New animated show announced... Star Wars: Resistance

[Reverend]

As I've said, there's a difference between individuals being racist (especially within the military where it's always quite rampant) and a regime's stated goal being racial dominance.

Palpatine doesn't care if humans are dominant, just the one. Him. The rest can all burn for all he cares.

ETA: Also worth keeping in mind that the movies gave us a very narrow view of the Empire. All we really saw was a bunch of military personnel and high level government types doing what they do. The only civilians we saw were dirt poor farmers on a nowhere dust ball so insignificant and out of the way the Empire barely bothered to maintain a single garrison and an independent city state that was also out in the middle of nowhere. We never got a sense of what live is like on the million plus worlds of the galaxy, what Palpatine's propaganda machine was putting out there or any of that stuff. We didn't see what atrocities or injustices were being committed daily, nor did we see how the elite benefited from the Empire.

 

[Gaith]

It's also worth remembering that the lines that split the Republic were mostly social and economical.

In Lucas' lame-ass PT, yeah. As I said, the PT is part of the problem.

The core worlds mostly remained loyal to Coruscant because those were the old guard established human colonies with the biggest stake in the bureaucracy, while the Separatist worlds were mostly those on the inner and outer rim that felt like they benefited more from their relationship to the commerce guilds than the centralised government.

Coscurant is a core world and Mustafar is an outer rim world, right? And yet, even in the PT era, Anakin was apparently (Lucas screwing up again) able to travel from the former to the latter in a relatively small ship over the course of a single day. So, I'm thinking the whole core world/outer rim distinction is a pretty meaningless one?

 

[Ithekro]

The Millenum Falcon was speculated to be on the other side of the galaxy within hours of the Imperial Navy losing sight of it in the Anoat System. And sure the Falcon is fast, but its only roughly twice as fast as most high speed Imperial ships in hyperspace thanks to its navigation computers. Travel time for liners, which are taking their time, seems to be a day. The Falcon went from Tatooine, to Alderaan, to Yavin is the course of a day. From the Rim on one side, to the Core Worlds, and to the Rim on the other side of the Galaxy. The slower Death Star made the trip in about two days. Having been at Scarrif not too long before that.

 

[Reverend]

In Lucas' lame-ass PT, yeah. As I said, the PT is part of the problem.

Whinge all you want, this concept was present even in the early drafts of ANH.

"The REPUBLIC GALACTICA is dead. Ruthless
trader barons, driven by greed and the
lust for power, have replaced enlighten-
ment with oppression, and "rule by the
people" with the FIRST GALACTIC EMPIRE."​

Coscurant is a core world and Mustafar is an outer rim world, right? And yet, even in the PT era, Anakin was apparently (Lucas screwing up again) able to travel from the former to the latter in a relatively small ship over the course of a single day. So, I'm thinking the whole core world/outer rim distinction is a pretty meaningless one?

What the hell do travel times have to do with anything?

Whatever. The outer rim is the outer rim because it's the least developed part of the galaxy and is literally on the outer edge of the galactic disc, relative to the core. Here in the real world the third world wasn't called the third world because it's really far away, it's a (somewhat arbitrary) economic and political distinction. Outer rim worlds are like developing nations, or impoverished backwaters.

 

[Tuskin38]

The first of the new Thrawn novels shows some anti-alien views. There were officers against Thrawn's advancement because he wasn't Human.

And I don't think we've seen any aliens other then Thrawn in the Imperial military in the new canon.

 

[Gaith]

Whinge all you want, this concept was present even in the early drafts of ANH.

So? Every Star Wars fan knows Lucas has never been at a loss for crappy ideas. Fortunately, and maybe with others' advice, he kept all that "trade route" crap out of the OT.

What the hell do travel times have to do with anything?

They demonstrate that coherent worldbuilding has never been one of Lucas' strengths - again, common knowledge for SW fans. As for the short travel times in ANH, they would ideally have been seen in retrospect as Early Installment Weirdness, not the intergalactic norm.

 

[Christopher]

I think Star Wars has always been pretty consistent about its brief travel times to nearly anywhere in the galaxy. As stated, the issue isn't that the Outer Rim worlds are difficult to reach, just that they're less developed/established/prosperous.

 

[The Wormhole]

The first of the new Thrawn novels shows some anti-alien views.

That same novel establishes that aliens still have their place among the Imperial social elite, at least in the civilian world. The majority of the time we see Thrawn among civilians in the novels, is frequently mistaken for a Pantoran and people wonder what the story is with his eyes. None of the civilians are ever "Oh my, a non-human. And without a leash, how ghastly."

nd I don't think we've seen any aliens other then Thrawn in the Imperial military in the new canon.

