Star Wars VIII: The Last Jedi (2017) (spoilers free to be seen)

[Darth Geek]

If Star Wars was hard science fiction I'd be complaining like crazy about hyperdrive suddenly being used as a weapon after all this time.  But it's always been more fantasy than science so I can let it go. 

It's still lazy, if you ask me. Tell me what you think about this little fanfic moment:

Poe: "Why don't we hyperdrive into these guys?"
Admiral Akbar: "Impossible! You have to pilot it into [technobabble area] for it to work. The odds are a million to one at that speed!"
[10mins later]
Holdo: "Holdo my beer. I'm going for it."

I just made that scene 100x more dramatic and the sacrifice that much more powerful (since there was more risk involved) while patching up all the loose logic with a dash of foreshadowing. And it only took me 30 seconds to write those 3 lines of dialogue. And no one has to say, "Eh... It's fantasy so who cares?" That's just as bad to me as, "Eh... It's just a movie." I understand we all have to draw the line somewhere though.

There are plenty of issues that could have been solved with little bit of added dialog. The most egregious problem in the movie is why Holdo doesn't tell the crew her plan. All you need is a few characters suspecting that the reason the First Order was able to find them so fast out of lightspeed is because there's a spy onboard. Which makes a hell of a lot more sense of a conclusion for them to make than jumping to a so far non-existent technology.

[NRRork]

Holdo didn't trust Poe because she didn't really KNOW him, she wasn't his protege like he was to Leia. All she saw was an impulsive idiot who'd get them all killed, and justifiably so from what she JUST saw of him. And furthermore later on with his impulsive plan that got ALMOST all of them killed.

She's an admiral, it's not her job to sit down and explain to all her subordinates what she's doing and why. That's not how it works. He's lucky she didn't toss him right in the brig.

I think she's just hated for the reason more people sided with Cap in Civil War or why Skylar White was so hated. It was real-world sensibilities creeping their way into our fantasy. Audiences WANT to see Poe blow shit up, they WANT to see the Avengers kick some ass, they WANT to see Walter White continue down his sinister path.

But it's not always a good idea to just bow to the wishes of the audiences. A five-year-old would eat nothing but cake and candy if you let them, but SOMEONE has to be the responsible one and stop them.

[Pak-Man]

Yeah, as someone who has to be trained in working with classified info, I can tell you it doesn't matter how much easier it would make your life or the other person's life. Classified is classified, and bugging someone for it will give you nothing but stink-eye.

[linszoid]

I just want to know why the First Order was so incompetent that they just couldn't jump a few ships ahead of the resistance fleet, or maybe why they forgot to bring any tie bombers to blow up the resistance ships.

[kunedog]

If Star Wars was hard science fiction I'd be complaining like crazy about hyperdrive suddenly being used as a weapon after all this time.  But it's always been more fantasy than science so I can let it go. 

It's still lazy, if you ask me. Tell me what you think about this little fanfic moment:

Poe: "Why don't we hyperdrive into these guys?"
Admiral Akbar: "Impossible! You have to pilot it into [technobabble area] for it to work. The odds are a million to one at that speed!"
[10mins later]
Holdo: "Holdo my beer. I'm going for it."

I just made that scene 100x more dramatic and the sacrifice that much more powerful (since there was more risk involved) while patching up all the loose logic with a dash of foreshadowing. And it only took me 30 seconds to write those 3 lines of dialogue. And no one has to say, "Eh... It's fantasy so who cares?" That's just as bad to me as, "Eh... It's just a movie." I understand we all have to draw the line somewhere though.

Having said all this.... I do want to extend my gratitude to everyone for explaining things better for me.

I've been giving some thought to how you could patch the script to handle hyperspace ramming competently: that is, how to justify ramming and then dispose of (or at least shelve) it so space battles in future installments aren't crippled.  It's still flawed, but this is what I came up with:

How bout we integrate the hyperspace ramming tactic with the First Order's hyperspace tracking mechanism.  First, the script should set up the brilliant ramming tactic, instead of having Holdo think of it out of nowhere, in the same scene she uses it.  With minor modifications, the numerous conversations about the hyperspace tracker will easily accomplish this.

