c0lo writes:
"After more than 35 years during which nobody seems to know about the fate of the Death Star architect responsible with the vents design, recently an open letter (which seems to have been written only weeks after the event) surfaced to offer an insight on both the engineering challenges as well as organizational challenges a technical minded person faces while working for a narrow-minded Empire.
The letter also raises some interesting points on potential in-fights within the upper management circles and possibly an early whistle-blowing attempt, force-choked instead of being protected and followed up; the allegations may well be the reason for which we got to read this latter so late and why nobody seems to know what happened with an otherwise pretty competent battle-station engineer and architect."
(Score: 4, Funny) by frojack on Saturday March 15 2014, @08:05PM
After all problems in the world were solved early last week, thankfully we can now move on to solving imaginary ones left hanging around from 30 years old movies.
Guys, it really IS time to get out of the basement, your parents want to sell the house.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 15 2014, @08:07PM
Between Janrinok's imaginary news/accidental posts and Dupefish's dupes, I think we have a forum slide [cryptome.org] going.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 15 2014, @08:23PM
It's possibly a case of story starvation. If you know a good article, post it!
(Score: 1) by aristarchus on Saturday March 15 2014, @08:44PM
What could they possibly be sliding over?
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday March 15 2014, @10:43PM
Everytime a forum-slide occurs, it's because the Jewish conspiracy is behind it. And who do we all know is Jewish? George Lucas! And he doesn't take criticism of his movies as nearly as lightly as he takes the dialogue he writes for them.
In fact, the techniques the conspiracy use go well-beyond forum-sliding -- Lucas himself is rumored to break into the houses of his critics and steal the change off their coffee tables, for "psychological intimidation." How would you feel, having left a nice pile of quarters on your coffee table and coming home from work to find them missing? Pretty fucking creeped out and unable to do laundry, which is the point.
(Score: 1) by gishzida on Saturday March 15 2014, @11:57PM
Not that it makes much difference but you are factually wrong... Lucas is not a Member of the Tribe... see here [adherents.com] and here [ask.com] Maybe you were thinking of Spielberg, Katzenberg, or Geffen. But Lucas? A Goy.
As for Jewish conspiracies? I'm not aware of one now or ever. The only real conspiracies are those imaginary ones created by Morons and Hate mongers to satisfy their need to feel superior because they are worthless @holes.
Maybe you need another drink.... after all today is Purim. Drink until You know not evil Haman or or saintly Mordecai...
and no I don't think your post was humorous. As for the death star? Obviously not designed by a Jew.
regards
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 18 2014, @12:36AM
He was joking.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bugamn on Saturday March 15 2014, @08:25PM
Or maybe nerds like to talk about Star Wars?
Not everything has to be business.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by frojack on Saturday March 15 2014, @08:49PM
True, but the real issue here is that the story writers needed a device that could reverse the impending doom at the last minute and bring the show to conclusion with the audience leaving the theater grinning.
Take it as that, nothing more than a plot device. Because that's all it ever was. There was no worry about this when the plot was written, there was always going to be a miraculous "Save" of one form or another.
Given that, there is no reason, other than as an inventive exercise, to bolster the story device with yet another back story. (And while I respect the inventive exercise, I'm not sure it warrants our time).
Part of the problem with the Star Wars franchise is that is has gotten totally out of control, due in no small part to piling on of stuff like the above, requiring Disney to step in with a machete and hack the Star Wars Canon [io9.com] back to something manageable that can go forward rather than chocking on its own detritus like a Compulsive Hoarder.
Every successful series [google.com] gains this sort of stuff. Many more copycat books and stories than actual episodes in the franchise. Authors come out of the wood work, and extend the legacy, and apparently the Studios will allow anyone to do this for a small percentage of royalties.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by efitton on Saturday March 15 2014, @09:37PM
I would say the bigger problem with Star Wars was George Lucas and his writing. Huge universe and we end up back on Tatooine with C3P0, throw in R2D2 and hey, a guest appearance by Chewbacca. Obviously he points out that they are kids movies, which is a fair point, but I still don't see why he made things so small. Add in that Jedi turned out to just be creepy, Lucas can't write dialog and Jar Jar Binks and I think I'll go read a book.
