What's Actually in the Movies? (for a GURPS RPG) — Page 2

What I mean is, do we have any confirmation they’re truly dead or merely KO’d? I have always assumed stormtrooper armor would prevent a blast hit from being lethal but would not stop the wearer from being stunned.

I think they’re very dead unless we’re expected to believe that blaster energy can explode holes that look like fireworks but only… stun the enemies. Like a chest shot KOs the troopers? What about the ones in grey tunics? Then why have a stun setting? That’s getting too close to Luke and his friendly snooze time power territory.

They might have a stun setting for unarmed people. Aren’t SW Leia and TLJ Poe the only people who got KO’d by a stun shot in the movies? Otherwise, from an in and out-ot-universe PoV, why would Imperial and FO Stormtroopers wear useless armor? For me it’s in RotJ where the bad aim of the OT Stormtroopers has no logical explanation (like “let’s allow the rebels to escape”).

GZK8000 said:

They might have a stun setting for unarmed people.

They might? I mean you also mention the two instances they ever use it, I don’t get what is ambiguous here.

Otherwise, from an in and out-ot-universe PoV, why would Imperial and FO Stormtroopers wear useless armor?

There is no in-universe explanation. They wear white armour, it looks nice and shiny. That’s it. Out of universe they call it movie magic, the heroes kill the bad guys who can only hit them back when it suit the plot.

You ask why would they have a stun setting if a blast shot can KO anyone wearing an armor, I merely said it might be for unprotected people.

Since this is pure speculation it’s worthless for OP. I’m merely saying it is never confirmed at least one Stormtrooper died in the OT by a blast shot. OP’s asking for facts from the movies.

Sorry I said “unarmed” in a previous post, I mean “unprotected”.

But the facts are the blue wavy projection style beam is for stun, as used in those two scenes. If people are secretly switching to a non lethal mode that also looks like their usual red blaster bolts so they can be more heroic or something, I’m not buying it. Han’s gun decimates the wall of Bay 94, and they usually do the same elsewhere. If the Imperial troopers wear armour to actually protect themselves then I don’t see that as a fact. It could be paper thin and designed for style over function for all we know.

I never said it was fact, I was speculating based on the lack of information about the death or survival of those Stormtroopers. The movies merely say they are out of combat, but they may be alive after the heroes leave the area.

And my speculation is very simple:
-Stun mode: everyone is stunned regardless of armor (or maybe some armor might absorb the energy)
-Lethal mode: an armor can save your life but you’ll get stunned if you’re hit in vital parts, if you lack an armor you’re dead

But you don’t need to speculate, the stun is a visually different energy blast. It causes no physical burning or carbon scoring as Luke puts it. Everything else does. Maybe it’s not clear what happened to the troops, but I suspect that the fire and high temperature impacts kill them since they don’t react in any pain from the visible burns after they are down. I don’t think Han said “sorry about the mess” because Greedo was out cold and drooling on the table.

Is stormtrooper armor really armor? We never see it provide any sort of protection (besides from Phasma, who of course seems to have her own special armor). Luke even calls it a “uniform.”

I don’t remember Han using stun shots in the movies. Also, if a Stormtrooper is stunned, why would they react to the pain?

But you don’t need to speculate

If I’m speculating it’s because I enjoy this conversation, not because it may help OP as the movies never specifically said “yup, this trooper is dead from this shot fired with Han’s blaster”.

If you want to take things to extreme, you could say maybe no one onboard the destroyed Star Destroyers from RotJ died, you could say Yoda was literally 800 when he met Luke (hello EU), you could say Lando is a very, very advanced droid, you could say maybe Threepio has lightsaber-related subroutines in his CPU. Nothing in the movies says the opposite, which is why you don’t see “Lando’s a human” in OP’s fact list.

I’m repeating myself here, but OP’s asking for facts, for undeniable statements, and “Stormtroopers die if they’re hit by a blast shot” is not an OT fact, or at least I don’t remember any of the movies giving full confirmation. It’s implied or suggested, but OP’s free to choose a different way for the RPG game OP’s designing.

And I simply believe that “Stormtrooper armor can save you from potentially lethal shots but you can get KO’d” is a better theory than “Stormtroopers wear useless armor just because”. Even if you take the mostly non-serious nature of SW77 in mind.

Also, did Greedo wear some kind of armor?

Maybe his species can survive direct hits. Maybe they can even travel through time. Lucas never said the opposite!

