Star Wars: The Force MacGuffins

Right, this is going to be totally a spoilery post. I won’t even try to do anything more than put in a bunch of spaces and a gif so that people can not read it.
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So, there’s been a bit of posts about the failings of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Take, for example, this post. Funny enough, nothing in that article bugged me really (apart from the bit about Phasma who really was underutilized, but we will see more of her I’m sure.

First, lets talk about things that I loved that I’m sure some people will hate:

C-3PO’s red left arm and Poe Dameron’s escape.

Personally, I loved the fact that they completely glossed over them. C-3PO might be covered in some of the official pre-TFA canon, but as for how Poe got off a relatively hostile planet (as in swarming with bad guys), while I’m sure it would make a great side story/comic book arc, I’m fine with it being ‘Why does it matter? He got off the planet. Period.’

I didn’t quite like the ending, but I still haven’t figured out why. It might simply be that it went on for too long. Maybe after so much noise and action, that amount of silence was off-putting.

But what I really didn’t like was the MacGuffin.

The map.

See, the map that they got had the location of Luke Skywalker on it.

But the stars present in that map didn’t match any known pattern of stars in the galaxy.

Except… when they finally figure it out, they only figured it out by putting it into a map of the rest of the galaxy that was hidden away in R2 or some storage unit somewhere.

The hell?

They’re able to make technology that can travel through hyperspace, shields that can block physical intrusion, space ships that can hold thousands of people, anti-gravity units that allow you to walk on the ship, but they can’t write an algorithm that would simply take the pattern of systems on the map and rotate the galaxy around until they found a match?

We have, on this planet, a piece of software that can take a song you are hearing and figure out what that song is, something that I had trouble figuring out how it would be done (although a friend gave me some tips as to how it would need to be done, and now I kind of get it), but they can’t map a 3-dimensional model to pattern match?