Snowspeeders have tow cables? Really? For what? Are they Galacto-Amazon's new delivery device? And look at the length of the thing! Anything you're "towing" is going to dragged along the ground at high speed. You've got to figure that the stall speed of a snowspeeder is above 100 MPH. Can you imagine dragging something around at 100 miles an hour with a cable so long that it bounces all over the place?
And how about what happens when the thing you're towing gets caught in a crevasse or alleyway? SPROING! Your snow speeder has its rear end ripped off.
I'm thinking that some defense contractor working for the Rebellion added that in just to make an extra profit.
If I'm visiting my sister and we happen to some movie and I point out these sorts of plot-holes, she scolds me.
ReplyDeleteWell, I suppose you could justify them based on the fact that Star Wars technology has kind of a general air of being kludged-together about it. In this case, I can see the rebels realizing that they weren't able to lay hands on big enough blasters to penetrate the walkers. So they rummaged around in the junkpile until they found these harpoon things that were originally made for who-knows-what original purpose (maybe hunting those big Space Whale things from a bit later in the movie?). Then they shoehorned them onto the snowspeeders specifically as a high-risk way to engage with the walkers, that quite possibly nobody really expected to work, but they were short of other options.
ReplyDeleteAnd this isn't so much of a stretch, considering that people in Star Wars seem to have grappling cables on them the way people in our world might carry multitools - I mean, in the first movie Luke uses one that just happened to be on *a uniform he stole from someone else* to swing over a chasm, and then he just happens to have one (with a hoist!) to lift him up a bit later in this movie, and then Boba Fett has one in the third movie. Grappling cables and harpoons seem to be all over the place.
But yeah, you would think that they could have come up with something better. Like maybe a minimalist flying droid carrying a thermal detonator, with a lightsaber-like lance that they could use to breach the armor so that they could get the detonator inside. That's pretty much what Luke did after all, and it seemed to work nicely. That would leave a lot less opportunity for personal heroics by the humans, though.
Tim, I'd agree with you save for the fact that in the dialog, the feel of the conversation is that the tow cables were part of the original snowspeeders. There's no reference to backfitting some hastily constructed rubbish and the risks that entails.
ReplyDeleteThis gets me started on the Deep Space 9 tragedy. The space station starts out as a patchwork wreck, but within 4 or 5 episodes, it's gleaming and new. Think of the fun they could have had if they were constantly having to patch that toad with duct tape and wire!