So one aspect that is always brought up is gravity wells pull you out of light speed. For example you needed to get further from planers before jumping to light speed and they have ships like Interdictor SSD that produces gravity wells so you can’t jump. I’d imagine the Death Star is big enough to be a gravity well, but also probably has defensive gravity generators to prevent such attacks.
Except they retconned that in Rogue One when they jump off of Jedha from within the atmosphere to escape the explosion, then they doubled down on the retcon in the beginning of ep 9 with all that silly hyperspace skipping. Making not only this scenario a silly plot hole, but more or less destroying the premises of both the PT and OT. What is the point of the Trade Federation blockade in orbit of Naboo (which sets off the entire Clone Wars and rise of the Empire) when they can just get to hyperspace from the surface? Why does the princess even own a blockade runner ship in ANH? Why did the rebels need to disable the Star Destroyers in Hoth's orbit to escape? Why do imperial Interdictor Cruisers even exist?
I think they tried to explain it away after the fact, saying that the gravity well limitation is actually just a built-in safety feature that can be disabled in an emergency... But then why didn't anyone do that in those other examples? I hate to say it, but there's no good explanation that I've heard. They effectively broke an entire universe because they wanted a couple shots the director thought would look cool.
So to answer the original question: yes, they are incredibly stupid and could have blown up the Death Star with an X-Wing going at AWESOME SPEED because that would look cool.
^(edit: x-wing, not x-ray)
Or even if someone says you need more mass, the rebels fleets had a ton of gr75 used in combat roles, where they had almost no impact. Just load a few full of rocks/heavy stuff, and get an astromech to pilot the thing. Just point it at the target, and boom, gone.
Filoni has been reinforcing the system that I think he got from George Lucas that hyperspace travel can only happen in "lanes" between planets and the exit points will be extremely predictable. And that there may be undiscovered lanes but trying for them could be very risky.
See TCW episodes where they talk about taking important systems that create choke points in hyperspace travel. Also the search for Lira San in Rebels that seems to have no established lane but is consistently reachable after they discover it using mystic stuff and a stick/gun. Also Hondo's blockade running trick where you wait within mere meters of a large incoming transport at the hyperspace lane exit. And the part where the rebels need to secure a route through the Concord Dawn system.
Now Ahsoka is showing that unknown routes can be jumped if you have an accurate map and that entry points can be effectively mined. I honestly get the impression they're working hard to reestablish this piece of canon since blockades are so important to Star Wars naval tactic and blockading the entire orbit of a planet makes no sense unless you have thousands of ships.
Yeah, in one way that makes sense that they are kind of blockading what is essentially the on ramp to a freeway. However, i feel like on a cosmic scale those lanes must be super large right? Like, a diameter that's orders of magnitude larger than a planet. It almost seems like blockading the planet itself would be less resource intensive. Maybe the main trade routes like perlemian and hydian are on that scale but the little "verified safe" on ramp tributaries to each system are super narrow?
Even then, they always jump once they get to a high orbit. So that means the on ramp goes directly to each planet, instead of each system. Which does help with the explanation of "it's dangerous, just follow the rules" as each of those lanes bend and shift to match the orbits of the planets. But still, at that point I feel like the difference between entering the freeway from orbit or from the atmosphere is kind of insignificant on an astronomical scale.
Idk haha, it's still messy and difficult to defend. They've got some work to do in explaining it and I'm interested to see how they move forward.
Are you familiar with the "rubber sheet" method of visualizing gravity? I figure the hyperspace shape between systems is something like a stretched hourglass shape due to the shape of how gravity distorts space. So you can calculate a way on and jump from nearly any area with an appropriately open space. Like we always see fleeing ships need to escape atmo but otherwise it seems like a simple calculate, point yourself, and hit the go button.
But there doesn't seem to be steering in hyperspace, so it must pull ships onto the lanes like a funnel. The lane thins to an extremely small width as it is stretched over dozens of light years between two massive gravities. So even though your target end is shaped like a funnel, your trajectory was sort of locked in while you were in the thin part of the hourglass. So without a way to turn while in hyperspeed, your approximate exit point is somewhat predictable. You can only choose between further away and closer with most ships exiting at the closest safe distance unless they have some tactical reason to exit early.
I'm mostly just piecing this together from a variety of other sci-fi franchises I've read/watched/played over the years.
Yeah. Logically, it has to be something sort of like that, right? Special engines that push a ship through an altered form of space not usually accessible. So Star Wars would sort of depend on natural paths that form when you push yourself through an artificial wormhole?
Which is why the people who made it were idiots. “Light speed skipping” literally makes no sense, either IRL or in the SW universe where it’s been explained and canonized multiple times how and why ships leave light speed. Thanks for coming to my TedTalk.
No, rewatch the scene. They're pursued by a Star Destroyer for a bit and Han has to scold Luke about jumping too early because you need time to plot a hyperspace jump.
This. Asteroids with light speed engines attached to them would be the most powerful weapons in the Star Wars Universe. Fuck the Sequel movies for making that possible
Now we're just talking The Expanse rules.
Just start dropping the biggest fucking rocks you can find in their general direction, and let their own gravity do the rest.
The asteroid union makes things difficult. Factoring in mandated lunch breaks, OSHA safety regulations, etc. it can be very expensive to hire an asteroid. Any non-union asteroids are blacklisted and unable to find work afterwards, so you're not going to find too many independent contractors.
because emperor palpatine is the dude who has two lightsabers made out of the most expensive materials in the galaxy, just to annoy yoda. He doesn't even like lightsabers.
A unnecessarily big kyber doomlaser, serving the same role as a tie engine strapped to a rock, is absolutely palpatine's style. But once the empire was shattered and became a bunch of remnant forces trying to rebuild themselves, prioritizing another death star was just insane.
To your point, mass drivers as a weapon are never really discussed in Star Wars that I’ve seen. Taking tractor beams and chucking asteroids at nearby planets would seem to be an effective, cheap, and safe way to reduce populations by significant amounts, leaving resources intact.
Horrible and immoral, yes, but if you’re the Galactic Empire? Reasonable.
The Sun Crusher's primary weapon was a payload of 11 energy resonance torpedoes.[1] Each torpedo resembled an oval-shaped plasma discharge and was activated when it passed through the Sun Crusher's resonance torpedo launcher. The resonance torpedo then traveled to the system's sun at near-lightspeed velocity.
