Not that I want to appear as some Lucas apologist, but again, this is kind of easy.
Humans can’t properly speak the Wookies’ language, but are able to learn how to understand it; similarly, Wookies can’t speak Basic (english in SW), but they can understand it. Perhaps, Chewbacca and other Wookie names are a Basic-speakers rendering of Wookie-language names into something they can pronounce?
Maybe I just have a good imagination, but I can easily sound out in my head what “Chewie” approximatting Chewbacca would sound like.
I bet it can cover up all sorts of embarassing rashes that are gained as a result of weekend liberty in Coruscant’s red light districts.
I’d imagine the Storm Trooper armor is 95% for PR purposes. A mass of perfectly identical soldiers can be a lot more intimidating than a variety of them mixed together, just because it makes them seem slightly less human (which can of course, work to both make it harder to muster a fight against them, and easier to kill them without remose, so double-edged sword, I guess).
In the EU, Storm Trooper armor also provides protection against airborne agents (ie: germ or chemical warfare or just smoke from nearby fires) and limited protection against the vacuum of space, which gives it’s wearer that much more protection than the stuff the rebel forces have been seen wearing. That said the overall training quality of Storm Troopers compared to their Clone Trooper precursors seems to be absolutely terrible.
Well, I’d imagine it protects against a lot of stuff that can harm a soldier that doesn’t consist of rifle rounds. Shrapnel from explosions, ricocheting bullets, bullets from small-calibre weapons (like handguns), etc. During Vietnam, some soldiers wore a “Flak Jacket”, which provided virtually no protection whatsoever from bullets, but could provide some defense against the various fast-moving debris that gets sent flying around in a firefight.
Tis isn’t true. To make a projectile good at piercing armour you have to make it sharp and hard. The problem then is that such a projectile would be less effective against an unarmoured target since it would pass right through a human body making a small puncture without causing a great deal of damage. I don’t want to go too far off topic but suffice to say that on the modern battlefield body armour and helmets DO work, and have not only saved many lives but have allowed soldiers who have been shot squarely in the chest to simply get back up, catch their breath, and resume fighting.
How about cryo-freezing prisoners (Demolishion Man, Minority Report)? What the fuck? So from the perspective of the prisoner, they go to sleep and wake up 50 years later with no skills and not knowing anyone in a completely new world? For what purpose?
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In Demolition Man, they were subconciously reprogrammed during that time.
Yep, inexcusably stupid. Just one of those things that writers use to say “GEE WHIZ remember we’re in the FUTURE!”, as if being on an interstellar space ship isn’t enough.
Shields in Star Trek pretty much suck, IMHO. You can fire phasers through them, but can’t get a transporter beam through 'em. Somebody dies in the Trekverse and no one thinks to go to the transporter console, pull up the data from the last time that person was beamed some place and bring 'em back that way. When a ship get’s phasers locked on it, alarm bells don’t start going off all over the place. Ships apparently have no way of replicating or storing a spare warp core onboard, so that if they have to eject one, they’re able to get back home. The drive system warps space, but they never worry about shifting a planet out of it’s orbit and sending it crashing towards a star or another planet. The starships also seem to be built by the same Acme Corporation that supplied one Wile E. Coyote with his equipment.
In the Star Wars universe, no one seems to have heard of the terms “network security” and “wifi.” Droids roll up to commports, stick a dealie in, and they’re surfing the net in no time. Kind of funny that they can jump through hyperspace, fire high energy weapons, but none of them can plunk down in a local Ureelbucks and surf the web without plugging into a commport (and they don’t seem to have laptop PCs either).
In Batman Begins the Scarecrow’s chemical needs to be vaporized in order to work, and this is accomplished by using a massive device, which means that apparently no one in Gotham bathes.
in the Mission Impossible movies they rely on the person they’re trying disguise themselves as to read a set phrase in order to synthasize the voice. What’s to stop them from repeating the phrase in a Donald Duck voice?
Easily overcome by mounting the laser on a small remote-controlled drone. Anyway, how does the effect propagate back along a beam of light? What if I fire the beam in (say)half-second bursts from one light-second away? - there wouldn’t even be a continuous beam connecting the gun and the shield.
I’ve thought that the best weapon for the Trek Universe was a computer virus that hacked the ship’s artificial gravity system. Smack everyone inside from ceiling to floor 50 times and then all you need to do is beam over a cleaning crew to hose the place down and you’ve got yourself a ship.
Lazguns are not lasers. Herbert was very careful to avoid that sci-fi bugaboo. We’re not really sure what they shoot, other than it interreacts disasterously with the Holtzmann effect of the shields. Which we also don’t know the physics for.
My theory is that lazguns are just another way to project the “shield effect.”
Which is exactly why we have to wear a hardhat where I work. My brains are regularly prevented from becoming more scrambled when I’m thinking about something else and stand up where there’s no room to stand up. It’s sort of an Engineer’s disease preventative measure.
