Questions about the SW movies (merged)

[stevelabny]

is this thread serious?
whats the purpose of asking these questions? None of them have any bearing on the story at all

1> the death star moves the same way every else does.
2> doesnt yoda also use force-lightning in the new movies?
3> The Wampa eats the other creatures that live on Hoth. Why does it matter? And did you really want exposition on Wampa diet in the movie? I dont know where Dragonblade is getting his info, but the Star Wars Encyclopedia says Tauntauns are native to Hoth.
4> Who were the members of the alliance? All of them? By name? I dont understand.
5> Alien creatures. If you care, why not get a Star Wars Encyclopedia or another source of information.
6> Centari is a planet that the moon Endor circles apparently. Again, what is THE POINT of this question?
7 and 8> arent even questions.

If I had any idea what you were trying to get at, I would attempt to answer the questions. But as asked, they all seem pretty self explanatory.

 

[s/LaSH]

1) Hyperdrive, the reason we have Star Wars in the first place. Hyperdrive was invented some 25,000 years ago IIRC, and has held the galaxy together in trade and conquest for all that time. With hyperdrive, a single-seater starfighter can cross the galaxy in a matter of days, that's how good it is. The hyperdrive translates a ship into a parallel continuum where you travel faster than light; unfortunately, this continuum doesn't exist in the presence of strong gravity, hence you have to break orbit before jumping to hyperspace, and the Empire fields vessels called Interdictors in the Extended Universe which generate their own gravity wells to snare anything hypering past.

EDIT: The question does arise, however: how much gravity does a Death Star generate by virtue of sitting there? Not as much as you'd think, because most of it is empty air in the form of corridors and rooms and big giant holes in the floor. We can assume that it either remains below the threshold, or employs advanced technology to offset its own mass footprint, in order for A New Hope to take less than ten thousand years between scenes. (I do, however, think it would have been clearer and awesomer had they shown the DS jump out of warp before maneuvering around Yavin. That did get me thinking when I watched the film.)

2) No offensive power; the Light Side is all about defence. Yoda doesn't use force lightning; he reflects force lightning. (Which, incidentally, is very hard to do; it's much easier to just absorb the energy with a Light Side energy aura.)

3) For all we know the wampa (there are very many of them, according to the Extended Universe) eat sparingly from the vast flocks of bantha they farm just over the ridge from Echo Base. As has been said, Hoth is to the rebels what Vinland was to Vikings: somewhere mysterious that nobody else knows about where you can set up shop (but will probably be attacked by the natives).

4) The Rebel Alliance is much like what it sounds to be: a number of worlds, presumably constituents of the old Republic, who deny the legitimacy of the Emperor and seek to overthrow his rule. Ironically, I suspect they had their roots in the separatist movement of Count Dooku, although certain details throw that into doubt; there's probably been a lot of turnover in the ranks after the Clone Wars finished off the initial bunch of separatists (I assume that's what happened, anyway; the new rebels are those who were too chicken to fight in the first place, but eventually saw the light).

More importantly, the Rebel Alliance has a large number of alien members, as the Empire has never been friendly to non-humans. I imagine that much of the Rebel fleet was manufactured by independant defence forces before or during the Clone Wars, as there was no centralised army before the rise of the Empire, and organised indigenous defence forces could defy the Emperor. So they were either destroyed, or forced out into the roaming ragtag band we see in the movies.

The book Splinter Of The Mind's Eye (by Allen Dean Foster), published before Empire came out, starts off with Luke and Leia en route to negotiate with a world that might join the Alliance. Thus indicating that there may be planetary centers that actively defy the Empire yet. (Alderaan being an obvious example of a society that didn't fight back (they'd exiled their weapons to space centuries ago), but would have if it could have.)

5) Nerf are like spoo, right? Except you farm one and ranch the other.

6) I always thought that was Sentry Moon. Indicating some sort of military/protective role (which would have fitted well). Guess you do learn something new every day.

