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Of the minimalism-plagued EU, how much of the minimalism do you feel is caused by an honest misunderstanding of the scale, and how much of it do you feel is caused by lazy "OMG THE GALAXY IS IN PERIL" hack writing?

I'd say that everything up until the AOTC Fiascos were simple misunderstandings. Even the pathetic, ONSCREEN size of the GAOR was done by Lucas, while it was only from Traviss on that people tried deliberately shoving the SW universe's size into the smaller mold.

Most of the best writers in SW don't understand the magnitude scale, and most of them don't get anything like the full scale.
The best example would be Zahn. Even his newer books, after we've sene far more of the universe's scale had 8 ships as a major expenditure. For a galactic government. Being less effort relatively than primitive islanders sending out canoes.

I think, that frankly, no one, Lucas included agree with the high end, maximalist, realistic scale of the SW universe. AOTC showed that, although the CW animated series might help found whatever Lucas vision's is, which is towards the higher end of the scale.

DEATH wrote:I'd say that everything up until the AOTC Fiascos were simple misunderstandings.

You sure? Have you forgotten KJA and his "Daala's four ISDs are a massive threat to the New Republic"? An honest misunderstanding of scale is Zahn's 200-ship strong Katana fleet and Darksaber's fleet of 157 Star Destroyers being a massive threat to the New Republic. Still way inadequate, but at least they're trying to be big.

Hack writing is Daala's four ISDs, and more blatantly, the Corellian Trilogy. In that, not only can the New Republic only send four ships to a crisis involving a major trade hub, but it also has to beg for them from a remote world. That's not an honest misunderstanding, that's just really bad writing.

Coiler wrote:

DEATH wrote:I'd say that everything up until the AOTC Fiascos were simple misunderstandings.

You sure? Have you forgotten KJA and his "Daala's four ISDs are a massive threat to the New Republic"? An honest misunderstanding of scale is Zahn's 200-ship strong Katana fleet and Darksaber's fleet of 157 Star Destroyers being a massive threat to the New Republic. Still way inadequate, but at least they're trying to be big.

Hack writing is Daala's four ISDs, and more blatantly, the Corellian Trilogy. In that, not only can the New Republic only send four ships to a crisis involving a major trade hub, but it also has to beg for them from a remote world. That's not an honest misunderstanding, that's just really bad writing.

The misunderstanding of scale is far too systemic for it too be isolated.
As much as people hate to admit it, the scale of the SW universe shown in the EU consistently (As well as numbers shown in the movies, not derived, [except for the DS, DS2 construction times]) is far smaller than what it should be.
The numbers most often shown are simply flat out impossibly small for a galactic empire, but they're the most consistant ones. Even so, there's a difference between 4 ISD's and 200 ships (Albeit, ships that couldn't destroy 2-3 ISD's), but still, the scale is understandable in the overall context.

It's stupid as balls, and I prefer the scale shown in Star by Star, or the Prequel era books (Which have a far better grasp on numbers, despite the bitching and moaning about minimalism, and the stupidly small troop numbers. It's stall less egregious than what came before).

Coiler wrote:

DEATH wrote:I'd say that everything up until the AOTC Fiascos were simple misunderstandings.

You sure? Have you forgotten KJA and his "Daala's four ISDs are a massive threat to the New Republic"? An honest misunderstanding of scale is Zahn's 200-ship strong Katana fleet and Darksaber's fleet of 157 Star Destroyers being a massive threat to the New Republic. Still way inadequate, but at least they're trying to be big.

Hack writing is Daala's four ISDs, and more blatantly, the Corellian Trilogy. In that, not only can the New Republic only send four ships to a crisis involving a major trade hub, but it also has to beg for them from a remote world. That's not an honest misunderstanding, that's just really bad writing.

The Corellian Trilogy can to a degree be explained away as the New Republic leadership being the village idiots of galactic history. At least official literature does not assign quite that margin of incompetence to the Empire.

Part of an in-universe attempt at explanation for overall minimalism in the military is also the essentially peaceful nature of the Galactic Empire. It had no outer threats to deal with (excepting ultra-minimal alien polities such as the Nagai or the Ssi-Ruuk and technologically incapable, as well as largely unknown, factors such as the Chiss), and containing the internal rebellion was less of a military campaign and more of a police action. Palpatine's policy of turning the Inner Planets into safe luxury liner worlds was evidently successful, as the John Q Imperial overall remained loyal to his government, much as the National Socialists' policy of welfare won the German people's hearts.