The basic premise is that back when hyperspace was invented, the military did consider using it as a weapon.  But it turns out that targeting any specific object is very difficult.  It's not an issue of size and location, but one of empty space versus solid matter.  So while it's quite possible to reliably avoid any and all objects (and stop just short of them, like the Falcon did with Starkiller Base), your hyperspace scanners/sensors would be hard pressed to even recognize, much less follow (i.e. track) something like a planet, much less a ship.  Throw in a comment about the laws of physics being slightly different in hyperspace (as they obviously always have been), which is fine as long as they're consistent.  To summarize: the nature of hyperspace is that navigation through regular space is mundane, but sensing anything about solid matter is a fool's game, so the idea of hyperspace tracking and/or ramming was wholly abandoned.

The First Order's invention that changed everything is some kind of hyperspace emitter that can send out hyperspace waves and (harmlessly) bounce them off matter in hyperspace, giving more precise data about the shape and movement of objects.  Essentially, it is active radar, an analogy most of the audience will understand.  Either the original hyperspace engineers never figured out exactly how to do this, or the ridiculous energy cost was considered to be an effective prohibition (and the FO's innovation is meeting the power generation requirement).  Finally, the First Order is able to recognize and follow objects with enough precision to track specific ships through hyperspace, but it's still far too blurry to target anything well enough to ram it.

On the rebel side, from the moment Leia deduces they're being tracked, everyone is astonished (maybe even in denial) and brainstorming to solve the mystery of how.  Maybe the original hyperspace engineers would have known almost instantly, but hyperspace has been a settled science for so long (and so many rebel engineers have been killed) that it (justifiably) takes most of the film's runtime for the rebels to figure out what I've just explained.  But only when Holdo is alone on the cruiser, and desperate for a hail mary, does the final revelation come to her: Snoke's ship is sending out waves through hyperspace, basically lighting itself up like a Christmas tree (as active radar really would) in hyperspace.  Maybe (through exposition) give her an engineering background, and have her lead the previous hyperspace tracker discussions so this is more believable.  After this flash of genius, it's now trivial to use the ship's existing hyperspace sensors to target Snoke's ship and ram through it (or tweak this part a bit so that she knowingly plans the ram ahead of time, and she has to be onboard to manually reconfigure the sensors, also justifying why it was necessary to sacrifice her life).


Pros:

* This explains why no one has ever tried hyperspace ramming before (no one has targeting capability).

* It explains why no one will ever try hyperspace ramming again (gaining targeting capability makes YOU the most vulnerable target).  A good future script writer could probably justify it in very specific circumstances though.

* It makes Holdo less of a defeatist, oblivious do-nothing.  Clearly, Holdo should've been completely scrapped and replaced with Akbar, but let's fix one problem at a time . . .

* It can be used to characterize the First Order as carelessly power-hungry, blind to how they've sown the seeds of their own destruction.  Maybe their own engineers don't specifically foresee the ramming danger, but they urge caution because no one has ever done anything like this in the history of hyperspace engines.  Snoke dismisses their concerns as cowardice.  Of course this also means Snoke is aware of the hyperspace tracking device from the beginning, instead of being somehow oblivious to the idea until after Hux had already made use of it.


Cons:

* This only works if integrated into TLJ's script; it can't be retconned in IX.  The damage is done.

* It's too Star Trek, i.e. too science "fiction" instead of science "fantasy" as Marty said.  But this is not a problem with my solution; the pandora's box was opened as soon as hyperspace ramming was introduced.  This was a fundamental point in Plinkett's Phantom Menace review (the one that put RLM on the map).  And he's right: how many Star Trek characters are engineers or scientists, and how many who aren't still spout technobabble?  But other than Mikkelson in Rogue One, how many engineers or scientists can you name in Star Wars?  IIRC if even a mechanic of a ship is a named character, it's the pilot himself.  Plinkett said that Star Trek had whole episodes devoted to how the engine/weapon/etc systems worked, but Star Wars left them largely opaque, expressed through light dialog and heavy SFX.  I contend that suddenly using an engine system as a weapon system is a decision that demands as much of an explanation and justification as suddenly scanning for midichlorians (and raises more contradictions).

