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naberiie · 4 years

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an analysis of five lines.

[id: a screenshot of a dialogue between Naboo handmaiden Rabé and former King Ari Veruna, from chapter 23 of the arcmaiden fic From Which Stars Have We Fallen, to Meet Each Other Here?. It reads:

“Then your oaths are, in order, to Naboo, to the Royal House, and to Padmé Amidala.” He angled his head. “When Queen Amidala’s second term ended, your oath of loyalty to a specific monarch came to a natural close. Your oaths of loyalty to the throne and to the system, on the other hand, are still active. Queen Neeyutnee happens to sit on that throne now, but she will not sit there forever.”

“As the monarch, my loyalties are to her and her orders. Her wishes.”

“You did not swear oaths of loyalty to her person.”

“A technicality.” Rabé said, her cheeks suddenly as hot as flames.

“A critical distinction.”

She stared at him, shocked by the sheer simplicity of it. /end id]

The above interaction between Ari and Rabé is absolutely one of the most favorite sequences that I have EVER written, and it’s definitely inspired and informed by the Elemental Logic series (surprising absolutely no one). I wanted to examine it in depth as informed by the context of the rest of the fic, in particular how Fives’ and Rabé’s backgrounds informed their views of a potential relationship, the conversation in the shooting range (when she turns him down), and the roles Ari and Echo play in helping them come to terms with their emotional turmoil – because I’m proud of the subtle work being done here.

TL;DR: Fives is idealistic, Rabé is realistic, and they have been throughout the entirety of FWS. They were both wearing blinders towards different outlooks with regards to a potential relationship: Fives didn’t want to see the war, while it was the only thing Rabé could see. He is motivated by desire but allows her motivations of duty and loyalty to take the lead in how they approach their relationship. Rabé desperately needed someone to help her make sense of her emotions, her duties, and her desires, which all seemingly come into conflict with each other - and Ari Veruna does it in five lines.

At first glance, the conversation seems like an obvious statement of fact, when in actuality there are TONS of character work being dealt with underneath these few lines; characterization that has become more and more tangled throughout the entire fic. This is the moment when we first start to see it untangling itself; this conversation is the catalyst towards the endgame.

Desire vs. Duty: Background and Views

Fives desiring a romantic relationship with Rabé is explicitly an act of defiance against his situation and purpose. He has repeatedly considered how he is essentially cannon fodder, and about how he was created for a purpose without his consent. There have been times in FWS when he wonders if Rabé would want to be in a relationship with him at all, if she would even want to be with a clone trooper, a weapon. He was born to die for the Republic; his environment is brutal and unfair. And so he romanticizes his desires by saying “Hey! I’m a person and I want person things like fulfilling relationships and a purpose that I have chosen for myself.”

Rabé’s home and environment is, on the surface, very romantic. Underneath those rose-colored lenses, however, the ‘modern’ Naboo we see is the result of a history teeming with violence and bloodshed and people sacrificing themselves for a cause they believe in. Her oaths of loyalty at the Order of Sanctuary were taken with full consent and understanding of how they would define, structure, and inform all decisions for the rest of her life.

Rabé chose her path, she chose to be a handmaiden, and therefore in her mind that decision means her planet, her people, and her monarch over all else. Fives did not choose his path, he didn’t choose to become a trooper, and therefore his act of rebellion is putting HIMSELF and what HE wants above this predetermined destiny someone else ordained for him - but he respects and loves Rabé enough to defer to her wishes, even when that act breaks their hearts.

Optimism and Negativity

Both Fives and Rabé only ever took the extremes into their account of a potential relationship: Fives the most exhilarating and passionate and optimistic, Rabé only the worst and most painful. She is absolutely quagmired in negativity and terror of the pain that might come, even though a part of her desperately wants to get on Fives’ level of optimism. She does want a relationship as much as he does, but the combination of both the war and her duties in it loom so large in her mind that she isn’t emotionally ready to take those steps. The conversation between Fives and Rabé in the shooting range brought Fives back to reality, that yes, the war is going on and will probably hurt them both, and it will likely hurt them even MORE if they got together. Fives can’t bring her towards his optimism and his consideration of the potential joy they might give each other, even as much as he desperately wants to – and he realizes this. This isn’t a role he can play for her, even though they both know she not only needs a guiding hand but desperately WANTS someone to help, and so he backs off to wait for someone who can.

Fives allowing himself to even imagine a happy thing for himself, one that’s all his own, is a minor act of mental rebellion against his reality and situation. Rabé is a dream that he allowed himself to get lost in, even for just a few weeks. However, he respects her so much that when Rabé tells him she wants to wait, that she’s not comfortable yet, he puts his own dreams on hold to wait for her. Fives has always been a trooper who DEMANDS better of his situation, he wants to be seen and RESPECTED… but he isn’t about to force Rabé into something she’s not ready for. He recognizes and respects her boundaries, and pulls back to wait.

