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Forum URL: http://www.eyrie-productions.com/Forum/dcboard.cgi
Forum Name: eyrie.private-mail
Topic ID: 670
Message ID: 1
#1, RE: SW Armory
Posted by Gryphon on Dec-19-15 at 04:25 PM
In response to message #0
LAST EDITED ON Dec-19-15 AT 04:26 PM (EST)
 
>Also, it seems to explain with the E-11 has such horrible aim :)

Well, it's based on the Sterling SMG, of course you can't hit anything with it. "If only we still had our Stens" is not something you will ever hear from anyone... except a 1960s British soldier carrying a Sterling. :)

I get that most of this guy's snark is for deliberate comic effect, so I'm not speaking directly to his narrative here, but the tone of the thing reminds me of something I was thinking more generally about a while ago, namely: What a lot of people nowadays seem not to know, when they start riffing on things like ILM's habit of kitbashing German tank parts onto spaceship models and basing galactic small arms on mid-century military firearms with greeblies attached, is that the original Star Wars was not a terribly high-budget movie, and most of that budget went on the moco rig and optical effects for the spaceflight scenes. With most of the principal photography conducted in England, it makes a lot of sense that the studio armorers they used would have had access to a lot of World War II-vintage weapons; WWII movies were still very big in Britain at the time, and so the prop department at someplace like Elstree was naturally going to have conexes full of British and German guns from the war. Why reinvent the wheel?

Personally, I think that's one of the best things about Star Wars, doubly so because it was originally largely unintentional. Even if you don't know what the real-life things under those props are, you can tell on some level that there are real-life things under them. It gives the technology in the setting an underlying air of authenticity that tends to be lacking in, for instance, Star Trek (particularly the newer movies—the tech in those films is very pretty but not, to me, terribly convincing). I can picture Han Solo with the bits of his blaster all spread out on the chess table, or a stormtrooper doing a bit of field expedient maintenance. Less easy to envision with, for instance, one of those arty chrome phaser pistols from the 2009 Star Trek movie.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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