I just finished this show, having waited for it all to come out before getting into it -- other Disney+ Star Wars series taught me the lesson that they are much better binged than watched week to week and I was not wrong.

Spoilers below

The endless references to a children's animated show that I have less than zero interest in viewing really drags it down, which is why my main take away as per the title is that it doesn't really work. Most of the premise of the show is finding Thrawn and Ezra -- two characters you have no way of knowing about unless you watched that cartoon. Yet these two characters are constantly referenced and for some reason important, but you're never really sure why.

It kind of works with Thrawn because there's a mysterious villain type of thing going on. But Ezra? Why do we miss him? Who is he? What did he do? Almost none of my questions are ever answered, even after we find him! Aside from simply being told by other characters that he is important, I am never told how or why. Nothing they say or do makes me care about him. They don't show me anything that makes me want to get emotionally invested in him. And no, I am not watching hundreds of hours of cartoons to understand the context. That is simply too much.

This show is in a very strange place between obviously trying to cater to a large audience (it is a Disney property after all, so $$$), but it simultaneously can only be fully understood by extremely hardcore Star Wars fans. I consider myself a fan. I have watched all live action movies and shows, even the laughably bad stuff like the Boba Fett and Kenobi shows. That they intentionally mix together animated and live action storylines though -- especially with any context lacking -- is a major misstep.

I like the Star Wars universe a lot. And while a lot of it is entertaining, it feels very bad to feel left out. It would be different if it was a small cameo or name drop once in a while. But the main storyline gets impacted by this, and it just kind of leaves a sour taste after finishing it.

I was decently entertained and it had some very good moments, particularly the Baylan and Shin duo was intriguing -- which is ironic as I understand that they are among the only original characters in this show. Regurgitating old canon is not the way.

7/10. Entertaining but unsatisfying.

Spoilers for Ahsoka Season 1, Episodes 1-4; but also Star Wars Rebels & Clone Wars, or really any Star Wars (including Mando/Book of Boba) is fair game.

I kept the title vague but I really want to discuss the World Between Worlds.

For those unfamiliar that is where Ahsoka found herself at the end of episode 4. For those familiar (again, Rebels spoilers) it is a special Force place that can view and, in at least one instance, interact with the past. By all accounts it also has some echos of the future.

It's not technically "time travel" but it will potentially be viewed as such and have a similarly long lasting affect on the Star Wars universe.

Do you think the World Between Worlds is a good idea? What story do you want to see told? What story do you think will be told?

This thread may contain spoilers.

I thought it was pretty good! Better than the last episode, we were pleasantly surprised here at house Godzilla. We actually watched the older episode where Kif gets pregnant the night before, so we were very curious to see how Amy would handle everything. Feels were had.

What were your thoughts? Let your voice be heard!

So, this was the big "musical episode" they hyped up for a few weeks. As not the biggest musical fan in the world (they can be fun to go see on occasion), this episode was a resounding "meh" for me. It was basically just a novelty. The hip-hop Klingons were the funniest part though, wasn't expecting that...

The first episode of the new season is out! What do you think of it?

I thought it was pretty okay. It was too self - referential for me. It kept making too many "we're back" jokes but they kind of did that the last time they were cancelled and brought back. They eased off those kind of jokes eventually the last time it happened.

I was worried about how they would handle references to more modern things as "Attack of the killer App" was really painful to watch. But it seems like they handled it pretty decently.

I'm slow, but it took me a while to realise that Scary Mirror as a replacement for Scary Door was a jab at Black Mirror.

I didn't think the episode was very funny, but it wasn't bad either. What was good about it shows promise, so I'm hopeful.

How did you guys feel about this one? There were some funny moments, like T'Pring's dad being shot down by the mom whenever he was enjoying himself. Not a fan of all the teen romance movie stuff that's in the newer Trek shows though.

The first three episodes didn't quite hit the mark for me, but this felt like proper TOS style Star Trek.

Starfleet messing up the Prime Directive. A villain who is actually a victim. Spock is challenged on feelings versus logic. The overall theme of exploring the importance of personal memories and the straight forward metaphor of fascist regime controlling the people, didn't feel as hamfisted as I have found some of the other newer trek episodes. It does stand on its own as a well rounded singular trek story. I do however still have a bit of a problem with how newer trek seems to like hand to hand combat violence so much. Feels unnecessary in most cases.

I would like to have a discussion of the season finale and season as a whole of Silo with other book readers who know the overarching plot. Non book readers are welcome obviously, but spoilers will be here.

Overall, would watch season 2. I wanna know what ends up happening.

First It was mentioned that, there are 12 of them. If one dies there memory is uploaded and another gets activated, I thought it was somewhat like cylo in star wars. later, we see all of them operating together, so they sync continously or at certain period? I'm wondering how do they actually work, in data sharing/sync scenario?

PS. My heart weeps for firefly.

