[HN Gopher] The Death Star and the Final Trench Run (2017)
___________________________________________________________________
The Death Star and the Final Trench Run (2017)
Author : BerislavLopac
Score : 260 points
Date : 2023-11-20 08:50 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (fxrant.blogspot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (fxrant.blogspot.com)
| smdyc1 wrote:
| Interesting details here. I too have always thought the trench
| run took place in the equatorial trench. I thought they were just
| going so fast it seemed narrower.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Even within the article it is pointed out that the the computer
| graphics got the Deathstar _dish_ in the wrong location.
|
| And I just assumed they got the trench wrong too, ha ha.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > Why have so many of us been confused for so many years? I have
| a few ideas on that
|
| Perhaps the strongest influence (?): Most video games from the
| Atari 2600 version in '83 onwards have a sequence where you enter
| the final run into the equatorial trench.
| arethuza wrote:
| I played the arcade version of Atari Star Wars far too much in
| '83 & '84 and for some reason I never thought it was the
| equatorial trench.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| It's possible I have a false memory based on my _belief_ that
| it's the equator trench and that there's a cut scene or
| transition in both the DOS version of tar Wars: X-Wing and
| Star Wars: Attack on the Death Star (1991) which are the ones
| I played most. Anyone remember for sure?
| deaddodo wrote:
| YouTube has things called "let's plays"/"longplays".
|
| For DOS Star Wings: X-Wing, I scrubbed multiple videos and
| didn't see anything about the trenchrun:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL480EC9A01E8C50F7
|
| There is no Attack on the Death Star PC videos that I could
| find. I did find Rebel Assault:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FX3B8yC38U
|
| Which almost explicitly avoids the entire conversation by
| starting at the trench entry.
|
| I found an x68000 version of "Attack on the Death Star"
| (maybe the same, maybe different) and it does the same as
| the previous, only showing the surface turret battle and
| then directly into the trench:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUzqbVRUxAE
|
| It would appear that most games of the era were either
| unsure, or aware that it wasn't the hangar bay trench.
| thom wrote:
| You fly _towards_ that in the same way they do in the film
| (and away from it when you die), but it cuts to you in a
| trench so there's plausible deniability here.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I assume the reason we got it wrong is because the equatorial
| trench is the only one visible to the audience at all scales.
|
| Sure, there could be additional trenches on the surface of the
| Deathstar -- like the seeming randomness of the digits of pi,
| there might even be a close approximation of the Taj Mahal
| somewhere on the surface -- but we go with what we see, not so
| much what we imagine.
| namaria wrote:
| The fact that dominant common sense was so wrong about such a
| verifiable and obvious tidbit makes me less prone to getting
| emotional when people fail to understand basic biology or physics
| in everyday life.
| jl6 wrote:
| Seems more Mandela Effect than scientific misunderstanding.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Now I have I have to read the West End Games sourcebook about the
| Deathstar and Episode 4 when I'm back home to check what those
| two have to say!
| tambourine_man wrote:
| Please do and leave the comment here
| hef19898 wrote:
| Absolutely will! That's gonna take a couple of hours so.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Obviously it didn't take place in either of those: the Death Star
| is not real, and the trench run was filmed in a (number of?)
| scale model sets.
|
| That's an even more annoying answer, but I think it lets us pull
| a more interesting lesson out of this than a factoid which nerds
| are going to trump each other with: how "direction" in the
| filmmaking sense and "misdirection" in the magic sense are
| related. We see a series of shots from a variety of angles and
| follow the action from shot to shot - despite the shots not
| taking place at the same time or even necessarily the same place.
| liotier wrote:
| Watch a movie car chase set in a city you know ! For example,
| the Ronin car chase in Paris jumps from street to street all
| over the region in an entirely nonsensical way - but a person
| who doesn't know Paris won't mind at all, and it does look very
| Parisian... The rest of us just has to suspend disbelief !
| gvurrdon wrote:
| The Morse/Lewis/Endeavour programmes often show that sort of
| thing, with the characters walking through various scenic
| areas of central Oxford which aren't directly connected.
| shellac wrote:
| You're never more than a couple of corners away from the
| Covered Market in Oxford-land.
| gvurrdon wrote:
| I recall the Covered Market becoming a bus station in one
| Endeavour episode.
| earthboundkid wrote:
| I lived in a small town in Japan, and experienced this for
| a movie shot there. They would just bounce from downtown to
| the heights in a second!
| regularfry wrote:
| Morse was _usually_ pretty good for this, and fairly
| regularly had shots of not-that-pretty bits of Oxford.
| Certainly the earlier ones.
|
| Lewis, however, regularly teleported significant distances
| in the pursuit of A Clue.
