Could Galatic empire build a warhammer 40K titan equivalent

[Adam Reynolds]

Also if they had a ready way of doing things electronically, they'd then also want to constantly engineer new hardware, and deploy ever more elaborate antennas to do so. Not really seeing much (as in we all know its zero) to suggest anything like that is going on. The best ECCM always ends up being hardware is the reality. Electronic methods are a way to exploit your hardware. it seems far more likely that they are stuck in the situation the world was in during the early 1950s when jamming largely just could blank out systems. And since they are using scibabble crap anyway we have no reason to assume they can't get stuck in that kind of situation.

TIE fighters over the first Death Star were still able to see where the X-wings were. Though it is just as likely that they were simply vectored by much more powerful sensors based on the Death Star. If the Empire stopped jamming the Rebel fighters would have almost certainly been able to hit the exhaust port. Though of course that begs the question of why they didn't use optical guidance. I suppose it could have been a speed and acceleration problem given the tight turn we saw the missiles make.

It's possible that the switch on the speeder bike simply caused some kind of feedback thanks to being in motion during a high speed chase which would have prevented legible messages being broadcast. Not quite 'jamming' in the usual sense, but still effective. But who knows.

That is a reasonable idea. Effectively a hot mic. I recall that being used in Generation Kill to prevent an incompetent officer from calling in artillery on his own position. Or something to that effect. I might be combining events.

As observed previously, it's only around a 5-year period from ANH to ROTJ. Would significant changes in electronic technology really be all that apparent from point A to B on that timeline? WWII ships didn't look *very* different in 1945 versus 1941, after all.

The F-16 block 10 and block 60 look largely the same despite the fact that the first version could only drop dumb bombs and fire sidewinders with a simplistic radar. At one point it was a daytime only aircraft with no ability to shoot missiles based on radar contacts. The block 60 has an AESA radar and can carry most any air launched weapon in the US inventory. Appearances mean nothing when it comes to electronic systems.

Electronic warfare sure advanced in that time period. It went from a few ground installations to virtually all night fighters having radar. And the ways of countering radar also proliferated with electronic warfare largely being invented. And warships similarly went through a change. While none of the ships sunk at Pearl Harbor had radar, virtually every ship in the US Navy did by 1945. They were even installing it on nearly every PT boat.

Though that has little relevance to Star Wars. Their technology is very nearly static. New technologies are simply different takes on old ideas.

It's credible, but they have immense processing power and it's not credible that they're all too stupid to try and use it.

I'm imagining a scenario where the hardware limitations are profound (Star Wars technology doesn't change rapidly), and the software responses to jamming are as good as anyone can make them- but where jamming IS as you say inherently very effective, so that while droid brains can sometimes counter the jamming, they can't always do so. And for all intents and purposes the merely human operators just give up trying to do anything about enemy ECM themselves; either the droids can cope or they can't. If they can't there's nothing for it except to blow up the jammer.

That is assuming that it is possible. If you dump enough energy from jammers, it would just plain interfere with sensors. Having an AI deal with electronic warfare could work, but we never see any indication of it. Jamming just plain works in Star Wars in most major battles that we see. Those who can defeat it seem to have enough power to do so.

It's why no one ever considers using jammers against the Trade Federation. Though by the Clone Wars, they had learned from their lesson and turned it into a kill switch rather than a keepalive signal.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Actually, the Warp doesn't rely on realspace psykers, you're confusing the Warp with beings in the Warp. It's supposed to be an echo of the souls of all the sentient creatures int he galaxy. Since the SW galaxy contains sentient beings, ergo the Warp will still exist there. It won't contain any Gods or daemons (yet) but it's there, just like how the Warp exited in the 40K verse at least sixty million years before the Chaos Gods emerged (it was used by the Old Ones in their war with the Necrons after all).

Am I the only one who sees a similarity between it and the force? A magical mystical thing that surrounds and binds all souls and all that. And the force is implied to have a will of its own and yet be in a state of flux sufficient that a "chosen one" can bring "balance" to it. I would not at all be surprised if in a crossover scenario the force it self turned out to be a hegemonic chaos god of the SW galaxy. And the reason why the warp does not manifest it self would than simply be the fact that as a hegemonic entity it would be the representation of all human tropes and emotions at once and thus wear toward neither extreme and thus basically be in a state of balance that precludes massive excesses like those inflicted by the chaos gods.

I said as much in my last post. The idea fits in with SW surprisingly well actually. Though sicne SW never had an equivalent to the War in Heaven where one side is throwing around Warp weapon and engineering whole races of psykers to fight for them, it's much more quiescent than the 40K Warp is.

[Simon_Jester]

Given that those seemed to be patrol/recon units jamming equipment might well be standard. That way if you are spotted on patrol by the enemy you can jam their communications and prevent them from calling reinforcements long enough for you to either kill them or flee.

Yes, but the converse of that is that the enemy will be trying to do the same thing to your patrol units at the same time.

So you want your scout bikers to be able to jam enemy communications (and since they're fast-moving and hard to localize and pin down, they could be very disruptive just by zipping around using their jammers to interfere with communications). But you also want them to be resistant to being jammed in return, because your scouts are useless to you unless they can communicate with you.

So you'd think that a reconnaissance speeder would have either the best available jammers and countermeasures (if it's high-end optimized hardware), or very little of both (if it's relatively cheap and economical hardware, equivalent to just buying your soldier a motorcycle to enhance their mobility).

Unless, of course, it is cheap and easy to add a jammer to a speeder, but very expensive and difficult to add effective countermeasures. Which is consistent with the "jamming just works and has largely won the contest between ECM and ECCM" idea.
________________

Really, I guess my only special point is that we cannot easily know how much computing, software, and data analysis goes on behind the scenes to allow Star Wars systems the level of communication and sensor data they do manage to get- because we only notice jamming when it's so effective that it blinds sensors and renders communication impossible. At other times, we might not notice the jamming because it's not there... or we might not notice it because it is being successfully neutralized by computer/droid controlled ECCM that is invisible from a plot point of view.

[Sea Skimmer]

TIE fighters over the first Death Star were still able to see where the X-wings were. Though it is just as likely that they were simply vectored by much more powerful sensors based on the Death Star.

Or they could just see them with optics. The US already built satellites which can see everything in earth orbit of even remotely X-wing like size, purely with visual wavelengths, and DAS on the F-35 kinda makes a joke of this subject compared to anything before it. Optical blinding systems were certainly not in use by the Death Star, but not all craft present may have been equally well equipped with sensors. But then this is really just another example of how real life technology has crushed most sci fi and how talking about jamming is a waste of time. We know the authors don't understand it worth a damn, it is best to adapt the simple explanations.

If the Empire stopped jamming the Rebel fighters would have almost certainly been able to hit the exhaust port.

Based on what? That certainly wasn't the Rebel concern voiced during the briefing. Was Beggar's Canyon full of Imperial Jammers? The Rebel attack plan was hardly inspiring either, why didn't the lead formation of X-wings attack the Imperial gun positions in the trench for example? They destroyed guns on the surface so its not like this was 'impossible' by any means.

We know the real answer to that of course, it was because the entire premise was based off a British movie about Lancasters attacking a U-boat pen and Lancaster's couldn't have done useful flak suppression.

Though of course that begs the question of why they didn't use optical guidance. I suppose it could have been a speed and acceleration problem given the tight turn we saw the missiles make.

Optical guidance will provide a much higher data rate then any active pulse based system like radar; ergo it only favors accuracy under high speed conditions. The only limit for it in real life is aerodynamic hearing and atmospheric blur, neither of which apply in space.

