Is this for real?
Even if it wasn’t, it sounds perfectly in character for pre-injury Vader to me.
I’m not sure that you can really capture Hayden Christian’s lousy line delivery on page, though.
I may have missed mention of it in this thread, and if so, I apologize.
Did you notice that the death star plans are still “wrong”? That they show the super laser on the equator, as it was in the plans seen in the original (one, true) Star Wars?
I think that was a nice touch. Not like retconning Klingon heads. Just ignore it and move on.
(fanwank: the plans they stole aren’t the current plans. They are like five revisions old. It’s just lucky the exhaust port hadn’t been removed or changed in the mean time.)
I honestly didn’t catch that. At this point it would probably be more of a flag to me if the Death Star plans didn’t have the superlaser on the equator because it would look wrong somehow.
Maybe that’s why there were like fifteen different sets of stolen Death Star plans in the Legends canon. Each was for a different subset of the station, being worked on by a different team or subcontractor. One can only imagine the sort of logistical hell it would be to organize the construction of anything so big and complicated even without a literally groundbreaking superweapon. But that was Legends, and this is the Disney canon, so different set of continuity.
Did the plans actually show the equator?
Does the Death Star even have an equator? I mean, I know it has a massive trench around its circumference, but does it actually rotate?
For lack of a better term. The trench acts like an equator. I could refer to it as the “seam”, like a baseball. A very BIG baseball. 
Original briefing scene. Just as a point of reference. The laser is seen being bisected by the [del]equator[/del] trench.
Maybe the equator in the display is the DS’s actual rotational equator, which does in fact pass through the center of the laser, while the “seam” is merely decorative, and actually appears to rise and fall when the DS rotates.
Of course, the real reason is that the (very early) cg images used in the briefing scene were sent out to be made before the film was done, and it was too late and too expensive to change them to match the later effects shots. And really, who’s going to care? Star Wars was just going to be forgotten in a year anyway, consigned to the heap of other movies that faded away, never to be shown again.
Interesting blog.
I see they have officially set the size of the DS at 160km. That was always a mystery before. I used to think it was 200 miles in diameter, based on something I read but forgot where and can’t find again.
“Legends canon” aroused my curiosity, so I Googled and went down the rabbit hole for a bit. I’m shocked to read a synopsis of the first book in that series (which I had vaguely heard of, I feel like), A Splinter in the Mind’s Eye. So from 1978 until 2014, Lucas was fine with the notion that Luke (and Leia!) had engaged in light saber combat with Vader between Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back? Seriously? :eek: Jesus, no wonder Disney dumped this stuff from canon.
I didn’t think “Splinter” was canon in the “Star Wars Extended Universe” sense. It certainly made for uncomfortable reading post “Return of the Jedi”.
Wookieepedia cites it as its primary example of Legends canon.
Be that as it may, it doesn’t seem to connect to the events of the movies which went off in a completely different direction, and later EU material is explicitly contradictory.
Also known as “Chekhov’s Tower.”
Splinter of the Mind’s Eye isn’t an especially good example because it was the first one, so naturally some ideas from it weren’t going to stand the test of time. There was a comic book adaptation which I think tried to fix some of the major issues, though.
But having said that, things like the “Kaiburr Crystals”* (sic)** originated in it, and though that concept was amorphously woven in and out of other EU material, Rogue One has now firmly established it as a genuine thing (though they have appeared in the animated TV series too, and they’re considered canon still).
+++
*The name was recycled in the prequels when an assassin used a “Kaminoan Kyber Dart” so I figured it had been consigned to the wastepaper bin
**Spelling has varied a LOT during the years
There was an article I found somewhere recently (not sure from this discussion or elsewhere) that defined the Legends material as sometimes excellent (Hand of Thrawn, starring Grand Admiral Thrawn, every internet fanboy’s favorite scheming Imperial), often good (X-Wing, starring Wedge Antilles, every internet fanboy’s favorite Alliance ace pilot), and downright terrible more often than folks like to admit (the Jedi Academy trilogy, staring Admiral Daala, every internet fanboy’s favorite Imperial laughing stock).
Rule of thumb with Legends was that new stuff trumped old stuff (which is why Coruscant isn’t a forest planet anymore) and that movies and Word of Lucas trumped everything else. Otherwise they did their best to make sure everything at least broadly fit together coherently. By the time Disney bought the whole lot, the continuity had already gone a generation or three past the point of where the current new trilogy is taking place, and I don’t think there was any way that new movies were going to be able to fit into all of that without confusing everyone or just retreading well-worn roads.
I expect Disney to strategically mine the Legends canon just like the Marvel Cinematic Universe strategically mines the comic books – there’s good stuff, but a lot of total crap, so the new Star Wars canon took Thrawn and used him in Star Wars Rebels, but can safely ignore the multitude of crap that also fills Legends. I think we’ve also seen several alien races originally introduced in Legends pop up in Rebels, the Force Awakens, and Rogue One.
Oh, yes. Lemme give you some more.
San Hill: “Welcome, Lord Vader! On behalf of the leadership of the Confederacy of Independent Systems, let me be the first to–”
Vader: “Very well. You will be the first.”
Vader closes the blast doors and pulls back his hood
San Hill: “You’re-- you’re Anakin Skywalker!” [is slashed; dies]
Vader: “The resemblance is deceptive.”
[later]
Rune Haako: “Stop! Enough! We surrender, do you understand? You can’t just kill us–”
Vader: “Can’t I?”
Rune Haako: “We’re unarmed! We surrender! Please-- please, you’re a Jedi!”
Vader: “You fought a war to destroy the Jedi.” [kills him] “Congratulations on your success.”
The Hammerhead Corvettes originated in a video game (KOTOR I think), were adopted and refined for Rebels, and then included in Rogue One. In fact Rebels is a great place for borrowing from the old EU, as the writers have a great affection for it and occasionally were contributors to it. And the guy in charge of looking after Star Wars canon, Pablo Hidalgo, has been part of Lucasfilm for nearly 20 years, so he also has an encyclopedic array of characters, locations, and even “historic” events that can be drawn on and massaged to suit any story element. The Witches of Dathomir, for example, or the resurrection of Darth Maul.
Yeesh. Reads like it was written by an 11-year-old.