Headscratchers / The Last Jedi Technology

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Technology

Ballistic arc

• Why did the long-range artillery have a ballistic arc? Ballistics are caused by the pull of gravity - they were not in orbit around a planet at the time. More importantly, why did their cannons lose power at range? Again, they're in space - there's no air friction or atmosphere to defract energy. I can understand needing fuel to stay out of range - as it wasn't so much a question of absolute speed as relative speed, with the rebel fleet simply accelerating as long as they can - but why was there a range maximum to begin with in space?
  • Two things. First, Attenuation of laser beams is a real thing. While it would be significantly less in space than inside an atmosphere, it would be there. Space is not (despite popular belief) a vacuum. It is filed with interstellar dust. Said dust is a lot less concentrated (on the level of a few thousand atoms per KM) than, well anywhere on a planet, but at ranges, it would cause some attenuation. Secondly and more importantly, at such long ranges "beam divergence" (http sls://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beam_divergence)starts becoming an issue. Basically, the further it travels the Electro-Magnetic "beam" becomes more and more wide and therefore delivers less energy. So in other words, the Resistance ships were at a range where losses from attenuation and beam divergence would be enough that the First Order could not have high confidence as to their destruction.
  • In addition, there is also the question of targeting. Space is really big and seeing a target and getting Ordnance onto their position are two different things. On Earth, search radars can only approximate the position of a target, to get a missile to it require more powerful Fire Control radars. So, it's likely that the First Order Sensors could not get a Fire Solution onto the Resistance Cruisers.
  • As for the Arc, the beams don't seem to be made of light, but a kind of plasma. It's possible that the shots are electromagnetically charged and are drawn to the ion charge of the shields or the metal of the ship like a lightning bolt. Also, there is some gravity acting on the ships. The ships have a gravity field produced inside of them so people can walk around on them. Shooting high may make the shots more likely to hit depending on how wide the area of effect is for the artificial gravity device.
  • And, for the arc, sometimes you just have to close your eyes and go, 'It's Star Wars physics, it doesn't always make sense'. After all, when the frigates run out of fuel and the First Order fleet starts to catch up with them, why are the frigates tumbling? If real physics were involved then they wouldn't, but it's Star Wars physics so apparently it happens.
    • Problem with all of these explanations: Out of nine theatrical films, multiple video games, numerous comics and book adaptations, and several animated series, we have never before seen laser blasts behave like this. The closest we had was the interactions of laser blasts with dovin basals during New Jedi Order.
    • Yes we have. In the 2005 Battlefront 2 game, bombs from bombers would accelerate downwards despite no presence of a planet. This was to allow the ship to fly parallel to its target, and it showed that plasma weaponry can be fired in a curved path in the star wars universe.
    • Gameplay and Story Segregation.
    • Perhaps, but it does nevertheless act as a counterexample to "we have never before seen laser blasts behave like this". Apparently we have, so they can.
    • Those are bombs. Not energy weapons. I know they're rendered as glowing orbs, but that's due to the simple graphics engine of the time. Bombs can be guided. Blaster shots cannot. We have literally never seen blaster shots guided before.
    • "Why are the frigates tumbling?" Tractor beams, perhaps? If the Resistance Fleet is going in pretty much a straight line, they'd just need to get momentum going and then they'd be able to turn off the engines to save fuel, unless they were being acted upon by an opposite force. We know Star Wars ships have tractor beam capabilities, right from ANH. Perhaps they are at an adequate distance from the Supremacy and her supporting fleet to not be in full tractor beam range, but close enough to be somewhat affected. When they run out of fuel, the tractor beam sucks the frigate in, as it is no longer offering resistance.

Crait has a planetary shield (except it doesn't)

• We learn that the Resistance base on Crait has Planetary shield that would protect the base from an Orbital Bombardment. There two problems with this 1) Planetary Shields are supposed to be capable to keep any non-ground vehicle from getting in or out with being severely damaged.(Recall how in The Empire Strikes Back the Rebels had to lower shield in order for their transports to try to make run through the blockade.) As mentioned under Hollywood Tactics this why the Empire didn't try to use TIE Fighter on Hoth because they couldn't get past the shield. Here however, the TIE Fighter have no problem flying around not even a mile out from the Resistance base. 2) If the Resistance did have a Planetary Shield generator, why doesn't the First Order try to destroy that shield generator and then do an orbital bombardment instead using their towed artillery piece? The film makes no effort to answer either of these questions almost as if there was shield in the script and the director adds a scene to explain it but the continues to act like the shield doesn't exist. But that can't be the case The writer and the directer ARE. THE. SAME. PERSON. I am surprised nobody brings it up as it seems so obvious.
  • Could be a different kind of planetary shield that allows landing, but not orbital bombardment (probably through something like the energy signature or speed). As for why they wouldn't destroy the generator and then bombard the planet: well, that's way more work. You're already there on the ground, so just kick their asses while you're down there.
  • That "base" (if you can even call it that) showed all the signs of decay that you would expect in a facility that had been vacant for more than 30 years on a planet covered in salt! While Leia knew it was there, it was obvious that nobody from the Rebel Alliance, the New Republic or the Resistance had bothered to do any upkeep on it over the decades. It is likely that the shield generator was in as bad of a condition as everything else on Crait. So it may not have been able to maintain complete coverage down to ground level.

Tracking being new

• How does tracking someone through hyperspace go from "Impossible!" in one scene to Rose saying "The technology is pretty new" in the next? Is it impossible or are strides being made towards that technology? And that makes it another case of "the First Order is too well equipped considering its means". How did they get this still-developmental tech?
  • It's likely something the Republic was rocking too, especially since Rose knows about it. The thing is, almost everyone in the Rebellion is retired or a civilian, not the kind of people you expect to know much about the bleeding edge of military technology.
  • Fun fact: this was foreshadowed in Rogue One. When Jyn was reading off the list of projects in the Scarif data library, one of the projects she mentions is "hyperspace tracking". The development of the technology might have been slowed down by the loss of the Scarif archive, but it is probable that such a valuable technology was the subject of R&D in subsequent decades.
  • Remember, Rose is an engineer. It's easily possible for her to be more aware of recent technological advancements. As for why she didn't tell Resistance command, she may have just assumed the technology was purely theoretical, much like FTL travel is in Real Life.
  • Well then why didn't she tell Resistance command once it became clear that they were being tracked?
  • They knew they were being tracked; that's why they didn't try to jump until the very end as part of the distraction. Rose's revelation was that the tracking could be turned off, which would give a short window of freedom to escape. And she didn't tell anyone except Poe because it would have been shot down as a fool's errand... correctly, as it turned out.
    • "theoretical, much like FTL travel..." — the words "theoretical" and "impossible" (or even, presently believed to be impossible) do not mean the same thing... (the key root of theoretical is _theory_, as in, there is a theory - in the scientific sense of the word - behind it?...)
  • Made worse in that this is a Series Continuity Error. In The Force Awakens, ships are tracked through hyperspace repeatedly.
    • Han and Chewie are able to pinpoint the Millennium Falcon the moment that Rey flew it off of Jakku.
    • Likewise, despite the fact that Han and Chewie diverted from their planned course to go and recover the Falcon, they themselves are promptly tracked down by the Guavian Death Gang and Kanjiklub.
    • The First Order discovers the location of the Resistance base on D'Qar by tracking Snap Wexley's X-wing after he does a surveillance flyby of Starkiller Base. That was how they suddenly knew to target the planet.
    • Heck, even in Rogue One, we learn that Vader caught up to Leia in A New Hope after she had jumped to light speed as well, probably immediately after.
    • Also, in Attack of the Clones we see Obi-Wan throw a very small tracking device onto Jango Fett's ship by hand. This proves to be good enough to track the ship from Kamino to Geonosis. The common argument that Holdo was being secretive because there were concerns about First Order spies aboard the Raddus falls apart completely because any spy would not even need to know what the plan was. They would just need a portable homing beacon stashed somewhere on the four-mile-long ship. Not unlike the one Leia was wearing on her wrist so that Rey would be able to find them...
    • That a small tracking device exists — in the hands of a Jedi, 50-ish years before — does not mean that is the only way anyone has available to get information, nor that it's the only one someone would ever use. The point is, if you don't know for certain, you don't assume that it has to be one of a million ways someone could be tracking you. Recall that, in the battle, substantial parts of that four-mile-long ship were blown up. Even if they had a small tracking device attached, for all we know it was on one of the bits that Kylo Ren shot.
    • For additional support, in the once canon Star Wars: Clone Wars Anakin's droid R4 is able to lock onto the hyperspace coordinates that Ventress is taking to reach Yavin IV. Presumably, this can be done by either a single astromech droid or simply by a ship's navigational systems. This isn't shown to be difficult as the clones on the planetside of Muunlinst are able to quickly acquire Anakin's coordinates and follow him without much difficulty, even as Anakin did this within a matter of seconds at most while high in orbit! This supports the logic that following ships through hyperspace isn't a new idea and something that could be done well before the First Order appeared. There's also no way that this technology could be lost as Jedi technology as TIE fighters and other Imperial craft took elements from Jedi starfighters like the solar wings and twin ion engines and advanced them. Hyperspace tracking systems would no doubt be part of that technology.
    • The point, going back to the original Headscratcher, is that tracking is not new and there was no reason why Leia of all people would assume that jumping to lightspeed guaranteed escape. In Rogue One, Leia's Tantive IV successfully makes a Hyperspeed Escape from Scarif. But this just leads into Vader chasing the ship down over Tatooine in his Devastator at the beginning of A New Hope. Later in that same film, Leia correctly surmises that the Millennium Falcon is being tracked from the Death Star to Yavin IV. That various means of tracking ships through hyperspace go back at least as far as before the Clone Wars and have appeared in multiple films that chronologically predate The Last Jedi is what causes the Headscratcher. Especially given Leia's canonical personal experiences with it.
  • Just need to point out, "hyperspace tracking" may indeed be new. There are other canonical methods of tracking, in both the movies and canon books, that are discussed. These mainly have included 1) tracking devices (examples include used by Obi-Wan to track Jango's ship and by the Empire to track the Falcon to Yavin and 2) vector tracking, where they track hyperspace routes used by ships. In the Star Wars universe there are only so many hyperspace lanes a ship can use without colliding with a planet or a star. Before entering hyperspace, the crew has to plot which way to go and follow that path. Enemy ships can then estimate the route taken to track the path of the vessel. This is different than hyperspace tracking because the enemy tracks the ships calculated route, not the actual ship while traveling at lightspeed. As far as Han and Chewie finding the Falcon in The Force Awakens, that was most likely less hyperspace tracking and more likely waiting for the Falcon to give off a signal. If the ship had not been used in years and suddenly a blip appeared of it in use, they could at least follow it based on that signal. It would make sense they've also been searching for it and came across it after the Jakku escape because they were tracking the ship's signal after it emerged from lightspeed. So hyperspace tracking is a new technology, but tracking a ship has been done before.

Lightspeed attack working

• Why did going to lightspeed even work in the first place? In Rogue One, during the climatic battle several of the republic survivors jump to lightspeed, and accidentally hit a Star destroyer just as it jumps into the system, which doesn't appear to do so much as scratch it. This seemed to imply that space vessels have some kind of protection against these lightspeed rams, which seems like a very important thing given the amount of damage something like that can do. Why was that completely absent in this movie?
  • It's a Cruiser hitting a Super-Dreadnought, intentionally. Nothing that big has ever been shown hitting anything that enormous before, and it's worth noting that the Cruiser still came off worse.
  • Holdo may have also intentionally overclocked the hyperspace drive in some way, effectively maximizing the impact, while deactivating whatever safeties would normally try to limit the full force of a collision. The ships that collide with the Star Destroyer in Rogue One weren't doing so deliberately.
  • Also, if you look at Rogue One, every ship except one (the medium transport on the right of the frame) already made the jump before the Star Destroyer jumped in. The ships that were crushed hadn't started the pseudomotion. However, that raises further questions about how much mass actually constitutes a danger in hyperspace.