(To illustrate just how pitiful the Empire's internal opposition truly was, there is the RotJ novelisation quote, which establishes the sum total of the space-capable Rebel Alliance being at Endor. This sets an upper limit in the millions range of personnel; in proportion to the galactic populace, they are literally fewer than the London Bombers compared to the population of Britain.)

In summary, the Empire did not need a vast military, with a single ISD being enough to seriously threaten any one planet not already under Imperial control. The WEG strike force of 25,000 ISDs, in addition to the individually smaller sector fleets of the thousands of sectors, would have been more than enough to conduct mobile operations as well as adequately garrisoning its territories.

(This still does not, of course, account for the early EU's extreme minimalism, such as Thrawn's "super" fleet analogous to 50 ISDs (one Dreadnaught more or less equalling 0.25 ISD) or his few thousand Spaarti cylinders, but it does reconcile the WEG numbers and other halfway reasonable sources.)

There is one way I've heard to reconcile it, which is that due to the speed of hyperdrive, attackers can be anywhere very fast, although response times can also be fast, the scale of weapons yield is enough even a fast raid can do damage.

So each side has to keep almost all their forces tied down in or near groups of systems (perhaps at a series of fleet bases). This breaks down the numbers into many smaller groups. Under these conditions, a few more vessels could make all the difference, giving local superiority to an attacked without weakening his own defences.

If, for example, both sides can muster ~50 ISD equivilants in the local star cluster, then 200 Dreadnaughts of ~150 various Star Destroyers would make tip the scale of any battle massively. Reinforcements from outside the local area can't be brought in for fear of the forces they were countering moving in on the worlds they were protecting.

A Rendili StarDrive Dreadnaught-class "heavy cruiser" is much less than a tenth the volume of the Kuat Drive Yards Imperator/Imperial-class Star Destroyer. Given its shape and firing arcs, and even granting its upgunning and modifications, giving it even a tenth the warfighting capacity of the Star Destroyer is very charitable. The Dark Force is barely comparable to the commonest one-mile Star Destroyer complement only of a minimally equipped single Sector Group. The Empire has thousands of Sector Groups. That's even according to WEG.

Really people focus in on examples like the military figures excessively; at least in spirit, if not in number, often the number of warships committed a single engagement does not seem absurd - and extrapolated upward given the varying importance of the world and particular engagement, yields realistic figures. The superficial impressions are much more often tolerable to verisimilitude than the stated figures. However, how about egregious stupidity like refusing to acknowledge that Coruscant's population exceeds one trillion? That mining operations of strategic resources and vital to the Empire will not be done with fucking slaves and bare hands (I can tolerate early 20th century mining if its done on the cheap by some prick local potentate partially to teach a lesson and just to keep shit cheap) when the galactic community clearly is at a state of civilization whereby starlifting and the complete stripping and dismembering of planets is practical and should be commonplace? Or the fact that the EU seriously maintains that a volcanic Io-like world called Sarapin supplies 80%(!) of the Core Worlds' energy needs, and that it is from geothermal resources. You cannot make this up.

Illuminatus Primus wrote:A Rendili StarDrive Dreadnaught-class "heavy cruiser" is much less than a tenth the volume of the Kuat Drive Yards Imperator/Imperial-class Star Destroyer. Given its shape and firing arcs, and even granting its upgunning and modifications, giving it even a tenth the warfighting capacity of the Star Destroyer is very charitable.

I know it is unreasonable, I merely went by what the Thrawn trilogy gave in actual performance. If nothing else, it is the absolute upper limit for EU supremacists.

Or the fact that the EU seriously maintains that a volcanic Io-like world called Sarapin supplies 80%(!) of the Core Worlds' energy needs, and that it is from geothermal resources. You cannot make this up.

What in the name of Kun?! Is this actually true? What is the source?

Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds: Clone Campaigns, Star Wars: Force Commander, and also Coruscant and the Core Worlds (though I may be mistaken on the last count) describes the hydrothermal Saudi Arabia of the Core Worlds. In my own notes and such for eventual essays and stories, I intend to retcon Sarapin as the most important hypermatter refinery and storage complex and transit shipping hub in the Core Worlds.

So putting geothermal plants on some volcanically active world in another star system, storing the power up in batteries, and shipping them back to your own system is supposed to be easier than just setting up a bunch of solar panels in one of your lagrange points and beaming the energy back via microwaves?

Holy guacamole that's retarded.

Oh man, lol. I totally forgot that Sarapin was supposed to be an energy exporter. It's so prima facie absurd no one should take it seriously. The planet is a source of metals like Nkklon or Mustafar and the geothermal plants power the mines, refineries, forges and what have you.

I always maintained that the uberpower cells of SW use some kind of allotrope easily harvested from magma. So Sarapin exports 80% of the galaxies batteries.

