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The Death Star and the Final Trench Run (2017)
- smdyc1 3y agoInteresting details here. I too have always thought the trench run took place in the equatorial trench. I thought they were just going so fast it seemed narrower.
- JKCalhoun 3y agoEven within the article it is pointed out that the the computer graphics got the Deathstar dish in the wrong location. And I just assumed they got the trench wrong too, ha ha.
- nonrandomstring 3y ago> Why have so many of us been confused for so many years? I have a few ideas on that Perhaps the strongest influence (?): Most video games from the Atari 2600 version in '83 onwards have a sequence where you enter the final run into the equatorial trench.
- arethuza 3y agoI played the arcade version of Atari Star Wars far too much in '83 & '84 and for some reason I never thought it was the equatorial trench.
- nonrandomstring 3y agoIt's possible I have a false memory based on my _belief_ that it's the equator trench and that there's a cut scene or transition in both the DOS version of tar Wars: X-Wing and Star Wars: Attack on the Death Star (1991) which are the ones I played most. Anyone remember for sure?
- deaddodo 3y agoYouTube has things called "let's plays"/"longplays". For DOS Star Wings: X-Wing, I scrubbed multiple videos and didn't see anything about the trenchrun: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL480EC9A01E8C50F7 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL480EC9A01E8C50F7 There is no Attack on the Death Star PC videos that I could find. I did find Rebel Assault: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FX3B8yC38U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FX3B8yC38U Which almost explicitly avoids the entire conversation by starting at the trench entry. I found an x68000 version of "Attack on the Death Star" (maybe the same, maybe different) and it does the same as the previous, only showing the surface turret battle and then directly into the trench: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUzqbVRUxAE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUzqbVRUxAE It would appear that most games of the era were either unsure, or aware that it wasn't the hangar bay trench.
- thom 3y agoYou fly _towards_ that in the same way they do in the film (and away from it when you die), but it cuts to you in a trench so there's plausible deniability here.
- JKCalhoun 3y agoI assume the reason we got it wrong is because the equatorial trench is the only one visible to the audience at all scales. Sure, there could be additional trenches on the surface of the Deathstar — like the seeming randomness of the digits of pi, there might even be a close approximation of the Taj Mahal somewhere on the surface — but we go with what we see, not so much what we imagine.
- namaria 3y agoThe fact that dominant common sense was so wrong about such a verifiable and obvious tidbit makes me less prone to getting emotional when people fail to understand basic biology or physics in everyday life.
- jl6 3y agoSeems more Mandela Effect than scientific misunderstanding.
- 3327 3y ago[dead]
- hef19898 3y agoNow I have I have to read the West End Games sourcebook about the Deathstar and Episode 4 when I'm back home to check what those two have to say!
- tambourine_man 3y agoPlease do and leave the comment here
- hef19898 3y agoAbsolutely will! That's gonna take a couple of hours so.
- hef19898 3y agoSo, just finished reading those books. Surprsingly, neither one (Galaxy Guide 1: A New Hope nor the Deathstar source book) have anything to say about which trench was attacked during the Battle of Yavin. The Deathstar sourcebook gives us some, propably not canon anymore, details about the Deathstar, e.g. it being divided into 24 sections, 12 per hemisphere, that there are the equatorial, and mid-hemisphere (one each north and south) and polar trenches (again, one each north and south) running parallel to the equator. Or there being trenches running between those 12 sections per hemisphere. But nothing about which trench was attacked. Maybe the Alliance and the New Republic have yet to de-classify that information.
- pjc50 3y agoObviously it didn't take place in either of those: the Death Star is not real, and the trench run was filmed in a (number of?) scale model sets. That's an even more annoying answer, but I think it lets us pull a more interesting lesson out of this than a factoid which nerds are going to trump each other with: how "direction" in the filmmaking sense and "misdirection" in the magic sense are related. We see a series of shots from a variety of angles and follow the action from shot to shot - despite the shots not taking place at the same time or even necessarily the same place.
- liotier 3y agoWatch a movie car chase set in a city you know ! For example, the Ronin car chase in Paris jumps from street to street all over the region in an entirely nonsensical way - but a person who doesn't know Paris won't mind at all, and it does look very Parisian... The rest of us just has to suspend disbelief !
- gvurrdon 3y agoThe Morse/Lewis/Endeavour programmes often show that sort of thing, with the characters walking through various scenic areas of central Oxford which aren't directly connected.
- shellac 3y agoYou're never more than a couple of corners away from the Covered Market in Oxford-land.
- gvurrdon 3y agoI recall the Covered Market becoming a bus station in one Endeavour episode.
- earthboundkid 3y agoI lived in a small town in Japan, and experienced this for a movie shot there. They would just bounce from downtown to the heights in a second!
