B101,
Bellosh101 wrote:
Perhaps you forgot the part where Lando mentioned that the Rebels wouldn't get another shot at DSII? So what if the Rebels fled to fight another day? That would only mean that the next time the fleet regroups attacks DSII, not only would an even larger Imperial armada be waiting for them, but the shield generator protecting DSII could have been replaced with no way for a second commando team to blow the shit out of it now that security will be up its ass.
None of which changes the fact that if you're out of the fight after a second major defeat and who knows what existing consequences to your backers after blowing up the first Death Star, your support will start to sag but your existing fleet assets can still be used to 'self supply' as _all_ insurgent forces do, from commercial and military supply convoys and depots.
If you have no force left, you are down to begging people to build you another at a time when the obvious consequences (DSII) are 'And if I catch you helping them again, I will scrag your entire culture!' apt to be pretty effective deterrent.
Ackbar has to think in these purely military conservation-of-force terms and one of the hardest (best) decisions any military leader can deal with is of course that of commiting to leading a fighting retreat to break contact escape to fight another day.
Bellosh101 wrote:
There wouldn't have been a next time. It's a credit to Lando (and Ackbar) that he was able to resist the seemingly-logical impulse to order a retreat when the only plan that allowed for possible victory was to take a stand.
Defeatist nonsense. The Empire is at it's most vulnerable to piracy and privateering on it's impossible-to-maintain supply routes. Exactly what a Jedi Knight could be most useful in clairvoyantly/precognitively running down.
How exactly such an attack happens we are never shown (in 'X-Wing' which you quote later for instance all convoy targets are shown already out of hyperspace) but it's a fool and his lack of historical knowledge who thinks that guerilla's -ever- beat mainforces in open field conditions.
If only because the rebs usually have very open home-and-hearth logistics that you can go burn down and genocidally annihilate every occupant of as well.
See the Teutoberger Walde. Or the American West. Or Vietnam before we went soft.
This is not necessarily true for the Alliance however since they can drop a Von Neumann package on any set of asteroids in an abandoned or unsurveyed system and make both a base, a factory and a mine.
From which a ready supply of supralight capable X-Wings can be made ready in short order.
It's only when you start thinking capital class that you find yourself in need of larger 'space dock' equivalents to slipways.
Indeed, the only reason you would ever need a planetary base is if you are conducting training for offensive operations against planetary targets. Which is a good way to get trapped, dirtside, when the enemy has a captive audience of 100,000,000,000,000,000.00 as a potential recruit pool (2 billion average pop X 50 million worlds = 100 quadrillion, I think.).
Bellosh101 wrote:
Well geez, I thought the original plan of having the Rebel cruisers establish a perimeter defense while the fighters fly inside DSII was how Ackbar accounted for the possibility of an Imperial fleet.
Anytime you 'surround' something you disperse your operational strength and lose the ability to coherently respond as a unit to an outside threat. Typical examples might include the Cuban Missile Blockade and the invasion of the Phillipines (Taffy 3).
Militaries of all forms are differentiated from mobs of any motive by their ability to _mass_ and maneuver operationally, at will, against sudden threats while generally force-protecting themselves and maintaining mission orientation.
None of which is possible if you are trapped up tight against the equivalent of a coastline when an enemy surface action group comes steaming over the horizon.
Indeed, one of the dumber elements of ROTJ is that inherent to the notion that, if the DSII has no operational shield generator, sending the fighters on a suicide run down the core is somehow required.
When a pickle cruiser reactor core set to explode in a hull packed with 'explosium' (seismic detonator stuff) and rammed into the exposed DS hull at the ordinary real space velocities of an asteroid or comet (40-100K mph) should -easily- be able to completely destroy the space station on it's own.
See the St. Nazairre Raid and HMS Campbeltown.
Hence there must likely be not just one but several, redundant, defensive shield generators and -of course- they are each going to be defended better than a 10-20 man commando unit can likely penetrate their perimeters on without any prior planning or assistance.
Certainly not without a SADM like rollback capability.
Bellosh101 wrote:
Watch the briefing scene again: DSII was only assumed to be lightly defended relative to the amount of Imperial starships chasing the Rebel fleet (ie. "relatively unprotected"). Mothma never claimed that DSII would be completely unprotected. Besides, if you've played through all of TIE Fighter and its expansions, you would have realized that the Empire managed to keep really good tabs on individuals who could have ruined Palpatine's surprise, and these folks all ended up either dead or captured. Clearly, Imperial counter-intelligence activities were very effective concerning keeping the trap a secret.
Which is just an thintelligence-as-imagineering way of justifying saying that the Rebel commanders are morons and an Empire of fifty million worlds has only a few hundred ships to send to any given place 'in an emergency'.