We've never seen any aliens serving in the Republic's military, but no one's accusing the Republic of practicing anti-alien bigotry.

 

[Gaith]

I think Star Wars has always been pretty consistent about its brief travel times to nearly anywhere in the galaxy. As stated, the issue isn't that the Outer Rim worlds are difficult to reach, just that they're less developed/established/prosperous.

From a certain point of view, Zahn established in his early 1990s Thrawn Trilogy that intersystem travel usually takes several days, and, instead of following the lead of a better writer than himself, Lucas (and now Abrams and Johnson) have crapped all over that.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Again, the original film had the Falcon going in just a few hours from the planet farthest from the bright center of the universe to the remains of a planet central enough to have made an effective demonstration of the Empire's planet killer. So... yeah, Lucas just kept going the way he'd always been going.

 

[Gaith]

^ NYC could be considered the "bright center" of the US, no? But, if one drives "just a few hours" (without traffic, of course), with even a crappy car, one can easily find quiet, rural towns where a disaffected teenager (a group known to make melodramatic exaggerations) might call his immediate surroundings the middle of nowhere.

In other words: to take that one line of Luke's entirely at face value is to give it more weight than it merits.

 

[Ithekro]

^ NYC could be considered the "bright center" of the US, no? But, if one drives "just a few hours" (without traffic, of course), with even a crappy car, one can easily find quiet, rural towns where a disaffected teenager (a group known to make melodramatic exaggerations) might call his immediate surroundings the middle of nowhere.

In other words: to take that one line of Luke's entirely at face value is to give it more weight than it merits.

We have maps you know.

 

[Booji]

From a certain point of view, Zahn established in his early 1990s Thrawn Trilogy that intersystem travel usually takes several days, and, instead of following the lead of a better writer than himself, Lucas (and now Abrams and Johnson) have crapped all over that.

Fortunately, the Zahn garbage never did and never will mean shit.

 

[Booji]

So? Every Star Wars fan knows Lucas has never been at a loss for crappy ideas. Fortunately, and maybe with others' advice, he kept all that "trade route" crap out of the OT.

They demonstrate that coherent worldbuilding has never been one of Lucas' strengths - again, common knowledge for SW fans. As for the short travel times in ANH, they would ideally have been seen in retrospect as Early Installment Weirdness, not the intergalactic norm.

His crappy ideas are the basis of the most successful and beloved franchise ever created. Yup, really crappy.

 

[Christopher]

From a certain point of view, Zahn established in his early 1990s Thrawn Trilogy that intersystem travel usually takes several days, and, instead of following the lead of a better writer than himself, Lucas (and now Abrams and Johnson) have crapped all over that.

I don't know why you're treating it as a value judgment. There's no reason a work of science fiction, let alone pure space fantasy like Star Wars, can't have near-instantaneous interstellar travel. Some space operas have slow-ish stardrives, like Star Trek, where travel time is proportional to distance; some, like, the remake of Battlestar Galactica, have drives that are instantaneous but finite in range, so that more distant destinations require more hops; but some SF universes have instantaneous or near-instantaneous drives that are independent of distance. In Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda, slipstream drive worked through a nexus of "cosmic string" connections in other-dimensional space, and the length of a slipstream journey was unrelated to real-space distance, so that a destination 3 million light years away in the Andromeda Galaxy could be a shorter slipstream journey than a destination just a dozen light years away in this galaxy. My own Hub series of comedy SF stories in Analog Magazine is named for a space warp that can send you anywhere within the Milky Way's dark-matter halo instantaneously, but only if you already know the right entry vector to get there, with a seemingly random relationship between your entry vector and the distance and direction of your exit point. The only universal rule for stardrives is that how they work depends on the needs of the individual story. And as a galaxy-spanning but fast-paced space opera, Star Wars needs a drive that can get anywhere in the galaxy at a fast pace.

Now, if an SF franchise that used to have relatively slow stardrive suddenly starts treating the same stardrive method as practically instantaneous, like the first two Kelvin Trek movies and several Discovery episodes have done, that can justifably be called a flaw in the writing. (Although previous Trek did this on occasion too, e.g. DS9: "Armageddon Game" saying a runabout could make an interstellar journey in less than an hour.) But however acclaimed Timothy Zahn's classic Thrawn novels were, they were just tie-ins, a secondary interpretation of the film universe. The interpretation that was binding was the one in the original movies. And the original movies never suggested a particularly long travel time between a fringe world like Tattooine and an important world like Alderaan -- and indeed were quite inconsistent about travel time, since there's still the mystery of how the Falcon was able to reach Bespin without hyperdrive. Travel time in SW has always been "speed of plot."

