Had he lived, he certainly would have been demoted from Grand Moff to Moff.
Christ, that’s shit.
Apparently other people thought the Emperor would be majorly pissed at Vader too. It was featured prominently in the recent Darth Vader comic series:
I believe the rank immediately below Grand Moff is Baby Grand Moff.
Or does that only work for pianos?
Don’t forget Upright Moff and the popular Moff DX-7
Well, that pre-supposes that the main objective is to have the strongest possible members. I can see that it might be preferable to have a weak but mostly harmonious Jedi Order, versus one full of strong family dynasties who would be prone to struggle among themselves.
Spinet Moff?
I haven’t seen the movie in decades, but I recall thinking that the DS went the long way round the planet: if they had gone the other direction the Rebel base would have been exposed sooner. Whether or not that’s true, waiting till the base was exposed to energize the planet destroyer was a tactical blunder — it should have been primed to fire as soon as they acquired the target.
(It’s just a movie …)
I always wondered how Vader got away alive at all, in nothing but a TIE fighter, with no Imperial ships visibly around to pick him up. You’d think his air would have run out before he could get to safety.
But, then, we saw in The Empire Strikes Back that even X-wings are capable of interstellar travel.
In very early concepts of what would become Star Wars, the Jedi and the Sith were two rival orders of Force users competing for influence in the Imperial Court ala’ Dune.
No, it’s canon that TIE fighters sacrifice hyperspace capability for improved performance. Presumably either Vader could send a distress signal, or else telemetry from the Death Star indicated a disaster had happened (or Tarkin was in the middle of a hyperspace conference with the Emperor saying “Everything’s going splendidly! In another few seconds the Reb”<rrrrrnnnnnnvvvv SIGNAL LOST>
BTW: was Vader the sole survivor out of all the Death Star’s personnel? No one else?
My understanding is that Vader’s TIE fighter did have a hyperdrive. He had a model of fighter that you don’t ever see again.
Even if we discount that as the explanation, I can’t imagine that the Death Star goes around without any kind of support ships. It may not need them for combat, but personnel changes, supplies, repairs, etc. Just look at all the tenders used in modern navies.
The DS came out of hyperspace with a primary between it and Yavin 4. It had to clear the primary before it could destroy the planet. There wasn’t any concern about making sure that the Rebel base sustained a direct hit, since the whole planet was going away.
And even if he couldn’t reach Imperial territory in his fighter, Vader could go to ground on Yavin and call for an extraction.
Did the Alliance relocate from Yavin 4 immediately after their victory ANH? Seems like the smart thing to do, which would make Vader’s extraction relatively risk-free.
Officially, Vader’s fighter may have had a Hyperdrive.
Actually, there was. Due to the fact that there was an extra playing an Imperial officer both here and later on the series, there’s at least one guy who apparently survived. This was apparently an accident from the casting department, but fans-being-fans, this got spun into a whole character with his own history and micro-story.
Looking it up on Wookiepedia, seems there’s a currently canon (since it was part of the run-up to The Force Awakens media) story called Lost Stars that touches upon what happened to Vader immediately after the Death Star - he sends a distress signal and gets picked up by the Star Destroyer Devastator (the same one that captured the Tantive IV at the start of A New Hope).
Palpatine could have just been playing a deep game. His main goal was to awaken Vader’s full power - but he also wanted to control it. He engineered the destruction of the Death Star but allowed Vader to feel it had been his responsibility. The guilt of failure and gratitude for being forgiven kept Vader under Palpatine’s control.