StarDestroyer.Net BBS

So, the discussion in the Ep 7 thread about whether or not the First Order's security is better or worse compared to the Empire made me think of a brief example of why I think I agree with the argument that it is worse; that's not to say that the First Order isn't better in other ways, nor a value judgement on the film.

But...

Scenario 1. Rey is imprisoned in the Death Star Detention block from ANH. Can she escape on her own and meet up (presumably by force-instinct) with Han, Finn & party, or does she need to be broken out as Leia did?

Scenario 2. Poe Dameron is imprisoned in the detention block aboard the star destroyer Devastator, crewed similarly, Finn is a stormtrooper on the crew, and looking to rescue him and liberate an assault gunboat (bit of EU there!) to escape in with him.



Link to full scene to refresh your memories.


It seems to me that both escapes would be impossible on board the Death Star which points to greater security in the Empire's detention facilities. Of course, Star Wars Rebels Season One has the infamous counter-example in the pilot episode, where Ezra manages to jump out of his cell and lock two guards in, then walk out, but given that Tarkin threatened to punish Kallus for incompetence, I'm presuming his star destroyer was below the normal standard of competence.

Well, in scenario 1 it requires them to leave a stormtrooper in the cell for Rey to mind trick. Since that did not appear to be the case, I don't know how she'd ever be unlocked in the first place. Even if she wasn't in a restraint chair, as Leia was not, who's going to unlock the door for her? And can she mind trick the what, five or so (counting people shot, it looks like five) guards all at once if she does somehow get out of her cell? Maybe she can (somehow) influence the guy in the corridor to open it up, but then there's the watch officer and three naval troopers she'd have to successful mind trick, all at once. I don't think even a fully trained Jedi could manage that.

Scenario 2, Finn has to bluff his way past the control crew (or start shooting) so it really depends on how much he's trying to plan it, how much access he would have to the system, etc. I think it's a failure there, as well. Unless he can fake a transfer order ahead of time to fool the watch officer, in which case he could just walk out like he did in TFA. But that requires a lot of unknowns so I wouldn't say he could manage it.

Who is doing the interrogating in Scenario 1, Kylo Ren or Vader? If it was Vader, it's unlikely that Rey would spontaneously develop force powers because he'd use the mind probe droid to try and break her rather than the Force.

Either way, given the number of guards IMO she's still better off waiting for rescue than trying to force her way out.

Another big problem is that they are down a member, and someone is going to have to disable the tractor beam in order for them to escape. Would they be able to do that and escape notice? While Obi Wan was able to, he was using the Force to help avoid detection and distract people.

As for Scenario #2, even if they managed to escape with a gunboat, they are going to have issues with the Devastator. Based on what we've seen, I don't see how a single gunboat is going to be able to disable all of the Devastator's turbolasers and escape; there doesn't appear to be a nice giant cavity in the hip to fly through nor does there appear to be any easy-to-destroy weapons. Seriously, does Kylo's ship even have shields? It's pretty pathetic that a single Starfighter was able to disable all of the ship's turbolasers in a single flyby. The Tantive IV didn't even scratch the Devastator, and it presumably had heavier weaponry than what Starfighters typically carried at the time. Did Starfighters receive an exponential increase in firepower between Episode VI and VII or something? We never saw a Starfighter take out a capital ship's weapons like that before (the damage done to the Executor was only done after the entire fleet had focused it's firepower and knocked out the main shields). Also, IIRC the Devastator appeared to have a higher rate of fire than Kylo's ship, which would make dodging more difficult.

Here' a thought:

Maybe their shields were down because they weren't in combat or expecting to be attacked, and they take a certain amount of time to bring up?

If Rey is imprisoned on the Death Star, isn't there a better than even chance Vader either senses her capability with the force, or detects her using her powers untrained? The only other force user she had to contend with in TFA was that jackass Ren.

Highlord Laan wrote:If Rey is imprisoned on the Death Star, isn't there a better than even chance Vader either senses her capability with the force, or detects her using her powers untrained? The only other force user she had to contend with in TFA was that jackass Ren.

He didn't pick up on Leia, so I guess it depends on whether Vader manages to trigger her Awakening or not.

Her chances of handling a match with Vader are... not impressive.

While Vader doesn't pull off a lot of spectacular feats with the Force in the OT, he is decidedly more competent and committed (at least in A New Hope) than Ren.

Plus there's the whole Chosen One thing.

Yeah. Ren's entire schtick is that he wishes he were as badass cooldark as Darth Vader (probably does teenage emo bullshit like painting his bedroom black)... but he isn't. Almost by definition, anything Kylo Ren can do, Vader could do better.

[It was noted by another poster, and I agree, that this was a great way for the Episode VII creative team to get around the fact that any villain they came up with would be compared to Vader, and most likely compared unfavorably. They created a character who was less scary, formidable, and powerful than Vader, and that was the entire point, such that they were able to actually take "he's no Vader" and turn it into a major theme of the movie and explore some of the implications of building such a character.

