Star Wars Star Wars Discussion Thread - LET THE PAST D-! Oh, wait, nevermind

Emperor Tippy said:

What Disney should have done was a straight remake of the OT with a new cast and modern CGI.

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Bear Ribs said:

I like the base idea, and it fixes a lot of issues with how the heck the Rule of Two doesn't result in anemic weakling Sith after a few losses.

It's hard to square with the prequel era, both Palpatine's revolving door of apprentices and things like Savage becoming Maul's apprentice when Palpatine was alive, though. Additionally if one takes things like KOTOR and the Old Republic stuff seriously, the OT-era Sith are anemic weaklings compared to the Sith at their height.

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Sailor.X said:

The Rule of Two was a failed ideology made by a flawed man. It was always going to fail eventually. Because it was one fuck up away from the Sith line being yeeted. And considering Sith History. A Sith dying to something unexpected is not that rare. After all Old Palpy did not forsee himself being thrown down the Deathstar 2 shaft did he. The Old Masters before the Kotor Era had it right when it came to Sith Ideology.

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Emperor Tippy said:

The Rule of Two is actually a lot more stable than it first appears.

Remember that everyone covered under it is a very powerful Force user. You aren't in consideration to be taken as the Sith Apprentice unless you have the raw power to at least be Jedi High Council level.

Just like the Jedi, the Sith have plot shields as one of their powers. The Force will bend the universe to advance their goals and they are all incredibly potent precognitives both consciously and subconsciously.

Force users at that level? They don't die in accidents or to bad luck. They die by either choosing to sacrifice their life (not likely for a Sith), to old age (again not likely for a Sith), or to another Force user of similar power wanting them dead.

The biggest single threat to a Sith was always other Sith and, pre Rule of Two, actual lasting Sith rule was essentially impossible. It only occured when you got a Sith substantially more capable than the rest who also achieved some reasonably decent form of extended life. Even when you got such a Sith, they would still inevitably fail as they inherently became everyone's enemy.

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As an individual, the first step in building a lasting Sith Empire is to kill off all the other Sith. They will always betray the Empire to advance their personal interests, that is essentially inherent in the Sith ideology. Sith don't do self sacrifice and they don't bow to those who can't make them fear - at least not long term. Any Sith Empire with a substantial number of Sith inevitably becomes ruled by a murderous upper class whose only claim to power is that they were able to kill whomever held it before and haven't yet been killed by someone else.

Vitiate in SWTOR is really about the only Sith who built anything like a lasting Empire, and that was almost entirely because of his own personal power and his immortality. Even then, after generations of a relatively stable Empire and power structure, his Empire collapsed (mostly to infighting) within a relative handful of years once he was removed.

Once you've killed off all the other Sith, you hang back and let the Jedi succeed. Whatever polity they choose to support (the Republic inevitably) is always going to outcompete every other polity absent substantial Force User interference. The Light Side is built around cooperation and the peaceful expansion of life. The Jedi are also precognitives with the ability to inevitably be in the right place at the right time to advance their goals. Remove the Sith as an eternal enemy that compels the Jedi to militarize and the Sith Empire as an existential threat to the Republic that compels them to militarize and let the Jedi control that military and what you get pre Clone Wars is essentially inevitable.

The Republic, largely on the back of the Jedi, inevitably becomes the dominant economic and political power and expands in an ever accelerating manner until it reaches a relatively stable equilibrium with the number of available Jedi and the cost of expansion.

The Republic, without the Sith Empire threat, will inevitably end up sidelining the Jedi. They are too Other to be accepted as a ruling class and yet the Force makes any other role effectively impossible. So they get sidelined, largely allowed to to their own thing with a broad grant of authority and remit, and avoid direct interference in the political or economic spheres. The very nature of the Jedi also makes their use of the Force to manipulate the power structures of the Republic anathema.

