CT Even if they didn’t get the Death Star plans from Scarif, could R2 have gotten it on Death Star?

Ok during ANH when our heroes find themselves trapped in the Death Star, R2 interprets the entire imperial network. Even if revel operatives hadn’t stolen the plans from Scariff could R2 have uploaded those files from the Death Star computer?

 

One would think. But maybe interpret doesn't necessarily mean have full read/write access to.

However, R2 wouldn't have found himself on the Death Star at all if it wasn't for the fact he was carrying the plans.

 

How do the Rebels know Artoo is going to end up DS and hooked up to the Imperial computer?

 

It also depends if R2 was pulling just floor plans essentially, or full technical schematics.

 

R2 would have just had to find the file titled "how to blow up the Death Star."

 

* Galactic Empire Proprietary (Internal Use Only) - Not for use or disclosure outside the Galactic Empire

 

I feel like the plans on Scarif are more like architectural blueprints. A building doesn't necessarily contain the early plans for construction, those are often in some other warehouse along with other plans. So any schematics on the DS may only be partial at best, nonexistent at worse.

 

I thought R2 already had the Death Star plans on him, when they were on it. Didn't Leia plant them on R2 at the beginning of the film, along with a message to Obi-Wan?

 

The question being asked is, if R2 didn’t have the plans (remember, the events of Scarif happens just before the opening sequence of A New Hope.)

That said, the only reason he was even on the Death Star was because Leia was captured. She was captured before giving the plans to him. The only reason she even had the plans was due to the events on Scarif.

So I really doubt the events we see would’ve happened at all.

EDIT: Indeed, we’d have to figure out scenario that demands that R2 be on the station at all.

EDIT II: That said, the Empire isn’t STUPID-EVIL™. They’re not gonna put the complicated blueprint of the entire station on terminals that can be hacked by droids.

 

https://transcripts.fandom.com/wiki/Rogue_One:_A_Star_Wars_Story

If every statement is by a reliable narrator, and every statement has a grain of literal fact, then Tagge is referring to an original medium, that cannot by itself be beamed anywhere, but idiomatically represents the information itself. Vader says it was several transmissions' worth of data. Technical readout can mean a whole bunch of things. At least as far as Lucas Star Wars is concerned, the data contained on the disk was enough, by itself, without any hinting or prompts by any such character as Galen Erso, to discover a vulnerability. That means, as far as Lucas Star Wars is concerned, it had to be a lot of data, a lot of comprehensive data, with overlapping, dovetailing, interlocking dependencies and redundancies. Which is in keeping with parallels to Bletchley Park. They had to sift through a lot of data, no silver bullets, uphill, both ways. None of this mouse click cheater codes from an undetected sympathetic mastermind von Braun in Peenemunde. Ridiculous on every face of it.

Something like CAD files would be the closest analogue to what Lucas had represented as the Death Star 'plans', particularly the 3D 'plans' holos coming out of R2, but also the 2D schematics shown in the guard room. I googled for largest CAD files and got one anecdote of an aircraft that was represented in 10 GB. So a *lower limit of how much data was contained on that one little disk would be DeathStar_mass / largestEverAircraft_mass * 10 GB. Antonov An-225 Mriya is 285,000 kilograms. Death Star was mistaken for a small moon. Lot of data.