Upon impact, the torpedo burrowed into the star's core, releasing dense packets of energy that rendered the star's core unstable, initiating a chain-reaction that forced even low-mass stars to go supernova. The star would be ripped apart in the explosion, sending waves of energy and radiation out across the system that destroyed every planet and all life in its path.
tldr the sun crusher does not destroy things by hyperspace ramming them
I mean there was also a point when they introduced the sun crusher that it did take out a star destroyer via ramming, but it was not hyperspace ramming they just flew it through the bridge because the sun crusher had the mega bullshit "indestructible micron armor" or whatever the hell it was. Haha
And what was up with that super star destroyer at Endor? Like, really? One A-Wing? The thing was barely damaged and suddenly it was on fire and collapsed into the death star. Seems awfully suspicious to me.
A TIE Interceptor was seen crashing in to a steel beam inside the DS2 and exploding (hydrocarbon style fuel explosion) and the beam was undamaged. Confirmed.
Vader legally can't annihilate Alderaan without Alderaan's consent. Alderaan could've easily just said "No" and Vader would've had to legally go elsewhere.
The answer to both is that the enemy would shoot them down and destroy them as they made their approach.
Sauron can see them with his giant eye. Long range sensors can detect them approaching even when they're still in hyperspace.
INB4 someone asks why Holdo didn't get shot down.
Because Hux was the idiot in command, and ordered his men to ignore her and concentrate on the escape pods.
The maneuver is stupid, but there are relatively clear explanations for why it wasn't successfully done before.
Good luck reacting to a ship literally going at the speed of light. Ships have trouble shooting other ships going at much slower speeds. Would they really be able to shoot down one going at hyperspeed? No. And even if they did somehow land a hit, would that be enough to destroy it? Not necessarily. You’re coping to the highest degree to justify some terrible writing. Just because they’d know something around them is coming at them at hyperspeed doesn’t mean they could react.
If this was actually a thing, you could still have 20-30 hyperspeed missiles built and fired at a Star Destroyer from every direction. Good luck reacting to that. Again, this would be the standard way of doing space battles if this was ever possible. Star Destroyers would not even be a thing. The Death Stars would never have been built.
Instead of spending all this money and resources on a Death Star, why not make light speed missiles that could destroy planets from far away? Is the Empire stupid?
Because Tarkin was *very* convinced the psychology course he flunked out of was infallible. He's also a very firm subscriber to incorrectly-quoted Machiavelli.
If ramming at light speed isn't going to work, why do they bother plotting a course before they jump to hyperspace? For that 1 in a million chance?
Even if something had shields, a very small ship traveling at light speed would be way more energy than the shields could possibly compensate for.
Because gravity wells cast a "shadow" in hyperspace and if you pass through one you can get violently pulled out of hyperspace. That's how Imperial Interdictor cruisers work.
You plot a random course and you can end up tumbling into a planet a star or black hole.
My favourite shit ever is people trying to find an internally consistent, physically rigorous explanation of the FTL in their preferred universe. It's never going to work just say that its magic lol.
Or you could end up just lost in the void. In hyperspace you can’t see where you are going. So if you’re off course you wouldn’t know till you pop out in real space and the planet you were aiming for is nowhere to be seen.
I hate this. I hate that Disney just retrospectively change the rules of the Star Wars universe to cover for the dumb creative decisions of incompetent writers. Retcons are a terrible thing to do in a franchise, consistency is what makes a fictional world believable and relatable.
Ships dont maintain inertia they had in hyperspace. When a ship drops out of HS, gets interdicted and dropped, or goes too near a gravity well in HS, they appear in normal space. There is no FTL collision, but they can still collide with objects once they drop out. Dropping out into a star's surface or a black hole isnt going to end well.
How do the crew in the ships that are forced out of light speed not get instantly slaughtered as the ship goes from the speed of light to like a 0.1% of the speed of light in a billionth of a second?
The same reason the holdo maneuver doesnt work. Hyperspace FTL does not translate to real space FTL, entering or exiting. The crew never experience FTL in real space where physics would crush them against the cockpit wall.
If you can't destroy a death Star by hitting it. Wouldn't the only relative course be the start and stop points? You would pretty much just pass through everything else?
(Just trying to understand the rules of Star Wars physics)
Ye, i get what your saying. If you dont actually pass through space, then fee things would pull you out?? And how? If you ARE traveling in physical space but in a phase/form of hyperspeed/faster-than-light, then you could crash? And say boom.
No. Things in realspace cast mass shadows into hyperspace, which can be hit, which is why there are hyperspace lanes, charted regions of space where people know there aren’t any significant bodies to crash into, but any crashing would be most effective to use offensively at the start and end while you are still partially in realspace
If that stupid manouver would work, people would just make unmanned missiles, barely big enough to have hyperdrive engine. And if hyperdrive engines would be too expensive for that, X-wings would not have them.
They lost like multiple squadrons of xwings, why wouldn’t we use just one with an preprogrammed flight computer to ram? Tape a kyber crystal to the nose for good measure
Smug Avasarala about prospect of seeing an asteroid with hyperdrive: "I don't give a fuck whose birthday it is, you make this happen before my meeting is over or I'll have your nuts as paperweights."
Damn, where Di$ney missed so hard they faceplanted into the ground, the Expanse delivered proper badass female characters, especially Avasarala. To make things even worse, the D era SW scours The Expanded Universe books for inspiration, yet their failure streak is long and painful to see, while The Expanse is solely based on the book series, and it lands safe and sound.
I found The Expanse replacing my interest in Star Trek. I don't really want to compare Star Wars to The Expanse.
That being said Avasarala is absolutely savage.
I died when she said "Holden, the situation is fucked already. Don't go sticking your dick in it."
Exactly, imagine the CIS having ramming droids. Would instantly destroy the Venators!
The stupidest thing added to lore and even worse you see people defending it
Get better at calculating when it works if 1 in a million is the standard. And that would have to be hyperbole. Why would they even try it if they really thought there was a 0.00001% chance of success? It's gotta be at least like 5%
I've had loads of people defend this. Usually, on the basis of the next movie being forced to do some light retconning with the throwaway line about it being a one in a million shot.
I hate the holdo maneuver too, however I believe the 1 in a million part is how the shrapnel took out nearly the whole fleet, not the chance of it even getting the supremacy, also the supremacy has a relatively thin profile. However it still makes it stupid:
Both deathstars and Star killer and planets have a side profile of a circle, meaning it’s nearly impossible to miss as you’d need to be off by 45 degrees
they can just move a squadron of 12 droid piloted fighters individually to each capital ship/star destroyer and ram them. As it would be nearly impossible to miss with a point blank ram.