| gvurrdon wrote:
| I'll have to revisit those episodes, which I've not seen
| for a while.
| davedx wrote:
| Bourne Identity 2. They start out on what looks like Palolem
| Beach in Goa, turn and walk off it into some bustling town
| nothing like the village there, before a few minutes later
| being embroiled in a car chase through somewhere looking more
| like Panaji.
| aap_ wrote:
| Another example from the Bourne movie the takes place in
| Berlin: when he's on his way to Berlin he's not feeling
| well and has to pull over. But that scene was filmed in
| Berlin so I found it rather confusing when shortly after
| the scene he's still on his way and not there yet at all.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Maybe the exception that proves the rule: I always thought
| The Blues Brothers perfectly captured the feeling of driving
| around in Chicago.
| eddieroger wrote:
| Lower Wacker Drive in Chicago is miles long if you watch the
| right Batman movie.
| sircastor wrote:
| I had an interesting experience with this for Michael
| Jackson's "Speed Demon" music video. I watched our copy of
| Moonwalker countless times, but watching the video as an
| adult, I recognized a number of streets and the freeway, and
| I realized they filmed the road sequences in Portland, OR (my
| home town). And it suddenly made sense, as the stop-animation
| in the music video came from Will Vinton studios, based in
| the Portland area.
| toast0 wrote:
| My favorite, certainly because of personal connections, is
| when the car chase leaves Long Beach, CA to go to San Pedro
| on the Vincent Thomas Bridge. There's often a big dramatic
| thing with the toll booth, but the toll booth was on the Long
| Beach side, so you'd have to jump over it (or whatever)
| before you went over the bridge.
|
| I believe the toll booths are gone now, the bridge has been
| toll free in both directions since 2000.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| The Steve McQueen flick Bullitt w/ the car chase thru San
| Francisco[0] is a good example of a car chase skipping around
| (and one that goes thru locations people on HN may be
| personally familiar with).
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nq10zyhe6o0
| xg15 wrote:
| The insights about psychology and misdirection are definitely
| fascinating, but I don't see why it's necessary to shoot one
| aspect down to appreciate the other: For me, both discussions
| are taking place on different "layers" of the movie: One is the
| story it's trying to tell and the universe it's building, the
| other is the technical/artistic realisation of that story. Both
| are interesting (and flawed) in their own right.
|
| When discussing a novel, you wouldn't say "well actually, none
| of that is real, it's all just letters on paper, but the font
| is really nice", would you?
| hnbad wrote:
| I think it's less "it's all just fiction so why do you care"
| and more that trying to analyze fiction by looking at
| contradictions or inaccuracies in world building is easy but
| fruitless.
|
| I think the most interesting part of the article is that it
| basically criticizes the film for featuring a prominent
| geographical feature that kinda looks like a trench and
| having the big ending scene take place in a trench but making
| the two completely unrelated. This is an example of
| misdirection, which can be a useful tool in storytelling, but
| it doesn't do anything with it.
|
| Others have commented about films being "flexible" with real-
| world urban geometry to better provide a visual narrative but
| I think the point is that considering these "mistakes" misses
| the point. It's not that, say, Paris looks like that, but in
| the context of the film it is certainly meant to feel like
| that.
|
| Patrick H Willems made a (infamous?) video about the related
| topic of "plot holes" a while back:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9HivyjAKlc While I disagree
| with the idea that plot holes never matter (arguably they can
| get in the way of suspension of disbelief and be a case of
| bad craftsmanship even if the art itself still ends up fine)
| he's right that trying to dissect a film through the lens of
| "logic" usually misses the point.
| buro9 wrote:
| I offer a third assumption... I believed it to be a trench
| parallel to the equatorial.
|
| I knew the equatorial was hangars, but I was seduced by the shots
| in thinking that these were East-West trenches.
|
| Goes to show how bad assumptions can be.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Funny, it never occured to me that the equatorial trench could be
| the trench. Perhaps when I watched the films at release and later
| I didn't have people to talk about it (no one was interested, my
| growing up in the 70s and 80s seems totally different from kids
| in the US), so there was no group think? Not sure. To me the
| equatorial trench and the trench run trench always were two
| seperate things. Also like, the trench run trench ends in the
| exhaust vent (?) while the equatorial trench seems to go all
| around without end?
| arethuza wrote:
| "Also like, the trench run trench ends in the exhaust vent (?)
| while the equatorial trench seems to go all around without
| end?"
|
| That probably explains my understanding that it wasn't the
| equatorial trench...
| derbOac wrote:
| I had the same thoughts.
|
| In fact, by showing the picture of the death star with the
| equatorial trench displayed so prominently the essay itself
| sort of primes you to make an error you might not have
| otherwise made.
