Star Wars: Of Plot-Holes & Loose-Ends Obscura

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Han Solo's claims regarding the Falcon's speed of .5 past light speed (I assume that would be 1.5 times the speed of light) pretty much have to be completely ignored - otherwise it would take months for anyone to travel to even the closest star system. At that speed I think it would take about 32 months to travel from Earth to Alpha Centauri.

I still at the elaborate explanations that have been created to explain why Han is using a unit of distance to describe how fast he made the Kessel run.

Lucas messed up - these are mistakes - live with it people.

 

I would say that he claims it's the fastest as non-hyperspatial travel. Jumping to the other side of the galaxy through hyperspace is all fine and dandy - but his goes plenty fast without heading through hyperspace.

 

If the Falcon can go faster than lightspeed outside of hyper-space it sure as heck is never shown that way. If we ignore the lack of some sort of speed related visual effects we have the problem of light based weapons that seem to have no problems hitting the ship.

So unless we also have some sort of faster than lightspeed laser than I think we can safely say that Lucas' knowledge of astronomy was a little lacking when he made A New Hope and leave it like that.

 

Actually, thanks to the mind-bending attributes of light, light-based weapons would have no problem hitting a vessle moving at FTL speeds. AS I recall from my high school/college physics, light always moves at the same speed, regardless of your frame of reference. This means that even if the Falcon is going twice light speed as it flies past a source firing a light-based weapon, to those aboard the Falcon, the discharge is still coming at them at the speed of light.

Yeah, it's really strange to consider, especially when it's also moving at the same constant velocity with respect to the stationary source.

It never has seemed right, but that's what I was taught.

The second death star being completed sooner was a combination of better techniques and the fact that it was begun BEFORE the first was destroyed. Why build one uber-weapon when you can make 2, or 4, etc.

 

I think you're on dubious ground trying to use Special Relativity to justify Star Wars! Anything moving faster than light (FTL) is unphysical, for starters. But if - somehow - you could do it, it would be using physics beyond our current understanding of how relativity works, and I doubt whether one would be able to rely upon all of the old physics about light in Inertial Frames.

As a sidenote, light is always seen travelling at the same speed because one's length & time scales change to ensure it. The Newtonian view of the universe hass Space & Time as absolutes (i.e. A meter is always 1 meter long, regardless of one's velocity), whereas SR has the speed of light as unchanging. Effectively, Space & Time "bend" to ensure this is the case: in a faster-moving Inertial Frame, the length of all measuring sticks contracts and time dilates, so all observers measure the speed of light in vacuo as the same thing.

And I think that the weapons hitting the falcon were only doing so while it was accelerating toward hyperspace, anyway

 

Absolutely. Lucas' talent isn't really in fleshing out a scifi universe in the kind of detail a novel requires; that's probably why he ripped off so much of Herbert's Dune (with a half-hearted attempt to cover his tracks), and then got a whole bunch of journeymen scifi/fantasy authors on board to try to expand on this universe. In other words, relative to other scifi universes out there, Star Wars is juryrigged, and there are a bunch of gaping holes in the science and cultures it portrays (not to mention some of the worse names in scifi history: Naboo, Count Dooku, Darth Sidious, even Porkins from ANH). Then again, Star Wars is a far more important movie than, say, David Lynch's version of Dune.

So did you get "Death Rabbit" from the Delta Sigs then?

 

Star Wars isn't really a science fiction venue -- as I've said before, it's a fantasy that is set in space. The science, such as it is, is unique to the "galaxy far far away" and amusingly internally inconsistent. But so are all myths and fantasies -- no one asks WHY the troll lives under the bridge in the Billy Goats story, nor is the virginity requirement for a dragon's sacrifice explained (in most tellings, anyhow). It's pure fantasy that Lucas used as a simple vehicle to tell his myth of family, politics, love, redemption, and dynastic progression.

 

DR stops in 8, I have a question too:

9- Why Obi doesn't know that 'there's another' hope, looks like he doesn't know that Luke has a sister, and he was there at Leia birth.

10- Han claims to have the fastest ship, also we see X-Wings and 2 or 3 other ship models but in episodes I, II and III we see lots of new models and even faster ships.

 

The Falcon is supposed to be the fastest ship in the galaxy, maybe. More likely, that's just a little bit of exaggeration on Han Solo's part. Even if it is the fastest though, that would probably only be in hyperspace. At sublight speeds, it's nothing really great.

As for the other fighters and stuff, realistically, a Y-Wing would leave a Jedi Starfighter or Naboo Crapfighter in the dust, and anyone who's played Rogue Leader knows how slow Y-Wings are. The reason they look faster is simply better special effects between the original Trilogy and the new ones.

 

Kam summed up what I was going to say about Han exaggerating to clinch the deal and just generally to impress. One can justify that ships flew faster in Eps 1-3 than 4-6 as being another feature of the change in technology.

Basically x-wings, y-wings etc and the rest of the rebel alliance's ships aren't made using top-notch materials anymore, they're rebels so they can't just nip to the local Imperial shopping mall to pick up a couple of super-light speed engines for their new shiny ships. However the Empire could have had problems with regards the fighting, as I understand it between 3 and 4 there's a lot of fighting to quell uprisings and generally try to hold onto the empire so the best ships are going to have to be replaced with faster mass-produced ships.

Considering that the Empire was most likely focussing on getting the Death Star operational they were less worried about fast ships and were happy with slower but cheaper and easier to produce craft.