GZK8000 said:

And I simply believe that “Stormtrooper armor can save you from potentially lethal shots but you can get KO’d” is a better theory than “Stormtroopers wear useless armor just because”. Even if you take the mostly non-serious nature of SW77 in mind.

I agree.

Frank your Majesty said:

Maybe Stormtrooper armour protects against weapons that are typically used by revolting civilians, like melee weapons or light blasters. The blasters used by the Empire and the Rebels might be high-powered military weapons.

I like this

dahmage said:

Frank your Majesty said:

Maybe Stormtrooper armour protects against weapons that are typically used by revolting civilians, like melee weapons or light blasters. The blasters used by the Empire and the Rebels might be high-powered military weapons.

Meeeeeeesa liiiiiiiike a dis

Frank your Majesty said:

Maybe Stormtrooper armour protects against weapons that are typically used by revolting civilians, like melee weapons or light blasters. The blasters used by the Empire and the Rebels might be high-powered military weapons.

This would make it a lot like the kevlar that cops wear. It will stop a pistol pretty reliably, but a close range .308 round will pop right through it and out your back and through the other side of the armor.

It could also be that part of the function of the armor is (like military armor) to protect from shrapnel and explosions but not direct fire. Perhaps also a pressure seal and protection against environmental toxins - the armor looks unsealed when Luke and Han are wearing it but it’s also not fitted to them (Luke is apparently too small to be a Stormtrooper anyway) and they may have just put it on incorrectly. We never see any Stormtroopers suffocating or getting gassed so there’s no way to tell.

And while I’m taking a few things from deleted scenes and the script what I am mainly looking for is ‘actually shown or said by someone believable’, rather than ‘what could reasonably be inferred/what Lucas wanted us to think’ (I don’t think Lucas gave most of this a lot of thought, even if he pretends he had all 12 movies mapped out when he was 8 years old).

As for hyperdrive speed, even if we take it literally that ‘upon entering lightspeed the MF could be to the other side of the galaxy’ this doesn’t tell us much. Galaxies vary wildly in size and density. A couple of nearby galaxies, the satellites of Andromeda, are tiny compared to the Milky Way. Heck, the Star Wars galaxy could be so tiny that light can cross it in a few hours and Hyperdrive is literally just light speed! Or the galaxy could be a giant like one of those super-galaxies, and hyperdrive is insanely, unbelievably fast - though if that were true it’d be hard to credit that anyone could ever find anything over any amount of time. Heck, it’s hard to believe anyone could find anyone hiding even in a very small galaxy, but Star Wars is not especially concerned with realism in stellar dimensions (nor is most science fiction, or they’d realize that most of what they show as ‘galactic empires’ could comfortably fit inside the Sol system - the sun alone would easily fit every stellar object, space ship and planet we have any scale for that was shown in the movies; Despite EU lore X-Wings look like they pull about 1G at best, so there’s not much to say the Death Star is all that big, as they crossed a distance as large as the Death Star itself within a few minutes to arrive at the Death Star. On the other hand the moon seems to have 1G itself, but it could just be very dense and not large at all - or maybe the Force monkeys with physics so much that all bets are off).

Stormtrooper helmets can’t even withstand a blow from a rock being dropped on them, never mind actual hand to hand weapons.

Mocata said:

Stormtrooper helmets can’t even withstand a blow from a rock being dropped on them, never mind actual hand to hand weapons.

Which specific scene from RotJ are you talking? I don’t remember any helmet breaking from the impact of a rock.

They didn’t break. However in an ironic call-back this battle was the one case on screen of them being incapacitated.

Mocata said:

Stormtrooper helmets can’t even withstand a blow from a rock being dropped on them, never mind actual hand to hand weapons.

A lot of this can be put up to ‘Plot Induced Stupidity’, though that would tend to counteract my intention to use ‘on screen’ stuff as evidence. But I would prefer to think that Imperial Stormtroopers really are accurate, than that they’re just a bunch of nitwits who can’t shoot as well as me with a pistol when using a recoiless beam weapon that does light speed. A random peasant who had never used a firearm in his life ought to do better than they do, shooting at a man-sized target running in a straight line away within 40’ in a freaking hallway (Han, in ESB).

Some sources (I think including EU) have rationalized this with Ewoks having nigh superhuman strength and the trees on Endor being made of some superdense high carbon matter. Otherwise (by on-screen analysis) a .357 magnum could destroy an Imperial walker in one shot which - in context - is less believable than some cooked-up story.

