[SD.net data base] Heir to the Jedi

[DarthPooky]

This thred is like the tarkin one but for the new novel heir to the empire and to discouse the different technical aspects of the new canon.

This interesting quote came from chapter 3 page 37-38

the blade was not pure light, of course : it was energy from the same sort of power cell that fueled blasters given form by passing through a kyber crystal as superheated plasma that arced at the top and returned to the hilt. It didn't give off heat until it touched something solid; the rest of the time it's power was contained by a force field.

Cool the first official mention of the operating characteristics of the light saber Your thoughts.

[Adam Reynolds]

I'm not sure how much use this has now that it is no longer canon. The idea with Tarkin is that it was the first canon source in the post-Disney continuity.

[FTeik]

Heir to the Empire is twenty years old until they published a special edition.

[Crazedwraith]

He may mean Heir To The Jedi, which has only just come out.

[DarthPooky]

Oh crap I'm sorry I meant heir to the jedi. It was kinda late ware I'm from when posted it.

[DarthPooky]

Oops sorry is there any way I can change the title of this thred to jedi

[Rogue 9]

You need to ask a moderator; editing is restricted in this forum.

[DarthPooky]

Ok so ware do I go to talk to a mod.

[NecronLord]

Ok so ware do I go to talk to a mod.

Fixed it for you and deleted the failed post.

[DarthPooky]

Hay thanks a million. Now back to the topic at hand. The part of the quote that mentions a force field makes me think that that is the part that deflects blaster bolts. What do you guys think.

[Balrog]

Good thing I checked the forums first, otherwise I would've made a duplicate post I'll just copy everything I was going to do into here.

Mini-review: Heir to the Jedi takes place an indeterminate time after ANH but well before ESB; although no definitive time period is given it seems to take place closer in time to the events of ANH than later. It also wasn't quite as good as Tarkin unfortunately, which I blame on a few things. It is told entirely from the first-person perspective of Luke Skywalker, which means it was important for the book to really capture Luke's voice throughout the story. Unfortunately in a number of parts it didn't, which threw me off a bit. Pacing is sometimes off as well, parts of the book just fly by while others linger a bit in certain sections. Finally there's a sense of minimalism in terms of the characters. The book starts off with the Alliance sending Luke to negotiate an arms deal with a Rodian clan, and I just can't help thinking they must have a trained diplomat or someone better trained for this. It's that common complain that despite a literal galaxy of characters everything revolves around the classic cast. This sense starts to dissipate as the book progresses but it left a bitter taste in my mouth.

As before I tried to keep spoilers to a bare minimum while highlighting passages which flesh out the background and provide fodder for debate. First batch of posts right now, will follow up with more later.

There's no one around to answer all my questions now that Ben's gone.[...]I know Han likes to scoff at the idea of the Force, but when a man's body simply disappears at the touch of a lightsaber, that's more than "simple tricks and nonsense."

And I know the Force is real. I've felt it.

I still feel it, actually, but I think it's like knowing there's something hidden in the sand while you're skimming above it. You see ripples on the surface, hints that something is moving down there - maybe something small, maybe something huge - living a completely different life out of your sight. And going after it to see what's underneath the surface might be safe and rewarding, or it might be the last thing you ever do. I need someone to tell me when to dive into those ripples and when to back off.

I thought I heard Ben's voice a couple of times during the Battle of Yavin, but I'm wondering now if that really happened. Maybe I only thought I did; maybe that was my subconscious speaking to me - a kind of wishful thinking. He's been silent since, and I don't feel I can talk to anyone else about the Force.

So this is pretty firm confirmation that there are no other Force users around post-Yavin who can teach Luke anything about the Force, unless Luke is acting totally out of character and simply dismissing potential teachers as being not Jedi enough. Which brings back that interesting question of what exactly is going to happen to all the Jedi we see in the Rebels cartoons.

Leia is cloistered with the leaders of the Alliance in the fleet, which is currently hiding in the Sujimis sector around an ice planet no one has paid attention to since the Clone Wars.

The Alliance fleet hiding in the Outer Rim. This location will be important for later quotes regarding hyperspace travel.

She wore desert camo fatigues tucked into thick-soled brown boots, a blaster strapped to her left hip, and what looked like a compact slug rifle strapped to her back, held in place by a leather band crossing diagonally across her torso.

I flicked a finger at the rifle. "You hunt sandstone scorpions with that?"

"Yep. Can't use a blaster on them. Their armor deflects heat too well."

"I'd heard that."

"And since so many people are wearing blaster armor these days, a throwback weapon that punches through it is surprisingly effective if you know how to shoot one."

Unsurprisingly, designing your armor to protect against certain attacks but not others leaves some vulnerabilities. Also clearly some animals are just naturally blaster-resistant.

We had to navigate several different hyperspace lanes to get to Rodia from the Sujimis sector and I was getting used to the way the Jewel handled, so our trip probably took more time than strictly necessary. Fortunately we weren't in a hurry and I enjoyed every minute of it.

A bit about the route Luke took, again giving context for later quotes.

I engaged the ship's baby laser cannon and waited until I got a system go-ahead, then dived on the lateral axis toward the TIE fighters. I flipped on the deflector shields and locked on the targeting computer. One look at the ships and I knew the TIE pilots were hanging on to the orientation of the Star Destroyer from which they had deployed; they had a sense of which way was "up" and they were sticking to it, which is a limiting and even dangerous perception to hold on to in space. Up and down don't really have a meaningful use until you're in atmosphere. I deliberately rolled as I dived, adjusted my nose so that the leading TIE fighter was in my sights, and fired.

It's curious how Luke seems to recognize this fact while these TIE pilots do not. It could be just that these pilots are newbies since there's no mention of this in any other incidents.

We arrived at a dock that appeared at first to be unguarded, but I sensed somehow that wasn't the case. After all the security I saw getting this far, I couldn't imagine they'd leave this wide open. Laneet caught my expression and interpreted it correctly. "There are guards. They're in stealth armor."

"Oh, really? I've never seen stealth armor."

Laneet made a noise similar to a chortle but closer to a digestive problem. "Hence the name."

It reminded me of Ben's assertion that your eyes can deceive you. The Force would help me pierce through such illusions if I could learn how.

A return of stealth armor from the EU which hides the wearer, at least from the visual spectrum. Luke opines about being unable to see past these stealth suits but it could be the sense he had felt earlier was the Force trying to warn him.

"Kenobi! I know that name! He came to Rodia during the Clone Wars to help return a kidnapped child from another clan. Am I to understand he's still alive?"

For a moment I felt my throat close up, but then I was able to say, "Not anymore. He died at the Battle of Yavin."

"Ah! So a Jedi was involved in the destruction of the Death Star. The Alliance's victory there makes much more sense now. The Jedi have a way of turning daunting taskes into routine ones."

I decided not to mention that I'd been the one who'd delivered the fatal shot to the exhaust port. Besides, Obi-Wan had helped me.

It's curious that Luke says Kenobi died during the Battle of Yavin since technically he died long before that on the Death Star itself. It could be he's purposefully conflating the earlier escape from the DS and the later attack on it as one event. Or he could be telling the truth "from a certain point of view" to the Rodian rather than get into the gritty details.

Insects and birds and amphibians continued to drone and chirp and croak, heedless of my problems, but their noise existed on another level than auditory. When I stretched out with my feelings and tried to locate the ghest through the Force, all I got was an overwhelming sense of the life surrounding me - nothing so specific as a single bird or fish or predator. I knew that many of the creatures were hungry and wanted to eat other creatures, but there was no sense that a certain one wished to eat me.

Not surprisingly, Luke is having difficulty distinguishing specific life forms in a setting chock full of them. Presumably with better training this wouldn't be as difficult.

Doing my best to relax and leave myself open to the Force, I activated Huulik's lightsaber and marveled again at how the hilt didn't feel quite right; even though I'd wiped it down with a damp cloth and removed all hints of debris, it still seemed to want to escape my grip with a slippery, viscous surface tension that was absent from my own lightsaber. Was it a function of Rodian versus human manufacture? Or was my lightsaber better suited to me because it had been constructed by my father?

The blade was not pure light, of course: It was energy from the same sort of power cell that fueled blasters, given form by passing through a kyber crystal as superheated plasma that arced at the top and returned to the hilt. It didn't give off heat until it touched something solid; the rest of the time its power was contained by a force field.

So a little canon information about how lightsabers work (surely enough to allow us to start building them, no?) and the possibility that lightsabers react differently when not being carried by the one who built them. Since the Force is clearly involved in its actual construction (see below) this shouldn't be a surprise.

As before, I kept myself open to the Force, but now I tried to focus on the lightsaber and feel the Force inherent in it. Closing my eyes, I explored the top of the hilt right below the emitter with my fingers, searching for any tactile clues. The surface retained the same strange slick feeling, but I detected nothing unusual at the top, or around the button or dial, or even on the rest of the hilt. When I ran my finger fully around the base, however, clockwise and then counterclockwise, eyes still closed and trying to feel the Force, a snick announced the appearance of a fissure lengthwise down the hilt; after another soft click, the casing popped free, revealing yet another metal sheath, one that looked more like mine and had visible screws. Artoo unscrewed them for me and I was able to lift off one half of the sheath and reveal the innards.

The power cell at the base was insulated and held no interest for me. Above that was a platform for the primary focusing crystal that gave the lightsaber its color. Two additional crystals floated above it, balanced so precariously on mounting ridges that they could easily be disturbed - and they had been. They lay askew, and I feared I must have done that in the process of disassembling it. The lightsaber wouldn't work properly now, even if I put it back together; without proper focusing there was no telling what would happen if I tried to turn it on. It might explode. And aligning those crystals by hand would be impossible - I sensed that it had to be done with the Force, and only through the Force would I know whether it was aligned properly or not. They were wafer-thin slices of crystal, too, a beautiful clear amethyst, and might scratch or cloud with handling. Moving them precisely with the Force would ensure that they remained pristine.

The lightsaber's construction confirmed for me what I had already suspected: Far from being merely a feeling of interconnectedness that could guide your actions or a method of tricking the weak-willed, the Force could be used to manipulate solid objects. However, the skill required to construct a lightsaber - or even put this one back together - was a parsec or five beyond my current abilities.
...
Obi-Wan had never addressed telekinesis with me. It was likely that I wasn't strong enough to begin training in such an advanced field of study.

