Have they missed any good ones?
species 8472 planet killer, very effective, extremely fast charging, due to haivng multiple vessels charging up the main planet killer ship in a few seconds, while other scifi takes a VERY long time to charge. plus extremely manuevarability of the ships and thier ability to appear anywhere in the galaxy due to opening “singularity rifts”, makes them extremely deadly.
Iain M Banks’ Culture series has a scene where a ship mind describes the Neural Lace as “The greatest torture device The Culture has ever created”
The Tasp (Larry Niven: Ringworld). No real destructive power, but renders victim incapacitated by inducing a strong orgasm.
The Boom Stick is missing. Ash time travels twice in the movie.
If James bond is in the mix, what about goldeneye?
I like that Han’s blaster is more powerful than an ATAT
Nobody accused Star Wars of having any form of coherent world building.
By a factor of 4 or more, no less.
Yeah, I don’t think the creator was very rigorous in their research. I feel like the Halo rings have to have more impact than the death star.
When the gravity gun gets temporarily modified in Half-Life 2
I’m really not a fan of super weapons in sci fi. They make little sense, if you ask me.
like. really. the Deathstar didn’t really serve much in the way of a useful purpose.
A carrier for self-mobile carriers? that made planets go poof?
Any reasonable rebel would just not be on a planet, which means you’re making your own resources go poof. and by resources, I mean labor force.
This something I never understood about Hoth. strap that ion gun and it’s genset to a freighter, and you’d have a pretty mean gunship that can disable entire convoys or blockades. equip other freighters for wildcat gas extraction and refinery and solve your fuel problems. same for manufacturing, with the advantage of not losing your shit everytime the Empire shows up.
Can it be powered from a ship or does it take some sort of crazy large power station you just can’t do on a ship. Ships did have ion weapons. They mention them in the movies and you see it in other media but it sounds like the hoth planet ones were way powerful. Also the dialogue and presentation is it was providing cover fire to forch the ships to veer off to make a cooridor for the escape ships. The plan was the ground based ion cannon makes a cooridor and each ship goes out with two fighters escorting it to harras any enemies that can recover enough to possibly take them out.
so, here’s an incredible cross sections scan of the v-150 cannon on hoth:
The cannons are absolute beasts. Don’t get me wrong.
We don’t actually know how big the thing is, at least not directly. We do have a scene with a golan df.9 turret (the stubby tower ones, not the dish turrets,) is next to it. those are 4 meters in height In the screen grab of the ion cannon. guestimating the height behind the snow drift, I make the ball 6 df.9’s in diameter. 8, if I ignore the base and go with whats seen, and ignoring the actual barrel thingies. (that’s another df.9.)
So for surface installation (Ball turret plus the reactor core that’s under the ball,) I’d make it needing something between 48 to 64 meters in over all length, and 24 to 36 meters in cylindrical space.
this wouldn’t be that hard to bolt on to something like a GR-75, which is 90 meters long, and mostly just cargo racks. Keep in mind they had to get all that equipment there in the first place, and these aren’t the kind of things you’re building in place, it might be broken down into some submodules, but you’re not breaking them down into component parts.
if a GR-75 isn’t large enough, (maybe because the reactor core isn’t… a reactor core? and needs “base” power.) Then the Imperial Container Ship certainly is (and incredibly easy to steal.) You can actually build that thing out to something that resembles a mobile operations base, to be honest. (the internals of the cargo stack are all shirt-sleeve habitation, apparently,)
Both ships have an advantage here in that they would be rather easy to modify into hauling something other than containers, and including possibly something outsized like the ion cannon. basically becoming a system defense monitor (slow, big guns, and mobile only the sense that, sure, it technically can shuffle off.)
You could do a few things with it. use it concert in lightling raids- it doesn’t come deep into the envelope, but it hits the biggies from range. Probably after a recon flight pops in and gives targets, it can jump in and start blasting with lighter things coming in to do whatever. fighters, bombers, etc.
alternatively, drop it in orbit and let it hang out where it can cover an escape and shuffle off on it’s own. (bonus points for everything else being space-based and not planet-side.)
You sir, are suggesting that Star Wars makes logical hard-sci-fi sense which it has not. Please refer to first minute of movie where you can hear engines and laser fire.
aural synthesis of sensrionics to enhance situational awareness.
(For a non bullshit answer it was for creating engagement with the audience. The utter silence of 2001 space odyssey kinda bothered a lot of people.)
(Same with the swooping.)
(Though from a certain point of view, swooping happens.)
Kinda misses the point that star wars is space fantasy, not sci fi
It absolutely is fantasy
But the physics as far as that goes are still on point compared to, idunno, Star Trek.
The sound in space, the swooping, all of that were story telling tools used to convey a sense of what was happening. Realistic space battles aren’t really all that exciting.
Not even the expanse got that right. They just replaced particle beams with Gatling guns and condescending but inaccurate explanations of why things don’t swoop.
Fun fact, the reason planes and stuff seem to swoop is because they’re under constant accelerations and observed from the perspective outside the plane. One source of that constant acceleration is the atmosphere (drag and lift,) but you can just as easily replace that with fusion maneuvering thrusters or something.
Real space battles are probably like split-second flypasts repeated until one spacecraft is destroyed. The likelihood of both spacecraft voluntarily keeping the speed between them below 100m/s is very low.
