(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 431: Transport and Cities in Star Wars

May the 4th be with you! This week my good friend Jeff Munowitch of Populus is joining the show to talk about Star Wars! We talk about the top five transportation modes and our top five cities in a galaxy far far away. Which ideas from this science fantasy could be in our future? Listen in and find out.

You can listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA or our hosting archive.

Below is an AI generated unedited transcript:

Jeff Wood (1m 24s):
Jeff Munowitch, welcome to the Talking Headways podcast.

Jeff Munowitch (1m 27s):
Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Jeff Wood (1m 29s):
Well thanks for being here. Thanks for coming to the house. This is the first time I think I’ve recorded a show live at the house since before the pandemic, so thanks for coming over.

Jeff Munowitch (1m 38s):
Yeah, I think it’s, there’s something special to have podcasts in person.

Jeff Wood (1m 42s):
So before we get started, this is gonna be a little bit different episode than all the other ones just because this is focused on May the fourth. But I wanna know a little bit about you and I Sure the listeners do and maybe give us a little bit of your Star Wars cred as well.

Jeff Munowitch (1m 55s):
Oh man. Well first, I’m Jeff Minnawi. I’m a software engineer. I work at a company called Populace that does transportation technology for transportation agencies. It’s a really cool group of people and there’s a few Star Wars nerds within that group as well. So this actually isn’t the first Star Wars conversation I’ve had in person in the last couple months, which is a little bit amazing. Kind of one of the first times in my life I, I really get that now cuz like when I started back in Star Wars, like I got, you know, the original movies on VHS and that’s when I entered Star Wars and started to go into what is now known as the expanded universe with all the different books and all the different video games at the time. And I think video games also back in the day were really not online first.

Jeff Munowitch (2m 40s):
So it was a lot of single player and like play by yourself. So much of my first part of my Star Wars experience was just me. Yeah. So it’s amazing in this current era to have a lot more like bringing everybody in. It’s

Jeff Wood (2m 53s):
Funny, I didn’t think about that cuz I, I mean I read all the books kind of by myself late at night in my room and you know, I got the dictionaries, all of the background information, the art of books, all that stuff. But also the Type Fighter game was like that big intro for me that was like the thing that got me, I mean the books in 1991 and so I heard The Empire, all that stuff, we’ll talk about that in a bit. But those got me in. But then it was the video games, the type fighter and X-Wing, cuz I think X-Wing came out maybe first and then Tie Fighter, but I,

Jeff Munowitch (3m 19s):
I can’t remember which the order was.

Jeff Wood (3m 20s):
I think it was X-Wing and then Tie Fighter, but Tie Fighter was the one that really got me

Jeff Munowitch (3m 24s):
And then it was X-Wing versus Ty Fighter. Yeah. And then X-Wing Alliance. Yeah. So they started to bring in that online

Jeff Wood (3m 30s):
And then it just kind of exploded into Lucas Arts and Lucas film and all that stuff. They started just generating content like nobody’s business after 1991. Yes, you thought it was over but it really wasn’t,

Jeff Munowitch (3m 41s):
It kind of faked you out.

Jeff Wood (3m 42s):
Yeah, it kind of faked you out. Well so this is a special episode we’ll be airing on May the fourth, which is, you know, fortuitous because I’ve been meaning to do this episode for a number of years but it never really would’ve come out on a May 4th when we usually release the show on a Thursday. So this year May the fourth is on a Thursday, which is really exciting. And May the fourth is typically recognized as Star Wars Day I think for fans and everybody else. And so what we’re gonna do is a top five cities and top five transportation modes of the Star Wars universe and this can include any type of Star Wars IP like we talked about, video games, books, comics, movies, TV shows, cartoons, all that stuff. Anything we’ll just bring it out of the woodwork a little bit, which I promise that we will do.

Jeff Wood (4m 26s):
But hopefully it’s something fun and a little different than usual talking Headways, which I know everybody thinks is fun and exciting when you listen to the show. If you’re listeners to the show, you like the show I hope anyways, but this is something a little bit different for May the fourth. And Jeff, I’m glad you’re here to share this with me because I know that you are a huge Star Wars fan just like me. We talked about it before, we’ve talked about it many times over beers and such, so I appreciate that. This is also a little bit of an homage too. My favorite Star Wars podcast, which is called Force Center, they do top five lists all the time and if you really wanna go deep into Canon and or non canon or just characters and things like that, they’re like top five weirdos. They have like top five bars and Star Wars, those types of things. You can go deep with those guys, but we’re just gonna do the urban issue focused transportation and cities.

Jeff Wood (5m 10s):
So with that being said, let’s start with transportation. Of course there’s big things like hyperspace and star destroyers, which Darth Vaers was like 11 miles long, those types of things. But maybe we’ll get into some of the stuff that folks who are deep into Star Wars will know or if you don’t know it, you’ll learn something interesting and fun or at least listen to us talk about it. But let’s start with some honorable mentions I’m to give this to you as your first bonus one, what’s your first bonus transportation honorable mention here?

Jeff Munowitch (5m 40s):
So I’d say the first like transportation topic that I think of is en quant. You have trillions of different vehicles flying around on the planet surface and you think of movies like iRobot which has like a central thing that’s managing all this traffic. And so that has to be happening on Corson and they do have something called the Corson traffic control, which is supposed to be that and it comes in and out of expanded universe. There’s some canon in there, but basically an agencies that’s in charge to make sure everybody is getting to where they need to go and not crashing every single time. And so when you look at the movies you kind of see all these little lanes of all these ships going by, but then also you get Anakin or you know bounty hunters just flying randomly throughout.

Jeff Munowitch (6m 30s):
So I think that’s a really interesting transport topic when you have a city that is basically the whole planet, how do you manage that at that scale?

Jeff Wood (6m 37s):
And I never thought about that before because in the movies in the ones that feature croissant, the prequel trilogy, you have all these lines of buses and and people’s vehicles and stuff and they’re going at different altitudes, they’re going in different directions. You have like little buses but also people’s individual vehicles And so that’s really interesting. I’m also thinking about when you’re at the start of revenge of the sy where the star fighters are starting to like kind of emerge on the other side of the pre-start destroyers and you have the vator class ships and you have these, you know, ships going everywhere and I’m like, oh my god, this is like how do you manage that? And then you go to the surface and I’m sure it’s even crazier. So there’s just so much going on there and I love that like sci-fi and fantasy like kind of allow us to imagine these things, right?

Jeff Wood (7m 21s):
Just think about what this would actually entail and it, it might give us some ideas about how to manage drones or other things in the future, but that’s it just kind of why I think Star Wars is so great and science fiction and even science fantasy is so great

Jeff Munowitch (7m 33s):
As well. Yeah, you can definitely see how the lessons that we can take away from Star Wars or Star Trek or any sort of science fiction, science fantasy really can be applied to our world.

Jeff Wood (7m 42s):
Yeah. So my bonus one is also kind of something we might be able to take into the future. There’s a episode called Bounty in season four of the Clone Wars episode 20 if folks wanna check it out. And it had an interorbital elevator in the cartoon, which basically you flew your ship to that elevator and then it took you below the surface because of the gravity on the surface was too much for ships to handle. And actually this is related to extended universe things called sky hooks and they actually say that in Wikipedia, which I had, I had to look it up, but they’re like, yeah it’s the same thing as Sky Hooks. So they actually took something, they do this pretty often, they take something from the expanded universe and they kind of bring it into the main show, which we can have a discussion about that at some point.