Admiral Holdo and the hyperdrive

• Holdo commits a Heroic Sacrifice by having her crew evacuate the ship and then she activates the ship's hyperdrive system and crash's the ship into Snoke's flagship. This doesn't make any sense because hyperdrive works by having a ship go into another dimension and then the ship exits that dimension and arrives at its destination at the other end, like a wormhole. The only way her sacrifice would work would be if the hyperdrive system was just a regular FTL drive that flies through regular space.
  • Maybe she opened a hyperspace window exactly at the position of the other ships using energy required to jump in a more destructive way. This also explains why she had to stay instead of just programming a valid course, as some level of precision and adjustments were needed.
  • As stated by Han in A New Hope, real-space objects such as planets and stars still project a presence in hyperspace (when he explains that jumping into hyperspace blindly is likely to leave you splattered against a planet or a sun). That's how Interdictor cruisers work: by generating a strong enough gravity that they simulate the presence of a planet in hyperspace, causing hyperdrives in both real-space and hyperspace to shut down as a safety. Presumably, Snoke's ship is big enough to also project a presence in hyperspace.
  • It's clearly not a straightforward ram either; rather than crashing through Snoke's ship, she pretty much cleanly cuts it in half with a very impressive and unusual looking light show.
  • The idea that the maneuver only worked due to the sheer size of Snoke's ship also could also explain how nobody on the other side was expecting it, i.e. going into hyperspace to suicide run into another ship would not normally work.
  • The fact that Holdo hit the ship several kilometers away from the center, where she was presumably aiming, tends to suggest that lightspeed ramming would probably have missed any ship that wasn't impossibly huge. One could argue that it would be more accurate at closer range, but that means getting the ship that much closer to the target's weapons systems.
  • Based on how it works, it seems more like the physical mass is shunted into another dimension to effectively turn it into energy in realspace, allowing the speedy travel but keeping just enough of the ship here to do some damage. On that logic, Holdo basically turned the ship into a blaster bolt with energy equivalent to the mass of a 3km starship.
  • There is the question of why she waited so long as the Rebels were down from almost thirty ships to only a handful as acting quicker would have saved lives.
  • It might not have been the first plan to have occurred to her. The film spends a decent amount of time examining the contrast between people fighting to stop an enemy (Poe, Finn), and people fighting to save something (Rose, Holdo). Given that Holdo is looking to save people the first few plans she might have tried out in her head could have involved placing her ship broadside between the First Order fleet and the fleeing transports so that the ship and its shields would take the turbolaser blasts from the fleet, only for her to discard those plans when she does the calculations and realises that that her ship lacks both the fuel and the shield power to have lasted long enough to provide any meaningful protection.
  • When a ship powers up its hyperdrive and makes the jump to lightspeed, they still exist in the normal realm of space for a brief period as they're "running up" to get into hyperspace. This is shown across the movies by a brief shot of the hyperspacing vessel elongating and then snapping away into hyperspace. So for that brief moment, that brief distance, a ship that's making the jump to lightspeed is the singular most dangerous thing in the entire Star Wars setting, because its full mass is being accelerated to the speed of light. Which is why you always see ships angling away from anything that could impede the jump to lightspeed. There was literally no hope for Snoke's flagship to evade or survive that hit. The fact that it held together as long as it did afterwards is suitably impressive.
  • The damage that can be done by a ship going into hyperspace was recently shown in Star Wars Rebels S04E07 "Kindred" where a ship jumping to hyperspace jumps through a hangar open on both ends. When it does, it destroys everything in the hangar, and pulls it out in the wake of the ship as well. So the idea that a ship jumping into hyperspace is dangerous during the jump definitely has merit.

Chekov's Hyperspace Missiles

• All right, so Admiral Holdo's Heroic Sacrifice works beautifully. I presume that the reason it works is that her ship was just under the light-speed threshold when it struck Snoke's: had it actually gone into hyperspace, it would likely have just "skipped" past the target the same way Han Solo "skipped" past the Starkiller Base's shields back in The Force Awakens. An object striking another object at any significant fraction of the speed of light being sufficient to do massive damage on the order of a nuclear blast, except (probably) without leaving any pesky radioactive fallout in its wake, I can see how that would work.
  
  My problem with this, as with Han's maneuver in The Force Awakens: now that we've established an object jumping into hyperspace can do these things, isn't it about time somebody started strapping hyperdrives to missiles and firing them through hyperspace? The first movie of this trilogy established that such missiles can bypass energy shields. Now this second movie has established that they can do massive damage if you crash them into things right before they hit the light-speed threshold. Han Solo and company were hoping to return from their mission alive, and Admiral Holdo obviously wasn't able to come up with a way to set her ship on autopilot and get off of it in time to survive her maneuver, but drones and any other kind of large objects that don't need to survive such maneuvers are an innovation so obvious that I don't see why they shouldn't become the new "nukes" of the Star Wars universe.
  • The question can be answered quite simply; hyperdrives are way too expensive to be strapping onto one-time use missiles, particularly for the cash-strapped Resistance and the not-quite-as-cash-strapped First Order. That would be the equivalent of using a Saturn V to propel a tank shell; it may make for a more impressive and destructive payload, but it just isn't fiscally responsible or sustainable. In addition, the type of targeting that hyperdrives typically employ is meant to calculate trajectories at distances of light-years, not the relatively short hundred or so kilometers of your standard space battle. As was discussed in Mass Effect 2, Sir Issac Newton is the deadliest son of a bitch in space, and if your targeting is off by even the smallest amount you could wind up throwing a hyperdrive missile right into an unsuspecting planet and causing an apocalyptic amount of unintended collateral destruction.
  • Yes, I can see that it's much more cost effective to just have your ships and personnel shot to pieces without them doing any damage to the enemy. You know, to avoid causing collateral damage to empty space.
  • As I replied when someone brought up this "prohibitive cost" counterpoint for The Force Awakens, hyperdrives can't be that expensive if even the underfunded rag-tag Rebellion and Resistance could afford to buy old ships for their fleet (and Han Solo with his money troubles could still afford to soup up the old Millennium Falcon with a fancy new hyperdrive to make it the "fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy" by Lando Calrissian's estimation), and if the Empire and First Order had the money and resources to build planet-killing super-weapons, no way could they not afford to throw an old decommissioned capital ship at just under the light-speed threshold at their enemies. As for targeting, it doesn't seem to me it has to be all that precise; you just have to make sure the object is close enough that the missile will hit it before it crosses the light-speed threshold so it doesn't "skip" past it (or get crushed by the target's mass shadow) in hyperspace.
  • I seriously doubt the Millennium Falcon's hyperdrive was "fancy and new", since they spent virtually the entirety of Empire Strikes Back just trying to make it work once. As for the newer movies, remember that this drive was also apparently sufficiently cobbled together (or undersized, or overpowered) that a compressor "put too much stress" on it. Look at it like racing cars; some people spend over $100K for a good racing engine, and others pick up a V8 off eBay for $600 and try to hook it into a little economy hatchback.
  • I mean "fancy and new" for its time; the Millennium Falcon itself was already very obsolete by the original trilogy era, but the engine must have been significantly upgraded for it to be such a fast and maneuverable ship. Again, Han Solo had money troubles, so he must have been able to get the souped-up hyperdrive relatively inexpensively, something like that $600 V8 off of eBay. In any case, the point stands that hyperdrives can't be too prohibitively expensive to use as weapons, especially if you're buying them used and in bulk. If Leia and the Resistance need some cheap hyperdrives to strap to missiles, the junkyards of Jakku ought to have plenty.
  • Honestly, I think this might be the biggest error the writers had made in this movie that completely rocks the entire lore of the franchise. I have just a simple question for you: If you can take a hyperdrive, slap it onto a big rock and smash it into a planet at relativistic speeds from the other end of the galaxy, why would anyone bother with any other doomsday weapon? Why would anyone try to build a space-station the size of the moon to blow up planets when they could just take something like a decommissioned Acclamator class destroyer, ram it into a planet via hyperdrive, and achieve practically the same result? The mere fact that they allowed hyperdrives to be used this way undermines the very existence of the Death Star, one of the big linchpins of the entire SW universe.
  • I'm guessing the bigger the mass of the ship or object being accelerated, the more powerful and expensive the hyperdrive has to be to accelerate it. Also, proper targeting requires the target to be close enough to the missile to keep it from crossing the light-speed threshold before smashing into it, so you couldn't just fire at something from across the galaxy; you have to get it into the same general vicinity as the victim you plan to ram with it. That said, applying what we've seen hyperdrives can do in The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi should be relatively simple.
    
    To take out one Starkiller Base without losing more than half your X-wing fleet, simply convert one of those X-wings into a drone and have it calculate a course that will bring it out of hyperspace just inside the planetary shields at a gentle angle of descent over that thermal oscillator you need to destroy. Next, have it point itself directly at the thermal oscillator and fire up the hyperdrive again. (This should only take a few seconds.) At this range, the ship might only be able to get up to one tenth of the speed of light before crashing into the thermal oscillator, but even that should be enough to produce a Hiroshima-sized explosion that will annihilate the oscillator, touching off a chain reaction that will blow the planet to kingdom come.
    
    Congratulations, Resistance: you're out the cost of one X-wing and maybe a droid's processing unit (to guide the drone ship to its destination), and the First Order just lost several quadrillion credits worth of super-weapon technology. Those Imperial wannabes are definitely going to have to rethink their strategy for reconquering the galaxy now, yes? (Don't celebrate too soon, though: as soon as it occurs to the First Order to do the same thing to your bases with expendable capital ships, this galaxy's going to have a nigh-apocalyptic war on a scale no one has ever seen before; it might not leave one inhabited planet intact.)
  • Well, there's two things that could stop this from happening. For a start, it's doubtful that hyperspace mass drivers could hit a planet, the planet's gravity would pull the mass out of hyperspace before it could hit (large as it is, not even Snoke's flagship would generate the kind of gravity shadow that even a small moon would which explains why the move works against the fleet), and the use of hyperspace mass drivers against fleets not actually in orbit around a planet (and therefore not protected by the planet's gravity well) would easily be countered by making sure each fleet is deployed with a Interdictor Cruiser.
  • One point a lot of these objections seem to keep missing: using hyperspace mass drivers as weapons specifically requires that they not actually reach hyperspace. The idea is that the missile is supposed to impact moments before it makes the jump, not after. If gravity wells can prevent a ship from initiating this acceleration in the first place, then those Interdictors might have some value as a defense against this kind of attack; but if they're only good for preventing the actual jump to hyperspace, they'll be no use at all against a maneuver like Holdo's just-barely-sub-light suicide run — or those hyperspace missiles.
  • It's canon that Interdictors stop a ship making the jump to hyperspace. The apparent massive increase in speed always gets canonically described as pseudomotion, suggesting that there is no increase in the speed that the ship is traveling at in real space before it makes the jump to hyperspace.
  • Not necessarily. Mass shadows created by stellar objects and Interdictor cruisers work to snatch ships out of hyperspace because ship hyperdrives are built with failsafes that preemptively cut the hyperdrive so that they don't get yanked out by the physical gravity of the object at a point where they can't escape the gravitational pull of the object under their own engine power. For these hypothetical Hyper-Death Missiles, you obviously would design a stripped-down hyperdrive that doesn't employ that safety feature. So, as stated up-thread, prohibitive cost and the fact that any miss—and even a direct hit, if you hit something so small that it doesn't destroy the Hyper-Death Missile and the thing keeps going—will cause calamitous harm against some other unsuspecting fool on the far side of the galaxy.
  • Are hyperspace engine failsafes when in hyperspace still canon though? I have to admit, I'm losing track with what is and isn't, but as far as I can tell the only canon hyperspace failsafes are those designed to stop somebody from activating the hyperdrive whilst still in a large enough gravity well, while getting pulled out of hyperspace by a large enough gravity well is an act of physics (which would explain Han's line about jumping right into a star. Given the inverse square law there's a very good chance that by the time a gravity well is strong enough to pull something out of hyperspace whatever is being pulled out is going to be deep inside the gravity well and would materialise either inside a planet, or close enough to star to be destroyed).
  • The thing is, a Cruiser hitting Snoke's ship doesn't do 'that' much damage, and we see ships hyperspace ramming Star Destroyers in Rogue One with almost no effect. Frankly, anything below the mass of a capital ship is likely to do next to nothing, it's clearly not nearly as effective as the physics would suggest.
  • The ships that ran into Vader's star destroyer in Rogue One weren't even accelerating to lightspeed when they struck - they were clearly making pre-lightspeed maneuvers. Those ships struck at normal sublight speeds, so no relativistic effects were in play.
  • You know, I'm starting to wonder if what we saw is the reason why nobody plots hyperspace jumps that short. Maybe it's the case that not only is the jump too short to fully merge the ship with hyperspace, it's also too short to allow the ship to properly reintegrate back into real space. The effect would be that during the partial entry into hyperspace every bond in the ship would break creating some truly staggering amounts of energy (E=mc^2), some of which would be expressed in real space as very excited photons, and the subsequent reintegration of the rest of the energy into real space (because it couldn't make the full dimensional shift into hyperspace) would be expressed as some very, very excited photons. This would make weaponising it incredibly difficult. For the distances involved you've got to think that turbolasers, proton torpedoes, and concussion missiles would be considerably more cost effective than a hyperspace jump over that distance using a mass equivalent to that of the cruiser.
  • Others up-thread have theorized that making hyperspace missiles would be impractical. I don't agree with that, but let's assume for a minute that hyperspace missiles ARE impractical. That still doesn't explain why hyperspace ramming isn't used in nearly every fleet engagement. Think of it this way: Admiral Holdo sacrificed herself and one single 3km Mon Calamari cruiser, and in exchange for that sacrifice she crippled one 60km Super Star Destroyer and destroyed several regular Star Destroyers. You think that a single Mon Cal cruiser could do that much damage on its own without the hyperspace ramming (just using turbolasers, proton torpedoes, etc)? This scene, while pretty to look at, killed my suspension of disbelief.
  • Um, Holdo using the cruiser to ram the FO's flagship didn't directly destroy the First Order SD fleet. It was the shock wave of the cruiser hitting the flagship that caused the destruction of the SD fleet. If the flagship hadn't been so preposterously huge then the shock wave would have been much smaller. On top of that, it isn't the amount of damage you can do with one shot that's important, it's how much it's going to cost you. And then you have to factor in just how much of a useful tactic it's going to be anyway. The Resistance is clearly short on materiel and personnel, so for them this isn't a viable tactic for fleet engagement.
    
