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cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/1104168
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The first one.
Any chance you know the canon explanation of how they counteract the gravity generated by the Deathstar’s mass?
How much gravity would the Deathstar’s mass provide? I feel like it would be very small considering it has no real massive central solid or liquid core.
It’s the size of a moon and made from metal: It’s definitely generating some gravity (even a small amount of mass generates gravity) but I guess whatever tech they use to generate gravity overcomes it.
It’s the size of a very, very small moon, and mostly hollow.
It’s not massive enough to create its own gravity. They use gravity deck plating.
Even if it was massive enough, if they can keep people sticking to the ground in a tiny ship they can surely counteract the gravity of a space station.
Also, most of their spaceships have wings. We’re thinking about this way too hard.
They don’t all have wings. Only the X-Wing and Imperial transport ships have actual wings, and we’ve seen them fly through atmospheres.
Well, yeah, but we’ve also seen the ones that look like a hamburger patty fly through the atmosphere (and, in fact, outmaneouver the winged ones). Clearly that’s not what they’re for.
Ah yeah. Dang. Well there probably a good technical reason behind it. I’m no starship engineer in the Star Wars universe.
I think the usual in universe reasoning is heat dissipation.
Both.
The Millenium Falcon landed in a bay that was oriented with the N/S axis of the station, but was accessed on the equator. So the interior of the station has a gravity well with “up” pointing to one of the polls.
The surface cannons, surface towers, and trench defenses were all radially oriented with “up” pointing out into space, like you’d expect on a moon.
This also suggests the station was littered with gravitational dead spots and areas where you’d have to carefully transition from one gravity well orientation to another. No wonder everyone is wearing a helmet.
One of the reasons Star Wars gets called space fantasy is that these objectively cool scenes to shoot simply never make it into the movies because no one even thought of these details in the first place.
Imagine how cool a lightsaber duel would be in these gravity transitional areas, or zero g for that matter! Instead we just got one scene in A New Hope where they’re in the gun turrets fighting off TIES and it’s a pretty subtle detail.
The one thing we can really say for sure is the gravity tech is everywhere and apparently crazy reliable.
The one thing we can really say for sure is the gravity tech is everywhere and apparently crazy reliable.
I love holding this fantasy nonsense up to scrutiny. I just falls apart in the most humorous way possible.
For instance, here’s a checklist for technology mastery in a galaxy far, far away:
[x] Artificial gravity [x] Practical FTL travel [x] Practical interstellar navigation [x] Energy weapons capable of destroying things at _any_ scale [x] Energy shielding [x] Laser. Swords. [x] High energy physics in general [x] Self-aware artificial Intelligence [x] Multicultural society spanning many worlds [x] Psychic powers, telekinesis [x] Pocket-sized SCUBA gear [ ] Materials capable of resisting laser swords [ ] Functional galactic government [ ] Counter-intelligence for said government [ ] Basic spycraft for said government [ ] AI that's good at lie detection [ ] Spaceborne capital ship battles, asymmetric warfare [ ] Large space-stations without critical weak pointsThere are materials resistant to laser swords and the magic in general in the EU. It’s an important factor in Hand of Thrawn I think.
One thing you haven’t mentioned is real-time intra-galactic video calls.
The government(s) is comparably effective to modern governments here on earth, which is to say rather dysfunctional. This would be more impressive if communication was limited to FTL couriers, but it’s very much better than that.
Spycraft isn’t too effective against members of the government using the government to destroy the government. It’s a problem we haven’t solved either, at least in democracies. The government is also not a major force everywhere in the galaxy, and a lot of spycraft and intelligence went into rooting out dissenters. It’s basically the whole plot of Episodes IV & V.
I think droids that are capable and/or willing to engage with subterfuge at more than face value are both expensive and controlled. This moreso exposes how relatively widespread and easily obtainable high-level computing is, yet it’s mostly slept on. There might have been an AI war at some point in the past that causes people to take AI shackles very seriously, but that brings us back to having large numbers of populated worlds without significant government regulation of any kind. AGI is a real weird point in general here, I agree.
There’s lots of capital ship battles, especially in the EU. The originals don’t have a lot of them because the Empire took them all and keeps a tight fist on everyone capable of making them, while the prequels are about the escalation of a very peaceful government to war. I think Clone Wars stories have more of this. Asymmetric warfare is definitely a thing in the main trilogies though, unless I misunderstand what asymmetric warfare is.
Weak points? Absolutely. It’s a disgrace to engineers everywhere, to the point that the Death Star’s flaw has been made into an intentional sabotage in at least one story.
I’d really like to see more laser sword tech though. Like Grievous but on purpose, maybe large plasma tunnel bores or something.
I think the lore explanation for light saber tech not being more common is the “Kyber crystals” they require are very rare, and also maybe it requires the force to use it somehow? Grievous was a cybernetic with an organic brain, and a sith lord.
Now I’m wondering, do we see any force-insesitives using a lightsaber at all, even without skill? Like to cut a door or something. Do they even operate without force assistance?
I know we’d all like some scientific actualisation of Star Wars but I mean:
- They made noise in space 'cause that’s fun.
- There was always gravity on pretty much any ship.
- I don’t really recall any spacewalks so we don’t see any instance of ‘no gravity’
- There’s hyperspace since lightyears is a bit of a long time.
- Stormtroopers seem very scientifically and inefficiently accurate
At this point I think the Star Wars movies (the oldies) pretty much ignored a fair bit of the science.
But if it was a death star literally put there in our universe, I think there would be a bit of structural considerations for gravity, but not huge due to it being quite hollow. Gravity is pretty strong when the sphere is entirely comprised of dense rock and no air. A mostly hollow sphere of air where air is something close to 1/1000 that of rock (yes, used the density of water lol) is not going to get much of a rollicking from gravity.
Edit: an interesting ‘expose’ on the moon landings claim one thing: why were the photos so relatively boring? Because they were real and that’s all they could get for all the limited resources they had at the time.
These guys are supposedly in a vacuum outside the first DS:
There’s a whole Legends thing for Spacetroopers. New canon is pretty much just the guys above.
This is just my head canon, but the noise actually comes from speakers on board the ship /in the cockpit, to help give the pilot an audio cue as to where hazards are around them.
This is just my head canon, but the noise actually comes from speakers on board the ship /in the cockpit
I’m pretty sure this was explicitly addressed in at least one of the pre-Disney novels, and was somewhat entrenched with a part of the fanbase afterward.
I don’t really recall any spacewalks so we don’t see any instance of ‘no gravity’
in The Last Jedi, Leia gets blasted into hard space and experiences weightlessness.
They specifically noted they were talking about the old movies. Or didn’t you get that far before you needed to “correct” them?
