46 minutes ago, Sekac said:

There's a gigantic difference between a standard gun and a DEATH Star.

A pistol can be used for competition shooting, for self defense, or for policing.

A weapon designed to destroy entire planets has no purpose other than to commit crimes against humanity. It's not a weapon of war, because the vast, vast majority of the population of a planet at war with the Empire would be innocent civilians. Neutralizing a military threat would be a side-effect of using the death star.

Its destructive power is so indiscriminate that "weapon of mass destruction" fails to capture the scale of it. "Weapon of Total Extinction" is more fitting. Can you think of a single legitimate use of a weapon designed to kill billions at a time? Target practice? Self-defense? No, of course not.

And the 3 uses we saw of the Death Star were:

1) Wipe out a population to keep them quiet about the Death Star

2) Friendly fire to keep cover up the Empire's failure to protect the death star's plans.

3) To destroy the home planet of a single prisoner who was being difficult.

So no, I don't think all weapons manufacturers are guilty. But weapons manufacturers who designed weapons primary to kill innocents by the billions and selling them to bloodthirsty regimes certainly are.

If you can't see the difference, that's on you.

I mostly agree with you.

Well it’s a good thing we don’t have companies responsible for doomsday weapons in the real world!

Oh....

well, as long as everyone is reasonable and keep cool heads...

oh....

holy Scyk!

oh well.

so long and thanks for all the fish.

1 hour ago, Stryker359 said:

In the old Expanded Universe they'd only let Daala be a cook until she beat Tarkin in a military simulation and he promoted her (and allegedly made her his mistress, but that's beside the point).

this seemed relevant.

4 hours ago, GrimmyV said:

His ethical and moral positions are highly dubious, but he’s got a point. His motto would be Don’t Join, because no ‘side’ is 100% ‘right’. The Rebellion won but the New Republic let the FO grow like a cancer while (not so) secretly allowing the Resistence to check the FO’s influence. The Resistence ‘does the right thing’ but seemingly also buys weapons from profiteers who sell to both sides. The ‘clear cut’ morality of the OT has been shattered! What are we to do? We’ve never had to deal with morally ambiguous characters before ?

NOOOOOO!!! Not the Hamburgler!!

Well to the first part yes.

Second part, I thought of the first example that came to mind.

37 minutes ago, GrimmyV said:

Well it’s a good thing we don’t have companies responsible for doomsday weapons in the real world!

Oh....

well, as long as everyone is reasonable and keep cool heads...

oh....

holy Scyk!

oh well.

so long and thanks for all the fish.

No, I’ve read the errata, targeting scrambler just orders POTUS a Diet Coke.

11 minutes ago, FlyingAnchors said:

No, I’ve read the errata, targeting scrambler just orders POTUS a Diet Coke.

2 minutes ago, GrimmyV said:

Yum....

that begs the question, why don’t we have breakfast alt arts? That was forum level of silly good fun.

19 minutes ago, FlyingAnchors said:

Yum....

that begs the question, why don’t we have breakfast alt arts? That was forum level of silly good fun.

#fakebreakfast.

there’s no bacon

32 minutes ago, GrimmyV said:

#fakebreakfast.

there’s no bacon

ya gotta order the scrambler missiles if ya want bacon

11 hours ago, Sekac said:

At the very least, non-military personnel on the death star had to realize the very existence of such a weapon is abhorrent, and by working on the death star, they are willingly standing in the middle of the highest priority target that could ever exist.

99.9999% of the people on the death star, cooks, construction workers, and military wives alike deserved to die for being complicit in the mass murder machine and the galaxy immediately became a brighter place the moment their lives were ended.

The core of your argument is sound, but you have to remember that the empire used both slaves and conscripts (slaves with an allowance).

The slaves simply don't deserve to die, which included an enormous amount of wookies and other manual labor type personnel.

