Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope/Other Corrections

## TV Tropes

### Tatooine

1. The boarding of the Tantive IV... Okay, so they are supposedly the elite 501st Stormtrooper squad or some such, but seriously. They're coming through a doorway. A narrow doorway which can fit maybe two people side by side. Are you seriously telling me that a couple of dozen people with guns can't just shoot constantly into that doorway and murder anything that even thinks of trying to come through? Had they had the mentality of the prequel trilogy, this would probably have set up a scene where after having many troops mown down trying to get through, Vader strolls through with lightsaber in hand casually blocking all the shots and cutting down the defenders. That would have been cool, and would have introduced the "guys with laser swords and magic power" concept quite nicely. **If you pay attention during the fight, you'll notice that most of the Tantive IV's crew recoiled from the blast as the door blew off. The Stormtroopers rushed inside, and then Tantive IV's crew recovered and started firing. By that time, the Stormtroopers were already inside and a number of Tantive IV crew had already been killed. The Stormtroopers also had sheer fire superiority and armor that protected them some, whereas the Tantive IV's crew had no armor. Look closely while the battle is raging right then: the blaster bolts are creating fairly intense explosions when they hit the walls, and near-misses are killing the unarmored crewmen with shrapnel. A couple of Stormtroopers were killed, but the majority of the Tantive IV crew holding that position were killed and in the confusion and smoke and noise, they were routed and withdrew. This is actually fairly realistic, as lightly-trained, poorly-armored, and lightly-armed ship crew fighting heavily-armored boarders with heavy weapons and solid discipline will break first. The only Tantive IV crewman to actually retain enough discipline to keep a cool head and return fire effectively is the first one to lean out of cover and kill the first Stormtrooper. Then he dies and the rest are routed by overwhelming enemy fire.**
2. Why didn't the soldiers fire on the pod despite knowing that there could be droids on board? **The commanding officer specifically told the gunner to let it go because there were no life forms detected and it had probably short-circuited.
Honestly, the more sensible reason they didn't fire on it is because if they blew it up, they would never be able to confirm whether or not the plans were there, and that was the mission—to secure the plans.
Destroying that escape pod could have endangered their ship. Explosions are best avoided when possible.
Maybe there just happens to be a standing order not to destroy unoccupied rebel vehicles (including escape pods), because the Empire wants to study rebel tech and reverse-engineer it in case they find anything interesting. (Obviously imperial tech tends to be superior anyway, but Palpatine doesn't want to take any chances.)
*SeniramUK (talk) 11:44, 29 December 2022 (UTC)* There may also be an issue with regard to wasting energy by firing the guns, at least if the Family Guy parody version of the scene is anything to go by!**
3. As soon as she's captured, Princess Leia tells Darth Vader "I'm a member of the Imperial Senate on a diplomatic mission to Alderaan." Why would she be on a diplomatic mission to her own home planet? I realize that she is, of course, lying. Still, that must have been her actual cover story. Wouldn't it have made more sense to say that she was on her way back home for a vacation or a family wedding or something? **It's not at all unusual to have a senator sent to his/her home state as part of official government business. In fact, they'd be the best person to send.
In any case, she's not Alderaan's representative. She's a Senator. She's expected to be neutral in Galactic affairs, not pro-Alderaan. As said above, she'd be the best person to travel from Coruscant to Alderaan on a diplomatic mission.
It may not be that the rebellion "whipped up" a diplomatic mission to send Leia there, but that there was a scheduled diplomatic mission Leia joined onto in order to get pretense to return to Alderaan.
During the time of the Republic, Senators WERE representatives of their homeworlds. But under the Empire things have obviously flipped, with Senators not being neutral, but being representatives of the EMPIRE and meant to keep their homeworlds in line. Note that the one objection to the Emperor's dissolving the Senate is a comment of "Who will keep the local systems in line?" That implies that it's a senator's job to tell their home system what the Empire wants them to do and make sure they do it. So a diplomatic mission to Alderaan would probably be a regular occurrence for Leia.**
4. Does the Empire's search on Tatooine for 3PO and R2 seem a little heavy-handed? I know we are talking about a maniacal military machine with little to no experience or regard towards proper investigative techniques, but why was it necessary to kill all those aboard the sandcrawler and all those at the Lars Homestead? Granted, we never get to see the conduct at both locations and I suppose it seems plausible that at both locations the Empire could have met resistance that necessitated the use of force, but it still seems like if a whole contingent of Storm Troopers knocked on your door/ship and asked you to give them the location of two droids, you would either tell them where to go/hand them over with little to no complaint if you are a being interested in self-preservation, which would remove the need for any sort of violence, unless the Storm Troopers just like that kind of thing... Then again, the Stormtroopers do seem the to be the "shoot first, ask later" type, so maybe this point is moot. **The droids are potentially carrying extremely high value intelligence. They want to make sure that even if they get the droids, anyone else who might have gleaned that information is taken care of.**
5. Why did the Stormtroopers try to make it look like the Jawas were killed by Sand People? It's not like the mighty Empire would suffer any consequences for killing a small band of junk traders out in the remote areas of a backwater planet. And the troopers later walk around Mos Eisley in broad daylight, while making it very obvious that they're looking for someone, so it's not like their presence on Tatooine is some kind of secret. **I imagine that imperial officers are of two minds on the subject. On one hand you've got folks like Tarkin who are quite willing to kill innocent people and take credit for it (see: Alderaan), because he figures that this will scare the galaxy into submission. On the other hand you've got some other people who figure that killing innocent people just boosts recruitment for the rebellion, which makes everything harder in the long run. Officer of the latter persuasion will be inclined to cover up the Empire's misdeeds whenever they get the chance, and apparently one of those people was in charge of the Tatooine operation.
Plus I'm sure that with the Empire looking for top secret intelligence information, they don't want people to know that they are looking. *SeniramUK (talk) 11:44, 29 December 2022 (UTC)* Which probably explains why they attempted this ‘False Flag’ style operation.**
6. How exactly were Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru murdered? I'm wondering if it was from a plasma grenade or they torched their bodies with flamethrowers. **The most likely way Beru and Owen were killed would be blaster fire. Since that doesn't quite result in charred skeletons, flamethrowers were probably used to incinerate the bodies. Don't ask me why they did that, but that's really the only option, at least from your guesses, that the damage corresponds closely enough to.**
7. So, the Stormtroopers tracked the droids to the Jawas and from the Jawas to the Lars farm. How did they not know about Luke? Why wouldn't they have left a squad behind to wait for him to go home? They had no clue R2 ran away. As far as they knew, Luke was with them doing his chores and they'd be back for lunch or dinner. **They didn't know he was there. It's not like they'd necessarily have records of every inhabitant of every moisture farm, and Owen and Beru knew he wasn't home, and they weren't going to tell them there's one more person in the farm that they missed.**
8. Given an inspection of the household would likely inform them there was a third person living there, why they didn't leave troops behind to capture Luke if he came home? **Given Luke's talk about applying to the Academy, he probably had stuff lying around his room (data files, pictures, posters, etc.). Most parents/guardians keep a room for their kid when they leave for college, so it could be that they assumed Luke had shipped out and his room was only used on vacations.**
9. A stormtrooper commander says "All right, men, load your weapons." Uh, what? Their guns are lasers. What would they have to load? **Blast weapons in the Star Wars universe use power packs that eventually need to be replaced or charged.
Unless the gun is designed to be plugged into an outlet to recharge, it will need to have something loaded into the weapon to fire - and only an idiot would design a man-portable weapon that can't be reloaded when its power runs out.**
10. Why wasn't Luke more upset about the death of his Aunt and Uncle?  **People react to tragedy differently. Some break down into tears, some enter Heroic BSoD, and others get really pissed off. Luke was in the "get pissed off" group. Revenge was his motivation to defeat the Empire, until he meets Yoda and learns to be a Jedi.
The impression is that he was horrified beyond belief at everything. He probably bottled it all up and had a good cry later after he had a chance to take it all in. Assuming the events take place in the timeline between movies, after the destruction of the Death Star, Luke has three years to come to terms with his emotions about his family, then mourn them, and finally get past it. Or at least live with it.
Alternatively, Luke is probably in shock and didn't really have a chance to grieve until after the Battle of Yavin.**
11. Why did Cornelius brag about having the death sentence in twelve systems in a cantina frequented by bounty hunters? **It's possible that he was just an idiot. It's also possible that he didn't have a death sentence anywhere, and was actually just making stuff up because he wanted to look tough. (In fact, if he's a guy who just wants to pick a fight to show how tough he is, that would help explain why he starts yelling at Luke for no reason. He probably picked out Luke specifically because the kid looked like a wimp.)**
12. The Jedi were all but destroyed, and Obi-Wan only managed to survive because he went into hiding for 20 years. And yet the first time we see him go out in public, he whips out his obviously Jedi weapon to break up a bar fight. **Well, he was intending to leave Tatooine pretty soon. Maybe he figured by the time he got back from Alderaan, news about his actions in the cantina would have died down. In addition, he's preparing to train Luke so this scene is useful because it shows Luke just what a Jedi can do.
