A new Star Wars happened, and opinions are released upon us like nibbling hounds demanding biscuits

[Spade Lead]

This is actually one of the parts where I felt the movie actually kept the Resistance looking like a proper military force. Poe is a Commander, demoted to Captain. That means that at best he's a wing commander responsible for some half dozen ships and pilots. As a Captain he's the lead wingman in a fighter pair. Why should this guy, hero or not, be briefed on a plan that's devised by an Admiral (some six or seven ranks above the commander) and hinges on secrecy to be successful? For all the Resistance knows, there's a mole on their ships that's feeding the First Order their location and that's how they got tracked.

By brushing Poe aside and telling him to suck it up, Huldo is actually acting in a way that I'd expect a military leader to act. They aren't going to brief every random joe in their organisation personally on the grand strategy of the war, they will tell those people to get back in line and wait for orders. This also makes Poe's arc and the way it is played a nice deconstruction of the Ace trope. Poe might be the Ace, but the Resistance is still a military organisation with a clear chain of command and they are not making exceptions just because that one guy is a damn good pilot.

Demotion or not, Poe is still highest ranking Squadron Leader which makes him Commander Air Group, fourth in line for command, behind Admiral Buzzfeed, the Captain of the ship they are aboard, and the XO of the ship they are aboard.

That right there is reason enough to keep him in the loop, since a catastrophic loss of command has already happened once today, and other officers who should outrank Poe keep going down with their ships instead of retreating to safety, further proving Admiral Holdo is a fuckwit who wasted lives and materiel.

 

[Spade Lead]

Why can she, with no prior explanation of how to even do it, force pull a lightsaber from a significant distance and great speed to herself when Luke struggled to accomplish pulling one to himself that was merely a few feet away despite the fact the he was further along in his training?

Where he was concussed by a Wampanoag and hung upside down, where the sum total of his training was "block these blaster bolts" and "just feel the shot"?

You mean the way Rey would have had a concussion from being tossed more than fifteen meters through the air to strike her head and back against a tree that was behind her, then fell five more meters to the ground?

 

[Spade Lead]

Back on topic over here, I liked it. There were a few odd momements (the chase scene in the Casino Town came far too close to something out of the prequels for my liking). There were some convienant plot holes and Finn's sidequest went preciesly nowhere, but I still enjoyed it, moreso than TFA and definitly more than Rogue One.

What I don't see is how it's worse than the prequels. Anyone who says that should be forced to rewatch those atrocities; remind themselves that the sequel triology couldn't possibly be worse than those movies.

I watched all 8 of the current bluray movies in one day, and the prequels are still better than the sequel trilogy

 

[Chimpzy_v1legacy]

The problem is that Holdo's move breaks Star Wars combat forever. One ship took out an entire fleet. They now have to explain why no one has ever done this before and will never do it again

This is just conjecture, but perhaps it's not done for the same reason high-speed impacts in space are so dangerous in real life: it tends to create a cloud of fast-moving debris that can ruin the day of anyone that crosses its path. If you've ever seen the movie Gravity, it's like that.

It's the reason space agencies are so meticulous about keeping track of every object they've left up there, lest something they send up collides with something else, the debris of which smashes another, which then smashes another, and so on in a domino effect. This is called the Kessler syndrome and if it cascades enough, it can render space activities extremely risky to impossible because our orbit is full of schrapnel wizzing around like hypersonic bullets.

How does this relate to Star Wars? Well, Holdo's kamikaze would be much, much, MUCH worse. Hit something at lightspeed and you can have debris moving at relativistic speeds. At those velocities even tiny objects carry a fuckton of energy. As in 'hits like a nuke' and above levels of energy. And they won't ever slow down or stop until they hit something, which may be millennia later.

The movies have at various times stressed how important it is for the navigation computer to calculate a safe route before jumping to lightspeed, because flying into something while travelling at c would really suck. I can imagine space travel would lose some of its appeal when everybody starts doing Holdos, filling up the most travelled routes with near impossible to detect or track swarms of relativistic death.

 

[Spade Lead]

However, the outrage against it can not be chalked up only to its' weird pacing, few weird character moments (Holdo's adamant refusal to tell Poe [...]

I thought this was odd while I was watching the film, but after thinking about it, I don't think it was terribly strange after all. Holdo is a commander; Poe is a pilot, not an adviser, vice-admiral, or commander. It is not his job to know the broader strategy behind decision-making-- it's his job to fly an X-Wing.

Military commanders in the real world do not tend to inform soldiers of broader strategy.

If Holdo and three other people (all located in the same compartment of the ship, just like when Leia and Ackbar were shot into space along with 99% of the Resistance leadership) died, Poe would be the next in line for command. Your military analogy is flawed in that you actually don't seem to know how a chain of command is actually organized. Poe isn't just some pilot, he is CAG, Commander Air Group, only outranked by his ship's Executive Officer, the Commanding Officer, and any Admiral aboard.