- buro9 3y agoI offer a third assumption... I believed it to be a trench parallel to the equatorial. I knew the equatorial was hangars, but I was seduced by the shots in thinking that these were East-West trenches. Goes to show how bad assumptions can be.
- KingOfCoders 3y agoFunny, it never occured to me that the equatorial trench could be the trench. Perhaps when I watched the films at release and later I didn't have people to talk about it (no one was interested, my growing up in the 70s and 80s seems totally different from kids in the US), so there was no group think? Not sure. To me the equatorial trench and the trench run trench always were two seperate things. Also like, the trench run trench ends in the exhaust vent (?) while the equatorial trench seems to go all around without end?
- arethuza 3y ago"Also like, the trench run trench ends in the exhaust vent (?) while the equatorial trench seems to go all around without end?" That probably explains my understanding that it wasn't the equatorial trench...
- derbOac 3y agoI had the same thoughts. In fact, by showing the picture of the death star with the equatorial trench displayed so prominently the essay itself sort of primes you to make an error you might not have otherwise made. But the whole thing was explained in the movie as the essay points out. The animation rotating as is pointed out kind of emphasized that the trench was not the equatorial trench. That's how I remembered it. It was always in my head as a sort of Achilles heel or the culvert in Helms Deep, an important but easily overlooked topological detail.
- seanhunter 3y agoDoesn't the holographic map they show in the briefing show the trench they go down to bomb it running north/south? It's been a while since I watched the film. Oh nevermind it says that in the article.
- coldtea 3y ago>Doesn't the holographic map they show in the briefing show the trench they go down to bomb it running north/south? Does it matter when approaching from space? They could just as well meant an equatorial run as far as a spaceship pilot is concerned. Would the Death Star even keep a consistent orientation while travelling in space?
- poulsbohemian 3y agoI wouldn’t call myself a serious star wars fan, but my first reaction after the premise was established was “well in the briefing they told us where the trench is and so we know the fighters will come out of the equator”. Now im thinking all this really tells us is thank goodness Luke was listening during the briefing and was on the mission and not the audience or else we’d still have a Death Star.
- JoeAltmaier 3y agoDidn't we get a 3D map of the deathstar with the exhaust vent flagged? So we know where the trench is...
- drfuchs 3y agoSheeple! The Death Star is flat!
- earthboundkid 3y agoYeah, it’s a matte painting.
- sersi 3y agoWeird, I'm not a big star wars fan but when I first watched it as a kid, the 3d map scene impressed me a lot and I always thought the trench was longitudinal because of this.
- layer8 3y agoThe dish position bothered me though.
- sersi 3y agooh yeah, I distinctly remember being confused by that as a kid.
- racl101 3y agoNot a big fan of the lore but I am a fan of the early production techniques and the feats that ILM pulled off on those first 3 movies were truly impressive. Also loved the design of those ships: the falcon, the tie fighter, the imperial shuttle, the slave 1. All of those were incredible.
- EB-Barrington 3y ago[dead]
- GuB-42 3y agoThere is also that Star Wars is quite loose in its narrative, requiring a significant amount of suspension of disbelief. Star Wars, if you look at it closely, has many inconsistencies, and it is rather shallow. But it does a great job at letting our minds fill in the gaps. The trench run is, I think, an unwanted result of that. It is almost set up as if they want us to believe that the final trench run happens at the equator, so that's what we believe, because we have been trained for the entire movie to ignore small details and think big. This is in contrast to films like, for example, Inception, that clearly encourages the audience to look at every little detail.
- davidw 3y ago> Star Wars is quite loose in its narrative, requiring a significant amount of suspension of disbelief "Hey, kid, it ain't that kind of movie"
- ethbr1 3y agoThe maddening thing is that it is that kind of movie in many places. It has rules, it has structure, it has proposed reasons that things work the way they do. People wouldn't be nearly as obsessed about Star Wars if it were all just handwavey reasoning. One reason, for all it's flaws, Last Jedi is my favorite new film. It simultaneously admits (through character dialog) that "there are rules" and "there are egregiously no rules".
- throw_m239339 3y ago> One reason, for all it's flaws, Last Jedi is my favorite new film. It simultaneously admits (through character dialog) that "there are rules" and "there are egregiously no rules". To each of their own, the meta in the Last Jedi is precisely why I hated that movie. Too many times it was the director speaking directly to the audience, in particular "the fans". This is simply not why I watch Star Wars. It also plagiarized a Battle Star Galactica episode a bit too much, and who the hell puts an epilogue in the middle of trilogy? Clearly Rian Johnson didn't care about what was going to be next.
