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Comment by jessaustin | Hacker News Reader

This confirms for me a complaint I've always had about the Millennium Falcon. A ship equipped with hyperdrive would certainly have had targeting systems as good as a B-29. There would have been no need for the midships ladders to the gun stations.

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But the best part of old WWII movies were the dogfighting scenes. And the movie you reference was cribbed from there. So, poetic license.

If I remember that scene correctly, the gun stations on the Millennium Falcon seem more like the B-29 sighting stations than directly operated "local control" guns (but located directly behind the remote controlled gun rather than next to it). The biggest problem that I see is that this causes the MF's sighting station's FOV to be smaller than the one pictured in the B29.

But yeah, that scene is mostly artistic license.

That scene? The whole thing is fantasy, not hard sci-fi.

Just a random guess, but maybe it's a regulation thing. Like the empire made such military-grade weapons illegal on civilian ships. And having an illegal military-grade autocannon mounted on the side of the ship would attract attention from authorities.

Of course this is all my own rationalization: it's not like Lucas thought all the intricacies of the Star Wars universe through for their technical accuracy. This is more like literary interpretation, only instead of showing "The Old Man and the Sea" is a metaphor for the tragedy of human existence, we figure out how space ships work!

When you analyse Star Wars like that, you'll find that the things which make sense are greatly outnumbered by the things that don't.

I think in one of the EU novels (Courtship of Princess Leia) Luke flies the Falcon while using both quadlasers, and if I recall correctly Han mentions that the controls in the cockpit allowed for such a thing but with a major accuracy penalty compared to having actual gunners at the gun stations. I don't recall if Luke was using the Force to make the cockpit quadlaser controls super accurate or if he was just reaching out with the Force to directly operate the controls at both gun stations.

and the same misconception populated many video games as well, yet are we not willing to trade some realism for fun and fantasy? What fun would it be if we didn't struggle? Much of science fiction in movies and games as portrayed seems to derive from WW1 fighting.

There's plenty like that in Star Wars. What about 'blasters', the weapon whose projectiles move so slowly that an alert person can physically dodge them?

Apparently it's harder than it seems[1], depending on distance.

1: http://www.discovery.com/tv-shows/mythbusters/videos/star-wa...

Unless the ship was assembled from parts of different things from around the empire...

Yeah, I think it was implied that the MF is heavily modified to significantly expand the capabilities of the base ship. So maybe the stock automated cannons were replaced by manual but more powerful versions.

Or something. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Having blown up a tonne of them in Tie Fighter, the stock YT-1300 basically had all the fighting ability of a cabbage. The only real thing to be worried about was ramming them by accident, or possibly laughing too much to rebalance your shields.

So yes, I'm pretty sure the Millenium Falcon was heavily upgraded.

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