Latest Travissty cancelled

[Darth Hoth]

Even had she been right, the argument would have amounted to jack when the Mining Guild alone has billions of resource-worlds at their disposal. Although the fun bit was the sheer passive-aggressiveness of it all. She even had her author insert feeling smug that she knew the real deal much better than Saxton the in-universe holovid pundit who argued in favour of a large 'droid army.

[Aaron]

I loved how her beloved journalism on the military apparently had little to no effect on the way she envisioned combat and strategy. While she was wanking it to uber Clone special forces with 200:1 kill ratios, and writing nonsensical justifications for that, the US Army was stuck in a quagmire in Iraq. I once made the completely non-controversial statement that no soldier would ever claim to be able to engage a billion enemies single-handedly (like 3 million clones would have to against quintillions of droids), at which point she accused me of libel that undermined her professional qualifications.

Being a Private in a PR section (even if her trade was actually PR) doesn't make her a qualified journalist anymore then me being a Radio Operator makes me a qualified Electrical Engineer. At her rank level her job and qualifications would have relegated her to making/fetching coffee and fucking everything that moved, it's only the general level of ignorance in the public of the military that lets her get away with this crap.

[Crossroads Inc.]

God damn is that hilarious.

I still think her low point in the EU was when she let her Mary Sue accountant/analyst/whatever "debunk" Saxton's numbers in-universe. She ran some arithmetics to "prove" that there was not enough iron on a single terrestrial planet to build a quintillion battle droids.

Oh man you have GOT to post the section form the book, this sounds hysterical

[General Soontir Fel]

God damn is that hilarious.

I still think her low point in the EU was when she let her Mary Sue accountant/analyst/whatever "debunk" Saxton's numbers in-universe. She ran some arithmetics to "prove" that there was not enough iron on a single terrestrial planet to build a quintillion battle droids.

Oh man you have GOT to post the section form the book, this sounds hysterical

I commented on that when I read the book. Here's the thread. The relevant part is the quote:

"Moron," she mumbled at the screen. The analyst was throwing out numbers, huge ones, and because her business was numbers she found herself reaching for a stylus and doodling a few figures on the nearest datapad. "I bet you don't even know how many zeros there are in a quintillion."

She did, though, and numbers comforted her, so she considered his argument. Then she started wondering how much metal went into a battle droid--forty kilos, at the very least--and multiplied it by a quintillion just out of curiosity, and then started wondering where all that metal came from if 90 percent of the average rocky planet was silica, and not all the remaining 10 percent was the right kind of metal, or could be mined anyway, and mining and ore processing took up a lot of resources...

Yeah, it's impossible to mine out 0.00067% of a single planet's mass in a galaxy with billions of planets...

[RogueIce]

Even had she been right, the argument would have amounted to jack when the Mining Guild alone has billions of resource-worlds at their disposal. Although the fun bit was the sheer passive-aggressiveness of it all. She even had her author insert feeling smug that she knew the real deal much better than Saxton the in-universe holovid pundit who argued in favour of a large 'droid army.

The passive-agressive thing got rather sickening in Order 66, at least WRT the 'lie' of the battledroids. It was somewhere in just about every other chapter, whether through those beginning-of-the-chapter insert thingies, or some clone commandoes smugly telling themselves how there couldn't possibly be that many (such as during the Battle of Coruscant's ground portions). Well, that and the aforementioned 'Mandos ftw' crap, leading up to a Jedi throwing herself in the path of another Jedi (some padawan IIRC) lightsaber blade which was about to cut down some random clone, yelling, "Don't kill that man!" (even though, y'know, this was Order 66 and that clone would've shot said Jedi anyway if he'd had the chance; clearly random clone > Jedi padawan/kid).

*sigh*

[Guardsman Bass]

then started wondering where all that metal came from if 90 percent of the average rocky planet was silica, and not all the remaining 10 percent was the right kind of metal, or could be mined anyway, and mining and ore processing took up a lot of resources...

Yeesh. Did she seriously not consider that planets might, I don't know, import metals and resources from other systems for production purposes? Someone should ask her if she thinks Kuat Drive Yards has been producing star destroyers just off the minerals available in-system.

[Ritterin Sophia]

Well as long as there is no SPARTAN 'culture' and Master Chief doesn't have some new language pulled out of his ass, it shouldn't be too bad. Hopefully.

Maybe they'll include a sneakpeak of Karen Traviss' new characters, the ZULU's. Special SPARTAN's who used to be farmers. They're better than the real SPARTAN's since they were adults when they got the implants, but they've got martial training because of their warrior culture heritage. They speak a complex language known as Cunt'ua. Like I said they're secretly better than the SPARTAN's but the common man can't tell the difference from the two so the SPARTAN's use their exploits for themselves, meanwhile the leader of the SPARTAN's persecutes and marginalizes the ZULU's and he's secretly in league with the covenant to extend the war. Also there's only about a million UNSC Marines and they don't have the industrial capability to make new equipment or repair old equipment. Damn, I didn't realize how easy it is to be a New York Times Best Selling Author...

