For the love of all that’s holy, they were the first ones to do something like that. I’m sure they are terribly sorry they failed to create detailed bio-enviro-social niches for each alien race, fully integrate it into the galactic economic, social, and civil order, and then demonstrate each and every bit for your viewing pleasure.
If only they’d just been people in jumpsuits and funny forehead makeup! Then it would have been so much more believable!
-Joe
On the other hand, the Rebels were on Hoth long enough for
a) the Imperials to deploy probes;
b) the probes to search the surface of an entire planet at grandma-in-a-Buick speeds;
c) the probes take some footage of any civilizations they find and upload the data back to Central Command;
d) some Imperial flunkie to examine the data and send it up the chain of command as a likely positive;
e) the Empire to prepare its fleet;
f) to deploy to Hoth.
F wouldn’t take long at hyperspace speeds. And C wouldn’t take long, given that the universe has some kind of faster-than-light communication system (Obi-Wan’s holographic reports to the Jedi Council from several star systems away has no discernable lag).
A is difficult: either (A1) the Empire deploys slower-than-light probes from every star system in the galaxy (in which case, the deploying Star Destroyer should’ve scanned the planet its own damn self), or (A2) the Empire included faster-than-light stardrives on millions of probes. If A2, then why B?
D and E would take as long as necessary, but nowhere near on the scale of a car-sized probe flying interstellar distances at sublight speeds.
So maybe the Rebels have been there for millenia, but they have incompetent engineers?
Or their shipment of speeders only arrived a few weeks ago.
-Joe
Or (and this is more likely) the Empire constantly deploys probes throughout the galaxy in order to spy on its populace, and there was a long delay between deployment and detection. (Although the general says “we have thousands of probes scanning the galaxy”. Off by orders of magnitude, I suspect.)
Because the alternative is that the Rebels landed on Hoth and domesticated a local species as a beast of burden before their shipment arrived. (Shouldn’t have used the Imperial Postal Service.)
Goddamn Imperial Post.
Hey, they should apologize. After all if my nitpickiness requires such snark they did us all a disservice. 
I never said they had to have a detailed bio for every single alien, I commented on the truly unlikely fact, even in a science fiction universe, that aliens with all the various forms would share the same needs on different but earth like planets. We all know almost every scifi/space opera does it, and while its only my opinion, the aliens in Star Wars are over the top sometimes. I never said in any post Star Wars sucks or its stupid or anything. Its possible to be nitpicky about a show or series of movies and still like them. Heck, I’ll make fun of **Trek, B5 **or Farscape any time and I really like those shows. Feel free to nitpick 'em any time. even 24 (not sci-fi but it may as well be with Jack’s superhuman abilities growing every season and the odd spatial distortions that allow CTU to cover anything in LA within minutes). I’d probably even join in on the nitpicks. Sorry if my personal opinion bothers you.
If you’re wondering that was said completely without malice. I respect your opinion if if its the opinion that I’m being too critical about the aliens and stuff in Star wars.
Or, even better, “we” refers to that specific Star Destroyer.
-Joe
Hoth is only marginally habitable…presumably it was towards the bottom of the probe dispersal list.
This thread does prove one thing, there is no such thing as a minor Star Wars nitpick.
You pick at a loose thread in Star Wars, and the whole thing comes unraveled.
I mean, where did the Tauntauns come from? There’s no record of any indigenous settlement on Hoth (“the Hoth system is supposed to be devoid of life”) so Tauntauns weren’t domesticated by natives. It’s unlikely that the Rebels happened to find an easily domesticable (took only a few hours with a blanket and a Tauntaun-shaped saddle they happened to have lying around) species in situ.
Did the Rebels secretly go around buying up cold-resistant species on other worlds and ship them to Hoth? If so, in what? Their speeders aren’t adapted to cold; surely they had some cargo-ready ships that were. They damn well didn’t buy the shield generator at the local Glacie-R-Mart. And if they did buy hundreds of Tauntauns and ship them from off-world, did the Empire not notice?
“Devoid of human forms”. If we’re going to nitpick, can’t we just at least go ahead and use actual lines from the movies, instead of misquotes?
-Joe
Who said they had hundreds of tauntauns? Might only have been a dozen or so. Even today, big-city police use horses; doesn’t seem too farfetched to me that, if the tauntauns weren’t indigenous to Hoth, the Rebels brought some from offworld for use on the ice world.
I would have to watch the movie again; don’t have that one 100% memorized any longer. 
And if you nitpick “human forms” or “human life” then it opens up the possibility that Hoth is a bustling non-human metropolis, which it doesn’t appear to be. The upshot is as I said: there is no recorded indigenous settlement on file with the Empire, so in all probability, Tauntauns were not domesticated local creatures.
So they brought Tauntauns… but not cold-adapted vehicles.
Tauntauns are native to Hoth according to the official StarWars.com databank. Maybe one of the never really discussed technologies of the Star Wars galaxy is a “instadomesticate” beam. 
If you want to go crazy with hand-waving you could imagine that Hoth was formerly a normal “M class” planet that is in the midst of an extreme ice age at the time of the Empire. The tautautans were domesticated by the Hoth natives before the ice age and retained that facet of their nature while adapting to the cold and ice and the disappearance of their domesticators.
Maybe they were from Haiti originally. You know, the Tauntaun Macoute.
Maybe the fleet was cruising around for a while, looking for a planet to set up a base. The speeders are all covered in cosmoline & densely packed in a transport. When they decide on Hoth, some supply type decides it would be a good idea to pick up some cold adapted transport to use until they get the speeders unpacked. So on the way, some pilot gets to buy a few dozen Tauntauns.
You’re going to hell.
Look, we’re seeing aliens from all over the galaxy. Sure, we see lots of bizarre aliens. But it isn’t suprising that the aliens we see just happen to be able to survive in the same environments that humans can. We just don’t see the bizarre aliens that aren’t able to survive in the same environments as humans. Simple application of the anthropic principle. There could be thousands of aliens that drink liquid ammonia and breathe methane, but those aliens never visit planets that have oxygen atmospheres.
But we do see lots of aliens that apparently have masks/helmets over their faces. Those helmets could be providing them with healthful chlorine gas for all we know.
Fair enough.
It wuld have been knda cool to see some aliens working for the empire…as in on their ships, though. Like an evil version of Admiral Ackbar. I mean in the original movies, they did get into the non-human enemies in the prequels. (I will admit that I liked General Greivous a bit…)
As I said before it is possible to nitpick a show or movies and still like them. I used to love Space 1999 and it takes a plunger to be able to swallow the premise of that show.
Covered, again, in the EU.
Basically, Humans are to the Empire as Aryans are to the Nazis.
-Joe