So we have the return of the Force being required to construct lightsabers and the inner layout of one (a primary color crystal and two additional ones? why does that seem so familiar... ). I do wonder if there are technological ways to get around the Force requirement though. Using precise force fields would allow for the safe handling of the crystals and exact alignment, so it would depend on being able to determine if the alignment is correct, whether it is simply a physical aspect of how the crystals are place or something more mystical.

Also, while it took me back a bit, there really is no demonstration or even mention of telekinesis in the original Star Wars movie. It really is only in ESB where we see Luke and Vader moving things with their mind. There are touches of this all through the book, where things we take for granted or assume simply are really aren't and get 'discovered' by Luke, which are nice.

Meditating and getting to a quite place when alone was somehow different from feeling the Force in combat or while piloting or practicing against drones. When I opened myself to the Force in those situations, it was more of an instinctive process, and I felt guided and warned in an almost effortless way, perhaps owing to a combat-ready state of action and reaction where there is no time for thought, and a profound sense of personal danger.

A little bit about how Jedi precognition works in combat, it matches previous descriptions from the EU and the movies.

We took a longer route back to the fleet, a circuitous path that involved forging a new hyperspace lane between Kirdo and Orto Plutonia - but only after scanning the ship for tracers and spyware. Without immediate pressure and with the luxury of time, Artoo minimized the inherent risk of traveling along unknown hyperspace lanes in conjuction with the nav computer of the Desert Jewel.

Confirmation that anyone can make a new hyperspace route as long as they have some time, a good nav computer and an astromech on hand.

"So one of Dad's scouts made a discovery recently on this moon orbiting a planet in the Deep Core, and when Dad got the news, he sent a full crew out - his best one. Hasn't heard from them in a couple of weeks, and he wants to know if his collection crew is still there, and, if so, whether anything can be salvaged - especially if there are any living or dead crew and critters on the ship. He'll pay handsomely for any news of it."

"Why doesn't he simply send someone else to go check it out?"

"It's a new discovery, as I said, and he'd prefer to keep it quiet. Industrial espionage is huge in his business. Crews can make a lot of cash on the side tipping off his competitors. He knows firsthand because he pays bribes to the crews of his competitors, as well. He was hoping I could go by myself because he doesn't really trust anyone else, but I told him I was serving the Alliance now and I am. And the other thing is, the hyperspace lanes to this system aren't well established yet, and being in the Deep Core with all those mass shadows makes it even more risky. So he needs someone who's not only loyal but also willing to take a leap. The nav computers on the Jewel are pretty good, but I don't know if they're that good."

So besides an expose of the cutthroat nature of the SW biomedical industry, we have further confirmation of the difficult nature of trying to navigate hyperspace through the Deep Core. While it's not impossible it requires skills and equipment which isn't too commonplace.

Pasher was located in the Inner Rim at a sort of interstellar dead end.

The location of our hero at this point, provides context for later hyperspace travel quote.

"This is Luke Skywalker, Daddy. He's with the Alliance and he'll be going with me to Fex."

"Pleasure to meet you, sir," I said, nodding at him.

"Hmph! Skywalker. Where have I heard that name?"

"He's the one who destroyed the Death Star, Daddy."

"Ah! The pilot!"

It seems knowledge of who destroyed the Death Star is somewhat common by now. The question is whether the Imperials themselves were the one to broadcast it or if it's something that's come out of the Alliance.

Artoo decrypted the Fexian file and used the coordinates therein to plot a route as we left the atmosphere of Pasher. I asked him to plot a safe trip into a well-known Core system before trying to navigate the Deep Core. When making a dangerous jump like that it was always best to pause, confirm your position among the stars, and recalculate using the latest possible data.

Pretty self-explanatory.

The human's limbs went slack, his eyes rolled up in his head, and he fell forward just as the Bith had. Hafner finally got it together, much too late, and shot a stun blast at the unnamed human and at the Bith. Tiny squeals resulted, and the predators lay revealed: small six-legged creatures with spindly limbs that ended in clawed fingers designed to clutch and hold on to prey. Their heads were long snouts with a bulbous skull at the top ringed by eight eyes evenly spaced around it. Their bodies had sharp rigid spines in four rows of four each, presented radially so that anything trying to slap away the creatures would get poked. In each case, the creatures had their snout inserted into a hole in the helmet. Hafner leaned in closer to the human to get a better look.
-snip-
Reaching out with the tip of his blaster, Hafner thrust it underneath the creature's neck and lifted, pulling the flexible snout out of the cavity only to discover that there was another, thinner snout, like a translucent hose, inside of that one, and as it came free, blood and chunks of brain slipped out and plopped wetly onto the helmet.
-snip-
Being careful to avoid the spines, Hafner picked up the limp alien form with his gloved hands. "Not heavy. Thin bones but very strong ones," he said. "And look at the skin. Colors radiate wherever I touch it." ... "Must be a highly advanced chromatophore system in their skin." Cradling the creature by its lower extremities in his left hand, he grabbed hold of the snout with his right. The clear feeding tube retracted by reflex on contact. Hafner continued his commentary. "Hmm. The snout looks completely flexible, but that's not entirely the case. There's a bone inside it along one edge - wait. It moved to the bottom now. How strange."
-snip-
Hafner's fingers probed at the bone, and it moved again. "Look at this. The bone inside that runs along the snout actually rotates in a full circle. Must be an extraordinary socket and musculature system at the base of the skull, and that feeding tube must retract far up inside for it to be allowed such free movement."

His fingers clutched around the edge of the snout. "Down here there is a ring of bone, near the orifice. Yes, it is a ring indeed. I wonder if..."

He squeezed and pulled down against the skin of the snout - and unveiled a horror. It was a rotary blade of teeth, pointed down and insulated by its angle from cutting the inside of the creature's snout. But they could cut through a helmet - and then a skull - just fine. The teeth were discolored but otherwise undamaged.

"This is incredible," Hafner mumbled. "They use these teeth and a rotary motion to drill through the skulls of their prey, damaing the brain, and then when their victims fall down, they insert their feeding tubes and...well. Feed. What must they be made of, to penetrate through these helmets like they did? Some sort of crystalline coating to the teeth, perhaps, as hard as diamond?"

The Fexian Skullborer. And yes that is it's actual name. The things read like something straight out of a cheesy horror movie, which is coincidentally how this part of the book reads.

We got a toxicity report that indicated the Bith would have fallen stone dead of heart failure if the skullborer hadn't penetrated his helmet first - so slapping at them was not an option. There was some speculative reports on the skullborer's skeleton and the composition of the drilling teeth. The helmets worn by the first crew were about an eight on the hardness scale, so the teeth were at a minimum a nine and possibly a ten, considering the speed at which they had bored through the material. Our helmets were now nine point five on the hardness scale, including the visor, while the rest of the armor was standard, albeit insulated from stun blasts. Since stunning had proven to be effective, recommended tactics suggested immediate application of the stun stick if attacked.

A bit more on the brain-eating creatures from outer space. It may be a bit of a leap to assume whichever hardness scale SW uses is the same as our own, but if so it gives us an idea of the hardness of standard personal armor.

It would be hours before we made it all the way into the Core, where we would take time to make the final calculations prior to making the last jump to Fex.

So we have a confirmed travel time of hours to travel from the Inner Rim to the Core, particularly between Pasher and their final jump-off point into the Deep Core. While no exact distances are given, with the size of the galaxy and relative locations of the Inner Rim and Core regions, that's pretty damn fast. Presumably they were traveling along known hyperspace routes to speed their progress.

After our meal, the armor begged to be tried on. The body was a strong but fairly lightweight insulated mesh, padded and reinforced on the torso and spine, designed to stop kinetic rounds and claws, I supposed. The helmets, by contrast, were almost absurdly heavy and cumbersome. We first had to put on a thick rubber insulation mask that the instructions claimed would shield us from the inevitable use of stun sticks to our own heads. It swept down across our collarbones and across the breadth of our shoulders. Then the helmet was fitted on top of that, so heavy that maintaining balance would be a problem. Any sudden movement forward or backward would tug your body in that direction, as I demonstrated by trying to look down. Nakari threw her head back to laugh at me and fell backward, pawing unsuccessfully at the walls to keep herself upright.
-snip-
It was a problem, but not an insurmountable one. We managed to regain our feet, but not quickly and not without considerable strain. If we went down on Fex, we would not spring back up again. Running for more than a few steps might be impossible.

"Did they even test these things before giving them to us?" I wondered aloud, steadying myself against the walls of the passageway.

The comical suits our heroes will use to combat the things from beyond the stars, and they're not even powered to assist the wearer. You know I'm not surprised the suits turned out this way. This is coming from the same guy who thought it'd be a swell idea to send his own daughter into danger rather than something which would make more sense like droids (to be fair a skullborer could still attack a droid, mistaking it for a living thing, and bore into its skull damaging important components before realizing there's no delicious grey matter to suck out, but still). Additionally we do find out that armor which defends against kinetic attacks are still being made, despite the rarity of slugthrowing weapons.

We had enough empty hours ahead that some rack ime was not only feasible but advisable, so we took advantage and asked Artoo to wake us when he was ready to jump into the Deep Core. He did so, and after we guzzled soome black, bitter instant caf that succeeded in clearing our heads while savaging our taste buds, I annoyed him by asking to triple-check his coordinates with the Desert Jewel's nav computer. It took him less than ten seconds, but he sounded affronted.

"Sorry, Artoo, but I've never jumped into the Deep Core before. It's crowded in there and things move fast and this isn't a well-established route yet, so I think an abundance of caution is warranted." That seemed to mollify him, and I let him take us in for the jump. It was only fifteen minutes until the white lines of the stars collapsed into pinpoints again and we were in the Sha Qarot system, a red sun and a black planet criscrossed with a web of crazed orange faults. Fex appeared from orbit to be a serene contrast to the angry planet, a cool soft plum scoop of ice cream. The whole system was beautiful from orbit, and since we were in the Deep Core the sky was thick with stars.

So we have an explicit time scale with this hyperspace jump, going from a point in the Core (likely a point on the border between the two regions) and Fex within the Deep Core. Even if we wanted to stupidly low-ball this example and have them be a lightyear or less from each other, that's still insanely fast.

And as soon as I hit the ground, two more weights landed on me in quick succession, thunk-thunk, right on my visor, though I saw nothing. A white circle of abraded polymer appeared directly above my left eye and I could hear the material scream as it was torn to shreds by the invisible creature drilling directly toward my head.

