Quote:
Originally Posted by BleedingRed
Just so people understand, the "Hyper Jump" that destroyed the ships....... Uh... Again why didn't the rebels just do this to both death stars?
|
I've been thinking about this. I will first say that this is not the strongest plot point in the movie.
But it isn't nearly as weak as people are making it out to be. In part you're asking--why didn't the rebels normally sacrifice their biggest, most powerful ships in suicide missions? The answer is that you don't blow up your most expensive, valuable, and hardest to replace weapons. That isn't good strategy. The ship that was used was the most poerful ship available to the resistance. You don't throw that away because it's useful for a lot more things, and over a much longer period, than if you simply drive it into an enemy ship.
It seems, further, that the maneuver would only work with an extremely large ship. Even using the resistance's largest ship, the Supremacy was not vaporized. It had a big hole torn in it that led to a catastrophic failure, but many people survived the collision. A smaller ship might not have even penetrated the shields, much less destroyed the Supremacy.
So we're left with the idea that the largest, most powerful, and most expensive ships you can find could destroy other ships. The reasons not to do it are noted above. Maybe you could put a hyperdrive on a very large rock? Maybe, but one would presume that the hyperdrive and power plant would be the most valuable components of these extremely large ships. Again, it seems plausible that the costs involved in accelerating anything massive enough to destroy a star destroyer to a high enough speed make this an impractical strategy.
As for the death stars, they were much larger and more massive than the Supremacy. The Supremacy was a relatively thing shape, 60 kilometers across, while the original Deathstar was a sphere of 120 km diameter. Given the level of damage to the Supremacy, it is reasonable to think that even the largest rebel ships could not have destroyed the much larger Deathstars with a suicide mission.