 

[Spade Lead]

The problem is that Holdo's move breaks Star Wars combat forever. One ship took out an entire fleet. They now have to explain why no one has ever done this before and will never do it again

The movies have at various times stressed how important it is for the navigation computer to calculate a safe route before jumping to lightspeed, because flying into something while travelling at c would really suck. I can imagine space travel would lose some of its appeal when everybody starts doing Holdos, filling up the most travelled routes with near impossible to detect or track swarms of relativistic death.

True, but at the same time, if your choice is Alderaan dies or you jump your X-Wing into the Death Star, destroying it and possibly throwing some shrapnel around at relativistic speeds, surely the better option is to save Alderaan. Besides, relativistic shrapnel will clear the galaxy pretty quickly in the grand scheme of things. Just make sure the shrapnel is aimed at an enemy formation or territory as well.

 

[Chimpzy_v1legacy]

The problem is that Holdo's move breaks Star Wars combat forever. One ship took out an entire fleet. They now have to explain why no one has ever done this before and will never do it again

The movies have at various times stressed how important it is for the navigation computer to calculate a safe route before jumping to lightspeed, because flying into something while travelling at c would really suck. I can imagine space travel would lose some of its appeal when everybody starts doing Holdos, filling up the most travelled routes with near impossible to detect or track swarms of relativistic death.

True, but at the same time, if your choice is Alderaan dies or you jump your X-Wing into the Death Star, destroying it and possibly throwing some shrapnel around at relativistic speeds, surely the better option is to save Alderaan. Besides, relativistic shrapnel will clear the galaxy pretty quickly in the grand scheme of things. Just make sure the shrapnel is aimed at an enemy formation or territory as well.

I suppose. Then again, Star Wars requires a lot of suspension of disbelief in general, so I'm guessing 'no one does tactical lightspeed kamikaze' is just one more in-universe convention we just have to accept, with Holdo's being the one exception cuz ... I don't know, they needed a cool set piece?

If anything tho, the movie grossly understates how destructive Holdo's maneouvre would be. I did some quick and dirty kinetic energy calculations using a rough estimate for the Raddus mass hitting at 99,99% c and the results are ... utterly terrifying.

 

[TheMysteriousGX]

Well, obviously, lightspeed kamikaze attack's must be difficult to pull off.

Otherwise you strap a hyperspace engine to a drone and let 'er rip.

Then again, it seems like there's only a danger if the ship hits something during the transition to hyperspace. All of Han's "you must be an idiot" examples involved huge gravity wells, which can pull things out of hyperspace, but not other solid things, else any random bit of space debris would annihilate a traveling ship.

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

I suppose. Then again, Star Wars requires a lot of suspension of disbelief in general, so I'm guessing 'no one does tactical lightspeed kamikaze' is just one more in-universe convention we just have to accept, with Holdo's being the one exception cuz ... I don't know, they needed a cool set piece?

If anything tho, the movie grossly understates how destructive Holdo's maneouvre would be. I did some quick and dirty kinetic energy calculations using a rough estimate for the Raddus mass hitting at 99,99% c and the results are ... utterly terrifying.

It is also well worth noting that a few ships smash into a Star Destroyer while jumping to hyperspace in Rogue One and they are just smashed to pieces against the Star Destroyers hull. So there are a lot of possible explanations here: Maybe you need to be a perfect distance away to cause havoc and not just have your ship smash into the shields, maybe you need enough mass that the only ships that can do functional suicide runs are capital ships, maybe it is tied to the output of the hyperdrive (with larger ships creating a larger hyperspace 'hole' that can cause damage) or maybe it is entirely down to writers fiat when and how hyperspace kamikaze works.

I mean, this is Star Wars. We can discuss potential explanations all day, but it is ultimately a drama first fantasy story in space and not anywhere near hard sci-fi. In Rogue One, hyperspacing into another ship means you get wrecked, in TLJ it means both ships get wrecked, which it is at any one time is entirely down to what works best from a dramatic viewpoint.

 

[Chimpzy_v1legacy]

I mean, this is Star Wars. We can discuss potential explanations all day, but it is ultimately a drama first fantasy story in space and not anywhere near hard sci-fi. In Rogue One, hyperspacing into another ship means you get wrecked, in TLJ it means both ships get wrecked, which it is at any one time is entirely down to what works best from a dramatic viewpoint.

Of course, we're not suppose to think too much about it and I don't think any Star Wars writers past or current ever really considered why no one uses lightspeed impacts offensively (let alone the physics of it) beyond a handwavey "they just don't". As for the movie, they wanted to show something awesome audiences haven't seen before, so there, lightspeed kamikaze. Rule of cool prevailed. Throw in some snazzy cgi and a dramatic sacrifice, and bam, people will nerdgasm all over it. And there's nothing wrong with that.

I just ran the numbers out of curiosity of how destructive it would be in real life.