Star Wars Rebels Season Three (spoilers)

[Christopher]

I've been annoyed by the way space battles around planets are handled in both The Clone Wars and Rebels. This battle had the same problems I've seen in other episodes. For some reason, even though the Rebel fleet was trying to get away from the Imperial ships, it was presumed that they had to go directly toward them in order to get away. Why? They have all of 3-dimensional space to move around in, yet it's choreographed in a straight line, like they're competing teams on a football field with the planet on one goal line and hyperspace on the other. If the goal is to escape, why not just leave from the opposite side of the planet? Or head off in any other direction that isn't straight toward the enemy? Is there some rule of the Star Wars universe I've managed to overlook that says hyperspace can only be accessed from a single point in a star system? If so, why is it always so close to the planet over which the battle takes place? And if so, why go for it by heading in a straight line toward the Imperial blockade? Why not circle around the blockade and come at it from some other direction? Or, for that matter, why isn't the blockade surrounding the exit point spherically?

Then there's the fact that, even though they're in weightless space, a damaged ship always sinks "down" relative to the camera and smoke always rises "up" from its wreckage. I know this is just fantasy, that it's never made any pretense of realism, but it's a pretty ridiculous trope. Especially when the same sequence has elements assuming weightlessness, like when the Mandalorians and Ezra do their spacewalk.

 

[Marc]

Why? They have all of 3-dimensional space to move around in, yet it's choreographed in a straight line, like they're competing teams on a football field with the planet on one goal line and hyperspace on the other.

You're over looking once thing.

In Star Wars you can't just jump to hyperspace the way Star Trek ships can engage warp drive.

You need to make sure you're well and truly clear of any gravity sources (planets, moons, asteroids) so heading towards the outer to part of Atahlon's system would normally be a safe route.

Plus in Star Wars, ships don't seem to be able to change direction - they have to return to real space so heading out of system would have put them on the vector they wanted.

 

[kitik]

I do wonder if there's some rule where you can't enter hyperspace if you're heading due up or due down relative to the galactic plane. Or maybe a solar system's plane.

Some of that just has to be attributed to "the needs of the storytelling define the rules of flight".

That said, I do wonder far more how Ezra was able to escape while there was still an Interdictor present. If those things are so ridiculously short-range, then how in the world didn't more Rebel ships escape?

And if they're so incredibly short-range, then how are they anything other than useless?

 

[Christopher]

You're over looking once thing.

In Star Wars you can't just jump to hyperspace the way Star Trek ships can engage warp drive.

You need to make sure you're well and truly clear of any gravity sources (planets, moons, asteroids) so heading towards the outer to part of Atahlon's system would normally be a safe route.

No, I'm not overlooking that -- it's the exact point I'm making. They could go in literally any direction to get out of the system (well, except directly toward the star, say), so why do they feel they have to head directly for the Imperial ships? That's the worst possible direction they could choose, but it's the only one it occurs to them to try, even though every other option is available to them. It makes no sense to try to get away from someone by running directly toward them. The only way that could ever make sense is if it were the only direction you could go, like if you were trapped in a cave or a building and they were guarding the only exit. But that wasn't the case here.

Plus in Star Wars, ships don't seem to be able to change direction - they have to return to real space so heading out of system would have put them on the vector they wanted.

But they established at the end that they were taking several different jumps to get to Yavin so that they couldn't be tracked. So if that was their plan all along, they could've chosen any escape vector to start with. Also, how could the Empire have known in advance which escape vector they'd choose? The Empire jumped in first, and then the fleet tried to escape by heading straight toward the Imperial ships. It's not like Thrawn saw which way they were heading and moved his ships to intercept. The escapees headed straight for their attackers, which is incredibly nonsensical. And the exact same thing happened once or twice in TCW. That's why this stood out for me -- because it's not the first time in the past couple of months that I've wondered at the oddness of Star Wars characters in animation trying to get away from an enemy by heading straight toward them.

 

[Tuskin38]

They did the same thing in Empire Strikes Back, instead of flying around the planet, they flew straight at the imperial fleet.

 

[Christopher]

They did the same thing in Empire Strikes Back, instead of flying around the planet, they flew straight at the imperial fleet.

I guess that's the reason for it -- Star Wars productions do tend to cleave quite faithfully to the details and conventions of their predecessors. But it still doesn't make any real sense. It just comes off as a gratuitous choice on the filmmakers' part to force what should be a completely avoidable confrontation, and that pulls me out of the story. It's like when a character is desperately trying to outrun a falling tree or rolling boulder and you're yelling at the screen, "Dodge sideways, you dummy!" But even worse, because they're running toward it on purpose.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

The idea that space battles would be in any way realistic in Star Wars sailed in 1977.

