Except as always comes up, the plot only works with everyone being as stupid as possible at every possible moment i.e. the thing I said.
It might be a minor detail to you but it bothers me so much that they suicided that ship because it means that at any point in the entire franchise they could have just shot an X-wing with an autopilot at whatever Bad Thing and it's done, gg.
That they hadn't done so makes it forgivable because you can assume that maybe hyperspace physics don't work that way, i.e. they can't intercept objects in real space or something. But... they did it, so they can, so... the whole thing just becomes so stupid.
Why even build a death star when you can literally just put an engine on an asteroid and destroy entire planets that way? Every single pilot heroically sacrificing themselves could have done 100x the damage just flying straight into the nearest star destroyer. Literally every x wing, all the rebel ships even, i think, have the capacity to become relativistic weapons. But instead they get fried in dogfights.
Or... literally thrown away with a few people still on board who could have ended the entire movie 10 minutes in if they'd only turned around and jumped into their pursuers.
It's just incredibly stupid, and that's on top of how boring a car chase in space looks visually. You can't fucking tell how fast anybody is going without any frame of reference so it was like watching the fucking police slowly roll after OJ in his Ford bronco
It might be a minor detail to you but it bothers me so much that they suicided that ship because it means that at any point in the entire franchise they could have just shot an X-wing with an autopilot at whatever Bad Thing and it’s done, gg.
At any point in WWII they could have just rammed one battleship in to another battleship!
Star wars space combat, when they bother to think about it at all, runs on WWII naval combat tropes. And they did run a snub fighter in to a capital ship before, in Jedi. It was really silly. A guy in an A wing killed the Executer by flying in to the bridge.
At any point in WWII they could have just rammed one battleship in to another battleship!
I mean the Japanese did make use of kamikaze attacks, the only difference is that planes can be shot down and might not necessarily destroy an entire ship and also they did not have the technology to autopilot them (which if they did, use missiles anyway) so there's kind of a lot of differences here
And they did run a snub fighter in to a capital ship before, in Jedi. It was really silly. A guy in an A wing killed the Executer by flying in to the bridge.
I don't remember that but did they jump to lightspeed? That's the thing, just ramming is pointless, but lightspeed ramming = you are a relativistic weapon carrying ridiculous amounts of energy. if a baseball is a nuke what is a xx-ton starship gonna do?
Like they just threw away all these cruisers for nothing, with however many people still on them (I know they were evacuating to the main ship, but some "ran out of gas" and fell behind and got blown up with people still on them). And they didn't even have to. Like, a single x-wing-mass-object going at the speed of light would have destroyed like half the pursuing fleet. If the very first cruiser to run out of gas just like turned around and did this right at the beginning, not only would they have saved so many lives but also the incredibly important materiel represented by the dwindling fleet of ships. Every ship and every person is irreplaceable in the context of the conflict against the Empire.
They could have redeemed this by giving a reason for having never done it before, but like, they don't?
idk maybe they just don't know e=mc^2 in this universe but uh now the cats out of the bag there, I don't expect to see another lightspeed ramming in future media though
I don't recall Star Wars doing anything with RKVs or tricky orbital weapons. Most of the media I've seen they stick with lasers and missiles. The series really does run on WWII tropes; Ships have to close to visual range to fight, fighters handle as though there was an atmosphere. Naval guns are big installations on the surface of the ships, or even in shielded bays along the side of the ships and they have actual gunners and support staff instead of computerized gun laying and aiming. Nothing moves very fast relative to anything else. No one is doing gun runs at 40,000kph relative to the target ship.
I agree the "Stern chase in space" plot was pretty weak. Personally I would have found another way to build tension in the story. It also made the conflict look very very small; The fate of the galaxy hangs on this tiny handful of ships? Okay whatever.
This is the trope Johnson was going for but I think even for Star Wars it was too much "Space is an ocean" to really work. In all prior media we're used to capital ships and even fighters jumping in to and out of the area unopposed. The old EU stuff even created interdictor ships that would pull anything in the area out of hyperspace because the unlimited mobility of hyperdrive equipped ships created so many narrative issues.
Yeah see, if they went to hyperspace the whole damn ship (or at least a very large portion of it) would have just been deleted from existence. I'm not sure if A-Wings have independent hyperdrives though, but I know X-wings do for sure (i.e. Luke traveling everywhere solo)
also lmao watching that scene today was unintentionally hilarious in so many ways, the little fireball on the bridge, the fact that literally destroying just the bridge instantly kills the entire ship (imperial design continues to be flawless), and then the special effects when it hits the death star
Except as always comes up, the plot only works with everyone being as stupid as possible at every possible moment i.e. the thing I said.
