Star Wars SPOILERS ALLOWED

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Nemo
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Re: Star Wars SPOILERS ALLOWED

Post by Nemo »

I wasnt commenting on this 'Resistance' as I havent seen the movie, just the idea that "to start a rebellion you want commonality if possible". You can smooth out your logistics after you've grown enough to employ bean counters. Till then a rebellion wants teeth in any shape it can get.

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cacambo43
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Re: Star Wars SPOILERS ALLOWED

Post by cacambo43 »

I think the movie at least implies that post-Empire, the galaxy is very much a fractious place, and the New "Republic" is more of a confederation. I also assume there are probably many systems that aren't under any particular "authority." The imperial remnant is probably fairly strong, though small; I assume they have manufacturing facilities intact after the war and used the peace treaty to remain unmolested and probably slowly ramping up their strength.

The Resistance is probably a barely sanctioned or tolerated group that wants to take more action against the imperial remnant's actions that are likely getting more bold as the decades have passed. I can see the republic being paralyzed to inaction pretty easily.

I think the "mistake" people make is thinking that once the Empire "fell," a strong and glorious republic quickly flourished and united the galaxy in peace and prosperity.

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Re: Star Wars SPOILERS ALLOWED

Post by Sweforce »

fredgiblet wrote:
Nemo wrote:Actually, no. If you're an empire or other force maintaining a standing army you want commonality so as to reduce ongoing costs. Rebels take anything they can get their hands on. Thus the rag-tag nature of the Alliance fleet and its snubfighter escorts. Also irl - Toyota trucks AKs, Mosins, M-4s. You don't care what you have so long as it shoots. Beggars and choosers.
More or less gonna restate what Arioch said but, the Resistance is pretty clearly a guerilla force made up of former Rebellion/New Republic people. They would have likely gotten all their gear from the New Republic in one way or another, thus they would likely have standardized quite a bit. Also consider as a counterpoint, in A New Hope they only had 2 types of fighters and those were actually separate roles, the X-Wing was a superiority fighter and the Y-wing was a bomber. So it's not like they had 15 differents models hodge-podged together.

On a related note it amuses me when games or TV shows or movie series have combatants coming out with dozens of models over the span of just a couple of years. Given how long the development cycles are getting for pretty much everything these days the idea of an entirely new starship with all new parts being designed in a few months is laughable.
Design work may have taken years and still several can be completed in short order. A "new" design may also be a adaptation of an old one. And we are talking abut galactic empires here, each with potentially millions of inhabited worlds. That is a lot of room for different companies to create their own designs. It is even likely that lets say a fighter are designed locally for use by police forces and then found worthy to be adopted by the imperial forces.

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icekatze
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Re: Star Wars SPOILERS ALLOWED

Post by icekatze »

hi hi

In a setting where a galactic power has the technological sophistication and resources to deconstruct planets and utilize the entire energy output of stars, one might wonder why human sized space craft are a significant cost in resources. (And for that matter, one might wonder why there is a market at all for salvaged bits by the handful.)

Maybe it's best to just not try to reason things out in such a situation. :P

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Re: Star Wars SPOILERS ALLOWED

Post by Absalom »

icekatze wrote:hi hi

In a setting where a galactic power has the technological sophistication and resources to deconstruct planets and utilize the entire energy output of stars, one might wonder why human sized space craft are a significant cost in resources. (And for that matter, one might wonder why there is a market at all for salvaged bits by the handful.)

Maybe it's best to just not try to reason things out in such a situation. :P
Simple: if you're Bill Stargates then you can have a "dinghy" that's several hundred feet long.

Some never-employed druggie that can only pay for drugs by stealing something first? Well, in that case you can steal some paper and fold it into a paper starship.

You can only take advantage of what you can personally apply some control over, so if you lack the control that's needed, then you're up a creek without a paddle (e.g. Leia was a Princess, but with Alderaan having been blown up, the majority of what she could have wielded is now gone, leaving only bread crumbs).

