Well that’s the question.
Watching ESB I realized that Leia, Chewie and Lando hop on the Falcon with 3PO AND R2D2.
Strange becasue they don’t know that Luke is going to get his butt kicked and fall out the bottom of Cloud City.
They do know that Luke came in his X-Wing with R2. (Actually they don’t know what ship he flew to CS,)
But shouldn’t R2 stay to fly with Luke?
I think the R2 units are just there to plot the hyperspace navagation or something like that, but the ships can fly sublight speed without them.
To my understanding the astromech droid helps calculate the hyperspace jumps, and acts autonomously to repair damage and stablize flight. They can also limitedly fly the ship on their own (“bring it outside and start the preflight list”).
So wouldn’t Luke be stranded without R2?
Luke has flown without Artoo before during the Death Star run. Artoo was more or less blown up and Luke was able to fly just fine. Granted is was just a straight line, but X-Wings are capable of flight without an astromech droid apparently.
Indeed. Back when I played the Star Wars arcade video game, I heard Luke lamenting “I’ve lost Artoo!” at least once per game. That phrase is etched into my memory. (Along with such immortal classics as “Artoo, try and increase the power.”)
My take on it, somewhat supported by material from the Star Wars roleplaying game:
X-Wings are spacefighters, and need to be able to make precision hyperspace jumps and come out the other side in battle formation. This sort of manuever requires advanced calculations, which are best performed by an astromech droid, although I suspect someone with Stephen Hawking-level math abilities, or who is very strong in the Force, might be able to do it as well. However, if that sort of tactical precision isn’t called for, most anyone with a good understanding of math and a simple (compared to an astromech droid, at least) on-board computer could get from one star to another, although the trip will probably take much longer.
So, without R2-D2, Luke probably would have been able to get to another system, but he might emerge from hyperspace eight hours out from the target, instead of, say, forty minutes if he’d had R2 calculate the jump.
In Rogue Squadron on the Nintendo 64 you could lose your R2 droid. All that happened was your ship would no longer be repaired. I think it might also have screwed up the torpedo auto-targeting, but I don’t remember.
Granted, not a 100% reliable source.
Everyone pretty much answered this, but I’ll add that astromechs also help target enemies during dogfights, providing the sound effect when the computer zeroes in on a target and finally gets a lock (it goes from slow beeps to fast ones, and finally an unbroken tone). I find this highly amusing.
And there are alien species in Star Wars who don’t need nav-computers or astromechs; they can make the hyperspace calculations themselves. Jedi can also use the Force to guide them.
No, he would have had hyperspace calcs stored in his nav-computer. You can store them like that and use them even without a navigator computer or droid.
I noticed once that on the Death Star, Tie Fighter Pilots had Black R2 units as well. These units didn’t fly on board like the Alliances do, but they were used by the empire anyway. Does anyone here know what purpose they served (for the empire that is)?
Repair, probably. That seems to be their primary purpose. In Phatom Menace, the Queen’s ship had three R2 units (including R2-D2) as part of the ship’s repair and maintenance system. They don’t put them on fighters because the Empire relies on cheap, disposable fighters with no hyperdrive instead of cutting edge, long range fighters like the X-Wing.
I recall reading somewhere (a novel, or the RPG sourcebooks, I dismember which) the real usefulness of an astromech on your fighter was that they had the computational power, which the ship’s onboard computer didn’t, to plot hyperspace jumps “on the fly” as it were.
The nav computer could store a limited (like two or three, tops) number or jumps, from a specified set of coordinates. Without dumping the ship’s memory, and downloading new jump data, a pilot could could get hisself lost or dead in a big hurry.
The A-Wing and B-Wing fighters seen in RotJ (like all of the Imperial fighters in the movies) didn’t carry astromechs, and were hence carrier based, and dependant on the capital ship they were assigned to for jump data. (If they didn’t actually just return to their mother ship before making a jump.)
The older X-Wing and Y-Wing ships could operate independantly, making them much more useful for the early stages of the guerilla war the rebellion was engaged in against the Empire.
[sub]How is it I can’t remember most of my high school Algebra, but this stuff sticks in my brain?[/sub]
How does an A-wing or B-wing manage to get into hyperspace then?? (not to mention countless other ships)
It seems ridiculous that a hyperspace ship needs to have an R2 unit to freaking fly anywhere. Something like that should be built in to any hyperspace ship, standard.
Teelo, you answered your own question.
Teelo, the newer fighters (A and B-Wing) are hyperspace capable, and can store the data for one or two jumps. (Any vessel bigger than a one man fighter would presumably be able to plot new jumps on their own, whether they carry an astromech, or just have a bigger nav computer.)
So long as they’re able to communicate with their respective capital ships, which do have the ability to plot new jumps (being that they’ve got much bigger, and more powerful nav computers), they can make multiple hyperspace transits.
Without direct capital ship support (IOW, the frigate or cruiser or whatever ship they’re based on actually going into combat with them) they can pretty much only jump to a target system, win or lose the fight there, and then jump straight back home.
With the older fighters (X and Y) they could jump to a system, and if the mission goes bad, they don’t have to go straight back to base (thus leading the bad guys right to the “Hidden Rebel Base”) but can run any which way, to avoid the Empire.
Guerilla tactics, so to speak.
Besides all that, so long as you include a couple of X or Y-Wings in your strike group, the ships with R2 units can still plot a new jump, and feed that data to the fighters without one. (Or those who’ve lost their R2 unit in the fight, feristance.)
Without an R2 unit, a pilot can use that space as a really big cup holder. No doubt 7-Eleven’s ever-increasing Gulps will have reached vat size by that time.
“A long time ago, in a galaxy far away…”
Price versus performance. It would be fairly expensive to put hyperdrive computers inside every fighter craft, and really, whats the benefit? X-Wings are Space-Superiority Fighters and Y-Wings are Fighter-Bombers. They don’t need to go on long-range (read: multi-system) patrols. They are designed on a limited production budget. They are going to be tied to a carrier anyway, as there’s limited benefit to sending them out over long distances. If you can just use a standard, off the shelf astromech instead for those few times you need it, its a good bargain. Then, when the missions over, the astromech can be removed and assigned other duties.
In ANH, Luke does lose R2 but he only has to fly back to Yavin and he can eyeball that trip.
It just seems to me that if Luke’s story on Bespin ended differently.
Like he doesn’t find Vader, or he kills Vader or he simply runs away…
He hops into his X-Wing and then what?
Han knew this area of space from experience. Luke doesn’t have that.
Could Luke find his way back to Hoth? Then what? Remember taking that long trip in a single seat fighter would be different from being inside a freighter that you can walk around in and get some exercise.
If Luke had the jump to the rendezvous point programmed into his nav computer at Hoth then it seems that he would have to get back to Hoth to use that.
Now when he left Hoth he ‘kept it on manual’ for a while and flew to Dagobah. Was he force guided to Dagobah? Did his computer have the location in it. Did he look it up at the base and secretly load it into his x-wing’s system before the battle?
When he leaves Dagobah he isn’t a fully trained Jedi. I saw him working on the running and jumping and picking up stones but I sure didn’t see any astro-navigation classes.