 

[Reverend]

^ NYC could be considered the "bright center" of the US, no? But, if one drives "just a few hours" (without traffic, of course), with even a crappy car, one can easily find quiet, rural towns where a disaffected teenager (a group known to make melodramatic exaggerations) might call his immediate surroundings the middle of nowhere.

In other words: to take that one line of Luke's entirely at face value is to give it more weight than it merits.

So you're saying the degree to which a place in civilised or developed is inversely proportional to the distance from, and time required to travel to less desirable locations? And furthermore, the lack of said distance is objective proof that said destination can't be all that bad....yeah because slums in wealthy cites aren't a thing, are they!?
I mean bloody hell, by your logic the likes of Io and Mercury must be veritable paradises given how far away they are from Swindon! Your logic is not like our earth logic...

And yet I'm still at a loss as to what exactly your point is in all this blathering.

 

[JD]

I don't know why you're treating it as a value judgment. There's no reason a work of science fiction, let alone pure space fantasy like Star Wars, can't have near-instantaneous interstellar travel. Some space operas have slow-ish stardrives, like Star Trek, where travel time is proportional to distance; some, like, the remake of Battlestar Galactica, have drives that are instantaneous but finite in range, so that more distant destinations require more hops; but some SF universes have instantaneous or near-instantaneous drives that are independent of distance. In Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda, slipstream drive worked through a nexus of "cosmic string" connections in other-dimensional space, and the length of a slipstream journey was unrelated to real-space distance, so that a destination 3 million light years away in the Andromeda Galaxy could be a shorter slipstream journey than a destination just a dozen light years away in this galaxy. My own Hub series of comedy SF stories in Analog Magazine is named for a space warp that can send you anywhere within the Milky Way's dark-matter halo instantaneously, but only if you already know the right entry vector to get there, with a seemingly random relationship between your entry vector and the distance and direction of your exit point. The only universal rule for stardrives is that how they work depends on the needs of the individual story. And as a galaxy-spanning but fast-paced space opera, Star Wars needs a drive that can get anywhere in the galaxy at a fast pace.

Now, if an SF franchise that used to have relatively slow stardrive suddenly starts treating the same stardrive method as practically instantaneous, like the first two Kelvin Trek movies and several Discovery episodes have done, that can justifably be called a flaw in the writing. (Although previous Trek did this on occasion too, e.g. DS9: "Armageddon Game" saying a runabout could make an interstellar journey in less than an hour.) But however acclaimed Timothy Zahn's classic Thrawn novels were, they were just tie-ins, a secondary interpretation of the film universe. The interpretation that was binding was the one in the original movies. And the original movies never suggested a particularly long travel time between a fringe world like Tattooine and an important world like Alderaan -- and indeed were quite inconsistent about travel time, since there's still the mystery of how the Falcon was able to reach Bespin without hyperdrive. Travel time in SW has always been "speed of plot."

Another example that comes to mind for me is Mass Effect, where ships use Mass Relays, which basically act like giant slingshots and shoot the ship from one relay to another, and travel time is based more around how many relays you need to hit than the actual distance.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

^ NYC could be considered the "bright center" of the US, no? But, if one drives "just a few hours" (without traffic, of course), with even a crappy car, one can easily find quiet, rural towns where a disaffected teenager (a group known to make melodramatic exaggerations) might call his immediate surroundings the middle of nowhere.

In other words: to take that one line of Luke's entirely at face value is to give it more weight than it merits.

No. The question isn't whether too much weight is given, but whether things remain consistent. This is Lucas expanding his own universe. It's his prerogative how much weight to give any particular thing.

And Luke said "farthest" not "furthest." Taking his dialog literally, he means that Tatooine is very far away, distance-wise, from the where things are happening. That itself doesn't imply or necessitate any particular location in the galaxy, and nor is it necessary to interpret him literally, but his jesting with 3PO is suggestive of a remote location, and more importantly it is certainly compatible with one.

Let's see where Tatooine is according to canon. Why, it's in the Outer Rim. A few hours drive from NYC is not a good analogy at all. If we're sticking with the US, we need some place far from the bright center. How about Akutan, Alaska? That sounds more like it.

 

[Gaith]

The point is, if one can easily bop from Core Worlds to Outer Rim ones in a day or less, than notions of planetary remoteness and geographic distinctions are pretty much meaningless. If hyperdrive is really that fast, it's more like flying commercial from Alaska to NYC - not long at all.

And, if Disney is determined to prettily dance around clarifying what the Empire/FO actually stands for, if not human supremacy, than the whole franchise is really not about anything, beyond "bad guys bad, good guys good," and probably never will be.

Just an observation.

 

[JD]

That's pretty much what the franchise has been since the beginning, so I don't see the problem. If you're looking for something deeper than that, you're looking in the wrong place.