dm@BBN-VAX.ARPA (09/13/85)
From: dm@BBN-VAX.ARPA I kind of like the ``blasters are a recent innovation'' argument. The Jedi knights were using light-sabres (although perhaps only for ceremonial purposes) just a generation ago. On the other hand, dueling with swords lasted for a couple of centuries after the development of hand-guns, so no real good conclusion can be drawn from the use of light-sabres by the knights. But storm trooper armor, pretty useless against blasters, may be good for: a) toxic gases and radiation (either used as weapons, or caused by accident when boarding a ``nuclear powered'' space vessel. They might also be good against vacuum. Which would explain their use in the earlier films in space battles, but is a fairly poor excuse for their use on planets like the moon of Endor, where you wouldn't expect the natives to go squirting nerve gas at you. (The protection against atmosphere-borne disease has already been mentioned.) I suppose the armor might be a vacuum suit for use in boarding ships with ruptured hulls. Its use on planets with an atmosphere might be just a hold over. b) most of the more primitive weapons available to subject races like the ewoks (although I guess in RotJ the armor wasn't all that good against ewok arrows). c) shrapnel from explosions. Throw a hand-grenade among a crowd of storm troopers and you might only kill one or two, not the whole lot of them. You might expect that the empire's biggest problems are guerrilla warfare and terrorism like you see in most national liberation movements today, and the armor might be proof against typical terrorist tactics like car-bombs. Maybe it isn't armor? Maybe the empire's troops are white insectoid creatures? Nope, that won't work, we see Luke and Han put on the armor in A New Hope... I give up. I wonder why we never see storm-troopers in combat fatigues. Why does the empire use storm troopers at all? Why not armed-to-the-teeth droids? Maybe droids are too expensive, and conscripts are cheap. Only we see lots of evidently cheap and stupid droids for use on the Lars' farm and for other menial tasks. Just fit a blaster on them and tell them to shoot anything that moves. On the other hand, if you (a rebel force) succeed in immobilizing a droid, there's nothing to stop you from re-programming it (assuming you can circumvent its self-destruct mechanism) to go home to the barracks and raise havoc there among the empire's forces, or reprogramming it to fight on your side. Soldiers in plastic armor are a bit harder to reprogram. Even if the intelligence in the droid is so complex that you can't reprogram it (without ``lobotomizing'' it and thus making it much less useful), even if you have to destroy the droid's ``brain'', you can use the rest of it as spare parts for your own attack droids, something that probably isn't too easy to do with spare parts of your soldiers... Hmm, for that matter, circumventing the attack-droid's self-destruct might be easy because the self-destruct would have to be built in a way that it couldn't be used against you as a weapon. That is, an opponent shouldn't be able to convince your entire fighting force to self-destruct on the battle-field. Also, unless all of your attack droids are designed to be kamikazes, they presumably come back need to be repaired, so they can't self-destruct whenever you open their casing. Fooling the droid into believing that it's being legitimately repaired long enough to turn it off in order to change its programming (or replace its brain) probably isn't that hard. What if the empire has an elaborate recognition code for its repair crews? The code is breakable, particularly if you have code box debris lying around the battlefield. Also, the empire doesn't want to make it too hard to repair the droids, or they won't be able to repair them themselves under battlefield conditions. [If you think my proposition that war-machines be recycled by the other side is unrealistic, just remember that Egypt gets its spare parts for its Soviet-built tanks from Israel, who gets them from the battle-field. Israel has a VERY EFFECTIVE weapon-recycling program.] Okay, so I guess there's a good reason to have a fighting force composed primarily of humans instead of machines (or humans directly controlling simple machines, such as the walkers and blasters).