Imperial Walkers are also extremely top-heavy, which is why you can knock them over/trip them so easily What you actually want is a something shaped like an upside-down walker, with most of the weight and weaponry (and the manned part) at the bottom, and a tower with all of the guidance systems at the top, to see over the battlefield. The only reason why it looks the way it looks is to be reminiscent of “War of the Worlds”. Terribly unstable design, though. Far too much energy is required just to keep it from toppling over.
The equivalent of the light saber, Niven came up with the idea for a variable sword – main problem with it (as would be a problem with a light saber) is that you can far too easily chop off one of your own limbs – the advantage of a physical sword is that if you drop it by accident, odds are that you may get a cut, but a light saber or variable sword would slice through you like butter without having to put any force behind it.
If my nerd-fu serves me correctly, ion cannons are basically a giant EMP gun for disabling ships without damaging them and they are frequently used. To take down the star destroyer, you would presumably need a massive one like the battery on Hoth.
I think you are missing the biggest design flaw of all. Giant orbital defense guns like the one on Hoth are highly effective at turning a 1 mile long warship into a 1 mile long unguided projectile in low orbit, ready to fall out of the sky.
But think of off the free heat the planet gets when they come down. Maybe the rebels and the Empire are being manipulated by a powerful, behind-the-scenes cabal of terra-forming companies?
5 pages in and no one mentions replicants? Sure, they’ll die eventually but as Batty and friends show, they can do some real damage in the meantime if they get loose. No remote kill switch. No tracking system. Shoot, they can somehow magically evade being detected without a Voight-Kampff machine when they look exactly like their id pictures!
Nobody thought of tattooing “REPLICANT” in big letters on their forehead? An RFID chip in their skulls?
They have a worse design flaw. No hyperdrive. Your cap ship leaves without you, or gets destroyed/captured, you’re shit outta luck. Enjoy floating in space the rest of your life (aka until your air runs out). Doesn’t apply to certain advanced models, like the one Darth Vader flew in Star Wars (or he never would have been in either of the sequels), but the base model is pretty much a “hey, you’re just cannon fodder, heh heh, empire”
They also don’t have shields… That’s just great in your primary fighter…
X-wings have both hyperdrives (obviously, they’re how Luke travels to/from Dagobah) and shields. No wonder the Rebels were able to find recruits, no matter the numbers advantage of the Empire.
It’s really, really hard to fall out of the sky, especially for something unguided.
But that reminds me of another one. In one of the Starcraft II missions, you have to defend the Terran capital from… its own orbital defense platform. Which apparently needs all five of its “atmospheric stabilizers” functioning to prevent it from crashing and destroying the city below it in a matter of minutes. And of course whatever defenses were mounted on the thing in the first place weren’t enough to prevent terrorists from boarding it, entrenching themselves, and disabling all of those stabilizers.
Lightsabers have an in-universe explanation for why more people don’t quisinart themselves - they are only used by Force sensitives. They’re able to control the weapons very precisely. Or something.
A joke in my family, this was acted out: Han Solo sees a lightsaber on the ground, tries to pick it up like a club, but grabs the wrong end.
Well, Han does use a lightsabre once in the original trilogy-- To cut open the tauntaun (it smells even worse on the inside). But that’s a slow, careful thing, not in the heat of combat.
And considering that a force-sensitive armed with a lightsabre is the next best thing to bulletproof, I’m not sure it’s actually such a bad weapon after all (though one might fairly complain about blasters which fire projectiles that can be deflected by a lightsabre).
The shotguns in Halo only really make sense from a Spartan perspective. They’re huge 8 gauge pump action shotguns firing magnum buckshot rounds, when your primary enemy are 8 foot tall aliens with energy shields that are backed up by even bigger and heavily armored aliens you’ll want as much power as you can in a shotgun. However the problem with this is when you realize these are the shotguns that are standard issue to everyone, not just the power armored Spartans and these were standard issue well before the alien threat materialized (in Halo ODST the police cruisers are equipped with the very same shotguns meaning cops are running around with 8 gauge shotguns as well)
Not only must the recoil be hell for the average soldier but having to carry the sheer weight of them and their shells must also be considered. It seems like it would be a much better idea of the standard shotgun for the normal army be some sort of semi-automatic 12 gauge with a box magazine, that way while not as powerful you can make up for that with volume of fire.
I fanwank that the Tnuctipun engineered an “air gap” between the AI and the firing trigger. It could advise the user to pull the trigger, but not activate the weapon itself. We don’t know much authoritative about the Tnuctipun, but the general impression is that they were pretty paranoid about a lot of things (being superintelligent engineering and science geniuses enslaved to small stupid telepathic dominators while secretly planning and executing a rebellion may do that). Trusting AI may have been beyond their risk-tolerance limits.
Not every platform should be able to do everything. Maybe X-wings are overdesigned or at least more generally designed, and not as good as TIE- fighters at the TIE-fighter’s primary role of defending starships.
Or maybe TIE-fighter pilots are just on the wrong side of screen writers.
Fundamentally, the difference between X-wings and TIE fighters is that the Rebels and the Empire place different values on human(oid) lives. To the Empire, pilots are cheap: They can draw pilots from a million worlds, and if some of them die, well, there are trillions more where they came from. If you can make a fighter with half the survivability, but at less than half the cost, then just make twice as many of them, and man them with twice as many expendable pilots.
To the rebels, of course, the pilots have value, and you can’t just make a fighter with half the cost, because from their point of view the pilot is most of the value of the vessel, and you can’t have half a pilot. So it makes sense to protect those precious pilots a little better.
Does the Rebellion even have any vessels that can serve as fighter carriers? If not then their fighters have to be hyperdrive capable. Then as long as you have a bigger and heavier fighter anyway, might as well throw in shields and more offensive armament. (In TESB bombing the asteroid required TIE variants specialized for the job).
FWIW, I’d always imagined that X and Y wings were old-type fighters left over from the Republic. The toughest and easiest to keep in repair.
The design philosophies and priorities of the Empire maybe different. But that doesn’t make them “bad”. (That is unless they are bad- they seem to underperform relative to the larger X-Wings; maybe the contract went to Darth Underbidder or to Darth Nephew. )
I have a theory that the TIE/X-Wing difference came indirectly from WW2. The TIE would have been based on the Japanese “Zero,” being a lightning-quick fighter but one without the firepower or toughness for a stand-up brawl. The X-Wing was probably based on the various American aircraft, which tended to be much tougher and more heavily armed. I could never find any specific description to demonstrate this, but I assume it’s because Lucas was familiar with old war movies and used them to describe his setting and develop his space battles.
It’s only been peripherally mentioned but non- crew served BFGs generally are really dumb unless you’re scaled to hold it (Like a Giant or Troll in D&D holding a two-handed sword one handed). Predator and the mini-gun comes to mind off the top of my head. Even if you could hold and aim it you only get about a seconds worth of firing before you’re out of ammo.
Know what happens when you fire a Barrett .50 from the hip? You spin in a circle.
Same applies for the stupid swords in the Final Fantasy series.