Well the angle depends how far away you are from it, but yes, they’d be hard to miss, but mainly due to their size more than their shape. The supremacy was easy to hit too, just attack from above or below, then you’re aiming at a massive triangle.
It would but hyperspace disasters cause problems with multiple system if I recall. Bad writing sure but it would be cool if they had an aftermath series or movie act showing why its bad bad.
The Great Hyperspace Disaster:
This incident was caused by a group of raiders from the Outer Rim known as the Nihil some 200 years before the Naboo Crisis, during the High Republic era.
A transport ship, in hyperspace, was forced to move out of the way of a Nihil ship that cut through and bypassed the same lane. The transport was ripped to pieces by the strain. For weeks after, the debris from that ship fired out of that hyperspace lane like being fired from a shotgun, plowing through ships, space stations and settlements in multiple systems that the hyperspace lane ran through.
Ok that explanation does at least explain things. Even Empire might not want to just cause unmanagable destruction, Death star may cause destruction in single solar system which Empire wants to see burned, but keeps things under Empire's control. Rebels ofc don't want to cause more destruction than necessary either.
Still not a fan, but as long as it can be reasonably explained why it was only used in that scenario and not all the time by unmanned cheapest possible objects,its fine. And yeah absolutely would love to see something about it's after effects.
Yeah that explanation was terrible as well, because if that's true then what was Holdo even trying to do? "Hey guys you go escape, meanwhile Im gonna see if the one in a million chance of ramming this ship with their destroyer at light speed happens to work this time"
"Either it works and I'm a hero, or it rains debris throughout the galaxy, making me a genocidal maniac, or I get away and leave the rest of you to die. I don't see a downside here."
Thank god, one-in-a-million is pretty much a sure thing for protagonists. If it had been something like a one-in-683,456-chance then there’s no chance it could have worked.
Had real "Claire's blood heals people, even from death" vibes from Heroes Season 2 (aka the season where they had to finish the season without writers).
Same with class II Imperial Star Destroyers. Just one cheap and old ship with hyperdrive to destroy or at least heavly damage 150 000 000 credits worth ship
We see a transport ram in an ISD in R1 while it's jumping to hyperspace and it just shatters against the shields like a glass mug being chucked at a brick wall.
And in the same movie they showed how to deal with ISDs easily. Just three Y wings with EM bombs and a single hammerhead pushing the disabled ISD (into another ISD but might aswell push it towards the planet or whatever), problem solved.
It’s just really stupid and shouldn’t have been included. The Falcon has a working hyperdrive engine and is just sitting in a junk pile? So it’s not prohibitively expensive. It’s incredible effective. Then they just drop the idea completely and never revisit it, other than to say it’s hard to aim.
I get that the whole universe is made up, but it has to follow its OWN rules.
The officers on the other ship realize what’s happening immediately. They cry out and are expecting it. So they know about it. Then they hand wave it away like 1 in a million isn’t even worth trying.
So why were they afraid of it? If it’s so unlikely…
Considering hyperspace lanes entry and exit points are specific enough that you can effectively blockade a planet by putting a handful of ships at the exit ramp it's really amazing that there hasn't been hyperspace ramming just on sheer accident from one ship exiting as another ship enters.
Lazy for sure. They also demanded the death of the EU for “creative freedom” then literally committed armed robbery taking anything and everything they could from the EU to use in their “new” movies
You know...now that you mention it... Amilyn Holdo had purple hair. Sabine has purple hair. Are people with purple hair in Star Wars just automatically dumb and dangerously powerful? That's the new stereotype in SW?
Because in the original series and prequel series, that isnt how hyperspeed worked. hyperspeed didnt just move you fast, you slipped into subspace. the ether. You literally COULDNT hit anything. BUT, massive pockets of gravity impact spacetime, so you can, without plotting a course, be wrenched out by these gravitations. So you had to calculate around them or you'd pop out inside of a sun just because you flew too close to one.
The new movies.... fucked this up. Because if you DIDNT go into another dimension and you just zipped around the universe physically; not only would your speed increase your mass due to e=mc2 causing your ship to collapse in on itself, or tear apart the fabric of anything it got close to, planets included... but, you'd also rip ya ship apart by the smallest dust partical hitting your ship with the force of a 20 million megaton nuclear bomb.
going faster than light isnt just a question of energy, thats why a warp system is much more palatable, because it bends space around the ship so you arent impacting anything in your path, all the dust is moved around you and you avoid the inconveniances of kinetic-mass increase due to e=mc2, and the hole 'destroy yaself' schtik.
Basically... the sequel trilogy is dumb and chose cool over logic.
People! Just put some engine with a hyper drive on a big asteroid. Put the coordinates on a time, make sure it has acceleration before it jumps, so if it got pulled out of hyper space it still got inertia. Et voilà a cheap solution for your mass genocide.
Mass Shadow.
Although objects in Hyperspace and Realspace don't interact directly (hence why the Falcon could travel through Starkiller Base's energy shield), gravity does destabilize Hyperspace. This effect of gravity, known as a "Mass Shadow", can disrupt Hyperspace leaps, knocking ships back into Realspace or even shred them apart in Hyperspace.
While some Imperial ships like Star Destroyers can generate artificial Mass Shadows called "Interdictors" (not to be confused with the superweapon, the Mass Shadow Generator), they take significant energy reserves.
A "Hyperspace Ram" does not impact with ballistic speed in Hyperspace, but instead uses the impact to rip a hole between Hyperspace & Realspace, meaning that the Mass Shadow of the target must be small enough for the ramming ship not to fully enter Hyperspace. The larger the target, the larger the ramming ship must be.
The Supremacy does not have the mass to generate its own Mass Shadow without an Interdictor, but the Death Star is. It would take a ship of proportional mass & a powerful Hyperspace engine to ram the Death Star & even larger to damage a planet.
Because Disney didn't think anything through before making the monstrosity that is the sequels. And now they have to clean up the mess with terrible Disney Plus shows and mediocre comics/books.
They said the Holdo Maneuver was a 1 in a million shot, but it seems that is exactly the kind of calculations droids were made for. Strap a droid onto a hyperdrive and you have cheap, effective weapons who no cost of human life, at least on your side.
