ST Space chase/ Crait plan discussion thread

The effect of the stars blurring when jumping to lightspeed is seen inside the cockpit of the ship that is going to lightspeed. It's not seen on Tatooine when Han jumps to lightspeed.

Where is Takodana in relation to Hosnian Prime? They are standing on a planet seeing shots at another planet light years away, in the atmosphere. They're seeing, what, the energy of a star somehow drained into an apparatus on a planet that then sends it at light speed at another planet?

I may be a liberal arts major, but that is impossible. It's beyond movie impossible because it takes you out of the movie. The Death Star shoots a laser beam. The Falcon jumps to light speed, which we've seen in movies for years. But the "science" of Starkiller Base is nonsensical.

 

I actually think the Vehicles visual guide mentions something on this. Something about having advanced shielding which is why it looks distinct from other shielding we've seen.

 

It would have been cool if the Raddus was so armoured and had such formidable weaponry the First Order essentially had to run it dead or risk their entire fleet of fighters.

 

At the very least it would have felt less convenient to me, to see Hux ordering all the fighters to come back.

 

Yeah it would have made more sense at least, and been more interesting.

 

This is your central argument and a standard I cannot disagree with. Speaking only for myself, the longevity of relevance of upcoming SW product depends on comprehending how other people can sit through it. I do not have to watch TFA again. I am in a better place, however, having on hand a Ptolemaic epicycle that explains how retrograde TFA does not break anything that is not broken already in SW77. You may find this change of reference unsuitable to get across a point, but move Finn from surface of Tokodana - same galaxy, same internal physics, per cosmological principle - to the inside of the cockpit of the MF when Han jumps to hyperspace in SW. Finn's eyes, whether they are on Tokodana 36 years hence, or in the MF, are receiving photons that ought not to have crossed spacetime at greater than lightspeed. Adhering to a principle of introducing the fewest new parameters to explain new phenomena, and seeing that hyperspace as an already plastic concept is the *only magical unobtanium in the room to work with, the necessary plug-in is that the SKB beam / technology / energy contains within itself the activating properties that a conventional starship hyperdrive possesses. A starship hyperdrive activates / instantiates / collapses / traverses (whatever) a phase that we can *only attribute to hyperspace. Locally. At least inside the cockpit, certainly.
It can be thought or extrapolated that the SKB beam energy contains within itself the property of a hyperdrive that activates / instantiates / collapses / traverses (whatever) a phase that we can *only attribute to hyperspace. Globally. Not confined locally to a single instance of a starship invoking hyperspace.

This does not address how Finn and company are perfectly ready to believe their eyes as if this thing happens all the time. But I have at least kicked back the problem of *where in the movie I am ejected. And my seven viewings in the theatre will last me my days.

 

It’s not as lazy as you make it out to be @godisawesome

Why don’t they end it sooner? Arrogance. They have them on a string. They aren’t in a hurry and see their defeat as inevitable. That’s not stupid. It’s actually pretty common in war when one side is heavily favored to win something that seems inevitable by staying course.

Why aren’t they focused on Crait? It’s barren and as you said it’s the vast emptiness of space and they’re en route for Sallust as much or more than Crait and Sallust is more populated. Something they should have addressed in film but didn’t.

They knew of the cloaking only because DJ knew what was going on and was himself a code breaker familiar with how people would seek to evade detection and helped them.

Holdo’s characterization is fine. She’s an even more strong-willed ANH Leia who never changed and kept living a cosmopolitan life. The same “either I’m going to kill her or I’m beginning to like her” infamous dynamic exists between Poe and her only they never really grow to like each other that same way and so they become adversaries.

Poe is popular though and Holdo likely knew it. She was hoping he’d cool off and hoping he wouldn’t go as far as he did. She needs to keep morale relatively high and thinks she’s doing so her way. Poe has a different idea of morale building and wants transparency she won’t provide. Then both go about their own need to know plans. Leia is likely the one who brings out the best in both Holdo and Poe. They both feel close to her and like they are carrying out what Leia would want in her absence and it’s her absence that leads to this situation.

There’s nothing particularly unrealistic about how those two butt heads or why she doesn’t tell him anything. She doesn’t have to. It’s aldo not unrealistic that she would hope she wouldn’t have to jail one of the most popular risers in leadership in their group.

There’s some truth to the earlier post. The situation is a pressure cooker where a lot of the drama is coming from mistakes due to that pressure. It’s not a situation where everyone is at their best and rising to the occasion and making all the right moves. It’s more tragic than that.

