MacroFab Engineering Podcast #204
MacroFab Engineering Podcast #204
Hyr0n of the AND!XOR group joins the podcast this week to discuss the DEFCON 30 Hacker Smart Watch and what we can look forward to next year.
On this episode, there are some AND!XOR hints for DC29 and we discuss the difference between PCB DRC specifications for clearance and creepage.
Hyr0n and Zapp are back! This time to discuss Firmware Stacks, Real Time Operating Systems, and more #Badgelife shenanigans.
Spoiler Alert: This podcast contains HEAVY SPOILERS for Star Wars Episode 9 and The Madalorian series up to Episode 7. If you do not want spoilers turn back now.
Josh Rozier
Hyr0n
Topics
Welcome to the fourth annual macro fab Star Wars Christmas special podcast. We're your guest
Hi Ron and Roz
and we are your host Parker Dohmen and Steven Craig. This is episode 204.
By day rods is a spreadsheet slinger for the Umbrella Corporation. When he's not wasting too much time playing Star Wars RPG with your gracious hosts. He's typically doing his best not to burn down his shed with whatever project has ADHD allows him to focus on. from nine to five Hi, Ron is a security researcher, systems engineer and corporate advisor of first order security policy via Carillion PowerPoints. However, from five to nine he is a hardware hacker designer of N not XOR embedded system puzzles and tree wiki and voiceover of droid holiday VR porn.
So does not go without saying his spoiler alert if you have not watched Star Wars Episode Nine.
Turn us off. Go see that movie, then come back. Thank you for your download. And thanks to our two guests for coming on. Hi, Ron and Roz. Hey, thank you.
Glad to be back.
Yeah. Roger was on last year's holiday special, which was a ton of fun.
Yeah, you got the bleep button. Ready this year, too. Are
we talked about all kinds of
posts? Yeah,
I want to be bleeped.
So episode nine, we all saw it. It was a movie.
It was a movie.
At least one movie. It had motions on screens, pictures. There was visual effects. So do we want to jump into that right now? Yeah, well, episode nine.
Yeah, let's let's just let's talk a little bit about that and then move on to some other stuff. Okay, so episode nine thoughts. I guess I will start. Yeah, go for it is I didn't write any notes. But
my biggest problem with the problems. Problem is our biggest problem is there doesn't seem to be any, like long lasting ramifications.
Oh my gosh, no. There's like strings of things that get resolved, like, introduced and resolved immediately sometimes in the same scene. Yeah, sometimes, but like the main ones I'm thinking about is like, when Ray blows up the transport blows up Chewbacca? Yeah. And I was like, holy. And then like, the next scene, like, yeah, like he's alive and you're like, that I will get no I didn't want Chewbacca to be dead. But I was like, man, they just like, they could have waited at least like 30 minutes before revealing that he was still alive.
Well, you know, they screen that scene, and some Disney exec was like, nope, get no reshot.
That's exactly what happened. I had already come to terms with it. Because that's thing is you don't see two transports you only see one transport the entire time. Right. And so they made up they say reshot that next scene that said, oh, there was two transports.
Yeah, I I figured you know what? They let them go there. Because last time I'm like, you killed Akhbar just on a whim. So you know, you killed chewy. I'm okay with it. I was coming to terms with it. And then two minutes later, you like, damn it.
But here's the thing, the scenes go leading up to that point. I was just I almost had my my head in my hands because it was like, Okay, we've got to go out to this random place in the desert to find this random ship that's been sitting there for a long time that has the thing that we need. And then oh, no, there's quicksand. And then, oh, no, there's a thing down there. And then oh, no, there's a worm. And then oh, no, I find that I can heal it. And this all happens in like, three minutes. And then oh, no, chewy dies, you don't like it's like, holy crap. How much crap? Can you just keep throwing at it? It's ridiculous.
So then, the next time they the major point when they do this is see Threepio when he gets his mind wiped, right? And they're like, Oh, you have a backup and they say, oh, r one r two D TOS backup isn't very good. So it won't work. Except for this time. It was perfect. And it's just like, Come on, guys. Like I thought it'd be really funny. From there. I'll point out like, he was like, how he wasn't episode one. We're like he just meeting people. It was Yeah, but no, they did it for one scene and then that was it. Well, so.
That leads in and sorry not to take the, you know, mantle from you. But that leads into my like, biggest problem with the entire mainly episode nine but really the whole last three, the latest trilogy is that the fan service is insane, right? It like everything Oh sure we get some metal you know at the very end it's and it gets a metal from like the intern you know like the lady who does the filing, like off to the side it's
like hey, we didn't want anybody to see this but you go you know? Yeah,
we got some last time to make up for you know,
right that does that make up for the hug? Yes, that's the metal what hug What are you talking about? At the end of it was episode seven. Where they come back and like Ray and and Leah hug and like completely bypass chewy. Oh they're just going around
Don't mind me I'm only feet you know, overlook
real quick back on see Threepio when he was getting his mind, I guess dumped for by the little gizmo guy. I was super super hoping that that little guy would say like, Who the hell built this
thing? Like, man, this thing is garbage. It's built like, like it's built by a six year old What the hell
is all the sand in here. Speaking of C three Pierre, though, is he stole the first act for me. He was the best character and best written character like in that first whole act.
Because of the mind wide thing. No, just like his interactions with everyone. His comments, quips like when they get sucked down into like the sandpit like everyone's like, Oh, yo, yo, okay, and then Z thief. He was like, I'm fine in the background. Like him, he stole the show, that first act, and then he gets kind of sidelined until he gets his memory raised. Right. But yeah, he was like, he he made the first act of that movie bearable for me.
You know, C three pill and RTD two are the only two characters that have been in every Star Wars movie all of the nine.
Yeah, cuz either one everyone is either not in that movie or dead by then. Right? Yeah,
Force ghosts. Hey, I
wouldn't be surprised with the way they did things if they killed off see Threepio and RTD to and made them force droid ghosts. Like that wouldn't surprise me at all with the way they handle the force and stuff now.
Oh, Jesus.
Well, so the interesting thing about this movie is like, it's like they finally realized that oh, God, we have to build background and plot into this story. Otherwise, it doesn't work. Quick. Let's do it in 60 minutes for the first half of the movie, cram everything in. Ray has to go to trading that explains her ridiculous powers. You know, like
there's it's not just that she has to go to training and then fail the training.
Yeah, well, because she doesn't
complete it. You know, actually, when I was watching a Star Wars review just the other day and the guy who was reviewing called out something I never thought about. We've never seen a Jedi complete their training, or actually, we've never seen anyone complete their training. We've only seen people who have but not like ever successfully do it. You know? Yeah, that would be true. Yeah, I'm just saying like, we don't know what that actually looks like. Like I was talking to my wife the other day was like, Do they just kind of like take you to Dave and Busters and get game cards be like you did it.
Get a certificate?
A free drink ticket and a hamburger your agenda
so something that was bothering me through Oh, other than Was this the shortest crawl ever. For the intro it felt like it I looked at I was like Christ the crawl has like a 64 character limit now it's like, tweet, it's based TLDR ship gone wrong space laser.
Just that it was like they introduced a major plot point, which was powerful teens back baby. And it's just like, it just says the dead can speak Palpatine is alive. And it's just like, if you're going to do that they could just end Ray has been in training for the past year as well. Yeah. And then all this other stuff that guess it's proven taking half the crap they combined in the first act and just shoved it into that beginning crawl. And then I would have been like, okay, cool. That's what they did in Jedi. Yeah, that's that's what they didn't Jedi
but but when it starts, you can tell that it's been time passed. Yeah, they, even though they didn't say it like they they kind of let it bleed in where it's like, yeah, some times gone on. Things have been happening here. You can't get any concept of time between the end of the last movie in this one. Yeah.
Well, because of the like the resurrection of Palpatine and like the training that Ray went through and God, I'm sure I'm forgetting a bunch of other things like, basically all you need to know from the last movie is that Snoke is dead. And you know, that's about it. A name a name, a major plot point from the last Jedi that really affected this movie. Go on. Oh, wait.
Oh became a leader. Irrelevant. That's about it. Power became a leader and Snoke is dead.
I didn't get it. Nobody listened to him. He didn't actually get promoted. That's why he's
just he's just the highest ranking person still alive. That's it.
But you saw that in the in the Sith temple. snugs just bad 3d prints.
Yeah, yeah. That was actually my favorite thing of just like, that's the equivalent of
like, you know, when you save your leftover abs to make slurry, like this one didn't work. Just throw it in the smoke pile will melt it down and use the Snoke
file. Geez. But in the Muttart materializer I thought that was like, I don't know, it just felt like a like whenever. Because whenever JJ Abrams basically like on wrote something from what happened in the last movie. It it felt like a snide to the previous movie like that holes like that of snakes. Oh, yeah. Because because probably they could have just
said, your evil villain is just a carbon copy. Like yeah, not as to base. Yeah, yeah.
They're like, yep, these clones didn't work out. Yeah. Like he's not
important at all or anything. There's nothing. Nothing about him. Because he probably could just said I was controlling Snoke like that whole, like when he was publishing was talking. And his voice morphed into Snopes voice. Like I really liked that. And then Vader's. Yeah, and I thought that was really cool. But then they pan to like the vat of snakes. And I couldn't help but laugh.
