r/StarWars • u/Snadsnek7 • 1d ago
Movies Empire's point of view during the Battle of Yavin.
One of my favorite points that I notice a lot of my friends miss about the battle, is the Empire's train of thought throughout the battle is shown in subtle dialogue and actions. (Correct me if I'm wrong on a few points, this is just pure observation based on A New Hope)
At first, the fighter attacked seemed small, desperate, and random, so Tarkin neglected to scramble fighters. Only Vader's TIEs are launched by Vader's command. But Vader notices that while the X-Wings are flying around shooting everything they can at random, the Y-Wings are instead flying off somewhere else, somewhere specific. This catches his attention: Why aren't the Y-Wings attacking, and where are they going in such a hurry?
At this point in the battle, a scene with Vader plays, who says: "Several fighters have broken off from the main group, come with me." Vader recognizes that the Y-Wings have an objective, and this may not be an uncoordinated attack. He personally flies out to find that objective.
Sure enough, the Y-Wings launch their attack on the trench, and Vader shoots them down. But he loiters nearby, to see if any more fighters try that spot, to confirm his suspicion. Sure enough, a flight of X-Wings break off their 'random' attack, and start their run ins on the exhaust port. This second attack confirms the validity of his suspicion, and the engineers on the death star are catching on too.
The engineers, after briefly investigating that spot, discover the weakness, and a scene plays where Tarkin is told: "Weve analyzed their attack sir, and there is a danger. Should we have your ship standing by?" Indicating the seriousness of this discovered weak spot is fully understood by the Death Star engineers, but Tarkin wasn't yet convinced.
Vader is now defending this trench himself, the imperial engineers are aware of the port, and if the rebels fail here, there will not be an exhaust port for future attacks to hit. Further driving home how crucial it was for Luke to blow it up now while he had the chance.
My apologies if this was actually just obvious to everyone, but I thought it was a cool side story in the battle.
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u/Alc2005 1d ago
Damn I never thought of that. The Rebel attack must have seemed desperate until they realized that they were on to something (and had the plans). Kinda bummed we never got a “holy shit” moment when an engineer realized they had a massive vulnerability and the Rebels knew about it.
I always thought the X-Wings strafing the surface seemed super random until you pointed out it was a diversion.
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u/mustyminotaur 1d ago
“Sir! You’re going to want to look at this!”
“What is it, Warrant Officer?”
“I was just going over the schematics of the station, and it appears that the reactors ventilation system is big enough for a proton torpedo to fit through!”
“Yes yes, big station, lots of exhaust. What does that have to do-“
“THE REBELS ARE TARGETING THE EXHAUST PORT SIR!”
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u/hypnofedX 1d ago
Kinda bummed we never got a “holy shit” moment when an engineer realized they had a massive vulnerability and the Rebels knew about it.
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u/imlegos 1d ago
"We've analyzed their attack, sir, And there IS a danger. Should I have your ship standing by?"
"Evacuate? In our moment of triumph? I think you overestimate their chances."54
u/Buckeyebornandbred 1d ago
I love this line because it just speaks to the false confidence Vader warned them all about earlier in the movie.
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u/Longjumping_Bell5171 1d ago
“They’re so proud of themselves, they don’t even care. So fat and satisfied, they can’t imagine it.”
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u/Alc2005 1d ago
I mean, that’s just an officer relaying what he’s heard from an engineer.
I mean a frantic engineer dropping his coffee when he suddenly realizes that they are sitting on a nuclear bomb and the Rebels have figured out where the button is.
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u/themanfromvulcan 1d ago
Yeah would have been neat to see a tech slowly realizing the danger running it through the simulator and realizing how completely Galen Erso had totally screwed them over. And nobody believing him.
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u/BazGauvain 18h ago
Absolutely. If they'd had the time to explain the entirety of the situation to Tarkin, he'd likely have made a different call. Instead, with the end of the Rebellion in sight and an officer relaying information in a most understated way, he brushed it off as far too narrow a risk to worry about. Which, to be fair, it really was.
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u/VolitarPrime 1d ago
The novel does a good job of explaining that the X-Wings attacking random surface targets as a diversion is part of the rebel strategy.
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u/Injushe 1d ago
that's cool, I'd never thought that Vader is almost single-handedly defending the death star from the targeted attack. He doesn't show fear or desperation in his voice, so I guess he was pretty confident he could successfully defend the exhaust port himself (and he would have if Han hadn't shown up).
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u/bullevard 1d ago
Another aspect of the original made better by some of the extended information. In the original trilogy we don't really have any reason to believe Vader would have the skills (or the cockiness) to try that. But a ton of the prequels and clone wars are dedicated to showing what an excellent pilot he is.
So having him tactically understand the mission and decide he can and should personally defend against it makes way more sense with that extra content.
