Star Wars is an ode to the stupidest use of battle lasers
sp3ctr4l @ sp3ctr4l @lemmy.dbzer0.com Posts 9Comments 1,146Joined 3 mo. ago
sp3ctr4l @ sp3ctr4l @lemmy.dbzer0.com
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Yep!
The sort of proto sabers seem to be prior to them figuring kyber crystal magic, iirc, and needing to carry a more crude power/plasma source with them.
Sort of like a radioman in WW2 had to carry around a whole backpack sized radio, whereas nowadays we have like, a cell/smart phone, or just a proper encrypted handheld radio with way, way superior battery/power system in a more compact package.
Yeah thats... kind of baffling.
I know that in these kinds of situations, it can come down to a combination of incompetence/being overworked, and also miscommunication or blind deference to a nonsensical command.
I am spitballing here, I don't know the internal layout of an '87 nor its exact take off procedures...
Maybe one of them somehow thought they were raising the landing gear?
I can't imagine it would be any kind of standard to like... significantly adjust flaps mere seconds after rotation...
The thing was flying (stalling) with its landing gear down the whole time, right? Never retracted up?
Is it not fairly routine to start retracting the gear soon after rotation?
...
I guess its also possible its some kind of intentional sabotage, but that would seem to either require a conspiracy or at least one of the pilots being suicidal?
Not impossible, but I am not aware of any evidence toward either of those.
Yeah, to add on to this:
At least back in the 90s/00s, the canon explanation from various books and such is roughly...
The 'lasers' are actually coherent 'bolts' of highly energetic plasma, ie, gas excited/heated to the point that electrons are breaking out of their atomic orbitals, extremely thermally hot, capable of doing immense burn damage, melting a hole through you or most other armors/materials/alloys.
The explanation is that 'laser' weapons, and 'turbolaser' canons... by some arcane process, as the plasma travels through the barrel of the weapon, it is somehow encased in, or enveloped by, or transformed into having a very strong, self contained psuedo-magnetic forcefield, that keeps the plasma from just immediately expanding in all directions upon exiting the barrel, and keeps it vaguely spatially constrained and coherent.
It is supposed to be a sort of analogy to how rifling in a conventional firearm makes the bullet much more accurate... and it also kind of intuitively thus makes sense that a big, fuck off huge barrel, can throw a larger projectile downrange, and faster.
Its also sort of how a rail gun or coil gun works in real life, but not really.
In universe, plasma bolts do not travel at light speed, they also do not travel forever: they dissapate and sort of evaporate or fizzle out after travelling a certain distance, and this generally occurs more quickly from smaller weapons than it does from larger weapons.
Basically, their 'coherence field' is only stable for a short time, sort of like a gel capsule for a drug dissolves in your stomach after a certain amount of time.
This is again another rough analogy to real world ballistics with solid bullets or shells... irl, longer barrels are able to increase the kinetic emergy imparted to a projectile, thus increasing its muzzle velocity, thus increasing its effective range.
Ammo is also a thing that exists in a lot of older Star Wars canon. A blaster will eventually run out of the... plasma fuel, which is often contained in essentially a magazine... and technically, all blasters also need either the rough equivalent of a starter engine, or an independent battery/'ignition' system to actually do the process of transforming the 'ammo' into a plasma bolt, and accelerate it out of the barrel and cohere it into a bolt.
I also recall Tibanna gas, from Cloud City, being specifically mentioned as a primary component of blaster ammunition in at least one of the Rogue Squadron games, though it apparently gets more complicated with different colored plasma bolts essentially being made of different blends of different kinds of input materials having different properties and only working properly in certain kinds of blasters, again, a sort of rough analogy to different calibers of bullets and barrels and chambers.
...
Light sabers follow a similar overall principle of 'plasma bolt contained by some kind of coherence field'... but they use totally different internals to generate both the plasma and coherence field, and can seemingly just... do this nearly infinitely, never needing to 'reload', never running out of energy.
Those internals?
Magic (kyber) crystals and an extremely esoteric, basically electronic circuit design.