|
| But the whole thing was explained in the movie as the essay
| points out. The animation rotating as is pointed out kind of
| emphasized that the trench was not the equatorial trench.
| That's how I remembered it.
|
| It was always in my head as a sort of Achilles heel or the
| culvert in Helms Deep, an important but easily overlooked
| topological detail.
| seanhunter wrote:
| Doesn't the holographic map they show in the briefing show the
| trench they go down to bomb it running north/south? It's been a
| while since I watched the film.
|
| Oh nevermind it says that in the article.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Doesn 't the holographic map they show in the briefing
| show the trench they go down to bomb it running north/south?_
|
| Does it matter when approaching from space?
|
| They could just as well meant an equatorial run as far as a
| spaceship pilot is concerned.
|
| Would the Death Star even keep a consistent orientation while
| travelling in space?
| seanhunter wrote:
| My recollection is that the briefing map shows the
| equatorial trench (let's call that running west-east
| although it's arbitrary I agree) and the trench they go
| down being perpendicular to that. check out
| https://youtu.be/TOgtj00Rp8s?si=2E5SieRc8-XMzUU5&t=20
|
| (you may have to scrub back and forward a bit to convince
| yourself either way). The sphere rotates and you see the
| big equatorial trench and highlights a smaller trench
| perpendicular to that that doesn't extend the whole way
| around. The briefing zooms in to show more detail. That's
| the one they are going to go down.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| It's always depicted as traveling with the equator "level"
| relative to the camera's arbitrary axis. The hyperdrive and
| sublights must enforce that. We actually never see any kind
| of exhaust like a star destroyer, no clue how it ominously
| hovers around. That adds to the menace.
|
| At Yavin 4, it approaches gun-first since it is calibrating
| to fire. But the equator is still level with the center of
| the planet it's orbiting, or perhaps the moons orbit plane.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| I think it does matter as the Death Star spins and its
| equatorial trench appears to be it's equator.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Sure, but it also shows the dish in the totally wrong
| location. So it doesn't seem like an especially trustworthy
| source of information to begin with.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Seems pretty apropros for a mission pre-brief. Ask pretty
| much any military type sitting in one of these meetings how
| well the "intelligence" held up in the field.
| throwbadubadu wrote:
| Indeed, the hologram in the meeting was just the
| "powerpoint slide", abstract to convey the idea: death
| star, trench, boom. Noone stood up and went studying it
| like a map, that was not its purpose at all.
| dylan604 wrote:
| most of the people look as enthused by that hologram as I
| feel about seeing someone's slide deck. most fighter
| jocks tend to have the attitude best expressed in Aliens,
| "I only need to know one thing...where they are".
| Roark66 wrote:
| I'm exactly the same. I can't understand how one can confuse
| the two...
| coldtea wrote:
| Easily? It's a minor detail, extremely easy to miss the point
| in the briefing animation, and extremely easy to not remember
| the size of the equatorial trench hangars.
|
| Both the equatorial one and the actual one being trenches,
| and the equatorial one being more prominent makes it even
| easier...
|
| It's more something a BBC Sherlock-type would notice, than a
| regular viewer...
| hotnfresh wrote:
| It also follows ordinary narrative convention more closely.
| We can tell from distant shots of the Death Star that
| there's an equatorial trench, but not other trenches. If
| you've already introduced a trench, conventionally you'd
| just use that if you need a trench. The difference between
| a narrative and just a bunch of stuff happening is
| precisely that kind of re-use and tying-together of
| elements.
| Pamar wrote:
| Agreed 100%: see also Checkov's Gun and Keith Johnstone's
| "Impro".
| hotnfresh wrote:
| Exactly. And, to be clear, this is a pretty minor
| violation of that principle of favoring re-use of
| elements, and it's also not the case that violating it's
| always a mistake. I just think it's (along with some
| other cues) why a lot of people assumed it was the
| equatorial trench. We knew of one trench, and it hadn't
| really served any trench-related purpose yet, so... why
| wouldn't it be that one?
| castlecrasher2 wrote:
| For the same reason most people think Vader said "Luke, I am
| your father."
| jimwillis5 wrote:
| Because that's exactly what he says?
| willis936 wrote:
| No, I am your daddy.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Hola Papi!!
| mindcrime wrote:
| > Because that's exactly what he says?
|
| Is it?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwtaM0GC-js
| jimwillis5 wrote:
| https://youtu.be/eZCo_hZLyh0?t=50s
| mindcrime wrote:
| Not sure if that's fake or what, but it's pretty well
| established that the actual line is "No, I am your
| father". Even Lucasfilm acknowledge this, so if you want
| to argue that everybody else is wrong, I hope you have
| some serious evidence to back that up.
