Latest Travissty cancelled

[Elfdart]

All I'm saying is that Saxton and his friends have, through fifteen years of publicizing and lobbying, introduced a number of retcons into Star Wars that can be shown to be methodologically flawed and unneccessary...

Ask him to name them -and be specific.

[PainRack]

Do they ever do any of that good old fashioned ANH/OT type of space adventuring? Witty banter between hero and sidekick and love interest and Chewy (who gets killed by an exploding moon), cocky one-liners, just a ragtag bunch of guys winning out by the skin of their teeth? Seems like all this Jedi-Sith-Force, big war-centric intrigue stuff kinda detracts from that and it really seems like they're kind of using all the old stuff over and over again. Perhaps some actual factual goofball space comedy would actually be a breath of fresh air - culminating with a Mangdalore getting his shit ruined by a good old fashioned jetpack stick-beating.

I dunno, I'm just rambling. Bleh.

To be honest..... once you move past the Lando Calrissan Trilogy and Han Solo Trilogy, most of the novels forgot that SW is supposed to be an space opera. Space adventurers along the lines of Flash Gordon.

[Shroom Man 777]

That's kind of sad. Most of the interesting characters in the OT really were the ones who were not indulging in the whole galaxy revolutionary rebellion new alliance bla-bla. I mean, look at Han. And, for a while, Luke.

[Darth Hoth]

Do they ever do any of that good old fashioned ANH/OT type of space adventuring? Witty banter between hero and sidekick and love interest and Chewy (who gets killed by an exploding moon), cocky one-liners, just a ragtag bunch of guys winning out by the skin of their teeth? Seems like all this Jedi-Sith-Force, big war-centric intrigue stuff kinda detracts from that and it really seems like they're kind of using all the old stuff over and over again. Perhaps some actual factual goofball space comedy would actually be a breath of fresh air - culminating with a Mangdalore getting his shit ruined by a good old fashioned jetpack stick-beating.

I dunno, I'm just rambling. Bleh.

Hilariously, Stackpole's X-wing comics are probably the closest you will get to that in the EU.

[Thanas]

Do not forget Timothy Zahn.

[Darth Yan]

the x-wing comics was alright, but for the love of god stackpole cannot write romance to save his life. The love lines between avan and feylis made me want to claw my eyes out. there was no fucking chemistry between them.

[Darth Hoth]

Do not forget Timothy Zahn.

Does Zahn write that kind of Jolly Space Adventure? Most of his books concerned the grand epic/galactic politics strain that Shroom appeared to wish to avoid.

[Thanas]

Do not forget Timothy Zahn.

Does Zahn write that kind of Jolly Space Adventure? Most of his books concerned the grand epic/galactic politics strain that Shroom appeared to wish to avoid.

Outbound flight and Survivor's Quest would fall into space adventure, methinks.

[Darth Hoth]

Well, they are not about Saving The Galaxy, at any rate. But the feel in those books is not comparable to the Han Solo pulps; they are more Star Trekky in their general approach.

[Thanas]

*Shrug* De gustibus non est disputandum.

[VT-16]

Having been unfortunate enough to read much of McEwok's (and his tool, blackmyron's) ramblings up until now, I've come across a fun comparison. Looking at Elfdart's sig, it suddenly dawned on me, McEwok is the Glenn Beck of SW fandom. He comes up with ideas and essay-length posts that slide into rants about connections and themes and meanings he and apparantly only he can find in SW. This conspiracy-fetish he has with Saxton is just the icing on the Beck-cake.
Oh, and he's also a big hypocrite, using TCW visuals to pretend the Venator-class is 400 meters long, as it "should be". He apparantly used the windows to come up with that number, even if said windows don't match up with the bridge sections, or might not even be actual windows at all. (Holographic imagery could account for the view out the bridge, like on the Acclamator-class, for instance)

blackmyron, with his constant harassment of people he disagrees with, is of course Billo. Yes, he's that shallow of a poster.

[Darksider]

Why in the fuck is he trying to argue that the Venators are 400 meters long? Haven't they been consistently portrayed at around 1,000 meters in every single source? It's not like the ships are "too big" for the republic to build, the empire built anywhere from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of 1.6km Imperators, at least several dozen Executors, and oh yeah, two fucking death stars.

