Jodorowski’s Dune is one of the best movies I’ve ever seen.
Let’s not lose sight of the truly important dichotomy here:
c’mon, not even close!
How is there even a conversation! Leia!
This is a top 5 thread all time. We should sticky this one…
I am sorry, but when women (alien or not) are green or purple I have to draw a line, unless they are choking. All other shades are okay though.
@NURB, glad to hear that you and all the others are enjoying my mindless thoughts regarding these things as much as I am. I need to vent these ideas out of my mind once in awhile.
This “technical manual” was a big influence on my design direction as a kid. As well the sketchbooks from Star Wars…
When I was young and Star Wars was released on cinemas it seemed me way more advanced than Star Trek. Now I don’t think the same. Star Trek was the typical 1960’s optimistic product, and the design of the 60’s still rocks. Look at those incredible space suits or at the design of the original Enterprise spaceship. Stars Wars design doesn’t seem me so modern, with the notable exception of the Death Star. Anyway Kubrick’s Space odyssey design still put them all biting the dust, IMHO. 
Riccardo
Mechanical Hacking in SW vs ST:
(note: except for very limited instances I don’t consider Episodes 1-3 part of my knowledge of the SW universe. The pod racers were OK though)
Star Wars - Han Solo, under the hood, bitching that the hyperdrive isn’t working, yelling at Chewie to bring him the spanners.
Star Trek - Scotty down in the engine room, bodies on fire all around him, bitching to the bridge that he can’t fix the ship.
Winner: Solo (with R2-D2s help, no thanks Cloud City mechanics)
Technological Prowess:
Star Wars - can blow up a planet with another planet-sized space station. Can’t turn on light saber with Jedi powers (love it)
Star Trek - can fricken teleport, usually without negative consequences.
Winner: Trek.
Star Trek loses big points for not having individually-piloted aircraft. Militarily speaking the whole Trek thing is very ‘Navy’ whereas Star Wars is a little bit more guerrilla with occasional Naval fleet warfare. So, all the offshoots of different craft make the Star Wars transport pantheon much larger and varied than what I know of Trek (Enterprise, Bird of Prey, Klingon thing).
Have you seen this?
Inside the battle of Hoth
“How did the Galactic Empire ever cement its hold on the Star Wars Universe? The war machine built by Emperor Palpatine and run by Darth Vader is a spectacularly bad fighting force, as evidenced by all of the pieces of Death Star littering space. But of all the Empire’s failures, none is a more spectacular military fiasco than the Battle of Hoth at the beginning of The Empire Strikes Back.”
There’s also a Star Trek one:
Star Trek: A Military Analysis
I always liked the big battle at the end of “Attack of the Clones”. There’s a great scene of lots of Clone Troopers walking out of the dust, firing thousands of blasters.
@sanjy009 and slippyfish:
Never thought about why they couldn’t just activate the lightsabers with the Force!
Star Wars does do all the space battles better! The points that the “Military Analysis” article makes is something that bugged me about the newest movies and series in general.
In the old shows, The Original Series and sometimes the Next Gen, they often depict the space battles as out of visual range and at many times the speed of light. This was so they didn’t have to build an alien ship model and film the two ships duking it out – very expensive! But in a way, this kind of combat was much more advanced than the kind in the later shows and movies. After all, they were zipping around space and shooting at moving things 300,000 km+ away. Of course, the later series that could afford better effects went more for the “dogfighting” scenes a la Star Wars or WWI fighters because it is more exciting to watch than shaking the camera telling the audience about the action. Just searched this Next Gen clip up, think it works alright for something without any visuals:
I guess an analogy would be modern jet fighters closing in and using their machine guns when they could stand off with radar/IR missiles from farther away.
Ah, thought way too much about this
Hold on…
In Episode IV Luke uses a light saber on the Millenium Falcon while he’s still learning the Force. How could he turn it on if he didn’t know how to use the Force to do it?
It was his father’s light saber, Obi-Wan Kenobi told him so. The first time he turned it on was at Kenobi’s man-cave on Tatooine. So there must have been a big ‘ON’ switch on the handle, written in Tatooineese, since Anakin/Vader was from there.
I’ll take the Force over a Vulcan mind-meld any day. But those Ceti eels are another story. Khan was doing bio-engineering on a molecular level with those yukky little bastards.
All Jedi build their own lightsabers after they are well versed in the force. Darth built his with an on/off switch.
Sad that I know that.
btw, Obi-Wan had to pull the switch to turn off the Death Star retractor field, standing next to it. Force schmorce.
‘Good’ Force and ‘Dark’ Force are incompatible. Its like the squiggly command button on Apple keyboards, it doesn’t do the same thing when you run BootCamp SolidWorks.
Are Phasers always ‘on’? Did they ever run out of batteries or did they run on dilithium crystals like the whole Enterprise did? Did lightsabers ever run out of juice?
KHHHHAAAAAAAAAANNNNN!!!
Also, I tend to think of phasers and lightsabers batteries the same way I think of bullets in movies…the better the movie the more realistic the handling of bullets/battery power.
Case and point; in Firefly there was an episode where Mal goes to use a gun that shoots lasers (not a phaser) and it runs out of juice…also I just threw Firefly into the mix…whoops 
Lightsabers needed to be recharged occasionally, I think; they run off of crystals that can be depleted over time IIRC. Though we’re talking like 20-30 year time frames. It’s somewhere in the extended universe. Lightsaber | Wookieepedia | Fandom
Hm, the original lightsabers ran off of a belt-mounted power supply.
Oh man. This is such a great thread.
Some of my favorite books that also made me more interested in science fiction particularly Star Wars/Star Trek were the Incredible Cross Section series. Here are some pages that always make me wish we had cool space ships and stuff.
Those are great illustrations!
Is it just me, or do the original Star Wars films’s tech have a much more ‘substantial’ or believable feeling to them? There’s less streamlining, more ‘chunkiness’, and more interesting architecture to the spacecraft. The only barely iconic ship from the second three films could be the yellow and chrome ‘retro’ craft that Natalie Portman flies around. Things like that ‘Venator’ Star Destroyer are just re-warmed originals, and not improvements.
I’m guessing that a combination of the original artist’s styles, the tendency to work more by hand and models than on-screen, and perhaps a lighter directorial influence made for more interesting craft in the first three films.