 

I think what happened was RJ realized that in SW, anytime you get in trouble, you can leap to hyperspace and get away...so as a way to change things up, and I say that in a positive sense, he would take that option off the table for the good guys, thus tightening the screws and writing them into a corner. It's a fine idea, IMO, and it's a bold one, too.

But the backflips and new conceits necessary to pull it off were exhausting to the plot. The lead ship tracker explanation takes like five minutes over two scenes. They are literally asked to repeat it for the audience again. They also had to introduce the fuel issue. And then the idea that the FO would only track the big ship and "wouldn't notice" the little ships escaping. Well the original idea was cool, but not if it gets you bogged down in all of this little minutia it's not worth it.

 

I like this break down.

Essentially, it means that two objects both moving into hyperpace at each other would miss each other.

That makes sense.

What remains is the fact that during the intial phase (star blurr) the objects would remain on a collision course able to exert enough energy to crack a planet to its core even if only one of them was speeding up.

So why has no one created weapons designed to hit sub-hyperspace moving targets before?

Planetary bombardment would be the most appropriate use of this technique. No shielding could withstand it (as we saw on the Supremacy and its fleet).

Holdo took out the Supremacy and a bunch of destroyers. So the Raddus delivered a fatal blow to a force 10-30 times larger than itself.

This puts paid to the notion that small ships couldn't similarly achieve massively disproportionate results also. Simply by autopiloting a few x-wings as missiles, or mounting shipping containers with hyperspace drives for that matter, would punch through pretty much anything.

 

Spoiler

I just want to speak up for old OT. To my eye this would be antithetical to the idea of gravity wells (SW77 Han) that can affect real matter that is presently inside hyperspace, and the EU notion of interdictors that can affect real matter that is presently inside hyperspace. To wit, a planet had an inferred gravity well in the OT. Up until Disney, there are not, that I recall, shots in OT or PT where a ship went to or came out of hyperspace while within Many planetary diameters of a planet surface. Since movies are canon, and early scripts are not canon, it cannot be called canon that Lucas in an early ROTJ script had Han suggesting to do what Abrams ultimately has Han do, exit hyperspace exactly at some altitude above some surface. So at least for genx formation of internal rule sets, or, how things work in Star Wars in genx minds, and therefore also how things are not supposed to work in Star Wars, planets had an effect on hyperspace that was real but not as sensational or fearsome as a large star. (Defining "genx" as a subclass of persons that have expectations for some degree of internal consistency in the representation of nuts and bolts.)

A clinical regard of the star field segment of travel is that it is not relativistic. There are two representations of a ship going to hyperspace - one from inside the cockpit, and one from outside the ship. For a suspended disbelief in a secondary reality to hold, the two ought to represent the same sequence of events and same phenomena. Therefore, if the star field segment is NOT relativistic, then from exterior view the ships that get smaller with perspective are NOT going to relativistic velocity. This in no way prevents them from getting smaller with non-relativistic velocity - they have conventional engine plumes and we know from TPM that the hyperdrive is a separate object from ship engines.

A technical regard, and an insistence upon maximizing suspended disbelief in a secondary reality, makes this wookiepedia line problematic: "An alternate dimension of space-time that could only be entered at faster-than-light speeds using a hyperdrive." Because technically it's not relativistic, and therefore it's not faster-than-light speeds. Artistically, it can have been that Lucas intended that the viewer think, ok, they have defied general relativity because this is a magical universe and then they also entered this other different looking magical transport system. That would be like its serial / flash gordon roots. If however, Lucas did not strongly assert what's happening, and allowed phenomena to be observed and modeled without authorial interference, ships going to hyperspace 1) go visually fast at sublight speeds, then 2) enter the star field segment of hyperspace, and then 3) enter the blue chiral segment of hyperspace. But never actually reach relativistic speeds, and never reach FTL speeds inside our spacetime.

Therefore, according to standards imbibed by genx, a planet in the OT would not be subject to as much kinetic energy as to crack a planet to its core because its gravity well would interdict or draw out of hyperspace some relevant mass. (I cannot define relevant, but I imagine that no one is going to be putting a hyperdrive on something any larger than a Death Star II.) There *could be conventional kinetic weapons that come in at some high velocity (for an analogue one can think of the long period comet at high velocity and high mass that hit the earth and caused the KT aka K-Pg event and the Chicxulub crater), and the planet's mass does provide the gravitational potential for an incoming mass to reach and exceed the planet's escape velocity at 11km/s. ( https://www.lpi.usra.edu/exploration/training/illustrations/craterMechanics/ )

So that covers time periods up until Disney. Disney has Han going to hyperspace from inside a ship, has a hyperspace weapon that generates FTL photons that can be seen in real space over practically infinite distance, has rebels communicating by radio while in hyperspace, has Han leaving hyperspace right above SKB, has Rey reaching Ach-To from Duqar in minutes, and has ships coming in and out right above Scariff. And now whatever else has been added to the pile by TLJ. As far as the idea of a guided weapon traveling through hyperspace and dropping out close enough or with enough energy to crack a planet to its core, Disney's new rules don't do much to prevent that. But prior to Disney, there was a lot standing in the way, conceptually, for that to happen. Under pre-Disney nuts and bolts, the going rate that I laid out above, with something like an upper limit of a long period comet causing devastation, still was of limited scope and did not upstage what the Death Star I achieved in terms of total energy release, which was to literally crack a planet to its core.