The F-16 block 10 and block 60 look largely the same despite the fact that the first version could only drop dumb bombs and fire sidewinders with a simplistic radar. At one point it was a daytime only aircraft with no ability to shoot missiles based on radar contacts. The block 60 has an AESA radar and can carry most any air launched weapon in the US inventory. Appearances mean nothing when it comes to electronic systems.

Just an FYI but the F-16 always had a night capability. It always had the ability to slew AIM-9 to radar contacts, actually models of F-4 before it had this ability. And while the radar was not super advanced it was certainly much better then what came before it. Not including AIM-7 was basically an issue of not wanting to pay for the continuous wave illuminator module, which is basically its own radar bolted to the existing one, to protect F-15 funding.

[Adam Reynolds]

Or they could just see them with optics. The US already built satellites which can see everything in earth orbit of even remotely X-wing like size, purely with visual wavelengths, and DAS on the F-35 kinda makes a joke of this subject compared to anything before it. Optical blinding systems were certainly not in use by the Death Star, but not all craft present may have been equally well equipped with sensors. But then this is really just another example of how real life technology has crushed most sci fi and how talking about jamming is a waste of time. We know the authors don't understand it worth a damn, it is best to adapt the simple explanations.

What DAS like systems especially makes a joke of is the idea "pick up your visual scanning" would ever beat sensors. Anything that you can see, so can multiple unjammable sensors. Thinking about that again, that is something that had bothered me for awhile, even before I knew just how sophisticated the F-35s sensors were getting. Even if they could jam every part of the spectrum other than visual light(for whatever reason), it would still be possible to have a 360 camera array that would still beat human eyes.

Not to mention the problem with something like the stealth systems used in Mass Effect that have no visual effect. While they mention that it is possible to see it visually, they never seem to have a problem with this in its use. Especially considering that the stealth systems aren't really even plot relevant. They could just as easily have had the Normandy be slightly faster at FTL and more easily able to jump close to its targets. It would have worked just as well as the stealth systems that were never used in the original game and only used three or four times in the entire series. Two of those against the AI Geth who were especially vulnerable because they don't use windows and also apparently lack other visual sensors.

Based on what? That certainly wasn't the Rebel concern voiced during the briefing. Was Beggar's Canyon full of Imperial Jammers? The Rebel attack plan was hardly inspiring either, why didn't the lead formation of X-wings attack the Imperial gun positions in the trench for example? They destroyed guns on the surface so its not like this was 'impossible' by any means.

We know the real answer to that of course, it was because the entire premise was based off a British movie about Lancasters attacking a U-boat pen and Lancaster's couldn't have done useful flak suppression.

I got nothing for that. It could almost be argued it was an attempt to preserve fighters for later attacks but that wouldn't make any sense in light of the fact that Rebel fighters were still in a position in which they were getting shot at by the Death Star's guns. They only moved out of range when they were down to a half dozen X-wings.

Optical guidance will provide a much higher data rate then any active pulse based system like radar; ergo it only favors accuracy under high speed conditions. The only limit for it in real life is aerodynamic hearing and atmospheric blur, neither of which apply in space.

Knew there had to be a flaw there. The only other thing I could think of is that it has something to do with the way the shields work. That the high speed turn was necessary as a means to bypass the shielding in a way that would mimic the effects of exhaust in reverse. Though that really doesn't make that much sense either. I suppose the torpedoes themselves could have been optical, but the targeting computer was something more like radar.

Just an FYI but the F-16 always had a night capability. It always had the ability to slew AIM-9 to radar contacts, actually models of F-4 before it had this ability. And while the radar was not super advanced it was certainly much better then what came before it. Not including AIM-7 was basically an issue of not wanting to pay for the continuous wave illuminator module, which is basically its own radar bolted to the existing one, to protect F-15 funding.

I thought originally it as it was conceived it was a daylight only fighter solely intended to be a superior dogfighter as created by the fighter mafia. That was before the USAF got sane and turned it into a multirole fighter. Though i suppose that wasn't the production version.

[Adam Reynolds]

Or they could just see them with optics. The US already built satellites which can see everything in earth orbit of even remotely X-wing like size, purely with visual wavelengths, and DAS on the F-35 kinda makes a joke of this subject compared to anything before it. Optical blinding systems were certainly not in use by the Death Star, but not all craft present may have been equally well equipped with sensors. But then this is really just another example of how real life technology has crushed most sci fi and how talking about jamming is a waste of time. We know the authors don't understand it worth a damn, it is best to adapt the simple explanations.

What DAS like systems especially makes a joke of is the idea "pick up your visual scanning" would ever beat sensors. Anything that you can see, so can multiple unjammable sensors. Thinking about that again, that is something that had bothered me for awhile, even before I knew just how sophisticated the F-35s sensors were getting. Even if they could jam every part of the spectrum other than visual light(for whatever reason), it would still be possible to have a 360 camera array that would still beat human eyes.

Not to mention the problem with something like the stealth systems used in Mass Effect that have no visual effect. While they mention that it is possible to see it visually, they never seem to have a problem with this in its use. Especially considering that the stealth systems aren't really even plot relevant. They could just as easily have had the Normandy be slightly faster at FTL and more easily able to jump close to its targets. It would have worked just as well as the stealth systems that were never used in the original game and only used three or four times in the entire series. Two of those against the AI Geth who were especially vulnerable because they don't use windows and also apparently lack other visual sensors.

Based on what? That certainly wasn't the Rebel concern voiced during the briefing. Was Beggar's Canyon full of Imperial Jammers? The Rebel attack plan was hardly inspiring either, why didn't the lead formation of X-wings attack the Imperial gun positions in the trench for example? They destroyed guns on the surface so its not like this was 'impossible' by any means.

We know the real answer to that of course, it was because the entire premise was based off a British movie about Lancasters attacking a U-boat pen and Lancaster's couldn't have done useful flak suppression.

I got nothing for that. It could almost be argued it was an attempt to preserve fighters for later attacks but that wouldn't make any sense in light of the fact that Rebel fighters were still in a position in which they were getting shot at by the Death Star's guns. They only moved out of range when they were down to a half dozen X-wings.

Optical guidance will provide a much higher data rate then any active pulse based system like radar; ergo it only favors accuracy under high speed conditions. The only limit for it in real life is aerodynamic hearing and atmospheric blur, neither of which apply in space.

Knew there had to be a flaw there. The only other thing I could think of is that it has something to do with the way the shields work. That the high speed turn was necessary as a means to bypass the shielding in a way that would mimic the effects of exhaust in reverse. Though that really doesn't make that much sense either. I suppose the torpedoes themselves could have been optical, but the targeting computer was something more like radar.

Just an FYI but the F-16 always had a night capability. It always had the ability to slew AIM-9 to radar contacts, actually models of F-4 before it had this ability. And while the radar was not super advanced it was certainly much better then what came before it. Not including AIM-7 was basically an issue of not wanting to pay for the continuous wave illuminator module, which is basically its own radar bolted to the existing one, to protect F-15 funding.

[/quote]
I thought originally it as it was conceived it was a daylight only fighter solely intended to be a superior dogfighter as created by the fighter mafia. That was before the USAF got sane and turned it into a multirole fighter. Though i suppose that wasn't the production version.[/quote]

[Sea Skimmer]

I would suggest the best answer to the X-wing attack is that the proton torpedoes were in fact inertially guided. That would be most compliant with the idea that the X-wing was supposed to lock onto the target, and yet Luke could do a better job hip shooting using the force.