Not to be pedantic, but I don't think one planet should be exporting 80% of the galaxy's anything.

Darth Raptor wrote:The planet is a source of metals like Nkklon or Mustafar and the geothermal plants power the mines, refineries, forges and what have you.

Mining worlds are themselves kind of an odd idea if you think about it. Most solar systems should have more than enough metal in them to satisfy the needs of a planetary civilization.

I suppose we can conclude that all these mining planets are fantastically rich (like nickel-iron asteroids blown up into the size of planets), or have very high amounts of useful rare materials. Super-easy SW FTL undoubtedly helps greatly in making them economically viable.

An energy exporter?? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot over?
Unless it's in Transformer style energon cube wankery that just isn't going to happen
Exporting the raw materials with which to create energy from - yes
Exporting raw energy in violation of the laws of physics - no
Perhaps the EU authors need to be hit over the head with a physics textbook a few times before they are permitted to write

Darth Nostril wrote:An energy exporter?? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot over?
Unless it's in Transformer style energon cube wankery that just isn't going to happen
Exporting the raw materials with which to create energy from - yes
Exporting raw energy in violation of the laws of physics - no

Technically, them exporting energy does NOT violate the laws of physics. As Ender already mentioned, they might just be the galaxy's major battery exporter. Them supporting 80% of the Core Worlds, while ALSO (tentatively) 'physically possible' within the confines of Star Wars physics, is dubious at best.

Perhaps the EU authors need to be hit over the head with a physics textbook a few times before they are permitted to write

THAT was sort of painfully obvious about the time Zahn got the EU back going to begin with.

Heh, I like Ender's comment. I'm going to somehow find a way to say Sarapin was the system which had the single largest hypermatter stored reserves (actual and capacity) for any single site, the greatest single hypermatter refining and processing capacity for any single site, and the single largest hypermatter shipping transit hub in the Core Worlds, but it only serves something like 2% or less of actual hypermatter traffic in the Core Worlds (enough to effect prices and supply bottlenecks in the short term), in order to shore up its logistical value in canon, but I'll also throw in a line how the planet Sarapin has a mining and factory complex for a particular brand of specialized batteries/power cells, including a rare, very narrow and particularly specialized class of battery, for which it represents 80% of Core Worlds regional market share. And the factories have some power provided by specialized geothermal extraction. Sometimes children's books confuse the three.

I like the idea that the geothermal energy is used in hypermatter production. If you assume hypermatter reactors are a common power source then the "energy export" thing sort of makes sense. It exports "energy" in the form of hypermatter which is burned in reactors. It would be like saying we get a lot of energy from the Middle East.

Do you have any idea how low the energy density of a planet's heat radiating into space is? Its pathetic. A ISD's peak power output competes with the continuous output of the fucking Sun. Its like trying to synthesize enough fuel for a conventional CV with your little backyard wind turbine or roof solar panels. Yeah technically it could be done but it'd take forever and be fucking pointless.

Yeah I know that, I'm just trying to find an explanation that's as faithful to canon as possible without being retarded. Whatever would make it a particularly good site for hypermatter production it wouldn't be raw energy density. Maybe it's rich in some exotic substance which is used in the process. Hell, I'll admit that's still contrived as fuck. The idea of it being a major exporter of batteries is probably better.

Illuminatus Primus wrote:Do you have any idea how low the energy density of a planet's heat radiating into space is? Its pathetic.

~10^17 watts IIRC. However, this situation is a little better. To be so active implies it is either like Mustafar an under extreme tidal interaction (no evidence of that), or very young. If the latter is true, then it is going to have an awful lot of heavy unstable isotopes in its makeup that haven't decayed away yet. Having fissile material being readily accessible and not requiring enrichment would be a great boon for energy production. The fact that this is a core world (with closer stars and greater accumulation of heavy metals as a result) means that it will have a greater concentration of such elements then earth even before you consider the age of the planet and its decay rate.

So there is another possibility for being an exporter, though I prefer batteries due to the mass. Figure a few micrograms of exotic metal X in each battery (most of the mass will be other things), a planet masses ~10^24 kgs, figure about 10 rocky planets or moons in the system, even if it is a tiny fraction of that mass that is a lot of batteries. Uranium plutonium etc will be consumed much faster.

Junghalli wrote:

Darth Raptor wrote:The planet is a source of metals like Nkklon or Mustafar and the geothermal plants power the mines, refineries, forges and what have you.

Mining worlds are themselves kind of an odd idea if you think about it. Most solar systems should have more than enough metal in them to satisfy the needs of a planetary civilization.

