The Death Star and the Final Trench Run (2017)

Yeah, disparate sizes are hard to understand.

Another example: when the Ever Given ship was stuck in the Suez Canal, all the internet wags were saying "why can't they just excavate the dirt?" Well, this pic shows the scale difference involved: https://i.redd.it/5g9jvoecj6p61.jpg

Growing up in southern California I had some relatives visit and we spent a day at Newport Beach. When the morning marine layer broke and Catalina Island became visible, they asked, "is that Hawaii?"

I heard of some European visitors to New York thinking they would drive to Chicago for the day. It's about 800 miles. Countries in Europe are similar to average or small states in the U.S.

Seems pretty apropros for a mission pre-brief. Ask pretty much any military type sitting in one of these meetings how well the "intelligence" held up in the field.

My recollection is that the briefing map shows the equatorial trench (let's call that running west-east although it's arbitrary I agree) and the trench they go down being perpendicular to that. check out https://youtu.be/TOgtj00Rp8s?si=2E5SieRc8-XMzUU5&t=20

(you may have to scrub back and forward a bit to convince yourself either way). The sphere rotates and you see the big equatorial trench and highlights a smaller trench perpendicular to that that doesn't extend the whole way around. The briefing zooms in to show more detail. That's the one they are going to go down.

It’s always depicted as traveling with the equator “level” relative to the camera’s arbitrary axis. The hyperdrive and sublights must enforce that. We actually never see any kind of exhaust like a star destroyer, no clue how it ominously hovers around. That adds to the menace.

At Yavin 4, it approaches gun-first since it is calibrating to fire. But the equator is still level with the center of the planet it’s orbiting, or perhaps the moons orbit plane.

I think it does matter as the Death Star spins and its equatorial trench appears to be it's equator.

Because that's exactly what he says?

It also follows ordinary narrative convention more closely. We can tell from distant shots of the Death Star that there’s an equatorial trench, but not other trenches. If you’ve already introduced a trench, conventionally you’d just use that if you need a trench. The difference between a narrative and just a bunch of stuff happening is precisely that kind of re-use and tying-together of elements.

Idk, they do clearly fly into the equatorial trench the first time we see the Death Star, and it is clearly very, very wide.

I never paid attention to the briefing graphic which showed it was a longitudinal trench, so in my head canon it was always lateral. But not the equatorial trench. I'm also a bit dumbfounded that misunderstanding is/was so common.

There are a lot of things I really loved about Last Jedi and a lot of things I really hated about Last Jedi. It was such a mixed bag.

I hate the way it threw out the Star Wars universe's physics - because it took me right out of the universe. Yes, the Star Wars universe never had realistic physics, but it did have reasonably self-consistent physics and Last Jedi threw them away. It had bombs falling in space (as opposed to being projected as missiles), it had turbolasers arcing (not something it ever had before), it introduced hyperspace fuel in order to make the finale escape make sense (they could have just used an interdictor instead). It was maddening.

But they almost did something really cool with the force, throwing out the dark/light dichotomy and replacing it with balance. They could have had Rey and Ben actually see eye to eye and both become grey Jedi after dispatching Snoke and finally obtaining the prophesied balance in the force. That would have opened up all kinds of interesting new places to take Star Wars and new stories to explore. But they chickened out at the last second.

And then yeah, the whole last half of the movie with the slow space chase, escape plan, side quest... none of that made any sense in terms of its writing.

> One reason, for all it's flaws, Last Jedi is my favorite new film. It simultaneously admits (through character dialog) that "there are rules" and "there are egregiously no rules".

To each of their own, the meta in the Last Jedi is precisely why I hated that movie. Too many times it was the director speaking directly to the audience, in particular "the fans". This is simply not why I watch Star Wars. It also plagiarized a Battle Star Galactica episode a bit too much, and who the hell puts an epilogue in the middle of trilogy? Clearly Rian Johnson didn't care about what was going to be next.

The Last Jedi was an abomination, filled with misdirection for misdirection’s sake, at the cost of a coherent or entertaining narrative. It’s also filled with awful postmodern tropes that it conjures out of nowhere. “Hey, it turns out there are ancient Jedi texts” But their whole purpose in the film is so that they can be burned and discarded. “Oh, they were never all that important anyhow, just make your own rules.”

YouTube has things called "let's plays"/"longplays".

For DOS Star Wings: X-Wing, I scrubbed multiple videos and didn't see anything about the trenchrun:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL480EC9A01E8C50F7

There is no Attack on the Death Star PC videos that I could find. I did find Rebel Assault:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FX3B8yC38U

Which almost explicitly avoids the entire conversation by starting at the trench entry.

I found an x68000 version of "Attack on the Death Star" (maybe the same, maybe different) and it does the same as the previous, only showing the surface turret battle and then directly into the trench:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUzqbVRUxAE

It would appear that most games of the era were either unsure, or aware that it wasn't the hangar bay trench.

Another example from the Bourne movie the takes place in Berlin: when he's on his way to Berlin he's not feeling well and has to pull over. But that scene was filmed in Berlin so I found it rather confusing when shortly after the scene he's still on his way and not there yet at all.

I lived in a small town in Japan, and experienced this for a movie shot there. They would just bounce from downtown to the heights in a second!

You're never more than a couple of corners away from the Covered Market in Oxford-land.

Morse was usually pretty good for this, and fairly regularly had shots of not-that-pretty bits of Oxford. Certainly the earlier ones.

Lewis, however, regularly teleported significant distances in the pursuit of A Clue.

Maybe so, but Jupiter has been regularly impacted by meteoroids and comets with huge amounts of kinetic energy to little effect. Of course such events pale in comparison to the binding energy of a planet like Earth, which is approx. 60 trillion Gt TNT, which if I've calculated correctly is almost 9 quintillion Tsar Bombas. But if that's the Death Star's normal output, it would need to be 10,000x as powerful to completely blow up Jupiter. Who knows, maybe that's possible if the fusion reaction produced by the Death Star automatically scales up according to the mass of its target. But then I suppose a problem might be that such a large explosion could catch the Death Star itself in its blast radius, shockwave, or lethal particle shower.