|
| _But ironically, the line is often misquoted: "Luke, I
| am your father." In fact, Vader responds to Luke's claim
| that he'd killed the young man's father. "No," the
| villain says, "I am your father."_
|
| https://www.lucasfilm.com/news/defining-moments-i-am-
| your-fa...
| ralferoo wrote:
| Reminds me of a similar misunderstanding in Casablanca,
| where most people quote the line as "Play it again, Sam".
| In actual fact, the lines in the film are "Play it once
| Sam, for old times sake." "Play it, Sam." and "Play it
| again" (without Sam).
| dkarl wrote:
| The sizes are so different. It's like showing Earth from space
| and getting the Amazon River confused with a canal.
| arethuza wrote:
| Not quite Amazon and a canal but...
|
| I was once asked by a tourist near where I lived if the
| bridge they had just driven across was the 2500m long Forth
| Road Bridge across what is, I believe, geographically a fjord
| - it was actually Dean Bridge which is 134m long across a
| gorge of a fairly small river.
| vikingerik wrote:
| Yeah, disparate sizes are hard to understand.
|
| Another example: when the Ever Given ship was stuck in the
| Suez Canal, all the internet wags were saying "why can't
| they just excavate the dirt?" Well, this pic shows the
| scale difference involved:
| https://i.redd.it/5g9jvoecj6p61.jpg
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| A bagger would be about the right relative proportions.
| We just need a couple on permanent standby near every
| major waterway.
| scelerat wrote:
| Growing up in southern California I had some relatives
| visit and we spent a day at Newport Beach. When the morning
| marine layer broke and Catalina Island became visible, they
| asked, "is that Hawaii?"
| poulsbohemian wrote:
| I wouldn't call myself a serious star wars fan, but my first
| reaction after the premise was established was "well in the
| briefing they told us where the trench is and so we know the
| fighters will come out of the equator". Now im thinking all this
| really tells us is thank goodness Luke was listening during the
| briefing and was on the mission and not the audience or else we'd
| still have a Death Star.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Didn't we get a 3D map of the deathstar with the exhaust vent
| flagged? So we know where the trench is...
| drfuchs wrote:
| Sheeple! The Death Star is flat!
| earthboundkid wrote:
| Yeah, it's a matte painting.
| sersi wrote:
| Weird, I'm not a big star wars fan but when I first watched it as
| a kid, the 3d map scene impressed me a lot and I always thought
| the trench was longitudinal because of this.
| layer8 wrote:
| The dish position bothered me though.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| There is also that Star Wars is quite loose in its narrative,
| requiring a significant amount of suspension of disbelief.
|
| Star Wars, if you look at it closely, has many inconsistencies,
| and it is rather shallow. But it does a great job at letting our
| minds fill in the gaps. The trench run is, I think, an unwanted
| result of that. It is almost set up as if they want us to believe
| that the final trench run happens at the equator, so that's what
| we believe, because we have been trained for the entire movie to
| ignore small details and think big.
|
| This is in contrast to films like, for example, Inception, that
| clearly encourages the audience to look at every little detail.
| davidw wrote:
| > Star Wars is quite loose in its narrative, requiring a
| significant amount of suspension of disbelief
|
| "Hey, kid, it ain't that kind of movie"
| ethbr1 wrote:
| The maddening thing is that it _is_ that kind of movie in
| many places.
|
| It has rules, it has structure, it has proposed reasons that
| things work the way they do.
|
| People wouldn't be nearly as obsessed about Star Wars if it
| were _all_ just handwavey reasoning.
|
| One reason, for all it's flaws, _Last Jedi_ is my favorite
| new film. It simultaneously admits (through character dialog)
| that "there are rules" and "there are egregiously no rules".
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| > One reason, for all it's flaws, Last Jedi is my favorite
| new film. It simultaneously admits (through character
| dialog) that "there are rules" and "there are egregiously
| no rules".
|
| To each of their own, the meta in the Last Jedi is
| precisely why I hated that movie. Too many times it was the
| director speaking directly to the audience, in particular
| "the fans". This is simply not why I watch Star Wars. It
| also plagiarized a Battle Star Galactica episode a bit too
| much, and who the hell puts an epilogue in the middle of
| trilogy? Clearly Rian Johnson didn't care about what was
| going to be next.
| quacked wrote:
| I can't stand that guy. In Johnson's last three movies,
| the only skill as a storyteller he demonstrates is
| castigation of the audience for their provincial
| admiration of "traditional" values like strength,
| heroism, stoicism, self-sacrifice, elitism, narrative
| predictability, etc. Oscar Isaac's mistrust of Laura
| Dern's brilliant plan to mock him in front of the
| soldiers and then take no action against the pursuers,
| Mark Hamill's apathy and cowardice in the face of renewed
| galactic domination, Chris Evans's deception and
| murderous intent to acquire his inheritance defend "his
| birthright" (which was actually built by a foreigner in
| 1980.)