The first thing he does is go, "Oh, don't worry about the boy, let's just have a drink on me and forget about it." Then the other guy pulls out his blaster and starts shooting. What the hell else was Obi-Wan supposed to do? The other guys forced a confrontation, meaning Obi-Wan's choices were to intervene, which at that point required immediate and overt use of his Jedi abilities, or let Luke deal with it and probably get at best mugged, and at worst shot.**
13. Why was there blood when Obi-Wan cut that alien guy's arm off in the cantina? Lightsabers are supposed to cauterize the wounds they inflict. **Either the guy's Bizarre Alien Biology doesn't allow cauterization, or what we think is blood is actually just a drink spilled conveniently right where the guy's severed arm lands.
On close inspection, the severed arm's stump looks almost hollow inside. It could be that the alien guy's anatomy relies on hydraulics rather than filament-contraction for movement, in which case it's hydraulic liquid that spilled out of an organic actuator too broad to sear shut, rather than blood from a narrow (hence able to be cauterized) transport vessel.**
14. Why is Han Solo on Tatooine? It was initially assumed he was hiding out there to avoid the intergalactic crime lord that he'd pissed off so much that he was sending bounty hunters after him. Imagine my surprise on seeing RotJ, when it turned out that Jabba actually resided on Tatooine. It's not as if Han has gone there to apologize or offer compensation for the cargo he dumped. He's simply whiling away the hours in a dingy cantina. He's not even surprised when Greedo shows up to threaten him, so he obviously knew he was in trouble. It could be likened to someone ripping off the Vegas mob, then coming back to town to play the slots. **Tatooine is a whole planet, and Jabba is just one mob boss, not some all-seeing overlord. Han probably expected to go unnoticed. As for what he was doing, he was looking for work - a wretched hive of scum and villainy probably has need for smugglers, it's also possible that he had recently taken a shipment to Tatooine.
For the purposes of the story, most planets in the series are treated as and can be considered little more than countries. Tatooine is a country Jabba controls a big part of. That said, it's still a fairly big country, and it's not like Han is number one on Jabba's hit list (yet).**
15. Han is leaving the bar when Greedo comes up to him and points a blaster at him. Yeah, Han took care of him (by shooting first of course) but why didn't Chewbacca come back when he realized that Han was missing. Or at the very least wait until he came out of the bar with the potentially dangerous people who might be hunting his best friend. This Wookiee is supposed to owe a life debt to Han, yet he really discounts security. **Because Han sent him out to prepare the ship. So Chewie went out to prepare the ship, not stick around to make sure nobody in all of Mos Eisley wanted to hurt Han. He's not his babysitter.**
16. When Han is in the Cantina and Greedo has him at gunpoint, while they're talking why doesn't Han just shoot Greedo instead of letting Greedo shoot first? **Greedo has the drop on Han, so Han needs to bide his time for a few moments so he can get his blaster out without Greedo seeing it. As it is, if Han moves for his blaster before they sit down, Greedo shoots him before it clears the holster.**
17. "She'll make it .5 past light speed". On an interstellar scale, that's not very fast, is it? **Hyperdrives use a series of classes based on a decreasing scale. .5 is ludicrously fast by this standard. "Light-speed" is simply slang for hyperspace travel. *SeniramUK (talk) 11:44, 29 December 2022 (UTC)* Or Class 1 Hyperspace travel - the point 5 Han refers to equates to a Hyperdrive multiplication rating of 0.5, meaning the Falcon is capable of covering distances in half the time taken by ships with Class 1 Hyperdrives.**

### Death Star

1. So, our heroes make it to the Alderaan system, where they see that the planet has been destroyed and there's this new moon-sized Imperial space station. They put two and two together, and try to leave... but they're captured by the Death Star, before Vader realizes that they're the ship which now has the Death Star plans. So, why did they capture the Millennium Falcon? 1) The whole point of the Death Star was to intimidate the rest of the galaxy into submission, so to do that, they should have let the Falcon escape to spread the news about Alderaan's destruction 2) Before Vader realized they have the plans, the Death Star crew just knew of the Falcon as a freighter known for smuggling who escaped the Empire at Mos Eisley; in other words, not exactly important enough to get the attention of a Planet Killer. **The Empire just saw the Falcon blast its way out of Mos Eisley with the two droids it's looking for. Plus, they would grab the ship anyway because they don't know what it's doing there. Letting it go wouldn't have spread news about the Death Star because until the Death Star grabs the ship, Han and the others don't even know it's there or that it exists.
The Empire stops ships all the time. The reason Han is in debt to Jabba in the first place is because he dumped his cargo and ran when an Imperial ship tried to board him. Tractoring it probably would have been standard proceedure. They only got into hostilites with them because it had Obi-Wan former Jedi and the escaped Droids on board and they resisted when boarded. If it had just been Han and Chewie with some regular cargo on board and they hadn't just escaped an Imperial ship earlier they probably would have just checked them and let them go.**
2. Why didn't Darth Vader recognize Leia when they were in the cell together? **It's instructive to note that Vader only recognizes Luke as his son after Luke Skywalker's name has been made public in-between ANH and TESB as The Hero of Yavin. Vader shows no recognition of Luke on the Death Star any more than he does Leia, and he did see Luke face-to-face in the hangar bay, and could only pick up 'This one is strong in the Force' as opposed to 'Wait a damn minute, that's my kid!' when sensing Luke's Force presence during the Battle of Yavin. Since Leia is not going around using Anakin's own last name, and is far more "latent" in the Force than Luke is (Luke was presumably already actively using his powers even before he was trained, while flying around on Tatooine — Leia wasn't doing anything similar), the clues that let Vader eventually pick up on Luke aren't going to tip him off about Leia.**
3. When Leia lies and says that the Rebel base is on Dantooine, why couldn't Vader sense that she was lying? **She's not lying. There is a Rebel base on Dantooine. It's just abandoned.**
4. While it doesn't really change anything, why is Dantooine "too remote" to demonstrate the station's power? You're blowing up a planet, people will notice and word will travel. It's obviously a charted world or nothing would have been there to begin with. **By destroying Alderaan, Tarkin wanted to send the message that no matter how beautful or popular your world might be with the rest of the galaxy, the Empire will not tolerate supporting the Rebel Alliance.**
5. Why was Leia surprised when Tarkin broke his word considering that he's presumably committed massacres before? **There's a big difference between ordering the deaths of, say, 200 people, and 2 billion. An entire planet is an unprecedented order. Hardly anyone would have expected Tarkin would indeed go that far, which he did because he was already planning for a demonstration.
Exactly. The closest thing to what Tarkin did was the bombardment of Taris, which had happened 2,000 years ago, still wasn't nearly as destructive as actually blowing up the planet, and even the Sith of the time thought it was going a little far. In fact, it's probably arguable that even Palpatine wasn't really intending to go around blowing up major hub worlds of the Empire with the thing and Tarkin had gone too far... the threat of the Death Star was supposed to keep everyone in line, not actually using it every time someone from some world that was an important part of the Empire stepped out of line.
It’s logical that Palpatine was planning on using the Death Star on an at least reasonably well populated world. The thing about weapons of this nature is that to be effective threats, you have to use them at least once, both to demonstrate that they do what you claim they do, and that you are willing to use them. Otherwise, the threat is meaningless.**
6. When they're on the Death Star and Artoo plugs into the computer, he informs Luke (via Threepio) that Princess Leia is onboard. Luke immediately understands the significance of this; Princess Leia is the girl from that "You're my only hope" message! But wait, how does Luke know that? Leia never identified herself in that message. In fact, no one in the entire movie refers to her as "Princess Leia" before that particular scene onboard the Death Star. (Vader calls her "Princess" earlier, but not "Leia", and anyway Luke wasn't around during that conversation. At the homestead, Threepio says "She was a passenger on our last voyage" but doesn't refer to her by name.) The only reason the name "Princess Leia" means anything to the audience is because we read the opening crawl. Luke shouldn't be able to recognize her name. **Maybe Obi-wan happened to mention it during the trip to Alderaan.
Since Leia is a member of Alderaan's royal family, Luke could've heard about her before, possibly seen her in some hologram news, and he just didn't make the connection/remember that that was Princess Leia until he heard her name.**
7. Why did Luke and Han leave the droids in that control tower in the Death Star when they went to go rescue the princess? They were carrying vital plans and the whole point of going to Alderaan was to give R2 to Leia. Why would they at least not try to hide them on the Falcon or something? **Perhaps, they wanted to have their best hackers at the most important, abandoned control panel nearby where they plug in the system. That they were near a panel is how they got them out of the trash compactor. Though they may not have thought it out that far and just left them there without even figuring out that could pose a problem if they get caught.
