In A New Hope, all of a sudden there was sound in space.
Not the first SF film to do that.
Fair, but it still contradicts real life. Therefore, star wars physics is not equal to real life physics. So you can’t say SKB contradicts star wars physics, unless at some point in the franchise they say "it is impossible for a red planet destroying beam to be seen throughout the galaxy. > >
In Empire, all of a sudden you could fly to other planets without the need of hyperspace.
Not the first SF film to do that. Besides, if you consider each system named to be a planetary system rather than a star system, all those planets could easily be circling the same star and no laws of physics are broken.
But that’s not the case: http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Bespin_system. According to Wikipedia, Bespin and Hoth are three systems away, which is impossible to reach at regular speed.
In Return of the Jedi, all of a sudden a moon sized space station can be flown through under the span of a couple minutes, besting even an explosion.
They aren’t flying faster than light so what’s your point?
The Death Star 2 is 200 kilometers in width, about 100 to the center. How does a ship fly through all that in a couple minutes? It’d have to be very fast, and in that case crash into something.
In The Phantom Menace, all of a sudden every star system in the galaxy could meet in one room.
This is just silly - not SF at all and not the first council of many civilizations seen.
A New Hope stated there were thousands of worlds under the Empire’s rule, and that fear will keep the local systems in line. That means all the tiny local systems must all be present at the senate meetings, and that is just impossible given what we were shown.
In Clones, all of a sudden you can erase the existence of a planet and no one will notice.
Well, as this was just in the Jedi Archives, this is hardly SF related in any way.
So no one in the Jedi Order didn’t stop and think "hey wasn’t there a planet here? Or just go on the regular republic database and notice a planet?
In Sith, all of a sudden the galaxy will just unanimously join a new Empire led by a scary guy making contradictory claims despite a prior civil war having just ended.
Now you are stretching things. It is based on 1930’s Germany and many other countries that have let a dictator/emperor take over.
Right after the CIS finally surrenders and joins back to the Republic, they notice exactly what they feared was going to happen and just roll with it? If they went into action beforehand why not now? This is like if a bunch of German Socialists rebelled against Weimer but then just didn’t care when the Nazis rose to power.
Star Wars physics have been contradicting themselves since day one.
Well, as a lot of those had nothing to do with physics, that really isn’t a point. Shall we talk about how Star Trek constantly broke the laws of physics? Don’t pretend any hollywood SF franchise or film was truly faithful to physics. They take short cuts and break the rules all the time. Constantly. That does not make Star Wars some other genre besides science fiction. But even so, most do a pretty good job of not being too obvious or providing some in-universe explanation to gloss over the errors. TFA didn’t even bother to do that.
Umm… Star Trek redesigned their species for the sake of looking cooler. If they changed the look of Chewbacca and the Wookies in Ep 7 I think JJ. Abrams would have been assassinated by the purist Star Wars Fandom.
My point with this is to bring up that the PT and to an extent the OT are just as guilty as the ST is. Would you have preferred if Finn and Rey had not seen Starkiller, and someone just tell them instead? There’s a little thing called show, don’t tell, which people love to say about TLJ but criticize TFA for accomplishing.
A system is never defined in any Star Wars film. 3 systems away means nothing unless you know what system refers to. It is like sector or quadrant. Either you use a standard term of measure or you define it. Sure, most people assume system means star system, but that is never explicitly stated and you can use that to refer to a planetary system as well, such as Jupiter and its moons.
And I’m still confused by why you think a gathering of all the senators of the republic must have a representative from every planet present. The US Senate has two representatives from every state, but our states are a political construct and we don’t have representatives from every city, town, or village. Just what the political constructs are that a senator represents is never indicated so there is no reason to think that the meeting is impossible. Plus we never see the entire senate chamber, only from a certain level down, so we don’t know how vast it is. The building is quite large on the outside so there could be a lot more than you are seeing.
And your complaint about how fast the Falcon exits the Death Star is a bit unfounded. If you go by screen time, they exit in 40 seconds. Based on the 160 km diameter of Death Star 2, that works out to be about 4500 miles an hour. Or about twice as fast as the SR-71. That is assuming it isn’t time compressed for drama. That also works out to be about 1/4 escape velocity for and Earth sized planet. So not all that fast.
My point is that your list of complaints is not a valid list of breaking the laws of physics. The parts that break the laws of physics lie in instantaneous holographic communication across the galaxy, hyperspace travel, telepathy, telekinesis, calling something that can be seen moving a laser, calling it a laser sword, ships flying though space like they fly through air, sound in space, and the list goes on and on. But none of these is unusual in soft science fiction. They are the norm. Star Trek did most of these first (except flying through space like flying through air - they skipped that one as well as light sabers). It is obvious that a lot of of the science gaffs in Star Wars can be fixed by terminology. Blasters do not fire lasers, but bolts of glowing plasma. TFA pretty much establishes that the word system does not refer to a solar system but a planetary system (fixing the gaff in TESB). Isaac Asimov even came up with a propulsion system that would explain the way ships fly - gravitic propulsion. Definitely not hard science fiction, but he used it in his later novels. It is also consistent with the use of anti and artificial gravity in the Star Wars universe.
The difference in some of these can be clearly differentiated by watching Babylon 5. The Earth tech is very much in keeping with hard science fiction. Rotation for gravity, fighters that obey the laws of physics in combat. But the aliens who are more advanced have the typical soft science fiction tech of FTL via hyperspace, artificial gravity, powerful energy weapons, etc.
And the difference between science fiction and fantasy can be summed up by Arthur C. Clarke himself. Any technology sufficiently advanced will appear a magic. Soft science fiction leans toward assuming we will find those advances and tries to not explain them very clearly (often not explaining typical tropes at all). When the tech is low and you still have magic, that is when you have fantasy. That is the line between science fiction and fantasy. If you provide tech to do the things that seem magic or provide even a quasi scientific explanation for it, it is science fiction. If there is some mystical source of the power - some deity usually - then you have fantasy. Lucas gave us a quasi scientific explanation for the force in 1977. He dredged up an out of date genre description that everyone in the science fiction entertainment industry ignored because what he created is space opera. Not space fantasy, but space opera. It amounts to the same thing and it is firmly science fiction, not fantasy. I’ve read some of the stuff that actually crosses the SF/Fantasy genre line and Star Wars is way to the SF side of that line.
This idea that it must be realistic to be science fiction is laughed at by science fiction writers, most of whom write soft science fiction. Only hard science fiction authors and fans make the claim that space opera is more fantasy than science fiction. Hard science fiction is only about 10% of the entire science fiction side. And the fantasy people laugh and say that it has spaceships so it isn’t fantasy.
Anyway, end of discussion here I think. I made a new thread if anyone cares to continue this conversation.
https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Science-Fiction-or-Space-Fantasy-what-is-Star-Wars/id/62732