A 'laser' wont explode upon impact with a planetary surface. Unless there are subterranean caverns its just going to punch a hole in the ground. I agree that the turbolasers were a bit underwhelming, but saying they should have been Tsar Bomba levels is an absurdity.

Also, consistency is not the language of Star Wars, especially technologically.

15 minutes ago, codegnave said:

A 'laser' wont explode upon impact with a planetary surface. Unless there are subterranean caverns its just going to punch a hole in the ground. I agree that the turbolasers were a bit underwhelming, but saying they should have been Tsar Bomba levels is an absurdity.

Also, consistency is not the language of Star Wars, especially technologically.

Those "things" the guns shoot in Star Wars are not even close to what lasers are... they work much more like plasma guns, actually.

Just now, Odanan said:

Those "things" the guns shoot in Star Wars are not even close to what lasers are... they work much more like plasma guns, actually.

Sure, thats what the '' were for. But they call them lasers so thats what they are. Star Wars ain't no science fiction folks!

Well colour me conflicted.

So much of the finalee was good... But some decisions (such as certain ships blowing up more than once, and where did that last Nebulon B go?) Really brought the episode down. It was also odd how some shots they did a good job of making the battle feel big (just by having a mix of elements at different distances and a little movement between them) in a way which was probably inexpensive... But then they obviously wasted a lot of time on other elements which actively worked against them and made the battle feel small (such as some of the shots of shingle ships or fighting lines with no ships actually firing) really janky (such as repeatedly blowing up the blue corvette which has essentially been a heroship till this episode, then it still escapes and may appear in rogue one acording to some folk) or seemed a waste of money/time/effort (such as some of the mandolorian boarding sequence with explosions and blaster fire and sputtering shields everywhere, when a brief firefight and some hand planted detonators would have been much better).

Final note: the imperial politics aspect paid of well again. Konstantine being an ass again. Price being merciless but outmatched. Tarkin's orders adding unnecessary complications. And rugged Kallus being a bad ass.... Shame he's all rebel-scumy now.

1 hour ago, codegnave said:

A 'laser' wont explode upon impact with a planetary surface. Unless there are subterranean caverns its just going to punch a hole in the ground. I agree that the turbolasers were a bit underwhelming, but saying they should have been Tsar Bomba levels is an absurdity.

Also, consistency is not the language of Star Wars, especially technologically.

They are supposed to transfer at least 5 gt worth of energy. It matters little if that energy is used for penetration power and bunching holes into the ground, which erupts afterwards with super-heated plasma rock or not. The energy needs to go somewhere after it has been transfer to the ground.

Now that consistency is not a thing star wars bothers with … not sure on that one in this regard actually. Considering the firepower of those weapons simply lower sounds like a very plausible way to achieve consistency. DBZ operations of single star destroyers are of the table sure, but that was legends stuff anyway and really not essential to the consistency of the current canon material. Leaves just the ESB asteroid vaporisation as inconstancy, which is not really a big thing. It's a fluke and that's it.

41 minutes ago, SEApocalypse said:

They are supposed to transfer at least 5 gt worth of energy. It matters little if that energy is used for penetration power and bunching holes into the ground, which erupts afterwards with super-heated plasma rock or not. The energy needs to go somewhere after it has been transfer to the ground.

Now that consistency is not a thing star wars bothers with … not sure on that one in this regard actually. Considering the firepower of those weapons simply lower sounds like a very plausible way to achieve consistency. DBZ operations of single star destroyers are of the table sure, but that was legends stuff anyway and really not essential to the consistency of the current canon material. Leaves just the ESB asteroid vaporisation as inconstancy, which is not really a big thing. It's a fluke and that's it.

Listen Curtis Saxton, don't bring your gigatons here

5 hours ago, Wilhelm Screamer said:

I will give the finale credit where it is due, I did not fully see Bendu just attacking everyone indiscriminately. That was pretty cool.

