SPOILERS: Rogue One didn't "Fix a plot hole", there was no plot hole to fix

By KungFuFerret, in Star Wars: Edge of the Empire RPG

Ok so, I was listening to the O66 Podcast about R1 recently, and it dawned on me, after they talked about how it was a brilliant move by R1 to "fix a glaring plothole that fans have been bitching about for decades".

No, there is no freaking plot hole.

Much like the Gov't, they invent cures for which there were no known diseases. By making one change in order to solve one problem, they end up creating 3 other problems (i.e. the fix made more problems, not less). The WORST thing about the 'fix' was that it took all the glory away from the IV team who found the weakness. So, now, they really didn't do anything special. (Even if her dad already told her what the weakness was and they didn't need the actual plans.) In IV, everyone had a heroic role to play but in R1 they're portrayed as a bunch of bumbling idiots with nothing to contribute.

Let's face it, some human beings just can't help themselves when it comes to messing with the way things are. They're always adding in little tidbits where they are not desired, expanding things until there's nothing left to expand. At which point, they make up new stuff. Some people really like that. I am not one of them.

I think that the Empire imagined that anyone wanting to attack the Death Star would use capital ships, so they designed the station to handle their attacks, planning to hold on long enough for the superlaser to destroy them, and probably call in a fleet of star destroyer to trap them. I guess that the battle of Endor is actually how they imagined an attack on the death star should have played out (of course DS 2 wasn't even completed so much more vulnerable with the shield down). So snubfigthers weren't considered so dangerous and somethign to be dealt by tie fighters. It appears they underestimated starfighters so much that only Darth Vader's order forced them to scramble the TIEs

As for the Titanic, it was combination of factors rather than a single flaw: the ship was going too fast inside an ice field and couldn't spot the iceberg soon enough, the damage was so extensive it overwhelmed the safety features, untrained crew and an ineffective captain didn't implement the evacuation as well as they could. Yes they lacked enough lifeboats for everybody (and still carreid more than required!), but it has been suggested that it wasn't planned to abandon ship in the high seas, but the standard procedure was to use the lifeboats to ferry passengers to rescuing ships, and the lifeboats would have been enough for the task. Of course now we know that it was a foolish idea and modern ships have enough lifeboats.

So the comaprison with the death star isn't particularly fitting i think. But at least the shipping companies learned quickly those lessons, while the Empire did not, as the death star 2 was even more vulnerable than the first!

Still, the Rogue One film has created a better explanation of why the exhaust port flaw went quite unnoticed. Even in the original trilogy R2 had the only blueprints still existing, so the imperials couldn't do anything until too late, even if they suspected some weakness.

Ok so, I was listening to the O66 Podcast about R1 recently, and it dawned on me, after they talked about how it was a brilliant move by R1 to "fix a glaring plothole that fans have been bitching about for decades".

No, there is no freaking plot hole.

Much like the Gov't, they invent cures for which there were no known diseases. By making one change in order to solve one problem, they end up creating 3 other problems (i.e. the fix made more problems, not less). The WORST thing about the 'fix' was that it took all the glory away from the IV team who found the weakness. So, now, they really didn't do anything special. (Even if her dad already told her what the weakness was and they didn't need the actual plans.) In IV, everyone had a heroic role to play but in R1 they're portrayed as a bunch of bumbling idiots with nothing to contribute.

Let's face it, some human beings just can't help themselves when it comes to messing with the way things are. They're always adding in little tidbits where they are not desired, expanding things until there's nothing left to expand. At which point, they make up new stuff. Some people really like that. I am not one of them.

I completely disagree. Galen told Jyn there was a lethal flaw in the plans but he didn't have time to tell her exactly what it was (it was cut short by Jedha City exploding i think), so the analyst team in Episode IV still did a good job in finding the one flaw in the plans, which must have been a huge amount of data to sort through. And they came up with a battle plan on the spot, which is not bad.

Ok so, I was listening to the O66 Podcast about R1 recently, and it dawned on me, after they talked about how it was a brilliant move by R1 to "fix a glaring plothole that fans have been bitching about for decades".

No, there is no freaking plot hole.

Much like the Gov't, they invent cures for which there were no known diseases. By making one change in order to solve one problem, they end up creating 3 other problems (i.e. the fix made more problems, not less). The WORST thing about the 'fix' was that it took all the glory away from the IV team who found the weakness. So, now, they really didn't do anything special. (Even if her dad already told her what the weakness was and they didn't need the actual plans.) In IV, everyone had a heroic role to play but in R1 they're portrayed as a bunch of bumbling idiots with nothing to contribute.

