More Traviss nonsense

[General Soontir Fel]

Sorry for necromancy, but I only read it today.

Frankly, it sucks. There's more of Traviss's Mandalorian "language" than in all her other books combined. And as it's been pointed out, it's not a language, it's just a cipher for English words, with lots of apostrophes.

Secondly, Kal Skirata is a fucking Gary Stu.

Thridly, Traviss's attitude of "Jedi, except those who agree with the Mandalorians, are evil" is spouting out of every page.

And finally, the latest attempt to justify her numbers:

(Besany Wennen, a Republic Treasury agent, is watching an analyst on the holonews):

"Moron," she mumbled at the screen. The analyst was throwing out numbers, huge ones, and because her business was numbers she found herself reaching for a stylus and doodling a few figures on the nearest datapad. "I bet you don't even know how many zeros there are in a quintillion."

She did, though, and numbers comforted her, so she considered his argument. Then she started wondering how much metal went into a battle droid--forty kilos, at the very least--and multiplied it by a quintillion just out of curiosity, and then started wondering where all that metal came from if 90 percent of the average rocky planet was silica, and not all the remaining 10 percent was the right kind of metal, or could be mined anyway, and mining and ore processing took up a lot of resources...

Sigh... let's take this up. Earth's mass is about 6x10^24 kg, a quintillion is 10^18, so 40 quintillion kilograms make up 0.00067% of the planet's mass. For one planet, it may be significant. But we're talking about a galaxy with at least a million inhabited worlds. And there's no reason not to mine from uninhabited ones, in fact, it may be more efficient to do that.

On Earth, we're currently producing over 100 million tons (10^11 kg) of steel per month. 40 quintillion kilograms is (33 million) x (Earth's yearly production of steel).

Is that too much? Given more advanced technology, ability to mine asteroid fields and uninhabited planets whole, and most importantly, sheer scope, it's certainly a possible feat in the SW galaxy. (Plus, there's no reason not to think a good fraction of at least the B1 battle droids were built in the 10 years between Naboo and Geonosis, and stockpiled in preparation for the war). Are such numbers really necessary? Given that the fight is over the million inhabited worlds, probably not--same idea as that, given the Death Stars, the Empire can make a fleet of billions of Star Destroyers, but there's no reason for them to do so.

But even if quintillions of droids is exaggerated, the true number would be in the quadrillions, or hundreds of trillions at the least. Not millions.

The real stupidity of the above quote is that, while its unnatural for us to do this, a SW in-universe character, should she take up that line of inquiry, would naturally continue and ask how many planets are there in the galaxy. That she doesn't even considere this shows just how much contortion Traviss has to go through to force her numbers on the galaxy.

[Illuminatus Primus]

Thank you, I'll find some way to bring up this on TFN. What good ammunition.

Oh, and Karen, if your math is so good, how did the Empire build the Death Star? From magic?

[Vympel]

You can just tell that like some child writing bad fan fiction she's talking about herself here, can't you?

The analyst was throwing out numbers, huge ones, and because her business was numbers she found herself reaching for a stylus and doodling a few figures on the nearest datapad

Yeah, some moron who writes hack fiction has better math than a PHD in astrophysics. Oh, wait, sorry, she's a journo, so that means she does.

[Mange]

How in the world was that piece of crap ever allowed into the novel? It's not only among the most inane writing I've ever seen, it's also a brainbug of enormous proportions and it's only there to further an agenda.

[CaptainChewbacca]

As I understand it, large-scale droid manufacture is pretty resource-free if you have the right startup investment. I think they said it after the GFFA got started in the Jedi Order:

First, you build a factory to build droids. Then, you tell those droids to build factories, which build more droids. Then you have THOSE droids start building ships.

So, yeah, pick five or eight metal-rich planets you don't want anymore and wait about 10 years. You'll get quintillions of droids. Just come and pick them up.

Without the greater context of the quoted passage, is her proxy character reasoning there's no way such a mass of droids could ever be created, or just that its a true, staggering mass of droids?

[Mange]

As I understand it, large-scale droid manufacture is pretty resource-free if you have the right startup investment. I think they said it after the GFFA got started in the Jedi Order:

First, you build a factory to build droids. Then, you tell those droids to build factories, which build more droids. Then you have THOSE droids start building ships.

So, yeah, pick five or eight metal-rich planets you don't want anymore and wait about 10 years. You'll get quintillions of droids. Just come and pick them up.

Without the greater context of the quoted passage, is her proxy character reasoning there's no way such a mass of droids could ever be created, or just that its a true, staggering mass of droids?

