Full Series Is Lothal gonna get slagged?

There's a number of things coming together that might hint at it IMHO.

First, they had that propaganda broadcast several eps back, that talked of planets being liberated by the "Base Delta Zero initiative". What this meant was not explained, of course. It seems "liberated" may be a particularly dark euphemism under the circumstances.

Then there was this screen that popped up when Sabine accessed Tseebo's brain implant:



Here's what Reddit had to say about it:

(It's a mix and match of Aurebesh and Greek there, with the Aurebesh B and Z and the Greek Delta in between.)

And finally you have Tarkin, the ruthless SOB who would eventually superlaser Alderaan, who believes in rule through fear, becoming much more involved in the story. It seems he's going to whip the imps into shape on Lothal and make them a much more aggressive, brutal force.

And right about the same time as he turned up, the Ghost cell made their pirated broadcast. This combination might just touch off a planetwide revolt, enough to convince Tarkin to cut their losses, pull out from Lothal, and glass the place from orbit. It's also noticeable that we've yet to see the ISDs really do anything in Rebels other than float around looking pretty. They gotta get their big guns out sometime...

Thoughts?

 

The title of this thread is just awesome.

But, yes, I think Lothal is going to face a similar fate as Taris.

 

Sounds very likely, it will be very interesting to see what happens next...

 

Half life 3 confirmed

 

Shucks really thought DF was a secret Employe of valve.

 

If Lothal getting slagged gets the Ghost crew off Lothal then i'm looking forward to it.

 

The question is would it because someone frees Kanan and rather than punish her Tarkin wipes out the city she holds in regard?

Might not mean slagging Lothal but they could also wipe out Tarkintown after learning they supply them with food, etc?

 

Well, if BDZ is mass bombardment of a planet (i.e. completely slagging it), why classify it at all? Orbital bombardment is not some secret squirrel military technique. It's been around for thousands of years. It doesn't require any new technology or training. It's a pretty straightforward concept: 1) put capital ships in orbit, 2) assign specific target areas to each ship, 3) issue order to fire, 4) tea time.

Also, we've heard imperial news reports in Rebels praising the "Base Delta Zero Initiative". If BDZ is classified as "top secret", why advertise the fact that you even have an initiative for it? It's just very strange. Also, they're apparently used BDZ on other worlds. Even in the Empire, it's hard to keep word of that from spreading. Trade routes and lines of communications are disrupted. Eventually someone's going to travel there, find a once-populated world turned into ash, leave, and then tell the rest of the galaxy about it. Word is going to get out, and it's going to be kind of a big deal.

The more I think about the idea of a complete bombardment and planet wipe, the more I think that it has the effect of diminishing the threat that the Death Star represented. If the Empire could have simply wiped out whole worlds with a fleet of Star Destroyers, what need did they have of the Death Star at that point? I mean, maybe the Death Star is the imperial military's version of the $400 claw hammer?

 

Well the evidence is pretty much overwhelming in the show from all the clues. On top of that they even brought it up that little goofy Sabine's rebel sketch book...yes a sketch book.

 

Is there actually evidence from the show that BDZ is mass bombardment? I may have missed it.

If I recall Sabine's sketch boom entry correctly, she talks about how it's the "elimination of a target population", or something to that effect. That can be accomplished in any number of ways, aside from destroying a planet via turbolasers.

 

My guess is that the BDZ will a massive campaign to destroy anything that can't help with TIE fighter production on Lothal. Some of that will be orbital bombardment and some of it will be more targeted strikes against specific threats to the Empire.

 

Octavian Dibar

The thing about the Death Star was planetary shields. Most lesser worlds, including almost all rim worlds, didn't have any. Wealthier worlds had them, and the richest planets, the core worlds, had the most powerful planetary shields available. Conventional capital ship armament couldn't touch them.

The Death Star was designed to inspire terror by being so monstrously overpowerful that planetary shields were useless. It could punch right through any shielding, and destroy even heavily shielded core worlds. No world was safe. Also, it did it very quickly, within seconds of dropping from hyperspace, leaving no time for escape.