(Score: 2) by mrbluze on Saturday March 15 2014, @09:58PM
I read a website that pointed out all the implausible aspects to the star wars, and since then I just laugh at the whole thing. It's glossy and the effects were awesome for the 1970s but that's all that's left for me in that series. We were more naiive back then I think.
Do it yourself, 'cause no one else will do it yourself.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday March 15 2014, @10:14PM
The original 3 Star Wars movies even now have more soul than any of the shit Lucas churned out from Episode 1 onward. The plot and execution of Episodes IV-VI made it hard to nitpick stuff like the proton torpedoes taking a 90-degree dive into the exhaust port, unlike Episodes I-III where it was impossible not to focus on the details of the effects because the acting and dialogue were so flat and wooden that there was no real sense of urgency like in the originals.
Some might say that's because there are far more effects(mostly CGI) in episodes I-III, but It's probably reallybecause we know in the back of our minds that Chewbacca was a real man in a furry suit who could have easily lost patience on the set and bitch-slapped Mark Hamill. There are no real things chasing and hunting down the tepid untalented kids in the arena, just a bunch of non-existent digital bullshit with a tremolo effect applied to all the sounds and "goo-goo, ga-ga" dialogue.
(Score: 2) by gallondr00nk on Sunday March 16 2014, @12:26AM
Episodes I-III are torn apart extremely competently, if a little weirdly, by Red Letter Media's Plinkett Reviews. [redlettermedia.com] Certainly worth watching for a better impression of just how poorly done the prequels are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 15 2014, @11:52PM
Rather entertaingingly, your sig says
"Discussion should abhor vacuity"
That's extremely fitting, given this story
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Sunday March 16 2014, @07:55PM
Quite, it's a nice stress relief from work issues in the ukraine with inmarsat and a 2-year-old with an ear infection, perfect to try to relax over the weekend
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 15 2014, @10:03PM
> After all problems in the world were solved early last week
I see you're not a ST:TNG fan. The 1701-D crew always solves all the problems in the last 5 minutes.
(Score: 2) by naubol on Sunday March 16 2014, @01:29AM
Hmm, I thought it was mildly amusing... I like the idea of a few silly posts once in awhile.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 16 2014, @11:16PM
Is SN really about solving the world's problems? I wish.
Perhaps some humor mixed with the serious isn't so bad.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Sunday March 16 2014, @11:30PM
And perhaps you just saw some humor and failed to recognize it.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by irick on Saturday March 15 2014, @09:39PM
Usually it's because the issue is hard to see through a modern lens, but the separation from reality we get allows us to see it from another perspective. But, I'm not sure we have too much trouble critiquing current organizational structures in large corporations, so this just seems to be a funny vent piece.
(Score: 2) by GungnirSniper on Saturday March 15 2014, @11:56PM
Maybe this fictional case was similar to an earthly story of engineers vs. management in a battle of testing vs. schedule [wikipedia.org]?
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by TheGratefulNet on Saturday March 15 2014, @10:37PM
the IBM deskstar is old, but not quite that old.
I was not aware that vents were the reason that drive died so often. this is quite telling.
(...)
wait, you actually meant 'deathstar'?
oh. nevermind.
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Saturday March 15 2014, @10:41PM
Seriously guys, can an "attempted humor" story category be created?
Jokingly (or maybe ha ha, only serious [catb.org]?)
I mean, in spite of "from the smile,-its-the-weekend dept.", there are comments [soylentnews.org] which show some of us don't get it or they feel the urge to be perpetually unhappy.
Would there be an "attempted humor" category marked as such by an icon, they could avoid wasting their time with such a story and go ahead and "solve the world problems on soylentnews" by commenting other stories.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by GungnirSniper on Sunday March 16 2014, @12:12AM
If you couldn't tell the article smelled oniony [theonion.com] from the headline, I'm not sure an icon is going to help.
