On 5/27/2018 at 10:05 PM, Daeglan said:

And a similar vial was 800 credits or so on correllia. Now there are a couple of possible wrinkles. How much inflation was caused buy the massive imperial build ups? What is the exchange rate? How does black market effect those prices?

The vial at the start of the film looked to be a single drop of the stuff, rather than the larger vials that made up the shipment. So, that could be a reason as to the disparity between the price at the beginning of the movie, and the Lando gambling scene, where a vial was equal to 10k.

On 5/27/2018 at 4:12 PM, Ghostofman said:

Blinding flash of the obvious:

Was thinking about this issue and realized something.

How many scenes REQUIRE the Macguffin to be explosive fuel? 2? 3?

What happens if you delete/replace/ modify those scenes, and make the Macguffin Spice?

Hmmmmm..... Feeling like it's an artifact of an early rewrite now...

It's a good theory, but how well would the film sell in the modern age when it became apparent that Han is on-screen smuggling intergalactic cocaine? That spice isn't paprika!

44 minutes ago, ColonelCommissar said:

It's a good theory, but how well would the film sell in the modern age when it became apparent that Han is on-screen smuggling intergalactic cocaine? That spice isn't paprika!

There’s another entry in the Official Guide that I just noticed last night. Don’t have the book with me at work, so can’t quote it exactly. But the gist of it was that Kessel spice is medicinal, while criminal enterprises convert it into illicit narcotics.

So, Han may not have been smuggling intergalactic cocaine, but rather intergalactic Sudafed that would later be converted into intergalactic meth. ?

I gotta say...I sort of prefer this explanation to the EU/Legends one that there was nationalization of a narcotic.

1 hour ago, ColonelCommissar said:

It's a good theory, but how well would the film sell in the modern age when it became apparent that Han is on-screen smuggling intergalactic cocaine? That spice isn't paprika!

That also part of my theory.

Basically the initial draft had them running spice, it stayed spice for some time through rewrites, eventually it goes to LFL for final(ish) approval, they (mouse influence or not) decide it's not a good idea to have Han running drugs, it goes back for more rewrites, and gets turned into coaxium. "Fuel" scenes are added during this set of rewrites eventually, but the core story was sufficiently locked down that without those new scenes, it's still the spice story and many spice artifacts remain.

Would cover a lot of ground... "Oh hey, this street grade coaxium is worth 500 credits, but that pure freshly refined coaxium is worth millions!"

My feelings exactly.

Taking a little spin off this thread. What about a Coaxium Inyector for the sublight engines? A ship attachment, that increase speed by 2 (or more) for 1 round. Maybe, if you recieve a critical hit, it could blow your engine.

Also, consider store safely that devil's substance. At a minor or major collision, it could blow part of your storage room.

6 hours ago, Rithuan said:

My feelings exactly.

Taking a little spin off this thread. What about a Coaxium Inyector for the sublight engines? A ship attachment, that increase speed by 2 (or more) for 1 round. Maybe, if you recieve a critical hit, it could blow your engine.

Also, consider store safely that devil's substance. At a minor or major collision, it could blow part of your storage room.

I would have that upgrade their pilot checks in addition

I'm just waiting to hear CinemaSins go off on Solo for being a movie about fuel, after they gave The Last Jedi guff for having fuel as a plotpoint.

But fuel has been at least implied in Star Wars from the beginning (as others in this thread have noted, the hoses hooked up to the fighters in A New Hope ).

My hypothesis would be that coaxium, when added to other substances, makes a fuel for all the motive components of a mixed-engine starship. Recall that most starships in Star Wars have three drive systems: repulsorlifts for atmospheric maneuvering that only work when there's a gravity well to push against, sublight engines for maneuvering in space, and hyperdrives for faster-than-light travel. Some ships will only have two out of three: some will forego the hyperdrive because they aren't meant to operate far from a base or base ship, and some might never need to enter atmosphere and so have no repulsorlifts (like Imperial -class Star Destroyers, at least before Rogue One showed otherwise). Repulsorlifts may not require fuel per se. . . they just emit repulsor energy that pushes against a local gravity field, allowing a vehicle to hover and move. But they're powered by something, which probably requires fuel or charge itself. One of the X-Wing books, I think, had the notation that hyperspace engines sipped fuel, while the sublight engines gulp it (or maybe it was the other way around). And The Last Jedi indeed indicates that the fuel for the hyperdrive and sublight engines are the same. Unless there's been a radical breakthrough in fuel technology and/or engine design since Solo , it stands to reason that coaxium is a component in starship fuel, not the whole thing. And possibly a component that can be left out if the ship being fueled has no hyperdrive, making sublight-only TIE Fighters even more cost-effective (no expensive hyperdrive, no expensive coaxium-infused fuel to power it).