Also, the Falcon was under armed guards and being swept for droids by electronic detectors. It was the opposite of a safe hiding place.**
8. When Luke gets pulled underwater by the dianoga, he comes up soaking wet with his hair plastered to his head, so how come a couple of scenes later his hair is perfectly dry? **The dehumidification systems outside that area are really freaking good. Fridge Brilliance moment: They'd have to be. Something like the Death Star would be a nightmare to operate without top-notch humidity controls. There'd be condensation everywhere if there wasn't, especially if there are large sections containing liquid water (which, again, there must be), so there must be incredibly powerful and incredibly sophisticated dehumidification systems to combat that; able to distinguish between wet clothes (and wet Wookiee hair) and moisture-laden living tissue. They'd almost certainly be operating at maximum just outside the water-laden compartments too.**
9. OK I know Changing Clothes Is a Free Action but still. After the trash compactor scene Luke and Han change back into their normal outfits from the stormtrooper armor, but where were their clothes in the meantime? The armor is skintight, at least the black sleeve they wear underneath is, there's no room for more clothes under there. **The Stormtrooper uniform has a little moulded on back pack, and a storage cannister on the rear of the belt. So they could have stuffed their clothes there. Alternatively, that body glove is just really good at compression.**
10. Why does Luke Skywalker, a simple farm boy, apparently just carry around a grappling hook? **It came from the stormtrooper belt he was wearing at the time.**
11. Why does Obi-Wan let Vader kill him so easily? Okay, he becomes a ghost, so he it's not like he's completely gone, but wouldn't it have been better if he'd been around longer as a human to mentor Luke and explain him things? (As a ghost, he seems to contact Luke only rarely.) I guess it's possible the lightsaber duel with Vader was such that he couldn't escape it, and he realized Vader was gonna win eventually... But even in that case, couldn't he at least have tried to fight longer to buy the heroes more time before Vader kills him? Now he just puts his saber down and lets Vader hit him. I know the real reason for Obi-Wan's death is that Alec Guinness didn't want to do any more Star Wars movies, but couldn't Lucas at least have written him a death scene that makes more sense? **Look where Obi-Wan is, where Luke and the rest are, and what's between them: A couple dozen storm troopers, a big shaft, and Darth freakin' Vader. Obi-Wan couldn't have disengaged from Vader and rejoined Luke and the others without taking up considerably more time, which would risk Luke and the others being captured and killed. He knew that Luke wouldn't leave without him if he was alive, so he made the choice to let himself die so he didn't delay their escape.
Anyway, Obi-Wan was clearly in an unwinnable situation given Vader and Stormtroopers being on both sides, and besides, Vader would have stopped Obi-Wan if he tried to escape.
In addition, he wanted Luke to hate Darth Vader by letting the boy see his mentor die at Vader's hands. This would go along with the general effort to keep Luke from learning of his relationship to Vader, or to keep him from being tempted to join Vader or risk everything on an attempt to redeem him.
Also, he did it to make a distraction so the others could escape (the reason he went to fight Vader in full view of the docking bay in the first place). He decides to let Vader kill him because he knows he's going to die soon anyway and it was a convenient way to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence so he could go on being Luke's mentor as a Force ghost.**
12. Just happened to rewatch the movie and the Obi-Wan moment in particular. It suddenly came to me, wasn't Kenobi's sacrifice... kinda stupid? There he is, fencing with Vader, and all the stormtroopers abandon their posts at the hatch of the Millennium Falcon and gather round to watch them (and maybe even pass popcorn) - that is, exactly what the heroes need to quietly sneak aboard the Falcon. And then he sees Luke, and allows Vader to kill him, Luke immediately starts shouting and shooting, Stormtroopers return fire, and they only escape because it's Stormtroopers. Wouldn't it make much more sense to keep fighting Vader until everybody is aboard and then give in to Vader, so that they wouldn't wait for him? **No, because Obi-Wan feared the heroes would try to save him and thus lose their chance to get aboard unnoticed. If he's already dead, then they have no need to intervene in the duel.**

### Escape to Yavin

1. When the Millenium Falcon is escaping Tarkin mentions they are letting them escape on purpose with the intent of letting the beacon they planted allow them to find the rebel base. Why then do they send some TIE fighters out to attack them? Isn't that counterproductive? **Because not sending the TIE fighters would look suspicious.**
2. Vader exclaims "There will be no one to stop this time!" Uh, correct me if I'm wrong, but haven't he and his boss basically ruled the galaxy for the last twenty years? Who stopped them last time? **Well we know the Rebel Alliance has been around some time, since they were organized enough to steal the Death Star plans, form a base on Yavin, arrange a small armada of ships, etc. Therefore, we can also assume that the Rebel Alliance has been meddling in the affairs of the Empire for some time. This is what Vader is likely referencing. While the Rebels have not outright "stopped" the Empire, they have impeded them and fought against them for years, so Vader is expressing his anticipation of being rid of their annoyance and threat.**
3. Why did they go directly to the Rebel base? Leia speculated they were being followed. So why didn't they fly to a relatively distant planet, make multiple copies of the Death Star plans on different machines and send those machines to different locations? There was no need to lead the Empire to the base so quickly. **What makes you think they had the time or resources for that? The Empire is big. Any stop at a place that isn't Rebel controlled runs the risk that some Empire agent is going to be there and catch you. And there's the tracking beacon too, so any time you stop? The Empire is catching up. The most important thing at that point was to get the plans into Rebel hands before anything else could happen to them.
They needed time to get to the base, have a team analyze the plans, have a meeting with all of the pilots present, pay Han, get the fighters ready and intercept the Death Star before it was in range of the moon.
Had they gone anywhere but straight to the rebel base, the Empire would quickly realize their plan's not working and so just recapture them. Leia had a miraculous second chance at delivering the Death Star plans to the Rebellion, and she figured losing the Yavin base would be worth it.
Maybe it's a case of covert ruthlessness on Leia's part: she knows the Empire is probably tracking them, and is actually counting on them to do so, so she can force the Rebellion into immediate action. We know there are lots of other authority-figures within the Rebellion's ranks, and some of them would probably drag their feet on taking on something as formidable as the Death Star if she leaves them that option. Worse, when word gets out among the rebels about what the Empire's new death machine is capable of, they're liable to see a rash of desertions, panic, and/or betrayals by their own people. And waiting will also give the Empire's engineers more time to review the planet-killer's design and compensate for weaknesses. The longer they delay, the worse their chances of ever stopping the Death Star will be. So she lets the Empire track them back to Yavin, gambling everything on the Rebels' ability to discern vulnerabilities and destroy the thing before it can blast them all into oblivion. She's arguably betraying her own allies' secrecy in order to lure Tarkin and his world-killing war machine into a trap, which is a pretty ruthless desperation-tactic on Leia's part**
4. More on the tracking beacon: why not dump it into space in orbit around some random uninhabited planet, possibly via the same method that Han dumps his smuggling shipments at the first sign of an Imperial cruiser? Or just disable the thing? ***SeniramUK (talk) 11:44, 29 December 2022 (UTC)* According to the dialogue between Vader and Tarkin, the beacon was hidden on the Falcon, possibly among the ship’s systems.**
5. Why does Leia lead the Falcon to the rebel base? She says it, she knows the ship is being tracked. Why not go to some random planet, leave the Falcon there, and take another ship? **She likely thought that both the plans and themselves would be captured again if she landed anywhere else, since they were being tracked. At this point of time there weren't any independent worlds from the Empire, and anyway any planet they went to is at risk of getting superlasered.
Ehm, summon a ship from the base, rendezvous with it somewhere inconspicuous, travel to the base on it and then use the Millennium Falcon as a bait, anyone?
How? The Falcon doesn't have a long-range comm system. They would have to stopover in the Yavin system to comm the base, and the Imperials would note the system that the Falcon stopped at and find the base anyway. Leia has no contacts that she could reach before the Imperials found them.**

### Battle of Yavin

1. Why didn't Tarkin order to blow up the planet that the moon with the rebel base was orbiting? The effect would've been devastating and they wouldn't have to wait while the rebels attacked them. **According to the Expanded Universe: 1. The first Death Star superlaser has at least a 3 hour to 24 hour recharge time, depending who you ask, so you can't just shoot the gas giant out of the way then hit the Rebel Base. 2. The superlaser's effects on a Gas Giant are unknown, but according to speculation from the characters who designed and used the thing it wouldn't have been that effective, it wouldn't have even come close to destroying the gas giant. 3. Destroying the Gas Giant (assuming it was possible) wouldn't necessarily render the moon uninhabitable fast enough, the rebels could potentially escape. Hitting the moon means they have no chance to escape. 4. Tarkin is neither an impatient nor worried man. He believes his station to be invincible, so much so that he didn't even launch any TIEs to deal with the incoming fighters. He was almost certainly enjoying every second of coming in range knowing how the rebels at the base would be worrying.**
2. Why didn't the Death Star take a different hyperspace route and approach from the other side of the planet? **Hyperspace works on pre-existing routes. For most systems, there's only one way in or out. If you look carefully, you'll see that the Falcon makes the same approach to Yavin base. Plus, the Death Star didn't need to go all the way to Yavin, just go around the gas giant far enough to get a clean shot.
