I’m no tactical genius, but no shit, seeing this movie in the theatere in my youth I said “just tie up the legs and trip them!”.
If I thought ofvthat in my youth, I’d expect battle hardened troops and commanders to do so quicker than I.
The other point about the tripping strategy is that you still need to rustle up something to use as a tripwire that’s strong enough to be effective at changing a walker’s center of gravity before breaking.
Let me wank this fan for you. 
Yes, you need to trip their legs. But that’s like saying that all you need to take out a M1-A1 Abrams is to take out the gun turret pipe or shove a potato into it. You’ll need to do it above-ground, i.e. ground forces are essentially useless. So you need an aircraft that’s capable of not only pin-point striking a harpoon, but also capable of flying in circles around what’s essentially a moving skyskraper, without slamming into a cliff wall, one of its legs or being picked off by AA fire. And you’re going to need cable that’s capable of resisting that much pressure without snapping like twine. And you’ll have to keep in mind that it’s an All Terrain - Armoured Transport. I.e., judging by size, there are hundreds of troops inside and although they didn’t fire through gun ports on Hoth, you can bet they drilled on doing it afterwards. Driving what’s essentially a jumped-up scooter in a circle around a moving skyscraper armed to the teeth with heat-seeking missile launchers? Not going to be pretty.
As for the TIE Fighters, the TIE fighter was probably dumped there by a transport running patrols. It happens a lot in the extended universe: A [pair/squad/squadron/wing of] TIEs gets dumped somewhere in the galaxy, along with a com relay of some sort. If something shows up, they pull it over, but if it’s bigger than them, they shoot a message off to base and scramble. When they start running low on gas or air, the freighter or capital ship shows up for re-fueling. Sleeping can be done on shifts.
Imperial TIEs are not equipped with a hyperdrive engine because the Emperor was afraid of the possiblity that some pilots might just fly into hyperspace and defect to the rebels.
(I dont remember where I read that. Either in one of the novels or in the strategy guidebook to TIE-Fighter)
I seem to recall that in one of the extended anthologies (most likely Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina) that an AT-AT trainee driver realizes the same weakness – and he gets sent off to Tatooine by an army general, to cover up this really bad weakness.
Getting back to the OP – one reason Rebel starfighters use astromech droids (especially R2-D2) is to use astromech droids as hyperspace navigation computers.
This is not beyond the realm of plausibility. Imagine, your a rebel commander…you need to set up house somewhere and you and your advisors think the ice planet Hoth will do. It will take some time, if ever, that the Empire finds out where you are.
So you begin planning how to defned the base if it comes down to it. You have your advisors sit down and figure out the needs while considering the known capabilities of your enemies. Because thats basic common sense.
Advisor: Sir, we can use the deflector generators and fire from our ion cannons to hold of an orbital bombardment from their capitol ships…but they will attempt a ground assualt. The Empire’s AT ATs have a lot of firepower.
Commander: Hmmm…(punches up holographic representation of an AT AT) yes, Major…I see what you mean. They’re slow but dangerous. What do we have that can counter that?
Advisor: Concentrated laser fire can damage an AT AT but their heavy armor is an obstacle sir. It only fails when the AT AT falls over.
Commander: What if we rig a bolo like device that can be fired from our cannons as an attachment? We can trip them before they get close.
Admiral Ackbar: ITS A TRAP!!
**Advisor:**uh…right…but sir, thats…thats…brilliant!
Commander: Well, I can’t take credit…my six year old suggested it.
I will admit the reasoning that TIE fighters don’t have hyperdrive makes sense though. Though I still think its a bit too much that a fighter would have long range FTL capable engines on the rebel side. Still, the reasoning males sense. AT ATs…no, I’m still not buying it.
If you’ll remember, the rebels were rather surprised that their turbolasers were having no effect on the AT-ATs, so it seems that their intel about the Imperial forces wasn’t all that great. Nor is it necessarily the case that the Empire would bother sending troops down. They could very well simply stand-off a distance and do a planetary bombardment. And while we never really saw it in the films, according to the various Lucas books, etc. the Empire had other armored troop transports that they used.
So, you’ve got a situation where you’re having to set up a base on a fairly hostile world (remember it got very cold at night), and you have to prepare for an Imperial attack by forces which greatly outnumber yours. There’s no way you can hope to win a pitched battle, the best option is to find a way to an effective delaying operation, so that folks can escape.
We don’t know how long the rebel forces were on Hoth before the Empire showed up. Given that one of the characters mentions that they were having trouble adapting the speedsters for the cold, we can only assume that they hadn’t been there for very long. This means that they probably hadn’t gotten their shit together, and were still trying to deal with all the crap that goes along with setting up a new base. If the Empire knew this (as seems likely), then given their overconfidence at their abilities, it seems logical that they’d just drop crap at the rebels, figuring that whatever their losses were, they’d pale in comparison to the damage they inflicted on the rebel forces.
Heck, maybe they had Rumsfeld running the show. That would explain a number of things. 
No FTL, no shields. The troopers within are clones and are thus, expendible.
Hell, I just watched a Clone Wars episode a week or two ago where Anakin and his padme are accompanied by 5 troopers and they lose all five while rescuing R2D2. How bad is it when the lives of five clones are considered less valuable than one freaking droid? Even if that droid is filled with secrets because you’re too stupid to erase them? And that’s by a freaking JEDI!
“Whoops, lost another five clones. Better go back and get more. Ho Hum.”
