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One interesting note from the Rebels Recon, courtesy of Pablo Hidalgo: turns out the YT-2400 was created for the ANH: SE, not for Shadows of the Empire - it was simply borrowed from the film and brought into the project.

Not sure if this was known before, but it's the first I've heard of it.

FaxModem1 wrote:Like I said, unless Thrawn is all hype, the only thing that makes sense is that Thrawn is working his own agenda separate from the Empire, or is a rebel sympathizer. Otherwise, he's a moron who just sits on his hands each and every time he has a chance to hurt the Rebellion.

He does have a point, in that these Rebel groups are tiny. They are not large enough to be a serious threat, as long as they don't do anything to seriously embarrass the Empire. If there is a way to arrange for the various Rebel groups to all appear at the same time and be ambushed, it would be downright perfect for him.

Given that such a strategy cannot possibly succeed, it is still inherently problematic from a character standpoint in that it makes Thrawn much less effective than if there were smaller goals he could suceed in, as was done in the Zahn trilogy. While he will inevitably fail regardless, it would be nice if he could at least win a couple victories in order to make his ultimate defeat seem even more impressive.

Personally I think Thrawn would have been a better antagonist if he were used during the OT era proper, around the time of The Empire Strikes Back, in which he is promoted to Grand Admiral after the destruction of the Death Star, and gets to actually be a serious threat to the main Rebel fleet under Ackbar as it is attempting to build up. At this point in time there just isn't enough of a Rebel Alliance for him to really threaten it without destroying everything.

Galvatron wrote:It's altogether possible that Palpatine wants the rebellion to survive at this point. Maybe Thrawn is only there to ensure that they don't do any real damage to the Empire.

This is a reasonable hypothesis at this point. One wonders if the Emperor would have been able to dissolve the Imperial Senate without the Rebel Alliance existing in some form.

The Imperial base that was destroyed on Ryloth was a Rebel general's house. It's not a big loss.

Adam Reynolds wrote:

Galvatron wrote:It's altogether possible that Palpatine wants the rebellion to survive at this point. Maybe Thrawn is only there to ensure that they don't do any real damage to the Empire.

This is a reasonable hypothesis at this point. One wonders if the Emperor would have been able to dissolve the Imperial Senate without the Rebel Alliance existing in some form.

With an operational Death Star as leverage, there wasn't much of anything that the Emperor couldn't have done. However, he was probably able to use the rebellion as political justification for dissolving the Senate, which was no doubt punctuated by the destruction of Alderaan.

Years before all that, however, the rebellion may have served his purposes as convenient scapegoats to justify harsher crackdowns and increased military spending.

Galvatron wrote: With an operational Death Star as leverage, there wasn't much of anything that the Emperor couldn't have done. However, he was probably able to use the rebellion as political justification for dissolving the Senate, which was no doubt punctuated by the destruction of Alderaan.

Years before all that, however, the rebellion may have served his purposes as convenient scapegoats to justify harsher crackdowns and increased military spending.

That is sort of what I meant, in that it allowed the buildup to that point. Perhaps Rogue One will shine some more light on this idea.

As excited as I am about it, Rogue One really worries me.

Placing the Death Star in orbit over what appears to be a tourist-laden space Jerusalem would seem to be at odds with the alleged secrecy of the project. Hopefully the film will reconcile that by telling us that the Jedha system has been declared off-limits to visitors, but I'm not holding my breath.

One of my longstanding pet peeves about Star Wars is how much the Imperial Senate's political power (pre-ANH) is downplayed. So far, Rebels hasn't really said much about it so I hope Rogue One doesn't either. I'd actually prefer they remain silent rather than thoughtlessly contradict everything that was said about it in ANH.

Ghetto edit: Upon further investigation, I was wrong. Jedha isn't the planet we see the Death Star orbiting in the trailers. So, uh... nevermind what I said above.

Thing is, I don't think Thrawn is after Sato. He want Bail Organa and Mon Mothma. He just doesn't know it yet.

That is to say, he knows, or at least has figured, that he's dealing with a Cell Network and not just random groups of dissidents. Here, he squeezed one cell and got another to come running. That's probably the focus of this part of the plan: Chew up individual cells, and see where the survivors run. Find the links between them, and follow that trail to suppliers and sponsors. Once he's got them, or a good idea of the rebellion's extent, hit everything at once.

Galvatron wrote:As excited as I am about it, Rogue One really worries me.

Placing the Death Star in orbit over what appears to be a tourist-laden space Jerusalem would seem to be at odds with the alleged secrecy of the project. Hopefully the film will reconcile that by telling us that the Jedha system has been declared off-limits to visitors, but I'm not holding my breath.

One of my longstanding pet peeves about Star Wars is how much the Imperial Senate's political power (pre-ANH) is downplayed. So far, Rebels hasn't really said much about it so I hope Rogue One doesn't either. I'd actually prefer they remain silent rather than thoughtlessly contradict everything that was said about it in ANH.

In the context of Rebels it makes sense. The worlds with political power have always been the core worlds. Outer rim worlds like Lorthal are backwaters the Senate doesn't care about, both during the Clone Wars and the Empire. The Senate has much less power in the outer rim, and the best they can do is things like Leia's mercy missions/covert operations.

Given that Rogue One features both Mon Mothma and Bail Organa, it makes sense there should at least be hints as to what is going on politically. Hopefully done in a similar fashion to the ANH scene that gives us enough to talk about.

Didn't the Senate have little influence on the outerrim even during republic times (or just didn't care about those systems) wasn't that part of the reason CIS was officially formed?

The last episode introduced Chimaera:



The decal is very subtle, hard to see even with some contrast and brightness adjustements:

Lord Revan wrote:Didn't the Senate have little influence on the outerrim even during republic times (or just didn't care about those systems) wasn't that part of the reason CIS was officially formed?