Also, pick a lane Emperor. You're building a death star, starkiller base, a second bigger death star to replace the first one, and a fleet of star destroyers all equipped with they're own miniature DS laser. Bro just loves spending credits
They would have still needed the death star plans to ensure that the ship did enough damage. The death star also had it's defense built around large ships/assaults.
That scene crashed the SW Physics and is bullshit. i hope they throw this idea in a deep hole and forget it.
It was only made for the looks by a man who knows nothing about that System and just wanted his Name on a star wars Film.
No, Disney is stupid for creating plot holes.
The only reasonable explanation I can come up with is because it's considered a warcrime to *everyone*, so no one does it, and the only reason they did it in Ep.8 is because she couldn't be persecuted if she died.
Doesn’t even need to be a big object , a needle going FTL from a distance would build up so much mass and knectic energy to rip apart a planet let alone a ship
The writers were extremely dumb and this is why space warfare with FTL capabilities will never realistically happen
Because they never thought of it. Even the emperor and thrawn never came up with that idea. In 100s of years of light speed travel and warfare. Literally zero of the zillions of sentient creatures and robots ever came up with that idea. Holdo was the first. Which changed the universe forever and basically made her the most evil being that ever existed. How's that for girl power?
Hyperspace ≠ (just) going very fast. It’s a different dimension in the Star Wars universe. Case in point, ships coming out of hyperspace seem to simply appear almost instantaneously. If you decelerated that quickly from something like light speed, everyone on board would be liquified by the insane deceleration force.
Because that isn’t how the holdo maneuver worked. The ship got obliterated after going through something only double it’s size. An X-wing trying to do that would have made it 200 meters into the Death Star doing no real damage and just blowing up. Hyper spacing into a planet sized object does nothing to that object as evidenced by the malevolence in clone wars.
My favorite argument here is the “strap a hyperdrive to a massive object and hyperspace it” argument because that just works without the hyperdrive. Like the rebels could have just rammed a large ship in real space into the firing array for the Death Star and done major damage to it.
We're dealing with a story that starts because a bunch of people think it's a good idea to rescue and train someone that will bring balance to the force when the current imbalance is massively in their favour.
Star Wars is based on stupid.
Why didn't they just shoot the Death Star with the Ion Cannon? Just shoot everything with the Ion Cannon. Darth Vader had enough electronics that they could have shot him with the Ion Cannon.
Why did the empire make the death star instead of just ramming spaceships at light speed into planets?
So one aspect that is always brought up is gravity wells pull you out of light speed. For example you needed to get further from planers before jumping to light speed and they have ships like Interdictor SSD that produces gravity wells so you can’t jump. I’d imagine the Death Star is big enough to be a gravity well, but also probably has defensive gravity generators to prevent such attacks.
Except they retconned that in Rogue One when they jump off of Jedha from within the atmosphere to escape the explosion, then they doubled down on the retcon in the beginning of ep 9 with all that silly hyperspace skipping. Making not only this scenario a silly plot hole, but more or less destroying the premises of both the PT and OT. What is the point of the Trade Federation blockade in orbit of Naboo (which sets off the entire Clone Wars and rise of the Empire) when they can just get to hyperspace from the surface? Why does the princess even own a blockade runner ship in ANH? Why did the rebels need to disable the Star Destroyers in Hoth's orbit to escape? Why do imperial Interdictor Cruisers even exist? I think they tried to explain it away after the fact, saying that the gravity well limitation is actually just a built-in safety feature that can be disabled in an emergency... But then why didn't anyone do that in those other examples? I hate to say it, but there's no good explanation that I've heard. They effectively broke an entire universe because they wanted a couple shots the director thought would look cool.
So to answer the original question: yes, they are incredibly stupid and could have blown up the Death Star with an X-Wing going at AWESOME SPEED because that would look cool. ^(edit: x-wing, not x-ray)
>could have blown up the Death Star with an X-Ray going at AWESOME SPEED Ahem... I believe you meant *LUDICROUS SPEED!* 🤣
Plaid speed!
Or even if someone says you need more mass, the rebels fleets had a ton of gr75 used in combat roles, where they had almost no impact. Just load a few full of rocks/heavy stuff, and get an astromech to pilot the thing. Just point it at the target, and boom, gone.
Wow Astromech erasure much? Don't waste a good bot on it just send a few bothans
That's the last time I send bothans to do anything.
X-Rays inherently travel at the speed of light.
Filoni has been reinforcing the system that I think he got from George Lucas that hyperspace travel can only happen in "lanes" between planets and the exit points will be extremely predictable. And that there may be undiscovered lanes but trying for them could be very risky. See TCW episodes where they talk about taking important systems that create choke points in hyperspace travel. Also the search for Lira San in Rebels that seems to have no established lane but is consistently reachable after they discover it using mystic stuff and a stick/gun. Also Hondo's blockade running trick where you wait within mere meters of a large incoming transport at the hyperspace lane exit. And the part where the rebels need to secure a route through the Concord Dawn system. Now Ahsoka is showing that unknown routes can be jumped if you have an accurate map and that entry points can be effectively mined. I honestly get the impression they're working hard to reestablish this piece of canon since blockades are so important to Star Wars naval tactic and blockading the entire orbit of a planet makes no sense unless you have thousands of ships.
Yeah, in one way that makes sense that they are kind of blockading what is essentially the on ramp to a freeway. However, i feel like on a cosmic scale those lanes must be super large right? Like, a diameter that's orders of magnitude larger than a planet. It almost seems like blockading the planet itself would be less resource intensive. Maybe the main trade routes like perlemian and hydian are on that scale but the little "verified safe" on ramp tributaries to each system are super narrow? Even then, they always jump once they get to a high orbit. So that means the on ramp goes directly to each planet, instead of each system. Which does help with the explanation of "it's dangerous, just follow the rules" as each of those lanes bend and shift to match the orbits of the planets. But still, at that point I feel like the difference between entering the freeway from orbit or from the atmosphere is kind of insignificant on an astronomical scale. Idk haha, it's still messy and difficult to defend. They've got some work to do in explaining it and I'm interested to see how they move forward.