So apparently visors with a hardness of nine point five on whatever scale SW uses can be drilled through by the skullborers' teeth (don't worry though, it takes them long enough that Luke survives, sorry for the spoiler )

The skullborer had chewed through her glove like tissue and had sawn through the web of tendons in the back of her hand, though it didn't break any of the bones; Nakari had blasted it to jelly before it could drill so far. It was impossible for her to make a fist now. I slapped a bacta patch on it, gave her something for the pain, and let the automated medical system continue from there. She'd need a true surgeon to repair the damage, but the system could keep her stable and free of infection.

The injury suffered by Nakari, will become relevant later.

Though my theories would probably be laughable to anyone with a better knowledge of biology, I wondered if the skullborers might get smarter depending on what they ate. Would the prions and neurons of their meals accrete somehow and improve their thinking? If such a thing were possible, maybe eating the double brain of a Cerean would explain how their tactics adapted and improved - because they had been pursuing a tactical strategy of going after Nakari's hands. And come to think of it, when they attacked my face, the way that one of them landed on top of the other was clever, too - I couldn't get to the one on the bottom using the stun sticks, and they hadn't seen the blasters get used yet, so they wouldn't have been able to account for that. But that possibility raised other questions. The one that landed on the other's back would have necessarily been punctured by the first's spines, so if that had been planned it had been a planned sacrifice. Could they even see each other while camouflaged? Maybe that one-two business had been a complete accident. The two that attacked Nakari had obviously coordinated their attack, though, which made me wonder how they communicated. We had heard no vocalizations from them until we caused them pain.

The simplest explanation - and far more likely than the idea that they could get smarter by eating brains - was that the skullborers were at least semi-sentient, maybe even sentient to begin with. But between them killing the first two collection crews and me and Nakari killing them back, we had never had time to puzzle out their status.

Well of course they get smarter by eating our brains, that's how space horror movie monsters work! It would be interesting though to find out just what sort of evolutionary impetus would result in a creature such as the skullborer. Mentioned in the book but not quoted is the fact that other creatures on Fex either have crystal-like armoring on their heads and shoulders or some other defensive mechanism (i.e. retracting head within body), but I wonder whether the animals developed these defenses as a direct result of the skullborers, or whether they were already going towards armored body parts for another reason and the skullborers developed based on this changing dynamic. Or it could be a Wizard did it, who knows.

Nakari's left hand, encased in a thin protective sheath full of bacta, waved at me from the ship's loading ramp. "Those must have been some sweet dreams," she said with a smile.

"Yeah, I feel rested. How about you?"

"High on meds and days away from getting back full use of my hand, but otherwise functional and happy to be here."

SW medical tech means, despite taking sever injury to her hand including tendons severed, our intrepid heroine will have her hand back to normal in a few days.

[Elheru Aran]

[snip] I need someone to tell me when to dive into those ripples and when to back off.

I thought I heard Ben's voice a couple of times during the Battle of Yavin, but I'm wondering now if that really happened. Maybe I only thought I did; maybe that was my subconscious speaking to me - a kind of wishful thinking. He's been silent since, and I don't feel I can talk to anyone else about the Force.

So this is pretty firm confirmation that there are no other Force users around post-Yavin who can teach Luke anything about the Force, unless Luke is acting totally out of character and simply dismissing potential teachers as being not Jedi enough. Which brings back that interesting question of what exactly is going to happen to all the Jedi we see in the Rebels cartoons.

Point of order: this is from Luke's POV, so naturally he's not going to be aware of any Jedi alive after the purges unless Obi-Wan told him of any offscreen (unlikely, he's been out of touch for decades) or the Alliance has information on them (plausible but is Skywalker at a high enough level at this point to be able to access that kind of information, which would be highly secure). There's still plenty of wiggle room to allow for Jedi to pop up later.

[Balrog]

Hay thanks a million. Now back to the topic at hand. The part of the quote that mentions a force field makes me think that that is the part that deflects blaster bolts. What do you guys think.

It could be, or it's the blade itself which does the deflecting and the force field is one-way only. Not enough info really.

[snip] I need someone to tell me when to dive into those ripples and when to back off.

I thought I heard Ben's voice a couple of times during the Battle of Yavin, but I'm wondering now if that really happened. Maybe I only thought I did; maybe that was my subconscious speaking to me - a kind of wishful thinking. He's been silent since, and I don't feel I can talk to anyone else about the Force.

So this is pretty firm confirmation that there are no other Force users around post-Yavin who can teach Luke anything about the Force, unless Luke is acting totally out of character and simply dismissing potential teachers as being not Jedi enough. Which brings back that interesting question of what exactly is going to happen to all the Jedi we see in the Rebels cartoons.

Point of order: this is from Luke's POV, so naturally he's not going to be aware of any Jedi alive after the purges unless Obi-Wan told him of any offscreen (unlikely, he's been out of touch for decades) or the Alliance has information on them (plausible but is Skywalker at a high enough level at this point to be able to access that kind of information, which would be highly secure). There's still plenty of wiggle room to allow for Jedi to pop up later.

Sure there could be Jedi hiding out in some ass-end of the galaxy, but I think if there were any Jedi actually active in the Alliance in any capacity it wouldn't take much time for people to connect the points and give the Hero of Yavin an introduction to them, especially since Luke is pretty open (with people he trusts) that he's looking for any help with Force training.

[RogueIce]

So we have the return of the Force being required to construct lightsabers and the inner layout of one (a primary color crystal and two additional ones? why does that seem so familiar... ). I do wonder if there are technological ways to get around the Force requirement though. Using precise force fields would allow for the safe handling of the crystals and exact alignment, so it would depend on being able to determine if the alignment is correct, whether it is simply a physical aspect of how the crystals are place or something more mystical.

TCW's Younglings arc already showed this, in all its glorious visual detail. So mostly just reinforcing that.

[Balrog]

Indeed, I had forgotten about that. Anyways next batch.

We did not trust the Chekko completely, of course, and took the Desert Jewel to a neutral planet to have the ship scanned for tracking devices and the computers swept for worms and other malignant code. I was as relieved as I was happy when the scans returned clean and we could return to the Alliance without worrying about an Imperial spy lodged among our new allies - for the moment.

A bit of computer espionage and the lengths the Rebels will go to to protect the fleet's location.

We navigated a sneaky path out of Orto Plutonia to avoid the Imperial division I'd skirmished with earlier, and relaxed once we had a course plotted along well-traveled hyperspace lanes.

Nothing but numbing hours of blurred stars stretched before us...

Again, hyperspace travel is depicted as taking mere hours, at least along normal routes.

Denon is an ecumenopolis like Coruscant, a vast city sprawling over all the landmass and dependent on imports for food and raw materials. Coming from a rural planet with a very scattered population, I wasn't used to seeing an endless vista of buildings all lit up at night and ships buzzing around them like they were flowers to be pollinated. The planet did kind of seem that way, a field of stiff bright plants swarming with alien insects. Except it wasn't nearly as peaceful as a field might be. The visual clutter was dizzying and even from orbit I imagined I could hear the constant throb of it pulsing in my bones.

So re-confirmation that Coruscant isn't the only city-planet in the SW galaxy, which again speaks to the level of infrastructure, logistics and technology needed to support such planets. The "throbbing" Luke is feeling may be his Force abilities picking up the sheer number of life on the planet.

"You mean telekinesis?"

"Yep. I can't seem to get the hang of that, but I should be able to. If this power flows through and around everything, then manipulating it and using it to push and pull physical objects has to be part of the deal. For example, when I'm in a fight, it guides my actions - or at least influences my brain to guide my actions. Still, that's a concrete manifestation of its power, not me simply saying that I believe it's there. If it can physically affect me, then it should be able to physically affect other things, as well. And I should be able to make that happen."

Luke further reasoning out the existence of TK powers, and a further description of how "battle precog" works.

"What is it?"

"It's a list of Kupohan contacts on various worlds should you find yourself on the run and in need of help."

"I didn't know the Kupohans had a network like that."

"Officially we don't. We're not organized like the Bothan spynet..."

The return of the Bothan spynet. I've always thought it almost disadvantageous for the Bothans to be so well-known as spies, ideally if you're going to spy on someone you don't want to stand out, and if everyone figures when they see a Bothan they see a spy that kinda makes your job harder.

We returned to our hotel and picked up Artoo before taking a rented speeder back to the park. Besides getting a positive ID on Drusil Bephorin, we needed to see how the security team conducted itself and whether they matched the report Sakhet had provided us. Artoo had plenty of scanning to do, accessing local comm networks, searching for encrypted tight beams and following them to their nodes; he didn't need to know Imperial codes to recognize that being sending and receiving encrypted transmissions in a public park marked themselves as security personnel every bit as clearly as stormtrooper armor would.

Nakari and I dressed in matching uniforms that suggested we were crewmates of a passenger cruiser enjoying some time together on leave. We both wore caps pulled low over our eyes and had applied lumps of synthflesh putty to our faces to alter the shapes of our cheeks, noses, and chins, and had changes of clothing for later stashed in small duffels. We entered the park on the south side, with Artoo trailing behind. We picked a bench that afforded us a good view of the rest of the park and waited.

A flying security droid, a black spherical number bristling with blasters and sensors, arrived first and swept the area, no doubt capturing our images and checking them against Imperial databases. My altered appearance wouldn't match any files they had on Luke Skywalker. We were also weaponless - I'd been careful to leave my lightsaber behind this once - and otherwise nonthreatening, so it hurtled away from us after a cursory scan to investigate other people.

Further examples of the type of security and espionage toys the Rebels and Imperials play with, including the Swiss Army Knife that is Artoo.

I pulled out my blaster and checked for perhaps the fifth time that it was dialed up to its maximum power...

Variable yields!

"I do not know for certain - I did say probability, not certainty. But I can make educated guesses as to our destination based on extant variables, and predict that our pursuit shall catch up to us prior to our exit unless they behave stupidly."

"Isn't that one of your extant variables?"

"The worst possible kind. As you may well know, unlike kinetics or time or distance, human stupidity is incalculable."

Given how often these debates focus so much on calculations, I just had to include this bit.

If they shot blaster bolts at me, I might be able to catch one or two of them on the blade as I had with that training remote on the Millennium Falcon, but I doubted my weak skills in the Force would allow me to deflect repeated fire from three blasters at once.