Echo and Ari both help take their blinders off for them. Echo validates both Fives’ pain and the potential joy that Fives sees and wants. Ari - someone who understands her culture, her background, and her conflicts - leads Rabé out of that swamp of negatvitiy by making that “critical distinction” (my favorite sentence of this chapter hands down) of what her duties are, where they lie, and by reminding her that her own wishes and desires are just as important as her duties to the throne and her home. Ari’s words, his clear logic, guides her out and towards the happy ending that both Fives and Rabé want.

#arc trooper fives #handmaiden rabé #clone trooper #handmaidens of naboo #arcmaiden #arcmaiden bts #navel gazing #from which stars have we fallen to meet each other here #analysis #long post //#sw meta #sw worldbuilding #naboo worldbuilding #i am not even REMOTELY sorry for the length of this analysis #i am SO PROUD of the entire work and how i - i think - deftly handled this conversation #and so therefore i WILL navel gaze and NO ONE can stop me

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nataliesnews · 4 years

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From: Natanya Sent: Sunday, February 23, 2020 3:08 PM To: Natanya <[email protected]> Subject: FW: She has written what is in my heart and I have not known how to say Home > Opinion Opinion Israel’s Dark Times Are Already With Us, Mr. President Ilana Hammerman SendSend me email alerts Feb 21, 2020 11:35 PM 0comments Print Zen • 275share on facebook Israeli soldiers detain a Palestinian cameraman during clashes with Palestinians in the village of Tuqu, West Bank, January 25, 2019.Mussa Issa Qawasma / Reuters Open your eyes and see them, Mr. President – you, Reuven Rivlin, who said the publication of the list of businesses with ties to West Bank settlements was “reminiscent of dark periods in our history.” Those dark periods are here, right here, right now. They’re here in Jerusalem, your city and mine. Go to the Shoafat refugee camp and see the crowded ghetto that has arisen behind the barriers walling in Arab residents of Jerusalem. Go to Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah and see how Arab families are evicted in Jerusalem neighborhoods, their homes becoming Jewish property. Join the Flag March that takes place in the Old City every year and see the masses of Jews parading through the narrow alleys, where all the shops are closed out of fear. Isn’t this what happened to the Jews in the “dark periods”? Continue on to the Jordan Valley and see how Bedouin shepherds are evicted by Jewish settlers, how Jewish vehicles speed into the Bedouin's flocks and soldiers from the Jewish army demolish their tents and tin shacks in the middle of the night. The soldiers leave men, women, children and babies exposed to the bitter cold of the winter nights and the scorching heat of the summer days. If you see this with your own eyes, such a decent man as yourself, your yearning Jewish soul that so reveres the memories of the past would surely cringe. If only I had the talent of spoken word artist Yossi Zabari, I would declare in his rhythmic Hebrew about this dark period of ours: “New in the frozen section you can find high-quality cannon fodder that was lovingly raised on Zionism and the sacredness of the land, with no artificial additives or love of the stranger and respect for the other and the sanctity of life.” And I would ask and respond as he does: To compare or not to compare, that is not the question, that is the duty.” Yes, this is the most important lesson for us Jews in Israel more than 80 years later. Salman Learned German jurists In Germany, tens of thousands of political opponents who were defeated in a democratic election were imprisoned in the concentration camps long before the Jews. The authorities shut down their organizations and publications – they could no longer object without risking their lives. Then the persecution of Jews was honed in an elaborate system of laws whose gradual construction was overseen by learned jurists and whose application was put in the hands of the courts. And the life of “Aryan” Germans went on as usual. Every liberal and humanist (not necessarily “leftist”) Israeli must read a book – translated into English as “Defying Hitler” – by the journalist (and jurist) Sebastian Haffner, who left Germany in 1938, long before the extermination camps were built. The process he went through must be compared to what is happening in Israel now. As Haffner put it, while he was experiencing the events, he couldn’t gauge their significance. He intensely felt the choking, nauseating character of it all but couldn’t grasp the constituent parts and put them together. He wrote that despite his generation’s historical and cultural education, they were completely helpless to deal with something that didn’t feature in anything they had learned. How meaningless were their explanations, how infinitely foolish their attempts at justification, how hopelessly superficial the jerry-rigged constructions with which the intellect tried to cover up the feeling of dread and disgust. Daily life also made it difficult to see the situation clearly. Life went on, though now it had become ghostly and unreal, and was mocked every day by the events going on in the background. The only place he felt sure of himself was at the courts, though for now the courts’ activities seemed to lack meaning. He and his girlfriend kept on going to the cinema, had meals in a small wine bar, drank Chianti and went dancing. He still saw his friends and had discussions with acquaintances. Family birthdays were still celebrated as they had always been. As he put it, it was this automatic continuation of ordinary life that hindered any strong reaction against the horror. A destroyed Jewish-owned store in Magdeburg, Germany, after Kristallnacht, which took place on November 9-10, 1938. German Federal Archives / Wikimedia Commons As Victor Klemperer saw it The horrors at that time were the gradual denial of civil and human rights to the Jews living in Germany. A Romance languages professor, Victor Klemperer, documented this in his journals that provide an incomparable record; they were put in book form and translated into English as “I Will Bear Witness.” A former convert from Judaism and a German patriot who lived to see the Reich defeated, he too described society as the events were occurring, in disbelief that things went so far. In 1936, he wrote that when he saw the mass of people happy and peaceful, he believed less than ever in any change in Germany’s political situation. In 1938 he noted how a gardener and a grocer he knew agreed completely: They said they had no idea what was happening, they didn’t read the newspapers. Klemperer wrote that people were apathetic and indifferent. The grocer told him that it all seemed like cinema to him. People simply regarded it all as a theatrical sham. Klemperer was astonished at the ease with which German society and German citizens accepted the collapse of democracy and the infringement of civil rights and liberties; they even considered this a price worth paying for Hitler’s foreign policy successes. Later he observed, again with some amazement, how the Germans, including the seemingly decent ones, preferred to close their eyes to injustices done to him and all German Jews, based on the law, even if these Jews were friends, neighbors and acquaintances. In 1940, as still in 1942 and 1943, Klemperer mentioned the people who were horrified to learn of the restrictions imposed on him as a Jew. No, they didn’t know, they regretted to hear it. These things must be compared to what his happening here, in Israel, where many people “regret” that their country denies civil and human rights to millions of people who live under its military rule, that it persecutes, humiliates and expels them, steals their property, imprisons them in enclaves and ghettos and is turning this reality into a permanent situation, not just a year or two but half a century already. Yes, they regret it, but they go on with their comfortable lives and do nothing about it. It must be compared, not because no regimes are worse than Israel’s oppressive regime, but because these are exactly the things that were done to us in the dark periods of our history. They happened in a modern society in the heart of supposedly enlightened Europe, whose countries closed themselves off to Jews and where many collaborated with Nazi Germany. This is our Jewish lesson. It’s not: Let the Israeli army win in the Palestinian cities and villages. It’s: Don’t let racism and fascism win in Israel. Ilana Hammerman Haaretz Contributor Send me email alerts Yreferable

