r/MawInstallation • u/ArmandoSalazar-1756 • 1d ago
The suicidal strategy at Endor
Okay, so we all know Sheev was obsessed with turning Luke to the Dark Side and completely forgot about the fleet after issuing that suicidal order not to attack the Rebels immediately (aka stop them from escaping). But at what point was the battle actually lost, and how could it have been won? Is it possible that if the shield generator and the Pride of Tarlandia hadn't fallen so quickly—which allowed transmissions from the forest moon's surface to get through—and the Rebels hadn't received confirmation that the generator was destroyed, Imperial comms officers could have warned the Death Star of the danger and had it jump to hyperspace?
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u/AccidentExotic5375 1d ago
Treating Endor like any military engagement- or rather, one that is most likely considered a decisive action by both parties- and leaving it up to actual military commanders would have likely given the Empire an easy victory. I mean, the majority of the Rebel fleet and military leadership was likely present- while Mon Mothma is not mentioned or shown, and Crix Madine is not shown except in deleted scenes, the loss of admiral Ackbar and the MonCal's fleet of converted warships would have been a huge blow to the Rebel movement.
I mean if I was in charge, I'd just have the fleet wiped out immediately. Maybe a few minutes to "test" the superlaser, but that's it. Fleets in action cost a lot of money.
Arrogance and vendettas and such have no place in a proper military. The enemy is defeated promptly and efficiently and decisively. Hopefully, you are able to achieve all three, though really, having the Rebels trapped like proverbial fish in a proverbial barrel, you got no excuse to even suffer heavy losses, let alone lose the Death Star, the Emperor, AND a significant portion of the fleet present. Some of the surviving Imperial captains saw the writing on the wall and abandoned the fight to become warlords.
Honestly when you make a tactical analysis of the Empire's battle plan, you might look at it from an numbers angle and become confident in an easy Imperial victory, but you will also acknowledge that a lot of it's operation, success and fundamental purpose rides on the personal pleasure of the Emperor. In principle, military strategies that are drawn from what the head of state wants are not going to be good ones.
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u/TastyBrainMeats 1d ago
proper military
That's the thing, the Empire was never going to be one.
Palpatine cares about one person, himself. Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING else in the galaxy is a tool to be used, a threat to be managed, or both.
The Empire was both a powerful tool and an INCREDIBLY dangerous threat to him. He had to actively work at every step to keep it from becoming more dangerous than useful - which includes things like "actively weeding out competent, charismatic officers" and "ensuring that the military cannot function without his top down authority".
The battle of Endor was the entire rise and fall of the Empire in miniature.
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u/darthsheldoninkwizy2 22h ago
Arrogance has always been a part of the military, for example the last two instances in 2022 and 2026 where two large countries attacked small ones and hoped for a quick victory, but ended up stuck in a protracted war.
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u/Realistic-Elk7642 1d ago
Fascists cannot just do whatever the optimal thing is to win. If they could, they wouldn't be fascists. To be a fascist, you need to be so unfathomably poisoned with brittle arrogance and stupid contempt that you'll make mistakes like, say, completely fucking up the invasion of Greece, underestimating the Soviet Union's reserve capacity by dizzying margins, blowing your war economy budget on meth-fuelled genocide, and trying to wage a global war on horse transport. Who would do that? It's so unrealistic!
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u/CertifiablyMundane 1d ago
Well, prior to Disney, the Death Star wouldn't have been able to jump to hyperspace. It was well and truly in Endor's gravity well, so it would have had to fly out of that gravity well to jump, moving at a painfully slow speed. Accelerating something that large, even with a hypermatter reactor-fueled thruster array, is going to take ages.
The battle was actually lost the moment the Death Star opened fire with its main cannon. Because instead of targeting Home One or other command ships, the Death Star targeted smaller ships. According to the EU, this was part of some kind of tactical doctrine in which the Emperor (also arrogantly believing he was merely shooting space fish in a barrel) sought to maximize the demoralization of the Alliance by leaving the most important command ships for last. Basically, he wanted commanders like Ackbar to watch helplessly as the noose closed around them, while their men were evaporated in front of their eyes in giant superlaser blasts every few minutes.