The limitations of Luke's abilities are expanded upon further. What I wonder though is if it is a function of simple rate-of-fire or having to defend against attacks coming from multiple directions, or if it's a little of both.

They raised their blasters at me and fired, expanding blue halos of energy that would disrupt my neural system and drop me unconscious - or maybe even kill me, considering I would be getting three blasts at almost the same instant. Choosing to stun instead of shooting plasma bolts at me, however, indicated that they would like an interrogation before my execution.

I held my lightsaber in front of me, blade aligned horizontally but pointing slightly toward the agents so that the tip would meet the oncoming wave first. There was no dodging to be done and no great skill with the Force required - either the lightsaber would save me or it wouldn't. And it did, sort of. There was a crackle as the blasts hit the blade, and a blue spiderweb of energy that shimmered outward as the blasts dissipated, leaving me conscious and the ISB agents flabbergasted. But before it dissipated, some of the energy kissed the fingers I was using to hold the hilt of the lightsaber; they went numb, and I dropped the weapon. Perhaps against a single stun blast that wouldn't have happened, but against three, something got through...
-snip-
One of the features of stunning someone is that you don't have to be a very good sharpshooter thanks to the spreading footprint of the blast. But in this case that worked in my favor: The lower edge skimming the wet floor ran into the blade of my lightsaber, still glowing and lying prone on the floor, and as soon as it did, the blade dissipated the blast with the same crackle of electricity as before.

So we have canon confirmation that lightsabers do block stun blasts, but it is still possible to overwhelm with sheer numbers. Presumably this would have a similar effect on other energy blasts with a wider area than the lightsaber blade, to differing effects obviously. Also enough stun blasts are capable of killing a person if enough are shot at them, but no word on whether they can dial-a-yield like regular blaster bolts.

...and Artoo would attempt to jam local transmissions for the few minutes we were inside the garage, since we could do little to disguise him.

Artoo is a regular electronic warfare fighter in this book, what with tracking and jamming signals and whatnot.

My breathing slowed and deepened, and soon I became aware that there were others breathing on the ship. Drusil was nearest, sitting in an attitude of prayer or perhaps meditation like myself, attempting to sooth away her worries. Perhaps the activity of her mind was pure math. Farther back and to the left, Nakari felt happy, though I didn't know about what. Her breath was uneven and sort of purred - was she humming to herself? I couldn't hear that to confirm it, of course, but I felt it through the Force that it must be true.

And what about...beyond the ship? There was nothing else breathing nearby, that's for sure. But I knew the Force could tell me of things beyond my immediate surroundings. Ben had shown me that. When the Death Star destroyed Alderaan, he had felt it, even in hyperspace, when we were still light-years away. I wondered if I could sense anything outside hyperspace.

I opened myself more - or perhaps I should say that I lost myself more, let go of my five senses and focused only on what the Force could show me. Nanth'ri waited ahead, and around it...some kind of danger? Anger? No, nothing so personal. More like antagonism. Aggression. But I couldn't see who was feeling such things, or against whom they were directed.
-snip-
I was grateful that we dropped into the Nanth'ri system a moment later, because it drew our attention to something else. An alarm pinged in my brain - danger, there - and without thinking, I banked the ship slightly to starboard and accelerated, even as a small fleet of ships appeared on our scanners that decidedly weren't Imperial.

So despite his neophyte status Luke is already progressing in his Force-sensing abilities, being able to locate individuals on his ship and pick up on danger from outside a solar system, albeit with limitations.

Phosphorus flares can burn much hotter than the engines for a brief time and draw the heat seekers away, but timing their release was critical. Deploy them too early and you risk them dying out and allowing the heat seekers to reacquire the sublight engines; deploy them too late and the explosion will damage your drive anyways. ...

If Drusil were in the cockpit she might be able to look at the vectors and speeds of the incoming missiles and calculate the optimal release time fo the flares, but I had to rely on instinct - or rather instinct aided by the Force. ...

When I closed my eyes and reached out to the Force, it was as if I ha never left it a couple minutes ago; the awareness was still there, a rush of it filling my head like an additional sense that spoke to me of my surroundings, inside the ship and out. Nakari was worried and willing to let me know; Drusil was also worried by keeping silent; Artoo was simply there, and I assumed he was busy working with the nav computer on our jump. I felt the five closes pirates and the six missiles, adjusted the course of the Jewel in response to their positions and pattern of fire, and waited for the right moment to set off the flares.

When it came, I opened my eyes to check that my finger really was hovering over the correct button on the newly installed Rodian weapons system panel - a moment of self-doubt I suppose - and pressed when my eyes confirmed it. The flares deployed and attracted the heat seekers; explosions rocked the space behind us, cannon fire continued to streak past, and the pirates launched another round of missiles.

Further examples of the Force guiding Luke's actions, in this case the perfect timing for fooling the missiles.

[bilateralrope]

Also, while it took me back a bit, there really is no demonstration or even mention of telekinesis in the original Star Wars movie. It really is only in ESB where we see Luke and Vader moving things with their mind. There are touches of this all through the book, where things we take for granted or assume simply are really aren't and get 'discovered' by Luke, which are nice.

Not from Luke or Obi-Wan. But Vader is probably using telekinesis in the I find your lack of faith disturbing scene.

[RogueIce]

The book starts off with the Alliance sending Luke to negotiate an arms deal with a Rodian clan, and I just can't help thinking they must have a trained diplomat or someone better trained for this. It's that common complain that despite a literal galaxy of characters everything revolves around the classic cast. This sense starts to dissipate as the book progresses but it left a bitter taste in my mouth.

A question, since I haven't read it: are his companions we see along to help him, or guide him or whatever?

Because I can totally see them sending Luke along as a Token Jedi, if such a thing is important to these Rodians, while backing him up with actual experienced individuals to do the hard work. That's actually sensible, and a good use of their neophyte Jedi, for those instances were somebody with a lightsaber would carry cultural significance or implicit authority with some group harboring fond feelings toward the Jedi Order of old.

[Balrog]

Also, while it took me back a bit, there really is no demonstration or even mention of telekinesis in the original Star Wars movie. It really is only in ESB where we see Luke and Vader moving things with their mind. There are touches of this all through the book, where things we take for granted or assume simply are really aren't and get 'discovered' by Luke, which are nice.

Not from Luke or Obi-Wan. But Vader is probably using telekinesis in the I find your lack of faith disturbing scene.

Yeah, that looks like a newbie mistake I made forgetting one of the memorable scenes from ANH, but it could be argued he was using his mental powers on a weak-minded person to make them think they're choking.

That's my story and I'm sticking with it.

The book starts off with the Alliance sending Luke to negotiate an arms deal with a Rodian clan, and I just can't help thinking they must have a trained diplomat or someone better trained for this. It's that common complain that despite a literal galaxy of characters everything revolves around the classic cast. This sense starts to dissipate as the book progresses but it left a bitter taste in my mouth.

A question, since I haven't read it: are his companions we see along to help him, or guide him or whatever?

Because I can totally see them sending Luke along as a Token Jedi, if such a thing is important to these Rodians, while backing him up with actual experienced individuals to do the hard work. That's actually sensible, and a good use of their neophyte Jedi, for those instances were somebody with a lightsaber would carry cultural significance or implicit authority with some group harboring fond feelings toward the Jedi Order of old.

Unfortunately no, it was Luke completely by himself. Nor was he advertising himself as a Jedi, he confided his abilities only to another Rodian when she brought up the fact her uncle was a Jedi and had been buried on their planet after the Clones turned on him (something which isn't common knowledge in the Imperial version of how the "Jedi betrayal" went down), which is where he gets the lightsaber he experiments on. The only thing I can think of that makes sense is that he was a closer on a deal which had been in the works for awhile, and the Alliance needed someone to rubber-stamp the final details, so why not give Luke some minor experience in this stuff and see if they can use him elsewhere as a diplomat.

[Balrog]

Anyways here's the last batch of quotes I found interesting and relevant, as spoiler-free as possible while including relevant info. Feel free to come back and add more, I can't quite recommend Heir as highly as Tarkin but it wasn't a bad read by any measure.

"I happen to know the Empire has been inspecting - and thereby harassing - all traffic going into Hutt Space in an effort to cut into their trade and reduce the Hutts' ability to remain independent."

"That's a recent development? How old is your information?"

"Very recent. For the past few weeks the Empire had me working on encrypted messages they intercepted in those sectors."

So Hutt Space still exists and remains separate from the rest of the Empire, but it's something the Imperials are working to change.

"We've been pulled out of hyperspace. Fail-safes came on in response to a mass shadow."

"What? But Artoo plotted a course using established - oh." We'd been pulled out of hyperspace by an Imperial Interdictor cruiser - shaped like a Star Destroyer but much smaller, with four gravity-well projectors. One of those projectors had pulled us out of hyperspace, and no doubt the others were blocking our exit from the system.

Hyperspace fail-safes still exist and is part of how the Interdictor system works.

"Wait, are you suggesting we attack the Interdictor by ourselves?" Nakari said.

"It's either that or let them catch us. I don't think they'll respond to a polite request to stand down. And this is one of the old models. We should go before they have time to get reinforcements here. Right now it's unescorted and only has twenty-four TIE fighters."

"Only twenty-four? We're one ship with a couple of blasters and a few missiles!"

TIE fighter compliment of an Immobilizer-class Interdictor.

"Artoo, which gravity projector should I target?"

ITS PORT SIDE, OUR STARBOARD.

"Both of them?"

YES.

"That complicates things."

"They weren't complicated before?" Nakari asked. "That cruiser has to be shielded."

"It is, but this is one of the Immobilizer models, and we've been studying them since the Empire has been using them against us on our raids. They have twelve shield generators - some of them ray shields, some particle shields. We take out the particle shield generators for the port side first, then go after the gravity projectors with whatever we have left."

So not just confirming the number of shield generators on an Immobilizer, but also the fact they are tied to specific facings on the ship. Additionally it is possible to detect from which gravity-well projectors a mass shadow is being projected.

I didn't bother firing at the cruiser, since there was no way our lone ship could weaken the shields enough to punch through, but I would gladly pull the trigger on the TIE fighters whenever the opportunity afforded.

