We all know that in Ep IV Leia hides the death star plans in R2 before she’s captured. My question: Who gave the plans to her? How did she get them?
I don’t know much about the EU so maybe there’s an answer in there.
And I’ve heard the rule that everything is canon unless contridicted by the movies, but that doesn’t help much here.
Anyway…
The computer games by lucasarts(which would probably make them more canon because it is part of Lucas’s Empire, so to speak) have two different depictions of the theft of the Death Star Plans.
In Dark Forces, Mercenary Kyle Kataran steals the plans from a small imperial outpost and (presumably) delivers them directly to the alliance.
In X-Wing, The rebels capture a freighter full of Imperial communication satillites(presumably without the empire realizing) that are used for relaying information for the Imperial Navy. Then they modify the sats to allow the rebels to listen in on imperial communications, and then proceed to replace a string of standred imperial comm sats in an isolated area with the rebel friendly ones.
Not long after they pull this off, somebody at the imperial head office decides to send the death star plans through the rebel friendly comm, thus tipping the rebels off and setting the stage for “A new hope”
At least, that’s how I remember it. It’s been a few years since I played X-Wing.
A couple problems.
These contridict each other. If Kyle grabbed the plans, there’s no point in picking them up using modified comm sats. If the sats found them, there’s no point in sending kyle.
Also, both show glaring flaws in Imperial Security. If I had a giant battlestation capable of blowing up planets but only had a single flaw, I’d have as few copies of the plans as possible lying around. I’d have maybe one in a secure vault on corsecant, and other in the hands of guy in charge of building the damn thing. Having one in a poorly defended outpost in the middle of nowhere guarded by a bunch of rent-a-cop stormtroopers seems…incredibly stupid. Hell, later in the game Kyle has to break into a heavily fortified vault on Corescant, which would have been a perfect place to keep the plans.
And sending it through imperial communication channels, as cool as that is for the rebel evesdroppers, is just fricken insane. Something that important should be transported in a locked safe by a star destroyer.
So does the EU have anything to say about this? Or is this yet another example of the imperial military being incredibly poorly led(or the writers not thinking things through)?
right at the start when boarding the Rebel ship Vader says… “Where are those transmissions you intercepted?”
so I always assumed the Empire were transmitting the plans from somewhere to somwhere and they were electronically intercepted…
but… I have a much scarier theory… the Emperor purposely allowed the rebels to intercept the plans - in order to lure Obi-Wan and the children of Anakin out of hiding… DA DA DAAA!!
This makes me wonder if maybe, as a limited animation series, there’s going to be a “Star Wars 3 1/2” - the formation of the Rebel Alliance and the event leading up to ANH.
This is for the Death Star Mark 2, though. It doesn’t necessarily relate to the plans for the original Death Star.
Personally, since I’m a Kyle Katarn fan, I go with the idea that he yoinked the original plans from an Imperial base. I don’t believe even the Dark Forces/Jedi Knight games (or for that matter, most of the other SW games) are canon, despite being made by Lucasarts, so they fall under the heading of EU. Still, I like that explanation best.
According to The EU, by way of my somewhat unreliable memory, Admiral Ackbar (It’s a trap!!!) was a personal slave of Grand Moff Tarkin and when he escaped to his freedom, he transmitted the Death Star plans to the Rebels.
One morning, a rather plain Bothan named R’tur Dant, who had his own problems, really, was whisked up into the middle of an adventure by his old friend Incom Skyhopper, who surprised R’tur by telling him that he wasn’t really from the Tantoford suburb of Bothuwai, as he had always believed, but was in reality an advance scout for the covert Alliance Intelligence Guide to the Empire.
Turns out, the Imperial constructor fleet had the plans on display for nine cycles, in the local planning office – they just hadn’t gone out of their way to draw attention to them. R’tur and his compatriots had to undertake a fairly dangerous operation to discover the actual details, which were located in locked holo-cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door reading “Beware of the Rancor.”
Mon Mothma did not appear until Return of the Jedi, where she discussed the attack on Death Star II. What those Bothans actually did, and why so many died, is explained in the game X-Wing Alliance.
I haven’t played alliance, but I remember one mission late in Tie Fighter where you basically blow the crap out of a bunch of bothan ships…letting the one with the death star plans go.
Well if I had a giant battlestation capable of blowing up panets that had a single flaw, I’d spend an extra hundred bucks on a sturdy metal gate to put outside that flaw.
Ah, why bother? The target area is only two meters wide, a small thermal exhaust port right below the main port. Only a precise hit would start the chain reaction, and the shaft is ray shielded, so they’d have to use proton torpedos. That’s impossible, even for a computer!
Though it makes me wonder if the Imperials even noticed it. And if they did, what’s the chances something is going to get that close and put the torpedo in?