The old site had a ridiculous number of categories [slashdot.org] including the much whined-about Idle section. There are plenty [fark.com] of other places [landoverbaptist.org] to get a chortle [reddit.com].
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Sunday March 16 2014, @01:28AM
(minor bitching, skip over: as the submitter of the story, of course I tried my best to sound as oniony as possible)
I still miss the "YRO" or, for the matter, "social" - after all, being interesting in events/manifestations/experiences pertaining to social doesn't make one less of a nerd.
On the contrary, I'm on the opinion that rejecting the "social" does raise the suspicion of dealing with a dork (maybe same manifestation as a geek, but the shallowness and self-centrism of a sociopath) - but now, that's a personal opinion, I may be wrong.
On the other side, I can't stop to notice the soylentnews provides two categories that may strongly overlap: "code" and "software" - I suspect a great deal of soygents won't be programmers or software engineers, maybe this is why the code [soylentnews.org] stories list only 3 entries (two of each could more appropriately be classified as "software") while software [soylentnews.org] shows 17 stories for the same period.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 16 2014, @02:45AM
> If you couldn't tell the article smelled oniony from the headline, I'm not sure an icon is going to help.
Really? I thought this was about a REAL letter from the REAL architect of the REAL Death Star. :-P
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday March 16 2014, @03:32AM
Best laugh I've had all day. We need a little don't-take-ourselves-too-seriously once in a while!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 15 2014, @11:12PM
I thought SoylentNews was meant to be about news, and commenting on news. And you serve us *this*?
This is nothing more than pathetic. Anyone involved in submitting this and approving it should feel utterly ashamed of themselves. And if they don't understand why they should feel ashamed of themselves then they should feel even more ashamed.
(Score: 1) by CluelessMoron on Saturday March 15 2014, @11:32PM
I see a lot of complaints here, but I got a chuckle out of that story. You're a contractor, you have your specs, you won the contract, and did you really have somebody demand "what if a Jedi Knight guides a missile down the exhaust tube"?
No. So you make your goddamned exhaust duct and that's the end of it. Its the goddamned "Death Star", after all. If it can't keep people from lobbing bombs down exhaust pipes you may as well give up and go home, but the bottom line is that as a contractor it's Not My Goddamned Problem.
(Score: 1) by Aiwendil on Sunday March 16 2014, @10:45AM
What I would have done differently is to put some grating over any and all exhaustports - and yes that has been bothering me since I first saw the movie..
Also, it would keep stuff like debris out of the vents as well, and something tells me it would be a lot easier to just send a maint-bot out to scrape the grate rather than having to rebuild the inner walls of the exhauststack(exhausttrench?)..
Yup, I would have reduced maintenance and made the thing invincible - and all for less than a couple of hundred bucks :)
(Score: 2) by bucc5062 on Sunday March 16 2014, @01:44PM
This is vent venting out into space. In what way would one need a grate to keep stuff out. As the designer mentions, it was designed to push thing out thus no need to stop things from coming in.
If the idea was to stop things from going out, what happens when the grate gets blocked and you really really really need to vent. It is not reasonable to design against magic unless you want to blow the budget of the whole Empire and Palpatine was not that dumb.
The more things change, the more they look the same
(Score: 3, Funny) by TheLink on Sunday March 16 2014, @04:27PM
Don't blame the architect - there are very many suspicious things about the official story of what happened: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dvv-Yib1Xg [youtube.com] ;)
(Score: 2) by bucc5062 on Sunday March 16 2014, @05:26PM
Yes...I always wondered. To cosie a family connection if you ask me and look at the outcome. Lea and Luke in charge of the known galaxy. Inside job indeed.