This is why so much emphasis is placed on a Jedi constructing their own lightsaber as a fundamental rite of passage:
Every lightsaber is bespoke, unique, you have to be essentially supernaturally intelligent, ie, sufficiently in tune with the Force, to be able to comprehend how to actually construct one... and indeed, there are at least a few instances or mentions of where someone attempts this, fucks it up, and their malformed lightsaber basically blows up in their face.
You can also see the 'coherence' principle at play as a light saber... well the 'blade' grows out of the hilt, as the coherence field expands... but it never disconnects, it never expels the plasma bolt away from the hilt.
...
So, if everything, lightsaber 'blades' and plasma 'bolts' are both encapsulated by some sort of pseudo magnetic coherence field, it makes some amount ofintuitive sense that if you get them close to each other, they will repel, deflect, ricochet.
... But, this cannot be just the electromagnetic force as we understand it in our world, because... well, that shit doesn't actually make any sense by our understanding of physics.
We have no idea how to create a self sustaining magnetic field that can be projected away from the source of what created the field and just... keeps sustaining itself on its own...
And EM is just + or -, either attactive or repulsive, so we would expect to see say a + bolt and a + lightsaber be capable of deflection... but a + bolt and a - saber, or even a + saber and a - saber... well those should actually be attractive, so you'd end up with a bolt that curves toward a light saber and then combines with it, or even two sabers being drawn toward each other and then merging.
...
In conclusion: Star Wars is science fantasy in the sense that it seems to operate under a... not completely alien, but significantly distinct set of basic laws of physics... you'd probably have to be a Jedi or Sith to truly understand how they actually work =P
Yeah, what this is saying is that this crash is, so far, looking to be due to pilot error:
They turned off the fuel feed to the engines right after take off, didn't realize they'd done this, didn't correct it in time, and then the plane stalled out and crashed.
An analogy would be maybe... you're driving a car, and trying to overtake someone on a highway, speed up and pass by them... and you don't realize that you've accidentally shifted into neutral, so now as you try to merge back into the correct lane, you're going way more slowly than you thought you were, and end up swerving into the car you were trying to pass, instead of ending up safely ahead of them.
This is extremely common rightoid behavior, even at a personal level.
Make a big outward show of being independent, self-made, wholly responsible for your own success...
... and the reality almost always is that this person is in fact getting subsidies or assistance or help from a wealthy friend or family member, but, they're lying about this, and very often mismanaging the money, which is 'ok' in their minds, because 'nobody knows' that money even exists.
...
Every Republican voter who is on welfare, but hates everyone else on welfare.
Every Republican business owner who gloats about being successful all thanks to themselves publically, but privately, amongst close friends, laughs about how good they are at manipulating their taxes or legal business structure so that they can get as many tax breaks and subsidies as possible.
Or, the 'dumbass' variant of that:
I'm a big tough hard blue collar worker who works real hard and real tough, and thats the right way to have a life and make a living... wait, what? That only even kind of works if the corporation I work for gets massive tax breaks and subsidies, or my own company gets tons of Federal grants and subsidies and tax breaks directly? I thought that was the free market?!
Also every 'entrepreneur wunderkid' story that ultimately boils down to: daddy gave me a whole lot of money and also knew a whole bunch of key figures in relevant industries.
... every mega church pastor that is very obviously fleecing their impoverished flock, but claims that they are so wealthy because god loves them so much.
... every rightwing raido talkshow host / podcaster who gloats about how successful their business is, but never mentions that they get a massive, stupidly large amount of money from wealthy right wing individuals and/or lobbying groups/think tanks... or by selling scam health products, scam financial products, etc... or, more recently, just literally gets directly funded by Russia's FSB.
...
It is literally a core tenet of being a Republican that you lie and gaslight about where your money comes from, or at bare minimum be just actually so stupid that you don't even realize where your money comes from, so I guess those ones arguably not intentionally lying... they're just actually too stupid to be trusted with any kind of non rote task.
Like it is essentially impossible to be a Republican and not do this. Its a fundamental aspect to their personalities.
Hence why it is just a social faux pas to even have a frank and transparent discussion about finances with them, and why they get so blustered snd indignant when the idea of 'fiscal responsibility' is applied onto them, instead of just projected outward as a demeaning attack on everyone else.
Thats my 2 cents anyway, from having grown up in a rightoid, fundamentalist family. Of course this behavior is not unique to Republicans, but it is essentially a mandatory requirement of being a Republican.
