CmdrWilkens wrote:
That would be stupid. Even a SOP would be intelligent enough to avoid a planet or a moon like battle station. even if your ship is almost lost, you dont want it to be completely destroyed by crushing into a planet or a moon if you build a programm for fleeing. as soulman(EDIT: i wrote wilkins here before, forgive me) said, the impact of a spaceship on a planet would not only kill the ship, but the planet as well. even the most simple system can see a planet and avoid touching it
Well again here's the problem:
1) You are assuming the SOP is computerized rather than the engine techs seeing the bridge being lost and manually jamming the throttles to full
2) SOPs again are designed to minimize the chance of a mechanical fault. In other words if you assume that you have sufered catastrophic damage then you also assume that you neat computer programs won't be able to function properly.
Once more let me repeat, for dire emergencies you trust mechanical systems as little as physically possible.
3) The corollary to that is actually part of point #1, a lot of SOPs detail what the CREW, not the Computer should do. If the Executor's SOP is similair to modern evasion emergency SOPs then the engineers down by the engines simply gunned them, probably assuming that the secondary bridge would attempt to take contol.
Here's my bet for normal emergency (haha) SOP and what happened at Endor:
Catastrophic Emergency SOP:
Asumption 1: Primary control of vessel has been lost
Assumption 2: C&C is currently waiting to be re-established
Conclusion 1: Escape current locaiton to minimize chance of being attacked while unable to effectively respond
Action 1: Thrusters to full
Action 2: Assume control from secondary C&C location
Action 3: Resume course as directed from secondary C&C location
Now at Endor I bet the engineer's jamemd the engines to full and they just misfired before the secondary bridge could react and gain control of the situation. now I include it all as a likely action because in most battles the planets are going to be well away from you and I doubt anybody ever thought to include the prescence of a 900km wide battlestation in their SOPs. Remember these wouldhave been written when the ship was built and reviewed on a regular basis and when directed. Unless Piett ordered a review of their SOP before the battle its likely that nobody thought to change things.[/quote]
I think you make much sense, but here's my $.02:
The destruction of the Executor seems to me to be similar to what happened to the
Kursk when it crashed. In the case of the Executor, could not the explosive loss of their command bridge combined with continued venting of atmosphere from the breach and temporary loss of atitude control be what turned the ship towards the DS? With a hole that big and spreading, it would have spun the ship like a balloon with a slow leak.
I mean, the ship had suffered pretty much a catastrophic hit and was in the middle of emergency procedures. Could it be that internal sensor displays and/or communications were so bad at that time that no one in the engine room knew that the ship was turning? I mean, it isn't being done by the engines, so they shouldn't be aware of it. When they restarted engines and atitude, they wouldn't have been aware of the change in orientation.
This to me is the only plausible explanation for why the Executor turned TOWARDS the Death Star to crash into it head-on. Gravity could have pulled it in, but as stated previously, it would not have turned the ship while it was in a vacuum.
Does this make sense to anyone else?
