Weird stuff in Star Wars?
 

https://i.ibb.co/zFxX3QV/s-l1600.jpg

It occurred to me there is a lot of really weird things in Star Wars that are sort of just brushed off by casual fans but stand out as pretty weird when you stand back and look at it from afar.

A couple of things:

* Droids' AI. From C3PO-level droids to the smallest, stupidest droids (like the pit droids), they ALL seem to gifted with full, sentient AI, right out of the box. With unique and complex personalities, moods, etc.. And this is never so much as even mentioned anywhere, ever. Why is this a thing? Is it by design (and if so, by who? is "the maker" an actual thing?) or accidental? And is this even a good idea?

* "Lightspeed." There's so many mentions of "we need to make the jump to lightspeed" or "going into lightspeed now" or "OK, making the jump to light!" But we know that it CAN'T be lightspeed, not if it's to make any sense. Like, even if we developed a drive that could enable us to travel at lightspeed tomorrow, it'd take us 5 years to get to our nearest star system. Yet you have stuff like Anakin traveling from Coruscant to Tatooine in like an hour.

* Lightsabers. So it's like "hard light," yes? About as hot as the sun, able to quickly cut through any metal surface quickly, but "stops" if it hits another lightsaber? I can think of several things wrong with that right off the bat.

Anakin apparently has a PSP:

https://i.imgur.com/CfiNxmU_d.webp?m...fidelity=grand

You could literally do this to any movie or show.

Given the lightsabers immediately slice something off, I can never understand how Jedi don't accidentally cut off their own limbs. Especially when they're swinging around the lightsaber like madmen during fight scenes or training scenes, just one slip of the hand and that light saber could cut off your own arm or leg in one slice.

Those things are damn dangerous. Yet the characters treat them as if it's nothing dangerous at all, even while standing around non-Jedi characters.

- When they say they are "jumping to lightspeed" they could as well mean lightspeed x100 or something. There's no reason they have to specify the actual speed.
- The droids' AI that seems to be gifted to them "out of the box" could be just that. An AI module or chip or board that can be plugged inside a robot's main circuitry. You put it in, you set some pameters (personality, intelligence..) and that's it. Who makes them? Someone. Maybe they are so common that you can find used ones around.
- We don't know the actual technology behind lightsabers and how they work. How come the jedi knights don't hurt themselves swinging them around? Because they are highly trained superhumans, few of a kind.

Let's see what I can think of off the top of my head:

• The racing pods essentially just being cockpits hanging hanging off jet engines with cables seems like an incredibly bad idea.
• Trying to figure out how evolution would even create a creature like Sebulba.
• C3PO calling R2D2 a "glob of grease", as if fat jokes would mean anything to a droid.
• That non-canon crossover with Indiana Jones, in which Chewie is the origin of the Bigfoot myth and spares Indy's life because he looks like Han.
• The original Death Star being built in 20 years but the second taking less than 6.
• The Phineas and Ferb crossover being an official part of the franchise.
• The fact that multiple episodes of Detours were completed and the show was simply just not released because Disney thought it would be embarrassing.
• Boba Fett being a character they made countless stories about despite the fact that he barely did or said anything in the movies and I'm pretty sure his name was only ever yelled out by Han right before he got knocked into the pit.
• The decision to make Luke and Leia twins after they had already kissed.
• The Imperial Walkers being way worse designed than the Republic Walkers, even though they could have just kept the better design.
• Weird pointless contradictions like establishing a human engineer for the Death Star long after the Geonoshans had been established.
• The fact that Jango Fett was even involved with the assassination attempt on Padmé when that just caused problems.
• The New Republic needing a "Resistance" to fight the First Order, even though logically the First Order would be a rebellion themselves.
• The Orange thing having Anakin's lightsaber and just brushing it off as "a story for another time".
• Darth Maul somehow ending up on a trash planet with mechanical spider legs.
• ... Every single fucking thing about Episode IX...

After the prequels it doesn't really make sense that Yoda got "so old" in just...20 years? I mean his species lives for over 800+ years, so even up to Episode III he was jumping and bouncing around fighting Palpatine with his light saber.

