Rescuing the topic: Star Wars and engineering

[Batman]

Ignore his analysis and focus on the actual screen caps from the movie.

The ones that completely FAIL to show any damage to the SD's bridge?

[Todeswind]

Actually It looked to me like it did some serious damage to the star destroyer.

Besides it says in the script for that scene.

INTERIOR: VADER'S STAR DESTROYER -- BRIDGE

Asteroids collide, creating a fireworks display outside the
bridge window. Darth Vader stands, staring out the window
above the control deck. Then slowly turns toward the bridge.
Before him are the hologram images of twenty battleship
commanders. One of these images, the commander of a ship that
has just exploded, is fading away quickly. Another image, in
the center and a little apart from the others, is faded and
continually disrupted by static. It is the image of Captain
Needa, commander of the Star Destroyer most hotly on the tail
of the Millennium Falcon. Admiral Piett and an aide stand
behind the Dark Lord.



It is relevant to mention that the ships have no doubt been being hit by a whole shitload of asteroids though. I'm not saying that star wars ships shielding doesn't stop asteroids. What I'm saying is that when their shielding FAILS their armor does little to stop the damage.

[Batman]

Not supported by the actual movie. We see the asteroid impact the ISD's bridge and said ISD loses Holonet communications, that's all.

[Ender]

Ignore his analysis and focus on the actual screen caps from the movie.

Ok, lets do that.

If the bridge is gone, where is the debris? Where is the huge energy release there should have been if it was vaporized? The argument that it was "crumbled in" like a tin can fails because the angle is completely wrong to press the tower in and down (asteroid coming upwards and trending towards the port side), and completely fails to account for the other side.

Further, if the materials used to construct the ships are that weak, how do they survive the acceleration stress their own engines put out? Even if you argue that the structural bracing is trillions of times stronger than the regular material (a claim difficult to make in the face of Coruscant and common sense) that same bracing would be holding the shield generators in the tower.


Best explanation is to write it off as an FX goof pending further evidence being released. However, thee is only one other reference to it. The Entor was attacked by a space slug and had a chunk bitten off it after the battle of Hoth. No, I'm not kidding.

[Ender]

Actually It looked to me like it did some serious damage to the star destroyer.

Besides it says in the script for that scene.

INTERIOR: VADER'S STAR DESTROYER -- BRIDGE

Asteroids collide, creating a fireworks display outside the
bridge window. Darth Vader stands, staring out the window
above the control deck. Then slowly turns toward the bridge.
Before him are the hologram images of twenty battleship
commanders. One of these images, the commander of a ship that
has just exploded, is fading away quickly. Another image, in
the center and a little apart from the others, is faded and
continually disrupted by static. It is the image of Captain
Needa, commander of the Star Destroyer most hotly on the tail
of the Millennium Falcon. Admiral Piett and an aide stand
behind the Dark Lord.



It is relevant to mention that the ships have no doubt been being hit by a whole shitload of asteroids though. I'm not saying that star wars ships shielding doesn't stop asteroids. What I'm saying is that when their shielding FAILS their armor does little to stop the damage.

The bridge tower isn't armored. I don't know how you could come to the conclusion it is - just look at it. By scaling, the hull on the bridge tower (and similar habitable sections) is 40 cm thick. THe main armor is 19.7 m thick, or about 50x as thick.

[Todeswind]

Look I just gave you the script notes saying that the ship was destroyed that were in the actual script as well as a scene from the movie where you clearly see a star destroyer getting pummeled. I don't know how much more canon I can get than showing you a scene from the move then a bit from the script explaining what happened in that scene. All I'm saying is that if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck it seems more likely that it's a duck than a pelican.

Star Destroyers are very powerful but hit them with enough blunt force and they will die. They were in an asteroid field being repeatedly hit by asteroids over a long period of time. It seems absurd to assume that they would not incur some losses in those conditions. This is the entire point that I've been trying to make.

However at this point I'm willing to just concede the matter as it would seem that you lot have devoted more study to the subject.

[Batman]

Look I just gave you the script notes saying that the ship was destroyed that were in the actual script as well as a scene from the movie where you clearly see a star destroyer getting pummeled.

We see a SD getting HIT by an asteroid and it temporarily loses communications as a consequence. There is NO EVIDENCE WHATSOEVER for said Star Destroyer being noticeably damaged leave alone destroyed. This has been done to death already.

[Todeswind]

Ok dude the exact words in the script made by Lucas and his writing team are " One of these images, the commander of a ship that has just exploded, is fading away quickly."

Unless the word exploded has ceased to mean that the ship is destroyed I really fail to see the validity of your argument.

