Admiral Ackbar: Competent or Not?

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Admiral Ackbar: Competent or Not?

Post by Bottlestein »

This is one that I have not been able to figure out. Is Ackbar supposed to be a competent "Admiral", just not "main character competent", or is he just a "by the book" authority figure that bungles while the main characters (in this case Lando, but also Luke, Endor Strike group & Ewoks) near him do what is required?

At first, I thought he was competent because of the "It's a Trap" line :P ...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).

But you could argue the inverse - Ackbar comments on the bleedingly obvious, which is what movie directors do for the bungling authority figure, especially if a main character is doing something awesome/critical.

Since I haven't read any novel with Ackbar in it - what is his depiction in the EU? Has Lucas commented on Ackbar's abilities?
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Re: Admiral Ackbar: Competent or Not?

Post by Professor Dire »

All the information I have read about 'The Admiral' states that he is very capable, charismatic,
and sincere. Mind you alot of my reading on the character was from back in the 90's when
there wasn't so many "chefs in the kitchen".

I do remember reading a quote from Mon Mothma that the empire would have remained
undefeated if it were not for Ackbar and the Mon Cal people's involvement in the war.

From an "outside looking in" perspective; in the movies he seemed competent, but not much
more. I agree with your assessment about him stating the obvious hence the infamous
"It's A Traaaap!" meme.
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Re: Admiral Ackbar: Competent or Not?

Post by Star Wars 888 »

According to EU sources Ackbar was a military genius on the level of Thrawn and Revan.
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Re: Admiral Ackbar: Competent or Not?

Post by Knife »

I don't see how you can infer bungling out of that. While Lando was screaming for all craft to pull up, Akbar was telling groups to go to specific locations and holding sectors (IIRC the dialogue), when he was told of incoming fighters he rightfully said it was a trap. Not sure where the comedy and goofiness is in that. When Lando was in the Death Star, Akbar coordinated and commanded the fleet in the engagement with the Executor and escorts, destroying the command ship.
They say, "the tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots." I suppose it never occurred to them that they are the tyrants, not the patriots. Those weapons are not being used to fight some kind of tyranny; they are bringing them to an event where people are getting together to talk. -Mike Wong

But as far as board culture in general, I do think that young male overaggression is a contributing factor to the general atmosphere of hostility. It's not SOS and the Mess throwing hand grenades all over the forum- Red
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Re: Admiral Ackbar: Competent or Not?

Post by Adam Reynolds »

Also his initial reaction to withdraw, when the Death Star began firing, was the most logical move for the conditions. He realized that the rebels were both outgunned in a conventional battle and had the death star picking them off one by one. If it wasn't for the death of the Emperor and a great deal of luck, the battle would have very easily went the other way. Remember that the destruction of the Executor and the rout of the Imperial fleet only came after the death of the Emperor.
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Re: Admiral Ackbar: Competent or Not?

Post by KhyronTheBackstabber »

The "It's a trap!' line didn't happen after the DS2 fired.
It happened after they realized the shield was still up,
and he was told about the Imperial ships behind them.

After the DS fired he called of a retreat because
"Our cruisers can't repel firepower of that magnitude!"
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Re: Admiral Ackbar: Competent or Not?

Post by LopEaredGaloot »

Adamskywalker007 wrote:Also his initial reaction to withdraw, when the Death Star began firing, was the most logical move for the conditions. He realized that the rebels were both outgunned in a conventional battle and had the death star picking them off one by one. If it wasn't for the death of the Emperor and a great deal of luck, the battle would have very easily went the other way. Remember that the destruction of the Executor and the rout of the Imperial fleet only came after the death of the Emperor.
Which is why he is a buffoon, he should have never been there with the plan (or lack thereof) he had. Let me make the case:

Lando says something like: 'Whaddya mean you can't tell if it's up or down? They can't be jamming us unless...they know we're coming. Pull Up! All craft PULL UP!'

