X-Wings v. AT-AT's

When I get off of work in an hour I’ll check this out on the DvD. I’m pretty sure that the shield was only around the death star though.

Simple: the giant deflector dish was probably surrounded by hundreds of AA-guns. No way an X-Wing could get within a hundred kilometers of that thing without getting shot down.

Isn’t that what they said about both death stars too?

Starfighters are probably not very good atmospheric fighters, and in any case, Snowspeeders can’t cover Space Transports that are trying to run an Imperial Blockade.

IIRC, space is “hot” relative to the distance from a sun; in a planetary shadow, or in ideep space, space is quite cold.

Also IIRC, the DS2 shield at Endor went all the way down to the ground (it sure looked that way in Ackbar’s cool holographic display tank).

What I want to know is this: back on Tatooine during EP: IV, why didn’t the blockading Star Destroyers deploy their scads of TIE Fighters to assist with the blockade?

Why didn’t the Star Destroyers chasing the Millenium Falcon from Tatooine, and then later from Hoth, ever use their Ion Cannons to simply disable the damned junkheap?

ILM didn’t have the funds.

They’re short-range fighters, meant for close dogfighting rather than patrol. They HAD dedicated patrol boats (rather, they were retconned in), but they weren’t seen. I guess Star Destroyers have faster real-space acceleration than smaller vessels (hell, look how quickly they rounded Endor for the ambush in ROTJ…)