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My biggest problem with the movie was using the hyperdrive as a weapon. Why couldn't that have been used on the first, second or third deathstar?

by plopz 9y ago

pavel_lishin 9y ago
I had a hypothesis: the damage done by a ship in hyperdrive doesn't scale linearly with mass. Anything under a given threshhold is basically a mosquito bite, and large capital ships such as the one used in The Last Jedi are too expensive and valuable to be used in such ways.
- dgritsko 9y ago
  Counterpoint: Why not slap some hyperdrives on an asteroid? Or otherwise accelerate a lot of (cheap and already widely available) mass. Regardless, I really enjoyed this scene because it falls well within the jurisdiction of the Rule of Cool (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RuleOfCool http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RuleOfCool)
  - da_chicken 9y ago
    Well, we don't really know how hyperdrive works. Maybe there's a reason only starships are capable of hyperdrive. Maybe an asteroid would just break up immediately. Maybe there's a discontinuity between hyperspace and realspace so that they're not always 1:1. In other words, maybe it's extremely easy to miss or otherwise be unable to hit. The scene in TLJ is presented as a go-for-broke situation, after all. Maybe it's something that only works over extremely short ranges because deflector screens will bounce the attacking or defending ships out of the way.
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- arielweisberg 9y ago
  Those ships are expensive because their ships. Complex redundant systems pieced together bit by bit by hand. Throwing a hyperdrive on whatever mass you have handy is a whole different ball game. Unless the hyperdrive itself represents the dominant cost it should be at least two orders of magnitude cheaper going by the cost of ordnance vs the cost of a warship. And even one order of magnitude would be enough. War is about economics as much as it is about winning battles. If you can force them to build ships that you can destroy at 1/10th the cost with no loss of life (people are a resource /Negan) you are doing good. Ship to ship combat is not cheap or without risk either. Ships are damaged and lost and in a real war you can lose quite a few of them!
  - pavel_lishin 9y ago
    You bring up good points. Maybe larger ships require larger, more expensive hyperdrive installations, and are more difficult to install - maybe it's not just a matter of bolting a hyperdrive unit onto something. There might be conduits you have to run all over and throughout the structure, there may be mass and balance concerns, etc. I don't know enough about the SW universe to really back up my hypothesis. (One of the reasons I'm not a huge fan of the SW universe as a playground for the mind is that it's fairly inconsistent, and the Rule of Cool that another user mentioned tends to trump other considerations. In one sense it's freeing, and in another sense, any given work set in that universe is free to disregard large portions of previous works.)
teraflop 9y ago
I'll steal a comment from elsewhere [1] that gives a perfectly reasonable justification for this. > A few hypothetical reasons why light speed attacks are not common despite being so effective: > - A capital ship's particle shields can usually tank smaller objects, like fighters, traveling at relativistic speeds. Only very large objects can attain enough kinetic energy to punch through the shields. However... > - ...the size and complexity of the engines required to accelerate an object to light speed increase geometrically with mass. Outfitting a dense asteroid with a hyperdrive system would make for a hideously expensive one-shot missile; it's almost always more practical to invest your year's worth of Mon Cala's GDP in a ship, which has broader sustained applications. > - The calculations for hyperspace jumps to or from gravity wells are incredibly fraught. Because of latency issues and certain limitations of droid cognition, an extremely skilled pilot must be physically onboard to perform the jump; no one wants to waste a pilot like that on a suicide run unless there's no other option. > - Even a skilled pilot is going to find targeting an individual ship very difficult because extreme velocity and distances turns small errors into big misses. The timing is also crucial; in the Star Wars universe, ships enter a hyperspatial dimension shortly after hitting light speed. If Holdo had accelerated too quickly, she would have passed "through" the Supremacy without hitting it; too slowly, and she wouldn't have accumulated enough energy to overwhelm its shields. > Holdo only succeeded because a bunch of factors aligned: she was a good pilot, her target was very close and very wide, she had no nearby allies in the blast radius, she and her ship were expendable, and the math broke her way. [1]: https://fanfare.metafilter.com/10441/Star-Wars-The-Last-Jedi#167147 https://fanfare.metafilter.com/10441/Star-Wars-The-Last-Jedi...
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- voxl 9y ago
  I only think the last reason is actually reasonable. You can argue that all the other small ships that they sacrificed could have also turned tail and gave it a go, even if it was difficult. However, the blast radius part wouldn't make as much sense, because the escape pods were likely fairly close, just at some orthogonal vector. However, this is all besides the point. The real problem is that the hyperdrive weapon was never motivated and it introduces plot holes in past movies.
Chaebixi 9y ago
> My biggest problem with the movie was using the hyperdrive as a weapon. Why couldn't that have been used on the first, second or third deathstar? Or even by the two other captial-ship escorts, which Holdo left to run out of gas and get pointlessly destroyed, so she could save the noble sacrifice scene for herself.

