Jedi Wars: The Last Starbender - Page 2

On April 02 2018 02:23 ninazerg wrote:


That's semi-explainable. The Star Wars universe really hasn't shed much light on how exactly ships work, because they're supposed to be as commonplace as cars. The source of their "fuel" was never really touched on throughout the whole original trilogy, and in the prequels, the only thing that they mention is having "power". Whatever is the source of the ship's power produces pure energy, which can be used to travel or produce deflector shields.

I was actually going to write about this but decided not to because I wasn't sure how to explain it, but it's sort of an old space-adventure paradigm for how ships operate. In this paradigm:

- Small ships travel in the way that aircraft on Earth do, and large ships travel in the way that floating vessels on Earth do.
- All ships have "Shields", which are made of energy and absorb damage.
- Ships have hyperdrives/hyperspace travel/wormhole travel or some means of traveling at an abnormally fast speed.

There is some variance between science fiction franchises. For example, in StarCraft, the "shields" are produced by psionic energy. Everything in the Protoss world has to do with some kind of psionic power, and it 'fuels' all of the Protoss stuff, which is why you need pylons. An example of psionic energy being drained is the Dark Archon's mind control ability. When the Dark Archon uses mind control, it requires so much psychic energy that not only is its mana drained, but its shields are gone as well.

In TLJ, the Resistance cruiser is traveling at full non-hyperspace speed. Also, it is mentioned in the movie that they've diverted all of the available power to the rear deflector shield. Because the engine and the shield generator are drawing from the same power source, once the fuel is gone, the shields go out. Normally, the shield is evenly distributed around the ship, so that it can take damage from any direction and be relatively safe. Being able to redistribute power to a certain area of the ship actually goes back to A New Hope during the trench sequence. In TLJ, the Resistance cruiser is putting all of its shields on its ass-side as it flees. Additionally, they're far away from the dreadnaught's cannons (This is how the movie explained it) so that they remained outside of the effective range of the cannons. So while the cannons were firing on the cruiser, by the time the shots reached the cruiser, they had lost most of their ability to deal damage.