They put a lot of effort into making this movie negate the last one. Like they put a ton of effort into it.
Because the last movie basically shot all continuity in the foot. Like, it's like three separate movies, and they're trying to make it a cohesive trilogy. And they had to do it in the first 60 minutes of the last movie.
So I tried to give them the benefit of the doubt. Disney's new EU forgive the hell it's called. So they released two books to bridge the lat the last movie in this one, the books called resistance reborn. So I was like, okay, all by get the audio book. Parker was right. They Disney does audio books, well, their master with sound effects, music and all that. There's like two to three years between last Jedi and rise of Skywalker. And the stuff that they explain where when they were talking about the back reasons for making the book was we couldn't fit this in the movie. But there's a lot of stuff we want to explain to let you realize that what you lost was Did you ever pick up on you know, when Poe Dameron goes rogue and contributes to like destroying the entire fleet and getting him on the run and running with beauty? And then all of a sudden, he's a hero again? No, he pretty much destroyed the resistance down to six or seven people. But when rises, Skywalker starts it's like, Hey, we got a bunch of people together. We don't talk about Hey, where were all our friends that didn't show up and they explain everything going on in the books and what happens is so when the he makes that comment in the movie, he's like, I just don't know where everyone showed up. I'm like, damn it Disney. You just shot your that's the whole reason you released a damn book where you explained it's meant for continuity. And you mess that one up with one line edited out.
Yeah, talk talk about that. Yeah, that you're talking about like the like desert fleet that shows up at the end of the movie. Like yeah, everybody rolls up their, you know, their T 16. Sky hopper and decides to go hey, it's like it's like Lando revere goes rides around the countryside and like
just rallies the whole galaxy. And he's like, I have no idea where were you guys at? I'm like, oh, did you forget the damn $14 book that Disney slang to get everyone on board with understanding where they came from? Oh, well, but you know, glass half full. If you don't let yourself get caught up in storyline, plot holes and things like that. I, I took a point of view of this. If you just look at the theme of the story arcs, like episode one through three, the theme is that the Jedi are too powerful and bureaucratic and bureaucratic. Yeah. Episodes four through six. They're tired of all the bureaucracy guess what now the set they're too powerful. The theme of the final arc is just balance and realizing II if you have set a Jedi or set they're just going to Fighting let's just burn it all down, burn the text get rid of it all. He despite feelings on raise incredible ability to learn the force really quickly, she can wield a Jedi Knights weapon and use force lightning and have a good balance and so not one or the other just have a balance.
I felt like I felt like the whole re re Palpatine thing. was kind of like
who did Palpatine right?
Hey, I didn't see a Mrs. Palpatine running around. So like Palpatine
was that was that post being executed by mace? Windu as well?
No cuz he like his son was not Yeah. Like his son in the flashbacks in the ninth movie, his son was like a grown well, obviously he's got a kid. So he's like a, like a middle aged grown man and his Yeah, 2025 30 years old. But I don't know, from a timeline standpoint, you'd have to do the math, but I would say that from a storyline, it was almost like they were like, ah, we have to explain why she's so good with the force. A who's who's more powerful than a Skywalker power? I don't know. Yeah, yeah. Write that in there. Write that in there. That'll work. They
couldn't make her Skywalker. Just from like, because the fact that like, Luke has no idea who she is. No, also, I think I think Disney wants to finish the Skywalker thing so they can go make money doing other things. Yeah, so they can merchandise other king. Right? Exactly. Yeah. They have to kill it. Somehow. It just took three movies in five years.
Like dakak Palpatine, you know, in his giant.
Oh, yeah, that's, that's totally what it reminded me of doing it was ridiculous. Yeah.
Like this guy's like more like a well, actually. He's more like a Marvel villain than he was like a Star Wars villain.
Here's a super nerdy connection. I know. Parker you've played Portal? Hi, Ron. Have you played Portal? Oh, yeah, and Roz. Oh, yeah. Look like a lot. Exactly. Exactly the last boss and portal to it's like identical just put, just copy paste Palpatine face on it. You got it. Oh,
that's gonna be an awesome mod. If someone can add force lightning, the glass, the end.
This is a thing about the movie, though, is I would agree with Chiron is, out of all the Star Wars movies. This one actually has like the least amount of plot holes. I agree. There's only one I can think of. And I might be I just missed it is when like, they go into they bring up fleet into the Unknown Regions, which was I thought it was really cool how they navigated it by tracking ray or whatever, cuz you only hear about that in a couple of books, like how to navigate the unknown region. So that whole scene that in film was really cool. But when they show up, and they're like, Okay, we got to get that tower. How do they know that tower is a thing?
Well, and the other question is, there's like x wings, like flying around all around. It was like, like, couldn't you just shoot it? With an X Wing?
Oh, yeah. They had to do a ground attack on it for some reason. on horseback. Yeah, they had to do a ground tack on horseback. And then we're like, oh, like they shut down the tower. It's like, Oh, we got to go to that tower. It's on the Star Destroyer. And then it's like, we're starting to ground attack and just like
and that even though they're all carbon copied, and like there's like 20,000 star destroyers. That's the only one that they decided to build a tower on for some reason. Okay,
excellent. Wait, wait. Here's here's two quick little pothole plot holes that I want to just bring into light here that bother Oh, not out of me. The first episode four or five and six. They, I mean, it's all about like building the Deathstar for the Empire, right, which is like their moon sized thing that they have to dump all of their effort in in order to have the capability to destroy planets. And then in episode nine, they just installed that gun on every ship. I mean, like it doesn't like
to giant swing and codpiece on the bottom of every Star Destroyer TIE
fighters are now going to have the planet destroying capabilities coming up here. Exactly, which is annoying. But hang on. There's one other thing that I just absolutely hated.
I guess it's Moore's law, you know, in in Star Wars terms? Yeah. But
I mean, we're not talking about very long here. We're talking about what 30 years that maybe Moore's law applies. But But okay, wait, that is was it not so unbelievably convenient that there was this sift weird planet over there that has a big triangle base on it? And it just they happen to have a fleet that would require the governments of like, the whole galaxy to be able to create this fleet? Like, where do they get the raw material to do that? Where do they get the whole like, ability to create all of that? At the end of the Empire when Thrawn was doing his
well, but you're, you're talking about like,
no, that's nuclear. That's new stuff. That's canon. That's
what I was wondering about. I thought even though they they cast everything aside, but didn't they allow the Thrawn Trilogy to be part of the the new stuff that yeah, they rewrote it the new Thrawn stuff? I haven't read those yet. Well, okay, here's
the thing. That's, that's fantastic. And all and I like that there's some kind of explanation. But as Hiren pointed out earlier, Disney has already said like, the books in the movies don't matter together. They've already like, rejected those. So why didn't they mention something like that in the in the movies, it just like it doesn't, it doesn't sit well with me that it's just like, here's this next scene, where there's this unbelievably huge thing. And it's super convenient that it's like, if you just follow me, you get all of this crap, you know?
Well, that, to build on it that that actually, in relation to that was what pissed me off was, hey, all of the old Expanded Universe, it's legends. Now, it doesn't matter. But we're going to write some books that do matter, right. But then they read them. And then they branded the road to Skywalker, where it's like, if you do want to know what happens, you read this book, and I'm like, Come on, guys.
You're correct is is? It seems that they play a little loose with the connection between the book and books and what's going on in the movie shit,
they play fast and loose between the connection of each movie are you kidding? And the
Florida was no connection?
You know, okay, but okay, as all all like, negative feedback aside, I will agree, I think you said it. Parker, I think I will agree that of the latest trilogy, this is probably the least bad movie. I wouldn't say it's my favorite. But they at least tried to explain some things that they just thought we would take is, you know, take on face value in the first two, like, you know, at least they had rego some training, at least they had, you know, an explanation for why, you know, whatever, you pick your major plot point, bins redemption and all that stuff. Like I was, I guess the big plot point, I didn't have any major problems with in this movie.
And the thing is, stuff happens in this movie, a lot of stuff. The basic My biggest concern or problem with the movie is why I said that first. It's just like, they do something why that's bad. And then next scene, they fix it immediately. So it's like, it's like, we're goldfish that we can only handle bad things for like, five seconds,
right? Yeah.
That's movies in general. Now, they
Well, very true. Like there has been there were several times in the movie where they came like a millimeters millimetres distance from actually like breaking the fourth wall and explaining to you alright, audience, this is what's happening. I mean, it was almost that basic. Some of the explanations like somebody would say something and then another character be like, You mean like XY and Z, like, yes, exactly.
Foreshadowing.
You know, who, you know, who I think steals the role for the best character. I think Lando takes it home for me. Just because I like it looks like he's the one who almost breaks the fourth wall the most of my opinion, just because he looks so happy to be back on a Star Wars set every scene of Orlando. He's smiling ear to ear and he's just like, Hey guys, how's it going? And then later on, he shows up with like, the fleet of 1000 suns. And he's like, Hey, guys, look what I got. And he's just super happy about everything all the time.
I'm just waiting for the Colt 45 relaunch.
I was half expecting like, whenever he would deliver a line he would turn to the camera wink. Was like this. Like he just looks like that really happy grandpa that is like really, really ecstatic to be around his grandkids all the time.
