Simon_Jester wrote:NecronLord wrote:Did you not read the post? Connor just talked about how they don't necessarily contradict given the number of variables involved. The point of variables is that they vary.
I read it. I guess my problem is that confronted with data points A, B, and C, sometimes it's easier for me to just
ignore point C as an outlier than it is to come up with a combination of factors that could explain how all three points are valid.
It's very easy for me to believe that a journey across a respectable chunk of the galaxy takes
at least several days under normal conditions in Star Wars. Sometimes I'm even the one arguing for such speeds, because (for example) it is very hard to explain Luke's interactions with Han and Obi-Wan during the Death Star escape unless they'd spent several days together aboard the
Falcon on the way to Alderaan.
But when someone tells me that it's going to take them several days to travel a thousand light years, which is only a tiny fraction of the galaxy's width, I have to ask whether or not they actually put in any effort to be consistent- and if not, I don't see a reason I should respect their position.
I think its partly a problem of the mindset created by the old style 'vs debates' where things were either/or. You get so used to hearing certain numbers (particularily the ones from one side, or your side, or whatever your position in it was.) that you grow so accustomed to thinking in those terms they become traditional (and thus, by and large, immutable in your own mind.) Thus when confronted with something that goes against what your 'tradition' tells you is right, you object because it 'feels' wrong, even if the evidence does not explicitly contradict the notion. (And here lets be honest, just how big a cross section of hyperdrive travel do we have, much less one where the timeframes and distances are concretely known? This isn't like the old rabid Trekkie 'logic' where X-wing pilots sit in a cockpit for days on end, or the galaxy is freakishly small, but there's still plenty of wiggle room nonetheless simply because there is so much we DON'T know and we don't really have a large enough sample size - at least not by the movies themselves.)
And its not just hyperdrive speeds. Its the 'scope' of the Empire/Star Wars galaxy based on the movies (how much territory it occupies, etc.), industrial capabilities (actual rather than potential, because the 'actual' demonstrated doesn't really seem to match up to the potential), military size, etc.
I mean the only thing we had concerete on size from the movies I recall (other than inferring from 'galactic' Empire, but thats like inferring a Star Destroyer's capabilities from its name.) is Obi-Wan generalizing 'thousands' of systems in ROTS and the whole 'Separatist' crisis (the prologue mentioning 'several thousand' systems and then Dooku mentioning 10K later.) and that's not going to mesh up with anyone's idea of 'epic' either, is it? If we go into the novelizations for the movies we get a bit better (REpublic at the time of TPM stated to have ~100K planets, ATOC mentioning 'tens of thousands' as well, whilst at the time of the ANH novelization there were a million worlds.) Ironically its the EU where we actually get bigger scope (millions/tens of millions/billions of inhabited planets in the Republic/Empire depending on source.) And in terms of ifrepower you only have really nasty stuff by extrapolating purely from the Death Star (which has always been contested) whereas the EU tends to have far more high end stuff (although its got its fair share of non-high end stuff as well.)
That chart is bizarre, because (for example) it says that it takes four hours to go from Tatooine to Corellia, and four hours from Corellia to Coruscant... but 542 hours to go directly from Tatooine to Coruscant!
Why is it bizarre? The rationale is that for the made up magic of the hyperdrive there are equally made up magic restrictions/limitations impacting performance. I can mention a bunch of them that have evolved over time (not only from WEG) but the end result is that hyperdrive speed is variable.
Think of it in this way. Hyperdrives have a specific 'thrust' that we don't know, and that is a fixed quantity. Depending on the 'resistance' they meet (various factors, including interstellar medium) as well as the nature of the course they have to navigate (how straight line is it, do they have to navigate around stuff, etc.) and other factors, your actual speed can vary dramatically. Its basically a FTL example of airspeed or land speed changing depending on terrain/atmosphere conditions and suchlike, although thats a very loose analogy and only one of the conditions I remember.
