ST Starkiller Base - Function and Purpose?

To you it was a great movie. To reality, causality and coherent storytelling are a thing.

It was wrong. You can keep telling people that they are the ones with the problem, but they're not. The film is flawed, greatly.

 

Don't come in here trying to claim you have a monopoly on what is great storytelling. These are all just your opinions.

Don't suggest otherwise.

 

We only saw the event from one vantage point (Maz's planet)...and who's to say that this world isn't as close to the Hosnian system (aka the Coruscant lookalike) as Earth is to Jupiter? Or at least Neptune? (Oh okay... The star Alpha Centauri)


The movie would have to be much, much longer if Maz and Co. didn't see the explosion instantly due to the speed light travels. This argument is about scientific merits.

 

No, we see the sequence from several perspectives, jumping around all over the galaxy. And of course it is not about scientific merits. Yet again, for the fiftieth time, it is about the terribly confused geography that Abrams conjures up for a few seconds of drama, despite all the head-scratching it causes in people who don't just absorb pretty explosions as if it's cinema. It really is like seeing Hiroshima from Manhattan - nobody buys it but the desperate and the hard of thinking.

I actually enjoyed the film, I thought it was great fun, but this sequence is boneheaded.

 

-We see the sequence from Starkiller (obviously)

-From the bridge of Kylo's Star Destroyer (which is orbiting Starkiller Base)

-From Finn's perspective (he's still on Maz's planet)

-From the Hosnian planet itself

-From Maz and Co.'s perspective (on Maz's planet)

There are no other locales in the galaxy that was shown witnessing this event...at least in the version of TFA that I saw (several times already).

I hope you enjoyed the film enough to watch it one more time to describe this scene accurately.

 

Break out the Star Wars galaxy map. Not sure how they saw it on Takodana at Maz's, but if they did then its likely the rest of the galaxy did as well.

 

I can't stand the people that are defending the implausible StarKiller scenes, such as Finn witnessing the destruction of the Hosnian system, on the basis of, "It's okay, Star Wars doesn't have to believable. You just have to suspend your belief"

Yes, Star Wars doesn't have to be 100% believable, but it DOES have to be plausible. In the first 6 movies, everything (apart from the space slug in ESB) can be explained plausibly in a pseudo-scientific way. Well, apart from sound in space, but that doesn't matter because it is irrelevant to the plot. Some of the things that were not 100% believable such as Han Solo flying the Millennium Falcon with no hyperdrive to a different solar system (Bespin) were at least somewhat plausible because Bespin and Hoth were next to each other. And it was an unavoidable plot point, because the Falcon HAD to have no hyperdrive for the story to function.It was a key part of the story, so it can be excused.

What angers me about the implausible StarKiller Base scenes, is that they didn't need to be implausible. All they needed was a slight change of dialogue or some other minor changes and they become somewhat believable, even if in a pseudo-scientific way. But because of the laziness of JJ Abrams and his seeming inability to communicate with the Story Group, we are left with stupid implausibilities that could so easily have been changed.

For example:

1. Finn says, "It sucks the power of the Sun until it is gone", implying that the Sun will disappear. This is stupid, as all life on StarKiller Base will die without a Sun.
To fix this implausibility: Simply have Finn say, "The weapon can charge from the Sun thousands of times without any noticeable impact on the Sun or the planet. This gives it an almost unlimited power source."

2.Poe Says, "When the Sun stops shining the weapon will be ready to fire. As long as the Sun is shining we still have hope"
To fix this implausibility: Simply have Poe say something else. Anything else. Something that isn't implausible.

3. Finn witnesses the destruction of the Hosnian System from Takodana. According the official map in the visual dictionary, the two systems are thousands of light years away.
To fix this implausibility: Simply have no one on Takodana witness it. Instead, have General Organa state in a sorrowful tone, "I have received some sad news. The Hosnian system, capital of the Republic, has been destroyed."

4. We see the hyperspace capable power beam shoot off. But it's not travelling through hyperspace, because we can witness it and see the speed it is travelling at.
To fix this implausibility: Show the beam accumulating in power near the big hole in the planet, then shooting off into hyperspace the same way we see ships shoot off into hyperspace.

5. We see the Sun and the planet too close to each other in one shot when the sun is being "sucked" into the hole in the planet. If our own Sun was the size of a basketball, the Earth would be a marble 86 feet away. A basketball sized Sun in TFA (if watching on a normal TV) was one foot away from the planet in that scene. Just stupidly unnecessary,
To fix this implausibility. Show the camera shot, not with Sun and planet side by side, but with the planet in the foreground and the Sun in the background, with the camera panning along past the planet showing the trail of energy from the Sun going into the planet. This would be a better looking shot anyway.

Like this post if you think Dan2626 should become director of "fixing up implausibilities in The Force Awakens" within Lucasfilm.

 

You are immediately disqualified.

 

Star Wars copying from ID4 instead of vice versa? Roland Emmerich would be proud!

 

Without picking sides here, some questionable things have been raised, and now that I've seen the movie three times, I question some things too:

First off, I was a big fan of Starkiller Base and thought it shouldn't have been written off so quickly and easily. It was used one time and then the Resistance met for a two minute discussion and then boom, it was destroyed.

But for real...what's the deal with the weapon draining the entire sun in order to charge up? If that's the case, there wouldn't be any light or warmth to keep anyone alive on the planet anymore. How would General Hux fire the weapon if the sun was gone and no form of life had any way of living on that base? Sorry if I'm missing something here...I'm sure there is a lot I do not know so someone help me out if possible.