He really, his last line movie is really creepy though.
Okay, so Alright, let's talk about that. God, I picked up on that. Either. He's just a really nice old man, or everything we know about Lando is correct. And he's trying to hit on like a 19 year old chick. Ah, no, no, no, no,
no, you got it all wrong. There's a third option. Disney's trying to do a spin off of another thing that has Lando and this new chick which what's her name? I don't even know it doesn't matter. I call her
Zed. Because that's all I remember from like the dialogue of when she was talking to Finn and her name like if there was a Zed in there because it sounded weird because I'm American, you
know that. Oh, he's two quick things. These new kids who've inherited the Millennium Falcon, treat it like garbage. Now, here's the thing. Look at the look at what No, no, no. Oh, hang on, hang on a little bit more than episode four. episode four, five and six. The Millennium Falcon hits something like legitimately hit something one time. Lando went He's flying satellite dish hits, he hits the satellite dish and that other guys like rub, rub rub rub rub is, you know, bubble whatever, that guy so he hits that every single movie in the name 79 They're like running the Millennium Falcon into the ground, like shits not working. It's like you gave the kids a new car and they just treat it like crap, you know? bothers the hell out.
It's like that kid whose parents bought him like a 69 Camaro in high school and then he went and wreck Yeah, like,
Yeah, three weeks later. Exactly. It's a classic. No, you Brando is like turning in his grave right now.
So is that because solo is wise and he cares about his stuff? Like member in in the solo spin off? You know, he was reckless, too. Yeah. Yeah.
Like he that ship was brand new at the beginning of that movie. I mean, up one, we see it in Episode Four.
When you think about the comparison, though, before he's like, Hey, let's just let's pop this. He's like, No, do you want to come out in the middle of an asteroid field? It's like, we got to plot this out and make sure it's okay. And they're like, fuck it. Let's go. hyperspace skipping. I don't care where I pop out. Yeah, that was about the same hyperspace
skip Thai fighters least of new first order Thai fighters, they have hyperdrives. Now,
right. And they can track they can track through hyperspace, which we found out in the last movie.
Yeah, so apparently now the Thai fighters, you don't need a giant ship for that anymore.
It's just a small range. Short Range fighter. Unless,
unless they're just like, because apparently when you hyperspace. In Star Wars, you only go in a straight line. Go fast. So if you knew what direction that thing was hyperspace enough? You could just follow a trajectory. But then you'd also have to know when to pop out.
So let's talk about that for a second because he hyperspace skipped what? At least four times a lot. Yeah, that we saw. And every time he came out of hyperspace, he was in the atmosphere of some planet. Yeah. Now let's let's talk about threading the goddamn astronomical needle, and not actually going through the core of said planets. Or even eating a planet at all. You know how much like open nothing there is in these galaxies. He's probably like just skipping through
back they hit matter at all four times in a row is amazing.
Actually, the newest, this is a super side note here, but sci fi stuff. The newest Rick and Morty episode that came out last week has a phenomenal quote in it where they have to go outside of their spaceship. And there is a space Oh ache that comes out and bites one of the guys. And one of the guys is like, there's this snake in space. And Rick is like, there is literally everything in space. But yeah, no, you're totally right, Roz, like being able to jump from planet to planet, but not just planet planet, like, a few miles above the surface of that planet. Everybody with that kind of precision. First of all, like, that's ridiculously improbable. But if there's anything that the episode four, five and six taught us about the Millennium Falcon, it's kind of crappy. And like, it breaks down all the time. Like the break can't do that, you know? No, I just like when it did come back from that mission. And, like, everyone's like, screaming like, it's on fire. Like, like, how they set that shot up, because it's from the perspective of Leah.
Who's the person who's actually I think it's late or whatever. But um, do you see that person who's taught I am
giving them shit? Like, what do you do that?
Yeah, no, no, it's afterwards after a land but like, everyone's like running to like the landing zone like oh, shit on fireball. And then because they set that scene up really well. And then they pan around and like shit is falling apart often lynnium Falcon on fire,
yet they're flying it like the next scene. So
they beat they beat the snot out of that ship. They They destroyed it. But a scene later, it's already fixed ready to go. So there was no consequences of their actions. No. Yeah. And they even They even told Poe it's like, you can't do this. And his solution was yes, I can. Like that's like what?
Oh, well, when you put it that way.
So potent learn his lesson from the previous movie. So yeah,
yeah. You think they'd all have to learn their lesson after seeing a holdo go like, kamikaze through a giant dreadknight or whatever the hell I think we
see that again too. Or the Ewok see it. The Oh, did you catch that Ariane we're like the resistance is rising up all over the galaxy because it goes to different scenes over the galaxy eight Yeah. Did you
catch the wicket cameo?
Yes, we did.
It shows a show some Ewok sitting there like looking up in the sky and it shows the sky and it shows up. Super Star Destroyer being like pure spy something and it like splitting asunder. Oh, someone else got they figured out that Lightspeed is the best weapon of all time somebody
said that somebody said that, like when they were getting, I don't remember what part of the movie but there was like, I think it might have been when they showed up on the CIP plant. They're like, let's do some holdo maneuvers. And just like,
yeah, they actually mentioned it. And they're like, We don't have enough ships this time. They had
we talked about this on the last podcast, why can't they just take like an asteroid and put a hyperdrive on it? I just start shooting them into planets. I don't know.
I would think you'd risk making black holes all over the place. By doing that, you're just gonna rip apart true bones. And
that's a cool thing, though. That's like
dashing, like giant chunks of mass and forcing them together, just shredding time
and space. So do we have any other comments on episode nine before we actually get to? Um, some technical I'm sure we do
a half hour ripping it and we're like, yeah, we enjoyed it. But here wasn't that that hate?
Yeah, I have the sequels. It is the best one. Objectively,
I'll agree with that.
I didn't walk away angry. I'll admit that.
I didn't walk away that angry either. I liked it. The least I think
my reaction was it's too little too late. That too. Yeah.
I thought the the like, basically, everything about the movie was like gorgeous, and it was kind of well done. But the storytelling was awful. And way too fast.
Well, yeah, yeah,
I agree with that. Yeah, I
would agree with that. But at least once you're telling it, yeah. True.
All right. Yeah. Let's let's let's move on. Let's move on. Alright, so this is this. Uh, so usually, we do this opposite. We usually do tech stuff. And then we talk about the movies. But this time I guess we kind of flipped it around. We just we just had to get get on with it.
We had Yeah, they will be able to end on a high note this time. Yeah, there you go.
This is something I've thought about is why does it seem that all the power in ships flow through control panels that are like right next to people? Like when when you get shot and not getting your ex going? And you get shot? Like all electricity like flows out, like force lightning into like the the pilots, or like in Star Trek, where like, they get hit by a clean on beam or whatever. I'm not big in Star Trek, but like, like, things explode in the control room and kill people.
Maybe they know something secret that we don't and if you just pass all the power of the ship through absolutely everything, then that's the most that's the most efficient way to run the whole ship.
And maybe their stuff runs on more than just ones and zeros.
Whoo. Oh, they run trainers.
Or it's all analog they actually have to control I used to power through you know, actually, Trek Voyager sort of does that their ship is analog because they have like bio power when they even have like a whole episode where they pop panels off and you see like green goo that's flowing through the tubes and start reading basically but but but still even with like bio power throughout the whole ship there
the control area blows up anytime something happens. Yeah, so even you you brought it up before though it in general, what we're good at, they're bad at and vice versa in our two universities. So a lot of stuff where we've taken a completely digital approach you're like yeah, look at see Threepio he's 90% Cat five cable and I probably power circuits and isolation not their thing. Yeah, good point. Good point.
I have isolation between you and the thing that can kill you.
Yeah, some some force lightning can take down your entire your entire fleet, apparently, you know.
You know, I was thinking shielding. It seems there's a big economy based around scrapping scrappers. There's guilds and pirates of people that just go out and because there's so many star fights and debris, they just steal shit and reuse it. You have all the Jhala where they buy shit from the Jawas. Yes, that's where you buy all the knockoff cheap shit and
the Star Wars universe doesn't have any ESD protection. No, they
just they're like, you know, we could refine and make stuff or we can buy the stuff that the job was stole from people and pack it up under a panel and it works.
It works. So instead of ESD it's FLP force lightning protection. Oh, you know, actually, I think that kind of reminds me of a scene in episode nine, I believe it was Finn where somebody handed him apart like a random part to one of these monstrous. So this is part like how the hell the first part, he says first Oh first order Okay, okay.
Okay Napa No
Yeah, it's like he tends Finn tends to know about weird things about the First Order and he was a janitor. Yeah.
Only when it's convenient. Oh, yeah, yeah, only ones
I really expected when they were talking about episode nine again. When he got on the ship like he would just know where to go. Oh, yeah. Well, when I went on on Oh,
what's the big? Yeah, like, where do we go? I don't know. Follow me big
the space boomerang. That big ship. Oh, the dreaded Dreadnought that's it. Yeah. No, that's, that's up. So it's a Yeah. And so nine they go on? Well, he knew where
to go in episode eight. When they got on the ship. Yes, on Episode Eight, but in episode nine, they get on that ship again. A different ship. But it's, uh, the commands why. Ben Solo's ship? The on his ship? Oh, yeah. Oh, remember? Because he's down on the ground, like looking for them? And they go up? Oh, and
yeah, they set up the trigger. And they're like, Hey, wait, you know, he's talking to Ray though. They're up there in my room. Right.