 

[137th Gebirg]

Their pattern indicates...2-dimensional thinking.

 

[Christopher]

Their pattern indicates...2-dimensional thinking.

More like 1-dimensional, since the whole battle is basically in a straight line. 2D thinking is the way most sci-fi handles space, as if it were the equivalent of naval engagements and maneuvers (with an exception for fighter battles, which are at least treated as analogous to aerial dogfights). But this is even more constrained -- like I said, it reminds me of a football game, two opposing forces trying to attain goals at opposite ends of the field.

It's ironic, though, because there's a nice bit of 3-dimensional thinking in the original Star Wars that tends to get overlooked -- in fact, I don't think I really figured it out myself until I rewatched The Force Awakens a couple of months ago. Namely, the gravity in the Millennium Falcon's weapon turrets is at a right angle to the gravity in the rest of the ship. We see Luke (and later Finn) climb up or down a vertical shaft to the turret, but once they're in the turret, the shaft is horizontal behind them. And I realized in TFA that when the Falcon was flying level, Finn was looking straight down at the ground. I don't think I ever really parsed that before. It's rare to see screen sci-fi take advantage of the potential of a spaceship to have more than one artificial gravity vector at the same time.

But modern Star Wars seems to treat spaceships as if they were subject to an external downward pull rather than generating their own gravity in weightless space. Like how the Separatist command ship in ROTS had its whole interior tip sideways when it tilted nose-down, or like the thing I mentioned before about damaged ships "sinking" in the animated shows.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

They did the same thing in Empire Strikes Back, instead of flying around the planet, they flew straight at the imperial fleet.

This is the ORIGIN of this trope in Star Wars, but the writers have long since forgotten WHY this was a thing.

In Empire Strikes Back, the Empire had actually surrounded the entire planet and were blockading it (same thing that happened in Phantom Menace) so any direction you might fly had an imperial ship sitting there, ready to cut them off. The ion cannon was supposed to punch a hole in the blockade so that the rebel ships could slip through there and get away easily, and that assumes that there's only ONE OR TWO imperial ships in any part of the sky.

The writers in Clone Wars basically forgot about this little detail, so we have things like the Battle of Christophisis where the entire separatist blockade basically consists of five or six ships that the Republic fleet is inexplicably unable to avoid. I like to retcon this by saying that the blockade is actually planet-wide and that Anakin's task force was just the tip of the spear for much larger force that would hit it from all sides once the command ship and its support vessels -- the center of it all -- were dealt with.

I figure you can probably do a similar thing here: the blockade wound up encircling all of Lothal, and the rebels knew this (even if they didn't mention it) so it was actually preferable to take the shortest possible path to freedom rather than try to cut through the blockade on an angle.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

More like 1-dimensional, since the whole battle is basically in a straight line.

So think of it this way: Thrawn deliberately cut off all other escape routes in order to ensure that the rebel fleet would head straight for his ship. Nobody mentioned this because everybody could plainly see it on their scanners. So they took the path of least resistance, it just happened to have a hell of a lot of resistance anyway.

 

[publiusr]

It could be that you have to go towards a certain direction in order to use hyperspace.

Here is a thought experiment. You put your fleet over the base. Try to go in any direction away from the base--and you get fired on from above--you are having to travel along a cone of fire, and you will get hit. Along the path of a weapon--you can jinx a bit.

It is nightfall.

It may be that, to enter hyperspace--you need to be in a line from nearest star to nearest star. There has to be a star's mass on one side of you--and on the other. This takes calculations--and limits your approach vectors.

That's all I can gin up at the moment.

 

[Christopher]

It may be that, to enter hyperspace--you need to be in a line from nearest star to nearest star. There has to be a star's mass on one side of you--and on the other. This takes calculations--and limits your approach vectors.

Yeah, but what about parallel lines? A star is quite gigantic compared to a starship. The Sun, for example, is nearly a million and a half kilometers across. The entire Imperial blockade here was only a few kilometers wide at most. The Rebel ships could've gone out way, way off to the side and still been on the "straight-line" path between stars.

Of course, Star Wars space battles have never been remotely realistic; they've always just been dressed-up versions of classic naval or aerial engagements. Planets are the equivalent of ports, orbital space is a harbor, and the ships are naval vessels trying to get out to sea. That's why they "sink" when they're hit. And part of that Earthly quality is that they happen on an Earthly scale. On Earth, the horizon is never more than a few kilometers away, so our instinct is to expect everything to take place within a similarly constrained area. So SW battles (and most other screen sci-fi space battles) tend to be quite cramped, instead of taking advantage of the immensity of space.