The Force should be irrelevant if the missile have some kind of active homing system, and that would yet further question why the X-Wing would need to lock onto a target already known in detail from the actual construction plans of the Death Star. That should be a pretty textbook case for using an autonomous system, were the Proton Torpedo at all capable of such operation. But we have no reason to think they must be so. Indeed if jamming is highly effective and the weapons are intended for attacking large capital targets inertial guidance should be more then effective enough, all the more so given that the X-wing could potentially be launching the thing at a fraction of the speed of light.

Luke would actually need to physically force the torpedoes into the port if they were homing missiles, which is utterly at odds with his force skills, or indeed pretty much anything else the force is ever shown doing in canon.

Meanwhile given an interial guidance system, and detailed plans of the Death Star the actual turn into the exhaust port could have been preprogrammed, requiring only an exact range and altitude to be fired. Thus something that could be hip shot.

As for the reason why a turn at all, probably some difference between ray and physical shields or their geometry, though the new movies and clone wars series kinda undermined that idea compared to when the forum was started up and this had some support in the old EU. Said factors might be compounded by high vulnerability of the fighters making a direct straight attack (trench run should be rather sharply curved) long enough to lock on. In the end though no answer will ever make much sense because the surface turbolasers were so vulnerable and ineffective as defenses, and the Rebels explicitly knew it. They should have been able to blowup the turrets around the port and had a fighter all but hover right over the port and crap a torpedo down it. Or even heck, send out a shuttle with a guy in a space suit to fire a missile down the port.

But then I also tend to think the port had to be an intentional design flaw as part of some plot to kill the Emperor or Tarkin. Otherwise its awful implausible that all those super droids everyone has to fix random farm equipment wouldn't notice should a vulnerability (the rebels found it functionally instantly afterall!) so its defenses may have also been intentionally flawed.

[Adam Reynolds]

As for the reason why a turn at all, probably some difference between ray and physical shields or their geometry, though the new movies and clone wars series kinda undermined that idea compared to when the forum was started up and this had some support in the old EU. Said factors might be compounded by high vulnerability of the fighters making a direct straight attack (trench run should be rather sharply curved) long enough to lock on. In the end though no answer will ever make much sense because the surface turbolasers were so vulnerable and ineffective as defenses, and the Rebels explicitly knew it. They should have been able to blowup the turrets around the port and had a fighter all but hover right over the port and crap a torpedo down it. Or even heck, send out a shuttle with a guy in a space suit to fire a missile down the port.

Agreed on the inertial guidance, that would be the most reasonable concept. Though I wonder if the high speed of the attack was a neccesary component. Given what we saw with droidika shields in Clone Wars and Gungan shields in TPM speed is an improtant component of permissive attacks. For the purpose of the Death Star, given that we know it was an exhaust port, it would make sense that it might be more vulnerable along a certain axis as that is the direction that the exhaust is allowed to escape along the edges of the shield. It is thus shielded against top down attacks from its most vulnerable angle and is only vulnerable at an odd angle high speed physical attack that operates as the reverse of its own exhaust. Given that we know shields can easily allow attacks of certain types, it is a reasonable theory.

For a slightly longer version, in the recent Death Star conspiracy theory thread, I stated this:

True. I am assuming that they do block both directions in most cases. Physics dictates that this must be the case. I would suggest that they are actually two way shields in more ways that one. In addition to blocking attacks from both directions, they also permit attacks from both directions. While this doesn't mean that blasters can penetrate shields, it does mean that physical attacks often can. In TPM we see droidikas poke their weapons through their own shields as a means of shooting through them*. At a sufficiently low speed, it also allows an attacker to roll a thermal detonator under it, or for an entire Jedi to dive under it(as shown in Clone Wars, A War on Two Fronts and Landing at Point Rain respectively).

That might also be the key to the sucess of the proton torpedo attack, it was able to travel at enough of an angle to get through without really interacting with the shields in a way they were designed to block(as it would otherwise block its own exhaust). That would also explain why the Rebel fighters had to attack through the trench and fire their torpedoes at an odd angle that made them more likely to miss. It was after all only after the comment about ray shields that Wedge state it to be impossible.

Ray shields, at least in some cases can also block physical attacks, as shown in ROTS. When trapped by what is referred to as ray shields, neither Obi-Wan nor Anakin consider the possibility of something like levitating a lightsaber beyond the shield and attacking the emitter. Though tactics like that are things we don't tend to see Jedi of the Old Republic doing. That is something I would more expect to see from Timothy Zahn.

* I would also suggest that capital ships use exactly the same trick as droidikas, though in this case it is a question of the shields rather than the weapons moving. Given that we know they are hull hugging, it would not be difficult to poke the weapons through in order to fire. It would also fit the fact that Anakin is successfully able to attack the main weapon of Malvolence as it is preparing to fire, even though he lacked a sufficient number of fighters to penetrate the bridge shields. Though it would seem odd that this sort of attack is not more common, most turbolaser barrels aren't a very large target. And the hole in the shields doesn't need to be very large in the first place, no one ever suggest shooting droidika shields in the same fashion even though they visibly poke through.

But then I also tend to think the port had to be an intentional design flaw as part of some plot to kill the Emperor or Tarkin. Otherwise its awful implausible that all those super droids everyone has to fix random farm equipment wouldn't notice should a vulnerability (the rebels found it functionally instantly afterall!) so its defenses may have also been intentionally flawed.

Makes one wonder which side caused said flaw. Perhaps the Alliance had infiltrators in the design process. Is there any historical analog to that idea, that of infiltrators sabotaging a major program? I can recall a handful of thrillers with loosely similar plots though no true stories of such things. That would be a potentially interesting plot element in Rouge One, set to come out next year. Though I doubt they will use that.

Another unlikely possibility is the AIs that were involved in the design process beliving it to be unsportsmanlike to not have a flaw and so left it in in a manner that allowed the attack to occur.

This has actually gotten me thinking about an odd idea for Star Wars with zero basis in canon. That droids and other AIs are secretly behind key events and even make up the Force itself. We know that droids capable of easily being smarter than humans and yet never seem to be. We also know that Force predictions are predictions rather than actual portrayals of the future(always in motion is the future). Even though they often come true, it does not mean that they were destined to. Force based precog isn't actually precog in the sense of genuinely being able to see the future. It is closer to The Machine in Person of Interest(a predictive AI) than traditional mystic precogs of the never wrong sort, which would actually be accurate enough to achieve essentially all of the feats of Force users apart from telekinesis.

What if midichlorians are actually a form of nanodroids(shown to exist in Clone Wars) that give users Force sensitivity as well as allow them to carry out various actions? The spiritual piece is an AI with a sense of humor that truly believes itself to be a god that should be worshiped but doesn't want to be known as a deity.

[Adam Reynolds]

My updated version of the above theory is this:

The recent discussion on the OSF forum about the nature of SW jamming being handled by droids that led to a discussion of the Death Star flaw being something droids should have been able to spot during the design phase gave me an interesting idea. It started with that of questioning why an AI would miss the flaws in the first Death Star's design. If they were intentional, perhaps the AI though it was unsportsmanlike.

I have long argued that The Force is not sentient, that it is a naturalistic phenomenon. But what if it were both, specifically, what if it was actually an AI.

