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I never realized he claimed the Executor nearly bankrupted a Galactic Government, but in regards to the Darksaber itself, the damn thing should have fallen apart. There's no way you could fuck with the structure of something that big that much and expect it to hold together, particularly since Lemelisk was saying that the materials they were using sucked.

I thought that Darksabre was an interesting collection of ideas that were exectued poorly.

First of all, Crix's death was horribly done. A war hero should not be shot down like an old dog. And then there was the destruction of the DS itself: it misfires and gets smashed between two asteroids. I almost stopped reading right there, I felt so ripped off. It was anti-climatic to spend an entire book building up to a case of bad luck.

This was after I had listened to abbridged readings of the first two books in his Jedi Academy Trilogy (the tapes for the third volume were warped or something, so I couldn't listen to it). I found myself bothered by the same thing as those: KJA's general writing style and plot ideas annoy me greatly.

His ideas seem almost outdated or anachronistic, like he's writing for 1960s comic books or 1950s Saturday morning radio serials. Bogies? Blob racing? A guy running from a love-sick duchess? A hotel resort in a comet? Streen's rickity air barge? All and more seemed goofy to me. He also seems to stick too close to the movies and limits his stories to barely handfulls of planets, as if space is a fraction of its actual size.

His execution of characters is pretty week and uncreative. Moroth Doole was a Jabba clone, just a different kind of ugly bloated gangster. Daala was an younger female version of Tarkin, just not as smart. Qui Xux was an idiot-savant, blissfully ignorent that for decades she's been designing things that couldn't be anything but superweapons. Kyp Durron was just an angsty Luke clone that went psychotic in an unbelievable manner.

What irritated me especially about Darksabre was how Bevel Lemelisk was portrayed. You'd think that after designing and redisigning the Death Star and other superweapons, executed and brought back to life multiple times, the guy would have some sort of ego complex? No. KJA makes him a spineless "woe is me" type character, bitching about the Imperial to himself in his mind. I was expecting a headstrong, unyeilding engineer, and I ended up absolutely disappointed. I also found the ideas of buying crappy secondhand computers on Nar Shaddaa, and worker creatures that share a hive mind but are easily distracted, to be idiotic and childish.

What also annoys me is the JAT subplot where Ackbar flies to Vortex (I can't even remember what for) and crash lands his extended B-wing into the Cathedral of Winds. This is like General Eisenhower flying his personal Mustang to Paris and crashing into the Notre Dame cathedral. Why wasn't there a capital ship and escorts? And worst of all, that subplot didn't seem to go anywhere. It (and others) just seemed to be there to fill up physical space.

Ossus is right about his books being overloaded with puns (blobstical course?!), but he also has a problem with there being too much humour and silliness.

Lord Poe wrote:And come on, the Darksaber resembles a lightsaber when completed, with the beam coming out one end like a blade. So it's cleverly called DARKsaber instead of LIGHTsaber...

Yeah well that was stupid.

From the JAT:

4 Star Destroyers almost brought the galaxy to its knees, or at least couldn't be dealt with by a damn thing the NR had.

Jacen and Jaina save the day, for the first of far too many times(usually in his other crappy books), by being the only ones who can contact Luke in his coma. Meh.

The DS prototype can't even discriminate between Kessel and its moon. The effects of blowing up Kessels moon while in orbit over Kessel are ignored with even less excuse than the DS2/Endor incident.

Well, here the good, the bad, and the ugly:

THE GOOD:
-That a Death Star prototype exists, is, belive it or not, a good thing. It shows, that the Empire is not as blue eyed to new technologys as the Federation is. They actually TESTED it all, before starting to build DS-I. And that they keep it, too. Why scraping a fuctionig superweapon? (Ok, it got no hull,and can be easily destoyed. But what?)

THE BAD:
-Madines Death is something, I wonder, why? That is a case of writing of its worst.
-Admiral Daala. She was a charakter with so much potential. But it was all thrown of of the window, and she became the humpty-dumpty of the week.
-The Suncrusher. A weapon, which can destroy stars? Oh how creative! But seriously. It is the stupiedest weapon I ever saw. Remember, a FULL HIT of the Superlaser of the Death Star prototype not even scratched it! Did the idiot.writer not know, how much energy is in such a blast!? I hate the suncrusher.
-The NR is weak, but that is not a wonder.

