I never understood why they needed to fly all the way down that narrow trench, they're in space, just enter the trench right next to the exhaust port.
It's all rule of cool. But presumably the exhaust port has heavier defences. In real life flying low in a plane or helicopter makes it harder to hit with air defences because you can't see it for long enough to work out when to fire in front of it or hit it with anything that can track it. Plus radar and other stuff find it harder to identify. So presumably they get close to the death star, swoop into the trench for cover and then try and hit the port with their missiles. If they flew head on either turrets or missile batteries would have got them.
On real planes some missiles are guided by directional radios mounted on the noses of the planes they're fired from, and approaching it from too high would expose fighters to AA turrets all over the surface so the trench would be useful as cover
I don't think the turrets were much of a problem, it's been a while since I watched the movie, but most if not all of the rebel fighters were taken out by TIEs.
Hell, they couldn't even hit the much bigger Millennium Falcon, although that's probably more a plot hole.
Yeah, they were mostly taken out by TIEs because they did their whole attack plan to avoid most of the turrets
Since the Millennium Falcon is really fast at full speed maybe it strafed the ties while they were preoccupied and outran them before they could react, like a MIG-31 ambushing a trio of F-15s
Or rule of cool, which is more likely.
Making your spaceships operate on WW2 dogfight logic is definitely cool lol
Star Wars was never supposed to be hard scifi and even as a kid I may have wondered about the trench run, but I realized the movies would've been much worse without explosions in space.
I know now that the real reason for it is that Lucas liked a similar scene from The Dam Busters.
That's what I respect the most about him, like a true nerd he got to mash together all the stuff he liked and make a lot of money doing it.
friend, you are walking a path that leads to diegetic essentialism. the only thing essential about it is that you don't go down there
https://www.reddit.com/r/Sigmarxism/comments/11wt3kp/the_plague_of_diegetic_essentialism_or_how_i/
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I was just thinking about this post the other day! I couldn’t remember what the term they came up with was.
The starfighters' computers needed time to lock on to the exhaust port. Plus, the proton torpedoes needed to immediately dive downward into the exhaust shaft to reach the Death Star's core, as seen in the animation before the battle -- fire too soon and they just impact on the surface, fire too late and they hit the back of the port before they can dive.
Unfortunately someone has left their bike in the trench leading to the exhaust port, not leaving enough room for ingress in the case of emergency (in this case, the emergency is a fascist super weapon)
What's your callsign, if it's gold ABORT IMMEDIATELY and shoot those ties. Also the poster is from 30 years in the future so i think ties aren't your only problem.
In the words of Mark Corrigan, "If you ask me, Skywalker was bloody lucky to get away with turning off his guidance system."