[Stark]

Is there even a reason? If Saxton's site doesn't have anything to say on it I'm inclined to think it's just there because it looks cool rather than being designed as something specific.

The internet does all your thinking now? It could just be a space-fuse - if it's not a primary control system, and just a bunch of service knobs attached to a power trunk that isn't meant to be casually used, this doesn't require Saint Curtis to come down with stone tablets.

[Batman]

Ok dude the exact words in the script made by Lucas and his writing team are " One of these images, the commander of a ship that has just exploded, is fading away quickly."
Unless the word exploded has ceased to mean that the ship is destroyed I really fail to see the validity of your argument.

Did that actually happen in the movie? No? Then I'm afraid you're shit outta luck.

[Ender]

Ok dude the exact words in the script made by Lucas and his writing team are " One of these images, the commander of a ship that has just exploded, is fading away quickly."

Unless the word exploded has ceased to mean that the ship is destroyed I really fail to see the validity of your argument.

You could quit trying to play fast and loose with the facts. Have you looked at the scene drawings that accompany those notes? I know Wayne used to have them up on his site. The ship in question, according to the drawings, is a TIE fighter.


More to the point, it is now YOU who are disregarding canon. The film clearly shows that the star destroyer DOES NOT explode, but continues on its way. We also have the problems with the scene I pointed out. Your nonsense of "I'm not going to counter your points, BUT I'M STILL RIGHT!!!!!!11111uno" will not fly very well here.

[Todeswind]

Look I admit that I got a bit shirty and off the point, I'm not the best at losing gracefully.

Getting back to the original topic I've been thinking about the whole endless pits thing with the death star, and who is to say that the death star's tractor beam that was being disabled was the only tractor beam on the entire ship. For that matter if it was what sort of sane person would have a lever that disables all tractor beams for a ship of that size and what purpose could it serve. Wouldn't it be more practical to have several hangar bays with separate arrays just in case they need to capture multiple ships? We are of course discussing an empire that suffers from Achilles-Vent syndrome but still it seems odd that there would not be some sort of redundancy in pace, or oversight for that matter, to ensure that that sort of thing doesn't happen.

I mean really wouldn't somebody at an engineering station be looking at a monitor to make sure everything was working up to snuff? Even in modern facilities of much lesser magnitudes there are people who's jobs amount to little more than looking at single readout to make sure everything is working. There is a job at most power plants jokingly refereed to as the "Oh Shit Meter Reader" (probably called different things in different places) who's job amounts to looking at a single dial to make sure that none of the big machines are about to overload and potentially kill somebody.

[Ender]

Look I admit that I got a bit shirty and off the point, I'm not the best at losing gracefully.

What a wonderful non-concession concession. Clearly you have been cribbing lessons from politicians.

Getting back to the original topic I've been thinking about the whole endless pits thing with the death star, and who is to say that the death star's tractor beam that was being disabled was the only tractor beam on the entire ship. For that matter if it was what sort of sane person would have a lever that disables all tractor beams for a ship of that size and what purpose could it serve.

It was likely a primary cut out for a number of things in that region, including the tractor beams. That isn't poor engineering; I know of several valves that I could turn that would disable large chunks of an aircraft carrier by turning them. They also tended to be up and out of the way, just like the relay in question. The poor engineering choice here is the lack of safety railing, not that there was an upstream cutout that could be manually overridden.

Wouldn't it be more practical to have several hangar bays with separate arrays just in case they need to capture multiple ships? We are of course discussing an empire that suffers from Achilles-Vent syndrome but still it seems odd that there would not be some sort of redundancy in pace, or oversight for that matter, to ensure that that sort of thing doesn't happen.

You mean like the 768 separate tractor beams and the hundreds of hangars and mooring towers we know it had? Why yes, I guess things being exactly how they were would be more practical than this fictional setup you have envisioned. That's probably why they are that way.

I mean really wouldn't somebody at an engineering station be looking at a monitor to make sure everything was working up to snuff? Even in modern facilities of much lesser magnitudes there are people who's jobs amount to little more than looking at single readout to make sure everything is working. There is a job at most power plants jokingly refereed to as the "Oh Shit Meter Reader" (probably called different things in different places) who's job amounts to looking at a single dial to make sure that none of the big machines are about to overload and potentially kill somebody.

No, there isn't. You need to stop bluffing and pretending you know what you are talking about. Right now.

[Teleros]

The internet does all your thinking now? It could just be a space-fuse - if it's not a primary control system, and just a bunch of service knobs attached to a power trunk that isn't meant to be casually used, this doesn't require Saint Curtis to come down with stone tablets.

