Discussion WhatAnIdiot / StarWars

Shadows of the Empire was declared non canon after the Disney acquisition, so in canon, none of those events took place.

Still the poster got how long the Time Skip was wrong and the concept main characters doing other things related to the rebellion at the time is not out of the question and using Legends as a counter-argument is valid in my book so I am keeping it.

I don't think using Legends is valid, period.

There are a few mistakes here, I´d say. For example suggesting Padme should have thought about an abortion, whole the problem was NOT her pregnancy but only her relationship with Anakin.

Or that it says Windu was in a position where he could have killed Palpatine before Anakin arrived. However Palpatine was at no point defenseless.

There is also one claiming that the heroes should have went straight for Tatooine at the end of the movie when they wanted to Han from Jabba and says they apparently a whole year before thinking of this when 1. the Time Skip between Episodes 5 & 6 was only six months and 2. Shadows Of Empire shows takes place between those two films showing that part of the reason it so was Boba Fett was constanly being attacked by other bounty hunters and so It took him nearly six months to finally deliver Han to Jabba and the heroes had other things going on at the same time (i.e. Xizor's repeated assaination attempts on Luke and the Theft of the Death Star II plans.)

Uh, yeah. That's bad.

The term is Sith or dark side user. Jedi are a different kind :P

Yeah, regardless if the assassination worked, the bounty hunter was expected to be captured and the clone army found. At least, that seems to have been the plan in hindsight.

Yeah... my only issue is I admittedly don't remember the movie that well, and I might be giving it more credit than it deserves.

Palpatine wanting the assassination to be botched feels like a Gambit Roulette, honesty. Jango didn't tell Zam to screw up an assassination, he gave her materials and told her to kill Padme. If he wanted to fake an assassination attempt so they'd follow him, he still could've done that himself and done it in much easier ways like deliberately missing Padme with the Kaminoan saberdart. Given how quickly Jango tries to escape after Obi-Wan meets him in person, and trying to kill him later on, Obi-Wan finding the clone army might've not been part of Sidious's plan but just an inconvenience he quickly flipped to help him anyway.

Yeah, looking back it's more Xanatos Gambit. If Padme dies, great. The obstacle in his path to passing the military act is gone and Anakin will be pissed. If she lives, then they'll follow the breadcrumbs and find the clones.

So not dumb on his part, but dumb on everyone else's.

Also, any reason why the last Attack Of The Clones example is there? That's not What An Idiot, it's complaining about (admittedly awful) writing and directing. I feel like calling What An Idiot for someone having feelings they can't control just doesn't make sense.

I think it's not about their feelings, but what they did with it. They had so many other options than get married.

The Rebels have no place to manoeuvre. They are stuck behind the energy shield (which isn't that big, given how quickly those slow, lumbering walkers managed to arrive). The fact that they detected the Imperials does not negate the orbital superiority, it merely made letting the Imperials have it while they hid behind the shield the best option because they didn't have their transports ready yet and not having the shield up meant the Imperials could shoot them with impunity. Any ship that tried to fly along the surface of the planet to escape the Imperials would not have the energy shield to protect them, and thus the Imperials could just shoot them as they can't use the planet as cover.

Meanwhile, the Rebels could only open the shield for brief periods, otherwise the Imperials would just shoot their now unshielded base, which is why they only sent out the transports and their escorts one at a time. And the longer they stay out, the more opportunities the Imperials have to run them down. Star Destroyers may not be manoeuvrable, but they have impressive linear acceleration, given how they could run down the Millennium Falcon, so any transport that tried to run in a different direction could be chased down while they were calculating the jump to hyperspace. At least with the "run straight at them" tactic, they had that massive ion cannon to cover them, making it the least sucky of many bad options.

This looks again like a "I don't agree" debate. As with other such discussions, I'll have to support the re-addition of the entry unless someone can demonstrate how it it factually inaccurate.

Again, What An Idiot is about solutions that should be obvious given the information and resources available to the characters in the story. If one really has to play Devil's advocate here, I'd say that the Star Destroyers could have moved to intercept any of the Rebel transports, so it was necessary to run them through the blockade in order to bring the Imperial ships within the firing arc of the ion cannon.

