Ep7 Reviews (Spoilers)

[Highlord Laan]

Still, I wouldn't expect him to beat Master Luke.

*Luke backhands Kylo*
"Don't fuck with the Jedi Master, son."

[The Romulan Republic]

One thing I really want to see in the new films is for someone to throw Force lightning at Luke and for him to block or deflect it like Yoda did. It would be a great way to establish, in one shot, that Luke hasn't just spent those thirty years since Return of the Jedi getting his apprentices turned/killed, hiding in the wilderness, and maybe abandoning his daughter in the process. That he is now Master Luke, and every bit as deserving of that title as Yoda.

I also feel that stopping an attack like that with just the Force, without having to resort to a lightsaber or violent means, would fit thematically with the man who's defining moment, arguably, was throwing away his lightsaber.

Edit: Of course, I'm biased. Luke was perhaps my favourite OT character. And while I fully expect him to die before the new trilogy is done, I want him to get at least one chance to be awesome. To show why he's worth spending a whole film trying to locate. To just once be a Master Luke who is worthy of the name.

[Simon_Jester]

I wouldn't call the First Order "laughable". Sure, they have their moments of weakness (the pathetically easy to escape and disarm star ship Poe and Finn fled comes to mind, as does the poor security around the shields on Starkiller Base). However, the Starkiller Base is genuinely impressive, Snoke is evidently a capable mastermind, and their ground troops and tie fighters seem far better equipped in at least some ways, and more competent in terms of personnel, than what we saw from the Empire. I also appreciate that they're willing to cut their losses and retreat when things go against them, rather than futiley fighting to the death. Thrawn would approve, I believe.

I wouldn't criticize the security arrangements, given that the base is supposed to be virtually inaccessible behind a planetary shield which is basically immune to anything approaching through Euclidean space and which can only be bypassed through an unbelievable feat of precision hyperspace navigation.

Its machinery spaces are so large that densely garrisoning the whole place would be nearly impossible for someone who lacks the literally galaxy-sized manpower pool the Empire had.

The greatest weakness of the security arrangements is the lack of a two-man lockout on the base's shields. You'd expect something like a dual key interlock, but those don't appear often in fiction anyway.

Well, that and Captain Phasma being willing to actually lower the shields because someone puts a gun to her head; I was slightly disappointed in that part because I'd hoped for a bit more badassery from the character.

Is there another term for "sanitation department worker" I should have used from my thesaurus instead?

Well, to be honest. If I heard a soldier, let alone one that had been brainwashed into being an unthinking killer, say "sanitation" was his assigned duty, I would in no way think he mopped floors and emptied trash bins. "Sanitizing" an area of operation (read: leaving no witnesses) is not entirely unheard of.

That's a good point... The catch is, we know Finn has is extremely reluctant to massacre innocent people at the village on Jakku. If he'd been routinely doing massacring duty on a regular basis in the past, you would think this reluctance of his would have appeared sooner, rather than being an unexpected first-"offense" thing like Captain Phasma claimed it was. Or, alternatively, you would think he'd be familiar and experienced with the act of massacring people and the events on Jakku would not have affected him so strongly that he'd quit the First Order, break out a high-value prisoner, and defect to the Resistance.

Are you referring to the difference in Starkiller Base destroying the Hosnian system and the Death Star destroying Alderaan? If so, you're forgetting the energy expended in making that multi-shot-beam travel faster-than-light across the galaxy via hyperspace.

Since we have literally no idea how much energy this involves relative to the energy involved in the beam itself, it's hard to estimate that. Does it take a million times more energy to project the beam that far? Ten times more energy? Who knows?

Where I was originally going with this is that the Starkiller weapon would inevitably absorb less energy from a star than the star would produce over its lifetime, orders of magnitude less, potentially not all that much more than the energy associated with the Death Star firing. The visuals of the star being physically absorbed are somewhat ambiguous as I recall.

However, the point that the absorption of the star's mass or energy is merely a first-stage exciter for the real energy generation process... this point is well taken and is significant, although not in any way referenced in the movie. Certainly the star's mass or energy provides a perfectly adequate energy source for the beam, provided that they were able to project it across interstellar distances without expending millions or billions of times more energy than the Death Star.

However, there's no reason to assume that the Starkiller weapon actually uses the lifetime energy output of a star. Stars aren't gigantic batteries that store a fixed amount of energy which can be released 'quickly' or 'slowly' with equal efficiency. They're gigantic fusion reactors that have to maintain high temperatures and pressures in order to function. If they stop functioning, they stop generating any energy.

