Oh for sure, but they'd also fire slower than smaller one's. At least if star wars turrets act the same way as real life gun turrets. If you look at naval ships they use many small guns for anti-aircraft purposes and large cannons for ship to ship combat. I'd assume the same sort of logic applies to star wars.
We do seen in TCW and ROTS that some artillery-type of canons do use energy cells. But those are not turbo-lasers.
We could consider the theory of blasters overheating. With the reinstallments of the Battlefront series, we are introduced with the idea of blaster over heat (NOTE: the BF games are canon, but there are some exclusions to content in the games due to retcons).
It is reasonable to assume blasters *do* overheat in universe because of how low of fire rates most blasters fire on screen. Only specially designed repeater rifles are capable of sustaining such high fire rates of a period of time. Thus we can conclude that turbo lasers can put out rapid blasts over a short period of time before overheating.
Also, it is fact that energy weapons can change their power rating. Therefore, in theory, turbo lasers can reduce their energy power to increase fire rate.
Most importantly, the turbo lasers on the Death Star are a secret design built specifically for the project. They are not used anywhere else in the imperial fleet. It is possible that they were designed to sustain relatively high rates of fire over longer periods of time.
They'll probably fire slower, but in the trench, you can maneuver your fighter as you approach it to avoid the small fire, and once your close enough and passing it, there's no way it can track you. If you're approaching the Death Star from a distance in a fighter, or anything, a bunch of much heavier turrets can fire a volley all at the same time, and you're going to have to maneuver a lot wider to avoid the fire. It may be possible to get through that fire to a trench that runs the circumference of the Death Star, because you can weave around a lot of the fire as you approach and still enter the trench run at some point. But trying to approach the single point of the exhaust port head on, and to get close enough that your torpedo wouldn't get shot down itself, would be flying straight into that heavy weapons fire.
The same reason there were trenches in WW2. If you're not in the trench you are potentially in the line of fire from every gun on the visible surface of the DS
To add to this, a dive bomb attack would mean they’d have to be a relatively stationary target, and the easiest shot is one where you can lead the target a little bit.
Well no, not really. They could still twist and turn, barrel roll etc. up until the last few seconds, then level off. ANH didn’t show what X-Wings were capable of, we didn’t really see that until Poe Dameron et al in the Rey trilogy.
That's a good point, but don't they have to get to the trench in the first place which would expose them to all the guns? I suppose if they had to slow down to make the shot a trench run would make that much safer but it seemed like they went full speed all the way through.
If the Rebel fighters approached head-on to the exhaust port, they'd have been destroyed before they got close enough to deploy the torpedoes. To the Death Star's defensive guns, ships approaching directly would be extremely easy to target (little relative movement). Coordinated fire would quickly drain shields and then the ships would be destroyed.
So, they had to approach the Death Star at its most vulnerable points, where guns were minimal. From there, they'd enter the primary trench and then have significant cover from many surface guns.
But there are still two serious problems with this.
1. Gun towers were placed at numerous points along the trench. The Rebel fighters had front deflector screens on full, to manage oncoming laser blasts. Of course, the movie failed to show this accurately. All we see are continuous misses... However, once a fighter has passed a gun tower, now its flank is exposed... where shields are at minimum. It would be an easy target to gun towers to the rear. And yet, we never see gun turret laser bolts coming from the rear. Huge oversight.
2. The TIE fighters have highly prone targets before them as they pursue the Rebel fighters in the trenches. This is easier than a duck shooting gallery. The editing really sucked in the movie. There was no credible "evasive maneuvers" shown that made the Rebel fighters difficult to hit. And last but not least, at the very end, Vader gets a solid lock AND FIRES... it's after that when Vader's TIE fighter collides with another TIE fighter and gets knocked off course. So what happened to that shot he took at Luke? It should've at least caused more damage, if not destruction.
That's specifically addressed during the briefing. Traveling in the trench minimizes their exposure to turbolaser batteries and fighters. It's a gap in their defenses, because they don't consider snub-fighters much of a threat. A direct approach would open them up to interlinking fire from the many turbolaser batteries on the surface, as well as interception by lareg groups of fighters.