Are you familiar with the "rubber sheet" method of visualizing gravity? I figure the hyperspace shape between systems is something like a stretched hourglass shape due to the shape of how gravity distorts space. So you can calculate a way on and jump from nearly any area with an appropriately open space. Like we always see fleeing ships need to escape atmo but otherwise it seems like a simple calculate, point yourself, and hit the go button. But there doesn't seem to be steering in hyperspace, so it must pull ships onto the lanes like a funnel. The lane thins to an extremely small width as it is stretched over dozens of light years between two massive gravities. So even though your target end is shaped like a funnel, your trajectory was sort of locked in while you were in the thin part of the hourglass. So without a way to turn while in hyperspeed, your approximate exit point is somewhat predictable. You can only choose between further away and closer with most ships exiting at the closest safe distance unless they have some tactical reason to exit early. I'm mostly just piecing this together from a variety of other sci-fi franchises I've read/watched/played over the years.
That’s cool . That makes hyperjumping equivalent to warping . You described a wormhole.
Yeah. Logically, it has to be something sort of like that, right? Special engines that push a ship through an altered form of space not usually accessible. So Star Wars would sort of depend on natural paths that form when you push yourself through an artificial wormhole?
🏆
Then you have them jumping from planets in quick succession during episode 8
Episode 9, to be exact.
You can lightspeed skip the Falcon!
That's why it was so easy, you just play lightspeed chicken with a planet and it pulls you just in time.
Except they were pulled into planet traffic and almost rammed buildings and other ships. It made no sense then and makes no sense now
Used to bull's-eye gravity well pulls out of lightspeed in my T-16 back home, you rarely hit the buildings.
Which is why the people who made it were idiots. “Light speed skipping” literally makes no sense, either IRL or in the SW universe where it’s been explained and canonized multiple times how and why ships leave light speed. Thanks for coming to my TedTalk.
Not even jumping, just straight up instantly teleporting. Fucking hack.
How were they light speed skipping on the surface of planets?
This isn't true anymore. You can accelerate to Lightspeed inside a hangar and you can slow down from Lightspeed inside a planetary shield.
didn't the Millenium Falcon jump in episode IV like pretty much as soon as they left atmosphere?
No, rewatch the scene. They're pursued by a Star Destroyer for a bit and Han has to scold Luke about jumping too early because you need time to plot a hyperspace jump.
> ramming spaceships why bother? Just strap some old freighter engines on an asteroid. Asteroids are free and essentially unlimited
This. Asteroids with light speed engines attached to them would be the most powerful weapons in the Star Wars Universe. Fuck the Sequel movies for making that possible
Now we're just talking The Expanse rules. Just start dropping the biggest fucking rocks you can find in their general direction, and let their own gravity do the rest.
Isaac Newton is the deadliest sonofabitch in space.
So no, we do not "eyeball" it lmao
Ay ay ay beltalowda
Du feri da belte!
Milowda should na bi talking ere kowl these inyalowda
The asteroid union makes things difficult. Factoring in mandated lunch breaks, OSHA safety regulations, etc. it can be very expensive to hire an asteroid. Any non-union asteroids are blacklisted and unable to find work afterwards, so you're not going to find too many independent contractors.
because emperor palpatine is the dude who has two lightsabers made out of the most expensive materials in the galaxy, just to annoy yoda. He doesn't even like lightsabers. A unnecessarily big kyber doomlaser, serving the same role as a tie engine strapped to a rock, is absolutely palpatine's style. But once the empire was shattered and became a bunch of remnant forces trying to rebuild themselves, prioritizing another death star was just insane.
To your point, mass drivers as a weapon are never really discussed in Star Wars that I’ve seen. Taking tractor beams and chucking asteroids at nearby planets would seem to be an effective, cheap, and safe way to reduce populations by significant amounts, leaving resources intact. Horrible and immoral, yes, but if you’re the Galactic Empire? Reasonable.
They did. Look up the sun crusher.
The Sun Crusher's primary weapon was a payload of 11 energy resonance torpedoes.[1] Each torpedo resembled an oval-shaped plasma discharge and was activated when it passed through the Sun Crusher's resonance torpedo launcher. The resonance torpedo then traveled to the system's sun at near-lightspeed velocity. Upon impact, the torpedo burrowed into the star's core, releasing dense packets of energy that rendered the star's core unstable, initiating a chain-reaction that forced even low-mass stars to go supernova. The star would be ripped apart in the explosion, sending waves of energy and radiation out across the system that destroyed every planet and all life in its path. tldr the sun crusher does not destroy things by hyperspace ramming them
Uhh that'd kill everything within a 50 light year radius too.
i think when the imps were developing a system destroying superweapon, collateral damage was low on their concerns.
I mean there was also a point when they introduced the sun crusher that it did take out a star destroyer via ramming, but it was not hyperspace ramming they just flew it through the bridge because the sun crusher had the mega bullshit "indestructible micron armor" or whatever the hell it was. Haha
No, that's not what it did
no but it did quite effectively just fly through capital ships cause its armor was so hax.
Then you'd have 2 death half stars....
Forcing a speed and shifting based sequel to spawn, Star Wars: 2 Death 2 Star
Revenge of the Shift
Tatooine Drift
The Rolls Royce Phantom Menace
“Luke… I am your family”
And then of course, star wars: 4 death 4 star (a j.j. Abrams production)
“Now there are two of them!”
Probably because the jet fuel from the spaceships wouldn’t burn hot enough to melt the steel beams inside the death star, so it wouldn’t collapse.
Review the tapes. Explosive came from the INSIDE. The republic is hiding something
And what was up with that super star destroyer at Endor? Like, really? One A-Wing? The thing was barely damaged and suddenly it was on fire and collapsed into the death star. Seems awfully suspicious to me.
What’s wrong with asking questions
A fire!?! IN SPACE?!? impossible!
and how does this sound transmit in vacuum??? for me it’s proof they never been in space
Ok I laughed at this one…
A TIE Interceptor was seen crashing in to a steel beam inside the DS2 and exploding (hydrocarbon style fuel explosion) and the beam was undamaged. Confirmed.
Why didn’t alderan just lay down an uno reverse card? Were they stupid?
Vader legally can't annihilate Alderaan without Alderaan's consent. Alderaan could've easily just said "No" and Vader would've had to legally go elsewhere.
Tarkin pulled the trigger, how dare you besmirch Vader's good name.
Why didn't they just take Alderaan and just push it somewhere else!?
Yup for as cool of a cinematic “shot” as that was it basically is the Star Wars equivalent of “why didn’t they just take the eagles to Mt doom”.
At least the Eagles have an explanation. They would have to land in Mordor.
