/swg/ The Old Days edition

saw tlj a second time, just to absorb everything.

went from a 7/10 to an 8/10. Idk why people hated it so much. I do feel as though Holdo should've told Poe everything.

Also shit, the final "duel" was possible the most samurai-feeling duel since a Kurosawa film. Dragging feet and all. Reminded me kinda of that story when Musashi trolls his opponent and just fucks off.

I mean iirc it took place literally right after rotj so like, he just learned he killed his wife and was probably at his pissiest.

Again I was running the idea that imbuing the lightsaber is either purely seramonial or only really applied to enhancing it's use as a lightsaber

We wouldn't hate what we do of it so much if there wasn't stuff of merit in it to be invested in.

Desert Troopers with ponchos, camo armor and cloth wraps. They've been fighting a guerilla war against Tusken type tribes and they're now winning by co-opting their strategies and conquering the tribes by using their methods but with greater firepower.

High Command hasn't heard from them in years and thinks they might all be dead.

>by the time the New Republic/First Order rediscovers them they're outwardly indistinguishable from tusken raiders

Crystals are stupid, RPG-level powerups to begin with. Lightsabres aren't an optical phenomenon, and aren't magnetically contained plasma. It does't matter a damn what Lucasfilm said, or what Disney says now. Onscreen evidence outweighs whatever the fuck they say, and onscreen evidence contradicts both of those theories.

Bob Brown's old page has the only lightsabre function theory ever put forth that actually matches all of the onscreen evidence. A microscopically thin tube of matter spinning at a high fraction of C does the following:
>creates an opaque surface (creates shadows),
>has density (a sabre is a solid object),
>doesn't melt people's hands (which would happen with plasma),
>DOES melt objects by stripping away free electrons (matches on-screen thermal effects),
>the spinning action would make lightsabres "grind" together when they bind (as seen onscreen),
>dense metals take longer to cut through (as per Vader's armor and the bridge door in TPM),
>the blade cauterizes wounds,
>hums,
>glows (the color is a "tracer" to help you track the blade movement)

Written canon is wrong. Onscreen overrules everything else.

>crystals showed up in the RotJ novelization when Luke was building his sabre...they were written as control buttons; not a magic internal crystal that powers the sabre.

>RPG-level powerups

Copy Lawrence of Arabia, Indiana Jones and the major Afghanistan wars.

Trooper Commandos with full beards pulling up bandanas. Scout Troopers in full hoods and cloaks stalking the party over the ridges. Hovertanks plastered with vulgar military slogans, blasting out space rock as they descend on an outpost and blow it to pieces. A single clapped out TIE cruising over the dunes to strafe a caravan.

>not a magic internal crystal that powers the sabre.
>powers the sabre
>powers

You are not competent to make commentary.

I mean, you aren't wrong, and crystals are pretty stupid, but goddamn. That's a LONG way back in the SW fandom.

I'm curious now, because I have no idea who the person user's refering to is, and the idea seems interesting. is any part of that model wrong, or does it fail to match anything we see on screen?

Hey /swg/, I'd like to sell you my new weapon. It's a droid brain attached to a tiny sublight engine and a powerful hyperdrive. A replacement for turbolaser batteries, a few of these things can shred through a capital ship in seconds. Hit 100% of the time (impossible to dodge projectiles at lightspeed) and a real bargain, too. Can even be carried in standard fighter bays. What do you say?

Well, firstly to explain myself, the crystal isn't the lightsaber's *power source*; lightsabers are powered by fairly mundane power cells. Crystal just focuses and projects the energy into the blade form.

Regarding the theory, it's...interesting as an old-school guess from the pre-canon explanation days. I kind of wonder how the tube of matter is supposed to fit into the handle when the lightsaber is deactivated. Telescoping?

>now
Fucking newfags.

>oldfag here. Old enough to remember reading Brown's webpage with the saber blades photoshopped in over top of shianai.

SW rebels contradicts it, because Rebels explicitly has lightsabers requiring Khyber crystals to function. And Rogue One also contradicts it for the same reason.