But like, I'm really expected him to know like, oh, yeah, we just go down this passageway and take a right. And then there's Albuquerque. And but they didn't do that. They were actually like, yeah, we're lost. Well, you never know. You never know. Maybe maybe the Empire has set up like standards on how their ships are laid out. Where it's just like, if you know what, you know, I'm all I would say sure. But yeah, the fact that in episode eight he knew where the tractor beam even though he didn't know that thing. Or the the hyperspace tracker was that even though he didn't know that they existed 30 seconds prior.
Convenience. But yeah. Yeah, so why does all the power I guess they just don't have isolation or relays. They don't have relays. Yeah,
everything is controlled by giant knife switches.
So when the droid pops into the back of the X Wing, it just like its chest opens up into a bunch of arms that manipulate switches.
Yeah, yeah. Like he's literally at parts of the movie, sticking his arm into like, socket like circuits to try and complete the Connect. Oh,
yeah. No, oh, yeah, as USB in Episode Seven, there's a point where our two or an RTU and I can't remember if it was a different one was trying to fix a circuit and that circuit had through hole carbon composition resistors on it, like straight up. So, I mean, their technology is very strange compared to ours.
They have a lot of Sam that can melt. Yes, at least two planets of it.
Well, and now they can just shoot those planets in one shot and they go mining is completely different now.
So I guess we can talk about about little bit from episode nine what we saw like what Hi, Ron saw.
So ignoring the fact that everyone thinks he's cute. I love Babu frik.
That's a little alien that a Jade's ready? Well, yes. To correct. Oh, yeah.
And partially because he reminds me of what you would get from the older, the older trilogy. He has four lines. We have no backstory. It's all your imagination. It's just like, Oh, we got to go see Baboo Frick, who's this? And they do not take the time to explain and, you know, downplay to all. Well, this is what he's done over the past 40 years. It's like those spice runners. He can bypass security on any droid. I'm like, awesome. We have a hardware hacker in the Star Wars universe finally. And he's about a foot tall.
He's an RPG quest. That's all he is. That's all you got to know. You got to go to this guy. And he'll get you the thing you need.
And I don't know. Yeah, he has five lines. He's funny. can barely speak basic. It's awesome. But what got me though was I'm like Oh, cool. I'm gonna finally see them doing some hacking because like in the RPG stuff, you know, you'll hear of slicers or different hackers and stuff. And I'm like, Cool. Let's let's see how they put it in there. And he just starts ripping open the back of three POS head and and well, basically, it's basically putting jumper wires in his head. I'm like, Okay, we got the Travis Goodspeed of hardware hacking in the, in the in the universe right now. But I looked at that and I'm like, okay, so how would you do this? It's going through the check like I am getting ready to decrypt this, this SIP message that you're not allowed to do it does some check. So he's doing a voltage glitch on his head just to make them skip over the damn instruction and go through sorry, I all work on software debugging as well. So I sit there and look at, well, how would I do this? It starts to fall apart for me though, because they're like, Okay, I analyze the check. And if he decodes this, it's going to wipe his memory, even if we bypass the first check. So why not pull in another protocol droid and show him or her whatever? I'm like, let's go get a sacrificial protocol.
Look at this knife. Yeah.
Yeah, you could download copy into something else. And then yeah,
I mean, come on, when you're, when you're doing tear downs, if you really want to reverse engineer a piece of hardware, you at least need four or five of them, because you're gonna brick like three of them and zap them in the process. So yeah, let's go get another protocol droid. Give him the info, do it. I, I still loved it. You know, he's he's doing it a very analog way, and probably collecting them through the process and just skipping over the checks. If it was modern times, you'd have some weird first order or resistance version of open OCD, and you'd debug them. I don't know what.
That's what the Empire would use.
I'm sitting here I'm like, I don't even want to think about what the openocd config for, like a protocol droid looks like, but it works. And you got Babu frik now, and he's awesome.
You talk about that remind me of the earlier in the movie to when they had to do the data, like get the data from?
From like, the from the spy, right. And they actually just like hook a cable down through like the open portals on the spaceships and like, our duty unit. And like, like, they don't trust wireless communication at all, for any kind of major data's like, transfer? No, at all. Like, we get operating system updates for our phones over the air. And we're like, yeah, that's good. And they're like, No, this like text file from the spy, we had to like, have this ginormous, like, four inch diameter cable hooked down the access holes, and then plugged into that cables, like two inches by five inches across. Big connector, got a lot of data transfer a lot, a lot of parallel bits. I think it could just be that in. I mean, you gotta think about it's a universe, right? Star Wars universe. And it's a galaxy. So it's a huge area with a lot of different cultures and stuff. Think about how many standards we have on the on this one planet, and then multiply that out by like a million. So how does how to even wrangle like standards that case like that might be the only way that you can hack a protocol joy because a protocol droid built in tattoo ween might have a different interface than a different one. So the only way is to manually kind of hook up wires and figure out what it is get
make sure that goes and that goes on kind of our joke before though, like what is Threepio he's he's just a saili logic analyzer with some machine learning. You know, that's, aside from talking. He's like, I can talk to droids I'm like, Yep, you're a logic analyzer. You're just using them to hack himself?
Yeah. And the like, that goes into like, the fact that there's multiple protocol droids means and I can didn't design him he just built you know, I
wonder if he was like, tattooing his version of a Heathkit for that you could you could Yeah. Cuz I really doubt he did everything from scratch. Yeah,
saved up his bottle caps and bought a non prime or something.
Malin?
Well, there. I mean, there are other versions of Threepio and various things like you see him in the background and whatnot. So yeah, it's it's a standard
build guns into one on Cloud City in an empire. Yeah, the silver one. Yeah. Yeah. How rude. Yeah,
Vader has triple zero.
So I would say Yeah, that's probably a kit you can buy and build. Now whether or not the ANA can put some some Sith juice in there. Who knows? Oh,
he wasn't a Sith when he was building him though. Sure.
Wait, so
nevermind, I don't want to go down that rabbit hole I'm interested now. Well, I was just gonna say so like one of the leading theories around how antique King came to be was nice guy Walker. was artificially force inseminated by Palpatine. Or whatever. That's canon, by the
way. So a new comic
Ray made out with her cousin at the end of the movie is what you're telling me?
Oh, yeah, that's totally what it is.
That's just so those Skywalker Palpa teens do
those, those kids
I was, I was about to say, like, you know, don't as gross as it is like incest is not anything new to the Star Wars franchise.
Well, so like, that whole scene kind of bothered me. Like, I don't know, up until about 30 minutes ago, we were trying to kill each other. But then yeah, let me suck your face. No, that's not how it works. I don't know why that's
Star Wars movies just can't write love.
Love things at all, like, interactions between people. It's just not its forte. Like in episode two. They're like, y'all. We can't be married or can't be together because I'm in the Senate and you're a Jedi. And then like, five minutes later, they're rolling around in the sunflower field.
Yeah, well, and fin fin port fin gets screwed. But well, he didn't. So there's that.
Yeah, that was the most interesting thing about that movie is like rose just got, like, sideline super hard. Because they were supposed to be like, a thing right? At the end of that movie. They were like together.
I don't know what Kelly trend did to piss off the producers. But she got basically wrote
out No, no, that goes exactly back to what I was talking about. They spent most of the movie trying to rewrite eight. And she was a character that was introduced in eight and nobody liked her. So they downplayed her as much as possible.
But she acts like in that movie. She's like, but I have an idea. And then it's like, no. Like, she like she pops up and then like people just ignore her in the movie feels like
I ignored her in the movie.
I mean, yeah, but yeah, it's just I just thought was really interesting how the other characters in that movie interacted with Rose is just it was like how, you know the fan base treated her
it's like she was a family friend of Ryan Johnson or something and like yeah, come on. We'll put you in the movie. I care and like yeah, like Carrie Yeah, but well she's actually legit actor has been in another movie. He's not say this other actress isn't but like, like JJ Abrams is like Well, alright,
fine. You can come sorry, I told you I didn't want to go down that
rabbit hole. We did it. So what other Heath kits does the Star Wars universe have?
Astro mix?
Yeah. The like the BB eight and the little one wheel the Segway robot. Oh, yeah. conehead
the coat. Yeah, the traffic's over the wheel on it.
conehead, so I don't understand this. Why do some droids just Beep boop and others can actually speak because conehead isn't our older Mac right than BBA. It is but BBA is only goes beeps and boops and then like
standards can you speak the binary language? Moisture evaporators battery that's
right. Or they just whoever made those Jory just didn't pay for the library for the Speak basic.
They didn't buy the license. Yeah.
Like James Version agreements.
Yeah, the the droid basic communication protocol is not a open source.
There's they still have the student license.
That's why we don't know what mouse he does. It's probably one of the best, most useful robots out there. And you're like, I don't know what the fuck it does. It just goes. Takes off
and its whole thing is to get scared and run away.