Yeah, it saves me time . More seriously, Saxton's site is a good source of information on technical details, and it being blank probably means that there wasn't much, if anything, mentioned about it anywhere. Yes I'm sure it could be any number of things, but we still don't know what it actually is, which was my point.

[Darth Wong]

In A New Hope we seen Obi-Wan moneky with some devices that control the tractor beams onboard the death star. These devices have readouts and manual controls in areas that are right above a yawning chasm with only a small ledge. Why were they designed that way? Why are the readouts and manual controls in such a dangerous area to access?

The tractor beam was probably considered an unimportant subsystem. The Death Star is not meant to serve as a patrol craft and capture vessels; it's a strategic terror weapon.

Real engineers, when designing complex systems, must prioritize them. If something is a low priority subsystem, they don't necessarily make space for it in the design. Instead, they simply shove it anywhere there appears to be extra space. A good and very common real-life example is the windshield washer fluid bottle inside a car. It's literally one of the last things they design, so they just stuck it in the cracks and crevices of the underhood area. If you were to actually take that bottle out of the car, you would find that it has a ridiculous crazy-ass shape unlike any other bottle you've ever seen, because it was designed to fill up irregular spaces left over after all the important systems were designed.

They probably stuck some tractor beam control subsystem in the middle of a cooling shaft because it was "garbage space" and they could stick it there without much hassle.

Why design a Star Destroyer with an exposed bridge super structure and then face that bridge with windows?

Others have given a number of reasons for this. It may simply be that they figure a ship won't last long without shields anyway. Alternatively, there may be cultural resistance. When the first ironclad vessels were developed during the American Civil War, there was a certain amount of cultural and institutional resistance, because the officers and men were suddenly thrust together in the same living and working spaces. Traditionally, they had been quite thoroughly segregated. The high bridge tower may be a symbolic gesture, to reinforce the separation between the officer class and the enlisted class.

BTW, the height of the tower may also serve another function, ie- to isolate the communications and sensor gear from the main hull which contains all sorts of high-energy systems which might cause interference problems.

Why, oh why is there such a lack of safety railings in every industrial and semi-industrial setting?

Maybe the Empire has more accountants than attorneys.

[Connor MacLeod]

As far as the railing thing goes, I hate to say it, but at least here in the US I've worked in a number of factories (and toured through a fair number of others) and I've rather often come across "unsafe" working conditions or things that simply weren't thought of or just ignored. Just because "its a good idea" doesnt mean people always do it.

Some examples I've run across:

- Walkways that are meant to keep people in warehouses out of the way of forklifts or other vehicles are often blocked by boxes or something or other because they over-stack an area of space designed for storage (usually they organize shipments by a lot area, and this means there's a finite amount of space and if you have too many boxes you don't always stick them in a new area.)

- As Mike noted, accountants may be in charge. I've known of things or procedures simply not changed because it would be too expensive, unless they're forced to. (including safety measures, I might add.). In the US profit and savings and being financially sound is always more important than things like safety (except when it comes to the possibility of surprise inspections or fines or whatever.)

Also, sometimes it may simply just be inertia. The old "if it ain't broke don't fix it" approach (Basically you trust in luck for it not to happen. But if it does happen, then you'll probably see idiots scrambling around pretending it IS a big deal now.)

- Sometimes people who actually do the jobs are either too stupid, too rushed, or too greedy to worry about safety or be careful so they will disregard safety. And safety courses are often a joke, more a chore to get past annually than anything anyone takes seriously. And few businesses I've known make an effort to keep up on it.

- Its also quite possible that even though a simple railing system might be the best security, the designers decided to go with something more high tech/sophisticated (and less idiot proof) like some "repuslor/force field safety net" or something like that. Hell, maybe the AG tech inside the DS can prevent falls or something. Such devices may have some sort of benefit (cost, savings on internal volume or wear and tear, versatility) or maybe the people who installed it are just stupid - its entirely possible for humans to be gulled into doing something more sophisticated and complex (and thus expensive) because they think it would be better.

Also, if they did use some "alternate" mechanism, the mindset probably also decides redundancy is unimportant (and thus you wouldn't need railings.)

[VT-16]

Since so many systems are meant to be serviced by droids, and droids can get programmed to avoid pitfalls, the designers simply told living technicians to "deal with it".

[CaptHawkeye]

Why design a Star Destroyer with an exposed bridge super structure and then face that bridge with windows?

