Fear The Power Creep

[cyberpaladin85]

Quadrillions of battle droids, ships that consume tons of fuel in seconds to power their weapons, photon topedos that (probably) can blow up planets, quadrillions of borg in (I think) a single galaxy; this is why I lose interest in otherwise cool stuff. Makes me want to wish for a total restart of the Sci-Fi genre, followed by draconian rules of what can and cannot be done in said genre.

Roddenberry (spelling?) must be turning... spinning in his grave; Lucas will be as well when his time is up, of that I am sure. I hope there's a special place in heck (heck, not hell, as these are relatively minor wrong doings in the grand sceme of things) for the people who mutilate perfectly good and awesome sci-fi settings with utter nonsense that goes against the spirit of said settings.



(If this is too antagonistic, I can remove it if you guys would like).

[Marcus Starkiller]

Actually, I think this would go better in your blog area.

[cyberpaladin85]

Good point. I just moved it there... er, here... er, whatever.

[Marcus Starkiller]

I have to agree with you. But look at the battledroids, the reason there are so many is because they are mass-produced due to their somewhat fragile state and how many are destroyed in battle.

[cyberpaladin85]

Well, yeah, but if there were that many battle droids, it wouldn't matter how flimsy and cheap they were, with more droids than people in the galaxy, the Seperatists should have one easily, especially since, to my knowledge, there were only a few million clones.

[Marcus Starkiller]

Also take Jedi into account, plus normal accidents, sabotage, and so one. Plus, battledroids aren't to smart.

[Steedo]

Which raises the question why they aren't fielding fewer, more intelligent, more durable droids like the super battle droids who seem not so dumb. When transporting over long distances the biggest issues are mass and volume.


When you consider the size of a Super Star Destroyer or Death Star, a ton of fuel isn't really that much. Actually, it makes a lot of sense as to why those ships have to be so very big. I mean the Death Star is the size of a moon! If it doesn't have several floors dedicated to hydroponics, fuel processing, materials fabrication, and all that type of stuff there is no way it could sustain itself and it would be incredibly expensive to supply it externally with everything it needs to operate.

20/21st century earth has a pawful of Billon people on it. Coruscant, from what I understand has a population in the trillians... So a Quadrillian is the population of 1000 Corruscants or a million 20/21st Century Earths... Not entirely unreasonable for the entire Borg collective which spills over the Delta and Gamma Quadrants, possibly into the Beta and Alpha Quadrants as well...

Now that many battledroids does seem excessive. You can store on the order of 100 battledroids folded up into a 10 cubic meter box(just over 3 m on each side). You need 10 trillion such boxes. That's a stack of boxes 3 kilometers high, 3 kilometers wide and 30 Km deep, just to store the droids themselves.

Anyway a few Photon Torps isn't anywhere near enough to blow up a planet... Flatten an undefended city with a photorp maybe. But yeah, I just watched an epidode of DS9 where Sisco commits an atrocity by firing two quantum torpedoes each strapped with some biological weapon at planet's surface to render it uninhabitable to hyoomins for the next 50 years. They didn't do really any noticable damage to the planets surface. Even if they were detonated a few hundred meters above the surface to spread the toxins faster, if they had that kind of power they still would have left vast scorchmarks on the plenet.

The worst part of the episode was that they the people had an hour warning, but started to evacuate only *after* the bombs hit(They of course thought Sisco was bluffing) and they still were able to get safely off into space in minutes. Riiiiight. How long did it take to evacuate after huricane Katrina? Prepping a colony for evactuation in 1 hour is ludacris,having them evacuate in minutes is whole absurd...

So yeah, I'm with you... Why can't writers pull their heads out of their rumps and stop with the shortcuts thinking we don't notice?

[cyberpaladin85]

Actually, in regards to Star Trek, I was referring to Voyager's Trans-Phasic Photon Torpedos. IF (and that a big IF), Star Trek was set in a setting with 25,000+ years to develop high tech, that would be somewhat believable; instead, it's more like a mere 250 years of high tech.

Yes, I know Voyager is set about 400+ years into the future, not 250; I was merely making a point that the Star Wars setting has had advanced tech for about 25,000 years, but the Star Trek setting has 1/100th of that amount of time, yet is seems more advanced.

[Marcus Starkiller]

This is actually why I like babylon 5, no overpowered humans or aliens (except for the First Ones). I mean look, the humans still need rotating areas on their ships to make gravity.