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Poor Design Choices In the Star Wars Universe

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the there-are-so-many dept.

Ant writes "John Scalzi's AMC blog shows a short guide to the most epic FAILs in Star Wars design — 'I'll come right out and say it: Star Wars has a badly-designed universe; so poorly-designed, in fact, that one can say that a significant goal of all those Star Wars novels is to rationalize and mitigate the bad design choices of the movies. Need examples? Here's ten ...'"

8 of 832 comments (clear)

  1. At the Risk of Sounding Like an Apologist by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Insightful

    R2-D2
    Sure, he's cute, but the flaws in his design are obvious the first time he approaches anything but the shallowest of stairs. Also: He has jets, a periscope, a taser and oil canisters to make enforcer droids fall about in slapsticky fashion -- and no voice synthesizer. Imagine that design conversation: "Yes, we can afford slapstick oil and tasers, but we'll never get a 30-cent voice chip past accounting. That's just madness."

    I believe his primary function is a flight droid so they were built to interface with ships. Not a lot else. John Scalzi seems to suffer from the "must have everything" school of thought and doesn't think the future will focus on minimalism and getting one thing right. Thank god he's not writing software and just another hot air blogger. I reject Episodes I, II & III so I don't know what he's talking about with the oil slick and jets.

    C-3PO
    Can't fully extend his arms; has a bunch of exposed wiring in his abs; walks and runs as if he has the droid equivalent of arthritis. And you say, well, he was put together by an eight-year-old. Yes, but a trip to the nearest Radio Shack would fix that. Also, I'm still waiting to hear the rationale for making a protocol droid a shrieking coward, aside from George Lucas rummaging through a box of offensive stereotypes (which he'd later return to while building Jar-Jar Binks) and picking out the "mincing gay man" module.

    Again, you're overlooking his primary function. C-3PO is a protocol droid designed to serve humans, and boasts that he is fluent "in over six million forms of communication." So he's got arthritis, well, you didn't build him to be flexible or fight. You built him to look pretty and translate. Everything else is bells and whistles. I think he was meant to stand in a corner for some rich merchant or politician and translate any language imaginable. Are you going to tell me that my car is flawed because I couldn't afford a $20 toaster to put in the dash?

    Death Star
    An unshielded exhaust port leading directly to the central reactor? Really? And when you rebuild it, your solution to this problem is four paths into the central core so large that you can literally fly a spaceship through them? Brilliant. Note to the Emperor: Someone on your Death Star design staff is in the pay of Rebel forces. Oh, right, you can't get the memo because someone threw you down a huge exposed shaft in your Death Star throne room.

    Uh, the second Death Star was never completed, you idiot. The rebels learned about it and attacked it before it had everything completed so anything like "four paths to the central core" or "exposed shafts" could well have been necessary during its construction. Haven't you seen Clerks or watched Robot Chicken's parody of Palpatine trying to talk to the foreman?

    But Luke's X-34 speeder on Tatooine? The Yugo of speeders, man. One hard stop, and out you go.

    He's a farmer. You should have seen the "vehicles" and ATVs I drove while working on farms. One was a modified bus with huge water tanks on the back and an upside down bucket for a seat. They make a Yugo look like a dream car. Are you going to complain about the blast marks and carbon scoring adorning the rag tag rebel ships next?

    So easy to rip apart. And you know, he doesn't offer anything constructive. Like the asteroid worm. He would have enjoyed it more if space in the Star Wars galaxy was like our space? Dead, uninhabited and void? George Lucas isn't a god but he sure thought up some neat ideas for a universe that John Scalzi will never come close to.

    --
    My work here is dung.
    1. Re:At the Risk of Sounding Like an Apologist by Shakrai · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Dude, you've got too much time on your hands ;)

      I rather liked the attitude that JMS had about this kind of stuff. One time a fan asked him "How fast do starfuries go?" and his response was "They move at the speed of plot"

      If the plot makes sense and the universe remains consistent about it's own rules then who cares how functional RD2D would be in our universe or how badly designed the weapons of Star Trek are?

      --
      I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
      We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
    2. Re:At the Risk of Sounding Like an Apologist by Shakrai · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I see you didn't defend the Storm Trooper armor...

      The armor is easier to defend than their marksmanship ;)

      Here we have the pride of the Empire. A professional solider who was cloned from stock hand selected to be the most effective killing machine possible. He spends every waking minute either training for battle or fighting in one. There's Han Solo, less than ten meters away. Avowed enemy of the empire. Working with the terrorist Luke Skywalker to try and overthrow the Emperor. He's ours now! The Stormtrooper raises his blaster to his shoulder, aims, fires....... and misses!

      --
      I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
      We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
    3. Re:At the Risk of Sounding Like an Apologist by eln · · Score: 5, Insightful

      C-3PO is a protocol droid designed to serve humans, and boasts that he is fluent "in over six million forms of communication."

      3PO is there for comic relief primarily, so his cowardice doesn't bother me. What really bothered me about him is the origin story in Episode 1. I mean seriously, are you trying to tell me that an 8 year old, bored out of his mind on a desert planet, with access to enough parts and knowledge to build a basically sentient robot is going to build a PROTOCOL DROID? I mean, he could have built a mindless killing machine, or a machine capable of fixing his speeder for him, or stealing shit from the marketplace, or raiding moisture farms for water, or SOMETHING. But no, he builds a droid designed to communicate politely in 6 million languages and that's about it. What the hell does a kid whose primary interest is podracing need with a protocol droid that can speak 6,000,000 languages, 5,999,999 of which he can't understand, and 5,999,983 of which he's unlikely to ever need to know? This kid had to be the biggest dork in 3 galaxies.

  2. Death Star by pwizard2 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Death Star
    An unshielded exhaust port leading directly to the central reactor? Really? And when you rebuild it, your solution to this problem is four paths into the central core so large that you can literally fly a spaceship through them? Brilliant. Note to the Emperor: Someone on your Death Star design staff is in the pay of Rebel forces. Oh, right, you can't get the memo because someone threw you down a huge exposed shaft in your Death Star throne room.

    I agree with the critique on the Death Stars. Centralized power was the fatal flaw in both, so it would have made a lot more sense to use distributed power systems throughout the Death Star II. (lots of little reactors instead of one big one) That way, the rebels would have had to destroy the DSII apart piece by piece. Given how much time that would take, the Imperials probably would have won.

    I won't even go into the Endor holocaust in detail. (guess what happens when you detonate a small artificial moon near a planetary atmosphere? You get lots of fallout, resulting in nuclear winter and lots of dead ewoks)

    --
    "It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
    1. Re:Death Star by gwern · · Score: 5, Insightful

      > Plus, how do you get around the fact that Luke killed way more people by destroying the Death Star I than Vader ever did?

      Let's keep in mind that we see very little of Darth Vader; we don't hear about his genocide of the Falleen, for example (I'll assume that you will refuse to accept that Darth Vader is responsible for blowing up Alderaan, even though he was Supreme Military Executor, in charge of all military operations). The EU covers his exploits in much more detail, and gives him a more appropriate bodycount.

      Also, the people on the Death Star were military. In war, military personnel are fair game. Luke didn't go after civilians; Darth Vader and the Empire did.

  3. Re:Re-cutting by MrNemesis · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I happen think giving George Lucas access to the star wars prequels was a poor design choice :)

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  4. Re:Let's not forget...... by 91degrees · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There is no sound in space.

    There's no incidental music in the real world. I like to consider space sound effects to be the same sort of thing.