Agreed. I was surprised that the attack on Lothal never even got the chance to happen. And even more surprised that Bendu got involved.

And then even further surprised that, when confronted with a nonsense Galactus cloud, Thrawn's response was to shoot it in the face. And that that worked!

5 hours ago, Forresto said:

Give us old man Cad Bane

Why would he be old? He's an alien. He might not have aged appreciably at all.

2 hours ago, codegnave said:

I agree that the turbolasers were a bit underwhelming, but saying they should have been Tsar Bomba levels is an absurdity.

Agreed. I know ships are portrayed to be unnecessarily fragile in Rebels, but the idea that getting hit with a turbolaser is like getting nuked is ridiculous. Proton Bombs aren't even that powerful, and a proton bomb deals a lot more damage than a turbolaser blast.

Anyway, I really liked the episode. The Rebellion got the defeat I was hoping it would.

On the one hand, I'm super relieved that Thrawn survived. On the other hand, it seems like they might be keeping him around for future seasons. Which means they might still kill him later, and I've only postponed my outrage.

I really want him to survive the series. Like, I know on an intellectual level that the Thrawn trilogy probably won't happen, but I feel like it still COULD fit in with the new canon with some rewriting. And I want that to still be a possibility someday.

Solid finale overall. Bits I didn't care for, but they got most of it right. Like most of this series, there's a better version of these stories, but that's true of most extended SW material (revisiting the games and books does not generally hold up to my mental impressions of what happened in them). Could have done without Force Storm Ex Machina. That was never going to pay off in the slightest and none of it made any sense. Not the reasons for it existing (Force Storm or I will taunt you again!) or its impact on an otherwise dire situation.

On that note, they really got the tone right. It's got that desperate, hopeless sense of ESB and Rouge One in no small part because almost everyone says something to shed their plot armor at some point. Legitimately shocked Kannan survived, though I was thrilled to have Hera acknowledge their relationship again. It wasn't ultimately as bleak as it probably should have been, but its probably as bleak as it should be for a show aimed at a variety of ages.

Thrawn was great overall. I loved the details of his armor when he took to the ground and overall the character holds up to all but the most impossible standards. He was menacing and a step ahead of everything within reason, so good on that.

Oh and was i the only one who wanted that Deathtrooper to turn to thrawn and say: "Permission to shoot the angry sky-face sir?"

I was always of the opinion that blast-type AOE weapons weren't very common in Star Wars because the basic armor completely negates them. A proton bomb is less bomb and more protons, a turbo laser is less laser and more turbo, a blaster is less blast and more... er....

That's also why they get up close - the shields and ships could just shrug off nukes and missile blasts, so warfare has come to a point of closing up along side and drilling through the enemy defenses with highly-focused plasma weapons.

Even in real space a nuke doesn't do much damage, and we still don't know the exact mechanism for energy shields: do they absorb damage, redirect it, etc? I think shields and hyperdrive make the game here.

Picture two knights fighting. Full plate armor, the works. There's no point in using a sling, and little point in using a bow, saber, or shield. A bow won't penetrate, a shield is superfluous, and you can not cut through plate.

Your best bets for weapons are a poleaxe, a mace, or a rondel dagger - all of which involve getting up-close and personal to deal with the mighty tin can.

Nowadays you'd scoff at the idea of up-and-personal combat on the seas or in person. "Their armor can't block .50 rounds!" you'd say, "so why wouldn't I fight from a distance?" But in Star Wars the pendulum has swung back, and defenses are very, very, powerful compared to the weapons. Ships can sit back and chillax, safe under shields and armor while a laser a thousand miles away lights them up like a Christmas tree, then hyper-drive to within a couple kilometers of it (and the ships are measured in kilometers long) and hammer it with slow-but-powerful plasma weapons.

I'm sure they make bullet- proof armor in Star Wars, but no one uses it because everyone already has blasters. Remember how armies just dropped armor after the gun was invented? No-one used bows anymore, so why spend the money on it? It's just that the weapon invented to defeat armor and shields in Star Wars comes in the form a slow-moving projectile, so while land combat with ranges of 1-2 km is relatively the same, space combat has narrowed down to ranges of 1-2 km and is back to dogfighting and cap-ship slugfests.

