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.