However, Bob Brown was the guy responsible for a ton of the "real-life physics intersecting Star Wars" stuff back in the day (his discussions with Curtis Saxton were legendary, both for their content and for how much they hated each other). That stuff about lightsabers was written between TPM and AOTC, so obviously it can't take Rebels and R1 into account. With that said, lightsaber crystals WERE taken from the WEG d6 RPG, and WERE intended for use as "powerups" for Jedi PCs, and found their way into the EU through the "back door".

I like applying real physics when and where I can too, and I like that explanation a ton better than what Disney is currently pushing. However, by definition, it's not canon, because it's not done by Disney, even if it does explain better than anything else I've seen so far how a lightsaber actually works in relation to what we saw in Eps I-VI. It's a great candidate for headcanon, though.

>Start using Krayt Dragon cries as war cries because it scares the Tuskens
>Start wearing the wraps of dead Tuskens because Tuskens are superstitious like that
>Start mocking them with the same celebratory rifle pumps
>Become the Tusken Raiders of Tusken Raiders
>After a generation they're the ones being feared as Tusken Raiders

Slap some solar panels on and I'll take 200.

Oh, also, something spinning at a significant fraction of C...I dunno if it's just gonna hum. I'd figure the thing would make a noise like a damn freight train and possibly vibrate like nobody's business.

You fool, what about the ball cockpit?

So basically pic related but with a hyperdrive?

does star wars have any hyper-dense matter that's usable, chuck in a few chunks of that and lets see how it improves your design...

also something like that with LIDAR and the schematics for all the enemy ships similar to the buzz droid would be super effective, being able to aim directly at the spot that would cause the most damage to an enemy ship

>I kind of wonder how the tube of matter is supposed to fit into the handle when the lightsaber is deactivated. Telescoping?

Image answers that, actually. A sphere of malleable matter is rotated, and the energy rotation extends it into a thin tube, which is the part of the sword with actual density. Which does makes sense. If the goal is an extremely thin tube - the thickness of the final cut of the saber blade - you don't need a very big sphere of matter to create a 3-foot blade. Something like a 2.5-cm wide sphere ought to do it, which leaves you with a 3-foot blade that's like 1/32th of an inch wide, and so leaves pretty damn thin cuts.

I'm not a fan of crystals either, honestly. I'm considering this as headcanon for any SWRPGs I run at home. I don't like what the RPGs do with crystals as far as making them customizable components to give mechanical game bonuses.

Wait, doesn't SW have gravity generators? Could you use them to artificially increase the mass of this space railgun projectile?

Basing it on our current understanding of physics in a universe that explicitly has sounds in vacuum is retarded.

I like the fact that it is practical, extremely effective and relatively cheap.

But could you maybe make it somehow more ominous? Maybe paint it black and add some gloomy red lights? I also would prefer my enemies say something like "Oh no, they are launching Doom Seeds." Could these units be designated "Doom Seeds"? Or something along those lines?

I understand that the practical aspects sometimes dominate the minds of armament engineers, but I assure you it pays not to neglect the branding. It is very important for me to project the right kind of menacing image as a (soon to be) galactic despot.

that sounds really expensive

we're trying to make cheap anti capital ship weapons

Hm, okay. I don't think I'm going to use it as I actually *do* like the crystal variations as special additional effects to lightsabers, but it's not a totally unsensible explanation. Though I'm still a little concerned about the sheer speed you need the thing to rotate.

Does the SW universe actually have sound in a vacuum, or is it added in for the audience's convenience? Is there anything where the main characters can actually hear each other talk through a vaccum without the aid of a commlink or something?

Gravity generation itself must be pretty cheap because every space ship larger than a snubfighter (which may or may not also have gravity) we have ever seen has them.

That said I doubt gravity generation actually increases mass, so it doesn't actually help the weapon at all.

The fact that you think that crystal is a power source and doesn't just focus the beam that ignites the plasma makes you retarded and wrong.