Why does he seem to be insistent on making the SW universe seem as small and minimalist as possible? He's not a trektard, he doesn't have ulterior motivation provided by any vs. debates, so why?

[Ghost Rider]

Why in the fuck is he trying to argue that the Venators are 400 meters long? Haven't they been consistently portrayed at around 1,000 meters in every single source? It's not like the ships are "too big" for the republic to build, the empire built anywhere from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of 1.6km Imperators, at least several dozen Executors, and oh yeah, two fucking death stars.

Why does he seem to be insistent on making the SW universe seem as small and minimalist as possible? He's not a trektard, he doesn't have ulterior motivation provided by any vs. debates, so why?

It sounds too big. Remember most are uneducated nimrods who think exactly as Karen did, and less at points. 3 million sounds absolutely enormous, a million worlds is unbelieveable, and so on. So they stick to ideas that it's these small tidbits because it also fits their idea of what they thought Lucas wanted to convey with SW. It's not a galactic power versus anyone, it's the Empire is pretty much the Death Star and the enemy is the plucky Alliance.

[Darth Yan]

Because Karen acted in a way that was worthy of being criticized; she said that people who criticized her were the taliban, and that they had aspergers (I actually have that, so i found it deeply offensive); in short, she acted like a petulant child who didn't get her way. Her supporters admitted that she hadn't been flamed, and she left before things got nasty. The only reason she wrote odds was as a Fuck You to her critics.

I don't remember Traviss's "aspergers" comment, but my general view is that if one side is indulging in the stupid, then that's no excuse for the other side to...

Let's turn this on its head; say you wrote a teasing blog post suggesting that I should focus less on Jaina/Wookiee romance... which would be the response you'd expect - for me to think about what you said, and engage in a constructive dialogue, and try and not take it too seriously; or for me to throw a tantrum?



I'm sorry, but the film visuals are consistent for the most part (aside from one or two errors, and Lealend Chee said that any contradictions would be dealt with. Plus correcting contradictions is a stated purpose of the special editions).

Three points here:

1.) I'm not talking about the visuals themselves, but about Saxton's use of them.

2.) The movies are visually highly inconsistent - from the fact that the Falcon's interior doesn't fit in its hull, to the five different sizes of the Imperial shuttle in RotJ, to the strong evidence for 1.4km Trade Federation battleships in TPM... for example.

3.) Chee said that contradictions in canon would be dealt with on a case-by-case basis; that doesn't mean automatically using inferrences from inconsistent movie visuals to retcon consistent non-movie canon!

Plus they are for more consistent then the EU books, which contradict each other far more then any of the film visuals.

In what ways? About things like ship-size and tech? Can you give me examples?

Also, the reasons the ships look that way is because that's how the modelmakers designed them, and they did that because george lucas wanted them to do it that way (and george lucases intent trumps anything EU.)

Actually, while George does sometimes have a clear idea about the appearance of things, sometimes he lets the designers take the lead (Maul, Dooku and Grievous were developed from VERY basic concepts) and then picks the idea he likes out of the varity they come up with; and sometimes, things are dictated by the technology (the fact that the horizon is flat on the trench run is purely because making it curve was technically too complex)...

Moreover, while the appearance of things certainly gets GL's approval, that's not the same as saying that the size is something he's signed off on.

You don't throw out books because they make occasional errors, therefore, you shouldn't chuck out the film visuals for making occasional errors (in fact, they make less errors then the books.) Also, the movie making tech back in 1983 was hardly perfect, and there were bound to be a few minor errors. Also, how the hell does measuring things based on movie visuals make the visuals invalid. If they are consistent and use scaling, then it should be valid. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean you can ignore it

If the movies return inconsistent scaling values (and they do), then the logical inference is that the movies do not represent a consistently-scaled representation of the story.

If you decide that you WANT to use the movies to calculate firm lengths, then you have to make further decisions about what you use and discard, and then you're adding interpretation that's NOT part of the movies... and means your results are very personal...

Except Karen Traviss's tactics were inconsistent. It would take trillions of clones to fight a galaxy sized war for 3 years. Also, there is more to war then commando raids. a war like the clone wars would involve supply lines, sieges, blockades, hand to hand combat that dragged on for ages. Commando raids would be one small part of the machine. It was large scale and fixed in place, and KT ignored it. She is not an expert.