Jeff Wood (8m 23s):
I know that you’re a big EU fan but I think that’s really fascinating and it kind of reminds me of these ideas that you’d always seen in like popular science or whatever about you know, space elevators where you know you don’t wanna waste all that fuel just taking materials up and down and up and down into space when you could actually have this like elevator thing taking everything up and thinking about how that might work in the future if we ever design our own shipyards up in space, those types of things. So something that we could actually replicate in the future far, far future. Far, far

Jeff Munowitch (8m 52s):
Future. Yeah, the future. I think the sky hooks or sky elevators is really interesting. In Star Wars they, they started it in expanding uni universe with the emperor had a sky hook on Corson and then the dark sun like mafia organization had one too above Corson. That was like one of the ways you showed your wealth in our world the amount of energy it takes for something to get to orbit is actually really high. But the Star Wars universe doesn’t quite seem like that. Yeah. So I wonder actually what the benefits is besides prestige, right? In your case there is a benefit because ships can’t handle gravity down there, but beyond that it’s like what is the application there? Yeah,

Jeff Wood (9m 32s):
Just that you can build a really long elevator. Yeah

Jeff Munowitch (9m 35s):
And also like the Za Wars universe is, you can think of it as infinite, so it has infinite resources that they can build it. I think that’s one of the biggest things that prevents us. It’s like we don’t quite have the resources or quite the right tech to be able to make that happen yet,

Jeff Wood (9m 48s):
Which is interesting. Infinite resources is something that’s really fascinating, especially when you start thinking about asteroid belts and, and what you can mine and all those things. So obviously like you said, we have finite resources which makes it really hard to think of some of these things, but if you have infinite planets basically and infinite resources that you can strip mine like an and or you, you have that, that situation going on. So Interesting. Okay, so let’s get into our top five. Okay. We’re gonna go 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. I’ll go first and then give it over to you and then you’ll have the last, last laugh as it were in terms of what your transportation number one is. Sounds great. So my first is jet packs.

Jeff Wood (10m 28s):
Jet packs on troopers, jet packs on Mandalorians, jet packs everywhere and they’re showing up all over the place. But I just think, you know, it’s kind of interesting it’s, and it’s kind of something that science fiction, science fantasy has been after for a long time is just put a jet pack on a person and see what happens. And I guess in the real world all we have is these like water packs where you have these, like these jet of water that kind of shoots you up or some people I think have used, you know, engines on their arms and things like that but it doesn’t last very long cuz you don’t have enough fuel to go very far. But I just think that’s interesting that, you know, something gives power to these jet packs on the Mandalorian but you know obviously it’s some power that we haven’t, you know, found yet. It’s not a lithium ion battery for sure.

Jeff Munowitch (11m 4s):
No. Well it’s interesting that in my understanding of Star Wars can, we’ve never actually encountered when Mandalorian or Jet Pack user ran outta fuel until very recently. Right? That was one of the first episodes with Mandalorian where they were chasing after the giant skybird that they ran outta fuel. So we do know that fuel is limited on their jet packs now. Yeah. Which was not necessarily something we knew honestly. It just seems like they’re burning something, right?

Jeff Wood (11m 32s):
Yeah. Or there’s a fuel cell of some sort or something. Yeah.

Jeff Munowitch (11m 35s):
It doesn’t seem that farfetched from our current tech. Yeah, like tweak a little bit and then you, you can get there.

Jeff Wood (11m 39s):
Yeah. I’ve often thought about energy in Star Wars especially because I mean they’ve talked about it in solo, right? You have the the coax and those types of things that power ships and whatnot and it’s really valuable and rare. But then also you have like battery cells for like lightsabers and I always wondered like do those run out eventually? It must in some way but maybe the the crystal enhances it or something. I don’t know.

Jeff Munowitch (12m 2s):
In the expanded universe they did run out. Yeah. But I don’t know if that’s ever quite made it into the modern day cannon I

Jeff Wood (12m 8s):
Don’t think. I don’t know if I’ve seen that before. Yeah, interesting. Alright, what’s your number five?

Jeff Munowitch (12m 13s):
So my number five is the levitation technology that they use for moving around cargo boxes and also land speeders. It’s a very similar levitation tech it seems to, you know, keep you about half a meter or a quarter of a meter above ground and you know, you can push it around relatively easily. So like I don’t know much at all about this tech, to me this is like pretty black box setup, but like why couldn’t you use this for jet packs? Is it like something related to the gravity of that planet you’re on or I just don’t know. So that’s like, we’re talking about limited power and jet packs, these things can just stay hovering constantly.

Jeff Munowitch (12m 53s):
Yeah. Like it doesn’t seem like there is a time where the turned off speeder sits on the ground. Yeah.

Jeff Wood (12m 59s):
They never just kind of plops down. Yeah.

Jeff Munowitch (13m 1s):
Yeah. So why not for jet packs? What’s that reason? Yeah, I’m sure somebody out there in the Star Wars like fandom has a reason, right? Because that’s one of the great things about Star Wars and the, the group of fans that it has accumulated after so many years is there are reasons somewhere. Yeah. Like everybody has

Jeff Wood (13m 19s):
Somebody said something. Yeah. Yeah. In the extended universe they were called Repulsor Lifts and I remember that they talked about them frequently in those first books and going throughout, I think it was something that they picked up, but then after that it just kind of disappeared as an explanation because in the books you can explain more obviously. Right? Yeah. But after that, I don’t think anybody’s ever really said Repulsor Lift in the Cannon or one of the main shows that they run. But I do know that’s what they called them and they, they used them for all kinds of things. Right. But the boxes I I I was thinking about the first and last mile, you know, solutions. Yeah. For freight, Amazon could invent a, a Repulsor Lyft or whatever or whoever Target or or or Walmart or whoever’s delivering u p s, FedEx whatever.

Jeff Wood (14m 2s):
But that’s really cool one. Yeah. Alright, what’s your number four?

Jeff Munowitch (14m 6s):
Well we’re talking about transport techniques and we’re thinking about ships and stuff like that. For me, star Wars is space fantasy. So this idea that you can do things that obviously wouldn’t work in our current world. So the force Diya being used as a way to transport objects. Something that’s so unique and interesting to me because like this basically didn’t exist in the original Star Wars and it’s been introduced and it just, to me it’s introduced so seamlessly, like it fits in the lore really well and you can say what you want about the new, you know, sequel movies, but I think this is one that really fits in well this like talent. So passing a lightsaber through the forced dyad connection is just, it’s not much, you’re not transporting much, but it’s pretty valuable And it comes into, you know, the original debate that I discovered with Star Wars, is it science fiction or is it science fantasy?

Jeff Munowitch (14m 58s):
And to me that’s like, it is science fantasy and it becomes so much more of a lore and like storytelling thing that really becomes something you start to look into. Yeah. So that’s why I had to pull in a transport technique that wasn’t just like technology. Yeah. I really like that forced diet setup.

Jeff Wood (15m 17s):
I agree. It’s interesting that you mentioned kind of that lore aspect of it because if you think of like Lord to the Rings or the Hobbit or the hero’s journey in general. Yep. You know, it’s not gonna be realistic, but it’s gonna be something that brings you out of your world and makes you think differently about things. And I, I really appreciate that about Star Wars and I think the whole thing about the force generally light side, dark side, the kind of themes of Star Wars generally. I think that really actually, and there’s churches of the force and stuff like that, but I actually just think that that can be used as as ways to look at kind of light and dark in the world that we live in. Now some people take it one way and some people take it other ways. Some people think that, you know, Luke should be aggressor versus a pacifist of of sorts.