From: Natanya Sent: Sunday, February 23, 2020 3:08 PM To: Natanya <[email protected]> Subject: FW: She has written what is in my heart and I have not known how to say

Israeli soldiers detain a Palestinian cameraman during clashes with Palestinians in the village of Tuqu, West Bank, January 25, 2019.Mussa Issa Qawasma / Reuters

Open your eyes and see them, Mr. President – you, Reuven Rivlin, who said the publication of the list of businesses with ties to West Bank settlements was “reminiscent of dark periods in our history.” Those dark periods are here, right here, right now.

They’re here in Jerusalem, your city and mine. Go to the Shoafat refugee camp and see the crowded ghetto that has arisen behind the barriers walling in Arab residents of Jerusalem.

Go to Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah and see how Arab families are evicted in Jerusalem neighborhoods, their homes becoming Jewish property. Join the Flag March that takes place in the Old City every year and see the masses of Jews parading through the narrow alleys, where all the shops are closed out of fear. Isn’t this what happened to the Jews in the “dark periods”?

Continue on to the Jordan Valley and see how Bedouin shepherds are evicted by Jewish settlers, how Jewish vehicles speed into the Bedouin's flocks and soldiers from the Jewish army demolish their tents and tin shacks in the middle of the night. The soldiers leave men, women, children and babies exposed to the bitter cold of the winter nights and the scorching heat of the summer days.

If you see this with your own eyes, such a decent man as yourself, your yearning Jewish soul that so reveres the memories of the past would surely cringe.

If only I had the talent of spoken word artist Yossi Zabari, I would declare in his rhythmic Hebrew about this dark period of ours: “New in the frozen section you can find high-quality cannon fodder that was lovingly raised on Zionism and the sacredness of the land, with no artificial additives or love of the stranger and respect for the other and the sanctity of life.”

And I would ask and respond as he does: To compare or not to compare, that is not the question, that is the duty.” Yes, this is the most important lesson for us Jews in Israel more than 80 years later.

Salman

Learned German jurists

In Germany, tens of thousands of political opponents who were defeated in a democratic election were imprisoned in the concentration camps long before the Jews. The authorities shut down their organizations and publications – they could no longer object without risking their lives. Then the persecution of Jews was honed in an elaborate system of laws whose gradual construction was overseen by learned jurists and whose application was put in the hands of the courts. And the life of “Aryan” Germans went on as usual.

Every liberal and humanist (not necessarily “leftist”) Israeli must read a book – translated into English as “Defying Hitler” – by the journalist (and jurist) Sebastian Haffner, who left Germany in 1938, long before the extermination camps were built. The process he went through must be compared to what is happening in Israel now.

As Haffner put it, while he was experiencing the events, he couldn’t gauge their significance. He intensely felt the choking, nauseating character of it all but couldn’t grasp the constituent parts and put them together.

