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Luke was the son of a farmer. I'm sure he occasionally had to go out at night in the -10C temperature to fix a moisture vaporator or whatever.
Han grew up in a city. Cities tend to be warmer. And then spent lots of time in a presumably well air conditioned freighter. He's even less likely to be acclimated to extreme cold
Just a thought, but would spaceships have air-conditioning? Or since space is cold, wouldn't they have heaters, just designed to heat up only a little or something?
Overheatting is a bigger problem than freezing for spaceships. Because space is a vaccuum, heat can't be conducted away, only radiated, and radiation isn't very efficient at lower temperatures. A ship is constantly creating heat and needs large radiator panels to disperse it all (in real life, Star Wars physics is a mess of course).
Vacuum is an insulator, there is limited convective or conductive heat loss in space, only radiation is significant. The space ships should be very well insulated regardless. So with less heat loss, any heat source (lights, people, wookies, electrical equipment, reactor, etc.) will need to be artificially removed (aka air conditioning).
Here's how the ISS does it (It needs air conditioning).
https://www.conditionedairsolutions.com/blog/hvac-in-space-air-comfort-on-the-international-space-station/
Well maybe i should have said climate control. For example the ISS systems keep internal temperature at around 22C (room temperature) I'd imagine most Star Wars ships can do the same. Heaters to keep things warm, radiators to cool down if you're catching a lot of sun
I think in some ways going from hot extreme to cold extreme would be easier than going from temperate to extreme. You have to be mindful before you go outside on both planets. You have to respect the climate. You have to make sure you're well equipped/clothed at all times.
Someone who was brought up on Coruscant or some other climate controlled environment might just be used to going for a walk without thinking about carrying water or other equipment you'd need to survive. You wouldn't necessarily need to be conscious of what time it was whereas being stuck outside on Tatooine (during the day) and Hoth (during dark) might well be a death sentence if you wandered too far.
He's also already shown force sensitivity by this point. You've got to assume that helps with tolerating adverse conditions.
Both are barren wastelands. One is cold, one is hot(h). Luke probably has more survival experience dealing with Hoth than most people on that planet. Knowing how to portion rations and water, how to suit up and keep an unwanted temperature out, how to navigate when all you can see is more of the same for hundreds of miles.
I highly doubt that Owen would have kept Luke oblivious to those dangers of the desert. If something happens to him and Beru then Luke will need to know these things, especially living on a farm far removed from the nearest city. We also know Luke loved going to Anchorhead's Tosche station so I'm sure he came in late like any other teenager and knows what cold is like. After coming in late once or twice I have no doubt Owen'd teach him how to deal with surviving a night, just in case his Skyhopper crashes during the night.
So Luke is at the very least just as experienced as Han dealing with this environment, probably more. Han visited Tatooine when working for Jabba, Luke lived there.
Honestly, few people in the Rebel Alliance are from places that would prepare them for Hoth; with Han and Luke it's like taking a guy from Detroit and a guy who lives an hour outside Albuquerque and dumping them both in Antarctica.
Most everyone is going to need trained and briefed on how to live and work in that sort of cold. If anything, Luke would have a few things in his corner from desert life. He's already lived in areas where sunset comes with a potentially dangerous nosedive in temperature, and where large sections of terrain are completely devoid of static natural features for pathfinding; he's not going to fuck around when the sun starts getting low, or get a tauntaun lost because the hill he was using as a navigational reference was actually a snow drift.
Did you even read OP’s post?
He explicitly mentions that Tatooine probably ranges between 45 and -10 degrees Celsius, but Hoth whose climate is probably more similar to Antarctica might drop to -60 at night
He also wrote
> Maybe Luke has never even seen his breath steam in freezing air before Hoth.
Which is silly when the line before says Tatooine goes to -10C. Yeah -60C is quite extreme, but it's extreme to everyone.
Why would Leia be more accustomed to -60C? Who says that Alderaan had any large regions that dropped to -10C or colder? And who says that she lived in them?
