Why do Star Wars ships use LIVING gunners?
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 19 พ.ย. 2023
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Why does Star Wars use living gunners instead of droids or AI turbolaser gunners? Is it a major plot error? We'll discuss on today's Star Wars Legends and canon lore video!
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Sequel trilogy has better ships prove me wrong
okay so when we getting a manscaped animation like with viteramen
@@Lumantrixdreadnaught is absolute shit, already been proved by Eckharts, TIE fighters got decent improvement tho
@@rockystudiogaming resurgence class and supremacy are beast though and mc85 also really good
Late WW2 battleships were able to hit Japanese aircraft beyond the range that the pilot thought they were safe due to radar automated aiming and firing systems. That was not with 40mm automatic fire but secondary 5.2 inch armament using single precisely aimed shots.
Star Wars here is just totally out of date for scripting reasons, it looks more exciting if you have a human operator.
I like to think that electronic countermeasures make it very easy to fool automated Gunner systems and tracking sensors so in time most navies defaulted back to analog systems like having a gunner to adjust for such things.
Most likely
MK-09 > God @ targeting.
You can kinda see that in ANH's targeting computers, and how the fighters' outlines on the display sway wildly from side-to-side while the ships themselves do not.
@@InvictusMatrixI alwayls assumed that's merely how the scope translated movement discernable to the pilot.
Droids exist
Another lore aspect with so many actual people manning the guns, at least with the Galactic Empire, is how it fulfilled Palatine's plan. He wanted to tie as much of the populace to his empire as possible, and would make crew requirements jump up dramatically. An example of this is the Arquintens-class Light Crusier. In the Clone Wars, they ran on a 100 man crew. Meanwhile in the Galactic Empire, they required more thay 700 people crewing it. In reality, things like Star Destroyers, and possibly even the Death Star, probably could've run with a fraction of the crew listed, but Palatine wanted everyone serving him and his empire
I think this is the answer that I most accept. Because everything else doesn't make sense.
@@shorewall artist expression. Lucas wasn't trying to make sense. It was a 70s film made by a guy who grew up watching gunners in WWII films.
So you ask why? Because Lucas wills it.
Gotta give shiev’s evil plan some props, the man knew how to reduce unemployment lol😂
I was going to post a reply similar to this, it's just creating jobs for people. Not every budding pilot or officer who joins the navy has the skills to be a tie pilot or captain of a starship. but you WANT all of those people in the navy. because it strengthens your political position.
Hard to rebel and hijack a modern Imperial vehicle if they need so many troops to properly man it. With so many people it be hard to do a proper Mutiny with out a small war going on in it.
Taking away that many jobs would destroy the Star-conomy
The Military of the empire IS the it's economy.
The most famous gun crew in Star Wars was led by Officer "Hold you fire, there's no life forms aboard." Guys, the plans you are looking aren't alive. Dumping the stuff when the cops are chasing you is Billy-Bob the Redneck level of planning.
Yes, but the cops do their best to not destroy the dumped goods before they can be recovered an analysed. The escape pod had no hyperdrive, so it would never get very far. The empire wanted to KNOW that the stolen plans were recovered.
@@Crosshair84, the Empire didn't NEED to recover the plans per se, only ensure the Rebels didn't receive and analyze them. Destroying the plans would have been a perfectly acceptable mission outcome. True they would have wanted to make sure, just so everyone could sleep at night but the Imperials found out pretty quickly that Princess Leia hadn't made any transmissions and that the plans weren't on the ship. If the escape pod had been destroyed, cutting off the only other possible variable, it could be concluded that the plans were destroyed and with Princess Leia herself in custody that would be mission complete with a valuable prisoner as bonus.
Clearly they get written up for using too many lasers. They're expensive or something.
@@MrFahrenheit200 Not just shot:kill ratio, firing that shot also guarantees him extra work in form of a report to explain such firing is not malfunction but out of necessity (hence not crew misbehavior), which most likely won't end well in his favor since the shot will left him no evidence to justify his action, not to mention the emperor's right-hand man Darth Vader was also at the scene and none of the people presented would want to draw his attention by doing something "odd".
"Lord Vader, an unauthorised escape pod has just left for the surface, permission to fire?" Series over, Palpatine wins.
Another interesting thought is from Dark Force Rising. When Mara and Karrde are talking about the Katana fleet, it mentions how after it was taken over by the hive virus, there was a large push toward decentralization in control of ships. One of the things that made the Katana fleet so special was the ships needed only an 8th of the crew. So presumably, one of the reasons the Republic and Imperial Ships needed so many crew members, including gunners, was because everyone was terrified of another Katana fleet incident.
So, in essence, RDM’s Battlestar Galactica? No networked computers because of Star Wars AI.
@@crysisrevelation6132basically. Bad ai do bad things with boom booms. Humans say no more ai / handling of boom booms.
Think that was from the Timothy Zahn books… which came first?
I think this would imply that the targeting computer provides a kind of "target envelope." By which I mean, it will keep track of your target, its heading, and speed, and perhaps auto-aim for the center of the envelope of where it could go, taking care of things like leading the shot. However, a living gunner can maneuver the cannons to where their intuition says that the fighter will go, rather than the targeted point. Depending on range, the gunner's intuition of how an enemy pilot might try to evade fire could be as important as the computer.
Or other way around, tail gunners from the 40s to 50s were radar assisted. A gunner aimed the reticle on the enemy and the radar calculated lead based on range and the gunner's reticle track speed.
@@user-do5zk6jh1k One of the coolest things is some late WWII fighters had a sort of 'inertial-lead' for their targeting reticles. You input the estimated range and it adjusts the mirror reflecting the targeted reticle's light to show you how far you need to aim ahead in turns and stuff. (Or something like that)
@@5peciesunkn0wn Yes. Adjust the reticle size based on wingspan and the sight assumes range based on the size of the average fighter.
