CT Whatever happened to the Tantive IV?

It was brought back to the Death Star so does that mean it was destroyed along with all the other rebels onboard when the station was destroyed or was it toed to an Imperial scrap yard and its crew imprisoned on some penal colony? It never states what happens to the unfortunate passengers. We know the high profile Senator was sent to a prison cell and tortured.

 

According to the film Vader ordered to sent a fake distress call and inform the senate that all aboard were killed (in a meteorite shower or something like this).

According to the extended screenplay and the original comics Vader ordered to "vaporize this ship, leave nothing".

Commander Praji informed Lord Vader that the Death Star plans were not aboard, but I still wonder how he could have possibly come to that conclusion (the floppy disc with the plans could have been anywhere on the ship). By destroying the Tantive IV Vader made certain that the plans, assuming they still might have been aboard, got definitely destroyed, too.

 

So Vader's ship the Devastator blew up the ship.

 

Vader didn't want to attract further attention after the "fireworks" display during the pursuit. I'm pretty confident they just unhooked the Tantive IV and let it burn up in Tatooine's atmosphere.

Later investigations and questioning of eye-witnesses would have then yielded that the Tantive IV got accidentally burned up during atmospheric entry. Any evidence of blast marks from the pursuit would have conveniently been eliminated, too.

 

This movie predates common use of floppy disks. The only people that would have known about those would be IBM employees, and those would have been 5&1/4". Also, the plans for the Death Star would have required stacks and stacks of these floppies, especially with all those groovy moving graphics.

And the dialogue refers to 'tapes'. They would have been looking for a large reel-to-reel magnetic tape, probably 8 inches in diameter.

 

Worker11811

Only Motti refers to "tapes" only once, otherwise they are referred to just as "plans".

VADER She must have hidden the plans in
the escape pod.

LEIA I have placed
information vital to the survival of
the Rebellion into the memory systems
of this R2 unit.

MOTTI Your
sad devotion to that ancient religion
has not helped you conjure up the
stolen data tapes, or given you
clairvoyance enough to find the
Rebel's hidden fort...

And the only tape reference looks erroneous, as no tapes were stolen (the data was received as a transmission). Possible that the Rogue One crew stole "tapes" but just transmitted the data.

 

I like this interpretation of what happened to the Tantive IV.

Seen at 1:42 in this video:


I like the image of the ship being discarded, burnt and empty.

 

Well, yes. And the only tech in 1977 that could hold that much data is magnetic tape stock. That's my point. (The data would have taken forever to transmit at, what, 4KB/second…) The Tantive would have recorded the incoming data to magnetic tape. The question I always had was: How did Leia get all that data into R2? In TFA Poe has a USB stick he drops into a pocket in BB-8, but in 1977… At the Rebel Base we see the IT staff hook R2 up to their computer to download R2 into their IBM mainframe. So did Leia - off camera - hook R2 up to the Tantive's on-board computer? We see Leia stick a card of some kind into R2, and later Luke dislodges something that causes the the fragment to play back, so maybe Lucas and his design team were thinking outside the box.

Also: I was watching the original Star Trek series a while ago, marveling at their data chips, and how they were about the size of Compact Flash cards. Because no one then would have believed in a card the size of an SDHC...

 

That upside-down sword thing is so insanely dumb. I can't suspend my disbelief enough to accept it. I'd never be able to play this game. I couldn't even finish the video.

But that shot of the burning Tantive is cool!

 

Are we really comparing fictional technology to real world tech?

 

*stuffs pile of robotic prosthetic limbs in closet*

Uhhhhhhh... no?

 

She put some kind of storage device into R2, it is shown on screen.

I do not think using the term tapes is a big deal, for all we know in 100 years some genius will figure out a way to store 1000x more data on tape than any other previous storage device. Even though the pencil was invented we still use pens. Technological advancement is not always a linear path.

 

Left stranded in space, maybe?

 

Yes, I did say that she put *something* into R2. I can't upload a photo, but the card is gray, about the size of a common card, and has no markings. The audience in 1977 would associate that with an ID card, not storage. But yes, it certainly could be a data card. I wonder if George ever mentioned Leia's card in an interview or special feature?

Look at what the Rebels had to use to transfer all that data, an inch-thick cable; but they did it in real time, as we see on their monitor…

Also, back then, you had to shutdown your computer entirely to attach *any* peripheral – even a composite video or RF video cable – so R2 was a modern miracle.

 

I imagine that the Star Destroyer either blew the Rebel ship up, let it burn up in Tatooine's atmosphere, or they toed it to an Imperial shipyard to destroy it.

I'm pretty sure that Vader had all the Rebels on the ship killed before he did anything with the ship. Gosh, this is a morbid discussion.

 

Here is a link of the screencap page with the data sheet Leia inserts into Artoo: http://starwarsscreencaps.com/star-wars-episode-iv-a-new-hope-1977/2/

SateleNovelist11 wrote

I'm pretty sure that Vader had all the Rebels on the ship killed before he did anything with the ship. Gosh, this is a morbid discussion.

LUKE What's in there?

YODA Only what you take with you.

Why are you that sure? We can clearly see Leia's defenders (Alderaan or Imperial Senate Guards) and droids being taken away, according to the novelization the captain of the Devastator "turned away, to listen with satisfaction to the reports of captured men and material coming from the ship".

Had Vader wanted to kill the crew he would have boxed them up in a room and then vaporized the ship.

 

Ah, I see. I guess I've seen the film so many times since 1994 that my mind ignores them being marched out.

 

I'd expect the Empire to interrogate the prisoners before they were executed. No point in throwing away potential sources of information before you've milked them dry.

 

May got stranded on a planet, were it was stranded underneath some desert. (Just a theory).

 

Sarge wrote

I'd expect the Empire to interrogate the prisoners before they were executed. No point in throwing away potential sources of information before you've milked them dry.

Why waste resources? As Threepio already said: "We'll be sent to the spice mines of Kessel" or "smashed into who knows what".

Compare the novelization quote "to listen with satisfaction to the reports of captured men and material coming from the ship" with the "first catch of the day" Star Destroyer captain remark in ESB and all the spaceship junk the Avenger tossed overboard before jumping into Hyperspace.

Again, the Imperial Starfleet rather reminds me of Nelson's Royal Navy, i.e. taking ships as prizes and crews prisoners for slave labor.