What if droids and other AIs are secretly behind key events and even make up the Force itself. We know that droids capable of easily being smarter than humans and yet never seem to be. We also know that Force predictions are predictions rather than actual portrayals of the future(always in motion is the future). Even though they often come true, it does not mean that they were destined to. Force based precog isn't actually precog in the sense of genuinely being able to see the future. It is closer to The Machine in Person of Interest(a predictive AI) than traditional mystic precogs of the never wrong sort. The Machine would actually be accurate enough to achieve essentially all of the feats of Force users apart from telekinesis(it even gives targeting data to individuals at certain points). Telekinesis is the only factor that I don't have an explanation for under this theory.

What if midichlorians are actually a form of nanodroids(shown to exist in Clone Wars) that give users Force sensitivity as well as allowing them to carry out various actions? Telekinesis could also be a result of nanodroids acting on whatever object the Jedi does. If they flow out of the Force user to the object it would explain why they appear winded every time they interact with something. The connective nature of the Force is the fact that all of these nanodroids are in constant communication. It is also where they get their information.

This would also explain the shroud of the Dark Side and the shroud of the Light Side. In times of darkness, Jedi are less able to see because the darker emotions caused by this feed Dark Side nanodroids/midichlorians. Likewise, the opposite is true for times of the light.

There was a previous internet theory that R2 was secretly a Rebel agent. What if instead he was actually an agent of the Force itself, one of the few to know its true nature. It would explain his extraordinary luck for a droid as well as the fact that he always seems involved in key events. It would also explain why Obi-Wan seemed to forget R2 in ANH. The Force AI made him forget.

This could also explain the nature of the Dark Side versus Light Side. They are actually a pair of rival AIs that each attempt to manipulate galactic affairs in their favor. The spiritual piece based on the fact that both AIs have a sense of humor and truly believe themselves to be a gods that should be worshiped but don't want to be though of as deities.

Thus the new movies could be about killing the Dark Side AI once and for all. I believe the novel Aftermath mentioned something about the wellspring of the Dark Side. Perhaps that is where the Dark Side half of the AI is hiding.

[bilateralrope]

But then I also tend to think the port had to be an intentional design flaw as part of some plot to kill the Emperor or Tarkin. Otherwise its awful implausible that all those super droids everyone has to fix random farm equipment wouldn't notice should a vulnerability (the rebels found it functionally instantly afterall!) so its defenses may have also been intentionally flawed.

Maybe intentional so that the Emperor has an way to deal with the Death Star if he lost control of whoever was in command of it. All he'd have to do is make sure enough fighter pilots on the Death Star remain loyal to him that they won't stop any attempt to blow it up.

[Adam Reynolds]

But then I also tend to think the port had to be an intentional design flaw as part of some plot to kill the Emperor or Tarkin. Otherwise its awful implausible that all those super droids everyone has to fix random farm equipment wouldn't notice should a vulnerability (the rebels found it functionally instantly afterall!) so its defenses may have also been intentionally flawed.

Maybe intentional so that the Emperor has an way to deal with the Death Star if he lost control of whoever was in command of it. All he'd have to do is make sure enough fighter pilots on the Death Star remain loyal to him that they won't stop any attempt to blow it up.

Even if he could do that, why would he? If enough fighter pilots on the Death Star remained loyal to him why would that also not apply to stormtroopers that would overthrow whomever attempted to rebel against the Empire. Not to mention that that is likely a reason Vader was present.

EDIT: Assuming the first line countermeasures against rebellion failed it would still be possible for the Empire to throw attackers at in until one got through, likely being Vader.

It is also interesting that the Rebels did in fact literally find it instantly. The second R2 plugged in it began giving a schematic that showed the exact same image used in the briefing.

[bilateralrope]

If you were the Emperor, would you rely on just one countermeasure to limit the damage of the Death Star going out of control ?

Or would you stick in several ?

Though it's more likely that someone decided that closing the exhaust port weakness was not worth the cost. Not when the Death Star had enough TIEs to prevent any attack from exploiting it. Which only failed because Tarkin refused to launch them.

[Simon_Jester]

For all we know there were numerous countermeasures... it's just that the exhaust port was the only one that R2-D2 could find in a hurry, and which the Rebels had the means to exploit with what they had on hand at Yavin. If the other options involved things like, oh, a secret radio transmitter concealed in Darth Vader's back pocket transmitting a shutdown code to the reactor assembly... that wouldn't do the Rebels a lot of good.

TIE fighters over the first Death Star were still able to see where the X-wings were. Though it is just as likely that they were simply vectored by much more powerful sensors based on the Death Star.

Or they could just see them with optics. The US already built satellites which can see everything in earth orbit of even remotely X-wing like size, purely with visual wavelengths, and DAS on the F-35 kinda makes a joke of this subject compared to anything before it. Optical blinding systems were certainly not in use by the Death Star, but not all craft present may have been equally well equipped with sensors...

The one question on my mind is, suppose you have optical sensors that work on the basis of "look out the window with a camera."

Now, translate that into Star Wars. An environment where (if we're going by our existing figures) fighters accelerate at two or three thousand gravities, where even the fighters are slinging around ten or hundred-kiloton bolts of energy and where capital ship weapons fire may well be up in the teratons per shot- a cosmic catastrophe by ordinary standards.

In a fleet battle, how well would visual sensors even work? If we accept the basic premise that Star Wars combat is massively energetic, both in terms of maneuver and in terms of weapon and shield performance... I'm not sure visual sensors would be a good way to detect things precisely enough for fire control, because things are moving so rapidly and there's going to be so much flash and sidescatter. Any visual sensor not hardened enough to withstand a nuclear fireball wouldn't be at its best, and "high-resolution fast-acting camera" and "shrugs off a nuclear explosion to the kisser" aren't very compatible design requirements.

The obvious counterpoint is that cameras will still outperform the Mark I eyeball... but do we really see that many cases of craft being detected visually by the pilots' own eyes before they show up on some other sensor?

We know the real answer to that of course, it was because the entire premise was based off a British movie about Lancasters attacking a U-boat pen and Lancaster's couldn't have done useful flak suppression.

Er, thought it was based on the dam-buster raid, but that's a nitpick.

Just an FYI but the F-16 always had a night capability. It always had the ability to slew AIM-9 to radar contacts, actually models of F-4 before it had this ability. And while the radar was not super advanced it was certainly much better then what came before it. Not including AIM-7 was basically an issue of not wanting to pay for the continuous wave illuminator module, which is basically its own radar bolted to the existing one, to protect F-15 funding.

Cool- but the point remains that it's hard to tell just by looking at a machine you don't understand, whether or not that machine has been upgraded. A lot of Star Wars ships don't even have anything we can recognize as an antenna, but they clearly have sensors that do many of the same things radar and so on do. We don't really know what parts of the ships generate and receive those signals, so if they were constantly modifying and upgrading them from generation of ship to generation, how would we know?

As for the reason why a turn at all, probably some difference between ray and physical shields or their geometry, though the new movies and clone wars series kinda undermined that idea compared to when the forum was started up and this had some support in the old EU. Said factors might be compounded by high vulnerability of the fighters making a direct straight attack (trench run should be rather sharply curved) long enough to lock on. In the end though no answer will ever make much sense because the surface turbolasers were so vulnerable and ineffective as defenses, and the Rebels explicitly knew it. They should have been able to blowup the turrets around the port and had a fighter all but hover right over the port and crap a torpedo down it. Or even heck, send out a shuttle with a guy in a space suit to fire a missile down the port.

The rebels may have been worried about massive swarms of TIEs blanketing the entire area. We know the Death Star had TIEs, and presumably lots of them. If Tarkin hadn't been so arrogant and dumb that he refused to even launch his own fighter escorts, the trench run would have been exponentially more difficult if not impossible.