Yes, the star would stop functioning, but that's the point - it isn't relying on the star to generate the energy, its apparent that the star's mass/energy is being directly absorbed by the Starkiller, which uses it for its own purposes (ref: "as the weapon is charged, the sun is drained until it disappears", / Starkiller Base seen literally vacuuming the star's mass). Starkiller Base would have to absorb only a comically small amount of a star's mass in order to reach the Death Star's 10^38J*.

It doesn't really matter though - while we could enter into a semi-academic discussion of the mechanics of how Starkiller Base's power generation works based off of the film, the novelization tells us that absorbing a star is just the intermediate stage to enable the collection of 'dark energy' so that Starkiller Base has access to an "almost literally infinite source of energy" (actual quote) anyway.

Well, it's nice, at least, to know that they are still bringing in shades of Doc Smith even now. I have fond memories of sunbeams.

[smiles wearily]

When you're talking about faster-than-light trans-galactic weaponry, referring to almost infinite sources of energy is probably wise. Its clearly a weapons system with engineering / power requirements far in excess of either Death Star by default (indeed, the novelization has Admiral Ackbar decry the engineering required to draw on dark energy as being impossible).

Draining the star's core of heat so that it can no longer sustain nuclear fusion would 'kill' it, and trigger a preemptive collapse of the star's core, probably resulting in a nova or other such event.* But this would not necessarily yield the same amount of energy you could get just by parking a Dyson sphere around the star and trickle-charging for a million years. Likewise, draining the star's surface of heat would cause it to visually 'go out' in that no more light could be seen from it until the core warmed the outer layers back up (and possibly destabilize the star somehow, though this is less certain)... but again, it wouldn't supply total energy equal to the total lifetime output of the star.

Recall that Finn tells us that stars absorbed by the Starkiller disappear. This isn't a matter of just taking heat, but mass- which is probably why there's no indication that any of the star is left behind or any sort of resulting stellar catastrophe in any of the material.

To be fair, Finn pretty much tells us he's the janitor, too.

Since he doesn't actually understand any of the physics or engineering involved, I wouldn't be too surprised if he believes that the stars drained by the weapon 'disappear' when in fact they end up collapsing, destabilizing, and exploding over the course of a few days, weeks or months. The difference is largely academic, unless you're working on the assumption that Starkiller Base will remain floating in space after the star is drained, and can't move to another star system.

Since you are quoting various supporting evidence from the novelization and so on, I suspect you also have evidence that the base moves from system to system after each shot.

That would make a lot of sense except that we already know exactly what the Empire was working on as its secret weapon right up until the destruction of Endor- namely, the second Death Star.

The Empire might have planned Starkiller Base, might have done the preliminary work on developing it, but that doesn't mean they would have gotten far along with the construction. Why would they do so when that would distract resources from the Death Stars?

Also, the First Order/Imperial remnants have thirty years or more to build Starkiller Base. Given that the Empire managed to construct the second Death Star in no more than a year or two, without making enough of an obvious dent in the Imperial economy for anyone to comment on it in canon. It seems likely that a remnant controlling a few percent of the Empire's strength could, by great sacrifice, construct a weapon of comparable size and scale in thirty years.

Note, the Episode 7 Visual Dictionary says that Starkiller Base is the culmination of Galactic Empire research on dark energy and hyperspace tunneling - and also makes apparent that it was constructed by the First Order, and not the Empire (it refers to the planetary selection process being conducted by the First Order).

Well, this is certainly in keeping with what we'd expect from basic strategic logic, so I'm glad to hear it. The idea that this weapon is based on Imperial research but was not constructed by the Empire (which had no pressing need of it) makes a lot of sense.

*EDIT: http://nerdist.com/the-physics-of-stark ... /[quote]As Dr. Carpenter explained to me, our sun is 73 percent hydrogen. And when that hydrogen fuses, 99.3 percent of it becomes helium. The rest is converted into raw energy according to Einstein’s famous equation, E=mc2. That’s a small percentage, but more than enough. “If all the hydrogen in the Sun were to be fused into helium,” Carpenter told me, “The energy equivalent of this [would be] 8.7 x 10^44 Joules.”

[/quote]Indeed, although the good doctor oversimplified the likely dynamics.

I will also note that if the star were being forced to fuse very rapidly to provide power for the weapon... as noted in the quote, 99% or more of the star's mass would still be there, in the form of helium (or heavier elements). Which, again, would lead to some kind of stellar catastrophe such as a nova.

[It wouldn't actually work like a real nova, it would be some other entirely new and unknown and unprecedented thing, but 'nova' conveys the scale of the resulting blast]

[Vympel]

To be fair, Finn pretty much tells us he's the janitor, too.