 

Or maybe they meant to tell us instead of BDZ'd Lothal will get DBZ'd



I'll just.... show myself out.

 

This are some good points, regarding shields and the speed of destruction. However, wasn't the Torpedo Sphere the solution to that problem? They were only about twice the cost of an Imperial I Star Destroyer. If you've already got a fleet that can wipe out a planet, then having a few Torpedo Spheres tagging along to knock out the shields isn't that big of a deal. Also, a fleet that size can also very effectively blockade the planet and prevent the majority of ships from escaping.

It just seems like, if BDZ is just a mass bombardment, that the Death Star is merely a refinement of the tactic, rather than a generational advancement. They spent twenty years building the first Death Star, when they already had the capability to wipe out a population more conventionally. Maybe it's the ultimate example of the military-industrial complex.

 

Consider who it was that was originally building the DS. It was the CIS. Specifically, it was the Geonosians who had the plan for the thing. It stands to reason they'd want a weapon like that. The CIS was based out of mid to rim worlds mostly, whereas the heartland of the Republic was the core worlds. But a monster superweapon... with which they could bulldoze into the core world region and threaten any of them with sudden, unstoppable planetary destruction... it could be a war-winner. They could hold a knife to the Republic's throat. They could force the Republic to end the war and accede to their terms, under threat of MAD.

Once the Clone Wars ended, the CIS was defeated / dissolved and the Republic was turned into the Empire, Palpatine repurposed the CIS' "Ultimate Weapon" as a weapon of terror, and had it built anyway.

To put it in real world terms, the difference between BDZ ops and the Death Star is kinda like the difference between the Tokyo or Dresden super-raids (both of which resulted in a firestorm and the deaths of between 50,000 - 100,000 people) and the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The death toll in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the death toll in Dresden and Tokyo, are actually in the same ballpark. All these cities were annhialated. But the sudden, one-bomb one-stroke nature of the nuke made it far more terrifying. The MAD doctrine of the Cold War wasn't built on the threat of thousand-bomber raids turning cities into fire-hurricanes with incendieries, it was built on the threat of nukes one-shotting cities. It's a more viscereally horrifying thing.

Scaling up from cities to entire planets, BDZ and the Death Star kinda slot in to those roles nicely. And thus the DS, as a tool of rule through absolute terror, fits perfectly into the ethos of men like Sheev Palpatine and Wilhuff Tarkin.

 

I agree with the idea that has been proposed here. I think in the season finale the Empire will have had enough of the Rebels and their annoying ways. I bet after even Tarkin fails to get rid of them (cause he is a villain like every other so he is bound to fail), the Grand Moff will order a BDZ bombing of the planet.
I bet the Empire will have had an evacuation of its assets like people and equipment from the Factories and Academy.
Then Tarkin, like a nod to his ANH appearance, will destroy the planet. This, on the other hand, will be the Alderaan for our beloved rebels.

The CIS could have totally won the war with their weapons if Palpatine did not have other plans and ordered his allies not to win basically. The CIS under Gunray, Tambor, Tikkes and co. had the finances and means to end the Republic but then we would not have the Original Trilogy.

 

It better get BDZ'd I was rewatching Droids in Distress earlier and realized when they went to the planet Garel and how much of a different show it already felt like. I really want to see that planet again it was so gorgeous!

 

Darth Valkyrus

I don't dispute that the CIS would have benefited immensely from having a Death Star. And your reasoning why they might want to possess such a weapon is sound. The Death Star does represent an advancement in capabilities over more traditional planetary bombardment. However, the analogy of the Death Star vs. the Nuclear bomb isn't exactly accurate, and the idea of BDZ still diminishes the overall shock of the first use of the Death Star.

