The Battle of Hoth

The way I understand it is, the Rebel's strategy is to split their forces.
During the battle of Endor they split their fleet, one half was sent to Sullust, as a diversion, the other to Endor. It makes sense, so their fleet isn't totally destroyed in one battle.
During Hoth their main objective was to evacuate, probably the same with Yavin.

 

Regardless of what happened in Rogue One I think the Alliance were always ill-prepared to handle the Empire. Even in Rogue One they were unwilling to be drawn into an engagement and in the OT only went on the offensive once. Mainly due to faulty intelligence and the possibility of something that was too good to pass up. Compared to the Empire they were a small band of freedom fighters and until Endor came along were just trying to live to fight another day. They preferred guerrilla tactics to all-out war.

 

It was a epic encounter & both sides played their part.

 

I read somewhere years ago that Lucas said the reason the advance on Hoth took so long was because the At-At's werent equipped for the freezing cold. iirc, he speculated that the hydraulics and other systems would react slowly, causing the walkers to move even slower than normal. This was a big factor in the escape from Hoth.

 

I thought the main reason for the slow advance was the fact they had to land beyond the energy shield and hoof it in from a distance.

 

I think you're right but I also think GL had the details so fine tuned that he took into account both the distance needed to be covered as well as the climate difficulties that the Empire vehicles would experience. I wish I could find where I read that at.

 

I don't know, the walkers we saw on Hoth don't seem to be moving that much slower than when we've seen them in other climates. And we're talking about a machine that was seemingly designed to look cool as opposed to being practical, so it would be kind of funny if George fine tuned any details about hydraulics reacting to climate.

 

How come the Rebels didn't use their x-wings against the Walkers? Is it becase the shield was too low? Proton torpedoes would knock the walkers out no problem. Other than it made a better story.

 

X-wings had a much more important job of escorting transport ships, which seemed to be rather poorly defended by themselves. The base would have been captured by the Empire with or without X-wings in atmosphere, so they were delegated to a more crucial task.

 

Yes but all of the snowspeeder pilots were fighter pilots. Their fighters were sitting there waiting for them. Instead of waisting 2 pilots on one snowspeeder, they could have had their x-wings.

 

Fighters were really just moderately effective against the AT-ACTs on Scarif. The walkers on Hoth were much more heavily armored.

Of course, the Rebels didn't know that until they had tried the Snowspeeders' lasers on them, so that doesn't really explain why X-Wings weren't at least part of the first pass. But I do assume that it was a tactic to use them escort, as they could leave the atmosphere. Snowspeeders would otherwise be relegated to combat near the surface, so they wouldn't be of use anywhere else. Not sure if the Rebels' had a worse shortage of pilots or shortage of resources.

 

There's also another explanation I found on the Internet. As you've mentioned, X-wings are better fighters. Since they're better, they're probably more expensive, so losing one is a greater loss than losing a Snowspeeder. Also, Snowspeeders are atmosphere-only fighters, what means that they're not really going anywhere after the evacuation, so if the Rebellion had to hold the Empire and get some losses anyway, it's wiser to send a cheaper fighter rather than the more expensive one. Also, there's the cynical "new fighter, new toy to sell" explanation.

 

Wow, just about every post in here had at least one point that could answer or expand on the original post. Lets just combine all and everyone can be happy.
Ok that wouldn't be fun so lets look at the timeline between A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back. Most timelines that I can find would suggest around three years ( if someone knows something different please post). Three years is a fair amount of time for the replacement and training for X-Wings and pilots but I'd also assume that
both didn't just grow on trees and I would expect the cost of the X-Wing was no small number. This is going off the theory that the Rebels had taken a huge hit on the number of these ships during the battle of Scarif and the attack on the Death Star. We know that the Rebels lost almost an entire squad on the planet of Scarif ( a couple of X-Wings from Blue squad looked to pull up and not hit the shield once closed), and we saw a large number of them destroyed in the space battle. Fast forward to the attack on the Death Star and I only remember two made it out, that's a huge blow to the numbers. I'm not sure and maybe someone can expand on this
but I would expect there were more X-Wings with the fleet that wasn't at the Death Star but I have no idea how many that would be.
We are now at the battle of Hoth and this is where all the post had some really good input on why the X-Wings didn't engage the Walkers. The cold, the numbers, ect
all are good points and I would expect the Rebels had no idea the Snow Speeders laser cannons would be so ineffective against the well armored Walkers. This with the fact that it was a full bug out and the Speeders and ground troops were only there as a delay force, and most of the X-Wings were escorting the transports (remember only two per transport) kind of sums up why they didn't use them to attack the Walkers. Well that's my take on it anyways, look forward for some more post on this.

 

Well they were used in TFA.