Rogue One Tech Discussion

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2046
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Re: Rogue One Tech Discussion

Post by 2046 » Thu Jan 05, 2017 8:03 pm

Those are largely consistent:

. . . an unshielded ship getting torn up by tanks of Firepower X
. . . a warship subject to fighter weapons that usually seem to be around Firepower X
. . . a massive vessel hit by a fighter with an energy near Firepower X with overly centralized controlling systems damaged (a not unreasonable assumption given that the bridge was struck)

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Re: Rogue One Tech Discussion

Post by Khas » Fri Jan 06, 2017 2:45 am

Actually, AT-TE firepower seems to be in the megajoule range as well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwHVsWSJmv4

So... even in TCW we see megajoule weapons doing a number on capital ships. Which is consistent with what's seen in Rogue One and Rebels.

Not to mention some of the shots shown in the "Rebels" Season 3 Mid-Season Trailer also show much of the same SW firepower:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upN-7ALj2OU

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Re: Rogue One Tech Discussion

Post by 2046 » Fri Jan 06, 2017 12:27 pm

… and?

Perhaps there was a misunderstanding. As I directly stated, I haven't seen the film, so obviously I wasn't claiming the movie showed gigatons of ship firepower. That was a generic EU-inspired example.

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Re: Rogue One Tech Discussion

Post by Khas » Fri Jan 06, 2017 5:07 pm

Ah. I was just saying that the firepower examples shown in Rogue One are consistent with what's seen elsewhere in the canon.

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Re: Rogue One Tech Discussion

Post by Mike DiCenso » Sat Jan 07, 2017 12:49 am

Great to see you again, Khas. What do you think is an important tech point that you saw in Rogue One?
-Mike

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Re: Rogue One Tech Discussion

Post by Khas » Sat Jan 07, 2017 1:23 am

Some of the technical things I thought were the most important in Rogue One were:

- That TIE Fighters could be blown up by hand-held weapons. Namely, with one shot (IIRC) at the right place.

- That starfighter firepower seems to be in the gigajoule range at most, going by the size of the explosions caused by the X-Wings firing on the base where Jyn's father was stationed.

- The existence of planetary shields, which means that Trek and Wars now canonically have similar shield area-covering capabilities, given that the Klingons had protected the planet Ty'Gokor with a shield, and Chakotay mentioned in "Year of Hell" that Voyager's allies could equip their homeworlds with temporal shielding. Though, SW's shield capabilities don't seem to be designed to deal with kinetic weapons all that well.

- Like 359, I could have sworn that I saw Scariff's planetary shield still up after the gate was taken out, judging by the glow surrounding the planet slightly above the atmosphere. And apparently, when the Death Star fired it's dialed-down blast at Scariff, the beam ignored the shield completely. It didn't overpower it and cause it to collapse, it just went right through unhindered. Which means that, even if Alderaan had a planetary shield, it would have done jack-diddly-shit to so much as give pause to the superlaser at even its lowest setting.

- The fact that Kyber crystals - which draw energy from the Force - were used in the Death Star's superlaser goes to show that this was anything but conventional technology. The fact that people were terrified of the idea of a planet killer in-universe shows that this level of destruction was something not to be taken lightly, or was anything close to normal.

- Ion torpedoes are a neat weapon that I didn't expect to see, though they make sense.

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Re: Rogue One Tech Discussion

Post by Cocytus » Sat Jan 07, 2017 3:16 am

If I'm not too much mistaken, it looked like the blast that mortally wounded Galen came from a piece of ordnance dropped from an X wing rather than a laser blast. I thought it odd that they would rely on that. It doesn't look any more powerful, and air dropped ordnance seems like it would be less accurate than laser fire, though granted it's being dropped from mere feet in the air.

I am continually amazed at just how worthless Stormtrooper armor is. The trilogy has always shown direct hits with blaster rifles being fatal. The real world has many types of armor, some more resilient than others. Kevlar is less resilient than ar500, for example, but there are different types of armor to handle different threats. Stormtrooper armor is pretty uniform, with the only real differences being color and faceplates for certain divisions. And it all seems to be uniformly useless against absolutely everything. Blaster rifles, blaster pistols (I'd expect Han's is well above spec given his line of work, but even so) swung rocks and now firmly established, kinetic impacts from Chirrut and Jyn's staves. Am I overreacting here? It's just comically worthless at this point.

I mean Christ, General Grievous had the presence of mind to equip his personal bodyguard droids with weapons made out of metal that lightsabers can't cut. Stormtroopers have reached battle droid levels of laughably unthreatening. The main characters cut them down like they're butter. They really are pretty useless.

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Re: Rogue One Tech Discussion

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Sat Jan 07, 2017 3:38 pm

2046 wrote:Such things would be satisfying only in a consistent universe.

I haven't seen TFA or R1 but as I understand the spoilers it is all as dichotomously schizoid as the EU, if not worse. A universe where fighters sling megajoules at best and destroy capital ships that laugh at megatons is just . . . ugh. I have better things to do with my brain than analyze space fantasy.. Voyager is my limit in that regard.
Would be a fine point if it weren't for the fact that the CGI Clone Wars series introduced a lot of that nonsense. And that was made under Lucas' rule.
I remember fighters being used as suicide ships against a shielded Venator, right? And screwing the capital ship.
What about the Republican transport ships that got attacked and significantly damaged from the ground by droid cannons, same cannons doing shit damage against ground targets? Those huge troop carriers had no reason to fly unshielded in enemy territory, above enemy positions.

