According to some canon sources, Ewoks are as strong, or stronger than Chimps. That’s a pretty huge mechanical advantage over wimpy human soldiers. It’s not like they’re lobbing a pebble. They’re throwing goddamn major league fastballs with kilogram mass rocks. That’ll do some damage if you take one to the head no matter how shiny your squeaky plastic armor is.
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Waves arms emphatically
MEEEE! Cut me up doc, if you’ve got replacements, then I’ve got dogfood to remove.
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Oh my GOD PEOPLE! SHUT UP about your Star Wars minutiae!
This kid just got a NEW ARM and all you can talk about is what storm trooper missed what in what scene?
If I were George Lucas I’d hate you guys too.
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On the contrary, stormtroopers are give-or-take 70% liquid. (50% if we count the armor too.)
Anybody with a projectile weapon or a squish-style trap knows this already, or soon will.
Edit: Anybody with an unattended pit-style trap in a desert environment knows too.
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That’s a hilariously desperate retcon, especially given what we saw on screen in RotJ - a bunch of little people awkwardly stumbling around in furry costumes, barely able to move; what appeared, at best, to be lightly-lobbed rocks bouncing off armor; and some tree-trunks, swinging under their own gravity, smashing through walking tanks. (And if imperial armor can’t withstand the equivalent of a bullet, it’s pretty useless - which admittedly it did completely seem to be in the trilogy. All the imperial equipment seemed to be made out of cardboard, for all the structural strength it had.) And of course chimps wouldn’t be very strong if they had little stubby arms.
I’ll stick with my ghost of Obi Wan making spooky “Whooo!” noises explanation, thank you. It somehow manages to be less silly.
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I think you may be OT.
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Imperial Stormtroopers - from the people that brought you flying motorbikes that travel at 500kph (and have no kind of restraint or harness) as an appropriate method of transport through dense forests and walking armoured transports hitherto invulnerable to blasters that suddenly become extremely vulnerable once they fall over.
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Dude, did you give the OT-dragon a PTO day, or what?
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…which now spawned a kind of remote-controlled quadcopters’ races (and a style of quads that is easy to rebuild/repair after the inevitable and frequent crashes, the rebuilds becoming part of the sports…
That may be an allegory to tanks; sloped front armor making it pretty much invulnerable from the front side, and weak armor on the top of the turrets; check the thickness of the “lids”. Tanks have their weaknesses (if you encounter one in the field, lay low until it exposes its side to you, and THEN fire the missile, if nothing else you can score at least a mobility kill; if it is in urban environment, attack from above from a tall building, they hate it).
I am always watching. And never full.
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Oh gods, I just realized - the Empire is nothing but a suicide-cult. Armor that provides no protection from any threats but impedes the wearer? Military vehicles bizarrely susceptible to weak attacks? Suicidally-dangerous-to-pilot vehicles? Death-trap Death Stars? They want to die, but apparently only at another’s hands.
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Ok, ok, let’s talk about how 3D printing is turning children into fantasy fascist stormtroopers, then. That they’re comically incompetent fantasy space fascists makes them a little more palatable, really.
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Oh yeah, and that philosophy goes all the way up to the highest levels. It’s economically suicidal. Can you imagine how must it cost to build those death-trap Death Stars? I assume it’s a lot, since Tarkin apparently had the rough-draft plans in his pocket at the end of Revenge of the Sith, fully twenty years before Motti warns his comrades “until this battle station is fully operational, we are vulnerable.” And three and a half years later, there’s a second one a bit more than half-built, which Vader motivates to operational status in mere weeks (days?) simply by threatening a visit from the CEO.
A stormtrooper’s training must be a non-trivial investment of time and resources if they’re supposed to be such precise killing machines (and a better fighting force than the Trade Federations’ Incompetencybots), but that white plastic “armor” that offers no apparent protection whatsoever from anything ranging from blaster bolts to Wookiee fists to sticks and stones flung by teddy bears… how was that anything but a low-bidder boondoggle dating all the way back to the Clone Wars?
The collapse of the Empire must have wrought economic ruin on the galaxy. Genuinely heroic rebels would have surgically eliminated Vader and Palpatine (yay ROTJ Luke!) without demolishing those highly valuable and cripplingly expensive Death Stars (boo Lando and ANH Luke!).
They could have turned those Death Stars into libraries or galaxy-hopping childcare facilities.
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You can do wonders in short time when you have to. See some WW2-era battleship repairs. Sometimes things that would take weeks were done in 48 hours or so. And that was without a spook in a plastic burqa breathing instructions down your neck and force-choking your foreman.
Getting the beam cannon or whatever the parabolic-reflector thing is online in few weeks sounds like small potatoes in comparison.
That explains a lot.
I see a sequel, Star Civil Wars. Each system for its own, against all the other systems.
Not a good idea, the latter. Imagine toddlers in charge of the planet-destroying beam. “You stepped on my mudcakes. Zzzap!, here goes your homeworld!”
On the other hand, a library with such a weapon would be a great incentive to return the books in time…
I’m imagining some badass librarian uttering the line:
“Say ‘that book needs to be banned’ again. I dare you, I double dare you, muthafucker!”
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If it were fully operational but only half built, what was the point of the other half?
Plus it’s always pissed me off the way they appear to have just worked on bits at random.
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The bit in question is there as an optical guidance to get the critical floors straight. Sometimes you just need an equivalent of the theodolite rod, and a flimsy-ish and almost invisible lightweight truss holder will do the job.
Logistics facilities, stores for food, fuel and weapons, crew quarters and long-term living amenities for when the station is fully manned (see the existing aircraft carriers for a scaled-down taste of such), landing bays for resupply spacecraft, “dry docks” for star destroyers, antenna arrays for C4I role and for the flagship duties… Such a big traveling base is a pretty flexible multi-mission craft, in addition to its primarily psychological planet-destroyer capabilities.
Edit: And don’t forget the infrastructure so often neglected in science fiction spacecraft: the toilets. Imagine having to hold it for all the mission! (Would explain the face of commander Tarkin, though, and the permanent bad temper of Darth Vader.)
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Awesome petting zoo
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Once all the Imperial Defense Department fluff, the superfluous throne rooms, the crew quarters, galleys, and recreational scorpion pits are excised, you end up with the Darksaber. Just the planet-destroying laser encased in a protective sheath, a guidance/propulsion system, and presumably a gunner’s seat.
Meh. No Sun Crusher, that.