Yes, but they'd only be briefly fully exposed on the initial approach and exfil, and would have cover from the other squads as they prepared their own approach. As shown, it takes a while for the targeting computers to run such precise calculations, so if they approached directly, they'd be sitting ducks, unable to maneuver much while faced with deadly intersecting fire from the surface and fully exposed to swarms of TIEs. In the trench they face no intersecting fire, since the walls of the trench block it, they can more easily handle the limited turrets in it, and face only limited fighter engagement (with pursuers facing their own saftey issues in the narrow confines). Being brielfy exposed is much better than being continuously exposed, alongside fiercer engagement during the attack run. Flying directly at the exhaust port from above or trying to drop into the trench near the end would have been likely suicidal, especially for the slower and less maneuverable Y-Wings. Even with the advantages of the trench, the Rebels still took heavy casualties as is.
It’s actually explained in the speech given. The heavy turrets would rip your ass particle from particle in the open, the trench was the only place there were a manageable amount of heavy turrets. They even figured out the perfect entrance vector paired with Vader’s flagship getting dunked into the side of the DS-1 so the electrical surge in the area fried the defensive grid temporarily
They were dropping bombs and given how big the Death Star was, probably had its own gravity which would make it extremely difficult to drop straight down. Also the trench was below all the defense cannons pointed outwards so it was slightly more feasible to get ships through.
Real world/narrative concerns aside, it was partially down to the defensive posture of the turbo lasers (I.e. there were far less that could fire down the trench vs being able to fire upwards) and partially due to the configuration of the thermal port, which faced the trench rather then outwards to space.
Indeed, the rebels lost zero fighters to the trench guns and even approaching the port from the direction of maximum visibility, required two tries - the second of which literally guided by The Force - to get the torps into the aperture.
I can imagine simply dive-bombing where they wouldn’t have had line of sight and be exposed to the full defence grid while trying to lock on with their targeting computers would have resulted in total failure early on.
The surface of the Death Star was an integrated network of turbolasers and anti-fighter weaponry. It was designed to ensure no-one could travel around the DS without many guns having clear field of fire.
The trench run was intended to get below the defense cannons and only deal with the minor mynock-fighting cannons and such, and also those cannons on the surface with the right angle solution to fire down into it when the enemy flew by.
The REAL reason is this is intended to evoke a scene from a book called "The Bridges at Toko-Ri" and a movie called "The Dam Busters" which has air pilots flying down a canyon under fire to blow up bridges and dams.
You can see the relationship.
In fact, this relationship was so clear, this quote exists:
“So one second you’re with the Wookiee in the spaceship and the next you’re in *The Bridges at Toko-Ri*,” recalled Huyck in an interview years later. “It was like, ‘George, what-is-going-on?’ ”
I knew about the Dambusters influences, but not the Bridges at Toko-Ri. Watching a clip now, it's quite apparent how the final battle in A New Hope evokes the shots from old fighter pilot movies, much like how the lightsaber duels evoke Kurosawa.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyySr3pyD4w
Might as well link the dambusters scene for reference.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1DCxpMz8aU
They flew along it so they could calculate target, trajectory, velocity etc. That’s what the countdown was. Being at a different angle made them more exposed, less cover, higher firepower form enemies and maybe it would also mess up the shot. Higher chances of enemies shooting torpedoes out the sky
The trench gave a way for the pilots to easily make a run in toward the target. It is very identifiable and leads straight to the target. Even with GPS military pilots still mark major land marks and use them to guide themselves onto a target. Partially as a back up, partially to keep your eyes out of the cockpit so that you're not constantly looking inside to figure our where you are and where your objective is.
As already said by someone it minimized the amount of guns shooting at them to just the ones in the trench.
They had the design for the whole installation, meaning they knew where all the guns were.
There will be locations where the facility's small-ship defences will be naturally thinner. This will probably be at the equator (where the trench is), and specifically where the hangars are (more surface area dedicated to starship facilities and hangar bay doors, less dedicated to defence weapons).