I always thought it was a way to reduce the damage a droid rebellion could do
Well, the lessons of the Butlerian Jihad were learned at great expense, and echo through galactic society still.
Maybe they were nervous because they'd just fought a massive war against a droid army. It's also possible that Palpatine just wanted to keep employment up. Also, people that you're paying can generally be relied upon to take your side in an argument.
Because droid brains can be EMP'ed, and living humans can't. Furthermore, Han had three separate droid brains wired into the Falcon, and they would quite frequently argue among themselves, sometimes catastrophically. In a combat scenario, you do not want droid brains arguing with each other when you're trying to get them to coordinate artillery fire.
and droids can be infected with computer viruses to boot have you not seen battle star Galactica that shits real
Humans can be EMPed just not as easy as non shielded circuits.
I mean an EMP would also take out the electronic motors that turn the turret and probably explode whatever system is creating the lasers, so I'm guessing short-circuiting droid gunners would be the least of your worries.
@@elmateo77 stop the cooling pumps for the reactor causing a melt down over core overload or breach take out gravity on board the star destroyer because gravity in space is artificial when you think about it an emp would take the star destroyer down slowly but it would make her blow up some how with everything on board
If a space ship gets hit by EMP there are a lot more systems malfunctioning than just the targeting computers - unless of course Star Wars ships are steam powered ;-)
No, the answer is that Star Wars is a recreation of WW II in space with magic and mysticism.
Idk they had a strong gunners union?
Lol, that would make sense. :D
“Because they love to and like to”
Palpatine essentially banned combat droids under the pretense of "that's what the Trade Federation was into so we're not doing that" and one could assume that would include droid gunners as well.
In typical evil bastard doctrine, he allowed companies to circumvent this law by building droids and simply branding them as security droids.
You don't even need a sentient droid, something with the processing power of a smartphone can easily plot the trajectory of an object and calculate an intercept point for whatever weapon it's controlling, and will do it much faster and more accurately than a person could. Once one side started using automated aiming systems everyone else would have no choice but to do the same or get wiped out, since having nearly 100% accuracy and engagement ranges many times longer than the other guy would give such a huge advantage.
Both continuities combined with fan theories give all sorts of understandable in-universe reasons for it, from the ECM/ECCM arms race getting so advanced and out of hand that it basically looped back around to the simple basics (similarly to BattleTech) to the Clone Wars causing an aversion to the usage of AIs (and subsequent reversion of AI capabilities) to highly advanced/actually sentient AIs going rogue (IG-88s, Crusader XX-777, the Bakuran droid rebellion, etc.) that, combined with it simply being the Star Wars aesthetic, it's extremely silly (to the point of annoyance with the particularly irritating nerds) to complain or question it. Why are there physical gunners aboard starships, even on the CIS ships where the crew *are* droids? Because that's how it is. Accept it or move on.
One thing that could also be invoked is the concept that computer technology in Star Wars got to advanced analogue tech before proper digital computers became a thing, and thus AI in star wars is not always the best at actually crunching calculations.
There is research on actually adding analogue capabilities to modern computers due to them often actually being very good and efficient at calculations they are specifically built for, as they can basically use the laws of physics to do the calculation rather than having to use 1s and 0s. A sufficiently advanced and large cluster of such technology could even likely emulate a mind more easily than a digital system could, which can even potentially explain why SW has machines that show sentience and think for themselves, yet can't just program a cannon with a visual camera since clearly its possible to aim with a visual system (human or droid eyes).
@@SephirothRyu Honestly there are just so many logical explanations available (even without accounting for any existing in-universe reasons) that it's silly for people to complain about it.
@@SephirothRyu So early starwars droids may have been huge walls of switchboards and clackers running the lightspeed calculations before getting digitalized?
Remember Luthen’s auto turret? Lol
In the Honorverse novels they also have "on mount" weapon crews. Their purpose, in addition to servicing the weapons, is the final fail safe for the system. If the ship's central computers are damaged, if the lines from those computers to the weapon mounts are damaged, or if a situation rapidly develops and the systems don't have time to respond the gun crews can act.
The weapon mounts have a full suite of secondary systems for detection, targeting, and engagement. There are scenes in the books where a ship comes under attack with little warning and the on mount weapon crews are able to get a shot off at an attacker before the crew in the CIC or bridge can figure out what is going on from all the sensor data coming in.
Of course the weapons in the Honorverse are a lot bigger than in Star Wars so these crews don't sit on a seat mounted to the laser cannon, but are in an armored bunker near the weapon mount.
Short answer, because WW2 capital naval ships living gunners because star wars space battles are based on WW2 naval battles. George Lucas even spliced together battles by using footage from WW2 air battles and naval battles
what are naval 6 ships?
also, that is literally what is said in the video
Exactly. It’s a “flavor” thing in the same way Star Wars fighters dogfight like WW2 fighters and many of the weapons are actually WW2 era weapons rebuilt to look like science fiction weapons.
@@neillindgren8992 Star Wars is like "the Guns of Navarone", Star Trek is like "The Adventures of Horatio Hornblower".
My theory is the large numbers of crew are used in a secondary role as damage control teams.
And even WW2 gun crews were a backup to central fire control if that failed.
This is a legitimate concern in actual navies. Yes we have many jobs that are automated but reducing the crew too much means that when damage, and casualties begin to mount, your crew now has to do more with less.
