Please answer these or feel free to leave your own. I don’t believe there are any major SITH spoilers, but if you include one please use the cloaking mechanism.
*So, are the stormtroopers from Episodes 4-6 still Jango Fett clones?
*What are the military advantages of clone warriors over droid warriors?
*Has there ever been an “official” explanation in any of the novelizations or fanmags as to how beings from thousands of planets can all bring the same air and speak the same language (well, most of them- Wookies, Ewoks, Hutts, whatever-Greedo-was and the other odd vaguely-walrus or reptilian creature will sometimes speak his/her own language)?
*Has the story of Han’s rescue of Chewie from a P.O.W. camp (referenced on these boards but occurring sometime between Episode 3 and Episode 4) ever been told in novelization or cartoon or what-not?
*Do prosthetic limbs in any way affect your skills in using the Force?
Han was training in the Imperial Navy when he discovered Chewie was a slave taken from Kashyyyk. He saved Chewie, and Chewie pledged a lifedebt to Han. I believe the story was, if not recounted, at least mentioned, in The Han Solo Adventures by Brian Daley.
And George Lucas (my source is a post in another forum on here) has said that Vader’s powers were less than when he was Anakin because the Force permeates your entire body, and Vader had less of his body than Anakin did, so his Force abilities were diminished.
I tend to think not. The original batch of clones used during the Clone Wars probably formed the nucleus of the army the Empire used to dominate the galaxy after the collapse of the Republic. At the time of Phantom Menace, the Republic appears to have had no military at all. In the original trilogy, it’s clear that the Imperial navy, at least, is not made up of Clones. If the Empire could put together a non-Clone navy in the time period between movies, there’s no reason it couldn’t do the same with its army. The clones were only needed because (Ep II spoiler:)
Palpatine needed a large army to fight the separtists, and that would be absolutely loyal to him to the extent that they would not hesitate to turn on the Jedi when he gave the word.
I don’t think that the cloning program was continued after the end of the Clone Wars, and that most of the clones made for that war probably were gradually killed off through the attrition of twenty years or more of near constant warfare, being replaced along the way by recruits and conscripts from Imperial-dominated worlds.
Clones are humans, and can think and act creatively. Droids can only act within the boundaries of their programming. Ep III spoiler:
I assume that it’s also easier to hide “programming” in the form of indoctrination and brainwashing in a human mind, than it is to hide it in a droid mind. If the Republic had used droids, all it would have taken would be one inquisitive Jedi tech trolling through a droid’s central programming to question why there’s a file called “KillAllJedi.exe” in it’s system to bring Palpatine’s whole plot crashing down.
Can’t help you on the air thing (although there are a few races that seem to have some sort of oxygen mask on whenever we see them), but as for the language thing, the Republic is tens of thousands of years old, and posseses the technology for real-time communication across interstellar distances. Those two factors alone would allow for “Galactic Standard” (English to you and me) to become the… well, galactic standard.
Yes, several times, often with conflicting details. I don’t know which version is canon.
According to one of the other Star Wars threads currently active, Darth Vader can’t do the force lightning trick because he’s got robot arms.
Miller pretty much nailed it here, but just to clarify: We’re hearing English, but they’re actually speaking “basic”. It’s alternately called standard/common/whatever in other universes. This is a staple in fantasy and science-fiction and it’s really more out of convenience than anything else. Even Tolkein - the only author I know of that actually took the time to invent multiple languages for his different races - had most of his characters speak “common tongue” more often than not.
No, they’re conscripts by that time. Of course, George could decide to have all the stormtroopers’ lines in the original trilogy relooped with kiwi accents, in which case all bets are off.
The droid army was equipped with Genuine People Personalities modelled on Max Sennett comedies. This was amusing to Palpatine, and suited him fine when he wanted the appearance of a threat in order to sell the idea of increased military and personal political power to the Senate. When the goal shifted to the extermination of the Jedi and the continuing domination of the galaxy. Oh, and that whole vulnerability of the entire army being controlled via telemetry from a single ship is a bit of a drawback, even when the footsoldiers aren’t running their slapstick behavioural algorithms.
Whatever is presented as English in Star Wars is supposed to be “Basic,” a sort of Star Wars equivalent of a constructed language like Swahili or Esperanto, combining elements of the languages of the first few races to develop space travel.
As for why all the various planets have similar atmospheres the societies that develop on them have familiar political organizations, and the intelligent species all have (vaguely) humanoid forms – I don’t think there’s ever been an “official” rationalization for that It’s in the same category as sound in space, space fighters behaving like terrestrial aircraft, monocultural ecosystems, instantaneous intersolar communication, and the rest. That’s how Flash Gordon serials and Edgar Rice Burroughs stories were, so that’s how Star Wars is.
