Star Wars: Rebels

[NecronLord]

On the other hand, you're assuming they can't pop their heads around the corner and check if there's anyone they want alive and then throw a grenade if there isn't (which there weren't) and while this is more dangerous than lobbing one, it is still safer than just walking into a room full of guys pointing guns at you. Again, check the real world videos linked on the last page (or hell, the jaffa one) for an example of this being done and exposing the soldiers entering the hatch far less than simply advancing at a walk.

It's amazing, how far you will go in terms of trying to maintain a claim that the stormtroopers are optimally competent. I'm still trying to recover from the 'bike helmet' bit.

[Havok]

I'm still trying to recover from the 'bike helmet' bit.

That's because you're an idiot that can't read. Sorry it hurts you so bad.

[NecronLord]

I see you've neither evidence nor coherent comment regarding mine at this stage, I will just keep on posting evidence.

"Poke your head around the corner" is of course the least sophisticated way of determining if there's anyone you want in a room before you enter it. If only the Imperials had some kind of equivalent to the miniature UAVs now coming into service with western armies and used to search buildings before entry.



Oh wait, they have the perfect thing for this. In fact this is one where stormtroopers had access to something that is now being developed (theirs being presumably better in terms of battery life and other characteristics) before it was a thing in real-life. If you want an argument for them having their shit sorted out, this is a good one, and definitely their use of these tools in Mos Eisley shows much better tactics.

[NecronLord]

Comparison, a RL soldier demonstrates one of various mini-UAVs now being developed for use in the same role as the stormtroopers' droids.

EDIT: And as earlier I said I wasn't able to get a clip of the boarding in Flash Gordon I talked about, I've uploaded it.



Note also the sound of off-screen grenades. And just because I've got extra examples illustrating how beneficial it is to use grenades when clearing buildings or ships.


Again, more effective and sophisticated than simply charging in.

Another sci-fi example from Stargate again, this time with flash-bang grenades:


Observe how this keeps the defenders heads down and stops them operating, rather than just charging in.

As a correction of a previous claim too, I've been put right, 'British Grenadiers' is in fact the regimental march of (among others) the Grenadier Guard, not the Coldstream Guard, though both are part of the Household Division.

[Rogue 9]

Ooooookay.

Anyway, going back to the topic at hand:



The character interactions seem mildly interesting. However, this floated across my Facebook feed today:



It seems like a cheap cop-out to make all the Imperial officers into complete dicks to everybody for no reason. I mean, why would the TIE pilot treat the kid that way having just crashed? I'd want out of that fighter stat, and be very glad just to still be alive; it seems extremely unreasonable for his first reaction to someone coming along to help get him out of the crash to be "Get your hands off my ship!" when it's in pieces, smoking, and (as we saw in the "Entanglement" short) has highly explosive fuel that could go up any second given the "smoking" bit. Honestly, it seems like a waste of a scene in terms of character development; they could show the officer grateful for the assist and then reacting to being betrayed by Ezra stealing parts of his fighter, establishing that Ezra isn't exactly an upstanding good guy through actions rather than through him just saying so as in the first clip I embedded.

[NecronLord]

I can only imagine this planet has been working really hard to piss the imperial forces off to be honest. Possibly because it is infested with rebels that shoot them. I can't imagine this level of jerkoff as anything but them imagining anyone they meet is up to something.

They're nothing like this on Tatooine after all; the guys that stop Obi Wan and Luke, and when they're searching the buildings, are frankly, pretty reasonable in comparison.

[Rogue 9]

Oh, and from the first clip there, I'm kind of disappointed that of all the stuff from the EU they chose to keep, the Wookiees as slave race idea seems to have topped the list. I mean, droids exist. Come the fuck on, why would they bother?

[Burak Gazan]

With how this shaping up, it has "epic fail" stamped all over the collective foreheads of the "writers"

[tezunegari]

With how this shaping up, it has "epic fail" stamped all over the collective foreheads of the "writers"

Wasn't Rebels advertised as being about the normal people living in the Empire, as in no force-users?
And suddenly we have the classic hiding Jedi and potential Padawan thief... and a force-using Inquisitor as antagonist.

[Imperial Overlord]

Oh, and from the first clip there, I'm kind of disappointed that of all the stuff from the EU they chose to keep, the Wookiees as slave race idea seems to have topped the list. I mean, droids exist. Come the fuck on, why would they bother?

It's collective punishment, the economic practicality of it is irrelevant. And it's not just EU. It's pretty clear in ROTS that Palpatine is going to fuck them for helping the Jedi.

[NecronLord]

Oh, and from the first clip there, I'm kind of disappointed that of all the stuff from the EU they chose to keep, the Wookiees as slave race idea seems to have topped the list. I mean, droids exist. Come the fuck on, why would they bother?

It's a dictatorship led by a guy with a fixation on hate and they were involved in an attempt to assassinate him. That it's not actual heaps-of-skulls killing fields is frankly somewhat restrained.

And as said, it's a dictatorial collective punishment thing, it is not rational but it is realistic. Because the real world isn't like pop economists make it sound, people aren't rational.