Also since hyperdrives seem to take time to make successive jumps, there is always a window for the proactive attacker where the enemy is in range after a jump.

2 hours ago, Wilhelm Screamer said:

Listen Curtis Saxton, don't bring your gigatons here

Hehe, not a fan either, so I actually like weaker weapons, it's just breaking with, well, Curtis Saxton and some established legends stuff and one case in canon.

I have a bad feeling for Sabine.

48 minutes ago, SEApocalypse said:

Hehe, not a fan either, so I actually like weaker weapons, it's just breaking with, well, Curtis Saxton and some established legends stuff and one case in canon.

I figure that most of the references to kilotons and gigatons could be changed to kilojoules and gigajoules (and terajoules for Star Destroyer-sized vessels) without much of a problem. Mike Stackpole consistently used those terms in the X-wing series.

3 hours ago, SEApocalypse said:

Leaves just the ESB asteroid vaporisation as inconstancy, which is not really a big thing. It's a fluke and that's it.

http://www.theforce.net/swtc/isd.html

Estimates of the melting plus vaporisation energy [by Eric Vandersall] are 32 TJ and 260 TJ respectively for 20m and 40m diameter asteroids at an initial temperature of about 206K. These are uncertain as detailed values, since the heating process process is non-equilibrium, supersonic and takes place in vacuo. Nevertheless, these results are plausibly indicative order-of-magnitude estimates.

So, even Saxton gives terajoules as TESB asteroid vaporisation levels of energy.

That said, the bolts landing near Kanan are weaker - more like kilojoules than terajoules.

Possible answer for those who like bigger energies - Thrawn is specifically trying to take Rebel Officers alive. So he begins with the guns dialed down to minimum power (hence the few shots that miss the shield and land near Kanan) - the targeting crews adjust their aims till all the shots are landing on the shield - then they gently start ramping up the energies once all the shots are landing on the shield, and deliver what's intended to be a barrage that will overwhelm the shield without destroying the base and everyone in it.

The shield turns out to be a little too tough to be overwhelmed - so they send down the walkers.

DBZ operations of single star destroyers are of the table sure, but that was legends stuff anyway and really not essential to the consistency of the current canon material.

BDZ does get mentioned in Rebels once - Season 1, the Luminara episode that introduces the Grand Inquisitor - begins with a Holonet report "Another planet liberated using the Base Delta Zero initiative" and in Sabine's Journal (tie-in book) she explains that what they really mean is exterminating the entire population.

However - in the context of the newcanon - it may not mean deep planet crust melting anymore (that was mostly Saxton's interpretation). I could see "newcanon BDZs" being handled a little differently - TIE bombers dropping bombs, as well as Star Destroyers dropping turbolaser bolts.

3 hours ago, LunarSol said:

Could have done without Force Storm Ex Machina. That was never going to pay off in the slightest and none of it made any sense. Not the reasons for it existing (Force Storm or I will taunt you again!) or its impact on an otherwise dire situation.

At first, when the storm first showed up, I was worried that Kanan taunting Bendu and insulting him had somehow actually gotten him to help them. I'm SUPER glad they didn't go that route and instead went with a "Get the hell off my planet!" **** everyone, response instead.

The space battle was really underwhelming... did the Rebel ships even fire a shot? And a single fly-by of 2 TIE Fighters is enough to cripple a Corvette? WTF?

1 hour ago, costi said:

The space battle was really underwhelming... did the Rebel ships even fire a shot? And a single fly-by of 2 TIE Fighters is enough to cripple a Corvette? WTF?

Those were either TIE bombers that did kills in one fly-by, or it can be assumed that we're just seeing the final crippling shots. To be fair, one A-Wing crashing into the bridge of a Super Star Destroyer shouldn't cause the thing to randomly plummet into the nearest Death Star II, but that's been canon almost longer than the idea of Star Wars canon.

