Cribing Notes From Star Wars

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Honestly, Garden planets are likely quite common, as photosynthesis is probably inevitable in any system with K through F stars.

Likely? We can't assign a probability when we have no data at all regarding the prevalence of life beyond Earth's atmosphere, and very limited data on what it takes to have a garden world form in the first place.

Pretty much any WAG is as good as any other regarding their prevalence.

Of course, Venus and Mars may have been Garden planets until a billion years ago

Venus more probable (as far as that means anything) than Mars, because of the temperature factor and the tendency that main sequence stars heat up as time passes.

[AlexanderHowl]

Mars had an atmosphere massive enough to keep oceans liquid four billion years ago despite the lower solar emissions, so it could have easily developed life much earlier than the Earth (Earth is a much larger target for planetoids than Mars, so life may have been rebooted a number of times on Earth). If Mars had early photosynthetic life, the sequestration of the carbon dioxide may have doomed Mars, as photosynthetic life may have caused Mars to get cooler faster than Sol was becoming brighter.

It is possible that we could find an analogy to early Mars orbiting cooler and/or younger stars. Despite the low gravity, the lower blackbody temperature may allow for the retention of a massive atmosphere for longer around cooler stars, even to the point of developing sapient life. Of course, it is quite difficult to detect such planets with our current technology.

[SolemnGolem]

Originally Posted by scc

2. Speed, this is a bit of a multi-headed one, but starfighters engage in WW2 dogfighting is SW.

(I apologize for the late bump - after a couple of searches on the forum, I couldn't find any better thread for this, and it's not novel enough to warrant its own thread.)

I was going through some back issues of The Path of Cunning netzine and issue #2 has a superb 25-page article on WW2 dogfights. My first through was "This would make for some exciting SW starfighting dogfights."

Just in case it's helpful for OP or any later readers.

[borithan]

Originally Posted by Prince Charon

No, the script makes it clear that Han is bull$#!+ing at Luke, with Obi-Wan rolling his eyes or something, it's just that the scene cuts away too fast to easily notice Alec Guinness's reaction.

He is ********ting, or at least Obi Wan thinks he is, but it is because he is stating something so fast that it is unbelievable that some goofball pilot on a hick world would have access to a ship that could do it. Obi Wan later on quite clearly says something along the lines of "If the ship is half as fast as he says it is it will serve us well", so he clearly understood it to be a boast of how fast his ship was (ie, travelled an understood distance in a short period of time), not how good he was at mapping flight lanes so you travel a shorter distance. It is also such a fundamental error (rather than an unbelievable boast) that 1) Luke would also notice it and 2) Obi Wan would likely go "well, this guy clearly doesn't know his arse from his elbow, best not fly with him."

Later on, rather than just saying "yeah, Lucas goofed on that one", they tried to find some way to rationalise it. This lead to the "maneuvering around black holes" that we ended up with in the novels and is now canon, and also results in Star Wars FTL making less sense than 40k FTL, and that is the one where you travel between stars by surfing the waves of hell itself.

Originally Posted by Varyon

Poking around on Wookiepedia, it looks like the script did indeed indicate it was a lie (although whether because it was impossible, or Han was speaking nonsense, isn't clear), but the novelization changed "parsecs" to "standard time units" in the dialogue,

This would have been the obvious solution. Just say that in Star Wars parsecs are a unit of time. No reason it has to mean the same thing, it is a fantasy universe.

while apparently as early as 1977 Lucas was treating the claim as true, with the Falcon's navigational computer being sufficiently advanced to plot a shorter path than others, hence the bragging about making the run in a short distance rather than short time.

Personally, my assumption would be Lucas wrote it thinking "parsec" was a unit of time (much as "lightyear" is often used inaccurately), then when he got called out on it his ego wouldn't let him be wrong, so he knee-jerk changed it to be that he really did mean it as a distance, and even made what he initially scripted as a lie be true.

Yup, almost certainly the case. Didn't realise it started as early as that, but I guess he probably had people commenting on it from as soon as it came out.

Originally Posted by pawsplay

Given that we see the Rebels launch a few ships from their own bases basically into the Empire's lap, it appears that even long-distance travel can be accomplished in hours, provided you have clear lanes. Whereas when Luke, Leia, Lando, and Chewie were leaving the Cloud City, it seems that it takes days if not weeks to travel the murk of the more distant systems.

Certainly in the sequel movies, it seems to take only a few hours to muster a small vanguard of ships to delay the Empire.

In the original films travel time is always ambigous. I can't remember any journeies you see end to end without cuts, and you never know how far apart destinations are meant to be. Therefore you could have the journeys be pretty much any length you want, thought the pacing of the some of the story elements suggests most take no more than a few days, and that was the presumption WEG seemed to work with (if I remember correctly, the base time of travel from Tatooine to Alderaan was a week, which the Falcon with its 0.5 hyperdrive would do in 3 or 4 days). Then the prequels came along, and a lot of the timing of story elements essentially either implied or required most travel took a matter of hours, even to very distant locations. And then when JJ "I don't understand space and I don't care" Abrams came along he basically made it explicit by having ships jump almost instantaneously across large chunks of the galaxy with almost no time passing at all, and that has been what they have been rolling with since.

