WOULD you people stop calling him Big Fat Pilot? That keeps very insensetively calling attention to his weight.
He had a name, and it was Porkins.
Oh, yeah. Big help! 
Kinda my point, but yeah… 
I was checking out the site linked by Tuckerfan when I came across a little nugget on this page.
The colloquial term “super star destroyer” should be avoided. This is not mere pedantry; the term is actually misleading. In addition to its connection with the confusion over Executor’s length, the term is also applied to some vessels which clearly belong to different classes: eg. Allegiance and Eclipse in Dark Empire, which only share little more than the distinction of being slightly or greatly bigger than one-mile destroyers.
You see, the proper name is “Executor-class Star Dreadnought.” Geez, I thought the SW fans here really knew their stuff. I’m rather disappointed in you all.
(obviously)
Is “executor” the correct word for someone who carries out death sentences, or should it be “executioner”? Unless the Empire meant to use the less blatant term.
You mean calling a fat guy “PORKins” is in any way more sensitive?
The correct term is “executioner.”
An “executor” is a person appointed to carry out the terms of a deceased’s last will and testament.
And when you add in the fact that the Death Star chose that day to hold their first Farmer’s Market, the whole thing just falls into place.
Thank you for that image of the Super Star Destroyer crashing through the Death Star and coming out the other side in a flurry of squawking chickens.
Star Destroyer Flunkie: “We just lost the bridge deflector shields!”
Star Destroyer Commander: “Intensify forward firepower. I don’t want anything to get through.”
Star Destroyer Lieutenant: “Too late!”
The Star Destroyer careens off course through the Death Star Farmer’s Market.
Rebel Pilot: “Fruit cart!”
Didn’t Zahn’s Thrawn series advance an explanation for the OP’s question? Namely, that the Emperor used the Force to coordinate his fleet and that after his death the senior officers were disoriented and could not change back quickly enough to thinking on their own.
Actually, although “executor” is now almost always used in the technical legal sense, it did originally have a broader sense of (to quote the OED) “One who executes or carries out (a purpose, design, command, work, etc.); one who carries into action, or puts into practice (some quality); a conductor or manager (of affairs); an administrator or enforcer of (a law, vengeance, etc.); an agent, doer, performer, executer”, and was sometimes previously used to mean “executioner” in the sense of someone who carries out a sentence of death. I suppose the Executor is that which carries out Darth Vader’s designs; and Darth Vader, in turn, is the administrator and enforcer of the Emperor’s plans.
Yes. Actually, this was one of the more intriguing points in Zahn’s books. Sadly, other bks went even farther (read: overboard) with this line until the Emperor was capable of rewriting the memories of thousands of people on Coruscant and tearing open teleportation gates and destroying whole fleets on a whim.
And people said George Lucas was nuts because the old bastard was able to fool Yoda! :dubious:
The A-wing can destroy a Super Star Destroyer in the same way that it is necessary for the two guys standing next to the Death Star’s laser to duck and shield their eyes when it’s fired. Yep, that should be all the protection they need.
-Lil
And remember, the Superlaser can only hurt you if you eat it.
Well, they were wearing very dark visors, and I thought they turned completely away from the superlaser when it fired. Also I imagine the light was uncomfortably bright but not actually dangerous (assuming proper safety protocols), since you wouldn’t want your trained crew to get fried every time you fired a shot.
If this is a mistake then it’s pretty common across the series.
I also wondered how this worked. In the video game (and generally the books) when a shield takes a hit it blocks 100% of the energy until the shield goes down. In the movie the a-wings shoot at the generators only a few times. That shouldn’t be enough to take them out (and the resulting explosion is also funny. It’s not like a generator is filled with explosives).
And the shields weren’t down until the a-wings hit the generator because the scene right after that shows the bridge officers reporting the shields are down.
It is a mistake, and yes, its very common. Don’t take the games and/or novels as anything but, well, games and novels.
Yes, it is. It seems to have morphed into cannon that those two big balls are the shield generators, and that you can blow them up even when the shields are still up. Which I think is dumb, and isn’t actually supported by the movie.
Those aren’t generators. Judging by the fireball, I’d say they were oxygen tanks. Again, I’m not using any material from outside the movie to make this judgement call. I’m not interested in what the novels/comics/video games say, I’m just talking about the movie.
I maintain this was just sloppy editing. The Executor is in the middle of a firefight with dozens of capital ships and hundreds of fighters. The shields fail just in time for the fighters making a strafing run on the bridge to take out one of those big balls. At the same moment, a member of the bridge crew turns and says, “Our shields are down!” right before the A-Wing kamikazis into them and the whole ship takes a header into the surface of the Death Star.