ST Starkiller Base Discussion Thread

He probably call it fan nick picking.

 

The more time I spend on Starkiller Base in Battlefront II, the more I am starting to realize that Starkiller Base is not a "better" Death Star. It's a much cruder method of creating a superweapon by carving out a planet to house it. Carving out your own shell from something as opposed to having it built from scratch...there's a huge difference in sophistication. Even the base itself on the inside is mostly cave walls.

Sure, it's bigger. Bigger doesn't always mean better. The Starkiller can't produce its own weapon energy like the Death Star can. It has to steal energy from another source like a parasite. That, IMO, automatically disqualifies it from being Death Star levels of useful.

 

Perhaps they would've preferred a Death Star but had to resort to other methods because they couldn't get their hands on enough kyber, or lacked the resources to refine it.

The First Order seems more medieval/fantasy-like than the Empire. They carve out a planet to build a fortress, they steal the suns energy for use against their enemies, one of their leaders wields a sword with a crossguard...
And then there's the whole lady of the lake thing with Maz Kanata, whose castle is destroyed by the forces of Kylo Ren, who joins the battle in his shuttle like a dragon - or perhaps like the Nazgûl on their fell beasts...

 

SKB was the most successful Death Star-like object in the Star Wars saga. They used it only once, but it destroyed the New Republic capital and most of the Republic's fleet.

I don't get why some fans are so mad about a "new Death Star". SKB is very secondary to the plot, is almost like just another location.

 

wut

 

I was curious after reading the Wookiepedia article on Starkiller Base, and noticed something. Starkiller base has a diameter of 660 km, far smaller than a planet that generates a decent gravity well normally is. Since it has a native ecosystem with trees and flora, this means the planet had to be unusually dense - around 20x the density of Earth, if you calculate it out and around 5x denser then the densest known element.

What the hell was this thing even made of before the First Order turned it into a superweapon?

 

^^^

Cheese. Parmesan.

 

Secondary to the plot? It is the main source of tension and suspense in the third act.

That's a pretty awesome comparison actually. And don't forget the "Knights" of Ren. Perhaps they sit at a round table? Too much???

 

SKB is secondary because the focus is much more on the characters rather than on SKB itself.

Comparable to how the focus on Return of the Jedi was different from A New Hope.
Both had Death Stars being the main weapon that must be destroyed, but the focus on RotJ was much more on Vader/Luke/Sidious rather than on Lando and Akbar.

 

I'd kinda like that!

 

Just came in to my mind when I re-watched TFA (to ready myself for the Last Jedi)- where are Starkiller-base forest-scenes filmed on? Interior scenes are studio shots in England for sure and I know many outside shots were from Iceland, but as far as I know Iceland has no forests at all really. Duel is filmed on some forested location or is it all just studio then? I didn't find anywhere more exact details about the scene just mention about Iceland.

 

Ok interesting. I thought so, but it looks pretty convincing at times so I thought it could have also been partially real-life location. Thanks for the info.

 

It's magical for that very reason, IMHO.

 

I'd say SKB is less important to the plot than DS1 in ANH but significantly more important to the plot than DS2 in RoTJ. In Jedi, DS2 is slowly picking off the Rebel fleet. SKB is about to actually blow the entire Resistance to space dust.

 

So I came across this a second time just today (https://what-if.xkcd.com/13/).

I knew that scene with Hux and all those stormtoopers standing around alive and not on fire seemed implausible.

 

why are people applying real life science to the GFFA? Why?

 

Cause we're bored.

 

Ironically to my post from 4 years ago, it seems that real life science, or at least a theory, dark energy, is the power source of SKB, not kyber crystals. This may or may not be new lore, i'm sure its from a reference book or something I never read, but here's a new article on SW.com about it.

https://www.starwars.com/news/star-wars-inside-intel-starkiller-base

 

The lore's from the Alan Dean Foster novelization of TFA.

 

While I do have mixed feelings on Starkiller Base, I do at least admit that the idea is genuinely terrifying (Starkiller Base can fire across the galaxy unlike the Death Star) and I like how they revealed Starkiller Base was Illum (which also makes Starkiller Base more plausible since it means that the earliest work on Starkiller Base was done by the Empire before the First Order).

 

Because it raises many questions how did the First Order build it in the first place? That and recycled Death Stars were already mocked by fans when Legends were around. Starkiller Base should really not exist in the first place. If you want a Death Star, go for a Death Star Destroyer since there is precedent of making powerful weapons smaller.

 

I mean a better question is why the hell the entire Republic fleet is clustered around the capital. There's ways you could explain this and have it work - making the Republic not look stupid in the process*, but TFA doesn't bother, it just expects the audience to go along with this and you're meant to do all this rationalising for it yourself. It's too much to ask so of course the Republic being wiped out in TFA was met with disbelief and frustration.

*Basically, you could have it as the Republic has gotten wind of the First Order threat and has massed its entire force at the capital in the belief that the FO will launch a massive Coruscant style assault on it. But this is a trap designed by the First Order, and they just use SKB instead.