The Empire had stopped making these particular Interdictor cruisers because of their vulnerabilities, but while they weren't making any new ones, there were still plenty of them out there. The Alliance kept running into them, so we had been training recently on how to eliminate them before our raiding parties got wiped out by their escorts of destroyers and cruisers. The Empire was putting gravity projectors into Star Destroyers now, much more difficult to take out for a group and impossible for a single ship to damage. To my knowledge no one had ever taken out an Immobilizer with a single ship before, but I'd theorized about the possibility with Wedge. I wouldn't be trying except that we were desperate - and we also had a bonus weapon that we'd picked up on Rodia. The Empire must have been frantic to find us if it had sent this one Interdictor to the edge of Hutt Space without any escorts.

Already in touch with the Force, I opened myself more to it and slipped into a nonthinking state of awareness, anticipation, and reaction, sliding the Desert Jewel into an attack vector that minimized my profile to the Interdictor's gunners and led us straight to the portside shield generators.

Some more information about the Immobilizer, Luke doesn't exactly spell out the vulnerabilities but presumably its shields part of it given what happens next, which as he notes hasn't been done before. There's also the revelation that ISDs are packing gravity-well projectors now.

Artoo, light up their particle shield generator for me on the targeting holo." A small rectangle flashed and blinked for me on the bladed edge of the cruiser, and I assigned two of the Jewel's six concussion missiles to it while also locating it with the Force. ... Spinning and juking my way down and feeling the ideal moment approach, I took two more hits from TIE fighters before launching the missiles. Cruiser fire aimed at me ceased and shifted to the missiles, which gave me more leeway to dodge the TIEs. I pulled the nose of the Jewel starboard so that we would dive past the shield generators shortly after the missiles hit. The sensors could pick up whether we scored a hit or not.
-snip-
The concussion missiles struck one after the other, the first weakening the generator's own shield and the second following up, penetrating and destroying it. Before we passed it, another hit took our shields down to 50 percent, and then we were briefly hidden from line-of-sight as I pulled the Jewel up to skate underneath the cruiser, just a meter above the shields to make it impossible for the TIEs above the cruiser to track me - to their scanners I was invisible now, lost in the shadow of the Interdictor. I planned to come up over the opposite side and take a shot at the newly vulnerable gravity projectors.

While the shield generators are self-protected, clearly these couldn't stand up to the one-two punch of the concussion missiles Luke fired. No idea what model or type of concussions missiles were fired though.

I kept hugging the structure of the cruiser to make a firing solution difficult for their laser cannons, and as soon as I cleared the bridge I targeted the twin bulges of the port gravity projectors and sent two concussion missiles each at them. That wouldn't necessarily set us free; with two of its projectors still working , we'd have to clear the Interdictor's simulated mass by a good deal before our hyperdrive could engage, and the cruiser would have plenty of time to redirect those starboard projectors toward Kupoh if its crew was alert and operating efficiently. We needed a kill shot - and we had one on board, purchased at great expense from Utheel Outfitters' secret catalog. ...

So I armed and released the Utheel Rockcrusher Compact Seismic Charge, letting it fall toward the rearmost gravity projector from the bracketed housing on the bottom of the Jewel. It didn't have a guidance system or any propellant, so it followed the Jewel's trajectory upon release and would detonate on a proximity trigger. It fell in an arc rather than continuing straight on our course because the gravity projector was still working.
-snip-
As the gases inside the seismic charge mixed prior to detonation, I pulled up and leveled out, streaking past the batteries of lasers. Then I kept going in as straight a line as possible, thrusting past the Interdictor as the concussion missiles hit and running for all the Jewel was worth...
-snip-
Right afterward, the seismic charge dropped into the open, unshielded wound of the gravity projector and detonated, its massive shock wave shredding the structure of the cruiser from the inside so that the huge ship bulged and came apart in a mess of bodies and metal, shearing the front half from the rear completely and rendering them into lifeless hunks of space debris heading in opposite directions. We picked up a tiny bit of speed as all the simulated gravity ceased to exist.

So we have a canon answer to an old question, what would a Seismic Charge do to a SW ship, which clearly is it would blow the hell out of ship. It should be noted though that this was only possible after Luke had managed to disable the particle shields in that section and open a hole in the hull for it to fall through, essentially blowing up inside the ship, something few other scifi ships could survive themselves. Presumably then the Immobilizer's shields would have blocked the blast in other circumstances, otherwise Luke would have just had to release the charge after getting close enough rather than go through all the trouble he did.

"We should have perished. Mathematically we had almost no chance of survival once we attacked. How did you accomplish this?"

I shrugged. "Artoo got us out of there."

"The droid did his job adequately," the Givin said, a dismissive summation to which Artoo belched an electronic burst of outrage, "but I speak of the piloting prior to that. Are you a Jedi in fact, Luke Skywalker?"

"No," I snorted. "Not even close."

"You refuse the title yet dress yourself in the trappings. You carry a lightsaber. And you used the Force to aid in the piloting of the ship, correct?"

"Yes," I admitted, wondering where this would lead.

"Astounding. I have never thought it before, having had no occasion to do so, but the Force must be a fulcrum variable. Yes, I must give this more thought."

"Sorry - a fulcrum variable?"

"A variable around which improbabilities can be turned to probabilities, or vice versa. The impossible becomes possible - at which point one might as well not even do the math. But of course I can't help myself in that regard."

Yeah, the Force basically lets you give a big ol' middle finger to probability and do the impossible, which in this case was using a small freighter to kill a cruiser.

Though the Empire strictly controlled the interstellar HoloNet, the Kupohans had a local system infonet set up almost of necessity to exchange weather information and help ships land safely.

The existence of planetary internets. No word on if they're a series of tubes or not.

They had certainly seemed intent on killing us at the time, but strategically that cruiser shouldn't have been there by itself. The Empire knew of the Interdictors' vulnerabilities or else they wouldn't habitually surround them with escorts.

Again confirmation of Imperial SOP regarding Interdictors.

"Hold on, let me see what Artoo said." The message read, MALICIOUS CODE FOUND AND NEUTRALIZED. SURVEILLANCE PROGRAM, ORIGIN UNKNOWN. INSERTED RECENTLY.

"It would have been almost as soon as we entered the system and accessed their net," she said. "When I did that search for Azzur Nessin. I can't believe we'd get tagged so fast or so easily."

"Well, we already know that some of them do contract work for the spynet. This is probably their way of saying hello."

"It's rude."

"To them it's business as usual. They probably figure if we can't protect ourselves, then we deserve to be spied on."

"I obviously need to upgrade my firewalls. Lots more fire, I think," she said.

And this, boys and girls, is why you don't connect to public WiFi hotspots

Utterly exhausted after a day that began in another part of the galaxy, I fell asleep almost as soon as I crashed onto the bed.

Can't have too many hyperspace travel quotes, it's getting to the point that the Imperial captain in ESB wasn't exaggerating when he said the Falcon could be on the other side of the galaxy.

A chirp sounded from up ahead. When I looked up the alley to locate Artoo, I saw that he was coming, but another figure strode with purpose in front of him. It was a Gotal with sienna skin and yellow eyes, thick brows supporting the sensitive horns that allowed his species to detect electromagnetic fields of all kinds. It made them excellent hunters, empathic to some extent with many species, and dangerous in confrontations, since they often sensed what you were planning to do before you did it. Han had warned me that many of them sympathized with the Empire.
-snip-
R2-D2 had an arm capable of delivering an electric shock, and the Gotal never saw the strick coming from behind....He screamed and clutched at his horns, which due to their electric sensitivity made such shocks doubly painful, and collapsed twitching to the ground until he subsided, carried off into oblivion for a while.

Besides some species info, it's interesting to read that there are "aliens" who support the Empire. So much of the EU emphasized the human-centric nature of the Empire, which was kinda supported by the movies since we only ever saw human Imperials while the Rebels were quite distinctly multi-species, but it would be simplistic to assume every non-human species was against or oppressed by the Empire. Some of them would benefit from the New Order, and the advantages would outweigh any disadvantages of being part of an authoritarian regime, even one which was biased against them.

"Therefore I do not know precisely what you did. I only know what you did not do."

"What?"

"You did not move the noodle with your mind. Physics prevents it, so it would be more accurate to say that you moved something else, and that moved the noodle."

"Oh!" The Gavin had a talent for uttering sentences that altered the way I looked at a problem. Her observation made it clear that I'd been moving the Force, not the noodle, but I hadn't perceived it that way until she said it.

"Have you tried this exercise on anything larger?"

"Not yet."

"Shall we experiment? Attempt to move the fork in your bowl."

"I don't know. That's quite a bit heavier than a noodle."

"Are you speaking of the Force as being heavier? Or the fork?"

"Well, I..." Her words stunned me again. I'd been looking at it from the wrong angle - which only underscored my need for help.

Size matters not! I think it's important to include this bit just to remind people that a Jedi's telekinesis doesn't come from them personally, it's them acting through the Force on an object. This is what allows them to move things which would be incredibly heavy or fast moving since they don't have to worry about their bodies being affected in the process.

I unconsciously stretched out my fingers toward the fork and stopped, taking the time to consciously note it. Why had I done that? My fingers wouldn't move the Force; that was a task for my mind. Since my attention was directed at the fork my hand naturally followed, being used to doing my bidding. Maybe that's all there was behind Obi-Wan's gesture at Mos Eisley, then, when he did something to the minds of those stormtroopers. The hand movement wasn't key to the procedure but rather an unconscious reflection of Obi-Wan's mental focus. I felt foolish again, remembering my failure to influence the Rodian at the Chekkoo spaceport, waving my hand in his face like an idiot.

But even that small insight was easy to second-guess. If I ever had the good fortune to be trained by a real Jedi, he or she would probably tell me that hand motion was vital, serving a function I couldn't even fathom, and all my halting progress was little more than staggering drunk in the dark and taking the wrong road home.

Hand motion may be key to the use of Force abilities, but we have seen examples of the non-somatic use of the Force (i.e. Vader ripping machines out of the wall at Bespin). It could be the hand motions are necessary to focus a Jedi's mind when they're first learning to use the Force, a sort of foci for manipulating such an unseen sense, but with enough practice they don't require it anymore.

I refocused, took a couple of deep breaths, and reached out again to the Force, urging it to lift the fork out of the bowl. It didn't twitch so much as shift lazily in the soup, like a teenager who, commanded to get up out of bed, rolled over instead and went aggressively back to sleep.

"I do not mean to presume, but perhaps you should close your eyes?" Drusil suggested. "The Force is an unseen power, so it is plausible that your sight may be interfering somehow, occupying a part of your mind that should be focused elsewhere."