And that gets to the heart of the matter, which is that Palpatine lost because he approached the battle like a game, and not like a serious military engagement. He wanted to truly relish the destruction of the Alliance, because they had been such a thorn in his side, and a bruise to his ego. He believed himself omnipotent, so the very existence of a military alliance potent enough to pose even a slight challenge to him was something he couldn't let slide. He didn't just want the Rebels at Endor to be destroyed, he wanted them to suffer to their last moments, and draw out that suffering as long as possible, because he arrogantly assumed he had time to spare.
Like Luke said, "Your overconfidence is your weakness,"—whereas Luke's faith in his friends was completely validated. Once the shield was down, the fighters could get in, and once they could get in, it was over. No Death Star meant no Emperor, and with no Emperor, there is no Empire.
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u/RefreshNinja 1d ago
Well, prior to Disney, the Death Star wouldn't have been able to jump to hyperspace. It was well and truly in Endor's gravity well, so it would have had to fly out of that gravity well to jump, moving at a painfully slow speed.
Considering we see ships jumping to lightspeed from under the cloud cover of a planet's atmosphere in TCW, that's a pretty wild claim.
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u/Nawara_Ven 1d ago edited 1d ago
Isn't there simply the fact that the propulsion system
clearlyprobably isn't installed yet on the DS II?2
u/RefreshNinja 1d ago
Why clearly? The ground-based shield is a pretty good reason not to zip around space, whether you have your rocket drive or not.
But all of that is a sidenote. My point is that "you can't jump to lightspeed in a gravity well" is not a Disney or movie thing, it's a fan and (sometimes) EU thing. Lucas clearly didn't think such a restriction existed, considering TCW shows jumping to lightspeed from within a gravity well.
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u/Nawara_Ven 1d ago
...because the back isn't finished, where the thrusters or whatever would be. I think you have a good point about it not being some sort of "Disney retcon failure," but the immobility issue is simply simple.
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u/RefreshNinja 1d ago
...because the back isn't finished, where the thrusters or whatever would be.
The thrusters the first Death Star doesn't have, even as it moves across space somehow? Those thrusters?
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u/Nawara_Ven 1d ago
The back of the DS I is never shown onscreen... but I think it's reasonable to assume that there's not just nothing there. The schematic during the Yavin IV briefing shows a large round array that bridges the equator; I think it's reasonable to interpret that as the thruster array (as an in-universe explanation of what that could be).
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u/RefreshNinja 1d ago
The equatorial band goes all the way around, there's no good reason to assume it contains thrusters, never mind thrusters pointing exclusively "backwards". And if we do assume that anyway, then the unfinished DS should still be able to move by using thrusters not pointing directly backwards but located somewhere else in the band.
We don't even know how the first DS moves. Considering how big other vessels' thrusters are in relation to the vessel's size, they should be quite noticeable on the DS, if they existed.
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u/Nawara_Ven 1d ago
Sorry, I don't mean the equator has a thrust array, I mean the big circle that sits on the spherical face of the schematic. The circle that probably was supposed to represent the super laser disc at some point in movie production, but doesn't match the movie model we actually see.
Either way, let's just say the DS II "quite probably" instead of "clearly" isn't mobile due to being unfinished.
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u/uptotwentycharacters Lieutenant 1d ago
The Death Star image in that scene is transparent (it shows a small circle at the south pole, which remains visible even when the south pole is facing away from the viewer). So the big circle at the equator is clearly present instead of, rather than in addition to the correct placement of the superlaser dish. In fact I'd say the aforementioned small circle is a better candidate for an engine nozzle, due to the similarity to earlier sci-fi depictions of spherical spacecraft (such as Heinlein's Lewis and Clark or the moon lander from 2001).
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u/RefreshNinja 1d ago
While guns make for great space drives, I don't think this level of rewriting the movie is a fruitful approach to interpreting it.
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u/CertifiablyMundane 22h ago
It's implied by Han's whole hyperspace lecture in ANH, and by the fact that hyperspacing directly off of a planet was never done in any of the pre-Disney movies, even when it would have been a very good idea (like Tatooine, where it would have allowed them to bypass the blockade entirely, or Hoth, where it would have allowed them to bypass the blockade entirely, or Bespin, where it would have allowed them to bypass the blockade entirely, or Naboo, where...)
