Full Series The Star Wars Rebels Stormtrooper Incompetence Thread

To me the most egregious is in Fighter Flight. There is a point during a fight between Ezra and the stormtroopers that one trooper has him at basically point blank range. Then the trooper notices that Ezra is only after Meiloorun fruits. Instead of blasting the kid who was attacking them he decides to ask him quite politely if this whole fight was over fruit instead of shooting at him. The trooper shooting and missing as Ezra ducks behind something I could stomach, but stopping mid battle to ask dumb questions is just so unprofessional. Stormtroopers are supposed to be the face of tyranny. The kind of soldier that shoots first and asks questions later, the kind that shoots for looking at them funny, and the kind that shoots innocents without hesitation. I understand that heroes have to live, but there is a proper way to go about it and frankly Rebels isn't pulling it off.

ANH pulled it off well. The battle in the DS was against difficult odds, but our heroes survived. However, what we got on screen is a desperate fight where it could be reasonable that one of our heroes could get hit. You could see the desperation and fear on the faces of Luke, Han, Leia, and Chewie. Certainly we never see any of the heroes having the audacity to mockingly wave or salute at the stormtroopers, which is something that happens quite often in Rebels. I know its a small gesture, but it has a profound impact in how the bad guys are perceived.

 

I think you'll all be generally pleased with the S2 opener then. The bucketheads are being written much more competent, emphasizing the threat the Empire poses.

 

I wonder if they'll have to explain how they suddenly become blind in ANH.

 

I keep reminding people of this, but on the Death Star they were supposed to not kill/stop the Rebels. Vaders plan was to let the Falcon go after a bit of a show...just enough to make it look good (and Leia saw through it anyway).

Earlier in the film the stormies are shown to be quite proficient against the crew of Tantive IV and the Jawa sandcrawler.

 

The problem is that they turned kind of incompetent again in Cloud City.

And I'm not going to even discus the "Ewok Incident".

I think the problem is not that they haven't displayed skill in the movies. It's that they're portrayed very inconsistently, usually for the benefit of the plot. I've mostly comes to terms with Stormtrooper incompetence. I think that it's just something that, as minions of the evil overlords, we're going to have to accept.

 

They let them escape so that they could be trapped on the Falcon with the turned off hyperdrive.

 

Vader's bucketheads tend to be more competent than the average troopers.

 

How were they written as more competent ???????????????

 

Ah well that makes sense.

 

you came to the wrong yub nub.

 

I'm not 100% sold on that idea. Why would they want them to escape Cloud City? They weren't planning on tracking them at that point. It seems easier to have captured them on Cloud City with ground troops, rather than try to intercept them in space. Disabling the Hyperdrive always seemed more like an insurance policy against their escape than the primary plan.

 

I have to ask, in each instance where capture was the goal why didn't they use the stun setting? It was only used ONCE in the entire OT to capture Leia on the Tantive IV, IIRC.

 

jabberwalkie

I think the last Stormtrooper that set his weapon on "stun" got shot in the face by a bun-haired princess. They learned their lesson after that.

 

I have a new theory about the inability of the storm troopers to hit the broadside of a star destroyer with their blasters. In the series, everyone who can hit anything has a custom weapon, or at least one that is no imperial issue. It could be that due to low quality materials and workmanship, the standard issue weapons are highly inaccurate. Loose parts, barrels heating as they are fired, creating a weapon the is not able to be fired accurately. As being's lives mean nothing to the empire, supplying troopers with the lowest cost bit of junk for their kit would not be a real issue as long an the right people are able to pocket the savings in cash.

Start with slave labor, or the next thing to it, add low grade materials, a touch of sabotage on the assembly line from time to time, some graft, and you would have weapons that would b close to useless.

 

That doesn't work because every time a good guy takes and uses a stormtrooper blaster, they usually have no problems hitting anything.