Speaking of Plinkett, the review's out.  It's good (and the Star Trek bits are what got me thinking about all this again):

I just want to know why the First Order was so incompetent that they just couldn't jump a few ships ahead of the resistance fleet, or maybe why they forgot to bring any tie bombers to blow up the resistance ships.

It's to hide how ridiculously incompetent the rebels' escape plan is, i.e. to artifically keep the First Order "one step behind".

[Pak-Man]

I just figure they don't hyperspace ram very often because it destroys the ship and everyone on board.

[RoninFox]

I just figure they don't hyperspace ram very often because it destroys the ship and everyone on board.

In most circumstances where hope is lost enough to consider it, hyperdrive would likely already be damaged. Makes sense to me. Disabling hyperdrive to prevent escape is probably a high priority in most battles involving any ship larger than a fighter.

[kunedog]

The story of the rebellion is a parade of hopeless situations, usually even when they initiate combat.  The death star alone (any of the three) would justify the tactic, especially with a purpose-built barebones hyperdrive ship, or a hyperdrive bolted onto an asteroid.  And that doesn't account for the empire or FO always refraining from using it.

[Edward J Grug III]

It's because of midichlorians

[Cyrusso]

There's a point at which inconsistencies will bother me to the point of being a bad movie going experience for me. However, nothing that occurs in any of these new films (TFA, Rogue One, TLJ, Solo) has done that. I accept inconsistencies in movies I watch all the time but I don't let certain plot details bother me when they're really not all that important to the structure of the overall story. Why didn't Holdo tell them the plan? Why doesn't the first order Kamikaze all of their robot-operated tie fighters into the Resistance fleet? Where are the bombers on both sides? I don't know, and frankly, I don't care. The only thing that matters to me is this... is it overall a good movie? Will I want to watch it again? If I can honestly answer yes to both questions... I can let go of a lot or potential problems that other people might bring up in conversation.

[linszoid]

I just figure they don't hyperspace ram very often because it destroys the ship and everyone on board.

So just make some "hyper ramming" missiles. If an A-Wing can take out the bridge of a super star destroyer at regular speeds then a hyper ramming missile the size of an Awing should do plenty of damage. 

[Pak-Man]

I'm pretty sure the hyperdrive alone isn't going to make light speed without a hyperspace-capable spacecraft attached to it, navigation computers, etc. By the time you're done, you have what I would assume is a pretty expensive missile. Same reason we don't just crash tiny jets into our enemies, despite the effectiveness of the tactic.

[Cyrusso]

I was thinking of something very similar. But I'm going to resort to what I like to call my "Logical default"... if the First Order hasn't developed them... if the Resistance doesn't have them, then there must be something that is preventing them from mass-producing them.

[kunedog]

I'm pretty sure the hyperdrive alone isn't going to make light speed without a hyperspace-capable spacecraft attached to it, navigation computers, etc. By the time you're done, you have what I would assume is a pretty expensive missile. Same reason we don't just crash tiny jets into our enemies, despite the effectiveness of the tactic.

True, but that's because a jet fighter's jet engines are weaker than the rocket motors powering its missles, not stronger.  If jet engines were so powerful that they could instantly accelerate a missle to a million times the velocity you get out of a rocket--to the point that you no longer even need a warhead, just some solid mass--then we would make missles with them.  We might stop bothering to build jet fighters altogether.

The navy already wants to develop railguns (basically guns that accelerate hunks of metal to ridiculous velocities) because of the advantage it would have with such incredible range and destructive power, even though the gun itself is so enormous it can only go on a warship.  If that whole weapon system could be made as self-contained as a missle (or even a jet), they'd do it in a heartbeat.  In fact, put two and two together: if hyperspace ramming is an option, then there has never been any reason to ever build a super-expensive death star (of any flavor) in the first place.  Not only is it vulnerable to HS ramming, but HS ramming probably more effectively fulfills the death star's own purpose!

This is part of what people mean when they say the clumsy, inconsistent, careless writing ruins not only the sequels, but the original movies.

[MartyS (Gromit)]

This is part of what people mean when they say the clumsy, inconsistent, careless writing ruins not only the sequels, but the original movies.

People really need to get over the idea of one movie ruining another, none of this is real, why would you let make believe stuff ruin your enjoyment of other make believe stuff?  If you really love a movie it stands by itself.