Bad design in Star Wars

[FSTargetDrone]

Except that it can't communicate with its crew directly, C3PO needed to find out the information that the hyperdrive was damaged. That might indicate that the droid brain of the Falcon is simply limited in its functionality or that its just computer diagnostic software that reported to C3PO the damage report status.

And:

That the Falcon is a rust bucket pile of home modifications that might not have a standard computer system or a system that a translator droid isn't able to use effectively.

That's right. Han says to 3PO, "I need you to talk to the Falcon. Find out what's wrong with the hyperdrive." 3PO then annoys Solo about the asteroid. Solo then says, "Chewie, take the professor in the back and plug him into the hyperdrive."

After awhile, 3PO is seen fiddling with a control board on the ship as we hear droid-like beeps and then, exasperated, he says to himself, "Oh! Where is R2 when I need him?"

Then he says to Solo,

"Sir, I don't know where your ship learned to communicate but it has the most peculiar dialect. I believe, sir, it says that the power coupling on the negative axis has been polarized. I'm afraid you'll have to replace it."

The computer board continues to beep and make other noises.

So, if we take the conversation literally, 3PO is actually plugged-in to the ship's computer (though this isn't seen--does he have provisions to be linked via cable or some-such, say a built-in jack of some kind?) and he has some trouble with the ship's computer, wishing he had R2 around, presumably to translate (somewhat surprising, given his language library). Then again, he does say the ship has a "peculiar dialect."

All of this does suggest that Solo doesn't normally talk to his ship, if ever. In none of the films does he ever do anything remotely like addressing the ship directly (though it would be cool--"Falcon, power up the main guns!") and this probably stems from his dislike of droids and/or there is no provision for voice-command with his ship.

[The Original Nex]

Now THERE'S something that's a design flaw...Solo needs a Protocol Droid to figure out that the Falcon's hyperdrive needs a power coupling replaced? Why is there not a diagnostic that could be run that would display such info on a computer screen? Or later when the Empire deactivated the Hyperdrive, why is there not an indicator somewhere or again, a diagnostic that could be run to find the problem, instead of running around the ship hacking it with tools?

[Aaron]

What is even more bizarre is that Solo has a conversation with a droid helping to fix the Falcon in Echo Base's hanger bay. And it was communicating in a language similar to R2.

[FSTargetDrone]

What is even more bizarre is that Solo has a conversation with a droid helping to fix the Falcon in Echo Base's hanger bay. And it was communicating in a language similar to R2.

I'd forgotten about that!

Then it seems Solo simply can't understand his own ship, even if he were to try talking to it. Maybe it's gotten as surly as he is.

That would have been a fun bit of business in the movies, the ship arguing with Solo, grudgingly accepting some of his more outlandish directives, reflecting its own sense of self-preservation: "You want me to do what?" (when commanded to attach itself to the side of the Star Destroyer's bride tower)

[Bilbo]

A plan only conceived after they busted into the detention level and rescued Leia.

A plan only mentioned after the Falcon was gone. Do we really know at what point the plan was conceived?

[Bilbo]

What is even more bizarre is that Solo has a conversation with a droid helping to fix the Falcon in Echo Base's hanger bay. And it was communicating in a language similar to R2.

I'd forgotten about that!

Then it seems Solo simply can't understand his own ship, even if he were to try talking to it. Maybe it's gotten as surly as he is.

That would have been a fun bit of business in the movies, the ship arguing with Solo, grudgingly accepting some of his more outlandish directives, reflecting its own sense of self-preservation: "You want me to do what?" (when commanded to attach itself to the side of the Star Destroyer's bride tower)

Or it means that Solo is in a hurry and does not have time to track down every problem the way he normally does, nor does he have time to sit at a terminal and read screens communicating with the Falcon. The ship was hiding inside an asteroid from a rather large Imperial fleet. Is it a surprise that Solo was doing whatever he could to expedite repairs?

[Havok]

This is what I was thinking. Han has a lot of problems with that piece of shit, and he wasn't even done making repairs when they evacuated Hoth and it's not like he is in a hanger with even remotely the tools he needs. He is using everything at his disposal to get it fixed not to mention that he needs to get Leia back to the fleet ASAP.

[18-Till-I-Die]

It's likely the thing is just broker or something. It's a smuggler ship, he probably hasn't had the thing actually repaired or updated in years, and it's pieced together on the fly as it were. It's possible there are whole parts of it that don't work anymore or barely do, like an old clunker. I mean the fact it's older than sin and falling apart is actually mentioned several times by characters who would likely know what they're talking about--that is to say, people who live in a world with sentient spaceships. Also the engines seem rather ify at best in the first and second movies, so yeah I'll go with "it's broken and systems are failing".

[Wing Commander MAD]

Something else to consider is that the MF is always described as heavily modified from stock configuration in the literature. Could it be that whatever Han has done has rendered any kind of diagnostic software useless due to incompatability with the parts?

