Today in The Force Awakens: Meet the planets

tfa-c1-01-falcon-castleEmpire today revealed the names of three planets from The Force Awakens. Takodana looks to be the jungle world where Maz Kanata’s castle is. D’Qar may be the home of the Resistance Base. The third, Hosnian Prime, is a mystery, though a Hosnian system was mentioned in Lost Stars.

As for a fourth location, copies of Empire are out in the wild, and there is a map which contains a Starkiller Base Origin Point. (It moves! Shit.) There’s some speculation floating around about the Base’s origin perhaps being Ilum. But why is Rakata Prime, a planet that apparently originates in Knights of the Old Republic, on the map? Could it be TFA’s Dantooine, a planet that gets mentioned but never seen, or will it meet a more sinister fate?

(For what it’s worth, Pablo says the map was created for The Force Awakens Visual Dictionary, one of the December 18th releases.)

→ Mike Cooper at Eleven-ThirtyEight figures out just how much of The Force Awakens we’ve seen. Today’s spot brings it up to 5:43 minutes, so please calm down about being ‘spoiled’ by officially released footage.

→ Entertainment Weekly’s Anthony Breznican talks about BB-8 in the first of four videos. (Nothing here really struck me as anything we don’t already know, but if you’re not glued to the internet, there may be something here for you.)

John Boyega hasn’t seen The Force Awakens yet, while Gwendoline Christie would like to go dancing as Captain Phasma.

→ Google will now translate Aurebesh, because why not.

In the news: Lucasfilm puts the brakes on “AT-AT for America”

Not so fast… Michael Koehler wants to build a life-size, working AT-AT. His project quickly got (l)ink from Cnet and the New York Daily News. A mention on Attack of the Show certainly didn’t hurt his cause… But it looks like it’s not exactly kosher with Lucasfilm. At least Koehler can solace in techies saying the feat is not impossible.

Paint it black? Plants on worlds with double stars – like Tatooine – would probably evolve plants that would look black to us, says National Geographic.

Blast-offs and could-have-beens. Star Wars producer Gary Kurtz writes in The Guardian’s film blog talks about the devotion the film inspired. Elsewhere on the site, Danny Leigh wonders what if Star Wars never existed?

A sandcrawler for Singpore. Remember the sandcrawler building that Lucasfilm was planning for their folks in Singapore? They announced details of the project last week.

Science, defense division. The U.S. Navy has made a significant leap forward in testing offensive lasers. A “solid-state, high-energy laser beam” successfully disabled a small vessel off the coast of California. There’s video!

The midweek catchup

Battlefront: Renegade Squadron came out yesterday. TOS keeps on trucking with a look at the game’s weapons and more Q&As

Also…