There are two events in the new Star Wars films that basically alter Galactic warfare doctrine established by, and in many cases driven the plots of 40 years of Star Wars films.
Specifically, I am referring to the following:
In The Force Awakens when Han Solo “times” brining the Falcon out of hyperspace inside Starkiller Base’s planetary defense shield.
and
In The Last Jedi when Vice Admiral Holdo jumps her ship at light speed into the Supremacy, crippling it and several of it’s escorts.
I feel like the writers didn’t bother to think about the greater implications of these scenes.
If a well timed ship coming out of hyperspace can circumvent the ubiquitous planetary shields under the control of a human pilot (even a very good one like Han Solo), then why not have guided missiles that do the same? It doesn’t even have to stop in time if the intent is to bombard a planet from orbit and destroy the shield generator.
No more planetary landings by inept admirals to take out the shield generator.
No more commando raids on forest moons to take out the shield generator.
No more fighters flying through the superstructure of gigantic ships and space stations to take out some weak spot.
You would just have superluminal missiles bypassing the shield and then careening into their target with mc^2 energy.
Or am I missing some sort of handwavy explanation here?
One could try to fanwank that hyperdrives are too expensive to throw away like that… except that we’ve already seen that X-Wings have hyperdrives, and how many of those has the Rebel Alliance lost (along with their pilots) in every space battle we’ve seen?
Well, the getting around shields thing could be plausible, I suppose, if no one ever thought to try that. I seriously doubt that even a computer could do such a thing unless it’s easier to be more precise with both location and timing coming out of hyperspace where you’ve been blind to the real universe for the duration of the jump.
As for the other one, it’s hard to imagine no one thought of that. The only reasonable explanation for why they didn’t do it before is if there was some sort of prohibition against it so strong that no one does it because of that alone. :dubious: It’s such an obvious weapon (which I think the writers actually underplayed…if a ship even the size of one of their fighters was going close to lightspeed it would have completely destroyed that ship and probably those around it, let alone the rebels cruiser).
Missiles don’t have hyperdrives of their own. Ships do, missiles don’t. All you can do is launch a missile at a target. It may have a guidance system to track the target but the missile itself, after being launched, can’t jump itself into hyperspace.
These new films are taking place 30 years after ROTJ. Perhaps they’ve developed new technologies in those 30 years? I mean, just think about how far mobile phones have come along in just the last ten years, and imagine how much further along they’ll be in another twenty years…
In a galactic culture that has existed for many thousands of years. So all the major advances in technology should have happened long ago. A better analogy is the huge differences in sheets of paper 10 years ago and today. (Hint: I mean that there aren’t.)
(Oh, and we are already waaaay down the path of diminishing returns in changes in cell phones. A cell phone 20 years from now will be much, much, much less different from today’s phone than today’s phone is from a 1998 phone.)
So are you saying that since the culture has been around for thousands of years, they can’t develop anything new? Is there some limit to developing new technologies based on the age of a culture?
There’s also the fact that nothing spurs technological development like a good war. If the Jedi really did maintain peace throughout the galaxy for a thousand years, it’s not surprising that ton of new tech got/gets developed since they fell.
Regarding Starkiller Base:
Wasn’t there a throwaway line about how the shields were set up in a certain way that allowed Han to pass through at hyperspeed? Maybe that’s not an option normally. Also the Falcon doesn’t have a regular hyperdrive. It’s been highly modified.
Regarding the Holdo Maneuver:
It involved several specific things to happen for that to be effective:
It was a whole capital ship that
Managed to jump to lightspeed just as it approached the enemy ship only because
They didn’t think it was a threat so they didn’t fire on it
Also, while it caused a bunch of damage, notice that it didn’t actually destroy the ship. It ripped a hole right through which set off a big enough explosion to damage the rest of the fleet.
No, I think he is saying that it is a mature technology that gets no more than minor tweaks. Firearms are a real life example of such. Today’s guns do exactly the same thing that guns from a century ago did and they work exactly the same way. There are differences in manufacturing techniques and materials but, if you gave a gun from today to a soldier from WWI, there wouldn’t be too much about it that would be groundbreaking from his point of view. Most likely, he’d be favorably impressed by the light weight compared to what he is issued. Optical sights, select fire, and other things we think of as modern were already in use then.
If you take an Xwing, and pack its pilot compartment with explosives, you’ve just made a hyper-space capable missile.
This is actually canon. A big deal is made about how the First Order is tracking them through hyperspace, and how that shouldn’t be possible. In Rogue One, when Jyn is in the Imperial facility, looking for the Death Star plans, she reads off a list of other projects they have in the works. One of them is hyperspace tracking.
That being said, “What if we hyperspace right at someone?” isn’t a technology advance. Worse, it’s something we’ve actually seen before, with wildly different results: again, in Rogue One, when the Rebels are trying to get away from Scarif, a transport jumps to hyperspace just as a Star Destroyer drops out of it, and the transport crumples up like an aluminum can when it hits the SD. Granted, Holdo’s flagship is a lot bigger than the transport, but it still doesn’t add up.
