There is actually some benefit to banking-style maneuvers in a space combat. With primary thrust fixed to the year, and your weapons fixed to the front, banking is your best bet for being able to continually fire at someone that you are chasing.
Of course, this all falls apart if you theorize a directional engine and a directional gun. There’s really no reason to have them both fixed forward/back. As soon as you put them on pivots/turrets, you’re now looking at real space combat where banking is stupid and makes little sense.
This is the thing about fan-wanking Star Wars. Every explanation you come up with requires further explanations.
And thus, my final opinion on Star Wars is simple: they’re propaganda films created by the New Republic for the centennial celebration of the Empire’s defeat. The trend among intellectuals is to point out how the NR was founded by criminals and terrorists. These pesky thinking types keep getting around Holonet restrictions, and the gulags are already overflowing. A series of inspirational films will surely explain the glorious ideals of the beloved founders and get the common man back to sacrificial laboring for the good of the community.
It’s for running away from a fight, not towards it. Besides, if he overshot, there’s a big hole in the middle of the room. Embarrassing… “I’m afraid this is going to reflect poorly on your Trials, young padawan…”
Consider the practical reason I mentioned above. Also, most encounters would happen either within atmosphere, or right near a planet, and/or passing between atmosphere and space.
Right. Anakin’s mom gets kidnapped and killed by Sand People, and in his rage and grief he goes and slaughters their entire village because he’s essentially a superman.
The Jedi’s attempt to avoid those type of situations is to prevent those types of emotional attachments from happening in the first place–take the kids away from their mothers as soon as possible, don’t let them fall in love, etc.
Anyway, it’s a huge galaxy and the Jedi were never a large order. Even if proper midichlorian count is equivalent to some super-recessive genetic trait, there’s still probably more than enough candidates around without the Jedi themselves having to breed for it.
Right, it’s implied (but never stated outright in the movies) that are hundreds of trillions of people in the Star Wars universe and maybe a few thousand Jedi, at best.
You might say. I maintain a higher standard for my fan wanks.
But seriously, this one just doesn’t work for me. The way the movies are constructed make it clear that the sound is being produced by the ships themselves, not by some sort of audio system built into the pilot’s earpiece.
Although, if you just look at the first film, virtually all of the space combat takes place around the Death Star, which is large enough to support its own atmosphere. Probably not a breathable one, but all those exhaust ports are venting something, and those gasses are likely to stay around the Death Star due to it’s huge mass. So all those banks, and explosions, and screaming ion engines are making audible noise that’s propagated through clouds of invisible, industrial waste gasses that cling to the surface of the Death Star.
The fankwank doesn’t work great for Empire, and falls apart completely in the other films, but it works pretty well just for that one.
Not nearly enough oxygen to justify the size of the explosions we see. We’re talking about a guy in, basically, a scuba suit. You’re not going to shoot Jacques Cousteau and get this.
I’m not sure it’s a *possible *technique in a vacuum. Anyway, the pilots over at Babylon 5 never had any problem dealing with realistic Newtonian physics in their space combat.
That’s what the computer system is supposed to do. Pilots, who are used to hearing sound, benefit from a simulation being pumped into their headsets, or speakers in the cockpit, and such. It gives the impressions you describe. Han actually mentions that to Luke in the radio drama, as they man the guns. Personally, if I was directing the film, I would have silence during the camera shots outside of any ship, with noise inside. I know all of this is post hoc, but it works, and it goes back a long way.
I figured, in the case of the TIE fighters, it’s highly concentrated stuff. There have been combat missions here on Earth that have more or less spanned the globe.
That might depend on what the engine thrusters/nozzles do, I suppose.
More Expanded Universe reference, which, as noted above, is considered to be more-or-less apocryphal now, but…
As originally established in some of the EU novels, such as I, Jedi, there was a branch of Jedi based on Corellia. Members of that order were known to marry, and there were a number of Jedi bloodlines in that order (though it appears that Force-sensitivity didn’t always breed true).
The revelation of “Jedi aren’t generally allowed to have relationships” in AotC led to some retroactive rationalization of what had been established in EU sources about Jedi and marriage: Ki-Adi-Mundi got a pass due to his species, while the Corellian situation was written off as, “they’re a splinter sect.”
FWIW, the Corellian Jedi, also known as the Green Jedi, also appear in the MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic, which is set about 4000 years before the movies. In that era, too, Jedi in the “mainline” order are prohibited from forming attachments, but it appears that the Corellian Jedi disagreed at that time, as well.
I still don’t think it works with what we see in the film. You see a TIE Fighter chasing an X-Wing in the movie. First, the X-Wing flies past the camera, then the TIE Fighter. In both cases, the ships get louder as they approach the camera, and quieter as they get further away. If we were hearing the TIE Fighter through the X-Wing pilot’s sound system, the sound of the TIE would remain constant. Clearly, the audio is meant to indicate what you would hear if you were standing where the camera was placed, not what you would hear if you were in the cockpit of one of the ships.
I also think the idea in general is just kind of goofy. If you’re going to give the pilot audio cues to help him track enemy craft, why do it with a sound effect? Why not a voice that says, “TIE Fighter approaching from rear,” maybe with come co-ordinates? Also, the TIE scream is explicitly meant as a terror weapon. Much like the German dive bombers in WWII, they were designed to make that terrible noise as a way of frightening and demoralizing their opponents. Which would be a weird design choice for a vehicle that’s primarily meant to be flown in a vacuum already, but it’s an even weirder design choice for the Rebels’ audio system to perfectly match the noise that’s intended to demoralize them.
I suppose you could go to some effort to create a system that imitated a ship banking in an atmosphere, but what would be the point? You’re actually sacrificing maneuverability, I’d think. And it doesn’t help with what the pilots are “used to.” The pilots are, by and large, human - nothing about flying feels natural to a human. A big part of training real-world pilots is getting them to overcome their instincts, because their instincts evolved on the ground, not in the air. I don’t think banking would feel easier or more natural - particularly if you start training your rookie pilots in a vacuum, instead of an atmosphere.
That’s why I imagined that the viewer hears a mix, based on where their vantage point, i.e. the camera, is. It’s what the filmmakers wanted them to hear, though I realize that’s not explicitly the thought process Lucas and company were using. I wonder if they even discussed anything about it!
Anybody who had ever heard the sound of the TIEs in atmosphere (which would be much more common than encountering them in space) would find the sound unforgettable, so, scary as it is, it would take no time at all for any pilot to wonder what their sensors and computer were telling them. I don’t remember where I read this, but there are radar systems today that do something similar. It’s more practical than a voice constantly giving updates on what’s happening, especially in a chaotic and rapidly changing environment like that above Endor’s moon.
I never saw anything of Babylon 5, but I was imagining fighters making extremely sudden, rapid changes of direction in a (near-)vacuum, and trying to imagine anybody keeping up with that, let alone flying and fighting effectively. I figure that flying in those different environments would in fact be very different, but at least superficially similar, at times and out of necessity.
I had never seen this site before, but some of the people responding (scroll down) make points similar to mine, among others.