For my money, all of Disney's deviations in TFA were rushed, crass, unmindful and oblivious. Disney's deviations in RO, particularly ships coming in and out right above the surface, possessed an artistry that goes a long way towards persuasion because it sucks you into a state of secondary reality. The artistry around nuts and bolts in TLJ is slightly better than in TFA, but the magnitude of deviation from an above defined genx perspective ejects me from the scene (minus the artistry around the bombing sequence which was basically excellent). SOLO:ASWS actually reverses the damage done by TFA because it celebrates the hyperspace and near-planet space travel moments that SW77 made iconic and did not take for granted, whereas TFA 2nd and 3rd acts take everything for granted like a kid in a candy store. *Unless someone at the helm actually thought about the depictions of hyperspace entry in SW77, and *mindfully extrapolated an enhanced effect of that property *based upon that precedent. But I have my doubts that is what happened.......

So all I am doing here by speaking up for a genx perspective (as defined) is to say that a genx perspective is not dead and does not need to be dead. If there are methods to move mountains to explain radical phenomena in Disney product to the satisfaction of a genx perspective, then it's worth the effort. (Much effort is futile and then is fun, only, and then eventually not fun at all.)

 

@godisawesome , they always had one final jump left that could occur at any time to any one direction. Crait was meaningless to everyone, most Resistance members included. The FO would have had reason to assume a last ditch jump of some kind would occur at some point to somewhere and may have just as easily been wondering where that jump would go and why. They knew that they’d be able to track them once it happened so long as they stuck to what they were doing.

These ships are at distances though far beyond that of the naked eye. It’s not like they can see these little ships from the distances they are at. I’m not even sure that occulus in the throne room was anything but a display.

The FO are presented as overly reliant on their technological superiority and staffed by young people who haven’t seen a ton of action. Their capital ship was boarded by a code breaker. They’re presented as arrogant and you’re right that they’re also stupid.

But this is where things seem to become selective. The antagonists in Star Wars have often been presented as incompetent. The troopers can’t shoot. They don’t call for backup when they’re guarding the single most vulnerable important shield generator in the history of shield generators on the one place where the Empire decided not to enslave a Warrior-like race who live there for reasons that aren’t explained after their boss has purposefully leaked to the enemy where his big weakness is. Their scientists designed equipment from a type of metal so weak that it can be swished by logs. They control the galaxy and yet don’t have the intel or means to question construction teams capable of building these massive rebel bases or track the materials used to construct them. The FO are the younger, even more incompetent descendants of an Empire made of a lot of arrogant, incompetent idiots because the saga, even according to Lucas himself, was made mostly for kids with Saturday morning serials in mind. All of this “Wait... why didn’t the Empire do ______ instead” stuff has always been part of Star Wars and in the space chase sequence all of the exterior action takes the back seat to the human drama of the main people we are following in a situation that brings out the worst in some of them.