Thus defusing the "but he's not as good a villain as Vader" complaint preemptively.

That was a good creative choice.

RogueIce wrote:Well, in scenario 1 it requires them to leave a stormtrooper in the cell for Rey to mind trick. Since that did not appear to be the case, I don't know how she'd ever be unlocked in the first place. Even if she wasn't in a restraint chair, as Leia was not, who's going to unlock the door for her? And can she mind trick the what, five or so (counting people shot, it looks like five) guards all at once if she does somehow get out of her cell? Maybe she can (somehow) influence the guy in the corridor to open it up, but then there's the watch officer and three naval troopers she'd have to successful mind trick, all at once. I don't think even a fully trained Jedi could manage that.

Rey had been taken to a special interrogation room which (given the restraint chair) was probably NOT a normal prison cell. We don't really know what kind of cell they would have parked Rey in if they'd been holding her for a longer time.

By contrast, on the Death Star, interrogation seems to have been done by menacing spiky droids in your prison cell, which is highly unusual. Interrogation and detention are normally separate functions with dedicated facilities for each in any large scale prison or other holding facility.

Tribble wrote:As for Scenario #2, even if they managed to escape with a gunboat, they are going to have issues with the Devastator. Based on what we've seen, I don't see how a single gunboat is going to be able to disable all of the Devastator's turbolasers and escape; there doesn't appear to be a nice giant cavity in the hip to fly through nor does there appear to be any easy-to-destroy weapons. Seriously, does Kylo's ship even have shields? It's pretty pathetic that a single Starfighter was able to disable all of the ship's turbolasers in a single flyby...

Hypothesis: Finalizer (Ren's flagship) has shields that do not hug the hull, but instead form some kind of bubble a certain distance from the hull. Outgoing objects (such as launched fighters and the ship's own weapons fire) can penetrate the shield, but incoming weapons fire cannot.

Therefore, the surface gun mounts under the shield could be put out of action by fighters that were likewise under the shield. Ships firing from outside the shield would be unable to disable the gun mounts.

This may sound stupid, but that is exactly how the DS-I's shields worked, given that the Rebel X-Wings didn't seem to have any trouble penetrating the shields and reaching the surface, and then were free to fly around strafing gun emplacements at will.

The Tantive IV didn't even scratch the Devastator, and it presumably had heavier weaponry than what Starfighters typically carried at the time. Did Starfighters receive an exponential increase in firepower between Episode VI and VII or something? We never saw a Starfighter take out a capital ship's weapons like that before...

We also never saw a starfighter attack a capital ship at all except from inside the ship's shields. The gun turrets on the Death Star in Episode I? Strafed from inside the shields. The Executor's bridge? As noted, rammed after the shields went down. The Trade Federation control ship? Blown up from the inside after a fighter flew through the (permeable) hangar bay force fields.

Grievous' flagship Invisible Hand? In this one case fighters were able to fly into the hangar by disabling a shield generator mounted outside the ship, and they presumably had to fire from outside the ship's main shielding to do it. If anything, THAT is the example you should look to if you want exaggerated starfighter firepower, since a pair of Eta-2s really shouldn't be able to penetrate capital ship shielding from the outside.

So it seems reasonable to assume that in this case, like three of the other four instances, the fighter attack did its damage from inside (or through bypassing) the ship's shields.

All that said, what this means is that SW ship are glass cannons. If star fighter level weaponry can destroy a warship main turret (not the asecondary classmate guns of the DS1, which also had fully enclosed turreted duel turbolasers we don't see destroyed) then a capital ship turbo laser should be able to hull a ship in one shot. That has lots of implications.

Also that whole scene is stupid anyway. We see Poe shoot two turrets right? On a ship the size of the Finalizer (stupid name), is that supposed to be all its turrets?

This is why Brian Young argued that Star Wars capship shields are semi-permeable to fighters. It would explain why they are actually effective against them with mere fighter weapons while full scale capital ship batteries are often not.

Patroklos wrote:All that said, what this means is that SW ship are glass cannons. If star fighter level weaponry can destroy a warship main turret (not the asecondary classmate guns of the DS1, which also had fully enclosed turreted duel turbolasers we don't see destroyed) then a capital ship turbo laser should be able to hull a ship in one shot. That has lots of implications.

Also that whole scene is stupid anyway. We see Poe shoot two turrets right? On a ship the size of the Finalizer (stupid name), is that supposed to be all its turrets?

well we see captital ships shooting each other (at point blank ranges even) in ROTS and while they blew off huge chunks of the hull neither the Invisible hand or the nameless Venator were destroyed though the Invisible hand was damaged enough that it started to de-orbit after that battle though it didn't crash until most of the bridge crew had been killed and rest abbandoned the ship leaving only 2 Jedi and an astromech droid to control the ship.