Even if you disregard the concept of hyperspace lanes, the Death Star has to get from Point A (the brand-new Alderaan Debris Field) to Point B (Yavin), so unless they deliberately take a longer route they're going to show up on the "whichever way is in the direction of The Space Dust Formerly Known As Alderaan" side of the system. The moon being on the wrong side is thus simply bad timing on the Empire's part, though how bad their timing is would depend on how long Yavin IV's orbital period is. Assuming they calculated where Yavin IV was in its orbit, the alternatives would be to either plot a longer course that lets them approach from a different direction (adding a delay of unknown length, when already in pursuit of a demonstrably-faster ship), or wait for it to be a time of "year" on Yavin IV where they'll exit from the Alderaan Asteroid Mine with a clear line of fire (by which time the rebels had better be long gone, unless Yavin IV's orbital speed is relativistic).**
3. Why weren't the rebels trying to evacuate Yavin while the Death Star was approaching? Yes, they were hoping someone would be able to blow it up, but all of them acknowledged it was a plan that had only a slim chance of working. Rather than sitting around, waiting for the Empire to arrive, shouldn't they have been evacuating their most important personnel and war material in case the starfighter assault failed? The Battle of Hoth shows they can tear down a base in relatively short order, so wouldn't you expect them to be doing the same when they have a planet-killing super-weapon on final approach? **The only reason the evacuation in Hoth worked was because they had an ion cannon they could use to disable the Imperial ships that would stop them from evacuating. Apparently, Yavin didn't have anything like that. Evacuation would've meant running right into the Empire anyway.
Yet the Empire didn't have Star Destroyers or other ships present (if they did, those ships would presumably be blockading the planet to disrupt any attempt at escape and they'd still be there after the Death Star blew up) and the Death Star, when it arrived in-system, was still on the far side of the gas giant. I'm not sure what Imperial ships the Rebels would need an ion cannon to fight against…
More likely they had so little time to evacuate that by the time they got off world they would be cooked by the Death Star anyway. The Battle of Yavin was rather short because the Death Star arrived right after the Falcon did and it was a last-ditch attempt to stop the base from being destroyed. This does run into a problem in that the Rebel technicians must have had enough time to analyze the plans to find the weak spot... how long did that take?
R2 might have done some analysis beforehand, cutting down on the amount of analysis time. The data might have also come with a searchable database that would allow imperial engineers intent on making repairs and improvements to find what they were looking for more quickly. With plans for something that big and complex, anyone not already intimately familiar with the station's design would be useless otherwise. The rebels could use such a system to quickly search for weaknesses.
With the added context of Rogue One we now know the rebels on Yavin already knew of a flaw in the Death Star's design even before they stole the plans (the fact that destroying the reactor would trigger a chain reaction destroying the Death Star), meaning they could narrow down things to looking for ways to exploit it with their available resources rather than just trying to find any kind of weakness.
Who says they didn't evacuate? Rogue One shows us a wide variety of capital ships, not a single one of which appears on or near Yavin. If we assume that all we see is all that's there, what we have are two fighter squadrons and a skeleton crew. It could be that all of the rest of the Rebellion, much of which we see in ESB, had already left.**
4. The rebels used the plans they stole to find the vulnerable spot in the structure of the Death Star. Good for them. So, what's the very first thing the imperials should've done as soon as they learned of the theft? Exactly, give the back up copy to their engineers and tell them: "I want these plans combed with the finest comb and all the structural imperfections that a relatively small rebel task force could exploit to harm the station found. Commence." Surely, the exposed ventilation shaft that the rebels found so easily, would've been found by another group of qualified specialists, let alone by the very people who build the damned thing. So, why exactly wasn't that done? **Granted, they didn't do it right away, but during that final attack, one of the officers on the Death Star goes to Tarkin mentions that they've analyzed the attack, and discovered there is a way they might get through and destroy the place. Tarkin waves it off, but it's obvious the guy was talking about that exhaust port. A station the size of the Death Star likely has a laundry-list of little vulnerabilities like the exhaust port. They probably only brought it up because the rebels were targeting the port directly.
The officer who reports the flaw says that the base's technicians only discovered the danger by taking the rebel fighters' own actions into account. Which means the attack was already in progress when they realized the exhaust port was an issue, so they only had a few minutes in which to devise a countermeasure and put it into effect. Unless they routinely stored suitable armor patches and the necessary equipment to install them right next to the exhaust port, there simply wasn't time to make the fix.
Maybe the engineers thought the guns could target and fighters the rebels would be able to field, or that the commander would mobilize a larger counter-force against the rebels. After all, the rebels only got the port at all because Black Squadron was the only one to mobilize.
Sure, but it's not like they had to reconstruct the whole station - just wield a protection grid/lid over the shafts exit. If it impedes with the shafts operation, fine, make the grid removable and close it right before the rebel attack. Or was Tarkin THAT incompetent, he decided that moving against the rebels with a known unfixed vulnerability would've been a good challenging sport?
Tarkin doesn't believe the station is vulnerable. And it really isn't. The exhaust port is a billion-to-one shot.
Basically. They know full well the exhaust port is a weak spot but...well there has to be an exhaust port SOMEWHERE for the station to work. When they noticed the fighters flying right into the trench that led to the port they realized "Oh no they must know where the port is." and it was technically a danger but the odds of them making the shot without getting shot down were so low it wasn't worth getting too concerned about. The fighters and defenses should have been enough to take care of some X and Y Wings and they nearly were. The Imperials certain never expected the Millenium Falcon to make a sudden return and jump into the fray at the last second.
You're forgetting something: It's possible that the imperials don't know the specs of the rebels' proton torpedoes. In fact the on-hand torpedoes might have been modified for this exact mission, once the rebels figured out what they needed. Remember that the goal is to set off a chain reaction, and that might require a very precise kind of explosion with a precise energy signature. In any other circumstance it wouldn't matter, but this is a very special circumstance! So maybe the imperial engineers were frantically looking over their copy of the plans for every weakness they could think of, while the rebels were able to quickly narrow the search to "things that would be vulnerable to our torpedoes, which have X, Y, and Z qualities that the imperials don't know about". During the battle, the imperials notice that the rebel ships are all gunning for a particular exhaust port, which gets them thinking "Hey, is it possible that rebel torpedoes have Quality Z and we just don't know it? Becuase we ran the figures just now, and if they do have Quality Z then it turns out that might be enough to trigger a chain reaction via that exhaust port." This is turn is what prompts the line "We've analyzed their attack, sir, and there is a danger." But they couldn't have figured it out in advance, because they didn't know the exact specs of the enemy's weapons and they didn't have the critical clue of "they're aiming for this one specific exhaust port".**
5. Did they have any backup precautions at all, just in case the attempt to destroy the Death Star didn't work? **No. What "backup precautions" could they have come up with? Besides evacuating the base?
It's more "why are we sticking around when we know the Death Star is coming?"
And where would they go? They're being chased by a world-destroying super weapon, an emperor who can predict the future and the entire military might of a galactic empire. Their options are somewhat limited, and any place they can run to will either be worse off than the Yavin base (not as much time to set up before DS shows up) or inhabited (so a world will die when the base is attacked, something the rebels very much don't want). They're out of options using their last desperate ploy to prevent themselves from being destroyed. Pulling off the torpedo shot from Yavin's base is easier than from any other (gas giant in the way) so going anywhere else would be worse than just hoping for the best.**
6. The Rebels were in a hurry to destroy the Death Star, but why didn't they have gunners in the Y-Wings, so that they could provide cover-fire from any TIE Fighters that tried intercepting them in the trenches? Don't tell me they were short on pilots, since we see a whole bunch of them at the ceremony in the final scene. **Where, exactly, are they going to put a gunner? The Y-Wing is a single-seat fighter-bomber that doesn't have a gun turret on it.
According to the Expanded Universe, there were two variants of the Y-Wing. One was a single-seat, used in this film, and the other was a two-man fighter, used in Return of the Jedi.
Don't know if it's canon anymore, but the Complete Cross-Sections book said that the Y-Wings they used were the one-seater variant (though it does say that there was a two-seater version). It also said that the ion cannons(meaning they temporarily disrupt electronics rather than doing actual damage, like the gun the Jawas use on R2) on the Y-Wings were extremely finicky and hard to calibrate, and only two Y-Wings taking part in the attack actually had them working. However, it does say that they were used, and that the only Y-Wing to survive was one of the ones with the working ion cannons. *SeniramUK (talk) 11:44, 29 December 2022 (UTC)* Besides, the turrets could have been remotely operated by the pilot, or an on board astromech.**
7. How were small fighters able to blast holes in the Death Star's surface and blow up its turbolaser towers just with their laser cannons? Surely such a large and important installation would've been shielded from that? Even if not or they somehow got inside the shield, the opening crawl says its armored, but the laser cannons on a small fighter are the weakest space weapons it would be up against! **Yes it is shielded, they even make a dialogue point of saying the fighters are passing through the shields. The fighter's turbolasers are still quite powerful though, however they are only doing limited damage. They score a few lucky hits on vulnerable locations, manage to spark a few overloads.