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Arioch
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Re: Star Wars SPOILERS ALLOWED

Post by Arioch »

This is why Star Wars is space fantasy. The word "science" doesn't belong in this genre. :D

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icekatze
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Re: Star Wars SPOILERS ALLOWED

Post by icekatze »

hi hi

Yeah, if this was a science fiction movie, they might try to address some of the consequences, besides the ability to blow up planets, of having a Kardashev Type II+ civilization competing with another civilization that is supposedly technologically competitive, even if we never see any megastructures from them.

Personally, I think lightsabers are cool. :)

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Arioch
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Re: Star Wars SPOILERS ALLOWED

Post by Arioch »

Lightsabers are very cool.

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Mr Bojangles
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Re: Star Wars SPOILERS ALLOWED

Post by Mr Bojangles »

Arioch wrote:Lightsabers are very cool.
This is practically a tautology. :lol:

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sunphoenix
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Re: Star Wars SPOILERS ALLOWED

Post by sunphoenix »

Yeah, definitely 'space-fantasy'.. the very logistics of a terrestrial planet sized object {ostensibly a 1 G world}.. tapping an consuming the total output of even JUST a G2V type star, a yellow dwarf and a main sequence star~ one like our own sun... is just MIND BOGGLING!!!

There is NO material known to science... Hell even 'Doc' E.E. Smiths 'neutronium-fadons' for his 5th and 6th Order-Ray projectors could not contain or harness that kind of power without total molecular annihilation! Even in "Skylark DeQuesne"... they did not harness stars as weapons they rotated them through the 4th dimension to transpose them in 3 dimensional space.. effectively smashing them into existing suns causing spectacular supernova to wipeout the Clhorian galactic infestation, but never actually drained a star of power.

It's almost laughable to any science minded viewer... which is part of the reason I did not like Kevin J. Anderson's writing in the Jedi Academy books and his over the top "Star Crusher"... super weapon.

Now, Marc Miller's - Traveler..RPG, introduced a offshoot branch of humanity called the Darrians, a race of humaniti who control a small confederation at the spinward edge of the Spinward Marches. They discovered... quite accidentally to their horror that a research device they developed a stellar probe they launched into their sun to do scientific research on gravitic and solar plasma reactions..cause uncontrollable destabilization of their star's photosphere and made their sun begin emitting LETHAL solar flares that made the normal life-zone of their star uninhabitable due to the heat and radiation emissions caused. It did not nova their star or drain its energies but it made the star system completely unihabitable for a VERY long time. They had to evacuate their home star-system and leave it uninhabited for any foreseeable future in their lifetime as a culture.

Many years later when faced with expansionist aggression by a superior star-faring nation of humaniti the Zhodani... they dragged out that old technology and suddenly the Zhodani found 10 of their star systems main sequence stars destabilizing in a very similar fashion ...requiring them to evacuate those star systems.. and a warning from the Darrians.. back off of face more such 'unfortunate' freck misfortunes of nature.

The weapon was coined as the Star Trigger.

Now THAT is science fiction!

... and yes, Lightsabers are Waaay cool! :)
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peragrin
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Re: Star Wars SPOILERS ALLOWED

Post by peragrin »

icekatze wrote:hi hi

In a setting where a galactic power has the technological sophistication and resources to deconstruct planets and utilize the entire energy output of stars, one might wonder why human sized space craft are a significant cost in resources. (And for that matter, one might wonder why there is a market at all for salvaged bits by the handful.)

Maybe it's best to just not try to reason things out in such a situation. :P
Resources includes notably raw materials but the tools too. Salvage is a valuable supply of parts when you are operating below the legal methods of obtaining equipment. If you needed a computer but couldn't afford to go to apple and buy one or wanted one that couldn't be traced through sales, then you have to go buy parts. but you are on a budget, factory new parts are a lot more expensive than margin bin. So you shop around scrounge a bit and you can build a decently spec'd system for a fraction of the price of a brand new. The same is true for cars. If you are a good mechanic and have a place to work, you can build a decent car just from junk yard salvage. Of course it will probably be ugly looking, but it will be functional.(that is how nascar really got started)

So a rebellion that can build star fighters isn't so much of a surprise when full combined economies can build death stars. There are a lot of pirates and unpatrolled areas of space in the star wars galaxy.