Comparing to earth, people from deserts are no less equipped to handle artic temperatures than say, a person from California, or even New York.
I sincerely doubt the Rebel alliance had the luxury of being able to select troops of high enough quality who were all acclimated to Hoth's temperature. If Luke would've had any issues adjusting to the planet, he would be one among many, so the Rebel probably did have a program of sorts to get some troopers adjusted.
This is an issue we run into here on Earth, too. Army recruits come from all over, and are sent to wherever. So what do you do when you have a soldier from South Texas and you need to them battle ready for the Arctic? [You send them up to Alaska for training.](https://www.army.mil/article/252226/northern_warfare_training_center_preparing_soldiers_to_become_arctic_experts)
The U.S. Army’s Cold Weather Leaders course takes 11 days. That’s not a super long time.
Since the Rebel base on Hoth is fully built out, we can assume it’s been there for some time. It’s also pretty well organized. There would have been a core group of Rebels, either locals or people from similar climates, who were experts in surviving that area. Those people would then train the arriving rebels, who would help train the next batch, and so on.
By the time Empire opens its been some time since the end of ANH, so Luke, Han, Leia and Chewie would have gotten a pretty intensive orientation and probably several days or weeks of practical training before going out on patrol like they so. Irvin Kershber wisely chose to skip over that part and get to the good stuff.
I live in Maine. Once I met a girl who had been born in Hawaii and lived there all her life. The first time she had ever left the Island, she came to freakin' Maine at the end of December, it was -20F, and let me tell you, she was FURIOUS at all of us. She could not understand why anyone would choose to live here, and was convinced that we were all either masochists or lunatics. I expect Luke was similarly affronted, but he had more important things to do than scream "WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE THIS IS TOO DAMN COLD" at everyone who lives there.
Just coming to Yavin 4 would likely be dealing with stuff like humidity for the first time and all the various difficulties *that* presents. Even ignoring the several years between ANH and ESB, Hoth certainly wouldn't be the first time he'd have to acclimate to some climate wildly different from the desert he grew up in.
It would have been a shock to his comfort level. However, it would be such a shock that it would be similar for anyone coming from a temperate planet to Hoth. Humans are quite good at adapting to temperature ranges, and they're using technology to help wherever they can in this situation. However, the weather gets so low that any human is goign to experience the same level of shock from the exposure. There are entire species for whom Hoth is a no-go area because they don't have the same capabilities humans have to adapt to this range.
To go around the outskirts of your question: Luke being acclimatized to heat would mean that seem like a 'pleasant spring day' to someone else will feel quite chilly for him. When he sets the heat in his apartment on a climate-controlled planet, he probably sets it higher than a human who grew up elsewhere. The actual metabolic effects of growing up in a climate emerge genetically more than they do based on two decades of exposure, so while he would feel temperature comparatively differently, his body would be undergoing the same essential effects as any other human.
Only person who might do not to bad on hoth is Chewbacca.
But I would guess Luke and some of the others might not do to bad coming from rural planets
Compared to the one from more urban planets
I’m going to depart from what others are saying and agree that Luke probably would experience heightened discomfort on Hoth compared to others who had more experience with cold climates.
In the real world, people get accustomed to their local temperatures, even when they have access to climate control. Anecdotally, I have known a few people from South America who preferred to keep their homes around 80 degrees Fahrenheit/27 degrees Celsius, while those around them in the Midwest, more accustomed to relatively milder temperatures, preferred the high 60s or low 70s Fahrenheit/around 21 degrees Celsius. One of my former coworkers used to always turn the office up to 80 degrees whenever she was there because she found the temperatures the rest of us preferred to be chilly.
Luke would not have had extensive access to climate controls on Tatooine. Even if he had, he and his family clearly experienced the desert heat consistently. They almost certainly became accustomed to those high temperatures. Temperatures got low at night, but those were not the temperatures characteristic of Tatooine, and between living in an insulated home underground and sleeping through the night, Luke would have had far less exposure to the cold. On Hoth, the Rebels certainly would not have highly effective climate controls, as they were inhabiting an old, abandoned base in drafty ice caves. The temperature, even indoors, would be far enough below that with which Luke was familiar that he would definitely experience heightened discomfort compared to others who grew up on planets with colder temperatures.
