No claim to originality here, but it occurred to me that a less suicidal strategy would be to enter the skinny trench at, say, 6000m away from the thermal exhaust port rather than 50,000m. Of course, you couldn't then have a one way conversation with the Kenobi ghost and await the last second Solo save.
shareor fly directly at the port from space
shareI always assumed they were getting into the trench at a point where they would have time to orient themselves and actually aim. Maybe the targetting computer need to be 5,000m out to start locking on to something that small and they didn't want to take the risk that they wouldn't have straightened out properly, so they went back a really long way to make sure the computer had time for a lock.
I dunno. It's a minor problem, you're right, but ignorable enough, I feel.
The Clint Eastwood action movie "Firefox" mimicked the Death Star trench run almost identically, but that was after.
I wonder what Star Wars itself was trying to mimic? Some famous historical "canyon run" of an aircraft attack?
It wasn’t from an actual historical battle, but instead from one from Lucas’ expanded Star Wars mythology. It came from a battle during the Tatooine Uprising when distant ancestor Jebediah Owen flew into a narrow desert canyon and took out the King of the Womp Rats thus leading to humans taking over as the dominant species on the planet.
shareyeah but that was made up later on, thats not why in 77 they filmed a trench run
shareWell, the obvious source is the 1964 movie "633 Squadron" which has a flight through a fjord to strike a hidden target which could not be bombed from a saner altitude. Of course ever since "Star Wars" was first released, we've known about the "Dam Busters" connection, based on the 1955 film which was itself based on the "bouncing bomb" attacks on the Ruhr dams in Germany during WWII.
shareTrue.
Another poster pointed out one time how much energy, manpower and time was wasted flying around on the surface shooting it up.
If the trench was the mission and they had only 10 minutes just line up wave after wave of fighters...if the first one misses another is there for a shot 15 seconds later and so on.
I always assumed the outer surface attacks were to eliminate anti-aircraft guns and things like that.
It could also have been to create enough of a ruse that the Empire would not have realised what they were doing; if they all swarmed the port right away, the Empire might have figured out the weakness fast and tightened defences around the port.
good answers!
The fly low in real life right? for those reasons, and also to stay under radar.
Maybe flying that trench means death star cant track them as easily
Death Star is round, they are in space, no need to even enter the trench at all.
I love Star Wars but even i will admit it was a stupid tactic.
Just target the port from any distance away, no need to actually go near the death star, you could fly straight at it from space with no need to enter the trench.
What basically happened was a 3d object got turned into a 2d object so we could get the trench run. Empire does the same mistake when leaving Hoth, they are flying into space why not fly out the other side of the planet away from the Star Destroyers.
[deleted]
Yeah, but any sphere large enough will become a flat plane when you fly within metres of the surface, that's why flat earthers think they have a case.