Jeff Wood (15m 58s):
And so you can have that debate of over The Last Jedi or how, you know, Ryan Johnson took things. But I think that that was interesting the way that that reflects into the, the universe that we live in now. Okay. My number four is ships that act like houses, which is a little funny, it’s like a houseboat almost kind of thing, but it’s not quite like an RV like Spaceballs makes fun of, right? Yeah. But you know, there are tons of ships that characters use as houses. So Millennium Falcon is kind of the primary example. Obviously Han and Chewy use it as their home but also, and they call it their home when they come back to it for that big force Awakens kind of reveal. But also Lando in in Solo he, he had all of his capes stored in there.

Jeff Wood (16m 39s):
He had like a nice kind of place where he did his own video log, his own flogging type of thing. So it is definitely something that I thought was kind of funny and fun. And also because, and people don’t think about this very much, but when you’re going around the universe and the Star Wars universe, time is weird, right? Like when you go through hyperspace it might actually take you a week to get somewhere. It’s not like you jump into hyperspace and then you’re there in a couple seconds. Yeah. It takes a long time. And so you might be sitting there for weeks on end in hyperspace going somewhere. So you need a place to sleep, which is why some of these single engine ships like the Mandalorians N one s fighter, it’s kind of weird to me like you’re gonna sit in the same like seat for like a week or two. That seems like it would be very, I don’t know, you get some deep vein thrombosis real easily Yeah.

Jeff Wood (17m 24s):
That way. But with these ships that often operate as houses as well, you have the kind of the benefit of having your home and you kind of hang out there for a few weeks while you’re getting between planets. So you have the ghost from the Rebels cartoon, which has some really cool character elevations as well. You have the ship from Bad Batch, which has been really cool lately. You have Lutheran ship from Andor. Yep. Which he hides his, his countenance basically he hides who he is in the ship. They have this really great scene where he basically changes himself from the rebel to the art dealer in like a couple of minutes as

Jeff Munowitch (17m 59s):
Coming back. He’s getting into the zone. Yeah. On a ship. Yeah.

Jeff Wood (18m 3s):
Really cool. So I dunno what you feel about house ships, but I thought that was kind of like a cool

Jeff Munowitch (18m 8s):
Idea. I mean if you come back to the idea that Star Wars is basically a space western, right? And that you are an individual person or thing or species in this galaxy, having your home be very mobile and with you makes a lot of sense, right? It’s the, you know, outlaw on their horse out in the middle of the desert making camp where they are. It follows that paradigm. Yeah. So it makes a lot of sense is it’s totally, it’s it’s great. I’m a little bit speechless by it because one of my top transports is one of those types of ships. Yeah.

Jeff Wood (18m 42s):
We’ll get there. It’s

Jeff Munowitch (18m 42s):
Just like so basic to West Star Wars is Yeah. And coming back to like snub fighters having hyper drives on them. It’s, I mean Luke did it in the original movies, right? Yeah.

Jeff Wood (18m 53s):
I mean to Deba he kind of just like hung out going

Jeff Munowitch (18m 56s):
Toba for weeks in the expanded universe. He would just like fly around in his X-wing. Like that was his home effectively, which is, if you think about even a smaller ship becomes his home, which is crazy. But

Jeff Wood (19m 8s):
See at least if you’re a Jedi you can do the meditation right during and the kind of the force sleep thing that they always talk about. So there’s some benefit to that I guess. And and recovery, there was a couple of books where I remember where he got injured or something and he was like, had time between hyperspace jumps to recover. So maybe that’s part of it as well.

Jeff Munowitch (19m 26s):
There was one book where he got his ship was damaged and he couldn’t communicate out with, you know, normal technology. And so he went into this force sleep essentially. And the expanded university get so many like force abilities that they don’t even talk about in Canon anymore. Or anti

Jeff Wood (19m 43s):
Force

Jeff Munowitch (19m 43s):
Abilities where basically he would use like one 100th of the oxygen so he could live longer in this meditative state. Yeah. And hope that somebody came by and it’s just like so interesting like he’s stuck in this tiny little ship completely like in a coma essentially trying to live Exactly. Trying to stay alive long enough for someone else to find him. Yeah.

Jeff Wood (20m 3s):
Okay. Number three. My number three is pod racers and speeders. So they’re held up by Repulsor lifts and they’re kind of like hot rods. So George Lucas was really big into, into hot rods and, and obviously when he made it American graffiti, that was part of the, the ethos of fifties and sixties Central California. And that was something that drove his thinking, you know, buck Rogers hot Rods, those types of things even around like the Millennium Falcon and stuff like that. I mean that it’s all kind of tied together. The idea of a Wookie was him driving around with his malamute dog Yeah. In the car. So these things are all close together. But we also saw this idea of speeders and kind of souped up vehicles in, in the book of Bobat too, where they had those space vespas Yeah.

Jeff Wood (20m 43s):
With the crazy colors. And I know that people were, were not big fans of those, but I feel like that’s George, like that’s what he would totally do that. So there’s those two and basically, you know, let’s face it, the Return of the Jedi speeder chase is like one of the best things ever. It goes through redwood trees. It’s like this really cool camera action where you feel like you’re in it and something new for cinema I think that people didn’t really get before. And so there’s like lots of cool movie effects, but also just like the idea of of having a speeder, it’s almost like a little scooter kind of thing. Your own e-bike Yeah. To go wherever you wanted to go

Jeff Munowitch (21m 16s):
And you know, in the return of the Jedi scene of it just feels so real. Yeah. It feels like you were there. You can talk about the camera angles and the approach and I think that’s a big part of it. But those speeders still live on all the new content. Right. There’s essentially those speeders over and over and over again. Yeah. Which is

Jeff Wood (21m 34s):
Great. Even have Jason Sudeikis beating up Baby Yoda on a speeder. Yes. Alright, what’s your number three?

Jeff Munowitch (21m 44s):
So I’m gonna go into the expanded universe for this one. There’s this book and that Lando Calin has designed and built a special shield chip. And this shield chip resembles basically a giant umbrella with engines and it’s, it’s made to ferry other ships to a mining colony that’s really close to a super hot star that would basically destroy the ships, any ships that would get close to it. And you know, the mining colony is a really advantageous revenue generator for Orlando. So he develops these ships and you know, pays a bunch of money to make sure that they’re maintained well. And I, I really love this idea of basically a ship being created to serve other ships in that way.

Jeff Munowitch (22m 26s):
Like it’s not, like, it’s not just a maintenance ship, it’s actually like a transport ship for ships. It’s

Jeff Wood (22m 33s):
Like a ferry almost,

Jeff Munowitch (22m 34s):
Right? Yeah. But

Jeff Wood (22m 35s):
Like a car ferry.

Jeff Munowitch (22m 36s):
Like a car ferry. But it’s like a boat ferry. Like it’s carrying other ships. Like if that makes sense. Yeah. It’s protecting other ships. So also this original functionality of basically linking two ships to have one ship controlled. Another one was, this is the first time I think I saw it. So you’d link up your ship to this big umbrella. Yeah. And the big umbrella would drive you and your ship to this, you know, to the planet. And I think that was also something that was really, really interesting when I was growing up and reading these books was like, not just manual control, but you can actually work together in tech, what

Jeff Wood (23m 13s):
Was it called? A slave circuit? It was

Jeff Munowitch (23m 15s):
Called a slave circuit.

