Official Derailed thread... Wait, what?

Really good video on the subject of longbows versus armor. 30+ minutes of good stuff and there are also several extra videos for each of the components such as about the fletching, about the longbow used, about making the armor and so forth.

 

So... it has come to this.

 

But at what cost?

 

pretty sure the sideways looks are entirely the point. In fact, if you don't get a sideways look, you have chosen incorrectly. Which should also be on this list. 'You have chosen incorrectly.'

 

Boo!

(Oasis of the Seas of the Oasis-class visiting Venice, might not be able to use the regular parking space for the dinghys)

Which brings me to, "I want to park my Super Star Destroyer to International Space Station... What's that you say, that the gravity caused by our ship will plunge all the satellites off of their orbits and cause for the ISS to drop into the sea? Nonsense!"

 

right, if the SSD generates it's own gravity it wouldn't cause them to fall to Earth, they'd all crash into the SSD or go careening off into deep space. Unless the SSD decided to jump in closer to earth than a stable orbit... which for an object that size is much farther than our current satellite network. Far more likely attempting to dock with the ISS would cause the SSD to be pulled in to Earth for being too close to maintain a stable orbit. Though I suppose it might be possible to maintain the majority of the ships mass within the stable orbit and still have the narrow end of the ship docked with the ISS, which might appear quite amusing.

Like tying a string to the tip of the wedge and spinning it around the planet XD

 

They do mention all the time in the pre Disney books. Ships in combat are too close to the atmosphere and (usually because of damage) are pulled into the planet. Though it seems if they have power they would be to stay in space.

Disney in their canon would just hand wave "oh this giant ship can take off from a planet no problem".

 

The only time Disney has brought the power requirements of starships in to play is when they ADDED the need for a fuel source. That's one change I actually appreciate them for. The older films just assumed power was infinite unless the plot said otherwise.

 

And they seem to have forgotten that in space an object that is moving would keep moving. It could have been fuel as in propellant but I don't think that is what they were talking about.

It seems like disney is trying to make star wars science fiction when it never was. it is science fantasy.

 

Velocity in space is relative. If both ships are accelerating in the same direction, when one runs out of propellant, it would appear to slow down relative to the other.

 

I mean... they -did- make an ENTIRE movie just to explain how it is that Han's errant statement in the original trilogy actually could make sense. Except it still has no bearing on speed whatsoever 'I cut corners therefor my ship is faster' only works until the corner cuts you (or shatters your ship like it's made of balsa wood and aluminum foil) XD

 

To be precise, it produces a gravity field with it's own Higg's field the size of which depends on it's distance to Earth, the gravitic effect extends beyond the Higg's field with exponential falloff.

There are three primary categories by which the two thousand satellites would be affected and two primary effects
- Those that are currently on a period of the orbit where the are distancing away from the SSD will be slowed down, their orbital energy is reduced
- Those that are doing the opposite, closing in on the SSD will experience and increase in velocity and orbital energy

All of the changes in velocity will be along a vector directly aimed at the SSD for all intents and purposes here.

The three primary categories of effect
- Dividing the vector of the slow down effect to an coordinate system relative to the satellite's original forward velocity, the sideways component of the pull vector will rotate the orbital trajectory
- The vector component that is opposite to the forward velocity will reduce the altitude of the next perigee or apogee, which will change the parameters of the stable orbit until perigee sinks too low and the satellite will experience periodic aerobraking or if it is reduced so much that the satellite will during it's current pass crash
- The vector component that is parallel to forward velocity will bring up the altitude of the next perigee or apogee and if this continues until it leaves Earth's Hill's Sphere then the satellite will escape Earth's orbit entirely to Sun's orbit

There was some more stuff about whether the perigee and apogee themselves will be rotated and so on and I don't honestly remember it all right now while working to emulate a radar system - yes, there would be various effects and some of the satellites would have trajectories by which they would not be brought close enough to SSD to experience any noticeable changes to their orbits.

 

I always suffer a significant loss of suspension of disbelief with stuff like big space cannons throwing out green shells that follow an arcing trajectory - 'falling over distance towards the target ship' as if the two were sailing on an invisible surface with a gravity perpendicular to that plane.

