LogFAQs > #913531630

Unbridled9 posted...

Heck, space combat itself might be rendered entirely obsolete since who the fuck would dare start a war when you'd suddenly have your capitol planet smashed to bits by sixty hyperspace missiles that you have little to no method of stopping vaporizing your planet?

Here's the problem with this as a complaint - TLJ didn't introduce anything that wasn't already there. FTL travel was already a thing. Missiles were already a thing. Why has no one combined the two to create WMDs? Who knows? Maybe something about gravity wells stops it from happening (in the old lore, ships would get pulled out of hyperspace if they passed too close to a gravity well - something like that apparently still exists in the new, as Interdictors are still a thing, though Han's manoeuvre in TFA seems to suggest it's less strict than before).

Basically, though, from Star Wars - most universes with FTL travel, honestly - always have that question hanging over their head: given the immense, destructive potential of something moving that fast, why has no one tried to weaponize it yet? Only thing that I can say is that clearly *something* must be preventing it, or else someone would have come up with it by now.

Unbridled9 posted...

Have you SEEN the imperials and what they do? They THRIVE on spending money to build massively powerful superweapons capable of destroying entire planets and star-systems. This isn't just 'right up their alley' it's 'inside their home, cooking them dinner, and asking how work went'. And it's COST EFFECTIVE to boot!

It's not cost effective - that's exactly what I've spent the last few posts explaining. You could have the same destructive potential for far less cost in something like the Dreadnought, which can one-shot enemy capital ships *without* relying on single-use hyperspace rams.

Unbridled9 posted...

The First Order was a fringe group while the Dumb-Names were a powerful organization that had their own freaking capitol planet. It's only because Ryan didn't give an F that things suddenly got flipped in 8.

This is not correct. The Resistance and the New Republic were not the same thing, the First Order isn't a fringe group, and J.J. Abrams is the one who wrote both of those facts, not Johnson.

Basically, after RotJ the Empire collapsed and was steadily driven out into the unknown regions of space. The Rebellion pursued them for a while then, once they were too weak to be considered a threat anymore, refocused their efforts on rebuilding the Republic. As part of their transition to the new governing body, the New Republic deliberately disarmed in order to prevent a dictator like Palpatine from ever rising to power by seizing control of the military.

This turned out to be a bad decision, because the remnants of the Empire wound up settling on previously unsurveyed planets and discovered a significant trove of natural resources that they used to rebuild and re-arm, turning themselves into the First Order. When this came to light, the leading elements of the New Republic were in favour of a detente, a sort of "you don't bother us, we won't bother you" type of truce - that became official policy, which some members decried as dangerous. Those members broke away and started re-arming themselves, becoming the Resistance - they were allied with the Republic, but not officially part of them, since their raison d'etre basically went against the Republic's whole philosophy of peace. As such, the Resistance didn't have access to the Republic's (considerably more sizable) cache of resources and was basically funded by independent donors.

That was all set up in the lore surrounding TFA and was what Johnson was working with when he came onboard.
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