There are probably any number of structures on the Death Star's surface that can't be armored, because their purpose precludes it. A lot of other times, the pilots are probably just blasting away randomly, not caring if they're chewing up armor (armor doesn't negate damage, it just absorbs it instead of something actually important) or actual vital components, because the point of those attacks is to draw the Death Star's attention away from the Y-Wings about to make the trench run. The attack is supposed to look like "Oh, look at those puny Rebels, fighting futilely with tiny fighters against our massive Planet Killer! They have no chance to do any damage- wait, why are we blowing up?"**
8. Why is it that when we see the Red and Gold squad fighter pilots close up in their fighters they're bouncing around, floating up and down? Whereas when we see the fighters from the outside they're fairly stable. **I don't think the pilots are supposed to be bouncing around. Note that the engines of the X-Wings tend to shift around as well. I believe it's meant to be a camera trick to make the viewer experience the changes in momentum when the fighters turn.**
9. During the final battle, the Rebel commander on Yavin says "Squad leaders, we've picked up a new group of signals. Enemy fighters coming your way." But how is the ground base on Yavin 4 able to detect these fighters in the first place? There's no line of sight from the moon to the Death Star. For the same reason that the Death Star can't instantly zap the moon, the Rebel base shouldn't be able to see what's going on at the Death Star. **They could have surveillance satellites around the system keeping an eye out for Empire ships and the like. After all, they're talking with the fighters somehow.
They're not detecting the TIE fighters themselves, they're detecting their radio signals.**
10. If Han had actually agreed to take part in the assault on the Death Star at the beginning, what would his role have been, exactly? The Millennium Falcon is easily the equal of any snub fighter in terms of speed, maneuverability and firepower, so would the Alliance higher ups have had Solo make the assault run with the Y-Wings? Or would the Falcon act as a wingman, or troubleshooting assault craft, shooting enemy fighters off Rebel ships trying to make their run? **The Falcon would probably have been disabled with a tractor beam if it had taken part from the start. The small fighters appear to be small enough able ignore the tractor beams with only a little turbulence, larger ships than the Y-wings would probably have been little use. It is only because everyone is already focused on the battle that Han is able to jump in with the element of surprise at the last minute. The Falcon would have been of more use as an evacuation vessel.**
11. Why didn't the rebel ships fly directly to the Death Star's power plant instead of flying through that long trench to reach it? **Because flying directly would've exposed them to fire from every turret on that side of the base. The trench provided cover. In any case, the "power plant" was deep inside the station (probably at the core) and out of reach. The trench had the exhaust port that led to the reactor, so they had to dive into that sooner or later to make the shot. Being closer to the station means that fewer guns can be brought to bear (even if turbolasers can't effectively target star fighters, filling the sky with enough of them will make flying through it suicide, just ask Porkins). The trench robs some maneuverability, but dramatically reduces the force the Death Star can bring to bear. And as for enemy fighters: who else but Darth Vader and his elite wingmen could have followed that narrow path? TIE Fighters' only defense is their maneuverability, they'd be daft to follow the Rebels in there. In addition, the likely reason for having to fly through it for such a long trip is probably due to the size of the target being so small, therefore the pilots would want the extra time to line up the shot.**
12. Can someone explain to me the dog fighting tactics used in the Battle of Yavin? When the star fighters were making their attack run, the one who was actually going to make the attack was supposedly being covered by his wing mates. Now, I'm not a fighter pilot, but I do know you don't cover your wingman by flying beside him. Instead, you fly well over him or behind him. So, if an enemy pilot drops onto your buddy's tail, you can drop behind the enemy fighter. In any World War II documentary, you see this. You'll see torpedo bombers making their way to their targets with friendly fighters, hovering above, ready to drop onto any enemy craft going after the bombers. In the first Death Star battle, you see nothing like this. You just see a bunch of stupid wingmen with "shoot me" written on the back of their fighters. **They were flying behind them. Specifically, they were flying close enough behind them to cover them with their fighters' shields. For all intents and purposes, the lead fighter's wingmen were disposable, ablative armor to protect him while he set up for his torpedo run. The wingmen couldn't hang very far back because that would let the TI Es slip inside the gap and smoke them, and they couldn't fly outside the trench overhead, because of the anti-air batteries.**
13. When the Death Star attacks Yavin, the Rebellion sends some fighters to destroy it. At one point during the attack, an Imperial officer says to Vader "We count thirty Rebel ships, Lord Vader, but they're so small they're evading our turbolasers." The largest number of rebel fighters we ever see in a single frame is seventeen. When the pilots are reporting in, only nine, counting Red Leader, do so, although that does not include Gold Group, only Red Group. So thirty seems to be the highest estimate for the number of Rebel fighters at the Battle of Yavin. Presumably, considering the stakes in this battle, the Rebels sent every fighter they had; they took Luke, a complete stranger of uncertain flying skill (yes, in a deleted scene Biggs vouched for him, but still, he had never flown an X-Wing before), indicating that they were pretty desperate for pilots. Now, shortly before the battle, Vader had said to Tarkin that "This will be a day long remembered: it has seen the end of Kenobi, and will soon see the end of the Rebellion", and, earlier in the film, Tarkin had anticipated that once they knew the location of the Rebel Base, they would "crush the Rebellion with one swift stroke." That suggests that Vader and Tarkin were anticipating that the destruction of the Yavin base would effectively end the Rebellion. That implies that a large proportion of the Rebellion's assets are located at Yavin. During the meeting on the Death Star, however, General Tagge said to Admiral Motti that "The Rebel Alliance is too well-equipped. They're more dangerous than you realize." So here is my confusion: the "well-equipped", "dangerous" Rebel Alliance keeps such a large proportion of its military strength in its secret base at Yavin that destroying Yavin will allow the Empire to "crush the Rebellion with one swift stroke", but that military strength was at most thirty fighters, of which only three survived the battle of Yavin. So something is not adding up here. **Yavin was not the entirety or the bulk of the Rebel Fleet. It was probably its most significant base, and, at the time, held its leadership. Tarkin is not saying they're going to exterminate every member of the Rebellion — he's saying they're going to break its back by destroying its leadership. That and Motti might well be, you know, wrong. Don't assume everyone is speaking the total and absolute truth.
But if Yavin houses the bulk of the Rebel leadership, such that destroying it would cripple the Rebellion, why is it guarded by only thirty fighters? I actually like your second explanation much better: if the Imperials were simply wrong about the importance of the Yavin base, and it actually wasn't all that important to the Rebellion (incidentally, Mon Mothma does not seem to have been at Yavin, which reinforces the idea that Yavin was not really the center of the Rebel leadership), then that might explain why Leia did not ask Han to pull the Falcon over somewhere in deep space so that they could find and dump the homing beacon. She wasn't especially worried about it, because she wasn't leading the Death Star anywhere all that important.
With more Rogue One information coming in, it seems that the Yavin base actually had been more extensive, including having both Mon Mothma and Bail Organa present there, but when Leia was captured they evacuated their leadership first. It also seems that the Rebellion chewed through much of it's resources even getting the plans in the first place.**
14. Why did Luke take charge during the final Trench Run? Biggs and Wedge both have more experience than Luke, and they outrank him as well (it's unlikely that Luke was given a high rank for his second mission in the Rebellion). **The pilots with lower numbers don't outrank Luke. When Red Squadron was originally formed, this would have been true, but casualties leave gaps and mess up everything, Red Leader/Red 1 being the only exception. Rebel squadrons in the EU fly in pairs. Judging by dialogue Biggs (Red 3) was Luke's (Red 5) wing-man. By the time Luke made his run on the exhaust port, most of Red Squadron was wiped out. Wedge's wing-man was presumably shot down already, and Biggs was already watching Luke's back while Luke looked for more TIE fighters to blast apart. Hence, Wedge would take up position on Luke's other wing, allowing the trio to share shields. This particular formation is not really used in real life in combat because it's dangerous to fly that close in combat (or any time), but here would be a case of reorganization. The Y-Wings of Gold Squadron would presumably be organized in the three-ship formation from the start since they were supposed to be the ones to bomb the Death Star in the original plan.
Red Leader actually put Luke in a position of authority well before he got blown up. "Luke, take Reds 2 and 3. Wait for my signal to start your run." Part of being a good officer is recognizing talent, and the Special Edition adds a brief scene of Red Leader questioning Luke's ability to handle the X-Wing. When Biggs gives him qualifications, Red Leader admits that Luke will "do alright." One could speculate that Red Leader knew Biggs well enough to know that if he vouched for someone, that someone was pretty damn good.**
15. Anyone else bothered with how completely nonchalant Luke is about Vader killing Biggs? He mourns Obi-Wan, a guy he barely knew up until a few hours ago, but they made it pretty clear Biggs was a fairly close friend of Luke, yet Luke doesn't even acknowledge his death once he docks back on Yavin ever. **Post-battle euphoria, which is extremely common and documented. An enormous amount was riding on that battle, and the fact that not only did Luke survive but he dealt a crippling blow to the Empire in the process, plus the elation of everyone else around him would be enough to sweep him up, at least for a bit. The realistic emotional response to that kind of a victory is intense euphoria, as the soldier in question both comes down off the adrenaline and has the exhilaration of both surviving intense combat and winning a battle and being congratulated by his fellows. He's got time to mourn later.
