Darths & Droids

Episode 2446: Shot Through the Dark, and You’ll Get Fame

Thank you, Irregulars, for the shout-out to the peasant railgun (aka commoner railgun). While it is an excellent illustration of how game logic, taken literally, violates physics, even more rigorous application of physics would tell you that the object would be subject to intense aerodynamic heating along its journey and kill or severely injure most of the people involved. The sonic boom alone would be deafening.

Edited by Fighteer on Mar 31st 2024 at 11:06:04 AM

Alternately, basic physics telling you that humans handing a stick to each other can't possibly accelerate it to supersonic speeds, since they can only throw it so fast.

The railgun doesn’t actually work via RAW as there are no rules of passed object speed, plus the pole isn’t actually a falling object. By RAW you’d get an improvised weapon thrown as normal by the final peasant.

The pole wouldn’t travel at an average speed of 1200 miles per hour, it would travel at normal handling speed and break the rules of time.

That should be the DM response to anyone doing a peasant railgun, it fails but makes a time-space hole through which some monsters come.

And yet, a literal interpretation of the rules permits it. Gotta love cheese.

Yes, that's the obvious interpretation. Still, it's a fun thought experiment. At a technical level, I suppose the stick would travel at infinite velocity down the chain, then slow to a stop at the end.

Edited by Fighteer on Mar 31st 2024 at 1:07:58 PM

The other easy rule 0 is that you can only "chain" so many readied actions in a single round, since humans have a finite reaction speed. Then you just pick a number and stick with it.

There’s a logic to that. I’d probably rule that a ready action occurs 0.5 initiative after the triggering action. So if you do something on initiative 12 that triggers a ready action the action works as if it was done on initiative 11.5 and may trigger another ready action which would be processed on initiative 11.

Episode 2447: He Don’t Like That Kind of Behaviour

Episode 2448: Even Dumber Than Regular Planning

Episode 2449: Fataller Traction

Episode 2450: Space Bar Mastery

Episode 2451: Not Worth the Effort

I understand the movie logic behind why a human has to pilot the Raddus on the suicide jump. It's just completely asinine. Why must the hyperdrive actuator be manually operated? Why would a droid not be trusted to do it — after all, we know there are droids programmed to kill.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 11th 2024 at 9:05:21 AM

If I remember my lore (most of which is Legends) correctly, battle droids (which the Resistance presumably doesn’t have) are a major exception to most droid programming, which is hard-coded to avoid violence so deeply that trying to get an autopilot or a droid pilot to deliberately do the lightspeed ram would either straight-up fail, or require more time than they have to hack the firmware.

Yeah, well. The film doesn't establish any of that, so we're left hanging.

Adding to that, the only new battle droids introduced into canon were all created by and in service to the Empire, which has far more resources than the Rebellion/Resistance.

The only battle-capable droids the Rebellion/Resistance could probably have are the few old Clone Wars era battle droids that refused the deactivation signal, weren't destroyed by the Empire and chose to join them. And who knows how many of those are still active by the time of the sequels.

Edited by Rockernator on Apr 11th 2024 at 5:41:57 PM

Episode 2452: Martyr Hurry

Memnarch is dead on in their interpretation of the scene. Love it.

Episode 2453: A Solid Plan

Episode 2454: Excelling at Evil, or Evil at Excelling?

I don't think this "spotted by the droid" scene is ridiculous in the movie. What I do think is ridiculous is that in the Lore separated from the movie, they made this droid actually malicious. It can't be simply someone working for the enemy and doing their job right. It had to be an evil droid.

We've seen in the past just how awful the Empire's and First Order's security is. Given how paranoid these folks are, having droids whose job it is to scan everyone would make absolute sense, which of course means it can't be routine; it has to be a "one-off" act of malice.

Episode 2455: Hooked on a Feeling

Why wouldn't there be evil droids?

No reason there can't be evil droids, but it's a conservation law in writing: there's no need to invent reasons for someone to be doing their job, and scanning for intruders should be a routine job in the First Order.

Anyway, that is a nice scene transition.