I got the ICS compilation

[GStone]

Okay, first off, the cover is silver, not the black one in the preview image on amazon.com. It says the words:

Complete cross-sections
The spacecraft and vehicles
of the entire Star Wars saga

It's even got a round sticker that says 30th anniversary. It's got a TIE bomber, Zam's speeder, a naboo fighter and the jedi fighter on it, unlike the tridroid fighter and the other one that's on the cover of the preview image at amazon.

We wanna know about the Saxton figures. They're in there. I checked it myself. The 40,000 ton figure for the Venator. The 200 gigaton per shot one for the 12 quad TL turrets is there. The figures for the Jango version of Salve 1 is in there, too.

There are other entries: the A wing, the B wing, the TIE bomber and Interceptor. I haven't looked to see if there are any changes to existing entries, but it isn't just where they put all the pages togethers, such as the intro pages for each ICS. They redesigned how things look when it's everything together in one book. I haven't had a chance to throughly look through it.

But, they have made updates to things like the weapons book before and the whole thing with Sarli was recent and given that there are multiple versions of the movies every few years, it might be excised later. But, for right now, it's still there.

And some from the other side of the aisle...on another board...will think I'm just whining with this post. But, I think that'd be a funny thought.




Edit: A couple notes here, as I look it over. First, it says "The hyperdrive field, once generated, has to be projected around the starship to enable it to remain in hyperspace- a drive system failure will result in the ship dropping out of hyperspace back into real space...". Second, "Laser cannons and turbolasers fire invible beams that travel at lightspeed. A glowing pulse traveling along the beam at less than lightspeed marks the energy bolt's path. However, the light given off by this pulse depletes the overall energy content of the beam."

This first part contradicts the idea that things in hyperspace of the EU remain in hyperspace on their own. There's this gem from Saxton's own hyperspace page, which is now contradicted by the ICS...again.

http://www.theforce.net/swtc/hyperspace.html#hos

"A HOS is not equipped with a hyperdrive. It remains freely in hyperspace but cannot enter or exit without the assistance of a hyperdrive-capable vessel."

As for the second, it's a lot like the way it is from the ep 2 ICS, but why the hell would anyone design a weapon like that? Shouldn't the sensor pick up on where the beam is heading and what it touches?

[Cpl Kendall]

Probably useful in heavy jamming enviroments and for when your sensors are to damaged to tell where your shot hits. Likely serves the same purpose as "calling the shot" with a forward observer does with artillery.

[Mr. Oragahn]

The lightspeed weapon was fanoned with that idea of a spinning in a tube, so even if the thing moves at c, it doesn't fly straight towards the target, but instead does absurds spirals.

The whole idea makes zero sense, safe to increase the firepower of the ships; so when a ship is shaked, it's because of the KE of the photons, instead of a simple explosion of whatever matter, and that's why flakbursts are their main enemy, nevermind if they're literally founs in most if not all battles.

As for the other figures, it was expectable. If Sarli is working out to rectify all this stuff, it will require time.

Nevermind, it would have just helped our point to bring sanity back, but in no way does it undermine the fact that any firepower yield Saxton gave in that book which that can be verified is shown wrong. Considering that all of them are relatively proportional and related, then the rest of unverifiable yields are just as equally wrong.

[GStone]

Okay, while I haven't done a throough examination, it looks like the old entries are the same. They took the x wing image from the OT ICS, turned most of it into a grayish brown and left a couple spots in full color and added all the tech entry blurbs from the ICS around it. There's a page for the Republic that has a blurb on Naboo Design, Droid Tech, Defenders of the Republic and Commercial Forces. The opposite page has Reign of Terror, Imperial Enforcer, Assault Behemoth and The Rebel Response for the galactic empire.

There's a glossary in the back that briefly talks of the tech and some vehicles and tech next to some of the entries.

There's a section on some of the vehicles from the OT with a tiny picture with a small box of datafile info with them. There's 2 sets of 2 pages that talk about how entries are made, using the TIE bomber and B wing as examples and they talk a little about the artists.

