Why do fanboys put the EU ahead of the films?

[Connor MacLeod]

There's also the "read technical figures from a handy reference book" crowd, which is actually quite dominant. They were most obstinate when dealing with the issue of the size of the Executor, and their motivation is simple: laziness. No mental effort whatsoever is required to crack open a "guide" book and copy-paste the information from it onto your personal website, which is what most SW website authors have done.

To be fair, that's not restricted just to minimalists or folk like the TFN/SW.com crowd. I've seen lots of people cite figures from your website, or Curtis' or the ICS books, and then fuck up because they didn't understand how/why you came up with the figures, and how it applies to the argument, and that's also lazy thinking.

[Qwerty 42]

There's also the "read technical figures from a handy reference book" crowd, which is actually quite dominant. They were most obstinate when dealing with the issue of the size of the Executor, and their motivation is simple: laziness. No mental effort whatsoever is required to crack open a "guide" book and copy-paste the information from it onto your personal website, which is what most SW website authors have done.

I would think that a lot of the people on the SW boards don't have much of a background in science, so it never occurs to them to question the figures they see in the books, which isn't really dishonesty per se. Those that ADHERE to them when shown that the book numbers don't correlate to the movies are, of course, a different breed.

[Palantas]

I would think that a lot of the people on the SW boards don't have much of a background in science, so it never occurs to them to question the figures they see in the books, which isn't really dishonesty per se. Those that ADHERE to them when shown that the book numbers don't correlate to the movies are, of course, a different breed.

I was thinking something along these lines. When I was much younger, I'd look at a source book and take it all at face value. It never occured to me that there are people who just pull numbers out of their ass for an encyclopedia, instead of researching them.

It wasn't until I stumbled upon Dr. Saxton's site that I realized that people who write source books do pull stuff out of their ass, insteading of, you know, using thinking. Then I began to re-evaluate the way I thought about science fiction.

[phred]

I was in the same boat for a long time. I would pick up numbers from various sources and consider them correct, because, they were an 'official' source.
I had a drawing that i did in my teens with a bunch of different SF ships all to approximate scale. It had an 8km Executor on it which I thought seemed a little small, but that was the number I had to go on.