ST-v-SW.Net :: Episode III Lesser Canon, Pt. I and Review

A brief review of the novelization and a look at some interesting technological reports from the novel and the film screenplay.

The Episode III Novelization: A Review

The final chapter of the Star Wars prequel trilogy, Revenge of the Sith, had its novelization released on April 2, 2005. This is a much different sort of novelization than what we've seen before. As author Matthew Stover put it:

In other words, Stover injected a large number of EU references, some of which managed to make it past Lucas. Stover theorized that he trimmed those mostly-older-materials-references because he didn't want them continuing to exist in the EU continuity. While this is an interesting hypothesis, it's more likely that Lucas simply trimmed out what EU he could immediately identify, though he did let Stover keep some of his own material in there. The only EU Lucas reads is the comics, and he exercises some oversight on the games . . . so, any older EU materials that might've filtered to the comics or games would've died at his pen's point.

That said, there are still a large number of EU references in the novel. However, those who do not follow the EU will not be lost. Much as Lucas threw in backstory references like the "maneuver at the Battle of Taanab" or the "nest of gundarks" or Anakin's scar to indicate a more detailed history than simply 'the last movie', Stover's various references wind up providing a similar function . . . letting the audience know that the relationship has changed and deepened due to shared events, but not going into detail about them.

Also, Stover ends up naming and explaining a large number of things, frequently halting the story to ponder some doo-dad that isn't ever seen again. In this, his writing style was somewhat jarring. This can be a good thing in certain contexts . . . "big reveal" moments or writing about combat events . . . but for the most part it was poor, made poorer by Stover's goal of EU-interjection. (Or, to borrow from "The Exploited Universe", it made things crappy.)

Stover's insistence on referring to the EU proved to be a weakness in his storytelling in several respects. First, he tried to refer to the EU so frequently that you'd think the entire Clone War had only involved two or three events (i.e. those which Lucas Licensing managed to create since AoTC). Whenever he needed or wanted to make use of a backstory reference, he mentions someplace called Jabiim or someone called the Ventress. Thus, he mentions these only about fifty times in the novel, leading the reader to wonder if Skywalker had simply been chilling at Coruscant making babies for 90% of the war, save for these few oft-referenced events.

Second, Stover also slipped in his ideas about Mace Windu, originally developed for Stover's EU novel Shatterpoint. Thus, in the midst of a perfectly good storyline moment, be it in the middle of some plot revelation or even combat, Stover would go off on some 'trajectory excursion' about Windu's fighting style or his way of understanding the Force. Indeed, there was no Mace Windu character per se . . . there was simply a guy with a shaved head who walked around looking for shatterpoints.

While an exploration of how different people view the Force differently is potentially interesting and might've worked in a Windu-centric novel, it simply served to distract from this story and the events where it was interjected, especially toward the end. Worse yet, by the end of the novel one doesn't really have a better grasp of the Force at all because of all the mutually-contradictory descriptions. Obi-Wan's interactions with the Force, for instance, are calming and peaceful . . . the Force feels like a lovely luminous cloud with helpful whispers and soft caresses. Even the Dooku-Force feels this way, though from the opposite perspective. The Windu-Force, meanwhile, feels more like a horror-movie, honey-combed spiderwebs of fractures on glass . . . harsh and sharp and obnoxious.

Third, Stover attempts to disregard the movie and claim that the fleet battles at the beginning are occurring near lightspeed, despite the fact that all the vessels are parked over Coruscant. This makes no sense whatsoever to me, but I'd imagine more than a few EU-philes think that the parking-orbit combat makes no sense.

Despite the above, Stover shines in some respects. One of my favorite elements was how he frequently stopped and put in a page or two starting with "this is [so-and-so]" or "this is what it means to be [so-and-so] right now", giving a nice character breakdown. Some might consider that to be more clumsy than introducing or explaining a character via dialogue or in the midst of other narration, but I rather liked it and thought Stover handled it nicely.

Overall, I'd say this is a decent addition to the canon novelizations, but far from the best.

Technology References, Et Cetera

Below, we take a look at some of the more interesting technological references from the novel, with assistance from the screenplay. As this is written prior to the appearance of the complete film, differences may yet crop up with the absolute canon. In the below, screenplay references come from the Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith Illustrated Screenplay e-book, and are colored for clarity, and arranged as close to chronologically as possible.