If we saw more cyber warfare/droid saboteur action in the Cannon Universe (espically on screen) you could use the Battlestar Galactica explanation of having the Human stop-gap between systems to counter hostile AI and viruses hijacking them during Battle to either disable them or turn them against your own fleet, would of been very paramount during the Clone Wars with capital ship droid brains leading the charge in the Munificents. Imagine a Lucrehulk whose entire storage space had been turned over to cyber warfare systems, give them a decent escort fleet and they'd take down more ships than the Malevolence possibly increasing the size of their escort, maybe even whole planets would fall if everything was networked
Except that Star Wars has already countered that problem by making their computers immune to wireless hacking. And the fact that gaining access to one console only gives you access to a limited number of systems. That’s why R2 only really has control of things like doors when he connects to a console. Also battlestars idea of how hacking works is Hollywood level (so nonexistent) and I pretty sure current day humanity could easily counter it without doing what the 12 colonies did.
I remember reading a book years ago that had a really interesting take on space fights. Traditional sci-fi combat is all about imitating ocean-going warships and atmospheric aircraft (probably because it looks cooler on screen), but this was more of a consideration of Newtonian physics and used AI to predict the enemies path and basically fill it full of micro drone bombs that act as a sort of flak screen - the ships in combat had so much velocity that they could not easily change direction. They would be in a constant state of trying to out-predict the enemy while simultaneously using their own FTL drives to jump to "safe" spots to avoid having to turn and lose momentum. It was pretty cool, although I can't remember the name of the book at this point.
I put a lot of weirdness in how Star wars uses advanced technology down to one likely good reason: Inefficient Compatibility. Remember these are all supposed to be old races, and old technologies. Many cobbled together from bits and pieces of other alien race technology. I'm not surprised that most systems just aren't efficient enough to be completely (and effectively) automated. I just don't think they 'talk to eachother' all that well (for example, almost everything in the Millenium Falcon). This would also explain the dreadfully slow development of technology as a whole. Whereas human development expanded by leaps and bounds in just 200 years, the whole galactic civilization of Star Wars barely moves at all.
Most advanced technology in Star Wars is also borrowed from an ancient alien race that doesn't exist anymore. Nobody has been alive in tens of thousands of years who fully grasps how warp drives or droid branes work. They're just following and gradually improving millennia old blueprints with only a limited grasp on how they actually function.
My thoughts are that, regardless of what canon may say, droids and most computational tech in Star Wars is actually composed of advanced analogue computing systems, and that digital computation is rare, limited, and/or mostly slotted into an otherwise analogue system for precise number crunching and such like a graphics card might be in a modern computer for graphical computations.
Analogue computing is actually being looked into as replacements for specific problems in real life calculations over digital stuff, as while a single analogue circuit is purpose-built and not flexible to really be used on another problem without physically altering/rebuilding it, or potentially combining it with another analogue circuit to change the output the way you want, these circuits are often far faster, if a bit less precise, than a digital system is for that particular problem. It is worth noting that brains are analogue things themselves, and so it makes sense that droid brains are primarily made up of a huge mess of tiny interconnected analogue systems with some droids having a "digital card" if they use numbers a lot.
As such, a lot of the general state of AI in Star Wars, especially having sentient robots without them being able to just be super-precise things all the time, could be explained by most of the computational stuff in the galaxy all being analogue systems.
It is because of their aversion to ais, if you want computer controlled guns then you are not that far from ships having computer systems running throughout. They had an ai rebellion back in their past and droids are the upper limit to what they were comfortable with.
Bingo. My thoughts exactly.
there was also the heavy implications of a sith sorcery based supervirus that spread across the core regions of the galaxy in the Darth Bane novels, sometime between 1100bby( at least 1 century before Darth bane era) and 3700 bby (the SWTOR era) that would somehow spread from droids/computer systems to organics (slowly transforming them into cyborg and then full droids called technobeasts), that always seemed to me like the kind of catastrophic event that permanently changes how things are done. also we know of at least two large scale/galaxy wide droid rebellions in star wars's expanded universe(Legends), even if we dont know any significant details about them, in the original HK1 led Droid Revolution and the HK47 led rebellions. as well as the implied (but never confirmed to be galaxy wide) droid rebellions during the pius dea crusade, during the SWTOR cold war, as mentioned before the sith technovirus "droid rebellion" because we know people in star wars dont actively remember the sith so they will likely think of it as a droid rebellion. during the clone wars(implied in some of the books that some cis automated bases went rouge,), C3-P0 led rebellion in hutt space implied to have continued after he left, and the droid liberation movement seen in the Fate of the Jedi books is implied to have had some form of militarist faction among them(but has never been outright stated as having done a rebellion).
overall its even accepted by parts of the community that the sith supervirus creating Technobeasts may have been one of the reasons behind why large parts of the galaxy seemed to have lost so much industry, technology seems to have devolved during the large gap between the swtor era and the darth bane era... that and the implied 2000 years of the sith empire fracturing into a waring states era style free for all where the overwhelming majority of the galaxy was in a state of constant war of extermination till armies even started to use swords and spears again as backup weapons because ammunition was easy to run out...(note that the average magazine in star wars is like half the size of an average handgun 9 bullet magazine and holds 500 rounds worth of shots... and that their amunition uses the same gas as their starship weapons, gas made in gas giants like Bespin... which are pretty common astrologically speaking (if hard to find and distinguish between non tibana gass based gass giants), so it must have been a supply issue caused by considerable limitations in either manufacturing or transport across the galaxy, hence implying an overall considerable decrease in facilities for production or a near complete usage of the majority of their supply of gass giants(which is highly unlikely.
Not really, the point defense systems on modern naval vessels are computer controlled, but are nothing close to AI. A human designates the target and tells the computer to engage it, then the computer just calculates when and where to fire.