|
| I've heard he's making a third Knives Out sequel. To save
| time, here's the twist: whichever character(s) Johnson
| has picked to represent "Norman Rockwell America" did the
| crime, and they did it for a stupid reason they didn't
| think through. Whichever characters Johnson picked to
| represent the antithesis of tradition will come through
| and expose the villainy and stupidity of the old guard,
| while remaining morally pure of heart.
| everdrive wrote:
| The Last Jedi was an abomination, filled with misdirection
| for misdirection's sake, at the cost of a coherent or
| entertaining narrative. It's also filled with awful
| postmodern tropes that it conjures out of nowhere. "Hey, it
| turns out there are ancient Jedi texts" But their whole
| purpose in the film is so that they can be burned and
| discarded. "Oh, they were never all that important anyhow,
| just make your own rules."
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| I dunno, compare that to _any_ holy book. It 's
| incredibly important, but also it never really mattered
| anyhow. Of course it matters because of its impact on
| society, but the lessons are universal with or without
| the sacred text.
| everdrive wrote:
| But what if you're 15 books into your fictional universe,
| and during one chapter, it turns out a major faction has
| extremely important ancient texts. And then as soon as
| those texts are discovered, they're flippantly burned
| because actually they're not important at all! The most
| important thing is to just be yourself.
|
| It's bad writing. If they wanted to discard something
| sacred, they could have taken something which was
| actually in the series and discarded _that_. They sort of
| did this by ruining Luke's character, only to reverse it
| at the end and have him save the day anyway. Really,
| Luke's characterization really follows the same pattern.
| He was strongly characterized in all the other Star Wars
| films. Then Last Jedi throws this out the window for no
| reason whatsoever. Then by the time you've accepted that
| he's a loser now, he steps up and saves the day. All more
| or less within the blink of an eye.
|
| They're just setting up a subverting expectations for the
| sake of doing so. It's terrible writing, and terrible
| storytelling.
| hotnfresh wrote:
| > They sort of did this by ruining Luke's character, only
| to reverse it at the end and have him save the day
| anyway. Really, Luke's characterization really follows
| the same pattern. He was strongly characterized in all
| the other Star Wars films. This was thrown out the window
| for no reason whatsoever.
|
| This complaint about TLJ resonates the least with me, as
| a (super, at one time) fan from well before the prequels.
| The seeds of this later Luke and of the situation of the
| Jedi are there in the OT, and I'm not sure what else you
| do with hermit-Luke in the setting established for the
| new trilogy. Sticking with "he's still a gung-ho hero"
| doesn't break "routine" (Johnstone's terminology) and
| wouldn't be good storytelling, and the way in which the
| routine will be broken has already been hemmed in by
| choices in VII (he's withdrawn from taking an active role
| in galactic politics). At least with this direction,
| there's somewhere to go with the character, and conflict
| for his scenes that's not a straight repeat of him and
| Yoda in Empire.
| robto wrote:
| The books weren't actually destroyed, there is a shot of
| Rey with them on Millenium Falcon at the end of the movie
| when they pick up all the survivors. I was actually
| really excited about this foreshadowing a Jedi
| reformation - a rediscovery of true orthodoxy a la Luther
| and a rejection of the corrupt ediface of the Jedi Order,
| as seen by its fruits. This was further paralleled by the
| stable boy at the end using the force to summon his broom
| - a parallel to turning over of interpretational
| authority of scripture from the ecclesiastics to the
| laity.
|
| Of course, all this was thrown away in the next
| installment, so it turns out I'm the fool!
| dbingham wrote:
| There are a lot of things I really loved about Last Jedi
| and a lot of things I really hated about Last Jedi. It was
| such a mixed bag.
|
| I hate the way it threw out the Star Wars universe's
| physics - because it took me right out of the universe.
| Yes, the Star Wars universe never had realistic physics,
| but it did have reasonably self-consistent physics and Last
| Jedi threw them away. It had bombs falling in space (as
| opposed to being projected as missiles), it had turbolasers
| arcing (not something it ever had before), it introduced
| hyperspace fuel in order to make the finale escape make
| sense (they could have just used an interdictor instead).
| It was maddening.
|
| But they almost did something really cool with the force,
| throwing out the dark/light dichotomy and replacing it with
| balance. They could have had Rey and Ben actually see eye
| to eye and both become grey Jedi after dispatching Snoke
| and finally obtaining the prophesied balance in the force.
| That would have opened up all kinds of interesting new
| places to take Star Wars and new stories to explore. But
| they chickened out at the last second.