At which point the first assumption of a smart commander would be that the Strike Team _had been taken_ either direct or by a prior intelligence screwup and so the whole op was compromised. Thus, any attempt to 'hold the line' (stay the course, whatever) was foolish.

Thus 'Come on Han ol' buddy, don't let me down.' is stupid.

Yet rather than IMMEDIATELY coordinate a withdrawal on the same line they came in on, they stick as the Imperial Fleet comes around the far side of the moon.

And then the DS lights off and Ackbar actually listens when Lando says: 'I know Han will pull through, we've got to give him more time!'

And Ackbar, who doesn't know this guy from drunken bum in a back alley says okey dokey.

1. Lando is clearly (trope dope) 'going all out to redeem himself' for his non-screwup in TESB. But it's not his sacrifice to make, it's that of dozens of other ships and potentially tens of thousands of crew.
2. Whether Ackbar knows Lando's situation or not, HE is in charge of this op and he can't let the commander of the special mission force dictate his own responses because his is the global responsibility. Lando is focussed, heart and soul, on getting down that reactor shaft which is a suicide mission to begin with (120mile DS diameter, 60 mile radius / 500 knots = 8.3 miles per minute = 7 minutes or so, no way to out run the blast wave, if its a 270 mile radius run, you're talking 30 minutes...) while Ackbar has to think in terms of conserving the fleet for the -next- op, since this one has clearly gone pear shaped.
3. Hiding in a planet's LOS/mass shadow is one of those 'old ten minutes after Marconi invented the fuckin' thing!' tricks that Ackbar should have accounted for. If nothing else, it should be easier to penetrate any system from the top and bottom of the ecliptic than dodging between the planets of it's inner system.
4. Failure to otherwise lockdown any and all Imperial Fleet movements was also dumb. If your spies on-site say there is nobody there then clearly something is wrong already. If your spies say that all other fleet traffic (arrivals at other system ports of call etc.) have stopped and they can't figure out where these heavy assets have vanished to, you should.
5. Failure to assume that there would be a _sizeable_ fleet detachment as close-in protective force, even if the rest of the Fleet was not assigned, further dumbness. There are 50 million worlds in the Empire, there cannot be a mere 3-4 dozen ISDs for all that territory.
6. Failure to have a means to cue the rest of the Rebel taskforce that it was indeed safe to delight and make the attack (i.e. some form of beacon or confirmation code from the Strike Team) = TERMINALLY IDIOTIC.
7. Failure to provide the Rebels with something more than hand emplaced charges as a sure means to take out the shield generator without having to 'cross that bridge when we get there' improv a penetration of the generator facility: grossly incompetent.
8. Failure to provide a reliable means of getting the Strike Team away from the shuttle (and the shuttle deviated off it's cleared flight path) without being blown out of the sky and/or tracked down and butchered within minutes by the SAR force, criminally stupid. The obvious solution is to land the shuttle on the tower landing pad, just like Vader did and blow up a sizeable nuke right there. But if you want to survive the assault, you still have to be able to AVOID bringing the weapon into an area where you are sure to be detected and cannot leave the device behind where it could be disabled. Doing this then of course means that Vader/Sidious are total morons for letting the Strike Team _anywhere's near_ the shield installation. Which of course he was anyway.
9. Failure to account for the effects of Interdictor class ships possibly preventing a conventional escape altogether and having some preassigned go-to plan for burning or blowing a hole through the interference fields to get out. Further lack of tactical insight.
10. Ingressing the entire task force on a common route with manual timing of hyperspace entry. Dumb. What if the Emperor, who can see the future, has laid high yield Nova mines along this very route? Don't you want to scout a little?
11. Failure to grasp the concept of a fireship.
12. Lack of competent saboteurs on the DS 'just in case' the shield generator wasn't taken out on the surface and it became necessary to blow up, if not the reactor then at least the beam controls or emitter.
13. Inabiity to comprehend the idea of stealing what you couldn't build to make the ambush a double bluff trap for the Imperial Fleet. Again, for the size of the Empire, there must be hundreds of thousands of ships out there. The fight at Endor was a pittance.
14. Failure to assign a getaway chaser force, in case the Emperor made a run for it. Or if he in fact was smart enough not to stand on Ground Zero of a teraton hypocenter and in fact was on some other ship 'off in the far north corner'. Luke would have been a real help here.