And not to forget that the factory which was seen in AOTC and which is described as old in the ItW:AOTC book, still had the capacity to churn out at least one battle droid/second per line.

[Surlethe]

Oh, and Karen, if your math is so good, how did the Empire build the Death Star? From magic?

Crunching a couple of numbers, DSII would have had a volume of about 4e12 m^3. If it had the density of iron (7e3 kg/m^3), that would jack up its mass to about 3e16 kg. A quintillion battle droids, each 40 kg, would mass equivalent to a little more than a thousand DSIIs.

Not that that does her argument any good; the same handwaving bullshit can equally be applied to the construction of the second Death Star nonetheless.

What I find more interesting is this: if it weighs 40 kg, the average B2 battle-droid has a density between 70 and 700 kg/m^3, which is still well less than that of water and an average human. To see why 40 kg is such a low estimate, imagine a 6 and a half foot tall human made entirely of metal, and then imagine him weighing as much as a big twelve year old kid. This 40 kg number isn't just a lower limit, it's a limit that's got to be at least two orders of magnitude lower than any reasonable estimate, unless battle droids are made chiefly of plastics, in which case all bets are off regarding her original argument.

[Ghost Rider]

From here.

And next time, just link the old topic.

[wjs7744]

Oh god, that really is pathetic. Is it me, or does that just scream that she's so insanely jealous of Dr. Saxton that she desperately wants to refute his calculations, despite not having a clue how to do so? It is truly shocking that her little jihad against George Lucas' vision of Star War has been allowed to continue for so long. I guess I can add her to the list of authors never to buy books by.

[NecronLord]

The Mining Guild alone - let alone its rivals in the Confederacy of Independant Systems - owns 'billions of metal rich planets in the galaxy's spiral arms.'

This Besany Wennen, Republic Treasury agent, is obviously evidence that the Republic's education system is rather sucky.

[Shroom Man 777]

And you can mine metallic hydrogen from gas giants, which make a thousand DSIIs look like a collection of midget testicles.

[tim31]

You can just tell that like some child writing bad fan fiction she's talking about herself here, can't you?

My impression is that she's commisioned the services of Stewart and his infallible team at SDI.

[General Soontir Fel]

You can just tell that like some child writing bad fan fiction she's talking about herself here, can't you?

I never thought Besany Wennen was KT's Mary Sue self-insert, but it makes sense.

One trait of the Mary Sue is that she gets away with behavior unacceptable from others.

In True Colors, Wennen gets away with terrorism. She takes an armed stand in a Republic Medcenter when they refuse to treat a clone, and gets away with it because a captain in the CSF agrees with her.

Not only that, but apparently, no one noticed anything, since she gets to keep her job at Treasury afterwards, despite being already watched by Republic Intelligence.

And of course, like all women in the novels, she's in a relationship with a clone. Urgh.

KT's stupidity extrends beyond the numbers. And I thought Fett-wanking in LOTF was bad...

[Darksider]

And of course, like all women in the novels, she's in a relationship with a clone. Urgh.

This is one of the things that both annoys the hell out of me, and really creeps me out. Why is it that every female character in Traviss' novels has to develop intense romantic feelings for her pet clones? Sometimes I seriously wonder wether or not Traviss is going to get in trouble for stalking temura morrison.

[Joe Momma]

Sigh... let's take this up.

It also says a lot that she never actually finishes said calculation in the book but simply jumps to the next paragraph where Bessany concludes that this number of droids isn't feasible. So it's implied by that passage that the idea of quintillions of droids is highly questionable, but the actual evidence is not presented. This is at best an embarrassing lapse, and at worst sheer intellectual dishonesty.

Also, it seems to assume that all of the droids are being churned out from a single location. These numbers become even less problematic if there are a thousand factories, for example.

It's painfully obvious that this and all the other contortions are only needed to justify the "three million clones" number in contradiction with other EU sources. The numbers wouldn't need to even be mentioned in the story otherwise.

It is confirmed that the Jedi are part of the falsehood, acting on Republic orders, but they don't understand it themselves and don't seem to actively wonder why. The Jedi do express doubts in private but never pursue any sort of investigation for reasons never discussed in the book. The Jedi Order: 10,000 Good Germans.

It also fails to explain why no one else has publicly reported the numeric discrepancies. Imagine if you will that WWII had been nothing but a series of limited Battle of Mogadishu-size skirmishes, but no one outside of the military ever figured it out nor brought it up in public -- no officials in the affected areas, no civilian groups, no journalists, no one. How the hell is that a more realistic approach?

As I've said before, I actually thought Traviss's first two books were decent SW military fiction though the Mando aspects underwent a major exponential leap from minor flavor piece to utterly annoying wankage by the second book as did the Jedi-hate*. The third book continued all of the wrong trends and I will likely read the upcoming book out of sheer morbid curiousity.