Actually my two biggest gripes about that galaxy.
The jedi are supposedly peaceful enforcers. Why do they fly around in fighters, when a slightly larger transport would be more effective?(see obi wan vs jango fett).

For as many star systems that are under republic control there are far to many areas between those star systems without any oversight. Yes space is vast but the Galactic Republic government looked more like the UN with a military than a true government.

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icekatze
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Re: Star Wars SPOILERS ALLOWED

Post by icekatze »

hi hi

Maybe if someone had a monopoly on the very highest production technology, or a monopoly on establishing the laws that govern the legality of equipment, some of those analogies might make sense, but there are clearly multiple powers at play.

It is still a rather silly disparity in scale, and just overall efficiency. In the time it took one group of people to disassemble and re-assembled an object with a volume that is upwards of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 m^3, our heroic salvage woman, and her peers, and all the people overseeing her work, didn't even visibly make a dent in disassembling an object with a volume of only roughly 70,000,000 m^3. I mean, how does that business model even work? It's like hiring a bunch of people to salvage the upholstery in a car, one fiber at a time, and hiring people to whip them if they slow down, while your neighbor has a factory pumping out 500 cars a day.

I mean, narratively I get it. It's an excellent plot device and makes for a relatable, sympathetic character. But the economics of scale are perhaps better hand waved away.

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peragrin
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Re: Star Wars SPOILERS ALLOWED

Post by peragrin »

Apple makes millions of iPhones a day, at full production the USA can build a carrier in less than two years.

Compare that production level to say Africa or an Amazonian tribe. The production levels are nearly that different.

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icekatze
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Re: Star Wars SPOILERS ALLOWED

Post by icekatze »

hi hi

I'm pretty sure Amazonian tribes don't try to salvage US aircraft carriers.

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Re: Star Wars SPOILERS ALLOWED

Post by Absalom »

If a US aircraft carrier somehow crashed in the Amazonian rain forest and then got left there, you can be sure that they'd either scavenge from it, live in it, or treat it as some cursed relic (all of our active carriers are nuclear, after all).

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icekatze
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Re: Star Wars SPOILERS ALLOWED

Post by icekatze »

hi hi

Honestly, none of those options seem particularly likely. They might protest and demand that it be removed, and probably be ignored like they always are.

It is also a matter of prerequisite technology. A group of people with no modern infrastructure can't maintain and operate an aircraft carrier, and if they had a modern infrastructure, they'd have more options at their disposal for salvaging one than having random wage-slaves randomly pick at it. If they were just salvaging it for raw materials to build their own crude, lower tech-level structures, you would think they wouldn't be aiming for little hand held trinkets. Those crashed ships are at the Empire's tech level. If they're actually using the components of that tech level, they'd have to have some understanding of how that tech level works. I mean, I can give my cat the keys to my car and rest safe and assured that my cat is never going to drive off with the darn thing, but Rey not only understood what things at that tech level could do, but how to operate and repair them.

With the kind of industrial capacity displayed on one end of the spectrum, if wrecked ships really are valuable, they should be scooping them up whole for breakfast. Orders of magnitude difference.

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Re: Star Wars SPOILERS ALLOWED

Post by dragoongfa »

I will agree on icekatze on this; even today ship salvaging is a huge business for developing countries, with Pakistan and India having the biggest salvage yards in the world. Each salvage yard bids for each ship to be scrapped and they turn a hefty profit depending on many factors. In Pakistan and India the two main factors are the abundance of cheap labor and the domestic demand of scrap metals that are used for domestic construction.

A fleet of warships that was shot down on a desert planet would have sparked an industrial scale salvage operation in months; when one thinks about it the whole concept of a poor planet being littered with the corpses of massive starships is kind of an oxymoron as the inevitable salvage operations would have changed the whole work orientation of the planet in less than an year.