Holdo isn’t presented as someone who wants to be a hardline by the books Admiral. Her laid back attire and vulnerable speech to her crew suggests the opposite. So, her characterization is more like someone rebellious in her own right who has just met too many wannabe Han’s in her life and who wants this new one to know she’s aware he was demoted for not listening to Leia and that she isn’t looking for his services at present. Quite frankly, she has other things to worry about and consider beyond him but she also knows he’s close to Leia and well-liked by others so it’s logical she’d try to avoid anything too extreme if she felt she could de-escalate differently. He’s one of 400 and there’s logistics to work through and her own inner circle whom she trusts more to prep and plan with. She’s busy. The film also wisely gives us the line of dialogue from C3PO that indicates that Holdo still had the diplomatic wisdom to seek him out individually and privately and allows us, the audience, to imagine what her intentions there could have been. Poe, meanwhile, has already made matters worse for himself by that point and is well into his own need to know plan and it’s the kind that tends to save the day in serials. It’s the better and more fun plan that on first viewing seems like it will save the day opposite Holdo’s, which seems cowardly initially. When analyzing film people frequently have a tendency to trivialize the impact of a surprise or twist after it has been experienced. That’s like seeing how a magic trick was constructed after and saying that you’re less impressed than when you didn’t know what was going to happen initially. We do this in film analysis often because we tend to ask ourselves how a film holds up to repeat viewings. This is reasonable on the one hand and some truly excellent twists and surprises can in fact be even more fun to see come together afterward but on the other it’s a little like slowing down a combat choreography sequence and zooming in on one area and scrutinizing something that wasn’t seen that same way initially. Cinema is an experience in one’s own mind and most surprises are going to be best experienced on first viewing and these surprises did work for myself and many others on first viewing. Downplaying the magic trick payoffs that previously lead to some positive surprises on first viewings because once experienced the suspense of the Rose/Poe/DJ/Rose mission is reduced and the Poe vs Holdo conflict is reduced feels unfair to me. Those surprises worked for me on first viewing with sufficient suspense so I reward them for that. There’s a difference between saying that you probably won’t ever enjoy the 6th sense more than the first watch of it and ignoring entirely the surprise itself like it wasn’t a surprise the first go round. Some of the turning points of the space chase were a surprise to me on first watch so I’m going to give the film credit for that.

Regarding Hyperpace, we don’t yet have any information on the history of weaponization of it or not. We have evidence to believe Holdo didn’t even collide while in hyperspace but simply at a very high speed prior to it. Until the story group tells us more we can only assume it wasn’t hyperspace speed truly but was obviously much faster than any other collision between ships we’ve seen in Star Wars movies when ships have hit each other before. This changes things a lot because being at sub-hyperpace speed doesn’t break anything and changes the narrative more toward “We’ve seem ships hit each other but never at extremely high speeds so close to hyperspace before” and that difference is more than semantics due to what we previously knew of hyperspace. It’s a different state/existence/portal/reality. In other words, I’m not jumping to the conclusion that this has or hasn’t happened before and I want to know more about the specifics of what happened there before I react positively or negatively to it beyond the thrill I experienced when watching it.

 

You're getting some measurements mixed up. Space itself is about 100 KM (62 miles) away from Earth, not miles, but even so... Sputnik could only be seen under very precise settings (early in the morning or late at night when the sun was just right to illuminate it but not bright enough to fully illuminate the sky). The transports may be close to that 62 mile range though. You're likely close there because the Supremacy itself is 38 miles wide and in the visual they give in the film the distance between the Supremacy and the Raddus is more than the width of the Supremacy (with the Raddus constantly gaining more).

The Raddus was the main energy source being tracked and visually it would have emitted the most light. The cruisers are headed toward Crait from afar to the side in near darkness and without much energy signatures in comparison to the massive Raddus.


The cloaking was only overcome by someone familar with how to avoid First Order detection (D.J) sharing his methods and telling them precisely where to look. The plan to escape was always going to be a gamble for Holdo and her choice to face them seemed more like a last ditch effort than what she had planned all along. It's entirely possible her plan was to jump away elsewhere to draw them much further away. She always had that one jump left.

Which brings me to why it's not entirely surprising that the FO wouldn't assume their only plan left was to go to a barren mineral planet. Observe this map of planets on the way to Crait and consider that they had one hyperspace jump left. Where might this rat (Raddus) on a run ultimately jump to and why? The answer to that may have been more valuable than just smashing them entirely because a jump to another location could have revealed allies they weren't aware of. Some of those worlds were sympathetic to the Rebellion in the past and with considerable resources in the present. They all seemed more likely as final jump points than Crait if you're trailing from behind a ship on the run.


I'm still confused over what aspect of Holdo you have the most difficulty with. She's presented as someone who's not by the books out of the gate. She's close to Leia and acts in many ways like ANH Leia. She tried to make it work with Poe and tried to let him blow off some steam because she knew he had admirable qualities but he eventually crossed a line she didn't think he'd cross.

Again, it's less about crafting some incredible military strategy plot than it is about exploring character drama. The high speed ramming is cool and all but what really matters in that scene is the magic trick of the audience and Poe realizing someone they judged as some artsy-fartsy peace keeper was actually super brave and that the big bold plan of the past that almost always worked in serials failed and that if these two people had been able to work together better -- and IMO that's on both of them -- they might have been able to pull of something even better than what happened. So, it's also a look at how the stress of war can bring out negative qualities in people and how communication can break apart.