Rather than as a standing guard force which never leaves the system.
In any case, it -does not- justify the 'All In' approach to the attack without better raid intelligence before committing your battlegroup centers. Nor the ineffective use of ships to 'surround' a battle station that, as far as the Alliance knew, didn't have effective propulsion OR main weapons capability.
And if it does that's even more reason not to get close.
People have no clue to the amount of prep work that goes into effect for things like OAF and ODS and OEF before even a COEA can be reasonably set up, close inshore. Subs and divers and UUVs and blue light scanners and and and.
Only idiots like the IJN and DKM send out heavy assets unescorted and without route and destination prep. And they lost with real naval platforms. The Rebs have nothing but converted civilian ships.
OTOH, if everybody merges their shields and joins their fire controls, they have a chance at doing some real damage to individual ISDs and Frigates.
Assuming they have the freedom to maneuver away from Endor's gravity well and the DSII.
It may also significantly improve their fighter defenses.
Alone, they are vulnerable to even the most basic of even 'mob' tactics.
Bellosh101 wrote:
Special ops don't always have the luxury of being able to communicate with conventional forces due to any number of reasons. One of them being that it's a very fast way for enemy ground troops to locate commandos and hunt them down like dogs.
This would be worth it.
There are 10-20 men in that team. All of them are volunteers. There are perhaps thousands of Rebel ship crews, all of whom need to live to carry on the fight if this whackadoodle mission goes tits up which it's fantastic lack of planning seems to give every likelihood of happening.
And because it is so critical, to KNOW whether or not that shield is down **before committing**, NONE of the Rebels would have -ever- stopped fighting, inside or out of that shield generator building.
If nothing else, they know that what awaits them in Imperial hands ain't gonna be pretty on this side of that final white light.
So they would make the call because, as illustrated, it's a suicide op anyway. They can't afford to leave those charges unmanned.
Bellosh101 wrote:
The Empire won't fall for that trick again after what happened to HIMS Invincible (play X-Wing for details). Not to mention that large portions of the shield complex was underground (as explained in SW:CL) and thus could survive a surface explosion. If the Empire had a backup shield projector away from the main garrison, the Rebels would have been screwed anyway.
Which doesn't work since this adds EU continuum ten years after the fact of ROTJ, using computer game technology which doesn't have to meet film quality standards like Jedi and cannot be included in the movie even if they were co-released.
And even if it was valid canon, it still doesn't work because the likelihood that a shuttle would be allowed down by Vader if it made a conventional approach, landed and 'out came Rebels Commandos like a swarm of maddened ants' is zero.
Now you need to have a separate landing field as well.
Since the alternative, to just 'disappear' off Imperial STC scopes, is equally absurd without a quite ordinary search and rescue response raised to absurdly (justifiably) paranoid levels. Levels which could easily get Luke killed anyway. Again, making Vader look like a simp.
OTOH if a guy/droid has a large, focussed blast wave, 'seismic charge', all's he has to do is hyperspatial blink-drop via stealth penetrator (like a messenger torpedo) and do an exo-endo drop down to a hillside in a reentry aeroshell.
Set the countdown for three seconds, pull the switch and see what comes next.
That will chop the shield projector off at the base like a giant weed eater and, _for the length of the raid_, such is all that you would need.
Bellosh101 wrote:
First off, Palpatine can't see the future for shit. All his schemes in the movies are the result of Byzantine plots which feature many backup plans; never does Darth Sidious show any actual precognition ability.
Shrug. Perhaps it's due to Lucas' general incompetence, but the idea that 'it's all a giant chess game' doesn't make sense relative to the idea that Sidious is lying there, waiting for Anakin to show up, with an angry Jedi wielding purple death six inches from his testicles either.
Blast ol' Windy right out the window, right then and there, ya' geezer.
Nor does it explain his 'I have foreseen it' commentary about Luke coming to see Vader.
Nor does it give us much of an idea why Sidious places such high emphasis upon gaining the acquaintance of Anakin at 9.
Nor does it make clear why he knows Anakin is going to need help, real quick. On Mustafar.
Or why he wants schmuck brain at all when the Clones did 90% of the heavy lifting and the Sith are no better than the Jedi at blocking blaster bolts.
Indeed, given the idea that half the running of a 50 million world Empire is done entirely by computer, it doesn't make sense that Palpatine would even be able to keep up with the 'most critical matters' without a little supernatural look-see of coming events.
Bellosh101 wrote:
Which explains why the Emperor needed a Banite splinter sect to serve as his prophets. As for the mines; since the Emperor can't forsee the future, what's stopping the fucking mines from blowing up Imperial vessels transporting construction material?