Jeff Wood (23m 16s):
Yeah. Slave circuit. And, and, and the whole thing about the Katana fleet and trying to, this was, this was an era of the empire. Was it, was he looking for the Katana fleet in the air? Yes, it was. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is the first book back after Return of the Jedi. Timothy Zahn wrote these amazing novels and he brought out all these like really cool ideas like this slave circuit. And the katana fleet was this fleet that disappeared because they slaved all the ships like 300 ships or something together. And so if you could find that fleet somewhere in the galaxy, you could have more power than anybody else. But the problem was that the, the slave circuit broke down or something. And so they jumped into is was that what happened? No, the

Jeff Munowitch (23m 55s):
Slave circuit did not. The slave circuit worked perfectly. There was a virus that took over every person That’s right. Took over the main head of the fleet that ship. Yeah. And then they, that ship controlled everything.

Jeff Wood (24m 9s):
So they disappeared into, so they all disappeared together. And so the gold rush or the the lost city of gold kind of action came to play where people were like, oh if we can find this fleet wherever it may be in the galaxy will, this is so interesting. And then there’s also something about, you know, the key gigging lost, I think it was Brando’s key, his slave key or something like that got lost on Deba or something in another book. So it’s connected in different ways.

Jeff Munowitch (24m 33s):
I mean the whole concept of someone controlling your ship is a little bit unnerving. Yeah. Right. So I’m a little bit surprised that like it’s built into most of the new ships. So much so that in the Mandalorian most recent episode,

Jeff Wood (24m 45s):
Right, right, right, right, right.

Jeff Munowitch (24m 46s):
The port where they were landing took over their ship and forced them to land at a specific spot. And that’s just so surprising to me cause that seems so Unstar wars like to me that you’re allowing other people to just tap into your ship and like take it over. Yeah. Without like a fight or something like that. Yeah. So that was a little bit surprising to me. Yeah, it still lives on a little bit.

Jeff Wood (25m 4s):
A little bit. Yeah. But also, you know, the air to Empire is where Thro showed up for the first time too. Na thinking about it and at Star Wars celebration a couple weeks ago, they revealed that he’s gonna be in the upcoming a Soka show too. What he was in Rebels. But he’s also gonna be in the Soca show too. So that’s, he’s coming back that whole book kind of trilogy. If you go back and read it, I bet you there’ll be some nuggets in there. Maybe we’ll get, maybe we’ll get a mention of slave circuits for ships. Okay. So let’s hear your number two.

Jeff Munowitch (25m 32s):
So another old school call out mine was a liberator class cruiser. So when I was growing up I was talking about, you know, you played all these video games by yourself. There were Star Wars Rebellion Video game was one that I played a lot. You could play it online, you’d find an opponent. But it was essentially like a resource gatherer game where you try to collect planets and build political support on those planets and build ships or troops. And then if you met in space, you actually got a space battle. And you know these are the old like dial up days. So like you could, it was very basic. But what they found out, I’m sure what they found out when they were creating the game at the time was the Rebels didn’t have a lot of capital ships.

Jeff Munowitch (26m 19s):
Like they didn’t have a lot of big ships on screen. Like so they created a bunch and the liberator class was actually one that they created for the game and it barely shows up anywhere else. But it’s one of my favorite ships cuz it’s basically just an aircraft carrier, you know, a star fighter carrier and it really plays well into the rebellions like strengths of hit and run, you know, jump in, get something done, jump out. And it wasn’t made by any of the big shipyards of the day. Right. It wasn’t what Drivey Yards, it wasn’t Corian Engineering Corporation, it was Soro sub corporation. Which they didn’t do a lot of ship building. They did some but it wasn’t like their main only thing.

Jeff Munowitch (27m 1s):
So I think I thought that was a really great example of building up lore for a specific reason in Star Wars and it kind of stays around.

Jeff Wood (27m 8s):
Do you remember what other ship that Soro sub made? They made something else? Like they

Jeff Munowitch (27m 11s):
Made a few different things. Yeah, they made some capital like bigger capital ships.

Jeff Wood (27m 15s):
Okay. Because I remember that name. It’s funny cuz you also have these kind of corporations in Star Wars and it’s funny, Corson even has a corporate sector. You know, you have all these corporations and they make these different ships and in, in the Last Jedi, you know you have the DJ character talking about who’s buying what from who. Yeah. And you know, you’re selling, you know they’re selling tie fighters and they’re selling X-Wing to make money. And so there’s all these corporations that are, you know, the greediness of it all is also shown in Star Wars. And I’m sure George Lucas meant that. Yeah. To a certain extent.

Jeff Munowitch (27m 46s):
Coming back to the thing you might be thinking of soup made the speeder that Luke was driving. Okay. In New Hope. Okay. When the

Jeff Wood (27m 55s):
Original I knew was familiar from from Cuz I knew they built a number of different things but I wasn’t sure what it was. Yeah. Okay. So my number two is the many trains of Star Wars. Oh yes. There’s lots of trains in Star Wars, including the one that’s carrying the Kwai and Solo with that old Western train heist situation going on. There’s the Sand train in the book of Bhe recently. All these old west themes. Right. There’s some really cool magnetic levitation trains that probably use Repulsor lifts as well in the Clone Wars cartoon, including the episode where Asoka loses her lightsaber. There’s a lot of them in that. And then you know, in the bounty episode that I mentioned earlier with the space elevator, they basically go below the surface of the planet and then they take these elevator trains.

Jeff Wood (28m 39s):
It’s kind of cool, it’s like a maglev type of of thing where they’re going through these loops and every loop they go through the train kind of connects and goes through and I don’t know, there’s lots of cool stuff in there. So there’s tons of trains. There’s, I mean you can go in into all of the eu, you could go to the cartoons, even the the comic books I’m sure and find millions of them. There’s even that bus like vehicle that takes people from Frick outside of Fex to the inside of Frick. So you know, if you got a lot of transit in Star Wars, but you’ll notice that there’s a lot of train like things and there’s also a lot of the ships that kind of operate like cruise ships and not quite like airplanes. Which I think is really fascinating as well. But that’s probably another discussion. But yeah, I don’t know what you think about all the trains of Star Wars.

Jeff Munowitch (29m 20s):
Yeah. You know we, we talk about the Repulsor lift technology and I find it so interesting. So if we have Repulsor lift technology, why do we have tracks for trains in the Star Wars universe? Like is that their like the

Jeff Wood (29m 35s):
Loops You

Jeff Munowitch (29m 36s):
Mean like the Loops? Loops or like in the Bad Batch episodes recently that’s on like a track.

Jeff Wood (29m 44s):
Right, right.

Jeff Munowitch (29m 45s):
And or in the solo heist, like beyond the storytelling requirements of like putting something on a track to get the Old Western like train heist. Like why effectively would you have this in this universe when you can basically fly in 3d, right?

Jeff Wood (29m 58s):
Yeah. You could move all that coax like with the ship between two places. So why would you do it? It might be just like an old like mining operation that was before. I don’t know. Yeah, it’s a good question cuz there’s really no reason other to have it on the rails. But yeah they do have the rails.

Jeff Munowitch (30m 15s):
Yeah they do.

Jeff Wood (30m 17s):
I think it’s probably cuz it’s balanced in our own kind of mythology too. That’s probably, you’re saying like the old Western themes and stuff. So you’re gonna have a real, and you have to keep it going in a direction that you know it’s gonna go in order to, you know, have the heist as it were. Exactly. Okay. I think we are getting to our number one. Yeah, I think we are. So I’ll go first on this one then I’ll give you the, I’ll give you the final say. So you mentioned the dyad but, and you gave me this idea too, while we’re thinking of kind of our top fives, but I do think that the world between worlds as a transport mechanisms is really cool. And so for those that don’t know the world between worlds is kind of an ancient space shared by, you know, kind of force users.