Just to expand on the answers given already, and to get really nitpicky, the line in the original movie was “A fighter that size couldn’t get this deep into space on its own.” He’s not talking about a small ship like fighters in general are, but rather a particularly tiny example of a fighter. TIEs are literally nothing more than a cockpit and two solar panels, with just enough room for a couple of small engines and guns. The cockpit wasn’t even pressurized and there was no life support, hence the need for an airtight flight helmet whereas the Rebel fighters were able to get by with a half helmet. (This was probably done more to keep playing up the faceless enemy versus human hero distinction, but it also makes thematic sense.) There’s no room to store a hyperdrive, and it would have uselessly jacked up the cost of production. X-Wings and Y-Wings are significantly larger than TIEs, with plenty of room to house extra equipment like a hyperdrive and shield generator.
During the trench run, you can see that Darth Vader’s personal fighter was noticeably larger and could easily have stored an emergency hyperdrive, which would make sense as he didn’t want to get stranded somewhere.
Actually, this is all stupid ret-conning.
They had Luke moving around in the x-wing because it was convenient to the story to have him do so. In the first movie, it was convenient to have the line about the TIE fighter because it made for a good way to emphasize the situation that was building, as the heros slowly come to the realization that the Death Star is a really, really big thing.
It’s highly doubtful that there was an intent to discriminate between the X-wing and the TIE fighter at the time. Fortunately, if you will, the discrepancy wasn’t something that couldn’t be retroactively explained. :dubious:
Actually the treads on a tracked vehicle are relatively vulnurable compared to the rest of the tank.
Not necessarily. According to everything I’ve read, when Lucas has been casually asked about an element of the Star Wars universe, he’s able to spew an amazing amount of crap. So he might well have had much of this already imagined.
Well if you think about it, an X-Wing is actually a lot bigger than a Tie Fighter. The Tie Fighter is just a cockpit, wings, lasers and an engine. The X-Wing is probably three to four times the size of the tie fighter. It’s shields are also better than a Tie Fighter’s. Tie Fighters are mass produced and done so quickly in many facilities around the galaxy. At the same time Imperial troops in general suck. Look at Storm Troopers. They are terrible soldiers.
Yea, from a friend of mine in the business, the transmedia side, where Star Wars is like the ultimate example of how to run a Transmedia franchise, has told me that Lucas meticulously plans everything. When I was complaining about how Lucas had been running the franchise and trying to chalk it up to stupidity, he told me that people he knew who knew Lucas said that no all of that was extremely intentional.
There seems to have been a lot of thought that went into Imperial and Rebel design concepts. I don’t think they were accidental, and I do think he knew this back in the 70s.
:dubious: The big tube sticking out the front of the turret is most definitely not “the gun turret pipe.”
It the barrel of the Rheinmettal M256 120mm smoothbore cannon.
And shoving a potato down it is only going to spread a finely misted, cooked potato over the better part of several acres.
Which just makes the empire look more ridiculous. Though I imagine that none of Vader’s or the Emperor’s lackeys had the guts to tell them “You know why the rebels keep evading us and beating us, sir? Because our tactics, methods and training of our troops sucks. maybe we should focus more on quality than quantity if we want to win this thing.”
I understand than a lot of this stuff is trivial and done for story reasons and the like. Its not just Star Wars that does it. Last night I caught the movie Star Trek: Nemesis on TV. Remember the part where the Enterprise is zooming to join their fleet hoping to get there before Shinzon can use his super weapon on Earth? Picard and Data are in stellar cartography when the screen flickers. Data starts saying how the image will right itself in a moment, but they’ve just entered some nebula which will interfere with their tactical uplink to the fleet and make communication with them impossible. He starts to trail off as he says it as he and Picard have an “Oh SHIT!” moment and Picard calls the bridge to tell Riker to put the shields up just as Shinzon begins bombarding them torpedoes.
Now I can imagine Shinzon in his cloaked ship saying to his right hand monster “I can’t believe these idiots didn’t put their shields up! I mean seriously, did they not think I would attack when they are an easy target?”.
But the nitpicky part of me made me think ok wait a minute, neither Picard, who is supposed to be some kind of super duper smart and ultimate starship commander and Data the “I can conduct 50 Quadrillion Billion simultaneous functions with my positronic brain man” considered that their path would take them through an area that would make them extremely vulnerable and prepare for it?
Actually, that’s because they cribbed the plot from The Wrath of Khan.
Not totally. Kirk made a bonehead move by not realizing that the Reliant might be a threat. But at the time he had no reason to think that another federation vessel had been hijacked by a man he hadn’t seen in 15 years and did not expect to see again.
Picard, Data, Riker…all of them KNEW that Shinzon was in a ship with the ultimate weapon and a superior cloaking device. They knew that he had no problems in killing anyone that got in his way and that he intended to commit genocide on Earth. That makes Picard dumber than Kirk. He should have considered that Shinzon would have an easy shot at them once they entered this area of space which essentially cut them off from the rest of the fleet.
Wrath of Khan nitpickiness makes me point out that Ceti Alpha whatever the hell exploded. but no one on the Reliant noticed that a fuckin’ planet was missing? Or that the planet they were inspecting wasn’t in the orbit it should have been?
In all of the Federation no starship or astronomer anywhere noticed this planet exploding?
Yabut, Kirk’s whole reason for going into the Motara nebula was that all the static discharge and gas would cloud the sensors and render the shields useless. “Sauce for the goose, Mr. Saavik. The odds, will be even.” to quoth Mr. Spock.
Missing the actual explosion of the planet is somewhat plausible, if you assume that Kirk stuffed Khan in some kind of out of the way corner of the galaxy. Not noticing that there was a planet in the system missing is, however, inexplicable. We have to assume that Kirk didn’t bother to tell anyone where he dumped Khan, since they went poking around in the system. One would think that Chekov would remember something about this before they headed into the system, and that when one of the planets was missing, he’d get an inkling that there might be trouble.