I like Babu frik, though, I did like Babu frik I was the only one in the whole theater laughing. I felt like in like a crazy person. Because everyone's sitting there like looking at the screen like the hell did he turn and I'm like, Ah, that guy's hilarious.
I felt the same way at the very beginning when I was like, basically laughing whenever ccpo Did something in the first act because I'm like, I have to enjoy this movie. So
did you like the Summa? See Threepio like his fresh, cold iron boot? He's like, Oh, what's going on? He's like, I'm Babu frik. He's like, Oh, Hi, Bobby Frick and later on, it's like, oh, Babu frik that's my oldest friend. He's just laughing it off. He's like, sweet, every robot I hack thinks I'm the mess
that that uh, one when right before C Threepio gets his memory white
where he's turns around and he's like my friends and then like like that's such a touching moment for like the audience but then all the characters are like start looking at their feet like ah
yeah, they finally feel guilty for shitting on him for the last nine episodes. Yeah, basically like oh damn, oh man
good thing we use flash ROM to get a backup of you don't give a shit
I thought it would be more. It might be more pay off on that when they did like boot him back up with our 2d to boot and backup like, and he's recalling some memories but they're, they're incomplete or wrong. That'd be really funny. But they didn't. I thought it was pretty great that even C three PL was like, oh, no, no, no, no, no our duty to know that guy's a hunk of junk.
How many times has he been blown up? Fried? Dropped out of the back of something.
Either durable.
Clearly. Those Astro Max killer
Astro mechs are like the Nokia phones of a droid world?
Yes. Please snake on them and everything.
Okay, let's move on to the Mandalorian.
Yes.
So series. What are your all? This is the new movie? Not movie TV series. I guess that's TV series streaming series from Disney. So what are your What are your thoughts?
They should have hired John fabro to do the last three movies. That's what I think.
I'd agree with that. The Mandalorian kicks ass.
It's great. Hell yeah.
Yeah. Um, I think it's probably the best piece of media. Disney's put out about the Star Wars universe so far. I would agree. I do wish two episodes were a little longer because some of them are like 25 ish minutes. And then some are like 40. And the 40 Minute ones are definitely a better paced than the shorter ones. But it's probably because I want to say budget reasons is why? Because the show looks amazing. The show looks like Star Wars. There's a lot of props, which are not cheap to build. And the CG looks just as good as it does in the movies. Yeah. So it's like, okay, this thing must be hella expensive to make. So it definitely makes sense where some parts were like, Okay, we got to speed this up a bit. Which the story or how the mood how the show is shot and how the dialogue works. It's more of a slow paced burn. So those episodes where they speed stuff up. Definitely hurts it.
No, I wouldn't disagree with that. It's I get caught in feeling like Oh, I wish it was longer. But I don't want them to stretch things out. Like imagine if Disney just did 130 minute episode, the first episode of the Mandalorian and then never did any. Oh, people go bananas. You lose your goddamn mind. It just thinks this is the best thing ever made.
No, no, I'm not saying it needs more episodes. I'm just saying the the couple episodes that were only like 25 minutes long. I think there's like three of them. Like if those were about 35 minutes so they could flesh out some of the sections that were rushed. Yeah, it would those would be strong episodes. Then instead of the weaker of the series, five or 10 more minutes of Bill Burr running around in space. Just just proving that there's a space Boston next.
So it was funny. That episode aired a week after Rick and Morty rift on heist. Yeah. Yeah. And that episode is pretty much not part of the main story arc, and it is a space heist, where it shows up. It's like what's going on? Oh, it's the old gang. I don't work with droids but there's money and it's like you son. I'm in. But even going through like their spin off episode like that. It's I love what they did with the fan service because they're doing this poking fun at things that we all poke fun at. Like he makes one of the guys he's like, Yeah, I was an imperial Sharpshooter. He's like, Yeah, tell me how great you Storm Troopers are like I wasn't a damn Stormtrooper. And you know, I'm like, Thank you, at least when you're doing fan service. You're you're poking fun at the things that we know have holes in them or just bad or like he might look like a gun gun under his mask. Right.
Well, and so it's a nice it's an interesting contrast of the fanservice that you see in like the trilogy that later Is trilogy, right? It's fanservice. But it's almost like if you have to explain the inside joke. It's not really that good of a joke anymore. Mandalorian they, they weave so much hidden there that's like, you kind of have to be a fan of the Star Wars galaxy to really get the full punch. Whereas, I don't know the trilogy's I just feel like they're like, they do something. And then they explain it, and then they explain it again with
a wink and a nod.
You got it. Okay, great. Now buy it in stores near you.
Well, there's a lot to remember. Yodas Exactly. You know, remember this. There's a lot of that.
Basically, I even give them that, like, they were able to keep the wraps on the child. I'm gonna save the child screw calling it baby Yoda
is referred to as the toy. Okay, it is not a baby nor Yoda.
I know. But I'm happy. They were able to keep lid on that thing. And they knew Christmas was coming up and they're like, Nah, screw it. We're not gonna ruin this. You want to buy a child toy? You're gonna do it next year. I don't care. We're not ruining our story by letting Hasbro or whoever Mattel sell shit ahead of time. Like,
yeah, that actually was very interesting of their decision. Because, you know, it's Disney. They're all about money. Right? There has to be an ROI one way or another. Yep.
So I'm, I couldn't be more ecstatic. I'm happy about it. Steven, since you were such a fan of IG 88 How do you like seeing IG 11 like non sentience model of IG 88 and seeing how he he comes to life?
Oh, I thought it was I thought it was absolutely amazing. I really love IG 11 and I loved his like he was quippy and and really almost snarky in a way but his his fighting methods were awesome. Were just like everything was so calculated. And it just like an arm goes out in one direction. arm goes in another direction. They spins around. It was freaking brutal. Yeah. I love how
cold his decisions are at the end. He's like, Well, we're self destruct mode. And man was like, no, no, don't do this. You know, I'm gonna self destruct. That's the best logical move right now.
And he's like, no, no. And he's like, and at the end, he's like, Yeah, I'll turn off my self destruct now.
Yeah. So I da da for I guess for those who don't know, first showed up in Empire Strikes Back and he was a this like trashcan looking bounty hunter that just stands next to the line of other bounty hunters. And you see him for like, a second. Yeah, but but like,
it's Boba Fett, Bosc, IG 88 and some other.
The EU has built so much lore behind him. Now, here's the thing. If you grew up playing the game, Shadows of the Empire on the Nintendo 64 Then you know, I 88 Because he was so freaking difficult as Yeah, he's a badass. Yeah, absolute badass. So anytime you like, you connect those two things. I see it in the Star Wars movie for like, a few seconds. And he beat the living hell out of me in Shadows of the Empire. And then as soon as you see him in the Mandalorian, and he actually kicks ass. It's like, oh, my gosh, just like vindication in a way. Well, if you don't see IgA, but you see an IGA model? Model?
Yeah. Well, and like ag The cool thing about I guess IG 11 versus IG 88 is IG 88 actually went literally haywire. And he he's he not right in the head, you know, but in the fact 11 Like
they built him and then he like killed myself out of it.
Right. And but but IG elevens like just this mechanical precision murder droid.
Yeah. And he doesn't have he is the epitome of like, shoot first no questions, right? Because like he shoots mando like immediately
Oh, yeah, he's like, let's go
and then mando only gets saved from his his armor armor but what's gonna be best can because that's our I think that's my favorite thing.
I mean
I think it was my favorite things with how that whole first episode is set up. Well, I'm happier going into that is is the because he get he gets up prepayment, you know, the best skin material. And he gets it forged into like, the the shoulder but they don't say why it's good, right? They're just like, you know, it's just shiny. Right? That's the only thing you really know about it's it might be rare, because the Empire's using it as kind of currency right now to get bounty hunters. But then The first time you see it in action is when the big two legged mouth monster Where were those called? They write them. Oh,
the blurb blurb.
Yeah,
which sounds like a baseball from from vet totally sounds like something that would be on Rick and Morty also, like they wouldn't call it an alert.
So I think it's blurred and so the the blurb bytes is his best gun armor shoulder and the armor holds up and then it bites his other side which is his red older armor and crushes it. So then you're like, oh, it's stronger, and then it deflects the laser blast from IG 11 later and Epson so you're like, Okay, this stuff is pretty badass. To say that to anyone. But they showed it showed it in the story.
No, from what am I reading EU stuff. So best car for one having to be comic book nerd.
Best Cars best car not best skin.
Best Car. The way they describe it is like a lightsaber could nick it. It will deflect blaster shots, but a lightsaber could deflect it. But if someone were to try to go perpendicular, it can't stop it. So it can even hold up. It's Mandalorian steel or Mandalorian iron it can hold up against blaster shots and some lightsaber damage.
But a forge that you can carry around and hide in a safe house melted. Look No problem.
I know weird. What's what's funny is the the rest of the Mandalorians you know, everyone's else is in hiding. And they're all kind of bitter against the Empire. And they're like, Oh, you're doing work with the Empire? That didn't really sink in a how crappy of a shot that is because it's like, your guild has to hide because of the imperials and and what they did, and they just hired you, and they're gonna pay you in best gar, which is the ship that your people Forge and make and you just melted it a bit and put an imperial stamp on there.
It's like blood gold. Yeah,
I know. It's insult to injury right there.