Also: Are we really sure that Stormtroopers shot in their armor are dead? I mean, they fall down, get scorch marks on their armor, and don’t move again while the camera’s on them – but who’s to say they’re not just knocked out, ready to be sent back in the next scene as cannon-fodder that can’t hit the broad side of a barn with their guns?
Well, OK, but MrDibble quoted something on the last page about the disaster that happens when coherent light impinges on a shield. That sure sounds like a laser to me (and the name ‘lazgun’ doesn’t exactly help), but I’m not a fan, so I’ll probably just wind my neck in now.
I’ll second pretty much every hand-held weapon in sci-fi. The Star Trek phaser pistol (and rifle) is a major pet peeve of mine. They’re supposed to be able to disintegrate people, but I’ve seen that happen once (and I don’t think it was even a starfleet phaser). They usually just knock somebody over, or (in the case of the monster of the week) just slow them down (if that). And yet they somehow have the nerve to dismiss bullet-firing guns as primitive and ineffective :smack: . Bugs me to no end.
All right! Yet another chance to mention the only piece of movie technology I really give a damn about, F.P.1. Anyone for a humungous concrete aircraft carrier with no engines that must be towed everywhere by ocean-going tugs and that can be scuttled by a single saboteur in a matter of hours?
In the Duniverse, there was an EXTREME aversion to the use of atomics. All the great houses had them, but the understandng was that if ANYONE used them no matter how noble the issue, the rest of the Laandsraad would collectively punk that house out of existance.
So the reason they never expected the use was that they never saw Paul as able to overthow the Emporer, which would have been the only way out of that conundrum.
Other way around, actually. Phasers don’t seem to be able to get through them, but sometimes transporters can, but only if you can synch up perfectly to the sheild’s refresh rate, for lack of a better term for it. For whatever reason, it seems to be impossible to determine a ship’s sheilds’ refresh rate from outside the ship (both times I can remember someone shooting torpedos or transporting through active sheilds, they had inside info on the sheild’s refresh rate). For a while, the Dominion had weapons that could fire through sheilds, but they described that as a different kind of weapon than phasers. In any case, Starfleet made a fix for that, and kept it a secret until they started their war with the Dominion.
Doesn’t work that way. Transporter buffers are strictly short-term storage, apparently because the buffer data is prone to rapid degredation. Scotty and another man stored themselves in a transporter buffer for some rather long time, but that involved lots of screwing around with how the buffer worked, and still only worked to successfully store Scotty. On DS9, they WERE able to store the buffer data for Sisko and his command staff, but that was on accident, and involved the fortuitous existence of a very large holosuite computer system connected to the same computer network (which presumably isn’t normally the case on Starfleet vessels).
Quite the contrary, alarms DO go off. They just happen to sound exactly like Michael Dorn saying “Captain, they’ved locked onto us!”
The fact that they haven’t yet figured out how to replicate Antimatter really isn’t high on my list of technical concerns about the show. Also, the warp core isn’t going to shift a planet out of it’s orbit if a ship pases it, because when the ship passes it, the planet (AND it’s orbit) get warped too, being returned to it’s proper place relative to everything else. I really can’t comment on the Acme Corporation comment until I figure out what it’s referring to.
Yeah, network security is a problem on Star Wars. Do they even have a Net to surf though?
I can buy that Han was approximating the wookie version of Chewie name in basic, but if that’s the case, he did a poor job.
I don’t recall ever hearing a wookie start a “word” with a hard “ch” sound. IIRC, all their words seem to start with vowels. So, if Han were to call him Ewebacca, I would buy that as good guess.
Right, it was one of those ‘it’s not a war crime if we win’ kind of things. The fact that he didn’t blow up humans only made it barely enough of a grey area for everyone to pretend it was OK after the fact when Paul basically controlled the empire.
The shield/lasgun thing, though, two thoughts.
First, there’s the whole concept of why not use spring-timer operated lasguns? Since after, all, I think Duncan does almost the same thing by setting up a large unmanned shield in the middle of a bunch of Harkonnens using lasguns; he then runs away before one of the random beams flying around hits it and blows up a whole bunch of bad guys. (For that matter, why were the Harkonnens using lasguns? Didn’t the Atriedes troopers have shields? I don’t recall any storms knocking out shields during the invasion. And then again, if the Harkonnens brought lasguns and cannons because they knew that shields would get knocked out, why do they then trust shields when they returned with the Emperor?)
But second, if the Fremen don’t use shields because they know that a sandstorm will knock them out eventually and/or attract a worm (OK, plausible), why don’ t they fight with lasguns/rifles/crossbows/grenade launchers? Or, at least use shields when they’re raiding the Harkonnen cities (outside of worm territory)?
OK, maybe I didn’t have enough to do the last time I re-read Dune, but still valid points.