I suppose we can conclude that all these mining planets are fantastically rich (like nickel-iron asteroids blown up into the size of planets), or have very high amounts of useful rare materials. Super-easy SW FTL undoubtedly helps greatly in making them economically viable.

I was always partial to the idea that the SW civilization is so ancient that it's forgotten half of what it ever did (CentrePoint Station is a good example of this), and some of those "asteroids" are actually huge chunks of refined metals from the great works of some ancient civilization. These pieces of debris drifted through space for eons and eventually accumulated a covering of rock and ice.

Alternatively, they were pieces of a Dyson Sphere or some other artificial habitat, so that they were deliberately covered with rock and other materials, and when the installation was destroyed, they ended up getting scattered.

Darth Wong wrote:I was always partial to the idea that the SW civilization is so ancient that it's forgotten half of what it ever did (CentrePoint Station is a good example of this), and some of those "asteroids" are actually huge chunks of refined metals from the great works of some ancient civilization. These pieces of debris drifted through space for eons and eventually accumulated a covering of rock and ice.

Alternatively, they were pieces of a Dyson Sphere or some other artificial habitat, so that they were deliberately covered with rock and other materials, and when the installation was destroyed, they ended up getting scattered.

And if you wawnt a good example of that, look at how Naboo was described in the DK books (a planet full of some sort of "plasma" that really isnt a plasma but apparently no molten core). Having the planet artificially made/constructed or "forgotten" would probably be a better explanation for that than saying it was "naturally occuring." Then again, maybe it was just the Will of the Force

Edit: There was also that neutronium rich moon, Myrkr where the Vornskr developed and you had metal-filled trees (or oens with metal content, etc.) I'm sure if I bothered I could come up with alot more obscure and goofy examples, but I'm feeling lazy tonight.

double-edit: Oh, and Centerpoint is interesting because what I remember of the Corellian trilogy indicated that it wasn't ALL some big, mysterious, alien aritfact (Except maybe in scale/application) - Lando as I recall understood enough of the physics/principles behind it to figure out what it could do, teh energy requirements, and whatnot. He even figured out that the tech behind Centerpoint's repulsor was based on relatively older technology even (compared to what the SW galaxy had at the time.) That too tends to back up the "lost and forgotten" concept.

Darth Wong wrote:I was always partial to the idea that the SW civilization is so ancient that it's forgotten half of what it ever did (CentrePoint Station is a good example of this), and some of those "asteroids" are actually huge chunks of refined metals from the great works of some ancient civilization. These pieces of debris drifted through space for eons and eventually accumulated a covering of rock and ice.

Alternatively, they were pieces of a Dyson Sphere or some other artificial habitat, so that they were deliberately covered with rock and other materials, and when the installation was destroyed, they ended up getting scattered.

I think that would be a really good explanation for the "Mandalorian Iron" bullshit, as well as being a nice nod to A Mote In God's Eye. The extremely warlike group has had its plant pounded by ships falling out of orbit. Eons later, dig them up. Would explain ultralight weight, damage resistant superconducting metal that can match starship hull plating without needing mor ethen a hammer, anvil, and fire to forge.

Ender wrote:

Illuminatus Primus wrote:Do you have any idea how low the energy density of a planet's heat radiating into space is? Its pathetic.

~10^17 watts IIRC. However, this situation is a little better. To be so active implies it is either like Mustafar an under extreme tidal interaction (no evidence of that), or very young. If the latter is true, then it is going to have an awful lot of heavy unstable isotopes in its makeup that haven't decayed away yet. Having fissile material being readily accessible and not requiring enrichment would be a great boon for energy production. The fact that this is a core world (with closer stars and greater accumulation of heavy metals as a result) means that it will have a greater concentration of such elements then earth even before you consider the age of the planet and its decay rate.

So there is another possibility for being an exporter, though I prefer batteries due to the mass. Figure a few micrograms of exotic metal X in each battery (most of the mass will be other things), a planet masses ~10^24 kgs, figure about 10 rocky planets or moons in the system, even if it is a tiny fraction of that mass that is a lot of batteries. Uranium plutonium etc will be consumed much faster.

These are all good theories, but I think the only way to maintain the claims face value content at any level is to break them up and assume different but confused characteristics (i.e., its a major logistics point for Core Worlds by say, it being a major hypermatter depot for Republic forces, and it using hydrothermals for local power generation, and the 80% being some side industry like a particular class of specialized battery for which it has the market share). You can't make it make sense for all those things simultaneously using one theory. Certainly your theories are acceptable, but then they shouldn't be major logistics points of failure just for recovery of fissiles or production of batteries in general.