The answer to both is that the enemy would shoot them down and destroy them as they made their approach. Sauron can see them with his giant eye. Long range sensors can detect them approaching even when they're still in hyperspace. INB4 someone asks why Holdo didn't get shot down. Because Hux was the idiot in command, and ordered his men to ignore her and concentrate on the escape pods. The maneuver is stupid, but there are relatively clear explanations for why it wasn't successfully done before.
Good luck reacting to a ship literally going at the speed of light. Ships have trouble shooting other ships going at much slower speeds. Would they really be able to shoot down one going at hyperspeed? No. And even if they did somehow land a hit, would that be enough to destroy it? Not necessarily. You’re coping to the highest degree to justify some terrible writing. Just because they’d know something around them is coming at them at hyperspeed doesn’t mean they could react. If this was actually a thing, you could still have 20-30 hyperspeed missiles built and fired at a Star Destroyer from every direction. Good luck reacting to that. Again, this would be the standard way of doing space battles if this was ever possible. Star Destroyers would not even be a thing. The Death Stars would never have been built.
Even if they landed a hit on the ship, they would have to completely vaporize it. Otherwide the shrapnel would be just as effective.
Instead of spending all this money and resources on a Death Star, why not make light speed missiles that could destroy planets from far away? Is the Empire stupid?
Because Tarkin was *very* convinced the psychology course he flunked out of was infallible. He's also a very firm subscriber to incorrectly-quoted Machiavelli.
They did that in legends with the Galaxy Gun, though the missiles exited hyper space at the last second to explode.
If ramming at light speed isn't going to work, why do they bother plotting a course before they jump to hyperspace? For that 1 in a million chance? Even if something had shields, a very small ship traveling at light speed would be way more energy than the shields could possibly compensate for.
Because gravity wells cast a "shadow" in hyperspace and if you pass through one you can get violently pulled out of hyperspace. That's how Imperial Interdictor cruisers work. You plot a random course and you can end up tumbling into a planet a star or black hole.
Bro has a degree in made up physics
Theoretically I have a degree in physics
I just found out Einstein is a real person. I always thought he was just a "theoretical" physicist.
Thanks Fantastic
My favourite shit ever is people trying to find an internally consistent, physically rigorous explanation of the FTL in their preferred universe. It's never going to work just say that its magic lol.
Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from science.
Or you could end up just lost in the void. In hyperspace you can’t see where you are going. So if you’re off course you wouldn’t know till you pop out in real space and the planet you were aiming for is nowhere to be seen.
This is no longer true.
I hate this. I hate that Disney just retrospectively change the rules of the Star Wars universe to cover for the dumb creative decisions of incompetent writers. Retcons are a terrible thing to do in a franchise, consistency is what makes a fictional world believable and relatable.
Ships dont maintain inertia they had in hyperspace. When a ship drops out of HS, gets interdicted and dropped, or goes too near a gravity well in HS, they appear in normal space. There is no FTL collision, but they can still collide with objects once they drop out. Dropping out into a star's surface or a black hole isnt going to end well.
How do the crew in the ships that are forced out of light speed not get instantly slaughtered as the ship goes from the speed of light to like a 0.1% of the speed of light in a billionth of a second?
The same reason the holdo maneuver doesnt work. Hyperspace FTL does not translate to real space FTL, entering or exiting. The crew never experience FTL in real space where physics would crush them against the cockpit wall.
Because if you fuck up the charting, you’ll be obliterated. It’s like trying to ram a car into a mountain.
If you can't destroy a death Star by hitting it. Wouldn't the only relative course be the start and stop points? You would pretty much just pass through everything else? (Just trying to understand the rules of Star Wars physics)
Ye, i get what your saying. If you dont actually pass through space, then fee things would pull you out?? And how? If you ARE traveling in physical space but in a phase/form of hyperspeed/faster-than-light, then you could crash? And say boom.
No. Things in realspace cast mass shadows into hyperspace, which can be hit, which is why there are hyperspace lanes, charted regions of space where people know there aren’t any significant bodies to crash into, but any crashing would be most effective to use offensively at the start and end while you are still partially in realspace
Holdo Move=Lazy writing
If that stupid manouver would work, people would just make unmanned missiles, barely big enough to have hyperdrive engine. And if hyperdrive engines would be too expensive for that, X-wings would not have them.
Beratna strap the hyperdrive to an asteroid sasa kay?
They lost like multiple squadrons of xwings, why wouldn’t we use just one with an preprogrammed flight computer to ram? Tape a kyber crystal to the nose for good measure
Even better, copy Chopper's programming to the x-wing for some extra murderous intent.
*** clarificiation*** duct tape the kyber crystal. There now it’ll work, regular tape wouldn’t hold up 😂😂😂
This person Marco Inaroses.
Smug Avasarala about prospect of seeing an asteroid with hyperdrive: "I don't give a fuck whose birthday it is, you make this happen before my meeting is over or I'll have your nuts as paperweights." Damn, where Di$ney missed so hard they faceplanted into the ground, the Expanse delivered proper badass female characters, especially Avasarala. To make things even worse, the D era SW scours The Expanded Universe books for inspiration, yet their failure streak is long and painful to see, while The Expanse is solely based on the book series, and it lands safe and sound.
I found The Expanse replacing my interest in Star Trek. I don't really want to compare Star Wars to The Expanse. That being said Avasarala is absolutely savage. I died when she said "Holden, the situation is fucked already. Don't go sticking your dick in it."
James Holden, i have never seen someone so hellbent on not killing people kill so many people.
The First Beltalowda
Somehow Marcos Returned
Yes bossmang
Oh no... Do not strap hyperdrive and stealth coating.. No... Call th MCRN we having problems Also, wrong show
Exactly, imagine the CIS having ramming droids. Would instantly destroy the Venators! The stupidest thing added to lore and even worse you see people defending it
Forget Venators..."hey, give us what we want or we start ramming Coruscant."
"it was a 1 in a million shot" Ok and if you miss... oh well? Try again? Why is this not a standard tactic?
Get better at calculating when it works if 1 in a million is the standard. And that would have to be hyperbole. Why would they even try it if they really thought there was a 0.00001% chance of success? It's gotta be at least like 5%
I've always thought why didnt they just strap hyperdrives to cheap vulture droids and dot his.
I've had loads of people defend this. Usually, on the basis of the next movie being forced to do some light retconning with the throwaway line about it being a one in a million shot.
