Star Wars in Spanish

[Slicker]

That's a GREAT set and I've listened to it many times though...

[Sleazer]

Thanks for confirming that I wasn't crazy for not finding that song...I do have that 4 disc Anthology, the 3 double-disc OT special edition soundtracks, and the prequel soundtracks. All of my hard copy CDs are in storage and the auto-filing of my iTunes is ridiculous, with discs loaded under multiple entries (John Williams, London Symphony Orchestra, John Williams-London Symphony Orchestra, Compilations, specific movie, etc - you get the idea, they're filed under 5 different methods so digging through the folders is a chore).

So why the heck didn't they release that? It's played during Boussh's deal with Jabba, then again on the sail barge...great music, I can't believe it's not on a soundtrack somewhere. Oh well.

Thanks again.

[anarky]

Figured I'd mention this here, since most of you don't look at the other site.

Someone very Tricksy mentioned that the Tauntauns are kinda wasted in ESB; the ones we see all wind up dead, and they're not shown doing very much. I commented that it would've been cool to see a sort of "Tauntaun Corps" of mounted Rebels, perhaps running around the AT-ATs and tying them up similar to how the Snowspeeders are doing in the air. And it got me thinking: that battle is a fucking joke.

Don't get me wrong: it's awesome in dramatic terms and visually stunning. But think about what's really going on here, and you'll be surprised that either side could stop drooling long enough for there to be a winner and a loser.

Before the battle starts, the Rebels know their days are numbered when Han blows up a probe droid. Then Vader kills Ozzel because the plan had been to exit hyperspace further out so as to surprise the Rebels. (Don't think about that. As fucking awesome as ESB is, if you start to really think about that seemingly minor point, it makes no fucking sense. The ships appear to emerge from hyperspace battle-ready, so it's not a question of preparing for battle after reverting to realspace; you'd think suddenly showing up right there on the doorstep, so to speak, would actually be far more of a surprise rather than the other way around. I mean, I think it's safe to assume that the Rebels had telescopes, so the Imperials' slower realspace travel through the system would've bought the Rebels more time since they would've seen them no matter where they reverted.)

In any case, let's just go with the logic presented so far and stick with the explanation that Ozzel somehow alerted the Rebels to their presence with his incompetence and this means the Rebels have time to throw up their planetary shields, so a ground assault is necessary. (Never mind that this also begs a question: do the Rebels just sit around twiddling their thumbs with the shield down until Imperials actually show up, and do the Imperials expect the Rebels to engage in such ridiculous behavior? And another question: did Vader not figure that, if he could guess that the Rebels' presence from seeing a brief image of a shield generator (so it's not like the Imperials were unaware that the Rebels had such defenses, but, anyway, let's keep going), maybe his Force-sensitive son and a whole bunch of seasoned generals (veterans of the Clone Wars as well as the Galactic Civil War) wouldn't figure the only probe droids to come sniffing around for them would be Imperial-related?)

Again, lets just roll with what's gone on so far, and it gets even crazier. The Imperials land AT-ATs some frickin' huge distance from the known location of the Rebel base and have them simply walk up to it. I know this is impressive as hell to watch, but it's moronic. Why not land closer? Why only send giant fucking walkers that are transporting ground troops? Of all the walkers we see, probably about a dozen, there's ONE AT-ST running interference (and not particularly well). There's no other escort vehicles and no air support. (Sure, later video games and toys have speeder bikes, which weren't even made up at the time, and TIE Bombers all over the fucking place, as well as probe droids that aren't nearly as worthless as the first one, but they're not in the movie.) Just these big, slow vehicles which are full of Stormtroopers. (Sure, the movie doesn't exactly say this last bit, but the official name of the vehicle is "All Terrain Armored Transport," which sure as hell suggests it.) On top of that, given how quickly the Rebels decide to trip them with tow cables, this had to have come up before. Unescorted troop transports with a major weakness the Rebels can exploit. Think about that for a minute.

Vader, for some reason, can't personally show up until Veers destroys the shield generator. If that's impossible, how the fuck did the AT-ATs get there? They had to land somehow, and they used some method that got past the shield. (Don't mention the landing ships. They're not in the movie.) Is there some weird honor system in battle where the Imperials can't put a few dozen (or even hundred) TIEs or something else in whatever-the-hell-landed-the-AT-ATs. "Oh no, that would be cheating!"

And what are the AT-ATs made of? They're impervious to all firepower... until they're tripped, since they apparently have some weird shield device that only works when they're completely upright. After that, just a couple of shots and they erupt in a huge fireball. Oh, and there's absolutely no weaponry that functions once they fall because it's all in the head. And a relatively small explosion inside an easily-accessed area in the back of this heavily armored vehicle will result in the head exploding.

