To nitpick, the B-2 bomber is not really an extension of Nazi development - here in the US, Jack Northrop was independantly working on flying wing aircraft prior to WWII. In 1941, Northrop got a contract to build a prototype of an intercontinental bomber, that eventually led to YB-35 and the YB-49 bombers, those these craft lost out to the B-36 for the full production contract. Note that the B-2 bombers is built by the Northrop corporation.
Ah, I guess I was confusing the games with the movie.
Follow-up question: I presume the shield was pretty damn big if they were inside it during the battle (maybe I’m wrong). Why didn’t they surround the shield generator with a smaller, shield generator sized shield?
If you reuse X-Wings instead of introduce Snowspeeders, you won’t have new toys to sell.
Another possibility is that there weren’t enough X-Wings to go around. They also had to cover the transports that were leaving the planet. Luke had his own, but did the other speeder pilots all have X-Wings as well? Or were they evacuated on transports?
The snowspeeders were made from scavenged parts and would be of limited utility anywhere besides Hoth. X-wings were the front line space superiority fighters and very valuable pieces of equipment. So the rearguard got the expendable speeders, and the X-wings escorted the transports offworld.
They did mention in the briefing that there was only 1 or 2 (I don’t remember offhand) fighters to cover each transport as it left, so it sounds like they didn’t have a whole lot of X-Wings around to spare.
It wouldn’t matter. The Rebels depended on not getting found. Once the Empire found the Hoth base they could lay seige to it indefinitely until they won. Even if they destroyed ever AT-AT and AT-ST, more star destroyers would come with more armor and stormtroopers and eventually the base would fall.
The Battle of Hoth is basically a rearguard action by the Rebels. The crappy snowspeeders and ground troops just had to delay the At-Ats long enough to evacuate the important stuff - the leadership, the bulk of the troops and the more powerful weapon systems like the X-Wings (which they probably don’t want destroyed fighting ground forces).
Yes, everyone remembers being awed at the sight of that steep mountainous terrain all over Hoth… 
Actually, Hoth did have steep mountainous terrain – in the backgrounds.
Ralph McQuarrie could manage it for the matte paintings with no problem – Phil Tippett, not so much. 
That’s what I’ve always admire most about Star Wars: It’s consistency
Argh, two typos in one post. Well, at least I’m consistent.
Since no-one else has tried saying this, I will:
“Good grief man, you can’t fire a proton torpedo within a planetary atmosphere!! Positive radiation would ionize the free gas radicals and you’d basically just manage to blow yourself up before the damn thing had gone twenty feet! They’re hard-vacuum jobbers only.”
No, no. That’s how Scotty from the original Star Trek would explain it. (Geordi would use more technobabble and less histrionics.)
In Star Wars, Han Solo or someone would just say that photon torpedos become unstable if fired in an atmpsphere, and leave it at that 
To nitpick your nitpick, the Northrop guys did go to the Smithsonian to scope out the Horten bomber when they were working on the B-2.
I guess you can tell that star wars isn’t really my fandom. But at least I got the proton/photon thing straight.
Wasn’t the main fleet somewhere else? I imagine X-Wings, if they WERE willing to sacrifice them to the AT-ATs, were in rare supply.
The fleet, which is shown in RotJ, was quite large. Most of the X-Wings must have been with Admiral Ackbar.
What I never could understand regarding air support was in Return of the Jedi. Instead of waiting for Han and Company to blow up the shield generator on Endor, Why didn’t they send a ship from the battle above down to just bomb the damn thing? At that point when the Death Star shield was still up you would think that sending one or two ships down the the planet would be a lot simpler than waiting around to see if the ground troops finished the job.
IIRC, looking at the hologram before the attack, wasn’t either the shield generator or all of Endor covered by the shield that’s protecting the Death Star?
Keep in mind that Han & Co. had to request deactivation of the shield before they were allowed to land on Endor.
Another thing to keep in mind is that in Star Wars there seem to be two kinds of shields (or maybe one kind that’s affected by the power you have available). One kind is the deflector shield which seems to do no good against a direct hit - see the fighting against the first Death Star for examples. The second kind is the actual 100% protection type, which is what we saw around Echo Base and DS2.
-Joe, geek
Could it be a matter of power supplies? I imagine an entire planetary moon’s geothermal systems would produce more power for shields than anything in a TIE fighter or X-Wing could have.