There are probably others but this should give you an idea that, far from having a really 'convenient' name, Ackbar was about as smart as a two day corpse.

When fighting an aggressive, competent, force, particularly when you don't have time to map and prep the battlefield, the essence of smart warfare is to have, not one but say five different axes of attack, extending like fingers into an enemy's defensive front.

One or two fingers can get broken but the more penetrations your opponent has to defend against, the more likely it is that one or two will not be sufficiently crushed to be stopped before they breakout. Which means you can 'supply success and starve defeat'.

The entire Endor op was a piss upwind with no ops plan, coordination, operational reserve or go/nogo thresholds to dictate whether and when you would stop throwing good lives after bad decisions and simply retire to fight another day.

Had Ackbar done the _right thing_, from the start, Luke would have never had a fireworks display to get angry over and it wouldn't have mattered if the Rebels were shot right there in the shield facility as they should have been.

The entire plotline is contrived as a dramatic forcing technique based on endless blunders.
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Re: Admiral Ackbar: Competent or Not?

Post by Professor Dire »

>>Regarding the post above.

Unfortunately all of the tactical concepts you described (which are valid points) are way
above the head of the target audience at the time(+). After all the easiets way to destroy
anything in SW is to take something big and put a hyperdrive on it and point it at your
target. Whatever it is just came apart, explosively.

(+)And likely the script writer's...
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Re: Admiral Ackbar: Competent or Not?

Post by Knife »

Lol. Do you people even watch the movies anymore. Akbar was the fleet Admiral. The Endor operation was put into action by the Rebel Alliance, not Admiral Akbar; though I'm sure he was in on the planning. The briefing was kicked off by Mom Mothma, leader of the Alliance, and she pretty much said that since Palpatine was on board the DSII, we're taking the opportunity and chance to kill him. The Strike Team was outlined by General Madine, special ops dude, and again Akbar had zero control over.

The Endor attack represented a total Alliance commitment, political, naval, and special ops and Akbar is not in charge of all that. He very well may have had access or even input into putting together that part of the plan, but as a fleet commander, his job was to plan the attack with the fleet. To put into our terms, a Fleet Admiral really isn't going to tell a beach landing team, or a SEAL team, what color of flare to use, or what type of explosive is best for a point destruction raid. He's going to get briefed on the basic plan of the beach landing team and what their command and control signals are and a basic time line so he can coordinate his ships with what ever action he's supporting.
They say, "the tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots." I suppose it never occurred to them that they are the tyrants, not the patriots. Those weapons are not being used to fight some kind of tyranny; they are bringing them to an event where people are getting together to talk. -Mike Wong

But as far as board culture in general, I do think that young male overaggression is a contributing factor to the general atmosphere of hostility. It's not SOS and the Mess throwing hand grenades all over the forum- Red
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Re: Admiral Ackbar: Competent or Not?

Post by Bellosh101 »