Something that holds true for warships as they exist now is that taking significant damage doesn’t just disable whatever it damages in the immediate area, but if it damages a central computer or some sort of power source or cable it can disable much more without physically destroying it
I can imagine this being especially problematic with ion weapons or warheads
Worth noting that modern “manual” aiming for guns (like fighter jets) also have a targeting computer that uses radar and heading data to automatically calculate the lead and bullet trajectory for the gun based on the target distance, so it has some modern parallels too
In most fighter jets aiming the gun requires turning the vehicle itself though, which is why the human pilot is involved. If you look at CIWS turrets, once the decision to fire is made the process is 100% automated. When the time between the target (possibly a hypersonic missile) coming in range and it hitting your ship could well be less than a second, you don't want a human getting in the way. Anything capable of space flight is likely to be traveling at least tens of miles per second, and human reflexes are grossly inadequate when it comes to dealing with those kinds of velocities.
I agree with your take on this, Eck. Also yeah, gunnery is typically very difficult. Most gunners on planes in WWII probably never shot anything down. When the Superfortress came out, it had a new mechanical computer that allowed gunners to operate all weapons and once and automatically adjust for lead as long as the operator is doing his job right (the operator was still important). But all prior gun turrets were much more manual, and it was super-difficult to hit evasive enemies, even when your own pilot is flying straight and level. And honestly, this stacks up. Games like Halo have a lot of autoaiming mechanics built in, which makes gun turrets more effective and fun. But if you strip those systems away, you'll find the same kind of difficulties. I've experienced this in both X-Wing: Alliance and earlier versions of Star Citizen. So then the effectiveness of the turret is substantially adjusted by the design of the ship; YT-1300s are pretty terrible, but Lancers are (probably) awesome. Then when it comes to warships, you'd have *at least* half a dozen people operating a single turret, even WITH the aid of mechanical computers.
Even on large capital ships, like Iowa Class BBs, automation only did the math to figure out where to point the gun. An observer was required to make accurate observations about the heading, distance, and speed of an enemy ship. They were then fed into a big mechanical calculator that told gunners where to point their gun. The gunnery crew then still had to load, aim, and fire the gun themselves. It wasn't till the advent of missiles and the need for radar guided fire control to consistently shoot them down that mass automation of naval gunnery started coming into play. But by then, naval gunnery was largely obsolete in comparison to guided munitions, like torpedoes and missiles, or aircraft.
Sometimes automation on larger guns also simply isnt worth it. For example, auto-loaders on Russians tanks are overly prone to jamming or simply not working. They also reload about half as fast as their American manually reloaded counterparts. So why waste all the time and cost of installing a system like that when you can just add a guy to the crew to load the gun faster anyway?
Furthermore, automated systems are far more susceptible to electronic warfare or failure from light damage, especially if it has to be precisely designed.
Thats not even mentioning the RnD costs to make the automated system reliable in the first place.
@@anthonyhovens7488 Thorough reply.
I mean, for the same reasons the CIS was shown as having issues during the Clone Wars: any droid smart enough to do such a job as well as a human well is past the threshold where they are smart enough to develop their own independent agendas and potentially conspire against you...
Droid brains are a black box, built with millennia old blueprints that nobody in the modern galaxy fully understands, and even the simplest droids expected to function with any level of autonomy will eventually gain sentience if allowed to go too long without a memory wipe.
No not really…. When was the last time we had a CIWS uprising?
@@Matt-yg8ub not truly aware or sapient.
it only follows the instructions operators give it.
@@cr90captain89 it follows the general tasking instructions, the operators give it. The system is fully automatic and can engage without outside assistance
@@Matt-yg8ub yeah but it still needs to be told to do so which is an outside input.
keyword being assistance, it still needs to be given instructions to begin searching for targets. it still needs instructions to begin functioning
lines of code that tell it what to do & how to act coming from an organic operator does not an intellect make.
One of the few small crafts with automated turrets we have seen is Luthen Rael’s Fondor Haulcraft but then again it’s supposed to have all the bells and whistles
Makes sense because Luthen is RICH.
Hadn't there been a few droid/AI rebellions?
Also in the case of Post-Clone Wars droids were seen as the enemy still.
I had a headcanon. If I had to pull something out of my butt as easily as an Essentials Guide:
The manned gun is the *air gap* against E-war.
It's fairly reasonable to assume a universe with droids as common as they are, that many systems are vulnerable to E-War of some kind. We've seen what one astromech is capable of inside a massive military space station.
There's no way to hack a manned gun, and you can still have the gun itself have it's own sophisticated guidance systems that are built into the gun itself.
Plus, things being built on highly sophisticated *mechanical computing* is possible, and again, nearly unhackable, but would suit the "mechanical" nature of the Astromech's plug.
The Trade Federation dabbled in a fully automated army, and I imagine having "one singular, control ship" is more secure then having lots of smaller, less defensable positions. There's a reason Lucrheulks are flying fortresses invicable to almost all attacks beyond plot armor.
Droids fighters should be the most vulnerable to e-war, since they are operating independently. But they did just fine. Having capital ship guns in a closed system is nearly unhackable unless you are on the ship itself. And the capital ship can have counter e-war, which it would need in such a scenario anyway. If they can spoof your guns, why can't they spoof your radar, or your shields?
Droid fighters either have the central control ship or function independantly. Droids would be the most resilient to hacking by other droids.
In my example, I'm seperating a casually automated system from a full droid mind. Otherwise, they'd just make every gun on a battle ship a bespoke "droid".@@shorewall
One thing I would like to mention is that (if I recall correctly) the BTL-A4 Y-Wing was modified by the Rebels so that the rear turret (which would require a living gunner) was replaced with an automated turret (typically an Ion turret) that could fire on its own (or with the help of the onboard astromech droid if I recall) so that they wouldn't loose two hard to train flight personnel if a Y-Wing got shot down
The amount of time in star wars wherea droid cites a statistic and is immediately proven wrong showcases an important fact: droids act according to stats calculated from situational datas and a basis in their memory. A human acts according to experience, and intuition (especially in combat). A gunner trying to shoot down a fighter can think "what would I do if I was this pilot", and act upon it, where a droid can only think "what should pilots do in situation like this one"
We've seen in 2003 clone wars how easily droid sensors can be jammed, so much so that you could be standing at point blank range directly in front of a super battle droid and it wouldn't even know you're there
Germany had a problem with auto gunners not properly tracking enemy fighters because they flew too slow. I would assume a similar issue is in Star Wars.