    For the First Order, who might or might not have the ships to spare, this still isn't a viable tactic because once word gets around about what you are doing enemy fleets will now fly in formation further apart, only allowing a ramming manoeuvre to hit one ship at most, or deploy some form of gravity well generator tech, like an Interdictor, stopping a ship from going to hyperspace anywhere near the fleet. And that's just considerations to be made on a strategic and tactical level. Then you have to take into account logistical necessities. So, first of all:
    
    1) Just how many 60km SSD are there out there that need destroying? (A: There probably isn't another one. Intimidation factor aside, a 60km wide starship is useless in a standard military engagement. It can't do anything than a greater number of SD can do in its place and it's a really huge, relatively sitting still target that's going to be subject to the same TRD problems that regular SD have.)
    
    2) Just how much does it cost to build a 3km Mon Cal Cruiser (A: A lot. If Earth pooled all its resources we would probably still fall short of being able to build a cruiser like that, and that's even assuming we would have the technology to stop the cruiser collapsing under its own weight within its own artificial gravity, and could give the ship enough structural integrity to stop it being ripped apart under the stresses induced by its own engines.)
    
    3) How much does it cost in regular munitions to take down a standard SD, compared to the cost of a cruiser, or vice versa (A: Considerably less. Munitions are designed to take down enemy vessels. Cruisers are designed to carry the means to take down enemy vessels.)
    
    To give a real world comparison: The second-longest US Naval vessel in history will be the Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carrier; Displacement: about 100 000 tonnes; Cost to build: $10.44bn, and that doesn't include the cost of all materiel on board, like aircraft, etc. It's not certain, because it's never happened, and for obvious reasons the various world's navies like to keep their own testing into the matter a secret, but two of the most modern supercavitating torpedoes would probably be enough to break to break the back of the carrier. But lets ramp it up a bit and say that you need ten supercavitating torpedoes to do the job; Cost: $0.04bn.
    
    Now let's bring in the cruiser analogue. Enter the HMAS Hobart (DDG 39); Displacent: 6,250 tonnes; Cost to build without project cost overruns: $1bn. Even if you could get the Hobart up to the speeds required to hit the carrier to do enough damage to sink it, and even if, by some miracle, the Hobart could hit it (the carrier would just sail away from the projected impact point, and the Hobart would be sunk long before the point it could reach the carrier) at what point does that make sense? You are spending $1bn, plus all the materiel on-board, plus an additional $1bn and cost of additional materiel to replace the cruiser, all to do the job that ten torpedoes costing $0.04bn would do. Oh, and you've still got the launching platform for the torpedoes, allowing you to launch even more torpedoes somewhere down the line.
  • Very nicely analyzed, but that brings us back to the original point: isn't everybody's best option, then, to start strapping hyperspace drives to their missiles (be they the smaller torpedoes of the kind Luke Skywalker used to destroy the first Death Star or concussion missiles of the sort Lando Calrissian used to destroy the second one)? Clearly, if hyperspace drives allow things to bypass shields and do massive damage, bigger is not better anymore, and Death Stars are obsolete. Hyperspace missiles are the new nuke, and proliferation should be the order of the day.
    
    That it took people in the Star Wars universe a while to make these innovations is realistic enough if you've studied military history; soon after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. military brass started researching and developing the hydrogen bomb and building things like MX Missiles under the doctrine that Bigger Is Better. As the decades passed, however, it gradually occurred to them that ten one-ton nukes could do much more damage than one ten-ton nuke, and so they began to develop things like cluster munitions with multiple warheads. If the Star Wars writers are going to take some practical pointers from Real Life, I think they'd better ditch those Death Stars from now on and start showing First Order fleets streamlining themselves with smaller and faster ships and spreading out to avoid being caught in huge blasts as happened to the fleet in this movie.
  • Except it doesn't solve the problem of gravity well generators. If people start using hyperspace weapons then people will deploy gravity well projectors to protect their fleets because at that point the benefits of even a faultily designed Interdictor cruiser outweigh its flaws. Rebels has established that only established hyperspace routes are safe to travel, so long-range launch of missiles can be stopped by placing gravity well generators on those routes, and short-range fleet-engagement missiles can be stopped by the fleet deploying its own gravity well projectors, and planets protect themselves anyway.
• All this discussion about hyperspace attacks misses the fact that in the entire history of the Galaxy, only one pilot has ever been known to jump to hyperspace aboard a ship that itself is still inside a larger ship's hangar, and only one pilot has even been known to drop out of hyperspace inside a planetary atmosphere. Oh, and those are the same pilot. And he pulled those tricks off within days of each other. And he once described flying through hyperspace as not like dusting crops. Oh, and he's now dead. And he was Han Friggin' Solo, who was as reckless as anyone ever got. So, yeah, no one has done it because most engineers would think it completely impossible.
  • That explains why people haven't tried these things up to now, but not why they wouldn't think to do them again. Rey, Chewbacca, BB-8, and Finn are all still around to testify to the success of Han's maneuvers, and everybody in the Resistance and First Order who survived this movie saw how successful Holdo's maneuver was. The technicians on either side would have to be pretty incompetent if they aren't already considering ways to improve on these innovations in war tactics (such as how to do as much damage to an enemy's fleet as Holdo did without making a suicide run).
• Consider how many hyperspace capable bombers and X-wings were destroyed in the attack on the dreadnought, there is no way it's not cost effective. Then consider that the mass of the bombs on the bomber would do less damage by exploding instead of striking the dreadnought at near light speed. The snub fighter and cruiser combo has always been a losing proposition. Why risk dozens of vulnerable and very expensive craft when guaranteeing the destruction of one. It's almost like the writers were trying to tell us the epic space battles are gone forever; they book ended an example of the failings of Star Wars' signature battles with an example of how they wanted it to go from now on.
  • Well, for a start, the attack on the dreadnaught, from a military point of view, is an abject failure for the Resistance and can't really be used as a comparison for anything (the original plan was for the Poe to distract the Dreadnought whilst the fleet finished evacuating and, once enough time has passed, for the fleet to make the jump to lightspeed leaving the First Order fleet behind, Poe decides to change the plan to the one he's been working on that's designed to take down the dreadnaught with minimal or no losses to the Republic snub-fighters. Both plans fail because of Poe, and it's only blind luck that the Dreadnaught is destroyed). To get a proper cost comparison you need to calculate the entire amount of damage that a snubfighter can output during it's projected lifespan, plus the value of all the other services that snubfighter can perform, versus that of the cost of a hyperspace mass driver.
    
    Then there's the matter of the bombs. The bombs aren't directly relying on mass to do damage. When people talk about mass drivers they are talking about the equivalent of somebody throwing a solid rubber ball against a wall, and effectively it's what the Resistance cruiser became when it did the hyperspace ramming move. Bombs and missiles don't impact against objects to cause damage, instead detonating explosives of some description contained in the payload in the vicinity of the target, which is kind of the equivalent of throwing a lit fire-cracker against the wall. In the real world, high yield explosives are used in equivalent situations because attempting to fire a solid mass to achieve the same energy output at impact means accelerating the mass to a small but appreciable percentage of the speed of light (it depends on the explosive, but the equivalent mass driver can end up needing to accelerate 1kg of mass to 2% of c to achieve the same energy output at impact, obviously high explosives make much more economical sense). So it doesn't matter the speed that the bombs or missiles are traveling at when they detonate, it's the explosive in the payload that's doing the damage, not the impact of the object carrying the payload. In effect, strapping hyperspace engines to either bombs or missiles is pointless, because all it would do is increase the speed that the explosive gets to the target to the point that at fleet-engagement distances missiles and bombs would massively overshoot their targets, and at longer distances (launching from one system to another) you run into the Lensman problem.
    
    So that leaves hyperspace mass drivers. Why aren't they suddenly going to flood the Star Wars universe? Practical issues first. How big a mass do you need? The FO flagship is impressively wide at 60km, but not nearly as impressive measured bow to stern (using a rough eyeball measurement I put the bow-stern length at about than 10km), and it's dorsal-ventral axis length at the impact point isn't that much greater than the Mon Cal Cruiser's. So a 3km cruiser, accelerated past c, produces enough energy at impact to cut through ~10km of opposing ship leaving a cut about as wide as the Mon Cal Cruiser, and releasing an energy shockwave that takes out the surrounding SD. So if you want to use hyperspace mass drivers against destroyers and cruisers you are looking at masses equivalent to a snubfighter, at the very least.
    
    Next question, how do you get your mass to the battlefield, and how is it going to be driven at the target? A self-propelled mass equivalent to a snubfighter would need sensors, on-board targeting and navigating systems including a navicomputer, comms systems so the mass driver can be given targeting instructions, a hyperspace engine, sublight engines, maneuvering thrusters, and fuel storage to power all the above, all just to get to the battlefield, lock on target, and make the jump to create the impact. Or, in other words, you've just built a weaponless, one-shot, snub-fighter, with all the equivalent costs near to that of a snubfighter. Or you could make the driver separate to the mass, with the mass just having hyperspace engines and fuel storage. But what is your driver going to be? You can't strap the mass to another stubfighter, you've literally just doubled the mass of the stub-fighter you want to use as a driver, and even if you are able to design a snub-fighter around that, each fighter can only carry one mass each, and the snubfighter would have all the maneuverability and acceleration problems the bombers attacking the dreadnaught have. Or you could put the mass projectiles on a cruiser, but for every mass taken on-board you lose the carrying capacity (in mass terms) for a snubfighter. With each fewer snubfighter on-board you now have one fewer fighter to fly in a fighter screen to protect the cruiser whilst it gets in position to drive the mass projectiles.
    
    And even if you decide that producing a hyperspace mass driver makes sense economically, there's still one glaring problem staring the designers in the face. They've just designed the most ineffectual and cost-ineffective weapon in the galaxy. A Ewok-powered pointy stick has more effectiveness. Hyperspace mass drivers can't be used for planetary bombardment purposes (the planet's gravity well would drag the mass out of hyperspace before it could hit), and hyperspace mass drivers can't be used against fleets, because at the first whiff of the development of hyperspace mass drivers every military everywhere is going to ensure that each of their fleets is equipped with already developed and well-understood gravity-well generator technology that would rip hyperspace masses out of hyperspace before they could hit the fleet.
  • All of you do realize that you have essentially described an ICBM, which we have in real life. All of the objections are a matter of design. While they would not be realistic for the Rebellion or the Resistance, the Republic or Empire could surely have the money to make these missiles. They are single-use, specialized weapons that can be carried on capital ships, much like the torpedo when it was invented in real life.
  • No. ICBM are just long-range missiles designed to carry one or more warheads to a target. The ICBM is not designed to impact with an object and in itself isn't designed to explode. It's just a payload delivery system. The damage is caused by the payload itself. The closest equivalent to an ICBM in the Star Wars universe is the proton torpedo or concussion missile. As mentioned above, strapping a hyperdrive to either of these is pointless. At fleet-engagement range the missile would:
    1) massively overshoot the target because hyperspace jumps that short can't be calculated accurately, or
    1a) even if you could get the missile to impact with the target from hyperspace the payload gets obliterated without ever detonating (to use your example of an ICBM and a nuclear warhead, if the ICBM slams into the target the payload would suffer such severe damage it wouldn't detonate, ICBM are designed to target co-ordinates in clear space and when that space is reached then trigger the payload to either detonate or be realised via a MiRV system, in which case the RV then targets clear space and detonates the payload at target), or
    2) if you manage to get over the problem of getting the targeting systems to be able to detect very low gravity-well real space objects from hyperspace in time to detonate near the target the explosion from the payload would still detonate in hyperspace and wouldn't affect the real-world object, or
    3) the missile would have to detect the object from hyperspace in time to drop out of hyperspace for the payload to then explode, making strapping a hyperspace engine to the missile pointless in the first place.
  • These objections are rather over-extending several analogies and missing the earlier point made that smashing anything into anything else at speeds just under the speed of light produces a massive release of energy to destroy both objects. Just as a meteorite's impact crater is much larger than the actual meteorite, so too would any object crashing into a ship right before it hits hyperspace blast a massive hole in it. When I say hyperspace missiles are the new nuke, I don't mean they have all the complex inner workings of a nuke, but that their impact could do a comparable amount of damage to the amount a nuclear detonation does. Any object approaching the speed of light isn't the delivery system for a payload; it is the payload! The missile in question wouldn't even have to have any explosive substance in its warhead to produce a massive explosion, just be going at near the speed of light as Holdo's ship was.
  • Or in other words, what's being talked about is a hyperspace mass driver, rather than a missile. Which gives rise to all the problems listed with hyperspace mass drivers above (not least of which is carrying that mass around. It's easy to gloss over the problem by saying load the mass projectile onto a capital ship, but it doesn't get rid of the problem. For every 1kg of mass a ship takes on requires the ship's engines to produce an additional 1N⋅M of thrust for every 1/ms^2 of acceleration or deceleration under normal operations. Or in other words, for every mass projectile equal in mass to a snub-fighter, the capital ship must now carry one less snub-fighter to maintain its thrust-to-mass profile, for every mass projectile equal in mass to an AT-AT the ship must now carry one less AT-AT, etc.). Then there's the matter of how hyperspace engines work. It doesn't matter if somehow the equivalent to a weaponless snub-fighter with no life support being rammed at an enemy is more economical in a military sense compared to having a fully-armed snub-fighter operating over a course of its projected lifetime because you still can't get hyperspace-driven mass projectiles to hit anything that's being protected by a large enough gravity well.
    
