Minimalism causes

[Illuminatus Primus]

Mount Corvast. The idiocy gets worse. Apparently this shit was furthered in The New Essential Chronology (no surprise there, Dan Wallace knows quality control like I know Swahili) with this zinger: "Scaling the slopes of Mount Corvast, Tann's Devastators [sic] vaporized the Republic's geothermal generators. Dozens of Core Worlds plunged into darkness."

Apparently the magical geothermal power plants magically beam energy through hyperspace to Core World cities, and they just blackout just as if you were to bomb power plants feeding a major grid in the U.S. Do they know when an analogy is not appropriate or should not be taken so literally and to the letter? Jesus Christ.

[Junghalli]

Apparently the magical geothermal power plants magically beam energy through hyperspace to Core World cities

That capability actually makes the basic concept of Sarapin somewhat less retarded, but fuck it's still stupid. The idea that this interstellar energy grid would have a single volcanically active planet as its lynchpin is utterly moronic. Energy is cheap anywhere near a star.

I was going to comment on the stupidity of having an entire planetary power grid go through one failure point, but apparently it's worse than that. Apparently all the geothermal plants on the planet are clustered together so tightly that it's possible for a ground-based weapons platform to stand on a high mountain and shoot them all. Which really makes you wonder how much electricity they can actually be pulling, and why they bother with a galactic energy grid when a tiny slice of land on a volcanic world can produce enough energy to meet 80% of the Core World's energy needs. They should be able to get that much with a bunch of orbiting solar panels easily, and save themselves the trouble of setting up power plants on some horrible volcanic hellhole in another solar system.

[Galvatron]

Mount Corvast. The idiocy gets worse. Apparently this shit was furthered in The New Essential Chronology

That's the real pisser. This all-inclusivity attitude that permeates the EU only serves to make the whole franchise shittier, but most of the casual fans just eat it up.

[Illuminatus Primus]

I am such an anti-all-inclusionist. Oooh, dumb mechanic from teh game! Let's copy the plot movement and the appearance on the screen as canon exactly as it appears! I think Command and Conquer novels are more sensible and less retarded about it. Jesus.

[Darth Wong]

The casual fans eat it up for the same reason that RSA said that Nemesis was an enormously entertaining film. They just want more material from their favourite brand-name, and they don't really give a damn whether it's any good. Mindless brand loyalty. And once it's out, they mindlessly defend it, like Republitards defending the latest idiot "talking point".

At least an understanding of mindless tribalism and brand loyalty helps me understand how the hell George W. Bush got elected twice.

[Junghalli]

I also wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people simply lack the scientific knowledge to realize how ridiculous a concept like Sarapin is. I mean it's offensively stupid if you know something about the logistical realities involved, but most of the general population isn't going to have a clue about that.

[18-Till-I-Die]

To be honest, beaming energy magically through hyperspace, while contrived, could work...IF and only IF they hadnt made it a single planet doing all this.

Now, see, if this was a Dyson Sphere, or a cluster of them (God only knows the Empire or Republic could build one) then not only would they get MORE energy but it would kinda make more sense and be far, far more difficult to disable in this way. You cant just blow up a whole Dyson Sphere, well you can but still, it's hard.

But all of this is made moot by the mere existence of hypermatter reactors, since one could, with this hyperspace energy grid technology, just build a huge ass one that generates power on a scale similar to the Death Star and power a good chunk of the galaxy with a tiny fraction of the infrastructure. After all we know a powersource of such size can be wedded to a device not even as large as the moon, so it shouldnt be too hard to build an even smaller, stationary, purpose built one.

[Darth Wong]

To be honest, beaming energy magically through hyperspace, while contrived, could work...IF and only IF they hadnt made it a single planet doing all this.

And then there's the fact that the movies show Naboo, a bucolic resort planet, with a giant subterranean power generator complex. It's painfully obvious that even a dipshit planet like Naboo (whose entire planetary defense force is a single squadron of showboat fighters) can have its own local power generation. These writers are just flaming imbeciles. I've always suspected that they actually PREFER the literature over the movies, even though the movies are supposed to be top-dog.

[Darth Ruinus]

I was under the impression that some ships in SW already used up energy levels comparable to stars, for instance the ISD with its "more enrgy than a planetary civilization's lifetime in one jump." That and arent hypermatter reactors in general comparable to small stars? Wouldnt Dyson Sphere just be a big waste of material to do something that a small ship could?

[18-Till-I-Die]

Which is my point.

Under most circumstances, having a machine that can beam energy through hyperspace from, say, a geothermal tap or a Dyson Sphere would be quite useful...

However, with the existence of hypermatter reactors, it becomes a moot point.

