Re: Star Wars: Episode IX - December 20, 2019
"Hyperspace tracking" goes by another term in every other SW film: "Tracking," lol. What other kind of ship to ship tracking is there? Line of sight?
Any tracking over distances too vast to cross at sublight speed is exactly what they make such a big deal about in TLJ. Darth Maul tracks the queen's ship to Tatooine. Obi-Wan tracks Slave I to Geonosis. Vader tracks the Blockade Runner to Tatooine. Tarkin tracks the Falcon. Enfy Nest tracks the Falcon. Even po dunk Unkar Plutt manages to track the Falcon after it jumps to hyperspace in a deleted TFA scene.
You're saying that "hyperspace tracking" is the same concept as any other tracking that we've seen in previous SW films? It's not! It's a new concept. It takes previous context from the OT, and creates an entirely different (evolved) type of tech than what these stories had used before.
Outside of a homing beacon, any pursuing ship in previous SW movies would have to "track" a fleeing vessel that jumped to lightspeed by employing their computer systems to calculate possible routes and endpoints. What Hux had finally finished developing (and teased to be in the works in RO) was essentially a combining of system resources to perform like a supercomputer (to use a real-life analogy). This new tech could perform calculations at unprecedented speeds, AND collapse all of those possible hyperspace routes down to the one actually used by the fleeing vessel. THAT is what "hyperspace tracking" is. It's a pinpoint tracking tech, and it's a totally new concept in SW.
It's quite literally one of the more commonplace aspects of the entire Saga.
Tracking through hyperspace? Commonplace? The "jump to lightspeed" was used in the OT as an effective escape maneuver. That's because it buys the target ship (like the Falcon) enough time to gain an extended reprieve from the pursuing ship(s). If it wasn't an effective escape strategy, Vader wouldn't have been so let down at the end of ESB when he did a double-take at the window after Artoo kicked the Falcon into hyperdrive.
If you have been under the impression that the Empire could always effectively track ships that had gone into hyperspace, how did you interpret Vader's disappointment when the Falcon made the jump in ESB?
Prior to TLJ, the best anyone could do to track ships that had jumped to lightspeed was either 1.) have a homing beacon on the target ship, or 2.) calculate the *possible* destinations, based on trajectory data, that a ship would use hyperspace routes for. That's exactly what Vader tells Piett to do when they presume that the Falcon had gone to lightspeed (right after the bounty hunters scene). Vader actually tells him to "calculate every possible destination along their last known trajectory." If the Falcon had indeed entered hyperspace, imagine how long it would take to disperse their fleet to check the endpoint of every single one of those hyperspace routes!
Yet in TLJ the very instant Snoke's fleet comes out of hyperspace Leia instantly assumes that he suddenly has a brand new version of the tech previously unused in the last 60 years of system to system tracking simply because she didn't personally witness a member of the FO attaching a device to any ship in her entire fleet? There's no way she could ever even know that it was the Raddus itself that the FO was locked on to.
I just don't see why Leia wouldn't be able to make a vague and general assumption that *somehow* the FO had tracked the Resistance through hyperspace. She has always been keenly aware and intuitive. I think that someone who had seen a Death Star get built by an Empire being trumped by a much more massive and powerful Starkiller Base built by the FO wouldn't hesitate to believe that the FO has taken Imperial concepts to evolved levels.
I would object more to her suspecting Finn (or anyone else) of planting a homing beacon. The Resistance is a group she herself put together. She trusts this small band of *heroes* enough not to have reason to suspect that one of them is working with the FO. And Finn would make the least sense as a conspirator for the reasons I outlined in my earlier post.
It seems like you're fine with it for no other reason than the fact that she guessed correctly which to me is simply RJ giving her out of the blue script knowledge, but speaking only for myself, that's such a wildly illogical assumption for what was previously such a tactically savvy character (going all the way back to ANH) that it really undermines the intelligence of her character IMO.
It's her established savvy character that adds credibility to her intuition in this case. Again, she knows that the FO was capable of taking out 5 planets with one strike. They had exceeded the old Empire's capacity for destruction by a large margin. Thirty years to improve upon tech and tactics from an Empire that had less urgency to innovate (because the Empire had established widespread control). I don't think any tech advancement, upgrade, or innovation from the FO should surprise Leia at this point.
I was also okay with Jyn taking in stride her discovery of "hyperspace tracking" info in RO. Given the computerized tracking methods employed by the Empire in the OT to "guesstimate" hyperspace routes, it was feasible that a jump in technology would perform those calculations much faster and provide precise tracking through hyperspace. It didn't blow Jyn over, so why wouldn't Leia be able to make a generalized connection 30 years later?
True story: "Solo" may be THE most solid film of the entire Saga for me--with regard to its lack of shortcomings. It doesn't have the "greatest" moments in the Saga per se but I definitely do love many of the sequences. It's just the fact that there is quite possibly not one single thing that makes me cringe or rubs me the wrong way.
You've proven to be extremely reasonable, so I trust that you understand that some other fans (myself included) have a very different experience when watching Solo. But it's because of having spent a year dealing with nonstop subjective criticisms of TLJ (oftentimes unreasonable ones, imo) that I've changed how I approach discussing a movie like Solo outside of my personal interactions with people who know me well. I don't want to dump on a movie that other people are fond of - getting lost in a delusion that my opinion is somehow fact - just because the movie didn't work for me. Hopefully, that will be a permanent lesson that I'll take out of this year-long TLJ discourse.