Or when they say "oh, damn, we have lasers and projectile cannons but that ship that is literally forced to fly in parallel direction relative to us to hope to accelerate away from us is 'out of reach' of our weapons. Yet it is so close we can literally see it from the windows."

I mean, you could just shoot at them, the lasers and projectiles would keep flying at them without experiencing any deceleration and since they were going at linear route parallel to yours they would have to make course adjustments which would reduce their distance to you when you maintained your course and made lesser course changes. In fact you could force them closer by first starting firing to the right of them and converging towards the fire intercept point and then do the same from the left side so that you would have to make less course adjustments yourself.

Legend of the Galactic Heroes had some of the best thought out space combat scenes that I know of.

Ultimately with every piece of entertainment what you see is what you get. It's difficult to get a story produced and it's difficult to write a good story and it's also difficult to get all the facts straight. And in production it's difficult to implement it all to the big screen.

When you have not one but four cumulative filters and then some financier and producer personal agenda, politics etc. - it is easy to understand why in general all of our entertainment struggles so much with these things.

Then we see stuff like individual fans and groups of fans outperforming the actual rich corporations with films such as Helsreach and Astartes being far superior to any of the official productions. And that is no coincidence these days - it is becoming increasingly impossible to produce any movie, series or game and to make it good.

Luckily in a dynamic free market when one creative entity succumbs to decay and confusion there are always many more little fish who are young and agile and who can smell the impending death of the old giant - one of them is going to grow up by being good at it and become the next big fish. The cycle of life.

 

I did hear that all the people working on The Mandalorian are the people who were with lucasarts before Disney but it and actually care about star wars which is why it looks good. And all the people working on the trilogy are new people who don't care about star wars (or at least not as much) thus why it sucks. When they push the science fiction part (which seems to be more in the trilogy) it suffers. When they go more the science fantasy (like every other thing that is not the trilogy, rebels, rogue one, solo, I hope the Mandalorian) it is much better.

 

There isn't one shred of credible scifi on the episodes 7 and 8. Just making a ship fly a loop in atmospheric setting as opposed to a plastic model hanging from ropes moving about awkwardly doesn't make the movies behave with respect to physics.

Cannons that fire.. shells that fall along an arc toward enemy ships in space? Maximum range on your weapons? "They're right there, fire at them or something" -"they're out of range! Our weapons fire will stop at invisible wall after flying for x meters!"

A shuttle onboard the escaping cruiser that can make several jumps out of system without anyone seeing. Gee, imagine if they would fetch some more fuel or evacuate the key personnel with it?

I've come to terms that a show doesn't need to be accurate to be good. It just has to have a nice story. Hence why I like reading the 40k and Horus Heresy books - they may use a solar panel to collect energy for interstellar space travel for a continent sized ship but who cares, I don't read the stuff to learn about economics or logistics of running a space empire!

 

I didn't say hard or credible science fiction. Just that they tried to do science fiction with star wars. The kind that star trek has.

 

To be honest for me the problem was nothing that rational. It was mostly the stories that I didn't have any way to relate to, the characters were weird and unrelatable to me personally and the story didn't seem to matter or have any gravitas to it. It didn't even really feel like watching Star Wars, more like some Netflix's production that has the right to slap SW stickers all over it to draw some connection to SW.

Other people who are not even fans and who probably won't be buying any of the merchandise or the special editions and who won't be watching the movies 10 times over the next few years said they really liked it but their reasons never had anything to do with "oh, this is such a great SW movie" - it was always some metagame stuff that I do not care to repeat here.

Then, I suppose there are some fans too that liked them. That's fine.

I, I really, really tried to like them and being simply unable to goes a long way of saying how far one can get alienated. As in, I once asked "Disney, really, how bad can it get?" - well, it can.

But that's all OK. I can watch all the older stuff and just ignore the latest trilogy. Imagine that Disney bought rights to Bible and then started printing out Bible: Episode II and Bible: Episode III and then the Pope and the Ecclesiastical Court would be under legally binding obligations to canonize them

Yea, that would cause some real problems really quickly.

But Star Wars? I can just watch the original and the prequel trilogy and the couple of series that I like as much as I like and steer clear off the new stuff. Problem solved. There are some very enjoyable things coming out that are much more entitled to attention than something that honestly doesn't deserve the time spent talking about it.