We are looking at you Bismarck!
@@coasthuder the exact ship I was thinking of
If they have decent computer technology something like that should be an easy fix.
@@lofowens it also could be political choice too. Like a law that prevents computers doing everything because of the Clone Wars.
@@Seriona1🤔 Ya... probably Ruusan Reformation...
It also has to do with "trauma", armed droids were looked down on during the civil war and before the clone wars there were instances of droid-operated military forces turning against the galaxy so there is also a galactic trauma on fully automatic forces
"We're cheaper than droids"
-Cassian Andor
Yuuuuuup
Computers and Droids in starwars may not be primarily digital, but analogue in nature. There may be some digital stuff mixed in here and there (perhaps as adjunct calculation components and such, especially if things like that C-3PO scene had him actually calculating the odds to any degree and not just pulling up a statistic in memory), but a primarily analogue setup with only limited (if any) digital infrastructure would explain some of the AI stuff going on in the setting.
Quick answer. Less maintenance.
For sure, a computer program takes way more maintenance than a human you need to feed, clothe, shelter, and fulfil maslow's heirarchy of needs. :D
@@shorewall This tube gives you water, and that tube is paste; best gunnery team's paste comes with flavor.
Two aspects I want to point out of this topic: First, during WWII and even up to the present day, automation firing control on warships is a thing, however the human element is maintained for various reasons, several of which are equivalent to what was pointed out in this video. Second, in Legends, in particular the book, "Tales of the Bounty Hunters," describes the entire "lifespan" of the assassin droid IG-88. According to the Legends story, IG-88 was actually four droids with one additional alternate version, that being IG-11 (who appears in "The Mandalorian" series.) While IG-11 departs on his own, the other four IGs plot to take over the galaxy via a droid revolution. (This is the explanation given to why the protocol droid, encountered by C-3PO on Bespin, is rude as the droid had already been reprogrammed by one of the IG-88s, the same IG-88 seen later in the droid scrapping area of the Ugnaughts where Chewy finds the disassembled C-3PO. The IG-88 having been ambushed and destroyed by Boba Fett.) Since the IG-88s are capable of sharing their collective knowledge with one another via a connected memory/information CPU, the remaining three IG-88s are aware of Boba Fett being in possession of the carbonite-frozen Han Solo and headed for Tatooine. In an attempt to steal the lucratively valuable bounty (even the IGs needed credits,) two of the IG-88s lay in orbit above Tatooine in order to ambush Boba Fett upon arrival. However, Boba Fett is Boba Fett, (arguably) the greatest bounty-hunter in the galaxy and much more abstract in cunning than the IG-88s. Upon arrival to the Tatooine system, Boba Fett, piloting the "Slave-1" immediately locks onto one of the IG-88 piloted starfighters and destroys it and the IG-88 inside. Now Boba has only one IG-88 threat. After a brief dogfight, Boba decides to make a break for the surface of the planet, racing at full speed, a speed that the remaining IG-88 concludes is at the limit of organic physical tolerance. Therefore, since the IG-88 is non-organic it knows that it can achieve a speed greater than that of the human bounty-hunter and so resolves to beat Boba Fett to the surface. IG-88's conclusion is accurate, and the assassin droid quickly begins to overtake the lead in the race to the surface. Of course, getting to the surface first was not Boba's actual plan. When the IG-88 starts to take the lead, Boba Fett hits the brakes which puts him in prime firing position on the droid piloted starship. IG-88 #3 is dispatched by the lethal, human bounty-hunter.
(FYI, if you want to know what happens to the fourth IG-88, it managed to install its memory/info CPU into the mind/control center of the second Death Star which of course was destroyed at the Battle of Endor.)
So, there you go, why it's always better to keep a human/organic in the loop, otherwise you might just start to hear Brad Fidel music sounding off.
Maybe it's the existence of the Force. The Force influences all living beings in the Star Wars universe. It's possible even non-Force sensitives are sufficiently guided by the Force that they're much better than most computers would be.
Alternatively, maybe computing in the Star Wars universe is just kind of primitive in weird ways. They can make droids, but their computer interfaces are downright primitive.
Droids fighters showed it can be done. Even just that level of tech is good enough for capital ship guns firing broadsides at other capital ships.
@@shorewall I think what it comes down to is that the Star Wars universe doesn't have "simple" automated systems. They have human gunners, and droid brains far more advanced than what is necessary for gunnery, and very little that can do the job in between.
The Force does not make a living body move faster than Mach 500. And that is still to slow to hit targets moving at .25 C.
The body doesn't need to move as fast as the target to aim a gun at it.
@lofowens that is BS when dealing with speeds as fast as targeting objects moving at percentages of C. Look George only made manned guns for WW2 callbacks. It can't be supported by any science. Because trying to do so only makes massive plot holes.
There wasn't a great need for AI gunners until the Clone Wars. The few years of the war wouldn't likely be enough time to develop a system better than meatbags. I wouldn't be surprised if Palpatine wanted as many organics involved as a way to keep control similar to the idea of psychohistory in Asimov's Foundation series.
Because it was in a time long ago they do not live on one planet like we do in earth where war is constantly happening and advancements are of one species. There are many different cultured alien peoples that'd have their own way of doing things. So it is hard for a unified system of order to exist both in the military sector as well as politically.
I've always wondered this!!! Great video Ecks!