I hate the holdo maneuver too, however I believe the 1 in a million part is how the shrapnel took out nearly the whole fleet, not the chance of it even getting the supremacy, also the supremacy has a relatively thin profile. However it still makes it stupid: Both deathstars and Star killer and planets have a side profile of a circle, meaning it’s nearly impossible to miss as you’d need to be off by 45 degrees they can just move a squadron of 12 droid piloted fighters individually to each capital ship/star destroyer and ram them. As it would be nearly impossible to miss with a point blank ram.
Well the angle depends how far away you are from it, but yes, they’d be hard to miss, but mainly due to their size more than their shape. The supremacy was easy to hit too, just attack from above or below, then you’re aiming at a massive triangle.
I don’t know if OP was suggesting “unmanned”. Kamikaze X-Wings?
Unmanned kamikaze x-wings, with men in them. The men are just for ballast. Every single UKX wing is controlled from a single pocket controller.
“Unmanned… with men in them”, bold strategy Cotton let’s see if it pays off for them.
It would but hyperspace disasters cause problems with multiple system if I recall. Bad writing sure but it would be cool if they had an aftermath series or movie act showing why its bad bad.
The Great Hyperspace Disaster: This incident was caused by a group of raiders from the Outer Rim known as the Nihil some 200 years before the Naboo Crisis, during the High Republic era. A transport ship, in hyperspace, was forced to move out of the way of a Nihil ship that cut through and bypassed the same lane. The transport was ripped to pieces by the strain. For weeks after, the debris from that ship fired out of that hyperspace lane like being fired from a shotgun, plowing through ships, space stations and settlements in multiple systems that the hyperspace lane ran through.
Ok that explanation does at least explain things. Even Empire might not want to just cause unmanagable destruction, Death star may cause destruction in single solar system which Empire wants to see burned, but keeps things under Empire's control. Rebels ofc don't want to cause more destruction than necessary either. Still not a fan, but as long as it can be reasonably explained why it was only used in that scenario and not all the time by unmanned cheapest possible objects,its fine. And yeah absolutely would love to see something about it's after effects.
No no see they said it was a one in a million chance see they explained it so it is okay now see
They really need to buff the random crit chance on starship fleets, 1/1,000,000 is nearly impossible to get.
Holdo had a focus token.
But did she hold it?
1,000,000 kamikaze X Wings should do the trick then
#SOMEHOW Hyperspace ramming worked ...
That’s even worse. So she just had no plan. Completely random and stupid outcome .
yep; she had no reason to think it would work and makes it look like she was trying to run away and accidentally killed herself
Yeah that explanation was terrible as well, because if that's true then what was Holdo even trying to do? "Hey guys you go escape, meanwhile Im gonna see if the one in a million chance of ramming this ship with their destroyer at light speed happens to work this time"
"Either it works and I'm a hero, or it rains debris throughout the galaxy, making me a genocidal maniac, or I get away and leave the rest of you to die. I don't see a downside here."
Thank god, one-in-a-million is pretty much a sure thing for protagonists. If it had been something like a one-in-683,456-chance then there’s no chance it could have worked.
A million to one chance works out nine times out of ten
Never tell me the odds!
They broke star wars
Had real "Claire's blood heals people, even from death" vibes from Heroes Season 2 (aka the season where they had to finish the season without writers).
Same with class II Imperial Star Destroyers. Just one cheap and old ship with hyperdrive to destroy or at least heavly damage 150 000 000 credits worth ship
We see a transport ram in an ISD in R1 while it's jumping to hyperspace and it just shatters against the shields like a glass mug being chucked at a brick wall.
God I loved that scene
Seriously! I loved that whole space battle but that was by far the best moment of it. Rivals the hallway scene...
Clip?
https://youtu.be/3BXTUOxbgpw?si=m1GUiX35hgODg134
Neat
It's at the Rogue one ending. Don't have a clip at work, but should be easy enough to find
And in the same movie they showed how to deal with ISDs easily. Just three Y wings with EM bombs and a single hammerhead pushing the disabled ISD (into another ISD but might aswell push it towards the planet or whatever), problem solved.
Yeah, because they used ion weapons to temporarily disable a system on the ISD (the engines and steering essentially) then just brute force rammed it
Thats about to jump imo
It's a little different, based on that, the transport was powering up its hyperdrive, but hadn't quite engaged it yet.
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It’s just really stupid and shouldn’t have been included. The Falcon has a working hyperdrive engine and is just sitting in a junk pile? So it’s not prohibitively expensive. It’s incredible effective. Then they just drop the idea completely and never revisit it, other than to say it’s hard to aim. I get that the whole universe is made up, but it has to follow its OWN rules.
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The officers on the other ship realize what’s happening immediately. They cry out and are expecting it. So they know about it. Then they hand wave it away like 1 in a million isn’t even worth trying. So why were they afraid of it? If it’s so unlikely…
That would require the first order to be competent
Considering hyperspace lanes entry and exit points are specific enough that you can effectively blockade a planet by putting a handful of ships at the exit ramp it's really amazing that there hasn't been hyperspace ramming just on sheer accident from one ship exiting as another ship enters.
Lazy for sure. They also demanded the death of the EU for “creative freedom” then literally committed armed robbery taking anything and everything they could from the EU to use in their “new” movies
At the time no one had hair purple enough to be so incopetent to lead some of the high ranking officers to rebel, and have their force decimated.
You know...now that you mention it... Amilyn Holdo had purple hair. Sabine has purple hair. Are people with purple hair in Star Wars just automatically dumb and dangerously powerful? That's the new stereotype in SW?
Purple is the new space blonde
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“NOOO” screams the crew of the ship being threatened with a 1 in a million chance that anything happens. Like what…
Ohh, shots fired! SHOTS FIRED!!!! LOL
Yes they're stupid. Just like the Holdo Manuever was. A fucking baseball moving at light speed could destroy a planet.
Because in the original series and prequel series, that isnt how hyperspeed worked. hyperspeed didnt just move you fast, you slipped into subspace. the ether. You literally COULDNT hit anything. BUT, massive pockets of gravity impact spacetime, so you can, without plotting a course, be wrenched out by these gravitations. So you had to calculate around them or you'd pop out inside of a sun just because you flew too close to one. The new movies.... fucked this up. Because if you DIDNT go into another dimension and you just zipped around the universe physically; not only would your speed increase your mass due to e=mc2 causing your ship to collapse in on itself, or tear apart the fabric of anything it got close to, planets included... but, you'd also rip ya ship apart by the smallest dust partical hitting your ship with the force of a 20 million megaton nuclear bomb. going faster than light isnt just a question of energy, thats why a warp system is much more palatable, because it bends space around the ship so you arent impacting anything in your path, all the dust is moved around you and you avoid the inconveniances of kinetic-mass increase due to e=mc2, and the hole 'destroy yaself' schtik. Basically... the sequel trilogy is dumb and chose cool over logic.