0. It's official . . . there are no planetary shields in Star Wars. Coruscant is invaded at the start of the opening fleet battle, and then pelted with debris from it, killing uncounted numbers of people over the course of the hours of combat. The only defense against it is the planet's surface defense umbrella, consisting of surface gun emplacements, fighters, and of course the orbiting fleet.

1. Stover makes frequent reference to orbital mirrors around Coruscant. On the other hand, he acknowledges a day-night cycle with sunsets and sunrises, and of course we've seen dark nights on the surface. At times, he seems to suggest that the orbital mirrors are in place simply to enhance the pre-existing daylight, as if Coruscant doesn't usually get enough sun. And, we've frequently seen that shadows on Coruscant are crisp and unidirectional . . . we've even seen the Coruscanti sunset in TPM (and thanks to Stover for giving us the planet name's adjective form). It thus isn't clear what effect, if any, this has on the issue of "Capital Time".

2. The war was going very badly for the Republic . . . and how bad was generally known. Stover refers on page 2 to "the remnants of the Republic", noting that everyone knew how bad things were and that the Grand Army of the Republic has been forced from numerous systems. Still, the public found the idea of an invasion of Coruscant virtually unthinkable.

3. Kenobi and Skywalker are a famous team to the Republic, with their names and qualities known to every child. This is rather unnecessary and doesn't really fit too well on several levels, given the story of RoTS, and how all was apparently forgotten by everyone by the time of the OT.

4. There is frequent mention of blaster ricochet, and at one point there's even mention of chrome being used for this purpose. This conforms nicely to an ANH novelization mention of polished surfaces resisting blaster fire via ricochet. But, we've also seen ricochet off of grass (in TPM) and dirty walls (ANH - Greedo).

5. There is variation between screenplay and novel in regards to nomenclature. In the script, for instance, we have "Republic Attack Cruisers" and "drop fighters". In the book we have "Republic cruisers", with the drop fighters nowhere to be seen.

6. Stover frequently says that Anakin is vaporizing droid fighters. However, the screenplay never uses such language even describing the same event, instead always saying that the fighters explode, along with frequent mention of debris. The film trailer appears to support the screenplay in that regard.