The conscripts are trickier, because they have access to tools (rifles, computer codes and information) that could be crucial to a resistance either during or after construction. They're technically complicit, but only because they're choosing not to risk their own life, not because they have real options to rebel and get away. Of course, notable exceptions like Galen, Bodhi and Bothans* chose to make the sacrifice, which is praiseworthy, but not obligatory behaviour for a conscript. Heck, even the proper armed forces were conscripted. Most of the storm troopers on the first death star were 501st (and other batallion) soldiers, who hadn't had a single meaningful choice since birth.

The only people who were truly complicit were volunteer officers, commanders, moffs and so on. A fair proportion of them would have volunteered for the duty once they realised its magnitude and prominence, and nearly all the rest are loyal to the Empire's goals.

*Many bothans died...

7 hours ago, Sekac said:

There's a gigantic difference between a standard gun and a DEATH Star.

A pistol can be used for competition shooting, for self defense, or for policing.

A weapon designed to destroy entire planets has no purpose other than to commit crimes against humanity. It's not a weapon of war, because the vast, vast majority of the population of a planet at war with the Empire would be innocent civilians. Neutralizing a military threat would be a side-effect of using the death star.

Its destructive power is so indiscriminate that "weapon of mass destruction" fails to capture the scale of it. "Weapon of Total Extinction" is more fitting. Can you think of a single legitimate use of a weapon designed to kill billions at a time? Target practice? Self-defense? No, of course not.

And the 3 uses we saw of the Death Star were:

1) Wipe out a population to keep them quiet about the Death Star

2) Friendly fire to keep cover up the Empire's failure to protect the death star's plans.

3) To destroy the home planet of a single prisoner who was being difficult.

So no, I don't think all weapons manufacturers are guilty. But weapons manufacturers who designed weapons primary to kill innocents by the billions and selling them to bloodthirsty regimes certainly are.

If you can't see the difference, that's on you.

Be careful when talking about "standard guns". I'm wholeheartedly behind police officers having access to small arms for law enforcement purposes. machine guns, high calibre rifles and so on, on the other hand, are explicitly designed to kill people - and kill lots of them. Are such weapons evil, on that small scale of personal choice to kill or not kill? When you think about it, nuclear bombs are worse than the death star - they irradiate a huge area for millions of years; stunting or outright destroying all life in the area. They're also impossible to target only military installations with (excluding perhaps Antarctica and space).

Now, the death star's purpose was not to go around blowing up every rebellious planet they could find.That makes no sense from a resources point of view - just bombard the surface with a couple hundred ISDs until no life is left, and mine the rest. The purpose of the death star was fear - the knowledge that the empire could blow up one's planet on a whim, without any prior warning. It's essentially the nuclear deterrent of our world - something that is potentially devastating.

In that sense it's the most peaceful weapon of all - one you never have to fire.

Besides, don't you know Jedha was caught in a mining accident and... strange... ALderaan doesn't exist on any Imperial records. Must have been a myth...

-looks at recent posts then the thread title-

What... the...

Anyway, about those s-foils... do we think they move or is this some odd angle in box where they look closed? Classic Red Squadron X-wing re-releasewith moving wings confirmed?

4 minutes ago, Kehl_Aecea said:

Anyway, about those s-foils... do we think they move or is this some odd angle in box where they look closed?

That was my first thought, that it was just an optical illusion, but if you look at the guns instead of the wings themselves you can see that there is nowhere near enough room between them for the wings to be open.

That's what I thought too!

While I'm only getting one of the Renegade sets, that will change in a year if we don't get a red/blue squadron version of this new X-wing.

3 hours ago, Astech said:

The slaves simply don't deserve to die,

I doubt they had very many slaves on the death star. There's certainly nothing in ANH to indicate there were. But they fall into the .0001%.

3 hours ago, Astech said:

Of course, notable exceptions like Galen, Bodhi and Bothans* chose to make the sacrifice, which is praiseworthy,

I mean, it's great that Galen put a flaw in the fully functional super weapon that slaughtered billions. But he did design and build a super weapon that slaughtered billions. His plan would have been better if he prevented its function with an "engineering oversight that might take months to correct." Bad plan, and Alderaan paid for it.

3 hours ago, Astech said:

When you think about it, nuclear bombs are worse than the death star - they irradiate a huge area for millions of years; stunting or outright destroying all life in the area.