>I don't think I'm going to use it as I actually *do* like the crystal variations as special additional effects to lightsabers

That's fair. Different strokes and all that.

I'd rather you didn't have such a defensive tone, but good post nonetheless. I like the idea. I couldn't find Bob brown's page on a google search. Where is his stuff hosted?

The working title for our test runs have been "Desolators," though if that title proves less than satisfying it can easily be modified. And indeed the final production model will be black, both for intimidation value (as you mention) and to make this difficult to pick up on visual scanners when acquiring its target.

>Does the SW universe actually have sound in a vacuum
I remember an old interview with Lucas (and some others) in which they talked about the necessity to establish parameters for how the world works and then stick to that, whether it's "realistic" as per real life or not, and it was said that they of course know that there's no sound in space, but they conciously decided that in Star Wars, there is sound in space.

So yeah, there's absolutely sound in space in Star Wars. It's one of those things that instantly divorces Star Wars from the real world. It's why a pilot in an X-Wing can hear he's being shot at, or the explosions around them, etc.

I was actually just going to find a big rock and stick a hyperdrive and a few sublight thrusters for orientation on it. Might save on some durasteel.

>plasma

Not that guy, but come on. Plasma doesn't fit the onscreen evidence, regardless of what the Mouse says. user is right. People holding a meter long stick of plasma would melt their own hands. If the saber can't be plasma, then it follows that the crytsal "which focuses the beam which ignites the plasma" wouldn't do anything either.

Actually, here's a thought. You'd have to keep a very regular rotation if you're spinning some sort of matter superfast, right? What if the crystal was in there to keep extremely regular timing? Like the quartz crystal in a watch? That way we can use the spinning matter saber theory, but crystals are still involved in the process. Different crystals produce different speeds of rotation, and the ionizing air around the blade would turn different colors based on the speed of rotation, so different crystals = different blade colors.

I mean, we'd have to ignore this "living crystals" thing Disney has going on where you have to kill or bleed the crystal to make it evil or whatever. But IMO it'd still split the baby pretty effectively.

I am concerned the name "Desolators" might cause these devices to be confused with the various "Devastators" other tyrant pretenders have in their arsenals.

Could it be made bigger? They seem so practical I expect a great many navies will end up deploying them. I would like for mine to be bigger than anyone else's, just as my capital ships are.

Yes, but back in the 80s Marvel had legitimately talented people working for them.

Snubs absolutely have gravity. It's obvious in most cockpit scenes, if you think about it, especially in the prequels, where Anakin and Obi-wan flies without helmets (for some fucking reason).

TIE-Fighters probably don't, because there'd be no reason. They don't even have interior life support.

>People holding a meter long stick of plasma would melt their own hands

Canon's explanation for this is that the same field that holds the blade's shape prevents excess thermal leakage as well.

god I love how Tie's are absolute Death Traps. I really want to run a Paranoia level death rate game of AoR where the players are Tie pilots going against Rebels in X and B-Wings

I like how R2-D2's color scheme is 90% inaccurate (the 10% being the white)

do it do it do it do it

Nope. Rey will never use anything other then a single-blade because the saber-staff is a PT invention. Disney does not allude to the prequels anytime they can help it.

Except it's plasma. Presumably, this is contained by the forcefield. Really, your "on-screen evidence" is based on the faulty notion that you know what you're looking at and can draw conclusions based on that, yet we know for a fact that physics do not work exactly the same way as in the real world (which is explicit, but also obvious even with casual observation).

Star Wars has always had a moral black/white on everything before the Expanded Universe. "Magic I aint gotta explain shit" was also the preferred method of explanation. Remember that the primary complaint about midichlorians has always been that it takes something that's supposed to basically be space magic and tries to give it a dull scientific explanation.

Magnetic fields do not and cannot stop thermal leakage. If they could, they would not be magnetic fields by definition.

Words have meanings.

>The absolute look of fear when Wedge appears.
Not even Howlrunner-senpai can save your souls

I mean, they ARE highly mobile, they are just meant to operate with support, which makes perfect sense. It's not like they spontaneously combust.