The more things change, the more they look the same
(Score: 1) by TheLink on Sunday March 16 2014, @05:50PM
Nah
(Score: 1) by Aiwendil on Sunday March 16 2014, @05:10PM
Debris from ships in fights (or recently blown up planets), meteoroids (they are not that rare) and well just about anything it runs in to while travelling (for instance dumped waste from other ships - and dumping waste seemed to be standard operations in star wars) are the first things that comes to mind. Considering that the exhaust probably is gas and/or radiation it would need quite an impressive speed/intensity in order to deflect even a tennisball-sized meteoroid comming in at an unlucky angle, also the deathstar probably has enough gravity to excaberate this problem (not to mention an unlucky choice of orbit around a planet, it was after all designed to be deployed near planets and they[planets] have a tedency to gather lots of stuff in its orbit)... Considering that the thing had defences for attacks from other ships it would be a gross oversight to allow anything big that is propelled by an explosion to enter.
The idea is to stop things from going in - and if you manage to get the grate blocked you either messed up maintance or it would have been blocked regardless (this is after all a "thermal exhaust vent" so any exhaust should be non-solids)... anyhow it could be fixed with explosive bolts for emergencies, or a pneumatic arm to "open/close" the grate, or just a robotic arm placed nearby to pick it clean, or - if you for some reason would need to exhaust quite a bit of mass - just design the grate to have a breaking point in its fastenings (when pushed outwards) a bit below the critical levels of the rest of the exhaust-system. Or if you are really paranoid just a couple of retractable bars would do wonders (instead of the grates).
I would consider the grates more to be to keep debris/meteoroids out then to protect against magic or welldesigned guided missiles, and given that this is a lowcost and yet effecient solution that increases the normal expected lifespan of anything on the protected site of the grate the cost of installation would probably recoup itself quite quickly under normal operations...
(Score: 2, Interesting) by krishnoid on Sunday March 16 2014, @01:06AM
I can't help but draw a rough parallel between the letter and comparable justifications for the World Trade Center design [tms.org], particularly the "WAS THE WTC DEFECTIVELY DESIGNED?" section, setting aside for the moment whether those justifications are valid.
Catastrophic and other well-reported structural failures traceable to nonexistence/poor enforcement of code standards occurs frequently enough in some regions. Even in fantastical situations, it seems particularly instructive to consider and compare failures when building code, and in this case, defensibility, standards are followed. It's particularly good if nobody actually has to die.
(Score: 2) by bucc5062 on Sunday March 16 2014, @01:56PM
For a site that caters to geeks, technical people, and I would have thought people with a sense of imagination, y'all see to missing your humor muscles. Must every article be somber, serious, and geared towards maximizing FUD. I rather enjoyed this one.
His criticism is well founded. As an designer he was asked to built along a strict set of guidelines. In typical THB fashion the shit rolled down to this guy instead of blame being kept where it belonged, at the foot of Vader and Palpatine. Those two knew of and understood the force. In their hubris they did not take into account the idea of a Force assisted attack on their premiere Star vessel. In typical political fashion they then divert and misdirection attention from their failures as leaders and place blame on the grunts.
The other thought is that Luke may have had self guided missiles then when target locked, could turn 90 degrees and handle the tubing such that it could arrive at the energy core. The viewer is presented with the information that there is a targeting computer. The targeting computer could not handle the high speed and high angle from a computational level which is why Luke turned his off. The Force only told him when to push the button. The missiles were already programmed to take over when they got a localized lock on the vent.
Boom!
The more things change, the more they look the same
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 16 2014, @03:20PM
Posting AC for moderation reasons.
Based on the comments above, yes, most people here have lost their sense of humor.
Personally, I got a good chuckle out of it.
(Score: 2) by Boxzy on Sunday March 16 2014, @04:42PM
Yes I know, scrolling text is very funny, haha. But do I really have to allow the nearly twenty tracking servers access to my machine just to watch the video?
Go green, Go Soylent.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Boxzy on Sunday March 16 2014, @05:14PM
Ah, turns out it wasn't video, the picture was just dependent on so many trackers I couldn't tell. Anyway here's the picture on a less invasive site.
http://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/scifi/death-star- architect-defends-exhaust-port-designs-open-letter .html [giantfreakinrobot.com]
Go green, Go Soylent.