Saturday, May 31, 2025

Aim and the Imperial Stormtrooper trope

Stormtroopers? PFFT! You can't hit me, nyah nyah!

Combat staging in the original Star Wars trilogy, particularly A New Hope and Empire, is actually surprisingly grounded. 

I understand we have assistant director Brian Johnston to thank for that.


In Rogue One, Jyn and Cassian just have to point their blaster in a random direction and a dozen stormtroopers drop dead. 


And I’m only slightly exaggerating. 


Not so in the original trilogy. Obviously, the stormtroopers can’t hit, because the only targets are the main cast. Always good to have a few expendables along for the narrative ride. But what many people ignore is that the heroes fire plenty of shots that don’t hit either.


This is true to actual combat: most shots don’t hit anyone, contrary to what playground battles would have you believe. Typically, an average of 60 shots are needed to take out an enemy combatant.


In other words, the people complaining are simply ignorant playground fantasists. 


Further, the bad guys (and heroes) use cover, and will duck in and out to fire. Again, quite realistic. You see this on the Tantive IV at the beginning, on the Death Star, and in Cloud City. 


As the Star Wars franchise has gone on, however, combat staging has become increasingly infantile. 


Jedi and Sith back flips, hundred foot leaps, whirling twirling and parrying blaster bolts by the dozen are the order of the day. 


I get that, they’re magical space wizards, but the grunts?


Clone troopers just walk around, standing straight up, across open terrain, making no effort to protect themselves or minimize likelihood of getting hit. They don’t drop prone, they don’t cluster behind vehicles or obstacles, they just walk in the open. Sane people don’t do that, unless egged on by sergeants or NKVD units threatening to shoot them if they don’t.


I get these sort of silly suicidal tactics for robots; droids can be programmed to have no self-preservation instinct. 


But for humans? Or clones who are supposed to be the best of the best, battle trained and genetically engineered from the galaxy’s greatest bounty-hunter warrior? 


Pft.


Perhaps this is meant to be evocative of the American Civil War, from which the clone GAR (Grand Army of the Republic) gets its name. In those days, troops were armed with largely inaccurate weapons that required massed firepower to be effective. The Civil War saw the introduction of repeater rifles and more accurate weapons with rifled (hence the name) barrels. These helical grooves on the interior barrel surface greatly increased accuracy. This was more expensive, so these weren’t distributed to the majority of troops, and were used primarily by snipers and cavalry. By the time of the Franco-Prussian War, however, they were more common, and the shift began towards taking cover and the German storm troop infiltration tactics of WWI (from which we get the name ‘stormtroopers’). 


But it doesn’t make sense here, because these weapons are no different than the ones used later, or thousands of years earlier at the advent of the Galactic Republic. Technology canonically hasn’t evolved substantially for thousands of years in Star Wars, so there’s no way they don’t understand basic infantry tactics, and there’s no reason why it has to be staged with such grandiose, blatant incompetence.


Combat staging in Andor, on the other hand, is generally good, particularly in season one. The action sequences with the corporate cops trying to stop Andor are entirely believable.


True, the stormtroopers on Ghorman in season two stand in the open, sans cover, which doesn’t make as much sense… except here the Empire wanted to take casualties.


But in Andor? The troopers don’t bother. Every shot the heroes fire hits. Why? Because audiences expect heroes to hit with every shot, because that’s how they think combat actually works. They’re wrong.


On Jeda, Imperials pop on stage and fall like ten pins, with stunning narrative convenience. 


None of it feels remotely believable, even for space opera.


Given the amount of effort Gareth Edwards went to to create a believable, grounded setting, including 360 degree sets, incredible costume and set design, and fabulous cinematography, it’s sad it’s all undermined by combat staging designed by a six year old.


Incredibly, The Mandalorian is even worse: it undermines the villains deliberately, making them canonically incompetent, armed with weapons that don’t shoot straight: these boobs can’t even hit a stationary object a few feet away. 


What menace can they muster? Not much. What's the value of victory over the inept and incompetent? Small wonder the Empire collapsed.


And when the Impies gather to assault a bar, they don’t bother with cover, they stand in a big crowd out in the open, waiting to be shot. Have you ever seen a SWAT team do that? No, because they take cover behind whatever is available… because people don’t like getting shot.


If you want to have a believable fantasy world, you need to have the inhabitants behave in believable ways, or the bubble of disbelief pops like a Death Star shot up the thermal exhaust pipe. 


