Seems like the Empire did a good enough job without air support. They won in a walk!
It would’ve been considerably more lopsided if they hadn’t lost 40% of their AT-AT Walkers, though. Esp. with the crews dead, not wounded.
Every time I see this scene, with the infantry running toward the AT-AT before the snowspeeder shoots at it, I always think “Killstealer!”
I’ve been spending way too much time with online games…
I always took the sudden effectiveness of the blasters to mean that the awkward position the AT-AT fell into allowed a weak point to be hit more easily.
That’s how I always saw it, although there’s no question that the hard fall would loosen things up inside and make a big bang easier, if not inevitable.
The killing shot is just like the *coup de grace * administered by a bullfighter. Now, who wants the ears and tail?
No, Vader is interested in finding Luke right from the get-go. He knows his name and that means Vader’s forming his ‘take over the galaxy’ plan pre-ESB.
Here’s the opening crawl from Empire:
“Sorry Senor, but thee ATAT does not always lose!”
Yeah. What the frack was that? They’re supposed to be defending the base, so when one of the walkers comes tumbling down, some dumbass leaps out of his trench and is going to…do what exactly? Cut it open with his field knife?
He also seems to have forgotten there were still 4 walkers trotting along.
Ooo, that’s even better!
Ah, but at this point (thanks to that incompetent, Ozzel) Vader already knows he won’t catch the Rebel leaders on the ground. He’s using the walkers purely to flush the Rebels off-planet. He doesn’t care what happens to them, because he’s going to catch them in space. That’s where he needs the fighters. The walkers? So long as they don’t all get wiped out, who cares? They’re just infantry. Vader is a navy man.
Would Speedy Gonzalez say, “AH-TAY, AH-TAY, andelay, andelay, arriba!”?
“Laugh it up, fuzzball!” – FWIW, I scooped you on the kind of signature gag in this thread that one would normally wait for, with bated breath, from a “Mr. Miskatonic”. (You have to check out the photo on p.1 first; my posts are on pp.3-4) T’was right in your wheelhouse, buster…
As someone pointed out in a similar thread on this subject, the Walkers are excellent psychological weapons, from a tactical standpoint, they don’t make much sense. Presumably the folks have radar (or something similar) in the SW universe, so the Walkers would have lit up the scopes like a Xmas tree, long before the grunts on the ground could have seen them. The image that Walkers project to folks is: We’re the biggest Ogdamned target you ever saw, and you can’t do shit to us, no matter how hard you try.
As for the garbled transmission from the probe, things like that happen all the time with Earthly probes, and NASA has a dedicated group of individuals designed to sort them all out. The last few minutes of telemetry from Columbia were initially read as jibberish, but after processing they were able to glean some valuable data out of it. Presumably, with technology capable of hurling starships across the galaxy, the Empire’s got sophisticated computers capable of analyzing bits of data and sorting them out on the fly.
Now, with the fleet being dropped out of lightspeed, it could be that there were other probes in the system which were trying to pinpoint the sensor operations of the rebels, without revealing their presence. The fleet could be waiting for that data, in order to know where the gaps in the coverage might be, thus picking out the best place to drop in and surprise the rebels. If the fleet dropped out of lightspeed before that survey had been completed, then the safest tactic, from a military standpoint, would be to assume that your cover had been blown, and go in with guns blazing. Given that Ozzel couldn’t be bothered to follow standard protocol in a situation as important as this was, demoting him really isn’t much of an option. It’s only going to make him surly and bitter, thus prime pickings for joining the rebellion, and if Ozzel’s familiar with classified information (like the DS 2.0 is being built near Endor), then the rebellion could skip most of the rest of the film, and 90% of the final film, and show up at Endor and trash the DS 2.0 before the subcontractors had gotten the first SlurpeeMart installed (and you’ve got to have the SlurpeeMart built before you get the planet smasher up and running). Thus eliminating all the possible mechandizing opportunities (and more importantly depriving us of the image of Leia in a brass bikini), so naturally, Vader couldn’t allow that to happen.
I said in that other thread that if the Empire wanted to insist on those huge AT-ATs, they should at least have given them more weapons. I’d design it with a missile rack, a small turbolaser on the back to use in a siege, and cannons on the sides and back. Heavy armor is nice and all, but without heavy weapons what’s the point?
Do fries come with that?
Aren’t they troop transports?
Good point. AT-AT stands for All Terrain Armored Transport.
So, they’re basically HumVees, not tanks…
For all your questions about the Battle ofHoth, I recommend this brilliant documentary:
http://www.atomfilms.com/af/content/battle_hoth
It seems to me that the ideal strategy would have been to come out of hyperspace far enough away that the fleet would not have been detected. An airstrike or commando mission could then have been lauched to destroy the field generator and ion cannon battery. After that the planet could have been blockaded and the base blown up from orbit.
sturmhauke - the AT-AT had lasers or whatever powerful enough to blow up the shield generator with one or two shots. I’ll agree that it probably could use some more smaller weapons scattered about.
Sure they could. If you have a line of AT-ATs spaced 500 meters apart firing at the incoming speeders, it would create a “crossfire” in the sense of the speeders would be in the field of fire of multiple AT-ATs.
Also there were smaller AT-STs hopping about the battlefield.
How do they deploy AT-ATs?
Dropships?
Detachable engine/wing/command pods, that allow them to act as shuttles?
Cannister/chute combos?
Yeah, I know that. But we only ever see the handful of crew in the head, not the troops waiting in the back. When it comes time for the troops to unload, they would be pretty damn high up, increasing the chance for injuries before they are even fully battle ready. I forgot how powerful those head lasers are, but the AT-AT is still a somewhat poorly designed vehicle.
Well, it was cold out and he wanted to keep warm inside the corpse.
And I thought they smelled bad…on the outside.
Same reason the Queen’s ship in Phantom Menace went straight toward the bad guys ship.
So that pilot had the force!!