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  1. In Memory of LAJ_FETT: Please share your remembrances and condolences HERE

CT What's Up In Star Wars

Discussion in 'Classic Trilogy' started by Hernalt, Aug 19, 2016.

  1. Hernalt

    Hernalt Force Ghost star 4

    Registered:
    Jun 29, 2000
    The idea here is to corral all evidence for and against the existence of a preferred vertical direction in Star Wars. This is in Classic Trilogy because the first movie set the stage.

    An example of evidence that is claimed to contradict an up or down in GFFA is the Millennium Falcon's top and bottom gunnery positions. Another example is that ROTJ DSII, during live action scenes, appears to be oriented towards the forest moon of Endor. Without doubt, other examples of evidence of this kind exist in OT, PT and ST, and maybe from TCW or Rebels.

    The question is muddled by the availability of anti-gravity. When on planets, the preferred vertical direction is of course that planet's gravity. Repulsorlifts acting directly against that occur in Landspeeders, Bespin's carbonite pallet jacks, Imperial Speeder bikes, every ship that ever had to depart or arrive at a planetary surface, probe droids, etc. Zero confusion what is happening, there.

    Also muddling the question is the availability of artificial gravity. The hangar bays in each DS are aligned with their equatorial plane, with a hemisphere overhead of presumably equal gravitational mass to that below, and yet the characters 'fall' in a single direction which we call the 'floor'. The Rebel fighters attack DSI in an analogue of the WWII Dam Busters, and fighters are "shot down" in the literal 'down' sense, to the surface. The proton torpedos go 'down' a target shaft. The DSII Throne room, meanwhile, exists high above the DSII surface, like a tower over a planetary surface, and DV throws the Emperor 'down' a shaft that has a different 'down' than the hangar bays.

    An example of evidence to support a claim that a physics cannot exist in any fashion in SW is the ESB space slug, where the actors are on a 1-g stage representing the interior of an asteroid that is most decidedly not of planetary mass. It bears directly on this question because there is no available explanation of artificial gravity.

    I'd love to see a pile of evidence that contradicts that Star Wars has a preferred vertical direction. I'll later start covering evidence that can be used to argue that such an 'up' and 'down' exist.
     
  2. Iron_lord

    Iron_lord Chosen One star 10

    Registered:
    Sep 2, 2012
    It looks to me like it's the south pole of the DS2 that's always pointed at the planetary surface.


    Actually, the DS2's throne room is usually portrayed as being at the north pole of the DS2. Which would mean that its direction of gravity would be parallel to that of the equatorial hangars:

    (so, the Emperor falling, and people falling from the top of an equatorial hangar to the floor of it : would fall in parallel lines)


    And it would be the only place on the "surface city sprawl" with that coinciding orientation.
    That one is something of a pain - simplest solution might be a

    "what we see is an oversimplification of what was "really" there, due to budget considerations"

    theory. So - what "really" happened was they were bouncing around in the low gravity, wearing true spacesuits rather than just masks.
     
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  3. Sarge

    Sarge Chosen One star 10

    Registered:
    Oct 4, 1998
    In my headcanon, the Falcon was emitting a field that maintained artificial gravity outside itself, as well as a low pressure atmosphere: not enough to breathe well, but enough pressure to not need a spacesuit.
     
  4. MOC Vober Dand

    MOC Vober Dand Manager Emeritus star 5 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Jan 6, 2004
    If I was clever enough I would certainly contribute something to this thread.

    Ok, bye...
     
  5. Hernalt

    Hernalt Force Ghost star 4

    Registered:
    Jun 29, 2000
    Iron_lord
    I agree that the DSII south pole always points to the Endor surface. How the local DSII orientation relates to a preferred global orientation is an interesting question. There is no denying that art comes into the interpretation.

    Right now I am trying to build a deeper foundation for anything I say by learning more about various aspect ratios, film formats and their history, and the human eyes’ natural angular field of vision, and how these relate to give us the widescreen theatrical frame that guides the artist in their creation of a (putative, hypothetical) ‘up’ or ‘down’. The central argument hinges on the last frames of ESB.

    Thank you for the news on the DSII throne room. I assume that fact is delivered in ancillary media. It answers a significant orientation question I had while doing analysis of the fleet battle.