I super enjoyed that episode. Not gonna lie, was disappointed that there weren't a few more deaths; I would have liked to see Zeb, AP-5, or Kanan die, since Zeb doesn't contribute much to the show anymore, AP-5 should not have been able outrun that death, and Kanan took off so much plot armour so much that he practically turned invisible...but overall it was good. I think seeing Maul's death, then Sato's in back to back episodes, along with the deaths of countless unnamed Rebel ships and soldiers was probably enough violence.

I'm also not disappointed with Thrawn's defeat; yes, it took a Deus Ex Machina and subordinate stupidity to do it but that also means it took a Deus Ex Machina to do it . Next time Thrawn shows up, he either wins, or they completely invalidate him as a character, and I highly doubt that they would do the second, since they've used up all their Deus Ex Machinas in this episode alone.

Also, super excited we're still seeing the Kom'rk fighter; it's only a matter of time, I'm sure, before we get to see it on the tables, either as a Rebel or Scum (or both) large base or Epic ship. And, also, I cannot wait to see the Rebel Kallus card, and what they change. Though I guess we'll need to see what he gets up to in this new season first.

Basically, I can't wait for the next Rebels wave (like Wave 8 was "The Rebels Wave," with the TAP, Ghost, and Assault Carrier).

1 hour ago, costi said:

The space battle was really underwhelming... did the Rebel ships even fire a shot? And a single fly-by of 2 TIE Fighters is enough to cripple a Corvette? WTF?

According to the new Rebels cannon apparently corvettes (and a few other small capital ships) are made of paper and TIE lasers are made of win. Remember what Vader did to Sato's first ship and how a single interceptor almost killed a corvette in Wedge's escape from the Imperial Academy.

I think people are forgetting what a deus ex-machina really is.

A deus ex-machina is a plot device that uses a new character or event to solve an unsolvable problem. New being a character that was created specifically to perform only this action this one time. We've been exposed to the Bendu for an entire season, and he's done way more for the series than conjuring up a force storm. Even then, he doesn't do it for the rebels. He attacks everyone as his way of saying "get off my lawn."

If it were a true deus ex-machina, we would have never heard of the Bendu before now, and the rebels would be untouched.

I was browsing youtube and someone had uploaded a clip titled "Bendu attacks Thrawn".

I didn't click it, but I was worried for most of the episode that the Bendu was going to take Thrawn out, which would have felt very cheap to me.

Glad it panned out the way it did. Was pleasantly surprised to see Thrawn outwit the Bendu. Glad he's likely going to return for season 4. I've liked Thrawn, but I feel he still needs more than this season has given him.

3 minutes ago, Ktan said:

Glad it panned out the way it did. Was pleasantly surprised to see Thrawn outwit the Bendu.

I'm not sure I'd qualify "Try shooting at it." as "outwitting".

24 minutes ago, Kreen said:

I'm also not disappointed with Thrawn's defeat

What defeat? He wiped out most of the Rebel fleet. Granted, he didn't accomplish all of his goals, but it sure as hell wasn't a Rebel victory.

Yeah, defeat would have been a better word.

If I were to rephrase, I'd say I'm pleased that Thrawn wasn't cowed by the Bendu. It clearly shocked him and caught him off guard, but he still defeated it.

3 minutes ago, Ktan said:

If I were to rephrase, I'd say I'm pleased that Thrawn wasn't cowed by the Benud. It clearly shocked him and caught him off guard, but he still defeated it.

I actually would have preferred if he HAD just withdrawn. Because shooting guns at a cloud is something that SHOULDN'T have worked, and, frankly, it's just bad writing that it did.

Since the Rebels had already left the planet at that point, there was no reason for him to stay anyway.

Frankly, I would have preferred if Bendu had just conjured a storm that started destroying everything without putting his dumb face in it and shouting at people.

