Why I prefer the Death Star design flaw

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.

Recommended: Andor season two

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. 

Christopher Bretz's realistic 'post-apocalypse' maps

Okay, they're not really post-apocalypse, more post-climate change. These are far more realistic and 'grounded' (heh) than the Gordon-Michael Scallion flights of fancy into glorious cranktown. 

According to an Anthropocene Magazine article, he created these when he grew concerned about global warming, and redrew the world map with coastlines 80 meters higher than they are currently. 

The most striking change? Florida is gone. Absolutely, totally... gone. 

Check out the Anthropocene site for more, including the map of Europe. 

Chris Bretz's map of post-climate change North America

Future maps of Gordon Michael Scallion

Post-apocalypse North America

These are a mix of fact and pseudo-science-sorcery, but they're still fun. 

Gordon-Michael Scallion put out two map sets, one in the nineties and a second set in the early aughts. Great background for a post-apocalypse sci-fi adventure like... Magnum Thrax!

Check out more over on the awesome Geographicus site.

The ruins of the world

Denis Villeneuve hates Ewoks too

No less a figure than auteur sci-fi director Denis Villeneuve shares the widespread disdain for the Ewoks:

“I was 15 years old, and my best friend and I wanted to take a cab and go to L.A. and talk to George Lucas — we were so angry! Still today, the Ewoks. It turned out to be a comedy for kids," he said. "Star Wars became crystallized in its own mythology, very dogmatic, it seemed like a recipe, no more surprises. So I’m not dreaming to do a Star Wars because it feels like code is very codified.”

Can't argue with that. 

See the full article over at CBR.

I compiled my own thoughts on the weeble-wooble fuzzballs here. 

Head canon: Star Wars edition

I like the idea of head canon, especially as I get older, and the franchises I loved get longer and longer in the tooth. 

It's inevitable that franchises will have ups and downs, golden eras and dark ages, fabulous creative teams and capricious greedy studio hacks who care nothing for the material, have nothing to say, and just want to milk it for every penny they can get their grubby cheeto stained fingers on. 

Or is it me with the cheetos? Whatever.

So I thought I'd put together a list of my own head canon. 

First up is Star Wars, because, honestly, that one is pretty easy.

My official (and completely irrelevant outside of my head) list: 

• Star Wars (just Star Wars, not the Very Special Edition with Blossom)

• The Empire Strikes Back (original cut)

• The Return of the Jedi (original cut, but only half of it)

• The Mandalorian season 1 (some of it) and season 2 (a little of it)

• Andor (all of it)

I'm not really a fan of the prequels, but George Lucas deserves his due: he didn't blatantly rehash the first trilogy, lazily reordering elements. He added to the whole, and he didn't blow up another d*mn Death Star (okay, that Trade Federation control ship came close). Still, it wasn't the creatively bankrupt hack job the sequel trilogy was.

Just as The Force Awakens regurgitates A New Hope, The Last Jedi recycles The Empire Strikes Back. It's so obvious, yet no one sees it (or they don't care). I still don't get why people swoon over this lacklustre film. It doesn't 'democratize' jedi or force powers: the jedi were shown to not have kids in the prequel trilogy already. Lucas set that up, so why this film gets the credit I have no idea. 

And as bad as I find Last Jedi, the Rise of Skywalker is an irredeemable, unwatchable abomination about which nothing further should be said.

Sadly, younger fans HATE Andor, they find it slow paced, boring, and insufficiently superficial with lots of bling bling. Not enough Death Stars blow up, and there isn't enough ostentatious back flipping. They'd probably prefer Swan Lake with lightsabers. 

Me? I think it's fascinating, smart, historically informed, and well constructed. It has slow builds that yield big payoffs. It's brilliant, far better than anything else put out since Empire Strikes Back. 

That said, Andor's NOT a kids show. Lucas famously declared himself a toymaker who also made movies (mostly to advertise the toys) and that the films were made for specifically for children. I think he's mistaken, in that the first two films are actually all-ages (despite muppet Yoda), and it's only with lame Ewoks and subsequent prequels that it smashed right into children's faces, rather than a general audience's. 

My head cannon reflects this. 

How the h*ll Andor ever got greenlit given the franchise focus on kiddies I can't explain, but it makes up for a lot Disney has put out. Not enough, mind, I'm still a disgruntled old fan who regularly yells at the younglings on his lawn (at least I don't dice them with a lightsaber, unlike Ani 'Are you an Angel' Skywalker), but a lot.

The Disney era for Star Wars has a few other highlights: they've put out some cool games (Rebellion, X-Wing, Armada) and... uh, okay that's about it. 

I've aged out as an audience member. As the feral kid says, it just lives now in my memories.

What qualifies as a fan these days?

When I was a little kid, I got caught up in all the hype and fanfare over Star Wars. It was a cultural moment. I got toys, comics, books, the works. Later on I even played the RPG and bought miniatures to go with it. 

I read a ton of sci-fi as a teenager, and watched all (most) of the Star Trek shows. I watched Doctor Who as a kid, too, from around age 6 or 7.

And then... it all kind of faded away. I stopped reading sci-fi, stopped playing RPGs and boardgames, stopped watching the TV shows. 

Over COVID, I picked up some RPGs and boardgames again, and watched the Trek I'd missed decades ago. 

Do I still qualify as a fan? 

I think I did as a teenager, and while I still love the original era of Star Wars and Star Trek and Doctor Who (some of which is better not rewatched lest the nostalgia goggles fail), I've never really jibed with the newer installments. I liked the new Doctor, but it was never quite as good as the old stuff. Or perhaps more to the point, I was no longer as impressionable and open to it. 

The media we consume between say, 8 and 18, can have a greater impact than anything subsequent. Our minds are sponges. We soak up everything we can and then seek out more. 

For some people, this never ends. They remain hard core fans their whole lives. 

If I think, hey, I'm a fan of X franchise, I can look over (on the Internets, it's figurative, just roll with me) at uber fans who live and breathe it. I still have some books and merchandise. They have the pajamas, compendiums, encyclopedias, costumes, games, books, films, fan films, their own podcast, tattoos, etcetera. 

My enthusiasm pales by comparison to insignificance. Can I still call myself a fan? 

Given that 'fan' is derived from 'fanatic', maybe not. 

Franchises are story machine loops, constantly cycling, the same but different, running decade after decade. Eventually, we start to cotton on to how they work. How many times did they blow up the Death Star? How many times did the transporter get blocked by a magnetic storm or barrier or what have you? How many times did a paradox blow up a computer? How many times were they separated from the TARDIS? How many times did the ally turn out to be the enemy? How many times did Kirk get his shirt off?

You get the idea.

The most impactful material is what you first ingest, because that's the freshest, even if it isn't. Fresh is relative. A ten year old watching a tired old show will think the new stuff is the bomb because they haven't soaked up the previous 40 years of material yet. 

So... I like certain franchises, and within them, I like certain eras, largely because that's what I first saw. Of course, they're also better than any other era, I mean obviously, but it's a waste of energy trying to convince others of that.