sp3ctr4l

joined 3 months ago
[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

I generally agree, with some nitpicks.

The old canon several times mentions that wielding a lightsaber is actually extremely difficult and unintuitive...

...because the 'blade' is literally weightless, that alone would throw off a lot of wielders of more conventional swords...

... but also because the saber, potentially as a byproduct of the 'coherence field,'... produces strong, unituitive gryoscopic forces when moved or rotated at various angles and speeds.

...

The old explanation I remember is roughly that force sensitives essentially just intuitively know how to counteract this, to varying degrees of proficiency, but a non force sensitive, a non force user... they'd pick it up and awkwardly flail about with it as it seemingly gains and loses weight, is being pushed and pulled in crazy directions that make no sense compared to just, a physical sword or staff.

Sort of like trying to use a very, very poorly balanced real world melee weapon, but the weapon's poor balance also actively changes, like its center of gravity just seemingly randomly alters as you move it.

Basically, a non force user fights the weapon, whereas a skilled force user understands it, and in a more physically tangible sense, literally allows the weapon to guide their combat movements and style, they know when to go 'with' it and when to go 'against' it, to achieve the actual desired motion.

This is kind of sort of depicted in the Mandalorian, with the Darksaber seemingly becoming exhaustively heavy, massive, and Mando has to... learn how to use it, how to work with it.

And also: yes, Han uses a lightsaber in the OT, but most of the early expanded universe did just explain that by saying he is actually force sensitive, that his absurd luck and piloting skill in various situations does mean he is actually a untrained force user, he just also is a stubborn ass who thinks the Force is bullshit, at least initially, lol.

...

But anyway, yes, they used to make lightsabers out of a wider variety of crystals, not just 'kyber'... and yes, i also do remember many different variants of how 'kyber' was actually spelled.

For the life of me I thought its proper spelling was 'khyber' until i bothered to look it up in an actual wiki in the last couple of months.

That could be me misremembering, or maybe that was what I originally read decades ago now, or maybe what i am rembering got 'telephoned' through a bunch of people first, on some forum.

....Man now I kinda want to set up SWGEmu, hahahah!

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 2 weeks ago

Huh.

I do not recall ever reading or hearing about what is now the 'legends' version of the canon... that lightsabers form some kind of self recycling loop, in that manner.

...

But anyway, that also makes no sense in our real world physics.

It... still net expends energy to maintain plasma in a contained space.

Said plasma would want to basically explode outward in every direction, and a real world magnetic field would have to be stronger than that (real world) force, and ... also... it would be absurdly thermally hot that any wielder of a lightsaber would basically oven cook themselves within seconds of turning it on.

...

As of yet, nuclear fusion in a tokomak style, contained plasma loop... is still a net energy loss, and that is the closest real world equivalent to a 'self cohering plasma bolt' that I can think of...

Barring I guess 'ball lightning', maybe, which is theorerically proposed to maybe be some kind of naturally occuring instance of something similar, but to my knowledge, no one has ever like, made a ball lightning generator to test those theories.

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I would also add that they tend correlate wealth as a sign of intelligence and hold wealthy people in the highest esteem.

This is the particularly infuriating/hilarious part.

Here's a graph from a 2016 meta-analysis of what contributes more to your mid/late life overall socioeconomic status, the general wealth of your society (shared environment, C), your particular wealth and social status at birth/childhood (nonshared environment, E) or, your assessed IQ (genes, A).

This is for the US, and measures variance, the variability of how important those factors are.

As you can clearly see, red line go up.

What this means is that the wealthier you are, the more of a total crapshoot it is whether you are a genius or a moron.

Reality is the exact opposite of how idiot rightoids believe it to be, and how the smarter ones project onto everyone else as a means of social control / gaslighting / propagandizing:

The correlation between wealth and intelligence gets markedly worse, the wealthier a person you are looking at.

(I can find the link for the paper again if you wanna read through it, be warned though it is pretty stats heavy)

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Apparently the cockpit voice recording caught one pilot asking why they shut off the fuel and the other denying it.

Welp.

So, yeah, sounds to me like astounding levels of incompetence from the idiot pilot.

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (3 children)

All they had to do for the Sequel Trilogy was adapt the Thrawn series.

...

Absolutely you do not have to be 100% faithful, absolutelty you can change some bits and bobs around, overemphasize a character's trait, underemphasize another, spend more or less run time developing certain people, relationships, etc.

Adjust and rewrite parts of it to make more sense with the old cast of actors being older than their characters were in the Thrawn series... and/or use all that fancy de-aging / re-voicing / face transplanting tech they have used all over the place with many of the same actual actors on other projects.

Its got new and old characters.

Its got Mara Jade, a new main female character, who is actually compelling and complex and fleshed out.

It respects the old characters, acknowledges their flaws and highlights their strengths. You actually see them face new struggles and have new failures in the actual temporal continuum of the plot... not as shoehorned momentary flashback/retcons to explain why someone is a completely different character now.

Its got more mature and serious themes and character arcs.