THE UGLY:
-You can wipe your ass with the character descriptions. He got them all wrong, and that bad too. Luke was thier main victim, transforming him into a complete idiot and fool.
-The whole story with the Darksaber is a big, cruel joke. Should we belive it, or laugh our asses of because of so much shit?
-All Imperials were such mindless idiots, that you must wonder, what happend.
-The Ueber-Jedis! Suddenly, the Jedi got godlike powers and are shown as semi-rulers of the galaxy. Alone the thing with throwing the ISDs was bad enough, but it becomes worse....
-Jacen and Jania. I must confess, I HATE them. And here it becomes extreme. These two brats and brainless excuses for heros are one of the worst crimes in the history of Star Wars, ever seen.
-He got all things about SSDs like the Executor wrong.
-The whole IG-88 story was a big no-no, but he did it. A big mistake, that makes me wonder, how much he can butcher.

Want to have some fun?

Lets assume that, as just the SL, Darksaber was the same size as the SL on DS 1.

This makes is a cylinder 80 km long and ~50 km wide.
Find the volume (1.57x10^14 m^3), and assuem it is solid and made of iron (density 7874 kg/m^3). This gives it a mass of 1.24x10^18 kg.

Now the DS SL was 3.4x10^38 joules. Formula for momentum of a laser is momentum =energy/speed of light. Thus the recoil exerted on the Darksaber would be 1.13x10^30 N. Divide this by the above mass of the Darksaber, and then divide that by the speed of light.

After one shot the Darksabre would have been traveling ~3000 times the speed of light backwards.

Lets here it for grade school level science boys and girls, a subject the esteemed Mr Anderson must have slept through!

KJA crimes for me include, generalisations not the specifics;

• Superweapon of the week.
• Supervillian of the day.
• Anti-climatic endings.
• Plot lines that make you scream why!!!!!!

And of course should you read to the end the worst crime; you realise that whole chunks of the novel served no point what so ever.

Jim Raynor wrote:-Forget what was at stakes at the epic Battle of Endor, KJA has his own vision of the SW universe. Now EVERYONE was going to die, not just the Rebels. The Empire's ultimate weapon would its own undoing. While the other writers in that anthology wrote little side-stories, knowing that their main characters were only bit players in the films, KJA writes his story so that the events in the films are downright trivial in comparison.

Moreso then you may realize. He wrote the Essential Chronology, and in that devotes more space to his own works then the movies, or other more prolific writers (EG Stackpole gets half the space despite having written much more then Anderson).

The sheer ego is astounding. Crap like that makes me more a canon purist every time he writes something.

Ender wrote:*snip*

Three things.

1. I'm assuming your size calc is based on the size of the SL dish on the Death Star I. Problem being, they actually specifically spoke about there not being any focusing dish I believe. It should be even thinner.

2. Isn't there some relativistic calculations with momentum that requires that it doesn't go 3000c?

3. This really makes the Eclipse and Soveriegn look retarded if you're right.

Crown wrote:KJA crimes for me include, generalisations not the specifics;

• Superweapon of the week.
• Supervillian of the day.
• Anti-climatic endings.
• Plot lines that make you scream why!!!!!!

And of course should you read to the end the worst crime; you realise that whole chunks of the novel served no point what so ever.

Don't forget poop jokes

Ender wrote:Don't forget poop jokes

Well thankyou very much! You know I was repressing that from my memory!

Eclipse and Sovereign class have a firepower 1 millionth that of the DS Superlaser's minimum Alderaan disruption figures, after charging up for a full day. Since they were designed as warships, the weight of the armor certainly brings up their mass, especially since the Eclipse is described in the fluff as having a new semi-uber armor. You also have to figure in the mass of the ridiculously dense fuel the Empire would have to use into all of these.

Illuminatus Primus wrote:

Ender wrote:*snip*

Three things.

1. I'm assuming your size calc is based on the size of the SL dish on the Death Star I. Problem being, they actually specifically spoke about there not being any focusing dish I believe. It should be even thinner.

