Encyclopedia Update

Incidentally, here's an interesting question from the SW.com VIP thread, and an interesting answer by Sue Rostoni:

Will we see the Star Wars Encyclopedia that was written by Mr. Sansweet updated?

This is definitely in the plans, probably for late 2006 or sometime in 2007. Stay tuned.

Hmm . . . wonder what will be said about canon in the new intro? The 1998 one still gets talked about from time to time.

Tetryon Ruminations

I was reading a post on Spacebattles by Vivftp from a couple of months ago and had a series of thoughts . . . at some point I'll do more with this:

First, some background, provided by Memory Alpha. It's not complete, but it's a start. Then:

1. Worf's shoulder-cannon thingy from Insurrection fired some weird pinkish-purplish pulse. It's commonly thought to be the isomagnetic disintegrator, but it is my belief that it is in fact the tetryon pulse launcher.
2. The tetryon plasma from the USS Yellowstone was purplish, IIRC.

((What color were other examples of tetryon whatzits in Trek? It might help confirm or deny the idea that his shoulder cannon was the tetryon pulse launcher, and thus intended to knock out the Son'a weapons (a la Dax in "Blood Oath").))

3. Romulan cloaks of the 24th Century make use of a "tetryon compositor". When sabotaged by a Canadian, it can disable the entire cloaking system ("The Die is Cast"[DSN3]). Tetryon emissions can be detected from Romulan warbirds ("Visionary"[DSN3])
4. Could the tetryon issue be the reason weapons still can't be fired while cloaked? After all, if tetryonic things are afoot, the ship's weapons might themselves be impossible to use. Perhaps there is some sort of field effect in play, or perhaps the ship's plasma energy system gets tetryon doodads in it, or what-have-you.
4a. Obviously the ship shouldn't be flooded with high levels of tetryon particle radiation, since "Workforce"[VOY6] features the ship striking a subspace mine and being flooded by tetryons, poisoning the crew. While there may be an acceptable tetryon radiation limit in the Romulan fleet, I can't imagine it's a good idea. Then again, too much of anything can poison you, so perhaps tetryons are considered safe at normal levels.
5. In any case, one would have to figure out why hand weapons can still be used. I don't know about phasers, but I'm pretty sure that the Romulan who took Troi in "Face of the Enemy"[TNG6] was vaped by a Romulan disruptor while the ship was cloaked, and there may be other examples I'm not remembering which feature particle weapons fire on cloaked ships.

Suffice it to say that it's an interesting line of reasoning, but I'm not sure what can be done with it. I doubt we know enough about most of the subjects to come up with anything firm. Nonetheless, I might find something that helps in regards to offering more proof that Worf was using the TPL.

Lucas, May 25 1977

I've bumped into a very fascinating Rolling Stones interview with Lucas from 1977. It's actually quite interesting to see how some things have changed but others have stayed the same. A brief rundown of the parts I found noteworthy:

1. Lucas seems to identify Star Wars as being intended as a kid's movie, circa 10-12 year olds.

2. More on the idea that Star Wars is space fantasy and not sci-fi:

"You firmly establish that at the beginning of Star Wars with the words: "A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away . . .""

"Well, I had a real problem because I was afraid that science-fiction buffs and everybody would say things like, "You know there's no sound in outer space." I just wanted to forget science. That would take care of itself. Stanley Kubrick made the ultimate science-fiction movie and it is going to be very hard for somebody to come along and make a better movie, as far as I'm concerned. I didn't want to make a 2001, 1 wanted to make a space fantasy that was more in the genre of Edgar Rice Burroughs; that whole other end of space fantasy that was there before science took it over in the Fifties. Once the atomic bomb came, everybody got into monsters and science and what would happen with this and what would happen with that. I think speculative fiction is very valid but they forgot the fairy tales and the dragons and Tolkien and all the real heroes."

3. A lot of the self-beating and disappointment Lucas expressed in the OT films around the time the Special Editions came out appears.

4. Unless Lucas was bullshitting profoundly, he had absolutely no idea what the hell was going on with Star Wars. That claim of this being worked out well in advance was completely bogus. For instance:

"Why does Darth Vader breathe so heavily?"

"I had wanted to do that and tie it in with the dialogue."

"It was a nice touch, because it adds to the bogyman quality of the character."

" [...] It was a whole part of the plot that essentially got cut out. It may be in one of the sequels."

"What's the story?"

"It's about Ben and Luke's father and Vader when they are young Jedi knights. But Vader kills Luke's father, then Ben and Vader have a confrontation, just like they have in Star Wars, and Ben almost kills Vader. As a matter of fact, he falls into a volcanic pit and gets fried and is one destroyed being."

5. Now that Lucas is finished with Star Wars, he's been saying he wants to go do little films that are experimental, avant-garde sorts of things. Looks like this dream has been in his head for a long time:

"The film's success should guarantee some success in the merchandising program you've launched."