    And this is all before we get into the esoterics of how hyperspace travel works. For all that the canon describes hyperspace travel as travel at lightspeed and FTL, it doesn't describe these speeds occurring within real space and, even more complicatedly, the canon also describes hyperspace engines as maintaining a ship's mass/energy profile (it's mass, speed, and acceleration amongst other things) when it enters, travels through, and exits hyperspace. So from the canon's description, hyperspace engines don't appear to add any real space acceleration to a ship, instead the speed the ship is traveling at is equal to its speed in real space at the time of the jump and the ship maintains this real space speed during the length of the jump. This means that in theory hyperspace provides a way of traveling between two points in real space without having to travel along the length of curved spacetime between those two points and the flight is described as being FTL because to travel that distance in real space in that amount of time would require the ship to be traveling at FTL speeds, but hyperspace allows the ship to travel a much shorter distance at the same speed the ship was traveling at in real space (kind of like the Babylon 5 model). If all of that is true, then hyperspace mass drivers aren't going to work because the mass never reaches anything approaching light speed.
  • All right, so if the ships jumping to hyperspace don't actually reach greater actual speeds (which would be consistent with the loophole in the laws of physics that hyperdrives are exploiting, i.e. they don't actually cross those light years, they just shorten the distance between two points by "skipping" a lot of it), that would explain why things producing gravity wells such as planets and interdictors are an effective defense against hyperspace ramming. This is also consistent with how Han was able to bypass the Starkiller Base's shields: the Millennium Falcon's hyperdrive basically went around the wholly three-dimensional planetary shield in the fourth dimension. Interestingly, if you're paying attention, the warp drives in Star Trek are actually indicated to work the exact same way, albeit less efficiently than those in Star Wars. (Star Trek's ships have better weapons like anti-matter warheads, but their warp drives in the 24th century take 70 years at maximum speed to cross the Milky Way, whereas Star Wars ships seem to be only a few hours' flight from anywhere in their galaxy.)
    
    That said, this would indicate that hyperdrive technology, like the equivalents in other shows with faster-than-light travel, is based on the ability to generate artificial gravity, since gravity uses the very same loophole (warping space itself) to have an effect on things before the light can reach them. (Classic example: if our Sun were suddenly to go nova, Earth would actually depart from its orbit several minutes before the light from the explosion reached us.) Obviously, if hyperdrives are designed to generate and focus the massive amounts of artificial gravity necessary to compress all the light years between one's point of departure and arrival, the interdictors work by using their artificial gravity generators to disrupt other artificial gravity generators, such as hyperdrives.
    
    Assuming the First Order has the sense to research a fix for the design flaw and start manufacturing those interdictors again, however, it strikes me that hyperdrives—or at least the technology on which they're based—could still be used as powerful gravity weapons. That gravity generators can prevent hyperdrives from initiating pseudo-motion (probably by disrupting their ability to focus the gravity) does not mean they could stop them from generating gravity altogether. That the hyperspace jumps don't produce real acceleration merely returns us to the question others have been asking as to why Holdo's suicide run worked. My new theory: notice the way Star Wars ships very suddenly elongate for just a moment as they're making the jump (as do Star Trek ships, in fact, at least from The Next Generation onward); that's probably the point at which the ship basically tears a tiny hole in the space-time continuum, and at which anything that happens to be near the ship at that time will be pummeled with concentrated gravity waves. That pummeling is what tore Snoke's ship in half, and produced a massive gravitational shock wave that trashed a lot of the surrounding destroyers as well.
    
    Now, considering that gravity in Real Life already causes great amounts of acceleration without yanking things into hyperspace, and that this acceleration produces massive damage to anything these accelerated objects strike within gravity wells (such as the planet itself; as mentioned, meteors produce craters much larger than themselves), it seems to me that being able to produce large amounts of gravity even if one can't focus it as the hyperdrives do would still enable the producer to achieve real acceleration up to great sub-light speeds, so long as the gravity isn't powerful enough to produce any pseudo-motion. So, the only variation on the attack plan for taking out Starkiller Base described above is that once the X-wing drone is inside the planetary shield, instead of firing up the drive again as if making a hyperspace jump, you have the X-wing drone turn on the artificial gravity generator (possibly a part of the hyperdrive and still pointed directly at the thermal oscillator you're targeting) and crank it up to, say, 50 Gs or so. The resulting sub-light-but-still-near-relativistic-speed plummet (which ironically could only occur in the presence of a sufficiently large gravity well such as a planet) still causes a massive explosion when it smashes the ship into the target faster than any natural meteor could go, and so you still have—for all intents and purposes—a super-weapon-destroying missile.
• So this is just handwaving, there's no actual backup for this idea, but... I'm thinking that the reason that nobody uses hyperdrive kinetic weapons like Admiral Holdo did is because of the collateral damage. Watching the space scenes a while afterward, it's clear that the space surrounding the flagship has just been space-junked all to hell. The other Star Destroyers present that got blasted to smithereens kinda reinforce the idea that this was basically nuking an entire area of space. However, even if this is the equivalent of Tsar Bomba-ing a fleet, that's still a hell of a weapon to bring to a fight, and one that should have seen use before if it's that powerful.
  So - and here's where the handwavium gets added to the mix - how much collateral damage did Admiral Holdo just do? What if there's just a blast cone of relativistic debris that blasted the First Order fleet half-apart, and then kept going? As folks above have quoted, Isaac Newton's a brutal man to mess with. If that impact happened in the vicinity of lightspeed, there may now be pea-sized trans-hyperspeed projectiles scattering across a good section of the galaxy. Holdo may not have just nuked local space, she may have made hyperspace around Crait lethally unusable in a cone-shaped Zone of Death. It neatly explains why the maneuver hasn't been used in the Star Wars universe yet (it has actually, but everybody knows that it's a historically bad idea) and it explains why nobody decided to come up with it until the very last moment (you don't do this historically stupid thing unless you are truly desperate).
  And lastly, what happens afterward is a great explanation of why it still wasn't all that great an idea: it didn't stop the First Order. It took out a surprising number of Star Destroyers, and ripped the Supremacy half apart, but it didn't stop the fleet from continuing on the same trip they were already taking, just slowed them down a bit while they crapped their Post-Imperial pantsuits.
• Ultimately, I think we'll eventually get the answer to this question in supplementary material. It's too incredible a scene and too high profile as a debate topic to go unanswered.
• Just a thought but maybe doing this is actually a war crime? After all relativistic speeds make everything really ridiculously dangerous. Hit a planet with a moderately sized asteroid that would normally only make a minor dent going at relativistic speeds and you've just wiped out a biosphere completely. We're talking millions, possibly billions or trillions depending on the planets population, all dead in a matter of seconds. Even worse in space that debris which isn't consumed in the immediate collision will become light speed shrapnel potentially tearing up everything in its path all the way across the galaxy until it exits the rim out into deep space. For a Rebel army that's trying to be the good guys that is a very good reason not to engage in this sort of behavior.
  • Meanwhile for the empire it's ridiculously wasteful, and dangerous to shipping with that hyper accelerated shrapnel, to build a device with a very expensive high tech piece of equipment that does this once and needs to be replaced while also potentially planting the idea in the minds of every lunatic with access to a ship. Meanwhile they have the resources to build something that can accomplish the same effect every few hours indefinitely but can't be replicated in a garage by a drunken moisture farmer with a grudge. It just makes more sense not to violate this one extremely serious taboo then to open the flood gates to all sorts of mayhem that could do serious damage to their own interests in the process.
  • As for the First Order, they are a slave army that relies on kidnappings to fill the ranks. Wiping out any inhabited planet in the outer rim is a terrible idea for them. Plus given the way they reacted to having one dreadnought destroyed it seems their resources aren't quite so unlimited. If anything they're what's left over of the Empires mothballed Navy with no possibility of replacing major ships or components if something breaks. Sure they can buy more Tie fighters because those things were dime a dozen and ended up everywhere but I doubt anyone will be selling an Imperial Star Destroyer.
    • I'd even hazard a guess that Holdo's attack wiped out the majority of the First Order's forces.
• The trouble with the part about the "light speed shrapnel" is that we've established hyperspace "pseudo-motion" isn't really the same thing as actual motion; it requires a certain ongoing expenditure of energy from a hyperdrive to maintain, and once that drive is obliterated in the explosion, the hyperspace distortions it's causing quickly smooth out and the shrapnel drops out of hyperspace. Basically, actual motion has momentum while pseudo-motion doesn't. That shrapnel isn't going to be going above light speed or even near light speed for very long, so it's not really that much of a credible long-term hazard. As for the Empire or First Order having any legal concerns about blowing up whole planets, one can see that men like Grand Moff Tarkin and Emperor Palpatine would never take any such "international" conventions seriously, even assuming there were any.
  
  It seems more likely to me that there must be some defense measures available against any kind of hyperspace missile, and that Holdo's attack only succeeded because she'd caught the First Order off their guard. The Death Stars and Starkiller Base already had some natural gravity, and all ships big and small seem to be routinely fitted with artificial gravity generators to keep people from floating around too much on them, so producing gravitational defenses against hyperspace missiles (which are basically gravitation-based weapons) probably isn't too difficult or expensive. In Holdo's case, the First Order just didn't have the time to put up their usual defenses because they needed a few minutes to fire up the gravitational disruptor fields (or whatever those defenses are called), and didn't realize what Holdo was planning to do until it was too late. Even when he realizes what she's planning, Hux doesn't call for his troops to raise the defenses, just yells "Fire on that ship!" because he knows he's only got seconds left to act while those defenses likely take at least a few minutes to activate.
• What can kind of defense is a one that takes few minutes to activate against something that strikes in seconds? That's not a defense, that's trying to use protect yourself with wooden shield against MG 42. If we assume this was because of miscalculation or oversight, that would make the New Order so hilariously incompetent, that the battles against it start to feel more like group of actual soldiers beating up disabled children.
  • It might not literally take "minutes", but it might still take longer to activate than might be feasible against a hyperspace attack. Shields that only take, say, ten seconds to fully activate will work wonders against about 90% of all attacks the ship is likely to face, but if a hyperspace attack can be completed in five seconds or less then it's still at a disadvantage. As for what kind it is, it's simply one with limitations like any kind of technology. If they were literally unstoppable, immune from flaw and capable of resisting literally every kind of attack that anyone could possible deploy against them ever, there'd be no tension.
• I think the issue is that the Holdo maneuver leads to a lot of questions about its use. If Star Wars hyperdrives produce little to none real acceleration (simply shunt the ship into hyper space to skip long distances), then Holdo’s attack wouldn’t have worked the way it did. If the hyperdrives do accelerate a ship to ludicrous relativistic speeds, then it brings up questions of WHY such an attack has never been used before. Regarding the latter, it’s explained that large masses (like planets, stars, etc.) have a presence in hyperspace, so most drives have safety regulators that deactivate the hyperdrive so the ship doesn’t get squished. Let’s just say that Holdo’s maneuver somehow works because of reason X (once again, the ships have never shown relativistic speeds when it came to hyperspace, but let’s go with it for now), then we still have that conflict. For example, during the Battle of Hoth, the Imperial forces could have grabbed a hyperdrive, strip it of its regular (so it can be used on the planet), attach it to a decommissioned ship, and point it at the Rebel base, ending the Rebellion for the cost of one hyperdrive and decommissioned ship. Yet they never do this despite the technology existing for a staggering long period of time.
• Does the movie ever state that a hyperspace attack can't be defended against? It's possible the technology to defend against it exists but on a Mile-Long Ship that type of shield consumes too much energy to leave it on 24/7. The First Order is known to have a Bigger Is Better mentality, most space battles don't last long enough for the power drainage to matter, and any kind of stealth ship would be too small to cause any real damage. So nobody realized the issue with tracking a fleet for hours and conserving energy until five seconds before it came back to bite them.
• Another consideration is that hyperdrives are big. The smallest things we see carrying them are still the size of a schoolbus and can only carry the one pilot. Ships smaller than that are forced to use hyperdrive rings to allow interstellar travel. Can the technology actually be miniaturized to the point of utility as a missile?

