wow they changed that story as originally solo was originally a captain for the empire and even though he had a temper hadnt done anything over the line until the empire captured chewie and the treatment of him pissed han off and they escaped together
And supposedly its why vader always sarcastically referred to him as “captain solo” because they knew about each other …
The grunts didn’t know anything about Death Star plans. Officers don’t explain stuff, they just give orders. They were ordered to man the guns and blow up anyone who tried to escape.
The real flaw is that bored gunners don’t not shoot at things when the can.
The Empire couldn’t afford railings what makes you think they had a budget for extra ammo?
Mostly, Jarjar the Hutt in Cloud City is to blame for this. In Episode XI, you will remember the Staretrooper Jawa Hans Threepeeoo tells the Ewok Village of Bespin that Emperor Palpatine, who is actually a Twilek, that nobody who has gone to the Tatooine Town of Mos Empress Tetla System can say.
Now that’s some authentic galactic frontier gibberish right there.
One of the two guys says, “There goes another one!” which suggests that they’ve been shooting at escape pods for a while. Maybe they’re low on … whatever those guns use. Perhaps they have to be periodically reloaded or recharged or something, and aren’t like 1980s video game weapons that can be fired endlessly.
Have you seen The Mandalorian? The episode with the two Scout Troopers trends very highly with veterans and active duty soldiers, especially grunts.
So your point about bored gunners is spot on; they’d have been like, “Get 'em! Get 'em!! You gonna shoot that thing?”
I thought it was because Solo actually was master of his own ship (run-down and unimpressive as it seemed to the naked eye).
I wonder if the guy who told his underlings not to shoot that escape pod ever found out that he was responsible for the destruction of the Death Star.
Or maybe he was a well placed rebel spy.
Now that’s what I call a creative fan theory. Kudos.
There are 12,000 people of captain or equivalent rank in the military of the United States right now. How many do you think there were in an army that is imposing martial law on an entire galaxy? There’s no way that the equivalent of the Secretary of Defense knows the name of any specific captain, even one who defected.
Named Henry Evans?
Well, the defect in the Death Star plans was deliberately designed in, by a rebel sympathizer. There’s probably a lot of them scattered through the Imperial forces.
Blaster fluid.
The thing no one, least of all the Empire, ever thought about:
So, if the gunner had shot the escape pod, then how would anyone ever know what happend to Princess Leia’s Stolen Deathstar Plans? Or if the plans had been in a pod they did shoot? Vader would surely have fun torturing everyone to death, but in the end, he still wouldn’t have the plans. It was not a well thought out plan by Vader, blasting everything in sight when you’re looking for something the size of a floppy disk.
True.
But if the plans were blasted, or just (dare I say it) Lost in Space, that risk to the Empire is retired. They wouldn’t know the risk is retired. They’d just discover over time that they were attacked / sabotaged less successfully in the future than might otherwise have been possible.
Any large organization has to assume many of its secrets are leaked to the enemy. And the longer lasting the secret the more likely. The plans for this afternoon’s battle may stay secret until the shooting starts. The plans for a 40 year old piece of equipment were probably compromised somewhere along the way. As a general rule in real militaries, if your equipment / plan requires total secrecy to succeed, you’ve designed in a failure. Secret is good; you can’t let it come crucial.
All in all it’s about writing a story with a catchy easy-to-grasp opener. “Where are those plans!?” is the hook that launched a couple hundred decent fortunes and one mongo fortune (Lucas’s).
Well, the Falcon did have 3 deflector shields. But more importantly, Solo only showed up at the very end after the Rebels had likely destroyed all the defensive batteries (remember there was no defensive fire while Vader was on Luke’s tail).
Very American ending, now that I think of it 
I’m pretty sure it was mentioned upthread, but it was a plot point explicitly called out in dialogue that the AA guns stopped shooting to allow Vader and his wing of T.I.E. fighters to engage the Rebel fighters.
Like a lot of Star Wars technology, and not at all coincidentally, the guidance systems on the AA guns apparently operate on roughly World War II levels of tech, and aren’t capable of Friend-or-Foe ID. They can just put out an undifferentiated barrage that will hit everything flying in their zone.
Now, it would make sense for the Death Star to have mid- and long-range defenses that would knock out approaching craft long before they reached the surface, but from what we see in the movie, for whatever reason they only have short-range defenses that can only barrage craft near the surface - where Vader and his T.I.E. fighter wing were operating.
Imagine the poor newbie sent all around the Star Destroyer for more blaster fluid.
“The guys at the magazine sent me here.”
“We’re the armory, we don’t have any blaster fluid. Did you try engineering?”
They addressed that too, in the briefing before the attack -
“Its defenses are designed around a direct, large scale assault, a small one man fighter should be able to penetrate the outer defense.”
“Pardon me for asking sir, but what good are snub fighters going to be against that?”
So the Death Star did have mid & long range defenses, but they weren’t designed to engage fighters, since no one thought fighters would do any good against the Death Star anyway.