[Luis Dias]

I do remember Star Destroyers spamming my tiny X Wing with green lasers. Was that my imagination?

[-Norbert-]

In X-Wing (the original one) I never had much trouble with Star Destroyers, since flying at the bridge fast enough made the guns shoot below and behind you, but Nebulon-B frigates were a nightmare to take down for me.

I remember getting splashed a few times by ships and base defenses in Tachyon too.

[niffiwan]

I recall capships in Wing Commander 2 being troublesome at times, fly too close and the flak would shred you, even from a transport.  Or in certain missions they'd fire their anti-matter guns at you, the Broadsword/Crossbow could tank one shot, the Sabre on the other hand... and evading the shot would ruin your torpedo lock

[AdmiralRalwood]

In X-Wing (the original one) I never had much trouble with Star Destroyers, since flying at the bridge fast enough made the guns shoot below and behind you

Not to mention they made the classic mistake of "radar domes = shield generators", so you could literally solo a Star Destroyer without even using torpedoes by taking out the domes and then plinking it to death.

[NGTM-1R]

Not to mention they made the classic mistake of "radar domes = shield generators", so you could literally solo a Star Destroyer without even using torpedoes by taking out the domes and then plinking it to death.

I hate to tell you but by now that's not a mistake. If it ever actually was.

[-Norbert-]

Yep, that was even in the movie. If there ever was a mistake, it was made by the special effects crew of "Return of the Jedi".

[headdie]

Yep, that was even in the movie. If there ever was a mistake, it was made by the special effects crew of "Return of the Jedi".

its also part of the lore of the extended universe

[karajorma]

No one gives a **** about the extended universe.

As the 7th movie will almost certainly make abundantly clear.

[Luis Dias]

Jesus. The more time passes, the more I am convinced that SW VII will be absolute garbage material. I'm starting to feel old, I am beggining to understand those old fellas who used to decry the degenerated music and movies and culture and so on twenty years ago.

[karajorma]

Actually I wasn't passing judgement on the quality of the movie in the slightest. Simply saying that it won't bother with extended universe canon much, so I don't know why anyone else bothers with it either. As far as I'm concerned the extended universe is basically fanon that George Lucas wanted to make money off of. That doesn't diminish the quality of the work itself but we should treat it the same way we treat Blue Planet or Inferno when it comes to FS canon.

[Luis Dias]

I wasn't commenting on the extended universe per se. The discussion of this made my mind wander imagining how they are currently processing the movie, the script, the screenplay and so on and all that comes to my mind is "They will **** this up and shove it to another rollercoaster. **** damn ****"

[AdmiralRalwood]

Not to mention they made the classic mistake of "radar domes = shield generators", so you could literally solo a Star Destroyer without even using torpedoes by taking out the domes and then plinking it to death.

I hate to tell you but by now that's not a mistake. If it ever actually was.

The radar dome exploding was a symptom of the shields being down, not the cause of it. Not even the Empire is stupid enough to paint a shield generator with a giant bullseye; radar domes actually have a reason for being off the hull like that.

[headdie]

Not to mention they made the classic mistake of "radar domes = shield generators", so you could literally solo a Star Destroyer without even using torpedoes by taking out the domes and then plinking it to death.

I hate to tell you but by now that's not a mistake. If it ever actually was.

The radar dome exploding was a symptom of the shields being down, not the cause of it. Not even the Empire is stupid enough to paint a shield generator with a giant bullseye; radar domes actually have a reason for being off the hull like that.

I dont see much other than the dome exploding, also lifting the shields away from the hull can be made to have logic if needed but I agree it was probably more of an artistic decision

[NGTM-1R]

The radar dome exploding was a symptom of the shields being down, not the cause of it. Not even the Empire is stupid enough to paint a shield generator with a giant bullseye; radar domes actually have a reason for being off the hull like that.

I see you failed to address the argument entirely, i.e. it's widespread enough in other official work it's no longer a mistake.

Don't post again on the subject until you can address that, maybe?