He wrote that despite his generation’s historical and cultural education, they were completely helpless to deal with something that didn’t feature in anything they had learned. How meaningless were their explanations, how infinitely foolish their attempts at justification, how hopelessly superficial the jerry-rigged constructions with which the intellect tried to cover up the feeling of dread and disgust.

Daily life also made it difficult to see the situation clearly. Life went on, though now it had become ghostly and unreal, and was mocked every day by the events going on in the background. The only place he felt sure of himself was at the courts, though for now the courts’ activities seemed to lack meaning.

He and his girlfriend kept on going to the cinema, had meals in a small wine bar, drank Chianti and went dancing. He still saw his friends and had discussions with acquaintances. Family birthdays were still celebrated as they had always been.

As he put it, it was this automatic continuation of ordinary life that hindered any strong reaction against the horror.

A destroyed Jewish-owned store in Magdeburg, Germany, after Kristallnacht, which took place on November 9-10, 1938. German Federal Archives / Wikimedia Commons

As Victor Klemperer saw it

The horrors at that time were the gradual denial of civil and human rights to the Jews living in Germany. A Romance languages professor, Victor Klemperer, documented this in his journals that provide an incomparable record; they were put in book form and translated into English as “I Will Bear Witness.” A former convert from Judaism and a German patriot who lived to see the Reich defeated, he too described society as the events were occurring, in disbelief that things went so far.

In 1936, he wrote that when he saw the mass of people happy and peaceful, he believed less than ever in any change in Germany’s political situation. In 1938 he noted how a gardener and a grocer he knew agreed completely: They said they had no idea what was happening, they didn’t read the newspapers.

Klemperer wrote that people were apathetic and indifferent. The grocer told him that it all seemed like cinema to him. People simply regarded it all as a theatrical sham.

Klemperer was astonished at the ease with which German society and German citizens accepted the collapse of democracy and the infringement of civil rights and liberties; they even considered this a price worth paying for Hitler’s foreign policy successes.

Later he observed, again with some amazement, how the Germans, including the seemingly decent ones, preferred to close their eyes to injustices done to him and all German Jews, based on the law, even if these Jews were friends, neighbors and acquaintances. In 1940, as still in 1942 and 1943, Klemperer mentioned the people who were horrified to learn of the restrictions imposed on him as a Jew. No, they didn’t know, they regretted to hear it.

These things must be compared to what his happening here, in Israel, where many people “regret” that their country denies civil and human rights to millions of people who live under its military rule, that it persecutes, humiliates and expels them, steals their property, imprisons them in enclaves and ghettos and is turning this reality into a permanent situation, not just a year or two but half a century already. Yes, they regret it, but they go on with their comfortable lives and do nothing about it.

It must be compared, not because no regimes are worse than Israel’s oppressive regime, but because these are exactly the things that were done to us in the dark periods of our history. They happened in a modern society in the heart of supposedly enlightened Europe, whose countries closed themselves off to Jews and where many collaborated with Nazi Germany.

This is our Jewish lesson. It’s not: Let the Israeli army win in the Palestinian cities and villages. It’s: Don’t let racism and fascism win in Israel.

Ilana Hammerman

Haaretz Contributor

0 notes

tendaifmp-blog · 7 years

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Ten of the best fighters of WWII??

MILITARY VEHICLES

Jun 25, 2015

Jack

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Over a period of six years of conflict, from 1939 to 1945, aircraft designs had progressed in leaps and bounds.

From the obsolete biplane to the world’s first fighter, from crude two-engined bombers to radical designs of the B-29 Superfortress heavy bombers, World War Two had seen the most radical use of aircraft in the battlefield.

Here are ten of the best!

Soviet Yakovlev Yak-3

The Soviet Yak fighter (Yakovlev Yak-3) was a Soviet dog-fighter that was used in World War 2. This was a robust craft, and its maintenance was very easy therefore making it liked by all ground crew and pilots. They were first developed in 1941 but didn’t see service until three years later, 1944. 4848 of these jets were manufactured in total. Their main use was as tactical fighters, engaging in dogfights in the lower sky (13,000 ft and lower).

The Yak was considered to be one of the lightest and smallest jets to be used as a major combat fighter from all the other combat fighters that were used within World War 2. It provided excellent performance due to its power-to-weight ratio, which was extremely high.

World War 2 French ace, Marcel Albert, considered the Yak to be a far superior aircraft to the Spitfire and P-51D Mustang, having flown the Yak in the USSR.

Following the end of the War, the Yak flew with the Polish and Yugoslav Air Forces and then, in 1952, retired from service.

Messerschmitt Me 262

The Germans began designing this jet-powered aircraft before the Second World War even started. They had engine problems and interference from top-level officials that kept this amazing machine grounded until 1944.

It was faster than any Allied aircraft including the British Gloster Meteor and it was heavily armored as well. The 262 was used in many situations like the light bomber, might fighters and reconnaissance.