Making the villains a joke turns the franchise into playground pantomime, operating at the level of the children for whom it’s made. 


They're now canonically incompetent; it just adds to their intimidating mystique!

Friday, May 23, 2025

Why I prefer the Death Star design flaw

Why, it's a moon-sized White Elephant!

Have you ever worked at a megacorporation? 

Or better yet, for government? 

If you’ve worked on a megaproject, you know how often things go wrong, how much compromise is involved, and how easy it is for something to be overlooked. 


Because something always is.


Take America's Zumwalt class destroyers: a multi-billion dollar fiasco for the United States Navy that fired $800,000 a pop shells. 


The HE177, the LaGG-3, the A7V, and the Lockheed XFV-1 Salmon? 


Failures every one.


History is littered with weapons and vehicles that perform badly, posing an even greater danger to their operators than the enemy. Ships so top heavy they immediately capsize (lookin' at you, Vasa), tanks so heavy they sink into the ground and can’t cross a bridge or use a road, sonic weapons that require targets to remain stationary for several minutes, ammo magazines placed below the ship’s chimney (the HMS Hood, possibly an inspiration for the Death Star flaw), constantly jamming gun magazines, and much worse have all been inflicted upon unfortunate servicemen.


The original Panama Canal project, designed by Ferdinand de Lesseps (the same man who built the Suez Canal), ended in fiasco, bankruptcy and mass death from disease. Some 800,000 French citizens lost their savings when the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Interocéanique de Panama folded, almost bringing down the French government. 


The bottom line? Lesseps original idea of building the canal, without locks, was wrong headed and never going to work.


How's that for a mega-project gone wrong?


Even worse, the USSR's White Sea-Baltic Canal was so badly managed it resulted in the deaths of 25,000+ workers.


How about the more recent Bataan nuclear power plant, built for $2.3 billion (and never completed, thankfully) in an earthquake-prone zone, near a volcano? I mean, seriously?


How about Chernobyl? 


And it's not just in the realm of hardware: software absurdities abound. Max Tegmark's Life 3.0 has some delicious examples:


"On June 4, 1996, scientists hoping to research Earth's magnetosphere cheered jubilantly as Ariane 5 rocket from the European Space Agency soared into the sky with scientific instruments they had built. Thirty-seven seconds later, their smiles vanished as the rocket exploded in a fireworks display costing hundreds of millions of dollars. 


The cause was found to be buggy software manipulating a number that was too large to fit into the 16 bits allocated for it. 


Two years later, NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter accidentally entered the Red Planet's atmosphere and disintegrated because two different parts of the software used different units for force, causing a 445% error in the rocket-engine thrust control.... their Mariner 1 mission to Venus exploded after launch from Cape Canaveral on July 22, 192, after the flight-control software was foiled by an incorrect punctuation mark."


Even better, a missing hyphen caused the Russian Phobos 1 probe to issue an 'end-of-mission' command while en route to Mars, resulting in it shutting down. 


You read that right: a missing hyphen took out a multi-million dollar interplanetary probe designed by some of the smartest people on the planet.


It happens.


Tiny oversights can lead to catastrophic consequences.


Building a space station the size of a small moon... now that is a project of such mammoth complexity, it's practically inevitable that something crucial would be overlooked. The bigger they are, the harder they fall. 


Honestly, it's amazing the Death Star worked at all. 


The only down side: the Rebellion managed to analyze the flaw a little too easily, and the Imperials confirmed it as a risk during the Rebel attack. If it was that easy to discover the flaw, the Imperials would already know. Unless hubris and overconfidence prevented them for looking for that kind of flaw at all… which is actually... also kind of plausible. 


If the Empire had HACMS (high-assurance cyber military systems), they'd have spotted major flaws, whether deliberately placed or accidental. As Star Wars droids don't seem to be especially bright, I doubt this was a thing. 


Making the Death Star flaw an act of deliberate sabotage by a disgruntled anti-Imperial designer is just so much less fun it’s not funny.


I like my doomsday devices big and dumb.

Sunday, May 18, 2025

Recommended: Andor season two

Ooo, a character collage, it must be good!

Andor season 2 is as excellent as the avalanche of reviews claim.

The first six episodes are on the slow side, even for Andor standards, but the slow build pays off big time in the second half. 


Hands down, the best Star Wars material since The Empire Strikes Back.


On top of that, it’s smart and politically relevant.


Some people are really, really going to hate it. 


I loved it.


Go watch.