One might as well ask where the Rebel fleet was and why it couldn't have fought a space battle to give cover to the transports. Again, that's not the point.

My main issue with this one is that it assumes the presence of any kind of ground troops on those transports, when there's no evidence of them being present beyond the transports themselves. Its nonsense to assume the transports have any troops on them without seeing any in the first place.

But the issue is, what is the point of having GR-75 medium transports with the fleet during the space battle? They are not exactly warships. They are used as transports to bring ground combat elements to the battlefront. If they didn't have ground combat elements (i.e. vehicles, turrets, and soldiers), why would they be with the fleet in the first place? Even if there is no evidence, it would still be very likely that they did carry ground battle stuff.

These pages record opinions. That one disagrees does not make an opinion suddenly disappear. So no, Zaptech, you will need a better argument than that to justify the entry's removal.

My issue with the entry is that it is logically flawed. "X should have used Y in Z manner" is flawed when X is never shown to even have Y on hand in the first place.

It might be better if the entry was rewritten to reflect that the transports are out of place instead of the Rebels not using something they don't have. Like:

You'd Expect: The Rebels would bring reinforcements on the transports to help Han and Leia's team on the ground.
Instead: The transports don't actually bring any troops and instead simply hang around during the battle, making them Star Destroyer and Death Star II bait.

This version would keep the point (that the Rebels didn't use their troops) while actually making sense (the Rebels not bringing troops as opposed to them not using troops that they never brought).

Also, Hoth didn't have a planetary shield, it just had a shield around the base. Given that the stolen shuttle needs them to turn off the shield on Endor just to land anywhere, it's extremely likely that the Rebels couldn't land anything on the planet until the shield was down.

But wouldn't a slow moving object be able to get through the shield though? A transport's not as fast a fighter or a bomber.

Also, Vader said on the Hoth base's shield, "Make ready to land our troops beyond their energy field...". I'm sure transports could get through a shield, planetary or base sized.

What does speed have to do with shields in Star Wars? This isn't Dune.

I was talking about energy shields.

Energy shields reflect or stop laser blasts.

Energy shields can be passed through by slow moving objects, like people or even a slow moving vehicle.

... gonna need you to cite a source there.

As it was said before: it was never stated that the Rebels brought any ground troops. Frankly why they should've? They all thought the infiltration was a secret plan, and by the time the fleet arrived they expected the shield generator already destroyed, so there would've had been no targets left on the moon. Why they brought the transports then? We don't know. So yeah, Trope Licious, you might assume, that they brought them, because they had ground troops. But someoneelse can assume e.g. that they were there to shield the other ships, and neither of you would be wrong, because both are possible.

Also even if there were ground troops on those ships...yeah sure the fleet of Star Destroyers would've totally allowed them to land...

@Larkman Energy shields do in fact let slow moving objects to pass through. See the Battle of Naboo, where the droids easily passed through the gungan army's shield, and TCW Season 5 episode 2 "War on Two Fronts", where the Jedi specifically train a group of rebels to exploit this weakness.

Gungan shields are ray shields. They let any objects through. They're only designed to deflect blaster bolts.

But wouldn't a slow moving object be able to get through the shield though? A transport's not as fast a fighter or a bomber.

Again: Han's own ship needed them to shut off the shield before they could land, and it wasn't moving very fast at all.

Also, Vader said on the Hoth base's shield, "Make ready to land our troops beyond their energy field...". I'm sure transports could get through a shield, planetary or base sized.

Again: Hoth's shield was only around the base itself. The shield on Endor was apparently a hell of a lot bigger — possibly even the whole planet. If you could just land outside the shield and walk in, the Rebels wouldn't have needed to bother with stealing a shuttle and getting the passcode.

Not to mention it's not nearly as easy as you seem to think it is to land a force of troops on a planet that someone else is actively defending. You think the Imperial Fleet is just going to let it go past? Also, how is Han supposed to tell them that it's needed when, as Lando points out, the Empire is jamming their transmissions.

So to recap: A. We don't know they have any troops at all;
B. The evidence of the movie suggests they can't land anywhere near the shield generator without the planetary shield being shut off;
C. Han has no way to tell them they need help or coordinate with them;
D. Even if the shield works the way you do, it took Han and his group several hours at least to get to the shield generator; by the time the backup arrived, the fight would be well over;
E. If the Empire sees one of the Rebel troop transports heading toward the planet, they're going to shoot it down.