The Pilots that flew the 262 had 542 confirmed allied kills, though some believe it may have been higher. The only way the Allies had a chance of winning were to destroy the planes before they could even get off the ground.

With its engine reliability issues and the Allied attacks of oilfields, this plane became very ineffective in late-war situations. With all this the 262 had almost no real effect on the war as a whole, they were placed into actions too late, and not enough of them were ever made.

Grumman F6F Hellcat

The F6F was the plane that carried the US on its back all the way to the gates of Tokyo. The F6F was a very good rival to the Vought F4U Corsair at being a carrier-based fighter.

The F6F was, much better at carrier landings, however, which made the Hellcat a very viable option as the main fighter for the Navy in World War II. The F4U was used mostly in land-based missions by the U.S. Marine Corps.

The F6F was similar to the Wildcat in a few ways but was actually a completely new design; it was powered by a 2,000 HP engine, the same engine that was in the F4U and the P-47 Thunderbolt Fighters. The F6F was actually called the “Wildcat’s big brother.”

The F6F was an amazing carrier-fighter, it debuted in 1943, in an attempt to counter the amazing Mitsubishi A6M Zero and it helped to secure air superiority in the Pacific. The quality came from its straightforward and basic design, the F6F was almost never modified and had a total of 12,200 built in just two years.

The F6F was credited with destroying over 5,000 aircraft while in service for both the U.S. and the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm. No other Allied naval aircraft even came close, after the war the F6F was slowly fazed out of frontline mission but was still used as a night fighter up until 1954.

Focke-Wulf Fw-190

The 190 is literally one of the best fighters of all time, no Allied plane that fought against it will ever forget what it could do. It was introduced in 1941; the fighter almost immediately started to tear through the RAF and was putting down major punishment of Allied bombers.

The 190 was highly respected by all the Allied pilots and it was a perfect fighter, fighter-bomber, and anti-tank aircraft. Oberleutnant Otto Kittel – who was an amazing pilot – scored almost all of his 267 killed in a 190.

The 190 was a single-engine, single-seat fighter designed by Kurt Tank. It had a counterpart, the Messerschmitt Bf 109, but the 190 became the backbone of the Luftwaffe’s Jagdwaffe (Fighter Force).

It was powered by a BMW engine and because of this it was able to lift larger loads than the 109, it also allowed it to be used as a night-fighter, day-fighter, ground-attack aircraft and fighter-bomber.

Messerschmitt Bf 109

If you look at Aviation history then you will see that the 109 was one of the best planes of all time. It even rivaled the British Spitfire, which is an amazing feat.

It was graceful in the air as a dancer, no other plane could even touch it in high altitudes, however when it accompanied bombers over Great Britain it usually fought at low altitudes, which it was not made for. It carried 20mm cannons, and it would become the most important fighter plane in the Luftwaffe.

The 109 was a German World War II fighter aircraft designed by two men by the names of Robert Lusser and Willy Messerschmitt during the 1930s. The 109 was one of the only true modern planes in the war; it included features such as a retractable landing gear, all-metal monocoque construction, and a closed canopy. It was actually powered by a liquid-cooled, inverted-V12 Aero engine.

It was first used in the Spanish Civil war and even stayed in use until the dawn of the fighter age near the end of World War II; it was still the backbone of the Luftwaffe’s Fighter Force. Slowly but surely it was being replaced by the superior Focke-Wulf Fw 190.

The original plan for the 109 was for it to be an interceptor, but later models were built for a variety of tasks, fighter-bomber, day-fighter, night-fighter, all-weather fighter, recon plane, ground-attack aircraft and of course a bomber escort.

The 109 was the most produced fighter in history, they produced a total of 33,984 airframes from 1936 -1945.

Continues on Page 2

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P-51 Mustang

The P-51 Mustang Fighter, a North American Aviation, is one of the most iconic fighter / fighter bombers that is single-seated and was used during World War 2. In total over 15,000 of these were manufactured.

The Mustang was designed originally to be used with the Allison V-1710 engine – making it a very good aircraft. When the B & C models were made of the P-51, they added a Rolls Royce Merlin engine and this completely transformed its performance at high altitude (15,000+ feet) which meant it matched or even bettered that of the Luftwaffe’s fighter jets.

The final version of the P-51 was the P-51D, and this was powered by yet another engine, the Packard V-1650-7, and was fully armed with .50 caliber M2 machine guns (6 in total on each jet).

From late in 1943 P-51’s were used to escort bombers in raids over occupied Europe and over Germany, all the way to Berlin. The P-51’s with the Merlin engines were also used as fighter-bombers which made sure that the Allied ruled supreme in the air in 1944.

The P-51 was also used in service with Allied air forces in Italian, Mediterranean and North African areas of service and also saw action in the Pacific War against the Japanese. Within World War 2, P-51 pilots claim to have shot down 4,950 enemy aircraft.