In my personal headcanon I go for the WEG approach as it is the one that I feel makes the most sense in the world we are presented. A galaxy that can be crossed in hours essentially makes a resistance movement like the Rebellion impossible, as any target you might attack would be literally seconds away from help, and the economics of how interstellar transport works seems to imply it is more like making a journey by sail than a journey by car.

Originally Posted by Phantasm

This is why many novels gave blasters a range of 30-35 meters, and hyperdrive classes had a larger number for slower drives - and some writers who tried to reverse that trend got yelled at by the fan base, particularly when the Falcon would always have a class 0.5 regardless of which camp the writers fell into.

I think the way Zahn used it, at least in the Heir to the Empire trilogy, suggested that "Point 5" was 5 on a rising scale, rather than a decimal (I don't remember him ever writing it as 0.5, and he capitalised 'point'). However, yeah the roleplaying games went for "it is a multiplier of base travel time," which resulted in the odd situation that apparently the most common hyperdrive was x2. I would have though that if it was the most common speed, that would have been the one that the multiplier had been calibrated around?

[AlexanderHowl]

It was an odd decision. Unfortunately, the original series is still the best of the lot, as the sequels, while superior in every respect to the prequels, still having massive problems. Strangely enough, the worst film of the sequels 8, was not Abrams fault, as it was written and directed by Johnson, who was rightly booted from the franchise afterwards. I have no idea what Disney was thinking giving a Star Wars movie to a scrubb, but the House of Mouse often makes such mistakes.

Honestly, I just assume that the original movies skip the boring stuff and get right to the action. After all, even if hyperdrives are capable of traveling 1,000,000 times the speed of light, they would take over two months to cross the galaxy. Of course, some hyperspace routes are going to be faster than others, and more well known than others, and the majority of the systems in Star Wars seem unconnected to the known hyperspace routes.

[Phantasm]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

the sequels, while superior in every respect to the prequels

I disagree with this statement, but I'll take it as your opinion and not argue it. It's an argument for the fan base forums rather than the GURPS forums anyway.

Honestly, I just assume that the original movies skip the boring stuff and get right to the action. After all, even if hyperdrives are capable of traveling 1,000,000 times the speed of light, they would take over two months to cross the galaxy. Of course, some hyperspace routes are going to be faster than others, and more well known than others, and the majority of the systems in Star Wars seem unconnected to the known hyperspace routes.

This I do agree with, for the most part, although to be fair we fail to see even 1% of the possible systems in the galaxy on-screen. The video games treat hyperspace travel as instantaneous in play while at the same time talking about how long it takes in the dialogue. Again, it makes sense: we're seeing the action and moving at the speed of plot.

To the OP: I find it best to just go "it takes X time to travel from sector to sector in the same "belt" (Core Worlds, Outer Rim, Mid Rim, etc.) or from belt to successive belt (Core to Colonies, Colonies to Inner Rim, Inner Rim to Expansion Rim, etc.; with 5 crossings from Tatooine in the Outer Rim to Alderaan in the Core). Well mapped routes (f'rex: the Perlemian Trade Route, Corellian Run) should halve the time. Whether it is possible to use sublight drives to travel in realspace from system to system (Hoth to Anoat to Bespin) is up to the GM. Pseudovelocity drives may help if you wish to permit realspace intersystem travel across several lightyears.

The Star Wars universe is not internally consistent, and never has been. I find it best to go with the amount of consistency that works for your game and let certain things fall into "tall spacers' tales".

[Gumby Bush]

Originally Posted by Phantasm

This I do agree with, for the most part, although to be fair we fail to see even 1% of the possible systems in the galaxy on-screen. The video games treat hyperspace travel as instantaneous in play while at the same time talking about how long it takes in the dialogue. Again, it makes sense: we're seeing the action and moving at the speed of plot.

...

The Star Wars universe is not internally consistent, and never has been. I find it best to go with the amount of consistency that works for your game and let certain things fall into "tall spacers' tales".

This. Look for how to model the SW feel, not the mere appearances. Assume the appearances represent a certain amount of "The GM was running it as cinematic, and trying to keep the action moving."

[AlexanderHowl]

Since the number of systems in the Old Republic was in the millions, we see only the smallest fraction of them in the movies, TV shows, video games, and books (especially since everyone seems to want to visit Tatooine for some ungodly reason).

[SolemnGolem]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

(especially since everyone seems to want to visit Tatooine for some ungodly reason).

If there is a bright center of the universe, this is the planet it's farthest from.

Although I can understand people coming back repeatedly for Jabba the Hutt, that saucy old minx.

[AlexanderHowl]

I would honestly rather go to Hoth.