An irradiated place is still a place that exists. Radiation levels are not hazardous for millions of years and life can still reassert itself in time. Not so with the Death Star.

3 hours ago, Astech said:

Now, the death star's purpose was not to go around blowing up every rebellious planet they could find.

No. It's to kill people who know about it to keep them hushed up, to kill your own soldiers to cover up your incompetence, to kill unarmed billions to torment a single prisoner, and then to wipe out a rebellious planet (but it got destroyed seconds before that happened).

3 hours ago, Astech said:

In that sense it's the most peaceful weapon of all - one you never have to fire.

That highly dubious argument could be made, except for the whole 3 uses, and an attempted 4th, within the span of--at most--a couple weeks. Surely they would've slowed down on all the wholesale slaughter pretty soon....right?

You know, until the next prisoner who told Grand Moff Tarkin he smelled bad...

9 hours ago, Sekac said:

I doubt they had very many slaves on the death star. There's certainly nothing in ANH to indicate there were. But they fall into the .0001%.

In the old EU, the surface of it was covered with wookie slaves in the unfinished areas. They'd make up no more than 1% of the population, but that's still tens of thousands of people.

I mean, it's great that Galen put a flaw in the fully functional super weapon that slaughtered billions. But he did design and build a super weapon that slaughtered billions. His plan would have been better if he prevented its function with an "engineering oversight that might take months to correct." Bad plan, and Alderaan paid for it.

In the book Catalyst, which is essentially the precursor to Rogue One, it's shown that Krennic masterfully manipulated both Galen and his wife into believing they were working on a fantastic way to harness the energy of kyber crystals, thus providing unlimited, free, clean energy to the entire galaxy. As soon as they realised the truth, they concocted and enacted an escape plan. Galen wasn't actually involved with the super weapon - only its power core originally.

Once Galen was recaptured, he immediately realised that the work would be completed - unstoppably - given a few more months/years. The exact when wasn't important, only that if the work wasn't sabotaged specifically by him , then the weapon would be built in an indestructible manner. There was no other sensible course of rebellious action available to him.

An irradiated place is still a place that exists. Radiation levels are not hazardous for millions of years and life can still reassert itself in time. Not so with the Death Star.

Radiation is hazardous Immediately in high enough doses, and lethal via cancer and birth defects and miniscule levels. What you're looking at is probably the poisoning of a gene pool, causing enormous suffering for millions of years, rather than a total wipe out of life. Compare this to the Death Star, which only kills one generation of people.

No. It's to kill people who know about it to keep them hushed up, to kill your own soldiers to cover up your incompetence, to kill unarmed billions to torment a single prisoner, and then to wipe out a rebellious planet (but it got destroyed seconds before that happened).

The Death Star was only kept hush hush until its completion, then revealed to the galaxy only to be swept under the rug a week later after its destruction. Alderaan wasn't destroyed primarily to torment Leia - It was destroyed because it had long been suspected to be the financial centrepiece of the rebellion. The old EU states that something like 90% of alliance funds were on the planet, so Alderaan was the best target Tarkin had.

That highly dubious argument could be made, except for the whole 3 uses, and an attempted 4th, within the span of--at most--a couple weeks. Surely they would've slowed down on all the wholesale slaughter pretty soon....right?

But in order to give an impression of fear, they had to prove the weapon worked. Krennic was much more simple about it - a "small moon" would have sufficed to notify the galaxy of its existence, but Tarkin waned things blown up, and he wanted them blown up now. Every firing of the laser was on Tarkin's orders, and every single one was a mistake. I don't think Tarkin would have stopped - and would probably have gone on to try a coup with it, but I think Krennic would be far more sensible.

3 hours ago, Astech said:

Radiation is hazardous Immediately in high enough doses, and lethal via cancer and birth defects and miniscule levels. What you're looking at is probably the poisoning of a gene pool, causing enormous suffering for millions of years, rather than a total wipe out of life.