|
| And then yeah, the whole last half of the movie with the
| slow space chase, escape plan, side quest... none of that
| made any sense in terms of its writing.
| iainmerrick wrote:
| I strongly agree on all counts. Overall, the bad
| outweighed the good for me; but at least it _tried_ and I
| give it points for that. The other two sequels were just
| lazy.
|
| The best modern Star Wars movie by far was Rogue One. In
| some ways Rogue One had an easier job because it was
| explicitly an exercise in elaborating on the original
| movies, rather than trying to expand in a brand new
| direction. But it did its job tremendously well. (And the
| TV show Andor _is_ taking things in cool new directions.)
| ethbr1 wrote:
| At this point with movies, especially franchise movies,
| I'm more interested in how high the highest points of a
| film hit than the average level.
|
| If you do 1 really cool thing and 99 shitty things? Still
| into it! And TLJ does better than that.
|
| There's far too much average pablum out there. Or almost
| worse, a movie that's entirely just slightly better than
| average... but never exceed slightly better.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Rogue One was great. The moment I saw Jyn being
| transported in Jaggurnought, I was sold. The Star Wars
| universe, from the original triology over the Clone Wars
| to the extended universe from the days of Westend Games,
| has so much stuff to work with. Stuff, that is now free
| to use since it is not canon anymore. The sequel triology
| did nothing of the sort, insetad it took the idea of a
| reborn Emperor, IMHO among the worst ideas of the Legebds
| EU, and made somehow even worse.
|
| When the hinted at a fleet of hidden star destroyers in
| Rise of Skywalker, I so hoped they would steal some
| elements of the Katana-fleet story arch. But nope. Funny
| how all the series set after Endor do their utmost to
| ignore the sequel movies, at least it feels like that to
| me.
|
| Fo rTgrawn so, they could have skippes the zombie
| stormtrooper part. Star Wars zombies were a bad idea when
| introduced in that book about an infested star destroyer,
| written at the hight of the pop culture zombie craze, and
| are an element the new canon could have well lived
| without. After all, Thrawns thing in Timothy Zahns book
| triology was cloned soldiers. But we will see how that
| story goes, Thrawn is bavk, and I'm all for it!
| servercobra wrote:
| Most egregiously, IMO, was the Holdo Maneuver (jumping
| the rebel cruiser into the pursuing First Order ship). If
| that's a thing, why didn't they use that on the Death
| Star, the Executor, etc. Why weren't people building
| massive objects with no guns or shields, just a
| hyperdrive? It just wrecks the internal consistency for
| an admittedly awe-inspiring moment in theaters.
| Lord-Jobo wrote:
| They specifically had a line about the pursuers rushing
| to catch up and dumping all power into that effort.
| Diverting from shielding and anything that would protect
| them. After all they had a much larger more powerful
| force, hubrus lead them to believe that they were safe
| enough to do so.
|
| As for the "why not just build a hyperdrive shell that
| you can use to javelin a planet into dust" this is a
| problem that is ignored in MUCH more serious science
| fiction than star wars. Because it's a pain I nthe ass to
| explain away.
| regularfry wrote:
| They could have bought themselves some points by saying
| "...and that's how the Death Star works, you need a
| massive space station as a power source if you want to do
| it more than once."
|
| But no, lasers.
| btach wrote:
| Gravity well. You would exit hyperspace before hitting
| the planet. Same concept as how the Interdictor class
| Star Destroyers prevent hyperspace/pull ships out of
| hyperspace.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| We never see Star Wars ships moving at relativistic
| speeds. Jumping to lightspeed takes you into hyper, it
| doesn't let you engage in a ramming attack.
|
| Besides, we don't know that shields won't stop a ramming
| attack. The only time it was done it appears the shields
| weren't being used.
| cgriswald wrote:
| We see a few collisions major in the original trilogy. I
| don't think it necessarily clears anything up. I haven't
| watched in some years so the details are a little hazy
| and might be wrong:
|
| In ESB:
|
| - An asteroid collides with a Star Destroyer.
| Communications with the Star Destroyer are lost, but
| nothing past the hit is shown on screen. (Presumably
| shields are active since they're putting these ships in
| the asteroid field.) [Just to speculate, the asteroid
| itself might have been pulverized and its materials
| interfering with communications, or some other
| shield/asteroid interaction causing loss of
| communications.]
|
| In ROTJ:
|
| - The _Executor_ loses its shields and the A-wing crashes
| into the bridge. (No shields.)
|
| - The _Executor_ subsequently loses control and crashes
| into the Death Star. (No shields.)
|
| And in Rogue One:
|
| - The corvette pushes the two Star Destroyers together
| and they take major damage. (Unknown shield status.)