Having finished out the Amazon Prime series "The Expanse" I'm now working my way through the novels and I keep coming up against a problem with with railguns. Specifically, the way that railguns are used in The Expanse doesn't mesh well with the way they're portrayed.

First, some background. Ships in The Expanse are generally unarmored. There are a bunch of reasons for this but the short version is "most things that can hit you in space will kill you anyway" and armor adds mass which makes every manuver more expensive in terms of reaction mass. So no one has armor. This is important because it means that ships in the Expanse can get ripped up by something as mundane as a stray bullet from a Point Defense Cannon (PDC). PDCs are... well, they're guns. Regular guns which are flinging around much less mass and at much lower velocities than railguns.

Thus, ships in the Expanse are equipped to handle impacts but nothing much bigger than a sand-grain moving at a few km/s.

When we're introduced to rail-guns in the series we're given to understand that they use magnetic acceleration to chuck a 5kg chunk of tungsten and/or uranium at a target at an "appreciable percentage of C." That's much faster than a bullet or any micrometeors ships are likely to encounter. Even 1% of C is ~3,000 km/s.

5 kg of Tungsten is less than you think. Some back of the envelope math suggests that's about cube about 2.6 inches on a side... which is not big. That works out to an incredible energy density which would make a lot of sense if railguns were routinely being fired at planets or asteroids but, since they seem to mainly target ships, the vast, vast majority of the energy that goes into flinging that slug at its target is going to carry through to the other side of the ship.

All total we're talking about 488.5 million Newtons of force for 1% of the speed of light. Helpfully, this scales roughly lineraly so long as we don't get too close to C and induce relativistic mass issues, so 10% of C is 4.8 billion Newtons and so on. So, that railgun slug is carrying a lot of energy. At 1% of C it represents 22.5 trillion joules of kinetic energy. Written out long-ways so we can appreciate all those zeros it's 22,500,000,000,000 J. At 10%, we're talking 2.25 quadrillion joules. To give some sense of scale, that means that, at 1% of C, three rail-gun slugs are delivering about as much energy as the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945. At 10% of C one round carries about 537 kilotons, or about the yield of a modern, city-busting hydrogen bomb.

Those are absolutely titanic amounts of energy but, realistically, they'll never deliver that much power to a target. After all, a railgun round can only push on its target as hard as the target can push back on it. If the round just punches through the entire ship like it's made of paper, most of the energy stays in the railgun slug as it exits the other side of the ship and you get a neat hole rather than a gigantic flash as trillions of joules of kinetic energy turn into heat.

And obviously, if we're trying to kill things, we want the latter. The solution to this problem is fairly obvious: you need fragmentation. While it's great to have a tungsten cube all tightly packed together as you accelerate it, if you're shooting at a ship, you want a fairly diffuse impact, especially if we're talking about a 10% of C railgun slug. There aren't a lot of things out there in the solar system which can take 500 kilotons of hate and come out the other side in one piece. Moreover, at the distances at which a rail-gun fight happens, that spread would help ensure that you hit your target. Like a shotgun loaded with birdshot, a fragmenting railgun round would provide a cone of impact rather than a line, making dodges less effective.

And, as I mentioned earlier, you don't need a ton of mass to make this work. If a PDC round can go straight through a military craft then we can safely assume that a chunk of tungsten with the same kinetic energy will do the same thing. PDCs look rather a lot like the close in weapons systems in use on many naval ships today so we'll use those as a guide. The 20mm cannon on a Phallanx CWIS tosses out rounds at about 1,035 m/s. Those rounds weigh about 100 g (0.1 kg) which gives them a kinetic energy at the muzzle of 53,422 J.

So, if we could predictably shatter our 1% C railgun round into 421,136 pieces, each would have about the same kinetic energy as a PDC round and be able to hole the ship. At 10% C we could go even smaller and do the same thing with upwards of 40 million shards. 1% is plenty though. Each hull-penetrating piece of our original 5 kg bullet needs only weigh about 1/100th of a gram, which works out to being about 1/100th of the size of a grain of sand.

Put another way, if the fragmentation of a rail round could be precisely controlled, a target ship would experience hundreds of thousands of individual hull breaches with the mean distance between them determined only by the geometry of the ship and the angle of the attack. The result of this would be either the delivery of a titanic amount of energy to the ship itself as the armor attempts to absorb the impact or, if no armor is present (as seems to be the case in the Expanse) the rapid conversion of the interior of the ship to a thin soup.

This, however, seems never to happen in the series and what leaves me scratching my head. As a book and TV series, The Expanse does an otherwise bang-up job with hard science fiction. Most things in universe make sense. This, however, does not. We have take as a given that the materials science technology exists to allow the mounting and firing of a railgun on a ship -- there are a lot of challenges there -- but the straight-line-of-fire use of them is a rare problem with the world-building.

Any fans have any suggestions to help me square this circle?

I thought it was pretty good, it's just that the whole season seemed a little off. I feel like the actual overarching plot of the season didn't even start until over halfway through.
Still enjoyed it overall and can't wait for the next season.