Do we know if any other private individuals without major backers (ie no spies or agents of the Emperor or Black Sun)that have heavily modified vessels (Boba Fett and Talon Karde are the only I can think of off the top of my head) who have self diagnostic programs in thier ships? Then again Fett is fairly wealthy it would seem, and Karde I think was generally doing much better financially compared to Solo (I really can only base my information of Kard off of the old Essential Guide books). I could see it being possible to get custom diagnostic software for a cost, which Han probably doesn't have the money for, if your making use of nonstandard/illegal starship parts. Then again 18-Till-I-Die could be right and so much of the Falcon is nonfunctional that and that something needed for a self diagnostic or reporting what is wrong to Han is simply broken.

The whole dialect thing is rather odd as well considering 3P0 is supposed to have some abilities to translate/communicate with industrial devices as Owen was buying him to talk with the vaporators. I wander just how much the "laguage" used by industrial devices and starships varies? You would think it would be relatively standardized for simplicity and ease of maintenance around the galaxy. It also seems rather odd that 3P0 wasn't able to translate the Falcon's computer. I can buy R2 being a maintenance droid having industrial machine languages programmed into him, much the way that 3P0 has sentient languages programmed into him. Yet, why would 3P0 have any programmed in at all (Bacci? for the vaporators), and didn't he have the ability to translate the Ewoks based on them using a dialect of some language he knew. He afterall recognized the language, just not the dialect. I of course realize that just because he could do it in one instance doesn't mean he could do it in every instance, but I would think that a machine language (albeit far more advanced than what we have now) would be less complex and thus easier to make sense of odd dialects than that of a sentient*.

*Note: I don't have much experience with lower level machine languages (or human languages other than English and a bit of German) except a bit from a Computer Architecture class in college.

[Agent Sorchus]

I greatly prefer the explanation that Han was trying to get Threepio out of his hair and doing a task that couldn't hurt to have done. Also, where was it said that Han couldn't get the information out of the computer himself? Most likely Han know that the computer had a bitter tongue and didn't want to have to deal with it himself and foisted it of the most annoying person that could get in his way.

[Batman]

The Falcon is and always has been a disaster waiting to happen. The Valendamned ship used HYDRAULICS to do the job of printed circuits at one point. The standard maintenance interface that tells the crew what's wrong no longer functioning/possibly no longer being THERE shouldn't come as much of a surprise.

[Havok]

Also the engines seem rather ify at best in the first and second movies, so yeah I'll go with "it's broken and systems are failing".

What is wrong with the engines in ANH? It's only an issue in TESB.

[FSTargetDrone]

It also seems rather odd that 3P0 wasn't able to translate the Falcon's computer.

Well, he was able to get the gist of it. If the rest of the ship is in less-than-pristine condition and clearly exhibits a lot of wear and tear and patchwork repairs, perhaps whatever language the ship's computer was using had somehow been corrupted or altered to the point where a droid such as 3PO wasn't precisely sure what it was saying.

[Batman]

I'm not sure it even qualifies as an issue. The engines are iffy exactly ONCE in ESB.

[ExarKun]

I love it when fans get butthurt by minor criticism and try to defend the indefensible.

1. Death star was designed with exhaust that leads straight out to the surface. "Ray shield" or not, you'd think they'd make a few curves in the path of the exhaust, just in case. Even cars have curved exhausts ffs. And it wasn't a one in a million shot Rebels felt like they could do it, even without a jedi. Just accept that it was a design flaw by the engineers or a fuck up by Lucas. But don't try crap like "1 in a million chance, it was shielded and you had to use proton torpedoes!!"

2. There is no reason why that thing doesn't talk Basic. It already talks to people in its own language, you'd think it wouldn't be that hard to install a language package to interface with its own machine language. May be I can think that the machine language is wide-spread and engineers that deal with it know it, but it's an incredible stretch. The only good excuse I can think of is that they are old old machines whose production has stopped in favor of better ones, that can talk.


As for Han Solo not knowing what's wrong with the hyperdrive, well, sometimes, I don't know what's wrong with my engine, and you have to hook it up to a computer to get the codes. It's no big deal that his instruments couldnt' tell him. It's ridiculous to expect the ship to monitor every tiny part in a complex piece of machinery like that.

[Darth Fanboy]

I think it's in Courtship of PRincess Leia where it is said that the Falcon has three different droid brains that actually caused the ship to argue with itself. I don't have the book onhand but it is mentioned in the Wookiepedia entries for the Falcon and Droid brains.

[The Original Nex]

1. Death star was designed with exhaust that leads straight out to the surface. "Ray shield" or not, you'd think they'd make a few curves in the path of the exhaust, just in case. Even cars have curved exhausts ffs. And it wasn't a one in a million shot Rebels felt like they could do it, even without a jedi. Just accept that it was a design flaw by the engineers or a fuck up by Lucas. But don't try crap like "1 in a million chance, it was shielded and you had to use proton torpedoes!!"

A fuck up by Lucas? Pretty sure it was a MAJOR PLOT POINT, so it sure as hell wasn't a production fuckup

[FSTargetDrone]

I think it's in Courtship of PRincess Leia where it is said that the Falcon has three different droid brains that actually caused the ship to argue with itself. I don't have the book onhand but it is mentioned in the Wookiepedia entries for the Falcon and Droid brains.

