Star Wars The Force Awakens

[evensgrey]

If they can always predict where he is going to strike, it shouldn't matter.
So, its stands to reason that they can't always do it. Which means feints are still a valid tactic.

He has up to four simultaneous attacks, the defender has at most two simultaneous defenses (and that's only for the relatively few jedi who bother with two-sabre styles).  It doesn't add up to a jedi being able to defeat him by anticipation unless they constantly retreat, and retreat FAST.  If any jedi tries to block four strikes at once with no more than two weapons, they're going to get sliced and diced, and they'd deserve it for being stupid.

[tnu]

Unfortunately the first Clone Wars anmated series is no onger canon.

[dallen68]

Wouldn't a powerful enough force user be able to make his opponent think he was going to do one thing, and actually do another? You know, like psychic feinting?

[R.E.H.W.R.]

Wouldn't a powerful enough force user be able to make his opponent think he was going to do one thing, and actually do another? You know, like psychic feinting?

Would that work on another force user?

[dallen68]

Would that work on another force user?

As long as he's not equal or stronger in the force, I don't see why not.

[tnu]

So are we using West End Games materiel as the basis here or is t based on conjecture? If we're using roleplaying materiel wouldn't it make more sense to use the more up to date Fantasy Flight materiel?

[R.E.H.W.R.]

[yt]P3zfGx00bhc[/yt]

[tnu]

It was handled much better in the comics.

[MrBogosity]

My prediction: before the movie's even released, the fans will have thought this through MUCH more thoroughly than Abrams & Co...

[tnu]

We already have my friend.

[evensgrey]

This IS the fandom that worked out what the Death Star's main reactor minimum output had to be, after all.

[Ibrahim90]

This IS the fandom that worked out what the Death Star's main reactor minimum output had to be, after all.

And this was so important to them because?

[evensgrey]

And this was so important to them because?

After working out how much energy the Death Star's anti-planet weapon had to output (based on the premise that it could permanently destroy an Earth-sized planet in a single shot such that it would not later recoalesce), the next obvious question is how much power does the Death Star have to generate in order to recharge it in the timeframe indicated (a day, more or less).  If you don't understand why anyone would care to know that, then you've got no hope of understanding Fandom.

I've seen these calculations used for the (more or less) practical aim of debunking cretinists.  (Carl Baugh making a silly claim that the asteroid belt is the result of a microwave pulse Earth released during the imaginary Flood of Noah permanently disrupting a planet between Mars and Jupiter.  As it happens, almost all the numbers had already been worked out for this.)

(The answer, incidentally, is that the Death Star puts out about as much energy as the Sun.  This has a very interesting consequence on interstellar warfare, as it has always been assumed that a K2 civilization could not be conquered by external force as no mobile facility or collection of mobile facilities could possibly compete with the firepower available to a K2 civilization.  If you could build a Death Star, they you would have a mobile base with the firepower of a K2 civilization and full support facilities for the rest of the fleet such an attack would require, all in one.  So, essentially, if you want a military invasion of a K2 civilization that doesn't just look silly, you need a Death Star to be possible.  Even in Star Wars, they have to cheat to make it work since no plausible energy source can generate enough power and be small enough.  A quantum singularity doesn't even work, since you'd have the universe's most dangerous, unstable, and hard to control energy source, and you probably couldn't feed matter into it fast enough to keep it stable at anything like the required output.)

[MrBogosity]

(The answer, incidentally, is that the Death Star puts out about as much energy as the Sun.  This has a very interesting consequence on interstellar warfare, as it has always been assumed that a K2 civilization could not be conquered by external force as no mobile facility or collection of mobile facilities could possibly compete with the firepower available to a K2 civilization.  If you could build a Death Star, they you would have a mobile base with the firepower of a K2 civilization and full support facilities for the rest of the fleet such an attack would require, all in one.  So, essentially, if you want a military invasion of a K2 civilization that doesn't just look silly, you need a Death Star to be possible.  Even in Star Wars, they have to cheat to make it work since no plausible energy source can generate enough power and be small enough.  A quantum singularity doesn't even work, since you'd have the universe's most dangerous, unstable, and hard to control energy source, and you probably couldn't feed matter into it fast enough to keep it stable at anything like the required output.)

Actually, the answer is that Lucas had no idea how much power it would take to actually blow up a planet and did it because he thought it would look cool. And if the Empire really did have the ability to generate that kind of power, the war would have been VERY one-sided!

The planet-killers in Babylon 5 were much more realistic, especially the Shadow planet killer. And notice that only the First Ones could generate enough power to do it. They were basically Type III civilizations; for all we know, their ships were powered by small black holes! (It was also why the younger races had no hope of winning the war by fighting them and had to come up with a more interesting way of doing it. JMS > Lucas, sorry.)

[evensgrey]

Actually, the answer is that Lucas had no idea how much power it would take to actually blow up a planet and did it because he thought it would look cool. And if the Empire really did have the ability to generate that kind of power, the war would have been VERY one-sided!

It was very one-sided in any case.  There were precisely two proper battles in the whole war, one at each Death Star, and only the second was a true fleet action.  In both battles, the Rebels took massive losses of the forces used and only won because the outcome of the battle depended on destroying the Death Star in each case.  The first one was destroyed because it had a small but critical design flaw, the second because it was far from ready for battle without its external fixed defenses.

The resources committed to building the Death Stars were mostly wasted, of course.  If the same resources had gone into building fleets and conventional support facilities, there would have been thousands of additional ships, likely enough to effectively police the galaxy.  Superweapons look grand, except they can't do all that much without a cooperative enemy.

The planet-killers in Babylon 5 were much more realistic, especially the Shadow planet killer. And notice that only the First Ones could generate enough power to do it. They were basically Type III civilizations; for all we know, their ships were powered by small black holes! (It was also why the younger races had no hope of winning the war by fighting them and had to come up with a more interesting way of doing it. JMS > Lucas, sorry.)

JMS can actually write, something Lucas has demonstrated he really doesn't know how to do.

Incidentally, according to the only references I've ever found, the Vorlons used something called a 'hyperspace power tap,' presumably drawing power from the difference between normal space and hyperspace.  Clearly, the Vorlons used far higher output power systems than the younger races, by a couple orders of magnitude based on the recharge time of the main gun on the Excalibur.