    Your method for how to interpret the space slug scene requires a reluctant wall breaking. I've had to do that for ESB in the admittedly cheesy and occupant-smashing Falcon spins.

    Sarge
    That is one I have not heard before. I have heard that all craft have a variety of shield projection capabilities, and that the EU had a (probably too wide) range of distances from the hull where the shield still had effect.

    Your interpretation of the projection of anti-gravity I’m pretty sure falls within the large range of distances from the EU, and so is probably in concept given a broad precedent. IIRC EU had the MF shields projecting to some additional MF diameter, much farther than the ‘floor’ of a space slug.

    One thing that leaps to mind is that the problem people see with the gunnery tunnels and the gunnery stations having a different ‘down’ can be interpreted as localized artificial gravity.

    Pushing that farther, in the way many potentially dangerous machines have automatic failsafes, physical and electronic interlocks (anathema in any action movie), the gunnery stations may have a deactivated artificial gravity field when not in use. That would include when the Falcon is in the space slug. When in combat, the act of crossing that threshold from ladder to gunnery station activates that station’s artificial gravity so that the seat corresponds to ‘down’. And both ladders have the same 'down' as the Falcon's main deck, so that should not be confusing.

    (A simple google of ‘bomber belly guns’, in the interest of seeing how it handles different orientations, makes me queasy *and assures me that I am far from knowing a fraction of what really went into that thing we cavilerly call the TIE fighter.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_turret)

    MOC Yak Face
    Are there specific instances in SW of this question that you found provocative?
     
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  6. Sarge

    Sarge Chosen One star 10

    Registered:
    Oct 4, 1998
    Old joke about a B-17 crew: the nose gunner got hit on the nose, the waist gunner got hit in the waist, the tailgunner was hit in his tail, then the ball turret gunner bailed out.
     
  7. Hernalt

    Hernalt Force Ghost star 4

    Registered:
    Jun 29, 2000
    That was actually my first thought looking at the images of the B-17 ball turret. 'When, exactly, is that guy allowed to bail out?'
     
  8. Hernalt

    Hernalt Force Ghost star 4

    Registered:
    Jun 29, 2000
    The following are the last each of the three shots showing the Nebulon B and MF in context with the GFFA. Everyone here should know these by heart, so there is no reason yet for pics larger than thumbnails. The first thing that can be seen is that the plane of the Rebel fleet is not actually in parallel to the disk of the galaxy.
    [​IMG]
    [​IMG]
    [​IMG]
    From: http://starwarsscreencaps.com/star-wars-episode-v-the-empire-strikes-back-1980/80/

    Here is a specific frame that has information one can treat as a fingerprint. Red arrows show sense of rotation, clockwise. Yellow arrow traces the clockwise motion of a counterclockwise-pointing trailing arm. The thing to see in this image is that as it was designed, and as it was painted by Joe Johnston, and as it was filmed, the trailing arms move clockwise and point counterclockwise.
    [​IMG]

    The scene uses a painting by Joe Johnston which was rotated slowly. Notice the trailing arms in the still, non-rotating, upper right image. The trailing arms point counterclockwise. All these images are terrible resolution but I saw enough match of fingerprint features, specifically nearby to that yellow arrow vs Joe Johnston's right hand (below), to be satisfied that the image in the film was actually the image painted by Joe Johnston.
    [​IMG]
    From:
    http://scifi.stackexchange.com/ques...-the-end-of-empire-strikes-back-a-real-galaxy
    (See also https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWars/comments/37pttd/joe_johnston_works_on_the_spiral_galaxy_used_in/)

    During the scene itself, the GFFA has a subtle rotation that is clockwise.


    Now that period evidence from 1978-1980 ESB era has been presented, the following image is the present state of media that proposes to represent the GFFA. The trailing arms point clockwise and the legend in the lower left states the sense of rotation, "spinward", is counter clockwise. Note also the legend in the lower right, where the galaxy is given cardinal directions as if it was a 2D surface on a globe.