 

[Emirikol]

These questions matter to me for several reasons:
1. I'm still a curious person (even though I'm 31 YOA). Does this change when a person get's older (or watches too much TV?)
2. I want to know for gaming purposes

>1) Hyperdrive, the reason we have Star Wars in the first place.

I never saw any output region on the Deathstar though. That's why I'm wondering. It didn't look like a star destroyer, with the large, constantly-emmitting jets off the back. Wouldn't there be tremendous structural complications from the hyperdrive?


>3) For all we know the wampa

There were a lot of bones in the Wampa cave. Several of them looked like large animals, besides TaunTauns I wonder if I still have my novel from "Empire." Maybe it would tell more in there.




>More importantly, the Rebel Alliance has a large number of alien members, as the Empire has never been friendly to non-humans.

Yea, as the earlier poster noted, there are some obvious ones by look. But, we don't know about the human make-up. I wonder if it will be addressed exactly who is going to belong in the upcoming movie?




>The book Splinter Of The Mind's Eye (by Allen Dean Foster),


Man, it's been 20 years since I read those Star Wars books. I like the description of how Vader was created. He went into that pit thingy and... Or was that in "Lando Callrisian and the Mindharp of Sharu?"


>5) Nerf are like spoo, right? Except you farm one and ranch the other.

Leia has such a great line in Empire when she calls Han a Nerf herder. I'm trying to conjure a picture of something other than a spongy football




6) I always thought that was Sentry Moon. Indicating some sort of military/protective role (which would have fitted well). Guess you do learn something new every day.

I guess the only way to know would be to take a look at the script and check.

If it's Centari, that would be interesting, 'from a certain point of view...'

jh

 

[Umbran]

I never saw any output region on the Deathstar though. That's why I'm wondering. It didn't look like a star destroyer, with the large, constantly-emmitting jets off the back. Wouldn't there be tremendous structural complications from the hyperdrive?

In the Star Wars Universe, the drives that get you around at sublight speeds and the hyperdrive are two completely different animals. The jets at the back are used by the sublight drives. I don't know of any particular reason to think that they're necessarily used by the hyperdrive, too. That's a space-warping thing more than anyting else, and may have no need for "jets".

 

[s/LaSH]

In the Star Wars Universe, the drives that get you around at sublight speeds and the hyperdrive are two completely different animals. The jets at the back are used by the sublight drives. I don't know of any particular reason to think that they're necessarily used by the hyperdrive, too. That's a space-warping thing more than anyting else, and may have no need for "jets".

True dat.

To elaborate, however, there are actually 3 kinds of drive module in Star Wars: repulsorlifts, thrusters, and hyperdrive.

Repulsors are antigravity, pure and simple; they require a gravity well to operate, have virtually no thrust, but allow ships to land without standing on their tails and have no ports.

Thrusters are what comes out the back of a ship. These are generally highly-sophisticated rockets: TIE stands for Twin Ion Engine. An ion engine is a magnetic accelerator which spits charged particles out at speeds approaching light, so you don't see much flare around the nozzles. NASA testbed vessels currently use ion engines, but they're sooo slow compared to chemical rockets it's not funny. Right now, their only advantage is that they just keep going with minimal fuel loss; you can get a spacecraft going faster in the end with ion engines than with chemical engines. Obviously, the low endurance of TIEs is linked to an incredible increase in engine output. The Death Star moved very slowly compared to anything else, so its sublight engine output can be assumed to be so insignificant that we didn't see any engine flare whatsoever; it was, presumably, still there, in a million tiny holes in the Star's pockmarked surface.

Hyperdrive seems to have no dedicated thrusters, being more a field effect. I don't know whether you can maneuver in hyperspace; considering that you need a navicomputer to safely jump, I assume you can maneuver (around planets, black holes, etc. in your path), although it might just be a very sophisticated angle calculator/map service. Or you drop out/turn/reengage like that one episode of Voyager.