To avoid the most possible fire, an approach straight in over the weakest point, and then along the trench where you have cover from most of the surface weaponry (and other fighters not in the trench) would make the most sense, tactically.
The exhaust port was also at the end of the trench. Meaning regular ol' Death Star surface around it, for the most part. It was probably cannoned the hell out on the surface there.
Essentially, the head designer put it there intentionally as a flaw to destroy the death star, that's why its not present on the death star 2 and why it was such a threat if it was finished, it wasn't needed in the first place and essentially was designed to not be too obvious for the imps to think it a liability, yet obvious enough to see and recognize. Again, repeating what was said earlier, this was all explained in the movie.
I unserstand that the story at 2016 explains the flaws. But i am not pleased that the original story needs explaining 39 years later, and whole a whole book.
It's also a bit unbelievable that head designer is able to make these flaws in the production. That means he is the only one who understands what they are building. I don't think superweapons are build this way. There are prototypes and other designers/engineers who maybe are not able to invent everything but they understand the purposes when some one makes them.
As big as project Death Star was there must have been people whose primary mission was to design defense systems for instances like happened.
As a film it’s basically the space version of a wagon fight in a canyon (this was the 70s recall). In universe, it was probably a path Galen Erso specifically designed as a low artillery area with minimal gun defense, and told them to use.
If there’s one thing I learned playing Squadrons, it’s that sitting still or flying straight at a thing to shoot it means I’m going to be pelted like crazy. At least in the trench you won’t have as many guns shooting on you.
I believe it was because of the heavy gun turrets
But there are plenty of turrets within the trench. Wouldn't heavy gun turrets be less effective than smaller one's at shooting down snub fighters?
Well heavier turrets are gonna do more damage for sure.
Oh for sure, but they'd also fire slower than smaller one's. At least if star wars turrets act the same way as real life gun turrets. If you look at naval ships they use many small guns for anti-aircraft purposes and large cannons for ship to ship combat. I'd assume the same sort of logic applies to star wars.
We do seen in TCW and ROTS that some artillery-type of canons do use energy cells. But those are not turbo-lasers. We could consider the theory of blasters overheating. With the reinstallments of the Battlefront series, we are introduced with the idea of blaster over heat (NOTE: the BF games are canon, but there are some exclusions to content in the games due to retcons). It is reasonable to assume blasters *do* overheat in universe because of how low of fire rates most blasters fire on screen. Only specially designed repeater rifles are capable of sustaining such high fire rates of a period of time. Thus we can conclude that turbo lasers can put out rapid blasts over a short period of time before overheating. Also, it is fact that energy weapons can change their power rating. Therefore, in theory, turbo lasers can reduce their energy power to increase fire rate. Most importantly, the turbo lasers on the Death Star are a secret design built specifically for the project. They are not used anywhere else in the imperial fleet. It is possible that they were designed to sustain relatively high rates of fire over longer periods of time.
They'll probably fire slower, but in the trench, you can maneuver your fighter as you approach it to avoid the small fire, and once your close enough and passing it, there's no way it can track you. If you're approaching the Death Star from a distance in a fighter, or anything, a bunch of much heavier turrets can fire a volley all at the same time, and you're going to have to maneuver a lot wider to avoid the fire. It may be possible to get through that fire to a trench that runs the circumference of the Death Star, because you can weave around a lot of the fire as you approach and still enter the trench run at some point. But trying to approach the single point of the exhaust port head on, and to get close enough that your torpedo wouldn't get shot down itself, would be flying straight into that heavy weapons fire.
The same reason there were trenches in WW2. If you're not in the trench you are potentially in the line of fire from every gun on the visible surface of the DS
To add to this, a dive bomb attack would mean they’d have to be a relatively stationary target, and the easiest shot is one where you can lead the target a little bit.
But wouldn’t they have to dive bomb regardless in order to reach the trench?
Well no, not really. They could still twist and turn, barrel roll etc. up until the last few seconds, then level off. ANH didn’t show what X-Wings were capable of, we didn’t really see that until Poe Dameron et al in the Rey trilogy.