But then I also tend to think the port had to be an intentional design flaw as part of some plot to kill the Emperor or Tarkin. Otherwise its awful implausible that all those super droids everyone has to fix random farm equipment wouldn't notice should a vulnerability (the rebels found it functionally instantly afterall!) so its defenses may have also been intentionally flawed.

I heard the interesting speculation that the reason Vader was even basing from the Death Star in the first place was because it was his job to keep an eye on Tarkin and stop him if he decided it would be a good idea to blow up Coruscant and proclaim himself Emperor Tarkin I.

And Vader is still an ace pilot- so building a vulnerability into the Death Star that allows a lone fighter to kill it is a relatively good way to make it killable by Vader, even if the guy can't physically get to Tarkin on the interior of the battlestation.

In which case, to paraphrase... had things gone differently, it might have been the elder Skywalker, not the younger, firing that proton torpedo.

This has actually gotten me thinking about an odd idea for Star Wars with zero basis in canon. That droids and other AIs are secretly behind key events and even make up the Force itself. We know that droids capable of easily being smarter than humans and yet never seem to be. We also know that Force predictions are predictions rather than actual portrayals of the future(always in motion is the future). Even though they often come true, it does not mean that they were destined to. Force based precog isn't actually precog in the sense of genuinely being able to see the future. It is closer to The Machine in Person of Interest(a predictive AI) than traditional mystic precogs of the never wrong sort, which would actually be accurate enough to achieve essentially all of the feats of Force users apart from telekinesis.

I disagree. There are LOTS of examples in mythology and superstition of the ability to see the future being imperfect, or of information about the future being granted in ambiguous visions (i.e. every shamanistic culture ever). Hell, the basic idea of someone being given information about the future by mystical means, panicking in an attempt to avoid their fate, and accidentally causing their fate, is at least as old as Oedipus Rex back in ancient Athens. Anakin was far from the first character to accidentally fulfill his own prophecies of doom.

Conversely, the Force routinely does NOT give people information that would be highly useful to them and which would be necessary for even a godlike machine to be sure of success. A godlike machine would not, for instance, have arranged the sequence of events involving Luke coming to Bespin! Even assuming the machine could influence Vader, Boba Fett, and the Millenium Falcon to make such events possible, it would have introduced far more variables and risk to do it this way than to do it in a myriad of other ways that would get similar long-term results.

[Adam Reynolds]

For all we know there were numerous countermeasures... it's just that the exhaust port was the only one that R2-D2 could find in a hurry, and which the Rebels had the means to exploit with what they had on hand at Yavin. If the other options involved things like, oh, a secret radio transmitter concealed in Darth Vader's back pocket transmitting a shutdown code to the reactor assembly... that wouldn't do the Rebels a lot of good.

That could certainly be true. Though another possibility, that was allowed in the old Rebellion game, was that the Rebels were also able to sabotage the reactor directly by infiltrating the battle station.

The one question on my mind is, suppose you have optical sensors that work on the basis of "look out the window with a camera."

Why would you not just mount that camera externally? There is no good reason to not do this. Whatever protection the window offers could also be put around the camera. This would give visibility in directions other than where the pilot could see. That is the whole point of DAS. It allows perfect situational awareness.

Now, translate that into Star Wars. An environment where (if we're going by our existing figures) fighters accelerate at two or three thousand gravities, where even the fighters are slinging around ten or hundred-kiloton bolts of energy and where capital ship weapons fire may well be up in the teratons per shot- a cosmic catastrophe by ordinary standards.

Aren't those numbers on the extreme high end, calculated on the assumption that reactor power scales linearly? If we assume that it scales greater than linearly, then low gigatons are the upper limit for capital ships and low kilotons are the upper limit for fighters(unless you mean high-yield missiles, which should be even more powerful than a hundred kilotons). I seem to recall you being in that camp from previous discussions.

While I had originally argued for larger numbers, the idea that reactor power does not exactly scale linearly and that the Death Star was proportionally more powerful, fits with my current theory about the need for the Death Star as a means to overcome planetary shields efficiently.

In a fleet battle, how well would visual sensors even work? If we accept the basic premise that Star Wars combat is massively energetic, both in terms of maneuver and in terms of weapon and shield performance... I'm not sure visual sensors would be a good way to detect things precisely enough for fire control, because things are moving so rapidly and there's going to be so much flash and sidescatter. Any visual sensor not hardened enough to withstand a nuclear fireball wouldn't be at its best, and "high-resolution fast-acting camera" and "shrugs off a nuclear explosion to the kisser" aren't very compatible design requirements.

The obvious counterpoint is that cameras will still outperform the Mark I eyeball... but do we really see that many cases of craft being detected visually by the pilots' own eyes before they show up on some other sensor?

We also don't see anything that would do something like outright blind pilots. Which explosions of that magnitude should. Given that this doesn't occur, sensors could be hardened just as well as fighter cockpits.

Cool- but the point remains that it's hard to tell just by looking at a machine you don't understand, whether or not that machine has been upgraded. A lot of Star Wars ships don't even have anything we can recognize as an antenna, but they clearly have sensors that do many of the same things radar and so on do. We don't really know what parts of the ships generate and receive those signals, so if they were constantly modifying and upgrading them from generation of ship to generation, how would we know?

I don't believe he was actually disagreeing with me, he was just pointing out that I was slightly wrong.

The rebels may have been worried about massive swarms of TIEs blanketing the entire area. We know the Death Star had TIEs, and presumably lots of them. If Tarkin hadn't been so arrogant and dumb that he refused to even launch his own fighter escorts, the trench run would have been exponentially more difficult if not impossible.

I suspect that he assumed Vader was taking care of it. Which he was. He just had the misfortune of failing to realize that Han would suddenly intervene. As to why more fighters didn't deploy, perhaps that was because they simply weren't needed. He was taking care of things fine with what he had.

I disagree. There are LOTS of examples in mythology and superstition of the ability to see the future being imperfect, or of information about the future being granted in ambiguous visions (i.e. every shamanistic culture ever). Hell, the basic idea of someone being given information about the future by mystical means, panicking in an attempt to avoid their fate, and accidentally causing their fate, is at least as old as Oedipus Rex back in ancient Athens. Anakin was far from the first character to accidentally fulfill his own prophecies of doom.

Of course. It is probably the case that most portrayals of seeing the future involve the character not being able to change it. That is the only way for such a thing to not violate causality. It is also true in reality as well, telling people that there is a problem in a part of the economy will cause one. In an amusing example, Johnny Carson once joked about a toilet paper shortage and caused it in the process.

Conversely, the Force routinely does NOT give people information that would be highly useful to them and which would be necessary for even a godlike machine to be sure of success. A godlike machine would not, for instance, have arranged the sequence of events involving Luke coming to Bespin! Even assuming the machine could influence Vader, Boba Fett, and the Millenium Falcon to make such events possible, it would have introduced far more variables and risk to do it this way than to do it in a myriad of other ways that would get similar long-term results.

What if it were actually two dueling and yet oddly symbiotic rival AIs(the Light and Dark sides respectively)? Especially if they had severe limitations on what they were allowed to do. What I was thinking about, and what got me thinking about this idea, is the way AIs are portrayed in Person of Interest. In that series, the primary good AI mostly has the limitation that she* will only spit out social security numbers of people that will either be a major national security threat or will be involved in a violent crime in NYC, often involved in some sort of conspiracy. The Force as an AI would have to be similarly limited to giving indirect advice to Jedi and Sith rather that attempting to intervene directly. It could have been a fundamental limitation created when it was originally coded in exactly the same fashion as The Machine in POI.