Others have given a number of reasons for this. It may simply be that they figure a ship won't last long without shields anyway. Alternatively, there may be cultural resistance. When the first ironclad vessels were developed during the American Civil War, there was a certain amount of cultural and institutional resistance, because the officers and men were suddenly thrust together in the same living and working spaces.

Too add: Every battleship in history has had large, open flag bridge complete with wide open windows. Barring the fact that yes, SDs are in space and ergo a vacuum, the reasoning that ships would always have an unprotected open bridge was simply because armoured conning towers suck to command out of. Both the Americans and British discovered the hard way that an open bridge was a necessity when trying to steer and command a ship in the midst of high speed/high traffic maneuvers. Say in port or formation cruising.

Your average conning tower is an armoured box that sticks up out of the hull and is usually placed nearto the open bridge so the commanding officers can transfer to it quickly. Its purpose is simple, provide a safer place for the ship's commanding staff to operate than the open bridge which was consistently threatened by shrapnel and harassing fire from smaller ships.

A conning tower provides excellent protection against shrapnel and light caliber shell hits, but it has its disadvantages. For one, the conning tower usually only has tiny vision slits, which make visual conn near impossible especially when other ships (or your own) are kicking up tons of smoke from fire and exhaust. Another serious disadvantage of conning towers is that they can't stop a direct hit from a sufficiently sized naval shell, and may actually contribute to its detonation as the armour might challenge the shell enough to set off its burster when the sheet metal of an open bridge would just let it pass right through.

With these factors in mind, it actually makes sense that Imperial Officers might dislike commanding from an armoured citadel safe inside the superstructure. (Star Destroyers almost certainly have them.) Even if it provides protection from light power blasts and vacuum. Like you said, the ship may very well be doomed when the shields come down, and retreating to the conning tower would do little more than stall the inevitable. American Officers were frequently unwilling to command from a conning tower even during the middle of fight because it was such an uncomftorable place to command from. US Naval Engineers actually tried to force Officers to use conning towers by designing some ships without an open bridge or superstructure of any kind. (See: USS Delaware) This ultimately didn't work and they eventually added them anyway.

[Connor MacLeod]

The command tower thingy may not have always been intended to be manned in a combat situation (maybe its a preference of the invidiual captain or Admiral - a cultural thing akin to the way, IIRC, Napoleonic era naval officers would stand out in the open during naval battles and risk injury or death. Stupid, ,but its part of the code fo the time.) We know they have backup bridges - it coudl be that its intended for the officers to normally command from there rather than use the bridge (Note that canonically, we only ever saw onboard an Imperial starship in battle at Endor, and that was hardly a "normal" combat situation since the Imperials were never intended to actually engage the Rebels nor did they actually prepare for combat)

As for the Asteroid impact in TESB.. its been done to death. I wouldn't rule out the possibility of damage (every time I did look at the scene there are bits that are hard to explain like why part tof the tower does seem missing) b ut that doesn't mean the damage was inflicted by that single asteroid alone. They were in the field for a long period of time (minutes? hours?) and had been enduring impacts (repeated multimegaton impacts according to the Anakin Skywalker/Story of Darth Vader book) which could have weakened/stressed the shield mountings with repeated abuse and no chance for maintenance or repairs (as Mike has noted, the energy of the impact wouldnt neccecsarily be the killer - the force/momentum of the collisions owuld be, and the resulting impacts could build up over time.) For all we know some shield generator got torn off its mountings and propelled into something else or other and did some internal damage. Its too vague to be a reliable "upper" limit on anything really.

As for the "Script" depiction with the 'destroyed" vessel, if one has read the novelization it is noted that there were other ships present and distinct from the ISDs themselves (and distinct from the Executor) (and reinforced/elaborated upon by other sourcecs too). The novelization also elaborated upon the scene by saying it was just a "smaller ship" but not specifying what it was, so we can't use it as proof that it was or wasn't an ISD (and you can't say there were twenty ISDs there, because the novelization only specified five such vessels as well as all the others.)

Furthermore the TESB comic adaption had wedge-shaped vessels (possibly ISDs) being destroyed.. but it was by collisions with asteroids as wide across (in diameter) or wider (for one maybe 2x the width) than the ships themselves (and thus CONSIDERABLY more massive) which would presumably be referencing what the script/noivel describe with the "holograms".

[The Spartan]

Scratch the 'bit'. There is absolutely no evidence in ESB for the ISD being destroyed NOR losing its bridge. They lost communications for a while. That's the total extent of the damage that ISD suffered.

I don't have my copy handy, but I recall from the novel something about the SD that got hit being the same one that got nailed by the ion cannon and that it's shields weren't up as a result.

Am I remembering wrong?