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sunphoenix
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Re: Star Wars SPOILERS ALLOWED

Post by sunphoenix »

Yeah, I know.. to me.. I would not care WHAT condition an Imperial Star Destroyer was in~ all 1,600 meters of it..would be worth my time and resources as a military to tow her if necessary into a space dock for refit and repair! Those 'planetary siege platforms' called Star Destroyers are just too powerful to let some independent civilian scrappers piece one back together no matter HOW make-shift they might get one working again! Waaaay too risky.. to just abandon a Star Destroyer... as scrap! At least to me...

...But the visual image on-screen of a wrecked, grounded Star Destroyer was SPECTACULAR... {likely the whole point} and drove home the message that The Empire was no longer the power in the galaxy! :)
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Re: Star Wars SPOILERS ALLOWED

Post by cacambo43 »

sunphoenix wrote:...But the visual image on-screen of a wrecked, grounded Star Destroyer was SPECTACULAR... {likely the whole point} and drove home the message that The Empire was no longer the power in the galaxy! :)
And realistic in the sense that any large scale conflict has an aftermath, beyond the geekdom snickers over Endor getting buried in meters of Death Star debris (something easily retconned, I am sure), that affect the people caught in the middle. Just like real-life wars, there are still millions (or in this case billions) of beings going about daily living, some closer to the fight than others. Some maybe even be quite unaffected by it. In the case of Jakku, it was the site of a major battle at the end of the conflict (I think the EU has it a year or so after Endor?), so I imagine there was a lot of aftermath, even beyond a crashed Star Destroyer.

CJSF

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Re: Star Wars SPOILERS ALLOWED

Post by Absalom »

icekatze wrote:It is also a matter of prerequisite technology. A group of people with no modern infrastructure can't maintain and operate an aircraft carrier, and if they had a modern infrastructure, they'd have more options at their disposal for salvaging one than having random wage-slaves randomly pick at it. If they were just salvaging it for raw materials to build their own crude, lower tech-level structures, you would think they wouldn't be aiming for little hand held trinkets. Those crashed ships are at the Empire's tech level. If they're actually using the components of that tech level, they'd have to have some understanding of how that tech level works. I mean, I can give my cat the keys to my car and rest safe and assured that my cat is never going to drive off with the darn thing, but Rey not only understood what things at that tech level could do, but how to operate and repair them.

With the kind of industrial capacity displayed on one end of the spectrum, if wrecked ships really are valuable, they should be scooping them up whole for breakfast. Orders of magnitude difference.
Ah, but how are the wrecked ships valuable? For all we know, all that's being salvaged at that site (which might be a small site, with hardly any scrap, that the professional operations can't be bothered with) is currently trivial little trinkets... the equivalent of USB power converters, active heat sinks/thermoelectric power supplies, and temperature monitors, for example. The Empire could hardly have justified having a full-blown Star Destroyer dead in space because the inability to manually change a parasitically-powered temperature monitor on an expansion bell forced one of the outer two of three primary engines to be deactivated. Instead, they'd have discrete systems capable of being replaced in the field by techs.

We have a lot of highly advanced tech today, but if we really felt like it we could actually replace BGA chips in the field: people do it at home already. The reason why we don't is simply because we have a knee-jerk assumption that it's cheaper just to replace the TV. If you have to replace the BGA chip then you might even be right on that... but if you just need to reflow it, then it's probably going to be cheaper to go buy a heat gun from your favorite tool store, some solder paste and flux from online, and get down to the work of reflowing the chip.

Salvaging a ship? Doing it properly isn't realistic with the group depicted in the movie, but if all that they're hunting for is salvage usable for their own purposes, then they'll find all of the parts they need for it on that ship, and yet move very little of it's mass, because honestly, they probably don't have the smelters for the bulk components.

If you ditch an aircraft carrier in the middle of the Amazon, then the ship & planes aren't going to be used for anything. However, any motors small enough to move, or wire, or clothes, or any other such thing, will quickly be requisitioned by the locals.

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