My Silly ‘Death Star Weakness’ Question

I don't know what all a Ray Shield can or can't repel, but we do see Obi-Wan/Anakin/Palpatine trapped by one in Ep. III. So it's possible a droid couldn't get through. And even if it could they may not have had what they needed to put a plan like that into action. They didn't have a lot of warning that the Death Star was heading towards them or even what the weakness was. They probably didn't have much time for finding or making a thruster propelled suicide bomber droid and just hoped that one of the multiple trench runs would hit the mark.

 

The Death Star had an insane amount of surface defenses (turrets, canons, etc.), and I would also guess that the exhaust shaft was probably VERY hot. It might not even be physically possible to build a droid that could withstand all that and still fit in the hole, and even if it is, it would be almost unthinkable to do it with such limited time and resources.

 

By stating each droid had its own propulsion I'm assuming you mean the booster rockets R2 used in the PT. So the out of universe explanation is that George hadn't come up with the idea of a flying astromech yet so it wasn't written into the script. In-universe I'm sure there could be a number of explanations. I'm not sure if every R2 unit had that feature or if it was just something R2 had, which in-universe were no longer functioning by the OT. But if all astromech droids had it, would the rockets fire in a vacuum or be able to fly with precision? I only recall seeing R2 use his boosters inside an atmosphere, though maybe I'm forgetting or haven't seen something to the contrary, so I'm not sure if they could just eject an astromech over the Death Star and expect it to be able to navigate down into the exhaust port and at a speed where it could avoid enemy fire. Plus if it's socketed into a fighter where is it going to hold the payload? Can they get it inside, strap it to its head? I'm sure they could rig something up but it's getting more complicated than the plan they used which actually did work. And we still don't even really know if a droid can penetrate a ray shield, it seems iffy since a human can't but maybe it wouldn't hurt a droid like it would a person. It's not a terrible plan, but there are probably 1000 not-a-terrible-plans they also could have tried but didn't need to, including bribing a Stormtrooper to spill his Kool-Aid on the Death Star firing controls. None of which would have made for a great ending like the one we got. Think about how traumatized kids would have been after seeing a little astromech hurtling toward certain death with a bomb strapped to its face. An awards ceremony where the gang stand around somberly as an R2 unit is posthumously awarded a medal of valor wouldn't have had people leaving the theater with smiles on their faces the way Luke's epic shot did.

 

Your question is not silly and it does indeed have alot of logic. A Droid could easily be sent to do the job and more so seeing as how Rogue One made it clear that even a minor detonation would set off a chain reaction that would blow up the DS. On the reactor shaft being to hot, ROTS showed us that there are droids built for intense heat as is the Mustafar Panning Droid.

This droid was small sized and it even had shields that protected it from the intense heat and the lava. Just one little bugger of these with a few thermal detonators and that would have been the end of the DS.

 

Just hypothethical, but maybe they considered it too risky to send in a droid. They only had one chance to use the element of surprise, so if they opted for a droid (just a droid or droid, but no backup plan) and the droid(s) would fail, then the element of surprise was wasted and their only chance to destroy the DS gone. But maybe a combination of the two plans might work: send in droids but make sure you have fighters standing by to attack the moment the droids fail.
Good question though, it is nice to think about other solutions that made a lot more sense than just to show off how cool Luke Skywalker is .

 

Although some droids do have booster rockets or other flying capabilities, my perception is that none of them moves nearly as fast as firing a torpedo. If a droid were just making a leisurely flight toward the shaft, it would inevitably get shot down way before it reached its destination.

Even if a droid could fly faster, considering the targeting computers couldn't hit the hole, a fast-moving droid might miss too. Although the plan the rebels did use also relied on targeting computers, it is probably easier to get multiple torpedoes and take multiple shots than to build multiple droids.

Although droids can withstand the heat of Mustafar, apparently so can humans without any special equipment. Mustafar is hot, but there is no way to prove whether it is as hot as the exhaust shaft.

 

maybe it depends on the density of the object going through the shield...humans are obviously more solid than a proton torpedo so they wouldnt pass just like ships but the orpedos probbaly could
.

 

they looked pretty much like light to me...but idk, maybe its the material its made from?

--- Double Post Merged, Feb 22, 2017, Original Post Date: Feb 22, 2017 ---

that looks more like a n Apollo capsule

 

While it did end up being Luke's super powers that made the shot, I don't think it was a plan which would have been impossible without Luke. It was a difficult shot but presumably not an impossible one. Red Leader almost had it. I'm guessing the Y-Wings were better suited to make the shot since they had been assigned the target to begin with, but they never even got to try. So while in the end it turned out that Luke used the Force to destroy the Death Star, I don't think that only a Force user could have made the shot. Or at least that's my guess, we don't know how things would have turned out otherwise.

 

Well that's getting into an area that's kind of confused me. I don't think we're meant to believe that Luke used the Force to actually alter the trajectory of the torpedoes and make them turn into the exhaust port, just to focus himself and perfectly time the shot. But there is that shot of the torpedoes taking that strange turn into the exhaust port. I'm guessing the idea was that the torpedoes had a trajectory like a falling bomb even though they were shot straight forward they dropped downwards. Or maybe it just looked cool and it the physics didn't matter, not realizing we'd be discussing this movie frame by frame decades later he went for style over substance. But the original plan was for the Y-Wings to take the shot, and they could drop a payload at a 90 degree angle. It was a more solid plan when the Y-Wings were still in it, though I don't know what us up with that one unexplained Y-Wing that flies away from the exploding Death Star.

 

A couple of thoughts here:
Droids take risks that might end in death but can they be programmed specifically for a suicide mission?

Being an exhaust port, wouldn't there be an exhaust-force, a resistance and/or repelling out a foreign object like a torpedo or droid? As I write that might be (one) reason why Red Leader "missed."
*strokes chin*

 

I think with the time constraint crafty solutions were not an option.

 

Oh, I just assumed they were going to drop it the way they do in the games and stuff. I'm not even sure if the 90 degree drop was intended at the time or something game developers or a novelist came up with later that stuck. I think they would have had room to drop them though, the port was a little ways out from the dead end wall, but they probably would have had to drop it as they were pulling out.

And I wasn't saying there was anything wrong with analyzing the movie, I'm doing it myself obviously (and my purpose for joining here), just that the movie wasn't really made with that type of scrutiny in mind. Sometimes things won't line up perfectly. They were just trying to make an entertaining movie, not knowing how vast the franchise/canon would become, that the Battle Of Yavin would be analyzed more in-depth than actual Earth battles, or that there would one day be an internet where we could discuss the movie frame by frame. And some fans (nobody in this thread from what I've seen) seem to find fault with OT movies for not always clinging to a canon that didn't exist yet. Star Trek fans are the worst about it though, they're more anal about canon than the worst Star Wars fan and in a franchise with many more inconsistencies and canon problems. People have been arguing for decades about what caused the shift in Klingon physiology that caused them to go from regular looking humans with overly bronzed skin from the original series to the monstrous looking creatures they became in later films/series. Theories about genetic experiments, a plague, different castes of Klingon society, etc. If you tell them the obvious, that the films had a much larger budget and better special effects so they made the Klingons more alien, they'll get mad at you. There HAS to be a complicated in-universe explanation for it.