All that said, an easy fanwank here is that hyperspace tracking doesn’t work if the tracking ship has its shields up, and the FO was too confident that the Resistance was finished that they didn’t realize Holdo was setting up a suicide run until it was too late to get their shields up. But there’s absolutely nothing in the film to suggest this, there’s just nothing (I think) that contradicts it.
I got absolutely nothing to explain how Han got through the shields around Starkiller base, though. He’s travelling at the speed of light, and he’s trying to hit a band of space that’s above the planet’s surface, but below the shield, which is maybe two, three miles at most. And he does it by hand. That’s just… man, that just really bugs me. Almost as much as the people at Maz’s bar being able to see a planet around an entirely different solar system explode. I don’t demand hard science in my science fiction, but… for fuck’s sake, Abrams, have you not ever gone outside and just looked at the sky? How many extra-solar planets can you see doing that?
I’m really bummed Abrams is coming back for the third movie. I like the guy’s stuff okay, for the most part, but his flaws make him really badly suited for this role. He has really neat ideas, but no real interest in world building, which is crucial for this sort of long-term, shared-world story telling.
No, there is a limit on developing new technologies based on physics. You will inevitably–with any and all technologies–reach a point where it is either impossible or impractical to push it further. For instance, silicon semiconductors. My first computer had a CPU that ran at 0.895 MHz. My current computer has a CPU that runs at 2,600 MHz. That’s a difference of 2,905x. Not only will I never own a CPU operating at 7,553,072 MHz, there is probably no chance that I’ll ever even own a CPU that runs at 10,000 MHz. So, yes, I absolutely am saying that an advanced technological culture that has been around for thousands of years has almost certainly wrung just about every bit of innovation they can out of the physical properties of matter and energy.
You aren’t missing anything, its just a bad movie that doesn’t stand up to any scrutiny whatsoever.
It doesn’t even have the excuse of being a “switch your brain off” type movie, because even when watching it your brain will be sounding alarms regarding the frankly bizarre plotholes and illogical happenings.
The greater implications? Those writers didn’t even consider the immediate implications of what was happening never mind any greater implications. Best advice is not to think about it, because it really doesn’t hold up to any thinking about it.
“I think it was speculating on the administrative cost of the janitorial staff of the Death Star, taking this hard-edged reality to something that’s fantasy,”
Oh screw Hamill. He never even finished Jedi School.
It’s a Galactic civilization with AI droids, faster than light capabilities, city planets, ships miles long and a space station the size of a small moon. I can justify hiring a hundred thousand janitors (or janitor-droids) to sweep the Death Star more than I can justify not weaponizing what is clearly a very common and easily weaponizable technology in their universe.
I get not wanting to nerd out to the minutiae of every aspect of Star Wars society. OTOH, Lucas did a great deal of world building to create this universe of various cultures, races and economic classes with very consistent tech. Sure, the Death Star was a leap forward in “giant lasers”. But it was just a bigger version of existing tech. One of the things that made Star Wars different from Star Trek was the lack of jury-rigging advanced, plot altering, super-weapon at the last minute by reversing the polarity of the deflector array. The battles and strategies were all a function of how their tech worked. Shields had to be circumvented. Hyperdrives let you jump somewhere out of the immediate story. The Force had some relatively specific applications.
You don’t even need to put explosives in it. The energy from a relativistic Xwing hitting anything is orders of magnitude greater than any explosive you could put inside.
“They let us go. It was the only reason for the ease of our escape…They’re tracking us.”
Princess Leia, Star Wars: A New Hope
Although I assume that was via a hidden transponder and not an inherent ability to track the Falcon through hyperspace (which they couldn’t do in Empire).
I just reviewed the scene on Netfilx. The Star Destroyer comes out of hyperspace in front of the Rebel fleet, so at the time of the collision, it is traveling at mere orbital velocities. The Rebel transport isn’t traveling at light speed yet and can be seen trying to make a turn to avoid SD right before it collides. So in this particular case, I think we are ok. But that could have ended very badly for Darth Vader, jumping head on into a Rebel fleet as it was jumping away.
Especially since there was a much less “ex machina” way of doing it. Have an employee of Starkiller base (i.e. Finn) have a code for disabling the shield or some other method of sneaking them in there.
Not to mention the people on the planets staring up in horror as a death-beam approached them at many times the speed of light. Their first warning that they were in danger should have been a mild “exploding” feeling as they evaporated.
Well, it’s kind of silly to argue that the new SW movies upset “Galactic warfare doctrine” that includes X-Wings banking in dogfights in hard vacuum that allow Death Stars to explode with loud boom!s, but…
The new movies created the planetary shield that they undermined. We never saw a planetary shield until Scarif and Starkiller Base; closest that the earlier SW movies came was the shield projected from Endor around Death Star II, which is tiny in comparison to a full planet. So the real question is, if it’s possible to hyperspace through a planetary shield, why didn’t Rogue One do that instead of all the mess with the shield gate? Those movies were being developed around the same time; did no one talk to each other?