Help me understand an aspect of SW:tFA

Its a skill Han has mastered but no one we know has tried. It's very dangerous and risky. Like pulling your parachute too late.

--- Double Post Merged, Dec 28, 2015, Original Post Date: Dec 28, 2015 ---

Also Han has some Force stuff going on. He shot that trooper without looking.

 

It's a stunt only a legendary hero can pull off. Like navigating through an asteroid field.

 

Did somebody say "asteroid field"?

 

My question is, if what Han did is possible, why are all these people dying to blow this place up?

You find a big rock nearby, attach some engines to hit, hurl it through the shields and into the base at "hyperspeed". The resulting explosion should make the dinosaur killing asteroid look like a toy.

In fact, why do we need death star/starkillers at all? Toss an asteroid into a planet at close to the speed of light, and well, it's hard to describe how bad a day that planet will have.

 

Assuming that an object that is the size of the Death Star cannot fly in hyperspace, I still do not understand how little time it took the first Death Star to travel from Alderaan to Yavin. It would take years and years at the speed of light. For example, the Earth's nearest star system (Alpha Centauri) is more than 4 light years away. It is perhaps best not to think too hard about these things.

 

I think the Death Star was supposedly able to travel through Hyperspace albeit very slowly, has never really been addressed in the new canon. X-Wings have always had hyperdrives

We can't use Han as a comparison for anyone else in the Galaxy, it has been discussed time and again how he does things people view as impossible.

The strapping hyperdrives to asteroids is an interesting idea but I feel like the cost of retrofitting an asteroid with engines and a hyperdrive to make a weapon that is about as effective as a turbolaser shelling is a little extravagant... The Empire would totally be down for it.

 

And Nien Nunb.
That pilot is underrated.

And ugly.

 

Ok, dunno how much power a turbolaser puts out, but if it is enough to destroy a planet, why bother with a death star?

I wasn't using Han as an example for anything other than you can use hyperdrives to bypass shields. If you're using an automated hunk of mass, it's basically just a missile at that point, no pilot to worry about surviving.

I think we have to assume that while in "hyperspace", things don't interact with the normal universe, otherwise ships would get constantly wrecked by hitting little pieces of space dust as they plow through the galaxy. So our missile also seems to have the benefit of being a stealth weapon.

Speed seems to carry over when coming out of hyperspace, otherwise Han wouldn't have been so desperate to slow down. How much speed is the question. One would assume Han did everything he could to be moving as slowly as he could when coming out of hyperspace, but still just about wrecked onto the surface.

Now without going into too long a ramble about how ships seem to have a lot of control of their speed when exiting hyperspace, let me just say that they are apparently able to match velocities from one star to the next, and with the planets, bases, other ships in those star systems as they drop into normal space.

Anyway, if you're purposely trying to have an object going as fast as you can into another object, it's probably possible to get a good fraction of the speed of light, which would turn a large sized object into a planet killer that could leave the surface molten, at the very least causing a very big crater with dire consequences for anything living on that planet.

Ok, not as flashy as watching the entire planet explode, leaving an asteroid belt behind, but still as effective. Although, if you can achieve enough velocity, like *really* close to the speed of light, the same thing would happen with our missile.

So we make our missile with the cheapest hyperdrive possible just to bypass any shields or other defenses, pile on the relative velocity to it's target, tada, planet sized weapons are obsolete.

Simplest thing would be to go grab some old large freighters and outfit those with automated systems. For even more carnage, fill the cargo holds with some dense materials.

 

This was one of many, many terrible plot devices, magic, whatever you want to call it.

Planetary shields not mattering anymore, R2 regaining the will to live, Rey being a female jason Bourne Jedi, the entire map thing, you could go on and on.

JJ is a hack.

 

I agree with most other people. Han's method was reckless and unproven, and that was enough for the fleet itself not to attempt it.

To me that always seemed what something like the rumored "catapult" superweapon would do. Or at least similar. I can't for the life of me remember if "catapult" became Starkiller or some other thing used in the movie, or if we ended up concluding it was just unused concepts like the battering ram and array things.

 

It's entirely in Han's character to not want to tell someone what he's up to. It's also entirely in Leia's character to trust Han to do what he says he can do.

Now the rest of the resistance may have questioned Leia's judgement, but it's apparently her decision.

I'd rather not have to deal with a scene stuck in the middle of the action that informs me Sargent Bitpart confronts Leia over something that's happening anyway. It'd be a waste of time.