Actually, Luke looks absolutely horrified when Biggs dies, but then has to focus on saving his own life and finishing the mission.**
16. How would Luke have any idea that it was Vader who killed Darklighter? ***SeniramUK (talk) 11:44, 29 December 2022 (UTC)* His newly found Force Sense, combined with the logical fact that the pilot of the modified TIE Fighter was the only one who fired on the X-Wings in the trench.**
17. At the Battle of Yavin, Luke is about to be shot down by Vader when Han comes out of hyperspace and shoots Vader and the other TIE fighters off of Luke's tail. Great, but two other groups of Rebel fighters had made attack runs on the thermal exhaust port before then: the flight of Y-wings from gold group, and then a first flight of X-wings led by Red Leader. So why didn't any of the X-wings from red group try to shoot Vader off of gold group's tails, and why didn't Luke, Biggs, and Wedge try to shoot Vader off of Red Leader's tail? **In the time it would take them to get to them, it would already be too late, especially considering that there was so much AA fire in the air that they had to fly down the trench in the first place.
Red Leader tells him to stay put; he knows that Luke and the others are the last chance should he fail and doesn't want them to possibly blow it helping him.**
18. So if Luke turned off his targeting computer, how did the proton torpedoes know when to do their 90 degree turn? Were they preprogrammed to follow the route down into the core, so all the pilots had to do was fire at the proper moment and then let the torps do all the maneuvering by themselves? **He guided them with the Force - It could have been instinctive; he is, after all, the son of The Chosen One. Once he knew subconsciously he'd be able to do things like this, he could have
Plus he had Ben to guide him, so control wouldn't have been much of an issue.
Its likely the torpedoes were preprogrammed to home in on the largest power source they could, but they needed to be guided to the exhaust vent itself through the massive jamming field around the Death Star itself. The instrumentation on the targeting computers on the fighters couldn't get through said jamming fields, which was why they were missing. Once Luke blind-fired the torpedoes and guided them at their target with the Force, the dropped into the exhaust vent.**
19. I always assumed that the Falcon exited hyperspace, and shot Vader’s wingman, because of the bright flash behind the Falcon and that the ship seemingly evaded all the Death Star's defenses. Yet I've had difficulty finding a source specifying exactly what occurred there. **Officially, that bright flash behind the ship is Yavin's star. Han flew directly out of the sun to mask his approach.**
20. Shown leaving the Death Star as it explodes is Luke, another X-Wing (presumably Wedge who was damaged and pulled back because he wouldn't be any help) The Falcon, which just showed up and one lone Y-Wing. Who the heck is this guy? Only 3 Y-Wings were part of the group earlier and they all got shot down. Why didn't this guy try to help or do anything. Did he just chill out the whole fight and nobody from the Empire noticed him there? It's not an error either because that shot of them leaving is redone in the Special Edition and that one random Y-Wing is STILL there. **We don't see every single thing that happens to every single ship. The official Disney canon is that there were eight Y-Wings at the Battle of Yavin, with the survivor being Gold Three.**

### Misc

1. If Owen and Beru really didn't want Luke getting involved in anything relating to the Jedi, Rebellion, or anything else, why didn't they raise Luke as their son rather than their nephew? Why did they let him keep the name Luke Skywalker instead of calling him Luke Lars? **The reason they didn't claim Luke as their son is they didn't see the need. When Obi-Wan gave Luke to Owen and Beru, it was under the assumption that Anakin was dead. It wasn't until years later that they realized Anakin survived as Vader but by then, the Lars' had probably already informed their nephew of his father's life and let him keep his father and grandmother's name. So they thought they were honoring a dead guy when really they were painting a target on Luke's back. Further, claiming Luke as their own might have been difficult since it would have been obvious that Beru was not pregnant right before they got Luke.
Moreover, when Obi-Wan originally brought Luke to them to be cared for, he and Yoda probably had no idea that they'd have to wait for decades to take another shot at the Emperor, or that Luke's location would even remain a secret that long. Rather, he probably warned them that he might have to come take the boy away to a different place of concealment at any moment. (Even if Vader had been dead, Palpatine would surely be interested in recruiting Anakin's child if he ever learned Padme'd lived long enough to give birth.) That being the case, Owen and Beru may have called Luke "nephew" rather than "son" because they feared the latter would only make it more painful for everyone if the kid were indeed taken away.
The in-universe reasoning could be that Owen and Beru were simply uncomfortable lying. It's one thing to raise your orphaned nephew, it's another to claim him as your own. Especially since Obi-Wan could have removed Luke at any time in the event of a threat. Maybe they didn't want to get too attached in case they were separated?
Interestingly, no one actually utters the name "Skywalker" while on the surface of Tatooine. It only comes up when Luke is far away on the Death Star, and announces "I'm Luke Skywalker. I'm here to rescue you." Luke may have been told to use a false surname, with the excuse that some local gangsters had a grudge against the Skywalker family. The actual reason for secrecy was that Luke was the son of a Jedi, but they didn't tell him that. So when Luke abandons Tatooine (with the explicit intention of never returning again), he figures that those "local gangsters" he'd been warned about were no longer a problem, so there was no longer any need to conceal his true surname. So he started calling himself "Luke Skywalker" again, having no idea that this would soon get Vader's attention...**
2. Why does Obi-Wan look so old in this one (and as a Force ghost in the sequels)? According to Wookieepedia, he was 57 when he died, but he looked much older. I know that Sir Alec Guinness was 63 when he played that part, so it's not much of a stretch, but in Phantom Menace you have a 60 year old Qui-Gon, played by a not-yet-50-year-old Liam Neeson, and he certainly looks \*a lot\* younger than Guinness, so... any guesses? **Qui-Gon was living at the height of the republic, with Jedi health care and generally good conditions. Obi-Wan, however, spent his later years living in a hobble on a desert planet.
Stress could also factor into it. For reference, look at the appearance of a U.S President at the beginning of his term and after. You have to consider Obi-Wan's predicament, the entire Jedi Order was destroyed as an organization with only a few survivors across the galaxy, his best friend betrayed him and he was forced to cut him apart only for him to survive as a shadow of his former self, and is on the run from the Empire in fear for his life. You try not growing a few gray hairs after an ordeal like that.
Keep in mind that he's spent the last twenty or so years living on a desert planet. With that much sun, people (humans, anyway) just don't age very well. And the older he looks, the less he'll be associated with General Kenobi of the Clone Wars.**
3. Why do Owen and Beru look like if they were in their 60s? They were just like in their late teens / early 20's when they adopted Luke and there have only passed 19 years since that. **Just being out under one sun seriously ages your skin. Imagine what two suns do to you.**
4. So what, exactly, happened to the moisture farm? Luke sells off his land-speeder, but there's no indication he sold the farm, too. Did all of the droids and vaporators and other equipment just get abandoned for the next sand crawler full of Jawas to swipe? **Presumably all of the droids were destroyed by the Storm Troopers.
In Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker it is confirmed that the homestead was abandoned for 35 years after Star Wars: A New Hope, with its moisture vaporators intact. That's the 'official' canon answer.**
5. In Episode III, we see that the construction of the Death Star has begun soon after Luke's and Leia's birth. In Episode IV, the Death Star is used for the first time, and Luke and Leia are now about 19 or 20 years old. So it took 20 years to finish the Death Star? **Makes sense. Remember, it wasn't the Empire from the moment Palpatine assumed emergency powers... it was still the Republic. Palpatine could have probably just started ordering the ridiculous amount of materials and personnel he needed to construct the Death Star quickly right away, but it would have made the Senate go "Uh, wait, what?" And in the early months, possibly even years, of his reign, Palpatine couldn't necessarily risk the Senate trying to overrule him. It would have taken years for him to consolidate his power to the point that the Senate was, in fact, powerless, during which time the construction would likely proceed quite slowly. And once he just out-and-out converted things to the Empire, he was probably putting a lot of resources into building more Star Destroyers and stamping out the beginnings of rebellions. He could have ramped up production on the Death Star but not to "finish it in a year" levels. So twenty years isn't unreasonable, all things considered.
Also they're building a moon-sized space station with a laser that can destroy entire planets. There's a fair bit of R&D involved in all that.
Now that Rogue One is out, we know the project became stagnant for a while and had a saboteur afterwards who might have done everything to delay the completion of the Death Star. Also, they were still trying to keep the Death Star's existence secret from the Senate — Vader's comment about the Jedha test shot being a "mining accident" and so forth. By the time of ROTJ there's no Senate to even pretend to play nice with; the Emperor can allocate funds and resources more openly for Death Star II.**
6. How did the Dianoga live in the trash compactor? Wouldn't it get crushed?  **Did you forget that the reason Luke survives that scene is because Dianoga lets him go and GTFOs of the trash compactor as it starts up? Whatever the thing is, it evidently has enough sense to get out when the crushinating starts.
The trash has to go somewhere after it's been crushed, right? There must be a pipe or something that leads out of the room. (I mean aside from that one door, which just leads into a hallway.) The Dianoga swims through the pipe whenever it needs to escape. It probably visits a bunch of different compactors, looking for the best food.**
7. Why does Leia call Chewbacca a "walking carpet" in A New Hope considering that it sounds like an ethnic slur aimed at Wookiees in general and Chewbacca is clearly a sapient being? I would imagine that an important person in the Rebel Alliance would be more respectful to nonhumans who are fighting against the Empire. **Cuz she's annoyed and angry.