Of course she was right. I wasn't flying an X-wing now, and Artoo's translated words weren't scrolling past on a screen; I didn't need to see. And I knew from recent experience that I felt the Force more clearly when I minimized visual distractions. "Okay, I'll give it another try that way."

I shut my eyes and let my awareness expand, and the Force took on a stronger presence, as if it were giving me its full attention now. It was probably the opposite - my full attention was on the Force. It built within me and I coaxed it to lift the fork out of the bowl, not a jerk or a leap but a slow, sustained levitation....

So we know why Jedi sometimes close their eyes when they use the Force, but like with hand-waving eventually they get good enough connecting with the Force that they don't need to do it all the time or for basic abilities. Often by this point they tend to do it when trying to achieve something difficult for them, which may be their attempt to better connect and focus through the Force.

"The Empire's Interdictors are blocking egress here, here, and here." She pointed with a pale finger to the three yellow dots. "I have indicated the mass shadows of their gravity projectors with blue lines. So to escape, we must plot a course out of the system in between those mass shadows and travel a goodly distance offplanet before the hyperdrive can engage. And you see that there are several options available to us - but our interest would be to move to the galactic east, correct?"

"Yes," I admitted, "but there's almost nothing mapped out in that direction."

"Precisely why they don't consider it a possible avenue of escape."

"You're right, nobody would consider it, including me. I'm all for the element of surprise, don't get me wrong, but what are you using as a navigation point? Not Gamorr, right? Because there's an entire sector of space between here and there, and that sector is largely unexplored. There might be uncharted brown dwarfs or planets or any number of things we could run into if you just pick a direction and go."

"Ah. One moment." Drusil dismissed the system map and called up a second one, which was a much larger view of several sectors, except that it had math symbols written all over it. "We will use this star here." She pointed to an equation below and left of center, and I failed to see any indication of a star. The marks looked indistinguishable from any other set of scribbles on the map. I had no idea what she was talking about.

"I'm sorry, which star again? You pointed to an equation."

"That's the star."

"I...what?"

"Unexplored space does not equate to unobserved space. An analysis of the movements of other stars around it prove that it must be there. No one has viewed it yet except through the lens of mathematics, but such a lens is frequently better than mere glass."

Another canon answer for a question which comes up often in debates involving SW, whether they can use their hyperdrives when operating in space where there hasn't been a chance to explore and map out lanes. Locating stars and traveling to them without having actually visited them is something that has been logically argued to be possible before, this just confirms that. Clearly though it's not something just anyone can do on their own.

On the face of it this seems to contradict earlier when Luke was able to forge a new hyperspace lane on his own, but I would assume is that it's a matter of degrees. Luke may have made his own lane, but he was still traveling through relatively well-known space, whereas this is an entire sector of space which has been unexplored.

Then his skull exploded in a bolt of superheated plasma, spraying me with blood, bone fragments, and brain tissue.

Boom, headshot. Quite literally.

Artoo reported finding and eliminating not one but five different tracking programs hidden in the nav computer's code sometime during the last few days. Drusil found another he missed, an Imperial Sleeper she called it, tied to the ship's clock. It would become active at a set time, triggered by the turning of the clock, note our current course and position, and send a coded burst reporting it to the nearest Imperial world.

An example of Imperial spyware.

"The flagship captain points out that if I am on board, I might be capable of charting a new hyperspace lane on my own. That is sobering. I fear he may be distressingly competent."

What? A competent Imperial?! Unheard of!

"The flagship captain has ordered us stopped now, and the Interdictor captain is complying. Turning off gravitational projector to realign in front of our present course."

"Can they stop us?" Nakari asked.

"Maybe," I said. "Depends partly on the crew and partly on their power situation. They've been conducting operations for awhile here, turning the projectors on and off, and their generators might be drained. Or they might not. I haven't done this all that often in raids, much less alone. ..."
-snip-
With thirty-two seconds to go, Drusil made another report. "Interdictor captain announced the projector is down and realigning to our sector. Spinning up."

Our intelligence was spotty here. Thirty seconds had to be a minimum time to get a gravity field projected - intelligence suggest it took more like a couple of minutes - but we weren't safely outside of operational parameters yet..

So rather than just projecting a gravity-well at their current location, Interdictors can project them at some distance from the ship itself, although this takes time. There is also the possibility that extended operations can have a negative effect on Interdictor functions.

I'd had very little to do with it - this part of the trip was all made possible by math and physics and brains that could process it far faster and more accurately than I ever could. It wasn't without its own tension, however. Without traveling established lanes, there was a chance we'd never come back into realspace again. But if we did, we'd have a view of the galaxy no one else had ever enjoyed before.

Over the next eight hours, we would up spending more time in realspace than hyperspace. Drusil's short jumps dumped us into new systems, and she spent time with Artoo taking readings, scanning the stars, and then tweaking her calculations for the next jump. I encouraged her to take all the time she needed.
-snip-
The worry of being lost in space got replaced by the worry of running into Imperials again once Drusil and Artoo announced that we were back on established routes, skirting the far side of Hutt Space and traveling to the galactic north....

So we have a direct comparison of traveling along established hyperspace routes vs forging your own in untraveled space. In this case, a few hours time to travel from one part of the galaxy to the other vs a few hours to travel through an unexplored sector of space. While the insane speeds of established hyperspace travel are lost in such a situation, it is still a good deal fast and would provide only an inconvenience in a fight against another foe, one which wouldn't last long once fast lanes were established.

The white electric bolt splashed and crackled against an egg-shaped obstruction, which fizzled and popped and then melted away, revealing a Rodian bounty hunter who had been advancing upon us using a stealth-field generator attached to his belt.

The return of stealth-fields from KotOR.

[Simon_Jester]

"What is it?"

"It's a list of Kupohan contacts on various worlds should you find yourself on the run and in need of help."

"I didn't know the Kupohans had a network like that."

"Officially we don't. We're not organized like the Bothan spynet..."

The return of the Bothan spynet. I've always thought it almost disadvantageous for the Bothans to be so well-known as spies, ideally if you're going to spy on someone you don't want to stand out, and if everyone figures when they see a Bothan they see a spy that kinda makes your job harder.

Definitely.

One redeeming possibility is that the spy network in question mostly consists of Bothans hiring other people to do the actual spying for them, while they themselves handle operational analysis, manning communications nodes, and possibly black ops missions that don't involve blending into the crowd.

[Simon_Jester]

Sorry, ghetto edit:

Another canon answer for a question which comes up often in debates involving SW, whether they can use their hyperdrives when operating in space where there hasn't been a chance to explore and map out lanes. Locating stars and traveling to them without having actually visited them is something that has been logically argued to be possible before, this just confirms that. Clearly though it's not something just anyone can do on their own.

Also, this feat of navigation is being based on extensive observations of the area of space in question- note the emphasis on the space not being "unobserved."

The general weighted average of claims I'd heard before is that it would require considerable charting and exploration of new space before hyperspace travel through that region became safe for rapid transit. Whether the charting is done by remote observations of the stars and their motions, or by having actual probes and scout ships fly around, is kind of a moot point.

On the face of it this seems to contradict earlier when Luke was able to forge a new hyperspace lane on his own, but I would assume is that it's a matter of degrees. Luke may have made his own lane, but he was still traveling through relatively well-known space, whereas this is an entire sector of space which has been unexplored.

Also, it's unclear what "make your own lane" means in context. It could just be a figure of speech for having to travel along a route that ships don't habitually travel, the equivalent of going cross-country.

So we have a direct comparison of traveling along established hyperspace routes vs forging your own in untraveled space. In this case, a few hours time to travel from one part of the galaxy to the other vs a few hours to travel through an unexplored sector of space. While the insane speeds of established hyperspace travel are lost in such a situation, it is still a good deal fast and would provide only an inconvenience in a fight against another foe, one which wouldn't last long once fast lanes were established.

True, although Luke thinks the risk associated with this kind of short range hopping and improvised navigation through uncharted space is significant, and he's presumably not wrong about that. Taking big, expensive warships on such journeys on a regular basis might wind up causing higher risk to the warships than enemy action does.

Also, it's not clear how much time it would take to establish fast lanes; one trip through a large volume of previously uncharted spact might well not be enough.

Hm... do we have an estimate for how big a 'sector' is in this context?

[Balrog]

Sorry, ghetto edit:

Another canon answer for a question which comes up often in debates involving SW, whether they can use their hyperdrives when operating in space where there hasn't been a chance to explore and map out lanes. Locating stars and traveling to them without having actually visited them is something that has been logically argued to be possible before, this just confirms that. Clearly though it's not something just anyone can do on their own.

Also, this feat of navigation is being based on extensive observations of the area of space in question- note the emphasis on the space not being "unobserved."

The general weighted average of claims I'd heard before is that it would require considerable charting and exploration of new space before hyperspace travel through that region became safe for rapid transit. Whether the charting is done by remote observations of the stars and their motions, or by having actual probes and scout ships fly around, is kind of a moot point.

In this particular example Drusil was able to chart a course based on observation and calculation after at most a few days, assuming the work was started as soon as the group arrived at their destination rather than when the Imperials arrived much later and cut off their normal escape routes. Drusil is particularly gifted in mathematics but it wouldn't be beyond the capabilities of a SW government to arrive in a given area, observe all the stars in the immediate area and start forging routes in a short timespan. Even if the ships were restricted to the system-to-system method of travel, given the fact we know they're able to travel tens to thousands of times the speed of light at minimum, such a halting method of travel would still give them the leg up on many competing factions.

On the face of it this seems to contradict earlier when Luke was able to forge a new hyperspace lane on his own, but I would assume is that it's a matter of degrees. Luke may have made his own lane, but he was still traveling through relatively well-known space, whereas this is an entire sector of space which has been unexplored.

Also, it's unclear what "make your own lane" means in context. It could just be a figure of speech for having to travel along a route that ships don't habitually travel, the equivalent of going cross-country.

Technically if you've safely traveled along a given distance in hyperspace you've forged your own personal hyperspace lane. The trouble being with things like galactic drift that lane might not be there in the future but in the short term it would work fine.

So we have a direct comparison of traveling along established hyperspace routes vs forging your own in untraveled space. In this case, a few hours time to travel from one part of the galaxy to the other vs a few hours to travel through an unexplored sector of space. While the insane speeds of established hyperspace travel are lost in such a situation, it is still a good deal fast and would provide only an inconvenience in a fight against another foe, one which wouldn't last long once fast lanes were established.

