Another Cold Rehash, er The Last Jedi, for those who have seen it (SPOILERS).

[Sommerswerd]

My working theory is that George Lucas was so butthurt by the poor fanboi response to The Phantom Menace that he scrapped his plans for the rest of the trilogy, and decided the second movie would just cram as much fanservice as possible into the movie.

So we got an entire movie about a throwaway line in ANH about Clone Wars. We got useless Boba Fett backstory. We got Death Star plans. We got Yoda fighting. We got lightsaber porn. Basically everything that TPM set up the prequel trilogy to be was replaced with stuff Lucas though the hardcore fans would want to see, with a nauseating, horribly acted, terribly written, and totally, unbelievably chemistry-starved "love story" interspersed.

I think I actually dislike AotC the least out of all the PT movies because it has the most plot *ducks* ... and is the most original of the 3... it also pays some homage to Blade Runner, which... that's gotta count for something right?... anyway I do see what you mean about forced fanservice. But also consider that the Clone Wars cartoon really needs the AotC movie to exist... and while the love story is indefensible, I won't even try to die on that hill.... you have to at least admit that the love scenes... and the movie in general give us the absolute best Padme outfits of the entire trilogy.

It makes sense in and of itself, it just doesn't make sense that it's so easy to do, so obvious, so effective and yet somehow it's not a standard tactic and took everyone completely by surprise.

What about the argument that suicide bombing has been shown to be so effective that its inexplicable that the armies of the Western world haven't adopted this tactic en masse by now What about mustard gas, that's pretty effective, why doesn't everyone use it? What about nukes? I heard those things work purty gud, why don't we just use those all the time instead of silly armies? I mean in Civ once the countries get nukes it's pretty much bombs away right? I'm just messing with you obviously, but I hope you see my point.

 

[warpus]

Well... at the risk of rehashing about 15 posts I made earlier in the thread...

It makes sense in and of itself, it just doesn't make sense that it's so easy to do, so obvious, so effective and yet somehow it's not a standard tactic and took everyone completely by surprise. It would be kind of like an 8 episode epic Western saga, full of battles and life and death struggles, where everyone fights with toothpicks for the first 7 films, and it isn't until episode 8 that someone decides to draw his six shooter and gun down all the bad guys.

It's probably not a great strategy because it means you have to lose a large ship each time you do this. The way their capital ship cut that other capital ship in two.. makes it seem as though in order to destroy a large ship using this technique, you also require a quite large ship. Plus IIRC the affected FO ship wasn't even destroyed, it was just cut in two. So the rebels won't be doing this on a regular basis since they have a lot less ships at their disposal. And the FO/Empire don't do it on a regular basis since they don't need to.

Plus wasn't there some specific set of circumstances that allowed them to do this? I can't really remember.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

It's probably not a great strategy because it means you have to lose a large ship each time you do this. The way their capital ship cut that other capital ship in two.. makes it seem as though in order to destroy a large ship using this technique, you also require a quite large ship. Plus IIRC the affected FO ship wasn't even destroyed, it was just cut in two. So the rebels won't be doing this on a regular basis since they have a lot less ships at their disposal. And the FO/Empire don't do it on a regular basis since they don't need to.

Plus wasn't there some specific set of circumstances that allowed them to do this? I can't really remember.

Ack...

They had already lost all their other large ships. If they'd done this first they would probably have saved most of them, so it is an effective strategy.

Putting those two halves back together is clearly more work than building another of the rebel ships would be, given the sheer scale of it.

I'm pretty sure several other ships behind it also got destroyed/damaged, so it was even more effective than that.

Others have argued that there were a specific set of weird circumstances that made this a once-in-a-lifetime option, but I really don't see it. Even if it were true, it shouldn't have taken the First Order by surprise in the way it did.

Plus as I said before, if it worked at all it would have been weaponised and made more efficient - attaching hyperdrives to asteroids if nothing else - so it wouldn't have to cost an actual ship every time.