Well, Karen started with a GAR of 1.2 million from Shatterpoint (and, um, AoTC), so it wasn't exactly her choice; that said, I personally think that the GAR is large enough for its role - they're not needed for rear-area peacekeeping or for Navy operations (the Republic has people for that), but purely for carrying out ground attacks... which, IMHO, would very largely take the form of commando raids and low-intensity skirmishes, as the ability to park fire support and troopships anywhere renders big manoeuvre campaigns both irrelevant and vulnerable...

The GAR could be divided up, for example, into two hundred brigades and several thousand smaller battallion and company deployments at any given time. Most of their deployment - certainly for the larger units - would consist of assaults against shielded bases, comparable to what we see on Hoth; rinse, swallow, repeat.

I don't view that as implausible.

Say how they are flawed.

To take just one random example: the size of the Home One...

To start with, the interior (matte painting) and exterior (VFX model) views of the hangar aperture are very different, a discrepancy which shows that we cannot trust the visual evidence of the movies.

Then there's the question of the length of the A-wing; the size Saxton uses happens to be the Expanded Universe one: no source is presented to show that this is G-canon, and it contradicts with the much smaller size of the implied by the pilot's head in the model...

Then there's the question of the height of the shuttle; the size Saxton uses is unsourced, and out of the various heights given elsewhere at SWTC, it's closest to the one from a piece of 1980s fan-art that he wrongly thought was canon; moreover, any height for the shuttle is problematic, based on the fact that the physical set, VFX model and matte paintings all show it differently in size and proportion...

Then there's the fact that the ship he uses for scaling in the external view is not a CR90, as he claims. It's the Y-head, which had no ofifcial size at the time (only a much later C-canon size of 95m from "What's the Story?")...

Based on the evidence of the movie visuals, the Imperial shuttle might have some difficulty fitting through the hangar aperture of a 1.2km Home One, but neither the shuttle nor the flypast forces a length of more than ~2km, and the inconsistencies between the different representations of the same things make any scaling estimates vague and largely meaningless; there is certainly NO justification to support Saxton's claim of a length of over 3km...

I can do the same for almost every Saxton-led retcon; why don't you ask me for my comments on something...?

Also Leland Chee said that the reason the executor's length was changed in 2004 was to make it more CONSISTENT WITH THE FILM VISUALS. The man who's job it is to maintain the star wars continutity says that the film visuals do matter. therefore, film visuals can't be chucked aside like you claim. They matter.

Chee said that the length was changed (on a case-by-case basis) by measuring the model, and working out how it related in size to the ISD - not from the film visuals themselves. That's pretty logical to me (although I'd argue that not all command towers are the same size), and I have no problem with the Ex being 19km. I just think the rest of the SSDs should stay at 8km.

Plus WEG has no clue about scale. It would take hundreds of millions of clones to maintain order on any average planet. Plus, did you consider that they might have knowingly changed things for playability purposes. And they also think that 200 meters is some big length. I find that hard to believe. Some of the ships in ROTS exceeded that length and those were the smallest.

The GAR have nothing to do with WEG, and most of the figures in question aren't really relevant for playability. There aren't actually problems with them.

I'm not sure what your idea that "they also think that 200 meters is some big length" comes from...? It's the size of the blockade runner and a little smaller than the medical frigate, so I'm not really sure what your point is here?

McEwoks latest response. Can you help me fashion a rebuttal?

[Ghost Rider]

Could use the quote function better? It literally is a wall of words with bolding interspersed between some sentences.

Simply use:

Code: Select all

[quote="McEwok]BLAH BLAH[/quote]

[quote="Opponent"]RABBLE RABBLE[/quote]

This way we can read who is saying what without needing a cipher.

[VT-16]

Tell McPigfucker the Home One hangar aparture is not different in its interior or exterior dimensions (the former of which we don't even get to see fully). It's the lights that are different, not the opening. So, no, that's an invalid argument. Also, for someone using visuals to make the Venator smaller than it is, he's a big blubbering hypocrite.