I don't recall, I've tried to actively block that book out of my memory

2. Isn't there some relativistic calculations with momentum that requires that it doesn't go 3000c?

Not sure. Should still be going FTL if I recall though, this is a recreation of something someone showed me years ago when I was first getting into SW

3. This really makes the Eclipse and Soveriegn look retarded if you're right.

Nope. The Eclipse and Sovereign weapons are described as scorching continents. Assuming this means a localized BDZ over the entire continent in one shot and assuming they have the same density as an ISD, they should get shoved back less then a meter.

The DS itself is a problem, but I haven't worked out its mass yet, so maybe not.

Ender wrote:Nope. The Eclipse and Sovereign weapons are described as scorching continents. Assuming this means a localized BDZ over the entire continent in one shot and assuming they have the same density as an ISD, they should get shoved back less then a meter.

The DS itself is a problem, but I haven't worked out its mass yet, so maybe not.

They can pierce shields and Eclipse has "2/3rds" the power of the DS. I think HDS has exact figures for his calcs on them, so I'll have to get back to you.

Bullshit, 2/3rds DS firepower is 6e37, which still would have made Alderaan go bye-bye ijn a few seconds.
Completely inconsistent with the described effects.

consequences wrote:Bullshit, 2/3rds DS firepower is 6e37, which still would have made Alderaan go bye-bye ijn a few seconds.
Completely inconsistent with the described effects.

Nope.
Alderaans shields withstood some 4 frames of the superlaser, the total event from shield impact to end of beam was 6 frames, thats 6.6e37joules, roughly the same as the shield, and the description wich talks about the eclipses firepower says:
========================
Pg. 88: The beam packs enough destructive power to shatter the most planetary shields and sear whole continents in a flash.
========================
-Dark Empire Sourcebook

So it seems to me that it is pretty consistant indeed, the Eclipse laser would just about overpower a planetary shield of Alderaans model and likely have a little energy left to sear continents and crack the crust of the planet and whatnot.

Also, if the shield withstood 4 frames it it removed 6e37j from the superlaser beam, yet the planet exploded with 1e38j of force, this can mean that the superlaser delivered 1e38joules in the two remaining frames rather than six, meaning that the superlaser is 3e38joules and the shield withstood 2e38joules.

Just where the hell did they find the space to engineer that kind of reactor into the Eclipse?

*shrug*
Gonna do some scaling.

Tribun wrote: -Jacen and Jania. I must confess, I HATE them. And here it becomes extreme. These two brats and brainless excuses for heros are one of the worst crimes in the history of Star Wars, ever seen.

It gets even worse by the fact that these two weren't creations of KJA himself...

Crown wrote:

Ender wrote:Don't forget poop jokes

Well thankyou very much! You know I was repressing that from my memory!

Can we get some quotes as evidence?

From the rumor mill, it's said that KJA dictates his books into a tape recorder, and his secretary transcribes it and sends it in to the publishers....

If anyone was disappointed by the Jedi Academy triolgy, pick up "I, Jedi" by Mike Stackpole, which completely rewrites it!

And pick up Specter of the Past and Vision of the Future books by Zahn. He TRASHES KJA in them!

And pick up Specter of the Past and Vision of the Future books by Zahn. He TRASHES KJA in them!

Creating his own trash in the form of Chiss kleenex leavings in the process.

Ender wrote:He wrote the Essential Chronology, and in that devotes more space to his own works then the movies, or other more prolific writers (EG Stackpole gets half the space despite having written much more then Anderson).

Well, that's understandable. After all, if there was a Star Wars University, he'd be the Chancellor!

-- Joe Momma

(Even more horribly, IIRC, after that blow-job-disguised-as-article was published in Starlog KJA started using that title seriously.)

What article in Starlog?

Spanky The Dolphin wrote:What article in Starlog?

Oh, lord, it was years ago, about the time that illustrated book with KJA and Ralph MacQuarrie's art came out. I only remembered it because I'd just finished that argument for retroactive abortion called the Jedi Academy Trilogy and that phrase set me off on a homicidal rampage like it was the code phrase for a CIA sleeper agent.

-- Joe Momma