Yeah. Yeah, the manufacturing the armor is kind of funky. It's its ability to be able to deflect hot plasma. It's like oh, that's like titanium, which is like, really hard to machine and work with guts really takes a lot heat to melt down and stuff. And no, like, it looks like they're just smelting iron.
Solder pouring down this pewter chute, like, into their Plato mold. And here's a new breastplate for
you. Yeah, and like the whole like hammering scene, which I thought was really cool, because it's like medieval style. And it wouldn't make sense, you would press the plate into a shape that would fit most people. And then you would hammer it to fit the person better. It's, it's stamped on the back and one size fits all. One size fits most.
That's what it is. You know, we never considered that. Maybe everything in the Star Wars universe is just fragile. Like, best car is really just led, they're just melting down led, lightsabers don't really get hotter than 500 degrees and just singe people. Good. You're like Stephens like I've done the math. I know.
I, you know, it wouldn't be a Star Wars special without some calculation, which we'll get to eventually, I guess. Yeah. So before we get to that one, let's talk about the rifle scope.
Okay, so this, this was entertaining in the fact that we originally talking about, like, if I had to make something or fix something, what would I go after. And I like hunting, I like weapons. So I kind of geek out whenever I see different weapons in any kind of sci fi. And there were a lot of good shots through Mandos rifle scope, and through some of the others like finish shot an episode five, her rifle scope. So I started looking at the different rifle scope shots, and I started seeing Okay, when they're taking shots, they're about it like 520 to 530 meters. And it's consistent among the other shots now that could be due to lazy ass editing. And CGI
probably isn't the same riflescopes Yeah, yeah,
it does change for Finnick shot but I was like, You know what, I'm just gonna crunch the numbers on this to see if it's even like in the realm of what's going on. So I used to work on electro optic systems and I was like, Well, I know electro optics. I know how to apply Johnson's criteria and and so I busted out my physics book and, and crunch through this. To give you an idea of how I was reading their scope. When you read electro optics and resolution you you're supposed to think about can I detect recognize or identify something like detections do I see an object or not recognition is, is this a speeder bike or humanoid and identification would be able to tell if like, am I looking at a Jawa or San people or the Mandalorian? You know, you don't have to exactly see their face. But you know, you can identify what the characteristic of something is. So I looked at that, I took a look at the shot of because he pops off his rifle scope a lot and hopes it up to his eye just to like, look at the job was and look at others.
There it goes to zero.
And it's, it's about the size of his finger. So I'm like, Okay, it's about 1.5 centimeters, I plug it into a lot of the area equations and what you would get for a wavelength. So I was expecting it to be completely off, it comes in at about 936 nanometers, when you punch through all the numbers. Yeah, that means like, with the aperture size of that scope, the most you can see is up to 936 nanometers, which goes into the infrared, which means like Fenix Finnick shot shot at night when they're racing across through the desert and everything. And she's seen them in infrared. And like, the math actually works out that with that size scope, you can see full color, you can take shots, about five to 600 meters, and it's an infrared. So it can kind of bummed me out because I was like, No, I'm gonna tweak this and re engineer it. I'm like, they just got lucky. Or they asked some gunsmith to give them proper numbers, because it all works out.
They got lucky. Yeah.
But yeah, I was going through wavelength, the electro optic system, Johnson's criteria range size, the target diameter, and you plug in everything to the standard formulas. I'm like, Oh, it normally doesn't happen. That's cool.
And I think it's interesting, because the Star Wars universe has like really unusual size scopes. Mm hmm.
Like, you'll see his rifle scope, and it's about the size of a finger. And then if you think of Luke or I can't remember that, uh, that bounty hunter in training that was following mando around, they take their monoculars out there. They're just like, huge and they're looking down and so yeah, there's there's a lot of range and what they're making and everything.
You know, the biggest thing that funny about it is that that scope, even though it's it's plausible, and it could actually work. mando never takes his helmet off. And it's got to be an absolute nightmare to look through that helmet and then look down this little pencil scope.
Yep. Well, that's all I was wondering, well, maybe that's why he has a scope that small because of the little slit in his helmet. I'm like, well, the aperture is small enough. He can see it through his dumb little quake shaped.
He loves it's the quick it is a quick look at the armor. Actually, strangely enough, let me let me look it up. I believe that that is also like if you go look up the Presbyterian Church of America, their logo looks like the Mandalorians face.
Really? At least it used to shut them Presbyterian now.
Know that a Kate? That's it. I guess this newer logo? I can't remember exactly what one my wife showed it to me the other day. Some it was a Presbyterian logo for whatever sector, whatever. And it looked like it looked like Boba Fett face. And underneath it was like Presbyterian. Like, yeah, awesome. I'm Presbyterian.
That is the way clear. I've spoken the way maybe maybe it was. Maybe it was a Presbyterian seminary or something like that.
So as we touched on it, Steven, you have a lightsaber calculation? Yeah, like I said, where, you know, it wouldn't be a Star Wars special without some calculations. And so I wanted to go and really figure out the energy behind a lightsaber. And more along the lines of like, what kind of energy source would the lightsaber actually need to have to accomplish the things that we have evidence of from the movies? Because lightsabers 18 650s Sorry, was it 18? Yeah, just one or two, you know, two if you want it to last longer. So actually, so I had sent all of you guys PDF files. So if you could open them up. While you guys go ahead and do that. I've got a question for you. We're going to do like a little bit of a multiple choice quiz ahead of time. So one of the things well, I have three questions that I decided I wanted to answer. The first one is how much total energy does the power source in the hilt of a lightsaber need to hold to be able to accomplish these things? Second one is how fast does the energy need to be delivered in other Words like how much is the instantaneous wattage that comes out of a lightsaber? And then the last one is, what is the total energy needed to slice Darth Maul and half, like half that like what happens in episode one?
So the just to kind of like bring our universe and Star Wars universe together, I have a ridiculous question. And everything about all of these equations that we're about to talk about are absolutely ridiculous. So we're prefacing by just saying that. So the thing is, that I want you guys to guess on before going too far into it, assuming that the lightsaber was to run off of a perfect 3.6 volt LiPo battery, perfect, perfect, meaning, no resistance, and capable of just like puking all of its guts as fast as you want. How many amp hours would that battery need to be rated for in a, in a lightsaber? So there's four, there's four options here, there's 320, Killa Amp Hours, 475 Killa Amp Hours, 666 killer amp hours, or 933 kilowatt hours. So start putting in start, start thinking about which one of those numbers is right. And we'll start going through the calculations to do discovered, you know,
have they ever charged about having to recharge or rebuild like the kyber crystals?
Okay, so the power supply recharges itself? I don't remember the name of it starts with a D. It's a It's basically like a D size battery, that they plug in there. And it it charges itself. It's a shake. Wait. Yes. That's it. Szekely Yeah. So out of those four, take a guess now and we'll go through our calculations to figure out how that how that actually works. Execute Adda 666 killer app hours.
666.
Okay, so check this out. Iron Maiden. Out of all the things in all the Star Wars movies, there's kind of one scene that really taxes a lightsaber or feels like it taxes the lightsaber more than any others. And it's at the very beginning of episode one. It's when Qui Gon Jinn cuts a hole in the door of Gosh, what's that guy's name? The Trade Federation? Yeah, that guy. I don't remember. That's a perfect. I don't remember his name. But But yeah. So the so Qui Gon Jinn just takes the lightsaber, and he shoves it through a blast door, and he just starts going to town cutting a hole on that. So there's a couple, not a couple, there's like a zillion assumptions that are going to be made in these calculations. But one of the things that happens in that, in that scene is after he's already like, a third of the way, cutting a hole in this door, a second set of glass doors close. In order to kind of like make the calculations workout, I just assumed that those second set of doors were also closed. So what would it take? What would the lightsaber need to be able to deliver to that door in order to cut it if all the blast doors were closed, because quite gone, actually does do that. So let's go ahead and analyze it. So I actually look up the height of Liam Nielsen to see how tall the actor was.
