General Star Wars Thread

Aside from Warhammer 40,000 I'd agree with you. This is the same setting that in the worst war in the series goes with the highly realistic casualty total of hundreds of worlds devastated, trillions killed, and dozens of species made extinct. Hell, the battle of Coruscant that ended the Yuuzhan Vong War had 5 million total casualties on the Alliance side alone.

The SS Ds may be expensive but I agree that in the terms of galactic scale they're peanuts compared to the galaxy that the Empire rules.

Truth be told, even the Death Stars probably wouldn't be a blink to a realistic Galaxy Spanning Empire. Not by themselves. I think it's less the ships and weapons and more the entire situation. They need enough ships to patrol the Galaxy, and they don't have FULL control over a lot of places. They have to deal with both rebellion AND corruption and it saps their resources.

That and I would imagine their expense doesn't come from credits but the amount of resources needed to maintain them. Keeping an SSD up to snuff would require a ton of resources that would add up really quick, and the Death Stars are planetoid-sized space stations that require a massive crew and a significant investment of resources. The Empire doesn't die because it runs out of money, remember. It runs out of competent people.

Plus in Lost Stars there's the story about the planet that's turned into a polluted junkyard from all the stuff the Empire mines to do build the DS-2. The Death Stars are probably still massively expensive credit-wise, most likely several orders of magnitude more than an SSD.

edited 9th Oct '15 9:01:31 PM by theLibrarian

Yeah, honestly, the Death Stars are a HUGE drain on the Empire's resources. They probably cannibalized a lot of planets in order to get all materials to build that monstrosity. And then it gets blown up. And then they build another one.

Lost Stars is really good about showing that. The protagonists' home world doesn't even resemble itself by the end of the novel because it's become so extremely polluted and junk.

edited 9th Oct '15 9:04:49 PM by higherbrainpattern

And then they wise up after Endor and say "That was stupid, why were we wasting money on stupidly huge super weapons when we could have used that building more ships?"

Then Reborn Palpatine comes along and goes "SUPERWEAPONS! PARKER! GET ME PICTURES OF SUPERWEAPONS!

"I WANT MY GALAXY GUN AND SUN CRUSHER DAMMIT!"

"AND MY WORLD DEVASTATORS!"

@ the last page.

I said Abrams because his movies have a history of screwing up on scale then badly try to explain it away after the fact. Star Trek was really bad at it with a super nova that will destroy the Galaxy and screwing up on the scale of the Enterprise, making it 3 times the size that it was supposed to be and such.

Anyway in terms of scale, Star Wars has almost always been too small for its implied size. Especially they claim to go to basic light speed or .5 past it and somehow go from system to system in hours. I would say stuff like the TNG / DS 9 era of Star Trek would be the biggest and most accurate in terms of Galaxy wide scales with tech to match that scale.

Also breaking apart planets with high amounts of minerals for the Death Star or even Star Destoyers should actually be standard, even if we went to space in RL we would use asteroids for resources instead of bringing everything up from Earth. It's kinda surprising that Endor wasn't one of the ones broken up, building it close to the source of materials is practical especially if you wanted to keep construction secret without massive easily exposed supply lines.

edited 10th Oct '15 4:09:56 AM by Memers

The Live Free or Die series by John Ringo is pretty good about that. The whole thing centers on a scifi writer pioneering space industry by hiring scientists to perfect an asteroid mining rig. Won't spoil the rest.

The Gundam franchise is good about it too. In 00 when colonies are being built they have Resource Satellites around them for materials, in the rest of the series those former Resource Satellites make the great military fortresses you see in the show.

In Mass Effect some terrorists try and slam a Resource Satellite into a populated planet it was being moved to for materials mining.

edited 10th Oct '15 6:06:42 AM by Memers

It does have a subversion in Dead Space though, where it's heavily implied that since humanity's grown so much they can't support themselves anymore (which I personally think is BS) and their main solution, planet cracking, doesn't work.

Planet cracking a normal planet with an atmosphere and internal heat is probably a bad idea, blowing it to pieces like Alderaan however not so much and then tow the chunks to be mined at a later date.

The ideal targets would be giant rocks in space with no atmosphere like the moon though. That was something that what's her face who designed the Death Star and Sun Crusher claimed that was what the Death Star was for.

edited 10th Oct '15 8:58:41 AM by Memers

So that one facebook meme happened. Did anything ever come of it?

New Prequel era comic coming out

Soule killed it on Lando so this should be fun.

Please watch.

That was fantastic

I love that he was still there, half buried in the ground like a Tom and Jerry cartoon after the walker lifts its foot

I was actually more amused by how horror movie like the whole thing was. The soldier keeps on firing and firing and Luke just closes in, unstoppable. The soldier tries to run and Luke speeds up...

So an accurate recreation of what it's like from a Stormtrooper's POV when faced by a Jedi?

edited 10th Oct '15 4:41:22 PM by comicwriter

Yes.

While we're posting Battlefront fails, behold riding an AT-AT!

"I'm gonna fuck you up! Oh shit, it's Luke, run away!"

I want that phrase to be in the new Trilogy and I want it to be Kylo Ren's exact words when he sees Luke.

Same.

I hope Luke is a Physical God, on par with Anakin Skywalker in his prime, his badassery alone having kept the Imperials/ First Order cowering in their corner of the galaxy for some time.