"One of my motivating factors for doing the film, along with all the other ones, was that I love toys and games. And so I figured, gee, I could start a kind of a store that sold comic art, and sold sevety-eight records, or old rock 'n' roll records that I like, and antique toys and a lot of things that I am really into; stuff that you can't buy in regular stores. I also like to create games and things, so that was part of the movie, to be able to generate toys and things. Also, I figured the merchandising along with the sequels would give me enough income over a period of time so that I could retire from professional filmmaking and go into making my own kind of movies, my own sort of abstract, weird, experimental stuff."

Of course, those people who claim Lucas said he never thinks of possible toys while making films would be sadly mistaken, given the above.

---

There's a lot more to the interview, and it's an interesting read. Go give it a look-see.

Orbiting Starship Visibility

Friday the 13th, 2029 will be an interesting day.

You see, back in 2004 a new asteroid was found, and its orbit was carefully calculated. As of a month ago, this asteroid had been given the formal number of 99942, and has the formal name of Apophis. As phrased most fabulously in the Wikipedia article, this is the first named asteroid with Earth impact solutions.

(SG-1 fans may now soil themselves at will.)

As it turns out, the asteroid isn't going to hit us . . . but it is going to come pretty damned close. As of May 18, it was estimated that Apophis would approach to within 30,000 kilometers of Earth on April 13, 2029 . . . way closer than the moon, and within geosynchronous orbital range (36,000km). The asteroid is 320m in diameter, and according to astronomers it will shine like a 3rd-mag star . . . in other words, it will be visible to the naked eye that night as it flies over Europe, Africa, and Asia.

And that's the point that got me thinking, since I'd never taken the time to do the math. What I mean is, we all know that the shuttle and the space station are visible in the sky. This never struck me as odd, though, since although they're tiny compared to sci-fi ships and stations, they're still just a couple of hundred kilometers up, in LEO. Obviously in the many Trek episodes where they're in orbit of some backwards civilization (i.e. something like where we are now), the starships would've been in a very high orbit and thus not observable. After all, Voyager is 340m, and the Enterprise-D was 640.

In any case, I always assumed that this orbit would be somewhere in the 40,000km range . . . i.e. transporter range. Well, it seems like that isn't enough. If a big dark asteroid at 30,000km is going to shine like a star, then what's a higher-albedo surface like a starship hull going to do?

Site Updates

As of a couple of weeks ago and until further notice, there will be no new pages on ST-v-SW.Net. I intend to focus on clean-ups, rewrites, and incomplete projects (such as the big glaring one of the SW canon pages rewrite), so that perhaps I can feel like I'm getting *something* done with this hobby that I hardly seem to have enough time for these days.

For instance, I have two or three guest author works that I've hardly had a chance to touch, and several other things I've been meaning to do. Of course, those pages will be "new" in the sense they've never been seen before, but they won't be "new-new".

The one exception is a page (or pages) dealing with the sizing of Star Wars vessels. There have been some very interesting questions raised over at Strek-v-Swars.Net about the commonly-accepted sizes lately, and given the profound bearing the issue of scale can have I feel that to be one of the more important matters of the debate. And, as you might imagine, it would hardly make sense to go to all the trouble of cleaning up the site only to have to go back and revise umpteen pages should it be discovered that an ISD is not 1600 meters.

Anyway, that's going to be primarily what's going on now. Just FYI.

Fark Results

The Fark event resulted in an extra 12,500 people Tuesday . . . certainly not the worst linkstorm ever weathered.

15.3% of my monthly bandwidth has been consumed. While that sounds like a big chunk, though, one must consider that May 2005 . . . a banner month thanks to the end of Enterprise and the end of Star Wars . . . only managed to take up 39.7%.

Or, in other words, I have significant reserves, though I obviously couldn't maintain such a pace over any length of time. (Those who remember the short-lived phpBB board will recall the bandwidth concern. Over three days 15% was consumed there, too, but . . . unlike a Fark event . . . that was going to be a continuous drain and unsustainable pace.)

I can report that I once again received no negative feedback responses, but then I've received no feedback at all. Curiously, I've received zilch since Tuesday, but I did just test the system and it is working.

All in all, it was a non-event, and I wouldn't even have noticed had I not been informed by someone who goes to SD.Net. About the only thing that would concern me now bandwidth-wise would be a slashdotting . . . not that I'd have a chance to comment on it, because I'd probably be down within a day or two.

Farked

(link)

I'll be keeping an eye on the bandwidth, but I figure it'll be fine. In the meantime, I can't help with agree with the entirety of this person's response . . . well, after the first paragraph, that is:

I am an admitted sf geek. I've visited stardestroyer.net and St-vs-Sw or whatever it is one time each. Never again.

Mike Wong is to whacko Star Wars fans as Chick Young is to whacko fundy Christians. Hard to believe uber-obsessive Star Wars zealots like him exist, makes me wonder about the emotional dysfunctions that led to him becoming so pathetic.

Besides, any real SF fan knows the very best stuff isn't in the movies, but in the independent, non-franchise novels. Stuff like Dan Simmons' Hyperion, Charles Streoss' Singularity Sky, Ring by Stephen Baxter, and just about anything by Niven, Brin, Clarke or Asimov blow anything created by either Lucas or Roddenberry completely out of the water.