Page	Quote	Commentary
	(The Coruscant Battle)	(In a nice little nod, Anakin's callsign is Red Five.)
1	"The artificial daylight spread by the capital's orbital mirrors is sliced by intersecting flames [...] contrails of debris raining into the atmosphere become tangled ribbons of cloud. The nightside sky is an infinite lattice of shining hairlines that interlock planetoids [...] The shining hairlines are light-scatter from turbolaser bolts powerful enough to vaporize a small town. The planetoids are capital ships."	The battlefield is large enough to be on both sides of the terminator, presumably by a fair margin. Debris from battle rained straight into atmosphere prior to the Separatist landing. And, here we get a little bit of firepower quantification, albeit a somewhat vague one. The Hiroshima airburst, for instance, vaporized very little. However, this does directly contradict the EU claims of multi-gigaton firepower. After all, if a 300 gigaton impact would be big enough to annihilate Long Island, NY and Connecticut with 5000 degree molten material within 10 seconds from impact, then simply vaporizing a small town would be less energetic by orders of magnitude. (According to some quick-and-dirty calculations using the inverse square law, a person could be vaporized at the edge of a fair-sized small US town by a radiant burst of low single-digit megatons.) This also serves to reinforce the idea that the bolts themselves have the power, as opposed to the unusual recent EU claim that the bolts are mere tracers for lightspeed beams.
2	"galvened particle beams"	Stover frequently refers to SW lasers as particle beams. This suggests that they are particle weapons, perhaps even plasma. "Galven", however, is not a real word (though it does sound like "galvanize"), so there is some room to maneuver.
2	"Live via HoloNet, beings watch the Separatist droid army flood the government district."	The Confederacy landed on Coruscant and took Palpatine in the midst of the fleet combat. In other words, no trace of planetary shielding over the center of government. On a lighter note, the EU's idea of TV . . . the HoloNet . . . gets a mention.
3.	Re: Grievous - "The Separatist Supreme Commander is an abomination of nature, a fusion of flesh and droid [...] This half-living creature is a slaughterer of billions. Whole planets have burned at his command."	The SW galaxy would loathe the Borg. As for carnage, the Clone War seems to have it in spades.
13	"Antifighter flak flashed on all sides."	More evidence in favor of flak bursts from the SW laser/turbolaser weapons. Elsewhere, however, there's also mention of shrapnel about (presumably from other sources).
17	"Obi-Wan's starfighter streaked along the curve of the Separatist cruiser's dorsal hull. Antifighter flak burst on all sides as the cruiser's guns tried to pick him up. [...] This low and close to the deck, the cruiser's antifighter guns couldn't depress their angle of fire enough to get a shot [...]"
15	"[Obi-Wan] is forced to fly through a maelstrom of laser flack."
13	""Arfour," he said on internal comm, "can't you do something with the inertials?""	Mention of inertial dampening on starfighters after Obi-Wan had bumped his head. In theory this could be used to argue for maneuvering capabilities above ~10g, if needed.
15	"The droid ships wrenched themselves into pursuit maneuvers that would have killed any living pilot."	I'm not quite sure how many g the fighter ought to be pulling, here, but it should be impressive.
16	"Fire from the pursuing tri-fighters blasted burning chunks from the cruiser's armor."	Republic cruiser hulls can be damaged by starfighter weaponry. Granted, most of us knew this sort of thing, but recent EU (e.g. Saxton) has made claims suggesting the contrary.
16	"the clang of lasers blasting ablative shielding off Obi-Wan's left wing."	There's no mention of actual shields on these fighters . . . just this ablative armor beneath easily-scorched paint. Afterward, a direct hit destroys the wing "control surfaces", though it isn't clear what that is.
19	"One of the control surfaces on his left wing shattered in a burst of plasma."
15	"The DROID DROP FIGHTER hits one of Obi-Wan's wings with a laser blast, and parts of the ship go flying [...]"
17	"Obi-Wan's starfighter streaked along the curve of the Separatist cruiser's dorsal hull. Antifighter flak burst on all sides as the cruiser's guns tried to pick him up. [...] This low and close to the deck, the cruiser's antifighter guns couldn't depress their angle of fire enough to get a shot [...]"	Antifighter weapons are mentioned, and these guns are also capable of creating flak bursts.
20	R2: "SCANNING. LOTS OF ECM SIGNAL JAMMING."	As seen also in ANH.
23	"There's still too much ECM. Artoo can't raise the Temple. I think the only reason we can even talk to each other is that we're practically side by side."	This suggests that there was actually less total ECM in ANH, given that none of the fighters had trouble communicating even with the Yavin base.
23	"["]Switching to clone fighter channel." Anakin spun his comm dial to the new frequency [...] "	The Jedi channel was almost useless, but the clone fighter channel was unaffected by all the ECM. This implies a limited frequency spread for said jamming.
