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Comment by KingOfCoders | Hacker News Reader

Funny, it never occured to me that the equatorial trench could be the trench. Perhaps when I watched the films at release and later I didn't have people to talk about it (no one was interested, my growing up in the 70s and 80s seems totally different from kids in the US), so there was no group think? Not sure. To me the equatorial trench and the trench run trench always were two seperate things. Also like, the trench run trench ends in the exhaust vent (?) while the equatorial trench seems to go all around without end?

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I had the same thoughts.

In fact, by showing the picture of the death star with the equatorial trench displayed so prominently the essay itself sort of primes you to make an error you might not have otherwise made.

But the whole thing was explained in the movie as the essay points out. The animation rotating as is pointed out kind of emphasized that the trench was not the equatorial trench. That's how I remembered it.

It was always in my head as a sort of Achilles heel or the culvert in Helms Deep, an important but easily overlooked topological detail.

The sizes are so different. It's like showing Earth from space and getting the Amazon River confused with a canal.

Not quite Amazon and a canal but...

I was once asked by a tourist near where I lived if the bridge they had just driven across was the 2500m long Forth Road Bridge across what is, I believe, geographically a fjord - it was actually Dean Bridge which is 134m long across a gorge of a fairly small river.

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

A bagger would be about the right relative proportions. We just need a couple on permanent standby near every major waterway.

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.

About 20 years ago I had a couple of people from the US ask me if they could drive to Rome for the day - we were in Edinburgh at the time. Rome is about 1,600 miles away from here.

"Also like, the trench run trench ends in the exhaust vent (?) while the equatorial trench seems to go all around without end?"

That probably explains my understanding that it wasn't the equatorial trench...

Doesn't the holographic map they show in the briefing show the trench they go down to bomb it running north/south? It's been a while since I watched the film.

Oh nevermind it says that in the article.

>Doesn't the holographic map they show in the briefing show the trench they go down to bomb it running north/south?

Does it matter when approaching from space?

They could just as well meant an equatorial run as far as a spaceship pilot is concerned.

Would the Death Star even keep a consistent orientation while travelling in space?

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.

Sure, but it also shows the dish in the totally wrong location. So it doesn't seem like an especially trustworthy source of information to begin with.

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.

Indeed, the hologram in the meeting was just the "powerpoint slide", abstract to convey the idea: death star, trench, boom. Noone stood up and went studying it like a map, that was not its purpose at all.

most of the people look as enthused by that hologram as I feel about seeing someone's slide deck. most fighter jocks tend to have the attitude best expressed in Aliens, "I only need to know one thing...where they are".

Yeah I'm in the same boat here I never even considered it taking place in the equatorial trench, the size established early on was huge and it was very clean compared to the cramped and chaotic trench featured in the trench run.

I'm exactly the same. I can't understand how one can confuse the two...

Easily? It's a minor detail, extremely easy to miss the point in the briefing animation, and extremely easy to not remember the size of the equatorial trench hangars.

Both the equatorial one and the actual one being trenches, and the equatorial one being more prominent makes it even easier...

It's more something a BBC Sherlock-type would notice, than a regular viewer...

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.

Agreed 100%: see also Checkov's Gun and Keith Johnstone's "Impro".

Exactly. And, to be clear, this is a pretty minor violation of that principle of favoring re-use of elements, and it’s also not the case that violating it’s always a mistake. I just think it’s (along with some other cues) why a lot of people assumed it was the equatorial trench. We knew of one trench, and it hadn’t really served any trench-related purpose yet, so… why wouldn’t it be that one?

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.

For the same reason most people think Vader said "Luke, I am your father."

Because that's exactly what he says?

No, I am your daddy.

Hola Papi!!

> Because that's exactly what he says?

Is it?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwtaM0GC-js

https://youtu.be/eZCo_hZLyh0?t=50s

Not sure if that's fake or what, but it's pretty well established that the actual line is "No, I am your father". Even Lucasfilm acknowledge this, so if you want to argue that everybody else is wrong, I hope you have some serious evidence to back that up.

But ironically, the line is often misquoted: “Luke, I am your father.” In fact, Vader responds to Luke’s claim that he’d killed the young man’s father. “No,” the villain says, “I am your father.”

https://www.lucasfilm.com/news/defining-moments-i-am-your-fa...

Reminds me of a similar misunderstanding in Casablanca, where most people quote the line as "Play it again, Sam". In actual fact, the lines in the film are "Play it once Sam, for old times sake." "Play it, Sam." and "Play it again" (without Sam).

Another very well known misquote is "Beam me up, Scotty".

The sound in that clip was doctored. One of the comments mentions from which other part of the film the word Luke is clipped from.

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