Is the galaxy round?

Sometimes I think the average SW book is knee-deep busy with X-wing spacefights at the expense of adding some interesting touches. I was thrilled to see masers in Swarm War. Finally, new tech after 15yrs book years of turbos and more ions. For me, I don't see the starmap as this forge of stars and black holes. I see it as something with underdeveloped potential.

What I liked about the Bantam books were the little tidbits you got in the background, offhand as they were. A Black Fleet book mentioned the place 120,000 lightyears across. Other books showed mysterious cosmic phenomena like Force-affected stars, the Maw dovin basals and Malestrom nebulae.

So why not make it more interesting? Say it's somehow round, and cause controversy and some excitement on- and offpage with readers. Or even rare places that affect your time sense; things slow whereas you feel time has flowed normally. Invisible planet. The imagination is limitless.

At what line is drawn between enhancing SW, or obediantly childbirthing the parental movie?

 

As far as I can tell (maps and such), the GFFA is nearly identical to the Milky Way in size and shape.

 

Indeed, but why make it such? Why not make it more . . . sssneaky?

 

A) It defies logic
B) It messes with the lines between Star Warsy and Star Trekky.

 

Star Wars without logic? How can that be? I mean, everything in the fantastical universe makes perfect sense.

 

Why would it be "Trekky", Matt? Not that I know much about that place, having only seen the lastest 3 movies, two of them on TV. Was Star Trek the first to incorporate strange phenomena? Scores of books do it every decade.

But that's the question: where does the line draw, between what is considered to be "SW", and what is "allowed."

 

I'm not quite understanding....are we asking to have the Star Wars galaxy supposed to be odd in appearance, looking like Darth Vader's helmet or something?

Spiral galaxy are probably the predominant galaxy type in the universe. The don't have so be boring, flat, with perfectly symetrical spiral arms and evenly placed stars....they can have all sorts of oddities. Supernovas, Black holes, Nebulae, "Sattelite" galaxies that are star clusters... The Spiral Galaxies can be flatter, rounder, spaceship saucer like, armless.... The best part is that they tend to have a strong gravitational center that makes it stable enough to be very large. An irregular galaxy tends to be smaller and far more boring - like the magellenic clouds that are close to our own Milky Way.

Carnage

 

"The capital ship exploded from the bombardment. Wedge prepared to swing his X-Wing around but couldn't help take notice and admire the beauty of a swirling orange and pink gas nebula..."

Like that?

 

I dunno, I guess it depends how it's handled. I hate the idea of Zonoma Sekot, for example, but whatever...the more time passes the more used to it I get. (Abel, please retcon D'Vouran to be an Imperial Experiment inspired by Zonama Sekot!) Time travel is a no-no, but flow-walking doesn't bug me too much. Interdimensional creatures is where it becomes Trek. Friggin' Waru.

It's hard to define what Star Wars is, but I think most fans would agree they can tell what it isn't, within reason. Then again, most of what you mentioned, besides a circular galaxy, can be created by gravitic anomolies...

 

Spirals, barred spirals(like the Milky Way), ellipticals, ring galaxies, there are all kinds. But there is more than enough variety of nature going on in any given galaxy.

Here's Some

 

Offtopic: The Milky Way is a barred spiral? I thought it was pretty much a textbook standard type spiral. It's been awhile.

Carnage

 

For over a year now yes, astronomers have good evidence for our home being a barred spiral.

Milky Way?s Central Structure Seen with Fresh Clarity

Right now the astronomy community believes that elliptical galaxies are the most common galaxy type. Spiral types are brighter, therefore easier to see, and therefore studied more.

Personally I'd like to see or read a space opera which features a ring galaxy like Hoag's Object.

[image=http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0209/hoag_hst_big.jpg]


[image=http://www.iaaa.org/pulsar/pictures/mayjun02/ring-galaxy-j-tuccr.jpg]

But spirals are common enough, and from a story point of view GL gives us something we are(or thought we were) familiar with as far as galaxies go.

 

Time travel:

[image=http://starwars.wikia.com/images/c/ce/Drc4cover.jpg]

 

"We have reached the edge of the galaxy!"

"Pay up. Its flat."

 

So if it's flat would ships just fall off in to the a super massive black hole?

 

Go fly a ship to the edge of the galaxy and find out.

 

Wow. Like I said, it's been awhile since I payed a lot of attention to astronomy. I had no idea that the MW was a barred spiral.
Good god. That Hoag's Object is crazy. The outside ring seems so far from the core to hold the galaxy together.