For sanity's sake (because my players would totally try to recreate the "obliterate a mountain" bit if I gave them the opportunity) I would state that coaxium-infused fuel is significantly more stable than even refined coaxium and contains very small percentages of it. One of those refined coaxium crystals would be dissolved into lots and lots of liters of fuel, making the final tally something like one part coaxium per one thousand parts regular fuel. As a result, coaxium-infused fuel is only about as explosive/flammable as non-coaxium-infused fuel, making it safer to handle and short-circuiting attempts to use it to nuke a solution to an in-game problem (we all know Star Wars runs on No OSHA Compliance, but you gotta draw the line somewhere! )

This all contributes to coaxium's value: it's rare, difficult and dangerous to mine, process, and transport, and it's useful only for one application (fueling a hyperdrive). Non-coaxium-infused fuel would be far easier to manufacture, making it a lot cheaper, while coaxium-infused fuel (or hyperfuel) is dramatically more expensive. . . not because adding coaxium to regular fuel is all that hard, but because getting coaxium to the point where you can do that is exceptionally difficult.

So the last question is: why have a combined fuel for all the engines instead of just coaxium for just the hyperdrive? Well, as mentioned, for sanity's sake I would say that coaxium-infused fuel is a thousand percent less dangerous to handle, so that's a good reason all by itself. Also, in Heir To The Empire , when the hyperdrive motivators on Luke's X-Wing are damaged, he comes up with the idea that maybe he can make one functional motivator between the two, mount it where it can handle both engines, and get home that way (it doesn't work). Indicating that the sublight engines are part of the hyperdrive in some way. So using the same fuel for both likely makes design, construction, and maintenance easier, at no appreciable change in cost of construction or operation.

Well, that's just how I'd look at it all.

On 5/30/2018 at 3:05 PM, Kabal said:

The vial at the start of the film looked to be a single drop of the stuff, rather than the larger vials that made up the shipment. So, that could be a reason as to the disparity between the price at the beginning of the movie, and the Lando gambling scene, where a vial was equal to 10k.

A friend argued that the constantly-escalating price was just Han being Han- constantly exaggerating.

But then those cases were worth millions in the end so ???
(Just like how Han's 'fastest ship in the galaxy!' and 'under 12 parsecs' in ANH were written as bluster then Solo made them pretty accurate statements)

1 hour ago, ErikModi said:

I would state that coaxium-infused fuel is significantly more stable than even refined coaxium and contains very small percentages of it.

Not sure about that one …

33 minutes ago, SEApocalypse said:

Not sure about that one …

You don't need explosive fuel for that. In fact, it's entirely redundant.

No realistic effects on hyper-drives. They have hyper-shields to negate them, without hyper-shields, no hyper-jumps.

The video is garbage, because it assumes that star wars ships have near infinite energy to just push with raw force to (near) light speed. And even under that assumption, the source of the energy would still be coaxium -infused fuel. Guess what happens when all that energy that is usually put into kinetic energy just burst out instead? ? Giant explosion.

So the nerdist would make coaxium reactors even more explosive. But as I said, his math has a fundamental irrational foundation ... and sound math afterwards. ?

Well, as he stated, the Raddus couldn't be in hyperspace at the time, or else it wouldn't have collided with the Supremacy at all (or by Legends , collided with the Supremacy 's mass shadow, leaving the ship itself untouched). Likely a part of the reason we haven't seen hyperspace ramming before is that it's only viable within that flicker of pseudomotion as the ship is transitioning between realspace and hyperspace, during which it may in fact have the kinetic energy of an object moving at relativistic speeds, since it is in a way "accelerating" into hyperspace.

Makes about as much sense as FTL ever does, honestly.

Lucas Film goes btw by the claim that the experimental shields of the Raddus are the cause of the effect, because the shields basically kept accelerating, a unique interaction between those new shields and the long established hyperdrive. Normally the ship would have stopped right away and doing far less damage. At least that is what iirc one of the technical handbooks state.

But eitherway, the energy comes from the coaxium reaction.

I did see a video stating that, as well, which is also interesting.

