And a million confused fanboys at once went “Wuh…?”
This kind of looks like a beautiful mess and I will gladly see it, if only for those hairy horses riding along a spaceship.
Also, it’s hilarious to see that JJ can’t help but have his spaceships do stupid shit like emerge from under ice (maybe the emperor is lifting it?). Remember when star destroyers couldn’t enter a planets atmosphere?
At least in Star Trek canon a star fleet starship was never able to enter atmo unitl JJ broke that. But in Star Wars? No such hard canon rule.
I think this is where you go totally off the rails and enter the world of delusion. No B-Wing is even remotely as cool as the Y-wing. A spinny flying T, or a stripped down, once svelte, now mechanically rigged fighter bomber with enormous engines? Y-Wings wahoo!
Maybe they have thought of it, but it’s just not used.
In Return of the Jedi, a damaged A-wing aimed deliberately for the bridge of the Executor - the flagship of the fleet defending the Death Star II. With no hope of survival anyway the pilot slammed into the bridge, destroying it, and the Executor changed course and collided with the second Death Star that it was supposed to be defending.
So ramming has a precedent in the universe. (Even if that chain of events is highly dubious. Why did ramming mean a sudden drive towards the Death Star? Do they not have an emergency bridge? Or an engine room that can cut the power?)
Personally, I think of the Last Jedi ramming like humans think of chemical and biological weapons. Everyone knows that they’re possible, but they’re reviled. The uses are few, and horrifying.
So ramming weapons, in the Star Wars universe, are like chemical and biological weapons. Banned. They’re difficult to control, awkward to store, and thought of as indecent, indiscriminate and cruel. Nobody even talks about them. The bigger threat of nuclear weapons occupies our mindshare, despite chemical and biological weapons being easier and cheaper to create and use.
And that right there is the Star Wars universe. Superweapons like the Death Star are the equivalent of nukes - occupying the mindshare. Ramming weapons, well, nobody uses those. Too dangerous…
Final trailer for Star Wars – is that a promise?
Actually I have quite enjoyed some of the movies but not that bothered.
Beat me to it…
That would have been a cool narrative structure to actually explore, instead of leaving it all to supposition. That choice between using a horrifying & taboo tactic or facing ultimate defeat would have been a genuinely interesting tension between the characters.
That’s what I thought would have made a much more compelling story in TFA, as well: instead of destroying the Death Star…er, I mean Starkiller Base, the resistance captures it and now has to deal with whether & what to do with a weapon that can wipe out planets.
Agreed, but it’s kind of implied, especially in the invasion of Hoth… Still, it’s only head-cannon.
Except Voyager, but I’m just being pedantic. Like you say, with the enterprise it’s almost explicit. I mean, the saucer section of the D crashes in one movie
This. And watching Luke swatting AT-ATs wouldn’t have taught Kylo anything except more insatiable thirst for power.
Thank you for that pedantry. Intrepid class ships were designed for that. But a constitution/galaxy? No way.
As for Hoth… Not sure I buy that as justification. Energy shield made them land far away with the walkers so they couldn’t bombard the base from orbit. The fleet was needed to catch any fleeing ships.
Ive only ever seen the prequel trilogy once, but dont Republic cruisers (forefather to the ISD) land on planets?
We did see an ISD floating above Jedah in Rogue One. That didn’t set off my nerd sense at all.
As for that shot in the trailer, im guessing it’s not actually planetside. But that fleet is hidden in an ice field somewhere in space.
my 2 cents in this…Star Trek (while showing some ships have planetary landing capabilities) bypassed the need for this capability entirely with shuttlecraft and transporters. Star Wars has shuttlecraft, but doesn’t have matter/energy transport tech. Additionally SW has historically focused on smaller crew compliment ships while ST focuses on large scale crew ships…which makes sense as SW’s story perspective is generally the rebels and ST’s story perspective is Starfleet crew based.
Many of the scenes in SW’s prequels have the largest cruisers in orbit and transports bring troops and vehicles down…not shown on screen with consistency.
The issue of these ships landing on planet are really just two things…both negated by hand waving…1) sheer size of the vessel vs the planet/moon…neither series is consistent with this, it’s just hand waved away. and 2) power needs to escape planetary gravity…both universes establish engine/power sources capable of escape velocity without issue.
nice thing about fictional universes…just do whatever you want and then say “but make believe”!
What about the time that the USS Enterprise was in the upper atmosphere of 1960’s earth and got intercepted by an F-104 fighter plane? Know your Star Trek history!
High orbit is allowed. Enough that it’s close enough for transport on that fighter pilot, but not so close that it couldn’t escape the gravity well.
Ok. An F-104 has a ceiling of 58,000 feet but if you consider that to be “high orbit” I won’t make a big deal about it.
I’d argue the issue is more in the ship design. I don’t care what magic metal these things are made of…the saucer section of the enterprise would either crush the center stack or topple over once in full planet gravity.
Star Treks timeline is not our own. Who is to say that the f104 of that reality doesn’t have a higher ceiling?
I can’t help but agree. However, it’s probably more of a Trek thing than a Star Wars thing. I mean, I can see Picard making a watchable hour of it, but let’s be honest - Han Solo would be scratching his balls out of boredom within 3 minutes.
In that regard, it’s much more of an EA thing because it would work better in prose or comic. Although I don’t recall much of it happening there either, unfortunately.