There was a Star Wars Battlefront game for the PSP called Renegade Squadron, where the titular squadron did go down to the surface during the battle, even when the shield was still up, to try and help Han's team out.

@Larkman Even if there's non-Legends (ie still canon) material on the Gungan ray shields being specifically designed that way, there're still several TCW examples of energy shields being passed through by slow moving objects and people. However that doesn't even really matter, because it's unlikely that a spaceship could slow down that much, and even if it could it would be immediately picked off by enemy ships. So yeah, the bypassability of the shields is irrelevant.
@Trope Licious in case you were living in a cave for the past three months: all EU has been declared non-canon. Furthermore, games had always been dubious canon even prior to that, especially when it came to games taking place during the movies. In other words: that didn't happen!

@Werebazs I heard about the EU (a lot of it, they did say they would pull some stuff from it, though) being declared non-canon. I'm just stating of how the Rebel strategy of Endor could still technically be counted as a What An Idiot.

Yeah, well technically bringing any ground troops at all, into a battle everyone expects to take place exclusively in space, can also be counted as an What An Idiot...
BTW with the EU wiped away do we even know how much armour and weapons those transports had? Because if there's no canon source on that, there's really no basis for questioning what they were doing there.

I'm just stating that the point is, even in a game that isn't really considered canon (Renegade Squadron), and even if there isn't a canon source, the Rebels should've still been able to land their GR-75 medium transports, which likely was holding some ground combat elements, beyond the planetary shield, and attempt to help Han out. Hence, the What An Idiot.

Unless the planetary shield is a combination ray and particle shield, which wouldn't be breachable by troops. Given the shield on the Death Star was definitely a combination shield, it's highly unlikely.

But then again, even in the now likely non-canon Star Wars Battlefront video game, Renegade Squadron, how do explain a story mode level on Endor, that takes place DURING the Battle of Endor, where the titular squadron tries to help Han out, if they couldn't get through the shield?

@Trope Licious you're ignoring one crucial detail: How were they supposed to land those transports in the first place? It's not like they had a free pass to the moon, when there was an entire fleet of Star Destroyers and fighter-bombers standing between them. Remember, the only reason they made it out of Hoth, was because the planetary ion-canon temporarly disabled the Star Destroyers. They didn't have that at Endor.
Also, that game is not "likely non-canon", but definitely non-canon. Everything was wiped, not just post-Rot J. The statement specifically said that only the six movies and TCW remain. And how do I explain a story element of a game that never actually happened? Well, how do you explain TFU's Tatooine and Hoth bonus levels? It's non-canon, it NEVER happened. Not even before the Continuity Reboot, because it contradicted the movie, thus was always non-canon.

It also just occured to me, that as far we know, the Rebels might've attempted to land and help Han's group. There's no telling if they did or did not. It was just never stated on-screen, because it was irrelevant to the over-all plot.

@Larkman: As far as we know the reason Han's ship needed the shield lowered was that they were posing as Imperials for an infiltration mission. It would've blown their cover if they tried to slow down to the speed of a walking human (around the max speed which an energy shield won't stop) to pass through it, not to mention it's highly unlikely that a spaceship could slow down that much at all. So merely from that, we really can't draw any assumpions on what that shield was composed of, and whether it would've stopped rebel ground forces or not. That's not even the point here.\

Here's the acid test for What An Idiot moments with respect to the films: Did they have another way of going about the task in question that was clearly in evidence within the films themselves. This means that EU material cannot count. Nobody said anything about the Rebels having access to a ground assault force in ROTJ, nor could they possibly have landed one while half the Imperial fleet was surrounding Endor.

That's pretty nonsensical, honestly. It's saying the characters should've done something that they realistically probably couldn't do, and depends on the idea that fixing a 50 year old R2 unit that was hit by a blaster while under fire is easier than busting open a door.

I know we're not supposed to pull things because we "don't agree" but that's like saying "Han should've made a forcefield with his mind and protected everyone." It's just not feasible.

Agreed. Kill it.

That was exactly the case.