Redundant on preview, but that was pretty much expected.
Right, I previewed and just read the other posts. Sorry about the sentence fragment:
It shouldn’t be hard to figure out the rest of that, of course.
When Palpatine came on the scene, the Republic only had the Jedi as federal peacekeepers – and they had the downside of being overly concerned with ethics and stuff. He played puppet-master to the Trade Federation and the Separatists to make it seem necessary for the Republic to adopt the conveniently-created clone army – purely mercenary, and, as a bonus, tweaked with some “Mandalorian Candidate” pre-programming, so that the need for a large-scale conspiracy in the ranks under the watching eyes of the Jedi was obviated.
Hmmm… by that explanation, shouldn’t all Jedi masters be really, really fat? Because then they’d have bigger bodies for more Force to permeate. And Yoda would have NEVER made Jedi Master, nohow, noway.
It’s not a matter of how big Yoda is; it’s a simple question of weight ratios.
In other words, it’s what percentage of your body is intact and can have the Force flowing through it. And I’ll assume the Force interacts with muscle much better than it does fat. Or, hell, maybe all those midichlorians in their bloodstream give them really high metabolisms.
I always get sucked into these discussions, even though the reason I prefer Star Wars to Star Trek is that Star Wars, at least the movies, isn’t founded on these nit-picky details. It’s about the mythmaking, and that’s all. As you can probably guess, I haven’t read any of the novels that form the Extended Universe, and I have no plans on doing so. More power to those who are into that stuff though.
A question of my own that just popped into my head today: how did Anakin learn the “Ghost Jedi” trick? From Ep. III, we learn that Qui-Gon figured it out (or learned it), and subsequently would teach Yoda and Obi-Wan. How, then did Anakin learn it? If he learned it from the Emperor, Vader ought to have known that tossing him into a shaft wouldn’t really kill him, since he’d just come back in ghost form, too (allegedly “more powerful than you can possibly imagine”, or whatever the line is that Obi-Wan taunted Vader with in their Ep. IV duel).
Yeah, he learned it from the Emperor, who really did have total mastery of the force.
[fanboy ass-pulling justification]
That’s what that whole bottomless-pit-in-the-throneroom is about. It’s a Jedi garbage chute, designed by the Emperor to disperse force-energy and prevent that irritating after-death tenacity. He just never anticipated that anyone would have the stones to toss him down it.
A minor question I have, and maybe I’ve overlooked something, but how did Qui-Gon learn the whole ghost/cheating death thing after he was killed? Isn’t that something you’d have to know how to do before you got killed, so as to, you know… not die?
Apparently, Qui-Gon taught it to Yoda and Obi-Wan despite already being dead. I guess there’s no reason why he can’t teach it to Anakin after they’re both already dead.
I still can’t believe that they told Qui Gon had learned this rather than having an actual visitation. Liam Neeson could have shot (or even just recorded) that scene in two minutes and it would have been way more effective (plus just hearing it from Yoda could have made Ben think the old green master was losing it).
I had the same gripe, Sampiro, but rumor has it that the sequence was shot and will be included in the DVD release. It was cut for time. It would have been better to have cut Yoda’s revelation from the theatrical release as well.
Has the obvious “species-ist” tendencies of the Emperor ever been addressed in the EU? The Empire has thousands and thousands of odd, strange and curious intelligent alien species, but only humans hold positions of authority on the Imperial vessels.
The human-centric Empire was described in a few books* as coming from Palpatine himself. In the Ep3 novelization, an internal monolog of Dooku’s implied that this was why all the Separatist factions were alien (Nemoidian, Geonosian, etc): to set up the anti-alien feelings of the population. Dooku was expecting to get captured, then after a time of imprisonment “see the light” of a human Empire and publicly support Palpatine to give Palpy that aristocratic stamp of approval.
However, as the movie showed, Sidious had other plans.
Of course, that just shifts the question to why Palpatine didn’t like aliens. Maybe it’s a Sith thing, or maybe he just got beat up by a bothan when he was in Sith pre-school.
The ones I remember most clearly was the Thrawn trilogy, where it came up due to Thrawn being a non-human who bypassed the restrictions due to his strong military talents. My memory fails me, but I think his promotion to Grand Admiral was either done after the battle of Endor or was explicitly hidden from the Emporor.
Sure, and why wouldn’t the ‘heroic’ jedi conjure up a jedi murdering, planet destroying, child killing, sociopathic sith lord with whom to ejoy the afterlife with? Makes sense to me… maybe they planned on bringing Sidious back too as a forth in a little Sith vs. Jedi euchre game.