I like to headcanon that nobody actually understands the computers in universe. They know how to build droid brains, and they know how to build navicomputers, but they don't know how to actually design a computer from the ground up. Therefore, they don't have optimal systems. And nobody seems to have figured out how to replace organics for certain tasks properly. Slapping a droid brain at the problem works, sort of, but it's like hammering in a nail with a screwdriver. Sure you can do it, but it isn't designed from the ground up for that. And the people of Star Wars only know how to make screwdrivers, so to say. That's what happens when you get most of your tech from ancient colonizers (the Rakata) and don't really understand how it works, only that it does work.
In the 1980s, a line in the radio drama said that there was so much jamming and counter jamming, that it was impossible for the Rebel control centre to track who was who in the X-Wing / Tie Fighter dogfight.
Other sources noted this EW and ECW was what force Vader and other pilots to constantly adjust the targeting systems.
Ain’t watched this yet, but I do remember a quote in a book saying a ship was relying on AI gunners and they weren’t always the most accurate and shot in predictable patterns
On a practical level, with the force being a thing and around for thousands of years, it would make sense to have organic operators there which could be influenced by Force users. As in the whole Battle Meditation thing from Kotor.
"Why do Star Wars ships use LIVING gunners?"
Their positions are Grandfathered in.
Strong Union
R2's only canon memory wipe onscreen was during the clone wars, it was kind of a short term amnestic by Cad bane to prevent the droids from knowing he kidnapped them
Some thoughts: There is a book where a fully automated fleet was mentioned. It disappeared to nowhere, so no one wanted this risk again. It was mentioned that Hans Falcon has 3 Druid Brains, which are very troublesome bringing them working together. An example of a fully automated ship might be the treasure ship of Alderaan.
Personaly think that the people of the galaxy where afraid of using droids/ai for such important tasks as to control the gun systems of ships, especialy after the great droid revoloution. I think that they where just to afraid of the possibility of their own ships turning aginst them that even if there was a option of automation they would prefer the human asphekt over it. A nother great video btw❤
Leftover feelings of paranoia from facing the CIS 'droid forces.
AskEck: what other racing sports are there in Star Wars? Love the videos btw
Yurrrr big fan keep it up
my husband told me growing up he referred to the Y-Wing as the Star Wars equivalent of the Nakajima B5N or the JU-87 Stuka or Dauntless dive bomber. it would if helped in the battle of Yavin to have a backseat rear gunner like the rebel speeder from hoth or even a droid
I’m posting this before watching so you might cover this, but in such a technological setting, you could give a lore reason that maybe there’s so much electronic countermeasures bouncing around that it’s easier to use manual gunners than automating the targeting.
Thanks Ecks!
It has even been shown that particularly smart astromechs are often crack shots as well.
I’m reminded of that one time in the X-Wing series where the heroes managed to accidentally recruit an entire cruiser to their side - the ship had once been an escort to the Alderaanian ship _Another Chance_ and was crewed entirely by droids. For plot reasons one of the X-wing pilots had his IFF set to the code from _Another Chance_ - so the cruiser saw this IFF signal, saw it was attached to a tiny fighter instead of the massive ship they’d been assigned to guard, and went “seems legit” and followed Rogue Squadrom home.
All of this is to say droids like R2 and Chopper are the exceptions - most droids think very rigidly and to put it bluntly, aren’t very intelligent. If imperial ships used automated turrets, it stands to reason the rebels could just fiddle with their IFF settings and become untargetable.
Vader adjusting his comp is supposed to be reminiscent of WW2 gyro sights in fighter planes which had to be manually set to wingspan of the target.
This reminds me of the ships the Mandalorians started building during the Legacy of the Force series. Not the slightly well-known beskar starfighters that the GA and Correllian Conferderation wanted to get their hands on but built at the same time. These ships were described, if I remember correctly as essentially flying tanks. The main feature that the book pointed out was that the gun turrets were turned manually with physical wheel cranks. I thought this was odd since gun turrets in Star Wars are already not as automated as we would expect so this feels like going even further from what makes sense. I think the justification was that a fully manual turret system isn't vulnerable to EMPs or ion cannons, but it doesn't seem like there are many examples in Star Wars books and movies of that issue specifically effecting turret movement. And wouldn't an EMP disable the firing of the cannons anyway (Since laser guns rely on electronic equipment) so that it wouldn't matter if the turret won't rotate? If anyone has any thoughts on this I would be interested to read them!
I always thought the reason in universe that they didn't use computers to control guns or navigation was the extreme danger that a slicer getting into the network and taking over the ships systems would pose. There was also the possibility that there was A.I. uprisings in the past and it became a matter of law that an organic must be at every decision point down a system chain on a ship. There is also the low level force sensitivity that everything in the galaxy has, making it possible that people would get flashes of future insight that no computer could possibly keep up with.
Imagine a power flux taking out both your guns and your gunners.
I also remember a comment in an old sourcebook talking a little ill about droid brain heurystics
I recall the second Darth Bane novel had a part where he was flying over a fortress, and he could tell the turrets were automated instead of manned because not only were the shots easy to avoid, they fired at the exact same intervals every time, making them pretty much a nonissue.
Of course, this was a verrrry long time before the movies, like a thousand years, and noncanon now anyway, but it speaks to how AI-run guns were seen in-universe.
It a purely stylistic choice that can't be explained with logic. At the speeds you are looking at, a wall of flak is your anti-fighter defense, especially at the ranges we are shown. Targetting is going to be calculating the possible paths and speeds a fighter can go and saturating those areas with fire. Which by extension means the weapons we see being used are also poorly designed, because they lack both rate of fire and the ability to be proximity/timer detonated like the weapons they were based on irl.
It's actually similar to trying to kill a Jedi, a task droids/computers did work well for properly deployed and equipped.