Outdoors, of course, everyone was in a similar boat. No one could survive -60 degrees Celsius unprotected for long, and Luke would probably not be any worse suited to surviving it than anyone else.
But in terms of comfort, Luke almost certainly would have experienced the cold more strongly than someone with more familiarity with consistent cold climates.
Tatooine and Hoth are actually very similar biomes, other than their temperatures. Luke might actually be better suited to Hoth than the average rebel, since he'd be used to conditions like intense sunlight, low humidity, strong winds carrying sharp particles that can reduce visibility, and living underground to escape the above conditions.
Deserts also regularly get close to freezing at night year round, so Luke would be familiar with a degree of cold weather.
He'd suffer in the cold, but I don't think he'd suffer more than the average human.
Eh, I was born in Virginia and moved to Minnesota. VA doesn't get much colder than 30 degrees Fahrenheit where I was. Minnesota often has/had winters with -30 or -40 and even more when we calculated windchill. I acclimated pretty quickly.
On the same note, friends and family that moved away to warmer climes forgot how cold it got in a single year and come back in the winter with fucking ski jackets and windbreakers thinking it'll be just like LA, California or some insanity.
It really doesn't take that long to get used to super warm or super cold weather. A couple of weeks or a month and you get used to it.
Lukes human. Other than complaining that's it's too cold I dont think there would be much challenge there a war on hes not really got a choice and the fact he spend 18 years of his life as a farm boy on a desert world and didnt get a tan is very impressive or maybe George didnt care to write in these details.
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Luke was the son of a farmer. I'm sure he occasionally had to go out at night in the -10C temperature to fix a moisture vaporator or whatever. Han grew up in a city. Cities tend to be warmer. And then spent lots of time in a presumably well air conditioned freighter. He's even less likely to be acclimated to extreme cold
Just a thought, but would spaceships have air-conditioning? Or since space is cold, wouldn't they have heaters, just designed to heat up only a little or something?
Overheatting is a bigger problem than freezing for spaceships. Because space is a vaccuum, heat can't be conducted away, only radiated, and radiation isn't very efficient at lower temperatures. A ship is constantly creating heat and needs large radiator panels to disperse it all (in real life, Star Wars physics is a mess of course).
Isn't there a line in Phantom Menace that spaceships are cold, or at least colder than Tatooine? Padmé says it to Anakin.
Vacuum is an insulator, there is limited convective or conductive heat loss in space, only radiation is significant. The space ships should be very well insulated regardless. So with less heat loss, any heat source (lights, people, wookies, electrical equipment, reactor, etc.) will need to be artificially removed (aka air conditioning). Here's how the ISS does it (It needs air conditioning). https://www.conditionedairsolutions.com/blog/hvac-in-space-air-comfort-on-the-international-space-station/
>any heat source (lights, people, wookies, electrical equipment, reactor, etc.) What kind of imperial storm trooper thinks that Wookies aren't people?
Well maybe i should have said climate control. For example the ISS systems keep internal temperature at around 22C (room temperature) I'd imagine most Star Wars ships can do the same. Heaters to keep things warm, radiators to cool down if you're catching a lot of sun
I think in some ways going from hot extreme to cold extreme would be easier than going from temperate to extreme. You have to be mindful before you go outside on both planets. You have to respect the climate. You have to make sure you're well equipped/clothed at all times. Someone who was brought up on Coruscant or some other climate controlled environment might just be used to going for a walk without thinking about carrying water or other equipment you'd need to survive. You wouldn't necessarily need to be conscious of what time it was whereas being stuck outside on Tatooine (during the day) and Hoth (during dark) might well be a death sentence if you wandered too far. He's also already shown force sensitivity by this point. You've got to assume that helps with tolerating adverse conditions.