Oh, the shuttle T the rebels used to sneak onto Endor is the only other new entry and I gotta say this ICS has made the B wing my favorite vessel right now.

There's 4 pages of indexing with a image for each of the 2 pages, Jango's Slave 1 and the republic cruiser. There's a forward by John Kroll opposite a close up image of the interior of the Death Star that's used in the DS entry (not the outline schematic from the movie either). Kerrie Dougherty did the writtings that show up here that weren't in the other ICSs and John Mullaney and Jon Hall did the pics that didn't show up in the individual ICSs.

There's a 2 page thing with some image that's spread across a page and a half with a blurb that talks of each movie subdivision of the book.

Probably useful in heavy jamming enviroments and for when your sensors are to damaged to tell where your shot hits. Likely serves the same purpose as "calling the shot" with a forward observer does with artillery.

If you want to do that, you could send some harmless particles down the stream to reflect some light and the computer picks up on it. At the speed the tracer moves at, someone watching with binoculars would be much better.

The whole idea makes zero sense, safe to increase the firepower of the ships; so when a ship is shaked, it's because of the KE of the photons, instead of a simple explosion of whatever matter, and that's why flakbursts are their main enemy, nevermind if they're literally founs in most if not all battles.

Another reason rail guns would be good in Wars.

[Cpl Kendall]

If you want to do that, you could send some harmless particles down the stream to reflect some light and the computer picks up on it. At the speed the tracer moves at, someone watching with binoculars would be much better.

Why would you do that when you can actually fire a damaging shot?

[GStone]

But, that's the point. You fire the damaging shot, but you send a particle stream down the same path, so it can be picked up, so that it travels at pretty much the same speed, if not the same speed, as the weapon energy. This is so you don't have to have a slow ass glob go down the path.

[AnonymousRedShirtEnsign]

It's not the notion of a tracer that we find stupid. It's the explanation for how the subsonic visible bolt is the tracer for an EM weapon. It just doesn't make since to claim that the laser part of the TL is timed to fire and impact with the target at the same time as the glowing bolt tracer. If there is heavy jamming, shouldn't the synchronization of the visible tracer and the laser be impossible? Yet in battles where we know jamming is taking place (ex. Endor) we still see TLs that inflict damage as the visible bolt impact the target. Either the jamming that made it impossible to determine weather or not the DS's planetary shield is up or not is insufficient to cause any noticeable problem to the TL sensors on either side, or that whole explanation is bull crap.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Goofs are impossible with modern graphics!
...

Should we claim that lightsabre blades are vampiric in nature because sometimes they are not reflecting on reflecting surfaces?

[GStone]

Goofs are impossible with modern graphics!
...

Should we claim that lightsabre blades are vampiric in nature because sometimes they are not reflecting on reflecting surfaces?

Yes, we should. :-P

They are evil, energy masses of old, sucking the life out of virgins and must be smighted.

[Jedi Master Spock]

Could I have a little less sarcasm, please? I'd much rather hear about TL bolt speeds, because it's an interesting problem than the ... "mystic" ... properties of the lightsaber.

[Mr. Oragahn]

As you wish.

[sarcasmless]
Some people come with contrieved explanations that don't seem to make sense at all, for the sake of explaining a few glitches.
Glitches happen even with modern computer graphics, and there's simply an overwhelming of events of explosion precisely occuring when bolts hit.

Now, I still believe that there's room for a "visible tracer + invisible bolt" theory. It would explain several instances of bolts exploding... and still going on (AOTC, Geonosis, ROTS, Kashyyyk).

That said, I won't about how that lightbeam theory is not only absurd, but created beyond the simple wish of explaining phenomenoms, with another purpose behind it.