If you stick to capital ships having shields only capable of coping with kilotons of energy and not so crazy amounts of momentum, coupled to the kind of damage caused to CIS Coreships by sort og gigajoule-beams fired from SPHA-Ts, the universe seems to depict a reality where the maximum sturdiness for shielded and unshielded large capital ships to be around the kilotons per quite large amounts of surface area (perhaps with even larger ships, the total does reach megaton levels if you consider all the terajoule-level shield pieces all knitted together as a defensive plaid).

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Re: Rogue One Tech Discussion

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Sat Jan 07, 2017 4:01 pm

Khas wrote:The existence of planetary shields, which means that Trek and Wars now canonically have similar shield area-covering capabilities, given that the Klingons had protected the planet Ty'Gokor with a shield, and Chakotay mentioned in "Year of Hell" that Voyager's allies could equip their homeworlds with temporal shielding. Though, SW's shield capabilities don't seem to be designed to deal with kinetic weapons all that well.
As per this thread, we actually see that a planet-wide shielding is not a given in Trek at all.
For one, it wasn't Ty'Gokor that was entirely shielded but only a military compound.
As for the second, it does not mention that the homeworlds would be shielded, only that the ships of these planets would now have temporal shielding and therefore, in all logic, be able to defend said worlds then.
Last edited by Mr. Oragahn on Sat Jan 07, 2017 4:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Rogue One Tech Discussion

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Sat Jan 07, 2017 4:05 pm

Those talks about planetary shields (in the sense of a planet encompassing shield) remind me of the little known case of planet Druidia.

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Re: Rogue One Tech Discussion

Post by Khas » Sat Jan 07, 2017 5:08 pm

Actually, according to Memory Alpha, all of Ty'Gokor was protected by a shield:
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Ty'Gokor

And the entire asteroid belt that Ty'Gokor was in was infused with a Tachyon Detection Grid, as to detect cloaked ships.

The implication I got from Chakotay's statement in "Year of Hell" wasn't that the Nihydron and Mawasi would use the temporal shielding to protect ships around their homeworlds, but rather their homeworlds themselves.

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Re: Rogue One Tech Discussion

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Sat Jan 07, 2017 8:18 pm

Khas wrote:Actually, according to Memory Alpha, all of Ty'Gokor was protected by a shield:
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Ty'Gokor

And the entire asteroid belt that Ty'Gokor was in was infused with a Tachyon Detection Grid, as to detect cloaked ships.

The implication I got from Chakotay's statement in "Year of Hell" wasn't that the Nihydron and Mawasi would use the temporal shielding to protect ships around their homeworlds, but rather their homeworlds themselves.
We shall continue this in the other thread.

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Re: Rogue One Tech Discussion

Post by Mike DiCenso » Sat Jan 07, 2017 11:32 pm

Cocytus wrote:I am continually amazed at just how worthless Stormtrooper armor is. The trilogy has always shown direct hits with blaster rifles being fatal. The real world has many types of armor, some more resilient than others. Kevlar is less resilient than ar500, for example, but there are different types of armor to handle different threats. Stormtrooper armor is pretty uniform, with the only real differences being color and faceplates for certain divisions. And it all seems to be uniformly useless against absolutely everything. Blaster rifles, blaster pistols (I'd expect Han's is well above spec given his line of work, but even so) swung rocks and now firmly established, kinetic impacts from Chirrut and Jyn's staves. Am I overreacting here? It's just comically worthless at this point.
Which not only fits in with what we saw in the OT, but is highly consistent with what is shown in Rebels. It's even a major plot point in the Rebels episode "Stealth Strike", when Captain Rex complains in frustration about how awful the armor is while he and Kanan sneak into an Imperial facility. The common reasoning is that the Empire decided to cut back on quality in favor of quantity when equipping the greater numbers of non-clone recruits.
-Mike

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Re: Rogue One Tech Discussion

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Sun Jan 08, 2017 11:13 pm

Which is clearly a clear contrast with clone armour. Right in ROTJ, downed clones weren't automatically killed, comrades were even calling for medical support.
In the CGI show, they even had an entire hospital station that healed wounded clonetroopers.
Now, back in ANH, we do see a stormtrooper checking on a downed comrade but stops when Vader arrives; the comrade in question showed no sign of life anyway.
That's a bit different than TFA where a neostormtrooper had enough lifebar left to actually smear some blood on the janitor's helmet.

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Re: Rogue One Tech Discussion

Post by Cocytus » Mon Jan 09, 2017 3:00 am

Mr. Oragahn wrote:Which is clearly a clear contrast with clone armour. Right in ROTJ, downed clones weren't automatically killed, comrades were even calling for medical support.
In the CGI show, they even had an entire hospital station that healed wounded clonetroopers.
Now, back in ANH, we do see a stormtrooper checking on a downed comrade but stops when Vader arrives; the comrade in question showed no sign of life anyway.
That's a bit different than TFA where a neostormtrooper had enough lifebar left to actually smear some blood on the janitor's helmet.
I remember reading in some behind-the-scenes info that the Finalizer's bridge tower is buried in the superstructure because the prominent towers of previous Star Destroyers were too much of a target. I guess the First Order learned a thing or two from the Empire's failures.

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