Again, Arkady Hodge, dishonest retard of TFN, still uses the fallacy that using visuals only points out inconsistencies and then uses fake evidence. If a model or character is consistently portrayed in a film, we have to assume this is the norm, not the abnormal example. Again, that means the Executor is between 17 and 19 kilometers in length, not 8 like West End Games claimed based on inaccurate readings of the ESB novel.

[Bakustra]

Let me provide some numbers on the clones:
Firstly, we have the sending-off of regiments (2204 clones) in the ROTS novel, to serve as bodyguards for the governors.
Assuming, extremely conservatively, that they only were sent to sector capitals, and that a supermajority within Republic parlance refers to a 50%+1 majority, then we have 8,820,408 clonetroopers being sent off. Three times the supposed GAR, being used as bodyguards.
Bumping this up to a 2/3rds supermajority, with the same assumptions otherwise, we have 13,224,000 clonetroopers sent off. Four times the GAR now.
Going to the more plausible every member planet having a regiment arrive with a governor, but with the conservative number of sectors and using the Chommell sector as an average, then we have 317,534,688, or 105 times the GAR, being put on bodyguard duty.
Using the more likely sector amount, but with the same assumptions otherwise, we have 476,064,000, or 158 times the GAR, being put on bodyguard duty.
Taking the statements about 100-125 members planets per sector on the average, but with the conservative figures on the senate size, we have 992,295,900, or 330 GARs, being put on bodyguard duty.
Taking the more reasonable senate size figures and the 100-125 member planets per sector, we have 1,487,700,000, or 496 times the GAR being put on bodyguard duty.
Now then, if we take the Imperial principle of having a garrison force on every planet they control as being representative of Palpatine's early governors, we have to contend with the dependencies and colonies. They number 50 million. Assuming Chommell sector to be representative and using the conservative senate size, we have 2.646e12 clonetroopers on guard duty (note that they swamp out those on member planets by about three orders of magnitude).
Assuming that Chommell sector is representative and using the more realistic senate size, we have 3.9672e12 clonetroopers on guard duty.
Note that these are the troops Palpatine could afford to send off at the height of the war, without the Jedi noticing or caring, so they cannot be a large proportion of the real GAR, nor do they include actual garrisons, naval and fighter crews, the Coruscant police, or the line forces proper. He almost certainly won't accept my methodology as average or talk about how it's a brushfire war, but let us look at one of the most one-sided wars of the twentieth century, the invasion of Grenada by the US. The US still sent 10,000 troops, one-eleventh of the island's total population, to invade against 2,200 local and Cuban soldiers. That's a five-to-one advantage when the US had total air and naval superiority, with two carriers operating in support. Taking that as a member planet-sized "brushfire war" and scaling up to a galaxy with one million full member planets yields about ten billion soldiers on the victorious side. Mere millions is roughly equivalent to an FBI sting operation.
Some more fun numbers: the NYPD has one officer for every 221 and change people in New York, 37838 in total. Coruscant has, at a minimum, one trillion people. The Coruscant Police Department would therefore have 4,524,886,878 officers. That is 1,508 GARs. That is using minimalistic numbers for Coruscant. Using Dr. Saxton's estimate of at least one quadrillion, we have 4.5 trillion police officers on Coruscant, or 1,508,295 GARs. This is assuming that the planet is as regularly patrolled as New York City, of course.
The US has about 800,000 people employed as police officers From here
The proportion of US police officers employed in New York is 4.73%. Assuming that Coruscant sucks up as much manpower as New York does, proportionately, we have a total of 95 trillion police officers in the galaxy as a whole, which is a ridiculously conservative number.
Feel free to use these numbers, but be aware that he is likely to deny them outright.

[Terralthra]

"Prove that Lama Su meant 'individual clones' when he said 'units.'"

Without that baseline assumption, none of the extrapolatory nonsense matters.

[Elfdart]

Extra Sad Fuck Points for the following:

Well, Karen started with a GAR of 1.2 million from Shatterpoint (and, um, AoTC), so it wasn't exactly her choice; that said, I personally think that the GAR is large enough for its role - they're not needed for rear-area peacekeeping or for Navy operations (the Republic has people for that), but purely for carrying out ground attacks... which, IMHO, would very largely take the form of commando raids and low-intensity skirmishes, as the ability to park fire support and troopships anywhere renders big manoeuvre campaigns both irrelevant and vulnerable...

