Star Wars has always been a mass market phenomenon. That’s what made Lucas all his money - he signed away most of the box office rights in exchange for the merchandising rights, then merchandised it to an extent no one else had ever really seen before.
And some people thought it was meh. 
Yeah, that really deflated the ending, big time. I can suspend disbelief about the First Order Approximation taking over the galaxy a mere 30 years after ROTJ, but I can’t suspend disbelief about people not reacting like people.
The rebellion was in the same state as the Dothraki at the end of book/season 1 of GoT. They’re a people who had just witnessed a miracle.
I’m slowly working my way through the thread, and this justification has been brought up a couple of times. But I don’t think it really works: when Star Wars first came out, these things defined its point of origin, its DNA, the axioms from which everything flows. In a really tightly constructed narrative, you take this origin point, and develop everything from there; and you have to take some things for granted at the origin (much like how you don’t further justify axioms in mathematics). Otherwise, there’d be no starting point to the story.
But now, we have a fully developed world built on these axioms. Introducing something now that doesn’t fit in with that world just brings in an alien element that’s going to feel jarring, unless it’s somehow integrated with that world.
Now, there are sometimes good storytelling reasons for doing something like that, like for instance trying to subvert the traditional expectations of how a narrative is constructed, but none of this is so far in evidence in the new Star Wars films.
So even though it doesn’t bother me terribly much, I think there’s reasonable grounds to expect some backstory, some sort of integration with the larger world—otherwise, we just basically give the film makers license to pull anything whatsoever from their asses.
Finally got around to seeing this and enjoyed it though had a few grumbles. I just read the first and last pages of this thread so I don’t know if these came up already:
- Ren’s betrayal of Snoke was telegraphed too heavily. Why would snoke even say “He will kill his true enemy” or whatever? And Ren’s line would put me immediately on edge if I were Snoke.
- If you can destroy big ships by flying into them at lightspeed, why isn’t that done all the time?
And was it plan A this time? The impression I got was that the commander was going to go down with the ship, as a noble sacrifice, but only thought to press the instant win button at the last moment. - If chrome armor can deflect blaster fire, make more of it. It’s not like stormtrooper armor does anything.
What’s clear to me is that these new Star Wars movies, including Rogue One, are the results of “if that was me what I would do is…” moments that the directors had when they originally watched the movies as kids. e.g. “If I was Luke I would have ignited my lightsabre with the Force when it was next to the Emperor and stabbed him!” or “If I was Han Solo I’d go to light speed right away, I wouldn’t even wait!” or “If I was a Rebel I’d steal the Death Star plans like this! Pow, zeeeow, wheeee, boom!”
George Lucas didn’t see his own creation the way its young audience did. To him they were the hero’s journey for a new generation. To kids they’re cool toys to play with.
They broke up a big ship by flying another big ship into it. This isn’t usually a great use of your big ships which are in limited supply, especially for the good guys. Also, harkening back to the WWII naval armada style, the result was Very Bad News for the ships involved but not “impacted by a massive object at light speed” bad. After the ship was hit, you still had Finn & Phasma fighting and Ren & Hux getting off the ship (after establishing an order of command). In Real World Physics, the whole ship would have been disintegrated, the end. The only thing the hyperspeed jump accomplished was not giving the First Order ship time to blow it up versus if it chugged over at regular speed. Basically, it’s like asking why you don’t defeat battleships by steering another battleship (or even a frigate or a cruiser) into it – it might get the job done but it’s very rarely going to be the best idea.
Based on how UNcatastrophic the collision was, I would guess that a smaller ship hitting a larger one at hyperspeed wouldn’t do a ton of damage and something like an X-Wing fighter hitting the Death Star would do almost nothing at all. Heck, the target ship’s shields might even absorb the hit. That’s Star Wars Physics which might be silly but are at least fairly consistent.
Looking it up, the Supremacy was ~42,000 ft long and the Raddus (the rebel ship) was 13,000 ft long. So while there was a size difference, we’re not talking orders of magnitude or anything. The damage is described on the Star Wars wiki as:
So it basically cut the ship in two but didn’t utterly destroy the ship. In Real Life, no one would have been flying away from a 42,000 ft ship getting hit by a 13,000 ft object impacting it at near light speed.