    [​IMG]
    From:
    http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/The_galaxy/Legends

    Some research would land the helpful map maker on a page such as the following, where one might see that astronomers don't think of a galactic disk in terms of a cardinal system. North and South certainly exist, but in the sense of the poles of a rotating object. Notice that this image of the Milky Way shows trailing arms pointing counter clockwise, and the Milky Way is rotating in a clockwise direction, in a general sense that is approximately exactly like what they did the first time when ESB was actually made.
    [​IMG]

    The Northern hemisphere of earth rotates counterclockwise. The Right Hand Rule in vector calculus means that x-vector cross product y-vector equals the z-vector. It is a convenience that the Northern hemisphere rehearses the Right Hand Rule, in which counterclockwise arrangement of the fingers results in a central vector pointing up along the thumb. By a phenomenon of convenience akin to the geopolitical chauvinism of the Mercator projection, the agreed upon "North Pole" of the galaxy is not consistent with the Right Hand Rule, but is assigned to coincide with the North Pole of the earth. Which is to say, the Milky Way's North Pole is determined by fiat, "even though" / "and" the Milky Way and the Earth rotate, about their North Poles, in opposite directions.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_coordinate_system

    So the EU map of GFFA deviates, apparently, from the ESB film and ESB BTS, by a whole 180 degrees. It also deviates from conventional galactic coordinate systems.

    If one wanted to recuperate the EU galaxy map, and make it as correct as ESB was, one could simply perceive that when Luke and co flee to the Rebel fleet beyond the edge of the galaxy, Luke and co and Rebel fleet and Lando and the Falcon and 2-1B are upside down with respect to the presentation of systems on the EU map. That would square up the rotation in ESB with the rotation on the EU map.

    The point in this post was to provide a basis for talking about orientation with respect to the galactic plane.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrograde_and_prograde_motion
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_projection
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleet_in_being
     
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  9. Iron_lord

    Iron_lord Chosen One star 10

    Registered:
    Sep 2, 2012


    The other option is to assume that what's seen on screen is not the galaxy at all, but something small - perhaps a star with a bit of nebulosity - as Saxton does. However - Legends (and possibly newcanon) have been going with "galaxy" for long enough that it doesn't seem like there's much point in changing it now.


    The newcanon does recuperate the EU map:

    It doesn't show where the rendezvous point is - but, as you say - it logically follows that it should be "below" the galactic plane rather than "above" (where "above" is toward the viewer looking at the map, and "below" is away from the viewer) - so, in the opposite direction to Kamino as portrayed in the EU.
     
  10. Hernalt

    Hernalt Force Ghost star 4

    Registered:
    Jun 29, 2000
    Ok. I have the vaguest memory of reading something from someone who thought this final scene depicted something other than a galaxy. It's useful for me to hear all the counter evidence.

    This is a storyboard for that scene (Storyboards, Rinzler). There is no mention in the caption of what this is, but it appears to constrain that this storyboard was by Nilo Rodis-Jamero. This is most definitely not a galactic bulge, and most definitely answers best to a star. (And as specifically as I would surmise, a mature star with a debris disk from a Mercury-type object that fell inside the Roche limit and broke up. )
    [​IMG]

    The shape of the central luminous object squares with an earlier ending in ESB. I can see how this storyboard concept was ordered and then changed later.
    From:
    http://starwarz.com/starkiller/the-empire-strikes-back-shooting-scriptfourth-draft/

    I do not know when the sanitized scripts were written, but the IMDB ESB one has this passage:
    http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Star-Wars-The-Empire-Strikes-Back.html

    Prior to me purchasing Rinzler Making of ESB, or trying to find provenance for the Joe Johnston painting, another thread of possible vintage / period evidence from ESB / ESB BTS is the ESB Radio Play. The following source has one poster claiming a passage from the Radio Play is referring to the scene in question, but I cannot know if this is a miscredit without buying the Radio Play.
    http://scifi.stackexchange.com/ques...ous-point-at-the-end-of-the-empire-strikes-ba

    So, this confusion over what the final scene depicted is something I can wrap my head around, now that you mention astronomical objects other than a galaxy. I'm confused over the confusion over what it was that Joe Johnston is photographed as painting, in 1978 or so, and I really need to see the sentences by Saxton. I'd love to go trying to find that reference from Saxton, but Technical Commentary appears to have offended someone :) , and http://www.theforce.net/swtc/ returns, "Directory does not allow contents to be listed."
     