 

[DimesDan]

One would almost think that this wasn't made to entertain young children. It looked good on screen, to hell with the dynamics of "proper" space combat, what ever that actually is.

 

[FPAlpha]

Nice action filled finale

One thing that struck me as odd and maybe i missed something in an earlier episode.. Hera calls Kanan "my love" at one point in the show. Did i miss them becoming a couple or was it a more close friends type of "love", kind of a saying without romantic notion. I had to rewind the scene and repeat because it stuck out the first time i heard it and wanted to make sure i didn't misshear.

 

[tharpdevenport]

Could it be that the planet's upper layers of atmosphere was where the battle took place (the Earth's extends out far) and that the it could account for a ship starting to sink downward after being damaged? There was something like that in the fil "Serenity", where the movie (like the series, "Firefly") adhered to mroe realistic depictions of outerspace: no sound in space, no ships on fire (for example: in the film we brefily here a weapon on the Serenity fire, because we are hearing insdie Mal's space suit, or we start to hear sound and see fire once the Serenity starts entering the atmosphere of a planet).


As for the battle, it also annoyed me for similar reasons stated in posts above mine.

Let'e say they could only go a certain planned route (which seems to be negated by choosing two or three stop/start points to loose the Emprie), I still don't get why it has to be through Thrawn's fleet. We know a ship can come out of hyperspace at nearly an instant, so why not -- for example:

1. Make a quick trip in hyperspace left or right, come out, re-position, make another jump at an angle passed Thrawn's fleet, stop again and re-position again and now head straight on your original trajectory -- a triangle around the attackers. Yes, they could be followed each short jump, but it's better than makign a full-on frontal assault of multiple giant Empire ships.

2. Same thing, only this time going behind the planet and making a more obtuse triangle.

3. Once back down on the planet, why not fly the ships around the planet and out to make the jumps?


Further more, where were all the giant spiders during that ground assault?

 

[The Wormhole]

Their pattern indicates...2-dimensional thinking.

Wasn't there something way back when in the EU that established it's considered proper battle etiquette to fight space battles two-dimensionally on the same plane? Hell, I remember the opening battle of Heir to the Empire the first thing Thrawn orders is for his fleet to go on a flat plane with the Republic fleet they're going to engage.

That being said, I will agree that General Grievous's flagship "sinking" when it's taken out in ROTS looks silly.

 

[Christopher]

One thing that struck me as odd and maybe i missed something in an earlier episode.. Hera calls Kanan "my love" at one point in the show. Did i miss them becoming a couple or was it a more close friends type of "love", kind of a saying without romantic notion. I had to rewind the scene and repeat because it stuck out the first time i heard it and wanted to make sure i didn't misshear.

They've been a couple since well before the series began. They just tend to be private about it.

Could it be that the planet's upper layers of atmosphere was where the battle took place (the Earth's extends out far) and that the it could account for a ship starting to sink downward after being damaged?

Well, for one thing, atmosphere and gravity have nothing to do with each other. A planet's gravitational field extends infinitely into space, just decreasing as the inverse square of the distance, and if you're hovering at any altitude over a planet -- rather than orbiting it -- then you'll fall down toward it. Whether there's a significant amount of atmosphere around you has no bearing on the matter. At those altitudes, it'd be so diffuse as to be barely distinguishable from the interplanetary medium anyway.

But the more important factor here is that, as depicted in the episode, the planet was behind the rebel fleet, not below it. This is a perennial problem with sci-fi depictions of orbit -- they always treat the ships as beside the planet rather than above it. So the direction of "down" shown here was actually perpendicular to the planet's gravitational pull. It was "down" relative to the camera's orientation, nothing more.

This is what I was saying about a "football field" arrangement. These shows tend to treat this sort of action as a flat arena with the planet on one end and the hyperspace ingress/egress point on the other end.

Further more, where were all the giant spiders during that ground assault?

I'd guess Thrawn's orbital bombardment scared off the ones it didn't kill.

 

[Shawnster]

Am I the only one that doesn't think the Bendu "died" and is now one with the Force? He wasn't visible the first time Kanaan encountered him, right? He had to become visible. Or am I misremembering? I had the impression that Thrawn was not going to be able to kill him and the Bendu just disappeared.

 

[Christopher]

Am I the only one that doesn't think the Bendu "died" and is now one with the Force? He wasn't visible the first time Kanaan encountered him, right? He had to become visible. Or am I misremembering? I had the impression that Thrawn was not going to be able to kill him and the Bendu just disappeared.

Yeah, that was my impression -- that Bendu just went away. If he could turn into a storm, he could probably vanish in some other way.