This is kind of silly but it just occurred to me. I’m sitting here watching ***Star Wars ***and SW The Empire Strikes Back on Spike TV. In the first movie when Han, Luke and company first encounter the Death Star and a single fighter is on their tail They comment that a fighter couldn’t have gotten that deep in space on its own. (Before they realize that the Death Star is not a moon, but a space station)
In The Empire Strikes Back though Luke flies his X-Wing fighter from Hoth to Deguba which I assume is in another sloar system. Then he flies it to Cloud City which is in yet an another system.
So what is it? Do rebel fighters have FTL capable engines while Imperial fighters do not? What kind of power source do these fighters have that they can travel light years without refueling?
As I said its a silly thing to be concerned about. Its just one of the little nitpicky things that get to me. (I also hated the freaking AT-ATsin the beginning of the movie. A 6 year old could see the inherent weakness in them having legs instead of wheels or treads? They moved so slowly its amazing that the rebels didn’t have a coffee break as they slowly approached their base. Not one Imperial engineer looked at the design and said “Hmmm…you know whe can make things that hover and fly so its a no brainer that we’ve mastered the wheel…why are putting legs on tanks?”)
I agree it’s an oversight. Luke seems to zip around to various star systems in his X-wing without any problem. I think it’d be waaaaaaaaaay too long to be cooped up in that little cockpit without a bathroom break, even if he has a high-capacity diaper that NASA would envy.
In the prequels, Obi-Wan’s Jedi fighter at least has a stardrive doughnut-thingy that it can plug into when he wants to go to another system.
Perhaps R2-D2 has some computational capacity that’s necessary for Luke’s interstellar travel.
I’ve always assumed that the walkers with legs could cross terrain that wheeled vehicles just couldn’t handle. There just isn’t any way to stabilize a wheeled vehicle on slippery ice. The feet of the walkers could have some mechanism that grips the ice.
I can deal with that. Its way old, but in the original Ultra Man series the Science Patrol needed to go into deep space to rescue an astronaut. They had to use a special attachment to their ship to travel that far. In future episodes they always had that attachment on their ship when they needed to travel into space.
From a common sense view I always wondered why they didn’t have at least some kind of shield or protection for the R2 units on their fighters in Star Wars.
As a matter of fact, yes. The Expanded Universe gets into this, but your average TIE Fighters do not have Hyperdrives or shields, wheres X-Wings, Y-Wings, A-Wings, and B-Wings do. The Empire’s philosophy is lots of cheaper fighters, where the Rebellion goes with more expensive but better fighters.
X-Wings do have Hyperdrives in them and Tie Fighters do not. Tie Fighters are mass produced cannon fodder. They are short range attack fighters meant to be ferried around by larger Star Destroyers. The Rebels did not have the resources to build Fighter Carriers so they devoted resources to making tougher and longer range fighters.
They go into this in the Tie Fighter and X-Wing games. Some of the more advanced Tie Fighters do have Hyperdrive engines in them. The basic Tie Fighters, Tie Interceptors and Tie Bombers however do not.
For the rebels it’s a logistical necessity, for the Empire it is not. Rebel craft are built around keeping the pilots alive because pilots are precious. Imperial craft are built around getting as much firepower into the sky as possible, because pilots are plentiful.
I always thought the answer was “Because the Emperor thinks walking war machines are cool”. Or some other high official that the engineers who know better don’t dare tell otherwise. That sort of thing tends to happen in extremely authoritarian cultures. The Nazis were fond of that sort of behavior, for example.
As someone here once pointed out, the AT-ATs would make a great psychological warfare weapon. The things would show up on radar like a freakin’ building, and you could see them coming for a long ways away. As we saw, pretty much everything the rebel forces threw at them might as well have been spitballs, for all the good it did. I can well imagine that this would be tremendously demoralizing to any forces opposed to the AT-ATs.
Well AT-ATs are a terrible design, but Battlemechs a la Battletech are a great design. If a walker can bound up a hill and leap over ravines it is far and a way superior to a wheeled design. The design of the AT-ATs walked kind of like my arthritic Grandmother with her walker.
Apache gunships are terrifying if you are on the receiving end, and they are an effective design. Imagine you are in a village where not everyone owns a car and you see a wing of Longbows come over the ridge and open up with their autocannons. Does it matter that they aren’t the size of a building?