A Sith has no such compunctions and the Force makes gaining political and financial power trivial. A smart Sith builds that power and uses it to maintain and advance the Republic and NOT cause problems for the Jedi or try to take over. Build it generation after generation until the time is right.

Then you pull a Clone Wars. You engineer a situation where the Jedi become enemies of the Republic and where you can kill the majority of them off in a single blow. Without the Jedi around to interfere, using the Force to bring the Republic under your rule is relatively trivial.

Use the organs of the state to continue purging all trace of the Jedi, and Sith, for a generation. Then build your own Imperial Knights or Knights of Zakuul who are trained to use the Light Side and indoctrinated from birth to see the Empire as a good thing and the Emperor as worthy of their fealty. Use these Force users to police other Force users and to stabilize and support your Empire in the same way the Jedi did the Republic.

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If you can't manage immortality good enough to survive the thousands of years such a plan would take and are instead reliant on successors, then the Rule of Two is about the only way to go about it. Find an Heir of the right temperament and power, train them up until they surpass you, and let them carry on.

Note that there is a difference between a fellow Sith and a disposable pawn. Your Maul might be a useful tool and might even think himself Sith but in reality he is never taught enough to be even a potential threat and is instead used as a disposable patsy to accomplish the Sith's goals.

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Sailor.X said:

Still a failed ideology. The Original Pre Kotor Era Sith lasted for well over 20,000 years. Banes Ideology could not even last 1,070 years. A complete failure all around.

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Emperor Tippy said:

Thoughts?

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Bear Ribs said:

Yeah, but you have to consider the enemies they faced too. Banites made it until they faced the brick wall that was Rey, with two lightsabers. Could the Vitiate's Eternal Empire or Darth Malgus' New Empire have stood up to that kind of power?

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Emperor Tippy said:

And the original Sith failed in basically all their goals basically all the time.

Say what you will about the Baneites, they did successfully conquer the entire galaxy, wipe out the Jedi, and replace the Republic. And they did it (relatively) quickly too.

Palpatine failed in properly securing his rule for the long term but that was a failure of Palpatine more than a failure of the Rule of Two.

And it's not like the Galactic Empire would have been better off with more Sith running around.

-x-x-x-
So different topic, droids vs. organics.

My take.

SW lacks FTL weapons or FTL sensors sufficiently detailed to allow accurate targeting. Being limited to lightspeed weapons and lightspeed combat sensors, a ship's range ends up inherently quite limited against other ships.

SW ships have acceleration rates in the thousands of G and in combat situations, they are constantly varying their acceleration and vector randomly to a (relatively) minor extent.

So an enemy is a light second away. It takes the sensors a second to receive the enemies position and a second for the weapons fire to arrive on target, meaning that at an absolute minimum the enemy has two seconds of movement.

Ships don't fire on where an enemy is, they fire on their best guess of where the enemy will be at the time the turbolaser shot arrives at its destination.

When you factor in ECM, effective range becomes even worse.

The closer the ships are too one another, the more capable the computers become because the inherent delays become shorter.

A fully droid controlled ship relies entirely on those mechanical systems and predictive algorithms. They achieve a baseline level of accuracy.

Living beings have the Force (although in most it is very limited). The ship's computer will provide its best guess to each gunner and let them modify it as they will. The computers then analyze to determine the accuracy of that gunners prediction and how they perform relative to the other gunners before weighting all of the gunners input in the algorithm based on their accuracy and then adjusting the shot to account for that.

Computer does a purely automated "best guess" -> Gunner receives the best guess and modifies it with their own intuition/skill/experience -> Computer takes the collective input of all the gunners (weighted based on past accuracy) and uses it to do the fine modification and engages the target.

So all else being equal, a vessel crewed by a living crew will end up noticeable more accurate than a droid crewed vessel with the difference increasing as the range increases.

In addition to that, the Force favors living beings and accomplishing their goals. Put a crewed ship against a Droid ship and the collective, subconscious, weight of the living crew will have an impact that the Droid ship has no way to account for. A droid ship will have a notably increased rate of mechanical failures or "random chance" working against it when in combat against a crewed vessel.

