Does Star Wars G canon always beat C canon?

Leland Chee (Keeper of the Holocron, and thus pretty much the main authority on canon) confirmed that this did indeed happen.

(explaining how canon database works) ... Source A contradicts Source B. More likely than not, if Source A is from the films and Source B is from the EU, we'll use Source A. Of course, there can always be exceptions which is why the case-by-case determination is always in effect no matter what the Sources." (src)

When pressed for details on the same thread, he indicated this (Tasty Taste is his ID on that starwars.com forum):

> I'd be interested to know what circumstances would allow the EU to overthrow the films...


Well, you've got the Boba Fett thing. Then there's stormtroopers where there's a bunch of sources released prior to Ep2 that said that they were human recruits. Hence we established that while most stormtroopers are clones, there are some that are recruits.

Why are there humans in the Star Wars Universe?

There's one hypothesis that IMHO makes the most sense (it's one of several that have already been mentioned). On the other hand, making sense is not necessarily a prerequisite for accuracy in the Star Wars universe.

That hypothesis is that some unknown alien species, for some unknown reasons, brought humans from Earth to Coruscant in the distant past, where they built a civilization and spread out to the rest of the Star Wars galaxy.

In our reality, there is ample evidence that humans evolved independently here on Earth. There's been plenty of fiction that has humans being introduced on Earth from elsewhere, but that doesn't fit in with the known fossil record and our genetic similarity to all the other species on Earth.

In the Star Wars universe, the origin of humans is unknown. The most widely accepted theory is that they evolved on Coruscant and spread out from there, but that's difficult to verify; Coruscant is so over-built that archaeology is impractical.

According to this timeline, Coruscant was completely covered by its principal city 100,000 years before the events of Episode IV. Anatomically modern humans appeared about 200,000 years ago. That leaves 100,000 years to be split between (a) time for the human colonists on Coruscant to build their planet-covering city, and (b) time to account for the "a long time ago" in the opening credits.

Humans on Coruscant developed an interstellar civilization much more quickly than Earth humans have, but that could be explained by the influence of whoever brought them to Coruscant.

This assumes that "a long time ago" is relative to our current time. If instead it's relative to the time of the story's hidden narrator, we have a lot more flexibility. Future Earth humans could develop interstellar, and then intergalactic travel, and establish a colony on Coruscant without outside help. Some disaster could then cause them to lose their historical records; as they recover, they build a new interstellar civilization, the one that we see in the movies.

Pulling some numbers out of the air, we could have:

• 1977: Humans on Earth watching science fiction movies.


• 2200: Humans have developed interstellar and intergalactic travel.


• 2500: Humans colonize a planet that will later be called Coruscant.


• 3000: Human civilization on Coruscant goes through a crisis that results in a loss of historical knowledge.


• 10,000: Human civilization on Coruscant has recovered and built a single dense city covering the entire planet.


• 110,000: Battle of Yavin


• 200,000: The civilization that (re)started on Coruscant has now spread to other galaxies. Someone produces an epic historical drama about the events that happened 90,000 years previously, "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away".


• 200,100: The script for this drama falls first into a black hole, then into the hands of George Lucas on 20th century Earth.


• 201,977: Contact with Earth is re-established. Descendants of Coruscant humans see the original Star Wars. The temporal paradox causes the Universe to vanish in a puff of logic.

Note that some of this is just a little bit speculative.

star trek - Are the Borg aware of the Q?

Is the Borg Collective aware of the Q continuum?

There is no canon that answers this question directly.

Certainly, it's possible; however, this was never explored in any of the series' that I am aware of.

The Borg would certainly have to real use for the information as they are not able to assimilate a member of the Q Continuum.

star trek - Why don't Starfleet Officers wear protective gear when going abroad?

Personal shields we see

Personal shields are not outside the realm of technological knowhow in-universe. La Forge creates a subspace isolation field (TNG:Timescape), however, this also reveals the flaw in that technology, they appear to be fairly weak fields (La Forges is easily disrupted by the alien).

The other place we see personal shielding is in TNG:Lessons where Lt. Commander Daren used Thermal Deflector Units to protect the away team from the firestorms on Bersallis III. Again, even though the deflector units were reenforced with energy from hand phasers two team members were still killed when their unit failed.

(Noted below is also Alt-Spock's use of thermal protection armor in the volcano)

It's about the power

These examples point to a plausible reason we don't see personal energy shields: power consumption. Generating a field may be easy but generating a field sufficient enough to defend against highly focused energy weapons or other harms is difficult.

What about the Borg? It's quite plausible that the Borg's advanced technology and cybernetic components allow them to generate the necessary energy to support such technology (it's worth noting that the Borg also don't employ energy weapons in close combat situations so there may be a tradeoff).

In all honesty, though, it seems quite likely that the weight and complexity of such personal armor or shielding would be worthwhile when combat was expected. However, we never get to see such "infantry" style combat in Star Trek.

Did we mention "We come in peace?"

Our Trek heroes are explorers, not soldiers, so to dress in heavily armed attire would be uncharacteristic. It's hard to believe "we come in peace" when you're wearing heavy armor. Klingons, however, are soldiers that prefer hand-to-hand combat so their armor is entirely appropriate.

