[tpurves]

This reminds me of all I could think about watching the new star wars films. Why don’t all the storm troopers get to have the shiny mirrored suits. Those pesky rebels and their lasers blasters would just bounce off. check mate empire.

[rasz]

This bothered you? and not WWII style bombing run using inexplicably slow and unmaneuverable crafts? or space ships slowing down after fuel runs out?!?!?! :o how about small unmanned shuttle hitting lightspeed into the destroyer? too obvious I guess.

[Retric]

The ship might not be slowing down, every ship in both fleets is accelerating so you are in an accelerating reference frame. Stop accelerating and you will not keep up.

A larger issue is the empire has light speed travel so they can easily get on the other side.

[adrianN]

The larger issue is that you can somehow kill an entire fleet by sacrificing a single ship and yet nobody had the idea to build hyperdrive torpedos.

[Retric]

Depends on relative costs of an engine and how random the destruction.

I think the bigger issue is simply how close the ships where to each other. If that's standard then hyperdrive weapons are a big deal, if it's a mistake then at best you take down a ship some % of the time.

[thawkins]

Yep KKW, kinetic kill weapons, basicaly large cannon balls moving at close to light speed.

What about the devastation a couple of buckets of playpen sand would cause when accelerated to relativistic speeds, hypervelocity buckshot gun..

[gamblor956]

Hypervelocity ballistic weapons have been researched in the real world, and found wanting. It turns out that mass and volume matter more than speed in terms of the damage inflicted. A projectile that is too fast and small may simply pass all the way through the target, retaining most of its energy, while a wider but slower projectile will impact the target and pass more/all of its energy into the target, causing significantly more damage (i.e., like hollow-point bullets).

So really, it's not that nobody had the idea to build hyperdrive torpedoes. It's that they knew they would be fairly useless, and nobody would expect your enemy to kamikaze their sole remaining flagship into yours at hyperdrive speeds when they could accomplish far more damage to the target by simply crashing into it at normal speeds, as has happened nearly a dozen times in the SW movies. Holdo's act wasn't an act of strategy; it was an act of desperation, and worked far better than she expected it to.

[adrianN]

Even if torpedos are ineffective because they pass right through the object (which I doubt, at relativistic speeds), you might want to consider sacrificing a flagship in case someone builds an attack station the size of a moon.

[Retric]

This is space fantasy, physics conforms to the plot not the other way around. Just pick the right technobabble.

Perhaps it required someone with the right force sensitivity to pull off.

Perhaps shields normally block these attacks and they turned them down to conserve fuel.

Perhaps when going past light speed ships normally just pass right on through normal matter. What happened was a never before seen effect based on failing to reach light speed in some highly unlikely fashion.

Perhaps it is reproducible, but requires tuning the shield frequencies. So it only worked do to the long period in very close proximity.

PS: Perhaps it's just a giant plot hole and showed up because someone at ILM showed a cool demo and they had to work that visual into the movie somehow.

[rasz]

mass is less important than speed, E = mc^2

[jliptzin]

Star Wars is not sci fi. It’s set in space and in a different time period, but has little to do with science, and much to do with fiction.

[gricardo99]

>in the far future

Ehm...

“A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...."

Couldn’t resist ;)

[jliptzin]

Ah you're right, updated. But whatever, point still stands, haha.

[stevula]

We still expect the people in the story to act plausibly based on the rules and conventions of their setting. Suspension of disbelief has its limits.

[asimpletune]

Exactly, it’s our age’s retelling of mythology.

[gamblor956]

1) B-wing bombers have been slow and lumbering and functioned that way since the original SW trilogy...

2) Star Wars has always worked that way. Having the ships continue coasting would violate rules established in the original Trilogy. See, e.g., ESB, where disabled Destroyers promptly lost stationkeeping.

3) The Resistance's largest ship barely damaged the Third Order flagship; a portion was split off but the flagship itself was still functional. It was the massive amount of debris from the Resistance ship breaking apart on impact that caused most of the damage to the remainder of the TO fleet. This strategy simply doesn't scale.

[bootlooped]

Don't forget the fact that the bombers, in space, had to fly "over" their target to "drop" their bombs.

[Osmium]

> Those pesky rebels and their lasers blasters would just bounce off.

They're not meant to be lasers in Star Wars (: They're packets of ionized gas (a gas Lando and friends mine at Cloud City).

[mrighele]

In the movies I never heard them being called laser blasters but only blasters (and in fact they don't behave as laser at all), though almost everybody I know consider them laser weapons. I don't know if this is a general issue or simply due to the fact that in my country "lightsabers" were translated as "laser swords".

There are lasers in fact , but are less common and bigger weapons. Death Star's weapon is the prime example of course, but there are also others (right now I remember a laser weapon looking like a rhasadar being used by the rebels during the battle of Hoth).

[taneq]

The thing that gets me is they have holographic displays but they can't figure out that it's a bad idea putting the pilot of a military ship right at the front with their head sticking out.

[codeulike]

Or they can build robots that are clearly sentient but they don't bother giving them a voice.

[220V_USKettle]

In fairness, we have no idea what the IP licensing schemes are like for text-to-speech technology in that galaxy.

[azeotropic]

Do you ever downvote comments or collapse threads? Maybe R2 units are just constantly incoherent, off-topic, or abusive.

[taneq]

Actually the treatment of sentient droids in those movies is one of the sour points for me, rewatching it now. Somehow it's OK to just wipe a droid's memories, or dismantle it, when it's just as much a 'person' as any of the organic characters. Blah.

[codeulike]

In Sci-Fi terms the Star Wars approach to AI is nonsensical. You have sentient droids that are treated as possesions/slaves/butlers but there's no AI except for the droids, no spaceships that fly themselves or superintelligent AI minds or anything. And the aforementioned lack of voice for some droids.

But in cinematic terms the R2D2/C3PO double-act does make for some funny exchanges, so I guess that's what they were going for. So its kindof tropes first, world-building afterwards as an afterthought.

[cicero]

The novelization of the first Star Wars movie alluded to controversies over "droid rights", but that was a theme that never developed as the series progressed.

[lawlessone]

> it's just as much a 'person' as any of the organic characters.

The organic ones aren't treated that well either.

[pnutjam]

Dude, this was "a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away..." Obviously we've gotten smarter.

[flippyhead]

Mostly I hate how they act like children.

[pault]

The Cohen Brothers' adaptation didn't perform well in focus groups.

[krapp]

>Why don’t all the storm troopers get to have the shiny mirrored suits. Those pesky rebels and their lasers blasters would just bounce off. check mate empire.

Firstly, it would look ridiculous, and they would no longer seem menacing.

Second, and most important, so Phasma's toys sell better.

If you want a canon-consistent reason, umm... because most stormtroopers are grunts and the Empire doesn't really care about them.

[ashelmire]

>Firstly, it would look ridiculous, and they would no longer seem menacing.

Cylons beg to disagree.

[krapp]

The original cylons looked pretty daft. The updated non-human versions were a lot less shiny, though.

[overcast]

They are not lasers, they are blaster bolts of plasma. Not a beam of light, but rather individual shots of super heated gas.

[nugi]

So carbon ablation foam armor then. Easy as toast.