number of grub hatcheries were bombed and the species as a whole was devastated. And through all of the stuff written about the similarities between the species, there's a lot of stuff and accounts of Duros being extremely offended by being mistaken for Neimoidians or associated with them, but it's weird how it's so one-sided and there's no accounts of Neimoidians being offended at being associated with the Duros, which you'd think if they're so greedy and wealthy there'd be some kind of elitism in there. Or maybe writers go a bit overboard in demonizing the one race because they're villains in the movie. SlothfulCobra fucked around with this message at 19:26 on Apr 19, 2021 |
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Apr 19, 2021 18:47
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The only thing I've seen like that is the beginning of the Essential Guide to Warfare that goes into things like Warlord Xim or the Alaskan conflicts. It's more interesting than you'd expect, but I wonder if a book like that could pull off that kind of storytelling with significant appeal if it didn't have a massive franchise behind it. I kinda like just how hosed the planet Duro is. Its best days are behind it, ruined by past successes. Their industry ruined the planet and their exploration and involvement in the rest of the galaxy is still steadily robbing the planet of its future.
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Apr 20, 2021 04:57
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I think there's been a few attempts like with Corellia being from outside the galaxy or Knights of the Old Republic having that bit implying that Tatooine could've been the original homeworld of humans before it got lasered into an inhospitable desert. There's a bunch of different groups of ancient aliens that could've been responsible for anything. It kinda reminds me of the Foundation series where they lost track of humanity's origins even though they still use the same Earth length day and year, and just kinda assume that they came from somewhere in the center of the galaxy. There's apparently some similar in-universe theories that humans originated on Coruscant, which they definitely didn't because there's a whole thing where Coruscant's original dominant species got pushed offworld in a war and went off to found the Mandalorians before eventually dying out in their wars and their culture being carried on by more humans who were their comrades in their wars.
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Apr 20, 2021 16:03
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So here's Qwi Xux. So she's an Omwati. Omwat was a planet that had made contact with the Republic long ago, but at some point stopped interacting with the galactic community and forgotten about for whatever reason. When the planet was rediscovered, Grand Moff Tarkin took control of it and kept it a secret from most of the galaxy while he did his work with it. He developed this weird theory that Omwati are capable of great brilliance, but only if cultivated for it from a young age, and as part of that, he took ten ten-year-old Omwati children, each from a different city and ran them through a special academic system where if any of them failed, their entire city would be subject to orbital bombardment as they watched, and then they would be executed. Nine children and nine cities later, Qwi Xux was the last one alive, and after Tarkin's bizarre theory somehow produced a result, he somehow indoctrinated her to work for the Empire and shipped her out to the Empire's secret facility in the Maw, a black hole cluster to develop superweapons.  She helped develop the Death Star and World Devastator, and was led to somehow believe that they were meant for mining. She also helped develop the Sun Crusher, but I have no idea what the justification for that was. Eventually Han Solo and Kyp Durron found the facility, and they told Qwi Xux about everything her inventions did, and after finally being convinced, she escaped with them to go work for the New Republic. She was put under the protection of Wedge Antilles, and over time they developed some kind of romantic relationship until after their first kiss, Kyp Durron showed up again after turning to the dark side and wiped her brain for reasons. Wedged stayed with her for a while, but eventually they both ended the relationship because it wasn't working out, and she went elsewhere to try to atone for and cope with all the damage she was responsible for. Other than Tarkin's weird child genius torture theory, the Omwati's main distinctive feature is having some kind of feather-hair, which was inspired by this lady:  From the weird softcore porn section of the Star Wars Holiday special. According to wookieepedia though, she has no species and only exists as a hologram. Weird.
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Jun 21, 2021 06:30
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Qwi Xux should've known better, but her naivety is also the result of a lot of calculated torture and abuse and a strategic bubble where she'd be unable to ever know what was going on in the rest of the galaxy, just that the Empire wasn't showing her pictures of her home city getting massacred because of her failures like they did with her schoolmates, so I'd give her a bit of a pass. And the rest of EU and even the movies and especially Disney's canon brings up all these other people who came up with and workshopped the concepts some of which before Qwi Xux was even born, because other writers had their own ideas they wanted to do about where superweapons came from that didn't involve torturing child geniuses until they become superweapon scientists, but that sorta vindicates her assertion that it's not all her fault a little. MadDogMike posted:So, Wedge dated a women with feathers for hair. Unless she, ahem, "shaves", I think we've got evidence it's not just Corran Horn who's into the strange, but Corellians in general. It seems pretty natural for a setting with lots of different species with similar social expectations about romance* to end up with people having relations with different species. It's even less weird the more basically human they are. The Star Wars EU just has an extra added level of ambiguity because a lot of species get used in stories without necessarily having an official image to go off of, and when an official image does get made, odds are it won't match what was in other authors' heads. Unless you're trying to say something weird about pubic hair, which canonically, Wedge never even got to that point, but presumably it'd just be down down there. I don't see the issue. *Which actually brings up even more questions about the otter who hosed Corran Horn, since Selonian social structure is supposed to be eusocial like bees with an individual fertile female being at the center of any den's structure and then bonding with one or more males and infertile females not even in the loop as opposed to standard human pair-bonding, so I dunno how much they'd share human romance tropes or how much they might just absorb from proximity or what. But also since Selonians are like the second most common sentient species on Corellia, why wasn't potential allergic reactions covered in Corellian sex-ed? Honestly, most of the stuff about Selonians doesn't seem well-written anyways, but that's what's there.