- EGreg 3y agoLook, a lot of these sci-fi movies make no sense in space. Especially with the scale of things, and how they could structurally hold together. For example I recently watched the movie "the Creator" and the space-based defense system "NOMAD" was clearly visible from the earth, as if it was maybe 1-3000 feet above. But no, it's in space! Yes, you heard right, it's in space, and you can see its scale in the movie, yet somehow instead of being a tiny dot, it's visible to everyone as it "hovers" over an area. So, they don't even try to make it realistic for people who think scientifically: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hp3P31ap4No https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hp3P31ap4No
- hef19898 3y agoThe main reason I take distance information in Star Trek, and space combat distances in both Star Trek and Wars, not seriously. They had to engage in what is basically hand to hand combat because both ships had to fit on either a TV screen from the 60s or the the cinema. Hence the close, perceived, distance. The only SF series getting that right, potentially as an other way around budget issues, is The Expanse. The just show space combat on the control screens of the engaged ships. Makes more realistic as well.
- regularfry 3y agoThe space combat in Star Wars was explicitly designed to be "spitfires in space". It was all designed from WW2 footage. Working it forwards from the physics doesn't get you there. They were going for a specific dramatic effect so everything that justifies the final look and feel gets retconned into place.
- hotnfresh 3y agoScale’s remarkably consistent in Star Wars. There exist crazy-comprehensive analyses on the Web that check relative sizes of ships and elements of ships (and even things like blaster bolts) against one another in different scenes/shots and against stated sizes in other sources and it’s clear that’s something the SFX crews on (at least) the original trilogy paid tons of attention to, despite how much pain that must have caused, since they were working with physical models.
- tempaway174751 3y agoSentient robots that can only whistle. That's all I've got to say.
- toast0 3y agoCan only whistle or choose to only whistle. They can clearly communicate with other sentient robots, maybe they don't care that much about communicating to humanoids.
- autoexec 3y agoFor some reason that never bothered me, not even when two droids were bickering with each other on tatooine, but battle droids talking and "roger roger"ing to each other bugged me. Nobody in the 70s was asking why they didn't just use wifi, but it seemed so obvious in the new ones.
- gmgmgmgmgm 3y agoStrange they misser that. As a kid when Star Wars came out it was obvious to me and my friends it wssn the equator trench What I missed as a kid was how dumb it was to have to wait for the Death Star to "clear the planet". It's a giant planet destroying laser. If the planet is in the way you blow it up. Then blow up the moon, assuming blowing up the planet didn't take the moon with it.
- cgriswald 3y agoThat’s not really that dumb. The Death Star is powerful enough to blow up an Earth-sized mass of rock, but Yavin Prime is larger than Jupiter. If they could blow it up at all, it might have taken longer to do than just rounding the planet. Or, it might have been impossible to do safely at a range close enough to do it. Additionally, recharging the Death Star takes some time so even if destroying the gas giant was as fast as destroying Alderaan, the rebels might have gained enough time to flee.
- nighthawk454 3y agoPlus, they were really arrogant. Figured it was a sure thing no matter what they did.
- hotnfresh 3y agoThe planet’s a gas giant. Not clear what the superlaser does to such a body. Maybe not enough to harm the moon before the rebels have time to evacuate. Maybe it’d be dangerous to the Death Star, as well.
- LorenPechtel 3y agoYeah. Gas giant = lots and lots of hydrogen. Hit hydrogen hard enough and you can initiate a fusion burn--and while the fusion burn in the sun's core is peaceful enough it's very sensitive to temperature. Supply enough energy at one point and you can make it run fast--and propagate for a while. I rather think firing on a gas giant makes a mighty big boom--Yavin Prime, the rebel base and the Death Star would all die. (Note that I'm talking energy densities far above a normal hydrogen bomb. The temperature/pressure required for a runaway fusion burn in deuterium-tritium is far below that required in plain old H-1.)
- ax3com 3y agoClick bait for all of you too young to have watched this originally in the theaters back in 1977.
- scelerat 3y agoHuh, I never thought too deeply about it, but I also never thought the equatorial band was "the trench."
- nxobject 3y agoAs an aside, it looks like they generated the visualization of the trench run with what looks like analog machinery? Interesting – I was always under the impression that they plotted on a vector display with a PDP-11, and then pointed a camera at that.
- charlieo88 3y agoGreen light saber. Everybody is adding way to much weight on a special effects thing they did just to make things look cool. Enjoy the story, and let it go. Nobody ACTUALLY designed a Death Star that it actually matters where the trench was.
- jimmaswell 3y ago> Well, it’s a longitudinal north-south trench because the movie literally showed us Yeah, that's why I never believed otherwise. Didn't know anyone thought it was the equator.
- rdsnsca 3y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNdb03Hw18M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNdb03Hw18M
- racl101 3y agoI never assumed it was the equator but I did assume it was a line of latitude.
- letqin 3y agoAs it usually goes browsing this site, this was not the news I was expecting today. Having watched that scene a good handful of times, it always felt the trench was not up to scale. Good to know that it's because I was thinking they were in the equatorial trench upon every watch-through.