The Technology of Star Wars

I think that the Star Trek universe has given us more reasonable and useful technological advances. Right now Dartmouth is using Star Trek style communicators over a VOIP network.
Personally I'll take my flip cell phone over a light saber any day.
(Darth Vader is still WAYYYY cooler then any Borg though)

It's not surprising that Star Trek tech is more useful than that of Star wars. Star Trek (original series) is a utopian dream where contact, communication and observation are the goals of the Enterprise crew. Killing is to be avoided if there is any way around it - peaceful solutions are preferred. The main weapon, the phaser, is usually set to stun. Star Wars, as the name implies, is about survival and upheaval. Unless you need tools to go to war against your neighbors, you're going to get more useful technology to use in your everyday life from the Star Trek model.

In that note here is a great Darth Vader Blog site . Interesting how you can see Vader as an Engineer...

"Admiral Ozzol took the fleet out of hyerspace too close to Hoth, and the Rebel Alliance were -- you guessed it -- alerted to our approach. The cornerstone of Ozzel's arrogance is his insistence that rebel technology is so vastly inferior to Imperial technology that we need broker no caution.
This attitude is typical of a man who could not rephase his own fusion orb if his life depended on it. He cannot fathom what rebel engineers may accomplish out of desperation. People who are good with things, people like me, can appreciate the infinite diversity of possible tools buried in artful combinations of even the humblest technologies. Give me an hour to reconfigure an industrial grade repulsolift and I will give you an ion cannon and enough parts left over to build a droid to run it.
Ozzel just isn't the creative type."

So did you see the movie last night?

No, but I did have a group of friends over to watch Trekies and Trekies 2 to commiserate the fact that we had no tickets. I'll probably go see it this weekend in Boston on the digital theater.

I finally saw it over the weekend. Other then a rather contrived thrown together ending the movie was great.
So when does Episode VII come out?

I salute Lucas for harnessing technology in service to a story. There are too many lame movies that use special effects as a smoke screen for their dramatic shortcomings.

"There are too many lame movies that use special effects as a smoke screen for their dramatic shortcomings."
To that I have only one thing to say.....
Jar Jar Binks

After watching "Revenge of the Sith", I need to modify my praise of Lucas' self-restraint with regard to special effects. Yes, friends, the computer animation in this latest "Star Wars" flick is brilliant; however, for this viewer at least, it's all about the story. Although I enjoyed the opening battle scene, I wish that Lucas has saved some of these precious on-screen minutes for deepening the story in places. After all, this is a morality play of epic proportions. Enough said.