He didn’t seem aware Lando was in the neighborhood himself.
Besides, it’s a floating, self-contained city. There’s definitely a few problems with that:
Living capacity. Bespin could be big enough to hold the Rebels, but then it might not, as there’s plenty of people living there, which brings us to:
Civilians. If the Empire figured out where the Rebels are hiding, the Rebels have suddenly put a lot of innocent lives involuntarily at risk. Plus, with that many eyes around in an enclosed city like Bespin, it’d be awful hard to hide the Rebels’ presence, which goes to:
Witnesses. Being such a full city, it’s doubtful the citizens are all of one mind. All it takes is one Imperial sympathizer or merc looking for a reward to notice the Rebels and call the fleet down on them.
Hoth was a pretty good choice, all things considered. Uninhabited, POS rock with horrific living conditions, plenty of natural caves to house ships and people within the need for artificial structures…had Vader not been aggressively sending out probes on hundreds of wild goose chases, they might have survived there for a very long time.
If they were traveling at near-light speed, what time?
I think Lumpy’s point was that Cloud City’s proximity might have attracted unwanted Imperial attention to the general vicinity. If Bespin and Hoth are at most a light-month apart or so, that puts them basically in the same neighborhood. Then again, Bespin was fairly free from Imperial meddling until after the Battle of Hoth, so maybe it was the other way around.
Actually, though, I expect the writers just weren’t thinking about the distances involved at all when writing the plot to Empire. According to Wookieepedia*, Bespin is 49,100 light years distant from the galactic core, while Hoth is 50,250 light years distant from same. That gives a lower bound of 1150 light years between Hoth and Bespin! If Han and Leia were really obliged to travel at sublight speeds, by the time they got there, Luke, Vader, and everyone else would be long dead, assuming, of course, that they were traveling close enough to c to make the journey before their own expiration became a concern.
The Wookieepedia articles reference Star Wars: Complete Locations, which I’m assuming is an authoritative source.
Keep in mind too that Han had no idea Bespin was even in the general vicinity. Leia had to mention it to him, and that’s only after looking at in through the computer.
Not really. Where do you think he got the parts? What’s more likely, that he has a forge in back so he can cast his own outer shell pieces, or that he can find pieces from a junked droid in the yard of the junk dealer that owns him?
All this talk about the warp issue makes me wonder about a different problem: When the Falcon left the asteroid fleet/threw the Star Destroyers off their track Boba Fett follows them. How did he guess where the Falcon was going? It would have to have been pretty soon after they left the system so they could overtake them and take over the gas minig facility.
Because Fett was faster. Keep in mind that this is Space Opera space, not the Chicago Loop. It’s safe to assume a straight-line course, so once Han plotted a course and started heading toward Cloud City, it would be nothing for Fett to determine Han’s destination and then beat him there.
Darth Vader clearly just isn’t the most energetic lightsaber on the utility belt. Of course, Luke isn’t exactly the brightest constellation in the sky, either. And Obi Wan’s comment about the destroyed Jawa transporter (“These blast points, too accurate for Sand People; only Imperial Stormtroopers are so precise,”) tends to indicate that he’s pretty full of crap as well, as the rest of the films make it clear that a stormtrooper could hit the broad side of a barn with a blast riflle only at contact range, and can readily be taken down by a bunch of Paddington Bear clones with rocks and big sticks. In fact, pretty much everybody in the Star Wars universe seems to be afflicted with some kind of mental disability. “It’s a trap!” No shit, fishhead? Maybe you shouldn’t have collected your fleet into one big battle group.
I’m firmly of the opinion that Jar-Jar ‘Captain Obvious’ Binks was one of the smartest characters in the film, even though he would be challenged at playing Scrabble against Pinky the lab mouse.