Jeff Wood (31m 1s):
And we don’t really know the origins of it, we don’t know where it came from. But in Rebels, basically if you were strong in the force, you could connect through this kind of world between worlds and it was almost like this time travel device where you came through one portal if you knew how to get in and then you could go out another portal and it would be a different timeline. So it’s where if, sorry, spoiler alert for something that happened several years ago. But you know, it’s where Ezra saved a Soca from being killed by Vader. It’s, you know, where Palpetine tried to get Ezra and there’s actually some in the trailer for the new Soca. There’s actually some kind of indication that the world between worlds might show up.

Jeff Munowitch (31m 42s):
Interesting.

Jeff Wood (31m 42s):
There’s also, and this is something that I, I’ve kind of been speculating about is that the force users, the orange bladed or red bladed force users in that trailer, there’s a replay of the scene from Rogue One and I’m wondering if they somehow get through the world between worlds and go back in time to try to get the plans for the desktop. Oh wow. And maybe TH’s behind that in some form or fashion because th was the one who’s interested in art, interested in all the ways mentally he could get to understand you. And it was also in that rebel, those Rebels episodes before the end when he was shipped off by Perles that the empire was getting close to finding something.

Jeff Wood (32m 24s):
Hmm. And he was kind of in that space too. So I think they’re all connected. But anyways, that’s all TV stuff. But the world between worlds itself, I think that’s, it’s a really interesting mechanism. But the only thing I worry about is that it could be overused or misused in storytelling. You know, any time travel device could be like this kind of get outta jail free card for, for a storyteller. So I worry about that. But the way it’s been used so far, I really appreciate and as a transportation device to go anywhere in the future of the past, the present just by going through a portal is a really interesting science fantasy type of idea.

Jeff Munowitch (32m 56s):
Yeah. We don’t necessarily know what it takes to get in beyond one time. Yeah. Right. To be the person activating it and actually physically going in. Cause I don’t think the emperor is able to. Right.

Jeff Wood (33m 9s):
He didn’t get in, he, he got the door open but he couldn’t quite get in. Exactly. It felt like unless Ezra pulled him in or something, I don’t know. It was really weird.

Jeff Munowitch (33m 16s):
Yeah. So that’s why I’m still very cautious about like thinking of as a transport mechanism. Ah, because like what, what does it take to actually transport something with that? Yeah. Like beyond, I mean you could say it’s the same thing about the forced diet, right? Yeah.

Jeff Wood (33m 31s):
Which is what I thought of when you were talking about the forced diet. Cuz I was thinking well it’s, it’s kind of the forced dyad might be a part of the world between worlds. Yeah. It might actually be that space. You know, if you’re, if you’re in the dyad, one of the two people in the dyad you have like, because of the connection between you two, you have this portal to the world between worlds you can use on your person to a certain extent. But there’s also the portals, the gates that are in that world. Which is interesting too. It’s just like those were some of my favorite episodes of Star Wars ever. Movies, books, comics, whatever. I read a ton of stuff for some reason those really got, I’ve watched the World Between World’s episode like 50 bajillion times, especially the part where Ezra pulls out a Soca because there’s also the connections between all of the kind of the force users on Mortis too, right?

Jeff Wood (34m 18s):
Yep. Because of, and for those who don’t know Mortis, it’s like this 3D episode arc that kind of goes really deep into the force and, and kind of the idea behind the dark side, the light side and the balance, the Bogan and the asla. And so it’s just really fascinating going back and seeing how all these things connect to each other and seeing the Owl Light creature come out and be in the world between worlds. Yeah. Because it connects to the force more generally.

Jeff Munowitch (34m 44s):
And the owl light creature follows Asoka. Yeah. That becomes her like symbol. Yeah. After that arc, which is really pretty cool. Yeah.

Jeff Wood (34m 52s):
Okay, gimme your number one.

Jeff Munowitch (34m 54s):
So my number one is the Outrider, which is Renar ship. And this again is expanded universe mostly. It did finally make an appearance in a New Hope in one of the special edition changes, but it’s a Y T 2,400 fader instead of like the Millennium Falcon, which was a Y T 1300 freighter. And it basically Dash renar is, you know, a little bit of a cleaner, slicker version than Han Solo. And his ship is a little bit cleaner, a little bit newer, a little bit slicker than the Millennium Falcon. And when you actually start to look at it and like see the differences, it just became a ship that I really bonded a little bit more to than the Millennium Falcon.

Jeff Munowitch (35m 41s):
Falcon’s iconic, but it’s everyone’s iconic, right? Yeah. But there’s something about, you know, it being a ship that acts as a house, a ship that acts as multiple purposes and really like retains its identity as the owner’s identity.

Jeff Wood (35m 59s):
I find that interesting you, you said kind of you’re connected more to that. Is it just because it was the, the way that you got most into Star Wars? I mean you had the movies that people had the the box sets and stuff like that. But I feel like, you know, for me all of those dictionaries and stuff and, and you could find like something that was special to you specifically. It didn’t have to be the main characters, it didn’t have to be a main ship even, you know, everybody like everybody seems to like X-Wing, but my thing was a Wings, I was like a really huge fan of a wing. So like was that something that like, you know, kind of connected you to Star Wars even more was just kind of having the ship that o obviously a lot of other people had, but it was a little bit something that you almost had to dive a little deeper to get connected to it.

Jeff Munowitch (36m 41s):
Yeah, it was actually, I think one of the first Star Wars games that I played had Dash Renar as the main protagonist and his ship as the main ship you were able to control. Right. So I felt like that was probably a little bit of a connection. It’s like I’m not just watching I’m interacting with Right, right. Especially in those early days of video games, like I’m actually controlling. It was this huge concept and how we just take for granted cuz video games are everywhere and it’s a lot easier to be able to control things. So I think that was a big part of it.

Jeff Wood (37m 11s):
Yeah. I don’t know if I mentioned this earlier, but I learned how to type by playing type fighter.

Jeff Munowitch (37m 16s):
Oh interesting.

Jeff Wood (37m 17s):
And you know, I wasn’t a big typer before I, you know, I did the Mavis Beacon teaches typing and everything, but at one summer when I was playing type fighter, you know if you have a joystick and you’re looking at the screen and you have to see where things are going, you have to use your other finger to like find all the keys to shoot missiles or power shields or whatever. And so by playing that game, I found out real quick where S for Shields was where the proton torpedoes were, all that stuff. And so eventually I basically taught myself how to type because of that game.

Jeff Munowitch (37m 49s):
Yeah, it’s really interesting cuz like growing up during our era, that’s how you kind of learned to type was the Mavis Beacon, those games. And funny enough, I have a story as well, the reason I got really fast at typing beyond like school, like forcing you to sit down and play this not great game to learn to type was Star Wars muds. Did you ever know about Muds? No. Multi-user dungeons. Oh. So imagine like MMO RPGs like World of Warcraft, but instead of graphics it’s all text. Yeah. So it was through Telenet, like before you really had graphical games and it was Star Wars. So like there were storytelling as you moved between rooms, very dungeons and dragons type of thing.

Jeff Munowitch (38m 33s):
Yeah. But you’d have to type out all the commands. Yeah. And if you were like fighting someone with your, you know, lightsaber or your blaster, you had to type really quickly. Yeah. Yeah. So that got my muscle memory and my twitch muscles, you know, my fingers going. I think that’s also like how I learned to type pretty fast was from that.