[Darksider]

Yeesh. Did she seriously not consider that planets might, I don't know, import metals and resources from other systems for production purposes? Someone should ask her if she thinks Kuat Drive Yards has been producing star destroyers just off the minerals available in-system.

It makes me wonder if she'd even seen the supplementary material for AOTC, since she apparently missed the fact that the entire Geonosis asteroid field was artificially created for the purpose of fueling the battle droid factories.

I wonder what would happen if someone did calcs on how many battledroids you could make with a single 5-10km asteroid, of which said field contained thousands, if not tens of thousands.

[Winston Blake]

"Moron," she mumbled at the screen. The analyst was throwing out numbers, huge ones, and because her business was numbers she found herself reaching for a stylus and doodling a few figures on the nearest datapad. "I bet you don't even know how many zeros there are in a quintillion."

She did, though, and numbers comforted her, so she considered his argument. Then she started wondering how much metal went into a battle droid--forty kilos, at the very least--and multiplied it by a quintillion just out of curiosity, and then started wondering where all that metal came from if 90 percent of the average rocky planet was silica, and not all the remaining 10 percent was the right kind of metal, or could be mined anyway, and mining and ore processing took up a lot of resources...

40 kg? For a man made of metal? What, flesh is twice as dense as iron now? I guess it could be a light metal of some kind. I'll use iron here because it's the most abundant metal I know of.

As a rough estimate, a torso-sized block of steel 200x300x1000mm weighs about 470kg. As a conservative estimate, let's say a B1 battledroid weighs about 200kg, considering internal space, etc. The USGS puts world iron reserves at 'exceeding' 800B tonnes ore, 230B tonnes of iron content. That's enough for 1.15 trillion battledroids. Curtis Saxton gives the number of 'inhabited' planets in the Empire as 12 million. Uninhabited, minable worlds are surely far more numerous. Every million Earth-like planets is another quintillion battledroids, in terms of potential resources. There should be enough metal.

Further, USGS gives 2.2B tonnes of iron ore produced in 2008. From the above ore-to-usable-metal ratio, I get 630M tonnes of iron per year. IIRC, the CIS had 15 years to build up the droid army. At 630M tonnes/year, and 200kg per droid, for 15 years, that's an army of 45 billion droids, using Earth's current production numbers. Consider 3 million clones versus that. If Star Wars has 50x Earth's production per mining planet (?), and the CIS had 1 million mining planets (?), then that's a droid army of... 2.4 quintillion battledroids.

I'm not sure if these numbers are good, but at least it shows that 'quintillions of droids' isn't wildly off the mark. However, it does require a few million planets to be torn to shreds to feed the foundries, which Traviss probably would not accept as plausible. Note that at the 50x rate above, a Star Wars mining operation would strip a whole Earth-like planet of iron ore in just 7.3 years. Hell, the ring around Geonosis may be the tip of the iceberg. I wouldn't be surprised if the mining corporations used mini-Death-Stars for blasting long before the Death Stars were built. Fleets of mass-produced 'miniature mining Darksabers' would conveniently give the Death Stars a solid pre-existing design lineage.

[Darth Hoth]

You mentioned Death Stars. The very existence of those (especially the largest one at Endor) proves Traviss's no-math idiocies irreconcilably wrong in the highest possible canon with no further arguments needed. Or does anyone imagine that a quintillion 'droids mass many orders of magnitude more than a whole artificially constructed dwarf planet?

[Grandmaster Jogurt]

You mentioned Death Stars. The very existence of those (especially the largest one at Endor) proves Traviss's no-math idiocies irreconcilably wrong in the highest possible canon with no further arguments needed. Or does anyone imagine that a quintillion 'droids mass many orders of magnitude more than a whole artificially constructed dwarf planet?

With a diameter of 800km, the Death Star at Endor had a completed volume of 3.28e17m3. If we assume it was 1% iron by volume, that gives it a mass of 3.01e19kg of iron, enough for .15 quintillion 200kg battledroids. IIRC, the standard assumption for Star Wars ships is a dry density of 10% that of iron, so that would give us somewhat less than 1.5 quintillion droids, depending on how much of said mass is iron.

[Darth Yan]

I posted on TFN that I was happy to see her go and cited why, and all I got was a let's keep it relevent. Apparently the mando wankers are loosing their hold.

[Havok]

I posted on TFN that I was happy to see her go and cited why, and all I got was a let's keep it relevent. Apparently the mando wankers are loosing their hold.

Link please. I've always meant to sign up there and see what the fuss was about. Maybe get myself banned.

[Darth Yan]

http://boards.theforce.net/literature/b ... 856810/p15

[Havok]

Wow. What a load of masturbatory crap. Think I'll just stay here with the rest of the 'Nazis' And hey, turns out I already have an account there. I logged in and had a PM from 2005.
It was telling me not to cuss.