... I have a graphic for that, if you're in the US.
"I don't want to set the world... on... fire..."
It all began on Twitter. On March 12, 2017, Jafari posted an update defending the comments of incendiary Republican Iowa Representative Steve King. King, who has a long history of controversial statements, made a comment arguing against immigration, saying "[we] can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies." The comment was widely criticized for being jingoistic and inflammatory, but found a defender in Jafari.
"Wow, how scandalous," said Jafari on Twitter. "Steve King doesn't want his country invaded by people who have contempt for his culture and people! NAZI!!!" The comment from Jafari surprised a lot of his followers, as Jafari rarely spoke about his political beliefs, and even rarer still with such vehemence.
...
In particular, Jafari stated his belief that the United States of America does not "need immigrants from incompatible places," and voicing his concern about a "demographic displacement" of white people which he compared to the South African apartheid.
https://gamerant.com/jontron-racism-controversy-breakdown/
Maybe now, almost 10 years later, now that Nazism and Facism just are commonplace ideologies, these are 'pretty generic right wing opinions'.
But uh, no, this is JonTron defending White Replacement Theory, ie, explicitly endorsing a racist ethnostate.
Its about as plainly and directly racist as you can be without just repeatedly shouting 'the gamer word'.
Thats a bit more than just having a poorly informed take on crime statistics.
...
It is also insanely hypocritical as he is a 2nd Gen immigrant of Hungarian and Iranian (1st Gen Immigrant) parents.
He of course identifies as white the same way that Ted Cruz does:
He is white-passing, but he knows he wouldn't actually pass any white racist's 'one drop' rule if they knew anything about his actual lineage, so he massively overcompensates by hating non white-passing people.
I am unironically moving to Minnesota ASAP.
Cheapest to live in decently blue state, all the climate risk assesments I've seen seem to show that, as long as you're not living right on the Mississippi, pretty low comparative climate risks... oh, and their housing market (thus economy generally) is fairly stable, compared to about half of the rest of the country, whose housing market is currently crashing harder than the 06-08 GFC.
Canada isn't a bad option at all, but its actually fairly difficult to legally migrate there.
Its gonna be really, really funny when the Canadians start deporting waves of poor Americans fleeing northward, in about 5 to 10 years.
Even better, this occurred about a decade ago, and we didn't even realize it untill now.... meaning the global thermohaline circulation cycle has been collapsing for a decade.
Oops.
Irreversible. Can't fix.
No going back.
In all likelihood, we have Great Filtered ourselves.
Best case scenario, we get a century or so, starting basically now, of civilization collapse, mass famine and death, attempts at mass migrations that mostly get Holocausted, and of course wars, potentially nuclear wars...
...and then maybe in 100 years the remaining human population of roughly 1-2 billion can maybe figure out a new paradigm... if we have not just permanently broken the biosphere, and already extracted all the easily extractable natural resources.
Uh yeah, actuaries have already determined the world GDP will be catastrophically damaged, forever, if we don't limit warming to 2C.
We already blew past 1.5C, if you didn't know... and also, the trend in the last decade is continuously that the climate is breaking harder and faster than the scientific consensus broadly projects... so its probably gonna be actually worse than this.
...
US insurance companies have already figured out that roughly the bottom 1/3 of the US will be uninsurable in 10 years... which is why they're either massively upping insurance rates, or largely pulling out of the home insurance business in CA, FL, other southern US states and regions, which is causing all these states to bankrupt themselves as they try to offer a public/government version of home insurance, but refuse to tax people appropriately or fairly to be able to actuslly fund such an endeavor.
Generally, you can't get a home mortgage without insurance, you can't own and rent a place out if you don't have property insurance.
...
tl;dr: You have no idea how fucked we all are.
Lets hope he doesn't nuke the next one.
https://www.axios.com/2019/08/25/trump-nuclear-bombs-hurricanes
Marjorie Trailerpark Greene is literally advancing a bill to ban chemtrails.
A thing that does not exist nor happen at any kind of scale whatsoever, beyond very, very limited and occasional scientific tests... decades ago, and were funded via programs and grants the Big Bullshit Bill and other Trump EOs have decimated.