Jeff Wood (38m 50s):
Yeah. Star Wars makes you type. Oh I remember back in the day my first kind of game that I played ever that wasn’t like in a computer lab or something like that was Kings Quest four, the perils of Rosea. It was like very medieval like kind of fantasy game. And it was, they had a lot of graphics and stuff, but you had to type everything right? You had to type like go here, do this, pick up that thing, do this, pick up that. It was like very intense, you know, game. And you had to get the commands right too. Obviously you couldn’t just, you know, you had to have a limited vocabulary cuz the game only had a limited vocabulary. But Exactly. It was just like those types of games when you were starting out were kind of the way, the way that you, you got into computing with the your 3 86 or your 2 86.

Jeff Wood (39m 33s):
Yeah. Whichever may be. Okay. So that’s, that’s the first half of our show. I like the out writer. I like the idea of having your own ship. Let’s take a quick break and then we’ll be back with cities. Okay. So we’ve been through some of the cool transport stuff in Star Wars. I should also say that again, I really like science fantasy because I think you can just like think of this wild and crazy stuff. And I think the cities is a good example of that too. And I think that these will be really interesting from a fantasy perspective just because there’s so many different ways that you can look at how people habitate around a galaxy. So let’s go with number five. Let’s start off, what’s your number five?

Jeff Munowitch (40m 11s):
Gotta start big start The most wide, most isley slash mopa I have to go with both because this planet is like the most visited desert planet, backwater planet in all of Star Wars. You continually come back to these like basically the same city.

Jeff Wood (40m 27s):
We’re always on Tattering. Yeah.

Jeff Munowitch (40m 29s):
And so it comes back to the old Western mythology of Star Wars. Right. There’s wild stuff outside and then that brings the wild stuff inside and you can definitely see some of those like relationships building between the neighbors and like the, the community around that. But it’s still this very, you know, sharp edged dirty area. Yeah.

Jeff Wood (40m 56s):
You have Marshalls. Yeah. In places like Mo Pego, which we found out in the man Mandalorian and you obviously meet crazy creatures, crate, dragon, those types of things. So you’re right, it’s also very deserty, it’s sandy, it’s like a old we like you, you know, it’s like a, it is that, you know, quintessential old west town, you get sand everywhere. You got your cowboy hats to a certain extent when you see the bounty hunters and stuff. So it’s definitely like that

Jeff Munowitch (41m 21s):
Everybody has their, you know, belt their gun hanging

Jeff Wood (41m 24s):
The gun hanging out outside.

Jeff Munowitch (41m 26s):
Yeah.

Jeff Wood (41m 27s):
Ready for a, ready for a draw at noon.

Jeff Munowitch (41m 29s):
Yes, exactly.

Jeff Wood (41m 31s):
Well so my number five are, are basically two, they’re two cities. The underwater cities of Nabu and Monka. So Nabu is in the Phantom Menace and basically it’s the bubble city where Georgia leads all we want in in Quan to and and I think it’s pretty cool that they live underwater in this kind of, when they first saw it, I was kind of amazed cuz it’s like, I was like, are we underwater? It’s like this light city when you first see it. The CGI was very clear and clean and I think that that was kind of a new thing for, for movies generally. But I just thought that was really cool. But I also wondered like what happens if any of those bubbles burst? Like does the water just kind of fall in? Hmm. And then the other one is Monka, which is the side of a big fight in, in the Clon Wars first couple of episodes of season.

Jeff Wood (42m 13s):
I think four between the mon calamari people and the Corin, which are two species that live on the same planet. They’re both water faring people and the city’s kinda something out of Futurama. Like they have tubes that go between the buildings. But also something cool about that I learned from those episodes was that the buildings were actually also capital ships. Yeah. And so that was really cool too. Now, now the ones the capital ships you see in Return of the Jedi, the Moncho ships and in Rogue One, those are actually built at the shipyards. But they also have the, these kind of capital ships that are part of of the planet cities, which I thought was really cool too. And you connect them by a tube and then you can disconnect them and then they can go in wherever in the universe, the galaxy you

Jeff Munowitch (42m 54s):
Want and defend the planet.

Jeff Wood (42m 55s):
And defend the planet. Yeah. Yeah.

Jeff Munowitch (42m 57s):
I think they also had like swimming tubes, right? Yeah. Like as these species were aquatic and they would swim, it would basically be a launch tube. Right? Yeah. They would push you through, which was really cool too. Yeah.

Jeff Wood (43m 7s):
And if you saw, I think it was one of the mo more recent episodes of, of Mandalorian, they had a Corin and a, a man in love, somebody had absconded with the other and the two have been warring factions for a while. And so I think that Clon Wars episode really set up that episode of the Mandalorian really, really well. Yeah. Which was fun cuz if you, if you, if you read the books and you watch the shows that you’ll get little keys like that every once in a while.

Jeff Munowitch (43m 31s):
Yeah.

Jeff Wood (43m 33s):
Okay. Number four.

Jeff Munowitch (43m 35s):
Yeah. So my number four is Aldera on the Alderon. For me it’s one of those cities that we sh actually should build a little bit more storytelling in Star Wars into, cuz it’s almost like this what people imagine a utopia would be. Right? Like you’re surrounded by green, it’s all very light colors and it’s very peaceful. Weapons have banned from Alderon and like we actually don’t see that much. But what we do see, we like Yeah right. Beautiful forests and like just a lot of, I think there’s a lot of potential in that city and on the aldan in general. But we, in a new hope we lose Aldan. So we don’t get a lot of storytelling on that side. But we can get a little bit beforehand.

Jeff Munowitch (44m 16s):
Yeah. Hoping that they start to do, you

Jeff Wood (44m 17s):
Got a little bit in OB one, you got some in the clone wars. Exactly. You had a lot in the books. So in Leia, princess of Alderon, it was in that book. And then a couple of other Leia books, which is really cool. It, you know what it reminds me of, it reminds me of like the Alps, the fantasy of the German Alps and the Chateau and stuff like that. But also tied with Vancouver BC with all the tall towers, the glass. Yeah. Just kind of a really cool scene and what you would think of as like a, a very clean, like you said, utopian society. I really think it’s a beautiful city, especially as how it’s depicted in, you know, the special additions and, and and also the, the prequel trilogy as well. You know, when when they bring Leia to the planet, you can kind of get a feel for what it’s like a very cool, calm, refreshing place that everybody would wanna go to to relax or in pad me’s case have a summit of sorts.

Jeff Wood (45m 9s):
So I, I like that. My number four are the Mandalorian dome cities from the Clon Wars cartoon and the Mandalorian itself. And then the Mandalorian don’t really see it because it’s blown up to pieces. But you can see the underground parts. But in the cartoon you can see kind of the domes of the cities. They’re almost like geodesic dome places and they’re cool. I mean the only thing that’s kind of weird about them is that there’s so much empty space which makes the jet packs necessary. Yeah. That they have. And so, you know, in a lot of the cartoon scenes, you have people flying around in the jet packs fighting obviously cuz that happens in there. But also you need hover ships. You need all kinds of thi transport modes to get around different buildings in the city because they’re not really connected.

Jeff Wood (45m 53s):
There’s just this empty space where you fall in which you see when Mando goes to basically find the, the living waters, right. He has to go down in his jet pack. And that’s actually how it is in the, in the cartoons when it’s actually a, a full civilization as well.

Jeff Munowitch (46m 8s):
So the question is, did that big space come before the jet packs?