Ellipticals tend to contain a much smaller amount of Stars, no? Again, it's been awhile but isn't it a rough distinction between a small elliptical galay and a large star cluster? Are the Magellenic Clouds ellipticals or Star clusters?

And with that, I will stop being off topic. I do thank you for the inforation, VL.

Carnage

 

The Magellenic clouds are irregular galaxys. They have no recogniseable shape but they are considered too big to be just star clusters. It is theorised that they were broken off from the milky way at one stage, maybe at a close approach to the Andromeda galaxy, the Largest galaxy in our Region (the Local Group)

IIRC Ellipticals are meant to be older galaxies with high densities of stars and little gas or dust to create new stars.

 

"But the universe ends just after Dogdoo 7!"

"So there are an infinate number of parallel universes?"
"Nope. Just the two."
"Well, I'm sure that's enough."

 

Actually, elliptical galaxies are very much on topic. They are the round, or roughly round, galaxies in the Universe. They tend to have smaller numbers of stars in them but can be large ranging from thousands to billions as compared to the 100 billion stars of our Milky Way. Elliptical galaxies hold older stars and have very little "dust". This means no new stars form within them, or at least star formation is very, very rare. The stars in elliptical galaxies tend to be much closer together on avergae as compared to our galaxy. If we were on a planet in an elliptical galaxy it would be daytime all the time.
Close proximity of stars makes the chances of intelligent less likely, though not impossible. So having a round galaxy for the setting in Star Wars in not such a good thing.
The best chance for intelligent, spacefaring civilizations in an elliptical galaxy would be around the stars on the outskirts away from the crowded middle so as not to be disturbed by the passage of nearby stars. It would be easier for such a civilization to become a TypeIII civilization since the stars are much closer and easier to get to. Still, the stars are older, and older Population II stars are not as heavy in metal content which makes life, let alone intelligent life, difficult to get going as far as we know.

So, GL picked well when he went with a spiral galaxy far far away...

 

Actually, based on the numbers of the Kardashev scale, a single Star Destroyer is roughly a Type II civilization.

 

That's probably correct.

Dyson Spheres are used as an example(Swarm would be a better word rather than Sphere). It's based on our own Sun's output of 10^26 watts every second. But just because a civilization can build a Dyson Sphere does not mean they need to. The Empire uses hypermatter so why cover up the stars? Even if the old standby of antimatter were used you can still become a TypeII without enshrouding stars.

Overall, given the power usage of the many starships and the number of worlds(3 milllion I think) in the GFFA, the Empire/Republic was somewhere between a TypeII and TypeIII civilization. There is a good way to break it down.

Carl Sagan suggested using all the powers of ten in between. If our stars puts out 10^26 wats/sec, and we used it all to be a straight TypeII, then a civilization that uses 10 times our Sun's power output would be a Type II.1, 100 times the Sun's output would be TypeII.2 and so on. Each full division(T-I, T-II, T-III) is separated by a factor of 10 billion.

We ourselves, right now in reality, are about a Type .7. We need to increase our usage by a factor of 1,000 to become a full fledged Type I. The GFFA is just about a Type II.6 to Type II.8, using roughly 10^32 or 10^34 watts for the civilization as a whole.
This is energy usage on a continuous basis, obviously higher energies can be expended in shorter time spans. The Death Star can fire a blast that equals the entire output of the galaxy for a brief moment, many thousands of times higher than the energy usage of all the worlds of the GFFA much the same way that a 1 megaton bomb releases more energy than our whole world uses in any given moment.

 

Well, the supermassive black hole is only in the galaxy's center, not it's edge or anything.

IMO, they wasted a valuable opportunity to make the GFFA look more exotic then a bland direct clone of the Milky Way. Would've been interesting if it was warped, or an amalgamation of two colliding galaxies like The Mice.

 

I thought there were quite a lot of interesting technological advances just in the NJO, but maybe I'm not much of a forward-thinker.

The masers seemed a bit Trekkish at the time, but I'm warming up to the idea. Progress is nice, but one of things that makes SW truly great is a balance of sci-fi and fantasy/myth. If we ever lose that feel, the GFFA descends into some wormhole-infested borgfest. And, to paraphrase Graham Chapman's King Arthur, that would make me sad.

As for geographical weirdness, we have all those unexplored areas where any number of messed-up things could be sitting. And we have the Maw. What's cooler than the Maw?

 

Because 1) the movies show its a spiral arm galaxy and 2) All galaxies are basically "pancake
shaped. You don't get perfectly spherical rotating objects. Even the earth is slighty oblate after 5 billion years.