I agree that the military plot logistics are juvenile to the point where some may feel they've outgrown them but I don't think they're entirely out of step from previous Star Wars episodes at all. Whatever contrivances are there are consistent with Star Wars contrivances of the past. I won't list them all but if you take as critical an eye to this as other episode plot issues and contrivances I think you'll see that many episodes have featured juvenile plotting, and many last minute contrivances that turned the tide, allowed someone to get away, or helped the save the day. These qualities are as much a part of serials and Star Wars as anything else. Is this plot a new low perhaps in some of those same areas? Most notably in how the FO seems stupid and how the suspension of disbelief and explanations for why things are happening from the filmmaker to the audience are lacking? Perhaps. I'll grant that the crait chase may be one of the low points in those areas in the saga but in a saga with Syfo Dyas leaving gigantic clone armies with ships and gear ready to for antagonism, and countless last minute moments of sizable outsiders, tribes, armies, jedi armies, coming in last minute to help save the day, I'm less convinced it would even make a bottom 3 level of contrivances for the saga. Star Wars has A TON of contrivances. They don't feel like it as much when you're having fun though and unfortunately for a lot of fans... VIII wasn't much fun for them.

 

As there seems to be a lot of defensive positions either on behalf of Poe's decisions or Holdo's decisions during this space chase, I think one overreaching theme of TLJ is being missed. The entire movie is about failure. Everyone at some point or another is guilty of failing and failing hard. Absolutely nothing goes right for anyone, either because of or in spite of their intentions. Unlike in Empire Strikes back, not even the "bad guys" succeed in their plans. Or as Luke so eloquently puts it, "This is not going to go the way you think." The FO loses it's dreadnaught and the Resistance loses many lives; Luke's training of Kylo failed, Rey's mission to bring back Luke fails, Finn's plan to jump ship fails, The FO's attack on the Resistance fails (leading to the drawn out chase), the plan to find the Master codebreaker fails, Chewie's attempt to eat a porg fails, Rey's training fails, disabling the hyperspace tracker fails, Snoke's plan totally fails, Rey's turning Kylo fails, Kylo recruiting Rey fails, Holdo leading her crew fails, Poe's mutiny fails (in the end), Holdo's escape plan fails, the attempt to stop the battering ram fails, Kylo defeating Luke and smashing the resistance fails, Leia's distress calls fail. And most of these failures are based on mistakes that could have been avoided, but no one took the time to learn from what was going on. Everyone was busy doing their own thing and not working together. Individual egos were overriding any sense of cooperation or seeing the bigger picture.

So in terms of the space chase, I think we are really being shown what happens when the hero's (as well as the villains) stop listening to each other. It's not just Snoke or Hux suffering from hubris. Neither Poe nor Holdo is wiling to give the other the time of day. This of course, is all told in Luke's story. He mourns the hubris of the Jedi without realizing that he too is so full of himself that he has abandoned his friends and family.. Yoda spells it all out for the audience when you gives his little speech on failure.

Interestingly enough, the characters without egos are the only ones that don't fail in what they do. R2 and BB8. R2 is the one to convince Luke to come to his senses, and BB8 saves the day a couple of times.

Just a few thoughts...

 

"Where might this rat (Raddus) on a run ultimately jump to and why? The answer to that may have been more valuable than just smashing them entirely because a jump to another location could have revealed allies they weren't aware of. Some of those worlds were sympathetic to the Rebellion in the past and with considerable resources in the present."
Good application of precedent in SW77. "Are they away?"

 

This post just be sticky. Thank you so much.

 

For a long time I though the chase in TLJ made no sense because the ships shouldn't slow down just because their propulsion systems shut down. Now I'm wondering if they were actually just continuously accelerating, and the First Order couldn't keep pace. I guess that would explain how the First Order could overtake the Resistance ships that ran out of fuel.

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I think the battle on Crait is one of my least favorite sequences across all the Star Wars films.

 

I hate Geonosis in AOTC most. But I dislike the space chase considerably. I don't know if it is second after Geonosis but it may very well be.

 

+1,000 because I just can't like this enough. You gave me a great laugh today sir. Thank you.

 

So I have a question, and I sincerely hope the most creative TLJ defenders will answer this call.

If there was only one code-breaker who could penetrate the Supremacy's shields for a sabotage mission, then why didn't Poe just send Finn and Rose on a mission to get more fuel for the Raddus? Because the film Solo, states that the amount of hyperfuel on the Millennium Falcon is enough to power an entire fleet. Why couldn't they just grab that, and then jump to system from which they could conduct guerrilla warfare, or lose them in an asteroid belt, or something? Why were they running out of hyperfuel when collecting it is as easy as picking up a suitcase?

 

In the end it's Han's fault that he did not bring enough fuel from Kessel to Enfys decades ago.
It finally ends in the mess that Leia now runs out of fuel. What a loser