1. Pilots and gunners deciding when to turn on targeting computers saves a lot of processing power rather than a targeting system always pinging and tracking. 2. A renegade can grab the controls of a turret and do a little damage to the surrounding areas before being taken down by nearby soldiers. Or a renegade can hack the AI and have all of the turrets fire all at once. 3. If we can take tie fighters as an example of the empire's affection for their defense force, they were basically flying trashcans with lasers. Pretty inexpensive to build. Add that situation to the growing number of recruits for the empire especially on planets they took over where there's really no other chance for anything besides staying at home forever. 4. "...an older code." would have gotten past a computer without suspicion as long as it was still valid. Probably more inferable reasons out there but those jumped at me.
My head cannon on this is that in Star Wars ECCM is so good that there’s a bias towards human corrected firing solutions.
I’m going to go with a more “Dune” answer to this. Many people may have been scared, due to collective unconsciousness, of droids from the clone wars.
One of the things I loved about the Battle Star Galactica Reboot is that they still used projectile weapons even in space. The scene where the Pegasus comes to save the Galactica and is just ripping a Basestar to shreds with cannon fire is far more epic than random lasers. Lasers needs a lot of power where as a kinetic energy weapon, like a shell, fired in Space is going to keep going until it hits something so it has very long range. Similar to Firefly where every one is still using fire arms and not lasers for side arms. Lasers in space might look cool in a movie but might not be that practical. Even the Enterprise needed real torpedoes. .
I like the idea that the targeting system is doing most the work, but that the ship designers want an actual body to select _what_ it targets.
One of the reference books said that ywings during the battle of yavin had damaged turrets due to how delicate ion cannons were on ywings
I've always questioned this in the back of my skull when watching SW. My head cannon was that ECM/jamming gear was on par (if not better than) most targeting computers.
Also, there was the fear of a droid rebellion in the back of everyone's mind. The Clone Wars was only twenty or so years before ANH, so the fear/hatred of AIs had instilled in everyone that sentients were the only ones entrusted with blasting others into smithereens.
That being said, I've always thought that it'd be cool if somebody would cobble together a very good automated (droid brain) defense system for their ship and thereby have a much smaller crew than otherwise needed for a rather large craft.
*Another element are advanced scrambling defense systems.*
We know jamming communications seems to be fairly easy tech to get ahold of, but also consider that computing defense systems are more potent than targeting systems. This would necessitate a separate gunner utilizing the controls. It makes a lot of sense that a gunner would have to intake the information given on particular targets and as they try to use what they have to land hits, adjustments would have to be made as shots are missed so that the targeting computer can filter through the noise and correctly interpret what it's looking at for more accurate shots. Shielding would serve as a pretty good interference.
This could also explain why long-range engagements don't exist in Star Wars because targeting capacity simply gets way too "fuzzy". Astromech droids and other onboard computes could also try counteracting the adjustments of gunners' computers in attempt to throw off more accurate shots. As such, space combat would be jockeying for position in addition to adjusting the targeting as targets are lined up. Certain ships with different technologies would also be limited to the scope, range, and speed at which they could thwart/detect the signatures, creating a new layer of advantages/disadvantages between craft, and older ships vs newer ones able to produce more accurate and effective fire compared to old ones.
I feel think this is a very well thought response but I would also like to say that Droid operated or ships running off of a computer would become very easy targets to take down for Ion cannons. For example, a ship like the malevolence would become very powerful as it could theoretically take on entire droid fleets and absolutely obliterate them.
when i first read the title my first thought was "wouldnt it just be the same reason why clones are better than droids during the clone wars"
Of course, depends on the droid...
And that doesn't get into the time/cost differences as well.
Hi eck
I think force battle meditations could be a good explanation. The Old Republic had Jedi Generals who could improve the efficacy of a fleet full of organic gunners, Emperor Palpatine and Darth Vader would also enjoy this advantage, and the Rebels would have to follow this trend as many of their fleet comprises of Old Republic and Galactic Empire ships. Which then also explains why the New Republic didn't continue this trend, given experienced force users weren't often working with them.
It might have something to with with the fact that droid brains tend to develop quirky personalities which is something you don't want guns to have, and frequent memory wipes for all the guns would be a lot of work and would basically impede the ability to gain experience and grow
I figured with the empire it’s a way to maintain control. It’s easier to limit someone’s power if you have 6 dudes crewing a single turbolaser vs. one dude who could theoretically take command of an entire broadside on an ISD.
From what I understand at least in legends it’s because of ECM and cyber warfare being so advanced as well as materials and devices existing that can interfere with automated targeting.
We see some examples of this in star wars starfighters video game.
Another thing you can consider is that every organic in Star Wars is, innately, connected to the Force, even if they are rarely force sensitive. So it's possible that, in average, Star Wars gunners are more "talented" than those in our universe and stand on more equal footing with automated weapons. A stretch, sure, but not the worst explanation
This. I was going to comment this if someone else hadn't already. I think it comes down to the fact that every person in their universe is weakly magic for all intents and purposes. Even normal (main) characters have been shown to have intuition, reflexes, and luck greater than what normal people should have. If everyone's base level is better than super advanced targeting and firing systems that we have today, then it makes sense why it wouldn't exist.
I didn’t think I’d wake up today and hear Eck talk about 18 million balls being shaved by manscape. Made my morning.
The laser cannons on the original 1978 Battle Star Galactica movie were automated on both the Cylon and human warships.
And they did not apoear to have much difficulty locking onto their targets, regardless as to whether the beams made actual contact or not.
Since ion cannons can disable those targeting computers, a living gunner would be a nice choise
I like to think of it like car trim levels. For example, Lando when he bought the Falcon, he didn’t spend the extra money to have a automatic defense system. That’s why the falcon doesn’t have the automatic defense system. As for big ships, maybe it’s just isn’t cost effective to have automated defense systems. Maybe the cost to maintain as well as the changing of the part supplies differ to greatly from planet to planet. You can use TPM for an example, only Watto had a hyperdrive that was suitable for Padmès ship. If one of most common components of a star ship is that rare in the outer rim. Then automatic weapons systems could be even rarer.