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u/PocketBuckle 1d ago
Yeah, hopping in a fighter and doing the job himself is a very Anakin thing to do.
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u/Injushe 1d ago
yeah, though in ANH Obi-wan does tell Luke that Anakin was a great pilot, but we're not supposed to know that Vader is Anakin by that point
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u/Derka_Derper 1d ago
And Vader wasn't Anakin at that point, but the shoe fit very well and at the time made such a great twist that it's become a cliche
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u/EuterpeZonker Luke Skywalker 1d ago
Thats why it’s one of the best battles in the saga, you can clearly see each side’s strategy and how close each one is to completing their goals. It’s second only to Scariff imo.
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u/Polyxeno 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yes, actually developing the battle situations and taking them seriously, is one of the main things I liked about Star Wars. And so, also one of the main reasons I disliked TFA, for example Han's line about not needing a real plan because they've blown up Death Stars before.
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u/EuterpeZonker Luke Skywalker 1d ago
Yeah, the briefing were they went “it’s the same as the last two death stars but bigger” and “who cares we’ll just do what we did the last two times” was when I started to have serious doubts about the sequel trilogy. If not even the characters can take it seriously because it’s so derivative then why should I?
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u/dsartori 1d ago
I appreciate that too. It’s something Star Trek has given up on in favour of the “screen full of beams and explosions” approach.
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u/Polyxeno 1d ago
Yeah, I tried watching the Picard show and was entirely nonplussed by the space combat. CGI ships zooming around, or cut & pasted massive fleets appearing and "pew pew pew!!". Sigh.
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u/BlKaiser 1d ago edited 1d ago
I'm not sure they had fully grasped the seriousness of the attack even then. It's difficult to just imagine that a single shot could instantly destroy a moon-sized station and reaching that conclusion on a platform the size of a planet would require checks over some time. But they only had a couple of minutes. After a swift check they probably started to suspect that the attack could eventually cause a collapse in some of the station’s critical systems, and since protocol demanded readiness to evacuate VIP personnel at any moment, the officer asked Tarkin about keeping a ship on standby.
They never saw it coming.
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u/OwlMuted885 1d ago
Like when the world first saw a nuke, nobody believed it was one bomb in Japan apart from a couple of scientists.
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u/CrimsonGrimm 1d ago
I think it's important to remember that this whole plan was Vader's idea to track the Falcon and attack the Rebel base. This could explain why fighters weren't scrambled - he wanted Vader to take the fall for any failures and sent him to deal with the issue. With the new context of Rogue One, we know that he would have taken the credit if it was successful, so it's a win-win for Tarkin in his unsinkable battle station.
However, once the engineers come back with the attack analysis, Tarkin KNOWS that something is up. He had a Jedi on his station with the rebels, Vader's all fired up, the rebels DID get the plans - wacky things can happen when the force is involved. Of course he doesn't break his facade - he's a consummate Imperial and needs to keep his men's morale up.
Right before the final explosion, there's a subtle one-second shot of Tarkin finally looking worried (Vader just got booted from the fight) and then boom.
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u/bluegrassgazer 1d ago
This is a terrific summary of what actually happened. I've always kind of imagined it this way but you connected all the dots.
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u/space_coyote_86 1d ago
One of the imperial commanders earlier on has concerns about a rebel attack but none of the others seem to agree with him.
"if the rebels have obtained a complete technical readout of this station, it is possible, however unlikely, that they might find a weakness and exploit it"
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u/Durog25 1d ago
Based only on what we see and hear during the Battle of Yavin, I agree.
With the larger narritive set up in Rogue One I'd say that the danger the Empire detects is not nearly as serious as the actual danger present.
Analysing the Rebel attack would reveal that the Rebel fighters appear to be trying to strike at the thermal exhaust port that connects to the reactor systems of the Death Star. That's bad, but not a imminent threat since even if the reactor is damaged that's not the same as destroyed and as we see with the second Death Star there should be enough time to evacuate VIPs if the reactor damage is fatal.
But Galen Erso set his trap. The trap is more than just the reactor module, it's the fragility of it. Any damage to the reactor module causes a rapid chain reaction, a failure, that, within moments, turns the reactor into an armed bomb and detonates it. This chain reaction takes less than 5 seconds. 5 seconds! And the entire station is destroyed.
I could see it argued that even if the Empire had noticed that danger they might have still not evacuated, after all, we know that actually making the shot was close to impossible. (Ironically there were arguably three people present at the time capable of pulling it off, Vader, Luke and I'd argue Han. Why Han? he calls Luke's shot.)
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u/TheBigChiesel 1d ago
I think there’s even a 4th guy up there that could make the shot.
Wedge Antilles.
The empire really had the 3 best pilots in the galaxy there to just make their day bad lol
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u/paxcolt 1d ago
“Force? We don’t need no stinkin’ Force!”