Since he doesn't actually understand any of the physics or engineering involved, I wouldn't be too surprised if he believes that the stars drained by the weapon 'disappear' when in fact they end up collapsing, destabilizing, and exploding over the course of a few days, weeks or months. The difference is largely academic, unless you're working on the assumption that Starkiller Base will remain floating in space after the star is drained, and can't move to another star system.

Since you are quoting various supporting evidence from the novelization and so on, I suspect you also have evidence that the base moves from system to system after each shot.

I think we can safely assume that Finn is telling us the straightforward truth in the scene, given its important to the plot that he know what he's talking about - but more importantly, at this stage there's simply no good reason to posit an interpretation of the draining of the star that posits its mass is left behind so that it would later collapse and explode in the absence of any explicit evidence tending towards that conclusion. I can't imagine that even the beginnings of such an event would be invisible enough to render 'disappears' accurate. We might learn more later.

That the base is mobile is not AFAIK in the novelization, but its stated by Pablo Hidalgo (in his capacity as part of the Lucasfilm Story Group) that it moves (and that it charged its weapon before repositioning to the system it fired at Hosnian Prime from). At this stage, that the base is mobile is important for it to find new stars to eat, rather than any escape from the exploding remnants of whatever is left behind.

In the currently printed canon, that Starkiller Base is mobile is only implied in one of the released maps - a part of the map is marked "Starkiller Base Origin Point", which would be pretty superfluous if it didn't leave that origin point.

(The Visual Dictionary is surprisingly spare on the matter of Starkiller Base and barely makes reference to its weapon at all).

[Simon_Jester]

I think we can safely assume that Finn is telling us the straightforward truth in the scene, given its important to the plot that he know what he's talking about - but more importantly, at this stage there's simply no good reason to posit an interpretation of the draining of the star that posits its mass is left behind so that it would later collapse and explode in the absence of any explicit evidence tending towards that conclusion. I can't imagine that even the beginnings of such an event would be invisible enough to render 'disappears' accurate. We might learn more later.

If a star were fully drained of thermal energy it would appear to "go out" in the sense of ceasing to shine. Collapse might proceed but it could easily take considerable time to proceed to completion, and the star would probably not glow with visible heat until some time had passed.

Finn may have never seen the weapon fired (it's so powerful and apparently somehow visible over interstellar distances that you'd expect any test-firings to have been spotted). So it may well be that all he knows is "this weapon drains the star" and he phrases as "the star disappears."

If the star's energy is drained but most or all of the mass is there, then it would be some time before there was any intense release of energy caused by gravitational collapse or explosion. If the base is mobile, then it might simply leave before any such event can take place for them to notice. In which case Finn might well know what the base does, and understand its defenses, telling the straightforward and not-particularly-misleading truth as it was told to him... and leave out a detail that isn't really relevant from the point of view of the First Order at large or Finn's briefings in particular.

Meanwhile... if the star's mass is entirely gone and destroyed by the process of charging the weapon, I would have some private concerns regarding where the mass all goes; that's an awful lot of matter to store inside anything, even a planet.

That the base is mobile is not AFAIK in the novelization, but its stated by Pablo Hidalgo (in his capacity as part of the Lucasfilm Story Group) that it moves (and that it charged its weapon before repositioning to the system it fired at Hosnian Prime from). At this stage, that the base is mobile is important for it to find new stars to eat, rather than any escape from the exploding remnants of whatever is left behind.

Well, I'd say it's both.

The weapon is too large and bulky to be sensible if it can only fire once (by draining the star it was built to orbit). There almost have to be more energy-efficient ways to blow up a planet, or other ways to achieve the First Order's goals, than to build something as large as or larger than the second Death Star, just to fire it once. So for that reason, the base has to be mobile.

AND above that, there are reasons to think it would be undesirable to retain a base in the drained star's system after the draining. If nothing else, the sun just went out- the planetary surface will quickly become uninhabitably cold, and even maintaining an oxygen atmosphere on the surface would require enormous artificial power generation. And unless the base really does physically destroy every last remnant of the star, there's a high risk of a nova-like event... that may not be happening, but the point about the sun having gone out stands.

This second reason doesn't prove that the First Order wouldn't build a one-shot Starkiller weapon... But it does mean they wouldn't use the Starkiller base for any purpose aside from that of draining a star to destroy several planets. There wouldn't be any point in constructing facilities for interrogation, large ground garrisons, basing starships, or the like. Because such facilities would simply have to be abandoned after the weapon fired, either when the base was physically destroyed or when the whole planet being plunged into darkness rendered the planet uninhabitable. It would make more sense to build those facilities elsewhere, on another, more permanent home.