They flew a basically defenseless ship, that was about to be vaporized into the empire’s flagship. Given how effective the tactic was, not only should Hux have expected that as the obvious next move, but skeleton ships acting as essentially missiles should be a common tactic.
Sure, but it wasn’t exactly something that could’ve been buffed out either. There was a path cut clean through the flagship that was as wide as the rebel ship.
Obviously the reason it didn’t fluorescent-light-dropped-on-the-ground blow up was because there were still major characters inside, but staying in-universe, we can still say a different trajectory through the ship should result in a “Great shot, kid”.
Again it cut a ship-sized hole right through it, which would still be devastating if said ship were smaller.
If the shields can block smaller ships then fine, but that’s of course a post-hoc fanwank. There was no indication that shields did anything to prevent or even reduce the impact of the larger ship but sure we can just suppose that the shields can totally stop small ships.
We don’t know that the shields were even up (or were up at minimal power, etc). They were just sitting out of return-fire range, taking pot shots at defenseless escape craft. Someone on the ship notices that the Raddus was preparing for hyperspace and Hux dismisses it at a distraction. Then the Raddus turns and they eventually figure it out and try to react but too late.
Basically, half the problem was that the crew on the Supremacy was dicking around and no one was paying any real attention to the Raddus. In normal circumstances, the Raddus would presumably have never gotten the chance. If they were in a real shooting match with the Raddus, it wouldn’t have gotten the chance.
We’ve only really seen two powers fighting in space in Star Wars: the Great Big Bad Guys and the scrappy rebels. The scrappy rebels don’t have enough equipment as is, much less to be manufacturing ships to try to throw at other ships. The Great Big Bad Guys don’t need to waste materials doing that because they have guns and stuff.
Anyway, in a film full of things I disliked or thought were unreasonable, that didn’t even ping my radar as a problem.
Meanwhile returning to those who thought its box office said something negative about its reception …
Box office mojo today has it the second fastest ever to $500 million.
I’m in the meh camp myself. Not great not horrible. But with overseas it’s already over a billion and it has not even opened in China yet.
Sure – if we’re allowed to just add on ad hoc suppositions like “Their shields were down” “They were at minimal power” or “They were dicking around; normally they’d be able to take measures before a ship travelling at LS hits them” then anything is explicable and there are no problems in any fiction.
But this doesn’t take away from the fact that, based only on what they’ve actually told us in the script, this looks like a tactic that should be effective a lot of the time.
IOW, it’s not that my earlier question “why isn’t [LS ramming in star wars] done all the time?” has no conceivable answer. It’s that it hasn’t been answered yet. And it probably should have been answered prior to using it as such an effective tactic.
In the end though, that’s just a nitpick, and if the movie were well written enough, I wouldn’t care. The main problem with this movie isn’t bad physics, it’s poor thematic consistency. It has several core themes to it, but it undermines and contradicts all of them when it’s convenient.
But that is what I’m criticizing, not the physics. Note that I had no issue with a lightspeed impact not being as damaging as it would be IRL (although of course a collision at actual c is not possible, but let’s put that to one side also). It’s science fantasy and need have no relation to physics as we know it.
The problem for me is in understanding the story and the conflict. If in the next film, it’s just back to standard dogfighting, and no-one mentions ramming as an option, then it’s a big flaw in the story.
Saw it again this morning and it only reinforced my feelings – the best Star Wars movie since Empire, and the best performances by actors (most notably Adam Driver) of all Star Wars movies. There are plenty of little things I didn’t really like, but the core of the movie was Rey, Kylo, and Luke, and I thought their part of the story was just magnificent.
because they’re suicide maneuvers?
That they were dicking around isn’t a supposition, it was literally the movie. They were shooting at pods when a guy reports that the Raddus was preparing to enter hyperspace and Hux says to ignore it and keep popping escape pods. It’s not until the last second (and too late) that Hux screams to take action to stop it. That’s not a guess, that was part of the movie and likely part of the whole people in power making seriously terrible decisions theme.
Not necessarily. You can just program an empty ship to jump to lightspeed remotely.
For a bit of a thinkpiece on the subject I invite you to read this article that speculates on how the move fits (or doesn’t) in Star Wars.
I like his final assessment: It’s never used because it’s actually a war crime
Apparently you can’t, considering Admiral Holdo’s fate.
As the linked article notes, a droid could presumably do what she did — and it’s a pretty short conceptual hop from that to the other type of ‘unmanned’.