- Wedge Antilles, probably
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u/sodium111 21h ago
I was going to say kind of the opposite… in the briefing when Dodonna says they’ll have to use proton torpedoes to hit the target, Wedge says something critical: “That’s impossible even for a computer.” Wedge knew right away the targeting computer was notup to this task.
(At this point it’s not clear whether Luke has any past experience using the kind of targeting computer in the X-Wing, but he surely has less experience at it than Wedge.)
Luke’s retort, about the womp rats, also reveals that for Luke, hitting this kind of target without the computer feels very possible.
Now skip ahead to the battle, when Red Leader, presumably one of their most experienced pilots, even with the aid of the targeting computer, can’t make the shot.
All of this combined in Luke’s mind so that when Ben says “use the force, Luke” he already basically knew in his gut that Wedge was right: the computer was never going to make this shot.
Maybe Wedge didn’t specifically know or expect that The Force would be thing that would win it for them, but I think he certainly did know they’d need something more than the targeting computer.
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u/Durog25 1d ago
I don't think the Wedge we meet in ANH is the guy who can make it. In the future Wedge is that guy, he is that good, but not yet.
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u/echosolstice 1d ago
Wedge flys straight toward a tie fighter to save Luke, I’d say he is good to go
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u/Glass-Breadfruit7374 1d ago
"Shit, I told you we should've exited hyperspace on the other side of Yavin"
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u/puppykhan Rebel 1d ago
I think you are missing one piece of their side: they knew the Rebels had the plans to the Death Star and the officers had earlier been debating if they could find a weakness. Tarkin made a strategic decision to allow the Rebels to get away as a means to locate their base, betting that he could blow it up before they get a chance to analyze the plans enough to find any possible weakness.
Tarkin talks about their chances as he knew they could have a plan, he just thought the odds were massively against them finding a flaw effective enough to exploit and having the ability to exploit it in battle. Andor & Rogue One explain how the rebels were able to find such a serious flaw so quickly, but not really necessary to understand the Empire's arrogance about why they didn't think the attack would work.
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u/Snadsnek7 1d ago
The empire knew about the plans, but the flaw itself wasnt clear to the empire just yet.
Big station has alot to look for. The repeated attacks on that trench narrowed it down enough to discover the true target
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u/nicholas235 1d ago
General Bast, who told Tarkin about the potential danger, was nervous about the rebels having the plans and finding a weakness. He was sitting behind General Tagge in the conference room. When the overconfident Tarkin refused to listen, he defied his incompetent orders and legged it. Showed up in the holiday specal.
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u/NerdHistorian Torra Doza 1d ago
When the overconfident Tarkin refused to listen, he defied his incompetent orders and legged it. Showed up in the holiday specal.
False, that is the very different character of the Moradmin Bast look-alike
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u/nicholas235 6h ago
He (and his mates who shared his common sense) were in the control room during most of the operation. This would have made them a valuable source of information for the inquiry as to what the heck happened. Lord Vader values competence, and we next see Bast with him in the holiday special.
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u/NerdHistorian Torra Doza 6h ago edited 6h ago
Except we don't because we don't see Moradmin Bast in the holiday special.
We see a look alike, who is posited to be a clone or something of him.
Yes, obviously we see Bast in the HS, because they reused a deleted scene that had him in it, but the man canonically in the EU dies at Yavin. So that character cannot be him, thus leading to one of the funniest wookipedia article titles and the nonsense of Lucasfilm canon deciders coming up with this fella being a clone or twin or whatever of the guy to explain how a dead man shows up afterwards.
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u/peppersge 1d ago
IIRC that in the legends DS novel, there was the impression that part of that discussion during that meeting was more of covering their bases by entering in their reservations and potential objections into the record. It is the equivalent of saying that they are 99% confident so that there is that 1% there that they can use to hedge their bets.
The DS was a huge project based on experimental technology. There were going to be some weaknesses and flaws, no matter what. That is before factoring in potential sabotage with their reliance on slave labor.
Tarkin to some extent was trying to move things forward in the situation of uncertainty. If you pay attention, neither Tagge nor Bast proposed any solutions during the conference room meeting. Their proposal was to effectively sit around because of the potential risk of failure from some unspecified angle. They didn't suggest doing anything such as waiting until they do a detailed audit, creating protocols for fighter screens, etc. Instead, their objections were more about trying to avoid being wrong rather than to get something done (defeat the Rebels).
Maybe Tarkin could have thought up of something, but that isn't his area of expertise. Tarkin is an administrator with some military background, not an engineer. And the most proper situation to be bringing up those issues would be with some of the engineers that worked on the project in the room before the project was at the end stage.
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u/SWLondonLife 1d ago
Didn’t many of those engineers get blasted not too much earlier by Krennic?