I also don't like that Thrawn tried to finish off Bendu. It seems out of character for him to waste an opportunity to learn from or study something.

37 minutes ago, MPG said:

I think people are forgetting what a deus ex-machina really is.

A deus ex-machina is a plot device that uses a new character or event to solve an unsolvable problem. New being a character that was created specifically to perform only this action this one time. We've been exposed to the Bendu for an entire season, and he's done way more for the series than conjuring up a force storm. Even then, he doesn't do it for the rebels. He attacks everyone as his way of saying "get off my lawn."

If it were a true deus ex-machina, we would have never heard of the Bendu before now, and the rebels would be untouched.

While that is true, the idea of a massive Force Storm, and Bendu suddenly creating one (when we've never seen anything like it in Rebels or the seven films) does come across as similar to a deus ex machina. While Bendu has been established as a character, his role as Weather Wizard was never even hinted at before now (as far as I remember) which means that the ending is still borderline deus ex machina.

I'd also like to back up my statement on the grounds that this is literally a deus ex-machina in its original form from the Greek theatre, where a divine being appears in the sky (lowered by a mechane, a crane in theater) and wraps up the plot. Note that this doesn't necessarily include resolving the problems or saving the heroes, but simply bringing the situation to a speedy conclusion, which the Bendu did.

21 minutes ago, DarthEnderX said:

What defeat? He wiped out most of the Rebel fleet. Granted, he didn't accomplish all of his goals, but it sure as hell wasn't a Rebel victory.

Sorry, yes. Failure to accomplish all goals, and generally not completely-winning certainly isn't a defeat. But losing a large portion of your ground forces to a mysterious energy storm and having the leadership escape when moments ago you had them surrounded is pretty dang close considering the circumstances.

16 minutes ago, DarthEnderX said:

I actually would have preferred if he HAD just withdrawn. Because shooting guns at a cloud is something that SHOULDN'T have worked, and, frankly, it's just bad writing that it did.

Since the Rebels had already left the planet at that point, there was no reason for him to stay anyway.

Frankly, I would have preferred if Bendu had just conjured a storm that started destroying everything without putting his dumb face in it and shouting at people.

I also don't like that Thrawn tried to finish off Bendu. It seems out of character for him to waste an opportunity to learn from or study something.

The dumb face was pretty stupid. Very very campy.

Shooting the cloud was bad writing, but the face up there was the first step of that. Had it been a regular magical storm, shooting it might actually have worked; the laserfire/plasma/whateverwe'veagreeditis would disperse the clouds and possibly disrupt the electrical charge that causes lightning, reducing the chances that further lightning will fly down to annihilate his troops. He also wasn't going to be able to evacuate everyone before the storm destroyed them. The Rebels were still attacked by lightning as they fled, and that was when the cloud still had the Imperials as a distraction; if the Imperials tried to take off, the storm would turn its full fury on them, destroying their ships as they tried to flee. Trying to deal with the cloud was really his only choice, even more so because his ships were fully on the other side of the base.

But it also makes sense that Thrawn would finish him. How in the world would they contain a monster that can fly and turn into a lightning storm and destroy AT-ATs at a whim? Especially since he seems rather unaware of the specifics of the Force ("Jedi Devilry") and has clear evidence that this being is dangerous to the Empire, and an ally of the Rebellion. They can't just keeping shooting him with AT-ATs every time he takes off, not without risking killing him and losing men in the process. Safer to just kill it now.

1 hour ago, costi said:

The space battle was really underwhelming... did the Rebel ships even fire a shot? And a single fly-by of 2 TIE Fighters is enough to cripple a Corvette? WTF?

Two TIE Bomber were in TIE-Fighter as well enough to cripple a corvette, those heavy bombs or even just torpedos hurt. Remember, the Ghost blasts away an Arquitten with one or two volleys with the cannons and a pair of proton torpedos.

In Zero hour we see them actually using even more heavy ordnance as both sides seem to prefer that day to use bombs.