That said, the energy doesn't necessarily come from a fuel reaction, at least not at a 1:1 ratio. Hyperdrives don't actually accelerate you physically to faster than light speeds, though my hypothesis behind the Holdo Maneuver is that, during that transition between realspace and hyperspace, the physical rules of realspace treat you like you are. In which case, the energy required to enter hyperspace is dramatically less than would be required to actually accelerate an object to lightspeed (which requires infinite energy). It's a quirk of realspace/hyperspace interactions that, during that brief flicker of transition, an object "straddling" hyperspace and realspace is a relativistic object in realspace for all intents and purposes. The energy required for it is not the near-infinite amount of energy required to accelerate an object to relativistic speeds in reality.

And as I said, I'd treat hyperfuel as not ridiculously explosive to prevent players from realizing that, if they have a ship, they essentially have a nuclear device they can deploy at will by dumping a few liters of fuel on whatever vexes them.

On 5/28/2018 at 9:40 AM, penpenpen said:

I didn't get them impression that the vial on Corellia would be enough for a ship, just to get them off planet where they then were confident that they could earn enough money to buy a ship, once Proxima didn't take most of the profit.

IIRC he also said "I'm guessing" in regards to its value and blurted out what he considers a big number. Being a street rat I'd imagine he'd never seen more than a few hundred credits at any one time.

Plus Correlia, being one of the biggest shipyards in the galaxy, might also have a large used ship market with tons of super cheap used ships. Perhaps you could indeed buy a used ship for only a few hundred credits. Likely stripped of most of its systems, no weapons, and no fuel, but flyable at the least. Do remember that the book prices for ships are for new/like new ships that have just rolled off the assembly line. Get a ship thats been put through the wringer, had its weapons stripped off, had some structural damage, etc... and you might get down somewhere the ship is only worth a couple hundred credits.

Take a Jumpmaster 5000. They are only 55,000 credits in mint condition.

Now lets use a real world example, the truck I currently drive. a 2000 F-150 pickup's MSRP was around $15,000 on the low end when they were new. My car isn't in great condition, but its drivable. Its Blue Book value is only between $300 and $1000. On the low end, its worth between 2% and 6.6% of what it was when it was new.

So using that, a very used and banged up, but still flyable, Jumpmaster could be found priced anywhere between 1100 and 3666 credits. Maybe even less if there is something majorly wrong with it, that may not make it worthless. Like perhaps it's comm system basically doesn't work. Still flyable, but it would drive the price way down.

As for what exactly Coaxium is. I'd say its a key ingredient in Hyperfuel. Like perhaps you mix it with petrochemicals at extremely low concentrations to create the fuel for the hyperdrive. So realistically a ship would only use an extremely small amount of Coaxium. Like Hyperfuel would be 99.9999999999999999999% Petrochemicals and 0.0000000000000000001% Coaxium. So realistically a ship would only top off with Coaxium maybe once every 20-40 years, and its more like replacing a part than refueling.

The amounts of Coaxium in your typical starship aren't anywhere near enough for making impromptu explosives, at least not without rendering your ship inert. Perhaps if you steal some like Han and the gang did, but then you'd be better off selling the stuff and buying some Baradium explosives.

On ‎5‎/‎26‎/‎2018 at 3:26 PM, TheMOELANDER said:

I agree. It seems that coaxium is seemingly more important to create hyperdrives, notfuel them. But I also guess you might to renew it after a while. And the hifgh price is simply because at that time the empire is building star destroyers like crazy, plus the DS-1. So they probably need a huge amont, thus the hoarding, thus the inflated cost.

I love it when fiction makes economic sense!

This is how I'm looking at it. Coaxium is NOT what the Resistance is running out of in Ep. 8.

I wouldn't even begin to try to extrapolate economic or logistical "facts" from the film. The writers clearly didn't put much thought into to it and the scant data points we were given don't provide anything close to a complete picture and weren't necessarily consistent with one another. Maybe they were, but we don't have enough information to determine that, either. We are the blind man fondling the elephant and left wondering "what is this?" Based on the film, we only have a very general conceptual framework to work with any any internally coherent / reasonably considered theory you want apply at your gaming table will suit.

For what it's worth, the Order 66 Podcast got a chuckle specifically out of the discussions of the economics of coaxium here. ?

3 hours ago, Sturn said:

This is how I'm looking at it. Coaxium is NOT what the Resistance is running out of in Ep. 8.

Most definitely not, because they are running out of the stuff which they had not the time to pump enough into their ships at the beginning. This was similar to the large pips connected to the X-Wings in ANH, they just had not enough time to fully fuel their ships before the first order arrived. So they were running on low fuel right from the start.

2 hours ago, Vondy said:

I wouldn't even begin to try to extrapolate economic or logistical "facts" from the film. The writers clearly  didn't put much thought into to it and the scant data points we were given don't provide anything close to a complete picture and weren't necessarily consistent with one another. Maybe they were, but we don't have enough information to determine that, either. We are the blind man fondling the elephant and left wondering "what is this?" Based on the film, we only have a very general conceptual framework to work with    any any internally coherent / reasonably considered theory you want apply at your gaming table will suit.