I still think there's reason to expect a nova, but that depends on exactly what the Starkiller weapon does and does not consume in the process of charging up to fire a beam.

In the currently printed canon, that Starkiller Base is mobile is only implied in one of the released maps - a part of the map is marked "Starkiller Base Origin Point", which would be pretty superfluous if it didn't leave that origin point.

(The Visual Dictionary is surprisingly spare on the matter of Starkiller Base and barely makes reference to its weapon at all).

Interesting- though I'm sure we'll get more information as time goes on, since the movie's only been out for two months or so. It may be that releasing the details would somehow spoiler Episode VIII or IX?

[Kojiro]

Incidentally with SKB, did anyone else notice that after it exploded it appeared to reform into a smaller sun?

[Vympel]

Incidentally with SKB, did anyone else notice that after it exploded it appeared to reform into a smaller sun?

Good point. That's good evidence that its fuel cells are absorbing the mass of the star it originally fed off, not just thermal energy. I'm not sure how a small star like that would work / how long it would last (or did the star grow larger over time?). Given Starkiller Base had just finished feeding, its possible that it was in the midst of finishing its 'dark energy' conversion phase and a lot of the fuel had already been expended in that process, so maybe it wouldn't grow anymore.

Meanwhile... if the star's mass is entirely gone and destroyed by the process of charging the weapon, I would have some private concerns regarding where the mass all goes; that's an awful lot of matter to store inside anything, even a planet.

Super-dense storage. It's science fiction!

(its not like this wasn't a concept introduced with hypermatter reactors back when the E2ICS came out).

Alternately, it could be a matter of the star being rapidly expended in collecting dark energy, so that its progressively 'spent' as it 'enters' the base and the base doesn't ever need to actually store all of it?

AND above that, there are reasons to think it would be undesirable to retain a base in the drained star's system after the draining. If nothing else, the sun just went out- the planetary surface will quickly become uninhabitably cold, and even maintaining an oxygen atmosphere on the surface would require enormous artificial power generation. And unless the base really does physically destroy every last remnant of the star, there's a high risk of a nova-like event... that may not be happening, but the point about the sun having gone out stands.

Good point - as it is, there's already significant problems with Starkiller Base as an 'ordinary' planet. IIRC, there are problematic atmospheric pressure issues given the gigantic chasm housing the weapon's 'barrel'.

This second reason doesn't prove that the First Order wouldn't build a one-shot Starkiller weapon... But it does mean they wouldn't use the Starkiller base for any purpose aside from that of draining a star to destroy several planets. There wouldn't be any point in constructing facilities for interrogation, large ground garrisons, basing starships, or the like. Because such facilities would simply have to be abandoned after the weapon fired, either when the base was physically destroyed or when the whole planet being plunged into darkness rendered the planet uninhabitable. It would make more sense to build those facilities elsewhere, on another, more permanent home.

Yup absolutely.

Interesting- though I'm sure we'll get more information as time goes on, since the movie's only been out for two months or so. It may be that releasing the details would somehow spoiler Episode VIII or IX?

I would hope not to be honest - the last thing the ST needs is yet another superweapon of any kind.

[Patroklos]

I wouldn't criticize the security arrangements, given that the base is supposed to be virtually inaccessible behind a planetary shield which is basically immune to anything approaching through Euclidean space and which can only be bypassed through an unbelievable feat of precision hyperspace navigation.

Precision? Han guessed. He was able to do it because he is just that smarmy and worldly, that's it. *cring*

[Haminal10]

AND above that, there are reasons to think it would be undesirable to retain a base in the drained star's system after the draining. If nothing else, the sun just went out- the planetary surface will quickly become uninhabitably cold, and even maintaining an oxygen atmosphere on the surface would require enormous artificial power generation. And unless the base really does physically destroy every last remnant of the star, there's a high risk of a nova-like event... that may not be happening, but the point about the sun having gone out stands.

I figured that this was the reason that the Star Killer Base planet looked like it was completely covered with ice and snow: the planet has been subjected to the lost of its star and the cold journey through interstellar space to a new star at least once.

[Patroklos]

The effects of such a state, even for a few hours, would leave it looking like Antarctica, not Norther Canada with a thriving forest landscape.

[SCRawl]

The effects of such a state, even for a few hours, would leave it looking like Antarctica, not Norther Canada with a thriving forest landscape.

This is a planet-sized object with (presumably) rather extreme power generation capabilities. I'm confident that the loss of any incoming energy from a nearby star could be more than compensated for by artificial means.