It might be a minor detail to you but it bothers me so much that they suicided that ship because it means that at any point in the entire franchise they could have just shot an X-wing with an autopilot at whatever Bad Thing and it's done, gg.
That they hadn't done so makes it forgivable because you can assume that maybe hyperspace physics don't work that way, i.e. they can't intercept objects in real space or something. But... they did it, so they can, so... the whole thing just becomes so stupid.
Why even build a death star when you can literally just put an engine on an asteroid and destroy entire planets that way? Every single pilot heroically sacrificing themselves could have done 100x the damage just flying straight into the nearest star destroyer. Literally every x wing, all the rebel ships even, i think, have the capacity to become relativistic weapons. But instead they get fried in dogfights.
Or... literally thrown away with a few people still on board who could have ended the entire movie 10 minutes in if they'd only turned around and jumped into their pursuers.
It's just incredibly stupid, and that's on top of how boring a car chase in space looks visually. You can't fucking tell how fast anybody is going without any frame of reference so it was like watching the fucking police slowly roll after OJ in his Ford bronco
It was awesome and I'm tired of pretending that it wasn't :joker-troll:
Visually cool but stupid as fuck to do now and never before
At any point in WWII they could have just rammed one battleship in to another battleship!
Star wars space combat, when they bother to think about it at all, runs on WWII naval combat tropes. And they did run a snub fighter in to a capital ship before, in Jedi. It was really silly. A guy in an A wing killed the Executer by flying in to the bridge.
I mean the Japanese did make use of kamikaze attacks, the only difference is that planes can be shot down and might not necessarily destroy an entire ship and also they did not have the technology to autopilot them (which if they did, use missiles anyway) so there's kind of a lot of differences here
I don't remember that but did they jump to lightspeed? That's the thing, just ramming is pointless, but lightspeed ramming = you are a relativistic weapon carrying ridiculous amounts of energy. if a baseball is a nuke what is a xx-ton starship gonna do?
Like they just threw away all these cruisers for nothing, with however many people still on them (I know they were evacuating to the main ship, but some "ran out of gas" and fell behind and got blown up with people still on them). And they didn't even have to. Like, a single x-wing-mass-object going at the speed of light would have destroyed like half the pursuing fleet. If the very first cruiser to run out of gas just like turned around and did this right at the beginning, not only would they have saved so many lives but also the incredibly important materiel represented by the dwindling fleet of ships. Every ship and every person is irreplaceable in the context of the conflict against the Empire.
They could have redeemed this by giving a reason for having never done it before, but like, they don't?
idk maybe they just don't know e=mc^2 in this universe but uh now the cats out of the bag there, I don't expect to see another lightspeed ramming in future media though
https://www.starwars.com/video/the-destruction-of-the-executor
I don't recall Star Wars doing anything with RKVs or tricky orbital weapons. Most of the media I've seen they stick with lasers and missiles. The series really does run on WWII tropes; Ships have to close to visual range to fight, fighters handle as though there was an atmosphere. Naval guns are big installations on the surface of the ships, or even in shielded bays along the side of the ships and they have actual gunners and support staff instead of computerized gun laying and aiming. Nothing moves very fast relative to anything else. No one is doing gun runs at 40,000kph relative to the target ship.
I agree the "Stern chase in space" plot was pretty weak. Personally I would have found another way to build tension in the story. It also made the conflict look very very small; The fate of the galaxy hangs on this tiny handful of ships? Okay whatever.
This is the trope Johnson was going for but I think even for Star Wars it was too much "Space is an ocean" to really work. In all prior media we're used to capital ships and even fighters jumping in to and out of the area unopposed. The old EU stuff even created interdictor ships that would pull anything in the area out of hyperspace because the unlimited mobility of hyperdrive equipped ships created so many narrative issues.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SternChase
Yeah see, if they went to hyperspace the whole damn ship (or at least a very large portion of it) would have just been deleted from existence. I'm not sure if A-Wings have independent hyperdrives though, but I know X-wings do for sure (i.e. Luke traveling everywhere solo)
also lmao watching that scene today was unintentionally hilarious in so many ways, the little fireball on the bridge, the fact that literally destroying just the bridge instantly kills the entire ship (imperial design continues to be flawless), and then the special effects when it hits the death star