From what I gather, the whole Republic and then Empire had little influence on the Outer Rim. I don't see why that would motivate large organizations like the Trade Federation and the Banking Clan to secede though.

Galvatron wrote:

Lord Revan wrote:Didn't the Senate have little influence on the outerrim even during republic times (or just didn't care about those systems) wasn't that part of the reason CIS was officially formed?

From what I gather, the whole Republic and then Empire had little influence on the Outer Rim. I don't see why that would motivate large organizations like the Trade Federation and the Banking Clan to secede though.

hence "officially" aka the official reason for the formation of the Confederacy of Independent Systems was to bring justice and prosperity the systems the Galactic Republic republic had neglected, obviously that's not the reason the Trade Federation or Banking Clan joined but that's, what is in the official documents so the smaller semi-independent systems wouldn't think they're there only satisfy the greed of the Trade Federation or similar organizations, that least that's the impression I got from the Clone Wars series.

Did I see correctly in the last episode (or what I assume was the lastest) that you can apparently do a bombing run with cargo containers??

Yes. And, I mean, why not? Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son of a bitch in space, after all. Load a bomb on the container, fly at target, release container.

Well sure I guess, if you're moving fast enough anything is a weapon. I just didn't really get that impression from the episode. Or are we assuming the containers were all loaded with explosives? Would ramming be equally effective?

The containers were clearly loaded with explosives, seeing how they, y'know, exploded.

We also clearly see why this is not a mainstream strategy in this episode, as even a frigate was effortlessly able to intercept them with flak. Had those instead been an equivalent load of proton torpedoes they would have hit their target.

It only worked against a small transport, hardly the might of the Empire.

I got the impression that Thrawn was less interested in the rebels, and more in setting Konstantine up for failure.
Which got me thinking - isn't Pryce technically his boss right now? So while he could *recommend* letting the rebels escape with the Y-Wings, he couldn't *order* her to; that was ultimately her decision, and therefore *her* failure, not his.
Holding fire over Ryloth is trickier, but it probably did more harm to Slavin than Thrawn, since the ship wouldn't even have been there if he hadn't screwed up the prisoner exchange...

Is Thrawn trying to "enhance" his career?
Drag his allies down, so he can appear to be "the only competent officier in this mess?"

That's not really his style. No, he wants a bigger prize than the crew of the Ghost - just because they're main characters to us doesn't mean they're the be-all and end-all of the Galaxy. Recall: Vader didn't kill any of them when he wrecked their shit on Lothal, but taking down the Rebel Command Ship and showing who was boss was considered more than sufficient for his purposes.

In this episode we get a hint that his target may be Commander Sato, which makes sense as he ranks higher in the Rebel hierarchy than any of the Ghost crew do. If anyone's leading him to other Rebel cells (like the one the Y-wings went to) it'd be him; the Empire may not have the intel that Hera is effectively Sato's XO at this point.

RogueIce wrote:In this episode we get a hint that his target may be Commander Sato, which makes sense as he ranks higher in the Rebel hierarchy than any of the Ghost crew do. If anyone's leading him to other Rebel cells (like the one the Y-wings went to) it'd be him; the Empire may not have the intel that Hera is effectively Sato's XO at this point.

Expanding upon that, maybe Thrawn is really going after big fish like Dodonna or Ackbar and the Phoenix cell is simply his best lead so far. In that case, it wouldn't do him much good to kill them.

Yes, it seems pretty clear that he's after somebody bigger - but it's starting to look a bit suspicious.

Why?
Nothing bigger has appeared yet, in the first episode he ignored a fleet consisting of a carrier (with Sato on board), two CR-90s, the Ghost, and a bunch of Y-wings and A-wings. That's most of the combat capabilities of the Phoenix Fleet, and its leadership. In the next encounters he let go the same ships with the same people on board (2x Ghost, 1x CR-90, 1x Sato), except for the worthless YT-2400 and its equally dangerous crew.

"Thrawn has a much larger objective in mind than a capture of a single rebel cell" according to Pryce

Phoenix Fleet was never Thrawn's target.

It is more that it is problematic in terms of drama to always have the bad guy let the heroes win so obviously. It works far better if they make tremendous sacrifices, fighting for even the smallest victory, when it turns out that they were outsmarted from the beginning.

This was done masterfully in the Thrawn Trilogy with the book Dark Force Rising, in which the heroes appear to have won the battle for the Katana fleet. Only after their apparent victory do they realize that only fifteen ships are left, which is combined with the revelation that Thrawn is also using cloned stormtroopers and must already have crews for the ships that he had captured.

eMeM wrote:Why?
Nothing bigger has appeared yet, in the first episode he ignored a fleet consisting of a carrier (with Sato on board), two CR-90s, the Ghost, and a bunch of Y-wings and A-wings. That's most of the combat capabilities of the Phoenix Fleet, and its leadership. In the next encounters he let go the same ships with the same people on board (2x Ghost, 1x CR-90, 1x Sato), except for the worthless YT-2400 and its equally dangerous crew.

"Thrawn has a much larger objective in mind than a capture of a single rebel cell" according to Pryce

Phoenix Fleet was never Thrawn's target.

The obvious conclusion, to me, is that he's trying to smoke out the Rebellion's political/financial backers, aka Mon Mothma and Bail Organa.

Of course, he presumably doesn't know its Mon Mothma and Bail Organa, but Thrawn is most likely well-informed and savvy enough to realize that the Rebellion couldn't be operating on this scale if they weren't being organized and funded covertly by someone with a lot of wealth and power.

That would be the ultimate target, and the ones he'd really have to take out to eliminate the Rebellion- otherwise they can keep funding more cells, and Thrawn will be stuck playing whack-a-mole.