My biggest problem with the movie was using the hyperdrive as a weapon. Why couldn't that have been used on the first, second or third deathstar?

by plopz 9y ago

My biggest problem with the movie was using the hyperdrive as a weapon. Why couldn't that have been used on the first, second or third deathstar?

pavel_lishin 9y ago

I had a hypothesis: the damage done by a ship in hyperdrive doesn't scale linearly with mass. Anything under a given threshhold is basically a mosquito bite, and large capital ships such as the one used in The Last Jedi are too expensive and valuable to be used in such ways.

dgritsko 9y ago
Counterpoint: Why not slap some hyperdrives on an asteroid? Or otherwise accelerate a lot of (cheap and already widely available) mass. Regardless, I really enjoyed this scene because it falls well within the jurisdiction of the Rule of Cool (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RuleOfCool http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RuleOfCool)
- da_chicken 9y ago
  Well, we don't really know how hyperdrive works. Maybe there's a reason only starships are capable of hyperdrive. Maybe an asteroid would just break up immediately. Maybe there's a discontinuity between hyperspace and realspace so that they're not always 1:1. In other words, maybe it's extremely easy to miss or otherwise be unable to hit. The scene in TLJ is presented as a go-for-broke situation, after all. Maybe it's something that only works over extremely short ranges because deflector screens will bounce the attacking or defending ships out of the way.
  - deleted 9y ago
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arielweisberg 9y ago
Those ships are expensive because their ships. Complex redundant systems pieced together bit by bit by hand. Throwing a hyperdrive on whatever mass you have handy is a whole different ball game. Unless the hyperdrive itself represents the dominant cost it should be at least two orders of magnitude cheaper going by the cost of ordnance vs the cost of a warship. And even one order of magnitude would be enough. War is about economics as much as it is about winning battles. If you can force them to build ships that you can destroy at 1/10th the cost with no loss of life (people are a resource /Negan) you are doing good. Ship to ship combat is not cheap or without risk either. Ships are damaged and lost and in a real war you can lose quite a few of them!
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  You bring up good points. Maybe larger ships require larger, more expensive hyperdrive installations, and are more difficult to install - maybe it's not just a matter of bolting a hyperdrive unit onto something. There might be conduits you have to run all over and throughout the structure, there may be mass and balance concerns, etc. I don't know enough about the SW universe to really back up my hypothesis. (One of the reasons I'm not a huge fan of the SW universe as a playground for the mind is that it's fairly inconsistent, and the Rule of Cool that another user mentioned tends to trump other considerations. In one sense it's freeing, and in another sense, any given work set in that universe is free to disregard large portions of previous works.)

teraflop 9y ago

I'll steal a comment from elsewhere [1] that gives a perfectly reasonable justification for this. > A few hypothetical reasons why light speed attacks are not common despite being so effective: > - A capital ship's particle shields can usually tank smaller objects, like fighters, traveling at relativistic speeds. Only very large objects can attain enough kinetic energy to punch through the shields. However... > - ...the size and complexity of the engines required to accelerate an object to light speed increase geometrically with mass. Outfitting a dense asteroid with a hyperdrive system would make for a hideously expensive one-shot missile; it's almost always more practical to invest your year's worth of Mon Cala's GDP in a ship, which has broader sustained applications. > - The calculations for hyperspace jumps to or from gravity wells are incredibly fraught. Because of latency issues and certain limitations of droid cognition, an extremely skilled pilot must be physically onboard to perform the jump; no one wants to waste a pilot like that on a suicide run unless there's no other option. > - Even a skilled pilot is going to find targeting an individual ship very difficult because extreme velocity and distances turns small errors into big misses. The timing is also crucial; in the Star Wars universe, ships enter a hyperspatial dimension shortly after hitting light speed. If Holdo had accelerated too quickly, she would have passed "through" the Supremacy without hitting it; too slowly, and she wouldn't have accumulated enough energy to overwhelm its shields. > Holdo only succeeded because a bunch of factors aligned: she was a good pilot, her target was very close and very wide, she had no nearby allies in the blast radius, she and her ship were expendable, and the math broke her way. [1]: https://fanfare.metafilter.com/10441/Star-Wars-The-Last-Jedi#167147 https://fanfare.metafilter.com/10441/Star-Wars-The-Last-Jedi...

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voxl 9y ago
I only think the last reason is actually reasonable. You can argue that all the other small ships that they sacrificed could have also turned tail and gave it a go, even if it was difficult. However, the blast radius part wouldn't make as much sense, because the escape pods were likely fairly close, just at some orthogonal vector. However, this is all besides the point. The real problem is that the hyperdrive weapon was never motivated and it introduces plot holes in past movies.

Chaebixi 9y ago

> My biggest problem with the movie was using the hyperdrive as a weapon. Why couldn't that have been used on the first, second or third deathstar? Or even by the two other captial-ship escorts, which Holdo left to run out of gas and get pointlessly destroyed, so she could save the noble sacrifice scene for herself.