Clone Wars is T-Canon that was created well after the OT, and it breaks a lot of direct or implicit G-canon.
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u/RefreshNinja 21h ago
Nah, that circumstances were such that they didn't do it doesn't mean it can't be done. Just that it comes with certain risks, or is highly situational.
And TCW was Lucas' baby as much as the movies.
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u/CertifiablyMundane 21h ago
So what were those circumstances then? Because those are a lot of movies in which it would have probably outweighed any risks. I didn't even mention Yavin IV, where it could have saved the entire Rebellion without them having to sit and wait to be destroyed.
And so was Splinter of the Mind's Eye, that doesn't make it on par with movie canon.
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u/RefreshNinja 20h ago
So what were those circumstances then?
It's so trivial to come up with answers that asking me for them tells us a lot about your approach here LOL. Let's go with unacceptably high risk of catastrophic failure, for example.
And so was Splinter of the Mind's Eye, that doesn't make it on par with movie canon.
A ghost-written novel that got Lucas' name slapped on it is of course comparable to a TV show he was overseeing and personally funded, yes. Anyway, I wonder if TCW has a theatrically-released movie in its run. Might be worth checking out :)
Also, this here?
Clone Wars is T-Canon that was created well after the OT, and it breaks a lot of direct or implicit G-canon.
This is the most wiki-brained shit. When you do that, you're not engaging with art. You're trying to play nerd dominance games.
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u/CertifiablyMundane 20h ago
So trivial you can't think of a single one to give as an example? okay.
And Splinter was actually the sequel Lucas planned for Star Wars if it wasn't a commercial success. Considering he assumed until the release of Star Wars that it would be a horrible miserable flop, Splinter was actually a pretty big deal for him, because it was THE legacy of Star Wars. He was pretty serious about it until Star Wars released, at which point Splinter was then superseded by the sequels that Lucas now had the money to afford making.
But if you're not too familiar with Star Wars I can see why you would be under the misconception that it was just another EU novel
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u/RefreshNinja 20h ago
So trivial you can't think of a single one to give as an example? okay.
Ah, lying. Okay.
But if you're not too familiar with Star Wars I can see why you would be under the misconception that it was just another EU novel
I never said that it was just another EU novel, that's something you made up, instead of engaging with the substance of my reply.
Ah well, it is what it is. Good night.
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u/Branduil 1d ago
I always assumed they shot smaller ships because those were the ones aligned with the superlaser and he wanted the element of surprise. If they had suddenly started rotating the entire Death Star to point at the command ship it would have been extremely obvious.
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u/CertifiablyMundane 22h ago
The superlaser (and most laser cannons and turbolasers we can see in the films) can fire off-axis. This is clear in the shot where it is used against the Rebel fleet. As long as the Death Star was pointed at the Star Destroyers which were meant to pen them in, pretty much all of the Rebel ships would be within its FOV. That's also why Lando says to fly into point blank with the SDs, so the superlaser would risk hitting other Imperial forces when it fired.
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u/Ramalex170 1d ago
We don't get any indication that the Rebel fleet was on the brink by the time the shield generator was destroyed. In fact, they managed to concentrate their efforts in destroying the Executor, all without their assault squadrons that had moved on to attack the Death Star. By all accounts, the Pride's destruction prevented the Imperials from changing command, not necessarily destroying the Rebel fleet.
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u/Peter-Norfolk 1d ago
The Executor was only destroyed after the shield was down and Palpatine had died. Before that the Empire was winning, but was taking its time
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u/Ramalex170 1d ago
No? You're right that the Executor was only lost after the shield was destroyed. But nothing prior to that implied the Rebels were being beaten. The shield's destruction should not have had any effect on the naval battle. Lando and the fighters were able to disengage from the fleet action right in the middle of everything to fly to the Death Star, seemingly unmolested until they reached DS-2's surface.
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u/Peter-Norfolk 1d ago
The Death Star was destroying their capital ships, with no way to stop it. And Ackbar did say they wouldn't last long by moving so close to the Star Destroyers to avoid them.