  11. Iron_lord

    Iron_lord Chosen One star 10

    Registered:
    Sep 2, 2012

    Might depend on the computer - for me, work computer (lunchtime) allows it all the time, and home computer only about half the time. After searching specifically for Astrophysical Concerns:


    http://www.theforce.net/swtc/astro.html#galaxy


    Rendezvous-point spectacle

    After escaping Lord Vader's trap at Bespin, Luke Skywalker and his companions rejoined their portion of the rebel fleet. From the rebel medical frigate a large white disk dominated the sky to the port side. The disk was thicker and brighter towards its centre and it seemed to contain a myriad of tiny points.
    There is much conjecture about the nature of this phenomenon. The Topps Widevision cards refer to it simply as the "vastness of space." Unfortunately it is not possible for other references to be so circumspect; a definite identification seems necessary.
    Some people believe that it is the entire Galactic Empire, or else a nearby companion galaxy. This theory seems to have been adopted by Tales of the Bounty Hunters, which describes the rebel fleet resting somewhere above the galactic plane. However the object seen outside the medical clinic window is more distant than several times its own diameter; the viewers are not merely just a little way above the plane of that disk. Perhaps the bulk of Palpatine's galaxy is out of sight in the other half of the sky and the glorious vista is just a neighbouring galaxy?
    There is a crucial difficulty with the "galaxy" interpretation, at least with the sequence seen in the original version of The Empire Strikes Back. Viewers of The Empire Strikes Back report that the phenomenon seems to rotate visibly within only a few seconds. This spin is much too rapid for a galaxy. Motions within a spiral galaxy are of the order of up to a hundred kilometres per second, but Palpatine's galaxy is of the order of a hundred thousand light years across. As pointed out in The Cosmic Mind Boggling Book, the observed rotation would equate to rotational speeds on the rim reaching at least "the impossible velocity of 33 billion times the speed of light".
    The object seems too bright to be a galaxy. When viewed from a distance great enough to account for the observed size, a spiral galaxy would look like a dim milky disk to the naked eye. It would have the same kind of luminance as the shine of the open sky on a moonlit night. From a vantage point inside a brightly-lit medical theatre, a spiral galaxy would be harder to see than the blazing entity at the end of The Empire Strikes Back. If it is galaxy-sized, the object must be a quasar or some other exotic active extragalactic entity which just happens to be in the neighbourhood of Palpatine's galaxy.
    A normal galaxy also exhibits overall colour variations due to regional differences in stellar populations. The galactic core should be a somewhat redder hue, and the disk bluer. It is not certain whether the object is colourful enough to be a normal spiral galaxy.
    This object's morphology also seems a bit unusual for a sprial galaxy. The arms are too tightly wound, and the nucleus is proportionately too large. On the other hand, it might be a galaxy which has suffered a gravitational encounter with another galaxy, which could distort its shape. There may be other galaxian possibilities capable of explaining the shape of this object; maybe it is some kind of nearby dwarf galaxy.
    Other commentators assert that it must be a protostellar disk, a cloud of gas and dust collapsing under gravity to form a new planetary system with a sun at its centre. Or it might be some kind of accretion disk surrounding a black hole or other compact strong gravitating body. Or it might be something yet more exotic, perhaps even something which exudes matter as it rotates, rather than accreting stuff. However it is not clear whether the structure and colouration suits a protostellar disk or accretion disk either. A protostar should be surrounded by dusty molecular cloud material, not open space as seen in the film. The observed rotation is less ludicrous for these smaller kinds of objects than for an entire galaxy, but it is still very problematic.
    The notion that the object is something of less than galactic scale is supported by a caption in a report in CINEFEX #2 p.8. The object is pictured and explicitly described as a "nebula". A nebula is one or another kind of cloud of gas and dust in interstellar space. It could refer to a protostellar nebula, or something similar in scale but presently unknown to science. The exact quote is:

    Effects unit art director Joe Johnston prepares a model nebula for photography. The swirling star formation was filmed with a slight rotation and incorporated into the final sequence.

    The novel The Mandalorian Armour supports a nebula interpretation, since it describes a similar "spiral nebula" near the Kuat system and remarks that there are several of these objects in the galaxy.

    This topic remains unconcluded; it is possibly the most severe technical difficulty in the whole trilogy.