Patroklos wrote:All that said, what this means is that SW ship are glass cannons. If star fighter level weaponry can destroy a warship main turret (not the asecondary classmate guns of the DS1, which also had fully enclosed turreted duel turbolasers we don't see destroyed) then a capital ship turbo laser should be able to hull a ship in one shot. That has lots of implications.

Yes- and many of those implications would result in other things happening differently elsewhere in movie canon. There'd be a contradiction there.

For example, this would result in capital ships being blown away with one or two shots, which is exactly what does NOT happen at Endor or Coruscant, except when there is massive overmatch (Rebel cruiser's shields against Death Star superlaser). Instead, ships regularly square off for protracted pounding matches minutes in length.

What is more likely and plausible is that capital ships are chronically vulnerable to fighterweight weapons fired at their surface features from inside their main shields. Or once those shields have been bypassed or knocked down. Most instances of fighters damaging large targets in the series involve exactly this event. Usually they make this very explicit. Why think that Poe's strafing run against the Finalizer's turbolasers is any different?

Also that whole scene is stupid anyway. We see Poe shoot two turrets right? On a ship the size of the Finalizer (stupid name), is that supposed to be all its turrets?

Hm. Possible rationalization- those may have been the two turrets that would have perfect zero-deflection shots on Poe's fighter as it flew away from the ship at close, "can't-miss" distances. Other turrets might have worse fields of fire, lower rate of fire (i.e. not being massive primary fighter defense guns, but lesser secondary ones), or be limited to other firing arcs so that Ren's flagship would have to turn in order to bring those guns to bear. Which would take time and allow Poe to open the range, reducing hit probability.

Do we actually hear anyone aboard the Finalizer saying something like "they just blew up all our weapons!" Because that would seem like a pretty big deal that people aboard the ship would remark on.

Um-the turrets Poe & whatever the black guy's name was weren't TLs, those were missile launchers, and the crew of the Finalizer had to be told to activate them. Which says something about their crew quality but nothing about their armament neither firepower nor resilience.

Given that the fighter they would hypothetically be shooting at was one of their own TIEs, with (presumably) a friendly IFF installed, it is reasonable that they would need an order from a senior officer to arm their missile launchers and fire on it.

I imagine that you'd need a pretty high-level command override to tell a US Navy aircraft carrier to launch SAMs at one of its own planes, for instance. Because under normal operating conditions, "some idiot accidentally shoots down one of our own fighters" is a much more common risk than "infiltrators aboard our ship steal a fighter to escape, and a few seconds' delay in firing at them means they get away."

Also, if those specific weapons mounts were missile launchers, it makes more sense that they'd be specially targeted by Poe and Finn.. And that there wouldn't be many such launchers.

The missile launchers may be uniquely threatening to a TIE fighter, more so than beam weapons, due to special tracking and guidance systems. Taking them out thus greatly improves the chance of escape. Maybe the missile launchers are the only thing that can effectively engage maneuvering TIEs at long range, in which case it means Finn and Poe are only in danger for a short time while close to Finalizer... assuming they can knock out the launchers.

And on top of that, it may be that while the ship has plenty of turbolasers for engaging heavy targets at long range, its close-in defensive missile systems may be centralized in a few major launchers in order to save space for other weapon systems. If it is normally not possible for fighters to penetrate the ship's shields to launch component strikes against specific parts of the ship, that would be at least understandable. Although the ship's defenses against fighters are severely compromised if the shields ever go down.

Although if we run with the idea of the missile launchers as long range antifighter weapons (possibly with other lighter beam armament for close-in defense) it makes more sense. Since you'd use the missiles to engage fighter swarms at long range (say, if they were lobbing salvoes of torpedoes from ten thousand kilometers away), but not when being strafed close up.

The Romulan Republic wrote:Her chances of handling a match with Vader are... not impressive.

While Vader doesn't pull off a lot of spectacular feats with the Force in the OT, he is decidedly more competent and committed (at least in A New Hope) than Ren.

Plus there's the whole Chosen One thing.

Oh, she'd be slaughtered by Vader. I mean he'd probably detect her, at which point she's hosed.

Even if we assume that Vader doesn't randomly kill Rey (the inquisitors prove that Vader doesn't kill any random force user he finds), there's no way Rey could resist his mind probing since Leia nearly broke to it and I'd assume any senior member of the imperial senate is trained to be resistant to mind probes and similar things.

I am pretty sure Leia resisted because she is a potential Jedi, not because she was trained to resist. I recall the novelization for ROTJ mentioning this, when she was contrasting her experience with Jabba to Vader.

As for Rey, she would indeed be easy prey for Vader in a way that she obviously was not for Kylo Ren.