| regularfry wrote:
| Interaction between hyperspace and non-hyperspace is
| (unintentionally) telegraphed in episode IV when Han says
| "Without precise calculations we could fly right through
| a star or bounce too close to a supernova, and that'd end
| your trip real quick, wouldn't it?"
|
| _That being said_ Star Wars script-writing has been
| totally winging it on _surprisingly_ big plot points from
| the start. It 's frankly astonishing that it's even as
| consistent as it is.
| klyrs wrote:
| This is my complaint about approximately every sci-fi
| that has both "shield" and "warp" technology. Just warp a
| large mass into the bridge, or a bomb if you're feeling
| nasty. Add instantaneous "subspace" communication a la
| Star Trek, and you can call in the equivalent of an air
| strike from the nearest hub. Warp core goes boom.
| twic wrote:
| "Any interesting space drive is a weapon of mass
| destruction. It only matters how long you want to wait
| for maximum damage."
|
| -- Jon Souza
|
| https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/prelimnotes.php
| #jo...
| gamblor956 wrote:
| Even within the SW universe there were limitations on the
| practicality of this strategy: (1) a large enough mass
| relative to the target so as to cause enough damage, (2)
| enough armor or shielding for the sacrificial mass to get
| within hyperspace jump range of the target, (3) a very
| limited window of space in which to actually hit the
| target while making the jump to hyperspace, and (4) a
| crew willing to sacrifice itself in such a manner
| (because droids and others couldn't simply be ordered to
| do something like this within the cannon of the SW
| universe).
|
| But more to the point: we don't know if the Holdo
| Maneuver became more common in the SW universe because
| the only subsequent film decided to try and ignore
| everything that happened in the previous movie in favor
| of having space horses galloping on the exterior of a
| starship.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > Star Wars is quite loose in its narrative, requiring a
| significant amount of suspension of disbelief. Star Wars, if
| you look at it closely, has many inconsistencies, and it is
| rather shallow
|
| This is the duality of the original trilogy.
|
| (Since we're talking about the trench run: if you've not seen
| it, please enjoy the audio of the trench run played over the
| corresponding sequence from _633 Squadron_ , itself based on
| true events.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OZq-tlJTrU )
| hotnfresh wrote:
| _633_ isn't as based-on-true-events as _Dambusters_. AFAIK
| there was no actual collapse-a-cliff mission, though various
| sub pen destruction bombing attacks were carried out.
|
| It's true that the action in _633_ is closer to _Star Wars_ ,
| though. _Dambusters_ is what Lucas cribbed some lines and the
| cutting between the action and the control room thing from,
| but the action itself is more from _633_. It's also a better
| movie. The action in _Dambusters_ is remarkably ugly and hard
| to follow even by the standards of contemporary (and much
| older!) air combat movies.
|
| [edit] oh, and talk about ripping off _633_ --the new _Top
| Gun_! Complete with all the mocked-up training runs! Hahaha.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| This side-by-side treatment of Dambusters is good fun too
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNdb03Hw18M
|
| No trench at all! They just had to skip the bomb off the
| surface of the water...
| eddieroger wrote:
| Given that it's that time of year when the cable channels show
| Star Wars in entirety, this thread and your comment reminded me
| of a thought I had last year when rewatching Ep4 on cable. The
| amount of content that has come from throwaway one-liners that
| Lucas probably gave nearly no thought to is insane when you
| consider it. "I fought with him in the Clone Wars" has given us
| a whole movie in the saga, which then gave us a whole animated
| series, when then begat a handful of additional series. And
| that's just one example from one line. It's crazy to think
| about.
| trilbyglens wrote:
| This is why I tend to roll my eyes at this sort of Tolkien-
| level analysis of the story and universe. It's just not a
| high-quality enough thing to really stand up to that sort of
| scrutiny. It's like talking about Jelly beans the same way
| you'd talk about wine. There's just not much there, and so
| much of it is just inventing things in the murk of the story.
| hardlianotion wrote:
| The thing that has always bothered me about the Death Star is
| what a lethal place it was to work. Wrong turn and you plunge
| down a vent to space. Open the wrong door and you'll be
| fighting for your life in a garbage compactor.
| NateEag wrote:
| > Open the wrong door and you'll be fighting for your life in
| a garbage compactor.
|
| Technically the heroes blast a hole in the wall to get into
| the compactor.
| EGreg wrote:
| Look, a lot of these sci-fi movies make no sense in space.
| Especially with the scale of things, and how they could
| structurally hold together.