    I would point out that 70s-era astronomy books, especially those aimed at younger ages, do use the term "Andromeda Nebula" for the Andromeda Galaxy on occasion.

    Also - I'd consider the possibility that the outer arms are impossible to see because of the glare from the core (maybe they're very dusty as well - allowing the core to be closer to the viewer than half a million light years.
     
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  12. missile

    missile Jedi Padawan star 1

    Registered:
    May 24, 2016
    The sky
     
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  13. Bob the X-Winger

    Bob the X-Winger Jedi Knight star 3

    Registered:
    Jan 8, 2016
    The only way I can add to this thread is that you mentioned the breathable atmosphere on the asteroid that the Millennium Falcon landed on. My theory is that many of the rocks in space have completely different gravity and oxygen levels that alter how Han, Chewie & Leia can travel about at ease across the stars. Star Wars is full of sci-fi to keep you intrigued.
     
  14. MOC Vober Dand

    MOC Vober Dand Manager Emeritus star 5 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Jan 6, 2004
    No, not really. Science isn't really my forte, so these things never occur to me while I'm watching. When someone else points them out, though, I find it interesting. When they go on to discuss what they've just pointed out, however, I become confused very quickly!
     
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  15. Hernalt

    Hernalt Force Ghost star 4

    Registered:
    Jun 29, 2000
    @Iron_Lord Thanks for that. That block of text will take some time to process. Nothing he is saying is technically wrong. And I am completely aware of the sensation that many around here get when they see someone being technical beyond the limit they themselves have drawn in the sand for themselves, and would say represents the line also drawn by every other poster. This here is that moment for me, so it takes a healthy bit of stepping back. An initial emotional reaction is that Saxton is performing, as in a theatrical performance, the Tragedy of Confusion, to the end of aggrandizement rather than search for solution. But his technical objections to this being a galaxy are exact. It's perfectly possible that if there is an artistic forest that was meant, drawn and painted at a level of story tellers, script writers, illustrators and industrial designers, then he is simply missing that forest for the trees of his own specialty. (Just by the argument of surface brightness, if Andromeda was that booming bright it would be visible by eye without dark skies or high elevation or averted vision. The morphology does have a 'high' bulge to disk ratio; Sombrero Galaxy has the highest bulge to disk ratio of a known galaxy and it still doesn't match this specific property that originates in Joe Johnston's design or imagination.)

    A more salient and useful attack on un-truth would be to characterize what sources Saxton references. Right off the bat, the claim in Cinefex that Joe Johnston was painting a nebula threw up some red flags. I am not personally aware of any movie, prior to SW77, that attempted to represent a geopolitical landscape, or adventure in general, at the scale of a galaxy, let alone represent a galaxy visually. It seems strange to me that copy writers for a science fiction magazine, in its second issue, who might yesterday be covering slasher films, would have the expertise to identify that Joe Johnston was painting a nebula as opposed to an accretion disk as opposed to an AGN. Perhaps Joe Johnston himself spoke the word "nebula". (Utterly beside the point, and as Saxton hinted, it echoes when Hubble in 1929 studied this kind of 'nebula' and discovered galaxies exterior to our own. http://cosmictimes.gsfc.nasa.gov/online_edition/1929Cosmic/andromeda.html )

    I see that Saxton does not reference the ESB Radio Play from 1983, or any ESB script. They may have a specific reference that the final scene shows a "galaxy". Saxton was writing most of his content between 1998 and 2006, iirc. Rinzler's Making of SW77 came out in 2007, and Making of ESB, which may have something specific, came out in 2010. It is an interesting problem that while Rinzler said there were thousands of storyboards to select from for "Storyboards", and that he had to construct a representative narrative, that he would select an image depicting a star with a disk, if there was available an image with an actual galaxy in it. The Topps Widevision, Tales of the Bounty Hunters and The Mandalorian Armour show that he is certainly considering all available sources that he *knows about or can access. His last sentence about glare (saturation) is the most reasoned and pragmatic pinch of incense burnt on the altar of Star Wars being first and foremost a visual moving art. More thinking needs done on this specific galaxy/not galaxy problem wrt the issue of expertise vs artisanship, and maybe two purchases.
     
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