LopEaredGaloot wrote:Yet rather than IMMEDIATELY coordinate a withdrawal on the same line they came in on, they stick as the Imperial Fleet comes around the far side of the moon. And then the DS lights off and Ackbar actually listens when Lando says: 'I know Han will pull through, we've got to give him more time!'
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. 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.
LopEaredGaloot wrote:Hiding in a planet's LOS/mass shadow is one of those 'old ten minutes after Marconi invented the fuckin' thing!' tricks that Ackbar should have accounted for. If nothing else, it should be easier to penetrate any system from the top and bottom of the ecliptic than dodging between the planets of it's inner system.
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. :wtf:
LopEaredGaloot wrote:Failure to otherwise lockdown any and all Imperial Fleet movements was also dumb. If your spies on-site say there is nobody there then clearly something is wrong already. If your spies say that all other fleet traffic (arrivals at other system ports of call etc.) have stopped and they can't figure out where these heavy assets have vanished to, you should.
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.
LopEaredGaloot wrote:Failure to have a means to cue the rest of the Rebel taskforce that it was indeed safe to delight and make the attack (i.e. some form of beacon or confirmation code from the Strike Team) = TERMINALLY IDIOTIC.
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.
LopEaredGaloot wrote:The obvious solution is to land the shuttle on the tower landing pad, just like Vader did and blow up a sizeable nuke right there.
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.
LopEaredGaloot wrote:Failure to account for the effects of Interdictor class ships possibly preventing a conventional escape altogether and having some preassigned go-to plan for burning or blowing a hole through the interference fields to get out. Further lack of tactical insight.
Read my second response.
LopEaredGaloot wrote:Ingressing the entire task force on a common route with manual timing of hyperspace entry. Dumb. What if the Emperor, who can see the future, has laid high yield Nova mines along this very route? Don't you want to scout a little?
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. 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?
LopEaredGaloot wrote:Failure to grasp the concept of a fireship.
Go read the fucking ROTJ novelization. :roll:
LopEaredGaloot wrote:Lack of competent saboteurs on the DS 'just in case' the shield generator wasn't taken out on the surface and it became necessary to blow up, if not the reactor then at least the beam controls or emitter.
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.
LopEaredGaloot wrote:Inabiity to comprehend the idea of stealing what you couldn't build to make the ambush a double bluff trap for the Imperial Fleet.
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.
LopEaredGaloot wrote:Failure to assign a getaway chaser force, in case the Emperor made a run for it.
Maybe this was... you know, covered in a different fucking briefing? :banghead:
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Re: Admiral Ackbar: Competent or Not?

Post by Knife »

Indeed, 30 years of arm chair generals nitpicking can make the Endor plan look bad, but if was fairly typical of an op plan. Send in a scout/ beach landing team to deal with coastal defenses, move the fleet in to the target and attack it. Use part of the fleet to isolate the target, with some used to attack secondary targets. The beach landing team didn't need to signal the fleet, they came with a time table, destroy shield by X time. Fleet didn't need direct comm. with beach landing team, if the shield is up, they didn't succeed in the mission, if it's down, they succeeded.
They say, "the tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots." I suppose it never occurred to them that they are the tyrants, not the patriots. Those weapons are not being used to fight some kind of tyranny; they are bringing them to an event where people are getting together to talk. -Mike Wong

But as far as board culture in general, I do think that young male overaggression is a contributing factor to the general atmosphere of hostility. It's not SOS and the Mess throwing hand grenades all over the forum- Red
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Re: Admiral Ackbar: Competent or Not?

Post by Molyneux »

Don't forget that Ackbar also is responsible for designing one of my personal favorite fighter designs...so at least as far as that side of the military goes, he's pretty decent.
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Re: Admiral Ackbar: Competent or Not?

Post by LopEaredGaloot »

Prof,

Fair enough, the thing is, this is a board where the question is being asked at a 'what do you really think' level. The OP deserves a straight up answer.

Lando was a fool to think like he did and Ackbar was an idiot to take his advice.

The unseen 'Battle of Tanaab' aside; Lando is never shown to have any tactical skills whatsoever, which is just fine because he is a suave, succe$$ful, businessman whose entire life got turned on it's head by a felon 'friend' who unfairly brought the Feds down on his head.

It should be enough for him to do his good deed by Leia and Chewie and then head off into the sunset, preferrably with a grub stake.

Given Han Solo's life is on a clock and we can't afford to dilly daddle at the Medical Frigate, let alone a full year doing _Shadows Of Empire_ stuff, Lando's role at Jabba's palace is kind've anemic anyway.