[Ender]

Scratch the 'bit'. There is absolutely no evidence in ESB for the ISD being destroyed NOR losing its bridge. They lost communications for a while. That's the total extent of the damage that ISD suffered.

I don't have my copy handy, but I recall from the novel something about the SD that got hit being the same one that got nailed by the ion cannon and that it's shields weren't up as a result.

Am I remembering wrong?

Yes. While it might have been hit off screen, on screen they are different ships.

[VT-16]

In the novelization, which I read a few days ago, there was a corresponding scene where the ship was stated to have been destroyed and the captain's image fades like in the movie. Then again, it could simply be a second ship that goes down while he's briefing his commanders.

[JGregory32]

Since we're talking about the asteroids I'd thought I'd bring this up.
First please take a look at this, a copy of the full asteroid scene uploaded to U-Tube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Gzf0kR5AvE
At 2:04 just before the Falcon comes around the large asteroid there is a large red explosion on the side of the asteroid facing the camera. As the asteroid rotates at 2:07 we see it's pretty large.
Was the red flash the detonation of the laser blasts from the Tie-Fighters chasing the Falcon?
If this is so then the bolt must have penetrated the asteroid to detonate on the side facing us.
If it is a bolt from the tie fighters does this give us a chance to calculate the penetrating power of TIE weapons?
I'll admit I don't have the math skills to figure this out but some one might want to.
BTW is it even possible possible for a energy weapon, firing the kinds of bolts we see the TIE's using to penetrate solid matter in this fashion? Or could this be taken as evidence for some kind of solid component?

[Big Phil]

Why design a Star Destroyer with an exposed bridge super structure and then face that bridge with windows?

Others have given a number of reasons for this. It may simply be that they figure a ship won't last long without shields anyway. Alternatively, there may be cultural resistance. When the first ironclad vessels were developed during the American Civil War, there was a certain amount of cultural and institutional resistance, because the officers and men were suddenly thrust together in the same living and working spaces.

Too add: Every battleship in history has had large, open flag bridge complete with wide open windows. Barring the fact that yes, SDs are in space and ergo a vacuum, the reasoning that ships would always have an unprotected open bridge was simply because armoured conning towers suck to command out of. Both the Americans and British discovered the hard way that an open bridge was a necessity when trying to steer and command a ship in the midst of high speed/high traffic maneuvers. Say in port or formation cruising.

Your average conning tower is an armoured box that sticks up out of the hull and is usually placed nearto the open bridge so the commanding officers can transfer to it quickly. Its purpose is simple, provide a safer place for the ship's commanding staff to operate than the open bridge which was consistently threatened by shrapnel and harassing fire from smaller ships.

A conning tower provides excellent protection against shrapnel and light caliber shell hits, but it has its disadvantages. For one, the conning tower usually only has tiny vision slits, which make visual conn near impossible especially when other ships (or your own) are kicking up tons of smoke from fire and exhaust. Another serious disadvantage of conning towers is that they can't stop a direct hit from a sufficiently sized naval shell, and may actually contribute to its detonation as the armour might challenge the shell enough to set off its burster when the sheet metal of an open bridge would just let it pass right through.

With these factors in mind, it actually makes sense that Imperial Officers might dislike commanding from an armoured citadel safe inside the superstructure. (Star Destroyers almost certainly have them.) Even if it provides protection from light power blasts and vacuum. Like you said, the ship may very well be doomed when the shields come down, and retreating to the conning tower would do little more than stall the inevitable. American Officers were frequently unwilling to command from a conning tower even during the middle of fight because it was such an uncomftorable place to command from. US Naval Engineers actually tried to force Officers to use conning towers by designing some ships without an open bridge or superstructure of any kind. (See: USS Delaware) This ultimately didn't work and they eventually added them anyway.

I've asked this in similar threads before, but can anyone identify a real-world example of a ship's command and control center being located deep within the bowels of the ship? Considering that, in modern combat, a hit sufficient to take out the bridge is likely to be powerful enough to take out the ship (or else it's just a lucky strike by a puny weapon - unlikely), placing the bridge deep within a ship is somewhat pointless. Similar thinking is likely at work in Star Wars (i.e., once the shields go down the ship is screwed anyway, so why bother with a bridge deep within the ship).

[CaptHawkeye]

Yeah. Unfortunately, faux-engineers like to think they can look at something and point out the problems with it as if no one else noticed it. Complaining "Star Destroyers have bridge windows" is like complaining "USS Iowa's bridge isn't safe in the bowels of the ship." Their's a reason no one wants to command their ship from a cramped, isolated, poorly lit bunker.