Let me have a go at this one. The more these authors write the stupider they seem and the angrier they make me. Let this be a lesson to anyone who's trying to get out of a hole they dug themselves in the future: step one is to stop digging.
Karen Traviss wrote:All this depends on which science bugs you. I meant what I said about the cloning technology and the teensy fact that Kamino can't actually produce that many clones;
Yes it can, which you would know if you hadn't been such an incredibly lazy retard and had bothered to do your fucking research by reading a text that would've taken all of an hour to get through.
and that to me is as improbable and as intrusive an incongruity as the numbers of droids.
The droid number fits extremely well with the scale of the SW Universe as established by the films, which has been repeatedly demonstrated in threads that you participated in and something which should have been immediately obvious, just as it was immediately obvious to the dozens of websurfers who aren't paid to write articles and follow the Star Wars Saga only out of love for the vision it represents.
The fact that I can spot it because it covers areas I know well but that some people are blind to doesn't mean that the improbable numbers are worse in continuity terms. We have to take the whole lot and work with it.
Improbable numbers ARE worse in continuity terms, and if you can spot mistakes then you should bring them to your editors' attention so that they can be dealt with in the future rather than perpetuating the mistakes throughout the EU as has been done in the past (ie. with the length of the
Executor).
The focus on one incongruity and not others - especially the life sciences side - is what I find illogical.
WHAT incongruity? We KNOW that the Kaminoans produced massive facilities under the surface of their oceans. How does it not make sense that they would be able to produce many clones with those purpose-built facilities?
Now - say we had a lot more biologists and ecologists and economists in fandom, and they raised a stink about Kamino: would we throw out AOTC because it shows clones being produced in vast numbers on a planet that couldn't have that infrastructure in reality? No. Nor should we.
I am an economist (or so my degree tells me) and I know that Kamino makes perfect sense in the scope of an economy as vast as that of the Star Wars Galaxy. I can't speak for biologists or ecologists, but I can say that your chain of thought is wrong because it presupposes things which are demonstrably incorrect.
And I happen to find that I can write better stories about the ethical issues given Kamino as a springboard than I ever could if I reverted to my hard SF mode.
Cool. Good for you. That's the whole point, though: the stories get better if they make sense within the continuity, and that's part of your role as a writer in a franchise like that of Star Wars.
A great deal was retconned and explained in the GAR feature and it's been pretty well ignored. It took a lot of work, especially for Ryan who had to do the number-crunching on the regular army section of the ORBAT. That was a monster task because the movie detail was set long before anyone thought of numbers, and it took some clever work to sort it.
Well, wah wah! Forgive me for not being sympathetic given that the authors of many websites have ALREADY DONE a substantial amount of work in the same areas and they're working for free! Dr. Curtis Saxton, for example, could've easily written such an article on the Clone Army because of all the research he's done for his website, and he would've done a better job than you did because he wouldn't have included nonsense like the 3 million clones number. Pleading that you were incompetent is a terrible excuse--it didn't work for Michael Brown, either.
For all I know, it might all change in the future like Coruscant's population did. (And I really don't know.)
Since your number is undoubtedly wrong it had better change in the future. This absolves you of no responsibility, though. YOU wrote that number into your article. YOU took responsibility for it when you signed your name to the article. YOU are accountable for errors in that article. Your editors may also be accountable, and if they take the fall for you then so be it, but no one forced you to write that thing and put your name on it.
And I don't heap blame on LFL. The more specific we were about maximum numbers, production and recruitment, the more we shut doors for other books and stories.
Let me get this straight: I shouldn't be mad at LFL because they're trying to make it easy for other authors to be lazy and not do their research, either? That is, essentially, what you're saying. That other LFL writers are so bad that they're incapable of writing interesting stories within the SW universe without totally violating previous materials. THAT is pathetic.
Fans don't see the advance work that's in the pipeline years ahead and that has to be accommodated too. If anything needs retconning, I'd say it's the quadrillions of droids, which is as improbable as anything else,
That is absolute bullshit of the highest order. I have justified the high number of droids (and it's actually "quintillions," but I'm sure that the difference is wasted on a numerical neophyte such as yourself) as being WELL within the scope of the Star Wars economy. The droids make perfect sense. Why don't the clones? Oh, yeah, I forgot: it's because they hired some morons who have no appreciation whatsoever for the fans or the Saga to write an article on the GAR.
but I can see an excellent storyline in that apparently inexplicable disparity in numbers.
Yet your explanations for the disparity are both retarded AND refuted by the movies themselves. Tell me, if the clones were able to make up for their disparity by quickly redeploying to various fronts throughout the Galaxy, then how the fuck did we see multiple, simultaneous campaigns going on on different planets during the Order 66 montage? Can I add, "Never watched Revenge of the Sith" to the list of your faults while (not) doing your research for this project?
You'll understand that my enthusiasm for exploring that has taken something of a knock, though.
I would hope that it would have. You are obviously too incompetent to duplicate what UNPAID FANS have been doing for years.
Unfortunately - and I'm speaking only for myself now, not Ryan - I have been called "lazy" and "stupid" by some fans, and I find those kind of personal insults unacceptable when I'm writing 16 hours a day, 24/7.
You may not be lazy but you failed in your job of maintaining an internally consistent and believable world when you wrote that article on the GAR--something that was supposed to make the war more believable. Instead, it made the conflict much less understandable. Nice work.
Okay, it's a tiny, tiny minority, but boy are they persistent...
It's a "tiny minority" that includes previous stalwarts for the EU like Kudzu, who have traditionally taken whatever the EU has told them to be gospel truth.
Anyway, thanks for getting in touch, mate. I can't give you any closure on this, but at least you've heard me out, and I'm grateful for that.
Best
KT
I've heard you out and I think you're COMPLETELY off-base about everything. Nothing that you've said has made me any more sympathetic to you since you brought all of this on yourself. Hope you like the hole you've got yourself, there. Good luck getting out now.
