Darths & Droids

The funny thing is that they do use hyperspace to escape that situation in the movie, echoing Han's use of hyperspace to approach Starkiller Base through the atmosphere. The NT seems to be violating quite a few bits of heretofore established canon, and throwing physics out the window in the process (not that it was ever more than hanging from the ledge by a thread).

If K is concerned about hitting small pebbles on the way out, he should be aware that at significant fractions of the speed of light even stray atoms strike like meteors, and a planetary atmosphere is like a brick wall to anything moving that fast. Conversely, hyperspace is faster than light, not near-lightspeed, and there are no physics equations to describe the energy states of particle interactions at such velocities.

Ducking into an alternate dimension to sidestep the speed of light is perfectly reasonable for sci-fi FTL travel, but in that case there's nothing to "hit", as ordinary matter wouldn't interact with hyperspace matter via the electromagnetic or nuclear forces. It might via the gravitational force, though — this is something implied by the OT and outright stated in the EU (plus Rebels if that's canonical). This raises all sorts of other questions, too, but I don't feel like writing up a physics dissertation on the topic.

edited 26th Dec '17 7:55:40 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

I feel confident that someone out there has already done that.

I think there’s a global conspiracy to see who can get the most clicks on the worst lies

Rebels and The Clone Wars were the only things besides the movies that remained in canon after the old EU was dropped.

Wasn't the EU dropped as soon as Disney bought the rights?

Spelunking through a Halo Ring is something else...

The EU prior to Disney's acquisition of the franchise was declared non-canon and relegated to the Legends continuity. However, certain elements were retained as Disney canon. These include:

• All six feature films.
• The Clone Wars animated series.
• Star Wars: Rebels animated series.

Ergo, anything in those is canon by Word of God, which includes by reference the use of Interdictor cruisers by the Empire to prevent or interrupt hyperspace travel. This becomes relevant for two reasons:

1. It implicitly confirms that gravity wells disturb hyperspace, meaning that the feats of hyperjumping into and out of a planet's atmosphere (and thus, gravity well) should be impossible.
2. It raises the question of why Interdictor technology is never used in any of the feature films, including The Last Jedi, where it would have both served the plot and not required introducing the extra phlebotinum of the hyperspace tracker.

The unavoidable conclusion, which should be obvious but bears repeating from time to time, is that the Star Wars franchise doesn't care about the consistency of its technology if ignoring it serves the plot.

edited 26th Dec '17 4:11:57 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Or makes them money.

Trump delenda est

To be fair, the interdictor was shown pulling ships into itself like a collapsing star. No planet has quite enough gravitational pull to do that, or else there would be no orbiting ships. AND that interdictor was more or less prototype technology, isn't it? It was destroyed, and later, most of the imperial tech database on Scarif was wiped out, so it's entirely possible that the casual destruction of Scarif Tower was actually more like the destruction of Alexandria's great library.

Say to the others who did not follow through You're still our brothers, and we will fight for you

And yet, Kylo Ren in The Force Awakens mentioned something about an old Imperial archive.

Spelunking through a Halo Ring is something else...

I mean, not every archive is going to have every blueprint, I'm sure.

Say to the others who did not follow through You're still our brothers, and we will fight for you

I guess the Empire never heard of redundant data storage?

Physicists are crying at this sentence. The gravitational attraction between two objects is proportional to the inverse square of the distance between them. A planet like Earth has a radius of about 6,400 km, so anything interacting with it will always be at a minimum of that distance. Anything beneath the Earth's surface will be attracted by the mass above it as well as the mass below it, so the gravity doesn't actually increase as you get near the center.

Now, if you concentrate an Earth-mass to a radius of, say, 100 km, then its surface gravity would be about 40,000 m/s^2, enough to create immense curvature and cause very serious problems for anything nearby. ^note It would also explode with tremendous force due to the increase in pressure. However, at the original radius of 6400 km, you'd still have 9.8 m/s^2 of gravitational force, exactly as if nothing had changed.

Gravity doesn't "suck things in" — that's a Hollywood Science trope. The sudden creation of a powerful gravity well where one had not previously existed, however, would cause everything nearby to fall towards it, following the new curvature of spacetime. Objects moving sideways relative to the gravity well would enter orbits, some of which might intersect the device generating it, while objects stationary ^note (more precisely, moving only towards/away) relative to the gravity well would accelerate directly towards it. The device itself would have to have some way not to be damaged or destroyed by all the projectiles hurtling towards it, as well as a way to resist its own gravity.

edited 27th Dec '17 9:40:47 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Surely they must have. They were a reorganised Republic, after all.

Spelunking through a Halo Ring is something else...

I meant at the distance from the core the ships are. I took three physics courses in college and another in high school, so I'm well aware of the maths there.

However, we do see the interdictor cause a massive enough change in gravity to pull the four nearby ships in to collide with it. The nearby planet isn't pulling nearly as much (again, at that distance). That would imply that at the distance the interdictor is from the ships, the interdictor is exerting a much stronger pull than the nearby planet. I would guess this means that the interdictor is capable of generating a gravity well similar to that of a planet while not having nearly as much mass as a planet. Somehow.

The Star Wars universe seems to universally be able to reject gravity. Bikes hover, Star destroyers can hover over cities without flattening them (implying that they're using anti-gravity rather than thrust), people can walk down corridors in space, and most bizarrely

Space cannons arc. In open space, not in orbit above a planet or star.

edited 27th Dec '17 2:25:11 PM by blkwhtrbbt

Say to the others who did not follow through You're still our brothers, and we will fight for you

"Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the cannon fire arcs, we would know a lot more about the nature of the Universe than we do now.”

(substitute "Why the fighters bank" or "Why the stars twinkle" as the readers sees fit)

I think there’s a global conspiracy to see who can get the most clicks on the worst lies

I imagine the cannons arcing are for Rule of Cool purposes.

Spelunking through a Halo Ring is something else...

Episode 1593: The Rubble With Ripples

My poor heart can't take the pun in that title. Ugh.

Anyway, The Rant rather succinctly covers most of the problems I expressed with the scenario, and manages to be eerily prescient about The Last Jedi.

Keybounce does note the rather extreme visuals for that explosion.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

1594

"Yeah, very sad. Where to now?"

Ah, classic Pete.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

So, Bodhi is actually a Noble Demon in this version of events. That's actually a nice change.

Spelunking through a Halo Ring is something else...

1595.

"Neutral partisans." This comic strip just became unrealistic.

The little personality details that the GM gives to the NPCs are adorable. "Frank was off sick today."

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

I get the feeling you'd really enjoy Hitman No Subtitle, or Middle Earth Shadowof Mordor.

"Get him Steve!"

Steve is knocked unconscious

"Next time, Steve!".

Say to the others who did not follow through You're still our brothers, and we will fight for you

Also, if Jedha city was on Tatooine, how has there been no nuclear winter due to the dust thrown up by the blast? A blast big enough to be witnessed from SPACE?

Say to the others who did not follow through You're still our brothers, and we will fight for you

A Jedi did it.

(Annoyed grunt)

Who, Obi-Wan?

Anyway, the sheer visual scale of that explosion implies an extinction-level ecological catastrophe, something you'd think people on Tatooine would have noticed in the handful of in-story days between this and Episode IV. Hell, it's big enough to send large amounts of debris into orbit.

edited 2nd Jan '18 8:34:21 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

They'll probably Hand Wave it all.

Spelunking through a Halo Ring is something else...