They do, literally, unironically, blame made up, magic, conspiracy nonsense instead of even attempting to agree with the vast, vast, vaaaaast majority of climate scientists, and even corpo scientists that work for fossil fuel companies that broadly predicted all this would happen roughly 30 years before public science caught up with it (thanks to the lobbying and propoganda campaigns of the same fossil fuel corps.)
They will do literally anything other than admit that they are wrong, their understanding of the world is objectively delusional.
They're too good at magic sky daddy logic.
Fatwa/Jihad, bad.
Crusade, good.
Right, right, now I remember, how silly of me.
Yep.
Having worked in software dev and db management professionally, and having been modding (as in making mods) all kinds of games for even longer... yep, I knew it was completely fucked almost immedeately, as soon as it was:
Throw out most of the old dev team
We are gonna rebuild the engine/game from the ground up
Add in vastly complex features and capabilities at the same time
On a horrendously unrealistic timeframe.
...
Normally, any two of those is extreme danger zone.
Jesus Fucking Christ.
I've done a lot of SQL/Database type work as well, and yep, I've been the person learning their insane spider web of db structures, and then either trying to enforce some kind of actual defined standards going forward, or in some instances, succeeding at restrucuring the dbs, transitioning them, and convincing corporate that this actually needed to be done.
It's insane to think what the civil engineering world would be like if it had the career structure of the software world.
Points at understaffed ATC tower, collapsing bridge that hasn't been even evaluated in a decade, general state of roadway disrepair and constant re-repair, also the new highway/overpass/lane expansion being built to 'solve traffic' despite doing that literally never working
No, not for the vast majority of EU States, no, it requires an actual official government id like the EU eID, your tax ID number, something like that.
Many US states have official citizens initiatives systems, but not on the Federal level, no.
Likely never, the intiative is not pushing for retroactive legal changes, it is pushing for new regulations / legal standards going forward.
No, no no.
You have to input your name, address, and various ways of establishing your EU member state, such as an EU electronic visa/id, or your specific EU state drivers liscence or tax id or some such, and the form makes it very obvious you must actually be an EU citizen.
Examples:
Poland
Portugal
Estonia
Its possible there could be spam or accidental/malformed inputs... but if you are putting fake info into an official government portal, especially en masse, thats potentially a number of crimes, and if its a genuine mistake from an EU citizen, it seems like there is a review process where people will be contacted and allowed to fix up their info.
Also, technically, there are a few countries with more lax submission requirements, such as the Netherlands, likely due to more intense personal privacy laws... but its not like this system is not logging people's IPs, not like they won't be taking that into acount.
This isn't a change.org petition, its an official EU government portal for a core process of democracy.
Knowingly falsifying info on this is again, potentially a large number of crimes, as if you say lied on voting registration, or lied to Social Security or your US state's unemployment assistance system.
Not quite sure if I am understanding you correctly, but I think you are saying it isn't like, a flat, edged geometry...
...its more like a sort of ... very angry, 'fuzzy', elongated cylinder with a roughly hemispherical 'endcap'.
And the sort of... exit point, or emmitting point of the 'blade' is... more like an camera aperture or a nozzle.
But you also say this O, this eye of the needle... is spinning?
That is a bit of lore I am not familiar with, could you expand on that?
...
But yeah, lightsabers work internally differently than say, the Mandalorian Darksaber... which actually is a proper blade, and uses... some other kind of arcane way to generate and sustain itself, I'm not up to snuff on that lore.
Also just kind of as a general addendum:
There are various materials in the Star Wars universe that can deflect or totally decohere and disperse the ... 'coherence field' of plasma bolts / saber blades.
The Imperial Guards have pikes, staffs that are made of some kind of metal alloy, which can block lightsaber blades, and presumably also deflect blaster bolts.
They may be made out of Beskar, the same material as Mando's armor? I am not sure.
Also, the uh... whatever the Darth Smiley's helmet is made out of in The Acolyte... while I think that show is basically a complete mess both as a show and in lore terms... that material/alloy, cortosis, is actually present in a good deal of the older canon, and it seems to have some kind of ability to nullify, extinguish, not just repel, the 'coherence field' of most other 'plasma' based weapons.