Its got an actually compelling main villain.

Its got a secret shadow fleet of ships... but with an actually competent explanation for them.

It got big ass space battles, and personal upfront altercations, its got strategizing and politics and intrigue.

It even ends on a victorious... but not a 'final' victorious note, leaving the gate open for you to really try and do your own thing from then after.

Its even already been functionally story boarded by being adapted into a comic book series.

...

But nope, we instead got a bunch of disrepectful hacks who were convinced they could outdo everything prior, cast it all aside initially, and then started trying to copy parts of it after they realized how badly they'd fucked up.

Fucking hacks.

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 2 weeks ago

I'd argue Firefly, Cowboy Bebop, and also Trigun are more 'Space Western' than StarWars is.

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

Cascadia Subduction Zone super-earthquake.

Imagine an 8.5 to 10 mag earthquake, but instead of at one localized point, its basically continuous along about 500 to 1000 miles of a line about 250 miles out in in the Pacific, where one tectonic plate is diving under others, but has been building up friction tension for ~300 years.

And it normally snaps roughly every 250 years, the last time it happened it caused a tsunami that hit Japan, and is the origin of many PNW Native People's flood stories.

So we're ~50 years overdue for that happening again.

When I was a kid, they said it was a 1 in 20 chance happening in this century. Now they say its a 1 in 3 chance.

After this process is over, after everything gets shaken to all hell, and tsunami'd... well, in many areas, the coastal plates actually end up something like 10 to 15 feet lower than it was previously...

So those areas are now just permanently flooded, now under the new default water line.

And if we are all super duper unlucky, this massive of an event could trigger other fault lines along the NA West Coast, in say, California...

... and the Cascade mountain range...

... yeah a lot of them are actually volcanoes, which were formed by this very same plate dynamic that would be snapping in a CSZ rupture... they have just been dormant for a long time... they could potentially become more active or even erupt.

So yeah, that would/could basically destroy most of civilization roughly west of I5, on the West Coast.

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 3 weeks ago

Yep, thats also true lol.

Quoting myself from another comment in this thread:

... of course you can then go way, way too far into fullblown sim territory and end up with actual geriatrics and/or turboautists, lol.

(I say this lovingly as a turboautist who has spent probably an unhealthy amount of time in various niche sim communities, lol)

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 3 weeks ago

I get that, sort of, that... some kind of supernatural/extradimensional energy is essentially drawn into, and then focused by the kyber crystals and the modulation systems of a light saber...

I just had not heard that they involved a mechanically spinning component.

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)

Not quite sure if I am understanding you correctly, but I think you are saying it isn't like, a flat, edged geometry...

...its more like a sort of ... very angry, 'fuzzy', elongated cylinder with a roughly hemispherical 'endcap'.

And the sort of... exit point, or emmitting point of the 'blade' is... more like an camera aperture or a nozzle.

But you also say this O, this eye of the needle... is spinning?

That is a bit of lore I am not familiar with, could you expand on that?

...

But yeah, lightsabers work internally differently than say, the Mandalorian Darksaber... which actually is a proper blade, and uses... some other kind of arcane way to generate and sustain itself, I'm not up to snuff on that lore.

Also just kind of as a general addendum:

There are various materials in the Star Wars universe that can deflect or totally decohere and disperse the ... 'coherence field' of plasma bolts / saber blades.

The Imperial Guards have pikes, staffs that are made of some kind of metal alloy, which can block lightsaber blades, and presumably also deflect blaster bolts.

They may be made out of Beskar, the same material as Mando's armor? I am not sure.

Also, the uh... whatever the Darth Smiley's helmet is made out of in The Acolyte... while I think that show is basically a complete mess both as a show and in lore terms... that material/alloy, cortosis, is actually present in a good deal of the older canon, and it seems to have some kind of ability to nullify, extinguish, not just repel, the 'coherence field' of most other 'plasma' based weapons.

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 3 weeks ago

Yep!

The sort of proto sabers seem to be prior to them figuring kyber crystal magic, iirc, and needing to carry a more crude power/plasma source with them.

Sort of like a radioman in WW2 had to carry around a whole backpack sized radio, whereas nowadays we have like, a cell/smart phone, or just a proper encrypted handheld radio with way, way superior battery/power system in a more compact package.

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (8 children)

Yeah thats... kind of baffling.

I know that in these kinds of situations, it can come down to a combination of incompetence/being overworked, and also miscommunication or blind deference to a nonsensical command.

I am spitballing here, I don't know the internal layout of an '87 nor its exact take off procedures...

Maybe one of them somehow thought they were raising the landing gear?

I can't imagine it would be any kind of standard to like... significantly adjust flaps mere seconds after rotation...

The thing was flying (stalling) with its landing gear down the whole time, right? Never retracted up?

Is it not fairly routine to start retracting the gear soon after rotation?

...

I guess its also possible its some kind of intentional sabotage, but that would seem to either require a conspiracy or at least one of the pilots being suicidal?

Not impossible, but I am not aware of any evidence toward either of those.

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