In Episodes 5 and 6 Yoda is written like an old man where he can barely move or do anything and always seemed tired. In-universe this is only 20 years after Episode 3...and even if he was just doing nothing on a swamp planet for two decades, it doesn't make sense someone of his species would age like that.

They wrote Yoda as if he was a human. As naturally say a 50 year old to 70 year old would be a lot different, but Yoda's species doesn't make sense for that.

The short answer to all of these observations is that "Star Wars is like Santa Claus - completely implausible and for kids in every way".

This one actually kind of makes sense given that when people age they tend to do it suddenly in bursts. So basically the older you get the more quickly you suddenly decline in general.

Yeah this one is pretty good. Basically we just take "jump to lightspeed" as the galactic shorthand but not the quantitative measure.

As in they actually use "warp drive" in Star Wars but because Star Wars is populated with a lot of low-level cities and people they just call it "light speed", whereas Star Trek is largely populated by more advanced, educated civilizations whereby people speak with lesser "lingo" and greater "actuality".

They are never going to show this in Star Wars, but I imagine that there is a comedy to be made somewhere that shows all of the Jedi-in-training who are..... not skilled and routinely making mistakes and cutting off their own limbs as younglings in training. You just don't see those people in the movies... :lol:

Also, how do starfighter or capital ship shields work in Star Wars? In the X-Wing/TIE Fighter games we see it's not like Star Trek where its a big bubble around, but rather shields that hug the hull of the ship and can be diverted one way or the other. But in the SW movies and Clone Wars cartoon it seems like they don't even really have shields at all? Like how are droids being shot off of starfighters if there's shields?

They have to use some sort of fake swords or whatever during training. They just have to. Even during normal fencing, people wear protective gear during sparring and whatnot so no one gets hurt if they didn't block a sword strike in time... but that doesn't apply with light sabers. There is no amount of clothes or amor that can protect your limbs from being severed, or hell, even getting sliced in half if you forgot to block a strike during a regular sparring session.

Also, and I'm sure this has been explained somewhere... why are the Separatists fighting the Republic? Like, what is so terrible about the Republic in their eyes that they are willing to sacrifice millions of lives?

I think you can turn down the settings on the beam to not cut through anything and just make an "ow!" Surely all those dials and knobs on a lightsaber do something.

Chewbacca is a wookie from the planet Kashyyyk. But Chewbacca lives on the planet Endor. Now think about that. That does not make sense! Why would a wookie, an 8 foot tall wookie, want to live on Endor, with a bunch of two foot tall ewoks? That does not make sense!

I couldn't help but laugh at this! Love this reference. :lol:

I mean, Chewie has to eat something. He's surrounded by chubby little snacks.

Why do you think Luke was around the porgs? :lol:

There is a novel where an Imperial General obsesses with locating Darth Vader's glove, which survived the Death Star

Yeah examining Star Wars in any kind of critical light causes the whole house of cards to crumble...

I guess if you want to maintain your enjoyment from the franchise the answer is "don't think about it"

Question: so... did Dooku know all along that Palpatine was Sidious? I see a lot of folks saying of course he did... but then why all the stuff about kidnapping Palpatine in the Clone Wars show and even the beginning of Episode 3?

1. Leia kissing Luke on the lips to make Han jealous.
2. Any concept created by Rian Johnson.

This should answer your question.

Eh... looks like that guy is drawing on a lot of pre-Disney "Legends" EU stuff. Like, where and when did it say that Dooku knew Sidious was Palpatine?

Also... Jedi starfighter pilots. Why wouldn't they just use the Force and smash enemy starfighters into one another? Or make them crash into their mothership? Like, it couldn't be "they need to concentrate on flying the ship" because they should just let go of the flightstick and just do that, over and over again while going in a straight line, or while letting their R2 unit fly them in a random direction.

I always thought that originally at least in the SW Universe moving things that big was still considered nigh impossible for most Jedi, that's why it was such a big deal when that one video game came out and it made a big deal about the main character who was like Darth Vader's apprentice or something and he was a natural prodigy with the Force who could bring a Star Destroyer down from orbit

Well sure but that was a feat because it was a Star Destroyer. But by comparison, Starfighters are small, single-rider ships like X-Wings and Tie Fighters. Hell, Yoda moved an X-Wing out of a swamp and he was a doddering old man when he did it.