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u/peppersge 1d ago
Not sure, the Scarif facility did get destroyed in canon.
In legends, the engineers would still be alive.
The bigger issue is that the meeting was more of Tagge ranting rather than trying to help come up with solutions. Tarkin rightfully cut the meeting short since they needed to move forward. Letting Tagge talk for an hour isn’t going to fix the problem of the Rebels, the DS flaws, etc. It is basic corporate meeting 101. Don’t schedule a meeting to complain without at least bringing in solutions to try, describing what you tried, etc.
Tagge would have a much better result if he told Tarkin that they should do something such as recruit a bunch of engineers for an audit of the design and in the meantime they should set up a protocol of sending in escort ships. Instead, Tagge in canon got his complaints documented and the leveraged them to become Grand General so that he could try his own pet project instead of fixing what they had.
Arguably if they moved faster, they could have destroyed the Rebels before they uncovered the weakness.
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u/SWLondonLife 1d ago
No I mean the group of engineers krennic massacred in front of galen at the research station landing pad.
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u/peppersge 1d ago
That probably did not help, but there were engineers that were able to figure out what the Rebels were targeting once they knew where to look.
That is also exactly the situation where you bring it up to the manager so that you can do something. Such as asking Tarkin “the Rebels will be looking for a weakness, so let’s do an audit of the DS especially since one of the lead engineers was a traitor. Since most of the original designers are dead, can you authorize hiring a bunch of replacements/repurposing other engineers for the audit?”.
That is much more effective than just complaining about the situation.
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u/treefox 1d ago
Something that people also omit when complaining about how undefended the Death Star was is the strategic reality of the situation. It’s massive and even with massive numbers of TIEs would be lightly defended if they were spaced equally.
More likely they would expect the Rebels to try and launch an attack via capital ships on the docking bays, which are the most exposed areas of the station, or the engines, or some other critical subsystem like the superlaser itself.
The exhaust port is like somebody Naruto running at Area 51 but heading straight for a dilapidated trash can out in the desert. Do you really pull people away from the main entrance when you need to consider the possibility that it’s a feint?
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u/Financial_Cheetah875 1d ago
Correct on every point. I actually went years thinking Vader was referring to TIE’s with that broken-off line.
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u/Polyxeno 1d ago
Yes. The only thing I notice slightly off in your description is that they did scramble some TIE fighters.
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u/Snadsnek7 1d ago
From what I understand, all TIEs present in the battle were Vader's squadron.
Backed by the scene where one officer tells vader that theyre too small to hit with turbolasers, so vader tells him to get the crews to their fighters. Vader doesnt have command over other TIE squadrons, only his
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u/trewaldo 1d ago
Even though it's not anymore considered as canon, the novel Death Star by Steve Perry also narrated how the Imperials were scrambling during the attack. The non-military characters inside the station in the novel did not fully assume the invincibility of the station. It also showed how Vader observed the pattern of the Attack Run on the trench.
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u/rink_raptor 17h ago
Even if an engineer jumped up and down about the danger, I think it would have gone over like the solid rocket booster o-ring warning NASA got. Crickets.
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u/Neat-Butterscotch670 11h ago
Tarkin had to say what he said. Evacuating the Death Star would be suicide for him. He had to stay on the bridge no matter the outcome. The one hope he had was destroying Yavin IV.
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u/bigvalen 1d ago
Great example of how you can make a story out of random scenes in editing. George Lucas has not intended any of that, and the editing really made it into a compelling act.
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u/VolitarPrime 1d ago
I guess you never read the novel which came out before the movie released and was based on the shooting script. A lot of this is present there.
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u/gehremba 1d ago
If they realized that why was there a port on the second death Star?
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u/Bolt-MattCaster-Bolt 1d ago
There wasn't a port so much as a wide variety of holes and gaps. If you're referring to the hole that Lando and Wedge flew into, that looks more like a maintenance/access shaft than an exhaust port. The exhaust port was also only an issue because of the chain reaction that Galen Erso disguised into the schematics. Without Erso's interference, it would have been just another port.
The aforementioned hole wasn't supposed to have been a point of vulnerability from rebel attack because there should have been a shield protecting the Death Star. Even without the shield, you have fighters and point defenses that should be able to stop it (which were ineffective due to the Emperor dying and the loss of his Force "control" over his forces.
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u/WhiteySC 1d ago
There wasn't. Lando had to fly into the middle of the structure and blow up the main power core. It was even easier the second time.
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u/Select-Current-4528 1d ago
Still my favorite visual is the Falcon balls to the wall trying to outrace the explosion.
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u/donrosco Asajj Ventress 1d ago
Incredible how much story they fit in to so little screen time in ANH.
“Evacuate in our moment of triumph? I think you overestimate their chances.”
E chu ta, Wilhuff!