Has anyone heard why the New Republic wasn't based on Coruscant? I'm guessing they either wanted to avoid anything Prequel related (even though most people liked the planet) or they didn't want to blow it up for some future use. Has anyone read anything about it?
Apparently the capital of the New Republic and the the seat of the Galactic Senate isn't fixed. It rotates and every so often a planet is voted upon to host the senate and effectively be the capital for some period of time. Hosnian Prime happened to be the capital when it was destroyed.
Ok I can accept that. I was still hoping Coruscant would pop up in the movie. But man that's a bummer that you got blown up based on a rotating capital!
that captial planet rotating thing is stupid,considering the republic was on coruscant for 1,000 years or more. I'm guessing your idea is moreright...they didn't want to blow up coruscant......despite makingthe new planet look like it visually.
Is that true? Where was that?
From Aftermath, Shattered Empire, the Visual Dictionary, and a couple other sources, the reconstructed gist is roughly... The Empire didn't quit after the Battle of Endor. Palpatine had contingency plans, among them the Scouring of Naboo (where he was from). The Rebels managed to thwart that. But at that point it was treason to repeat the "Rebel propeganda" that the Emperor was dead. A few months later, the Empire was starting to hurt. They were looking more and more to the Rim for planets they could secure or intimidate into supplying what they needed to keep fighting. The Rebels declared a New Republic, with the capitol on Mon Mothma's homeworld of Chandrila. There were several reasons for this. The Empire still held Coruscant, and even if they didn't, there'd be a strong Imperial Loyalist presence for some time, what with billions of inhabitants. It had also become a seat of corruption over the last several centuries at least, what with the waning of the Old Republic and decades of Empire.
The Alliance wanted to start fresh with the New Republic. Part of this was setting up the rotating capitol idea, so that the sort of decay that led to the demise of the Old Republic might be prevented or slowed. And part of this was working toward eliminating the Rebel (now Republic) fleet. The Empire had ruled through force, and the new government didn't want even the perception or suspicion that they might do the same.
About a year after the Battle of Endor, the most staunchly Imperialist forces had regrouped at Jakku, which housed a secret Imperial research facility at that time. They fought a last-stand battle over the planet, with crippled Imperial ships using their tractor beams to drag Republic ships down with them. The Imperial loss at Jakku broke the back of the Imperial holdout, and they signed the Galactic Concordance that included strong and specific disarmament policies and reparations. Most acquiesced, but the hardline loyalists trashed the research facility and fled into the Unknown Regions.
There are a lot of gaps in all that that are going to continue to be filled in over the next few years, but we've got a scaffold already in place.
Here's an interesting thought the senate and the chosen capital got turned into a firecracker but of course the new republic will want to reform it however....what if nobody wants the damn thing on their world? they've had forty odd years of one version of the Empire or another showing up and blowing planets up so maybe people will be less then warm on the idea of pasting a target on their planets anymore.
Things could become really unstable the next film.
Well, we've seen plenty of demonstration that they're capable of realtime holographic virtual conferences. Why not just have all the senators stay on their homeworlds and teleconference? The "capitol" is just the homeworld of whoever happens to be Chancellor at the time.
My big beef with all this... *gestures to everything above in this post* ... is that it's all in the ancillary material.
Some screen time needed to be spent on it. Not much, but enough. Also, the visual dictionary has Maz's planet and the Republic capitol further apart than we are from any of the individual stars we can see in the night sky, but somehow they were able to see Hosnian Prime and its moons get wiped out like Takodana was only a little further away than we are from our moon. *sigh* Nice to see JJ repeating
that mistake from Trek'09 -- where Delta Vega was closer to Vulcan than our moon is to us, so Spock could have front-row seats for the planet's destruction.
I have no problem with systems close together or hyperspace transit times being short, but a few of the visuals in TFA had things
way too close together. Why didn't we see the blast of this "hyperspace" weapon tunnel into hyperspace? We just saw it poke along through space, sublight, until it hit Hosmian Prime... along the way, clearly visible -- and still sublight -- in the sky over Takodana, which wasn't even on a line between Ilum and the Hosnian system. And while Starkiller Base is supposedly mobile, we got no indications of that from the film. Did the Ilum star have enough mass for two shots? Or did they actually travel to another system to suck down that sun for the second shot?
I know a lot needed to get crammed into this film to get us all up to speed, but too many things got left out that needed to be there...
--Jonah