Agreed. Add in that there are other economic considerations untouched by the movie (i.e. if Correllian Credits are much stronger than Imperial credits, it goes a long way towards explaining why Han thinks he can get a ship for ~600 credits.

The most telling thing, though, is that there isn't a single character in this entire movie with a speaking part who can be trusted. Not one. Maybe you could trust your life with a couple of them, but not your wallet, and you certainly shouldn't ever believe any of there stories. Lando's droid could easily have actually been certain that Lando wanted a piece of that casing, but she could also have been messing with Khaleesi. Han talks about the worth of stuff from time to time, but he has been known to exaggerate.

That's part of the fun of the movie, isn't it? Did Khaleesi ever care about Han? Would Beckett have cut Han in if everything had gone the way it was supposed to with the train job? Did Han really get kicked out of the academy for not taking orders, or did he just fail a test that he should have studied for? Is Chewy really a wookie, or just an Ewok with a thyroid problem?

6 minutes ago, Genuine said:

Agreed. Add in that there are other economic considerations untouched by the movie (i.e. if Correllian Credits are much stronger than Imperial credits, it goes a long way towards explaining why Han thinks he can get a ship for ~600 credits.

The most telling thing, though, is that there isn't a single character in this entire movie with a speaking part who can be trusted. Not one. Maybe you could trust your life with a couple of them, but not your wallet, and you certainly shouldn't ever believe any of there stories. Lando's droid could easily have actually been certain that Lando wanted a piece of that casing, but she could also have been messing with Khaleesi. Han talks about the worth of stuff from time to time, but he has been known to exaggerate.

That's part of the fun of the movie, isn't it? Did Khaleesi ever care about Han? Would Beckett have cut Han in if everything had gone the way it was supposed to with the train job? Did Han really get kicked out of the academy for not taking orders, or did he just fail a test that he should have studied for? Is Chewy really a wookie, or just an Ewok with a thyroid problem?

I would trust my Wallet with Chewbacca...

1 minute ago, Daeglan said:

I would trust my Wallet with Chewbacca...

No speaking part. He gets interpretations offered by untrustworthy characters.

14 minutes ago, Genuine said:

Agreed. Add in that there are other economic considerations untouched by the movie (i.e. if Correllian Credits are much stronger than Imperial credits, it goes a long way towards explaining why Han thinks he can get a ship for ~600 credits.

Having seen it a second time, I'm not sure they ever say that. They say if they can use that to get past the checkpoints, they can get off world, and then get a ship. Sounded like they understood that it was just bypassing the checkpoint.

22 minutes ago, Darzil said:

Having seen it a second time, I'm not sure they ever say that. They say if they can use that to get past the checkpoints, they can get off world, and then get a ship. Sounded like they understood that it was just bypassing the checkpoint.

Also a very valid interpretation. I had assumed that the 600 credits would have been more in the way of a down payment than a full price, too. There's a lot of ways to look at it, each of which would have very different implications for SW's galactic economy.

On 6/9/2018 at 7:53 PM, Genuine said:

Agreed. Add in that there are other economic considerations untouched by the movie (i.e. if Correllian Credits are much stronger than Imperial credits, it goes a long way towards explaining why Han thinks he can get a ship for ~600 credits.

The most telling thing, though, is that there isn't a single character in this entire movie with a speaking part who can be trusted. Not one. Maybe you could trust your life with a couple of them, but not your wallet, and you certainly shouldn't ever believe any of there stories. Lando's droid could easily have actually been certain that Lando wanted a piece of that casing, but she could also have been messing with Khaleesi. Han talks about the worth of stuff from time to time, but he has been known to exaggerate.

That's part of the fun of the movie, isn't it? Did Khaleesi ever care about Han? Would Beckett have cut Han in if everything had gone the way it was supposed to with the train job? Did Han really get kicked out of the academy for not taking orders, or did he just fail a test that he should have studied for? Is Chewy really a wookie, or just an Ewok with a thyroid problem?

The distinct impression I got was Khalessi really cared for Han. So much so that she much preferred becoming Maul's pawn alone then getting Han involved. What fascinated me was their final scene together when they talked about their life they would never have together. Both her and Han talked around the subject in circles, both people never quite having the bravery to confront the idea, but both coming to terms with their fate in their individual ways. In the end Han left to save Chewie, and she left to save Han from a fate worse then death.