Star Wars: The Old Republic

Of course the reason that the Council didn't want to get involved in the Mandalorian Wars was that they sensed a Third party had instigated them and wanted to figure out what was really going on before taking action. It turns out that they were right. So the Council wasn't being entirely unreasonable in their desire to not charge in guns blazing.

What they did to the Exile was inexcusable though.

edited 13th Mar '14 7:28:55 PM by millardkillmoore

Who cares if there was a Man Behind The Mandalorians? It didn't change the fact that they were fucking up the Republic and needed to be stopped. The problem with the Jedi Council is that they priorities "not falling to the dark side" above everything. Things like their decision regarding the Mandalorian War show that they care about avoiding the dark side above literally everything else — above saving the Republic, even. While the dark side is certainly something to be avoided, there are times when calculated risks are the better alternative, especially given that the Jedi Council doesn't really have any mechanism for enforcing their decisions, meaning that people like Revan can just give them the bird and go do what they want anyway.

Imagine if the Jedi Council had allowed the jedi to intervene in the Mandalorian Wars rather than forcing people to go rogue to do it. How many jedi might have avoided falling if they'd had the support and oversight of the Order? How different might things have been if Revan had been able to fight with the Council's blessing rather than their condemnation? It probably wouldn't have kept them from being turned by the Emperor, but at the very least it would have prevented them from having a ready-made army loyal to them personally when they returned.

The Jedi Council is risk-averse as all hell, along with having a bad case of the Perfect Solution problem. The Mandalorian Wars are bad, but the jedi can't fight against the Mandalorians without the risk of some of them falling — therefore, they should not fight the Mandalorians. Nevermind the fact that the fall of a jedi or two is probably worth it in order to stop the Mandalorians, especially if there's enough oversight to notice when they fall and get them help rather than letting them wander off to go do dark jedi stuff somewhere. Since there's no perfect solution (stop the Mandalorians without any risk of jedi falling), the Jedi Council choose to do nothing instead.

That's what I mean when I say they've got their heads in the sand.

So question... why wasn't Korriban carpet bombed with so many Nuclear warheads in the interim that even a guy in a rad suit would melt in seconds the moment he stepped onto the surface?

edited 14th Mar '14 9:27:12 AM by Canid117

Korriban looks like it frigging sucks to live on. Think about it. Whenever it shows up in games, you basically never see any plant life, all the animals are mutated by the dark side presence and so on. Maybe they thought it was a waste of resources.

And who knows what kind of horrific defenses the True Sith put in place long ago when they lived there?

Also, does Star Wars even have nuclear weaponry?

edited 14th Mar '14 9:30:33 AM by Zendervai

An illegal and apparently very rare (given the lengths to which he's going for it) nuclear device is the MacGuffin Darth Maul is trying to get his hands on in Lockdown, which I'm currently reading.

Other than that I can't recall any, although the most destructive bombs use baradium—not sure if those are meant to be nuclear or not. And of course you have the ever-popular thermal detonator.

I can't help but think nuclear winter would somehow make all the horrible critters on Korriban even worse.

edited 14th Mar '14 9:38:31 AM by montagohalcyon

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Nuclear_bomb

It wouldn't shock me if nukes aren't enough. IIRC, there was a Jedi holocron that survived the destruction of Alderaan. If it can survive a planet blowing up, nothing short of a blackhole is taking it out. Well, without sending in ground troops and destroying it manually.

edited 14th Mar '14 11:00:18 AM by GethKnight

IIRC it was encased in phrik, which is basically Made of Indestructium in ore shape.

Oh right, that would put a damper on things. Still, bombardment just wouldn't be cost effective when you can't be certain that everything's destroyed without sending people down there to confirm destruction. And with a five thousand+ history, there's a lot of ruins that would go undiscovered and still intact to be discovered by some aspiring pirate, smuggler, disenfranchised trooper looking to strike it rich, overly curious Jedi, or fallen Jedi looking to get more power.

With enough ships, the Republic could have turned the entire surface of Korriban into slag. Look up the planet Humbarine on Wookieepedia; it was a Coruscant-lite city planet that General Grievous turned into a molten wasteland, through sheer volume of fire.

Fairly certain it's not in the Republic's best interest to glass a planet. No matter whose side it's on.

Also, if the Knight story is anything to follow from, the Republic has a tradition of building Nostril of Palpatine-esque superweapons.

I remember in Darth Plagueis that King Veruna attempted to kill Plagueis and Palpatine with a warhead. He failed, but still.

I'm not talking about destroying the artifacts (though that would be a nice side bonus) I'm talking about irradiating the surface so much that any Sith who set foot there dies of radiation sickness before they can get more than 50 feet from their ship.

Also what is heavily implied to be a multi-gigaton nuclear warhead appears in the Trooper storyline.

edited 14th Mar '14 1:11:20 PM by Canid117

Why on earth would the Republic want to preserve Korriban?

The Republic isn't really the glassing-planets type.

I think for the planet of psychotic doom an exception can be made.

I'm not saying that glassing Korriban is a bad idea, I'm saying that I don't think it's something the Republic would really consider. It's just not in their MO.

And for all we know it was in the books, they just never got around to it. They did have an armed guard of sorts, regardless of how ineffective it was.

They had 300 whole years! This is the Republic we are talking about not the Imperium.

edited 14th Mar '14 4:04:03 PM by Canid117

"The entire starfleet couldn't destroy the whole planet, it'd take a thousand ships with more firepower than I've . . ."

Han Solo.

It's not that it's out of their reach, just that a planet-destroying super weapon wasn't thought as feasible until the Empire.

Malak used a fleet to reduce Taris to a desolate wasteland 4,000 years before the Death Star. Glassing a planet is well within SWTOR level technology. Reducing one to chunks of rock is not.

I suppose there's also what the hell the Barrager would have done to Balmorra when it was fired. It sounds an awful lot like it would take out everything in orbit, but the tradeoff would be the planet being rendered uninhabitable.

So it's official — player housing! Also guild flagships and legacy banks.

I am excite.

And Now For Something Completely Different: does any of you guys have characters in the English-language European RP server?