 

[Evie]

It took the first order by surprise for one reason, and one reason only - they believed that ship to be virtually empty and attempting to decoy them away from the transport. They misread the situation, which is something that happens, oh, all the bloody time in warfare (see, for example, Halsey at Leyte who managed an epic misread of the situation that nearly led to disaster). The second they saw it change heading they knew exactly what was happening.

As for using the strategy earlier...not reasonably workable, no. The one reason they were able to carry out the plan is that they had been able to evacuate the ship via transport in the first place. Which required getting close enough to Crait, and refueling the transport - both time limitations that made it harder to carry out the plan earlier. Escape pods are a criminally bad plan, since even one surviving First Order ship is enough to pick the survivors and anihilate the resistance at their leisure in that version.

Finally, even if you do suicide the bigger ship and save the smaller ships, you still end up with one or two small ships, almost out of fuel, overloaded with people (since you presumably evacuated everyone to that ship) - and, much like the escape pods, highly vulnerable to whatever First Order ships, if any, survive the suicide ramming. Adnd that's the lynchpin. You can't be assured of killing them all. You might, but you might not. And if all you have left are the smaller ships against one or more surviving First Order battlecruiser...you're no better off than you were before the suicide attack.

Sure, the suicide attack is a great way to inflict damage, but its primary strategic value, in that situation, was as a distraction, and a way to gain time - because it was almost a given any remaining ship would at least temporarily abandon the chase of the rebel ship to assist their stricken allies, especially with the senior officer of the fleet being on the flagship, so unable to give effective instructions. This bought the precious minutes the Rebels needed to land on Crait - but the First Order got back on its feet quickly enough to land an invasion fleet not far behind them. If they had remained in space on the smaller ships, it's likely those few minutes would have made no difference.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

It took the first order by surprise for one reason, and one reason only - they believed that ship to be virtually empty and attempting to decoy them away from the transport. The second they saw it change heading they knew exactly what was happening.

Yep and had absolutely no defence against being cut in half...

That's like saying a rocket launcher isn't an effective weapon because the second you saw me start to point it at you, you'd know exactly what was happening.

 

[Evie]

There certainly are potential counters for those strategy.

Starting with, the most effective, *scattering*. Starships are fast moving, and hyperspace jumps follow precise vectors. In the space of the minute or more required to undertake hyperspace calculations, a tightly grouped First Order formation can spread out, greatly limiting the impact of a rebel ship suicide run. Sure, the big ship still probably get cut in two (because it's THAT enormous, and hard to move out of the way), but a lot more of the smaller ships survive - and those smaller ships are themselves 3+ kilometers behemoths that severely outgun the remaining resistance ships. This makes the strategy highly inadvisable against a fleet that doesn't include a 60-kilometers behemoth (like Snoke's flagship), since smaller ships can in fact just scatter out of your way. Since there are very few ships that big (really, the two Death Stars and Snoke's flagship are the long and short list of it) in the galaxy, that severely limits the strategy, right there.

There is also the fact that slowing down to prepare its hyperspace jump then turning around put the cruiser within firing range of the First Order warships. With a minute of sustained fire, they could do significant damage (witness how quickly the other two resistance ships go down when they fall within First Order firing range), and quite possibly prevent the suicide run altogether by disabling or destroying the ship.

If someone with a rifle see you get a rocket launcher out, they can shoot you before you get off your shot. Especially if the rocket launcher need a minute to fire.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Well... at the risk of rehashing about 15 posts I made earlier in the thread...

It makes sense in and of itself, it just doesn't make sense that it's so easy to do, so obvious, so effective and yet somehow it's not a standard tactic and took everyone completely by surprise. It would be kind of like an 8 episode epic Western saga, full of battles and life and death struggles, where everyone fights with toothpicks for the first 7 films, and it isn't until episode 8 that someone decides to draw his six shooter and gun down all the bad guys.