I think you're over-estimating the long term effects of nuclear weapons. Nagasaki and Hiroshima are rebuilt and bustling urban centers with 1.6 million inhabitants. Those people probably prefer being alive. (BTW, do not read that as down-playing the tragedy of those bombings, just that the long term effects are not what you think.)

Even Chernobyl, a much worse radiological disaster (in terms of amount of radioactive material, not loss of life) has caused scientists to question our understanding of the long term effects. Just 30 years after the accident, native wildlife has repopulated the area and many species are not showing the expected side-effects, despite testing for high doses of radiation.

I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that there is enormous suffering for millions of years considering we now have been able to study the long-term effects of nuclear weapons for just over 72 years and already are seeing results that don't match expectations.

3 hours ago, Astech said:

Compare this to the Death Star, which only kills one generation of people.

And any potential for future generations.

1 hour ago, Sekac said:

And any potential for future generations.

it's not like those future generations have done anything worth while.

2 minutes ago, Wiredin said:

it's not like those future generations have done anything worth while.

Can’t do anything worthwhile if you’re never born...

1 hour ago, FlyingAnchors said:

Can’t do anything worthwhile if you’re never born...

sound strategy for preventing rebellions

3 hours ago, Sekac said:

I think you're over-estimating the long term effects of nuclear weapons. Nagasaki and Hiroshima are rebuilt and bustling urban centers with 1.6 million inhabitants. Those people probably prefer being alive. (BTW, do not read that as down-playing the tragedy of those bombings, just that the long term effects are not what you think.)

Even Chernobyl, a much worse radiological disaster (in terms of amount of radioactive material, not loss of life) has caused scientists to question our understanding of the long term effects. Just 30 years after the accident, native wildlife has repopulated the area and many species are not showing the expected side-effects, despite testing for high doses of radiation.

I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that there is enormous suffering for millions of years considering we now have been able to study the long-term effects of nuclear weapons for just over 72 years and already are seeing results that don't match expectations.

And any potential for future generations.

The thing is that the effect of the remaining radiation can't be measured with the disturbances of modern life. Cancer is a massive problem, unlike 100 years ago. I get that those bombs - neraly the smallest ever detonated - have relatively weak long-term side effects. The thing is that long term can be in the billions of years. I just checked, and U-238 has a half-life of 4.46 billion years, so we're looking at a nearly unimaginable timescale.

Life is great like that, but animals don't require the same things humans d. How do you test for a drop in IQ of an ant? Or the reflexes of a snail? There is so much that can't be analysed that could easily have been lost by mutation, especially in places like Chernobyl.

The effect of nuclear weapons operates in the true long term - not just the span of a person's life (whee increased cancer risk is a big worry) but over millions of years, where you're looking at cumulative mutation effects over numerous generations living in the same area.

The Death star's laser destroys a planet. According to current theory, the earth was formed about 4 billion years ago. So, in the time a nuclear bomb is halved in effectiveness, those asteroids that were Alderaan could have reformed and created new life.

1 hour ago, Wiredin said:

sound strategy for preventing rebellions

Better to flood their economy with cheap, slave-made goods.

You do realize that really long half lives mean much lower rates of radiation, right?

A half-life is the amount of time it takes a radioactive isotope to lose half its mass as alpha, beta, and gamma particles bleed off. The longer the half-life, the slower the bleed and the less harmful it is.

The scary stuff has a short half-life as it is giving off extremely high levels over a relatively short period. The longer the half-life, the more stable the isotope.

as an aside.... how did we go from flappy wing x-wings and palp canoe to talking about nuclear warfare?

JUDGE

22 pages is how

*edit* In short: U-wing->Saw->guerrilla tactics->who's more evil, rebels or empire?->death star->what's worse, nukes or super lasers?->page 22

3 hours ago, Wiredin said:

as an aside.... how did we go from flappy wing x-wings and palp canoe to talking about nuclear warfare?

JUDGE

At least we got to breakfast as well!

3 hours ago, Wiredin said:

as an aside.... how did we go from flappy wing x-wings and palp canoe to talking about nuclear warfare?

JUDGE

Yeup. That's sticking.