My guess is her bad mood might have something to do with the fact that she just witnessed everyone she ever knew and loved being blown to bits. You'd be a little testy too.**
8. Why is it that everyone in the galaxy appears to know the language of everybody else? Think about it — Luke speaks droid (whatever that is), Han speaks fluent Wookish, Huttese, and whatever language Greedo speaks. Where did all these hardworking moisture farmers, starship pilots, and mercenaries find the time to learn three or four languages? And how come everyone they speak to in their own language understands them without having to use a translator? **Han is a smuggler and Huttese is one of the most common trade languages (similar to how sailors or traders would have learned Portugese or French). Official canon is that Huttese is very similar to Rodese, making one easy to learn if you know the other (like Romance languages on Earth). He would have learned Shyriiwook to speak with Chewbacca.
Farmers, pilots, etc. knowing several languages isn't all that strange anyway (See immigrants, multilingual countries, and probably other examples on Earth.) People raised in a multilingual environment tend to learn languages quickly at a young age. Owen knows Jawa because inhabitants of Tatooine regularly deal with Jawas, but he doesn't speak Boccee or Vaporator. Han and Lando travel a lot and so probably picked up a lot of different alien languages over the years. In the ancient world, it wasn't uncommon for merchants or the educated to understand two or three languages other than their own.**
9. Princess Leia wears a long white dress. She's in a space battle, captured by Imperials, tortured, dragged through a trash compactor, engages in various firefights and escapes from the Death Star, and that beautiful long white dress (not to mention her hair and make-up) remains *perfect*. **If you look at her, though, her hair is definitely not perfect - strands are coming loose and sticking up, and she looks significantly more disheveled. As to why it's not come undone completely? Her hair (as seen in RotJ) is long enough that it can be very snugly coiled around itself and still create those sizable buns; it was probably also hair-sprayed and pinned in place, and those sorts of things can make a hairstyle resilient now in the present without futuristic Star Wars technology. Even hair that is simply braided tightly and held with a hairband can stay in place for days, with strands coming loose and sticking up precisely as Leia's hair is doing. She also appears more and more tired as time goes by in the film. As to her dress, there's a chance it's made of a stain-resistant and tear-resistant fabric - we have that technology available today, it's not a stretch to imagine a princess familiar with action and firefights would want a few gowns made out of a similar material.**
10. Why is Vader Tarkin's subordinate? Isn't he supposed to be the Emperor's right hand man? And why isn't there another Grand Moff after Tarkin's death?
Formally, Vader outranked Tarkin, being Supreme Commander of the Imperial Navy. Tarkin was pushing his luck in talking back to Vader so much; Vader bided his time, because the Empire needed Tarkin just then. Tarkin felt he was indispensable to the Empire since the Emperor had wholeheartedly adopted his big idea (the Death Star) and his political strategy (crush the slightest sign of resistance with overwhelming force). Maybe Tarkin felt that he was about to become the Emperor's new right-hand man. And Tarkin just had an overconfident personality in general; that's what killed him in the end.
Also, Tarkin is the Death Star's commander, and the whole project was his to begin with. That probably plays a big role in why Vader defers to him so long as they're both on board (though had Tarkin done anything/ordered Vader to do anything that the Emperor really didn't want, Vader certainly wouldn't have cooperated - and according to some sources, Palpatine put him there in the first place to make sure Tarkin didn't let the station's power go to his head and decide to become The Starscream). Oh, and there were plenty of other Grand Moffs both contemporary to and after Tarkin- he was just the most prominent and important (both politically and to the story).
11. I understand that space is a very big place but seriously, how did the Empire manage to build a Death Star without anybody noticing? Unless they were always leaving it at the extreme far end of nowhere that's actually dangerous and they're lucky nobody exited hyperspace inside this moon-sized thing that wasn't supposed to be there! **The Empire likely moved the Death Star around quite a bit. Any area that it was moved to was probably declared a no-fly zone.**
12. The way Vader is portrayed in this movie is not that of the second in command of the galaxy. **Chalk it up to one part Early-Installment Weirdness, one part the Death Star being Tarkin's command and he can order around just about anyone he wants short of the Emperor himself if they're on board (and, possibly, one part Palpatine having told Vader to obey Tarkin while also watching him for sings of potential treasonous behavior).**
13. Darth Vader is Anakin Skywalker. So he has Anakin's height by the end of Ep 3. However, in Ep 4, he is a huge bodybuilder type of guy. So how did he grow to his new size? **Any real anomalies come from his armored life support suit. Basically, Anakin/Vader didn't grow; he got put in a heavy armored suit that is a bit more bulky than a Jedi's robes. Cape and all I think Vader takes up less space than Anakin does wearing full Jedi robes.**
14. How did Han and Luke get promoted so fast? Just because he blew up the Death Star, Luke is automatically a Commander? Yeah, it was great and all but he should have gotten a medal for bravery and then work his way up through the ranks. And Han became a general? How is he General material? And what about Chewbacca? Does he have a rank? If not, he should. He did just as much as Han and yet no one refers to him by rank. **It's not uncommon at all to promote someone if they pulled off something like that. There's something called the "Forlorn Hope." When a fortress was under siege, and a wall was finally broken, someone has to lead the charge in, and the first platoon charging in is usually slaughtered or at least takes heavy casualties. So if you were either part of this charge or led it (I can't remember off the top of my head which) and survived, you were instantly promoted to an officer rank. Also, three people from the X/Y-Wing Fleet survived the Death Star, and we're shown that Red Leader is not among them. Luke would've been promoted by default.
In any case, Luke doesn't automatically become a commander. By the time of ESB, three years have passed, plenty of time to work his way up through the ranks. Keep in mind we also don't know what the rank system of the Rebel Alliance is like and therefore "commander" is a somewhat vague term anyway. In real-world navies, commander is a middle rank and not nearly as high as an admiral.**
15. So, how come Luke never got any Jedi training while he was growing up? Obi-Wan knew where he was, had been keeping an eye on him, and yet never once thought it would be a good idea to train him? Luke is their last hope. They know he's likely the last Jedi that'll be able to confront the Emperor and Vader, yet his only training is relegated to a little lightsaber practice on board the Millennium Falcon and some hasty 'too old to be a Jedi' training with Yoda? Wouldn't it have been much more effective to gradual teach the boy as he's growing up so that he'll be a much more powerful Jedi when he's older? **Because that would draw more attention to him, and his uncle and father figure would've forbidden it. Obi-Wan knew this and says as much.
Also, there's the line about the lightsaber: "Your father wanted you to have this when you were old enough, but your uncle wouldn't allow it." The available dialogue indicates that Owen was not enthused with the idea of Luke following at all in Anakin's footsteps. Owen may have made it clear to Obi-Wan that he was not welcome, and that Owen wouldn't allow Luke to have any Jedi training. Then there's the Revenge of the Sith novelization, in which Yoda realizes that the Sith have changed and adapted, they've learned to fight a new war. While the Jedi have spent the last thousand years preparing to re-fight the last war. The old Jedi have no chance against the new Sith, and Yoda immediately vetoes Obi-Wan declaring that he will train Luke as Anakin should have been trained because Yoda knows only a new kind of Jedi can defeat this new kind of Sith. And indeed, because Luke believes (through the emotional attachments he was raised with, that are forbidden to Obi-Wan's brand of Jedi) that Anakin can be saved, he ultimately gets Anakin to turn on the Emperor.
Don't forget that Obi-wan has a personal reason to be reluctant here. The last time he trained a Jedi, it turned out really bad. It's easy to imagine him constantly putting off the training idea because he's scared of screwing up. Then once he sees Leia's message, he finally decides that he's waited long enough, it's now or never, and he's gotta train Luke as best he can.
Plus there's the implication that Owen really didn't want Luke having anything to do with the Jedi-"your uncle was afraid you'd follow your father on some damn fool crusade," or something. Plus there's the fact that he's worried for his family's safety.**
16. It is clear that Chewie cannot pronounce "Chewbacca". So why is he called by that name? **Presumably it's the closest approximation in Basic to Chewie's name in his own language. We see this all the time: "John and "Juan" are the same name in different languages. The only difference is most humans aren't capable of reproducing the sounds necessary to say Chewbacca's name in his native language.**
17. If the point of hiding Luke was to keep him away from Vader and the Emperor then: a) Why did Kenobi deliver the baby to his evil father's next-of-kin?!? Even Luke calls Owen "uncle"! One would think that just in case, the Empire would keep a dossier on Owen and Beru, given how they're related to one of the Empire’s main officials. And then b) Why do you keep the father’s last name in the kid?!? He’s Luke Skywalker for crying out loud!! Even if the plan worked OK, it was just tempting fate! **This has already been covered. When Obi-Wan gave Luke to Owen and Beru he thought Anakin was dead and didn't learn otherwise for a few years. Tatooine is not in important world, it's at the ass end of nowhere and nobody is watching it. Even once restored Vader has no interest in going back there, and in fact physically can't because it upsets him too much and jeopardizes his life support systems. Nobody is watching Owen and Beru because they're nobodies, they're not even blood relations to Anakin and they spoke to him only once. And most of this is on Owen's head as he and his wife are the ones who decided what to call him and what to tell him about his family since Obi-Wan was not welcome there.