 

Keep it pithy. I loled at that.

 

See point numbers 1 and 2 that I made a couple of posts back.

The implausibilities you correctly mention could have so easily been fixed with a couple of minor dialogue changes.

So frustrating that they stuffed up so badly.

 

The general audience doesn't care about planet distances.

 

Going with Alan Dean Foster. I just calculated that there is not enough dark energy in the spherical orbit delineated by the Kuiper Belt orbit (50 AU), but there is within the Oort Cloud (100,000 AU), in order to inject the necessary gravitational binding energy of the 5 presumably earth-mass planets of the Hosnian system. How one captures or transports this thinly spread dark energy over distances greater than a lightyear, to collect it at a central point in the Starkiller base, and do that quickly...?

But the dark energy does exist presumably in a earth-size G2 type solar system. And a solar type star generates enough energy in something like 12 days to match the gravitational binding energy of an earth size planet. So, at least in ADF, they're using one type of energy to gather another type of energy, and I have to wonder if this is pushed to its logical conclusion that only dark energy can be sent through hyperspace and something like the DSI beam cannot.

A highly efficient (near 100%) process for spending solar thermal and luminous energy to gather and process dark energy would then be close to a 1:1 ratio to that 12 days solar production, if you had a way to transport dark energy rapidly / instantaneously.

ADF is having his cake and pie and ice cream and eating it too by dropping dark energy then quintessense then phantom energy then big rip. I'd guess he's postulating that the collateral effect is that the space local to Hosnia system experiences fast progression of the natural aging of space time / accelerated cosmology on a local scale.

 

Do we know if the Star killer then releases some of the energy back out after the use of the sun? Could that be a possibility that we're just not shown in the movie? Also do we know if it's not a "Big Gun for Show" purposes to scare people into submission. Given that the FO seems to be based around the idea of the Nazi's of WWII in a lot of ways, could this weapon be something that's just for show. We blow up one system then just have the threat around for now? I would think that even the FO would realize some of the problems with this weapon.

 

I don't think all life on an planet will perish immediately the moment there is no sun. It should cause the planetary system movements to go crazy due to sudden change in gravitational interactions though.

 

Eh, me personally I just figure if they have the tech to harvest and use the energy of the sun, all the other questions I have can be covered by "they have tech for that."

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Everyone who saw that film clearly understood that Takodana is "somewhere near" Hosnian. Not everyone understands distances correctly, so there are plenty of people who would have thought it's supposed to be "a couple of systems over", but no one saw that sequence and thought, "ah, Takodana is clearly on the other side of the galaxy from Hosnian". No one, and that is abundantly clear.

I understand that not everyone agrees that fantasy films like SW shouldn't insult the intelligence of the audience by at least keeping things internally consistent, but that scene is a catastrophic failure on a filmmaking level alone, as it completely disorients the audience and muddles up the geography of where the characters are in relation to each other.


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If a giant worm was able to survive in an asteroid in the vacuum of space, I'm sure First Order people (who BTW don't live on the planet surface) would be fine without a sun. They have air conditioning and I'm sure they'd be able to import or create their own food/oxygen.

PS

And yes, I'm aware of gravity changes that would happen with such a massive object suddenly disappearing, but if people are ignoring light speed travel (and the fact it would still take years to reach a neighboring star system even with those speeds), they can ignore this.

 

I think the implication is that the disbanding of the Imperial Senate destruction of Alderaan enraged everybody in the Galaxy, and once the first Death Star was destroyed Palpatine couldn't keep the Galaxy on line through raw fear, so rebellions started to pop up everywhere. In ROTJ those many rebellious groups gathered together against the Empire.

 

Tardigrades can survive in the vacuum of space.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperspace_(science_fiction)

You are confusing "far-fetched sci-fi idea" with "lazy and intelligence-insulting storytelling". The point is that the screenwriters didn't bother to mention that the Base would need to be evacuated after the sun stopped shining, they just ignored it -- but they kept the "as long as the sun shines, we got a chance" line....

 

Han, Chewie, Rey, Finn and Maz could have heard emergency special reports detailing how the main worlds of the New Republic have been destroyed, the Galaxy is in disarray and the First Order forces are advancing "to restore order". I watched the fall of the Twin Towers in real time despite being half a world away; why can't the people of the Galaxy learn about the destruction of Hosnian Prime the same way?

 

What was it feeding on in that asteroid? Also, you are comparing microscopic organisms which can possibly survive vacuum by hibernating and not doing anything, to a giant worm actually living in an asteroid in the vacuum of space. Clearly lazy and intelligence-insulting story telling.
Why do they keep calling it light speed in the movies? It's funny that suddenly some people are bothered with science in Star Wars and yet they've ignored light sabers, FORCE, light speed travelling through wormholes (lol) for decades...

 

Impossible and implausible are not the same thing, I hope we can agree on that. It's implausible that telekinesis is real, that a blade of plasma can have a controlled length, that a large organism would survive in outer space for long (that space slug was supposed to be hibernating btw), etc etc. It has to be clothed with an air of plausibility to be served to the audience. SK Base was not. As it was presented, it went far beyond the realms of plausibility, and that mostly has to do with how the director chose his shots etc. It could have been presented plausibly, but I felt the movie was just saying, "lol its teh starwarz its dumb eat it up nerds".

 

This type of thing happens all the time in sci-fi. In Star Trek, Spock was dropped off on a planet to watch Vulcan be destroyed. J.J. Abrams isn't the only one, but that is the one that pops immediately to mind.