For instance, in the gulag system

Their nucleus was to eliminate so-called “work-day credits.” This system provided for reducing the convict’s sentence by a certain proportion of the time worked in production. Its elimination allowed the worker contingents to stabilize, but brought about the destruction of the last quasi-economic incentives in the NKVD economy. The elimination of “credits,” which had been the most effective way of motivating prisoner labor, was accompanied by tougher repressions against the “disorganizers” of camp production (up to and including execution)
[...]
issue of incentives for prisoner labor was contentious. Despite the fact that there was a strict legislative ban on the use of “work-day credits,” which had been eliminated in 1939, the Gulag leadership claimed that credits were the most effective way of rewarding prisoner labor, and it sought after the war to reinstate credits for certain projects. As a result, by September 1950, “work-day credits” were in use at camps housing more than 27 percent of all prisoners[25] and the process was on the upswing. Although the proliferation of “credits” intensified the shortage of manpower (due to its effect on early releases), the Gulag leaders preferred this course, acknowledging, in effect, the inefficiency of administrative punitive measures.

And here.

"Labor productivity on NKVD construction sites was on average 50 percent lower than at construction projects under the Union of People's Commissariats."

There is an example of political institution of policies directly inefficient in the real world, above the objections of people who actually understand it, and in 1940 23% of all the workers apart from farm laborers in the USSR.

And if Palpatine has proclaimed Wookiees are to be worked to death, then suddenly the cost of a wookiee slavery program is already in the budget and is cheaper than buying droids for the same task (assuming the costs of transporting the wookiees to the work site are low enough, which they probably are).

The point of enslaving the wookiees is to punish the wookies; just like the point of GULAG was to create terror and punish the supposed enemies of the regime, in both cases, the use of forced labour on real projects recoups some of the cost.

This is a government policy that makes no financial sense; those people would be better off contributing to the economy somewhere, but once you've already got them in the work camps, then utilizing forced labour is not actually that pointless.

tl;dr - the "evil Galactic Empire" is evil, and its leaders like hurting people, forced labour projects IRL are often not economically sound, why should the Empire's be?

[Rogue 9]

Well, yes, but Base Delta Zero on Kashyyyk would also be a suitably evil punishment and wouldn't get Imperial works projects sabotaged.

[Batman]

It would merely remove the Wookies from the picture. People that dared to oppose your evil scheme need to suffer, and they can't suffer if they're vapourized. More efficient? Absolutely. More prudent? Yep. But nowhere near as emotionally satisfying.
If people only ever did what was rational the world would look a hell of a lot different.

[NecronLord]

Well, yes, but Base Delta Zero on Kashyyyk would also be a suitably evil punishment and wouldn't get Imperial works projects sabotaged.

Why do we think they're doing anything they can plasuibly sabotage? Real governments have used slave labour successfully without this by simply assigning slave labourers to say, cutting down trees, clearing mining tailings, carrying bricks, hauling uranium in smelting facilities by hand without shielding, tanning hides and mining gold in world of warcraft, while naturally these jobs are unproductive, there's no real opportunity for lasting sabotage in doing them.

[Rogue 9]

Isn't the big thing they were (formerly) canonically used for was construction of the first Death Star? That seems fairly major and complex, to put it mildly.

[NecronLord]

It was indeed, but whether they keep with that (or indeed Lucas' notion that the Geonosians built it for the empire from one of the commentaries) isn't known yet.

[Lord Revan]

while it's no longer canon in the "Death Star" novel they do have Wookies as part of the construction team for the first Death Star but it does imply that a) Wookies are culturally imcapable of not their all on work project even if they're forced to do it and B) that they are doing "grunt" work like welding hull plates and such and not anything critical.

[Rogue 9]

And one more thing.



They actually named a character Agent Callous Kallus? Really?

[NecronLord]

Remember back on page 2 or 3 there was a uniform people thought might be Imperial Army? Looks from those storyboards that they might be jetbike troops too.

[Rogue 9]

Oh. Yeah, the extended preview makes that pretty clear.



I'd thought that was old news for the thread, though. Must have glossed over when I was reading through it before posting.

Also, more Imperial officers being needlessly dickish at the beginning. This clip is actually what I was mainly referring to when I brought that up in the first place.

[Rogue 9]

The Star Wars YouTube channel put up three new TV spots today. The first two don't tell us much new, but here's the third:



There's actually a few seconds of new footage in this one, with what looks suspiciously like Tatooine architecture in the background. If they actually show the Lars homestead being destroyed I'll be shocked, but that's what it looks remarkably like.

[RogueIce]

There's actually a few seconds of new footage in this one, with what looks suspiciously like Tatooine architecture in the background. If they actually show the Lars homestead being destroyed I'll be shocked, but that's what it looks remarkably like.

No, it's some random old dude and a lady. Two of three people getting locked up in the next scene.

[RogueIce]

So for those who can access it, Spark of Rebellion will be available on Disney Channel VOD, WatchDisneyXD.com and the WatchDisneyXD app starting next Monday, September 29th.

[Patroklos]

It would merely remove the Wookies from the picture. People that dared to oppose your evil scheme need to suffer, and they can't suffer if they're vapourized. More efficient? Absolutely. More prudent? Yep. But nowhere near as emotionally satisfying.
If people only ever did what was rational the world would look a hell of a lot different.

Tell that to Tarkin, he seems just fine with removing whole peoples from the picture wholesale.

[Rogue 9]

So for those who can access it, Spark of Rebellion will be available on Disney Channel VOD, WatchDisneyXD.com and the WatchDisneyXD app starting next Monday, September 29th.

Yeah. I'll have to wait for it to be on TV even though Disney's in our cable package. The price of patronizing the local telecom and ISP instead of Time-Warner, I suppose.