A mote in God’s eye summarizes how the Imperium in the novel basically ‘owned’ bubbles in space and not so much the space between the stars they did claim to occupy. It’s funny too because in Stellaris when you setup outposts around a star you get the space between which is weird to me. I still like how in the 1.0 version it was just bubbles that would eventually connect over time but I think bubble territories or equivalent systems would be a better presentation of actual space occupancy.
Pedantry aside, it was an offhand comment to illustrate that Star Wars is necessarily going to reflect American biases, so if we’re diegetically talking about why the fascist Star Wars baddies do what they do the American view of fascism matters more than how they behave in the real world. (This is not my area of expertise, but it seems uncontroversial that the Nazis did confiscate Jews’ weapons, e.g. Disarmament of the German Jews - Wikipedia)
“Star Wars is a modern American myth” is so commonplace an expression as to be cliché; the nitpicking seems unnecessary. https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/14/myth-star-wars-force-awakens-heroic-legends
And Lucas read Campbell after making Star Wars, not before.
It was law enforcement Donaldson was interested in, not the legal definition. Put a activity sensors on one edge of a sensitive territory that was a few light year across, and it would be a years before the sensor could actually report a crime. Response times for law enforcement would rate in decades unless you set up a pony express system of vessels or probes, which supposedly could be shot down. No matter how much manpower you have 3d territories quickly become huge.
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I’d agree of course but how you draw that line is personal. For me making some hand wavey woo about the laws of physics is fine. How else are you going to get people to zip around stars? For me ignoring the structural racism in the archetypes you are perpetuating is very much not worth a bit of light entertainment.
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Unless highlighting the racism is the point of the story, yes.
Just for reference, though, I was talking specifically about the notion that spaceships would have to have a fuel that is more energetic than what we have now.
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And I was talking about the wild west pew pew guns for our space cowboys
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Star Wars was explicitly a critique of the Vietnam War, with Lucas casting the Empire as an analogue of the US. He spoke of this many times in interviews. I won’t get in the way of your sanctimony, but a little research wouldn’t go amiss.
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… [ reading on ] …
Nope, doesn’t seem to be the case… 
Offhand comments or not aside, Star Wars ain’t no myth, and keeping weapons of war out of the hands of basically everyone is not a fascist idea, in general. Repeating this is in order, maybe even the first order.
Don’t give me weapons of war, e.g.
I would probably use them when I am in the mood.
I might nuke a comment or even a topic sometimes.
So, is there already a consensus in this topic why there would be all those weapons around on every other ship in SciFi? Still seems like a waste of space, energy and quite probably lifes.
OTH,
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The Firefly Verse is insanely big considering that they don’t seem to have an FTL drive.
First of a few videos:
Technology implies belligerence
-Peter Watts, Blindsight
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War is the father of all things, kind of? Heard that somewhere before…
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2nd amendment in space?
“The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a proton cannon is a good guy with 10 proton cannons.”
Divert auxiliary power to front deflectors!
I always thought that Firefly took place in a terraformed and colonized version of our solar system at a point far enough in the future that colony names had superceded the original planetary names and that most of the “planets” on the show were actually moons.
But I have also never bothered to confirm this, so that is probably just head canon
Why are so many civilians armed with head canons in sci-fi fandoms? 
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Because Jesus put it in a secret amendment to the constitution! Freedumb!!!
Careerism. Rich and boundless careerism.
I thought I remembered reading that the entire show took place in a single solar system (not ours). It has many planets and large moons, but still just one system, thus the lack of FTL not being a showstopper.
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I knew it was just one system, but figured that without FTL it had to be ours, And that Earth that was was in the system but uninhabitable. But like I said, never bothered to check
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