Um, forget about sparks, how come theres fire(s), sparks, smoke, and sound while in space? Or for example, in RotS when General Grievous' ship gets ripped apart its starts to fall "down" in space? Gotta love gravity in space eh?
I guess fire and smoke could be contributed to the atmosphere that was previously inside the ship. It wouldn't last more than a second, but that could be an explanation, of sorts.
I would assume that they were fighting relatively close to the planet that the ship crashed on. So, when the ship lost power to the engines, it started to succumb to the planet's gravitational pull.
What bugs me about space physics, especially in RoTS, is those little buzzer droids. After R2 shoots them in the face, why do they slide off the back of the ship? There's no air resistance to push them backwards. They should remain exactly where they are until the ship changes direction.
Now, back to shields; shields should act as energy dissipators. It takes the energy, whether an energy blast or kinetic energy, and spreads it over the surface area of the shields, thereby minimizing the effect of the energy impact.
But, why does shield strength decrease when they get hit? That doesn't make any sense. The shield is generated by some sort of internal power source. TV/movie writers treat energy shields like an egg shell of sorts, like it has a finite coverage. If you shoot at the egg shell, it has now lost coverage in that area and shield strength is down 30% - what? It should be a continuously generated shield - always at 100% until the power source is either destroyed or there is no fuel left to power the generator.
It's like saying that since your car only has half a tank of gas left, it will now only generate half of it's potential horsepower, or will only go half as fast as if it had a full tank.
-Fred