*The Jedi-hate is all the sillier simply because there's plenty of grist for criticism of the Jedi Order which has already been used to good effect in books like Shatterpoint, but Traviss bypasses all of that to depict them alternatively as either martinets who are slavishly obedient to their superiors or lost souls looking for a Cult of Personality to which they can attach themselves. Those are really two sides of the same sad coin, which makes it an even lamer two-dimensional depiction.

[The Dark]

What I find more interesting is this: if it weighs 40 kg, the average B2 battle-droid has a density between 70 and 700 kg/m^3, which is still well less than that of water and an average human. To see why 40 kg is such a low estimate, imagine a 6 and a half foot tall human made entirely of metal, and then imagine him weighing as much as a big twelve year old kid. This 40 kg number isn't just a lower limit, it's a limit that's got to be at least two orders of magnitude lower than any reasonable estimate, unless battle droids are made chiefly of plastics, in which case all bets are off regarding her original argument.

To use an anecdotal example, there's a company in Thailand manufacturing metal models of the B1 battle droid. It's 1.7 meters tall (0.21 meters shorter than the actual thing), and weighs 100 kilos. While the droid wouldn't be solid metal, the exterior should be a dense alloy to provide protection, so the overall weight should not be significantly less than 100 kilograms for an unloaded B1 battle droid. The B2s should be much heavier, since they are larger, have a more solid torso, have internal weaponry, and appear to be better armored.

[Vehrec]

Here's some more calcs for you, just for fun: The proportion of the Earth's biosphere that equals the mass of the Grand Army of the Republic's clone component. The Earth's biosphere is a trivial part of it's total mass, measuring only 1.0148E16 kilos. For the purposes of this calc, each clone is assumed to weigh 75 kilos, a large muscular man. I will also assume that there are a quintillion enemy units, and that they are outnumbering our clones 200 to one.

5E15*75=3.75E17
3.75E17/1.0148E16=36.9

So we can see that even a Grand Army of truly epic proportions would only require the strip-harvesting of 37 primitive worlds of their organic material to feed the clone-vats. You could probably arrive at this figure by reclaiming corpses in the Core although such action is probably illegal.

[Revan's Fire]

I think my biggest problem with all things Traviss related is her belief that if it sounds big to her, it's big to everyone. 3 million clones? That's a million! It'd take me a long time to count that high, therefore, it's obviously applicable in this situation that requires big numbers! Her attempts to sell herself as a 'military journalist' make this pure base dishonesty even more nauseating.

[Connor MacLeod]

I've been aware of this for some time, Ender borrowed the book from a friend and made me aware of these things. I hear there's alot more problems too (her tactics are as worse as ever in the book from what I hear, especially in her handling of the "sieges".)

What I noticed especially when he brought it up, and was quoted above, was this:

She did, though, and numbers comforted her, so she considered his argument. Then she started wondering how much metal went into a battle droid--forty kilos, at the very least--and multiplied it by a quintillion just out of curiosity, and then started wondering where all that metal came from if 90 percent of the average rocky planet was silica, and not all the remaining 10 percent was the right kind of metal, or could be mined anyway, and mining and ore processing took up a lot of resources...

Just looking up on the average Wiki site says that 5% of the Earth's Crust is iron (alone) and that at least a third of its mass is iron. wiki here

I consider the nine planets.org
site to be much more reliable, but it basically validates the wiki article.

Its obvious from googling "Earth" in less than a minute Traviss didn't do her math. What's more she's blatantly ignoring canon capabilities established in STar Wrs elsewhere:

- The Hutts used automated droid construcction and refinement to build Darksaber from the Hoth asteroid belt in Darksaber. If the hutts could do it, so could the empire.

- World Devastators are an obvious example as well. What's even more amusing is that molecular furnaces used on World Devastators are apparently an established technology (the Coruscant Construction droids use them as well.) and other kinds of mining droids.

- The various sourcecs like the Rogue Squadron novels, the Jedi academy books and the essential guides for droids have the Coruscant construction droids. Mentioned here

- The SW galaxy had duplicators which were apparently some kind of replicator type device as well, and thoise were old technologies.

- Geonosis in AOTC was the site of both mining, ore processing,a nd construction facilities - the materials for droid construction was from the planet's own asteroid belt (Established in various sources like the DK books)

- in ROTS we saw Mustafar, which featured droids and other machines harvesting materisl from a volcanic world. Yet another source for materials.