A lot of these problems are not special to Star Wars and just reflect the source material and genre - such as Flash Gordon - where some dude for some reason doesn’t get wasted by hundreds of thousands of armored vehicles with death rays. One may presume that if Star Wars had attempted to be ‘realistic’, rather than plot-based, in its combat that the Death Star would have incinerated the entire Rebel Fleet in seconds and millions of TIEs would have swarmed out, destroying the Rebel fighters by suicide runs if nothing else. That’s certainly what’s implied by the West End Games treatment of Imperial resources and equipment, which tends to err on the side of believability rather more than the films. Likewise, whenever Luke and Han, et. al. get away from the Stormtroopers it’s because they’re being allowed to, rather than reflecting an incompetence on the part of the Empire that’s stunning even for a bureaucratic government corps.

In my headcanon the Stormtroopers from Cloud City allowed the heroes to escape, because Vader had ordered the sabotage of the Falcon’s hyperdrive and there was the change Luke might run away from Vader and to try to escape from the city. With Luke’s X-Wing probably taken down or heavily guarded, Luke’s only hope would be to telepathically call Leia. That way, Vader would capture all the good guys and Lando would reveal himself as a Rebel sympathiser, thus granting the Empire a plausible justification for taking Cloud City.

If Vader did not let Leia, Lando and Chewbacca escape, Luke would have remained in Cloud City until he could get a safe way to leave the city, and the Imperials would never capture him again (maybe Vader would have tried to torture Leia, who knows). If the Falcon is outside Cloud City, Luke’s first choice would be that ship.

Given how smart Vader is in TESB, I think it makes sense. But it’s headcanon.

VonKatzen said:

Mocata said:

Stormtrooper helmets can’t even withstand a blow from a rock being dropped on them, never mind actual hand to hand weapons.

A lot of this can be put up to ‘Plot Induced Stupidity’, though that would tend to counteract my intention to use ‘on screen’ stuff as evidence. But I would prefer to think …

Oooo that’s a dangerous conflict of interests 😛

Mocata said:
Oooo that’s a dangerous conflict of interests 😛

The problem isn’t just the conflict of interest, but internal conflicts. Stormtroopers are described as accurate, the Empire is supposed to actually be powerful and dangerous, the Imperial Navy is supposed to be fearsome. Yet apparently neither their foot soldiers or starships can hit jack crap at nearly point blank range against targets moving in a straight line!

A lot of this comes down to plain movie tropes and ‘the future blows’, i.e. in Perfect Dark where every single personal weapon has less power, ammunition capacity, accuracy and range than real world weapons from WW2. Star Trek has this problem from time to time, especially the Next Generation: a hand phaser is supposed to be able to vaporize an office building in one shot, and yet Star Fleet officers who are supposedly the best of the best can’t hit some dude 25’ away with a recoiless beam weapon that continuously fires when the button is held down. Not even Data, the android superman! If these scenes were done in a realistic way it would be like something out of Terminator, with Data stunning 12 guys in 12 seconds and nobody even finding it remarkable. Indeed, Terminator 1/2 are some of the only science fiction movies where weapons, vehicles and killer robots are not routinely inferior to real world people - and the reason is obvious, because if future tech is portrayed realistically then computers would run everything, every ship would be hit by every shot and blow up in one hit. This is pretty accurate to modern technology - the only reason Air Force fighter-bombers don’t get blown out of the sky more often is because they’re fighting people with no air force and no large scale anti-air defense. Missiles generally don’t miss their targets (at least the good ones), they can turn faster than any human-piloted vehicle could ever hope to, and one shot is MORE than enough to instantly incinerate any realistic air vehicle (and generally tanks, too!) Realistic military and automation technology tends to render people irrelevant (or at least resigned to strategic and not operational roles), and such technology would not only be implied but actually necessary to operate a vehicle moving and fighting as fast as science fiction craft are supposed to be. I’m a big fan of hard science fiction, but it’s certainly a whole different reality than space operas and ‘lasers and feelings’ fiction.

If weapons and militaries were shown to be realistically competent (or even realistically incompetent!) James Bond would have died in the 60s under a hail of 7.65x39 bullets.

So you basically have to either conclude that Obi Wan is an idiot with no judgment and the Rebellion sucks utterly because the Empire are a bunch of clowns, or the characters are extremely lucky and/or contrived circumstances assist them.

Tyrphanax said:

This is a cool thread.

It probably is, but I’m lazy and I see too many words in it. So I’ll just mention that after my dog eats a meal, she generally says “gurps.”