Where are the construction jigs, gantries, tugs, supply dumps, orbital cranes, or whatever to begin with?
If the mines are modern, they probably have signature memories based on reactor core signatures or whatever. Maybe even a netcentric IFF system with user codes.
Bellosh101 wrote:
Go read the fucking ROTJ novelization.
I did. I also know that, aside from a couple turtle freighters in the initial jump sequence, we never see them doing what they should as kamikaze super nukes.
It would make a LOT more sense if they had rather than see a pair of A-Wings cause the Executor to do a 'roll off and dive for the bottom' sinking scene, straight out of Victory At Sea.
Bellosh101 wrote:
That would have excessive complication to the commando mission. An additional shuttle would need to be procured, the second commando group would have needed a way to either obtain security clearences to vital areas or waste every Imperial in their path, and they would need an exit strategy that wouldn't give the Imperials a chance to revert sabotage. In short, your plan is incredibly moronic and impossible.
I'm thinking Greenglass, Rosenberg, Fuchs level in-place spies Belosh. There is no way you could secure a project that large unless you killed them all or kept them all captive, on-planet.
For dramatic purposes, the way to get Luke past the ever watchful Force senses of the Sith is not to.
Let HIM be the lone ranger hero who does an orbital high dive and like I suggested: attempts to Jedi all-terrain-runner get within a 10-20km kill radius to try and blow up a SADM, errr, 'seismic charge' before getting caught by Vader and Imperial Specfors in optically adaptive camouflage. Big Fight. Too Many. Uh Oh, the 'surprise' is lost because it never was a secret. Damn Luke, what a screw up you are.
And then a shuttle lands on the main hangar deck of the DSII. And out comes a very smart looking Imperial Officer who just happens to look a lot like Leia Organa.
Who has a secret mission: to take the Death Star, for the Rebels.
Bellosh101 wrote:
Not going to work unless said Rebel ships have the right codes and such. This was why the Rebels needed to steal a specific shuttle in the first place.
Ainh. Given 'Ewoks defeat the elite 501st Legion by gnawing through their calf armor, film at 11!' idiocy, I'm going to pull the movie magic card on this one.
I wanted to see an spaceborne assault with vac troops for quite awhile and given Endor looks way too much like Northern California, the DSII would be the IDEAL terrain matrix to depict such.
Not least because, again, you go from flying out of multiple launch tubes on the turtle freighters (giving them a reason for being there) to falling through incredible flak defenses. In total silence.
To setting a couple hundred micronuke charges that let you blow a hole through what, 5m of durasteel hull armor? Some decoys, some not, like roman candles of pure incandescent light, flared to torch brilliance by escaping atmosphere into a Rayleigh Taylor type effect. Which might be accurate, for once. Also in silence.
TO A HUGE FUCKIN NOISE!
As troops drop down 5-10 decks to take key traffic chokes with Vader and the Emperor and Luke all showing us why the Jedi and Sith are truly feared (teeking an entire floor level to collapse etc.).
And of course it saves me having to listen to the utterly -gay- 'no I can feel you more!' nonsense in the throneroom if Palpatine doesn't give a damn about Skywalker and has him thrown in the brig because 'he has better things to do'.
Like mauling the Rebels.
Which of course is the Rebels cue to go get their pet Jedi out of prison so he can be their anti-Sith protector.
And it's all double-blind Force good.
Past which, the idea of seeing the superlaser 'reslew and superelevate' onto the SSD would have been -priceless-.
"Awwwwh, can't leave because your Interdictors are locked in for a given dwell period before they drop their massive jamming fields to listen for new orders? That's just terrible sparky!"
Bellosh101 wrote:
Maybe this was... you know, covered in a different fucking briefing?
No. It needs to happen in the mass brief. If someone calls 'Code Purple', the royal is in flight and specific assets can no longer be tasked by rank or mission and may even have to be given up. Whereever, whenever.
Because there will only be seconds before the Emperor's go-fast is gone, superluminal.
Hence everyone needs to know what it means and what to look out for, even if it's a taran endgame. The Emperor _must not_ get away.
Palpatine should never have come, the DSII was enough of a lure. He should have never have set his butt on Ground Zero in a propulsionless hulk dependent on external protection he couldn't personally control. And he never should have stayed there once he stupidly let the Rebels down onto the sentry moon.
Maybe he isn't a precog after all...
LEG
...hear me out: He notices it's a trap as soon as the DSII blows up the frigate - while Lando simply notes the gun is operational. Maybe this was a hint that amongst the Rebels, he had figured out the Emperor's plan first (Luke doesn't count since Palpatine told him the plan).