|
| For example I recently watched the movie "the Creator" and the
| space-based defense system "NOMAD" was clearly visible from the
| earth, as if it was maybe 1-3000 feet above. But no, it's in
| space! Yes, you heard right, it's in space, and you can see its
| scale in the movie, yet somehow instead of being a tiny dot, it's
| visible to everyone as it "hovers" over an area. So, they don't
| even try to make it realistic for people who think
| scientifically:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hp3P31ap4No
| hef19898 wrote:
| The main reason I take distance information in Star Trek, and
| space combat distances in both Star Trek and Wars, not
| seriously. They had to engage in what is basically hand to hand
| combat because both ships had to fit on either a TV screen from
| the 60s or the the cinema. Hence the close, perceived,
| distance.
|
| The only SF series getting that right, potentially as an other
| way around budget issues, is The Expanse. The just show space
| combat on the control screens of the engaged ships. Makes more
| realistic as well.
| regularfry wrote:
| The space combat in Star Wars was explicitly designed to be
| "spitfires in space". It was all designed from WW2 footage.
| Working it forwards from the physics doesn't get you there.
| They were going for a specific dramatic effect so everything
| that justifies the final look and feel gets retconned into
| place.
| hotnfresh wrote:
| Scale's remarkably consistent in Star Wars. There exist crazy-
| comprehensive analyses on the Web that check relative sizes of
| ships and elements of ships (and even things like blaster
| bolts) against one another in different scenes/shots and
| against stated sizes in other sources and it's clear that's
| something the SFX crews on (at least) the original trilogy paid
| tons of attention to, despite how much pain that must have
| caused, since they were working with physical models.
| tempaway174751 wrote:
| Sentient robots that can only whistle. That's all I've got to
| say.
| toast0 wrote:
| Can only whistle or choose to only whistle.
|
| They can clearly communicate with other sentient robots, maybe
| they don't care that much about communicating to humanoids.
| gmgmgmgmgm wrote:
| Strange they misser that. As a kid when Star Wars came out it was
| obvious to me and my friends it wssn the equator trench
|
| What I missed as a kid was how dumb it was to have to wait for
| the Death Star to "clear the planet". It's a giant planet
| destroying laser. If the planet is in the way you blow it up.
| Then blow up the moon, assuming blowing up the planet didn't take
| the moon with it.
| cgriswald wrote:
| That's not really that dumb. The Death Star is powerful enough
| to blow up an Earth-sized mass of rock, but Yavin Prime is
| larger than Jupiter. If they could blow it up at all, it might
| have taken longer to do than just rounding the planet. Or, it
| might have been impossible to do safely at a range close enough
| to do it. Additionally, recharging the Death Star takes some
| time so even if destroying the gas giant was as fast as
| destroying Alderaan, the rebels might have gained enough time
| to flee.
| nighthawk454 wrote:
| Plus, they were really arrogant. Figured it was a sure thing
| no matter what they did.
| hotnfresh wrote:
| The planet's a gas giant. Not clear what the superlaser does to
| such a body. Maybe not enough to harm the moon before the
| rebels have time to evacuate. Maybe it'd be dangerous to the
| Death Star, as well.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Yeah. Gas giant = lots and lots of hydrogen. Hit hydrogen
| hard enough and you can initiate a fusion burn--and while the
| fusion burn in the sun's core is peaceful enough it's very
| sensitive to temperature. Supply enough energy at one point
| and you can make it run fast--and propagate for a while. I
| rather think firing on a gas giant makes a mighty big boom--
| Yavin Prime, the rebel base and the Death Star would all die.
|
| (Note that I'm talking energy densities far above a normal
| hydrogen bomb. The temperature/pressure required for a
| runaway fusion burn in deuterium-tritium is far below that
| required in plain old H-1.)
| munchler wrote:
| I always assumed that a Death Star blast is rather expensive,
| so they only had the ability to do one at a time.
| ax3com wrote:
| Click bait for all of you too young to have watched this
| originally in the theaters back in 1977.
| scelerat wrote:
| Huh, I never thought too deeply about it, but I also never
| thought the equatorial band was "the trench."
| nxobject wrote:
| As an aside, it looks like they generated the visualization of
| the trench run with what looks like analog machinery? Interesting
| - I was always under the impression that they plotted on a vector
| display with a PDP-11, and then pointed a camera at that.
| charlieo88 wrote:
| Green light saber. Everybody is adding way to much weight on a
| special effects thing they did just to make things look cool.
| Enjoy the story, and let it go. Nobody ACTUALLY designed a Death
| Star that it actually matters where the trench was.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| > Well, it's a longitudinal north-south trench because the movie
| literally showed us
|
| Yeah, that's why I never believed otherwise. Didn't know anyone
| thought it was the equator.
| rdsnsca wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNdb03Hw18M
| racl101 wrote:
| I never assumed it was the equator but I did assume it was a line
| of latitude.
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