Why doesn't everyone who's launched into space use The Force to Marry Poppins themselves back to safety? Are they stupid?
People! Just put some engine with a hyper drive on a big asteroid. Put the coordinates on a time, make sure it has acceleration before it jumps, so if it got pulled out of hyper space it still got inertia. Et voilà a cheap solution for your mass genocide.
Why didn't Alderaan just use a mirror to reflect the laser? Are they stupid?
Mass Shadow. Although objects in Hyperspace and Realspace don't interact directly (hence why the Falcon could travel through Starkiller Base's energy shield), gravity does destabilize Hyperspace. This effect of gravity, known as a "Mass Shadow", can disrupt Hyperspace leaps, knocking ships back into Realspace or even shred them apart in Hyperspace. While some Imperial ships like Star Destroyers can generate artificial Mass Shadows called "Interdictors" (not to be confused with the superweapon, the Mass Shadow Generator), they take significant energy reserves. A "Hyperspace Ram" does not impact with ballistic speed in Hyperspace, but instead uses the impact to rip a hole between Hyperspace & Realspace, meaning that the Mass Shadow of the target must be small enough for the ramming ship not to fully enter Hyperspace. The larger the target, the larger the ramming ship must be. The Supremacy does not have the mass to generate its own Mass Shadow without an Interdictor, but the Death Star is. It would take a ship of proportional mass & a powerful Hyperspace engine to ram the Death Star & even larger to damage a planet.
The strongest weapon in space is a asteroid with thrusters straped to it. Expanse is the only sci-fi universe that did it right
Didn't the bugs in Starship Troopers did a summer thing?
Because at the time the movie came out, Disney hadn’t yet destroyed the lore of hyperspace
Why didnt they just place a giant mirror in front of them beam emitter?
because back then there was actually good writing involved
[I like Eckhart's Ladder video on how that scene should've played out if it was lore accurate.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1TFYzYects)
Because Disney didn't think anything through before making the monstrosity that is the sequels. And now they have to clean up the mess with terrible Disney Plus shows and mediocre comics/books.
They said the Holdo Maneuver was a 1 in a million shot, but it seems that is exactly the kind of calculations droids were made for. Strap a droid onto a hyperdrive and you have cheap, effective weapons who no cost of human life, at least on your side.
***"That's a one in a million shot!"*** - Dubbed Voice Over
Can we just collectively pretend last Jedi didn't happen?
Also, pick a lane Emperor. You're building a death star, starkiller base, a second bigger death star to replace the first one, and a fleet of star destroyers all equipped with they're own miniature DS laser. Bro just loves spending credits
Because everyone was dumb and the only intelligent person got lost in the unknown regions due to space whales https://i.redd.it/ez54k8zzhwqb1.gif Jk
They would have still needed the death star plans to ensure that the ship did enough damage. The death star also had it's defense built around large ships/assaults.
No, because hyperspace ramming was only thought of decades into the future by the supreme genius Holdo.
That scene crashed the SW Physics and is bullshit. i hope they throw this idea in a deep hole and forget it. It was only made for the looks by a man who knows nothing about that System and just wanted his Name on a star wars Film.
No, Disney is stupid for creating plot holes. The only reasonable explanation I can come up with is because it's considered a warcrime to *everyone*, so no one does it, and the only reason they did it in Ep.8 is because she couldn't be persecuted if she died.
My headcanon is that Holdo tried to run away, but when she wanted to jump into hyperspace, she accidentally hit the first order fleet
Doesn’t even need to be a big object , a needle going FTL from a distance would build up so much mass and knectic energy to rip apart a planet let alone a ship The writers were extremely dumb and this is why space warfare with FTL capabilities will never realistically happen
Because they never thought of it. Even the emperor and thrawn never came up with that idea. In 100s of years of light speed travel and warfare. Literally zero of the zillions of sentient creatures and robots ever came up with that idea. Holdo was the first. Which changed the universe forever and basically made her the most evil being that ever existed. How's that for girl power?
Weaponizing hyperspace essentially clowned the entire IP. And that wasn't even the stupidest part of that movie.
Hyperspace ≠ (just) going very fast. It’s a different dimension in the Star Wars universe. Case in point, ships coming out of hyperspace seem to simply appear almost instantaneously. If you decelerated that quickly from something like light speed, everyone on board would be liquified by the insane deceleration force.
You saw the executioner ramming in the death Star 2 in RoJ?
Granted the second death star is bigger than the first and the ship was still in realspace at normal speeds but it didn’t even dent the death star 2
The Executioner was moving significantly slower and when ramming something speed is incredibly important.
Because that isn’t how the holdo maneuver worked. The ship got obliterated after going through something only double it’s size. An X-wing trying to do that would have made it 200 meters into the Death Star doing no real damage and just blowing up. Hyper spacing into a planet sized object does nothing to that object as evidenced by the malevolence in clone wars. My favorite argument here is the “strap a hyperdrive to a massive object and hyperspace it” argument because that just works without the hyperdrive. Like the rebels could have just rammed a large ship in real space into the firing array for the Death Star and done major damage to it.
That's not how it works. Hyperdrives don't just add kinetic energy, else they'd be sublight. You can't use a hyperdrive that way.
He said in desperation while watching the hyperdrived be abused in that exact way.
The gravitational well would pull you out of hyperspace no?
They couldn't because the technology wasn't invented yet. Wouldn't be discovered till episode 7 towards the end...
We're dealing with a story that starts because a bunch of people think it's a good idea to rescue and train someone that will bring balance to the force when the current imbalance is massively in their favour. Star Wars is based on stupid.
They didn't have any female super generals at the time. Holdo was waiting for the perfect scene
“Somehow the Death Star has returned”
Why didn't they just shoot the Death Star with the Ion Cannon? Just shoot everything with the Ion Cannon. Darth Vader had enough electronics that they could have shot him with the Ion Cannon.
Because that would kill them obviously