If you want purely movie- based proof that rebel fighters have hyperdrives, check out the big space battle in Return of the Jedi. The whole fleet assembles somewhere, then you see everybody (fighters and big ships) make the jump to lightspeed.
Although one would imagine that the practical limit of hyperdrive travel for small ships would have to be a few tens of hours at best. Space diapers or not, things would start to get ugly in the cockpit.
According to the first book of the Thrawn trilogy, the usual method for a single-seat fighter to make a multi-day trip would simply be to make stop-overs along the way. For a Jedi this is unnecessary, as they are able to put themselves into a state of hibernation.
It’s also worth remembering that interstellar flight in Star Wars is very fast.
Yes, but we’re talking about a technological civilization where everyone’s (at least in the combat forces) well acquainted with the best equipment technology can offer. I doubt if a professional US soldier would be frightened by the sight of a Soviet/Russian helicopter showing up, but a Soviet/Russian piece of equipment that simply didn’t care that it had a huge radar profile, and could shrug off anything he could throw at it would be a bit demoralizing.
The fact that they’re huge, slow, lumbering machines only adds to the terror, because that means the designers didn’t bother with making in a conventional manner (i.e. capable of taking evasive action, high speed, etc.), as they knew that you wouldn’t be able to put up an effective defense. The AT-ATs are showing up on the battlefield with a big “You wanna piece of me? Here I am, muthfucka!” sign flashing over their head, and no matter what you do, you can’t even make them slow down.
Something that big and slow ought to be easy to take out, and yet it isn’t. You’re throwing everything you can at it, and it just keeps coming. Slowly. Blowing the shit out of everything around you as it approaches. Slowly. It doesn’t care what you fire at it. It just keeps coming. Slowly. You could probably outrun the thing, if you just turned and ran. You don’t even know if there’s any humans at the controls. Certainly, they don’t seem to be bothered by what you’re shooting at them with. They just keep walking. Slowly. At some point, it’ll get to where you are, but if you broke and ran, you could probably get away, because of how it moves. Slowly.
Not really. They managed to trip a few of them, and Luke took one out with a grenade, but, especially in the “reimagined version,” you can see that there’s plenty more of them running about.
My impression of Imperial forces is that their technology was always a regression from what the Republic had. They just threw lots and lots and lots of it at the problem. Nothing fancy, engines, armor and guns.
I spoke of this with a friend of mine. We came to the conclusion that AT ATs looked so ridiculous that the rebel commander would lose because he would be too busy laughing to effectively command.
But you can. With a rope. Yes, you can just hobble them with a bolo. They did it in the movie.
Yes, they are so low the rebels even have time to think “Lets use harpoons and ropes to trip them!”. Thats not a compliment for them. A child could think of that within 60 seconds of seeing them. And lets be honest…with the level of tech the empire has, AT ATs were a really dumb design. We all know they were only featured in the movie because the model made really cool toys to shill out to all of the kiddies. And they did get tripped they blew up with the first shot given. they aren’t scary, they’re stupid. I know tht the Star Wars franchise is geared for kids, and that is fine. But as an adult, with info given, its kinda obvious that the empire could have built better assualt vehicles.
This is one of those things where you have to put yourself in the situation of the heroes. You’re in a panicked evacuation mode, you know the Empire’s coming, and they’ve got more men and more weapons than you do. You’ve just been sent out on a suicide mission to try and hold the Imperial forces back long enough for everyone else to make their escape. (If you manage to survive, you’ll have to take off from a base that’s rapidly being overran, and with no help from supporting forces.)
Its easy to sit there and say, “Oh, just trip the bastards!” when you’re watching the movie, but quite another thing if you’re fighting the things. The idea of tripping them didn’t even occur to them at first, they fired at them with their turbolasers. Why? Well, that’s pretty much what they’re trained to do. How likely would it be for troops who’d never seen the movie to think of that in the heat of battle? I don’t know. We do that they were only able to bring down a small number of them.
As for them being in the film solely to pimp toys, well yeah, but so would have anything that Lucas chose to have in that scene. That they were walkers and not, for example, some kind of hover tank (which was one of the original ideas for the scene, BTW), is because Lucas wanted to do an homage to Ray Harryhausen.