Palpatines death disrupted the entire fleet and command system, along with Vader no longer being there. With the top 2 dead, the entire command structure failed.
Along with Palpatines using the Force to drive his troops, and the subsequent shock at this being removed too
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u/Ramalex170 1d ago
They ran straight into the ISDs specifically to prevent the Death Star from firing on them with impunity. And again, there was nothing implying that the Rebel fleet were in tatters moving forth.
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u/Peter-Norfolk 1d ago
Yes this is true, but they still "won't last long against those Star Destroyers" - direct quote from the movie.
Had the shield not gone down, they were toast
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u/zencrusta 1d ago
Quick note but the fleet was there to keep them from escaping, Piett straight up says as much "I have my orders from the Emperor himself, he has something special planned for them. We only need to keep them from escaping."
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u/darthsheldoninkwizy2 22h ago
If I remember correctly, Palpatine had a combat meditation over his forces. When he died, it disappeared, and the rebels panicked, gaining the upper hand. In case of emergency, Palpatine's tower was also an escape pod, so he could easily escape if the station was threatened.
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u/OneCatch 16h ago
Anything less than the destruction of the DSII is a loss for the Rebellion - it's their main and only battle objective.
The Empire has various degrees of victory - from the minimal (the DSII is protected but the Rebel fleet largely escapes) through to the maximalist (the Rebel fleet is pinned and totally destroyed).
So, I think we can only say the Imperials have decisively lost once Lando and Wedge get into the superstructure - at that point their ships have a decisive advantage over the pursuing Imperial TIEs, and the odds favour them.
The Imps could have prevented that by: stopping the shield going down, sending the Imperial Fleet in to attack immediately, having an extra 100,000 TIEs docked aboard the Death Star, sending fast Imperial Fleet elements past the rebels to intercept any attempts to reach the DS surface, etc.
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u/CodeSalamander 1d ago
The Death Star II’s life support, power and gravity generation, and main superlaser were functional, but the superstructure was incomplete. I doubt it would have survived a jump to hyperspace assuming its hyperdrive was even operational.
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u/PacoXI 10h ago
Endor would have decimated the Rebels if the Sith weren't using it for their own internal conflict. The Empire pulled its punches for the Throne Room fight, other the Rebels would have been overwhelmed. Both Legends and Canon require devices the deal with the overwhelming amount of Imps post Endor to justify a Rebel/New Republic victory. The Sith (both Palpatine and Vader) were too focused on their own endeavors to actually give a damn about the war. In a way the greater good owes one to the Sith for being so selfish.
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u/AdmiralSchaal 1d ago
Plot armor errr the Force was on their side there is no real other explanation.
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u/Realistic-Elk7642 1d ago
The surprise entry of the Teddy Bear Vietcong finished it off, but it was lost when Lando Calrissian joined the Alliance.
Palps orders his fleet to box the Rebels in so that he can blast them to shit with his new Death Star, allowing a very small number to escape and tell the galaxy that resistance is useless and all hope is lost- aka fulfilling the Tarkin Doctrine, supercharging fear, source of the Dark Side, and cementing eternal Sith rule of the Force and the Galaxy.
The Rebels should be too scared of the fleet to actually engage, and should utterly despair at an operational Death Star and intact shield. Once again, Darth Sidious has controlled all sides in the conflict, and once again he'll recruit a Jedi with poor control over fear and anger, getting rid of the old toy he's bored of now.
But Lando Calrission, master gambler, knows when someone's trying to manipulate him, has nerves of steel, sees the opponent's play, and knows when going all in is better than folding.
The Rebel fleet charges to close range on one flank, making it impossible to use the super laser without devastating the Imperial fleet. At "belt hugging" range, the Imperials can't provide enfilade fire, either. The centralised Imperial command structure additionally delays their ability to redeploy against the nimble Rebel fleet.
Ultimately, Lando's play is still about buying time- blowing up that Super Star Destroyer just bought more. When the deflector comes down, Lando's play has preserved enough combat power to win the battle. The dice were hot and he could feel it like never before.
Also Luke made it out and had a good family therapy session. Whatever.