There's also the possibility Luke was glorified bait. We have the Sith Rule of Two, which limits our problems to Palpatine and Vader. Of course, the Sith also work on Chronic Backstabbing Disorder (which Rule of Two tries to account for and turn into an asset instead of fatal flaw). Now, there's Anakin's twins. Anakin didn't know he was having twins. Anakin has a Berserk Button about losing family. Both have a Force Sensitivity of "yes." With Leia, they kept her hidden with allies, changed her surname, gave her all the indoctrination about duty and stoicism, all the military, political, and diplomat training - everything but the Force and lightsaber training. With the other? Put him in plain sight, don't change the name, no training whatsoever. If the Force was with them (and it was), Anakin wouldn't bother going near Tatooine again and Palpatine wouldn't bother, as it's (apparently) a low-rent dustball in the middle of nowhere. If they were unlucky, and one or both of them went looking? Well, they'd find the not-that-well-hidden Luke, not be looking for Leia at all, and leave the rest to Sith being Sith. They'd end up with either Vader or Palpatine dead and the other grievously wounded, all the better for Obi-Wan and Yoda to finish off, hopefully with Luke being none the wiser. And if Luke was turned? Well, we still have our ace in the hole over on Alderaan would could be persuaded to kill her brother if you gave her the "for the greater good" speech.**
18. Why is the Death Star operating alone without any other capital ships? You would think an asset that important would always have plenty of escort ships wherever it goes. Heck, you'd think it would have an entire fleet backing it up. Also at Yavin, why does it not launch its TIE fighters until after the Rebels have commenced their attack on it? You'd think they would have them space-born the moment the Death Star dropped out of hyperspace. **It's almost like there's this incredibly arrogant guy commanding it who is convinced it's the ultimate power in the universe and that it is completely invincible, to the point that he completely disregards warnings that they're in danger, or something.
The Empire probably figured the Death Star had so much armor nothing could ever destroy it, at least not before the Death Star deployed its hundreds of thousands of Tie-Fighters and destroyed the threat, so having any routine support or perimeter control was a waste of resources. The Death Star in general was a stupid idea on the Empire's part, but it didn't have to work, just be scary to the populace.**
19. Why does Obi-Wan catch so much crap from fans for not telling Luke the truth about his father straightaway? **The reason Obi-Wan lied to Luke is both reasonable and obvious, even if one disagrees with him. He didn't tell Luke that Vader was his father because he was concerned that Luke would be reluctant to kill Vader if he found out. Seeing as that is literally exactly what happened when Luke did find out, it's kind of hard to argue Obi-Wan was in the wrong. As far as Obi-Wan was concerned, Vader was a lost cause who had to be put down. It was simply too dangerous to try to rely on there still being good left in him. He needed to be taken out in the most direct way possible and anything that interfered with this, such as Luke knowing Vader was his father, was an unnecessary complication.**
20. In the first film, Leia watches her entire planet get incinerated right in front of her. Most, if not all of her family and friends were killed instantly. Does she spend the rest of the movie a) freaking out; b) in numb disbelief; c) in a slightly crabby, bantering mood? I mean I understand everyone deals differently with grief, and some people manage by putting their head down and immersing themselves in work, but I can't imagine how anyone could experience a tragedy like that and keep going without a great deal effort of holding herself together, and that isn't really shown to any extent at all. **Leia probably spent some time in her prison cell fighting back tears, she just didn't do it on camera. When we do see her, she's still coping with overwhelming grief, but she's at the stage of being really, really angry about what's happened. Hence, her carping at her rescuers and the ferocity with which she joins in the blaster-fights.**
21. So many people wonder why Chewie didn't get a medal, but another question might be why didn't Wedge and the surviving Y-Wing pilot receive medals? They fought in the entire battle while Han and Chewie only showed up at the end. **Luke destroyed the actual station while Han took down Vader one of the Empire's most dangerous pilots. Wedge meanwhile got damaged and had to retreat. Obviously Wedge's ability to fight that kind of battle and survive got him recognition and attention through promotion and squadron commandship but he didn't really do anything medal worthy in that battle. Certainly not enough to be dragged in front of the whole Rebellion in a big ceremony and become their bigshot heroes when his accomplishment was basically "Not dying".**
22. So, Vader senses that the Force is strong with Luke during the final battle. Yet he couldn't sense both Luke AND Obi-Wan when they were on the Millennium Falcon earlier in the movie? **He did say that he sensed a presence that he had not felt in a long time. He initially dismissed it but sensed it again when Obi-Wan was heading to the tractor beam generator, which is what convinced Vader and he went to discuss it with Tarkin.**
23. What's the deal with Leia's accent? Sometimes she sounds British and sometimes she sounds American. (Compare "Governor Tarkin. I should have expected to find you holding Vader's leash" with "Would someone get this big walking carpet out of my way?") **Since all the Imperial officers sound British and all the rebels sound American, I like to imagine that Palpatine has established some sort of "Imperial Accent" which high-ranking people are supposed to speak. Leia's natural accent is the "common" (American) accent, but as a member of the senate she was forced to learn the "Imperial" (British) accent as well. She tends to slip into her native accent whenever she's stressed or whenever there aren't any imperials around to hear her. By the time of ESB, she's been out of the senate for three years and she uses her native accent 24/7. *SeniramUK (talk) 11:44, 29 December 2022 (UTC)* Or she’s mocking Tarkin!**
24. The whole scene with Motti and Vader never made sense. Motti doesn't believe in the force and makes fun of Vader for believing in it. All this despite it being common knowledge that Darth Vader is a powerful force user (as he quickly shows Motti). **It is a big galaxy, and most people never met a Jedi, much less a Sith, in person. Not to mention that Palpatine has been discrediting Jedi pretty heavily, at least early in his reign. It is very possible that Motti has just taken the party line on the matter, thinking Vader is just another charlatan who trades on the discredited Jedi tropes to get his way and cow people.
The vast majority of people in real life have never met the rulers of their countries either, but pretty much everyone learns about them in school. And if they did have magic powers it's pretty hard for me to believe they never would have taught that (particularly in a regime like the Empire, where they stress to the citizens how great and powerful their leaders are.) really, the whole thing makes Motti seem like a Flat-Earth Atheist.
Simple: Motti has never seen those powers in use, so assumes they're propaganda. There were people in Iraq that believed Saddam had a magic jewel that made him invincible. Official North Korean history is that its founder was literally sent by Heaven, and that Kim Jong Il played one game of golf and played it absolutely perfectly. None of that is remotely true. So, Motti hears that the Emperor is a wizard, and that his buddy is also a wizard. He's never seen them in action, so he assumes it's propaganda to keep the rubes in line.
It's also possible that Motti does know that Jedi and Sith have special powers: he just didn't believe in the religious explanation for those powers. Psionic abilities demonstrated by individuals wouldn't necessarily prove the existence of a greater "Force" that permeates the universe, any more than the existence of lightning proves that Zeus exists.
Note Motti's appearance, he looks to be 40 tops probably even younger and is the youngest officer in the room by a good decade if not more. He was likely no older than a teen when the Jedi were wiped out and a small child pre Clone Wars so he almost certainly never saw a Jedi in action. Sure he's heard the stories but he probably figures they're mostly nonsense. Note that Han, who's about 35 and would have been around 16 when the Jedi were wiped out and also a young child pre Clone Wars (and thus also probably never met a Jedi and only knows the stories) also thinks the Force and Jedi are nonsense at first. The older officers meanwhile probably served in the Clone Wars and therefore saw the Jedi's abilities first hand and know Vader is legit.**
25. How does the Death Star actually move? It doesn't appear to have any engines, though we only ever see it from one angle so I guess it could have some on the back. **For interstellar travel it has a hyperdrive, which is confirmed in Rogue One (and implied in this film, because Alderaan and Yavin aren't in the same star system). For real space travel, it probably has ion engines like star destroyers to act as maneuvering thrusters, just ones that are spread around the station that are too small compared to the bulk of the station and used sparingly. Also, during the final battle, they aren't used as much because the station is taking advantage of Yavin's gravity to swing them about.**
26. None of the Rebel Alliance seemed to recognize the name Skywalker from anywhere. Luke just appears to be some nobody with an insignificant name. Even in early drafts. Skywalker was a General with a reputation. Owen claimed that Luke's father was a nobody to the general public. But Obi-Wan, of course, knew better (even in the early days of the franchise before the big reveal) and said as much. The Alliance elders, whom Luke would have met after helping rescue one of their most important Rebel agents, didn't think to connect Luke's last name with anyone notable that they might have heard of or known from the old days. **Perhaps Skywalker is actually a very common name like Smith, perhaps widely taken because of the legendary Skywalkers of the past. Not the most satisfying answer, but does have canon support in one film...**
27. It's pretty well-known at this point that Vader was not supposed to be Luke's father until Empire. So was it just a happy coincidence that the hilt of Vader's saber was almost identical to Luke's (A.K.A. Anakin's old saber)? Or did they use a different hilt on set and create a new one for Empire when the twist was established? I can't recall a shot where you can clearly see Vader's hilt in A New Hope. **It was kind of a coincidence, driven primarily by availability of materials. Vader's lightsaber hilt (i.e. the original one used in the first film) was fashioned from an old-style camera flash gun, just like Luke's but using a different flash brand, and it wasn't changed for Empire except maybe a few minor details.**