Jeff Wood (46m 13s):
Or were the jet packs invented to deal with the empty space?

Jeff Munowitch (46m 16s):
Yeah. Like did you create the empty space because you had jet packs or did you create jet packs? Cuz you had the empty

Jeff Wood (46m 23s):
Space maybe, right? Yeah. Chicken and egg. Yeah. Or jet pack and egg. Exactly. Alright, number three. Gimme your number three.

Jeff Munowitch (46m 31s):
Yeah. So this is where I’m gonna deviate from like typical cities. The quad drive shipyards intrigues me because basically it’s a ring around the planet. And so you deal with a lot of like urban transport issues with that. Like how do you get to the other side of the planet? Like you can’t go through the planet. So do you have a train that goes all the way around and like how does the transportation of materials and people and communication work between them? I find that really interesting. Again, I feel like there’s just so much potential content and stories that can be told about these different areas. That’s really interesting.

Jeff Munowitch (47m 11s):
And I’d say like, it’s also, I’m pretty sure the only shipyard that like goes all the way around the planet. Right. I think most of the other shipyards are not encompassing a planet.

Jeff Wood (47m 21s):
Yeah. Yeah. It reminds me a little bit of halo, right? Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. That’s kinda what I thought of. Cause it was in, in a lot of the expanded universe stuff, it was in the X-Wing books, right? Yes. Is where it showed up the most. And so there was a lot of, there was actually a lot of scenes there. And I remember looking it up on online when I, where I got a chance, you know, when when the internet started becoming, people started putting their images of what they thought things looked like. Yeah. In the Star Wars universe. And so you could start to see what they would look like. And I think that’s really interesting that kind of like, it’s almost like a space halo around a planet. And you’re right, I mean, trying to get between one side and the other might prove difficult on the planet. And then the planet itself was like supposed to be like a utopia apparently.

Jeff Wood (48m 1s):
So I, I looked up on Wikipedia a little bit more about Cowa and it’s supposed to be a paradise where, you know, basically the engineers went down there and chilled out and then they came back up and they designed ships and built ships around the outside, which is, you know, when we’re thinking about those, those space elevators and things like that, I feel like if you’re gonna build ships that are gonna go through deep space, you’re not gonna do it on Earth or you’re not gonna do it on the planet, you’re gonna do it in the atmosphere outside. And so kind of, this is an example of that. I think I mentioned to you earlier that I thought that the ring of cuffing was something similar, but it’s actually not, it’s actually an asteroid base kind of thing. So it’s not quite the same as like a, a halo around a planet. But yeah, I remember those, I remember them in the X-Wing novels and really thinking that was a cool idea, especially just shipyards generally.

Jeff Wood (48m 46s):
I think those would be a cool place to hang out to see what was going on. See how they’re building things. Yeah, how the verine techs, you’re

Jeff Munowitch (48m 54s):
Going deep cut right

Jeff Wood (48m 55s):
There. Yeah, I went really deep, didn’t I? Built the hyper drives, those types of things. Well, so my number three is Christofis and so is a planet, it’s like a crystalline planet, basically. The whole planet is, it looks like a big crystal. It’s a kind of a bluegreen tint as if it were like a water and you can, you can see it in the Clone war cartoon and in revenge of the sy at the end. I think Kti Muni is defending Christofis when he is killed the Jedi. It’s just kind of a cool looking planet. I don’t know if it actually has even has a backstory. I don’t even know if it’s used a lot. It’s just kind of like a plot device as something kind of as a cool idea that other things happen on, in the Clon horse cartoon. It’s a place where Anakin actually meets a, a Soca for the first time and they go on their first mission.

Jeff Wood (49m 39s):
The buildings are all kind of skyscrapers on a, on a plane and they’re all look like crystals and it’s just kind of a cool scene. I think. So that’s kind of something that I thought about when I was thinking about cities because they are skyscrapers. It is urbanist, but it’s also kind of a weird scene just because of the way things are designed on the planet and what the planet is, which is a big crystal.

Jeff Munowitch (49m 58s):
Yeah, turquoise crystal spires. Yeah. Which is really interesting description of it. Yeah.

Jeff Wood (50m 5s):
Okay. I think we’re at number two now. Yeah.

Jeff Munowitch (50m 7s):
For me, number two, top two cities now is the death star. Okay. Is kind of my, my number two.

Jeff Wood (50m 15s):
I I was thinking about that. You know, before we sat down I was like, well, Desar is almost a ship too, cuz it has a hyper drive and it can go places. But it is a, is a city.

Jeff Munowitch (50m 21s):
You’re true. It’s true. It’s a city for me. Like it’s like a city moon, right? Is the moon. But like again those urbanistic and transportation challenges, especially now that you’re in a sphere that creates some gravity. Right? Right. Like what is prime real estate on the death star? Is that the equa? Like, is that the equator are, are the floors all flat like sliced from top to bottom that the equator, you’re all like standing looking out from the equator? Because I think the spaceship battles, that’s what you see, right? Like you see people looking out like, you know, the bottom of, you know, the South pole of the death star is the bottom of the ship.

Jeff Munowitch (51m 4s):
Yeah. So then like how does Gravity work in it? Like how do you get from prime real estate? Where like, do you wanna be on the top? Like how we think about skyscrapers now, do you wanna be in the middle? But that’s close to like the energy core where the big space lasers gonna blow you up. Like so where is the most important part of the ship? I don’t know. Yeah. Like it is just really interesting and even though you have the books like the Breakdown Cuts, like the children’s books, like Oh this is what everything is and this Testar is like, I don’t know if that’s actually what it would be. No. Like how, how would you actually build that? Like where would you put the command center? I don’t know.

Jeff Wood (51m 39s):
Palpatine’s Throne Room I guess is like, I guess he probably thought about it, right? He probably thought about where things should go and he picked the best spot. That’d be my guess anyways, wherever Palpetine put his throne room is where probably the best spot would be,

Jeff Munowitch (51m 52s):
I guess. So

Jeff Wood (51m 53s):
Yeah, no, it’s interesting question. And also that’s the lore behind, you know, how it got built by the G oceans and, and kind of that history and stuff that they’ve been building out through the books and through the cartoons and now, you know, and or, and those types of things has been really fascinating, even Rogue one. But yeah. And I think you mentioned also transportation on the Death Star. Like how do you get from one side to the other? Is it a train, is it an elevator? Is it a, cuz it seems like it would have to be pretty sophisticated, right? Yeah. And you think about these capital ships that are, like I mentioned the, you know, Darth Vader’s executor class star destroyer, like 11 miles long. That’s like serious serious size. That’s, that’s between here and Lafayette basically 12 I think.

Jeff Wood (52m 34s):
Or maybe is it Oakland’s 12 miles or it’s Lafayette to 12 miles anyways, it’s like it’s going across the bay. Yeah. And it’s a lot. So you’d have to have a train, I think in one of the first Clone Wars episodes ever when season one they had this huge ship where grievous was trying to blow stuff up. You know, they actually had trains that were taking people between sections of this ship because it was so huge. And I imagine that’s how it would work. But yeah, the Death Star as a city is an interesting concept, especially since, you know, in Return of the Jedi, when you see it, it’s partially built. Right. And so

Jeff Munowitch (53m 5s):
You’re thinking about the Death Star too.