Let's face it, some human beings just can't help themselves when it comes to messing with the way things are. They're always adding in little tidbits where they are not desired, expanding things until there's nothing left to expand. At which point, they make up new stuff. Some people really like that. I am not one of them.

I completely disagree. Galen told Jyn there was a lethal flaw in the plans but he didn't have time to tell her exactly what it was (it was cut short by Jedha City exploding i think), so the analyst team in Episode IV still did a good job in finding the one flaw in the plans, which must have been a huge amount of data to sort through. And they came up with a battle plan on the spot, which is not bad.

Actually he had plenty of time to tell her that super important bit of information, that he devoted years of his life to. He could've you know, not spent 95% of the holorecording talking about his daughter. "Hey! To whomever get's this message, get it to the Rebellion! Tell them I built a flaw into the design of this thing, it's in the exhaust ports! The full specs are in this data place on this planet (i can't be arsed to remember the name of it, most of the movie has faded from memory for me). But yeah, even if you can't find the plans, just look for the exhaust ports along the main diameter of the station! Shoot it with a torpedo or something and you'll blow it all up! Oh yeah, and Jyn, I love you, I never stopped loving you. Not that I have ANY way of knowing if you are alive, or how in the hell someone would find one person in an entire galaxy, who has been spending most of her life off grid, avoiding notice as much as she can. But yeah, I have faith this will find you, so I love you kid. "

Boom, information conveyed :P And he even had time to give her a message too.

Ok so, I was listening to the O66 Podcast about R1 recently, and it dawned on me, after they talked about how it was a brilliant move by R1 to "fix a glaring plothole that fans have been bitching about for decades".

No, there is no freaking plot hole.

Much like the Gov't, they invent cures for which there were no known diseases. By making one change in order to solve one problem, they end up creating 3 other problems (i.e. the fix made more problems, not less). The WORST thing about the 'fix' was that it took all the glory away from the IV team who found the weakness. So, now, they really didn't do anything special. (Even if her dad already told her what the weakness was and they didn't need the actual plans.) In IV, everyone had a heroic role to play but in R1 they're portrayed as a bunch of bumbling idiots with nothing to contribute.

Let's face it, some human beings just can't help themselves when it comes to messing with the way things are. They're always adding in little tidbits where they are not desired, expanding things until there's nothing left to expand. At which point, they make up new stuff. Some people really like that. I am not one of them.

I completely disagree. Galen told Jyn there was a lethal flaw in the plans but he didn't have time to tell her exactly what it was (it was cut short by Jedha City exploding i think), so the analyst team in Episode IV still did a good job in finding the one flaw in the plans, which must have been a huge amount of data to sort through. And they came up with a battle plan on the spot, which is not bad.

Actually he had plenty of time to tell her that super important bit of information, that he devoted years of his life to. He could've you know, not spent 95% of the holorecording talking about his daughter. "Hey! To whomever get's this message, get it to the Rebellion! Tell them I built a flaw into the design of this thing, it's in the exhaust ports! The full specs are in this data place on this planet (i can't be arsed to remember the name of it, most of the movie has faded from memory for me). But yeah, even if you can't find the plans, just look for the exhaust ports along the main diameter of the station! Shoot it with a torpedo or something and you'll blow it all up! Oh yeah, and Jyn, I love you, I never stopped loving you. Not that I have ANY way of knowing if you are alive, or how in the hell someone would find one person in an entire galaxy, who has been spending most of her life off grid, avoiding notice as much as she can. But yeah, I have faith this will find you, so I love you kid. "

Boom, information conveyed :P And he even had time to give her a message too.

Except the design flaw wasn't in the exhaust ports. It was in the reactor module. Basically, he said if you make a big enough boom at this spot, the entire thing will blow. But he didn't know exactly how the Rebellion would be able to exploit the weakness. Maybe snubfighters. Maybe a saboteur. Like a good GM, he told the party what to do, not how to do it.

In the old canon, the problem with the Battle of Yavin was Tarkin's arrogance. He felt that the DS could handle itself and that the fighters would pose no serious threat to the station as they would need to survive the defensive fire and that they would not be able to do serious harm to it. As such, the TIE fighters that should have been protecting the DS, flying CAP for it were still hanger bound. As I recall from the old technical specs, the DS itself carried at least 2 wings of TIEs.

Vader, realizing what was happening scrambled his personal TIE squadron from his Star Destroyer.