Nuclear weapons were so useful because their extremely high power and low cost. While the development of the bomb and its delivery system may have been expensive, once perfected, they were rather cheap comparatively. Virtually any first-world nation of reasonable wealth could afford to have an arsenal that could obliterate its neighbors. France, for example, once possessed an arsenal somewhere above 500 warheads at one point, I believe. The MAD doctrine was successful, in part, because of the relative ease in the creation of the arsenal, and that arsenal's ability to be distributed in a manner that prevented one side from knocking out the others' ability to retaliate (i.e. the Nuclear Triad).

The Death Star, economically, represents the exact opposite of a nuclear weapon. It's hard to tell exactly how much in terms of resources the first Death Star used, but in terms of just conventional firepower, it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 250 star destroyers. In terms of raw material for the hull and structure, it was probably far more than that, as it would take a line of about 100 star destroyers, laid end to end, just to run the inside diameter once. Comparatively, in our world, all you needed to wipe out a city was a nuclear bomb and a single bomber or an ICBM. Additionally, once built, the Death Star must also be continually crewed and maintained. In terms of crew, you're probably talking a crew multiple times that of the SSD Executor, which had a crew somewhere around a quarter million. The DS 1 had a diameter over eight times the length of the SSD Executor.

The shock value of the atomic bomb vs. the firebombing raids and their respective impacts on forcing the Japanese to surrender is a hotly debated issue among academics. There are many who argue that the nuclear strikes had only limited shock value, and little effect on the Japanese decision to capitulate. They often cite Russia's entry into the war as the primary reason for the Japanese surrender. I don't necessarily subscribe to this but I'll return to this issue in a moment.

Returning to Star Wars more fully, I want to work off the premise that a "slagged world" with its population obliterated is just as emotionally terrifying an end result as a planet being Super-Lasered. They're both destroyed worlds. Let's face facts: everyone and every living thing is dead, and that's what is most significant overall. How you got there or how long it took really is just a secondary issue. From an emotional standpoint, I don't see the difference between taking 3 seconds to murder a planet vs. 3 hours to murder one. It's equally horrifying and heartbreaking.

Let me bring it back to the most important aspect: The story. Let's assume that Tarkin calls in the fleet, surrounds Lothal and pounds it with turbolasers for hours. Your average audience member for Rebels is going to see the Imperial Navy turn a habitable world and its population into a fireball, effectively destroying it via the use of a fleet of star destroyers. Then, if they watch ANH, they're going to see the DS 1 destroy a world by itself. And then some are going to ask: "They did almost the same thing years ago in Rebels." Your average audience isn't going to be a super nerd like you or I. They're not going to understand the Death Star's advantages vs. planetary shields or the proliferation of said shields in the Core Worlds. It's immaterial to the majority of them. All they're going to see, in both cases, is a useless world and dead population. The fact that one world is still spherical in shape and one is drifting rubble isn't that a big deal in the end.

One of the reasons why the nuclear strikes on Japan were so shocking as to convince the Japanese to surrender was the unique nature of the attacks. No one on earth, save for some guys out in the New Mexico desert, had never seen such a weapon before. Initially the fire raids on Japan were pretty horrifying as well, but eventually they turned routine--as callous as that sounds. If we are assuming that BDZ is, in fact, the razing of a world via the fleet, then by the time of ANH, the Imperial Navy has been running around the galaxy murdering worlds for the past 5 years before the Death Star destroys Alderaan. The galaxy shouldn't be shocked by the idea of destroyed worlds by that point. It should be routine. Likewise, if anyone was actually on left alive on Earth after 5 years of nuclear strikes, the shock value of a nuclear weapon would probably have worn off as well.

 

I don't think it'll get "slagged" as in the whole planet, I think it'll be more like some locations on planet will probably get "slagged".

 

Yep. Very slagged.

 

is slag a word?

 

Yes
Slag:
noun:stony waste matter separated from metals during the smelting or refining of ore.
verb: produce deposits of slag.

 

I definitely want Lothal to get BDZed. Just to get them freaking off. But I wouldn't like it as a Series Finale, that would be such a waste.