A rather one-sided description of the controversy over Doctor Saxton's work. Leland Chee promptly replied:Hello Leland, I had a couple of questions regarding star wars canon that I was hoping you’d be able to answer for me.
The first is regarding the possibility of altered time lines and continuity. In episode "Ghost of Morris" of Star Wars: the Clone Wars, the Son shows Anakin a vision of future events in his life like destroying Alderaan, joining up with Darth Sidious, betraying Obi-wan, and becoming Darth Vader. After seeing this future Anakin decides to join up with the Son to kill the Emperor and take other steps to avoid this future from happening. The Son told him that the future by its very nature can be changed. The Father later told him that destiny's are not set in stone. Later in this episode the Father said his son broke the laws of time by showing him the vision and then erased his memory of it. This presumably restored continuity between the show and the movies.
This episode seems to insinuate that at the very least, the laws of time are not unbreakable. This made it plausible in star wars canon to have a story where we would have seen a new timeline created where Anakin does not become Darth Vader while the series still possibly remains part of star wars canon. Most instances of time travel that I’ve read about involve tidy predestination paradoxes where the past is not actually changed. This avoids the issue of new timelines. However, in the Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia under the entry of time-drifting it says that this method of time travel could create shifts in the flow of time by altering the visited beings’ actions. To me that suggests that possibility of altering time is real.
My question is, could time travel be used to rectify or explain contradictions in canon? Throwing a random example out there to illustrate what I mean: Even Piell gets killed in Star Wars The Clone Wars episode “Citadel Rescue” though there are stories in C-canon which say he’s still alive in the future. On the surface this would suggest that these both cannot be correct. But if we ponder the idea of an altered timeline somewhere in the star wars universe, this could allow both versions to be correct in their own timelines.
My second question regards what seems to me and many others to be controversial statistics in the Incredible Cross Section books. In Star Wars Attack of the Clones Incredible Cross-Sections on Page 23 regarding Republic Assault Ships it states: “Armament: 12 quad turbolaser turrents (200 gigatons per shot); 24 laser cannons (6 megatons per shot);”. I’ve looked all over star wars canon and I’ve seen nothing to suggest that quad turbolasers or any other weapon short of the super laser of the Death Star has this type of firepower. This would mean that the primary lasers of the Republican Assault Ships are over 33,000 times more powerful than their secondary weapons.
To put this in perspective, a nuclear weapon having a yield of 200 gigatons would level of the state of California and cripple most of the continent of North America in a single shot. This just doesn’t seem realistic to me based on what I’ve seen in the movies, the clone wars series, clone wars animated movie, and the rest of the expanded universe. Even in conventional RPG books the primary weapons of capital ships only range between 50% to 200% more powerful than their secondary weapons.
In Star Wars Revenge of the Sith Incredible Cross Sections on page 16 regarding the Invisible Hand toward the bottom of the page there's a line pointing to a quad turbolaser canon that says "Quad turbolaser cannon's maximum yield is equivalent to magnitude-10 earthquake" which most people conclude to then have the equivalent yield of a teraton or 1000 gigatons.
These books are one of the few sources that try to pin an exact yield value of star wars weaponry. Often times in hypothetical versus scenarios, these figures are brought up and treated as factual. My question here is, how seriously should these ICS yield stats be treated in regards to overall canon?
The Cross-Section stats with regard to firepower are considered canon.
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Just recently, Ulic from spacebattles asked Chee:
Chee promptly responds, saying:Hi Mr Chee, I was wondering if I could ask a question related to something you mentioned on your old Dark Horse forum thread; you confirmed that the Incredible Cross Section firepower stats were still considered canon, but I noticed that X-Wing: Isard's Revenge mentioned capital ships firing "terajoules of coherent light", which is significantly lower than the gigatons of firepower the ICS mentions; are these firepower figures from X-Wing: Isard's Revenge still considered canon, and if so how would the Holocron reconcile the two, for example, if an author requested starship firepower figures from the database?
Cross-Sections would still be the first place I'd look when determining firepower.