So yeah, there is no plothole that needed patching, fans are just too anal and nitpicky about everything, and had nothing better to do for 30 years than to try and pick apart every frame of those films and try and find flaws.

I never thought it was a plot hole. Just a very unfortunate bug that made it to the production model. S happens, especially when putting toghether something the size of a planet with several billion systems to make it work.

Now that said - when someone came up to Tarkin and said "We've analyzed their attack and there is a danger", instead of reporting to Tarkin, he should have issued an order to the quartermaster to bring up 10 bucks of rebar from the Death Star stores and stuffed some down the exhaust port.

Edited by Desslok

This is a very similar situation to the WTC on 9/11 where the jet fuel caused the beams to fail.

Yeah, sure.

webquest-soccer-red-card.jpg

Nope, nope, nope - let us not open this can of worms.

The Titanic had more problems than just two.

The ship had been built in compartments, so that if one compartment was breeched, the ship could remain floating. But the compartments had no “roof” to them, and they didn’t design the ship to be able to handle as many breeched compartments as were caused. When the water overflowed one breeched compartment, it could just flow right into the next compartment, even if it wasn’t already breeched.

The class system also played a heavy role, in that the lifeboats were really meant just for the first class passengers, and if anyone else managed to get in, then they got lucky.

When the lifeboats were being launched, many could not be lowered because of the angle that the ship was listing. Many that were launched were damaged or destroyed due to being crushed up against the ship as it was heaving and rolling.

IIRC, they didn’t have enough life vests for everyone.

Of course, the water was deathly cold.

One of the stranger aspects of the Titanic was that not only did the crew not see the Iceberg, they COULDN'T see the iceberg. There's a documentary on it, but the TL;DNR version is that the temperature difference between the sea, the air directly above it and the air way above it caused an optical illusion that refracted the sea into the sky - think driving on a highway on a really hot day and you see that shimmer on the road ahead of you.

Some think there is a plot hole or they just found the premise of a single starfighter taking down a death machine the size of a moon implausible. For those Rogue One adds to the lore to explain how something like that would happen. For those who don't find it implausible, Rogue One adds to it by still building on how that flaw came about. Either way, it adds to the saga, something a prequel in any franchise often doesn't.

Funnily enough reactors explode when shot at.

Who would have known?

An industrial chemical plant failed spectacularly once because someone put in a valve on a pipe but neglected to tell people higher up its purpose (according to a story from one of my Chemical Engineering lecturers at university). It is not as uncommon as you may think. Car manufactuers now do product recalls, but in years gone by, they had people try and calculate how much it would cost to recall against the potential law suits for hurt or death due to defects. Ie they tried to calculate the cost to human life in pounds lost to law suits.

Now that said - when someone came up to Tarkin and said "We've analyzed their attack and there is a danger", instead of reporting to Tarkin, he should have issued an order to the quartermaster to bring up 10 bucks of rebar from the Death Star stores and stuffed some down the exhaust port.

Being the Empire, he probably would have gotten shot for using Rebar without approval from higher up.

Vader, realizing what was happening scrambled his personal TIE squadron from his Star Destroyer.

Actually, I think he was still on the Death Star - probably brought his buddies (or just requisitioned the best pilots or something).

Edited by Spraug

I could be mistaken but the exhaust port was not apart of Galen Erso's sabotage. He laid a trap in the reactor.

The station is probably the largest artificial structure ever built, or at least the largest built for some time, and has the capability of blowing up entire planets. Knowing that its pretty easy to assume as an Imperial that such a structure was impregnable.

You wanna talk plot holes, lets talk ion torpedoes and why everyone doesn't use those first and all the time....

As for the plot device, it made sense pre-Erso. If someone gets technical specs of anything, let alone something as complex as a moon-sized installation, they'll find a weak point.

Yet the Empire had those plans for much longer and never found that weak point... That's the hole.

More like it was dismissed as a weak point. Remember that the death star was supposed to be escorted by a battle group and have a lot more TIEs as CAS.

An industrial chemical plant failed spectacularly once because someone put in a valve on a pipe but neglected to tell people higher up its purpose (according to a story from one of my Chemical Engineering lecturers at university). It is not as uncommon as you may think. Car manufactuers now do product recalls, but in years gone by, they had people try and calculate how much it would cost to recall against the potential law suits for hurt or death due to defects. Ie they tried to calculate the cost to human life in pounds lost to law suits.

The Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, is probably what you're talking about. I was going to mention that and the Russian submarine Kursk but didn't. For some reason that I can't remember at the moment but was legit at the time.