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Jun 21, 2021 23:26
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I think you can have interesting stories without the Empire or an aesthetic somehow evocative of the Empire, I just don't wanna read stories about noseless S&M juggalos. I kinda wanna read a story about soul-stealing dinosaurs, but then again everyone says that story was garbage, so... I don't necessarily hate the idea of imperial remnants drifting after years of the same old power-mad warlord who's got a new plan to retake the galaxy and maybe finding new purpose that might not be a bad. I just don't think you should write stories about how imperial warmongering is actually a good thing that you should be thankful for, and definitely don't take one of the imperial warlords who did the whole cartoon villain routine and elect her president.
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Jun 22, 2021 23:11
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I wouldn't call it awful, but it's not very interesting either. It's pretty boring. Maybe that's worse than being bad. I blame a lot on the fact that if you try to stay vigilant on your licensed works to make sure that they won't do something stupid, you'll stop weird things from happening, but I think there's also an issue with starting a big new project without much of an idea of what you're doing or why you're doing it, maybe nobody really takes control and sparks something off. Which I can't really be sure about, but it kinda feels like one of those.
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Jun 25, 2021 07:30
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Tarkin also didn't want a bunch of pretty good scientists nebulously loyal to the Empire for their wellbeing (contingent on the empire providing wellbeing that less oppressive options couldn't match), he wanted a few superscientists that he could brainwash and hole up in some rear end end of the galaxy where nobody could ever find them working on his projects with no obligations to some wider population. Like I get it, fascism has a lot of efficiency issues, and oppressing people to get what you want can cause way more problems than it solves, but fascists will still be fascists and try to find new ways around all those problems instead of trying to be nice.
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Jun 26, 2021 06:04
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After the outbreak of the Clone Wars, the Republic extended membership to the distant planet of Kamino in order to safeguard the source of the clone army, and Kamino was granted a full seat in the senate as well. This is who they sent as their senator. She used her seat in the senate mainly to petition the Republic to take out more loans to spend more money on expanding its military, using the war to enrich Kamino. Her name is Halle Burtoni.
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Jul 25, 2021 03:12
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In fairness, naming characters can be hard, and when you've committed to weird alien names, it takes a lot of confidence to stick to any one weird alien name, because they're all gonna sound dumb, at least at first, and it's hard to know what names can get past that. Also I don't think Lucas wrote the episodes Halle Burtoni showed up in, but anything's possible, he had some kind of involvement in the show. In one of the first cuts of Star Wars, Luke's friends called him Wormy.
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Jul 25, 2021 16:20
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I finally got around to watching The Mandalorian, and it made me think about how Mandalorians seem like they're portrayed wildly different in pretty much every piece of media they're featured in, and I wanna run down all the ones I've seen. Wiki editors and sourcebook writers do a lot of work reconciling the discrepancies, and a lot of the differences could be passed off as being from different time periods, but it's still a pretty weird timeline.
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Sep 2, 2021 23:18
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I dunno, part of the reason I posted that was all three of the projects Filoni was associated with don't seem to match. Like in Rebels, Fenn Rau gets angry at Sabine, because apparently her clan was with Deathwatch, but then what was he? The Duchess was very big on disavowing violence as a society, but Fenn Rau fought in the Clone Wars when the Duchess was making a big deal about not getting involved? Were Fenn Rau's Protectors a weird loophole? Are they a politically independent unit? Did offworld mandalorians rapidly militarize after the Deathwatch coup? I guess we don't really see any of the civilian Mandalorians that were around in Clone Wars, so either they're somewhere offscreen in droves, or they declared allegiance to the various returning warrior clans after all the chaos in Clone Wars? And we see even less in The Mandalorian, there's just the pretender to the throne in exile and the weird secret fundamentalist cult. For all I know, that could even mean that the horrifying thing that happened to Mandalore is just disarmament.
