Star Wars Fans Are Big Nerds!

by Tjames Madison

1999-05-27 00:16:49

Net Flotsam

The old (on- and off-net) flame goes, "You've got too much time on your hands," but hardly anyone ever examines the diametric here: if people didn't have the time to build lavish, lovingly intricate web sites full of Star Wars bulldata concerning technology that only exists in a cheesy movie and seems as real to the creator as the specs of the M1A2 Abrams Main Battle Tank, then what else in the world could these saps possibly be occupying their time with? Needlepoint?

Case in point: The Star Wars Technical Commentaries (see link below). Inside these hallowed walls you will find gathered the world's collected archives of masturbatory fanboy pseudo-techno esoterica. For instance, did you know that the jump to hyperspace involves a brief but violent acceleration to high relativistic speeds and then a leap beyond the lightspeed threshold by some unknown mechanism? Or that inertial dampers linked to the hyperdrive system must protect the ship, its crew and contents from feeling the effect of this acceleration? Neither did I. I just thought it was a cool effect when I was twelve years old.

I made a "Star Wars" ship in my closet in 1977. It consisted of an old vinyl seat pulled out of a junked Chevy van, a flight stick made out of clothehangers and a control panel assembled from Radio Shack LEDS and flip switches. When I made the jump to hyperspace in my ship I would go "Whooooooooosh!"

The whole time I was doing this I was blissfully unaware of things like wake rotation and causality paradoxes. But that's what Star Wars nerds are good for!

I didn't intend to single out Curtis Saxon, the creator of the aforementioned site. I wasn't going to bitchslap him for taking the pure and simple fun out of something that was never intended to be rocket science (and cannot stand on its own merits as anything but eye candy, as it was produced mainly with a target audience of early teens in mind and executed with a cloying sappiness that pervades the series and ultimately results in mishaps like Ewoks). But he was there, and I picked his site out at random from what seems like millions of them. All cram packed with data about TIE fighters and Star Destroyers and things like "Could the Death Star beat up the Borg?" and whatnot.

So if you're interested in this kind of shit, go check out his site. You can probably find links there to all sorts of other sites where people take themselves so seriously they'd make your average Trekkie blush. But whatever. I'm not your dad.

Check it out yourself

punchbowl@pigdog.org