As another note, Ender also commented that its rather silly to assume a droid would be made SOLELY of iron - the electronics and other internal components alone would need other parts (silicates included, IIRC) and there would probably be a fair bit of plastics involved as well (needing other resourcecs.) so it doesnt seem Travis gave that a great deal of thought either.

Since her second novel onwards my biggest beef with Traviss (and one reason why I havent bothered to buy her novels anynmore) is what appears to be her utter contempt for anything in STar Wars not expressly written for her, and her blatant dismissal of anything smacking of research. If I can dig all this stuff up in a cursory glance on Wikipedia, I fail to see why Traviss couldn't be bothered to. It's a rather poor gesture towards your fellow writers when you are so wrapped up in your own work that you cannot stop to check what other people may or may not have established. Traviss has done much to flout other people's efforts on the clone numbers as well - even people who want to retcon her own figures as well as the larger and more realistic ones tend to get ignored (like Wallace.)

[wjs7744]

I still don't know where the hell she gets the idea that she has the right to completely rewrite the entire prequel trilogy! Has any other EU author even come close to that level of audacity? Honestly, it's as if she doesn't even realise that Star Wars is George Lucas', not hers.

[Master of Ossus]

[snip]

More good stuff: assuming that Coruscant has a diameter equal to that of Earth, and it's a perfect sphere with a uniform covering of 1km of buildings on all sides, then the volume of buildings is 5E8 kilometers. In order for Coruscant's buildings to have a mass of less than or equal to the quintillion droid army that Traviss calculated (40 quintillion kilograms--and why the fuck would someone who understood numbers have to calculate what one quintillion times 40 is? Why wouldn't they immediately recognize that it was 40 quintillion?), the average density for Coruscant's buildings must be equal to or less than 5 GRAMS/meter^3. At sea level, air has a density of 1.2 kilograms per meter cubed.

In order for Traviss' droid army to be considered an EQUIVALENT construction feat, in terms of the mass of materials used, as the construction we see on Coruscant (hardly a unique city world in SW), the buildings on Coruscant would have to have a density that is conservatively on the order of 250 times less than that of AIR. To say that this is unrealistic is... well, the truth points to itself.

Dear Karen Traviss,

If you are out there and listening (for once in your life), then I implore you to think about about this: you simply will not win an intellectual debate over the size of the armies you have created. The figures you have pinned your hat on are so outlandish, so utterly devoid of scale, that if you try and argue with people who know what they're talking about, you will lose. No reasoned defense of your figures is possible, and the more you couch your arguments in reason, the more absurd you will appear. The ramifications of your figures, as shown above by Connor (among others) are not in any way realistic or sensible. Drop the topic and move on with your writing and your life.

[Battlehymn Republic]

What wanky things happened to Fett in LOTF? I haven't been following the character after his post-sarlaac bounty hunting days with Dengar.

[General Soontir Fel]

What wanky things happened to Fett in LOTF? I haven't been following the character after his post-sarlaac bounty hunting days with Dengar.

Maybe "wanky" isn't the right word. K.W. Jeter wanked his abilities a lot more, but he wrote about a different character. Jeter's Fett is uber--KT's Fett is awesome--that is, like all Mandalorians KT's writing about, he's the real good guy... a beacon of good qualities.

Here's what I remember (I've read the novels around the time when they came out, and I haven't re-read them, nor do I want to):

In Bloodlines, we learn that:
-Fett can take off in Slave I with the inertial dampeners turned off.
-Fett is one of the richest men in the galaxy.
-Despite not even knowing the language, he's somehow accepted as Mandalore

And in Sacrifice:
-Fett, like all Mandalorians, believes family is very important... despite the fact that his wife left him, and that his daughter and grandaughter have tried to kill him.
-Fett's wife has been frozen in carbonite for decades, and may still be alive.
-Despite never having met either, Fett instantly knows that it was Jacen Solo who killed Mara Jade Skywalker.
-Fett is going to get a cure from aging (I thought he was an unaltered clone, meaning no accelerated aging, and is over 70 years old by the time of LOTF, so he should be aging).

Frankly, I'm anticipating Revelation--not because I think it's going to be any good, but because Fett-wanking and Mandalorian-wanking is going to reach galactic proportions if there's any precedent.

[Alexian Cale]

Maybe it's just me, but I personally find it "a no brainer" that Jacen killed Mara Jade; I'm surprised that no one on the Council suspects it.


Edit: I don't consider myself a Fett fanboy, but he is extremely badass, and I was hoping that he'd kick the shit out of Jacen (who might be my least favorite SW character).

[Lord Pounder]

you missed the part where Mandalorian deigned fighter ships where to be considered a galactic threat, a million of them apparently. What the fuck is up with travis and figures in the millions?