Stupid enough from the Imperial perspective. Now, the Rebel side. They know the Imperials are potentially aware of their location following the probe droid incident. But they apparently just line up ground troops with some light cannons outside the base and send a few pilots in Snowspeeders. Why Snowspeeders? No armor, light weapons at best, and two pilots required. They clearly have X-Wings, which have something called a "proton torpedo"--which, even without doing any EU research, is pretty safe to say is tougher than the blasters on a Snowspeeder. They had Y-Wings in ANH and will have them again in ROTJ, so it's safe to assume they have those. But they don't use either the fast, agile fighter or the heavy bomber. Why not? It's not like the Imperials have a lick of air support, just four cannons per AT-AT, all facing forward. Oh, and that one AT-ST, also with four forward-facing blasters.

They've also got Tauntauns. Like I mentioned, why isn't there a cavalry of Tauntaun-riding Rebels out there kicking ass? And why do they have only those incredibly ineffective dish cannons and turrets? They can come up with a cannon that can short out a fucking starship in space, but can't get some ground defenses that are any more powerful than their Snowspeeder guns?

Even when they get in space, it's silly. It looks like every single Rebel ship just zips right past a few sleeping Star Destroyers. Sure, one of them got turned off, in essence, by the ion cannon, but are we to assume all of them did? There are no TIEs anywhere, at least until the Falcon shows up. Did they not expect the Rebels to try to escape? Did Vader not count on his son possibly being lucky enough to get off-world until too late.

Really, man, awesome in the context of the movie, but one of the worst-planned and executed battles in real or fictional history.

[Ran]

I'll admit, the Ozzel/Vader never made sense to me, so I just ignored it.

Whatever dropped the AT-ATs off had to be big, and I suspect it was vulnerable to the Ion Cannon. That would have forced them to land away from the base. Still, where were the TIE Bombers? They were added in one of the Rogue Squadron games, along with a bunch of AT-STs.

Was it Robot Chicken that made fun of how the Imperial Engineers always seem to make it rather easy to destroy their stuff? The exhaust port, AT-ATs, Endor shield generator. The Super Star Destroyer wasn't as bad as the rest. They lost their shields right before the A-Wing crashed into the bridge.

I figured that if the Rebels turned on their shield generator, the Empire would have been able to detect it and find them sooner. By not turning it on, they would look more like an "uncharted colony" or whatever they were referred to.

The Tauntauns would have been wiped out by the time they got to the AT-ATs. Seems like they were just used for scouting patrols until they got the speeders running. Which brings up another point that didn't make much sense...they got that entire base built, inferring they had been there for a while, but they couldn't get the speeders working? I never quite understood the whole Rebel Occupation of Hoth time frame.

I agree that the space battle over Hoth didn't make much sense either.

[RoIIo Tomassi]

No doubt, JJL will bounce in here with a bunch of EU minutiae to school you with, but here's how I took it.

Imperials. The Rebel's Shield prevented the Imperials from employing their Ray-based primary weapons systems that they usually deploy from space an just wipe whatever settlement/secret rebel base they find from their Star Destroyer Comfy chairs. As it was, they had to deploy Outside the shield and then move in towards their goal: The Generator. The shield doesn't stop everything. It's not a wall. It absorbs energy weapons.
ONLY deploying Walkers was probably just a bit of obnoxious overconfidence on the part of the Empire. There had been no outright ground battle confrontations in the War at that point. It was mostly guerilla fighting.

Rebels. Their primary goal wasn't to engage the enemy. It was to retreat. The token force left to defend was merely a delaying tactic to hassle the enemy an give the rest of them the time to load up the transports (Imagine the logistics of clearing out an ENTIRE town in just a day or less). Most people were packing up as much shit as they could as quickly as they could. But who wants to watch THAT in a movie?
They used T-47s because they were cheap and disposable compared to the X and Y-Wings. Again, the idea was to hassle the enemy and stretch the escape window. Not waste valuable resources on a non-essential mission. (Ehile viscerally it might feel good blowing up a few At-Ats, it doesn't really matter if the Empire has a million more. It's not worth the risk of losing one of a limited supply of advanced Space Fighters.)
Third(and this was better explained in one of the EU books but I can't remember which one) the way the Imperial Fleet dispersed itself around the planet was problematic, mathematically speaking. They couldn't cover the ENTIRE PLANET. And the Rebels could immediately discern the best escape route (ie the least covered area) and head that direction. They only needed a couple seconds to clear the atmosphere and then Jump to Hyperspace.

[jjreason]

I don't give a fuck, it's still the best part of any movie ever.

[Senor JabbaJohnL]

No doubt, JJL will bounce in here with a bunch of EU minutiae to school you with, but here's how I took it.

Nah, fuck the EU. I'll take my minutiae from the films themselves, thanks.

As JT mentioned, they were having issues adapting the T-47s to the cold, so we can probably assume that the X-wings were having an even more difficult time, given that they're for space anyway whereas the T-47s were airspeeders. (That's probably also why we don't see any TIEs bombing or fighting in the atmosphere.)