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Sep 3, 2021 04:57
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Somebody laid this down in another thread, and it deserves to be here.ninjahedgehog posted:People talk a lot of poo poo about Darth Lightsaber Knees or otter loving or Waru, but this right here is the nadir of Legends (and I say this as someone who was overall a Legends fan)
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Oct 12, 2021 20:55
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The Naboo Starfighter has to pull off its astromech droid's head in order to get it to fit right, since it's too narrow for R2's "shoulders" to fit.
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Jan 28, 2022 21:23
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So here's a thing a lot of people probably know about if they paid more attention than me, but it's still something weird. So this is one of the two turrets on the Millennium Falcon.  Here's Luke sitting in the seat for that turret.  And here's some wide shots of the turret room. You can see the passageway that the characters went through to get into the turret.  The turret rooms in the Millennium Falcon are on a separate plane of artificial gravity perpendicular to the gravity in the rest of the ship. You can even see it at the beginning of the scene where Han climbs up to his turret, Luke climbs down to his, and then he steps down from the ladder to get into his seat perpendicular to the ladder. He doesn't buckle himself into his seat or anything, and you can sorta see Luke and Han talking like they're just seated behind eachother. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSvPxNopdHs The design seems to imply that the Falcon's guns are really mainly good at firing up and down and aren't great at shooting along the horizontal plane of the ship. They can't shoot straight forward or back. Makes it seem less like an offensive weapon and more like it's meant to defend and discourage against things approaching from the ship's widest axes where it presents the largest target. Those are the ship's only guns too. The ship is ill-suited towards being a dedicated warship. It's a really interesting way of designing the ship, and I don't think I've seen any other ship use the trick of shifting its plane of gravity between rooms. It's also a nice trick that probably makes the scene a lot more visually readable.
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Apr 24, 2022 19:00
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I thought of it a little like the Millennium Falcon is a flying saucer with its shape tweaked to be more rocket-like (along with some other weird bits). As opposed to the starship Enterprise, which was a flying saucer stuck onto the end of a rocket. Cease to Hope posted:the blockade runner design looks like a lot of spaceships from that period. i can see why they didn't go with it, in the end. That was the main reason, yes. 
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Apr 25, 2022 17:39
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It makes a lot of basic sense to put the cockpit at the front and center of the craft, because that's how all aircraft work. Otherwise there's just a whole lot of your field of view that is going to be blocked. Especially if you're making a flight sim type of game. X-Wing Alliance did cheat with the way it rendered the Millennium Falcon cockpit by just showing you the view from the center of the craft, but they made their own YT ship where they didn't have to cheat, the Otana. It still managed to recreate its own weirdness to compensate for fixing some of the Falcon's weirdness, and preserved the "mandible" look even while sticking a rocket fuselage into the middle. Maybe if the ship ever comes back again, somebody could try depicting it as rotating its cockpit. I don't really remember how they rendered the turret seat in the game or whether they placed the turret view perpendicular to the ship, but the way that they made a much more elevated room for the turret and put windows all around does seem to imply that when designing the ship, they thought more about somebody in the turret needing to see along the plane of the ship. It's also a lot like what Star Wars Galaxies did when they made their attempt at an "imperial" version of the Millennium Falcon, the VT-49 Decimator. https://i.imgur.com/JRPyqMr.mp4 Except with the Decimator, those windows are actually where the real cockpit is. The turrets I guess just don't have a big window and probably use some kind of smaller sights. The window down below is just an observation port. From a naval perspective, it's actually pretty normal for ships to be run from the rear instead of the front. With planes, visibility is a major concern because pilots need to react instantly to if they see something wrong, but on the ocean, most of the time you don't need that kind of instant reaction. You're not gonna fall out of the sea if you steer wrong. There can be people on other parts of the ship relaying information to the helm for steering. The only time you really need to be precise is when docking, and even then most big ships just end up getting other boats to move them into place. So I assume that the Millennium Falcon has a bunch of instruments for helping being precise when docking and landing and a bunch of other instruments for long-term navigation so they could afford to put the cockpit out to the side as just a backup system, but nobody's tried making a really granular YT-1300 flightsim with manual landing/takeoff to depict what those instruments would even be. There has to be some kind of proximity system for all those Falcon flying in extremely close quarters scenes. And then the VCX-100 in Rebels both went with a central cockpit and also straight-up ball turrets for its guns, taking the B-17's scheme for its nose gun. It's a design that really makes you think more about 3D space, which you'd expect from CGI artists. It might also help that the Ghost is a bit bigger than the Falcon. 
