I did a rant back at December when I first watched The Force Awakens, but now, as my English lesson requires an essay, I made it quite better and complete. Special thanks to my team members: Helen, Hugo, Phoebe, Tania, and Wintama.
I think, at the very least some of you who have watched this show
must have simply admired it, and you couldn’t have your minds separated from
this show until now. I know that this show has been fascinating for
all of us who have watched it, and so we thought that it could fascinate us all
even more if we could take a more in-depth look at the mechanics of The Force
Awakens, and to criticize
it.
By the mechanics, I meant physics,
which is almost always a frightening subject, am I right? However, however bad
we are at physics, however much we resent it, we all must have known that Star
Wars is, indeed, a fictional world, and
in fictional worlds, almost no laws of physics are followed. Thus, let us investigate some of the physical
laws that are disobeyed in The Force Awakens.
Star Wars: The
Force Awakens is, without a doubt, science fiction, where there are always gaps
in the science. Actually there are also gaps in its storytelling, one being that in a
world of fiction, what I learned was that a writer should always show and not merely
tell. That crawl at the beginning dropped a tremendous amount of events that
happened over the thirty years between episodes six and seven. But what can I
say, that opening crawl is tradition, and The Force Awakens did follow that Star
Wars tradition of being an epic, with very nearly tear-jerking moments and
lighthearted ones, plus astounding CGI, along with tense action.
But anyway, as Star Wars is a space
opera set in space, most of the more fictional moments clearly disregard the
law of gravity and orbital motion, what I grazed through back at grade ten. I, or who had played Kerbal Space Program, shall investigate
how much The Force Awakens follow Kepler’s rules on orbital motion, first on
how the spaceships should behave in space as opposed to in Star Wars, and
second on how this superweapon called Starkiller Base will fail if ever made in
real life. Finally, we shall delve into the world of theoretical physics and
consider how probable is hyperdrive.
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| credit: slashfilms.com |
The first fault in The Force Awakens was in that one
scene, where several starships flew past a planet's ring. That planet's ring
clearly was orbiting the planet, so how could the ships have gone past it
perpendicularly? According to Kepler’s law of orbital motion, to be able to
head straight to a center of gravity, an object must either be travelling
extremely fast so not to have its path deflected by the gravity well, or it
should not be moving with respect to the center of gravity, so that gravity
could pull it straight down.
Thus, to move in that manner, either
the ships were travelling extremely fast, which they weren't in the scene, or
extremely slowly, which they also weren't. At the velocity they were moving, they
would fall under the planet's gravity well, and dragged into a hyperbolic
orbit. Then, to land on the planet, they should do a de-orbiting burn, where a
ship fires its engines opposite to where it is flying to decrease velocity. We
haven’t even talked about how forces are applied in space, which is another
long story altogether.
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| credit: starwars.wikia.com |
Speaking about orbits, how Starkiller Base worked was
peculiar. If it needs to completely drain the star it is orbiting to charge up,
then at the moment it fires, it will no longer have a star to orbit. After
that, it will retain its tangential velocity, thus it will be slingshoted to
deep space, so that the First Order will have a much harder time targeting. We
could see this principle working when a slingshot is used, in striking a golf
ball, or even in the chains of a bicycle, those that turn rotation into linear velocity.
And how did it fire for the first
time, when it destroyed the Republic capital system, without draining the star
it was orbiting? As the planet should have been slingshoted, it would be impossible
to get captured into another star's orbit in the time range of The Force
Awakens. In our own solar system, the nearest stars are Alpha Centauri, 4.5 lightyears away, Barnard’s Star, 6 lightyears away, and Sirius,
9 lightyears away. Stars are sparse, and even if the planet was slingshoted
in the right direction it would take tens of thousands of years to reach another
star.
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| Actually from the original trilogy. credit: cinemablend.com |
Until now, we talked about real space in Star Wars,
and the physical laws that go with it, and not hyperspace, the method of
faster-than-light travel. All we can say, sadly, is that hyperdrive is
completely science fiction, with no scientific facts at all to support it. We
have searched, and all there were on how hyperdrive works are completely
imaginative, with terms like ‘hyperdrive motivator’ and ‘interdictor fields’
that have no explanation and scientific basis whatsoever on how they work.
If we want to see a good way to fly
faster-than-light, then look no further than Star Trek. Its warp drive does
have a scientific basis: the Alcubierre Drive. By expanding space-time behind a
ship and compressing it in front, a bubble will form where space-time itself,
and not the ship, will move, bringing it faster than Einstein’s law of special
relativity dictates. This is the way that the Enterprise managed to explore the
final frontier, exploring new worlds, seeking new life and civilizations, and
boldly go where no one has gone before. Well, certainly, this is clearly more
thought out than the very imaginative hyperdrive.
However, that being said, the hyperdrive being
imaginative is probably not such a bad idea in science fiction. So far, The
hyperdrive, the Starkiller Base, and how the starships ignored gravity were the
only faults that stuck in our minds, and we just can't remember anything else.
The story and the visuals were what made The Force Awakens great, and not
thinking on how everything should have worked according to the laws of physics.
In the end, those faults in science
are the part of the imagination of Star Wars that made it a legendary science
fiction, along with the Fore and Darth Vader. While it had been a great
opportunity to understand the world of physics better, those faults remind us
that Star Wars is merely a story of fiction, to be enjoyed and celebrated as an
epic set in space. All along, my friends were right: in science fiction, we
should always put more emphasis on the fiction. Certainly, The Force Awakens
was good fiction.
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Star Wars: The Force Awakens is a movie by Lucasfilms.
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