Then you have Battle Meditation, which was a lot more common when most military best practices were really being figured out thousands of years in the past. A Jedi or Sith with the skill can share their precognition with a living crew. Suddenly those ships effectively have FTL sensors and weapons.

In a decent military, everyone gets Midi tested as standard practice and those with higher midi counts are sent into specific roles.
The highest get sent to be Fighter pilots because the relative benefits are the highest.
Next is given to helmsmen on capital ships, because being better at "random" dodging is really good.
Then is gunner on a capital ship.

This is also why ship crews are so large. The metaphysical weight of tens of thousands of living beings all focused on the same thing, all desperate to survive and win, is huge.

A ship crewed with a few hundred people and the rest droids will perform notable worse than a ship crewed by thirty thousand people; even if by all "normal" metrics it really shouldn't.

Vessels are generally tested with fully droid crews against other vessels with fully droid crews. This establishes the "baseline" standard of efficacy and relative value.

Crew efficacy in testing is determined by combat against a fully droid enemy vessel. This establishes a crew baseline against an objective standard.

Manned vs. Manned exercises are generally only for testing the ships command crew.

Thoughts?

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The Whispering Monk said:

It's not a bad extrapolation of SW'verse impacts to warfare. I'm not sure that I buy that larger crew equates to better performance simply b/c you're going to have to get EVERY SINGLE crewmember focused on the same thing in order to really have the Force assist. Some will be wishing their ship dodges just right, others will be cursing the ship's movements b/c it's interfering with their ability to line up a good shot at the enemy, others will be wishing the dang thing would stop pushing its engines so hard so they can cool down and allow for a repair to happen, and who knows how many other aims will be interfering.

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Sailor.X said:

And Empire lasting only 25 years is no victory. And many Jedi escaped Palpatine's purge. Most of them just turned off their lighsabers.

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Emperor Tippy said:

Palpatine openly ruling was itself a violation of the Rule of Two. Bane was all about remaining under the radar and the power behind the throne. Not having the Supreme Commander of your military known as Darth Vader, Lord of the Sith.

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Emperor Tippy said:

And no, a relative handful of Jedi escaped the purge. Even fewer of them fully trained. And they all went to ground because it was the only way to survive.

If Luke doesn't get Vader to shaft Palpatine, the Jedi remain a non-entity.

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KilroywasNOTHere said:

Eh if we're going by Disney canon that may be the case, but the EU made it clear that even if the skywalker's had failed someone would have risen up to take on the empire or at the very least it would have crumbled from it's own infighting. On the good guy side you have Leia, Ahsoka, Kyle Katarn, Starkiller (or possible Galen Marek himself we never got an absolute question as to what Starkiller in TFU II was) Rahm Kota, Master K'Kruhk...ect....

and on the imperial side you had the likes of Vader himself, Jerec and his acolytes, Admiral Thrawn, Vader's clone of Galen Marek nearly all the grand moffs.

and that's not assuming Palpatine's huberus grew to the point he decided to pee off the hutts and make enemies of them. Sooner or later someone or something was going to knock sidious off his throne at least going by the EU even if it took a long bloodier conflict.

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Emperor Tippy said:

Even in the EU, the total number of surviving Jedi is under a hundred.

Force Sensitives aren't Jedi. Leia, for example, was entirely untrained pre Endor and wouldn't have been trained at all if Palpatine didn't fall.

And no, Palpatine would have sat that throne basically forever if Anakin hadn't offed him. Or at least sat it until his future Apprentice offed him.

The Hutts? They are fucked if the Imperial Navy decides to seriously go after them.

If the Jedi could orchestrate his downfall, it would have occured before Luke. If a dark sider could have orchestrated it then Vader would have already been offed or Palpatine already killed.

How the Empire fractured post Palpatine is perhaps the best evidence that none of the Imperials were a serious threat to Palpatine. Anyone who could have been would have unified the galaxy under them post Endor.