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May 1, 2022 00:55
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There's a lot of crazy lore for the Millennium Falcon from nerds attempting to justify and confirm Han Solo's bragging over his lovely car. Like at the factory where it was assembled, it accidentally activated and destroyed the assembly line. And the outlaw scientist Klaus Vandagante created its overpowered hyperdrive unit to create a streamlined spacetime pocket so it can be a rank 0.5 (in the weird ranking system of Star Wars hyperdrives where 1 is usually the fastest). During the Clone Wars a guy named Jorn Kulish piloting a Z-95 in the defense force of one outer rim sector who ran bombing runs with plasma charges that released blinding flashes of lights when they went off. In order to counteract this, pilots were given helmets with totally opaque visors to wear when the blast went off to shield their eyes and fly blind. Being voluntarily blind was almost as bad as being blinded by plasma charges, and he almost crashed into a mountain on the last bombing run. He quit in frustration and booked a trip on a freighter called the Stellar Envoy to go somewhere else to live his life. At some point in the process he tossed his helmet into a back room, where it would stay for something like 30 years until some old guy fished the helmet out of the backroom of the renamed freighter to use as a training aid for his budding apprentice. Because that makes so much more sense than a sci-fi welding mask.
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May 9, 2022 20:13
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The trench Luke goes through to the thermal exhaust vent is actually towards the north pole, not around the equator.
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Jun 3, 2022 23:23
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Does Kyle even exist in new canon? No stories have used him, and sourcebooks generally don't deal with individual characters. But one of the "leaky" bits of the new canon is the X-Wing miniatures game, which he's still technically part of, so "technically" he's in the new canon. There's a similar deal with Corran Horn, Soontir Fel, Manaroo (Dengar's Wife), Maarek Stele (the player character from TIE Fighter), Guri (Xizor's robot bodyguard), and Emon Azzameen (part of the Azzameen merchant family who were the stars of X-Wing Alliance). Dash Rendar actually has a couple more references in the new canon and was in a mobile game.         I guess Kyle Katarn and Corn Horn lack force powers, but Guri's still a robot. But also canon is a lie and any stories you cared about still "matter" and any stories you don't like you can freely ignore and the canon police can't come to get you.
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Jun 16, 2022 16:17
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No see Kyle Katarn reloads saves when he dies.
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Jun 21, 2022 05:34
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https://twitter.com/SW_Moment/status/1552635864123166723
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Jul 29, 2022 20:29
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Uncle Owen and aunt Beru sleep in separate beds.
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Aug 2, 2022 23:00
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That was actually Shmi's carpet.
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Aug 3, 2022 04:26
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I have mixed feelings on KotOR 2. When I first played it, it was kinda disappointing just because it was really not what I was expecting after the first game. There's way less comedy, less of a world to explore like I had grown accustomed to in KotOR 1. There's so many worlds that are barren or lack characters to interact with, and even when people are around, you're sneaking around them. Everything's so dark and self-serious. And then I can appreciate a lot about it later. Peragus is a really slow burn, but it's a whole suspenseful mystery thing. It's a cool idea for there to be a lot about fixing up the galaxy in the wake of the previous wars. There's a lot of cinematic bits, the Sith Lords are all spooky and heavy, Goto's neat. It's just that so much about the big game decisions chafe with how I tend to approach these games. The game very much has its own pace that it wants to move at, there's a lot of sections where you get locked into areas and you better either finish all the content now or be fine with missing stuff. The influence system is a neat idea, but I wanna progress through all the characters' plotlines regardless of bringing them on the specific right missions to philosophically please them. Dxun is a neat storyline and area, but when they tell you you're riding a Basilisk War Droid, there ain't a robo-dragon anywhere to be seen. And then the ending wasn't finished. There's been a cut content patch, but I've never had the patience to finish the game again. What wasn't cut was how it ends up with your standard JRPG existential nihilist, but without any of the spectacle you normally get from JRPG finales, just long diatribes. I guess it's nice that somebody out there likes Chris Avellone's endless tracts of writing.
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Apr 4, 2023 05:21
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There is a race of whale-men in Star Wars. They're called the Herglic. There's not really a lot of lore about them; they had an ancient trading empire and were one of the earlier spacefaring civilizations, but they don't really come up much outside of the RPG books. They have blowholes on the top of their heads and they're big guys with thick skin, but otherwise a lot of artists have different takes on it. Some try to get further away from the whole whale thing.        I think I like the races that have a bunch of different takes on them work better for me than the ones that all try to copy the same one design, because real species have a lot of visual variation and it allows a lot of room for making unique looking characters.
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Jan 15, 2024 22:59
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