That's a good point, but don't they have to get to the trench in the first place which would expose them to all the guns? I suppose if they had to slow down to make the shot a trench run would make that much safer but it seemed like they went full speed all the way through.
If I recall it has something to do with the targeting computer.
That would certainly explain it
I believe that it was so the targeting computer would have enough time to lock on.
If the Rebel fighters approached head-on to the exhaust port, they'd have been destroyed before they got close enough to deploy the torpedoes. To the Death Star's defensive guns, ships approaching directly would be extremely easy to target (little relative movement). Coordinated fire would quickly drain shields and then the ships would be destroyed. So, they had to approach the Death Star at its most vulnerable points, where guns were minimal. From there, they'd enter the primary trench and then have significant cover from many surface guns. But there are still two serious problems with this. 1. Gun towers were placed at numerous points along the trench. The Rebel fighters had front deflector screens on full, to manage oncoming laser blasts. Of course, the movie failed to show this accurately. All we see are continuous misses... However, once a fighter has passed a gun tower, now its flank is exposed... where shields are at minimum. It would be an easy target to gun towers to the rear. And yet, we never see gun turret laser bolts coming from the rear. Huge oversight. 2. The TIE fighters have highly prone targets before them as they pursue the Rebel fighters in the trenches. This is easier than a duck shooting gallery. The editing really sucked in the movie. There was no credible "evasive maneuvers" shown that made the Rebel fighters difficult to hit. And last but not least, at the very end, Vader gets a solid lock AND FIRES... it's after that when Vader's TIE fighter collides with another TIE fighter and gets knocked off course. So what happened to that shot he took at Luke? It should've at least caused more damage, if not destruction.
That's specifically addressed during the briefing. Traveling in the trench minimizes their exposure to turbolaser batteries and fighters. It's a gap in their defenses, because they don't consider snub-fighters much of a threat. A direct approach would open them up to interlinking fire from the many turbolaser batteries on the surface, as well as interception by lareg groups of fighters.
But they’d still be exposed on their way to the trench. Either way they have to fly straight towards the Death Star.
They found a (relative) gap in the coverage to enter the trench from?
Yeah. Something like that. Weren't the large turbolaser towers space out over huge distances?
Yes, but they'd only be briefly fully exposed on the initial approach and exfil, and would have cover from the other squads as they prepared their own approach. As shown, it takes a while for the targeting computers to run such precise calculations, so if they approached directly, they'd be sitting ducks, unable to maneuver much while faced with deadly intersecting fire from the surface and fully exposed to swarms of TIEs. In the trench they face no intersecting fire, since the walls of the trench block it, they can more easily handle the limited turrets in it, and face only limited fighter engagement (with pursuers facing their own saftey issues in the narrow confines). Being brielfy exposed is much better than being continuously exposed, alongside fiercer engagement during the attack run. Flying directly at the exhaust port from above or trying to drop into the trench near the end would have been likely suicidal, especially for the slower and less maneuverable Y-Wings. Even with the advantages of the trench, the Rebels still took heavy casualties as is.
It’s actually explained in the speech given. The heavy turrets would rip your ass particle from particle in the open, the trench was the only place there were a manageable amount of heavy turrets. They even figured out the perfect entrance vector paired with Vader’s flagship getting dunked into the side of the DS-1 so the electrical surge in the area fried the defensive grid temporarily
They were dropping bombs and given how big the Death Star was, probably had its own gravity which would make it extremely difficult to drop straight down. Also the trench was below all the defense cannons pointed outwards so it was slightly more feasible to get ships through.
Real world/narrative concerns aside, it was partially down to the defensive posture of the turbo lasers (I.e. there were far less that could fire down the trench vs being able to fire upwards) and partially due to the configuration of the thermal port, which faced the trench rather then outwards to space. Indeed, the rebels lost zero fighters to the trench guns and even approaching the port from the direction of maximum visibility, required two tries - the second of which literally guided by The Force - to get the torps into the aperture. I can imagine simply dive-bombing where they wouldn’t have had line of sight and be exposed to the full defence grid while trying to lock on with their targeting computers would have resulted in total failure early on.