I would say tokenism is clearly in play because Solo is also the hotshot pilot who has never had his own chance at deliberate heroism and Leia deserves her own opportunity to show her mettle in a battle she personally leads for once, before cowing out as Han's sock puppet.

No Lando, no need for unwarranted claims of inside knowledge above and beyond his pay grade or mission role as an Affirmative Action assertion and you can simply go with the Interdictor threat (complete with cloaking tech?) as a means to not let the Rebels leave.

Having _no choice in the matter_, if Admiral Ackbar needed to be shown as a strategic genius, this would be his 'Battle of Salamis' chance to: "Okay, they want a fight..." be the one who Themistocles'd the Imperials to a heroic stand still in his own right.

Preferably until the Rebels turned the DS on their own ships. Again, to be different from ANH. And to prove that there were plans within plans here.

There is nothing wrong with a guy in a rubber suit who looks like he belongs on an horderves tray being a one-film hero either (please get rid of the floppy finger hands though...:-)
Professor Dire wrote: Whatever it is just came apart, explosively.
You're correct so of course I'm thinking this needs a 'special exception to realistic physics rule' trope explanation.

Like maybe real space won't fold or unfold near high gravitic masses and thus you can't get close to light speed (or exit it) except at certain distances from planets.

'Or your ship will instantly compact to quarksized anomalies as space gets stiffer'.

Given the amount of traffic shown in the PT and the nearly random trajectories (no dedicated, off-limits, hyperspace entry/exit corridors and ETA based flightplanning) there has to be something like this or 'statistically' some drunk bastard would fly the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez through the core of an important world like Alderaan once a year.

Notice how they come out at least 3-5 planetary diameters away from Endor and move _quickly_, but not at hyperlight velocities, towards it.

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Re: Admiral Ackbar: Competent or Not?

Post by LopEaredGaloot »

Knife,
Knife wrote: Lol. Do you people even watch the movies anymore. Akbar was the fleet Admiral. The Endor operation was put into action by the Rebel Alliance, not Admiral Akbar; though I'm sure he was in on the planning. The briefing was kicked off by Mom Mothma, leader of the Alliance, and she pretty much said that since Palpatine was on board the DSII, we're taking the opportunity and chance to kill him. The Strike Team was outlined by General Madine, special ops dude, and again Akbar had zero control over.
Not true unless you're name is Hitler and the entire OKW is subservient to your every foolish desire.

The theater Commander has full operational authority within the limits of a known set of objectives set out by the CINC-POTUS. He is the only one with the speed of response to make time critical decisions and you can be sure the politicians don't want the responsibility for possible defeat on -their- shoulders.

He in turn talks through his regional CINC to the JCS who help get the various component commands into the region as largely a function of coordinated logistics.

Someone like Schwarzkopf will then talk downhill to his Joint Force Component (Air/Land/Sea) Commanders telling them what his basic idea is with the forces he has coming and they will each execute a series of fragmentary day orders through their staffs which will be coordinated further down the chain by the mission planning elements (senior tactical coordinators and wing weenies) of say the tactical fighter wings. This will in turn require cross coordination for fuel and weaponeering and map for route planning and deconfliction etc.

There will be a LOT of juggling in terms of what the pointy end people know they can specifically accomplish in a number crunching and execution fashion. What the operations managers like General Horner knows in non-specific way as a function of overall battle management. And what Schwarzkopf knows only a little of on a 'can you be here with this many sorties for this many minutes at this particular time to break out my armor force?' wish-driven basis.

The theater commander, if he's not a fool, is going to listen to his can/can't do advisors very closely and adjust his own game plan.

BUT. If Schwarzkopf says "You _will be here_ at X time for Y minutes with Z sorties." you can bet Horner is going to say how high in the fly. And make it happen, even if he has to take away missions in other areas.

Or Schwarzkopf will know why the hell not. Before they go in. 'Cause a failure to execute here as a failure of knowing what is going on is tantamount to treason by ignorance. Which is still a lousy way to end thousands of lives. And a career.