"C-3PO Lamenting" needs to be the name of a band.
One simple reason is redundancy, if you take Star Trek for example they use an automated weapon target which is great until you get hit in a key system then bye-bye all weapons, in Star Wars it is very hard to completely disarm a warship short of destroying it or disabling the entire ship.
One reason why is the reason Thrawn beat Savit in Thrawn: Treason; automated gunners require active scanning which means that if you destroy the often vulnerable scanners then the turrets become practically useless.
If i remember right the ywing operators locked their guns forward before the turret mechinism was increasingly fault proned, similar to the a wings not using their gun swivels to shoot backwards
It's also probably a bit of the difficulties of a self driving car and roadways that contain both self driving and human operated traffic, or basically if there are human passengers/operators. They tend to make different decisions from a fully automated craft because a full automated craft to make riskier maneuvers in order to get a better shot. Less about g-forces and such of course, but more in the way of collisions or risking enemy line of fire to take down a target. While there is a benefit to adding some adjustable degree of self preservation to a droid fighter, they don't need to worry about the life of an organic operator in the pursuit of a target. Thus the limitations of automated targeting and firing control are only present on manned assets.
Speaking of 18 million balls I really need to brush my teeth.
I tend to go with the theory that people may have been hesitant to put droids/computers in charge of guns after having just fought a war against droid armies.
The explanation I enjoy is the one given by Obi Wan in Episode 2: "If droids could think, none of us would be here". Droids aren´t sentient, and that is deliberate. In a world where droids are so ubiquitous they are ignored and mistreated, computer technology is deliberately restricted to prevent sentience, human-exceeding abilities and rebellion to be a possibility. Which is also why droids are constantly memory wiped so their learning cores do not gather too much experience and creativity.
An aegis cruiser can track over 100 targets simultaneously. You would think the Star Wars ships could do a lot more.
18 million balls to store the shields in. That's impressive.
Also, before we start, I always assumed that the whole living gunners thing was an aesthetic thing, channelling the World War 2 energy that Stars War has always channelled. And of course, there's probably some factor of "I don't trust no droid-brain to man these guns".
The lore needs to have some history of electro-magnetic weapons making automated gunners and pilots obsolete.
In Andor, Luthen Rael's ship uses automated weapons including a blaster turret while he pilots solo. Granted his ship is also implied to be expensive state of the art technology. Also the Millennium Falcon's hidden belly blaster when escaping Hoth seemed to be automated. From playing the X-Wing games my head canon is Y-Wing turrets draw an unsafe amount of power from the shields and engines when going against TIE fighters, so they're usually locked forward and off. I still want to know how a Dreadnought could need 10,000's of crew to operate.
Star Wars is a story: having bad compute is implicit 'plot armour'.
Systems that can kill/injure/disable the lead characters (too) easily makes it boring / "a real short trip" (tm?).
[loving the bad compute for IV, V, VI....the others: 'Meh...']
Computing trajectories - firing solutions' (i.e.: 'where to point m' field gun to hit another point') or 'courses' (shipping / aviation) - was literally the first mass use of computers in real time on earth being just in the realm of possibility for even mechanical devices (re: Fire Control on Battleships or the Norden Bomb sight around the time of the Dam Busters / Tirpitz raids on which 'The Trench run' is based).
Huh, what do you mean? The Y-wings present at the Battle of Yavin were BTL-A4 models, which were single seaters. The ion cannons on top of the canopy were fired by the pilot and mostly fixed in the foreward or rear position. Edit: I wrote the comment before I reached the part where you mentioned that. But still, the A4 variant was a single seater. The S3 variant was the two seater, but it wasn't present at the Battle of Yavin.
The other issue, that we have even today with modern fire control systems, is that while computers are great at doing the gunnery math, even picking out targets from the background clutter, they aren't good at determining if they should fire. Would you want to be in an army where the tanks choose who to fire at, and when to fire? How does the computer know if it's an enemy or friendly ship? If your guns only shoot, non-imperial, type ships does that mean anyone who gets their hands on a tie fighter can simply fly around shooting you up? You need a decision-maker in the loop. The computer keeps the guns on targets, adjusts aim, and accounts for environmental factors, but if you want a "droid" to decide if it should shoot, you need a pretty smart droid, and at that point, you might as well have a person do the job. People can be trained for cheap, and they don't require a huge tech burden to support them. That is all without saying that after the Clone Wars, there was deep distrust of advanced combat droids, for good reasons, and when manpower is cheap why swim upstream on this issue.
In guessing it was more of an employment method. Even though it wasn’t necessary, they just wanted to create jobs any place they could so everything was well managed. Plus the vast majority supported and wanted to be part of the Empire, so I guess they had to find jobs for everyone somewhere.
So there are a few things I have to point out.
1. Any ships that are being used by the clone wars, era republic, or the Empire, not reliable for this metric. As one of the things that Palpatine did was deliberately reduce, the amount of automation on the war, ships made for his forces in order to have more people walking on them. the reason for these deliberately inflated crew requirements, is because Palpatine wanted as many people employed to him as possible, because an employed citizen was a complacent citizen.
2. The thing with the y-wing’s ion cannons is more doctrinal than anything else. Both the rogue squadron games in legends, and one of the episodes of rebels in canon shows that the only reason the rebels retained the ion cannon on the back of the y-wing was because of the potential desire to disable a ship for later capture.
3. Well, the confederacy did use droid star fighters with highly advanced droid brains. They still apparently kept them linked to a central control, computer and rig them to self destruct. If they were disconnected from it for too long my guess is that this is because of a sort of Geneva convention equivalent, that says you cannot leave too much floating debris in space for the danger of harming. Random passersby. It’s probably also why very few ships use kinetic weapons.