Star Wars Quirks

@alexgreat:

Horta, Tholians, Sheliak, Species 8472, Calamarain, Tribbles, to name a few on the top of my head. And then there are aliens like Gorn, which I guess could pass as humanoids in a way.

Just because those pretty dancers have lekku doesnt mean they are non-humanoid, and the same goes for wings of Geonosians.

Comparing not only screened aliens (would be unfair I guess) but all things in the books as well, I dont think that Star Wars has more biodiversity. And in any case humanoids cannot come cooler than Romulans :)

And as Wheat said, Star Trek explained why there are so many humanoids, in I guess another attempt to picture our similarities, not our differences.

So having said all that, both franchises are great if you include the books, but Star Trek is maybe richer overall, with more time devoted to more cultures.

Agree with Wheat, SciFi cannot come better than as DS9.

@wheatbeer:

@amanntai:

I just find the aliens in Star Trek boring. They all look like humans. Vulcans are humans with pointy ears. Klingons are humans with weird foreheads.
Star Wars has more biodiversity in my opinion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chase_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation)

This episode sort of explained away the similarities but saying that life was seeded by some earlier species.

Most Star Wars aliens are still bipedal, with heads featuring eyes/nose/mouth/ears, who communicate with vocalizations. A truly alien creature wouldn’t be able to emote for a human audience.

(and just in case, I didn’t geek out enough already, Star Trek aliens have more deeply developed cultures than Star Wars aliens)

I wasn’t thinking of Twi’leks. I was thinking of Hutts, Ortolans, Wampas, or the Sarlacc (which is indeed a sapient creature in the Star Wars universe).

I also believe the humanoid species in Star Wars are considerably less human than the humanoids in Star Trek. Dugs are technically humanoid, but don’t really look like humans.

Also, Geonosians aren’t really humanoid. Just take a look at the Geonosian Queen, she doesn’t resemble humans at all.

@seththenewb:

Very interesting stuff there Mark. Although Dyer’s credentials lend his thoughts a lot more weight that mine do, I have to disagree with his analysis of what the threshold for a war to be dubbed a ‘world war’. I guess my thinking is that his criteria (based on this short narrative) seems to pretty Euro-Centric in account the 30 year’s war and the Spanish Succession to be a world war. I could be wrong, but I thought both of those wars were pretty much just fought between European powers and confined, for the most part, to Europe itself. 
I know I’m pretty guilty of knowing a LOT more about Western civilization and history than I do about Eastern history/civilization. I’m not trying to dig on him or his work, I just figure that you could apply the label of ‘major power’ to at least the Incan, Aztec, and Chinese empires. I guess it depends on how you define major power though.
[…]
I do however agree that the last four on his list qualify as world wars and I like his theory on treaties reflecting the true balance of power. I never really thought of the time periods between wars in that light before and on the surface it seems to make a lot of sense and in my mind goes a long way towards explaining the cycle of war and peace in Europe.

You make a good point about Dyer’s list being Eurocentric, which is something that hadn’t occurred to me (since I don’t have much familiarity with wars outside the western world).  And I don’t know enough about the first three wars on the list to make an informed judgment about how well they fit the all-the-major-powers-of-the-time criterion.

In his discussion of the fifty-year cycle, Dyer speculates that this amount of time is about how long it takes for the difference between the fixed world power structure defined by major peace treaties and the constantly-evolving actual power structure on the ground to become sufficiently large that it reaches the breaking point.  Dyer’s book (based on a TV series of the same name) was published two years before Paul Kennedy’s 1987 book “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000,” but the argument Dyer makes has some similarity to Kennedy’s.

Kennedy argues that, even when a particular country retains the same level of absolute strength, it may still find itself in a position of decline relative to other countries whose strength happens to be growing.  He identifies the source of that strength as the relationship between economic and military power in any given country, saying that they reinforce each other: economic power (gross national product and foreign trade ) enables you to boost your military power (by buying weapons and enlarging your military forces), and military power returns the favour by helping to protect your economic interests from foreign threats.  A classic example is the synergistic relationship that existed between the Royal Navy and the British merchant marine in the 19th century.  An example closer to home (here on this discussion board) is the fact that, in A&A, income buys units, units fight battles, battles win territories, and territories generate income.

Kennedy states, however, that economic and military strength must be kept properly balanced for the equation to work.  He points to the way in which history’s great powers have tended to get caught in the following trap: when their power declines in either relative or absolute terms, they try to maintain their standing by devoting more and more of their economic resources to the expansion of their military strength, thus upsetting the balance of the equation.  His book came out before the USSR imploded, but as I recall one of the factors which contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union was that it bankrupted itself through excessive military spending, along the lines of Kennedy’s theory.

@Imperious:

Never watch it should fix the problem :mrgreen:

Now after seeing the movie tonight, that would be a mistake. Star Trek is alive.

Ha Ha!    I had not heard that      I do remember Edward Porter Alexander was stationed their before the war and had some social interaction with british officers

I wonder what sports they played    sounds like it was probably a drinking game:)

@Mr:

I saw on CNN.com that Minnesota beat Dallas 1-0 last night

What the F… I’m I talking about!
If I really did see this on CNN then you could say they are full of sh*t ,as it was Anaheim that beat Dallas 1-0. :oops: I’m stupid!

that’s it!
you have less credibility with me than CNN OR CBC!
you SUCK Ghoul!!!

(see ya sunday)

Mr. Ghoul, I think the Japanese started in China as far back as 1933. You are right as to why the US cut off her fuel supplies. You’re right that didn’t give the Japanese the right to attack in the minds of the US and according to their law. And that is probably the right position legally. However, how would the US react if her oil supply was threatened. Ahhhhh yes, if radical Islam swept across all the oil in the middle east and the world decided to shut of the oil to the US. How would the US react.

The only difference is the degree to which their arguments are valid. Both Japan in 1940 and the US in the last 5 years of done some bad stuff, broken internation law etc. Of course the rape of Nanking is orders of magnitude worse then anything the US has done since perhaps the Indian wars, even then it was spread out over centuries not weeks.

I believe the US had and has laws on her books not to sell weapons to countries at war that don’t involve the US. The US was not at war during WWII until Dec 8, 1941. Therefore it was illegal for the US to supply ANY weapons or war materials to any country at war during the period preceding Dec, 8 1941. The US doesn’t like syria selling weapons to Iraq now, why should they expect war time Germany to like the US selling weapons to England.

In fact, Germany had a legal right to stop and sink any ships entering the british home waters found to be carring war materials. But I digress on this law and history lesson.

BB

I say we come up with a set of rules and restart this topic (Its a fun topic).

For Example:

German Airforce still intact?
German Navy and Uboats still intact?
Egypt Conquered?
What about Japan?