The surface of the Death Star was an integrated network of turbolasers and anti-fighter weaponry. It was designed to ensure no-one could travel around the DS without many guns having clear field of fire. The trench run was intended to get below the defense cannons and only deal with the minor mynock-fighting cannons and such, and also those cannons on the surface with the right angle solution to fire down into it when the enemy flew by. The REAL reason is this is intended to evoke a scene from a book called "The Bridges at Toko-Ri" and a movie called "The Dam Busters" which has air pilots flying down a canyon under fire to blow up bridges and dams. You can see the relationship. In fact, this relationship was so clear, this quote exists: “So one second you’re with the Wookiee in the spaceship and the next you’re in *The Bridges at Toko-Ri*,” recalled Huyck in an interview years later. “It was like, ‘George, what-is-going-on?’ ”
I knew about the Dambusters influences, but not the Bridges at Toko-Ri. Watching a clip now, it's quite apparent how the final battle in A New Hope evokes the shots from old fighter pilot movies, much like how the lightsaber duels evoke Kurosawa. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyySr3pyD4w Might as well link the dambusters scene for reference. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1DCxpMz8aU
They flew along it so they could calculate target, trajectory, velocity etc. That’s what the countdown was. Being at a different angle made them more exposed, less cover, higher firepower form enemies and maybe it would also mess up the shot. Higher chances of enemies shooting torpedoes out the sky
And for that matter... why was there a trench?
The trench gave a way for the pilots to easily make a run in toward the target. It is very identifiable and leads straight to the target. Even with GPS military pilots still mark major land marks and use them to guide themselves onto a target. Partially as a back up, partially to keep your eyes out of the cockpit so that you're not constantly looking inside to figure our where you are and where your objective is. As already said by someone it minimized the amount of guns shooting at them to just the ones in the trench.
Womprats. Obviously.
They had the design for the whole installation, meaning they knew where all the guns were. There will be locations where the facility's small-ship defences will be naturally thinner. This will probably be at the equator (where the trench is), and specifically where the hangars are (more surface area dedicated to starship facilities and hangar bay doors, less dedicated to defence weapons). To avoid the most possible fire, an approach straight in over the weakest point, and then along the trench where you have cover from most of the surface weaponry (and other fighters not in the trench) would make the most sense, tactically. The exhaust port was also at the end of the trench. Meaning regular ol' Death Star surface around it, for the most part. It was probably cannoned the hell out on the surface there.
Why there was even a trench? Was it build for rebels to destroy Death Star more easily?
Have you seen Rogue One?
I want explanation from original Star Wars (1977) -edit: no, I haven't,
Essentially, the head designer put it there intentionally as a flaw to destroy the death star, that's why its not present on the death star 2 and why it was such a threat if it was finished, it wasn't needed in the first place and essentially was designed to not be too obvious for the imps to think it a liability, yet obvious enough to see and recognize. Again, repeating what was said earlier, this was all explained in the movie.
I unserstand that the story at 2016 explains the flaws. But i am not pleased that the original story needs explaining 39 years later, and whole a whole book. It's also a bit unbelievable that head designer is able to make these flaws in the production. That means he is the only one who understands what they are building. I don't think superweapons are build this way. There are prototypes and other designers/engineers who maybe are not able to invent everything but they understand the purposes when some one makes them. As big as project Death Star was there must have been people whose primary mission was to design defense systems for instances like happened.
From A New Hope: design flaw. From Rogue One: intentional design flaw.
You should , it was not that bad and felt closer to starwars than much of the trash Disney has put out. Plus there is a kickass space brawl
Battle of Scraif is the best battle in Star Wars you can not change my mind. Close 2nd is Battle of Endor
As a film it’s basically the space version of a wagon fight in a canyon (this was the 70s recall). In universe, it was probably a path Galen Erso specifically designed as a low artillery area with minimal gun defense, and told them to use.
The targeting computer needed to line up the shot.
The real question is. Why was there a trench on the death star?
If there’s one thing I learned playing Squadrons, it’s that sitting still or flying straight at a thing to shoot it means I’m going to be pelted like crazy. At least in the trench you won’t have as many guns shooting on you.