So the Falcon may not be particularly fast with regards Ep 1-3 but by the time of Ep 4-6 all the other ships have also become slower. I'm basically saying that 'fast' is relative and becomes slower between Ep 3 and 4.

 

That's a very good point.

 

@ Bion

No, Death Rabbit is based on a BG2 character I made once - a beligerant halfling barbarian. Long story, I'm sure I've told it in a few other threads. My fraternity nickname was "#4," because I'm the 4th guy in my family to become a member of my particular chapter.

I believe this is because Leia grows up to become a politician, and we all could gather from the prequels that Obiwan has a pretty deep-seated mistrust of politicians. This predeliction was certainly cemented with the betrayal of Palpatine, I'm sure. I believe he sees politicians as morally suspect and deceptive by nature, to virtues a die-hard Jedi like Obiwan doesn't seem likely to stomach. IMO, he probably just didn't think Leia had it in her, and hence didn't consider her as a possibility.

 

I think he just being dramatic - to see what Yoda would say. We don't really get to hear his whole conversation with Yoda on Dagobah so don't know what else they talked about.

 

Well...once the whipped up the whole "oh, the Kessel run involves flying by a few dozen closely grouped black holes" idea, it sorta started making sense.

 

Actually, the Y-Wing was a top of the line fighter in its day, which would presumably be between Ep. 4 and 5. The X-Wing is THE space superiority fighter until the TIE Defender is created. If Imperial ships did slow down after the Clone Wars, why weren't the Rebs flying surplus Naboo and Jedi Starfighters?

Simple: they were obsolete. I stand by my statement that it's just the differance in special effects capabilities. Take a look at the redone scenes in the OT. The X-Wings look a lot faster there. A Z-95 Headhunter would probably fly circles around a Jedi fighter. They're certainly much more heavily armed.

 

@ AMaster - that is one of the main rationalizations that I have often at.

 

Sorry, got to make this quick, but it wouldn't be right if I didn't reply

1) Sifo Dyas...obviosuly never explained, we can best conclude it was Dooku using the name of a dead Jedi Master. Conspiracy theories of Anakin, Palps, even Mace have been set aside. Dooku was once a Jedi. Yoda and Obi-Wan agree only a Jedi could have erased the Kamino files. So it seems either Sifo Dyas (the legit Jedi who died around the time of TPM) was either forced to erase the files or his untimely death somehow allowed Dooku an opportunity to use his name to order the clones. Either way, I agree this should have been cleared up better. And it is a storytelling fault within the prequels, that could have been better addressed with some sharper storytelling, i.e. combining the characters of Dooku and Grievous to have more time to flesh stuff like this out. As it is it works, but near as efficient or as clean as it could be.

2) The first Death Star is the first attempt at doing anything on that grand of scale, it takes time to get it right. There may have even been political set-backs. The second Death Star was purposely smaller and incomplete, thus needing less time. You add on the fact that it's the second time around, so they know what they are doing and can do it faster. Plus, it is reasonable to assume that Palps is a sneaky enough weasel that he had secretly begun construction on a second Death Star before the first one ever blew up.

3) Palps uses aliens to get him into power, then he crushes them beneath his heel once he is in power. What can you expect from a Sith Lord?

4) I will always believe that the majority of stormtroopers are clones and that every officer is a human. However, I can also believe that the Empire would be paranoid enough to have human stormtroopers scattered throughout contingents to keep "an eye" on the clones and provide human insight to tactical situations as well. We're talking a majority of clones as stormtroopers with some humans sprinkled in here and there. The bigger question is once the Fett clones grow too old, who gets cloned next?

5) We see Kashyyk fall to Imperial rule in RotS. It is safe to assume Chewbacca is not welcome there unless he's going to be a slave. Would you rather be an indebbted partner to the guy who saved you from slavery, or still be in slavery to the Imperials. Don't forget the qoute from ANH "Where are you taking this thing?"

6) Sir Bel said it best, the sun does murder on the skin. I always thought Shmi looked beautiful, but also rugged, and older than her age. Such is the life on Tatooine.

7) It would be cool to know what significance the name Vader has, but then again, we can wonder the significance of Maul, Sidious, and Dooku as well.

8) Purple is a good cross between red and blue. Plus, Sam just wanted a purple one. Lucky for him purple is a cross between red and blue. I would want an orange one. But I wonder what that would symbolize?

 

As nerdy as this topic is, I still have to keep posting -- it's an addiction!

One line from ANH has an Imperial officer saying that the Rebellion is "too well armed, too well equipped." Technology has possibly declined since the Empire formed, but I think it more likely that it's the change in OUR technology that accounts for the differences in ships between the trilogies.

Oh, and as for the Falcon, "0.5 over the Big L" is a meaningless statement, as we don't know what kind of scale is in use -- does each 0.1 mean 10 times the spead of light? 100 times? The Richter scale is something like this. It just sounds good. All we need know is that the galaxy can be spanned fairly quickly (TESB -- "If they made the jump to lightspeed, they could be halfway across the galaxy by now")

 

After the Clone Wars, cloning was forbidden. Even the Empire didn't do it. That's why, in Heir to the Empire, it's such a big deal for Thrawn to find a working set of Spaarti cylinders. By the time the clones would have aged beyond usefulness, Palpatine would have strengthened his rule enough to make forced conscription a viable option. And of course, there were always plenty of young kids looking for adventure willing to visit their local Imperial recruiter.