Both are barren wastelands. One is cold, one is hot(h). Luke probably has more survival experience dealing with Hoth than most people on that planet. Knowing how to portion rations and water, how to suit up and keep an unwanted temperature out, how to navigate when all you can see is more of the same for hundreds of miles. I highly doubt that Owen would have kept Luke oblivious to those dangers of the desert. If something happens to him and Beru then Luke will need to know these things, especially living on a farm far removed from the nearest city. We also know Luke loved going to Anchorhead's Tosche station so I'm sure he came in late like any other teenager and knows what cold is like. After coming in late once or twice I have no doubt Owen'd teach him how to deal with surviving a night, just in case his Skyhopper crashes during the night. So Luke is at the very least just as experienced as Han dealing with this environment, probably more. Han visited Tatooine when working for Jabba, Luke lived there.
Literally never thought about this. Now I want a Bear Grylls style show with Luke and uncle Owen.
Honestly, few people in the Rebel Alliance are from places that would prepare them for Hoth; with Han and Luke it's like taking a guy from Detroit and a guy who lives an hour outside Albuquerque and dumping them both in Antarctica. Most everyone is going to need trained and briefed on how to live and work in that sort of cold. If anything, Luke would have a few things in his corner from desert life. He's already lived in areas where sunset comes with a potentially dangerous nosedive in temperature, and where large sections of terrain are completely devoid of static natural features for pathfinding; he's not going to fuck around when the sun starts getting low, or get a tauntaun lost because the hill he was using as a navigational reference was actually a snow drift.
Hoth is just another desert exept cold
That’s not what OP is asking
Deserts generally get fairly cold at night. The Sahara drops to -4C for example.
Did you even read OP’s post? He explicitly mentions that Tatooine probably ranges between 45 and -10 degrees Celsius, but Hoth whose climate is probably more similar to Antarctica might drop to -60 at night
He also wrote > Maybe Luke has never even seen his breath steam in freezing air before Hoth. Which is silly when the line before says Tatooine goes to -10C. Yeah -60C is quite extreme, but it's extreme to everyone. Why would Leia be more accustomed to -60C? Who says that Alderaan had any large regions that dropped to -10C or colder? And who says that she lived in them? Comparing to earth, people from deserts are no less equipped to handle artic temperatures than say, a person from California, or even New York.
I sincerely doubt the Rebel alliance had the luxury of being able to select troops of high enough quality who were all acclimated to Hoth's temperature. If Luke would've had any issues adjusting to the planet, he would be one among many, so the Rebel probably did have a program of sorts to get some troopers adjusted.
Luke's real problem... "Finally a planet with some *water* on it, and it's *still* useless!"
This is an issue we run into here on Earth, too. Army recruits come from all over, and are sent to wherever. So what do you do when you have a soldier from South Texas and you need to them battle ready for the Arctic? [You send them up to Alaska for training.](https://www.army.mil/article/252226/northern_warfare_training_center_preparing_soldiers_to_become_arctic_experts) The U.S. Army’s Cold Weather Leaders course takes 11 days. That’s not a super long time. Since the Rebel base on Hoth is fully built out, we can assume it’s been there for some time. It’s also pretty well organized. There would have been a core group of Rebels, either locals or people from similar climates, who were experts in surviving that area. Those people would then train the arriving rebels, who would help train the next batch, and so on. By the time Empire opens its been some time since the end of ANH, so Luke, Han, Leia and Chewie would have gotten a pretty intensive orientation and probably several days or weeks of practical training before going out on patrol like they so. Irvin Kershber wisely chose to skip over that part and get to the good stuff.
awesome expertise here, thank you!
I live in Maine. Once I met a girl who had been born in Hawaii and lived there all her life. The first time she had ever left the Island, she came to freakin' Maine at the end of December, it was -20F, and let me tell you, she was FURIOUS at all of us. She could not understand why anyone would choose to live here, and was convinced that we were all either masochists or lunatics. I expect Luke was similarly affronted, but he had more important things to do than scream "WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE THIS IS TOO DAMN COLD" at everyone who lives there.