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Emperor Tippy said:

It's less about the specifics and more the "I want to survive/I want to win" idea.

Crewed vs. Crewed that basically cancels eachother out, although morale has a substantially more notable effect than in real life and one of the impacts of Battle Meditation is disrupting the enemies unity of purpose and harnessing your own sides (and having a trained Force user directing it).

Note that these are, generally, relatively marginal gains. Crewed vs. Droid is a relatively massive difference because of the synergistic effects, but even then you are talking advantages at the margins.

Put a crewed vessel against a droid vessel at maximum effective range and the crewed vessel is perhaps ten percent more accurate/has ten percent more effective range.

My take on ship to ship combat is as follows.

Shields work by absorbing the incoming energy and then dumping it away. A ship has some amount of energy it can dispose of every second. Everything over that is stored in capacitors (part of the shield generator) to be disposed of as opportunity allows.

Shield strength is measured is 1) Disposal rate, 2) Energy Capacity, and 3) Surge Strength.

Energy on target under the Disposal rate is essentially meaningless and a ship can tank that for as long as the ships reactors can provide power.

Energy on target over the disposal rate and under the Surge Strength is added to the capacitors and only so much can be stored. Max the capacitors and the shields have to be turned off unless you want the generator to blow.

Energy on target over the Surge Strength overloads the ability of the shield generator to transfer energy. This will usually fry the generator.

So when ships of relatively equal power engage, what generally matters is the sustained hit rate over time as the vessels slowly erode one anothers capacity.

So a crewed vs. droid ship, the crewed vessel delivers more shots on target and so eats into capacity more rapidly and thus destroys the enemy more rapidly.

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Of course, it's much more complicated than just that. In reality, a ship has an entire array of mutually interlinked and supporting shield generators, the capacitors are being tapped to power other ship systems (guns, for example) so that they are drained faster, weapons and shields can be tweaked for relative advantage against that opponent, etc.


Palpatine openly ruling was itself a violation of the Rule of Two. Bane was all about remaining under the radar and the power behind the throne. Not having the Supreme Commander of your military known as Darth Vader, Lord of the Sith.

And no, a relative handful of Jedi escaped the purge. Even fewer of them fully trained. And they all went to ground because it was the only way to survive.

If Luke doesn't get Vader to shaft Palpatine, the Jedi remain a non-entity.

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Skallagrim said:

Every one that starred Johnny Depp as a pirate, for starters? Those made loads of money. The first three were great fun to watch, too. (The latter two weren't, but they still raked in the cash.)

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Typhonis said:

Sorry, forgot about those but it seems like when Disney does live action Sci Fi they much it up. Like the advertising campaign for JCoM.

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Emperor Tippy said:

Even in the EU, the total number of surviving Jedi is under a hundred.

Force Sensitives aren't Jedi. Leia, for example, was entirely untrained pre Endor and wouldn't have been trained at all if Palpatine didn't fall.

And no, Palpatine would have sat that throne basically forever if Anakin hadn't offed him. Or at least sat it until his future Apprentice offed him.

The Hutts? They are fucked if the Imperial Navy decides to seriously go after them.

If the Jedi could orchestrate his downfall, it would have occured before Luke. If a dark sider could have orchestrated it then Vader would have already been offed or Palpatine already killed.

How the Empire fractured post Palpatine is perhaps the best evidence that none of the Imperials were a serious threat to Palpatine. Anyone who could have been would have unified the galaxy under them post Endor.

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Bear Ribs said:

So, looks like another Star Wars is in the pipe, this time directed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy who gave us Ms. Marvel, and written by Damon Lindelof, the guy who produced the ending to Lost and Star Trek: Into Darkness.

Secret ‘Star Wars’ Film From Damon Lindelof And Lucasfilm Sets ‘Ms Marvel’s Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy As Director

Lindelof is developing project

deadline.com

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