Comments on: To the Gentleman at Slashdot Who Points Out That R2-D2 Totally Has Jets to Climb Stairs, DUH

By: Deb

Deb — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 02:32:35 +0000

Rewatched Star Wars just 'cause, and the thing is, if R2 and 3PO had good design, they wouldn't work nearly as well as characters. Think about it, if R2 had good design he'd be the size of a thumb drive, would simply interface with starships, and he'd probably talk like a GPS. No expressive whistles or beeps, no silly banter. What's fun about that? (OK well, it wouldn't be the same kind of fun.) Jets are COOL! R2 And 3PO are flawed and useful and full of texture and life and brilliance. All things that make for interesting characters. And all part of a universe that blew me away one summer day a long time ago in a town far, far away....

By: NelC

NelC — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 16:29:52 +0000

Where did I read the rationalisation that R2D2 is a spy-droid disguised as an ordinary astromech? Or possibly an ordinary astromech upgraded and retrofitted so that it can serve as a spy. (R2 wasn’t given the plans for the Death Star, it stole them in the first place.)

In this rationalisation, astromechs aren’t commonly found haring off having adventures everywhere — especially in places with stairs instead of elevators — so the compromises evident in their design make sense for their usual environments. R2D2′s other odd abilities are the result of being fitted with devices by the SW’s equivalent of James Bond’s Q, and are used for the surprise factor to get it out of bad situations. (Still doesn’t explain why it has jets rather than anti-gravity, though.)

By: Richard

Richard — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 21:23:51 +0000

If you want to excuse the deliberate design decisions, like R2′s jets, simply point out that conclusions like “R2D2 has jets to traverse stairs” is just an extrapolation from available data. We don’t know that’s why he has jets.

But I admire John’s article for not making that link, instead simply noting that (a) stairs are a bit of a problem for R2 and (b) he’s got enough ordinance to give TSA heart murmurs if he ever went near an airport, but not a 30-cent voice chip.

For me, it’s the design omissions which reveal the greater weaknesses. Safety railings, people! Safety railings! The Rebel Alliance isn’t the Empire’s greatest foe. OSHA is!

By: Steve

Steve — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 18:39:04 +0000

I think Julian’s got this one figured out — not a lot of stairs in Star Wars. So one might take into account where old R2 was designed to operate.

Now a 10 year old slave building a protocol droid for his mom is a bit of a stretch. Definitely a bit of history shoehorned into a spot it didn’t belong.

By: ajay

ajay — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 16:35:53 +0000

I actually think that the terrible design doesn’t really detract from the films. In fact, it makes them all the more believable. Military design classics like “don’t get this radio wet, it’ll explode”, “we’ve run the fuel line through the ammo locker so that it’ll all explode at once” and “we’ve put the bridge immediately behind the smokestack so you can’t see where you’re going because the bridge is full of smoke” really happened in the real world, guys.

By: Daniel Roman

Daniel Roman — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 15:48:10 +0000

Well, I *do* have a Mechanical Engineering degree, with just about two decades experience in industrial automation and robotics, and I can say most of Scalzi’s comments about the horrible technical designs in the SW universe were correct.

By: Jacob

Jacob — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 21:41:01 +0000

Yeah, I liked Starship Troopers quite a bit. It wasn't an adaptation of Heinlein's book, it was a satire of it. My take of the movie was that its arguement was that military science fiction, especially when fighting an evil Other, was fascist. And so it was a fascist movie. Now, granted it was a pretty heavyhanded satire, but I enjoyed it none the less.

By: Craig Ranapia

Craig Ranapia — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 13:11:47 +0000

On a final note, if anyone would like to discuss the piece of trash that Paul Verhoeven made that has the same name as Heinlein’s “Starship Troopers”, I’m your man.

It’s interesting as an elaborate piss-take of war films. That’s about all.

By: John Scalzi

John Scalzi — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 20:50:12 +0000

I don’t think we need to worry too much about that, MarkHB.

By: MarkHB

MarkHB — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 20:46:57 +0000

I hope, on the above topics, it doesn’t go too far the other way. I loved the way in Babylon 5, you had an O’Neill-type station, with fighters liberally barnacled with engines. Robust, plausible designs. The shwooshy dogfights in Galactica were all the sweeter for their silence, the muted, hull-transmitted rumble of gunfire, the blatting of fractional jets.

It would be a terrible shame, though, if people stopped making up stories just because they can’t face ignoring the man behind the curtain.