Jeff Wood (53m 7s):
Sorry, dust Star too. Yeah. But it’s partially built and so you see all of the kind of the, the edges of it and the cuts and stuff, which I think is an iconic, in addition to the Dust Star itself, that’s kind of an iconic vision of the Dust Star as well. Is that kind of ragged not quite built yet, I’m afraid. This battle station is fully operational when your friends arrive type of situation. Really fascinating. The Dust Star as a city. Okay, my number two is Udap P and Udap P is full of underground cities. Basically they have all these sink holes on the planet. Apparently the, the surface of the planet is winds swept and kind of harsh, but they have these sinkhole because an underwater ocean.

Jeff Wood (53m 48s):
And along the side of the sinkholes people have kind of parked their ships or kind of set up shop. And so you have these sinkhole where, and it’s almost like something you’d see like Mesa Verde or something like that, right? Yeah. Where you have these kind of cliff dwellers, cliff cities. And so all the way down in the sinkhole you see all these kind of, you know, buildings and settlements. And I think that’s a really cool idea for future cities in terms of if you’re gonna go to like another planet like Mars and you know, survive without heat specifically, that might be like one of the ways they do it is dig a hole in a lava tube and you know, build a city in there or a settlement because you’re not gonna do it on the surface necessarily, but you might do it inside.

Jeff Wood (54m 31s):
And so that’s kind of one of the things where I think this, this idea of Udap, which is actually in revenge of the Seth where Obiwan kills grievous.

Jeff Munowitch (54m 38s):
Hello there. Hello

Jeff Wood (54m 39s):
There. Which is one of his now famous lines. I think that’s kind of an example of how we can use science fantasy to inform future kind of settlements if we do ever go to Mars. Yeah. Or other planets. Okay. Number one, I’m gonna do number one first and then I’ll, I’ll leave it up to you. All right, so my number one is Hosni and Prime. And I think I just kind of like put this here because I don’t know if it’s actually a number one. I think I have to defer to your number one specifically, but you know, 30 years after Indoor this Planet Sian Prime served as the headquarters of the Senate because they didn’t want it to be on on the other planet that we’re gonna talk about in a second. And you know, it was featured in the Force Awakens by being blown up

Jeff Munowitch (55m 21s):
Basically.

Jeff Wood (55m 23s):
So the first order blew it to hell, it was a city planet, but basically it leads into what your number one is because I feel like they’re similar cities, but your number one is kind of the giant of them all.

Jeff Munowitch (55m 35s):
Yeah. So my number one, you kind of can’t avoid it as corson. Yeah, right. It is the ultimate city in the Star Wars universe. It’s supposed to be, and it kind of takes that mantle. It’s just a, what is the word for the city that encompasses the whole planet? E

Jeff Wood (55m 51s):
Ecu Monopolist, is that what it was called?

Jeff Munowitch (55m 54s):
I’m very proud of you for attempting that word without looking it up. Yes. I, I think that’s it. And you know, we were talking about the traffic management earlier, but everything about Corson is just urban challenges over urban challenges, you know, happening the lower levels. They’re just completely built over having basically these transport, not even transport tubes, but tubes, holes big enough that go deeper into the core to get to the lower levels. You know, big ships going up and down and you know, there’s just so much, especially like what in the Mandalorian you get to see this tiny little piece of the top of the mountain of the actual planet of Corson and that’s just so strange for people on Corson.

Jeff Munowitch (56m 38s):
You never see it. Yeah. But just this tiny little area and you know, can’t touch it. Yeah. Because that would be, you know, bad sac, but just taking as you know, the top city in the galaxy. Yeah, I mean it has been the center of, in the expanding universe, every major government organization in Star Wars, I think Ossian Prime kind of took that away in the, you know, the rebirth of Star Wars, you know, Disney Star Wars. But in the expanded universe it’s still a corson. Yeah.

Jeff Wood (57m 7s):
You know, it wasn’t even mentioned in the first three movies and it shows up in air to the Empire by Timothy Z, which he mentioned a number of times. And it just kind of, I think caught people’s imaginations and even George Lucas and he then he put it as the center of the universe. You know, he went back and put it back into, you know, when he redid the remastered, his movies to his liking, which you know, people had problems with but whatever, it’s his movies. But yeah, I mean ever since Zon kind of introduced it, it was just kind of this really cool place a planet city, what are you talking about? Like, you mean a whole planet could be a whole city. I just have lots of, I have so many questions like are there rivers still down there or there is like we saw the mountain, we’ve seen rain and weather there, but like where, how is that generated if there’s not like forests and trees and you know, those types of things.

Jeff Wood (57m 53s):
And there’s a, there’s an industrial area where palpatine in the sit hide out how is that, you know, and, and also does it not deteriorate over time this kind of like subsurface levels and and like how do they get replaced and does it rust and just, I have so many questions. Yeah. Like I don’t, I don’t even know where to start, but it’s such a cool idea that you could have a whole city be a planet and just the visuals of it from space too. I mean these rings that show up in the light when you know the sun and that specific solar system is hitting it is just really, really cool storytelling.

Jeff Munowitch (58m 26s):
Yeah. And again, we talk about how many stories you can tell within these environments. I think there’s millions of stories you could be telling about Corson, about every single level of people that are there. Yeah. I think part of the expanded universe also has, they have like snow skiing, they have mountains that they’re snow skiing on like Yeah. Obviously in the lower levels, but there’s snow and how do they get snow? Like I don’t think they’re creating, I think it’s falling. So it’s such an interesting canvas that you can really paint so many stories on. Yeah

Jeff Wood (58m 58s):
And I think they’re starting to do that a little bit too with Andor and with Mandalorian the shows. And they did it in the Clone Wars obviously, where you got a lot of stories there as well talk about the lower levels and the crime syndicates and a lot of those types of things. But it’s just really cool and, and how they design it and, and what they come up with, the ideas and what it looks like. You know, all the neon signs and the clubs and the regular walking street and commerce and all those things and danger from Pickpockets and stuff like that. It’s just really fascinating and you’re right, there’s just so many stories you could tell in that space because it’s so huge. It’s so huge. You can be anywhere in that space and it would be far away from maybe the main story so you can actually maybe invent something new, which is what this cool storytelling is all about.

Jeff Munowitch (59m 40s):
Yeah. And they’re, they’re starting again, right. Which is fantastic. Yeah. The Imperial Bureau of Standards on and or is just like, that’s what you need to run this huge machine.

Jeff Wood (59m 49s):
Right. And you know, the storytelling of people too. Like, you know how, you know he has an uncle who can get him into the Yeah. Into work and things like that. Just funny. Well so that’s our top fives for transportation for cities and I just think I’m just a huge fan of Star Wars. I just like it so much and, and I think that just kind of is an escape, but also kind of a way to dream about future realities outside of our normal day-to-day life.

Jeff Munowitch (1h 0m 16s):
Star Wars can be an escape. It certainly was growing up. And I think it’s an interesting topic to look at through the urban planning and the transportation planning lens. Cuz you see a lot of the same problems in the Star Wars universes you see here. And so you can try to start to imagine how they’ve solved them or not. There’s a lot of times they haven’t either. So I, I really enjoy that process of living in this other world in my mind Yeah. To kind of figure out what’s going on and what could be. Yeah.

Jeff Wood (1h 0m 53s):
Awesome. Well, Jeff, thanks for joining us. We really appreciate your time.

Jeff Munowitch (1h 0m 57s):
Yeah, thank you for inviting me here. And hopefully we’ll do this next year with a different top five.

Jeff Wood (1h 1m 2s):
Yes. Let’s do it next year. And also may the fourth be with you.

Jeff Munowitch (1h 1m 5s):
With you. Yeah. May the fourth be with you.