He's tall, he's like 663, or 664, which
is 1.93 meters. I'm doing this in in meters here
in science units. Yeah, and science unit. So
in the scene where he's doing it, he's slightly bent over but the the hole he's cutting is not even as tall as he is. So I kind of analyzed the the scene from the film and found out that the radius of the circle that he's trying to cut is about point eight, two meters tall. And let me go ahead and preface this real quick by saying, there's been a lot of other people who've done this calculation out there. So there was a lot of information that I could find on this already before having to just like chug through all the calculations myself. And I'm going to credit a gentleman named Rhett Allien, a ll AI, and I'm sorry, I'm butchering that. I don't know how to say red. But Rhett wrote an article in 2010 for Wired, where he does basically this calculation. And so I walked through all of his calculations and found that there was a lot of stuff that I wasn't, I didn't agree with his assumptions on so I modified those and went a little bit above and beyond that. So yeah, the hole in the door was about point eight, two meters. So the very first thing that I basically that I tried to do was figure out what is the volume of material that would need to be sliced, which is basically the width of a lightsaber blade and the circumference of the circle that he's trying to cut. And if you look up kits for building lightsabers, and general lightsaber lore, the beam width itself is about three quarters of an inch so I went with that as like, okay, so if if you were to cut a circumference, it would be three quarters of an inch by the circumference of a point a two radius circle, what that all ends up meaning is you have point 098 meters cubed of material that would need to be melted by a lightsaber, given the thickness and the circumference. So the great thing is, you now that we have a volume, we can calculate the mass of material that needs to be melted. So to find the mass of the melted material, you take the volume and you multiply it by the density of the material. This is where the second kind of big assumption comes in, I am making an assumption of that the material is ar 500 steel. So basically, hard, really hard armor proof steel or yet basically, bulletproof steel is what they would what I basically went with, and that has a density of point 283 pounds per inch cube, which is 7833 kilograms per meters cubed, which if you multiply that by the volume, you can get the mass of purely the amount of material that was melted, which is 787 kilograms of material. 787 kilograms is already a ton of steel that has to get melted. So, you know, I gave you those four numbers earlier that were they all seemed like huge numbers. But if, if the first number in our calculation is coming out to 797 kilograms of steel melted by this thing, and he does it pretty fast, those numbers, you know, start to like, generate it in your head, they're gonna be big. Okay, so here's the thing, in order to actually calculate how much energy is delivered to the door, what I what I did, or what, what I kind of like followed along the path with was, there's the melted portion of the door where it's actually liquid steel, but then around the liquid steel, the energy is, is dissipating into the door. So you have you have steel that's in liquid state, but you also have a gradient of steel that is not in liquid state. So there's two matches we've really calculate. The first one is the melted steel, and then the mass of the steel around the melted portion that is also getting ridiculously hot. And so just from analyzing the scene and the width of the the the thickness of what looks like melted versus non melted steel, it looks like the area around the cut is about five times, sorry, four times the width of the cut itself. So if we multiply our the mass, we just calculated that 787 by four, we get 3150 kilograms. So we're melting 797 kilograms of steel, but we're also heating up an additional 3150 kilograms of steel around the cut. Here's where it gets kind of cool. If you if you assume that the door itself can act as a blackbody radiator, then by analyzing the color of the cut, you can analyze, you can back calculate the heat of the cut. And you can analyze the the what temperature the surrounding area around the cut is. So we're we've already found the mass. But now we can just look at the picture and say the cut according to the color in the movie is about 5200 Kelvin. And the area surrounding the cut is about 2700 Kelvin, which those numbers were taken directly from that Wired article, give credit, where where it's due. But if you look at steel, steel has a melting temperature of around 1600 Kelvin. And we're seeing that the melting here is 5200. So we're just gonna chalk that up to Star Wars. And just say this is like super special Star Wars steel that melts at a really ridiculous temperature. So all said and done, we kind of now have the majority of what we need. We know the mass of the melted material. We know the mass of the unmelted material, we know the temperatures. And then if we just use the specific heat of, of steel, and then also the latent heat, that that is required to do the phase transition between a solid to a liquid, we can kind of add all of that up given all of the masses. And I have this all spelled out in this document that I have here. But calculate all of those things together. And in order to cut this door, which I apologize I think I may have missed saying earlier that I calculated with the door being one meter thick. It takes 606 I'm sorry, 6.16 times 10 to the ninth jewels to actually cut through this door to cut a circle that that that large and when we're talking about jewels here like we're not talking about in a particular amount of time, it just takes that much energy to cut it, it could, that could happen in a second or that could happen to a week. Who cares, it's just, that's the total amount of energy 6.16 times 10 to the ninth joules is an enormous number. So by using that number, we can actually calculate the instantaneous power that the lightsaber itself has to put out at any one point in time. And the way we do that is we take the total amount of energy, and we divide by the amount of time it takes to get there. And in general, I just estimated 20 seconds, just, it was just a number I use these numbers are so ridiculous that it sort of almost doesn't matter what number you use, they're always gonna be ridiculous.
I just had to google it. For reference. Hiroshima was 4000 joules. Yeah.
Yeah. So yeah, six. So you take 6.16 times 10 to the ninth jewels, you divide by 20. And you end up getting a a wattage output of 3.08 megawatts that the lightsaber has to just continuously dump into the door in order to cut with how much three megawatts basically, which is absolutely
ridiculous. 21 gigawatts.
Pretty much. So. So given those numbers now, and the numbers that I mentioned to you guys earlier, assuming we had a 3.6 volt battery, just take a guess at one of those four numbers, the 323
three megawatt hours No, no, three, three
megawatts is the instantaneous power that the lightsaber was holding, like, continuous three megawatts. So of those four battery numbers, I gave you 320 kilowatt hours 475 66, six, or 933? Which one? Do you guys guess? For a regular 3.6 volt lipo? Would it have to put out I still like the 666, because it plays in that Palpatine. I was
erring on the high side, just saying like screw it the 975.
That was kind of my logic as well. So so
it actually ends up being 475 Killa amp hours, which all said and done. It's just absolutely ridiculous. Like, like I said, you'd have to have a an absolutely perfect battery that it's 3.6 volts, and it delivers 3.6 volts, and has zero resistance. But in terms of just the sheer number of electrons you have to have in order to have that happen, is just absolutely ridiculous. So I think the whole point of doing this calculation just showing that like, yeah, no, that doesn't happen. Can you imagine what kind of conductors you would have to have from the power source to the kyber crystal emitter? To handle all that power?
They would have to be perfect, just perfect conductors. You know, if you go back to if you go back to your question about why the power panels explode. If you think about in general, this is the amount of load that they're traditionally dealing with in Star Wars tech. It doesn't surprise me that their panels explode when just something just a little bit of a fluctuation goes right.
That could be it. I'm thinking like, basically underneath the panels in Star Wars or inside a lightsaber. It's actually at zero Kelvin. So you can have superconductors. Just just Yeah. Because force. Yeah. Because space opera reasons you get
space magic.
Well, okay, so So this leads to sort of the last calculation that I did in there. So the first two were, how much energy how much instantaneous power, but then what is the total energy needed to cut Darth Maul in half? And given what we know, just keep this in your mind? I'll ask you in a little bit, but the slice that goes through Darth Maul would would Obi Wan have felt any resistance or at all or no resistance whatsoever for the cut. So in order to do this calculation, I basically treated Darth Maul in the same way I treated the door. I basically found like, what is what is the actor's waist size? And then I did just some general calculations about the density of flesh tissue. Actually, if you looked at my Google search results right now it's it's it's horrifying. It's like fleshy, yeah. She changed density. What's the specific heat of average human tissue? And the difference is instead of
human steaks, steaks delivered to your door, sort
of the biggest difference here is instead of using the melting temperature of steel I used what is the actual Mission temperature of human tissue and spinal cord. And then what is the average diameter of a
adult male spinal cord? And I have to know did at least pop up in your first three Google search results of anything relevant, everything relevant?
You would you would you'd be surprised at how easy it is to find these numbers. And like there's medical journals all over the place where it's like, yep, yep, human burns like this. It's okay. So these numbers were all incredibly easy to find, with with I mean, it didn't take much digging, it's just like, it's just weird to type in what's the ignition temperature of human flesh. But it for the in the name of science, we're doing this right. So using generally the same calculations, but instead of putting the melting temperatures in putting the ignition temperatures in, I was able to back calculate the mass of a three quarter inch cylinder slice of Darth Maul gut, and how much energy is contained within there. And all said and done after all the calculations, the energy required to cut that slice is only 2441 Jewels worth of that little sliver inside of Darth Maul. So surprisingly little amazingly little compared to a metre thick of Super Star Wars. Steel. So all said and done, I would guess it especially because the movies actually kind of imply this also, slicing through Darth Maul, you wouldn't even feel it. Like the lightsaber would just go straight through and there wouldn't even be any resistance whatsoever.
Except for the amount of energy that thing's pumping out. It'd be like dumping a bucket of water in a deep fat fryer. When you hit it with it. It sucker would just fucking explode.
This See, lightsabers must be vaporizing everything within like the moment you turn it on
instantly. Ignite was cook yourself with the radiator heat just holding the damn blade. No Yeah,
for sure. Like you wouldn't even be able to be close to that thing. In fact, that wouldn't be another fun calculation. Like if you actually held a lightsaber that was continuously dumping three megawatts out? How how close could you actually get to? There is there's one article that I read. I don't know how much canon this is. But apparently, according to this one person, they suggested that lightsabers were kind of like induction burners, where they could instantaneously change their output based off of the load that they felt. So when you just turn it on, it's at a very minimal load and it's just basically producing light. It's an idle Yeah, but as soon as you as soon as it actually strikes a load then it then it goes from like one watt to three megawatts. So So yeah, all what I like about that is it I think they did very well actually in episode one. Even though the numbers are ridiculous. The fact that like Kwai Egon actually did experience some resistance in the door. He like it took some time for the door to actually heat up. But if if those numbers were actually even slightly accurate, then going through Darth Maul his gut would be absolutely nothing. Yeah, just straight through.
Which is why Episode Seven is bullshit, because Ray should not be able to hold a lightsaber and swinging around like that she'd cut her own damn head off.
Tell us how you really feel. It's
just tying it all back together.
