Category: Opinion

Republic Restored – Taking Stock of the New Republic

Posted on February 24, 2016by

nr-commandroom

For those of you who are regular readers of Eleven-ThirtyEight, you’ll note that in the lead-up to The Force Awakens, various articles were published wherein we speculated on the state of the galaxy post-Return of the Jedi. More specifically, what sort of government the Rebel Alliance would found in the aftermath of their victory at the Battle of Endor. Back in July 2013, Mike Cooper gave me the honor of being the first to write an article about the “Glorious Cause” of the Rebellion and the New Republic that they needed to establish.  In my original article, I highlighted five essentials that would be needed in the sequel trilogy to show that sacrifices of our heroes in the original trilogy were worthwhile. Now, with The Force Awakens out and various tie-in materials released, it is as good a time as any to take stock of what we now know and how it matched up to my original list.

The “Glorious Cause” successful

Thanks to various books and comics unveiled under the Journey to The Force Awakens banner, we learned early on that the Rebel Alliance was successful in defeating the Empire and restoring the Republic. What probably surprised many fans was how quickly and how completely this success was achieved. For those of us who grew up and cut our teeth on the old Expanded Universe (aka Legends), the battle to liberate the galaxy and defeat the Empire was a long, tough fight. It ultimately took nearly fifteen years in-universe to have the Galactic Civil War truly end, with the signing of the Bastion Accords between the New Republic and the few remaining sectors of the Imperial Remnant. As a result of that, many fans (myself included) assumed that the war post-Endor would be a long, drawn out fight. Read More

The Case for a New Star Wars MMO

Posted on February 22, 2016by A Certain Point of View

swtor

The first time I logged on to Star Wars: The Old Republic and created my Jedi Consular, I was instantly hooked. For a fan like myself, simply having the chance to play in the Star Wars sandbox is enough to get me interested (and cause me to stay up way too late because I’m running around slashing enemies with my lightsaber). Getting to create all manner of characters, from Jedi to Sith to superspies to smugglers, meant getting to explore the Star Wars universe through the viewpoints of all manner of archetypes.

But though the base game makes a strong start and had me obsessed from the get-go, that momentum hasn’t kept up. Instead, it’s petered out into lackluster expansions and monthly story updates that take an hour at most to complete (and come across more as a desperate attempt to retain subscribers and keep revenue flowing).

While I would like to see SWTOR take steps towards embracing the features that made it great, I unfortunately think that it’s highly unlikely we’ll see a return to the expansive universe of the base game. So even though I love SWTOR and I love the characters and stories it has added to the Star Wars universe, I ultimately think it failed to live up to a lot of its potential. Therefore, it would be better idea to learn from SWTOR’s successes and failures and create a new Star Wars MMO.

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The Expanded Universe Explains, Vol. XII – Galactic Cartography and Astrogation

Posted on February 17, 2016by Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks

jasondan-atlas

While The EU Explains dates back to the earliest days of this site, and thus before the reboot actually took place, that seemed a likely enough prospect that this series was conceived less as “what are the definitive answers to these questions?” than as “how did the Expanded Universe address this?” The EU’s version(s) of the theft of the Death Star plans, certainly, isn’t going to hold up much longer, but if we don’t learn from the past we’re doomed to repeat it and all that—so I feel it’s helpful for both old fans and new to reflect on how these things were dealt with in Legends so that we might gain insight into what might happen in the new canon, and just as importantly, what we might hope to avoid.

To that end, this time around I’m going to realign my targeting computer and use The EU Explains to comment on The Force Awakens directly, and investigate one of the biggest questions that has arisen from the film—not to provide definitive answers, but simply to suggest some. After all, one of the hallmarks of the new canon is not to explain background details when the story doesn’t absolutely demand it, so knowing there are at least possible answers might be the best we can hope for anytime soon. Read More

Continuity with a Smile: The Lessons of HoloNet News

Posted on February 15, 2016by
Hey, it's the two-headed Benedict Cumberbatch alien.
Hey, it’s the two-headed Benedict Cumberbatch alien.

Canon and continuity seem to be an excessively important issue for a big chunk of the hardcore Star Wars fandom. It’s been almost two years since the Star Wars continuity was rebooted and trimmed down, and the continuity wars (well, to be honest, the continuity playground arguments) don’t seem to be going to die anytime soon. The current official position appears to be a more informal approach to continuity, one less bogged in minutiae and more interested in storytelling opportunities, something that we have argued for from this website. And still, for all the disturbing behavior of a very vocal sector of the Bring Back Legends crew and for how tempting it is to point and laugh at them, we can’t ignore that that anal, exhaustive, all-encompassing approach to continuity that they seem to prefer was for a long time the official stance.

Yes, the sweet lie of a water-tight Star Wars continuity was a lie fed by Lucasfilm and its affiliates, sometimes quite aggressively. This tedious, mind-numbing, encyclopedic approach to what should be a fantastic universe full of magic and mystery was fed by hundreds of guides and technical specifications and was sponsored by just as many novels and comics, whose only purpose was to patch a completely unwieldy continuity that had grown without control or direction. Let’s not forget that all these works were official ones, that the G-canon, C-canon, WTF-canon nonsense came from Lucasfilm employees. That’s why it’s necessary to look at the times the old EU seemed to shun that approach, as a way to perhaps learn how to avoid these pitfalls in the futures. And one of the best examples of this is, without any doubt, the defunct HoloNet News, the website Lucasfilm released to promote Attack of the Clones. The website decided to smooth over continuity using two weapons: humor and a knowing wink.

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The Scars of Concord Dawn—A Physicist Overthinks Star Wars Rebels

Posted on February 10, 2016by Guest Editorials

concorddawn

Star Wars art designers seem to have a tendency to carve chunks out of planets lately, be it to make them part of a massive superweapon, to create a hellish and/or exotic landscape, or to show that a place has gone through serious turmoil over the centuries. The latter of those led to the newest depiction of Concord Dawn in the Star Wars Rebels episode two weeks ago, “The Protector of Concord Dawn”, as shown in the picture above. Now, I won’t lie; it looks very cool, and makes for a beautiful and interesting background, more memorable than just what a normal planet with some moons in the darkness of space would be. But still—and Mike knew this when he tempted asked me to write this piece—I can’t put my astrophysicist’s brain aside when looking at it, and as such I can’t help but wondering: could a place like this really exist? Would a planetary body retain that shape after some unknown cataclysm blows away a big portion of it into fragments, or would everything collapse pretty soon under its own weight?

To answer this, one must first gather some basic information. For example, how big is the world in question? In the episode, the surface where the Protectors’ camp is located seems to match what we see of this bigger object from space. And if we assume that it is, we can tell that it has quite an Earth-like gravity (although lower gravity in Star Wars is typically represented like this, too), a comfortable atmosphere with clouds, landscapes that don’t seem so bad harboring what look like rivers or lakes, and an intact half that looks very much like a semisphere. Taking all that into account, I’d say this world is somewhere between the sizes of Mars and Earth (6,000 to 12,000 km in diameter). This is important because size and roundness are related when it comes to planets—If you make a list of all the objects in our solar system, you’ll see that everything with a size of 1,000 kilometers and up is round, no matter how violent its past. The biggest impact basins are no more than a few kilometers deep. Even the Earth is the result of the collision of two planet-sized objects that merged to form a bigger one, and we wouldn’t know if it wasn’t for the fact that this is how the Moon came to exist. Read More