The primary idea I had here was that it would allow the Force to exist with violating causality.

* Root, who has a direct connection to the Machine, always uses female pronouns when referring to it. I should also note that this is self plagiarism from the PSW thread on the same subject.

[Simon_Jester]

The one question on my mind is, suppose you have optical sensors that work on the basis of "look out the window with a camera."

Why would you not just mount that camera externally? There is no good reason to not do this. Whatever protection the window offers could also be put around the camera. This would give visibility in directions other than where the pilot could see. That is the whole point of DAS. It allows perfect situational awareness.

Sorry, I'm being over-metaphorical (or, from my perspective, you're being over-literal). I said "out the window" as a sort of expression for "use purely visual sensors." No, there is no reason to mount the optical sensor inside the craft, but at the same time, this doesn't actually address the real question of whether such optical sensors could reliably track fast-maneuvering targets in an environment where the flash hazards are likely to be very intense.

Now, translate that into Star Wars. An environment where (if we're going by our existing figures) fighters accelerate at two or three thousand gravities, where even the fighters are slinging around ten or hundred-kiloton bolts of energy and where capital ship weapons fire may well be up in the teratons per shot- a cosmic catastrophe by ordinary standards.

Aren't those numbers on the extreme high end, calculated on the assumption that reactor power scales linearly? If we assume that it scales greater than linearly, then low gigatons are the upper limit for capital ships and low kilotons are the upper limit for fighters(unless you mean high-yield missiles, which should be even more powerful than a hundred kilotons). I seem to recall you being in that camp from previous discussions.

The high end ship firepower numbers come from the required energy to deliver a Base Delta Zero bombardment, as I recall. Basically, the argument is that for Base Delta Zero to work as described, a line destroyer needs to be able to lay down enough fire to boil the oceans and melt the crust of an Earthlike planet in a matter of a few hours- which you really can't do unless your ship's main guns are capable of landing, oh, about one Chicxulub impact worth of energy per minute or so.

Fighter firepower is determined mainly by observations of X-wing gunfire during the Death Star surface attack, as I recall.

While I had originally argued for larger numbers, the idea that reactor power does not exactly scale linearly and that the Death Star was proportionally more powerful, fits with my current theory about the need for the Death Star as a means to overcome planetary shields efficiently.

Thing is, even if Base Delta Zero does melt the continents and boil the oceans, the Death Star is still many orders of magnitude more powerful than that. There's plenty of room for upscaling.

Now, it IS definitely elegant to assume a smooth geometric curve of power output as a function of reactor volume, starting with the LAAT's man-sized ball turret lasers and scaling up to the death star, and you can actually make that work by assuming firepower scales roughly with the square of the reactor volume.

But that's not required- and, again, it doesn't really change the question, because gigaton-range capital ship weapons are STILL powerful enough that flash and shield scatter will tend to dazzle or damage optical cameras.

We also don't see anything that would do something like outright blind pilots. Which explosions of that magnitude should. Given that this doesn't occur, sensors could be hardened just as well as fighter cockpits.

Yes- but the fighter cockpits don't have to allow the pilot's eyeballs to track targets to a precision of a few dozen meters in space or milliseconds in time. As far as the pilot is concerned, it's okay if, say, the cockpit is an active layer that artificially damps bright light sources and puts them on a time delay, while allowing normal-intensity light to pass through.

However, this kind of passive hardening can be a serious obstacle in making a sensor delicate and receptive enough to be precise and fast-acting.

The rebels may have been worried about massive swarms of TIEs blanketing the entire area. We know the Death Star had TIEs, and presumably lots of them. If Tarkin hadn't been so arrogant and dumb that he refused to even launch his own fighter escorts, the trench run would have been exponentially more difficult if not impossible.

I suspect that he assumed Vader was taking care of it. Which he was. He just had the misfortune of failing to realize that Han would suddenly intervene. As to why more fighters didn't deploy, perhaps that was because they simply weren't needed. He was taking care of things fine with what he had.

Overkill is one of the most basic military principles, and the Death Star wouldn't even exist if Tarkin weren't an advocate of overwhelming brutal military force. The Empire's entire military posture is built around large, dominant, brutalist military architecture, ship design, and doctrine.

For him to stand around with his hands literally folded and refuse to commit 99% or so of his total forces is, in the context of that, pure stupidity.

Of course. It is probably the case that most portrayals of seeing the future involve the character not being able to change it. That is the only way for such a thing to not violate causality. It is also true in reality as well, telling people that there is a problem in a part of the economy will cause one. In an amusing example, Johnny Carson once joked about a toilet paper shortage and caused it in the process.

Thing is, other stories do feature people taking a warning seriously and avoiding a bad fate. Or following the advice of an oracle and reaping rewards.

But the key point is that this kind of attitude is all very... vague, shifting, messy, organic. It is not the kind of thing you normally associate with computer logic and nanosecond-fast calculation. It is the kind of thing you associate with life and living processes.

Conversely, the Force routinely does NOT give people information that would be highly useful to them and which would be necessary for even a godlike machine to be sure of success. A godlike machine would not, for instance, have arranged the sequence of events involving Luke coming to Bespin! Even assuming the machine could influence Vader, Boba Fett, and the Millenium Falcon to make such events possible, it would have introduced far more variables and risk to do it this way than to do it in a myriad of other ways that would get similar long-term results.

What if it were actually two dueling and yet oddly symbiotic rival AIs(the Light and Dark sides respectively)? Especially if they had severe limitations on what they were allowed to do. What I was thinking about, and what got me thinking about this idea, is the way AIs are portrayed in Person of Interest. In that series, the primary good AI mostly has the limitation that she* will only spit out social security numbers of people that will either be a major national security threat or will be involved in a violent crime in NYC, often involved in some sort of conspiracy. The Force as an AI would have to be similarly limited to giving indirect advice to Jedi and Sith rather that attempting to intervene directly. It could have been a fundamental limitation created when it was originally coded in exactly the same fashion as The Machine in POI.

The problems that arise then are:

Who "coded" this, and to what purpose? What function do these highly specific limitations serve?

And what practical difference is there between a sentient computer that provides information but never intervenes directly to accomplish its own agenda, and a nonsentient mechanism that does much the same at the bidding of an intelligent operator?

Why do we assume that the dueling Fates (to borrow from Star Wars soundtrack titles) know or understand the affairs of sentient beings in the kind of precise terms that we might imagine?

[Jub]

Sorry, I'm being over-metaphorical (or, from my perspective, you're being over-literal). I said "out the window" as a sort of expression for "use purely visual sensors." No, there is no reason to mount the optical sensor inside the craft, but at the same time, this doesn't actually address the real question of whether such optical sensors could reliably track fast-maneuvering targets in an environment where the flash hazards are likely to be very intense.

-----

But that's not required- and, again, it doesn't really change the question, because gigaton-range capital ship weapons are STILL powerful enough that flash and shield scatter will tend to dazzle or damage optical cameras.

-----

Yes- but the fighter cockpits don't have to allow the pilot's eyeballs to track targets to a precision of a few dozen meters in space or milliseconds in time. As far as the pilot is concerned, it's okay if, say, the cockpit is an active layer that artificially damps bright light sources and puts them on a time delay, while allowing normal-intensity light to pass through.

However, this kind of passive hardening can be a serious obstacle in making a sensor delicate and receptive enough to be precise and fast-acting.