On that note, I miss the Force Awakens games - they were terrific. I haven't booted them up in years - maybe over a decade to be honest. I wonder how they play now. Anyone remember "Jedi Power Battles" on the PSOne? That game was like the first truly good "Jedi experience" in a video game.

You mean the Phantom Menace games?

I liked them too!

Probably has something to do with Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, except in space instead of on a train…

I LOVED Jedi Power Battles on the Playstation.
The Jedi Academy games on PS2 were pretty sick too.

I may have to give those a go.

There's no reason to go back to those PS3-era games now that the modern Jedi Survivor games exist.

Got another one. Red lightsaber kyber crystals. Ehhh... so how does this work? The Clone Wars cartoon and Fallen Jedi game made it canon that every Jedi padawan must go to the planet Ilum and acquire a kyber crystal in the temple there, both as a rite of passage and just a basic need. Every one of them. Sooo... are we to assume when padawans come back with red crystals, they're quietly pushed into other fields? Or what? Or do all the former Jedi who go Dark Side come back to Illum to get a red crystal to replace their old one, to better suit their identity? That seems a little... odd. Is that what Vader did? Did Dooku get his on Illum and just hope he didn't bump into any padawans?

I'm sure there had to have been an explanation at some point, even if it's novels or comics.

I was under the impression that red kyber crystals are "synthetic", in that they don't occur naturally and formed by a deliberate dark side process to corrupt a crystal of different colour. Hence Sabine's comment, I think, in Ahsoka about "bleeding the crystal" to return it to its natural colour. Even both Death Stars used green crystals.

But why even bother, if they have a perfectly good crystal as is?

The canon reason apparently is solidarity, all Sith have the same colour.

If Force powers were used logically every fight would be one-sided. Like there would be no way for anyone to stop people using the force at all.

But there's plenty of non-Sith who have a red lightsaber. It seems like, if anything, it's to signal "I'm not a Jedi."

Oddly enough as I'm playing through Jedi Survivor I see the game gives the answer. Yeah, they just kind of change the crystal color to red with the Force, then Force-reassemble the lightsaber. In this case a guy's goes from yellow to red. It's like he poured his anger into it. OK, that makes sense.

Sith, dark Jedi, the terms get confused at times. Asajj was Dooku's apprentice but not part of "the two", and she had red lightsabres. But then again, prior to the rule of two, all dark jedi users used red.

What Jedi Academy games on PS2? There was only one game named Jedi Academy and it wasn't released for the PS2.
No they didn't. You had ones like the Dark Jedi from the Jedi Knight game who didn't use red lightsabers.

Sorry, it's been a long time.
Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy I think, yeah on XBox.

Didn't play Jedi Knight for some reason (even though I loved the original Dark Forces). Suspect the game came before the "canon" of red lightsabers perhaps?

I believe Asajj would fit the definition of a Sith, technically. Darth Tyranus/Count Dooku was a Dark Lord of the Sith and she was definitely his apprentice. "Always two there are" or not, which didn't even turn out to be true (in the same way that "no, there is another!"/"there is another... skyyyy-walker..." meaning Leia, turned out to be both b*llshit in a number of ways"). And certainly in the past there was more than 2 Sith in the galaxy. Kylo, not a Sith. Baylan, not a Sith. Shin Hati, not a Sith. Certainly none of the Inquisitors are Sith, but bear the red.

You should play them on PC, as they were designed for. I believe the Steam versions are the best that exist, and there's about to be a "remake" of Dark Forces that has about the same level of care as the recent re-release of Quake 1 and 2.

The series:

Dark Forces
Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight
Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy

I wish I'd stuck with these. I believe I beat Dark Forces ages ago and then played a LITTLE bit of Jedi Knight, but that's it.

I got another one. Forget about Stormtrooper blaster accuracy... what about the droids' blaster accuracy? Beyond the ones fighting Jedi with lightsabers. Their accuracy should be about 99.9%, no? Subprograms to account for wind shift, motion, etcetera... but no? Or does this get back into the weird idea that ALL droids have to be made sentient, not really just programmed automatons, so they basically have human error?

IG11 was pretty effective in Mandalorian now so... maybe Filloni was trying to reset the balance there.