[niffiwan]

There's a lengthy discourse here on the shields vs sensors question (which fully supports the sensors view), interestingly it claims that "official non-canon sources are divided".   

[Lorric]

There's a lengthy discourse here on the shields vs sensors question (which fully supports the sensors view), interestingly it claims that "official non-canon sources are divided".   

The can of worms has been opened!

I did and still do wish it is true when I read Ralwood's post.

[Phantom Hoover]

Jesus. The more time passes, the more I am convinced that SW VII will be absolute garbage material. I'm starting to feel old, I am beggining to understand those old fellas who used to decry the degenerated music and movies and culture and so on twenty years ago.

...despite having the evidence of it being a psychosomatic reaction to one's own ageing staring you in the face?

[AdmiralRalwood]

The radar dome exploding was a symptom of the shields being down, not the cause of it. Not even the Empire is stupid enough to paint a shield generator with a giant bullseye; radar domes actually have a reason for being off the hull like that.

I see you failed to address the argument entirely, i.e. it's widespread enough in other official work it's no longer a mistake.

Don't post again on the subject until you can address that, maybe?

Nothing in the Expanded Universe is internally consistent with other Expanded Universe works anyway, unless the authors intentionally work together (or by sheer coincidence). I know at least one (rather good, in fact) book that refers to the domes as shield generators. It also uses the laughably small figure of 8 kilometers for the length of an Executor-class. I don't care about the inaccuracies because it's a good book, but I don't take it as anything but a work of C-canon by an author without an encyclopedic knowledge of everything Star Wars.

EDIT: To make my point more clear, we have only one instance of one of those domes exploding in the movies, which is the only source of canon that actually matters 99% of the time.

[Dragon]

They're actually both sensor domes and shield emitters. The "ball" piece is probably a radar dome, while the shield emitters are overlaid on that. IIRC, that's the "word of god" official statement.

[NGTM-1R]

Nothing in the Expanded Universe is internally consistent with other Expanded Universe works anyway,

That's a kind of ridiculous statement to make considering most of the EU actually doesn't step on each others toes at all.

Also I'd point as they're never identified by name or type in the movies the movies are utterly useless in identifying them as sensor domes (but not as shield generators, see below!), and I've never seen an EU work that does otherwise than as shield generators. (Or for that matter a second-tier work, not EU but something like one of the Essential Guides or an artbook.)

You're falling into the trap that folks like sd.net do, with saying that turbolasers are amazingly powerful based on a couple scenes in ESB where the effects budget and technology didn't permit showing the Star Destroyers firing broadsides is more likely (assuming the staff even knew the calculations that ultimately derive turbolaser power output and did so in the knowledge of them), but they were taking out asteroids with single shots so clearly they must be that powerful because that's what's on screen. People assert the movies as the only legitimate source of truth, basically, and insist to a rigid adherence of what happened onscreen.

Yet when it comes to this, where something blows up and the shields go down immediately onscreen, it's obviously a second-order unrelated effect in blatant defiance of any attempt at good narration, which follows conservation of detail and shows us only things we need to know so that we can establish clear logical chains of events. If something blows up and we cut immediately to a report of the shields going down, it's very unlikely that even a marginally competent storyteller would have had the thing that blew up be completely unrelated to making the shields work. And whatever you want to say about Lucas now, he had an editorial group back then.

That is to say, your following the narrative on the screen is subordinate to your desire to make assumptions that paint the creations of the screen in the best possible light. You're working backwards from a premise (that premise being that making exposed shield generators would be dumb, something we don't even know for a fact; they might need to be exposed), not forwards from the evidence, every time you assert they're sensor domes.

EDIT THE TEN MILLIONTH: I mean christ I watched some of the least-competent sci-fi ever made the last couple of nights with Voyager and Enterprise and when they tell you that Deck 5 is about to blow out and then we cut to an exterior shot of half a deck exploding, are you saying it's something other than Deck 5 blowing out? This is basic narrative theory, okay?