C-3PO to Han Solo in Empire: Sir, I don’t know where your ship learned to communicate, but it has the most peculiar dialect.
this isn’t gone into at all but I like the idea that the Falcon, bashed together from illegal aftermarket parts, familiar with all corners of the galaxy but with no real home, speaks her own patois that works reasonably well everywhere rather than learning several formal machine languages (I imagine there are relatively few of those compared to the range of lifeforms’ languages, but still)
3PO is fluent in over six million forms of communication, so he’s surely familiar with various pidgins, creoles, and so on, but if the Falcon’s sort of created one for herself then obviously translating it will be a more involved job
protocol droids probably have algorithms for parsing pidgins and creoles by identifying the parent languages and predicting how the language will behave based on the parents’ vocabulary/grammar and the general processes of creole formation
I like the idea of the Falcon getting impatient with 3PO because he keeps asking her to repeat herself and she’s like who the hell are you and why can’t you understand plain talk when you hear it
revisiting this thought: imagine Rey, who has met about a thousand different droids and computers and learned to speak whatever language they speak
she starts talking to the Falcon’s computer because something is broken, again, and it takes her all of five minutes to pick up the peculiar dialect because it’s similar to one common among smugglers’ ships she’s repaired, though it has a few idiosyncracies that are new to her (in part because it’s honestly just older than most things she’s run into)
soon enough instead of plugging in a droid to find out what’s wrong she’s just yelling at the Falcon from upside down in a compartment full of sparks and the Falcon is insulting her repair skills and insinuating some really unpleasant things about her parentage and Rey’s like JUST TELL ME WHERE THE SHORT IS ALREADY YOU CAN TRASH-TALK ME WHEN YOUR CIRCUITRY’S NOT SETTING ME ON FIRE
The Millennium Falcon Satellite Dish
The Millennium Falcon Satellite Dish
Here’s a thing I noticed while watching the Star Wars trailer yesterday. The Falcon has a new satellite dish. Below you can see what it used to look like (taken from A New Hope) and what it looks like in The Force Awakens.
It’s completely different At first I thought “that’s a weird thing to change, but OK, the Falcon got an upgrade since Return of the Jedi.” And then I remembered:
Oh right. It neededa new satellite dish.
I like how Han was like, “Well, since that last one almost killed me, maybe I’ll try one with a lower profile.”
From The Mary Sue’s chatroom:
<Susana> but the thing is, han wasn’t even flying it when this happened
<Susana> Lando was
<Susana> so now I’m imagining the conversation where Han’s reaction isn’t that lando is alive or that the death star is gone or the emperor is dead or anything else
<Susana> YOU BROKE MY SHIP
<Susana> Lando: Han, I whacked off a totally superficial part of it –
<Susana> Han: MY SHIP
<Susana> Lando: – while I was DESTROYING THE DEATH STAR –
<Susana> Han: I JUST BOUGHT THAT SATELLITE DISH
<Susana> Leia: Han, the Rebels can get you a new dish.
<Susana> Han: MY SHIP
<Susana> finally chewbacca picks him up and starts petting his head
In fairness, Lando DID say, “Not a scratch”.