Yeah that bugged me too for the reasons you said. Also, somehow when they rammed the dreadnaught all the other ships got rammed too (they were all cut in half).

But by that point there had been so much more nonsense going on that it barely registered. Like the opening scene with a single XWing taking down all the cannons on a hug ship. Ugh

 

[Senethro]

Its Star Wars. Combat sequences must always look like WW2 movies with a lasery makeover.

But yeah, I always give the sideeye to science fiction containing FTL in which the primary weapon isn't putting an FTL engine on a big rock and lobbing it.

 

[Evie]

Depends on the nature of FTL. Star Wars's FTL severely limit that strategy, due to FTL in Star Wars being alt-dimensional (through hyperspace). Once in hyperspace, you can hit mass shadows cast in hyperspace by realspace objects, but that's dangerous to *you*, not to *them*. So for one thing, per Star Wars physics, you can't actually do FTL projectiles ; the best you can do is relativistic ramming while accelerating to enter hyperspace (or possibly decelerating your way back out of it). And that requires very precise calculation and timing. Not so easy to pull off.

That said, the bigger problem with using that strategy on a regular basis is that, it is canonically possible to simulate the mass shadow cast by those large objects. The Empire has starships capable of doing precisely that (yes, the old Interdictor Cruisers are back into Canon, via Rebels). This allows them to force crafts out of hyperspace (at a location of the Empire's own choosing), and prevent crafts within the area from entering hyperspace. This pretty effectively neuters weapons that rely on relativistic ramming that's only possible when entering or leaving hyperspace. So, why isn't FTL ramming a widespread technology? Because the perfect counter for it *already exists* is probably a huge part of the answer.

(And while it's a relatively recent technology...so is mass-production small craft hyperdrive. Remember that as recently as the prequels, starfighter-sized crafts needed to dock with oversized hyperdrive rings to be able to enter hyperspace. Even in the OT era, the Empire, with all its resources, favored cheaper starfighter models without hyperdrives. There's pretty significant evidence hyperdrive miniaturization and such are recent phenomenons)

 

[Kyriakos]

 

[Evie]

And Alec Guiness hated being in the original trilogy, and Harrison Ford had been demanding to have his character be killed since Empire Strikes Back or so.

Actors sometime don't like how their roles work out. It means precisely nada about the movie, except for making the occasional whiner feel somehow validated.

 

[Kyriakos]

^It's ok, Evie; your view is more important than Luke Skywalker's. Evie? E-V. Of course

 

[Evie]

My view is just as valid as his, yes, especially considering he's not Luke Skywalker. He's Mark Hamill : an actor who happened to play the character in the film. It gives him no special insight or authority in the quality of the finished product. Nor even special authority in what is or is not a good direction for his character to take.

He's entitled to his opinion, certainly. But it's just one man's opinion, no better or worse than mine. He'S not some authority you can appeal to (and even if he were an actual authority, an appeal to authority remain the lowest of intellectual arguments)

 

[Kyriakos]

My view is just as valid as his, yes, especially considering he's not Luke Skywalker. He's Mark Hamill : an actor who happened to play the character in the film. It gives him no special insight or authority in the quality of the finished product. Nor even special authority in what is or is not a good direction for his character to take.

He's entitled to his opinion, certainly. But it's just one man's opinion, no better or worse than mine. He'S not some authority you can appeal to (and even if he were an actual authority, an appeal to authority remain the lowest of intellectual arguments)

You aren't even aware when you are being played, m8. Tldr: not all of us here actually care about SW. Hamill is somewhat tied to it, so i posted his negative view of the latest movie(s).

 

[Evie]

For someone who doesn't care about Star Wars (and the Lord of the Rings, and...) you seem to post in threads about them a great deal.

 

[Synobun]

For someone who doesn't care about Star Wars (and the Lord of the Rings, and...) you seem to post in threads about them a great deal.

All a part of his masterful ruse, you see...

