Blog time!
If you’re not a Star Wars nerd, this post will not interest you.
If you are a Star Wars nerd, there’s a chance this post still won’t interest you.
Part of my problem with Rogue One was the timing of everything. Jyn and her band of misfits head out from Yavin to Scarif. This is after being told by the Rebel bigwigs that the Alliance can’t afford to send any resources out to Scarif. Yet the Alliance fleet arrives at Scarif just in time for when things start going sideways for Rogue Squad. The Rogues are what? A couple of hours into their mission at most? That means that the Alliance had to change their minds AND mobilize the fleet within a very short time frame.
One of the accepted truths about the Star Wars universe has been that not all hyperdrives are equal. A fleet would have to coordinate to travel at the speed of their slowest ship. Now assuming that Rogue One has a decent hyperdrive, it should have taken LESS time to get to Scariff than it would take the fleet to get there. That gives even LESS time for the Alliance to change their mind if the fleet is to reach Scarif at “coincidentally” the exact right time.
So they would have to go from being diametrically opposed to the plan to hit Scarif to deciding to launch everything pretty much as soon as Rogue One left. Talk about a mood swing.
Now I haven’t rewatched Rogue One recently, so it’s entirely possible that Jyn’s time spent hours, if not days, scouting the planet before they launched the assault. Still, the timing really seems fortuitous.
As I was thinking about this, I came to think about A New Hope and there’s a timing problem there too actually.
So the Devastator attacks the Tantive IV over Tatooine (and they got there pretty fast after the Rebels for a ship that had no idea where the Tantive was heading at the end of Rogue One, but that’s just another problem I have with Rogue One). Anyway, the Devastator attacks. The droids escape to the surface and Vader sends a detachment down to retrieve them. Shortly thereafter, the Devastator leaves to rendezvous with the Death Star in some unknown system (or at least I can’t remember it). They interrogate Leia and make their way to Alderaan, in the galactic core. They blow it up and send scout ships to Dantooine. Let’s say excluding the hyperspace travel of all ships involved, at most a day passes.
The droids get captured by Jawas, get purchase by Uncle Owen. Artoo escapes. Luke heads out to find him early the next morning. Assume that by the end of that day or sometime the next day AT THE LATEST , they’re on the Falcon heading towards Alderaan.
The Falcon is considered to have one of the best hyperdrives in the galaxy when it’s working. We’re not led to believe they run into any trouble on the way so we can assume it was travelling at a top speed. Yet the Falcon reaches Alderaan just as the Empire’s scout ships have reached Dantooine.
Now the Falcon is making a bee line to Alderaan. They leave at most three days after the Devastator which has to rendezvous with the Death Star. Let’s say wherever the Death Star is just happens to be on the most direct route to Alderaan from Tatooine. Star Destroyers and especially the Death Star are not known for having fast hyperdrives. They take twice as long to get there as a standard hyperdrive. The Falcon takes half the time that a standard hyperdrive. So the Falcon should travel the same distance in a half hour that the Devastator can travel in two hours, give or take.
The trip from Tatooine, the farthest point from the bright side of the universe, to Alderaan, which as mentioned earlier, is in the core, can’t be very long even at half speed. If it took the Falcon a day to make the trip, it would take the Devastator/Death Star four days. My math may be off, but at that rate, even with the head start of a day or two, the Falcon should actually reach Alderaan BEFORE the Death Star. The longer it takes for the Falcon, compounds the discrepency. Granted I’m not taking the length of the Empire’s scout ships’ trip from Alderaan to Dantooine into account but actually that just makes things seem even less possible.
Given all this, the Falcon’s trip from Tatooine looks to be excessively short, meaning Luke didn’t get a whole lot more time to train with Obi Wan than that one session we see in the movie. Either that or the Death Star and Star Destroyers DON’T have slower hyperdrives OR there is no such thing as different speeds in hyperspace.
That’s all for this week! Have a good seven and we’ll do this again next Monday. Carja V.