P-38 Lightning

Want to know about one of the greatest Allied fighters ever? How about two turbocharged engines, range, firepower and the best aerodynamics of the era made the P-38 one of the top choices ever. Its only drawback was its altitude capabilities but even still, it dominated the Pacific.

https://www.warhistoryonline.com/military-vehicle-news/ten-of-the-best-fighters-of-wwii.html

Recently, U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter once again shot down South Korea’s request to transfer four key technologies for that country’s KF-X “indigenous” fighter project. The United States’ refusal to transfer those technologies highlights a fundamental problem with developing a homegrown fighter—most nations don’t have the technology to develop a jet on their own.

The technologies Korea wanted include the know-how to develop an active electronically scanned array radar, cutting edge electronic warfare systems, an infrared search and track system and an electro-optical targeting system. The U.S. also refused to help South Korea with a sensor fusion engine to tie all of those systems together into a single coherent picture for the pilot—all the keys needed to develop a modern fighter. Nonetheless, the U.S. is willing to transfer twenty-one other less important but vital technologies needed to build the KF-X—it’s just unwilling to transfer the crown jewels of American technology to anyone. Indeed, much of the technology for the indigenous KF-X will come from the United States—including its General Electric F414 afterburning turbofan engines.

But depending on the United States can be a major drawback for many countries—especially if they want to incorporate technologies from third parties or export those platforms. Using American technology means that Washington gets a veto—which it exercises often. Indeed, both Israel and Korea have discovered that the hard way on several occasions.

But it’s not just the United States—using any foreign technology generally means that a third party has veto on sales or modifications. Saab discovered that the hard way when the United Kingdom vetoed a JAS-39 Gripen sale to Argentina because the jet uses British technology. Incidentally, since the Swedes use so much American technology in the JAS-39—the United States also has a veto on Gripen sales.

http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/mission-impossible-why-most-militaries-dont-build-their-own-14156

The TIE Fighter Is The Worst Spacecraft In TheStar Wars Universe

Jason Torchinsky

10/20/15 12:35pm

Filed to: STAR WARS

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I’m sure there’s going to be lots of people who disagree with me on this. Sure, TIE fighters look cool, I get that. And this isn’t about politics — I’m not an Empire-voter, but they did at least provide a good system of academies, for example. This is about the TIE fighter being a stupid design, even in the fictitious reality of the Star Wars universe.

Here's a Shot-by-Shot Breakdown of All the Goodies in the Final Star Wars: The Force Awakens Trailer

If you’re like us, you’re still recovering from the amazingness of the latest Star Wars: The Force…Read more on io9.com

Now, I get the fundamental concept for the TIE fighter, and it’s a good one: a simple, agile, fast, short-range fighter that can be produced cheaply and quickly in large quantities. For an organization like the Empire, fleets of fighters like these are a great idea. But the design of the TIE fighters, as we’ve known them for almost 40 years, makes no sense at all, even within the rules set by the technology and physics of the movies. Here, I’ll explain.

The biggest issue with the TIE fighters is that there’s just no room in them for anything they’d need to actually work. There’s plenty of other issues with the design as well, but we’ll start there. Star Wars deals with all sorts of fictional technology, of course — hyperdrives, laser-like ‘blaster’ things, light sabers, anti-gravity tech, blue milk, ubiquitous and surprisingly poor-quality holographic projectors —but these technologies do tend to follow certain visual and conceptual rules.

Let’s look at spaceships, for example. Ships that are demonstrated to be fast tend to be lean and smaller, with proportionally very large engines. Take a look at the first ship ever seen in a Star Wars movie, the Tantive IV.

The Tantive IV was a blockade runner ship (and was the original design for the Millenium Falcon) and as such needed to be very fast. It needed to look fast to the audience as well, so the designers cleverly took a classic muscle car approach to the design: compact body, huge engine. The Tantive IV looks like a a rubber mallet with a massive cluster of eleven engines at the end of the handle. Lots of engine on a proportionally smaller body, but one that could still plausibly contain whatever made-up fuel these things use.

The Millenium Falcon is the same way; everything is more integrated in the Falcon, but there’s still a massive band of engines at the rear that take up the entire width of the ship. It’s clearly a craft built around a big-ass engine.

The engineering design isn’t super-carefully explained in Star Wars, but the aesthetic design — heavy on pipes and tanks and exposed fasteners and ductwork certainly suggest engineering over magic. These are machines, and they need lots of complicated parts to work.

The spacecraft design is pretty consistent in making things look ‘plausible’ in the universe of the movies: Star Destroyers are massive, with huge storage tanks and colossal engines, X-Wings have multiple, substantial engines, wings that could maybe act as aerodynamic surfaces, and a decent amount of interior volume to hold equipment and consumables, and so on.

All except the eyeball sandwich that is the TIE fighter.