Once everybody has it all in one sock, things will tend to devolve around force generation maintenance (3 sorties a day for the first 3-5 days, 1.5 sorties there after, depending on losses etc.) which is controlled by individual command centers like the CAOC or 'Black Hole' in Riyadh.

But the CMIC, as the big dawg, still knows the game plan so he knows which ass to sink his teeth into if operations start to bog. And where it's starting to happen.
Knife wrote: The Endor attack represented a total Alliance commitment, political, naval, and special ops and Akbar is not in charge of all that. He very well may have had access or even input into putting together that part of the plan, but as a fleet commander, his job was to plan the attack with the fleet. To put into our terms, a Fleet Admiral really isn't going to tell a beach landing team, or a SEAL team, what color of flare to use, or what type of explosive is best for a point destruction raid. He's going to get briefed on the basic plan of the beach landing team and what their command and control signals are and a basic time line so he can coordinate his ships with what ever action he's supporting.
You've got that exactly backwards.

The UDT team is going to get told where and when to go and they will 'make it happen' as a function of meeting higher objectives of which they know not. Because they are expendable and opsec doesn't need them to know more than they do (and squids hate snake eaters and and and).

The theater ops commander (usually not the regional CINC who is a 'retired' field guy and more of an administrative paper chaser) can very well dictate what color of flare is used, he will simply do so through his JFCC and since 'Sea' -is- the primary rather than enabler mission force, it is likely that Ackbar is wearing both hats, though he may well have several Commodore or Rear Admiral equivalents managing individual ships in the battle itself.

Now the specops issue -can- create some hassles, depending on whether the Team is operating under strictly Naval or is USSOCOM/JSOC detached. It all depends on prior taskings and who is the most current in the required mission set.

The snake eaters have their own way of doing things and can be a bit uppity at times with strict adherence to their individual unit command structures (usually there is a liason attached to the flag staff who can speak their language). But since only a few teams will be current on the rather passe` art of beach clearance and scouting and most of those will be direct or seconded to military chain of command, it's likely that JFCC 'Ackbar' has full control here as well.

Which is good because without the Strike Team being successful (and given that 'plan' they hadn't a hope in hell of doing the mission against any kind of competent conventional warfighter, dug in with heavy weapons and sensorized killing fields cleared to several kilometers depth around the installlation), the fleet might as well not come.

The key to all military specialities being: Get In, Get It Done, Get Out. And if the the shield is still up, the 'naval coastal artillery and naval mines' (as DS/ambush force) will blow the Rebs right out of the water, just like at Gallipoli.

Around that highly predictable fixed point of attack.

And that's another big damn difference. No naval commander worth his braids is going to commit to a fight like that on the assumption that the enemy is unprepared or that he is seeing everything.

Not with that kind of a high value asset.

He's going to go in, by unit elements (cruiser/destroyer SAGs), to test the waters on the -assumption- that the bad guys are just waiting to cut loose with everything from heavy preregistered fires to a full on reaction force from a nearby point in deep space (if they are 'holding station' then they don't see the DSII being built and can't talk about it...).


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Re: Admiral Ackbar: Competent or Not?

Post by Aaron »

I can't believe I'm saying this, being ex-Army but how things work here and now are not necessarily how they work in the Rebel Alliance. Lets not forget that these guys where an amalgamation of the Mon Cal military and whatever assorted smugglers, crooks and idealists they could get.
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Re: Admiral Ackbar: Competent or Not?

Post by LopEaredGaloot »

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. :wtf:
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. :roll:
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? :banghead:
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...


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Re: Admiral Ackbar: Competent or Not?

Post by Knife »

lol

Kid, the fleet commander isn't ginning up the op for the beach landing team. A fleet commander isn't in charge of them, if they are a part of his fleet, sure technically he is but he'll have staff qualified to run up an op for them... so my point remains the same; Akbar would have very little input on the finer details of the commando raid on the shield generator. He would get a briefing from his staff about times and objectives.