True, although Luke thinks the risk associated with this kind of short range hopping and improvised navigation through uncharted space is significant, and he's presumably not wrong about that. Taking big, expensive warships on such journeys on a regular basis might wind up causing higher risk to the warships than enemy action does.

Also, it's not clear how much time it would take to establish fast lanes; one trip through a large volume of previously uncharted spact might well not be enough.

Hm... do we have an estimate for how big a 'sector' is in this context?

Using big expensive ships would be a last resort, ideally in addition to/instead of doing the math you would just send out waves of probe droids/expendable scouts and let them run into the brown dwarfs until you've found the safe routes.

As far as establishing a fast lane it doesn't seem to take that long. Remember Luke was able to travel from a point in the Core to the Deep Core in fifteen minutes, along a route which had only be traveled on a few times at most, in an area explicitly noted for being difficult to navigate and which he stopped first to double-check the calculations. In the short term, days or weeks perhaps, once you've found a safe route that route is good enough for others to follow you through at full-speed.

There isn't any context for exactly how big a sector is, but given that so much of the EU is being reintroduced in the books I firmly believe it would be sufficient to use the old definition until the Super New Extended Guide to the Galaxy reference book gets released.

[Simon_Jester]

In this particular example Drusil was able to chart a course based on observation and calculation after at most a few days, assuming the work was started as soon as the group arrived at their destination rather than when the Imperials arrived much later and cut off their normal escape routes.

Ah, and Drusil did not have access to any prior information on observations of that region of space?

I mean, you'd think that there would be some pre-existing information on what stars exist in that volume, even if the information all comes from remote observation.

Technically if you've safely traveled along a given distance in hyperspace you've forged your own personal hyperspace lane. The trouble being with things like galactic drift that lane might not be there in the future but in the short term it would work fine.

Fair enough, although in that case 'lane' is a somewhat misleading term, because the word in English suggests some kind of a road or path that is significantly more accessible and easier to pass through than the surrounding terrain.

Using big expensive ships would be a last resort, ideally in addition to/instead of doing the math you would just send out waves of probe droids/expendable scouts and let them run into the brown dwarfs until you've found the safe routes.

As far as establishing a fast lane it doesn't seem to take that long. Remember Luke was able to travel from a point in the Core to the Deep Core in fifteen minutes, along a route which had only be traveled on a few times at most, in an area explicitly noted for being difficult to navigate and which he stopped first to double-check the calculations. In the short term, days or weeks perhaps, once you've found a safe route that route is good enough for others to follow you through at full-speed.

There isn't any context for exactly how big a sector is, but given that so much of the EU is being reintroduced in the books I firmly believe it would be sufficient to use the old definition until the Super New Extended Guide to the Galaxy reference book gets released.

Yeah. The only question in my mind is to what extent all this good navigation relies on having detailed databases of the locations of known celestial bodies dating back for decades, centuries, or millenia. Even if the hyperspace routes haven't been charted through all parts of galactic space, the locations of the stars themselves are presumably known.

[Adam Reynolds]

Mini-review: Heir to the Jedi takes place an indeterminate time after ANH but well before ESB; although no definitive time period is given it seems to take place closer in time to the events of ANH than later. It also wasn't quite as good as Tarkin unfortunately, which I blame on a few things. It is told entirely from the first-person perspective of Luke Skywalker, which means it was important for the book to really capture Luke's voice throughout the story. Unfortunately in a number of parts it didn't, which threw me off a bit. Pacing is sometimes off as well, parts of the book just fly by while others linger a bit in certain sections. Finally there's a sense of minimalism in terms of the characters. The book starts off with the Alliance sending Luke to negotiate an arms deal with a Rodian clan, and I just can't help thinking they must have a trained diplomat or someone better trained for this. It's that common complain that despite a literal galaxy of characters everything revolves around the classic cast. This sense starts to dissipate as the book progresses but it left a bitter taste in my mouth.

Luke being used as a diplomat could be justified by the idea that it was a group that respected war heroes more than diplomats, similarly to the Navi in Avatar respecting Jake over the scientists as he was a warrior. Doesn't excuse the overuse of the main characters, but is is a somewhat reasonable justification. Though the minimalist issue is one shared by Rebels and Clone Wars, which doesn't leave me very hopeful for the new canon overcoming the weaknesses of the old EU. Especially since they seem to be throwing out the old foggy window concept that existed with the old EU. Which as far as I'm concerned is the only thing that made the entire continuity bearable is that it could be assumed that worse elements were wrong,

The issue of the voice not feeling like Luke is much worse, something that really can't be justified.

So this is pretty firm confirmation that there are no other Force users around post-Yavin who can teach Luke anything about the Force, unless Luke is acting totally out of character and simply dismissing potential teachers as being not Jedi enough. Which brings back that interesting question of what exactly is going to happen to all the Jedi we see in the Rebels cartoons.

In any case it would be extremely illogical for them to survive just based on the films. Luke's description of The Force in this passage is also rather interesting from the perspective of one with limited training.

Unsurprisingly, designing your armor to protect against certain attacks but not others leaves some vulnerabilities. Also clearly some animals are just naturally blaster-resistant.

The Zilo Beast among others in Clone Wars already had put blaster-resistant species into canon. As for the armor comments, this does seem to contradict the idea of stormtrooper armor being impervious to kinetic fire as was suggested in the old EU. Unless she wasn't discussing stormtrooper armor.

It's curious how Luke seems to recognize this fact while these TIE pilots do not. It could be just that these pilots are newbies since there's no mention of this in any other incidents.

This is an incredibly common problem in Star Wars(lack of understanding of the third dimension in space). I wonder if there is some sort of limitation that makes this common? We see very few canon cases of ships maneuvering in different axis in space. One possibility is that it is taught as a measure to reduce collisions. Luke, with no formal military training, would have never learned this lesson.

A return of stealth armor from the EU which hides the wearer, at least from the visual spectrum. Luke opines about being unable to see past these stealth suits but it could be the sense he had felt earlier was the Force trying to warn him.

Did this ever exist in Clone Wars? I remember seeing holographic clothes on a changeling, plus holographic disguises, implying that similar technologies exist.

So we have the return of the Force being required to construct lightsabers and the inner layout of one (a primary color crystal and two additional ones? why does that seem so familiar... ). I do wonder if there are technological ways to get around the Force requirement though. Using precise force fields would allow for the safe handling of the crystals and exact alignment, so it would depend on being able to determine if the alignment is correct, whether it is simply a physical aspect of how the crystals are place or something more mystical.

In Clone Wars, a droid was able to tell whether the crystal was properly aligned. In principle this would mean that if force fields have the necessary control, they should be able to align the crystal properly and tell if it had. But there is no indication that Star Wars technological force fields have that level of control. There is the second problem that lightsabers are extremely dangerous for one who isn't a proper Jedi and thus why would anyone want one? Though he fact that the pirate Hondo wanted to sell the crystals implies that there must be a demand for them and thus a purpose beyond that of building lightsabers.

It seems knowledge of who destroyed the Death Star is somewhat common by now. The question is whether the Imperials themselves were the one to broadcast it or if it's something that's come out of the Alliance.

It would make sense that there was a propaganda element by the Rebel Alliance. It would also explain why in ESB Vader knew who Luke was. Once Vader found out who he was, he would have no reason to publicize it.

A bit more on the brain-eating creatures from outer space. It may be a bit of a leap to assume whichever hardness scale SW uses is the same as our own, but if so it gives us an idea of the hardness of standard personal armor.

Given the shown effectiveness of SW starship armor, I would guess that they have things stronger than diamond. Though it is possible that this performance is largely due to active systems that fail safely. Such an idea would explain how high speed speeder crashes are survivable. As the system fails slowly, the occupants are slowed down in a manner that protects them from more serious injuries.

Well of course they get smarter by eating our brains, that's how space horror movie monsters work! It would be interesting though to find out just what sort of evolutionary impetus would result in a creature such as the skullborer. Mentioned in the book but not quoted is the fact that other creatures on Fex either have crystal-like armoring on their heads and shoulders or some other defensive mechanism (i.e. retracting head within body), but I wonder whether the animals developed these defenses as a direct result of the skullborers, or whether they were already going towards armored body parts for another reason and the skullborers developed based on this changing dynamic. Or it could be a Wizard did it, who knows.

This is an interesting thought. Given that the Force exists in SW, I wonder if evolution really could be assumed to act in the same way as in reality?

SW medical tech means, despite taking sever injury to her hand including tendons severed, our intrepid heroine will have her hand back to normal in a few days.

It is interesting that SW medical tech actually seems to work better the worse the injury is.

A bit of computer espionage and the lengths the Rebels will go to to protect the fleet's location.

What's odd is that this didn't seem to be the case in ANH. Were these measures introduced after or was it merely considered worth the risk in that instance. If the Death Star survived the Rebellion was doomed regardless of whether their base survived. This would be the case due to the fact that the Death Star's main strategic purpose was to punch through planetary shielding, something that took conventional fleets much longer.

Luke further reasoning out the existence of TK powers, and a further description of how "battle precog" works.

That does sound like an interesting part of the book, learning how to be a Jedi without a teacher.

Variable yields!

It's nice to have an offical quote, but only an idiot watches Veers in ESB and doesn't think that blasters have variable yields.

The limitations of Luke's abilities are expanded upon further. What I wonder though is if it is a function of simple rate-of-fire or having to defend against attacks coming from multiple directions, or if it's a little of both.

Based on both the arena in AOTC and Order 66 in ROTS, it would seem to be a combination. Multiple directions are probably far worse due to the physical difficulty of moving from one point to another.

So we have canon confirmation that lightsabers do block stun blasts, but it is still possible to overwhelm with sheer numbers. Presumably this would have a similar effect on other energy blasts with a wider area than the lightsaber blade, to differing effects obviously. Also enough stun blasts are capable of killing a person if enough are shot at them, but no word on whether they can dial-a-yield like regular blaster bolts.

This also happened in Clone Wars. In the episode "The Jedi Who Knew Too Much," Ashoka fended off fire from clonetrooper weapons set for stun. Based on the appearance in that episode, the lightsaber simply stops the stun blasts cold. Dial a yield would make sense based on the target. It would also explain how they are capable of stunning Jedi who have the ability to dissipate energy.

Artoo is a regular electronic warfare fighter in this book, what with tracking and jamming signals and whatnot.