Even if we assume that the TIE fighter is short-range, relies on a pilot’s spacesuit for life support, and has minimal equipment inside, the little ball that makes up the TIE fighter’s body is way, way too small to be anything other than a short-use travel pod thing, handy for scooting around between Star Destroyers so Storm Troopers in committed relationships can meet for dinner even if they’re stationed on different ships. That’s about all they’re good for.

Here, look at this cutaway diagram:

As you can see, most of that interior volume in the main sphere is used for the pilot. There’s a manhole-cover-sized “fuel tank” listed there, which is also confusing, since TIE stands for ‘Twin Ion Engine’ and if their ion engines are anything at all like ours (and I think we can assume they are, since nearly all of the words spoken in that language that sounds like English (Galactic Basic Standard, I’m told) then ion engines shouldn’t really be using ‘fuel’ at all — ion engines are basically electrical.

Still, they do use a propellant of sorts, so maybe that’s what’s in the tank. But the bigger issue is that ion engines are notoriously low-thrust. Ion engines that we make have a thrust roughly equivalent to the force of a sheet of paper — but they can keep thrusting almost indefinitely. So, the cumulative force does build up, which makes them great for gradual, long-term, eventually high speed travel, with minimal changes in direction or velocity. In short, the exact opposite of what a TIE fighter needs to do.

So, we can assume that the Star Wars universe has a totally different technology that they call ‘ion engines’ that somehow produce plenty of thrust. That’s fine. But the way these engines look and are scaled still is out of line with everything else in the Star Wars universe. They have the same bluish glow as almost all the engines in the movies, yet they’re somehow like 1/10th the size of any of them, and yet manage to accelerate as well or better than the massive cylindrical engines of the X-wing?

Maybe they just have much more advanced technology for these fighters? That seems unlikely for a few reasons. First, these are supposed to be cheap, mass-produced fighters — almost expendable. Would you really want to put your most energy-dense, exotic power sources and engines in something like that?

And, if it is using some kind of impossibly tiny (remember, it has to cram in the very bottom of the sphere along with the weapons system and other hardware) and powerful energy source, how is it not cooking or irradiating the pilot?

The TIE design even includes two huge heat radiators/solar panels, which implies that there is a lot of heat to remove from the systems that drive everything. These were sometimes just called solar panels, but that seems to make even less sense considering the power needs and unpredictable locations of TIE fighters.

Every other ship seems to have been made at least somewhat plausible (again, in the reality of the movies, I know we’re not going to be building any Star Destroyers) except these innumerable, illogical TIE fighters.

Plus, they’ve showed these things traveling inside atmospheres of planets, which makes even less sense. As they are, they could possibly make sense as a decent design for a simple orbital satellite: big solar panels/heat radiators, small engines suited only to making slight orbital adjustments, and that’s it.

I had to look for some diagrams to show me where, exactly, a TIE fighter had its maneuvering jets, since they’re not obvious at all. And, from what these diagrams show, they’re in a terrible place, and would not be able to let TIE fighters perform all the acrobatic motions we’ve seen them make, fictional universe or not. Ideally, you want your small maneuvering thrusters (also called reaction control systems, or RCS) as far away from the center of mass as possible, so they have a greater torque advantage, and can move the ship about its various axes faster, with less energy used. The TIE seems to have them right near the center of the ship, which is just about the worst place to have them.

And, I know this is all a fake universe and explosions don’t make sounds in space and all that, but Star Wars seems to be defined by basic physics at least a little bit. These RCS thrusters just don’t make sense where they are.

As space dogfighters, they strain credulity, and once you plop them in an atmosphere, they get absurd. Even if we assume they’re made of some highly heat-tolerant alloy (sure, why not?) the way they’re shaped — with, basically, a pair of vertical sails on each side — suggest that without massive amounts of thrust to just shove the damn thing through the air, they’d spin and pinwheel around like a seed pod in any atmosphere, making their pilots puke lavishly in their shiny black helmets.

I’ve done a lot of complaining so far, so, really, I should probably either shut up or come up with a solution. Luckily, I’m slightly worse at shutting up than I am at coming up with ideas, so here’s what I think a really Star Wars-universe plausible TIE fighter should look like:

I’ll walk you through what I did. First, I agree with you: it’s way uglier than the actual TIE fighters. I know. But that’s okay. See, the Empire would not give two bantha shits about how this thing looked, just how fast and how many they could crank out.

I’m keeping the basic spherical base module, since a sphere is a good design to enclose volume no matter what, and I always liked that big octagonal window. I’m moving the big radiator panels horizontally, which would let them at least act a little like wings if these ever end up inside an atmosphere — they’re certainly better than the big vertical walls of the original one for that.

I’ve made the engines much bigger, fitting much closer to the scale of similar-performing vehicles in the SW universe, and mounted them behind the main sphere and some more generously-sized consumables tanks (for propellant or radiator-panel coolant or slushies or whatever). I’ve also added a set of RCS thruster cubes, with thrusters on all five exposed faces, at the end of large, possibly extendible booms. This would maximize the torque each thuster could act upon the ship and make a TIE really, really maneuverable.