I've been thinking about this optical sensor idea a bit and I think that your objections can be made a non-issue with visual evidence from the movies and clever applications of technology.

The visuals in the movies simply don't show the intense retina burning light we would expect to see from kilo/mega/gigaton ranged weapons fire. My theory for this is that shields are efficient and both absorbing light in general as well as filtering out some level of harmful wavelengths. Otherwise, we'd expect intensities rivaling staring at the sun, if not worse, every time a weapon hits anything. This would go a long way to making certain kinds of visual sensors more viable.

Secondly, the idea of making hardened visual sensors becomes easier to imagine if you think in terms of fixed sensor clusters with a wide viewing angle which don't have to move. I'm thinking of a pattern of 6 sensors arranged like half of a squashed dodecagon. Tracking is done by following the target across camera views, something that should be trivial for the computers of the Star Wars universe to handle. You'd probably need at least 6-8 clusters to get decent coverage of something like an X-Wing, and depending on their bulk you may want more or fewer.

[Adam Reynolds]

Sorry, I'm being over-metaphorical (or, from my perspective, you're being over-literal). I said "out the window" as a sort of expression for "use purely visual sensors." No, there is no reason to mount the optical sensor inside the craft, but at the same time, this doesn't actually address the real question of whether such optical sensors could reliably track fast-maneuvering targets in an environment where the flash hazards are likely to be very intense.

Sorry, that is a bad habit of mine.

The high end ship firepower numbers come from the required energy to deliver a Base Delta Zero bombardment, as I recall. Basically, the argument is that for Base Delta Zero to work as described, a line destroyer needs to be able to lay down enough fire to boil the oceans and melt the crust of an Earthlike planet in a matter of a few hours- which you really can't do unless your ship's main guns are capable of landing, oh, about one Chicxulub impact worth of energy per minute or so.

The problem with that assumption is that it wouldn't make sense to carry out such an operation with a single ship. I would expect at least a half dozen Star Destroyers for such an operation to prevent escape. Possibly even something Executor sized. I know why Mike made that argument, it gave him a minimalist position from which he could be comfortably secure in victory. But that doesn't make those numbers entirely reasonable.

Fighter firepower is determined mainly by observations of X-wing gunfire during the Death Star surface attack, as I recall.

The numbers from ANH give 60GJ which comes out to a few dozen tons of TNT equivalent. Still impressive for soemthing the size of an X-wing but not quite as powerful as often assumed. Though that is a minimum estimate based on the assumption of iron and ignoring the rate of propagation of the debris. Still, I would not expect more than a couple KT out of starfighter guns. They are effective because

Now, it IS definitely elegant to assume a smooth geometric curve of power output as a function of reactor volume, starting with the LAAT's man-sized ball turret lasers and scaling up to the death star, and you can actually make that work by assuming firepower scales roughly with the square of the reactor volume.

But that's not required- and, again, it doesn't really change the question, because gigaton-range capital ship weapons are STILL powerful enough that flash and shield scatter will tend to dazzle or damage optical cameras.

Agreed on both counts.

Yes- but the fighter cockpits don't have to allow the pilot's eyeballs to track targets to a precision of a few dozen meters in space or milliseconds in time. As far as the pilot is concerned, it's okay if, say, the cockpit is an active layer that artificially damps bright light sources and puts them on a time delay, while allowing normal-intensity light to pass through.

However, this kind of passive hardening can be a serious obstacle in making a sensor delicate and receptive enough to be precise and fast-acting.

Even if a sensor had the same limits as human eyes it would still be superior due to what it could do that eyes cannot. Having interrupted perfect vision is still better than limited vision. Especially as systems like that have predictive abilities that can read between the lines so to speak in times in which they are blinded by their own shields. Though as shown in ANH, those predictive abilities aren't very good given the lousy sucess of the Death Star's turbolasers.

Overkill is one of the most basic military principles, and the Death Star wouldn't even exist if Tarkin weren't an advocate of overwhelming brutal military force. The Empire's entire military posture is built around large, dominant, brutalist military architecture, ship design, and doctrine.

For him to stand around with his hands literally folded and refuse to commit 99% or so of his total forces is, in the context of that, pure stupidity.

It is absurdly stupid. Especially when one of his officers mentioned the possibility of evacuating. Given that fact, why did said officer not just launch more fighters and swarm the Rebels.

I was just trying to come up with a justifiable reason that it was done the way it was. Though it is not entirely illogical that Tarkin was overly proud of his technological terror(to misquote Vader). He didn't see the Rebels making any effective attack. Vader did due to his experience flying fighters in the Clone Wars under similarly bad odds. And once he flew out personally, I could see Imperial officers hesitating to send out anyone else.

I've been thinking about this optical sensor idea a bit and I think that your objections can be made a non-issue with visual evidence from the movies and clever applications of technology.

The visuals in the movies simply don't show the intense retina burning light we would expect to see from kilo/mega/gigaton ranged weapons fire. My theory for this is that shields are efficient and both absorbing light in general as well as filtering out some level of harmful wavelengths. Otherwise, we'd expect intensities rivaling staring at the sun, if not worse, every time a weapon hits anything. This would go a long way to making certain kinds of visual sensors more viable.

That would also nicely explain why no one has ever considered using visible light as a weapon.

Secondly, the idea of making hardened visual sensors becomes easier to imagine if you think in terms of fixed sensor clusters with a wide viewing angle which don't have to move. I'm thinking of a pattern of 6 sensors arranged like half of a squashed dodecagon. Tracking is done by following the target across camera views, something that should be trivial for the computers of the Star Wars universe to handle. You'd probably need at least 6-8 clusters to get decent coverage of something like an X-Wing, and depending on their bulk you may want more or fewer.

You actually just described the F-35's DAS sensor with that idea. That was what Sea Skimmer and I were originally referring to. There really is no context in which it would make sense to use unaided eyesight instead of some form of sensor even if it is limited.

Another possibility that occurred to me is that visual scanning really isn't. While it appears that pilots are able to actually see their surroundings, what if that is actually a sensor picture rather than a true image. So when Rebel pilots look through their windows they aren't actually seeing what is really occurring, that it is instead a visual reconstruction with much greater accuracy. Such a technology was already mentioned as an explanation as to how they can hear sound in space. Though that would beg the question of why it wasn't a 360 display like the F-35 sensors.

I believe the technology actually was mentioned in the context of windows onboard capital ships in the ROTS novelization.

[Adam Reynolds]

Thing is, other stories do feature people taking a warning seriously and avoiding a bad fate. Or following the advice of an oracle and reaping rewards.

But the key point is that this kind of attitude is all very... vague, shifting, messy, organic. It is not the kind of thing you normally associate with computer logic and nanosecond-fast calculation. It is the kind of thing you associate with life and living processes.

And yet if we had an actual AI, who is to say that it wouldn't have odd limitations as created by its organic designers. And who is to say that it wouldn't attempt to get around this by the oddly antagonistic relationship we see with the Light Side vs the Dark Side.

The problems that arise then are:

Who "coded" this, and to what purpose? What function do these highly specific limitations serve?

One obvious function is that it would prevent it from becoming the Reapers from Mass Effect as it would still be reliant on people.

And what practical difference is there between a sentient computer that provides information but never intervenes directly to accomplish its own agenda, and a nonsentient mechanism that does much the same at the bidding of an intelligent operator?

Why do we assume that the dueling Fates (to borrow from Star Wars soundtrack titles) know or understand the affairs of sentient beings in the kind of precise terms that we might imagine?

