What is your Star Wars hot take?
What is your Star Wars hot take?
Mine is they shouldn't have made the sequel series without George as a consultant.
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I find Jedi boring and have always been way more interested in the space fleet battles/logistics/tactics. As a kid I would watch RotJ and fast forward through the ground/throne room scenes just to watch the space battles. I still know exactly where all the scene cuts are.
That's a strange thing to fixate on considering it's absolute nonsense. They work because they look cool as hell but nothing about them makes sense in a logistical way.
Why are the defense batteries manually aimed? Why are capital ships engaging from within visible range? Why do they only do the lightspeed-suicide maneuver one time when it's clearly the perfect weapon in space? Why do they fly like they're moving through air?
Logistics is probably the wrong word, I don’t mean the actual physics of space combat, that never super mattered to me. As a kid that played a lot of X-wing so I probably imprinted some of that onto the movies. That game made it feel like a real space navy with an organization, ranks, squadrons, tactics, etc. that made more sense than the way the movies portrayed it.
I always disliked that the movies didn’t show more of the world-building, they definitely could feel shallow at times, but considering they were based on old Flash Gordon type serials I guess it makes sense.
I suppose the space battles could sort of some sense given the technology in the Star Wars universe.
Your spaceships have two engines/drives. You have the hyperspace engines which are fast but you can't engage in fight in hyperspace (well...mostly), then you have the regular ion engines for use out of hyperspace which are slow as shit. Capital ships can barely get out of their own way, and even the Millennial Falcon isn't terribly quick when not in hyperspace. Now combined with weapons like blasters which have the problem that blaster bolts are also slow as shit. As in considerably slower than bullet fired from a conventional firearm. So if you fire them from a distance from a target, they can see the blaster bolt coming and move out of the way (or jump into hyperspace) long before it gets there. Crappy, slow engines combined with crappy, slow space weapons means capital ship battles might involve the ships having to get close to each other and just slugging it out. That can also sort of explain the small fighters since they can get in really close and hit the ships at basically point-blank range. Though the lack of hit-and-run tactics involving jumping in and out of hyperspace is a bit curious.
The rareness of the hyperspace-suicide maneuver might be rare as the rebels don't have a lot of ships, and if they start plowing them into Empire ships, they'll quickly run of ships and no matter how many Empire ships they take out in a battle, the Empire will always have another Star Destroyer. Though the big problem with introducing the possibility of this sort of maneuver in the later movies is the rebels would have absolutely plowed a ship into the Death Star with completely devastating results in the first movie. And anyone building a Death Star would have been well aware of an attack like that and would have known it would be almost impossible to defend against when you're building a moon-sized target for it.
Blasters and turbolasers being about as fast as a thrown stone is another ridiculous point. They have "slugthrowers", they know about solid projectiles, and thanks to ewoks we know that stormtrooper armor ain't shit against rocks and sharp stocks. Presumably the entire galaxy, other than Tuskens and sometimes Mandalorians, decided that carrying ammo around wasn't worth it. Whatever, it kind of makes sense for small arms.
But space! Use one of those hyperspace drives to launch a modest plasteel rod at relativistic speed from the absolute edge of sensor range. No need to get anywhere near the turbolaser batteries. Small ships should be for boarding/anti-boarding exclusively.
Maybe the problem is that everyone in Star Wars is super racist. We know that druids are a slave class of sapient beings with no rights and we know that Tuskens are feared and/or reviled by most that know of them. So maybe nobody wants to benefit from working guns or computer minds because of the association.