 

Just the other day I created a simple gun simulator using a program called "Scratch". So, I had gotten to the point when everything was working like I wanted it to, but decided to make the bullet have a degree of inaccuracy like real guns do. I program a little RNGing and test it. I fire the gun and the bullet shoots way under the target. I shoot again. It still misses awfully. Only 3 shots of ten would hit the target at a roughly scale distance of two meters. I thought this to be hilarious and renamed it to be the "Stormtrooper gun simulator".

In regards to the topic: the stormtroopers in this series are too incompetent. They have less combat prowess then a bunch of twelve year olds with nerf guns. And just about as harmful. Even Lando is flinching from near misses in the escape from cloud city. My biggest beef is that this show is now canon and has already contradicted the OT in enough ways for me to disregard it in my head-canon. I like the technical side of SW because its "sci-fi" and this> http://www.theforce.net/swtc/index.html is one of my favorite sites. And well, this side of SW isn't portrayed well in his show(I shouldn't expect too much though). An example of this would be the ISDs in the show. They look nothing like the ISD we see in ANH with the interior being even more grossly inaccurate. Aside from that, an easy way (and one that I think would make more sense) to save the stormtroopers from such ridiculous idiocy, would've been to replace STs with Imperial Army Troopers http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Imperial_Army_trooper . STs aren't the only branch in the imperial military. These guys wouldn't be as "elite" and are actually much more common place in TGFFA. That way when the STs show up we really know that the empire means business. I would love for there to be an Anthology film like the fan film IMPS: Relentless with competent STs just doing "the best darn job in the galaxy".

 

How much of the interior of an ISD do we see in the movies, anyway?

The show ones have differences from the ANH and TESB Imperial Star Destroyers - but not huge ones.

 

I consider the bridge to be the biggest difference

(images slightly distorted from resizing)

This makes it a different sub class entirely http://www.theforce.net/swtc/isd.html#features
It looks like a turkey sticking its neck out to get chopped off.
Other subtle differences reaffirm it to be a different sub class. The strange thing is the wiki doesn't seem to acknowledge this. http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Imperial_I-class_Star_Destroyer/Canon
Also, very conveniently for a lightsaber duel I might add, the reactor room has very thin catwalks and LOTS of room to fall and things with NO personnel milling about doing stuff.
And shouldn't the radiation have killed Kanan?

 

Don't real-life naval ships get all sorts of modifications without necessarily being designated as a sub-class?

Anyway, I think if there is a glaring visual inconsistency, it would have to be the TIE Fighters, which have these ridiculously stubby wing panels in the show.

 

For ships I think that's the case. Ships get periodic refits throughout their service life. For aircraft if there is a major update, usually it gets a letter designation.

 

Just look at the USS Enterprise when she was first commissioned in 1962, to her final appearance when retired in 2012.

There were a bunch of mods over the years, especially to her radar and communication equipment on top of the bridge tower... funny that.

 

I would consider those changes to be minor, and unimportant. I would never notice without someone pointing it out.

 

It wouldn't be the first time a reactor area was portrayed as mostly empty - I think the Venator's was, in TCW, in the Cloak of Darkness episode where Ventress sabotages it.

That's because there's no canon sources that say the ANH Star Destroyer is ISD-I : only EU sources say that. And there is a canon source (the Rebels Visual Guide) that says the Rebels ship is an ISD-I.

Conclusion - either the Devastator is not an ISD-I anymore, or it's a heavily modified one (that is, if the differences aren't just artistic licence). I notice that the Rebels ships have flank turrets more like the TESB star destroyers.

And that one did get a "variant" explanation in the Ultimate Star Wars book:

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Ultimate_Star_Wars

which explains it as "wings were reinforced so the TIEs could land on them".

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/TIE/LN_starfighter/Canon

 

Why is the reactor room always empty? You'd think the ship's crew would be acutely aware of what happens if the main reactor gets sabotaged and would have heightened security around it in the event of hostiles boarding the ship.