Akbar would have gotten his orders from Mon Mothma, and created his op plan based off of political objectives, destroy the death star and Palpatine on it.
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Re: Admiral Ackbar: Competent or Not?

Post by Havok »

LopEaredGaloot wrote:And Ackbar, who doesn't know this guy from drunken bum in a back alley says okey dokey.
You are talking about Han Solo?
You mean the Han Solo that helped blow up the first Death Star, also saving Yavin IV and the Alliance base, commanders etc. that were there.
The Han Solo that helped the Rebel Alliance evacuate Hoth?
The Han Solo that infiltrated the Death Star and saved Princess Leia and got the plans of the Death Star to the Alliance commanders?
You mean Han Solo the guy that saved Luke's bacon twice, including during the above mentioned 'blow up the first Death Star?
You mean Han Solo, the man that was trusted to command the most important mission the Alliance has ever undertaken, at the risk of almost their entire fleet?
You mean the Han Solo that held the rank of GENERAL, the equivalent rank of Admiral, in the Alliance?

I think this line pretty much sums up your level of thought that went into this thread.
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Re: Admiral Ackbar: Competent or Not?

Post by Bellosh101 »

LopEaredGaloot wrote: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.
Which would be inconsequential if the first assault on DSII fails, leaving no option left to take it out before its completion because afterwards, the Empire would have no reason to NOT make Endor the most heavily-defended place in the galaxy. Once it gets finished, DSII would have simply blasted away every planet suspected of treason until the Alliance surrendered. Since DSII no longer had an exhaust port flaw, no fleet asset would be capable of blowing the completed battlestation to shit. If faced with a practically invincible battlestation, the Alliance really would have no option left but surrender unless it wanted to see a whole bunch of blown up planets. For some reason, you can't seem to grasp that in some military scenarios, failure is not an option.
LopEaredGaloot wrote:The Empire is at it's most vulnerable to piracy and privateering on it's impossible-to-maintain supply routes.
That sort of logic is suicidal when the enemy responds by blowing up entire planets with its practically invincible battlestation. The Alliance would have shattered if faced with an unstoppable weapon that turns piracy into an useless geasture.
LopEaredGaloot wrote: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.
Why bother with that effort if it won't stop a practically invincible battlestation? Von Neumann packages can't create recruits for the Alliance cause, let alone those with high hopes of overthrowing the Empire. If people can't believe that the Empire can be stopped, there's no Rebellion... period.
LopEaredGaloot wrote:Anytime you 'surround' something you disperse your operational strength and lose the ability to coherently respond as a unit to an outside threat. 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.
Nice of you to strawman my point by assuming that a perimeter defense can only entitle surrounding the entire DSII instead of merely holding a defensive position at a certan battlefield sector. If you're such a wiseguy, can you conjure up an alternate plan for the Alliance fleet to destroy DSII before every Imperial cruiser in the Outer Rim arrives to rape Ackbar's cruisers?
LopEaredGaloot wrote:Rather than as a standing guard force which never leaves the system.
Didn't you see the Empire's standing guard force at Endor when Han & Co. arrived in their stolen shuttle? No Rebel seemed surprised, meaning that the Alliance already knew that considerable enemy forces would be there to warrant bringing the entire Rebel fleet along.
LopEaredGaloot wrote:Only idiots like the IJN and DKM send out heavy assets unescorted and without route and destination prep.
That sort of shit is almost useless when ships have the ability to hyper from one end of the galaxy to the other at will. :roll:
LopEaredGaloot wrote: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.
The Katana Fleet showed what sort of stupidity can occur when ships are slave-rigged.
LopEaredGaloot wrote:There are 10-20 men in that team. All of them are volunteers.
Commandos volunteer to do commando work because they have a reasonable expectation that they will be extracted safely. They cannot be extracted safely if they're being stupid by sending out communications. Plus, what makes you think that the Empire wouldn't be jamming communication frequencies the moment the shield generator blows up? How could the Rebel fleet exploit the situation if they can't recieve an all-clear signal? Did you ever think of that? :wtf:
LopEaredGaloot wrote: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.
What the fuck is that dribble supposed to mean?
LopEaredGaloot wrote: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.
If that crap was practical in the SW universe, everyone would be pulling it off more often than the zero instances we've seen happen so far. How can you be so sure that a 'seismic charge' will work wonders on something other than mere asteroids?
LopEaredGaloot wrote: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.
These sorts of actions are typical of those who revel in high stakes gambling. Darth Sidious by all accounts was one such gambler who happened to win nearly all the time by playing the odds (by risking his life in ROTS and ROTJ) and making connections with everyone possible (like an apparent Chosen One... it takes no precognition to realize that such a person is worth keeping an eye on). If the Emperor had any incredible gift of foresight, he would have at least predicted DSII's destruction (which the Prophets of the Dark Side actually did... only to end up exiled by a fussy Palpatine).
LopEaredGaloot wrote:If the mines are modern, they probably have signature memories based on reactor core signatures or whatever.
What good is that supposed to do when an Imperial freighter accidently rams into it? Mines can't be an effective defense if they pose a danger to friendly forces.
LopEaredGaloot wrote: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.
Yet it did happen anyway. If the movie itself didn't show these things, then too bad for you. Also nice of you to ignore that it required the firepower of the entire Rebel fleet to bring down the SSD's shields.
LopEaredGaloot wrote: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.
In order words, you'll ignore my points if they're too inconvenient for you to handle. :finger:
LopEaredGaloot wrote:No. It needs to happen in the mass brief.
You mean the one which didn't have all the Rebellion's pilots in attendence? The one that didn't even bother to show the layout of the Empire's Endor complex? You're just being a butthurt asshole for no reason other than the fact that you desire a crappy version of the Battle of Endor.
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Re: Admiral Ackbar: Competent or Not?