The main body is just open framework, and everything is just bolted in and exposed — perfect for cheap production and easy, cheap maintenance.

I’m providing rights to this sketch free of charge to JJ Abrams and his team, just in case they want to do the right thing and replace all their TIE fighters with ones that look like these for the new movie.

I’m sure if they had to push the release date back a month or two, nobody would mind at all, right? Of course not.

http://jalopnik.com/the-tie-fighter-is-the-worst-spacecraft-in-the-star-war-1737549846

David Axe

May 15, 2016

The U.S. Senate just confirmed what an Air Force general hinted at in February 2016 — and which should have been obvious for years to close observers of U.S. air power.

The Joint Strike Fighter program is not developing one, common warplane for the U.S. Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps and the air arms of America’s closest allies.

No, the Joint Strike Fighter is actually three different plane designs sharing a basic cockpit, engine and software and a logistical network. The Air Force’s F-35A, the Marines’ F-35B and the Navy’s F-35C should, in all fairness, be the F-35, F-36 and F-37.

“Despite aspirations for a joint aircraft, the F-35A, F-35B and F-35C are essentially three distinct aircraft, with significantly different missions and capability requirements,” the Senate stated in its version of the National Defense Authorization Act for 2017.

Before the act becomes law, the Senate must reconcile its NDAA with the House of Representative’s own version of the same bill— and Pres. Barack Obama must sign it. The F-35 language could change or disappear in coming months.

The Senate’s assertion comes just three months after U.S. Air Force lieutenant general Christopher Bogdan, head of the JSF program office, told a seminar audience that the three F-35 models are only 20- to 25-percent common, mainly in their cockpits.

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It’s “almost like three separate production lines,” Bogdan said, according toAir Force magazine. A real joint fighter, the program boss said, is “hard” because each branch is adamant about its requirements. “You want what you want,” Bogdan said.

The Senate backs up its NDAA language by requiring Bogdan’s office to shut down in 2019, by which time the F-35 should be in full-rate production. The singular Joint Strike Fighter would break up into three separate programs — one each for the Air Force, Marines and Navy. “Devolving this program to the services will help ensure the proper alignment of responsibility and accountability the F-35 program needs and has too often lacked,” the Senate explained.

To be fair, the Navy tends to oversee most of the Marine Corps’ major weapons-acquisitions efforts. If the Senate’s proposal becomes law, the Navy could open up two new offices to manage the F-35B and F-35C. It’s unlikely the military will redesignate those JSF models as the F-36 and F-37, despite our humble recommendation that it do so.

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The Senate’s push to break up the monolithic JSF organization reflects poorly on Lockheed Martin, the prime contractor on the $400-billion program. Lockheed sold the F-35 as a “universal” stealth warplane whose different models would be highly compatible in order to simplify production, maintenance and training — and to drive down cost.

Of course, as the F-35A, F-35B and F-35C have evolved and Lockheed and the government have struggled to solve deeply-ingrained conceptual and design flaws within the program, the three models have grown in separate directions.

The multi-role F-35A is the lightest and most maneuverable of the three versions — and, at around $150 million per copy as of 2014, the — ahem — “cheapest.” Granted, that price tag is trending downward as order volume increases and Lockheed’s workers gain experience.

http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/the-f-35-stealth-fighters-dirty-little-secret-now-out-the-16211

How Fast Does Light Travel? | The Speed of LightBy Nola Taylor Redd, Space.com Contributor | May 22, 2012 08:37pm ET

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The speed of light in a vacuum is 186,282 miles per second (299,792 kilometers per second), and in theory nothing can travel faster than light. In miles per hour, light speed is, well, a lot: about 670,616,629 mph. If you could travel at the speed of light, you could go around the Earth 7.5 times in one second.

Early scientists, unable to perceive light’s motion, thought it must travel instantaneously. Over time, however, measurements of the motion of these wave-like particles became more and more precise. Thanks to the work of Albert Einstein and others, we now understand light speed to be a theoretical limit: light speed — a constant called "c" — is thought to be not acheivable by anything with mass, for reasons explained below. That doesn’t stop sci-fi writers, and even some very serious scientists, from imagining alternative theories that would allow for some awfully fast trips around the universe.

Speed of light: History of the theory

The first known discourse on the speed of light comes from the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, who penned his disagreement with another Greek scientist, Empedocles. Empedocles argued that because light moved, it must take time to travel. Aristotle, believing light to travel instantaneously, disagreed.

In 1667, the Italian astronomer Galileo stood two people on a hill at a distance of less than a mile, each holding a shielded lantern. One uncovered his lantern; when the second saw the flash, he uncovered his, as well. By observing how long it took for the light to be seen by the first lantern-holder (and factoring out reaction times), he thought he could calculate the speed of light. Unfortunately, Galileo's distances were too small to see a difference, so he could only determine that light traveled at least ten times faster than sound.

http://www.space.com/15830-light-speed.html

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