I think my favorite
piece of Star Wars media is the Robot Chicken episodes, which is a cartoon show on work that
does like skit comedy, but with action figures, I think stop animation. Yeah, they have a there's a skit where someone drops a lightsaber while it's on it just goes because this yard just burns a hole like a robbery the an alien the
in the blood and the alien
next to the ship. You see, like when you start analyzing the actual mechanisms behind the lightsabers, there's so many variables and knobs that you can turn that really have drastic effect on the equations that you're dealing with. Like okay, so lasers do a pretty damn good job of cutting through things, but the width of the beam of a laser is absolutely tiny. You know one of the reasons why the numbers came out so huge is the fact that I was assuming that the lightsaber has you equal density as like a point seven five inch cylinder Light that was coming out. And that actually makes the the numbers massive. But if you assume that a lightsaber is just, you know, a 1,000th of an inch worth of cutting light, and all the rest is just like a glow that comes off of it. Well then the numbers change massively. So I don't know like, like I said, the numbers are all ridiculous. When you look at the movie, those cut a beam with sloth out of the exact the door. Exactly. And that's why I went off of like, kits that you can buy that look like lightsabers.
Damn, I was gonna start to go down the rabbit hole. All that would make sense. It's just plasma floating around the actual heat source. But you're right.
This is that this is the part that sucks about like dealing with or or even playing around with numbers and physics, you get a really healthy dose of reality. As soon as you start looking at things like this where it's just like, yeah, it takes a shitload of energy to melt steel, like there's no way around that.
So Roz, you were talking about a calculation you were working on? I think it was with mando Well, no, no,
no, no, no, I'm an underachiever. Don't worry, I took that number off to you. You. You you rain on my parade when you told me and correctly that Mandos rifle was a disintegrator rifle. I thought it was a Slug Thrower. Oh, yeah. I was gonna figure out like Newtonian physics figure out how much like force it would take to turn a Java into a fine red mist and a measly like and back calculate what exactly mando shoulders made out of? Because the Yeah, that'd be a lot worse. On his on it honestly, that
episode was was freaking awesome. Because I was not ready for that. I was like, oh, man, they're stealing his stuff. And he just pulls out a gun, and then just just start to waste laying down.
I was super surprised that Disney allowed because it's like,
it's like PG 13 I think. Yeah.
And I'm surprised how much violence is actually in there. Like in the first episode, like a guy gets chopped in half by a door. It's like holy.
Yeah, the first episode was pretty, pretty good. Like it sets the tone for the rest of the series. Yeah, I thought it was a slugger because he keeps those he keeps like ammunition on his on his. I guess he carries like a bandolier or something. But irrelevant because he's carrying a disintegrator rifle. So
because he's pointing that in. It was the first episode he's pointing it at a stormtrooper at like point blank range.
Yeah. Apparently. Ray Yeah. There's no like, less disintegrated. It's kind of like binary.
So like partially disintegrated. Don't worry about it.
I don't know. I don't think it kills you. Any more if you're closer. What I don't understand is why don't the if the Empire's got so much best car steel floating around? Why don't they make you know, Stormtrooper armor out of it or something?
I thought they did. I thought was it is it the Shadow Troopers? Oh, he
talked about from from like dark dark forces.
Yeah, I thought they did use beskar skill to make some some of the specialized troopers armor.
Yeah, it wouldn't surprise me hops on
Google. Yep.
I'm already doing it. The Death Troopers show up in Episode Seven. I like
that with Gus. Gus. He shows up with boys play or Manas. Death Troopers and just ways late lays waste to that Nazi Gen guys cantina there. Can't remember his name. The imp.
That was also a big shock to me that that's happened. Yeah, I'm
still trying to kind of put two and two together on that one. Obviously to be determined, but yeah, Episode Eight. Cannot wait. It's gonna be good. What? What is it Tuesday? Yeah.
And then they're gonna make us wait a year to watch another seven or eight episodes.
Wait, don't tell me that.
Yeah, there's only eight episodes in the first season of the Mandalorian Jesus crushes. We've lost Ross. Yeah, yeah, get you know what bomber John Favaro was like, I can either drag this out or just give people just a taste and make them hate themselves for a year wanting more. Star Wars game of thrones. man's a genius. Yeah, he's like, You know what? Episode Eight is going to be 13 minutes
that's great. I think that's all the top. Oh no. We have one more topic. Engineering Star Wars. Tech Data pads security resistance reborn book. Oh, I
forgot about that. No, you know, I just thought it was interesting that so I go back to the book I was ripping on that they released to try to bridge the two things out of all the different like hice. And they every episodes a heist, you're trying to get data about something crucial. Back to the good guys. Their security is awful most of the time Imperial Security. And what I thought was funny as hell was when they actually talk about the book, there's one of the generals has a data pad. And they keep talking about him using this data pad. And when every time he logs into the data pad, they use two factor authentication, first order two factor authentication, where you have to type in a text message. Yeah. And you put your thumbprint on this security alert. And I'm just like, Wait, really, it's thumbprint and password. And then it gives them like some kind of information system warning, or it's like this message is intended for executive records officers brat. And if you have received this an error, you will continue under penalty of the first order. And like that, it's an eu la have a Yeah, the first order EULA, where it's like, will kill you. But please provide some print impact. If you're
reading this, we are going to kill you. So please tell us that you're reading it in air.
But of all things you would think out of, out of like two or three generations of you know what the majority of our war and fallacies are over Intel and information leaks and information stealing about plans and whatnot. You think they would do more than a password and a thumbprint. At least they finally addressed what a data pad actually uses. And it's got a EULA to keep your ass in line
going in Rogue One. They store him an eight tracks in a giant
vault. Yep. Yeah. And then in physical Senator
mando. Yeah, they're Mandos communication is unencrypted. Because the stormtroopers pick it up. That's true. Now.
I did. Okay, so that this is interesting. You remember in Empire, there's the whole backstory about the guy running around with the ice cream maker. Yeah. And like, What the hell is that thing and he like, people gave him a name and a backstory
on Cloud sit. Right, right. Right, right.
Yeah. What did you realize that when mando gets paid by the imp in the best car steel, he hands him one of those ice cream maker containers.
Ah, go look it up. It's one of those things. They just retcon what the hell that thing was go look it up.
It's promise holds? Material giant.
It's a giant Tupperware
container to hold things in space.
Yeah, it's a step away well, now I'm going to put my beer and one let's 3d print one.
You know, I just realized something that we we do every year and we haven't done this year. And I've done it. Now four times or three times. Parker's done it three times. Ross did it once. But Hi, Ron. Since since you haven't been on with it, say Star Wars stuff before. What is your favorite droid?
Oh, I'm so old series and new stuff. Actually, it was IG 88. I had read some of the older EU novels and he's an assassin badass. And he's, he's more of a I don't need to re explain what you explained. But in the newer series, or the newer EU, there's a comic series that I read. You know, Disney was putting out a lot of different comics starting past three or four years ago. One's called Dr. Aphra. And they have an equivalent of C Threepio and Artoo called triple zero and BT one, Google BT one on it, so BT one is a blast Romac droid. He's an assassin droid, disguised as an astro
rocket launcher. Missile pods.
Yes. So imagine an asshole like our two. He is armed to the teeth. And oh, what else was there part of his backstory. Basically, he is part of target industries where they developed all the weapons and he burnt target industries to the ground and escapes and Dr. Aphra finds him and like puts basically restraining bolt on him saying, Okay, you're not going to kill people, but you're going to be my assassin droid. Kind of similar just just kind of Aerius clunky, Assassin blaster mech droid
that's amazing that's funny
and yeah he's he's a cool little droid if I had to go character aside from droid just to upset you all I'm gonna say wicked chata love You gotta love them and I was so happy to see wicked at the end of episode nine just kind of looking up he's gonna be getting up there in the edge though, right? I wonder how long they live.
You never know.
You watch kid live to be like, oh wait, hold on. I've got the Star Wars RPG core rulebook
and would tell you they're all average lifespan 10 years. I'm like, hey, it's wickets. Great, great,
great, great, great, great grandson.
I do wonder if there was a Star Wars podcast if they would have been available when Empire or Return of the Jedi came out if they would have shot all over it like we shot on nine you know? This hashtag my Star Wars
what's a hash?
We're pretty controversial and sign. Yeah, like Yeah, no like the teddy bear movie.
They were foreshadowing of the gogans
30 years early.
You know your shit all over the the over the the holiday special movie. You don't talk much about the Ewok to made for TV movies. Oh, I think there's two
Yeah, they were awful. Too young for it. Yeah,
they have nothing to do with anything. And they're amazing. And
I think we do need to watch the the holiday special. Because it does have like 30 minutes of just Wookie noises No subtitles, it's just working. He's talking he has a long period of time of a wiki like following like an instructional video on how to put together like an electronic radio kind of thing. Like swear to God,
it's so bad. I think in our first Star Wars Episode, we had a
an intermission with Star Wars on nice, wasn't it? I think we had something like that. Oh, man, this is an hour and 15 minutes long. podcast.
Yeah, you're gonna have to Edit. Edit this sucker down.
We have to make it longer than episode nine.
Well, we spend an hour we have an hour to go then. Yeah. Well, cool. Would would you guys care to sign us out?
That was the fourth annual macro fab Star Wars Christmas special podcast where your host Josh Rocher.
And Hi Ron and your hosts Parker, Dolman. And Steven Craig. Let everyone take it easy. Commence primary ignition.
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