18- 19	"Set S-foils in attack position. The protective ray shield lowers on the main hangar of the TRADE FEDERATION CRUISER, and six new DROID TRI-FIGHTERS emerge and join the DROID VULTURE FIGHTERS heading toward the Jedi. The JEDI STARFIGHTERS extend the stability foils on the ends of their wings."	Here we finally learn what is meant by "S-foils". Given the wing control surfaces and the fact that these are stability foils, there's apparently something very odd about the maneuvering of small vessels in Star Wars. This presumably relates to anti-grav technology in some manner, given that the ANH novel also has a reference to Tantive IV's "main stabilizer fin" for use in landing. And, the only times we've seen S-foils locked into position was during combat near planetary bodies, within the antigrav range. Perhaps it's intended to produce a more stable firing platform somehow? Perhaps it explains the usual non-Newtonianism of SW fighter maneuvering? More analysis is indicated. We also get the statement that ray shields are employed in hangar bays. While this might simply refer to a tactical shield as opposed to a separate atmospheric containment shield, this does help serve to canonically explain the issue of a 9 year old flying into a hangar bay in TPM. On the other hand, this does start to get confusing in regards to the varieties of shields we've seen in Star Wars.
25	"Children on Tatooine tell each other of the dragons that live inside the suns; smaller cousins of the sun-dragons are supposed to live inside the fusion furnaces that power everything from starships to Podracers."	Once again, we have it clearly stated that Star Wars power systems are fusion-based like suns are, much as was seen in the other novelizations. It can hardly get any plainer. This stands in stark contradiction to the claims made elsewhere. EU-philes are attempting to claim that this quote is either non-literal, based on children's delusions, or is somehow supposed to refer to fusion of EU hypermatter, any of which are intended to maintain the claim of ridiculously-large energy generation numbers for SW vessels. Just reading the quote, however, shows that none of these attempted reinterpretations have any basis in reality. Sun-type fusion is the power system of Star Wars vehicles.
28	"Cannon misses from the vulture fighters swooping toward him blasted chunks out of the cruiser's armor."	This time it's a Separatist cruiser. Incidentally, I believe these vulture fighters are the same sort of vehicle seen at Naboo in TPM, though I could be mistaken. Fighters of that type do appear in the RoTS trailers.
26	"A CLONE fighter is hit and explodes, spewing debris. The CLONE PILOT spins off into space."	The trailer shows this event, unless I'm mistaken . . . it looks eerily like a shot from the new Battlestar Galactica, and yet is also reminiscent of the scene with the TIE pilot visible after an asteroid collision destroys his fighter in TESB. Suffice it to say, though, that the pilot being intact limits the possible energies of the event in several respects.
31	"They flashed through the battle, dodging flak and turbolaser bolts, slipping around cruisers to eclipse themselves from the sensors of droid fighters."	Hiding behind ships is effective for/against fighters.
31	"Missiles lack the sophisticated brains of droid fighters; to keep them from colliding on their inbound vectors, one of them would lock onto his fighter's left drive, the other onto his right. A quick snap-roll would make those vectors intersect. Which they did in a silent blossom of flame."	Missiles appear to lack almost any brain at all. (My opponents, not catching the play of the above against the first line of the quote, have been howling bloody murder about the comment above. Thus, they try to defend these idiot missiles. I enjoy that.)
32	"The trailing missile came close enough to trigger its proximity sensors, and detonated in a spray of glowing shrapnel."	As with TPM and other examples, we see that starfighter weapons are sub-kiloton in yield . . . multi-megaton missiles do not spray shrapnel. Note that the screenplay includes missiles which the book does not, making it clear that there are regular missiles and buzz-droid-carrying missiles. Both produce shrapnel/debris, much to the chagrin of my opponents.
28	"The second missile streaks next to Obi-Wan�s Fighter and EXPLODES. Obi-Wan�s ship rocks, and R-4 SCREAMS as the Starfighter rips through the explosion. Debris flies all around them."
29	"The BUZZ DROIDS crawl across Obi-Wan�s ship and start to tear it apart. SPARKS ERUPT where the BUZZ DROIDS break into the wiring."	Electrical wires for power transfer, and hull materials that can be bent by a droid.
32	"Anakin [...] triggered a single burst of his right-side cannon that blasted the two buzz droids into gouts of molten metal. Along with most of Obi-Wan's left wing."	Though already damaged, it seems possible that these starfighter weapons are more powerful than those of the Confederacy. In any case this causes Obi-Wan to bump his head again.
33	"Anakin's starfighter edged closer and with a dip of its wing physically slammed a buzz droid into a smear of metal. The impact jolted Obi-Wan again, pounded a deep streak of dent into his starfighter's hull, and shattered the forward control surface of Anakin's wing."	No wonder Obi-Wan was worried about shrapnel. If this appears in the film, it will be interesting to see what happens there.
34	"The buzz droid spun aft until it was caught in the blast wash of Anakin's sublights then blew away faster than even Obi-Wan's eye could follow."	These ion drives are a heckuva-lot stronger than the one from NASA's Deep Space One.