Likewise, not all hyperdrives will neccesarily emphasize 'MAXIMUM THRUST', because of fuel concerns, reliability, cost, and various things (again just as not all engines are the same performance wise.) and that too can impact speed. Victory and Venator class SDs have a class one hyperdrive. ISDs have a class two (slower), whilst a Venator has a class .6 (and a 250,000 LY range, which is more than 4 times the Venator's 60,000 LY range.)
Put in that way of thinking, there's nothing really bizarre about it.
I can wrap my brain around a navigational environment where this is true, where it really does take sixty-five times as long to go directly from A to C as from A to B to C. What I cannot grasp is why anyone would even bother talking about "the route from A to C" in that context, because no sane person would ever travel that way. It would be like driving from New York to Seattle on the way to Philadelphia.
We dont know enough about the nature of the 'resistances' hyperdrive may face to really predict that sort of thing to know its an outlier. Magic black box technology, after all. All you can say is 'its slower than the relatively handful of examples form the movie' which by itself is not really indicative of a contradiction without more data (again the movies are rather vague on this, for the obvious reasons they aren't designed as infodumps.)
And that further assumes there is only a single factor involved, rather than a combination of multiple factors influencing effective 'top' speed, which I have again addressed.
Now, again, I can take that chart as a data-point and accomodate it. But if that is accomodated, the first thing we have to recognize is that realistically, all accessible points in galactic space are reached by zipping around a network of corridors, and that no one ever goes "off-net" under normal circumstances if they can possibly avoid it.
Yes and no. There are certain 'predictable' routes of unspecified volume within galactic space that are easier to travel through than others. It doesn't mean that you can't travel 'off' those routes, its just its not going to be as effective to do so. I mean if it was impossible at all to travel off those routes, how did hte routes themselves get established to begin with? These aren't wormholes or jump point networks, its closer in principle to how Warp navigation in 40K works (in theory you can travel anywhere, but 40K space weather - which they call immateriology or something like that IIRC - imposes certain limits on certain routes, certain directions of travel, and so on and so forth, but there is still tons of latitude within very broad limitations.)
I never got the overall impression that this was the case in Star Wars- navigation seems comparatively free, with the ability to go from any point to any point at least implicit. Is it just me?
Probably not. But again it depends on what context you're looking at this evidence in and what evidence you're factoring in. If you go by 'movies only' approach and extrapolate you're probably not going to get a picture that resembles what you get if you add in the EU together. But by that same token, those extrapolations are going to be less precise simply because your data set is much sparser, and that means your extrapolations are correspondingly less precise.) That is in fact a major drawback of a 'movie only' approach to Star Wars, you're literally severing away a vastly huger chunk of your data set for no discernable reason other than 'purity', and that is going to affect your conclusions. I'd get the same result if I broke up 40K up analysis into 'codex only' and 'book only' or broke it up by edition and it would be not only less precise due to less data, it would be messier becasue I have to juggle all these separate classifications that shit has to be organized into (which is why I just dump everything into one big pile. Its still a big pile that is time consuming to sort, but the actual classification is pretty simple.)
Thing is, we calculate firepower by looking at special effects- so it's easy to rationalize a disparity of firepower, when you are at least vaguely aware that you're reading/viewing a work of fiction.
We calculate ship speeds by looking at the plot. It's harder to rationalize a plot hole created by "wait, if they were hopping across the galaxy in a day here, why would it take them six months to cross the galaxy over here?" At least, it is for me.
Thing is, this kind of ignores context something fierce. Its possible to 'analyze' stuff again simply by what we observe without understanding the how and why, but not knowing how and why limits our ability to predict stuff, and as I noted the movies-only data set is pretty small to begin with. doing shit to make it even smaller and more restrictive is not, IMHO, a good idea.
) and destroy the associated planets of a system. Wether it is a nova or some effect everyone describes as going nova is IMO immaterial here if it is capable of destroying the planets in system killing everyone on them. Also, while the core worlds have planetary shields, most fringe and middle sectors do not and therefore might be disinclined to support the empire in a war. 