I'm kind of curious why people make that assumption, since Leia and Rey (at that point) aren't too different: potential Jedi who don't know they're Force sensitive. I mean maybe her 'Awakening' if it happens but otherwise?

It's not that Leia is likely to be more resistant than Rey, in my opinion.

It's that Vader is almost axiomatically better at using the Force to read people's minds than Kylo Ren. Because thematically, the entire point of Kylo Ren's character is that he wishes he were as skilled, disciplined, controlled, and powerful as Vader... but he isn't.

Technically that's not true. Kylo wishes he were as skilled, disciplined, controlled and powerful as he imagines Vader was. The guy's got a serious case of villain worship.

And since when do we know Vader tried to Mind Probe Leia? All we saw in ANH was that torture droid.

Batman wrote:And since when do we know Vader tried to Mind Probe Leia? All we saw in ANH was that torture droid.

"Her resistance to the Mind Probe is considerable."

Edit: No idea if that means Vader used the Force on her as part of Mind Probe process.

Batman wrote:Technically that's not true. Kylo wishes he were as skilled, disciplined, controlled and powerful as he imagines Vader was. The guy's got a serious case of villain worship.

And since when do we know Vader tried to Mind Probe Leia? All we saw in ANH was that torture droid.

Yeah...

It is possible, maybe even probable, that Ren has a greatly inflated idea of Vader's power.

However, I still think that, all other factors being equal, I'd give Vader the edge because he's the Chosen One and at the end of the day, at least in A New Hope (before his son's survival and efforts at redeeming him started getting to him), he seemed more focussed, certain of his intent and himself. Kylo isn't, and that's an awful mindset for a Force user, as I've said before.

Also, Vader undoubtably has the edge in age and experience.

Batman wrote:Technically that's not true. Kylo wishes he were as skilled, disciplined, controlled and powerful as he imagines Vader was. The guy's got a serious case of villain worship.

As noted, this is a terrible mindset for a Force user- so I'd say that as long as Kylo Ren goes around wishing he were as 'great' as Vader, he will never be as 'great' as Vader. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, because while Darth Vader was consumed with self-loathing and anger, he did at least manage to keep his mind on "where he was, what he was doing" in a twisted inversion of Yoda's teachings in Episode V. He was organized and had the confidence to do what he saw fit without angsting about it.

As long as Ren can't do that, he's going to be weak compared to Vader- because the Force flows from inner strength of will and character, and Ren's will and character are deeply flawed in ways not even Anakin's were.

He is especially going to be weak in matters that require a relatively high degree of mental discipline. Like Force-powered telepathy, I imagine.

Now, the counterargument that we have no reason to assume Vader would have used the Force to probe Ren's mind at all... that is a much better argument and I have no counter to it.

Simon_Jester wrote:

Batman wrote:Technically that's not true. Kylo wishes he were as skilled, disciplined, controlled and powerful as he imagines Vader was. The guy's got a serious case of villain worship.

As noted, this is a terrible mindset for a Force user- so I'd say that as long as Kylo Ren goes around wishing he were as 'great' as Vader, he will never be as 'great' as Vader. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, because while Darth Vader was consumed with self-loathing and anger, he did at least manage to keep his mind on "where he was, what he was doing" in a twisted inversion of Yoda's teachings in Episode V. He was organized and had the confidence to do what he saw fit without angsting about it.

As long as Ren can't do that, he's going to be weak compared to Vader- because the Force flows from inner strength of will and character, and Ren's will and character are deeply flawed in ways not even Anakin's were.

He is especially going to be weak in matters that require a relatively high degree of mental discipline. Like Force-powered telepathy, I imagine.

Now, the counterargument that we have no reason to assume Vader would have used the Force to probe Ren's mind at all... that is a much better argument and I have no counter to it.

Yeah Kylo Ren main weakness is looking for a shortcut to greatness because he has no faith on his own powers. By contrast if anything Vader is overconfident about his power.

It's quite obvious when you compare how other people treat Darth Vader and Kylo Ren, only people to taunt Vader and not regret it are his kids and Obi-wan. On the other hand if you had a name and were in a scene with Kylo Ren it was likely that you'd taunt or belittle him (IIRC only Snoke and Han Solo didn't do that (or at least didn't do that to his face)).

To be fair, Leia and Luke both did regret taunting Vader. Leia was brutally interrogated after defying Vader and insulting him ("holding Vader's leash"). Luke got his hand chopped off.

And Obi-Wan got bisected; the only reason that doesn't qualify as 'regret' is that he specifically went into that fight planning to die.

So I think it would be more accurate to note that nobody taunted Vader and got away with it. It's just that one person who was explicitly attempting to commit suicide-by-Vader proceeded to taunt him and got what he was aiming for, and his children could get away with taunting him and get out alive, if not necessarily in one piece.