Most of this probably comes down to real-world issues - it would have been hard as hell to show Tauntauns fighting in battle, as the go-motion techniques they used for the ones in the film were already difficult. In-universe, maybe it was too taxing for the animals . . . though we see them running with Luke and Han riding them, so that's probably not the case. I've seen images of Tauntauns running from AT-ATs (the shirt I'm wearing has one, and Ralph McQuarrie painted another), so it was probably considered at one point but dropped for time/budget/etc. The AT-ST only exists in ESB at all since it was an additional and/or abandoned concept that Lucas just liked and wanted in there briefly; the model wasn't nearly as completed as the AT-AT, and that's why it was completely redesigned for ROTJ.

So, really, it pretty much all boils down to choices made for real-world considerations, one of which is making the most dramatic, interesting scene possible. There are plenty of issues like this throughout the films (though people typically only seem interested in pointing out the ones in the PT and ignoring the ones in the OT).

[vynsane]

By their very nature, spaceships need to be capable of operating in extreme temperatures - be they hot or cold, seeing as how they are meant to work in, y'know, space. Our own moon spans a difference of over 250°C from a literally boiling 107°C in the sunshine to a Canada-esque (so i'm told) -153°C in the shade. So, to assume the X-wings would have trouble adapting to the cold simply because they said they were having trouble adapting the T-47s to the cold wouldn't make sense.

If you were to say they had trouble adapting to the moisture of the atmosphere (yes, a lot of it is frozen, but there's still a lot of moisture on Hoth) that would make a little more sense, though we see them taking off from the planet surface accompanying the transports without a problem, so we can assume X-wings are also capable of operating in varying atmospheric conditions (we've seen them on Hoth and Dagobah - we couldn't find two more extreme opposite atmospheres unless we swapped out Dagobah for Mustafar, where we've also seen spaceships land and take off without incident). This, then, debunks any theoretical issues of X-wings or any other spacecraft being incapable of performing the air support role in the battle, but they aren't used, so the Rebels must have used the T-47s for some reason.

Obviously, the Rebels have both T-47s and X-wings on Hoth - we don't see any other craft, so they're not taken into account. They apparently have very few X-wings, if each transport is only afforded two apiece as escort. If we go with the theory that the X-wings are more valuable to the Rebellion because of their dual-role nature as atmospheric AND space fighters, whereas the T-47s are merely atmospheric craft which can't escort the transports anyway, it stands to reason those would be the craft that are used to harass the Imperials long enough for the retreat to succeed, which was the entire point of the Rebel side of the battle to begin with as stated previously in this topic. The T-47s aren't very effective against the walkers, but they're effective enough to make good their escape, plain and simple.

The use of a "Taun-Taun cavalry," while it sounds cool, doesn't make sense because the Rebel harassment force is a skeleton crew left behind to ensure the greater population of Echo Base escapes. The amount of Taun-Tauns and riders necessary to fulfill the same harassment role the T-47s play would result in a lot more casualties and MIAs, because the defense force would be scattered about the battlefield instead of entrenched behind the Echo Base fortifications, ready to make good their final retreat once given word.

As for the issues on the Imperial side of the conflict - the lack of air support was a pretty big one. We can chalk this up to Imperial arrogance or lack of proper military intelligence on what kind of defensive hardware the Rebels were packing.

The "Admiral Ozzel" problem about being as clumsy as he is stupid could be that, had the fleet come out of lightspeed further out from the system, it could have redeployed in a spherical formation undetected and closed in around the planet from all sides as opposed to in a direct line - Ozzel didn't use the three-dimensional battlefield to his advantage.

[anarky]

The "surround the planet" possibility vyn and Rollo put forward makes sense. It's just not explained well (or at all) in the movie.

IIRC, they had to adapt the airspeeders to the cold. Airspeeders are strictly atmospheric vehicles.

[vynsane]

^ I was countering the notion JJL posited that the X-wings were having the same troubles adapting to the cold that the T-47s were. I suppose they COULD have had the same issues at some point, as we only see them both in flight on Hoth at basically the same time (during the battle), but whether the X-wings were having issues in the Hoth atmosphere or not, the fact that they were needed to escort the transports supersedes any other use.

[Mister Roboto]

SO'S YOUR FACE!!

[Slicker]

The only thing I have to add would be about the lack of Imperial bombers. I've always assumed that the shield is a low lying (maybe several hundred to several thousand feet) area affect shield and the reason the Imperials couldn't use bombers was simply because they couldn't risk them flying UNDER the shield. If they were to get under and bomb the effect from the bombs would possibly do as much harm to the bombers as the Rebels.

[Ran]

I was thinking about the bombers. TIE is "twin ion engine". I don't think they would work in the atmosphere, but Lucas hasn't let physics stop him in the past.