[NecronLord]

To be so active implies it is either like Mustafar an under extreme tidal interaction (no evidence of that)

According to the Wookiepedia article it has two moons which are mentioned to have vaapads living on them, implying they're big enough to hold onto dense oxygen atmospheres of their own (unless vaapads can live in vacuum). Those would be pretty freaking big moons, I'd say strong tidal interaction is a definite possibility.

On another note, this particular stupid brainbug isn't limited to Star Wars. In the TNG pilot episode Encounter at Farpoint the Federation was interested in that crappy desert planet because of its abundant geothermal energy.

It makes a lot more sense in that context. In that megatons and kilotons are the units of energy that are relevant to military starships.

I've also seen this concept crop up in Stargate Atlantis, where on two occasions the Ancients (an uber race who have power modules the size of coke bottles that output several megatons per second, three of which make a viable city shield to protect against fleets) seem to have generated power by drilling into supervolcanos (to be fair, one supposes they could just be aiming to cool the magma chambers involved, and thought they should put the energy to use rather than trying to dump all that heat somewhere.

It's still rediculous, of course, but it's less rediculous than it is for Star Wars. For both Mustafar and Serapin (though I stopped playing that game when I got to Serapin, it was just too stupid) I assumed the industrial 'energy' production was manufacture of batteries from rare metals or something.

[montypython]

Popular franchises more often than not suffer from this degradation, one only needs to look at stuff like Gundam where internal plot consistency is tossed in favor of fanservice nowadays.

[NecronLord]

The odd thing about Star Wars is that the creep goes downward. Things are (PT aside) often less grand in scope than preceeding items.

[NeoGoomba]

The odd thing about Star Wars is that the creep goes downward. Things are (PT aside) often less grand in scope than preceeding items.

Sounds like just another "grand old days" cliche. Because, as we all know, older empires were just so much bigger and better than the galaxy-straddling, pinnacle of technology that was Palpatine's Galactic Empire.

[Darth Wong]

I think he's referring to newer literature shrinking the scope compared to older literature.

I think the problem boils down to a lack of creativity. When you write a story, there are two ways to do it:

1) Launch yourself into the unknown. Try to reason your way to conclusions, and imagine what life would be like in a truly different environment: an environment created as a work of fiction and fleshed out by the power of your imagination and intelligence.

2) Just take one of the many well-established stock storylines you've seen many times before in other genres, and adapt it slightly for the setting. If the setting and the story don't fit, just mush them both together, changing and rationalizing whatever you need to.

Most writers seem to choose door #2 for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that they just aren't that smart. And the result is to reduce everything to scales which are appropriate for other genres, because that's where they're getting their stories from.

[18-Till-I-Die]

You know, thats what i really enjoyed about Lensmen, was that it was really what Star Wars should be in terms of infrastructure. But the EU authors are too afraid (or simply lacking in imagination) to do anything that awesome.

If you have a Civilization that controls an ENTIRE galaxy, billions of worlds, trillions of moons, asteroids, etc...their resources are such that they shouldnt blink at the kind of numbers thrown around in the SWEU. Yeah sure, tens of millions of ships: we have billions of worlds, even if every planet only produces ONE ship a year they'd make back any losses in a year's time. Millions of men, we can get millions of men from one planet, lets outsource to a few thousand more planets and get HUNDREDS of millions. If we're going to posit a civilization spanning whole galaxies then one has to accept that the pittance of manpower--and firepower--our single-planet civilization considers "big" will be insignificant to them.

I mean, there are more Lensmen in Civilization than ther are Clone Troopers in the Grand Army of the Republic...and the Lensmen are the elite special forces division, like the Jedi. LOL whut?

[NeoGoomba]

I think he's referring to newer literature shrinking the scope compared to older literature.

Ah my mistake, I thought he was referring to in-universe events withinin the Star Wars timeline, not the authors themselves.

[Coiler]

I also think that author arrogance (if that's the right term) may play a role in making everything be on a scale beyond their comprehension, forcing them to distort it to an understandable level. They want their story to affect the entire galaxy-but the galaxy is too big to comprehend. So what do they do-make the galaxy smaller.

[000]

Mount Corvast. The idiocy gets worse. Apparently this shit was furthered in The New Essential Chronology (no surprise there, Dan Wallace knows quality control like I know Swahili) with this zinger: "Scaling the slopes of Mount Corvast, Tann's Devastators [sic] vaporized the Republic's geothermal generators. Dozens of Core Worlds plunged into darkness."

Apparently the magical geothermal power plants magically beam energy through hyperspace to Core World cities, and they just blackout just as if you were to bomb power plants feeding a major grid in the U.S. Do they know when an analogy is not appropriate or should not be taken so literally and to the letter? Jesus Christ.

It's probably worth pointing out that the NEC is, 'in-universe,' penned by one Voren Na'al-- a historian well known (again, in-universe) for being, uh... overly dramatic.