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How Star Wars Trumped Star Trek For Scientific Accuracy
An anonymous reader writes "When George Lucas added the 'ring around the Death Star' effect to his 1997 re-release of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, the revision was almost as hated as Greedo shooting first, and to boot was seen as a knock-off of the seminal 'Praxis effect' in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991). But a debunking astronomer claims that the Federation got it wrong and the fan-boys should thank Lucas for adding some scientific accuracy to his fictional universe."
Sadly, upon closer inspection, we see that ILM blew this rare opportunity for scientific realism in the Star Wars universe ...
Indeed, if you're familiar with Docking Bay 327, it is inside a large maitenance trench where the structural weaknesses should have created a horizontal ring exploding outward. Instead the movie gave us a vertical ring exploding outward.
I hate most of Star Trek and basically considered Star Wars a religion as a human larva & pupa (see above docking bay reference). Being as how I was hatched after the last (real) Star Wars movie came out, my nipples exploded with joy at the prospect of seeing the originals on the big screen -- special edition or not. I was confused by the Han/Greedo exchange, found not a whole lot of added value in the other aspects but must have been the only person pleased with a more satisfactory Death Star explosion.
But a debunking astronomer
Yes, it's Phil "Bad Astronomer" Plait. Look, it's great you get people into astronomy via sci-fi religious flamebait stoking but ... I think you put it best in the last slide of one of your presentations.
My work here is dung.
Cue the guys with pointy latex ear extensions flipping off the guys with the neon glowing plastic swords.
Ring around the Death Star? Greedo shooting first? You mean, people actually watch the butchered editions of Star Wars?
I had no idea.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
When George Lucas added the 'ring around the Death Star' effect to his 1997 re-release of Star Wars episode IV: A New Hope, the revision was almost as hated as Greedo shooting first ...
No. Greedo shooting first is far more hated. Enhanced explosion effects and cgi starfighters are the sort of thing expected not a major character personality rewrite.
Adding ridiculous numbers of storm troopers to corridors is probably far more hated. The death star explosion is most likely pretty far down the list.
I care about the integrity of a work of art, cheesy pyro effects and all.
Digital remasterings that go beyond color correction and noise reduction suck. JMHO.
Acceptable? Getting rid of the matte outlines that were visible in VHS Star Wars IV. Not acceptable? Adding a CGI tauntaun.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Unless, of course, Praxis had a trench round its circumference too (visible or not). Strip-mining is a viable extraction method.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Neither, due to mismatched physics.
http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1759
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Both are entertainment. If you know anything about the relevant science they spout off, I hope you're not taking notes for future reference. I assume both put just enough real science in there to make it sound not _entirely_ bullshit but didn't bother going to ridiculous realistic detail to turn it into a class.
Again, these shows/movies were for entertainment. Picking apart the "science" that was written by.. writers.. might be funny in some blatant cases, but generally it's just a futile effort since not even they cared and they were the ones writing it into canon.
Frankly, my opinion is that those who "take offense" to the lack of credible science in these two series/movies are the ones who sincerely hope/hoped it will/would/(was?) become reality in the not so distant future (or long ago past for the Star Wars fans). OMG! The science isn't real! Does that mean I won't get to tool around the galaxy on the Enterprise-A/B/C/D/E?
VrrrrrWhooosh!
(That's the "sound" of a TIE fighter flying over your head, in space.)
Yeah, it's not like conjuring up some mystical phenomena that allows the characters to defy the laws of physics.
That could be because Star Wars is about the story, whereas Star Trek is about the characters.
Inventing Particle A which is fixed by Particle B may not be a good story in itself, but how Kirk, Spock, Bones et al deal with the situation is why I like ST over SW.
Darth Vader was a great baddie, but so was Khan.
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
Absolutely wrong, at least for connoisseurs. "Hard" science fiction, or SF for short, is very different from fantasy.
SF is a genre written with a "what if" question. Suppose *one* and only one thing that's impossible today were possible, what then? Examples of authors in this genre are Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein and Arthur Clarke. There's very little true SF in movies and TV, it's too cerebral for visual consumption. A magazine that specializes in SF is Analog, published since 1930, when it was named "Astounding".
Fantasy is a genre where anything goes. You could say that SF and, as a matter of fact, all fiction is a sub-genre of fantasy. Star Trek and Star Wars are fantasy but not true SF, they have too many impossible things to qualify as true Science Fiction.
No, the problem was that Episodes 1-3 didn't fill in the interesting gaps.
4: Here's this Luke kid. Light Side wins.
5: The Empire blows up the base, hacks off Luke's hand, and Han's fully-clothed and petrified. Dark Side wins.
6: Luke beats Palpatine. Dad's OK. Light Side wins.
Following the parallel, we should have had:
1: Here's the Anakin kid. Light Side wins.
2: Anakin hacks up a bunch of Sandpeople, kids, and finally flips out Natalie Portman, formerly naked, ends up petrified. Dark Side wins.
3: Here's this Darth Vader dude. He gets more and more evil with every passing month, slaughtering millions, razing planets, building Star Destroyers and Death Stars, and he's so freaking oppressive that the Rebellion starts. Some Bothans rip off the plans for the Death Star and haul ass outa there! Light Side wins.
Instead we got this incoherent jumble:
1: Here's the Anakin kid. Light Side wins.
2: Here's the Anakin dude. Whiny little bugger, ain't he?
3: Here's the Anakin dude. Still a whiny little bugger, ain't he? DO NOT WANT.
All the interesting gaps in the Star Wars storyline took place between Episode III and Episode IV. We all know Anakin's going to fall to the Dark Side, and there was no need to spend two movies doing it. The unexplored part of the movie timeline is what life is like immediately after he becomes Vader, but before the events of Episode IV.
Star Wars uses laser weapons. Any advanced space-race would never use laser weapons as they are readily re-mediated by the use of reflective materials.
Try reflecting a megawatt or even kilowatt laser from a vehicle coating sometime and let us know how it works out. The material needs to be able to survive re-entry and be easily repaired between flights.
- An entire planet existing as a city? This makes no sense from a material logistics point of view, at all. There is nothing like this in Star Trek.
It's been explored repeatedly in Science Fiction, most notably by Isaac Asimov in the Foundation series.
Need I mention the force? Microscopic life forms (midichlorians) giving magical powers to people? It is an interesting plot device, but rooted in any kind of science? No.
Midichlorians were the attempt to root it into some kind of science. I could invent all kinds of bullshit QM explanations for them but I'm not that much of a fanboy. I don't think we need to go into the whole mind-melding thing as a counterexample. Can't we just accept that both are fantasy, and move on?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What is more scientifically accurate? Superman or Spider-man? They are both so wide of the mark it is not even worth noting the difference.
vi +
On the other hand, if you look at the way the Millennium Falcon moves, especially the way it goes into hyperdrive, it is WAY more realistic.
You lost me when you used FTL drive as an example of something that's "more" realistic.....
The whole idea in Star Wars of a struggle between good and evil is far more realistic
Except it's not a struggle between good and evil. It's a struggle between two sets of elitists that basically espouse the same philosophy. You think the Jedi represent good? Yoda was perfectly content to allow Anakin's Mother to die and even encouraged the boy to let it happen. Windu tried to appoint himself Judge, Jury and Executioner. Qui-Gon wasn't permitted by the Jedi code to rescue two people from slavery and broke the rules in saving one of them.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Star Wars is adolescent nonsense, ... Star Trek can turn your brains to puree of bat guano, and the greatest science fiction series of all time is Doctor Who! And I'll take you all on, one-by-one or all in a bunch to back it up!
- Harlan Ellison
But of course I agree.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.