Or at the very least a mission he is totally unsure either will survive?
If you take the info given in all the films:
Obi has had two damn decades to mentor and teach Luke and he has done squat, its doubtful he has ever even left Tattooine since he came there as a fugitive and had no cash in ANH. ROTS ended with Yoda and Obi hatching some plan to wait and train the twins and then take on Vader and Palpatine together somewhere down the line. Well that never happened and I’m guessing since he was getting old once he heard about the Death Star from R2 he decided it was too dangerous to exist.
So he decided he had to try to take it out, AND since he knew its only weakness was the tiny port he decided to take the untrained Luke with him hoping he would be of use with his innate abilities (could a non force user have hit it?). So basically he knew it was likely a suicide mission and took the kid along figuring at this point taking out the DS was the best thing he could do.
Originally, Obi Wan and Luke were looking for passage to Alderaan because R2D2 had the Death Star plans. At that time, they didn’t know the Death Star was at Alderaan until it blew up the planet (while the Millenium Falcon was en route in hyperspace).
Luke doesn’t join the rebellion flying against the Death Star until after Obi Wan is already dead.
Although you do have a good point that Obi Wan doesn’t seem to make a lot of effort in training Luke. You could argue that he was still watching and waiting to train Luke and that Uncle Owen didn’t want him around. This theory takes a beating when you think of all the Jedi younglings in the later movies, which adds more evidence that Lucas shouldn’t have kids in the movies to begin with.
No, I don’t think Obi-Wan knew of the Death Star’s achilles heel.
His intentions were to get the schematics to the rebels, and that’s it. He figured that with Imperial attention fixed on Tatooine, there was a risk that Luke would be discovered by somebody with an inquisitive brain, especially as it was Luke’s droid that had the only copy of the message and plans in it.
I figured Obi-Wan just wanted to get Luke outta there, and maybe go from Alderaan to Dagoba to see Yoda.
Obi-Wan said he had enough cash to charter Han’s ship once Luke sold his speeder. But I don’t know why Obi-Wan sat on his ass for 20 years.
I’m guessing Obiwan was planning on getting involved in the assault on the Death Star rather than handing off R2 to the rebellion and leaving with Luke to train him as that would take years. I was guessing the realization the empire had created the DS was the final straw that finally got him off his ass.
Obiwan didn’t know the weakness of the Death Star and neither did anyone else, until they got to Yavin and handed over the plans contained in R2 and the rebel scientists got a chance to study them.
The Jedi, from the various comix and clone wars stuff, did suicidal stuff all the time. As for Obi Wan in A New Hope, it looks like he didn’t want to bother anymore and was outright suicidal.
I’ve always assumed that Obi-wan would have trained Luke, preferably at a younger age, but Uncle Owen forbade it. Obi decided that it was safer for Luke to stay with Owen and have Obi keep an eye on him from a distance. Once the Imperial troopers started nosing around, and Owen was killed, there was no longer any reason to stay hidden. He may have been planning to take Luke to Yoda after delivering the Deathstar plans to the Rebels, or planned to continue training Luke himself, which he had already started to do with the lightsaber lessons.
I don’t remember that part of the plan. I thought the plan was just to keep the kids away from Anakin, hoping he’d figure they’d just died along with Padme. Just so happened that Organa wanted a daughter, so off she goes, now what to do with the boy. Oh well, better just drop him in on the step brother Anakin met all of once in his life.
Not sure where you get all this. IIRC, the only thing Obi Wan had was the “Help me Obi Wan, you’re our only hope” message in R2 to take the Death Star plans to the rebels on Alderan. He didn’t know it wouldn’t be there when they arrived or that the Death Star would be waiting.
One thing I got wrong was I thought the info about the DS’s port issue was included in the info R2 was carrying, it was not as someone pointed out.
He didn’t know Alderan would be gone and the DS waiting for them, but I believe he did plan on getting in on the action(why all the hub bub over the plans unless an assault was planned?)
Of course they were planning an assault, or infiltration, or something to try to take it out. But Obi-Wan didn’t know squat about it. He was winging it once they got dragged aboard the Death Star. He encountered Vader and knew he had to make a stand to allow the others to escape. Having spent the last 18 years in the desert with nothing to do but work on his mojo, he figured it was time to go out with a witness he could inspire. The whole thing was a chance encounter, not a suicide mission.
Remember, Star Wars is a once-off movie. None of the information available in the <shudder> prequels is valid in assessing Obi-Wan’s motives or actions.
A good question is, why the hell did’nt Vader discover the twins in about 10 minutes, the boy is on Vader’s home planet and the girl is with a prominent senator and is apparently strong in the force.
Not only that. The boy is living in the same fucking house as his ma did, and they didn’t even change his last name.
Darth Vader: “The Empire will compensate you if he dies. Put him in! Wait… on the back of that Wookie, is that the protocol droid I built as a child? Look, I used non-standard arm linkages… Yeah, and you can still see the class III servo locks. Where the hell did you get this droid?”
Vader doesn’t know he has children, right? He doesn’t have any reason to look, though apparently once he sees Obi-Won and Luke together he figures it out, since he knows by the end of Empire.
Though I’ll grant even with that Yoda and Kenobi could’ve put a little more effort into hiding Luke, or at least changing his last name. I mean, there’s no guarantee that Vader won’t randomly look up his step-sibliings on whatever the Star Wars equivalent of Facebook is and notice they have a nephew with his lastname living with them.
There were probably lots of people potentially strong in the force throughout the galaxy, but without training in how to use it, they weren’t seen as a threat, so there was no reason for Vader to worry about it.
OB1 couldn’t have known about the DS weakness, since even Leia didn’t know about it. She says something like “I sure hope they can find a weakness” as they’re on their way to Yavin. I assume it was difficult to actually read the stolen data, otherwise they could have easily transmitted the plans to the base. Some sort of encryption issue I guess.
Anyway, I think OB1 has a touch of Space Alzheimers. Just before he leaves the red control room to find the tractor beam, he tells Luke “The droids must be safely delivered, or more systems will suffer the same fate as Alderaan.” Delivered where? Alderaan is gone, and they have no idea at that point where the rebel base is. They don’t find that out until they rescue Leia, and they don’t even know that she is on the Death Star yet. So what was the plan at that point? Shut off the tractor beam, escape the DS, and then what? They didn’t really have anywhere to go if they hadn’t happened to find Leia. Don’t try to tell me Leia revealed the location of the rebel base in R2’s message to OB1. No way she would have risked the entire rebellion like that.
I don’t think this is really a problem. Presumably the rebel base isn’t on the Death Star, so escaping is a good first step. We don’t really know what OB1 plans to do afterwords, but he might have some scheme to find the rebels, or he might just figure he’ll worry about finding them after they escape.
(And for all we know, OB1 knows where the base is, or at least knows someone who would know. Leia knows to look for him on Tatooine, so apparently he’s had some contact with the rebels over the last 20 years.)