That said, DO IT.

It's a force field, not a magnetic field.

IIRC it's partly magnetic but there's also a kind of insulating field in there too.

Where can an user find information about Tie training, deployment, and squadrons? I know there's a ton about rebels, but I don't have any idea how Tie's do other than go fast die fast

Well, you have ships being attacked by Sonic Mines when chasing Jango's ship...so it seems so.

Look up some stuff on Imperial Japanese Navy fighter tactics; that was part of the inspiration for TIE squadrons.

They follow the Billy Bishop school of flying.

>You're not going to believe this, Jean-Louis. All of them have ribbon insignias.

...

Tell me, how do you make sound travel in vacuum, or create unidirectional gravity without increasing mass?

IMO this kind of feels like 6 year olds playing pretend. "I did the thing." "No it doesn't work because X". "No the X doesn't work because Y." There's always another technobabble thing you can add when there's a logic hole pointed out.

>How does a saber work
>It's plasma
>How does the plasma not go anywhere?
>there's a magnetic field that holds the shape
>Magnetic fields don't insulate heat. Why don't people's hands get burnt?
>there's an insulating field that holds temperature too
>If the insulating field protects someone outside from the heat, wouldn't it protect the person getting hit?
>it's a special 1-way field the drops just as it hits somebody
>why don't people wear projectors that project this anti-thermal field?
>etc, etc, etc

Yeah, canon is canon. But the theory upthread does have the advantage of not having to make shit up constantly to cover logic holes as they're discovered. Plus, I'm also on the 'crystals are stupid' bus. Anything's better than the "bleeding crystal" thing Disney's doing.

Huh, I always figured the german air force, with the crazy experimental prototypes it seemed that had with Tie-variations

>But the theory upthread does have the advantage of not having to make shit up constantly to cover logic holes as they're discovered.

That is true, but canon explanations for technical questions in all kinds of media basically are exactly this anyway no matter how you slice it. Making up shit to cover your ass is part of the fun. Also,

>why don't people wear projectors that project this anti-thermal field?

Same reason you don't wear super heavy winter clothing in the desert at midday, m8

Yeah, like, I think that's the point of force fields. A magnetic field wouldn't stop my hand, either, but a star wars force field of almost any kind would.

Honeslty, I'm not sure if they ever even straightened out how the military is organized/ranked, and even differentiating between the uniforms of army vs. navy is a mess. Wookieepedia probably has something, and there's probably a bunch in some comics, but you can probably largely wing it.

No pun intended.

Like this?

I would also posit that while the canon explanation is a lot less elegant than the Brown explanation, it's not really more complicated than a lot of real-life physics breakdowns. The simplest explanation isn't always the correct one.

Good shit right there

>this user is literally mad that space wizards who fight with magic swords have magic crystals inside the magic swords.

Are there any rules on an ARC-170 in FFG rpgs? I love flying them in X-Wing, so I'd like to get my hands on them in game.

m.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpTe3BWdTH9kTm6R1YGCc4vo6_pwSot-O&v=oaGupDBELAA

For what it's worth I also still prefer the Legends idea that Sith just grow their crystals artificially rather than wait for nature to provide.

Hilariously I think, uh, I think as of Disciples of Harmony you can now have *both* in FFG Star Wars.

A little bit of both, as well as a little bit of a lot of other things. The Empire was a cultural mish-mash of multiple historical empires and authoritarian states. So you have famous pilots with baron titles, but you've also got the Zero-inspired TIE/LN with its paper-thin armor, superb agility, and gradual transition from dominance to obsolescence.

It's not a 1:1 comparison, of course. More than anyone else (apart from the USAAF in Europe), the Japanese Navy put the biggest premium on operational range; early in the war, the Japanese pulled off some attacks (most famously, the sinking of the Prince of Wales) because British intelligence had no idea that Japanese planes had such long legs (based on British intelligence the Prince of Wales was not within the range of Japanese sea-based or, in this case, land-based aviation). TIEs obviously don't reflect this at all.