35	"More than one kilometer from end to end, the vast command cruiser filled his visual field."	This is the Invisibile Hand, flagship of Grievous.
36	"[Obi-Wan's] mind followed the starfighter's mangled circuitry to locate and activate the sublight engines' manual test board. With a slight push, he triggered a command normally used only in bench tests: full reverse. The cometary tail of glowing debris shed by his disintegrating starfighter shot past him and evaporated in a cascade of miniature starbursts on contact with the hangar shield."	We get several interesting facts here. First, there is the circuitry thing, which conforms to the notion that electronics are in use. Further, it makes for an interesting Jedi ability, following the circuitry and then force-pushing some button or switch. It's also interesting that full reverse is not commonly used. We then have debris exploding on contact with the hangar shield. We'd earlier gotten mention of the ray shield at the hangar bay entrance, so this is somewhat odd. If ray shields can do this, then why are there particle shields?
37	"Energy flared from his cannons, and the shield emitters at the right side of the hangar door exploded into scrap."	Not very effective shielding, what with the emitter in plain sight and readily shootable. Apparently these ray shields were serving as atmosphere containment shields, or else both shields dropped at the same time.
37	"Another Force-touch on the manual test board cut power to his engines, but he couldn't trigger the explosive bolts on his cockpit canopy [...]"	There were limits to Obi-Wan's Force control abilities in regards to the fighter.
39	"[...] Obi-Wan is sixteen standard years Anakin's elder [...]" (And, it's 13 years since Qui-Gon's death.)	Obi-Wan was twenty-five to Anakin's nine in TPM. Anakin is now 22, Obi-Wan 38. And, since we see the birth of Luke and Leia in this film, we can establish more facts. In the TESB novel, Luke is said to be barely 23, with the events of ANH occurring three years prior. Luke was thus barely 20 in ANH, and therefore ANH is 20 years after RoTS.
42	"The hand of jointed durasteel inside his black glove clenched [...]"	Anakin's hand is durasteel.
39	"ANAKIN and OBI-WAN use their lightsabers and cut a large circle in the floor. [...] The TWO JEDI cut their way down several floors into a large generator room. Huge EXPLOSIONS outside the ship have caused several large pipes overhead to break, and fluid is spewing everywhere. The Jedi get up and turn off their lightsabers. ANAKIN dips his hand into the fluid and sniffs it. OBI-WAN:�.�.�. fuel. The slightest charge from our sabers will send this ship into oblivion. That�s why they�ve stopped shooting."	The Invisible Hand has been taking serious damage, with fuel pipes breaking open and leaking a liquid fuel. The existence of liquid fuel is altogether strange. We know, for instance, that Star Wars ships are powered by fusion, and we know that fusing hydrogen or isotopes thereof is the best way to go for the greatest energy yields. Room-temperature hydrogen, though, is a gas. While there are liquids one could use which could be processed by a fusion reactor (water, for instance, could be electrolysized to get the two hydrogen atoms), this would not generally be the best way to go about things. The way I see it, there are but two possibilities. 1. Much as hydrogen can be 'stored' in metal hydrides or deuterides (such as lithium deuteride), perhaps SW engineering has found or created a way to store hydrogen by combining it with another material to form some sort of liquid. This would help shave weight and make the material easier to transport, though one ends up with safety concerns much like those relating to gasoline. Given the worry about a "charge" from sabers or charges from the electrical power dischargers, apparently the hydrogen can be fairly easily released as gas by electrical means. or: 2. The fuel in question is not used for power . . . instead the fusion reactors would be fuelled in some more normal manner. In the script, there are power generators nearby which don't seem to fail due to the broken fuel pipes . . . we may presume, then, that they are not fed by them. Thus, this fuel is for something else. The fuel pipes are near the hangars. Given the use of ion drives in fighters, we know that there is something which must be ionized, and thus electrically accelerated out of the tailpipe. It could be this liquid . . . buckminsterfullerenes have been discussed as a candidate for future ion drives, and these can be stored in liquid form via dissolution in benzene (the latter is a skin irritant, and flammable). Alternately, and perhaps more interestingly, the fighters might actually get some rocket thrust from good ole flammable or electrically-ignited liquid fuel of some type, and its drive products, some of which would be positively charged, are then accelerated electrically. This would be a sort of hybrid rocket-ion drive. More research is needed.
42	"ANAKIN grabs the side of the tiny hole and gives it a big yank, ripping a large panel loose revealing a �man-sized� work shaft. They scramble through it as the DROIDS swim closer."	At least some Star Wars ships feature service crawlways akin to Jefferies tubes. Also noteworthy is the somewhat flimsy interior construction of the Separatist flagship. Last but not least, Super Battle Droids can apparently swim. That's unexpected, and is quite interesting. This bears implications about their structure, given that they are apparently bouyant enough to not just have to walk along the bottom.