 

[warpus]

Mark Hamill also had a very specific vision of Luke in his mind. But it was a vision of Luke from 30 years ago, not including any sort of growth during those 30 years.

He claims that now upon finally having some time to study the new Luke and where that story is (still) going, that he sees the vision and understands and approves it. It could just be an evil guy dressed in black with giant black ears telling him to say that, but.. I personally like the end of Luke's arc myself but at first my response was also "huh"

Luke's part of the story is basically IMO the only near-perfectly done part of the movie. So far. I am probably going to change my mind after I see ep 9, as I admit that this is a trilogy and so not all the plot elements are wrapped up yet

 

[Takhisis]

What's so scary about Phasma? We don't know anything about her.

In fact, in TFA she's threatened with a blaster and taken prisoner but then in TLJ she's actually shot with one and her armour takes it.

Yeah let's get back to how hyperspace ramming doesn't really make any sense as presented.

Apparently most people say the cruiser accelerated into hyperspace speed and just bumped into the Imperial ship(s). At the time when I watched it I thought it was a Quake-style telefrag, with the ship rematerialising (reappearing in normal space) in the same spot as Snoke's ship was. If it had been rammed, I think, then it would have been thrown backwards, but as I saw it it was simply bisected.

Tldr: not all of us here actually care about SW.

If you're going to post here please address my discussion of a new name for the men in red. IIRC I said ‘Hyperprotarchontic Guard’.

 

[metalhead]

I think I actually dislike AotC the least out of all the PT movies because it has the most plot *ducks* ... and is the most original of the 3... it also pays some homage to Blade Runner, which... that's gotta count for something right?... anyway I do see what you mean about forced fanservice. But also consider that the Clone Wars cartoon really needs the AotC movie to exist... and while the love story is indefensible, I won't even try to die on that hill.... you have to at least admit that the love scenes... and the movie in general give us the absolute best Padme outfits of the entire trilogy.

People are gonna like what they're gonna like. I can't even watch Attack of the Clones because the "love" story is so cringeworthy, but if one didn't find that so revolting, I can see where the movie is fun, even though it's terrible. There's no sin in liking a bad movie as long as one doesn't insist on saying it's good, and Padme's outfit in the Coliseum is the best thing AotC has going for it, so you got me there

 

[Sommerswerd]

Remember that as recently as the prequels, starfighter-sized crafts needed to dock with oversized hyperdrive rings to be able to enter hyperspace. Even in the OT era, the Empire, with all its resources, favored cheaper starfighter models without hyperdrives. There's pretty significant evidence hyperdrive miniaturization and such are recent phenomenons)

IIRC the Millennium falcon having a hyperdrive on such a small ship made it kind of an anomaly and was part of why it was so legendary.

For someone who doesn't care about Star Wars (and the Lord of the Rings, and...) you seem to post in threads about them a great deal.

That's his MO... he makes a specious argument... gets dubunked... then claims that he "doesn't care" about the subject matter to deflect from the egg on his face... I've seen this tune play out dozens of times

In fact, in TFA she's threatened with a blaster and taken prisoner but then in TLJ she's actually shot with one and her armour takes it.

Ah ah ah, no no no... go back and watch the scene... the whole time, she either has Wookie arm-snatching-out-of-their-sockets hands around her neck, and/or the super-powered Wookie-Crossbow pointed at her (which I doubt her armor would save her from), and/or someone's blaster pointed either straight at her neck, between the metal plating of her armor, or actually under her helmet, directly at her head/neck... go back and see for yourself...

But by that point there had been so much more nonsense going on that it barely registered. Like the opening scene with a single XWing taking down all the cannons on a hug ship. Ugh

I know this isn't exactly what you're talking about... but about the jokes... go back and watch TFA and you'll remember that TFA opens up with Poe doing stand-up comedy mocking Kylo Ren... it seems like its kinda his thing... and a theme of this trilogy... I guess we'll see if they stick with it in IX.