Yeah, for what it is worth, here is the relevant portion of the entry on the Falcon:

The cobbled-together nature of the ship presented many problems throughout her smuggling days and during the Rebellion. Systems were barely held together and apparently had many incompatibilities, resulting in numerous malfunctions. C-3PO commented that he wasn't quite sure where the ship learned to communicate. (However, that may be a reference to the ship's "dialect", leaving open the possibility that the ship's computer uses slang and/or vulgar language, thus upsetting C-3PO's sensibilities.) Years after the Battle of Endor, Han Solo and Chewbacca resolved these difficulties. The resolution of those problems may have involved a virtual rebuild of her internal operation systems; this was never discussed in detail.

The "Systems were barely held together and apparently had many incompatibilities, resulting in numerous malfunctions" part there is interesting.

[Guardsman Bass]

I think it's in Courtship of PRincess Leia where it is said that the Falcon has three different droid brains that actually caused the ship to argue with itself. I don't have the book onhand but it is mentioned in the Wookiepedia entries for the Falcon and Droid brains.

She mentions that Han told her that the Droid Brains bickered, then mentally voiced her suspicions that they were probably sabotaging each others' systems.

[Stark]

As for Han Solo not knowing what's wrong with the hyperdrive, well, sometimes, I don't know what's wrong with my engine, and you have to hook it up to a computer to get the codes. It's no big deal that his instruments couldnt' tell him. It's ridiculous to expect the ship to monitor every tiny part in a complex piece of machinery like that.

You mean... the way your engine computer does?

[Havok]

I think it's in Courtship of PRincess Leia where it is said that the Falcon has three different droid brains that actually caused the ship to argue with itself. I don't have the book onhand but it is mentioned in the Wookiepedia entries for the Falcon and Droid brains.

She mentions that Han told her that the Droid Brains bickered, then mentally voiced her suspicions that they were probably sabotaging each others' systems.

So I was correct in my assumption that 'computers' are basically just immobile droids. Perhaps in this advanced state of technology, what they consider a computer is based on size. Like how we don't call laptops, which are just mobile computers, computers anymore. For them a 'computer' is a 'Droid brain' that runs something the size of a spaceship or a city.

[Havok]

As for Han Solo not knowing what's wrong with the hyperdrive, well, sometimes, I don't know what's wrong with my engine, and you have to hook it up to a computer to get the codes. It's no big deal that his instruments couldnt' tell him. It's ridiculous to expect the ship to monitor every tiny part in a complex piece of machinery like that.

You mean... the way your engine computer does?

Wait... Is ExarKun the guy that wrote the article that started this thread?

[Drooling Iguana]

1. Death star was designed with exhaust that leads straight out to the surface. "Ray shield" or not, you'd think they'd make a few curves in the path of the exhaust, just in case. Even cars have curved exhausts ffs. And it wasn't a one in a million shot Rebels felt like they could do it, even without a jedi. Just accept that it was a design flaw by the engineers or a fuck up by Lucas. But don't try crap like "1 in a million chance, it was shielded and you had to use proton torpedoes!!"

It wasn't so much that the Rebels thought that they could do it, so much as they knew that if they didn't do it they would get 'sploded. They decided to go for the one-in-a-million shot rather than sit around and wait to die.

[18-Till-I-Die]

Also the engines seem rather ify at best in the first and second movies, so yeah I'll go with "it's broken and systems are failing".

What is wrong with the engines in ANH? It's only an issue in TESB.

I'm possibly mistaking it for TESB then?

Come to think of it yeah, because I distinctly recall Leia looking at Han cross when the engines don't fire. So yeah I guess it was only in The Empire Strikes Back.

Argh! My Star Wars street cred is lost!

[Ritterin Sophia]

I love it when fans get butthurt by minor criticism and try to defend the indefensible.

1. Death star was designed with exhaust that leads straight out to the surface. "Ray shield" or not, you'd think they'd make a few curves in the path of the exhaust, just in case. Even cars have curved exhausts ffs. And it wasn't a one in a million shot Rebels felt like they could do it, even without a jedi. Just accept that it was a design flaw by the engineers or a fuck up by Lucas. But don't try crap like "1 in a million chance, it was shielded and you had to use proton torpedoes!!"

You do realize that had Tarkin ordered even another handful of TIE Fighters out, instead of Vader taking initiative with just his own squadron, Yavin IV would not exist any more in the EU. Right? That's akin to saying a carrier is a stupid design because it was destroyed by a squadron of prop planes when the officer in charge refused to allow his DDG escort to knock them down.

2. There is no reason why that thing doesn't talk Basic. It already talks to people in its own language, you'd think it wouldn't be that hard to install a language package to interface with its own machine language. May be I can think that the machine language is wide-spread and engineers that deal with it know it, but it's an incredible stretch. The only good excuse I can think of is that they are old old machines whose production has stopped in favor of better ones, that can talk.

Why? Luke seems to understand binary just fine, Anakin too, so does Ahsoka, all the pilots and crew understand droid binary.