See what I meant by lightbeams vs flakbursts and that other thread started for it.
[/sarcasmless]

[GStone]

I don't get why the laser cannons have to be literal lasers at all. It was widely accepted in the EU that a charged gas was what was fired. The new ICS next to me specifically mentions that 'blasters fire powerful bolts created by the excitation of high-energy gas while ion cannons emit bursts of ionized energy'.

A better thing might have been a weak force field of virtually massless particles guides the glowing glob towards the target. What's the point of firing invisible energy anyway? I don't know of any fights with laser/TL aiming over more than a 'sun to earth' distance. They don't have rear view mirrors and their sensors would pick up on it before they saw it.

Are they just trying to be different?

[Praeothmin]

Gstone wrote:

What's the point of firing invisible energy anyway?

I would rather say:
What's the point of firing a tracer which shows where you're going to fire and allows the enemy ships to "get the hell out of Dodge"...
You don't need a tracer when your weapons have auto targetting capabilities.
The tracer would have no use.
Specially if your weapon truly is lightspeed. You aim, you fire, and "Boom" goes the opposition, because they had no clue you were firing upon them, and had no time to raise shields...

[GStone]

Hey, when is the new ICS supposed to be available in bookstores?

[GStone]

Gstone wrote:

What's the point of firing invisible energy anyway?

I would rather say:
What's the point of firing a tracer which shows where you're going to fire and allows the enemy ships to "get the hell out of Dodge"...
You don't need a tracer when your weapons have auto targetting capabilities.

The tracer would have no use.

Well, the point of a tracer is so it can be tracked. Tracer rounds in the field have been used during some night fights. But, the ICS shows more often than not only forward sensor structures. Side and rear ones usually come from being attached to turret/fixed weapon ports.

So, I'm thinking it's less about letting the enemy know the path and more for the ones firing to better guage future shots on the specific target you're firing upon.

I think I remember recently seeing modern aircraft fighters still using tracer rounds in the sky some times.

Specially if your weapon truly is lightspeed. You aim, you fire, and "Boom" goes the opposition, because they had no clue you were firing upon them, and had no time to raise shields...

With it being lightspeed, I imagined it was kinda like B5 superalien weapons from mother ships, where we see the particle beam in space and the direction of the beam swings around, running into the target.

If their computers really could track objects moving at lightspeed, it'd show up on a display for the gunners to look at. Maybe a touch screen to fire on specific targets and zooming features to make more pin point strikes. The computer calculates the angle the weapon should be at and the gunner get a signal, saying they have locked on and he fires (push a button, move a lever, etc.).

So, the use of the tracer makes me think firing laser cannons is more like firing real life artillery from rifles and hand guns, but without a scope or (at least) a not very effective one and also kinda like firing a mortar round without calculating much of the trajectory necessary before you fire.

The idea of spinning it around before firing would be a necessity at the Saxton written ICS levels. But, as Wong showed in his plasma weapons page, it still isn't that much of a help. With a pure laser, to reach 50 GT per barrel of a quadturret, you've spun it so tightly that you've created a packet of dense electroplasma for each blast. To maintain cohesiveness, so it won't expand automatically after it elaves the barrel and stay together for any appreciable distance and time, you'd have to spin it so tightly that it's virtually (though not literally) very close to fusion level compacting.

All the particles would have to be of the same charge or you risk locking them together and you'll fire an electrified solid or semi-solid. By the time a laser blast reaches a target, it'll have started to turn into a cone shaped blast. The comics follow the movies in close regard when it comes to the speear shaped blasts, I think, but unless they put some force field around the energy of the emissions, the energy spears would probably have started to turn cone shape, even if it isn't appreciable when viewed from far away. Instead of being more pin point like a knife strike, it'd be more shotgun-like in effect.

Being invisble itself, that's not that far a stretch because of the limited particle density in space vacuum, but this tracer thing feels more like someone was thinking along the lines of making things more difficult for the gunners. They're supposed to have more advanced tech than us, but this feels less advanced than us. We have laser projectors and satellites that can turn to reflect/transmit energy beams. How come they can't have this kind of tracking?