Interstellar Communication

• So, a big part of the plot is that the Resistance need to get in contact with the rest of their forces on the Outer Rim and can't do it because their tech isn't strong enough to signal them...Yet, Finn, Poe and Rose have no trouble contacting Maz Kanata in wherever the heck she is? I get she might not be in the Outer Rim, but still - a) if they can contact her, they can contact others and get those people (or maybe Maz herself) to contact the Outer Rim forces, and b) how they hell did they know where Maz is anyway or how to contact her? Finn had only met her once and received zero contact info, and last time we checked her place was being attacked by the First Order and everyone was fleeing, and this was mere days before the events of this movie! Whole thing seems contrived to me.
  • It was more that they needed a safe place to set up a new base before calling for reinforcements. Something they couldn't do when being constantly hounded by the First Order fleet.
  • No, it was very explicitly stated that they couldn't contact the fleet but that the new base has the communication capabilities to do so. Which is undermined by the fact that they could contact Maz (never mind Finn and Rose being able to break away from the battle entirely now that I think about it).
  • They took the last hyper-capable transport, which was clearly not roomy enough to take much people. And maybe the plan was to send the higher-ups and/or some sort of advance team to the Crait base in that ship. Or get most of the transports down while the fighters screen, and send the shuttle off to call for help.
  • Perhaps Maz is somewhere that can be reached using relay stations, but there are no relay stations leading out to the thinly-populated outer rim. The base has a transmitter powerful enough to reach that distance without the need for relays.
  • I think it's less a function of the comm network, and more a function of Maz. She's clearly powerful and resourceful.
  • But not so powerful and resourceful that they can ask HER to get a message to their allies in the Outer Rim, apparently.
  • Um, Maz is real busy. That's one hell of a union dispute, and the last we see of Maz is her jet-packing off to avoid fire. If I was in that position I probably wouldn't be that interested in jotting down a message to pass on to somebody else. Plus, you probably don't want to be entrusting Maz of all people with the Resistance's passcodes, secure comm frequencies, and encryption keys.
  • Maz is busy at that moment with a violent union dispute. But there's no reason why they couldn't contact her a week later or whatever.
  • Well, for a start Maz isn't a member of the Resistance, nor does she seem particularly aligned with the Resistance. First and foremost she's a business woman, probably leaning towards the more shady side of things given that she's perfectly happy to deal with a known smuggler like Han. The First Order is the rising power in this part of the galaxy, so whilst she might be willing to give the Resistance a bit of information, she isn't going to cross the First Order by running messages for the Resistance. That's just bad business. Likewise, part of Maz's business dealings seems to involve information brokerage. The Resistance cell with Leia might be desperate, but that doesn't mean that they are willing to sell out whatever remaining Resistance cells might remain on the Outer Rim by giving an unaligned third party access to their secure comm frequencies, encryption codes, and identifying pass codes. Then there's the matter of the timeline. For a film that focusses around how much time the fleet doesn't have left it does a masterful job of obscuring just how much time passes during the film. But nonetheless, there are clues, and they're on Ach-To. The first seen we see on Ach-To is the same scene we see at the end of TLJ, which gives as a frame of reference, and this is occurring at the same time that the Resistance is evacuating D'Qar. The next point of reference we get is a night scene where Rey waits and then sleeps in front of Luke's door (very myffic, very Apprentice and Master). We don't know how long a planetary day is on Ach-To, but given it isn't a plot point in the film lets say that by wild coincidence it's exactly 1 day long. Given the shadows on the first scene on Ach-To, this means either about a quarter of a day has gone, or three-quarters. Split the difference, call it about half-a-day. The next night scene we get is Chewie, Porgs, and chewy Porg. So call that about a day and a half having gone by. After that, we don't know how much time has gone by, but it can't be that long, so it's reasonable to say that the film takes place over the course of about 3 days. If, as seems likely, Poe, Finn, and Rose contacted Maz towards the end of the first day, that means that by the time Maz has dealt with her problem, and the necessary clean-up, everything is already over for the Resistance cell.
    Update:I've managed to see the film for a second time. The length of time from Poe, Finn, & Rose contacting Maz to the evacuation of the cruiser? A little over 18 hours. All-in-all, from evacuation of D'qar to the evacuation off of Crait? I've got it timed to about 40 hours, or one and two thirds of a day. That is one really tightly written timeline.
  • Well, the fact that they have limited fuel, are being shot at by a massive fleet and are apparently in near-imminent danger of death is a pretty compelling reason why they might not be able to contact her a week later. They need help now, not in a week; if Maz can't help them now, then to all practical purposes she can't help them at all.

Why doesn't the First Order have Interdictors?

• The Empire rolled them out in Rebels and they work perfectly. The First Order has been fighting a small evasive enemy for years. Why don't they have them available for exactly the kind of situation they were in at the beginning of the movie? Other than "the Resistance would have all died", of course.
  • According to canon Interdictors stopped being made in 0 BBY because of serious design flaws (in Rebels series 2 a manufactured error in the gravity well generators caused the Interdictor to destroy itself). They were still plentifully available to the Empire during the Empire's height, but how many remained after the Empire fell is unknown. Even if the First Order decided that Interdictors are worth the effort of bringing back into manufacture, the fact that they now have hundreds of star systems that have joined the First Order means that most of their fleet is tied up in bringing these new systems into order, and the fact that Hux's fleet can trace the Resistance Fleet through as many hyperspace jumps as they can make means that Interdictor cruisers don't need to be deployed with Hux's fleet for Hux's plan to work.

Multiple trackers

• The First Order tracks the Resistance through hyperspace. Somehow, no one considers that they might have planted a tracking device aboard a Resistance ship (a la how the Falcon got tracked in ANH) or that there might be a mole in the Resistance who's feeding them information. Fine, whatever. Somehow we know for a fact that the First Order is using a "tracker" device that senses Resistance capital ships at a distance, sort of like a hyperspace radar. Finn and Rose quickly conclude that there can only be one tracker. Uh, how do they know that? If the FO can build one tracker, why not two? Or ten? But no no, there's definitely only one tracker. So they take this info to Poe, and he suggests blowing up the ship with the tracker. Finn explains that this wouldn't work, because once one ship is destroyed they'll just track us using a different ship. Um...what? Didn't you just say that there is only one tracker? And now suddenly there's more than one? Which is it?? I feel like the script is running on doublethink; there needs to be one tracker (so that Finn and Rose won't need to bother boarding multiple ships), but at the same time there needs to be multiple trackers (so that we can nix Poe's idea of just bombing it...though come to think of it the Resistance was in no position to bomb anybody at that point...but they don't nix his idea by saying "We don't have any bombers left", actually they just nix it by saying that there are multiple trackers). This makes no sense.
  • I think the "maybe there's a mole" thing is why admiral Holdo was so secretive with her plan. As for a tracking device, it would still require something on the FO ships to serve as an end point so it doesn't really matter. And for the one tracker thing : Finn says that it is standard protocol to have only one active at a time, for some reason, so the plan is to disable that one and to get away before the bad guys notice and switch another one on.
  • It's quite possible that having two or more trackers active in one fleet would tamper with function of others. Think of it as two high powered radars next to each other. This would explain the Fin saying its standard protocol to have only one active at the time, but being able to easily turn on another when one goes dark and somebody notices it went dark.
  • Plus this seems to be fairly new tech that's being used in a shakedown cruise. You wouldn't want all your trackers running at once just in case something happens to them. You run one, and you keep the others in standby in case the one you're running falls foul of technical difficulties.
  • I think the point was that all FO ships had trackers, but only of them was working at a time, simply because it was enough, or indeed to prevent interference. If you destroy the currently tracking ship (already a tall order), tracking duty instantly goes to another ship. Buuut, if you manage to covertly turn the tracker off, FO won't realise it (after all, they aren't actually tracking the Resistance through Hyperspace at the moment) until the system diagnostic runs, which gives the Resistance a six minute window to make an untracked jump.
    • This is pretty much exactly what Finn says to Poe when he explains why they can't just blow up the one ship that's tracking them.

The bombers

• What was with those bombers? They were slow and unmaneuverable, and thus easily taken out by TIE Fighters. Surely, the Resistance has something a bit smaller and more maneuverable like a new model of Y-Wing? Because as we saw in the film, there were A-Wings, so why not Y-Wings or better yet, the K-Wing from the old EU? I get they were trying to ratchet up the tension and provide a Shout-Out to World War II bomber crews, but in-universe, it makes little sense to use them.
  • This movie takes place about 30 years later from the original, and technology has been progressing apace. It's likely that the armor of the dreadnought was far too advanced for ordinary torpedoes to handle. The attack on Starkiller base in the previous movie would have failed miserably if they had relied on their torpedoes alone, and it's not hard to imagine that the First Order would apply the same armor tech on an asset as vital asset as a "fleet killer". With the imperial era torpedoes no longer cutting it, they needed better ordinance to crack that nut. Too bad the technological advancement of the delivery systems didn't keep pace with the payloads they were carrying.
    • Even WWII-era bombers could glide-bomb their payloads to minimize their exposure to ground fire. To say nothing of the fact that blowing up just one of the bombers will cause the entire friggen' formation to go up in flames. The Resistance Bomber was a just-plain bad design from concept.
    • So bad, in fact, that I honestly wonder how exactly were they supposed to be used if not in a suicide run and what were Leia's and Holdo's problem when Poe should've been given a medal for succeeding to get any value out of those stupid things, let alone exchange them for a frigging dreadnaught.
    • The issue is that the attack played out the way it did because Poe didn't follow orders. For all we know, Poe's superiors may have had a plan that would have had a lower risk of the Resistance losing every single one of the bombers. As for why they would use these particular bombers, consider this: When you're backed into a corner and your destruction is almost guaranteed, are you really going to ignore something that might help your side of the conflict survive just because it's not optimal? There might not have been any Y-Wings or K-Wings available that could carry enough of a payload to get the job done.
    • Which considering the Supremacy was seconds away from blowing them all up, they needed to tell him that. Withholding information was stupid both here and later on with Holdo, there is no cutting it either way. And as for there being no Y-Wing's available, why not? The Raddus is meant to be the best ship in the Resistance fleet and backed by the Republic. If they have X-Wing's (updated models no less) then why do they have no Y-Wing's or indeed anything better designed than these kamikaze bombers?
    • We don't see any Y-Wings in either this or The Force Awakens, so the simplest answer is that they're not in use or available to the Resistance.
    • But that is not the simplest answer though because the question as to why has to be ignored in order to make that work. Why would the Resistance not have Y-Wings but does have access to top of the line modern X-Wing's? Why would Y-Wing's no longer be in service but the suicidally designed, slow as molasses bombers are? This is very bad world building.
    • If I'm not mistaken, Y-Wings were already old equipment in the original series. Remember that the Resistance has a limited budget, so it's probably just easier for them to buy X-Wings — which can do most of what the Y-Wings can do anyway — rather than spending more to diversify the fleet. The bombers were probably leftovers and other old tech that they scrounged together. Just because you, in your infinite, arm-chair hindsight wisdom, think you could have written it better doesn't make it "bad world building." You know what's bad world building? A Resistance on a limited budget with very little support having everything they need.
    • Except that the Rebel Alliance before them had a modest supply of Y-wings and B-wings on an even stricter budget than the Resistance (being hunted by a galactic superpower rather than backed by one) both of which served their niche better than the bombers we see in the intro.
    • Things like the B and A wings came in Jedi, which was after the Rebellion had really started to gain enough traction to pull in more allies, after the Death Star proved that they could actually win. The Resistance isn't backed by the Republic and all its material wealth — it's backed under the table by certain elements of the Republic; a Republic whose government and fleet were blown up the week before. The Resistance is clearly not working with a huge budget.
    • A huge part of world building is respecting (or at least maintaining) a coherent connection to the established lore, and the big awkward death traps in the introduction are a huge departure from the slick fighter combat that's been a staple of the franchise since it's first inception.
    • They're what they had. Evidence shown in the films indicates they didn't have anything better. That you wanted something different doesn't make it a headscratcher.
    • It's not that I wanted something better, it's that the setting itself already had something better. Nothing like those bombers existed throughout the prequel or classic trilogies before; the bombers came out of nowhere in a universe that had exclusively used dog-fighters for that role in every conflict prior.
    • This may come as a shock, but those movies did not feature a complete and exhaustive look at every fighting machine available in an entire galaxy. It is, in fact, possible for there to have been weapons and equipment that we didn't see before. The salt skimmers, for instance, are explicitly old tech.
    • At the risk of sounding like a nerd, there is an exhaustive look at every galactic conflict. Star Wars It's a popular franchise with a thriving Extended Universe outside of the movies, and those bombers are out of place in both the Disney and Legends cannon.
    • Legends no longer applies. And the Star Wars universe in either case consists of thousands of worlds. Thousands. There's no way we've seen everything such that we can declare, "Nope, this thing definitely couldn't have existed."
    • And even the Y-Wings were never shown to be nearly as effective as the bombers here. Consider Return of the Jedi — where the best the Y-Wings can do against a Star Destroyer is disable its shields, so someone else can take out the command bridge. As opposed to the opening of TLJ, where the payload of one of these bombers obliterates something even bigger and more dangerous than that.
    • Regarding their effectiveness, disabling shields while other fighters finish the job was a tired and true method that worked with only a fraction of the resources and casualties, while gaining the same result. Since the TLJ bombers are dead meat without a fighter screen, combined arms are a necessity whichever way you slice it.
    • It's one method that worked. Dropping a crapload of bombs on them is another method that works; if Poe hadn't had them group up so close, then losing one bomber wouldn't have turned into losing all of them. The Resistance — which, again, is the "Resistance" and not "The Republic Fleet" because they're a private group, supported by only a small portion of the Republic because the Republic up to TFA does not consider the First Order a real threat — apparently doesn't just have Y-Wings for some reason. Note that they didn't bring Y-Wings with them to Starkiller base, either, and that was even more ripe for a bomber since it was a completely stationary target. There's some discussion here as to why the Y-Wings might not have been used (Ctrl+F for 'Resistance strike fleet'), starting with them being already old and obsolete in the original trilogy and that the X-Wings do everything but the ion cannon better.
    • That still doesn't explain why they don't use B-Wings the ships made to replace Y-Wings and even then there is nothing saying Korsayer who manufactured Y-Wings went bankrupt so why don't they make new and improved Y-Wings and join that bandwagon (as a side note am I the only bothered that technology in Canon is somehow less advanced than Legends around the same time peroid. I mean it was about 8 years after Endor in legends when the E-Wing first showed up.)
    • You really don't know how heavy bombers work, do you? The tactics for that type of bomber are built around flying in a close formation — called a box — so that they can provide mutual defensive fire support against enemy fighter defenses. The theory being that it allows the formation to operate without its own fighter escort (in practice, it quickly proved that the fighters were too fast and maneuverable for the flexible guns and turrets of the heavy bombers, necessitating fighter escort anyway). Additionally, level bombing with unguided munitions (like the bombs on the Resistance Bombers) is not conducive to precision bombing. Thus the tight formation was also necessary just to hit what you're frelling aiming at by sheer saturation of the target.
    • The ship they were "aiming at" was enormous and they were dropping the bombs from what looked like about 20 feet over it — literally every single bomb that was dropped hit the target directly, so no, there wasn't any concern here about whether or not they'd hit it, it was quite literally impossible to miss. The bombers that we see didn't have point defense effective enough for flying in close formation to actually provide them any benefit; in fact, all it seems to have done is give the First Order an easier time. That's exactly what happens in the film — one bomber gets hit, and shrapnel from that causes a chain reaction that takes out all but one of the others.
    • And one X-wing obliterated something even bigger and more dangerous than that in the original film. And for the same reason: Because the bombs hit one convenient weak point on the upper surface of the hull. One that would have been much easier to hit in a conventional torpedo run. And Y-wings had no problems disabling a Star Destroyer in Rogue One with a single torpedo run. A much more practical design for anti-shipping would have been an upscaled spin on the TBM Avenger carrying torpedoes the size of an X-wing, rather than a Space B-17 (level bombing is simply a bad approach for precision bombing. Tirpitz survived multiple level bombing raids despite being tied up in harbor).
    • The Death Star is not really relevant; the X-Wing didn't obliterate it with a massive payload of damage, it did so with a weakspot that was deliberately built in to be a weak spot. It's a completely different situation. In Rogue One, the Y-Wings disable it with ion cannons, which don't destroy the ship like Poe wanted, they effectively "stun" it. The bomber in TLJ was able to completely destroy in one go a massive, heavily armored target without disabling its shields first; a target that Poe seems to consider worth destroying at any cost, so apparently they're bigger and badder than most of what else is out there.
      