This would likely be reflected in the type of technology researched and implemented so it would have less of a presence in the universe. It seems likely that Starfleet would have learned the lesson our current Earth has not yet learned. Highly militarized personnel tend to result in more violence and escalation of volatile situations.

The Starfleet Pajamas may be a lot of things but they certainly wouldn't feel intimidating.

Pattern Enhancers and their variable use

The questioner also mentioned the humble pattern enhancer, often use for variable purposes within the Trek universe. It does not seem to have been used for shielding purposes (although it, or a substantially similar device, was used in Time's Arrow to allow phase shifting in the alien cavern).

Portable Energy Weapons > Portable Energy Shields or Physical Armor

In short, your supposition seems accurate: Energy weapons commonly employed within the Trek Universe make it difficult to provide effective individual shielding (physical armor or energy shielding).

This actually might make a little "sci-fi science" sense, if you consider that even the Borg had to adapt to the energy weapons being used to effectively block them. It seems likely that in order to block all of the possible variations of energy weapons would have proven too difficult or energy intensive.

I'd like to add a small caveat: it does seem likely that special militarized units within Starfleet would find it worthwhile to find specialized implementations of energy shielding (a "burst shield" or a "assault shield" like the literal police/military shields). However, these would seem to be specialized requirements and outside the realm of normal training within the peaceful exploration mission of Starfleet.

game of thrones - DragonBone usage in the GoT/aSoIaF universe

People do use bone for armour / decorative armour; see Rattleshirt, albeit he uses regular (human and animal) bones.

It would be a matter of workability and accessibility.

Dragonbone is highly sought after (especially by the Dothraki):

Dragonbone bows are greatly prized by the Dothraki, and small wonder. An archer so armed can outrange any wooden bow.
^{-A Song of Ice and Fire: A Game of Thrones, Chapter Thirteen (Tyrion II).}

And apparently Magister Illyrio is a dealer in Dragonbone:

Dany said nothing. Magister Illyrio was a dealer in spices, gemstones, dragonbone, and other, less savory things.
^{-A Song of Ice and Fire: A Game of Thrones, Chapter Three (Daenerys I).}

Bear in mind though, that the last Dragons (before Dany's) died in 153AC (over 100 years ago) and as such is a rare commodity, which is why you wouldn't see them around.

Targaryens were renown for their ownership of Dragons, but I couldn't see them turning their dead Dragons into armour / weapons. We see that most of the known Targaryen Dragon skulls were kept in the Throne Room (and most recently in the Cellars). So in a way they were honoured as prized possessions - not likely to be made into tools.

star trek - How did Data so easily access and control the Borg ship?

Several points:

• A wise command structure does not apply commands globally by default, but locally. (And this, alone, is likely the answer.)




• Sometimes commands can have default settings. For instance, in Unix, the command "rm *" applies to the current directory, not to every directory on the drive. It also doesn't descend into subdirectories unless you tell it to.




• There would be propagation delays. There was one cube in the Alpha Quadrant (or one that we know of -- maybe there were a couple back-up ones that got blown up without our knowledge). The others were far away, so the command would have taken time to reach them.




• With any networking system, it's prudent to not always trust something just because it came from another node without verifying it. Think of it in today's terms: Something might come into your LAN from another LAN that you trust, but it's still possible it was from malware, so it's still wise to scan it for issues. Other cubes, or the collective as a whole, probably scans incoming communications from members to be sure they're valid and free of malware.

Think of how vulnerable the Borg would be if a command like "sleep" were to work on the entire collective at once. Such a command, like many others, would work only on a local level by default. (Or, as a safety, it could be that such commands would never work globally and would have to be activated on each individual ship separately.)

The question is, more likely, why it didn't effect Locutus' subgroup (or unimatrix, or whatever the proper term is) only. But since Data was gaining access to the command structure, it is very likely that along with finding the commands, he was also able to find out how to pass parameters with it, such as, "sleep --range=cube."

star trek - Did The Doctor on the Starship Voyager ever explicitly reference memories or knowledge from the EMH Diagnostic utility grafted into his programming?

My interpretation of that episode is that they dumped the diagnostic program to make space for further expansion of the Doctor's program. So the diagnostic program was entirely wiped, making it impossible for the Doctor to access any part of it. They "grafted" the space used by the memory onto the Doctor's program. Think of it as a Linux file system. It is possible to limit the size of a file at any value you wish, as opposed to the traditional view of Windows file systems where you can keep on adding files or expanding existing files until the disc runs out of space. So let's say that the Doctor's file was 20% of Voyager's total storage and that the diagnostic program was another 20%. The remaining 60% is for other systems such as propulsion, astrometric data, replicator patterns, holodeck programs, music, literature, personal files, crew logs, etc. Each system has a maximum allocation so they can't simply wipe out most of the computer's memory to make way for the Doctor. A lot of the Doctor's computer memory (as opposed to his own memories) is allocated to behavioural and medical diagnostic subroutines. Only a part is used for his own memories and experiences which is why adding more memory significantly extended his running time. If he was left running for long enough the problem would eventually recur.