The Emperer always liked weapons of terror, so big tanks that shoot down on you would be included.
Of course, the Empire’s using stuff that can be beaten by Teddy bears with sticks, but you know…
Hey! The teddy bears didn’t just have sticks. They had rocks too.
Not to mention logs, ropes, trees, and a far better understanding of the terrain.
That would fit with the Gungan (sp?) shield in Ep I, and also with the droid army shield in Clone Wars (don’t blame me – it’s my 7 year old’s movie), where Obi Wan, Anakin and whatsherface get inside the impenetrable (but moving) shield by the simple tactic of standing still and letting it wash over them.
Short version – high energy weapons (and possibly fast moving objects) can’t get through, slow ones can… which of course still means the Empire’s best recourse to the Hoth rebels is to drop a nuke on a parachute. 
The first AT in ATAT is ALL TERRAIN. How badly would you have to mess up the ground before it stopped being terrain?
The Walkers never bothered me; they are actually the kind of stupidity I’d expect from a tyrannical Empire. If the Emperor or some Moff decides he likes the idea and orders them made, who’s going to tell them it’s a bad idea? I recall that the same sort of thing happened in WWII; Hitler and Mussolini and lesser fascists making what should have been engineering decisions according to politics or personal preferences.
For stupidity in sci-fi, one that really got under my skin was the ST:TNG two parter Descent where Picard ordered almost the whole crew down to the unknown planet to search. And naturally got them all captured. That was a winceworthy moment.
I hate to detract from a Star Wars geekfight, but I need to mention a science-fiction stupidity that I recall from another series.
In the original V, the aliens land, announce they are from Sirius, and put on sunglasses against the brightness of our sun. Hello? Sirius? About 40 times brighter than our sun?
The aliens are LYING about their system of origin and NOBODY called them on that!
(My fiance at the time did not understand why this upset me. Not that she didn’t understand why I was upset at a TV show, but that she could not understand that Sirius is a real star, and people really, really know how bright it is. Needless to say, the marriage did not occur.)
Apollo rotated to alternately expose the capsule to radiation from the sun and in turn radiate the heat off into space.
Besides, gawddammit, Kahn said, “It is very cold in space.” Don’t piss him off.
BattleStar Galactica (70’s): That anyone ever took two looks at Baltar and thought “This man looks trustworthy enough for us to let him broker a Peace Treaty with the Cylon Empire!”
Transformers 2: The Army guys reverting from fighting the Decepticons with 40mm grenade launchers (which were middlingly effective) in the first movie to trying to take them down with 5.56 NATO and .30 cal minigun fire (which was about as effective as you’d expect it to be against a 40 foot tall robot that transforms into something like a tank).
Would the amount of light at the surface depend upon distance from the star and the composition of the atmosphere? Sounds like a job for Poul Anderson.
It’s the Speeders that they are having trouble adapting to cold (and why Han had to take the Taun Taun out to look for Luke). The speeders aren’t SNOWspeeders out of the box. They are regular atmospheric vehicles that can be adapted to different weather conditions. Apparently they were able to fix the problem by the next day because a speeder find Han and Luke.
Turns out all they had to do was paint the buggers white.
This is Star Wars. Where explosions in space make sounds.
Star Wars space is cold air, not cold vacuum. Obviously.
And spacecraft maneuver with control surfaces in space. :rolleyes:
The Star Trek series with the Quantum Leap guy.
There was an early episode where the crew of the Enterprise decides to study a large comet or asteroid. Two of them fall in a fairly deep pit when ice cracks under their feet. One guy managed to break his ankle in the fall. And they were worried they’d die because the forty or fifty foot pit wall was sheer and smooth and they were trapped.
I wanted to throw something at the television. Putting aside the idea that in microgravity one could break a leg in such a fall. I’ll grant that it is possible, if contrived. Even assuming that, they were in microgravity, both were physically fit humans. The guy with healthy legs could have slung the other guy over his shoulder and jumped out rather easily. I never watched another episode after that.
Every space science fiction movie or TV series that ignores the existence of nuclear weapons (which is why I adored the remake Battlestar Galactica). 99% of SF space battles are depicted as using the same tactics as the Pacific Theater of World War Two.
FWIW, I gather that Hoth at night was really, really, REALLY cold. As in “that’s not dew, that’s liquid nitrogen” cold.
They need them for avoiding the giant-space-worms that live in asteroids where there’s nothing for them to eat.
(also, you can tell that there’s breathable air in Star Wars space, because said space worms have an internal atmosphere, despite their mouth being wide open.)
It was a comet, and the physics did pretty well suck.
It got better, too late.
I always thought Sam Beckett leapt into Captain Archer, and didn’t quite know what to do.
Of course, there is momentum which is dependent upon mass; there was danger of Gemini astronauts attempting to free a shroud on an Agena docking target. If the stuck shroud had fired off while they were trying to remove it, an accelerating several hundred slug mass would have injured them. The attempt was abandoned.
What can I say? The reason I’m not married to the young lady at the time is my jumping up and down and screaming about Star Wars in the theater. I was taking physics courses at the time.
Hey, physics is boring.
Lucas understands that, and fills his movie with stuff that is counter-physics, but entertaining.
Oh dear lord, I just defended George Lucas. :eek:
Bourbon. Where is the bourbon?