      

Look, the point is, they just didn't have Y-Wings. They did have these flawed, but powerful, bombers available, so they used what they had. Or rather, Poe used them, against direct orders from someone who apparently saw the flaws better and knew how bad an idea it potentially was.

• I guess you missed the part I pointed out before that the bombers were aiming for a specific weak point, and that otherwise the bombing run would have been futile. They did not destroy the Dreadnaught with sheer firepower. They destroyed it with the equivalent of dropping a lucky bomb through the powder magazine.
• Most of the bombers would not have hit the same place that last bomber dropped her payload, as they were flying all abreast, not in a straight line. So they couldn't have all been going for one specific weak point — and if it was a Death Star level weakness, why didn't Poe just have X-Wings go after it? He seemed to think the bombers were necessary to take it down at all. It might have been vulnerable to a mass bombing like that, but that doesn't make it a "weak point" like was on the Death Star. The whole "You need to drop the bombs now!" wasn't because there was only that one specific spot where the Dreadnaught absolutely had to be hit to do any damage so much as it was, "We're down to literally one bomber, it's over the target now, if it doesn't drop the bombs it's going to get blown up."
• Considering Johnson has made clear he set out from the start to deconstruct everything that makes Star Wars Star Wars I'm sure that departure was intentional, no matter how illogical it looks on the screen. A real-life military, no matter how desperate it was for materiel, would ground a craft that flawed because the costs of using them outweigh any return they get out of them. And I'm not talking about obsolescence, because real militaries have certainly gone to war with outdated equipment. It's astounding those bombers even made it into production in the first place.
• There are real life militaries that have fielded armies that had more people than available weapons, essentially telling troops to pick up the weapon of someone in front of you that dies; there are militaries that use costly, out of date things because that's all they have.
• I think you missed my last point: It makes no sense those bombers even went into production.
• The bombers are not inherently bad. They're flawed for the mission we see them on, but with better screening forces and if they weren't flying at arm's length and thus prone to setting each other off, there are any number of uses for them against hardened targets.
• With how slow, large and unshielded they were, I don't think it would've mattered much how loose a formation they had. It is only due to Poe disabling the guns did they even had a chance to get that close. In any other situation they would've been shot down long before.

What's going on with those Bombers?

• The bombers from the opening scene are confusing in both design and in narrative purpose. Why are they designed with such a large vertical profile. Evidently they wanted to carry a large payload, but their deployment mechanism requires that GRAVITY, in space, carry the bombs to their target. Why not deploy the explosives more practically, with torpedoes, from a distance? If you're going to make your bombers the size of capital ships and move three inches an hour, why not just give it some actual range? Additionally, if Leia didn't want to destroy the dreadnought, why did she scramble the bombers at all? Poe took care of the turbo lasers on his own, so it didn't seem like there was a reason to use them.
  • The bombers appeared to have artificial gravity inside of them, so the bombs actually would fall out if released. Also, there is nothing ruling out the use of magnetic technology both in the launchers and in the bombs themselves. That would allow for more of each bomb's mass to consist of explosive payload rather than engine, fuel and guidance systems. As for why the bombers were even being used when Leia seemed so contrary about it — that will likely remain a plot hole. It ultimately served no purpose other than providing a reason to abuse Poe for once again successfully blowing up something really, really big. Leia seems to have forgotten the losses the Rebel Alliance had to endure destroying both Death Stars.
  • If the bombs are accelerated via artificial gravity or a magnetic system, then there's no reason for all the bombers to position themselves "above" the dreadnought. They could just as well encircle the dreadnought and bomb it from all sides. Yet we see them gathering "above" the dreadnought, as if Space Is an Ocean and normal gravity will cause the bombs to drop "down" onto their targets. Of course physics has never really made sense in Star Wars, but this is the first time we've seen tactics that appear to revolve around imaginary gravity.
  • In Return of the Jedi, the Executor nosedives into the Death Star after its main bridge gets destroyed. (Though the EU explains this by saying that the Executor was in the middle of a maneuver at the time.)
  • Leia didn't forget about losses to take Death Stars, but the Death Stars were by several magnitudes bigger threats, which simply demanded those sacrifices to be made. Dreadnought was arguably much less valuable target to risk and sacrifice so much for it. As why Leia seems to despise the usage of the bombers and their design flaws: I believe they are meant to be bad design even in-universe. Resistance seems so be even more rag-tag and underfunded that Alliance ever was, which makes sense since it was conceived during a peace time out of Leia's paranoia, and as such, those bombers may be converted cargo shuttles or anything, simply because Y-Wings and B-Wings simply weren't available. And as such, they are used only in desperate situations and are pretty much flying coffins, which is something Leia realizes.
  • The dreadnaught was still big enough to obliterate an entire base in one shot and, apparently, could've done the same to their ships (Leia never contradicts that). How is that the very desperate situation to roll out the bombers in?
  • So my question about the bombers is why the hell are they so slow? Ok so Star Wars takes a lot of liberties with how space works but the bombers move at a fraction of the speed of the fighters around them. I mean I know they are suppose to evoke real bombers but these things don't fly through space so much as aggressively float.
  • For the same reason real-life bombers are slow: the thrust-to-weight (or in this case, thrust-to-mass) ratio cross-referenced with the vessel's structural integrity cross-referenced with inertia determine what the craft is capable of in term of acceleration and change of direction. Basically, the engines on the bomber has to provide enough thrust to be able to provide acceptable acceleration whilst the bomber is fully loaded, without the same amount of thrust damaging the ship when the bomber is empty. Then, on top of all of that, the bomber engine design also has to take into account inertia whenever the bomber wants to do anything that isn't flying in a straight line. If the bomber is moving at the same speed as, say, an X-Wing can, and attempted to turn as sharply as an X-Wing does, then the strain the bomber experiences as the directionally applied stress of the direction of inertial movement compete with the directionally applied stress of the engine thrust would tear the bomber apart. On the other hand, if the bomber was to make the turn in such a way as to avoid being torn apart then the turn circle would be so large it would make the bomber worthless in combat. Plus, Rule of Cool.
  • Rule of Cool my ass. The Y-Wing has been shown to be a perfectly serviceable bomber/fighter platform, plenty faster than that useless as fuck slow thing the Resistance fielded in that fight. I doubt Leia couldn't have found a few moth-balled ships somewhere or some that could be brought up to snuff out of a ship's graveyard if she could get her hands on current generation X-Wing fighters and A-Wings. The movie was just being stupid for the sake of drama using inadequate ships that required a larger crew.
  • Even aside from the fact that the Y-Wing is a Clone Wars era bomber (approaching 50 at the time), it's also a light fighter-bomber, that canonically carries four torpedoes. These are heavy bombers, capable of taking out Star Destroyers. The Y-Wing is equivalent to the De Havilland Mosquito, the heavy bombers to a Flying Fortress or a Lancaster. They didn't sink the Tirpitz with light bombers, they sunk it with Lancasters.
  • During Rebels we are shown that the Y-Wing is considered to be an older-class of ship that is in the process of being decommissioned, and a prototype B-Wing having been made. By the time the Battle of Yavin comes around the Y-Wing is already obsolete, and the T-65 arguably outperforms it as a missile platform during the assault on the Death Star. By the time the Battle of Endor comes around the Y-Wing is all-but-gone, having been replaced by the B-Wing. By the time of TLJ nobody's manufacturing the Y-Wing anymore, and haven't been for close on to 40 years. We know from the film that the Resistance buys it's snubfighters, and even if militaries were stupid enough to leave decommed Y-Wings lying around (which they're are not, even Rebels shows the Empire breaking these craft down so they can't be pressed back into service), they are ridiculously outdated by the more modern craft. And we don't know the speed that the new B-Wing bomber craft are flying at. For all we know, they are flying at twice the speed of the old Y-Wings, but the new X-Wings and A-Wings have six times the speed of the old equivalents, and that makes the B-Wings look slow by comparison.
  • As for why they had to bunch up and fly "over" the dreadnought, they mentioned a "Sweet Spot", so presumably the dreadnoughts have a particular weakness that could be exploited, and which required more firepower than a snub fighter could deliver while doing more than just "pecking on the surface". It seems the main problems the bombers faced in practical terms was that they flew too close together (hence the Disaster Dominoes which took out most of them), and that was probably brought about because the Resistance didn't have enough fighters to properly screen them. They were truly fortunate that it was Amateur Hour over at the First Order when they planned a major assault on a Resistance base and didn't think to launch their own fighters immediately. But really, the "why" behind the bombers was that space combat in Star Wars has always had a closer relationship to the tactics of 1942 than to those of any time anyone was ever watching the films.
    • In addition to the above, we don't really know what the armament of a dreadnaught is beyond its surface deck turbolasers and the two ventral guns. For all we know, there are more turrets on the edges and belly of the ship, so having the bombers approach from those vectors would have required Poe to clear many more targets, both making his intentions all the more obvious and wasting even more time. (Now, why he didn't have his squadron clear all the guns at once, not just him, is another matter. But considering he wasted a LOT of time destroying that last gun, Poe is clearly not the best tactician.)
    • That last one is very simple. If an entire squadron approached the dreadnaught, it would've opened fire one them, no alternative. With just him, there was a chance for his crazy diversion to work.
  • According to the wiki, those bombers can carry just over 1,000 proton bombs with a crew of 5, whereas (at least in the old canon) a Y-Wing can carry 20 bombs with a crew of 1 or 2, it's simply a matter of not having enough pilots. The real question, however, is why they didn't use modified freighters for the job considering their bomb-bay is comparable in size to the Millennium Falcon's cargo bay, and it has less crew (1-2), more maneuverability, and a better attack profile.
• Another confusing aspect of the bombers is the trigger mechanism. If one breaks they only had 1 extra trigger? For such a large fighter why not have more accessible triggers in case the first two fail?
• To put my own two cents, the bombers shown in the film seemed incapable of glide bombing (they had to hover in place over the Dreadnought) or dive-bombing. This makes them inferior to our own WW2 era bombers in terms of bombing; no matter how powerful your munitions, it doesn’t matter if you get blasted into smithereens before doing anything. Their tactics were also atrocious; using a box formation despite their personal guns not giving the formation the defense it would normally provide, and making them veritable dominos. The Resistance would’ve saved money buying the bombs themselves and sticking them in anything but the flying metal coffins.

