Winter Exhibition

I just had my second winter Exhibition a few weeks ago and I am going to take some time in this post to reflect on my work.

This exhibition was one of my best, probably because I had a lot more experience than when I did my others. For this exhibition I had to pick a topic relating to Star Wars and make a question out of it, I then had to make a presentation about my topic and show it to a large group of people. For question I decided to pick a topic that I was pretty confident in so I made my question: “Could Star Wars weapons be used in today’s military’s”. When going into this I knew I had a decent understanding of both real weapons and the weapons from Star Wars.

To answer my question I needed to compare multiple examples of similar weaponry from both real life and Star Wars. It didn’t take too long for me to find a whole load of different weapons which I could use as examples for my project. Most of the weapons from Star Wars have some real life counterparts when it comes to their uses. So I put each weapon or vehicle into a certain classification and then began to think of ways to determine which one is better at that specific role. I ended up with three, a rifle, a air superiority fighter and a armoured vehicle. However it took me some time to figure out what makes a good rifle or a good jet? I had to look at when they were used, how they were used and what improvements are being made currently to get a way of listing the weapons.

U.S. Air Force F-35A

After I did my research and double checked all of the stats that I had wrote down I began to work on my actual presentation. I made a poster board with some brief facts and some photos to help people understand what I’m going to be talking about. I didn’t bring a video or an experiment rather I just decided to talk around the three points that were on my poster board. I knew I didn’t need a script as my knowledge of the subject matter allowed me to really just jump around between questions and detailed points on specific parts while still giving out correct information.

M1 Abrams Tank

For the three weapons and vehichles that I chose I had a M4A1 rifle against an E-11, a M4 Sherman tank against a AT AP and a f-16 against a tie fighter.

For the M4A1 against the E-11 I used three different statistics to determine a winner: Range, ammo capacity and projectile type. All of these have good explanations as to why they are the deciding factors as to what makes a difference between these two rifles. I chose range as in our conflicts as well as the conflicts in Star Wars having a longer range rifle allows for a bit more flexibility in certain engagements and can be really beneficial depending on the circumstances. The M4A1 can shoot way further. I chose ammo capacity because a larger magazine is more often than not beneficial, the E-11 wins with a ridiculous 100 round cartridge. Finally there is the bullet type, while you may think that the lasers Star Wars weapons shoot would be more effective, they simply don’t have the speed of a normal bullet. They also cease any internal bleeding upon impact making them not as deadly as a normal bullet. So I think our weapons win the first round.

An M4A1 and a E-11

For my second example I chose to compare two different air superiority fighters. I chose to put the iconic tie fighter against a NATO F-35. These are designed to clear an air space from enemy fighters and bombers. So once again I picked three different factors I think would matter and I put them head to head in an atmosphere the same as ours. First is speed, speed is very important to a jet especially in a dogfight as the engagements take place kilometers away and are normally very quick and one sided. Getting an advantage in positioning over a possible opponent can make all the difference. To my surprise the F-35 actually travels a few hundred kilometers an hour faster than a TIE in atmosphere. Round two involved the armament of the two craft. The F-35 carries multiple missile pods and has a 35mm cannon meanwhile the tie carries proton torpedoes and twin laser cannons. I assumed that both ships would be taken down pretty fast and I was more focused on range. The F-35 wins once again with its missiles being able to travel a few kilometers unlike the TIE’s which don’t travel nearly as far. Finally I looked at countermeasures to attacks to see how they would be able to avoid each other in a direct fight, I concluded that the F-35 was the only fighter to have some kind of defence with its state of the art stealth technology. Yet again our tech wins.

Finally we have the ground assault vehicles. I chose the m1 Abrams against a AT AP. Now this one was difficult as they were pretty even over all when it came to all the category’s I could think of except for one and that is size. In this case bigger is not better and that goes especially for open and urban combat where minimizing exposure is huge. The AT AP lost with its huge height and width giving the victories to real weapons for the third and final time.

Overall I loved doing the research for this project and having discussions and conversations with everyone at the exhibition and I look forward to next year.

So uncreative

jamieb

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