Police riot gear. One hit from a high-powered rifle and you’re dead. What’s the point?
Sorry - should probably try that with less snark. But the point stands. There are probably weapons - knives, projectile guns, whatever - which are more common than blasters in the Star Wars Universe, and which the armor is a perfectly good protection against. It’s designed to stand up to that level of threat, but it’s impractical to equip it to withstand higher-powered weapons. We make the same sorts of decisions in equipping our police and soldiers.
Nit: Teflon-coating doesn’t in any way aid in armor penetration. It was a complete media creation meant to falsely create an OMG BAN GUNS BECAUSE EVERYONE HAS COP KILLER BULLETS hysteria. There were, indeed, rounds coated in Teflon - but they were to reduce barrel wear of JHP bullets which actually did worse against armor than standard ball ammunition.
Missiles aren’t designed to hit the bridge. Also, for most purposes, it can be useful for the captain to actually see outside of the ship - I doubt the little window on the ceiling on star trek bridges serves the same useful purposes. I suspect in combat situations, the captain would go to the CIC, inside the ship.
Hm… something I’d have to ask in the “Navy Dopers” thread in GQ, actually. I vaguely recall, from a tour I took of a missile cruiser when I was 11, the guy telling us that at least on that ship, during combat the Captain would be on the Bridge, and the XO in the CIC. The Captain could get a summarized version of all the information available in CIC from displays on the bridge, but the XO had access to more in-depth stuff, including a big-screen map showing the local tactical situation (known locations and identities of ships, local geography, etc.). The Captain still had enough information to make any needed decisions, and the chain of succession was broken up in case one of them should be killed (though from what I’ve seen of torpedo tests on derelict ships, the XO was probably in a far more vulnerable position than the Captain).
I gotta think there was something like the Alderaan News Network, which would probably have a story about it. Not to mention any astronomer types would have to notice the thing.
At the very least, they would probably expect to be occupied by Imperial forces (since they wouldn’t know [though the planetary leaders most likely would suspect that this was very bad juju] of it’s planetary killing ability). Yavin doesn’t react the same, because it’s basically the last Rebel strong hold, and if they don’t stop the Death Star, it’s all over for them anyway. Plus, according to the novelization, Yavin is only inhabited by animals and Rebel forces, the intelligent species native to the planet having died out some time long before this.
Well, there’d certainly be trade ships, and possibly cruise ships there, but as you point out, we don’t know how long they were parked in orbit around the place. I’d think that given the Empire’s love of “shock and awe” (the AT-AT’s are clearly more designed for psychological impact than military efficiency), they’d probably have the thing in orbit long enough for everyone on Alderaan to get a good look at the thing (and contact the people they know on other planets to say, “Holy shit! There’s this big ass Imperial station here!” so they wouldn’t think Alderaan subsequent disappearance was a natural occurance).
Could be. I’m not familiar with the EU at all. If Guin checks in, she could provide a definitive answer, I’m sure.
I don’t know if you actually paid attention to how tall those trees were, but 20m up and you’d still be getting pasted against the trunk.
You could go to 200m, but if you do that you can’t actually SEE anything so why are you patrolling in the first place? Besides, if they’re analogous to hovercraft there’s a limit to how high they can go.
Ever see “Space Mutiny”? Proof that railings are dangerous, man! You’d be better off walking around with a cortex bomb that’s got a loose wire.
The vehicles in this thread are included for coolness, not technical plausibility.
That said, I think the Landmaster from Damnation Alley makes no sense at all. How does that “tristar” three-wheel arrangement turn?! Does the car have six axles?! Are all of the rear ones (or front ones, or all six) drive axles?! How could they make that work?
Sure. Now tell me how much energy is required to rip open a hole in the universe, propel your ship into another dimension, have shields to protect them from said dimension, and then rip a hole back into realspace.
Oh, and all that energy and unobtainium is contained in something the size of an A-Wing fighter.
When you’re dealing with orders of magnitude beyond what you can really imagine, quibbling about the numbers probably won’t get you very far.
Besides, the Death Star was obviously exceptional in the destructive ability it was packing - Han, who was in the Imperial Navy, couldn’t even conceive of an actually completely-demolished planet.
From here and here (sorry; jpegs, not text) it appears that there is a fourth “wheel” behind the three you can see. The fourth wheel is actually the one that is attached to the axle. The three outer wheels are attached to this fourth wheel. This fourth wheel is what turns the other three (through a combination of gears and chains).
As long as the wheels on the ground are turning they work normally. But, if the leading wheel hits an obstruction, the entire wheel assembly rotates around the fourth wheel, allowing it to roll over the obstruction.
Here is another site with most of this info linked off of it that has to do with building such an arrangement.
Having a senior member of the Royal Family die isn’t a problem. Having them captured is. Imagine the crisis if insurgents in Iraq took Prince William hostage and threatened to behead him. Or if while a POW Elizabeth and Charles died elevating him to the throne.
No, we’ve seen all of the above on screen. Duplication can happen by accident, see the duplication of Riker and Kirk, bonus points if you split the duplicates into good and evil halves. Reverse-aging was done by accident, it turned Picard into a pre-teen, and at the end of the episode the characters were aged back to “normal”. And didn’t they use transporters to reverse the aging virus in TOS’s “The Deadly Years”, and they did the same thing to Dr. Pulaski in TNG. You can merge two people into one, like Tuvok and Neelix merging into Tuvix, and Tuvix was forcibly de-merged at the end of the show, with Janeway ignoring his objections that the de-merging would be equivalent to killing him. Scotty was famously stored for decades in the transporter buffer. Viruses, bacteria and parasites are edited out by the transporter’s biofilter. How many times have we seen “the transporter buffer” used in the show’s epilog to restore a character to their orignial state. No matter what damage a character has taken, you can fix anything by using the transporter buffer. Although this should logically restore the character to the state they were in when the buffer was recorded…that is, their memory of the show’s events should be wiped out. In other words, you just kill the afflicted character and restore a fresh copy from your archive.
So human duplication is clearly easily done. Yeah, yeah, ethical objections, sure. But duplication should be a clearly understood transporter phenomenon. And in fact it seems to me that transporters really are duplicators, it’s just that Star Fleet is careful to always disintegrate one of the duplicates.
“If our transporter simply creates a duplicate elsewhere, then shouldn’t we just shoot the one that’s in the Send booth? After alll, if we don’t then he hasn’t gone anywhere.”
– Larrt Niven, The Theory and Practice of Teleportation (quote from memory)
The same applies to Galaxy class ship’s shields. If they’re that far advanced, why can’t they come up with something where the shield absorbs the energy of an impact and converts that energy back into the shield system? No more “shields failing” crap.