How did Holdo jump to hyperspace without fuel?

• Early on, it's mentioned that the crew only has enough fuel for one hyperspace jump, but they deplete their fuel source during their retreat over the course of the movie. How, then, did Holdo manage to pull off her kamikaze attack without the fuel to jump to hyperspace?
  • Now that we know the plan the whole 'we've got this long until we run out of fuel' is a red-herring. Given that Leia and/or Holdo came up with the plan in the first place they are working off of a timer that indicates how much fuel they've got left to burn before the cruiser has to make the decoy hyperspace jump for the plan to work. The reason that so few other people knew this? To forestall the possibility that if somebody cracked under the pressure and tried to sell the fleet out to the First Order the information that the Resistance would be hiding on Crait still wouldn't be leaked.
  • Hyperspace jumps probably use a different type of fuel than regular space travel. So they had fuel for one jump and fuel for that much regular travel.
  • They weren't running until they were out of fuel entirely, they were running until they no longer had the fuel for a jump. Holdo was able to jump the cruiser because they still had just enough fuel for one jump. The idea was to jump the cruiser away and have the Imperials follow, but DJ blew that plan.
  • Although we don't have solid numbers to work with perhaps fueling a fleet of transports then jumping is less extensive then jumping the entire ship laden with transports.
  • Don't forget, she didn't need enough fuel to make a jump at that point, she only needed enough to hit the Supremacy, which was in the same system. Jumping to another system would obviously require much more.

Why does a spaceship moving at a constant rate burn so much fuel?

• So I know Star Wars is a little wishy washy on the whole rules of space thing but its never been used as a plot point before. The Resistance ships not only burn fuel while moving through a vacuum but when they run out they lose speed and start to tumble. Real spacecraft only need to burn fuel to make course corrections. And don't you think they would have a practically indefinite supply on board? Nuclear powered ships can go years without needing a refuel. Don't you think they would have devised something a little more sustainable if they have FTL technology?
  • Tumbling, I can't explain away. That's a classic case of Space Is an Ocean, and I just close my eyes and whisper to myself, 'It's Star Wars physics.' As for the ships moving, the frigates apparently falling back when they run out of fuel, and burning through fuel, that can be explained, kind of, if you close your eyes and squint a little. In Battlefront II, the campaign shows Imperial Cruisers stocking up on fuel refined on Tibanna gas harvested from Bespin. It isn't a stretch to say that similar kinds of fuel need to be used in sub-light engines in the Star Wars universe, it's just isn't explained why. As for the ships moving at a constant rate? They aren't, they are moving at a constant acceleration (which is the only way to explain the frigates, which I'll get to in a sec) and a steadily increasing speed. Hux does order the FO fleet to move at maximum acceleration, and one of the deck officers points out that they can't catch up with the Resistance fleet because the Resistance fleet is lighter and faster. That only makes sense if what the deck officer is talking about is the relative thrust-to-mass ratios of the engines on the various ships in the fleet. In effect, the Resistance fleet can always accelerate faster than the FO fleet, but the reason it doesn't pull away from the FO fleet is that the Resistance plan requires carefully rationing of the fuel so they can get close enough to Crait to launch the transports, whilst leaving enough fuel for the cruise to make the decoy jump, and so they maintain an acceleration equal to the maximum that the FO fleet can achieve. It's like the old cartoon stick of dangling a carrot in front of a mule's nose. The mule always moves forward to try to eat the carrot, the carrot always stays the same distance away from the mule to constantly entice it forward, and this way you have a guarantee as to what the mule is going to do instead of having the mule stop and do something you haven't planned for. This means that when the frigates run out of fuel they maintain their current speed, but can no longer continue to accelerate, and so the FO fleet catches up with the frigates and it's only relativistic framing that makes it look like the frigates are traveling slower and falling back.
  • Yeah, this is a serious plot hole if you apply even a moment of real world science to it. They would have required one full burn to achieve maximum speed indefinitely. And it honestly took me twenty seconds to think of a solution to this from a storytelling point of view: Instead of the First Order ships firing lasers at the Resistance ships, have them use long range tractor beams to exert a constant force upon them. This also gets around the fuel problem as you could hand wave this by saying that these ships had no reason to be carrying significant quantities of the Resistance's limited fuel supplies because they were never designed to operate at full burn for half a day. And the tumbling? That's the tractor beams finally knocking them off course. It's perfect in every way apart from one: that's not what happened.
  • Well, given that it's still canon that sublight engines in Star Wars are some kind of variant of the real-world ion thruster (and it would have to be a variant, our form of ion thruster wouldn't actually work in Star Wars space vehicles), an argument can be made that the sublight engines have an extremely high maximum speed coupled with a relatively low acceleration. In that case, neither fleet would have achieved maximum speed during the amount of time that elapses during the chase, the FO fleet is running at maximum acceleration, and the Resistance fleet is matching that acceleration. That allows for a scenario that explains everything that happens during the chase, apart from the tumbling.
  • There is actually an explanation. The constant bombardment with capital ship weapons. It is likely that the fuel is used to produce energy and the ships systems draw on it, like for example the shielding. Now we start bombarding the shield for hours with strong weapons and we generate an enormous drain off energy and as the fuel is needed to produce this energy it drains the fuel rapidly.
  • Another explanation: the Resistance fleet isn't going at a constant velocity - they're continuously accelerating. So is the First Order fleet. The Resistance ships are smaller and lighter, so they can maintain a higher top acceleration than the lumbering Star Destroyers, but they're a lot shorter on fuel, so they accelerate out of effective range of the First Order's weapons and then drop to the enemy fleet's max acceleration to conserve fuel. As the support ships run out of fuel, they cease to accelerate, and the First Order catches up with them. (I still got nothing on why the Nebulon-B frigate tumbled when it ran out.) Basically, similar to the theory two up from this one, except there's no such thing as "maximum speed" (or at least their acceleration isn't anywhere near high enough for anyone to get to relativistic velocity in a few hours) so the speed relative to any nearby planets or stars just keeps going up as the chase goes on. Really, the issue is how they got from deep space to Crait in a mere few hours, and that's just Star Wars' usual Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale problem, same as the Millennium Falcon reaching Bespin without a working hyperdrive.
  • The tumbling might have been a deliberate last-ditch effort to make the depleted ship slightly harder to hit. Not something that would save the people on board, but using the last dregs of fuel to set their vessel spinning at least gave them a few seconds to say It Has Been an Honor before the First Order weapons got a solid targeting fix.

Running out of Fuel

• So, it's mentioned that the Resistance has a very limited amount of fuel and that's why they can't jump to hyperspace or keep running indefinitely. But they also manage to sneak ships past the First Order at numerous points in the movie, with Finn and Rose even taking one to another planet. What exactly is stopping them from buying some fuel on Cantonica or some other world and bringing it back to the fleet?
  • That ship is way too small to carry much more than a handful of passengers, let alone enough fuel to power a three-mile long capital ship. Any transport that tried to connect and transfer it's fuel would have been intercepted by the first order fighters or cruisers before it even got close.
  • I think the bigger question is how are they running out of fuel as all ships in Star Wars use reactors. These reactors need fuel to run of course, but for a real life comparison the Nimtiz-class aircraft carrier also uses a nuclear reactor and has an unlimited range and needs to be refueled every 20-25 years so I am thinking for a ship that has been in service for less than that time, fuel shouldn't be a problem. And if fuel remains a problem, How does the First Order not have these problems despite the fact the Supremacy would be giant gas guzzler of a capital ship but only the Resistance has to worry about fuel for some reason.

Sequel Escalation and Overpowered Starfighters

• Is it just me, or have the effectiveness of starfighters been turned up to 11 in the new series? In the original series, even a dedicated attack wing of fighters would have a hard time fighting an Imperial Star Destroyer, which had 60 guns and carried a full wing (72) of TIEs. However, in The Last Jedi, Poe creates a blind spot in a Dreadnought in less than a minute, and a single bomber held enough firepower to down a ship 64 times that size (4 times longer, wider, and thicker).
  • Even in the X-Wing game series, where the player routinely took out capital ships with that very tactic of shooting off the surface guns, finally blasting down the health points takes a long time and lots of missiles or laser cannon blasts.
  • For me it less the Starfighters are overpowered more the ships suddenly get bad point defense. The last movie we saw The Finalizer and Starkiller Base have have much better point defense than any other ships seen the films previously. This film on the other hand, every ship suddenly gets borderline non-existent point defense seen not just with the Dreadnought but the Raddus and Supremacy also seeing both Kylo Ren and Rey respectively get way too close to those ships than they would have if they had point defense. (recall Film A New Hope revealed a Imperial Star Destroyer could target an escape pod, scan it for lifeforms, more than likely fire and hit in one shot.)
  • Both in and out of universe a lot of time has passed so technology and expectations have changed accordingly.
• Speaking of which, why are all of the First Order's weapons so much bigger than the Empire's? They have been running on a fraction of the Empire's infinite budget and poured most of that into Starkiller base. Why are the AT-M6s so much bigger than AT-AT's? Why are the Dreadnoughts so much bigger than Star Destroyers, which were the largest warships of their kind when they were first built, so big that they were questionably effective at anything other than fleet engagements.
  • Well after the fall of the Empire the First Order was setup by the Emperor on the down low made up of loyal and trust worthy officers he though would be best suited to handle things. Unfortunately their kids and subsequently grandkids, since most of them were pretty old already, turned out to be a bunch of idiot whiny fascists who are all heart but no brain. Despite extensive training they caught onto the idea of the Empire being glorious and perfect while ignoring the lessons on why things fell apart in the first place. After a while General Hux and his generation basically upended the old guard that was supposed to lead the First Order fueled by dreams of the old Empire they'd been taught to revere but not recognizing any of its faults. That's why they keep doing the same stupid things the Empire did without learning anything at all and why all the older officers are so irritated with Hux for being an idiot.
  • Where does it say that they've only got a fraction of the Empire's budget? The opening crawl to The Force Awakens says that they're built on the remains of the Empire, but that only means they picked up some of the Empire's old assets, and they're still a large enough force to be reckoned with that most of the galaxy is scared of them. If anything, the existence of Starkiller base should indicate they have more cash to work with than the Empire did, especially considering the scale when compared to the Death Star.
  • In regards to the size, though, that could again feed back into the movie's themes of the past and growing beyond it. What the First Order does with their weapons is just taking the Empire's stuff, and making it bigger and badder, with that being their solution to the Empire's shortcomings (and Dramatically Missing the Point as a result), while the heroes (Rey and Luke especially) are actually examining their pasts, confronting their flaws and growing in ways that don't amount to just More Dakka.
  • It's worth noting that the first order and the empire have achieved similar things but in different ways, for example, the Death Star is a complete ship the size of a small Moon while Starkiller is a heavily modified planet. So while I doubt the budget is the same for both organizations the newer one can get more done with it's coffers.
  • Also, every complaint about the Starkiller base (including mine, I admit) seems to imply that the First Order built it and all its stuff in the thirty years after "Return". That might jut be not the case. Who says the Starkiller base wasn't being in production since the dawn of the Empire or hell, that it wasn't some ancient relic the baddies found and appropriated? As for the other colossal ships, the Empire didn't have them. Maybe Snoke and whoever he represents had but were keeping them at bay until the time was right.
    • Canon sources point to the Empire having mined the planet for Kyber Crystals for the Death Star project but it was decades after Jakku before it was found again by the First Order and engineered as a weapon.
    • While it’s more of a gripe towards TFA, this raises questions of how the Republic missed Starkiller Base. The plans for the Death Star, including the ‘kill a planet in one shot’ death beam were known to the Rebels/Republic leadership for decades. Kyber crystals should’ve been treated like uranium and monitored heavily since they could be used to create Death Star type weapons platform, and if the Empire mined that planet for its crystals, then it would’ve been one of the first planets the New Republic would have captured to ensure no Death Stars could be made again. To do otherwise would be as if the US received news that ISIS took over a recently active nuclear manufacturing and processing plant, and sat on their thumbs for years while the terrorists got to work.