[/quote]
There isn't really much difference. It's just that we know that a mechanism like the Force doesn't exist.

As for the understanding, it is possible that neither has full understanding in much the same way that neither Jedi nor Sith do. They are each reliant on the other for part of their view of the galaxy.

[Jub]

That would also nicely explain why no one has ever considered using visible light as a weapon.

That is another plus in favor of that theory. It's always nice when that happens.

You actually just described the F-35's DAS sensor with that idea. That was what Sea Skimmer and I were originally referring to.

Wow, I hadn't looked up the DAS sensor. I guess when there are limited ways to make an idea work, the simplest one tends to win out.

There really is no context in which it would make sense to use unaided eyesight instead of some form of sensor even if it is limited.

I agree. Anything that can blind your sensor will blind an eye, but if your sensors get burnt out you can replace them which seems a little less messy than giving all your pilots prosthetic eyes or keeping a stock of cloned eyeballs around. With sensors at least as durable as eyes, you solve for things like reliable identification, which SW obviously has as evidenced by their droids, and with this solved your sensors are now the best way to relay data to your pilots.

Another possibility that occurred to me is that visual scanning really isn't. While it appears that pilots are able to actually see their surroundings, what if that is actually a sensor picture rather than a true image. So when Rebel pilots look through their windows they aren't actually seeing what is really occurring, that it is instead a visual reconstruction with much greater accuracy. Such a technology was already mentioned as an explanation as to how they can hear sound in space. Though that would beg the question of why it wasn't a 360 display like the F-35 sensors.

That would make the most sense. My best guess for not having 360 display is that your pilots could be overloaded with the sheer number of sensor contacts in a large battle. So they're given a narrower slice of the total picture to allow them to cope. This raises the question of how human pilots ever out-competed droids, but we can chalk that up to massive cultural bias.

[Adam Reynolds]

That would make the most sense. My best guess for not having 360 display is that your pilots could be overloaded with the sheer number of sensor contacts in a large battle. So they're given a narrower slice of the total picture to allow them to cope. This raises the question of how human pilots ever out-competed droids, but we can chalk that up to massive cultural bias.

As for droids, it is probable that they are deliberately engineered to be worse than they could be out of fears of a droid rebellion. Unless you subscribe to my odd Force idea, that it is deliberately hindering droids for the benefit or organics. Another weak possibility is that most people are Force sensitive to a limited degree and thus able to compete. Though that is rather unlikely and with essentially no evidence.

[Sea Skimmer]

Yes- but the fighter cockpits don't have to allow the pilot's eyeballs to track targets to a precision of a few dozen meters in space or milliseconds in time. As far as the pilot is concerned, it's okay if, say, the cockpit is an active layer that artificially damps bright light sources and puts them on a time delay, while allowing normal-intensity light to pass through.

However, this kind of passive hardening can be a serious obstacle in making a sensor delicate and receptive enough to be precise and fast-acting.

That's complete and utter nonsense. What the hell world do you exist on in which a human is going to deal with flash blinding better then a damn camera and computer? Humans freaking have to BLINK. That alone means we loose observational time and tracking resolution by simple biology.

A digital camera system is overwhelmingly superior on this subject in every possible way. Human eyes are blinded if even just one of the three colors they can see is too bright, while a computer and camera is not, it will simply loose that color and keep working with the other two or more, and can do things utterly impossible for a human such as combining frames as a form of image sharpening. And it can do that while still continuously sampling the image.

Human's in fact can't even deal with the real world in real time under good conditions, the only reason our vision works as well as it does is that the human mind guesses and uses past experience to fill in the numerous processing gaps. That also turns into humans being very unreliable observers and fooled by even still images as to what color is what, and seeing faces in random patterns.

The one big thing that holds back the value of optical systems in real life is the software to interpret the image once processed; its just not even close to human brains at the moment, if advancing on a daily basis, but Star Wars has that subject completely covered as shown by its unending droids. Anything you could possibly do to enhance or protect human vision would work even better with a well designed automatic system.

As it is we already have the technology to make optically guided (and I mean actual visual wavelengths, not just IR) systems hit to kill at 13km/s closing velocities, and expect them to work in a nuclear effects environment while maneuvering sideways. Think about how much distance passes in the blink of an eye at those speeds, and how far away a human would be able to see let alone track an object the size of an ICBM MIRV.

[Sea Skimmer]

That would make the most sense. My best guess for not having 360 display is that your pilots could be overloaded with the sheer number of sensor contacts in a large battle. So they're given a narrower slice of the total picture to allow them to cope. This raises the question of how human pilots ever out-competed droids, but we can chalk that up to massive cultural bias.

If you want to really hurt your brain on the 'why', ask yourself, why was someone still using a grease pencil plotting board to track the attack on the Death Star? That was utterly obsolete even in 1977. But its another of those annoying ass things that was from Lucas patterning his combat on WW2 era movies he liked and knowing little about even contemporary technology.

[Simon_Jester]

While I have other things I would like to say, this is my primary.

Skimmer and Reynolds have both said to me something like "how could an optical camera ever be less effective than the human eye?" And there appears to be this assumption that I think it is, or could be, under some kind of plausible combat conditions.

Except... I don't.

As far as I know there is literally no such thing as a fighter without extensive cockpit instrumentation in Star Wars. And I'm pretty sure that's true for a reason. If I had to guess how Star Wars fighter pilots acquire and engage targets, I would say "they rely almost exclusively on their fighters' built-in sensors." The only time the Mk I eyeball would ever come into play would be, oh, when landing the fighter on a pad or something.

And speculatively, that's probably the main reason for even having a cockpit that is or appears to be transparent*- so that you can physically fly the thing in case something goes badly but survivably wrong with the instrumentation (say, IFF malfunction so you can't tell friends from enemies). And you wouldn't use that in order to fly it in combat, but accelerate and decelerate and obey flight control and get your fighter back to the ship or the launch pad.

The point I'm making is that optical sensors, specifically, might not be as jamming-proof as we make them out to be in Star Wars. The technology certainly exists to dazzle them badly enough that optical systems become profoundly dubious as fire control systems- sure, they know roughly where the enemy is, but perhaps not with enough precision to hit a moving, jinking target that could be accelerating at anything between zero and thirty kilometers per second squared.

And indeed, this level of dazzling and blinding could easily occur purely by accident as a natural consequence of the spacecraft shooting and being shot at. On a level that even nuclear warfare doesn't produce normally, because Star Wars beam weapon combat can be a great deal more energetic than a nuclear exchange.

So if we say "other sensors are all ludicrously vulnerable to jamming, why don't they just use cameras," the logical response is "maybe they do and the cameras aren't always as helpful as we'd think," or "maybe they try that sometimes and the cameras all end up so flash-dazzled that they become actively less effective than whatever other systems they already have."
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*Come to think of it, spacesuit visors also appear transparent in a lot of SF, and often feature face lighting that would be actively counterproductive, such that the visor would effectively blind the user. This is hardly more realistic, and personally I think it's reasonable to rationalize the glass cockpit windows as a product of the 'Hollywood version' of Star Wars events, with the real windows being much more complex and protective.

[Adam Reynolds]

If you want to really hurt your brain on the 'why', ask yourself, why was someone still using a grease pencil plotting board to track the attack on the Death Star? That was utterly obsolete even in 1977. But its another of those annoying ass things that was from Lucas patterning his combat on WW2 era movies he liked and knowing little about even contemporary technology.

I thought it was some electrical version of that. Though it could be ESB I was thinking of, which had loosely similar boards.