46	"The fuel hits the SPARKING power discharger, and there is a HUGE EXPLOSION. [...] A GREAT EXPLOSION and a flaming gas cloud spray out of the side of the Federation Cruiser.[...] A large bulge appears in the wall around the sealed hatch as the EXPLOSION hits. OBI-WAN jumps back, then stands amazed."	Whatever the fuel is, it is apparently difficult to ignite thermally, given that it has to touch the sparking discharger before it goes. When it goes, however, it goes big. Interestingly, the flagship's interior survives a blast which the exterior hull does not. We are told in the script of a work shaft through which the Jedi crawl, but the implication isn't that they are far from the hull. Only the film will tell, however . . . these scenes do not appear in the novelization.
57- 58	"ARTOO activates his oil hose and sprays the SUPER BATTLE DROIDS. The SUPER BATTLE DROIDS slip on the oil." "ARTOO ignites his arm rockets and shoots out of their grip, spraying them both with oil and setting them on fire. The SUPER BATTLE DROIDS slip and slide until they fall, smoldering. ARTOO rolls away."	R2-D2 defeats two Super Battle Droids with a simple oil hose and fire.
44	"The vast semisphere of the view wall bloomed with battle. Sophisticated sensor algorithms compressed the combat that sprawled throughout the galactic capital's orbit to a view the naked eye could enjoy: cruisers hundreds of kilometers apart, exchanging fire at near lightspeed, appeared to be practically hull-to-hull, joined by pulsing cables of flame. Turbolaser blasts became swift shafts of light that shattered into prismatic splinters against shields, or bloomed into miniature supernovae that swallowed ships whole."	This is an interesting claim on Stover's part, but ultimately futile. We see the exterior shots in the film, and they correspond to the "enjoy"-able view. Also: 1. Ships at lightspeed do not remain in planetary orbit unless they are circling madly. 2. Hundreds of kilometers as a combat range is mentioned, as opposed to the millions or billions of kilometers from Saxton. 3. Interesting "prismatic splinters against shields". Reminds one of that hit on Tantive IV in ANH. In any case, I have a feeling that the "view wall" is actually a "window" in the film, and will probably be very similar to the bridge window from the same ship.
45	"Why does [Palpatine] remain on this ship at all? He should be hidden. He should be guarded. We should have had him outsystem hours ago!"	Grievous indicates that the orbital battle has been raging for hours by this point.
51	"The new government . . . This had been their star of destiny for lo, these many years. A government clean, pure, direct: none of the messy scramble for the favor of ignorant rabble and subhuman creatures that made up the Republic he so despised. The government he would serve would be Authority personified. Human authority. It was no accident that the primary powers of the Confederacy of Independent Systems were Neimoidian, Skakoan, Quarren and Aqualish, Muun and Gossam, Sy Myrthian and Koorivar and Geonosian. At war's end the aliens would be crushed, stripped of all they possessed, and their systems and their wealth would be given into the hands of the only beings who could be trusted with them. Human beings. Dooku would serve an Empire of Man."	Dooku of Serenno ponders the future . . . a racist Empire, an Empire of Man, in whose very genesis the destruction of alien power was arranged. Once the Senate was swept away in ANH, all the leaders of the Empire were human. Every officer and soldier of the Empire was human. Now we officially know why. Fascinating. Incidentally, this also suggests that Serenno was colonized, along with planets like Tatooine (as told in ANH) and Naboo. Little wonder the Gungans didn't like the surface-dwellers.
64	"Maul had been an animal. A skilled animal, but a beast nonetheless."	Dooku's opinion of his predecessor.
73	"[...] the Sith Lord spent lavishly of his reserve of the Force merely to meet these attacks without being cut in half [...] Each parry cost Dooku more power than he'd used tho throw Kenobi across the room [...] Force exhaustion began to close down his perceptions, drawing his consciousness back down to his physical form, trapping him within his own skull [...]"	This suggests that the Force is like an ATM and you can only make so many withdrawals at a time until you reach your limit. Presumably better-trained Force-users spend this more efficiently and thus are more powerful . . . perhaps they are even capable of having more reserve or making larger individual withdrawals. In any case, this explains why raising an X-Wing left Yoda weary.
74	"[...] his blade batted every blast back at the droids, whose mirror-polished carapace armor deflected the bolts again. Galvened particle beams screeched through the room in blinding ricochets."	More galvened particle beams, along with more ricochets. This is not the chrome example previously referred to, but does suggest that any old mirror-finish item has a fair chance of deflecting a blaster.
74	"[He] slammed into the wall so hard the hydrofoamed permacrete buckled and collapsed onto him."	The walls of the ship are composed of a lightened version of permacrete. We later learn (p. 86) that it is "permacrete, hydrofoamed to reduce weight." In other words, weight is a concern on Star Wars warships.

Episode III: The Lesser Canon

The Episode III Novelization: A Review

Technology References, Et Cetera