Post by Thanas »

Star Wars 888 wrote:According to EU sources Ackbar was a military genius on the level of Thrawn and Revan.
Quite wrong, seeing as how Thrawn beat Ackbar both strategically and tactically in every campaign they went up against each other - and did it with inferior forces to boot.
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Re: Admiral Ackbar: Competent or Not?

Post by PhilosopherOfSorts »

In regards to the idea of the rebel commando team sending an "all clear" message after taking out the shield generator, I refer you to this:

Lando: We've gotta be able to get some kind of reading on that shield, up or down.

Sullustian Co-pilot: *Alien giberish*

Lando: How can they be jamming us if the don't know we're *pause* coming.

Emphasis mine. The Imperials were already jamming, sensors at least, well before the shield went down. What makes you think this would stop when the shield went down, as opposed to the Empire turning it up to eleven.
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Re: Admiral Ackbar: Competent or Not?

Post by Havok »

The Empire isn't supposed to know they are there, so the jamming is a mot point. Note that Lando specifies they should be reading something. And clearly, the Empire wasn't jamming communications. Also note that even with the jamming, the second the shield generator blows up, Akbar is aware of it. Signal, jamming, signals or whatever.
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Re: Admiral Ackbar: Competent or Not?

Post by Captain Seafort »

Havok wrote:Also note that even with the jamming, the second the shield generator blows up, Akbar is aware of it. Signal, jamming, signals or whatever.
That was because the jamming was being generated by the main communications ship. Once it was destroyed the jamming ceased and they got their reading. Hence they knew when the shield came down.
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Re: Admiral Ackbar: Competent or Not?

Post by Havok »

That's great, except the command ship is blown up WELL AFTER the shield goes down. Oops.
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Re: Admiral Ackbar: Competent or Not?

Post by Captain Seafort »

Havok wrote:That's great, except the command ship is blown up WELL AFTER the shield goes down. Oops.
Captain Seafort wrote:That was because the jamming was being generated by the main communications ship.
You were saying? :roll:
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