Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)

I saw this opening night, and then the next night on IMAX (mainly an issue with me being too lazy to drive 30 miles just to return the tickets that I bought online but apparently can't be returned except at the actual box office, so if I'm going to drive that far, might as well just watch the fucking movie), but this thread really exploded and I just now caught up with everything. I enjoyed the movie a lot and was quite happy seeing it that second time, but my comment is in regard to the Starkiller Base.

I have seen dozens of references to it devouring the sun for the shot and how stupid it would be to have a one or two shot superweapon, and only Gavinmad recently mentioned the possibility of it not draining the entire thing. When I was watching it both times, I never even considered that it actually sucked the sun dry to the point of destroying it, I pictured it as a perpetual battery type of thing. You siphon off as much energy as you need to charge the weapon, and then you have to wait for the sun to recharge itself before siphoning it again. That way you've at least got a plot reason for them not shooting it over and over. And the sun "going dark" is just a convenient visual effect for us to know how much time we have left before the good guys are fucked.

Sure, it doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense, but nothing about that base does, and it makes a lot more sense than a one-and-done superweapon too. It is interesting how almost everyone assumed it was entirely consuming the sun, as I'm the only one I've spoken to in person or that I remember reading about in this thread thinking the opposite. Even if I'm right, that statistic alone shows that they needed to do a lot better job of explaining it, even if it was just a throwaway line like, "When the sun goes dark it still has enough nuclear reaction to restart itself, but if we go beyond that it will never recover, or go supernova, or black hole, or whatever."

Still, I have to think that was the intention, even if they failed to clarify it. Otherwise that base makes even less sense than it already does.