First Order Dreadnought

• It seems like the Dreadnought is one of the most egregious cases of Awesome, but Impractical in the Star Wars canon. It's bigger than any other First Order ship and has two massive cannons. Both of these can only hit one target at a time and have alarmingly long reload times. That's not to mention that they seemingly have no other fleet combat weapons, and their pathetically small (for their size) TIE complement, and what I assume is the main reactor is a giant dome that, if hit, blows the whole damn thing to pieces. It's possible that I'm wrong, and that the Dreadnought is much better than we see in Last Jedi, and the Dreadnought's performance was due to tactical misuse by Hux. In either case, then how is the First Order winning the war?
  • Simple, the only other side fighting the war is the pathetically under-equipped Resistance. The stupidity of parking the Republic fleet in orbit around Hosnian Prime shows clearly here because it really was the shot from Starkiller Base that decapitated the Republic. Odds are that the First Order builds its ships big and impractical in order to look more powerful than they really are. They are trying to surpass the image of the Empire after all.
  • The Dreadnought's primary function was planetary assault, not front-line combat. Those autocannons are great for taking out ground bases (even with planetary shielding) and large cruisers, but useless otherwise. The old rebel tactic of hiding behind a ground-based shield as they did at Hoth was rendered useless.
  • They're only winning because the dealt a seemingly-crippling blow to the only nation on a comparable level to them with a superweapon. As for the Dreadnought, it seems to be a Siege weapon first and foremost. Those cannon shots utterly annihilated what was left of the Resistance base, likely far, far faster than Star Destroyers could do on their own. But siege tech tends to lean heavily on support from other forces to protect it from direct assaults.
  • K, where was it? Support from other forces, I mean. Where's the swarm of TIE-fighters ready to shoot anything that looks funny at it, medium-size gunboats, minefields, whatever? Mind you, this in no way excuses the lack of a billion point-defence guns all over the dreadnought itself, just exacerbates it. Surpass the image of Empire and all that nonsense, sure, but they're still a military. They have to have the basic grasp of fleet composition, don't they?
    • The rest of the fleet Hux brought was the support. Or would have been, if Hux and his officers were better at their jobs. As for the fighters, yeah they should have been launched earlier. Canady says as much when Hux calls him.
    • The First Order really seems to put emphasis on fanatic devotion to the cause, while the Empire's officers seemed to bank more on professionalism and experience. Compare how long it took Hux to deploy any kind of screen at all (he, or possibly Snoke, insists on having his Star Destroyers trail obediently behind his most valuable capital ships instead of having them deployed to actually protect those valuable capital ships) to how quickly the Imperials (caught completely flat-footed) were able to scramble their defenses at Scarif. Overall, the First Order's tacticians seem more interested in making grand entrances than they are in doing any solid tactical planning, hence why Poe was able to destroy the Dreadnought with such a half-cocked plan.
    • Wouldn't these be the exact same people, or at least those trained by them? FO is a direct successor to the Empire, why would its military doctrine degrade so much in just a few decades?
    • With all the key leadership dead, it's not that surprising that their successors would try to bring in different ideas and doctrines.
    • Oh boy this one is a fun one to address because there's actually a canon answer as to where those people are and why the First Order sucks so bad despite being trained by the Empires best. The original plan made by the Emperor was to select specific officers with the best skills in certain tasks and have them take a chunk of the Empire's fleet and personnel into the unknown regions to conscript, breed, and train a new army to take back the Empire (assuming that the Emperors contingency plan of destroying everything cool the Empire had so nobody else could take it failed) which was a decent plan. But then having bought into the glory of the empire and been indoctrinated into its ways the children and grandchildren those officers brought along to become the new commanders overthrew the old guard. Hux had Phasma murder his dad so he could take over part of the operation and other parts of the order fell into these inexperienced dogmatic gloryhound idiots who didn't understand the faults of the Empire. As a result the First Order is being lead by a bunch of half trained zealots who think the Empire was perfect and take any questioning of its ways as an affront, and space zombie wizard Hugh Hefner in his golden bath robe. The remaining old guard members are commanders of individual ships and all too aware of this but lacking the power or clout to do anything about it, incidentally like the Dreadnought commander who knew they should have immediately scrambled fighters.

Cloaking Technology

• The plan of escaping in the cloaked escape pods brings up some major questions. If the First Order has the ability to scan for cloaked ships, why don't they use it even in cases where they don't suspect their enemy is using them? Wouldn't it make sense to scan for them anyway just to be safe? Second of all, what's the point of cloaking technology if there are scans that can detect the ships that use it?
  • Perhaps DJ told them not just what to look for but how to look. If he can crack open the FO defences so easily, it makes sense he can do that with the Resistance as well, or he had some "Resistance cloaking field frequency" in his magic pouch that allowed the FO to adjust their scanners just right.
  • There's "Master Codebreaker" (and it's left ambiguous as to whether DJ really is one, as his only feats are unlocking a door that R2 does in every film and sabotaging some FO tech without prior knowledge of it, but physical access) and there's "remotely see through cloaking technology on multiple military ships that he'd never set foot on at once, which apparently no one on a fleet of shipment could do." The point of the plot point is "DJ betrays the Resistance," Star Wars rarely bothers with the details.

Battering-Ram Cannon

• So 2 questions about the battering ram cannon:
  • Considering the thing is only about half the size of the walkers, why aren't multiple cannons standard issue on all star destroyers and other capital ships? And why have none of the good guys ever seen one before? Were they just invented a few months before the film takes place or what?
    • It may not be useful on capital ships. That it has to be wheeled up to within line of sight means it has a very limited range, which makes it useless in space. It's useful for breaking down hardened, completely stationary targets, but the long charge time means it'd be next to useless against anything that moves.
    • I didn't mean they'd be mounted to the ships, I mean why don't they have several in the cargo bay with the walkers for when they need to do a ground attack?
    • It's just not practical enough of a weapon to have a bunch of. Alternately, maybe they did have a bunch, but Holdo's ramming destroyed the rest.

  • When Finn is about to crash into it we can already see there's a beam coming out and the heat of it is starting to wreck his ship, however it doesn't actually destroy the door until after he's been knocked out of the way. So does the cannon have to be left on to "warm up" for ~45 seconds before it can actually destroy anything? Seems like a weird design.
    • Apparently it does — which might account for why the good guys have never seen it before. This is the first time the good guys have been in a context where the battering ram cannon would be worth using against them.
    • Could be related to power requirements. The cannon was based on Death Star superlaser technology, which originally (in A New Hope) took hours to recharge, even with the DS 1's massive fusion reactor. Even accounting for technological advances such as miniaturization and the DS 2's minutes-long recharge process, it may have taken a longer time for the siege cannon's capacitors to reach full charge since it wasn't wired into a moon-sized doomsday machine. The gigantic tanks pulling it might have been partly huge battery arrays intended to provide power, but only able to do so up to a certain rate with the cables running between them and the cannon.
• I actually have a third question: why doesn't Finn try shooting the cannon's apeture? Yes his guns start to melt eventually but he should have time to get off a few shots first.
  • Probably wouldn't have done much of anything to a weapon of that size. It'd be like firing a handgun at a cannon.
    • The one hope he'd have would be to somehow damage the focusing lens and fragment the beam. If he could pull that off, then the misaligned laser would fire against the inside of the aperture and the weapon would end up destroying itself. That said, doing so with a comparatively weak blaster cannon whose own aperture was in the process of melting down would be a tall order indeed. He would have had a better chance at catastrophic damage had his suicide run succeeded.
• I honestly think the bigger is why are they still using towed artillery when Spaceships exist. Film./Attack Of The Clones Feature the Republic using what amount to a Turbolaser (standard armament for any capital ship in Star Wars) on legs. But apparently the First Order hired engineers too dumb to figure how to slap legs or replusorlifts onto the siege cannon. When you that kind of tech there is no excuse for having towed artillery at all.
  • There's an answer to this one, too. The Empire deliberately kept everyone but itself as weak as it could in order to be able to maintain control and focused on massive firepower rather than really building anything new. What research it was doing was kept secret on remote facilities and so couldn't be easily accessed or even known about (note that the Rebel Alliance nearly disintegrated the second they learned about the Death Star, years after it was shown under construction at the end of Revenge of the Sith). That's why they have towed artillery; people are just ignorant about warfare in this era. As for why they used it here? Their fleet just got decimated and they simply have no orbital bombardment capabilities, but want to end the Resistance right away.

Where the transports from the last film?

The Force Awakens had the Resistance using transports that had weapons shields and hyperdrives. The closest they get to appearing in this movie is the shuttle Finn and Rose use the last movie had multiple transports featured so where are they? We never get an answer for where they went but they were in the movie, Holdo's plan would have made sense.

How exactly does cloaking work in the Star Wars universe?

• So I'm confused about how cloaking works. From what we see it seems to work like real life stealth planes i.e the ships can't be detected by radar and the like but are still visible. However, if this is true it doesn't seem like they would be very useful in helping the transports escape if anyone on the First Order ships happened to look out the window in the general direction they were going they would see them. And indeed no-one in the First Order learns about the transports until DJ suggests they run a de-cloaking scan, all of which implies cloaking actually does make the ships invisible. So are they really invisible in-universe and just made visible for the benefit of the audience? That would make the most sense to me.
  • Raddus was far enough from the First Order fleet pursuing her that their turbolasers were ineffective against her shields, which means there's a considerable amount of distance involved. Keep in mind the Hubble orbits the Earth at an altitude of about 340 miles — a pretty insignificant distance astronomically speaking — and although it is visible to the naked eye, it's so far away that it's just another speck of light in the night sky and you have to know where to look to spot it in the first place. The First Order fleet is a considerably greater distance from the transports. All an observer would have to go by is light off the hull, or perhaps the transports' visible engine emissions, and they would also have to be looking in the exact right spot to detect either. TL;DR: Space is big and transports are tiny.

What's with those speeders on Crait

• Why are the seemingly the only vehicles in the galaxy (besides the walkers) that can't fly or at least hover? This only makes sense if they are centuries old or older, in which case how do the characters know how to pilot them?
  • They do hover, just not as well as newer speeders that are in better shape. Being designed differently from speeders seen in other movies doesn't mean they must be centuries old, it just means whoever built them took a different design approach. They may have been built with deliberately under-powered repulsors and a ski to make up for it as a fuel- or cost-saving measure. "Sure, it's not as flashy as the new XP-38, but it's much cheaper!"
  • Regarding how do the characters know how to pilot them, there's no reason to assume they use radically different control schemes from any other speeder. Just about any automobile on the road today has controls similar enough to all the others for a new driver to figure them out in a few seconds, despite big differences in manufacturing, size, and handling characteristics. Besides, in Star Wars knowing how to pilot a low-budget air-speeder like the T-16 is good enough to let you fly high-performance X-wings with no additional training.

Laser axes

• As if the lightsaber-resistant mace wasn't enough, why would the First Order need those things? What purpose could they possibly serve? Even if some mental case decided they needed a dedicated execution weapon, I'm sure they'd come up with something more practical and less messy. Or was Phasma going to then grab Finn's head by the hair and show it to everyone? Or put it on a (laser) spike?
  • Pointless too as her explanation for using it is that she wants to make his death hurt - a blaster is going to hurt a heck of a lot more than a tidy decapitation will.
  • Hurt is different than pain. I think she wanted to make the death as humiliating as possible, giving them enough time to stew in their own fear and die mull over how their heads were going to be put on a (laser) spike. Secondly, The First Order (and the Imperials before them) have always been more interested in style over functionality. Infamously so. Yes, "laser axes" are impractical and virtually worthless, but it's still perfectly in character for them.

Where did the TIE Bombers go?

• So in "The Empire Strikes Back" and other media like "Rebels" we are shown that TIE Bombers were starfighters that the Empire deployed against the Rebellion. Thirty years have passed and.....nothing?!? The First Order never invested in creating a successor to this? TIE Defenders were also able to fit this role in the era of the Empire, and they were more advanced than bombers while still belonging to the Imperial Navy. The whole point of bombers was to destroy bases and transports. Even if you want to argue that these factions grew to rely on massive weapons like Death Stars, they still used starfighters and bombers to attack smaller targets. The implication we are supposed to draw is that the First Order didn't think that investing in bombers was worthwhile. Which is just outrageous! They could have been very effective in destroying the engine systems of the Raddus and not giving it the chance to speed away. Why aren't bombers a tool that the First Order would want? Why wouldn't they have them? They are explicitly removed, similar to how Y-Wings don't exist for the Resistance, for even fewer reasons. As in none.
  • Maybe Hux? He’s been shown a number of times to have a chip on his shoulder and is something of a glory hound. Canady showed up Hux by screening the fighters against Poe, and then Snoke shows up to abuse the git with the Force, and so Hux is pissed and wants to make up the ‘slight’ in his eyes. To that end, he wants HIS ship to be the one that snuffs out the Resistance, and probably wants to be the guy who pushes the button as well, to soothe his pride. So, when his subordinates ask why they don’t hop in their Defenders to blow up the Raddus, Hux demotes them and doubles down on his decision, wasted time be damned. Granted, this doesn’t explain why Snoke or Kylo Ren don’t simply go over Hux’s head and give the go ahead to the Defenders (or even the Fighters) to swarm the Raddus and escorts, but...yeah...

Why is Phasma the only person with blaster-proof armor?

• Even if the Unobtanium required to make it is super rare/expensive, there's no way an entire interstellar empire would only be able to procure enough for one suit of armor.
  • The material that made Phasma's armor blasterproof was a Chromium polish, so the whole suit wasn't made of the stuff. And Chromium was mostly used to make hyperdrives, so every suit of armor made from it was probably at least one ship that could no longer enter hyper space.

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