[Patroklos]

I am sure Imperial Officers like tropical beaches as much as the next guy. If it is so trivial and they are choosing the environment of a planet I doubt Siberian winter is what most would go for. For practical reasons alone snow buried taiga isn't exactly operationally friendly.

[Simon_Jester]

It may well be that while the base has the stored energy to do something like turn on a planet-wide battery of space heaters, they don't have the space heaters themselves set up. I wouldn't blame them.

I mean, the entire point of the base's design is that it stores quantities of energy powerful enough to pop a planet like a balloon. It may well be that the only hardware systems hooked up to this vast storehouse of energy are:

1) The main gun, and
2) The charging mechanism that drains stars.

There's a lot of good reasons NOT to have any power connections running direct from the planet-crushing energy storage system to the parts of the base that use relatively normal and mundane amounts of energy. It'd be like having a connection running directly from a set of high-voltage transmission lines outside your house, into your light bulbs. Even if you won't instantly blow out the light bulbs by default, any electrical grid accident is vastly more dangerous when you have that kind of power on tap to short out into the grid.

[Purple]

Given that this is all true what of the radiant heat? I mean, a storage system powerful enough to suck up a star and the associated vacuum cleaner are going to give off a lot of heat when working. The radiant heat from the regular operation of the system might well be enough to heat the atmosphere sufficiently to maintain it in a just barely livable state. Hence the landscape.

[Simon_Jester]

...Exactly how would having massive amounts of energy dumped into the planetary ecosystem explain a part of said ecosystem being a snowy boreal forest?

[Note: do we actually know the whole planet is cold? Maybe it's just the part near the base.]

[Purple]

Actually I would be surprised if the area around the base was not the only one with an ecosystem. That is after all where most of the energy is going to be escaping. For all we know the rest of the world could be a frozen ball of ice.

[Borgholio]

[Note: do we actually know the whole planet is cold? Maybe it's just the part near the base.]

Looked pretty Hoth-like from orbit...

[Galvatron]

I wish the VD or ICS or whatever reference book it is that tells us all about the base hadn't done so. I was perfectly fine just assuming that Starkiller Base was some form of worldcraft that was repurposed and weaponized by the First Order.

After all, given the size comparison hologram with the Death Star, isn't Starkiller Base ridiculously tiny to be a naturally occurring planet with Earthlike gravity and surface conditions (yes, I'm aware that Endor was also tiny by that rationale)?

[Purple]

Given that all planets in the SW universe seem to have earth like gravity maybe there is an unknown component to it. Like maybe their physics are different and hyperspace somehow makes all planets have the same gravity.

[Galvatron]

I tend to prefer a less complicated explanation. I mean, we didn't see Tatooine, Hoth, or any of the other Earthlike planets shown next to anything with a defined size for comparison so we don't have to reconcile them with actual physics.

One outside-the-box thought I had is that maybe Starkiller Base and Endor are BOTH artificial. Maybe Endor was actually created as a wildlife preserve for certain endangered lifeforms during the bleeding heart days of the Old Republic and that's why it was called a "sanctuary moon."

[Iroscato]

I wish the VD or ICS or whatever reference book it is that tells us all about the base hadn't done so. I was perfectly fine just assuming that Starkiller Base was some form of worldcraft that was repurposed and weaponized by the First Order.

After all, given the size comparison hologram with the Death Star, isn't Starkiller Base ridiculously tiny to be a naturally occurring planet with Earthlike gravity and surface conditions (yes, I'm aware that Endor was also tiny by that rationale)?

If they've figured out how to contain a star in an area a few hundred miles across without it instantly turning into a black hole, I'm confident they'll have engineered planet-wide artificial gravity.

[Simon_Jester]

After all, given the size comparison hologram with the Death Star, isn't Starkiller Base ridiculously tiny to be a naturally occurring planet with Earthlike gravity and surface conditions (yes, I'm aware that Endor was also tiny by that rationale)?

If that was the DS-II we saw in the hologram, then the base isn't that ridiculously small.

We can't assume that just because the film was shot in 1.0g, that the gravity is exactly 1.0g, and a planet that is 8-10 times as wide as the second Death Star would be large enough to have something pretty close to Earth's gravity.

[Galvatron]

Is Wookieepedia incorrect or isn't the DS2 still canonically 160km in diameter?

Yes, I'm aware of the intended size and Saxton's commentary page.

[Themightytom]

Well at this point I've been waiting for this longer than I was waiting for Star Wars Episode 7 to come out and the day has come!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0Wi7J_ ... =youtu.be/

[SCRawl]

Well at this point I've been waiting for this longer than I was waiting for Star Wars Episode 7 to come out and the day has come!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0Wi7J_ ... =youtu.be/

Are you sure you have the right link?