The GAR could be divided up, for example, into two hundred brigades and several thousand smaller battallion and company deployments at any given time. Most of their deployment - certainly for the larger units - would consist of assaults against shielded bases, comparable to what we see on Hoth; rinse, swallow, repeat.

I don't view that as implausible.

At some point you have to realize that McEwok is really just a deranged bullshitter who thinks that because his puny mind can't comprehend things that are portrayed on a vast scale, no one else (including George Lucas) can either.

Want to settle the Three Million Clones Issue once and for all? Concede that Traviss was right all along. That's right, and here's the proof:

In the OT, you never see more than a few dozen stormtroopers on screen at any given time.



Going by this shot from Return of the Jedi, there are only eighty-five stormtroopers left after A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back. So the Galactic Empire only has a few platoons of its armor-clad troops after losing a like number on the first Death Star, maybe a dozen on the Blockade Runner, one in Docking Bay 94, four or five in the hangar on Hoth and maybe a dozen on Bespin (let's call it 140 for Episodes IV and V -a nice round number, as Pontius Pilate would say). So Traviss is 100% correct and her 3 Million clones were in fact whittled down to all of 225 troops that Darth Vader had at his command. No wonder Princess Leia was so confident in the Rebellion when she told off Governor Tarkin! She was proved right -all the Ewoks and Han Solo's commando team had to do was bump off a few dozen stormtroopers and the jig was up for the Galactic Empire!

I posted this along with more details at TFN. Check it out before they delete it!

+http://boards.theforce.net/literature/b ... 629982/p1/

[Darksider]

how is he saying that large scale manoeuvre warfare engagements are "implausable" when we fucking saw them in the movies, games, books, and t.v. series?

(First Geonosis, every campaign in The Clone Wars, Jedi Trial, and Second Geonosis respectively.)

[Havok]

*snip*Elfdarts genius!

I am tempted to either agree and take it further, or write up a line by line rebuttal!

[Darth Yan]

The exterior aperture has dimensions of 3:1; the interior aperture is far wider in ratio to height, 4:1 - they aren't the same, in even the most basic details. The difference is in the entire design of the aperture. The lights are different, as you say, as are little things like the wall pipes; but take a look yourself, and tell me where the gap at the bottom of the side walls is on the exterior view? What do you mean by this?

None of your points actually change the fact that Saxton's basic lengths are all inaccurate, so his size for Home One has no canon basis... even by his own methodology.
So when does your personal judgement about what's "most consistent" become G-canon?

And why dismiss evidence that doesn't fit as errors; why not take it for what it is - namely as hard proof of the unreliability of movie scaling? Sure, but if you do accept that methodology, you have to accept those conclusions, no?

Can you help me fashion a rebuttal to this guy, and send photos? I hope that if i keep my cool long enough I can make him drop his facade, then show it to the mods. That might deal with him for good.

[Ugolino]

Don't bother. I've argued via PM, cited sources, showed screens...

He cited the Clone Wars Venator bridge shots as showing the class is actually 600 m long or some such nonsense, claiming that the window sizes supported it. I showed an external comparison shot from Cloak of Darkness with the cruiser entering the hanger bay. He wasn't convinced.

He has an opinion and no amount of evidence is going to convince him otherwise.

[Darth Yan]

I just hope to make him loose his cool and then show him for the jackass he really is. But if what you say is true, can you at least show me the same sources you used? He's devilishly persuasive, and I might need proof myself (Plus it will be a MASSIVE HELP for any future debates I get into. Can you at least send me those for that reason?

[VT-16]

If movie visuals are inherently unreliable, why do designers bother to write up specs for their models, as ILM has always done? That the models are usually following their written instructions should only be expected, not the nonsensical fanon that secondary later sources make up, such as the 8km fallacy he likes to support. A fanboy religiously following fanon is quite amusing though, but that's McEwok's one schtick and it was old a decade ago.

Again, he provides no source for claiming the internal and external hangar aperture on the Home One is different. Repeating his claims ad nauseum is Arkady Hodge's favorite tactic, hoping people won't actually bother to research, but believe him on his word. Also claiming authors like Saxton only rest their cases on one thing, like visuals, and not FX artist's notes or written creator intentions on top of that. Fools like blackmyron are a dime a dozen on TFN, so he's got an audience.