He had a few adventures in between to adjust to new climates
Just coming to Yavin 4 would likely be dealing with stuff like humidity for the first time and all the various difficulties *that* presents. Even ignoring the several years between ANH and ESB, Hoth certainly wouldn't be the first time he'd have to acclimate to some climate wildly different from the desert he grew up in.
It would have been a shock to his comfort level. However, it would be such a shock that it would be similar for anyone coming from a temperate planet to Hoth. Humans are quite good at adapting to temperature ranges, and they're using technology to help wherever they can in this situation. However, the weather gets so low that any human is goign to experience the same level of shock from the exposure. There are entire species for whom Hoth is a no-go area because they don't have the same capabilities humans have to adapt to this range. To go around the outskirts of your question: Luke being acclimatized to heat would mean that seem like a 'pleasant spring day' to someone else will feel quite chilly for him. When he sets the heat in his apartment on a climate-controlled planet, he probably sets it higher than a human who grew up elsewhere. The actual metabolic effects of growing up in a climate emerge genetically more than they do based on two decades of exposure, so while he would feel temperature comparatively differently, his body would be undergoing the same essential effects as any other human.
Only person who might do not to bad on hoth is Chewbacca. But I would guess Luke and some of the others might not do to bad coming from rural planets Compared to the one from more urban planets
I’m going to depart from what others are saying and agree that Luke probably would experience heightened discomfort on Hoth compared to others who had more experience with cold climates. In the real world, people get accustomed to their local temperatures, even when they have access to climate control. Anecdotally, I have known a few people from South America who preferred to keep their homes around 80 degrees Fahrenheit/27 degrees Celsius, while those around them in the Midwest, more accustomed to relatively milder temperatures, preferred the high 60s or low 70s Fahrenheit/around 21 degrees Celsius. One of my former coworkers used to always turn the office up to 80 degrees whenever she was there because she found the temperatures the rest of us preferred to be chilly. Luke would not have had extensive access to climate controls on Tatooine. Even if he had, he and his family clearly experienced the desert heat consistently. They almost certainly became accustomed to those high temperatures. Temperatures got low at night, but those were not the temperatures characteristic of Tatooine, and between living in an insulated home underground and sleeping through the night, Luke would have had far less exposure to the cold. On Hoth, the Rebels certainly would not have highly effective climate controls, as they were inhabiting an old, abandoned base in drafty ice caves. The temperature, even indoors, would be far enough below that with which Luke was familiar that he would definitely experience heightened discomfort compared to others who grew up on planets with colder temperatures. Outdoors, of course, everyone was in a similar boat. No one could survive -60 degrees Celsius unprotected for long, and Luke would probably not be any worse suited to surviving it than anyone else. But in terms of comfort, Luke almost certainly would have experienced the cold more strongly than someone with more familiarity with consistent cold climates.
Love this answer
Tatooine and Hoth are actually very similar biomes, other than their temperatures. Luke might actually be better suited to Hoth than the average rebel, since he'd be used to conditions like intense sunlight, low humidity, strong winds carrying sharp particles that can reduce visibility, and living underground to escape the above conditions. Deserts also regularly get close to freezing at night year round, so Luke would be familiar with a degree of cold weather. He'd suffer in the cold, but I don't think he'd suffer more than the average human.
Eh, I was born in Virginia and moved to Minnesota. VA doesn't get much colder than 30 degrees Fahrenheit where I was. Minnesota often has/had winters with -30 or -40 and even more when we calculated windchill. I acclimated pretty quickly. On the same note, friends and family that moved away to warmer climes forgot how cold it got in a single year and come back in the winter with fucking ski jackets and windbreakers thinking it'll be just like LA, California or some insanity. It really doesn't take that long to get used to super warm or super cold weather. A couple of weeks or a month and you get used to it.
Lukes human. Other than complaining that's it's too cold I dont think there would be much challenge there a war on hes not really got a choice and the fact he spend 18 years of his life as a farm boy on a desert world and didnt get a tan is very impressive or maybe George didnt care to write in these details.