But due to those concerns the Japanese did prioritize maneuverability over armor and survivability, which does define the TIE fighter. Unfortunately for them, everyone does slip up once in a while and when you're in a Zero you're not going to be as capable of surviving it as you are in a Hellcat. Japanese missteps and superior American intelligence eventually led to the loss of most of Japan's best pilots, so near the end they did take to zerg rushing.

The inspiration for the Imperial Swarm tactic was probably this late war period, i.e. the Marianas Turkey Shoot, where Japanese pilots just out of training were thrown at veteran American crews and pilots with predictable results.

I'm mad that I can't find a Mandalorian girl who will hunt with me, I swear I'm a real Mandalorian I just haven't shot anyone yet...

I don't think so, a look at the FFG SW index reveals only the ARC-40b. Shipfag may have made a homebrew one though.

Have you tried going to /k/?

I'm a fan of the old RPGs so I'm not for "bleeding" but I am for crystals and their seramonial importance to jedi and sith teachings and blade crafting

spelled "ceremonial", mate

Well in theory using a ritual to turn a stolen jedi crytal to a prefered sith color isn't implausible, as it still saves the time of having to make one yourself and has the added effect of insulting the jedi, but making it a necessity to make it run at all is where it gets dumb

Ahh yes, I had the dumb there

Not yet, oddly. I've got a couple homebrew takes sitting around if you'd like

What

>original weapon was a staff
>only lightsaber she ever wielded is now destroyed

She's gonna use a saberstaff user. Accept it.

As an addendum this has no bering on the nonexistent alignment of the rocks themselves, it simply alters the subtle prismatic compositions

JJ did promise more prequel references to "bring it all full circle" or somthing

The thing about TIEs is they're basically Japanese Zeros, as others have said; thin armor, incredible speed and mobility,l but once they're hit, they're fucked. This is why the Imperial Navy used fighters more as a defensive screening tool than an offensive assault one. Then there's the pilots themselves. The Navy paid TIE pilots EXTREMELY well even compared to other equivalent positions in the fleet, but they did so because survivability was low, so it was a get rich or die trying scenario that typically meant the Navy wasn't spending as much cash as it seemed.

However, TIE pilots who survived quickly became some absolute beastly Red Baron-tier dudes, because to survive in such a fragile but fast ship, skill is all that can save you. It had the morbid but notable effect of weeding the weak out pretty damn quick, as you either died, survived and quit, or survived and became tough enough to do so.

Even though the fighters tend to be the butt of jokes, that speed is terrifying when a good pilot's in the cockpit; even Rebel aces acknowledged that, if given the same level of hardware, TIE aces would fly circles around them.

There's a reason that lone Defenders can challenge multiple squadrons of X-Wings and come out unscathed.

Does having the high ground provide any advantage in EOTE/AOR/FAD?

Calling it now: A big chunk of whatever military the Rebellion has access to will be wookiees, for ROTS pottery.

eh, varying degrees of boost dice depending on elevation.

>Star Wars has always had a moral black/white on everything

Not true.

>Remember that the primary complaint about midichlorians has always been that it takes something that's supposed to basically be space magic and tries to give it a dull scientific explanation.

The problem with midichlorians is that they were a bad way to explain Force powers, not that Force powers got an explanation. Getting an explanation for things, a scientific one, can be great if it's done well. Saying "it's magic just go with it" can work too, but for the (and I say this unironically) non-casual audience it can take you out of things and break the immersion, which is why for us RPGfags we need more than just "it happens because it does."

Imagine if JRR hadn't fleshed everything out in his mythos, if he just said "orcs exist because and dragons because and then elves because and stuff happens because" it'd be fucking boring and unmemorable. Chalking things up to magic like Disney's doing is laziness and nothing but.

The Zero was also very quickly outclassed once the US manufacturing machine got rolling. Japs never really made an effort to design a new fighter either, much like the Empire just constantly updating the same basic TIE chassis

They could just quit?