[Wyrm]

My god, by the end of the description of the Amazon preview, I could hear a military dude in my head saying, "If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire... The M-Team."

[Ritterin Sophia]

I love those retards on there. "If Mandalorians are peaceful then Jango's backstory don't work no more!"

I mean it's not like the Death Watch and True Mandalorians can't be the last remaining torch bearers of a warrior tradition that became defunct when it was realised that being a part of a pangalactic government would mean they can get the resources they need to survive on their arid planet without necessitating raiding anymore. Cuz as we all know warrior cultures naturally spring up from societies that are completely self-sustaining on farming and not out of necessity.

[PainRack]

To be honest, Travis was a semi-good author, although its funny. Her real good strong points was developing likeable character hooks, not the battle tactics or even the so called "camaderie" of her clones. If anyone actually read her battles........ it sucks. Seriously. Jedi Trial, a travesty that attempted to say "hey, logistics matter! So do tactics and strategy" before evolving into rambo in SW had better written battles than Travis. And I'm not talking realism either, I'm talking about interesting battles. Battles that won't make you want to just skip the page and etc.

Its just ironic that she hangs the entire aspect of her credibility on military realism and her stint in the armed forces, ignoring her true strengths as an author.

[Darth Yan]

i posted shcattens ideas on tfn. I wonder how they'll be recieved.

[Havok]

I love how they are all "OMG BOBA ISN'T A MANDALORIAN ANY MORE!!! HE'S BEEN THAT WAY FOR 20 YEARS!!!" I was like, what? Dude, he just wore their armor... He's just a douche that got beat with a stick.

[Shroom Man 777]

My god, by the end of the description of the Amazon preview, I could hear a military dude in my head saying, "If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire... The M-Team."

I think it would be hilarious if we had a story about a bunch of Clone crackpack guys whose exploits are more humorous and awesome than serious or anything, with them besting foes through sheer light-hearted dickery, sorta like the Ciaphas Cain books in 40k but for Star Wars. Does Star Wars have any silly fun lighthearted stuff in the EU?

[Havok]

Hmmm, not to my knowledge. It is all ROTS/ROTJ serious. Not much ANH humor going on.

[Bakustra]

My god, by the end of the description of the Amazon preview, I could hear a military dude in my head saying, "If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire... The M-Team."

I think it would be hilarious if we had a story about a bunch of Clone crackpack guys whose exploits are more humorous and awesome than serious or anything, with them besting foes through sheer light-hearted dickery, sorta like the Ciaphas Cain books in 40k but for Star Wars. Does Star Wars have any silly fun lighthearted stuff in the EU?

There's the Wraith Squadron part of the X-wing book series, and the follow-up, Starfighters of Adumar. Both are fairly close to the Ciaphas Cain stuff, but they are really the only EU that I can recall that comes even close.

[Ghost Rider]

My god, by the end of the description of the Amazon preview, I could hear a military dude in my head saying, "If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire... The M-Team."

I think it would be hilarious if we had a story about a bunch of Clone crackpack guys whose exploits are more humorous and awesome than serious or anything, with them besting foes through sheer light-hearted dickery, sorta like the Ciaphas Cain books in 40k but for Star Wars. Does Star Wars have any silly fun lighthearted stuff in the EU?

But without GRIMDARK!!! how will we ever be respected!

All the emo teens love the GRIMDARK. And it's been a long time since Wraith Squadron or hell most humor in SW that isn't at best gallows humor and touting about some galactic scare that involves only a planet or three.

[Bakustra]

My god, by the end of the description of the Amazon preview, I could hear a military dude in my head saying, "If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire... The M-Team."

I think it would be hilarious if we had a story about a bunch of Clone crackpack guys whose exploits are more humorous and awesome than serious or anything, with them besting foes through sheer light-hearted dickery, sorta like the Ciaphas Cain books in 40k but for Star Wars. Does Star Wars have any silly fun lighthearted stuff in the EU?

But without GRIMDARK!!! how will we ever be respected!

All the emo teens love the GRIMDARK. And it's been a long time since Wraith Squadron or hell most humor in SW that isn't at best gallows humor and touting about some galactic scare that involves only a planet or three.

To be honest, the Wraith Squadron stuff (and Starfighters of Adumar) had serious aspects, like the fate of Toprawa, Project Chubar, and the Adumari society, it's just that they didn't wallow in the grimdark. Nowadays they'd probably have entire novels dedicated to the grim essentials of survival on Toprawa, or the blastsword forms of Cartann, or the warrior culture developed by the mentally-enhanced Ewoks, blatantly ripped off from... the Mongols.

Yeah! We'll have warrior Ewoks on speederbikes, shooting bows and arrows at people. But with their enhanced intelligence, they'd make laser bows. With plasma arrows. And we could have an endless array of point-for-point references to Mongol history, right down to their legendary leader Genghis Kettch. This still might actually be enjoyable to read, if in an ironic way, so we need some way to suck any sense of humor or over-the-topness from it. Thoughts?