It would make sense given his primary function. Starfighters with astromech droids seem to be reliant on them for most of the electronic capabilities of the craft, substituting for an onboard computer. Are there any canon examples of fighters sending out jamming signals?

So despite his neophyte status Luke is already progressing in his Force-sensing abilities, being able to locate individuals on his ship and pick up on danger from outside a solar system, albeit with limitations.

I wonder why this doesn't help him in ESB with the Wampa attack? One possibility, fitting with the concept in the ROTS novelization about the lack of malice from clones when Order 66 was carried out, is that an attacking animal is simply acting on instinct and thus the danger sense is less effective. Though it must still work for a trained Jedi given that Obi-Wan and Anakin realized the danger from the poisonous centipedes in AOTC.

Another interesting possibility is that he missed it because the Force was telling him to check out the debris from the probe droid, and thus he missed the possibility of the attacking Wampa. He also clearly wasn't focusing on that in general, given how little life they had detected, the probability of an animal attack wasn't a major concern for the Rebels.This is ignoring the deleted scenes that I assume are non canon.

Further examples of the Force guiding Luke's actions, in this case the perfect timing for fooling the missiles.

It is interesting that flares are effective against SW sensors given that they actually aren't much anymore against modern missiles. Current aircraft rely on towed decoys and soft kill laser systems to defeat heat seeking missiles rather than flares. Though clearly the timing issue is extremely precise, given that Luke needed to use the Force to be successful.

So Hutt Space still exists and remains separate from the rest of the Empire, but it's something the Imperials are working to change.

Based on both this and Clone Wars, the Hutts are apparently powerful enough that the three largest players in the galaxy leave them alone somewhat and rely on a combination of indirect threats, covert action and diplomacy in terms of dealing with them. While it would make sense that during the Clone Wars neither side wanted to add a new enemy, it seems odd that the Empire wasn't willing to. This would seem to imply that despite the shows of Imperial force, their control is not as powerful as it seems. This is backed up by the presence of the Mon Calamari fleet in ROTJ. This then implies that local planetary militias still have a great deal of power. It is also backed up by Leia's quote "The more you tighten your grip Tarkin, the more star systems will slip though your fingers."

Hyperspace fail-safes still exist and is part of how the Interdictor system works.

That hasn't changed from the old EU. But this seems to be a contradiction with the Clone Wars episode Jedi Crash. In that episode a damaged Republic cruiser(the same sort used by Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon in the beginning of TPM) nearly crashes into a star when its navicomputer fails. This is only avoided when they shut down all power to drop out of hyperspace. Based on that episode, the ability exists to detect obstructions in the path of ships in hyperspace, even without the navicomputer, implying it is done with sensors. How would this fail to detect an interdiction field ahead of a ship in hyperspace?

It is also interesting that in Clone Wars we never see interdictors used. This seems to indicate that against a conventional enemy they aren't worth the trouble, that they are too vulnerable to enemy capital ships. There is also the problem that they would logically

So not just confirming the number of shield generators on an Immobilizer, but also the fact they are tied to specific facings on the ship. Additionally it is possible to detect from which gravity-well projectors a mass shadow is being projected.

It also confirms seperate particle and ray shields for Imperial vessels. This might cast doubt on Brian Young's theory of shield permeability. This might explain how fighters could fly under shields and attack with missiles while also explaining why attacks appear on the surface of shields. But if fighters could only fly under the particle shields, their blasters would be useless. And in Clone Wars the majority of fighter attacks use guns rather than missiles, fired as close to the target as possible.

Some more information about the Immobilizer, Luke doesn't exactly spell out the vulnerabilities but presumably its shields part of it given what happens next, which as he notes hasn't been done before. There's also the revelation that ISDs are packing gravity-well projectors now.

I believe the vulnerability was that their shields are weaker due to the need to power the gravity well projectors. And the ISD version used to be a specialized vessel, not the standard ISD. Though this could have changed, I doubt it given the number of other things that seem the same.

So we have a canon answer to an old question, what would a Seismic Charge do to a SW ship, which clearly is it would blow the hell out of ship. It should be noted though that this was only possible after Luke had managed to disable the particle shields in that section and open a hole in the hull for it to fall through, essentially blowing up inside the ship, something few other scifi ships could survive themselves. Presumably then the Immobilizer's shields would have blocked the blast in other circumstances, otherwise Luke would have just had to release the charge after getting close enough rather than go through all the trouble he did.

It would be logical that the effect would be less effective against shields, given the way it dissipates over an area. Clearly the weapon was intended for use against surface targets and only improvised as a space weapon. Though I wonder what would happen if one used it to clear the surface of the Death Star? Though presumably the poorly equipped Rebels lacked the money for more exotic weapons such as these.

Besides some species info, it's interesting to read that there are "aliens" who support the Empire. So much of the EU emphasized the human-centric nature of the Empire, which was kinda supported by the movies since we only ever saw human Imperials while the Rebels were quite distinctly multi-species, but it would be simplistic to assume every non-human species was against or oppressed by the Empire. Some of them would benefit from the New Order, and the advantages would outweigh any disadvantages of being part of an authoritarian regime, even one which was biased against them.

It would make sense that this would be the case. We also see an alien in ANH who points the stormtroopers against Luke and Obi-Wan. So even in the films there is something to suggest that this is the case.

Size matters not! I think it's important to include this bit just to remind people that a Jedi's telekinesis doesn't come from them personally, it's them acting through the Force on an object. This is what allows them to move things which would be incredibly heavy or fast moving since they don't have to worry about their bodies being affected in the process.

It is interesting to see a purely scientific perspective contrasted with Luke's when it comes to the Force. This really would be an interesting conflict to show in more detail, feeling closer to traditional science fiction. This also seems to indicate that it would be harder, if not impossible for Jedi to say pinch off blood vessels inside a target body, something that was once frequently mentioned on the forums as a way for Jedi to kill virtually anyone in single combat.

Hand motion may be key to the use of Force abilities, but we have seen examples of the non-somatic use of the Force (i.e. Vader ripping machines out of the wall at Bespin). It could be the hand motions are necessary to focus a Jedi's mind when they're first learning to use the Force, a sort of foci for manipulating such an unseen sense, but with enough practice they don't require it anymore.

Vader on Bespin seems a rare case of this not being needed. Even Yoda uses hand movements to manipulate things. Obi-Wan seems to always do this regardless of how small the task is.

Another canon answer for a question which comes up often in debates involving SW, whether they can use their hyperdrives when operating in space where there hasn't been a chance to explore and map out lanes. Locating stars and traveling to them without having actually visited them is something that has been logically argued to be possible before, this just confirms that. Clearly though it's not something just anyone can do on their own.

On the face of it this seems to contradict earlier when Luke was able to forge a new hyperspace lane on his own, but I would assume is that it's a matter of degrees. Luke may have made his own lane, but he was still traveling through relatively well-known space, whereas this is an entire sector of space which has been unexplored.

How can there still be unexplored space? In AOTC the Jedi librarian confidently says that if a star system doesn't appear in their records, it does not exist. Yoda and Obi-Wan realize that if there is something not there, it must have been erased from the records. This makes the nonsense from Zahn novels about the Unknown Regions absurd.

Though in this case it would make sense given that the Rebels presumably don't have the same elaborate records as the Jedi or the Empire. This quote does lead me to another question, how did they detect the inderdictors? And given that they did, why isn't it more common to detect them ahead of time?

Ch 20 pg 226 wrote:
Then his skull exploded in a bolt of superheated plasma, spraying me with blood, bone fragments, and brain tissue.

Boom, headshot. Quite literally.

So if blasters are plasma, why don't the bolts noticeably arc in gravity? And why do we occasionally see damage that precedes the visible bolt?

What? A competent Imperial?! Unheard of!

It's sad that they mentioned it as if it were odd. Given what we have apparently seen on Rebels, it isn't very encouraging.

The return of the Bothan spynet. I've always thought it almost disadvantageous for the Bothans to be so well-known as spies, ideally if you're going to spy on someone you don't want to stand out, and if everyone figures when they see a Bothan they see a spy that kinda makes your job harder.

Definitely.

One redeeming possibility is that the spy network in question mostly consists of Bothans hiring other people to do the actual spying for them, while they themselves handle operational analysis, manning communications nodes, and possibly black ops missions that don't involve blending into the crowd.

Typical EU brainbug polluting the new canon. If it was mentioned in the films as a throwaway line it must be important. In fact it must be the most important representative of whatever was mentioned. Thus Bothans are all master spies and general deceptive by nature. Though they are spies that were easily fooled by Palpatine's deception, something the EU seems to forget.

Simon's suggestion is quite reasonable, especially if they do a great deal of their intelligence gathering remotely, in a similar manner to the US National Security Agency. There is also the fact that much of intelligence gathering simply requires deep pockets. This fits with Leia's comment in ROTJ about the code to bypass the shield at Endor "I hope that code is worth the price we payed."

Also, this feat of navigation is being based on extensive observations of the area of space in question- note the emphasis on the space not being "unobserved."

This fits with the Jedi archives in AOTC. The deeper question in a versus context is how long it would take. We have no idea on that.

True, although Luke thinks the risk associated with this kind of short range hopping and improvised navigation through uncharted space is significant, and he's presumably not wrong about that. Taking big, expensive warships on such journeys on a regular basis might wind up causing higher risk to the warships than enemy action does.

Anakin did exactly this in Clone Wars to get his fighters in position against Malvolence. And one of them was lost in the process while flying through a nebula.

[Balrog]

Ah, and Drusil did not have access to any prior information on observations of that region of space?

I mean, you'd think that there would be some pre-existing information on what stars exist in that volume, even if the information all comes from remote observation.

Undoubtedly, but the calculations themselves took a very short time. In which case the only limiting factor is how long the invading force can sit in one location and observe enough of local space to determine where the stars are, assuming again the "spam probe droids" or "buy star charts from the natives" strategy isn't an option.

Yeah. The only question in my mind is to what extent all this good navigation relies on having detailed databases of the locations of known celestial bodies dating back for decades, centuries, or millenia. Even if the hyperspace routes haven't been charted through all parts of galactic space, the locations of the stars themselves are presumably known.

In the context of a versus debate it would present an inconvenience, but not some sort of insurmountable or I believe a truly significant disadvantage. While a SW ship might not be able to travel from one end of a foreign galaxy to another in a matter of hours, the sheer speed of hyperspace would mean even the system-to-system approach would be significantly faster than many other franchises' FTL travel methods.